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All right, guys, we are back with Innovators Think Tank week number 10. In my goodness, am I excited to have everybody in here. This is What a privilege to, you know, 10 weeks in a row be able to on Saturday, you know, show up and do this with everybody. For anybody who's new to the Think Tank, this is a place where we take anybody working on a project, an idea, a business. We bring them to the front of the tank and we help them collaborate with folks who have a different expertise, education perspective, and what we do is we help them innovate in real time.

This week, I'm so excited about our guest speaker, Miles, welcome up to the stage, my friend, and thank you so much for making time out of your day to join us. How are you? I bet we'll get Miles locked in here in 1 moment and no problem, sir. We'll let you get all adjusted. Really excited to have you in the tank.

Buccaneer, welcome on in and Planfile. Great to see you guys here and on time. Awesome. And I'm recognizing a couple of friendly faces in a space from earlier. What is this, Jack Quinn?

I remember you from earlier. You made some excellent points, sir. It's great to have you in the Think Tank. This is, every Saturday we bring in some awesome businesses, awesome speakers, and we do innovation in real time. It's been over 30, I think close to 40 hours in this space of just awesome stuff.

So I want to do a quick shout out before we begin talking with some of our speakers. And guys, this is recorded, and I'm sure you guys understand that a lot of, you know, viewership can happen after the fact. And so this space is, you know, can be viewed up to 600 times, 650 times. And so, yeah, it doesn't, you know, hurt me to just go ahead and get shredded right into it. A couple of things I wanna share with everybody right here, we will have up in the nest, our Discord link.

We had a lot of folks, you know, who just, they can't share their project, they couldn't share their business today, but they, you know, the conversation does not have to end here. We can keep the discussion going. And so you can incubate, network, work with all the big thinkers inside that Discord channel. So, we have a couple of folks who are actually in that Discord, I'd love to hear from them and hear how things are going in that Discord. We also have a Twitter community that lets you kind of have a pulse on all the tanks that are coming and feel free to join that.

Both those links are in the nest. So we got a couple of awesome speakers on the panel right now. Phantom, great to see you. Billy, great to see you. Billy has been around since Innovators Think Tank number 1.

He's been here ever since day 1 uh billy how are you man how are things going how's everything since tank 1 my friend man I'm striking out twice with the speakers.

Thank you so much.

Okay, we got you in now. Go ahead. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. So good evening, everyone. Honestly, Innovators Think Tank has been a lot of, has a lot of impact on me personally. From day 1, there's always something to gain from it. Like whenever you are on, you hear a lot of important insights.

Like there's really a question that someone throws here. There's really a problem that you don't have people bringing suggestions, like people coming up with very important suggestions that could help you, right, about businesses. Like, even when they don't, maybe, even when you don't find the exact persons you're looking for, the exact kind of people, there are people that are always going to point you to the right direction. Right. So I'm really impressed by what Josh has been pulling off so far.

This is very, very massive. And then also there's so many other consistent people like me as well, that have been here like almost every week, showing up and contributing massively. It's really important. And then for most of other persons that are joining, I am like, honestly, I'm going to tell you this from someone that's been here for so long that you can never regret the time you spend here because there's so much value, there's so much things to share, there's so much things happening that you can learn a lot from, right? Just being here, even if you are not building new projects, even if you are not working, like you're not a founder, there's so much to learn from it, right?

There's so much, the conversation span around across different things. So I really, really feel honored to be here and thank you George once again for creating this, for putting us up here to help ourselves and then learn from ourselves as well. Thank you so much.

Yeah, Billy, no, I love this. I love this. Look, I believe that most people are working on a project, a business, an idea. And sometimes when we take that to our friends and our family, we don't get the 2 cents that we deserve for that project. And with collaboration being the new currency, when we have different strengths that can be met and brought to our project to take it to the next level, we have to take those opportunities.

And so I love seeing Twitter spaces as this forum for that. I know that businesses pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a panel of speakers to talk about meaningful issues. So the fact that we can do that here in Twitter with everybody in real time, I love it. And Billy, you're making just an excellent point. And I really appreciate you being here throughout time.

Miles, I appreciate you, man, for taking some time out of your day to join us as a guest speaker. I have loved your content. And for me, the power of innovation lies a lot sometimes in the leaders of companies. Their ability to take the ideas, the wonderful ideas of the folks, the people that they lead and implement those and take those into action is so crucial. And I wanted somebody who really understands leadership to be up on this panel and help contribute that perspective.

So you being here and just being such a great thinker, I wanted to thank you and feel free to introduce yourself and share any notes you kind of have to start.

Oh, I'm excited to be here. Good to meet you all. I've seen, on this 1, I can treat, I'm gonna learn how to keep your open

to take notes. I've seen a lot of people that have been on this,

want to contribute, I'm a computer open to take notes, and I'm excited for what this is.

I love that, Miles, and it's so great to have you. I feel the same way. I, you know, take notes along the way. I learned so much from everybody else in this tank. And that's, that's part of it.

You know, not any 1 person has the answer, but it's with our perspective, with our strength, that we bring that, that discussion to the, or that those questions and that, that part of the discussion here. And I think, you know, I really just, you know, you're taking Saturday, I don't know what time it is for you to kind of come up in here and chat with us, you know, mad respect to you. So thanks again.

For sure.

Just taking a moment, we have Zen in here, Damian. Solution, I know we were in the space together earlier. Adam, PlanFile, my gosh, guys, it's so great to see all these new faces and even familiar ones up in the tank. I wanna invite everybody to request to be a speaker, ask questions along the way. We're going to be cracking into our first business here shortly.

And if you can contribute your perspective and you have even the smallest question, bring it up. Let's talk about it. Oftentimes, the quality of our questions determines the quality of our results. And oftentimes, somebody else has that question that you don't have. So let's give the floor to anybody new who wants to come up and take that speaker role.

You're more than welcome to have it. I know we have some great thinkers in here as well. So Phantom with this hand up, just a great value in here. Somebody actually active, very active in that Discord. And guys, again, that link is up in the nest.

If you ever wanna continue this think tanking well after we're done on Saturdays, let's keep the whole thing going. I think it's important to have a place where you can incubate your ideas with folks who want to see you do better, want to see you succeed. And when they've had challenges and problems that they've overcome, that they can contribute to what you're going through, What a resource. So just want to pivot over to Fantum. I know he has a couple of points to make.

We're going to get some speakers up on deck here. But Raja, the floor is yours, my friend. What do you got?

Yes. Hello, Value News and innovators of the think tank. So yeah, how's your week going? You know, we are meeting every Saturday. This is the final 10th Think Tank.

You know, we are hitting double digits. So, you know, thank you, Josh. You've been hosting pretty well. And you know, this is such a great atmosphere to sort of come around, innovate, and put your ideas forth. So I appreciate you for creating this platform.

You know, I am so lucky to have kind of found this. So I really appreciate that.

Wow, man, we're lucky you found us as well, you know, constant great stuff coming from you. And even though this is think tank number 10, we're just getting started. We are just getting started. Number 10, you know, uh, I know it's a 10 weeks long, but I hope soon enough we're on, you know, think tank number a hundred and we're just still crushing it with all these amazing folks that are joining us, um, so, Hey, everybody who's taking time, you know, to join right now, I'm going to do a quick recap so that way everybody knows what's going on here. In Innovators Think Tank number 10, and always, we bring anybody with a project, business, idea to the front of the tank.

We help them collaborate with big thinkers, folks, with a different passion, different talents, different perspective, education, and so on. And the innovation in real time is real. So hey, it doesn't cost a thing if you take a moment in the bottom right to go ahead and share like, you know, get anybody that's like-minded in this space. Maybe we can drive even more real-time innovation, make some even better progress and even help people get some more value along the way. Because as we discuss a lot of this, we can kind of draw the parallels from this person's project who's at the front of the tank to what we're doing and move in then Monday through Friday and go crush it moving forward.

So such good stuff here and what an honor to have everybody that's here. Let's go ahead and get a couple more speakers lined up. Buccaneers, so great to have you at the top of the tank. I'm very excited to hear more about your mission here, what you're doing and to get some feedback from our wonderful innovators in the tank. So we appreciate you joining in on Innovators Think Tank number 10.

Definitely not the final, we're just getting started. So please, I'd love to have you just go ahead and introduce yourself. Don't worry about talking too much about exactly what the business is, but tell us a little bit about you. And talk to us briefly about what inspired you to kind of move in the direction that you're in right now. And then we'll talk more about that direction and the project itself.

But we wanna give you that opportunity to speak a little bit. And I wanna welcome up to the top of the panel. We have Miles up here, Cash Money Cav, Planphile, anybody else who wants to jump up here and contribute along the way. You know, collaboration is the new currency. Let's all pay it forward.

Buccaneer, I want to give you the opportunity, my friend. Go ahead, give an introduction and tell us a little bit about who you are and what kind of inspired you to start doing what you've been doing.

For sure. Hey, actually, I don't know if you were expecting me. I'm Lydia. I'm on the Buccaneers team. I'm responsible for, like, I'm the person behind the account mostly.

So I joined about 5 months ago. And I guess everyone's bored by a backstory, but I'm just gonna say that it's sort of the family business but I've got at least 15 years experience in international investigations and due diligence, intelligence compliance, anti-fraud, anti-money laundering, anti-bribery. So the SEC is something I've known about for a while and also my joke is like I was a philosophy major in college and I say I've been following crypto since Farmville. It's kind of my joke, but like alternative currencies. But anyway, I didn't dive in until I started working with the team in earnest.

And like like I think at the 3 month mark when I was starting to understand not just Twitter, but crypto Twitter, like I mean, I was using a handle from for my personal account from like 10 years ago. So lots of learning. But then I went to VCon, got a little overwhelmed. It's been sort of a rocky start for me, but at the same time, our mission, I'm gonna just, that's me, that's me in a nutshell. I was in a place where I wanted purpose, like after COVID, after seeing institutions sort of existing ones fail, like all of a sudden the matrix opened up and I was like, oh, this lifelong fascination is real and it's here.

So would

you mind I'm so sorry, real quick, I just wanted to stop you and apologies on cutting off just wanted to say, would you repeat 1 more time, your name and then also your role in the company. And so sorry for cutting you off.

Oh, no, no problem at all. I'm Lydia. My personal handle is Lydia tweets, but I'm mainly on this account. So my role is messaging. And thus, like recently it pivoted a lot to the Twitter account and stuff like that.

But I do everything, most of the content. I wrote the white paper, wrote the pitch decks, press release, pretty much everything.

Wow, so you're definitely in charge of taking what is the product and the story of the company and communicating that across Twitter, across many platforms. And it sounds like you've been writing some pretty elite documents, some white pages regarding all this. So Lydia, I wanted to thank you so much for joining us, you know, in the tank today, and being willing to come and discuss what you guys are doing. I think, you know, I don't know who exactly I was in a space with earlier. You may know his name, another person from Buccaneer.

I believe it was Brendan, our founder and CEO. So he was telling me that I was talking about myself.

No, it was wonderful. And Brendan, he definitely has some very awesome concepts and I think he's taking your project to a really cool place and I really wanted to bring this to the top of the tank and have you share some of not only the project, but also your challenges and your role of what's going on. Because we have some heavy hitters, some big thinkers that might be able to help you innovate in real time.

So I

want to take a quick moment and just shout out, I see so many awesome people that are joining just week after week here. Azadi, welcome back in. Martin, Yazid, Darius, Park, Power, how's it going? So good to see you, Adam, welcome back in. Oh, Christian, my gosh.

Guys, welcome back into the tank. And for anybody that's new, this is Innovators Think Tank week number 10. We bring anybody with a project, a business, an idea to the front of the tank. We help them collaborate with big bankers, folks, different perspective, education. And what we see is real-time innovation week after week.

And so I wanna invite you guys to check out the Discord community, check out the Twitter community and keep innovating with us thereafter. So sorry to step on your toes, Lydia. I just love getting people caught up, making sure that everybody in the tank knows what we're doing, knows what's going on, and they're feeling good about it. So tell us a little bit more about what is the mission of Buccaneer and talk to us a little bit on, you know, what inspired the mission. Obviously, you've been around and are communicating it, the whole story, and then exactly what it is.

I'll give you the floor, Lydia.

Right. So, So the big picture, the vision of it is to bring philanthropy to the blockchain in a new and exciting way. That's pretty much what it is. We are partnered officially with Disabled American Veterans. And so ours is sort of a mixture of an NFT, PFP community and a gaming experience where 25% of the mint and

40%

in-game is all directed on chain are like as much as humanly possible, unfortunately, is something I always say. But it's all verifiable. It's all visible and it's all chain as much as we can. And anyway, so you buy your NFT and then you get entry into game 1, where all 40 percent of all of the in-game transactions are then directed also to the DAB. But a matching amount goes to a treasure chest so you can act like it's a game that you can play with the NFT and we're in our very first collection And it's sort of the first step in our mission toward, you know, reconnecting veterans and civilians, reigniting a sense of duty, a sense of service into your community.

And, you know, with all the mental health issues going on, It's just sort of like do more and have fun doing it.

Lydia, I love this. And part of the reason I love your guys' mission is I think Web3, which I don't fully understand, and I'm sure a lot of our speakers, you know, may not have full experience with this, but it doesn't mean that there's not an amazing discussion to be had at the base level of what's driving this whole purpose here. I wanna say that with Web3, with all the projects going on and all the people that say the word value, right? They say that word, what is value, right? I think in Web3, the only way a project is value valuable is if it has real world impact is like, how is it?

How's it impacting the real world in a positive way? And I love that about your project. I love that you guys are figuring out, you know, in what, what had inspired you to drive change and positive impact for the veterans of America, which I think is an amazing task, to use modern technology and Web3 to do that, I think is a phenomenal thing to do. I think there's real value there that can be supported by substantial growth, unlike some other cryptos, which can kind of just shoot up in price with no foundational impact in the real world. So Lydia, just want to get some of your thoughts there.

And you know, what kind of inspired also more of you guys to work with the Veterans Association? You wouldn't mind sharing?

Absolutely. Although I do want to say that our founder and CEO has joined Brendan down there.

We will make sure to get them up on stage here. So if anyone wants to join us. So Lydia, we can let you go ahead and chat on some of those points. And I know Phantom has his hand up. We'd love to hear from him.

And anybody along the way as we're chatting here, look, I don't fully understand the whole NFT Web3 game. I guess I do a little bit to some extent. I know Xavier is pretty deep in the computer science world and knows quite a bit. And then Miles, I want you to constantly figure out how we can correlate this to being better leaders and how they can drive better leadership in their organization. So just so you know, Lydia and Brandon, we have a guest speaker here named Miles, just an incredible teacher on what it means to be a good leader and drive leadership in your organization that effectively can take you to the next level.

And that's why he's here today. So I hope we can find some points to get Miles in here and share some of that critical information. Um, cause in my eyes, you know, with the law of innovation that look, you know, without integrating your innovations, it's just an idea. It's just ideation. Good leadership is paramount.

Um, so Miles, I really, really appreciate you being here to kind of chime in on some of this. Xavier and some of our more technical guys, we appreciate you being here too. GD, welcome up in here. I know you're quite the technical guy. And anybody who's just joining us, we'd love to have you come up to the front of the tank as well.

So Lydia, kind of on over to you. We'll hear from Fansum, and I know we have Brandon, the CEO here, so we'll get rocking.

Absolutely. So the question was, why veterans? And We've got a couple on our team actually. But Brendan, I think, should speak for himself on this. Brendan was the 1 who really wanted to do good for veterans.

He's got a personal story. And he was really the 1 who sold us to the DAV, because it really does become about what it is you're giving back to the world. And you wanna take it away, Brendan?

No, that is so cool. Brendan, real quick, I just wanna say, I love this think tank because we can hear some of that backstory and understand more of what's driving, you know, what, what makes Bucking your, you know, not only impactful to the team, but to the world as a whole. And so I love the opportunity to hear from these folks and hear about their stories. So Brendan, Do not hold back on us, man. We definitely want to hear more about what inspired you to take this to the DA, the veterans, excuse me.

Yeah, the DA. Yeah, and how you did that.

Sure, so first of all, thank you very much. Let's start from my tardiness. It is, it's a Saturday in Chicago that is full of surprises. And I suppose that every day that ends in Y is full of surprises too. So my apologies for that.

I wasn't able to catch the entirety of the question, but I can give you some background on, you know, I heard how you guys.

I'd be more than happy to kind of repackage it for you. It'd be, you know, no problem.

Yeah, sure. And I'll be as concise as I possibly can, which is difficult, but I'll try

my best.

No, I think I get you. I think in here, we definitely want you to elaborate, but I know the need for information density for listeners is so important, right? So like capturing our points in a way where the folks who are listening can really understand that and not dragging it on is super important. But just to kind of recap some of what Lydia and I were talking about briefly, Phantom, I know you had a point and maybe even, you know, Brendan will let Phantom crack into his point and then I'll recap and we'll go over to you because he's had his hand up for a moment. So Raj, over to you real quick.

I'll do a recap and then we'll get Brendan locked in.

Yeah, thank you, Josh. And I just wanted to just add in this point that, you know, the point of any blockchain or anything is to tokenize and give, you know, action value, right? So we are kind of creating these systems of like tokenizing certain actions and incentivizing them and giving people sort of a share and stake in that. So it's about giving that sort of public funded, cooperative funding, like decentralized funding thing and that sort of comes with like structure and sort of traceability within like you know NFT and blockchain technology so that kind of adoption with technology has been happening but yeah smart contracts are pretty complicated I'm not gonna say I'm an expert on that so yeah I would like to hear more on that from the others So that's sort of where I will ask them to explore and give us a bit details on.

Yeah. No, Raja, that is excellent stuff. I'm really excited that you kind of have a perspective there that will yield some really great questions. My thought here is, at the beginning, Brendan, what we were talking about with Lydia is understanding, you know, more of what's driving you guys in this direction to even start doing what you're doing in the first place. And I was mentioning that, you know, in the web 3 space, you know, it seems to me that the word value is defined by real world impact with that project.

And if it's not, I don't know what exactly it's being valuable for. Somebody might be able to come up and explain. I don't know.

That's 1 of my favorite points. And we met in that other space. We were talking about that exact point. Value by and large, I'm not sure, did I interrupt you where you were about to continue?

Oh, no problem. I was just gonna repackage a little bit of what Lydia and I were saying, but I would love to hear your kind of perspective of value with this whole thing. Absolutely. So just, just a small little recap would be, you know, Lydia was saying, you know, explaining some of her role on the team and, you know, we didn't even cracked in into the product exactly side of things. We just wanted to learn more about what's driving the mission.

You know, what is the vision here of, of doing? And, um, you know, you joined at the perfect time, So don't worry about being late. You weren't even late at all. But yeah, if you want to tell us more, the question before was, what's the story of why you started this around the mission that you did? How did you approach the DA's office?

But I would love to hear your kind of notes on value as well. And anybody else who's-

Well, it's perfectly intertwined, I can tell you that much.

Well, perfect. And Brandon, I wanna take a moment. I know we have a bunch of new folks in the space. Anybody joining us for Innovators Think Tank, week number 10, look, this is a place where we bring anybody working on a project, a business, an idea, and we help them collaborate with big thinkers, with a different perspective, education, experience, and what it yields is real-time innovation. We've seen it week after week, helping folks hit the next level, helping folks in the tank learn more about their project and extract the ways that we can innovate, you know, personally, professionally.

And, you know, I just love this. So thanks so much for being here. And yeah, I wanted to take that moment to get everybody caught up. Brandon, over to you.

Sure. Yeah, first of all, Thanks again for having me. I really think the idea behind what this space represents is something that's sorely, sorely needed. And it's a pleasure to be a part of it. To boil back down to my why, and then we can get into the what.

No, it really does tie into a couple of things and I think it was Xavier, Xavier, Xavier, I'm not sure which way you prefer me to pronounce it, but was talking about the tokenization and the capabilities of it. It boiled down to me as, you know, I spent a decade plus, 13 years in sales, doing some extremely complex work within wealth management, life insurance, commercial real estate brokerage, owned a commercial real industrial real estate development company for the better part of a decade as well. And even worked in SaaS sales as well. And I gotta be honest with you, I never found something that I could really, truly be passionate about because I always wanted to do something bigger and I could never effectuate impact or value as I saw it. And I think value is a three-pronged piece, right?

It's value for a company. If you're putting something out there, you need to be returning value so that you can continue to scale, operate, grow, etc. You need to have value for your employees, develop a culture and a team dynamic that's exceptional, that's unique, and that rewards them both on and off the field, if you know what I mean, monetarily, but also in their hearts, you know, fulfillment wise. And then, you know, certainly that value is what the consumer base sees. What I saw in

2021

was an enormous amount of capital. But I mean, I've been in crypto and options trading and things like that for since at least

2017.

So by no means did I just decide, hey, I'm gonna jump into crypto. It was more like, all right, it's about damn time, I just go for it. Anyway, The point is I saw an enormous amount of capital being made by some of these projects that their value proposition was their community and the fact that people were excited about it. But there was no genuine, In my mind, there was no real calculability to any of the value, such that people will storm into adopting the technology. It wasn't, as you would put it before, you know, being leaders in technology and in business, I viewed it as being a proper steward of technology.

And I felt that it was being used in a way that, well, frankly, used in a way that was about 0.1% of what it could be. And so what I, uh, what I set out to, to discover, and I did a lot of research and I saw, you know, by November, I think it was board API club and this is, I'm not knocking them. This is just an example. It made 450 million dollars by November of

2021

And I I looked at what their likely profit margins were and I was like there's no reason a hundred million dollars of that shouldn't or couldn't go to a charity and It wouldn't impact their business operations at all Because that scale these this technology allows for that type of profit margin and what does that do that allows for? Truly innovative and Like real ideation because what's the a lot of people misuse the term use case, like the use case for blockchain. Blockchain technology is really a store of information securely and transparently and the ability to move it. The use cases, what do you do with that, right? How can you make that work?

And so from my past, my grandfather, both my grandfathers served in the military. My grandfather on my father's side was a D-Day. I wear a pendant around my neck that was gifted to my father from him. I carry his lucky coin that he was he had on him at D-Day as well. And gave it to my dad for 30 years, and my dad gave it to me when I decided to go be insane and start my own company, liquidate my 401k, and chase something that's just wild.

And it's always, it's always bothered me that I never really had a chance to talk to my grandfather who passed about 23 years ago about his service. But, you know, my brother-in-law is a disabled veteran as well. My cousin's husband or cousin-in-law is a Navy pilot, Like Top Gun kind of guy. He even has the mustache to boot. So Basically, you know, I don't want to go on for too long, but

no no 1 is really awesome And I just want to take a quick moment just for anybody who's just now tuned it in like Brent Brendan You know was not working in this space for a considerable amount of time. He was in construction. But then he kind of realized that, my gosh, a lot of these projects, their value proposition wasn't necessarily driving any real world impact. And he knew that there was an opportunity for him to make something that actually could drive real world impact. And Brendan, I think that's an amazing thing to take on.

And anybody joining us in the tank just for the first time, we're very glad to have you. Right now we're just talking with Brendan, the CEO of Buccaneer, about what made him start his project. I think it's a really great place to start. We have Xavier in here too. He posted a number of awesome questions in the bottom that I would love to get to as well as we go more to the product side.

Sure.

That's where

I'm moving right now.

No problem, man. No need to rotate to that quite yet. I wanted to learn more about how you even approach the DA office to sell them on this vision, right? Yeah, DAV.

It's the Disabled American Veteran Foundation is the largest non-profit veteran support organization in the world. You know, when I started this thing, I set out to find a way to use game theory, the technology itself, and kind of meld it into a new way of doing something where you can make real calculable value to the consumers to the people who are who are buying without cannibalizing or draining the liquidity, but rather, you know, delivering it back to them and delivering, delivering calculability, tangibility to the value rather than relying on community to justify value. But also I wanted to do that with, you know, bringing legitimacy to the space in the form of blockchain charitable donations, blockchain-based, like programmatic. I saw a lot of scams and the DAV, you know, my cause has always been veteran support. It's been close to my heart forever And I, you know, 22 veterans a day, take their own lives.

My grandfathers weren't 1 of weren't in that number, thank God. But I can't imagine what they went through because I don't, I just fundamentally don't understand. So the DAV we chose for a couple of different reasons, or I chose and we chose. And then we had the harder task of actually getting a partnership in place. But when I brought on our chief development officer, who's an 18 and a half year Navy vet, Navy chief, and a badass, 1 of the best coders or web 3 developers and for that matter, developers overall in I would say the world.

He's an incredible, incredible individual. Also a member of the DAV, Disabled American Veterans Foundation. So it's important to make the distinction. It was not planned. DAB Inc.

Is my company. DAV was not planned when I decided on that name. It stands for Digital Art Brokers and or Dream Build. But the DAV specifically has a reputation and a sterling legacy of over a hundred years of being the type of nonprofit that gives 90% plus of donations straight back through to veterans in need. They do so much amazing work.

And anybody who has dealt with nonprofits or is in the nonprofit space knows that there's a lot of them that do not operate above board. And so there was a great deal of vetting out of various veteran organizations but ultimately it boiled down to it was kind of close to home. And the reason that our chief development officer put himself out there for me to find less than an hour after he put himself out there was that he attended a DAV event. And he was like, you know, maybe somebody, maybe somebody will, will want to hire me. Because his story, and it's his story to tell, but there's a lot of pain involved in transitioning from service to civilian.

And that's- So,

Brendan, I love this idea that you went to the place that you wanted to make impact to also source some of your team members, folks that are driven in a very real way to see the level, you know, and that have been part of kind of that scene for some time and understand it well. I think that's a very smart move on your behalf.

The other piece of it is, and it's almost a chip on my shoulder. My dad told me, my dad failed 5 times at starting his own company. And then he found something that he was really good at, but told me you'll never find a team that cares as much or more about your company and what you're doing than you do as the owner. And I was like, bullshit, I'm going to prove you wrong. Because the entire purpose of what we've done here to 4 and what we plan to do moving forward is to do things differently, because inherently, everything is imperfect, it can be improved upon, in my view.

And so what we did, what I did was probably, and Dorothy, the head of partnerships at DAV can attest. I think I called her a thousand times, you know, just relentlessly pursuing. And this is all during the beginning of

2022,

when there was still a bull run. And then, you know, by the time we actually got got a chance to talk to him, it was just scammy, scary, and everything. Web 3 was just, you know, the odds are stacked against us. But despite all of that, we were able to Form a really strong relationship with them and mark Burgess to his credit 1 of the final things that was done before he and here's the the former call CEO They use a different term for it, but he just retired in June. Um, but, uh, you know, we became the first, uh, the first web 3 company after 9 months, 10 months, almost a year of trying.

But the first Web3 company to partner with a non-profit of that scale ever. And among the other partners, probably 23 others were the only ones that are not on the Fortune 500 list. Now, the really cool thing about it is, the goal has always been to make this space legitimate so that people can use the technology and not feel afraid. The goal was to make it something that people can understand without having to be an expert and without having to be anonymous. I mean, the only reason I have not my face here is because I'm a big Grateful Dead fan and I had our artist 40fps check him out, he's amazing.

I asked him to do a Jerry Garcia buccaneer for me. But that's the only reason. My name is Brendan Ryan though, and you feel free to look me up. You know, the DAV, it's very tough to move nonprofits forward, but we presented them with our plan, which was for this initial launch, the first in the series of what I've called GiveFi. Not DeFi, GameFi, but GiveFi.

And what Buccaneers of the Blockchain really is a strategy-based battle card game where, and by the way, I don't like the term NFTs I don't I apologize to people if you if you really love the term NFT I prefer to call them PGPs player game pieces but But what we've done is create a way that programmatically we've written ourselves out of the game where we have no control or ability to divert funds from where we promised them to be.

Okay, I like where this is going. Brendan, before I let you crack into this, because I wanted to hear a lot of this backstory and understand more of what's driving you to do what you do. And clearly, it's a lot of passion and clearly, it's a lot of love for making positive impact and using the new tools of our time to do that. And I applaud you, sir, to a very high degree. And the way that you've kind of sourced even some of your top level talent by going to the community in which you wanna make impact, because you know that those people will see your vision as well.

Brendan, I love that kind of idea. I've heard that phrase too, that hey, nobody will love your vision as much as you do. And I love that you're aiming to prove somebody wrong. I love that chip on your shoulder, because I believe that it's true too, that you can kind of share it enough and that people have an affinity for impact. And if you're really driving it, they can love it just as much or more than you do.

I think it's possible,

100%.

I also agree that you can constantly improve. I know this 1 phrase, it says like, if it ain't broke, and then everybody says, don't fix it, but I love saying, if it ain't broke, make it better. There's always a way to improve. There's always a way to build on what you're doing. And being stagnant is really what kills us in this 21st century, in this competitive, high-octane world.

You gotta collaborate with folks. You gotta drive the needle forward. I think that's so important. For anybody now just joining us, I want to take a quick moment and just say, thank you so much for taking your Saturday to tune into Innovators Think Tank number 10. We have been doing this for 10 weeks now.

Every Saturday, 2 p.m. Mountain Time, we come in here with businesses, project owners, idea founders, and we help them collaborate with some really big thinkers. So if you have any questions, comments, thoughts along the way, as we're talking about this Web3 project, completely changing the game, taking a more philanthropic approach, partnering with the DAV as they meant and as the product that we're going to crack into here actually unfolds. It sounds like it's contributing to a meaningful mission. And I'd love to, you know, kind of understand even more and more about that.

But Brendan, just wanted to take a moment for all of our new listeners. Guys, thanks for tuning in. We also have a Discord channel. The think tanking does not stop here. Here after this, you know, there's a place for you to incubate, network with big thinkers, and kind of take this to the next level, even outside this tank.

And Brendan, before I go to you, we have Phantom with his hand up. I wanna get him on stage to share his thoughts and then we'll crank right back. Phantom, all yours.

Good. Yeah, thank you, Josh. So the main thing that, you know, even I have been wondering about is where is the integration of blockchain with reality? At the end of the day, wherever the software is vulnerable is wherever the reality comes into play, whether it is servers, whether it is satellites. So the thing is, you know, I believe that there is a lot of internet infrastructure being developed with not that great idea of sort of resource management around it.

So today we have sort of that awareness growing, but I believe in that sort of supply chain reinforcement where people sort of understand the true value of, you know, what their material can be. So the thing is like, I feel like, you know, some of the poorer countries have sort of raw materials that become very powerful by the value adds of other countries. But the thing is, there is no revenue share mechanism there, where the original country gets some aspect of revenue back for giving such a powerful raw material. Only now you see that sort of geopolitical tussle there in terms of resource management. So I believe that cryptocurrency will be this sort of public funded way in which we will give our resources to the world apart from the governments.

So this is how I believe the decentralization of the world will happen. And yeah, I believe that philanthropy is part of it, right? It is about trying to envelop the people's value and get them to a livable space with all this technology and monetization. I think that's the ultimate goal.

Well, and what we've built is a way and a framework with which to accomplish all of that, while also maintaining profitability at scale too. But giving more than we take. Right, so the way that we've split it up is, you know, the mint, obviously, we've split it up programmatically so that all of this happens without our ability to touch, impact, or even, you know, divert or scam or rug or anything like that. We've eliminated our ability to influence anything. And that's really important because again, by bringing the DAV to the fold, we were trying to bring legitimacy to the technology as well as move nonprofits forward into the future.

And so they, within this game, receive out of the mint

25%

of the proceeds via smart contract in crypto for the first time ever. It's a 500 million dollar a year nonprofit. It's a very special special thing that we were able to get them to buy into. Wow. Yeah, they certainly agreed

to something that doesn't normally exist. And Brendan, before we crack too far down the product side of things, and I do want to do that, and then also Xavier has posted some very awesome questions in the chat. And anybody who has some questions and just doesn't want to be a speaker, please put those in there. You know, we have a lot of amazing innovators here, Brendan, and I want to be able to open up some good questions and points to help you and your team even drive the product or project even further. But I know Heartthrob came up on stage just a little bit earlier and made a point from something earlier that we were talking about.

So Heartthrob, I wanna get you an opportunity to talk real quick and then I wanna go more into explaining exactly what the product is. And Brendan, again, sorry for stepping on your toes. Just want to make sure we get to hear from a couple other folks there.

So, shout

out to you, my brother. That was an accidental thumbs down. I meant to do thumbs up.

No problem. All right, Heartthrob, go ahead. Tell us what's on your mind, my brother.

Well, I love what Brendan is saying and what he is doing. It runs in parallel a little bit with another project, Trappyverse, that I know because they're working on an aspect in an area that is designed to help veterans. So I definitely feel that you have a noble cause. I tagged you in a tweet with their names so then you guys can link up. And definitely I love what you say about how you put in the contract.

All money is pre-allocated before it even comes. So then there is no way for it to be altered, affected or manipulated in any way. And that is something I've not seen any other project going non-profit, which is something I myself am doing with my flowers to offer the peer to peer support. And so I feel like there is definitely a future for where Web3 is going with the utilization with these, you know, their digital artifacts is what I like to call these NFTs because, you know, in the future people are going to remember by the picture of, you know, the NFT what it is that it's doing.

Hell yeah. And I appreciate that. Because, you know, the peer to peer part that you mentioned at the end, too, is the next aspect. Right. So it's like there's a lot of projects that are out there that are, you know, philanthropic focused, but that's not everybody is philanthropically focused.

You know, consumer wise, there has to be value. And so what we did was create that value in a calculable way via this game. And so another 25% of the mint goes towards a treasure chest that is updated in real time. If you go to Buccaneers.io, which is the game site, the Mint site. If you're doing some mobile, go through your wallet browser.

Desktop is, I like it more, it's more interactive. The whole point is to, out of the mint alone,

and we're doing

1, 944

at 0.1 ETH a piece. Out of the mint alone, once we mint all 1, 944 out, there'll be 32 ETH, roughly 32.067 ETH in the treasure chest that you can use if you want to sell your buccaneer I don't think anybody will because they're incredible and I'm not biased I swear but you know the game is also it's also amazing in that in-game transactions are also split, but differently. Every projection that we've done, and we've done close to a billion of simulations, to the point where I had to buy, we had to replace a computer that almost exploded for 1 of our team, for our chief development officer. You know, the vast majority of all of the proceeds and any of the revenues or anything is going to come from in-game transactions. And so we chose to go with 40% of in-game transactions such as your actions in the game.

So attack, defend, train, attack, whether that's specific or randomized matchmaking. It's all based on battle logic that's been... I don't know, meticulously would be the most incredible understatement possible. But the other

40%

of every transaction goes towards increasing the total value in the prize pot and the game lasts for 14 days the top 22 players or Buccaneers after 14 days will be winners. Now we base that 22 off of the 22 veterans who take their lives each day. Like I said, we try to make meaning in everything that we do. And this is, That distribution is handled by a blind trust for which we are the grantor. That trust owns the crypto wallet and in all of the legal documents which we will publicize and have the ability to put forward.

You know, we can't touch it, and they are instructed to distribute based on the information, the wallet, and a couple of other things, minimal things that just essentially give you know first through 22 their percentage of that giant pot but the big point is at any given moment it's really representative of market agnostic situation where it's all proportionality not monetary value however the even if you're talking about the initial mint, it's a very simple thing to have a tax write-off verified by DAV. Because like I said, this is not the first or this is not the last this is the first and we plan to have Tens and twenties of these running in all levels of scope and scale Across the board at any given time so that people who are have an appetite for less less risk or or less intensity less length or An appetite for a longer more even depth in in-depth strategic level game Everybody will have something but everybody will be whether they are in Wanting to or not They're gonna be giving back to the DAV as well. The biggest piece, I would say, is this. If I could just say 1 last thing.

Please do. You know, the idea whether you care about better whether you don't the value is is there and we've taken we've taken an immense amount of steps to to ensure that By part by it by getting involved by minting Even if you don't play you'll you know, there is verifiable value for the first time ever. You don't have to care about philanthropy to get value out of this.

I love that. Okay. No, this is just an amazing topic. I'm so glad that, you know, we decided to bring you up into the tank to discuss this today, because at the intersect of this, you know, web 3 gamification space needs to be pursuits of real world impact. And the fact that you're doing it in this lens of philanthropy is just, it's so powerful.

And I hope that everybody around here kind of realizes that that space is littered with so much nonsense that when you find a company like this, that's driving genuine impact and trying to do something of actual, meaning and value instead of just inflate the value of their coin, the monetary value of their coin, or whatever NFT they're holding. But there's something really amazing about that. So I know we have a lot of new speakers in the tank and a couple of folks raising their hands. We'll definitely make sure we come around to you. And just to plant a seed in your mind, Brandon, there's 1 thing that I'm really interested to talk about is sort of your biggest challenges as a leader, as in business, in development, and kind of discuss some of that even in the context of where you're trying to go.

And we have a lot of big thinkers, and I know business is not just roses and butterflies and daisies, it comes with real challenges and challenges that other people may have addressed before, or may have notes on, or may be able to help overcome, or learn from you. And so I'm really excited to kind of crack into some of those, but I really appreciate you sharing more on the product side of things where we're gamifying, you know, Web3 and creating this philanthropic landscape is just a wonderful thing where there's obviously still revenue built in. And you mentioned at scale still maintaining profitability, which is, you know, I'm sure part of the development strategy that you have going and also maybe some challenges you have as well. So I know we have Miles up here and I'm really excited to hear some of his take when we start talking about some of your challenges as a leader. And, you know, I hope that we can kind of cultivate a space where you can kind of talk about that honestly and openly and really get the feedback that you deserve in your project.

Because I think that this is what this space is all about. Not only exposure and not only, you know, getting to talk to folks who are part of the community, but get that feedback from folks that are experts in a discipline that we may not be experts in. I think it's just an amazing point here. So collaboration being the new currency, we wanna hear some more from our panel. Fansome, I'd love to hear from you, my friend, and then we'll go ahead and even get deeper into this topic.

Yeah, thank you, Josh. And I think that the idea is pretty solid and this is kind of what I believe is value displacement in the market. So we are kind of defining new markets and capturing them in these new tokens, I believe. And we are sort of sharing that sort of market with people in a different way than how currently the market is defined. So we get that approach of first principles approach to market again.

And we can sort of redefine some of those terms and take back some of that control of value definitions in society. But the decentralization aspect means that it has to sort of have a token exchange aspect as well as actual currency exchange aspect, which means that it will flow into the public government money somewhere and that is sort of where the vulnerabilities I believe lies. So we have to create like sort of stable tokens and all those things. So yeah, I would love to hear more about those kind of thoughts from Brendan and about the Buccaneers.

Sure, no, it's such an excellent point and especially with regulation looming and even all of these, you know, all of the craziness SCC-wise that, you know, we foresaw a long time ago. I'm sure a lot of other people did but we kind of built ourselves to be insulated from it But you know you're right, and I think What you're really pointing to is the onboarding and offboarding, the onboarding of or the exchange of fiat to crypto and crypto to fiat, but also the economies within which that occurs and then moves to. So like 1 of the biggest problems that we've found exists in the space is that there's not really a good way to on-ramp from fiat straight to a project like this that does so much good, but it nonetheless is restricted by technology and by the blockchain itself, which is, it really is just a tool. But what I think you're also getting at, which I found really interesting is, you know, from a regulatory standpoint, how do you feel safe within, you know, participating in a project? When it could be under SEC investigation, 10 minutes later, right?

Well, we thought about that at length. And 1 of the things that our contention would be that the United States, they really, I don't know, I don't know if anybody else agrees, but the United States doesn't like it when money gets moved out of their US economy, especially en masse. And that's really what crypto is representing right now. What we've done is create something that is probably 1 of the only projects that is dedicated to repatriating money back into the United States economy and directly impacting the people that Frankly, we're subsidizing the VA's efforts if anything But that's that's 1. It's 1 item that was a challenge I see it as a challenge for almost every single other project, but crypto in general, there needs to be something that there needs to be a lack of maxi-ism around only using this or only using that.

And it really needs to move towards a hybrid system because otherwise you're never going to achieve what you're talking about across the board.

Brandon, I wanna take just a quick moment. I know we have so many new listeners in the tank and I wanna make sure that they're fully caught up on what's going on in here. That way we can get their full participation and

collaboration along the way. That was done. It's done.

Beautiful timing there, man. We're in lockstep right now. So anybody joining us on Innovators Think Tank week number 10, Just so you know, this is a place where we bring anybody working on a project, business and idea to the front of the tank. We often collaborate with folks with a different perspective, education, background, experience, resources, you name it, guys, we're all different. We have different strengths.

And we have so much to add to people's projects. So we have the honor of working with Buccaneer up here, talking about this intersection of gamified Web3 and philanthropy and creating such a meaningful movement within a space that can be littered by not necessarily the best projects. So I think such value out there. And guys, thanks for joining us again. We have a discord community you can catch up in the nest.

Do you wanna continue think tanking after this tank? You know where to find us. I noticed we had Xavier's hand up and this man has always got excellent points, constantly adding phenomenal value every time I hear him speak. So hopefully I didn't crack the stage for you, Xavier, but I'd love to hear your notes, sir. This stage is yours.

Hopefully I don't, I don't, yeah, that was pretty bad, but you hear me?

We got you. You sound good.

All right. Well, again, I don't like wasting your

guys' time.

So I think the goal is, I want to know is like, what, well, crypto is more of a bullish kind of mindset. So when you're saying you're trying to do something for nonprofits, even though it's very ethical, and I'm sure you've already gone through this, it's very hard to make it lucrative. And obviously that's not the point, but obviously the state company and keep the company up flow, You have to make a decision of where is your currency going to come from? Or where is your revenue, aka overall coming from? Now, you can do grants.

Okay, well, great. Now you're going to do great things for society because now you have grants. But you have to also think to yourself, okay, Well, if I'm not going to do grants, well, how are you going to get the money? Is it going to be marketing? Okay.

Yeah. Well, that's going to make you a, that's that you can do all this. You can't do this end user style approach all you want. And then everyone gets, everyone gets a piece of a piece of the pie. Uh, people who don't want to play the games, get the security feeling of it, because it's essentially that NFT is going to be attached to their identity forever and all the above.

But again, if you're trying to just make this a low thing, like, as you know, the reason why it's been difficult for cryptos to be such a good hearted thing is because there's so much regulation behind it. I'm months to build. I'm not sure if you've done it faster. I would like to know that. And they're very robust and they take a lot to maintain.

And so, you know, and in a lot of people are trying to invest in that and I see why it might be difficult to an investor Or get people to put in because a lot of times when people crypto Have a crypto isn't the kindness and the sincerity it gives It's the risk or the gamble of what I will return and that's why you've solved it's so volatile but because it goes so quickly and day to day, things change. So you have to be able to find a way to give that same thrill, that same adrenaline, but in a way that does good. And I can add more to it, but I'll leave that right there.

Sure, those are some incredible points. Yeah, please, Brandon, I would love to hear your reply to that. Go ahead. Sure,

it's exactly what I was thinking and what we've, as a team, when we developed this, took into specific consideration. So the idea being, you know, when I when I mentioned like the breakdown, for example, it's designed to and the model will enable for profitable operations, lean operations, you know, because we take, we'll take

50%

of the initial mint and then 20% of the in-game transactions and then we have multiple, multiple games running. We've built our stack over the port of the past 22 months To 22 months to develop this Or 21 we're going on 21. I think what month is it? Anyway, something like that The entire thing is you know our back end and our and our our ability to be agile and lighten the lift such that it's replicable, sustainable and profitable without having to scale up the to scale up the size of the business. We could run this thing with a 10 person team and have it be an enormously scalable, from a profit and revenue perspective at the same time, but the thrill thing, thrill aspect is 1 of the really interesting pieces is that that's where the time frame comes in and the competition comes in.

And the desire, if you're looking for adrenaline, well, beat the hell out of all of these other people who are trying to win and come in first. And then you know what? You can flaunt that and play again in another game. But another game could be a 3 day game, or a 24 hour game or a 30 minute game, we'll be able to relaunch these things continuously. But from a funding perspective, I never sought to be funded.

I mean, I never I never sought to need funding, I did explore VCs, There's a ton of interest until they told me that they didn't like how much I was donating. And then I told them that they didn't understand what they what the point was. And so I've self funded.

I personally would. I love what you did. Recently, there was a guy, individual that came on to the innovative think tank. And he was in UK, he had a difficulty with the 8 with, you know, doing I love I love data. So it sounds like you want it since you don't want to make a whole bunch of money, well, then you got to do the opposite, where you got to find the ways to lean things out where you're not spending as much.

And so if they're at the point of you want to give, that's fine. It's great. Thank you for telling me that. Now, then we need to take the opposite approach. Well, where can we save money?

Where can we make this more like more reserves? And I think the best way you can do that is obviously for every dollar you spend, you're getting a dollar return. So it's 1 for 1. So if you want to 0 out like a like a stereotypical nonprofit approach, just take the 1 for 1 approach. You spend 5, make sure you make back 5, boom, and you clear back or if you're trying to spend to give back 5 Make sure you obviously and this is I'm hyper simplifying this I know you and I know so I'm not saying you're incompetent So, please forgive me if it comes off that way

It doesn't it doesn't and I can explain how we do it to write you down

Please do but also to Once it down I donate my time where I could build a robust back end to do that data collection to do that, because at that point, then you could start branching off. And, and I would suggest is connecting your blockchain to other apps and intersect it like a like, think of it like a API, right? Blockchain essentially is that right. And so you what I would encourage at this point is if you're not going to make money off of this, well, I would essentially say, well, you already have this robust chain you've been working on for 22 months. We'll build an interface on it with a new idea and a new thing and keep it going.

I would love to donate my time to you guys to build that.

Well, I love that. I definitely want to connect with you offline because I think what you'll find when we talk offline is that we position ourselves to do exactly that and that's the roadmap. The plan is, first of all, the plan for this initial framework is that it does generate significant profits. The revenue, We're not in it just to do great for charity. We're in it to make money too.

Anybody who says otherwise is lying to you. And or you know incompetent as you said. But you know at the very minimum you know if we if we were to have you know a fully minted out or even if we minted out 200 of these things, if we had 100 active players playing with 10 transactions a day for 14 days, then you're still looking at 6 figures donations, 6 figures revenues and 6 figures distributed back to the winners, right? So, it's like the model itself allows for and incentivizes and creates a way to replicable, excuse me, replicably create value, but create profit and facilitate donations all while benchmarking legitimacy within the space itself. And so when you say reskin it and connect it to other apps, the plan that we have in place goes even further than that.

With the framework itself, even applying it to things that are beyond just Web3, because it is at scale.

Web 3 because

it is at scale proof that that charitability and return of value and non-cannibalizing or draining the consumer of liquidity while being profitable is doable if you do it the right way. And we've incorporated a lot of operational efficiency tactics from even the military, you know, in the way that we've set up the system of doing things. So, you know, I hope that helps bring clarity, but yes, please, I would love to chat with you offline.

Yeah, and you know, something like an offer from Xavier to his time donation to help Ben to build anything in your company is worth more than, you know, those, those words in gold, I can just tell you, I know, uh, he's got incredible experience in that. So him telling you that he'd love to be helpful for you. For me that I love that. It's like a beautiful by-product of this tank. This it's that element of connection that comes from this collaboration.

And just so you guys know, we've had 10 think tanks now, and I've heard back from so many of our folks who have ended up connecting after the tank and have taken their project to the next level, even outside of this discussion. And so I just think that that's absolutely amazing. And anybody who's in here listening right now, feel free to post in the comments what it is you do, what it is your strengths are. And feel free to introduce yourself. You'll never know who might reach out to you and you'll be able to collaborate with.

Collaboration is the new currency and part of doing this tank week after week is to bring anybody working on a project or business to the front of this tank and help them collaborate with you know folks who have a completely different set of strengths and we absolutely love seeing that you know week after week and just to touch on something you're saying Brendan it's like I've seen this nearly you know all over is this evolution of capitalism to conscious capitalism. Folks want to know, just in this age of being more and more transparent with our disclosures, even the SEC soon to require carbon disclosures for climate. Folks wanting to know what animals are being used to test certain products. You'll notice that we're just moving deeper into an age of conscious capitalism. And I think the products and the services that are oriented more in the direction of delivering value to the communities in which we are, to the people that we love, is gonna be just paramount, because in the past that capital was not making its way into there because the models weren't built like that.

And so I just, you know, I love what you guys are talking about there. And I, you know, during the tank, I love to take a moment for anybody in here working on a project or business to kind of point out something that a great innovator, you know, once said, and he listed out the 5 things that make a startup very successful. If you've heard this over, you know, many think tanks, you know, sorry, you keep hearing it. And we can always say it's up for discussion, but I love sharing it. And so I'll go ahead and list those 5 things and we'll let you guys think about them.

And then I wanna bridge into another point. So these 5 things, the Number 1 is timing. Number 1 thing that makes any startup or any company successful is timing. Number 2, team slash execution. The idea here is without a good team and without the ability to execute, look, good goodness, there's no hope at all.

3 is the idea. Number 4 is the model. Number 5 is funding. So it's so interesting when you hear from great innovators and great, great folks that have started some just amazing companies. They point out that funding is 1 of the least important aspects in terms of why a startup is successful versus unsuccessful.

The 4 prior topics there, points, the timing, the team and execution, the idea and the business model. And I see Matia, 1 of our co-hosts, went and put that up into the chat. We'd love to hear what you guys think, but giving that lane of thinking, you know, and kind of looking at that is very important. And so working on this for 22 months now, Brendan, you guys obviously have seen a host of challenges, but also a host of wins. And so we want to congratulate you for all the wins you have and thank you again for being in the tank here today with us and I kind of want to go in you know a good direction and we'll let phantom You know come up and make a point even before we go, but I'll go ahead and kind of tease the direction I want to go here, which I mentioned briefly earlier Which which is we want to talk more about you guys' biggest challenges.

And Brendan, I want to hear specifically from you your biggest challenge as a leader. And then we would love to even hear your biggest challenge as a business, given where you guys are going and what that framework looks like. And I think a discussion with some of our big thinkers and anybody in the audience who's listening in now, who wants to ask a question and come up to the front, please feel free to put in the bottom right there, that little bubble and give us your note. We'll go ahead and read it there. Also guys, it doesn't cost anything at all to go ahead and retweet and like this space and push it out so we can get more big thinkers in here and push these folks even further and learn as much as we can.

Really excited again to have our guest speaker, Miles, here, just an incredible teacher and content creator around what it means to be a good leader. And I truly believe there's almost no innovation without leadership, without good leadership. And so I really hope that we can kind of rotate a discussion here at some point towards those challenges you have as a leader, Brendan, and really get some incredible feedback from somebody who would love to kind of give some advice along the way. Also welcoming up to the panel, Leah as a speaker and a number of other folks, if you have anything to say, feel free to raise your hand, we'll make sure we get around to you. So Phantom, floor is yours and then we'll go ahead and dig into some of these challenges and help each other innovate in real time.

Yeah, thank you Josh. So what I wanted to say was, you know, the profit motive is definitely a good thing and the main problem I find is like too much gamification can be quite dangerous right so there can be sort of incentives that may seem innocent at first but as the market plays out there can be some sort of system level behavior that is emergent. So I think there is definitely, you know, points where I believe that decentralized autonomous organizations are good, but they need to be like very robustly tested because, you know, there are a lot of emergent risks. And at the point, I believe right now that you always need a human in the loop at some point. And without a human in the loop, you know, there is some point of misguidance for these sort of autonomous systems.

So I would definitely want to hear that. And the main thing I will definitely say, right? We are the leaders for these autonomous systems, right? At the end of the day, we think we are leading the conversation, the idea, and people are converging around that. So we have to understand that, and I will leave the floor to Miles to come in and set the floor for leadership and how we can discuss that innovation.

I love that. Phantom, thank you so much. And yeah, Miles, not to cut you off

if you were about to

come rocking in, but I definitely want to tee up that discussion in a really high quality way. And Phantom, thanks for such a great bridge. Really appreciate that. So, Brendan, you've been doing this for many, many months now, and obviously brought something to impact, you know, wonderful job, sir. Obviously, there's a long way to go to where you know, you're having the level of impact that you want, and driving the level of progress with your team with with all of your mission, in general, And I would love to hear from you, what is your biggest challenge as a leader?

And if you can try to distill that into a way where, you know, a lot of people here can try to understand it. And that way we can give you optimal feedback and contribution. You know, we have a global presence in this tank right now, and a lot of folks that want to see you succeed and want to succeed themselves and may synergize with some of your challenges. So sir, the floor is yours.

Sure. I think that, you know, there's The challenges of being a leader of a startup are not, they're not unique to Web3, first of all. And I'll, you know, I think the first 1 I identified was the fact that, okay, I have no active feedback from someone above me at the moment, and no ability to... I have no 1 to rely on but myself at the very beginning, right? And so 1 of the big challenges was finding mentorship and strategic advisors that could help me balance ideas off of and validate the direction.

And that was 1 big challenge. I think a lot of leaders need first of all, but struggle to find the right 1. So that was 1.

How did you go about trying to find a mentor or an advisor? I know that, I mean, man, what an excellent point, Brendan, just in general, trying to find, even when you're the leader, you're the CEO, you're the visionary, you still need somebody to try to bounce ideas off of and have it as an advisor. What was your tactic to do that? And Miles, along the way, if you hear any points where you're just like, wow, I gotta add this to everybody in here, of what it means for a leader to find a mentor, right? We'd love to hear from you.

But Brendan, keep rocking on to him.

Yeah, I mean, it was the same strategy I used when I was doing sales, you know, in insurance or software or commercial real estate. Prospecting using my network. There, you know, With at least a decade of time in business and doing business with high-level business owners, specifically, I had access to, I was lucky enough, or maybe I earned enough of a, an access to a network that I could take, take advantage of. And I think that it's an example of, if you operate properly and, and do excellent work for people throughout your career in the right way, you'll amass a very vast resource pool of people willing to help you, at least talk to. And so that's where I attacked first.

And then secondarily, I just jumped into different communities as deeply as I could to see if there was any philosophical, at least high level philosophy matching. And then the third thing was I sought diversity of perspective and background. And that's really the 3 main pillars.

No, I love that. I love that. I hope anybody in here who's trying to find a mentor, an advisor to help kind of take you to that next level and be that ear for you. I was taking some points there from Brendan. Miles has got some his hand up.

I'm so excited to hear from you, brother. What do you got?

Yeah, man. Thanks. I know you've been trying to get me in here. We've been talking about Technology the whole time. I thought you just brought me in here to make me feel stupid for an hour.

So I appreciate that So, all right, first of all Brenda I was a huge Grateful Dead fan. I literally dropped out of high school to follow the Grateful Dead for a while and fortunately decided to go back and finish and whatever. But I have just a couple thoughts. The first 1 is, I read a quote the other day that says, we lead from the essence of who we are. And your passion for veterans, I think is awesome.

You're leading out of that, and I congratulate you for that. I was thinking about this for a long time. I think part of us don't take the time to really learn who we are. We just want to make money, and I think a lot of

people do.

And I think all of us have that itch, you know, we have a mercenary self that we just like, I talk to so many people, they just wanna make as much money as possible. And all their decision making boils down to what makes me more money. And I think that's not always the best part of us. Obviously I'm not scared of money but that mercenary self isn't the best part of us. I do like the mission, I call it the missionary self which is taking the time to learn who you are enough to know that you believe in something deeply and are willing to sacrifice to see the needle move on a certain cause.

And I'll say this, these are just reflections on things you've been saying. The more we build our business from our missionary self, the more credibility we have, and the more credibility we have, the better people follow up, our team follows us better, the money finds us, all those things happen because of your credibility. And so I congratulate you for that. And, you know, I think a lot of people don't take, They've never really taken the time to discover their missionary self Because they either have too much pressure or to you know, they just need to make money now or whatever So so Good for that. The second thing I was thinking as you were talking about finding mentors, this is just true and this is, I'm a coach, I coach people who run businesses.

Most people who have enough ego to start a business have too much ego to ask for help. And so you have the right amount of ego. And which is, you know, I congratulate you for and everything you said about finding mentors, I completely, You know, you got to get in there. You got to, uh, you got to just try multiple things, get into multiple groups, try multiple people and come away with what works for you for now, which may not work for you later. So anyways, those are, those are the thoughts that, that, uh, come to my mind as you're talking.

I mean, I love this. And Miles, can you tell us a little bit more about this missionary self and talk a little bit of like what that means, from a leader point of view and why that needs to be instilled into what we're doing. And I have some original thoughts, but I just wanna hear more notes from you on this missionary self, please.

Yeah, I say, I mean, when you lead from the essence of who you are, your decision-making becomes a lot easier And the consistency and the integrity that comes out of leading from who you are just is, it's something that other people trust. And you can rely on, other people count on. So I was just thinking, when you lead from your missionary self and you have a real cause that you believe in, people are proud to be on your team. They feel a strong sense of team spirit. People see their values line up with yours, people feel attached, people feel a sense of almost citizenship with your.

So sorry about that, I think Miles, feel free to go ahead and unmute yourself. I think a button got clicked where everybody was muted. So, you know, huge apologies there. Just retract about 30 seconds. Sorry, no, maybe 10 seconds, literally.

Apologies there, sir. Yeah.

Oh, no worries. Yeah. So when you're leading from your missionary self, your team, they're zealots, they're not just employees. When your cause, people buy into it, people trust it. When you lead from your missionary self, or your mercenary self, you invite the same from others and they just look to you as they went to make money.

Their primary motivation becomes money. So, you know, I was sitting here thinking about while we were, that could help you figure out what is my my you know how do I explore my missionary self like what do you stand for what do you believe in what do you discontent about what brings you suffering what makes you weep what makes you joyful what are you passionate about what keeps you up at night what's this is a great question I was thinking about what what has grabbed hold of you and just won't let go? And, go ahead.

I'm sorry, I thought that you were,

no, I'm done. Please continue. I'm done. But those are the things that come to mind when you talk about missionary self.

Yeah, no, I totally get it more. I just wanted you to elaborate more on that, Myles, so everybody in here as innovators, as leaders, as founders and creators, they can understand more, Because I believe that's so important, especially when that's grounded deep in that passion you have for that impact. You know, I love this quote that you're saying, we lead from the ethics of who we are. I wrote that down and I'm just like, man, I hope everybody kind of hears a piece from that. Brendan, I want to give you an opportunity to reply and then, you know, obviously feel free to share, you know, beyond mentorship and advisors, where you're having some of these challenges as a leader.

And then I'd love to hear a couple more, you know, notes from Miles, just in general, as innovators, as creators, what are just key things that we need to be doing? I think now is a really good point to talk about that. So Brendan, over to you. Yeah, for sure. And then I know we have some hands up.

We'll get some more questions here down the line.

So over

to you, sir. I'll keep it super quick. The missionary self was the reason I, finding that was the onus upon which I put in my resignation and started the company. And The way that we operate, I love the way that you talk about it because it truly is, especially when you said it makes decision making easier and it makes almost zealous. It was the route by which I wanted to prove my dad wrong that you can have a team that's more passionate or as passionate as you are.

What we develop is principles of truth, righteousness, these pillars within which we operate that make decision-making very black and white. We do things above board. We do things with impactful intent and as representatives of DAV, but also as stewards of technology and leaders in a space that maybe doesn't even view us as leaders. But the missionary self for me was to, you know, what keeps me up at night? The fact that I can't make people change the way that they view things, but I really wish that I had the capacity to be more persuasive, I suppose.

But as far as challenges as a leader, so I just wanted to say the missionary self has been 1 of the biggest most impactful and applying that to to building a team, finding a team that matches and meshes well, but brings different perspectives. That's been the most valuable thing by far in this entire journey, Miles. So, I mean, you sniped it right out of the air. I mean, I can't, I followed you. I'm gonna follow everything you do.

The other thing, just another challenge, and it goes back to ego. When you're a person, so I self-funded, I liquidated my 401k, sold everything I had of value and just went into it, tried to make it happen. There's a couple of small investors here and there, but by and large, I've funded it out of the passive income from another company that I own. It's been bootstrapped, and that means that I was kind of a lone wolf, but also growing pack, so to speak, over the course of 2 years. And it came to the point where, you know, I had, there was a point at which I was reliant upon myself entirely.

And then as the team coalesced, that point, you know, that stranglehold as a founder and as a CEO, it had to be lessened and lessened on how things are done. You know, I think I struggled with trusting my team, trusting what I built, trusting the team to do things without me being involved. That was something that I was confronted with. And it's just like, I care so deeply. I want to be in the know And have my hands in something not that I don't trust my team, but at a certain point you just have to let go and Believe in what you've built and the people that you brought into it.

I think that was another big challenge.

I love that. Do you mind if I jump in on that?

No, Miles, not a problem at all. I want to take just a quick moment and recap just what even this tank is about for everybody in here and then we'll let you go ahead and rip up the stage. So guys, anybody joining us on innovators think tank week number 10, this is where we take anybody working on a project, a business, an idea, and we have them come up to the front of the panel and collaborate with folks who have a different perspective, education, expertise, background, resources, talents. And what we see is folks be able to ask questions that ultimately deliver better results than when they started. And so we're so glad everybody's here this week.

We've done over 40 hours of stuff in this tank here on Twitter Spaces. So if you want to continue to be part of this, We'd love to have you in the Discord. Feel free to give a follow over to our co-host and myself and we'll go ahead and get you into the Twitter community so we can get you guys the latest updates. Miles, over to you, sir.

Yeah, I just was reflecting on what, Bren, you were saying about, you know, trusting the team and you care about it so much. It's 1 of the first breakdowns leaders have is they don't, you know, your team is under 10 people, right? Or around 10 people?

Yeah, just about.

Yeah, so everyone, you know everyone personally, right?

Yeah, I mean, virtually and personally.

Right, right, right. And so culture and heart and passion and all the things you care about is past relationally right now. And that's where you're at now. If you get to, I'll pick a random number, 30 or 40, There's gonna be a day where the next challenge is gonna be how do I trust these people? I don't even know them.

And that's where you're gonna have to do things like, I'm gonna have to, like the values that are in your bones are gonna have to get onto the wall in a way that they're, and into the fabric of the organization in a way that you can scale and the value scales with it. And that's not easy, That's actually way harder than what you're doing now. It's like, in a way, the relational part is fun. The organizational, institutional part is the hard part.

No, no question.

Because what you have at 10 people is zealots. When you get to 200 employees, they're just many of them are just employees.

Right, right. That's why that's why the methodology for scaling has to be there before you scale. And that's 1 of the things that we plan for in terms of no, it's kind of a node methodology where everybody that is in the team represents, you know, a node that node is capable of x. And if if, if we bring someone on, they need to be onboarded with the missionary self having been established, but also the capacity to duplicate that node that they're coming in under, and then ultimately expand from there. It's a Navy methodology in many ways.

Yeah, it's a great point.

I say this to some of my clients. I'm like, you know, after every successful revolution becomes a nation, And the skill set that makes a revolution successful is a completely different skill set than actually running a nation. And and so you you've gotten to a place it sounds like where you're you're now you know in going to start thinking about how to like all the skills are going to have to change to get there. So that's an exciting thing for you.

Well, hopefully we get there. I mean, I would love the support of everybody in this first launch. It really is the linchpin in driving forward our ability to create and innovate. Because what we've done is we've created a thousand versions of a thousand X more complex and more things that are already built and ready to go and we sliced them down into a thousand SKUs. You know, and this 1 being the most simple, but you know, I would love the support of anybody here, you know, at the very least, you know, it's a special project and it's about time some good people got involved or back involved in something that's worthwhile across a number of different fronts.

But Miles, I couldn't appreciate your perspective more across the board. I'd love to connect with you offline as well. You seem to be a very, 1 of the more insightful individuals I've ever heard on Twitter spaces.

Well, dude, that's kind, thank you.

Man, I knew that having Miles up on this stage just would only make sense. Miles, thank you so much for bringing such excellent notes and comments. And I'm so glad that that first hour you could kind of hear more from Brendan on his thoughts and feelings on things. And I felt like the advice and kind of the points you're able to make about being a better leader could be more custom there, Miles. So I really appreciate you kind of hanging on and then saying some of those notes.

I wanna share just a quick thing with this idea, Brendan, of having team members and as a leader, having the issue of trust, right? And I heard this interesting kind of acronym, it was called OEE, it was Organization, Expectation, Execution, right? Because when you have confusion, then you definitely have failure. And as a leader, if we don't have things organized and have an expectation of how those those organized systems or tools are used, and then understand how that's, you know, sort of executed upon in real time with the expectation of the culture, with the company, the mission, I get why you would have kind of some reserve and in some ways, you know, kind of feel, you know, a little bit like, you know, there's an issue there, but I love what Miles is saying. There's clearly a next curve and imagine with 200 folks with the challenges, It sounds like you've done a wonderful job of curating a team that reflects your missionary self already.

And so I just, you know, hearing that language kind of for the first time, Miles, I just applaud you for bringing that into the tank. Real quick, I just I see we have a hand up over at a nightie, you know, over at the Google devs and does in between the brackets, an incredible space that just drives the community to the next level. I'd love to hear his notes and then, you know, Brendan, any other challenges you're facing as a leader before we dive into the business side of things. You know, we'd love to hear from you. So Anaiti, over to you, my brother.

Thanks, Josh. I joined this quite late, but I heard a little bit about, I don't know what it was, Manon talking or it was Miles talking about mentorship. And I just wanted to share some thoughts about mentorship. If I'm off track or if I'm not supposed to be saying this, please just let me know and I'm happy to drop off. So should I go ahead?

No, we would love to hear your notes about mentorship. You know, 1 of the biggest challenges as innovators and creators is even when we're the founders of what we're doing is having those points to feedback off of. And I love that. And we got some really cool notes from Brendan and, you know, Miles, I'd love to hear from you after how we find good advisors, how we find, you know, obviously working with folks like yourself to slow things down when we're white knuckling our business, you know, and getting folks to give us that other perspective is key. So, but yeah, Ohnadi, please, no, this is not off topic at all.

I think it's good for all of our innovators in attendance. So thanks for bringing it up and rock on.

Sure. So this is a very personal opinionated view about mentorship that I've grown to sort of adopt. And I think there are a few people on this call I see that may have heard this before. But for the benefit of those that haven't, I tend to see that a lot of people conflict the fact that they want a mentor with the fact that they need a mentor. And it's 2 different things.

And I totally agree that having a mentor is a fantastic experience. But 2 things I want to clearly help people understand from a personal point of view, and this is taking in some information from other people I've had talk, people I've interacted with, is there's a difference between wanting a mentor and needing a mentor. And in my opinion, you don't need a mentor all the time. And I've just added that all the time. Prior to now, I used to say you don't need a mentor.

What you do is you want a mentor. And sometimes because people don't have a mentor, they now sort of limit themselves from achieving what they could achieve on their own or with the resources around them, just because they feel they need a mentor to get to the next level. Now, The way I look at this is like, I think there are like 3 or 4 categories of this, I'll call it professionally uplifting relationship that you could desire. The mentor is 1 of the best of them, but the strongest of them is something beyond the mentor. And then I'll leave that for the last end of what I'm saying.

So the first things first I think what people really need is a role model and I'll take that at the bottom of this hierarchy of you know sort of relationships that can uplift you. So I see a role model as someone you know, but the person doesn't know you, I know. And you can role model yourself after anyone, you know, Jack Canfield, Elon Musk, Sunda Pichai, Barack Obama, Donald Trump. You, you could literally be, anyone could be your role model. Right.

And I think at that point the person doesn't know you but you know the person I tend to say okay soon the peach I is or such an Adele of Microsoft he's my mentor is only like he doesn't know right just not aware but I think he's a role model. And what can you do? You can pick up someone's book. I mean, that's what all these biographies and autobiographies were. You can pick up a book written by whoever, right?

You know, Miles Monroe, whatever. You could even be a religious mentor, T.D. Jakes or whatever. And then you could role model because they'll tell you their life story, right? The today's version of my biography, you know, and all that kind of thing is you could just follow this person on Twitter, on LinkedIn, or if they have a blog, and literally you can get a lot about what they do, how they think, the kind of decisions they make.

And if you find yourself in a situation where you have to make a decision or a choice, you could actually model your decision after this role model you have chosen. And then you can have many role models, probably not the best option. I would limit the number of role models I have, but everyone and anyone can be a role model. So sometimes people come to me and they want me to be their mentor. I'm like, maybe you want me to be a role model.

And I would, I would, I would suggest that you role model some aspects of my life that I'm proud of. And then there's some of the aspects that if you find out, please don't role model yourself against that because that would be terrible. Like I'm only here, I'm only here by luck because that other side of my life didn't destroy this other side of my life that you see that is all fancy or whatever. So the role model, you don't know the person, you don't talk to the person, you have no contact, you probably can send them an email or a Twitter DM or you can mention them and they don't have any obligation to respond to you. Now the mentor is a step above that and the mentor is someone you know probably has worked with you, was your boss, could have been a relationship that started with like maybe your elder brother or your uncle or could even be your dad or this, you know, but you sort of know your mentor, your mentor knows you.

If they ask your mentor, who's Zaniedi Udobong, he's like, oh yeah, I worked with that guy back in Nigeria 20 years ago. Or you don't know, we were on the same team and we worked on this project together, solid guy, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you have a relationship with your mentor. And I want to say you can talk to your mentor and your mentor can talk to you. And then if it's a very experienced mentor, they hardly make decisions for you.

You could come to them and say, hey, I'm thinking of resigning from Google and going into entrepreneurship. I have this idea, I want to launch a startup. How did I get into Y Combinator or Techstars or blah, blah, blah, blah. How do I launch my business? This is the idea I'm more than around with.

And then your mentor is going to take a lot of time and figure out who you are, your abilities, your soft, hard skills, and then come back to you with a very suggestive option, not prescriptive. It may be, if I was in your shoes, considering you just got here, you have a family, ABCXYZ, you don't have a green card, blah, blah, blah. Here's what I would do. Or have you thought of doing this? Blah, blah, blah.

It will never really tell you an experienced mentor, unless you're really in a very precarious situation, would never really tell you do this, right? And that's why I tell people that the mentor-mentee relationship is actually more difficult for the mentor than the mentee. Because you come and you say, I have a problem, help me sort it out. Do you know what it takes for the mentor to figure out and own the responsibility of a life decision for someone else? Like I'm going to tell you to jump out of Google, go on Stripe, Atlas, Incorporated company, apply to YC or do this, this.

That's a huge responsibility. In many respects, I'm gonna be your safety net. If all that goes wrong, I have to be ready to cut you a check, invest in you, take you in my house. You know, if you're, if you're going to jump off the Empire State Building or I have to come there and pull you down, I have to save you because I helped you along that line. So Mentoring somebody is, it's not, you can't, you don't mentor at scale.

It's a one-on-one, 1 to 2, 1 to 3 relationship. So at every point in time, I probably can't mentor more than 4 or 5 people. So when I get people jumping in my DMs, I can't mentor you. I'm sorry. And I used to be a bit more civil and courteous in this conversation, but right now I'm very blunt.

Sorry, I can't mentor you, no. Now, the other part of the mentor-mentee relationship I tell people is you've got to position yourself to be mentored, right? If you're a 12 year old boy playing football in the streets of Argentina and you're dribbling everybody, I want to be your mentor. I see you as Lionel Messi 10 years from now. You're not the 1 who needs me as a mentor.

I need you as a mentee because as a football coach, as an agent, I want to build the next best thing in football after Pelé. So you need to position yourself for me to want to be your mentor. You don't look at my position and tell me because I am now the head of dev rel at Google or I co-lead Google communities, you want to mentor me. When you think of it that way, you're already on the wrong track. What you want to do is you want to roll down me and figure out if you can get to where I am or beyond using some of the parts, skills and stuff I've done.

And honestly, all you need to do is follow me on Twitter. You know, I would talk about Nigerian politics once in a while and some shitty things I'm going through at work, but 80% of the time I'll be dropping gems and retweeting stuff and sharing spaces like this, which I don't tell you to join innovators. I set a reminder for the space. I retweeted. If you were sensible, you would join and figure out why am I hanging out there?

If I need is hanging out there, I should hang out there. He's trying to get something there. You don't even need me to tell you joining innovators. I just retweeted Josh's tweet. And that's all.

If you're a smart mentee kind of person, then you would do the right thing. So in summary, your mentor speaks to you in front of you. That may be email, phone call, whatever, or in person. Hey, you know, it depends on the kind of mentor you have and the kind of person you have. It's like, okay, yeah.

Meet me up on Malibu or let's meet in Hawaii. During my vacation, I'll come up to Aspen, you know, that's kind of mentor we all want, right? It's not, it's not, it's not available in the market in abundance. Right. And then the slight variation to the mentor is actually what people call a coach.

I've never really been coached. I have been mentored, but in having conversations with people, especially people who come from like a sports background, you start finding that I think a coach is someone who's more hands-on than a mentor. So I think every coach is already a mentor, but they do a little bit more hands-on stuff and they're a bit more prescriptive. They don't say, if I was in your situation, I would do this. They literally say, do this.

So if you are the coach of Messi, you would say, hey, take 10 trips around the field, you know, do this number of press ups. I think the coach is more prescriptive and I've not really been a professional coaching or coach situation, but I guess it is the same. So it's like, you have access to the person, the person knows you, they wake the person up in the sleep, say, hey, do you know Josh? He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know him, I've been working with him on XYZ, blah, blah, blah, and he's trying to execute this brilliant guy, or man, yeah, great guy, but you know, he needs to work on his soft skills or documentation, but overall, man, he's got a bright future. That is the mentor coach kind of relationship.

And it's amazing, but there's 1 more that is more powerful, right? And that's the sponsor. And the way I put the sponsor is everything a role model, a coach or a mentor, but the sponsor speaks about you when you're not there. So someone's going to start a new division in a company, execs are in a high-level meeting, they're like, who do we make the next CEO of Google? Or who do we make, who do we get to lead our operations in Asia Pacific?

And while you're not there, somebody raises up an hand and says, give it to this guy. I know exactly who you're looking for. Let me have a chat with him and figure out if he's ready to move bays from the Bay Area to Singapore. So if you knew what a sponsor is, you wouldn't be looking for a mentor. I'm not looking for a mentor right now.

I'm looking for a sponsor. I'm looking for people who call my name in places and at levels I do not belong. I need people who will pull me up and many times Those people remain anonymous someone called your name somewhere and you got mentioned or you got, you know, offered a role and you still don't know who that person is. Those are some of the most powerful mentors. They don't want you to owe them in depth of gratitude.

They don't want to do anything. So here's what I tell people in summary. You want a mentor? How many role models do you have and how well have you modeled your role model, right? When you role model your role model, well, I tell you, you don't look for a mentor, a mentor will look for you.

In quote, this kind of, that my messy analogy. And if you do all this, well, man, when you finally get a sponsor, it will blow your mind. So it all boils down back to you. It's not them, or it's not anything, which is why I say you don't need a mentor. You want a mentor.

And if you knew what I know, you wouldn't even want a mentor, you would want a sponsor. Thank you.

Wow. If I could say 1 thing.

Yeah, Brendan, give me 1 moment. I would love to hear your reply, especially given the context of our discussion here. And, Nighty, thank you so much for sharing all of that insight with us. I'm blown away, learning more about, I didn't even fully digest even before listening to you the dynamic between role model, mentor, coach, and sponsor, and how important it is, like, if we don't even know what we're looking for in that landscape, how can we possibly probe the right people to fill those spots? You know, I don't know.

And so I hope everybody is listening to all that and just, you know, giving as much as I was and thinking about the people in our lives who already fit these positions and what we're really looking for next to get us to where we're trying to go. And maybe it doesn't always look like a mentor. Wow, you just gave incredible, incredible insight. Miles, I know some of those points kind of like cross collaborate with some key points that you're making about leadership as well. And I would love to hear any notes you have on that.

Billy, I saw your hand go up as well. So I wanna just quickly say, we got a bunch of new folks in the tank. I know we do recaps often guys and forgive me for that, but with the rotating audience, I just wanna keep them informed. Innovators Think Tank, week number 10, we take anybody with a project, business, or an idea, we bring them to the front of this tank, we help them collaborate with big thinkers, such as Oneidi, even with things like mentorship, with coaching, with sponsors. What does it mean for us as innovators to actually connect with folks who have different strengths that can get us to where we need to go in the context of how we're trying to get there?

Sometimes you don't always need a mentor, and I think learning that from Oneidi is just so powerful. Phantom and GD, you guys have been so patient with your hands up and I wanna recognize both of you, just going back and forth here with Miles and Oneidi on some key topics and I know you guys have some points. If You could give me a thumbs up if they're very relevant to this thread that we're in right now before we pivot. Perfect. Perfect.

So yeah, Phantom, let's go ahead and go over to you real quick. And GD, I saw your DM. I know you have some questions that we'll definitely let you get to here in the next little bit. So, Raja, over to you, my brother, and then, Miles, I really want to hear your take on some of the points Anaiti is saying there after Phantom. So, Raja, all you.

Thank you, Josh. And, Anaiti, like, such a wonderful breakdown, right? So, I would like to add my space engineer perspectives, and I will try to guide you guys through the idea of traveling through space. So we have 3 concepts that we call guidance, navigation and control. So we have guidance and then we have to figure out how to navigate our lives and what is in our control, right?

So once we sort of figure those things and we sort of improve on that, the main thing that the mentor or the role models think is about guidance, right? Your thoughts are not developed yet. So you use the vehicle of other thought leaders who have innovated to the utmost things. I call them the pioneers, right? The pioneers have new thought verticals that have been created and they have changed the way the world views with their own reality.

So I believe that there is a reality integration of perspectives of experts. If you look at what chatGPT does, It is 16 experts who sit together and break down exactly what your prompt is and try to give you an answer. So the thing is I am working on a platform that does multidisciplinary optimization and that also believes in model-based systems engineering. So you have to sort of rethink how the world works in your own little ways and sort of, you know, place that interoperability of perspectives. So I think we all have, you know, our own little pieces of the puzzle.

And that's how we fix the humanitarian global puzzle. So we all have to contribute with our perspectives, help us check and balances of perspectives. And effectively, we give all of us a voice. That is what I believe. Global governance, right?

What United Nations is somewhat trying to attempt, I believe.

Sure, what excellent points to add on there, Phantom. Thank you so much for sharing those. And Brendan, apologies if I stepped on your toes. I know we had a couple hands up for a minute there. I know you had a reply for a nightie and then I'd love to hear your- Somebody else wants

to go first, please. I don't mean-

You're the man. You're the man. I really appreciate that. Miles, I really was hoping to hear from you just on this thread of role model, mentor, coach, sponsor, and obviously folks in leadership positions who think that they need a mentor in order to kind of hit the next level with taking their idea to impact. What are your thoughts here, my friend?

Yeah. First of all, I love everything that's being talked about and I love the breakdown of sponsor and all those things. That's super helpful. I want to talk about how to be a, back to Brandon, how to be a business owner and also a developer of your people. Because that's like doing this in the context of running a business is a little bit different.

And I would just say this, it starts with what I call a developmental heart, which is different than, you know, I separate development from equipping. Equipping is teaching people skill sets. And that's kind of a science. It's really easy. Not easy, but it's it's it's it's very black and white.

How to teach people a skill teaching but developing somebody is is more about who they are. Who they could be and helping helping them see who they could be and move in the direction of who they could be. The best employers have a development heart where they want to see their people grow in every aspect of their life. And I would just suggest how you know deep down if you're a business owner and you have a development heart, if what's best for 1 of your employees is to no longer work with you, you have a decision. And when you choose to say, listen, you're gonna transcend me and you need to go, that's how you know, okay, I have a development heart.

But if you keep them and hold them back, then maybe you don't as much. But in the context of a business, I've done a lot of research on the environment. There's kind of 2 ways to be developmental. 1 is you start a program and the other is you create an environment. And there's an upside and a downside to both.

The programs are very intentional and you pick people, you do specific things to develop them. An environment, I like to have a Developmental environment and then in the context of environment build a couple programs because and why I like an environment is that if a Developmental environment invites everyone in because it's just a way of behaving and I'm gonna give you 3 the kind of the 3 environments in which that create development and you have to have all 3 for it to work and and you'll see how they work. It's challenge, feedback, and belief. If you want to be a developer as an employer, then your environment needs to have challenge, meaning you need to be calling people up, you need to be giving them assignments that they're uncomfortable with because it's a little bit larger than what they feel confident in. And and you need to give them feedback, consistent, good or bad, but consistent, honest feedback.

And then all of that in an ocean of belief. And it's the belief that kind of humanizes the challenge. And when you have challenge, feedback and belief built into the fabric of the DNA of the team you're on, people grow. They just do. That is, I think about the environments I've been in, that's what they're like.

Now to build a program, I honestly don't think, if you don't have any development program, honestly, don't overthink it, Get a book, read a chapter, sit down and say, what did you learn and what are you going to do different? Don't think that being a developer is some wild, you have to have a PhD in leadership to develop somebody. Get a book, get a group in a room, read a chapter, what did you learn? What are you going to do differently? The other thing I would say about this, and this is just kind of a practical thing, if you're gonna do that and have a development time, don't try to do business and development in the same meeting because business will win.

And the development will get the leftovers. And so do like a launch or whatever. Do it, try it for 6 weeks, see what happens, and then our 6 months and go from there. But when I hear all of this, I think, The last thought I have about mentors and mentees, this is my perspective and it's, 1 of the questions is who's supposed to do the asking? Is it the mentee that's supposed to ask the potential mentor, or is it the mentor that's supposed to ask the mentee?

In my experience, in general, not 100%, it's better when the mentee asks the mentor, and it's more, it tends to be more, that's more common. In other words, like think about people, think about what it would take for you to go look at somebody and say hey I want to be your mentor like that's that's a you know I guess in the messy example I understand that if you're positioned in a way but if you're not you're not gonna do that and so I think there's a lot of sharp a lot of experience because of their age they don't necessarily feel as valuable as they once did. If you were to come alongside, I collect mentors, I really do, I believe in having a ton of mentors. And because they do become sponsors, and I want people to think me winning is them winning because then they're gonna help me win. And so I collect mentors, but I have to do the asking every time.

And that also, it's like, I want them to know that I'm going to do the work because I did the asking. Okay, I'm done.

Oh man, I wish you weren't, Miles. But yeah, Nighty, over to you, brother. I love your reply.

Yeah, so Miles, you are 100% correct that

99.99%

of the time, the mentee has to ask the mentor. But let me, what I would add to that is, at that point, it shouldn't be a strange ask either for the mentee or the mentor. If it feels like a strange ask to any of the 2 people involved, then I think there is a problem. So when I say it should be a strange ask, we could have gotten to the point where We're friends, you know what I'm doing, I'm doing something, or you've heard my story. And then I reach out to you and say, hey, would you like to mentor me?

Because it feels like maybe I could do more for the mentee. And I need his permission to do it. Like maybe like signing a consent form. Like, I would love to help you do from this to that. I'm not going to ask you, but I need you to ask me.

And that's why I said it's not going to be strange. There would have been a little bit of activity if I just meet, like I said, I meet Elon Musk at coalition conference in Canada. Hey, Elon, can you be my mentor? That is a strange ask, like, where did that come from? It's surprising even to me if he says yes, and it's of course surprising to him, like, who's that guy that's asking me to mentor him?

So 99.9% of the time, the mentor, the mentee needs to ask for mentorship. But if the mentor finds that a strange request, this is my personal opinion, then I think you've not built the muscle or the trajectory to make that a next, what would I call it? An eventual next step. Right? So it's like me being a manager.

I maybe I have my skip level manager or I'm in a company and it is a director or I'm a member of, I don't know what the Rotarian club or something, or we play golf together or something. And then we've had a couple of conversations and you've shown a little bit of interest in my business. And then I come to you and say, Hey, would you like, can I, can you be my mentor? That's a natural progression. And it's also because maybe you've seen me at every talk, every Ted talk you've given and every conference and every space you keep seeing, like, I see some people that I don't know if I mentored them.

Where's Yuma on this call? I've seen some people on this space that are, they probably found out I've joined this space and then they're going there to figure out what I'm talking about. When that person comes to me and says mentor me, it's 100 percent. It's not even

50-50,

right? So I think that's my restful. That I agree with you that the mentee needs to ask, but my question, my caveat will be, if that seems like an unnatural progression in the relationship between the 2, then there's probably something wrong on 1 side of the relationship.

That is a super interesting point in contrast. Miles, did you have a reply to that? Any thoughts come to mind that you wanted to share with all of us?

No, I can bring this into a really practical, current example that I'm in. So like I said, I'm an executive coach. I work with businesses. So I did a cultural evaluation of a leadership team of a business, and they had problems. Like normally organizations don't want a culture evaluation when everything's going fantastic, you know.

But we found them And so then I sat with the owner of the business and I said, man, I can help you. And I'm laying out a contract and saying, I think you need about a year and here's I'm, and he's become hesitant and hesitant and hesitant. And I'm not going to chase him to coach him because even if I can twist his arm into signing this contract, now I have

a new team.

And that's not going to, honestly, I would just be taking his money and probably not helping him. And I don't need to do that. And so I've like, I set a deadline and he didn't go with it. I know he needs me and he knows he needs me, he just won't do it. And so I just like, I won't chase because the more I chase as a coach, the less value they perceive in me when I get them.

And so there is an art to that. And, but that's just, I don't know, when I think of this discussion, that's what comes to mind.

Miles, I think that that's a really excellent point. And to have 2 such high level folks, and Heidi and Miles, both on the panel with such excellent experience in, not only bringing their own ideas to impact, but helping other people do that. I hope everybody listening right now realizes kind of the value going back and forth and really the context at which we're talking about this very high level. For anybody just now joining the Think Tank guys, Innovators Think Tank week number 10, and that's right, we've been doing this for 10 weeks straight. Every Saturday at 2 p.m.

Mountain, we come together and we collaborate with big thinkers, anybody with a project, a business, an idea, even if you have a project, a business, or an idea, feel free to shoot us a DM to either the co-host or myself, we'd love to get you up here and take your project to the next level, help you collaborate with folks, connect, and really explore some questions that maybe you hadn't originally thought of. Oftentimes, the quality of our questions determines the quality of our results, and sometimes we don't even have those questions at our disposal. It's a matter of talking to somebody with another bit of strength. So anybody, you know, that's tuning in for the first time in this tank, thank you so much for being here. Um, the collaboration doesn't end, you know, once we do here, we have a discord community that can be found in the link and the nest, um, phantom.

I see your hand up. Also, we had a buccaneer and Brendan, you know, obviously this is in the context of some of our discussion within, you know, biggest challenges of being a leader. Right. And what that can look like and obviously needing an advisor is something that Brendan had brought up. A key point of, you know, what he needs is kind of navigating the terrain of this, you know, and I think Inai put it really interesting, this role model mentor, coach, and sponsor, and think more, you know, what really he could use to drive himself to the next level, I think is a really cool point of, yeah.

Well, and Just to clarify, Josh, sorry to jump in.

Please, please. I was kind of outlining the initial challenges. I've acquired mentors using that practice. It's not something that I'm, I mean, I'm always looking for more mentorship, of course, But I was trying to outline the progression of the challenges for everybody in the space that is either about to do something like what we've all either have done or are doing or trying to do. But in that respect, I love the approach that Miles mentioned.

I mean, I wrote a number of points down, but I digress. I know that my hand wasn't up, but I just wanted to

make it clear.

No, no. Yeah. So, I definitely hear you. You know, there was a huge challenge of that originally. It's something you've overcame and you're sharing some of the ways that you've done that.

You know, even though we're talking about your business and your project, Brendan, I think the ways that you've gotten to be successful where you are now can even be a point of learning for all the innovators in attendance. So I always welcome you to share your wins and how you were able to actually find a mentor, it's really huge. I know that we have Lydia, you have your hand up and on the team over at Buccaneers. And obviously, leadership is something very important to you and your role and all that all around. I'd love to hear from you and some of your thoughts.

Yeah, please, the stage is yours, Lydia.

Uh-oh. Of course, I know. No, I'd love to chime in here. I just wanted to say that my current experience is probably 1 of the best ones I've ever had working for anyone. And so those are flowers directly to Brendan.

It was 1 of those examples of where like building a team and finding mentors were the same thing. They were paralleled. So yes, I'm the content girl, but that's kind of a diminishing title for what all I do within the team. You know what I mean? I feel like all of our perspectives are voiced and you guys know a little bit about my background.

I was sort of like an active and open learner. In fact, that's sort of a subtitle that I occupy for onboarding, is that they sort of guided me in and I was able to offer my perspective on international compliance and stuff, you know, on all the stuff that I knew about on the financial end and on the writing end. So it's really wonderful when they all align like that.

I love that point when kind of that mentorship lines in with that work. And sometimes like, students who are just so promising and so talented can be invited by their teachers to come work on projects outside of school, has some synergy with that, just such talented folks that come onto the team. And not only is the teacher a mentor of that student, but also can turn into a deeper team setting as well. And I love what you're talking about there, Lydia. And also it's really cool to hear from a team member shouting out their founder and CEO while we're talking here in the think tank.

Obviously, probably not the best time to bag on him, but it's really cool to hear that feedback from Brendan and his demeanor of how he's delivering all of his points is just really, really cool. Billy, I know, and then, Phantom, we're going to go over to you. I think Billy just shot up a hand with something with a 90. Wanted to be sure he can reply there. And then, Rajah, Phantom, the stage will be yours after Billy.

So Billy, we'd love to hear from you.

OK, OK, guys, so I'll be responding firstly to Aniedi. Honestly, I enjoyed his analysis because he was very thorough about the different roles, the different responsibilities of these people and how they come to play. Firstly, about the mentor, he clearly explained what a mentor is and then at what point you need a mentor. He also mentioned a sponsor. To a large extent, I didn't really know how to put them together, how to look at who a mentor is and what points you need a mentor, what points you need a role model and also when you need a sponsor, right?

So my contribution is this, I feel There are different roles at different stages, right? We may need different people, right? So if you're looking for the motivation for a new attraction to a new career, right? At that point, You may not really attract a sponsor right at that point at that point Your role model might not really be so effective because for many for many skills I can text skills You cannot really see what these people are doing for them, for you to just copy them, right? You just know that this person is in tech, right?

They don't like most people don't upload the courses. They are taking the workload like the activities like your tasks for the day online. You understand? So in many instances, a role model in that scheme, like you can, like Annie, you can respond to me back if I'm getting some of the things not right. So I feel in that case, a mentor, someone that is working, someone that is in that field that you're trying to get into, or someone that is in the capacity of what you're trying to achieve, does a lot more for you in that particular area, because they are the people that are going to guide you on what to do, on how to go about it, and then maybe share their own journeys with you as well.

So that interaction helps you grow faster. That interaction helps you grow faster as well. So I feel that like the analogy of football and then for like tech, for tech, to some extent, it might not necessarily be so much as in football you see potentials, in football you can like you can hang

around. We're going over time, I'm sorry to interrupt you. So I think you start with a role model and then you go to a mentor, then you get to a sponsor. And it's not generally a linear trajectory. The thing I would like to share with you, And please take everything I'm saying with a pinch of salt.

Like it's very opinionated. And sometimes I try not to be this prescriptive.

Yes, I understand.

I'll give

you a very classic example. Not every tech person who is ahead of you can mentor you, because mentorship is a skill, right? And if you're looking for someone, I'll give you a very clear example. I mean, the cloud-ish kind of space, right? The AI space.

And there's someone called Kelsey Hightower who just resigned from Google after 9 years, right? If you know, everybody knows Kelsey Hightower. So Kelsey Hightower writes code and gives talks at almost every cloud next cube con cloud native conferences, right? So if I was role modeling Kelsey Hightower, I'll follow him on GitHub, follow his open source projects, listen to his talks there. I may not be able to role model some other kind of people who are not, like you said, they're not publishing their work, right?

But I should be able to role model Kelsey Hightower. Will I ever get to the point where Kelsey Hightower is my mentor? Probably would have been easier for me if I was at Google or if I was on 1 of the foundations where he's working. But let's put that aside. What I'm trying to say is that eventually the role model that you end up in quote adopting has to be the role model that is a role model, not just somebody who is ahead of you in tech.

So if you get it, think of your mentor like a scholarship. If you find someone who can help you go from 0 to 60, much faster than or 0 to 1, much faster than anything else through that kind of abridged mentoring or like you said, maybe hand-holding, that's great. And I don't want to get into the details of all that because I'm not even an expert in this thing. But what I'm trying to say is that at that point, imagine I had an opportunity to meet Satya Nadella, right, the CEO of Microsoft, And I wanted him to be my mentor. And he asked me, have you read Heat Refresh?

And I said, no. How would that sound? Or I met Richard Branson and I'm not ready to losing my virginity. Or I read Michelle Obama and I've not become, I've not read Becoming Michelle and I'm asking her to be my mentor. Do you get what I'm trying to say?

That's why you need to do the prep work. It's how we say even in tech. It's how we say even in tech. You don't come to me and ask me what's cloud computing, I expect you to ask Google that question. You Google it, you Wikipedia it, you YouTube it, then when you get stuck, you could come and tell me, yeah, I've been reading about cloud computing.

I'm finding it difficult to understand the difference between big data and artificial intelligence. And also, What's this whole thing about infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service? That's the question I want to answer to you, not what is Cloud computing. If you ask me what is Cloud computing, a previous me would Google and give you an answer so that I could be smart, because I didn't want to be known as a Googler who doesn't know cloud computing. The current me will tell you to go and Google it, period.

And if that offends you, I don't want to have a relationship with you, in quotes. If I tell you Google cloud computing and then you feel upset, I honestly don't wanna deal with you. I want you to tell me, oh, I've Googled it and this is what I came up with, or I'm not here to do your Googling or your chat GPT for you. I'm sorry, that's not my job as your mentor. And I will not do it.

And if that annoys you, if that makes you go and bash me on Twitter, so be it. But this is a level of awareness that I'm very careful about what I'm saying. I try. This is a recorded space. But I am at that level of awareness and I don't owe any apologies.

I'm open to superior arguments, right? And I'm very open to people who are introverted, extroverted, I'm trying to understand a lot of those things. And it helps even in business and in coaching, right? Like, And miles was saying very specifically about, I love what miles said. There are 2 things he said about being in a position where you winning is me winning.

I want to mentor you. He said that and that stock. The other 1 is he talked about in a meeting. You don't want the leadership and the business to be in the same I've made that mistake today Today like in a call earlier today I don't know if any of the people that was on that call is with me where I sort of mixed the business and the leadership conversation And thank you Miles. I'm never going to do it again.

I'll probably set the agenda and tell people, hey, let's get on the call. And like, hey, this is supposed to be a standoff or a technical conversation, but let's put that aside and let's talk about leadership. And let's talk about ABCXYZ. Or let me give you guys a few nuggets about some of the things I've been thinking of recent. And I'll wrap up that conversation.

I'm like, hey, do you know what? At tomorrow's standup, we'll look at the bugs, the features, and the issues in Jira. So I'm sorry if I interrupted you. And I really wanted to make this brief because I know there's a lot of people that are talking and this, you know, think tank, I don't know if it's time bound to like 60 minutes or 75 minutes, something like that. But we can take this offline.

I should probably do a blog post and create a couple of content. But this is very opinionated. I hope this has helped explain a little more. And like I said, the sponsor finding a sponsor, It's like a lottery, man. It's like a lottery.

So I maybe if you go about finding a sponsor, you may get very frustrated. But when someone sponsors you my brother and you feel that experience of being sponsored. Very orgasmic. For want of a better word. Thank you.

Okay, thank you so much, Billy. You definitely do get a good reply. And then I'll go ahead and reframe and we'll get moving back in. But Billy, the floor is yours.

Okay, okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. Honestly, I got that clarity. I got that clarity.

First off, I got the clarity that, first off, it is very opinionated. So that is from your own perspective. And then also beyond your opinion, it's about the kind of things you're looking for. It's about the kind of people, like the extent you want to go further, like you want to go deeper, and then the different stages you're looking for different people. Like someone, the old you might not be looking for a sponsor, right?

The old you might not be looking for a sponsor when you started. So it is clear. I like the clarity there at different stages. This is what you need, right? It makes a whole lot of sense and thank you so much on this then something else something else I I had written down initially when miles was speaking about the the leadership about being a missionary leader rather than a mercenary.

Like when he was talking about some of the motivations for people to really put in their best and a lot of that like Generally, generally an average person would easily want to leave a job to get a better paying job, right? But in many instances that is that is that is what is that is what is even that is what is that is why people go to go to extra length to take courses to make themselves command higher pay right and then also he had like he spoke on how we should be more of um missionary and he explained what missionary is and a lot of us have that experience of missionaries like people who are Serving a purpose people who are doing things that the monetary benefit is not what is their interest as a matter of fact? That is that is a weaker interest. That is a weaker Motivation right they want to achieve something they want to make sure there is, they are putting up a meaning, like for example, people that are leading companies, they're trying to solve a problem, they're trying to take the world to a better place, They're trying to make sure like a lot of people that are facing certain problems are not facing that issue anymore.

So that is why you see some CEOs, that's why they are busy schedule, like you see them, you see them like an example, I stand to be corrected for this. Someone like Elon Musk, right, to a large extent, Elon, before he acquired Twitter, was so active about the differences and then his motivation to like the idea, Like, he was so vocal about his intention to acquire Twitter, his intention to be part of this team, his intention for what he wants to change, right? He was always speaking about how he wanted to be, he wants free speech to be completely free speech, right? He wasn't looking, he wasn't impressed by the fact that it was tilted to the left a bit. So I feel to some extent, right, to some extent when the motivation is strong, when it is more about the solutions, it's more about what you want to achieve, what you want to add value, then people can stay and work for so long.

Then also something very interesting that Miles mentioned was that sometimes founders and employers should be able to let people proceed, like let people ascend, right, to bigger responsibilities, to other roles, other companies to grow in their careers, right? This is something that we find very, very rare because in my experience and in most instances where people have met, people have looked up to, when they're leaving jobs, it's always difficult, right? Because you find out that the older employers try as much as possible to make sure they hold you down. In many instances, it might not necessarily be the monetary aspect. You may have an interest to work in a certain environment, You may be aspiring so much, but in many instances, they want the best value from you to be something that is contributing to their progress and that alone.

And to an extent, that is very selfish, right? So lastly, I feel for those of us like that are into innovation and trying to create solutions to problems, trying to solve problems and make the world a better place, I feel putting it at the back of our mind that it is not only for profit sake, this is not only something we are doing to make money, to make a lump sum of money out of it. Because if that is your motivation, then there's going to be a point where you get that, you get what you want, you get that amount, maybe the initial motivation, you get that. At that point, you might lose focus. You might feel that, okay, you've arrived, and then the company starts deteriorating, and business starts, like, You may not put in your best as much as you would have done if it was something you were doing it out of the passion, out of love, that is of the monetary value.

Thank you

so much, guys. Billy, thank you so much for that incredible insight. I love having you on the tank. For anybody curious, Billy has literally been around since innovators think tank number 1. It was, there wasn't even a number on that think tank yet.

It was just innovators think tank with a brain and a nice cloud coming out of it. So I'm just to tell you guys, Billy has been around and you know, he really believes in this power of collaboration. All the points you're making, Billy, I feel like are so impactful, so powerful. And I just want to do a quick recap for anybody joined in the Think Tank. And for anybody who's heard this many times today, I apologize.

But this Think Tank is for anybody working on a project, a business, an idea to collaborate with big thinkers, folks with a different expertise, perspective, background. And what we notice is that folks are able to innovate in real time and really address their problems, concerns of businesses in a way that they haven't done before. So 1 thing that, you know, why we're even on this thread of discussion is Brendan had brought up the point, you know, when we asked him, what's your biggest challenge as a leader, he was kind of going through the time horizon of trying to find mentors. And he's always open for them, you know, always, always loves them, but just sharing some of his tactics to do that. And it really expanded a bigger discussion within the innovators think tank with with the 90 with Billy with miles with with a bunch of folks here about what it means to be a leader and then also look to find somebody who can help lead you and provide that bit of advice when we really need it.

I think this is so powerful And Brandon, just to put a bug in your ear, 1 thing that we're gonna rotate to is, you know, your biggest challenge in business. And obviously, you know, for anybody who's curious what Brendan's doing, guys, he's taking Web3 and he's gamifying it with also a philanthropic element. And what that looks like is, you know, disabled veterans in America having real world impact and real world benefit from this Web3 project. It's unlike anything that we really see in that space. So we applaud him and his work and his innovation all around.

But Brendan, we are going to be going to you more on, you know, your biggest challenges in business, not just in leadership. And obviously going from, you know, how many mints you want to do in the place where you want to go to this point where you are now. And, you know, drawing some contrast there and what the challenges are for you. We have a number of hands up from some people I just can't wait to hear from. I have left Phantom on the back burner for far too long here and we had a number of speakers going back and forth on a key point, but he's generally very concise and very clear, has an awesome information density and good points to make.

So, Phantom, over to you, sir. Power, I know you had your hand up. And then, Myles, I saw your hand shoot up. We can't wait to hear from you as well. And then we're gonna pivot into a little bit more of a discussion on challenges in business.

Brandon, we'll hear from you. So, Raja, the floor is yours.

Yeah, thank you, Josh. So what I definitely believe, you know, is that, you know, with any sort of system, governance effectively is a very important question, right? So I think that Brendan might understand this quite well because it's the blockchain terms. But I think what we have to understand is how the demand drives the proof of stake, right? People have that proof of stake that sort of creates the demand side of things.

And then you have the sort of proof of work, which is a supply side of things. So what you have to do is sort of match that equilibrium between demand and supply. And what we are doing is we are creating these NFT chains and opening up these values, right? Human values that probably we do human actions because data streams already do that. They categorize and use our data for various things.

So, Web3 is about using the data for productive good, I believe. And I think Brendan is on the right track and I wish to give him these wisdoms, right? So, about mentorship, India has a great, you know, world and I think everyone has heard of it. It's called the guru, right? But the guru, that is the mentor, has a thing that is equivalent is the mentee and that is the shishya, right?

So what happens in the Guru and Shesha relationship is that there is an evolving perspective between the dynamic look at reality. So what happens is that the student grows by learning from the master, eventually becoming a master of thought himself. But then the master has to now become the student and learn to match his students mastery. That dynamic grows all of us together. The collaboration is the new currency, my friends.

Valueneers, you heard it here first. Josh, you know how to do this. You know, we at Innovators Think Tank believe in collaboration, right? We believe in what I believe is called reality integration, right? It's not about creating NFTs, it's about real world impact, guys.

Where is the impact? Who is getting impacted? How can we make systems of control that is within peoples and communities and that can help us, help technology and channel for positivity. So that is my benefit of, you know, sharing these wisdoms. And, you know, I believe that you guys can now channel that messaging in your own ways.

Raja, what profound stuff. And as a systems thinker, as somebody who just really understands the idea of value engineering down to, you know, the systems and algorithms that, you know, we're discovering every day to try to do that. I just applaud you for the way that you wrap up those points and drive, you know, the mission in such a clean way. Thank you so much for that. Power, I want to rotate over to you.

I know you've had your hand up for a minute, likely a question and a couple things there. That will go over to Miles and then we'll open up our new topic and then we'll be rotating into a whole new portion of this tank here shortly guys. So yeah, give the floor over to you, Power.

Appreciate that, Josh. And I just wanted to try and keep this as brief as I can. So more so to just Brandon and even just to anyone who's an innovator innovator in their space business or practice, we need to remember as innovators, we're trying to kind of bring forth something that doesn't exist in today's current world in today's current reality, right? Or we want to challenge the status quo or change the way things have been done. And because of this, there is no inherent roadmap or anybody who can tell us effectively how to do it except our own initial vision, our own voice, and our own kind of, you know, our link to that quantum mind where all things stem.

And, you know, I'd like to bring in more of an esoteric understanding of the self to you, Brandon, and say, you know, your voice sounds more so, it's not that, you know, you need a mentor, a coach, or guru, any, however you want to word it, but maybe you just need to kind of grow more your own understanding on on yourself and what it is that you're trying to bring forth. And I'll even say to you, when it comes down to managing teams or the uncertainty of how to manage teams, you probably have the best resource more than anyone if you have an entire battalion of guys who have led armies, who are from different cultures and different backgrounds and they can tell you different stories and anecdotes and so many different, so much wealth of information that even just listening to their stories and their challenges, you know, you'll be surprised in how you can then grow in your ability to kind of lead others into an unknown reality or unknown future, you know. And I'll just say that to you to maybe what you need is maybe encouragement, what you need is maybe somebody to maybe help you hone and heighten your sixth sense because there are other aspects of things that need to speak to you but if you're kind of drowned out too much by the noise of what it must be, what it needs to have and you know what people need and all this kind of stuff, you're not going to hear the voice of the unseen.

And that's kind of what you're trying to bring through. So what I will say to you is, and even as well, shout out to Miles because he said something so profound, I almost dropped my phone. You know, I was just like, what the? I can't even remember what it was but it resonates kind of with the sense of you, great men are made and not born and by virtue of you kind of deciding to do something of greatness, by virtue gives you that responsibility and that crown. So I'd just like to say to you, bro, like, you know, more power to you for stepping to the plate and even leading within an initiative like this.

And you are going to be met with so much, I guess, either can call it confusion or rebuttals or people who just don't simply understand it because it's never been seen before. And this is the beauty, but also the disadvantage of being an innovator in space, and I mean space by industry or the world, is that no one's seen it before, so we don't know what it looks like. But then this is where you must silence the inner critic or the inner 1 who's kind of of this world. And you need to kind of transcend your understanding past all this stuff and all this noise, so then you can really kind of get a deeper understanding of what you're trying to do, who you're trying to do it with, and you'll be surprised that the universe or God or your deity, whatever you want to call it, will send the right people to you, and by doing so, you'll be mentored through different lessons, different experiences and your understanding of what you're trying to do and everyone who you're trying to do it with will grow stronger and you'll be surprised at how much clearer the way becomes, you know?

So that's what my challenge is.

I don't

think you'll

be surprised, Power. You're so profound in the way that you worded that. It's such an important piece to the entirety of anybody who wants to be a fully optimized individual, no matter what you're doing, really. And, and, you know, to to be blazing a trail is to be is to be, you know, to operate with conviction, but be open to agility, and know for a fact that you don't know everything and Do your best to know what you don't know and attack those vectors And be open for when you find out that you don't know something else, too and so, you know if The day I'm done learning is bad. I think it's the same for anybody else who wants, who seeks to be great and do some great things.

You know, I'll say, you know, just a brilliant points from Power over there. I had the honor of hearing from, for the first time an innovator's think tank number 9. And I always just send him an invite to come back and share his point of view. It's just such a raw sort of uncut, but also very cut take of the point that we're talking about and just add such another layer of perspective. I'm very glad that you found the Think Tank power and I really appreciate the constant wisdom that you pour out and the authenticity that you pour out to everybody here.

So, huge shout out to you. Miles, I know you had a hand up and then you DC'd and we got you back up here on the panel. Power, you know, gave you a huge shout out, said he almost dropped his phone from some of the notes you were talking about. And, you know, I have to agree. And even from a nightie over there, Billy Phantom, all of our speakers, guys, we really appreciate your notes.

But Miles, I want to give you an opportunity to, you know, reply. I'm going to do a pivot, kind of get us into another little segment of what we're doing here. We'll keep moving forward in the Innovators Think Tank.

Yeah, thanks. First of all, I missed, I don't know why, but my sound just died. So I jumped off and back on. That's what happened. I missed all of it, Power.

Sorry about that. So I just was, we were talking about the mercenary missionary thing I just had a couple thoughts and I'll be brief so that we can pivot You know like we talked about Like let's just call it compassion and profit Honestly my opinion is Without profit compassion is not sustainable People get compassion fatigue. They just run out of gas when it comes to compassion. And so I just had just a thought that profit is what makes compassion sustainable. And so it's not just that you can do both, it's that it's necessary to do both if you want a long-term compassionate endeavor first.

The second thing we were talking about is, you know, we were talking about missionary and mercenary and how you attract. I would just say, if I think you should pay your people well, but I don't think that should be the main attraction to your business or to work for you. I have a saying, it might be a little bit harsh, but it's Simply this, that if you want an eagle, then point to the heavens. If you want a duck, then pull out the bread. And so, you know, like, learning how to cast vision and invite people in, like there's just a thought, whatever you catch someone with, that's what you're going to keep them with.

And so if you catch them with money, your only way to keep them is by giving them more money. If you catch them with vision, then you have their heart and you just give more vision. You keep going with the vision. And again, I don't think you should pay people poorly. I just don't think that should be the main attraction to working with you.

Eventually, you're not gonna like the end result of it. So I just wanted to kind of wrap a bow on the mercenary missionary conversation that we've been having.

No, and I really appreciate you saying that. I see Brendan, you know, clearly has some thoughts to what you're saying. This is kind of the first time I've heard it in that language, Miles, kind of packaged up in that way. And some of the stuff that you're pointing out is just so, so important that I hope everybody in this tank can, you know, give you a follow and kind of absorb more of that content. This idea of pointing to the sky if you want an eagle and take out their bread if you want a duck.

I am gonna use that from you shamelessly, sir. That is a really, really funny good note.

So check this out. Like I was in the Marine Corps. In the Marines, like if you ever watch a Marine commercial They're not like the Army Navy and Air Force at all They're they're like Army Navy and Air Force talk about all the benefits and all the hey, we're gonna GI Bill We're gonna pay for out, you know VA loan. We're gonna do all that. At least they used to Marines offer all the same benefits that the other branches in the military offer, but every 1 of their commercials is like, you know, can you like scale a mountain and then fight a dragon?

Because if you can, then, you know, we want you And they don't talk about the benefits, they have all of the benefits, but they're appealing to something better. And I think, again, that's a good case, a model of how to think about attracting people onto your team.

I couldn't agree more. I think that that is a wonderful model to think about how to attract people on your team. And really people move businesses, businesses don't move businesses. So getting the folks on your team that see that vision, that are inspired to move the business with you, Miles, is so, so important. And I hope any innovator that's putting together a team to streamline your idea to impact can leverage some of this context that Miles is painting for us.

Miles, we are forever grateful for your perspective in the think tank this week, sir. Thank you very much. So as a quick, small pivot, I know that we've been going for about 2 and a half hours talking with Brandon here about a number of different aspects about innovation and then in the context of his Web3 philanthropic, you know, contribution to veterans. And I love this mission, Brandon. So 1 thing I wanna ask you is what are your biggest challenges as a business, as growing your business, when you're going to do a mint, right, and do a project, why is, you know, Buccaneers not already having, you know, a million, 2000000 mints, and is it just a time function, or is there, you know, challenges to get to where you want to go, and please express some of those to us.

I bet we have a lot of folks here who would love to chat with you about them.

Yeah, sure. You know, I would hearken back to, you know, there's, there's a couple of different reasons why we haven't minted a million. 1 of them is because we didn't want a million straight up, but it would be awesome if we could. But I can't remember who said it and I wish I could. It was either Miles or maybe it was Phantom or it was you, Jeff.

But you mentioned timing, you know, the hierarchy of what is actually necessary for the success of, you know, a new business. Timing for us, our biggest challenge right now is that we took the time to meticulously build something that was great, that not only was like 1 thing, but iterations beyond it, so that we could break the mold of, hey, we're gonna sell you a bunch of stuff so that we can afford to develop what we are promising and then probably never do it. You know, the idea of instilling trust in this industry was super, super important. That's why we built everything to be essentially we meant to actually have it used right immediately. And, And the problem with that is that it took time, and it took a lot of precision.

And assembling the proper team, don't let anybody ever tell you it's gonna happen overnight in the course of 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months. I don't care. If somebody said that they assembled their whole team, you know, in less than a quarter, good luck to you. I'm sorry. I don't know if that's possible.

To actually have the proper team, but you know, all of that was being done. And believe me, I didn't know any of the I didn't know anyone until I met them during that process. And 1 of the things, to Miles' 0.1 of the things that was always necessary was that passion and belief in the mission and the vision has always superseded or has to supersede anybody who has joined my team and to the point where we even have a 12 and a half year Marine that he told me, don't pay me until we're successful. Like, I just want to help. He's also, he also told me that he speaks fluent dolphin, which I'm still trying to get more clarity on.

Um, but, but I, I take great, great, uh, great solace in the fact that, that, uh, miles, what you're saying is something that, that I've been, it has been kind of at my core and it's, it's very validating to hear that that is such a pivotal part and that we've been operating in that way. But from a core problem, my major problem, our company's major problem is that timing. Timing of the market and the fact that, if we had launched probably 7 months earlier, the consumer base within Twitter, it was different in a lot of ways. And so was what the demand, the demand and the openness for this type of a project. A lot of people have left the space because of recent scandals, recent scams, and this isn't the entirety of the problem.

Some of it, there's some additional stuff, but it's reaching the right people at the right time. And it seems to me that, or what I've identified is, that there's A, we focused too much on getting exposure in spaces where There's lip service, but no action on the consumer side. But at the same time, from our side of things, we didn't have the proper balance in terms of our outreach. And we tried to partner with partners that we didn't vet thoroughly in a couple of ways from a marketing perspective and from a promotional perspective. But All that to say, it's about making...

There is a widespread...

How should I say this?

I don't know, cloud of smog over the market that we sought to enter. I saw it coming 2 years ago before I started the business. I didn't realize it was going to impact our ability to get the value proposition through to people because the idea is with every mint, the value of every subsequent mint increases. And in addition to that, your mint increases as well. And your mint increases the value of everyone else in the community as well.

And, and so that, that idea is very difficult for people to get around when you're throwing, you know, a bunch of beef at a random scam that takes 20 million in liquidity out of a market every other week. But couple that with the macroeconomic regulatory situations and people are skittish. And so we've pivoted significantly in terms of the platforms with which we are putting our messaging out there to find the people that are looking for trustworthy, safe haven, stewardship projects of this technology that they can put, they can get into. But- I

just want to chime in just real quick and I want you to definitely keep going but I just want to add a couple notes along the way because I definitely am hearing exactly what you're talking about with this timing issue. And even before I chime in, I would love to go ahead and go over to Phantom real quick. He has his hand up. I think he has a key point to make. But Brendan, I just want to before we go and, you know, kind of put more layers on the timing issue.

I have a couple notes I want to make and also want to give anybody an opportunity who's in the tank right now and hearing exactly what's the challenge at bay. If you have any comments, questions that you wanna share, please do come up on stage. We'd love to get you. Phantom, over to you, sir.

I love it, I

love it.

Yeah, thank you, Josh. And Brendan, yeah. So I have a lot of ideas, you know, as an engineer, the liquidity of the market intrigues my fluid dynamics principles. And I just have a whole different idea of like the whole, what they call business physics, right. So I believe that there is a lot of organicness in the market that ultimately is just us human beings.

At some level, we are deciding the value of these things. So what effectively, I believe, happens is that you are defining value. And there needs to be that price discovery mechanism. So what happens is you kind of capture the value, define it in the market. And then the sort of exchange of that across the ecosystem will still affect you.

You are not deprived of it. So you have to create somewhat a different level of private blockchaining and sort of have that internal government regulated currency exchange happening. And that is going to take time. But what I believe is that here, us today can discuss that, bring forth policies, right? We have the technological know-how.

So we go to the government and say, hey guys, like I know you want to regulate, but maybe you don't have the technical expertise. So let's get some people who are in the government and help that integration happen. Because see, at the end of the day, the centralization of power happens somewhere, right? The decentralization aspect is great. It is about different aspects that we decentralize on.

But there is centralization somewhere. And that's where government and public should have the best you know approach to you know handle it it's about you know building in public and helping the public. Because at the end of the day, we are the public. So yeah, let's do this.

This is true.

This is true.

Raj, I love that point. I just wanna take a quick moment for anybody joining the Think Tank right now, Innovators Think Tank week number 10. Guys, we've been doing this for 10 weeks now, I can't even believe it, and we're just getting started. This is over 30, 40 hours of being in this tank, working with businesses, bringing anybody working on a project, a business, an idea, up to the front of the tank to collaborate with big bankers. We truly believe here at the Think Tank that collaboration is the new currency and that other people have strengths and can ask questions that ultimately make our results even better.

So I just wanted to thank each 1 of you for being here. I see some folks out in the audience that I see very often and have been around for some time. So I just want to say Frank, Ener-G, Light-Yah, Ultra, O'Nally, welcome in here, Ryan McDermott, I appreciate both you guys more than you know, Adam, Leo, Raul, everybody, thanks for joining us today. Okay, the Innovators Think Tank is nothing without, you know, all the folks that come here to extract value and contribute value to it. So, you know, I really appreciate each and every 1 of you being here.

If you have any questions, if you have anything you wanna bring up, come up on stage. In the bottom right there, you can go ahead and leave, you know, a tweet at us and let us know your thoughts. We'll definitely look through those and bring them up as well. Brendan, just to go ahead and get back on this, I think that there's a really interesting point to be made. And then I want to go over to my co-host Cash Money Kev after this.

But It's interesting with the Web3 NFT space, there's like, you know, hype waves that are essentially created. And even you could view the whole space, the NFT wave and cryptocurrency wave as a bit of a hype wave, even though there's obvious utility there and stuff that you're putting into your project. And so what I want to say is with the timing and communicating the value of your project to the right customer, which I think quite literally, you said the issue is reaching the right people at the right time. Just to quote you and exactly what you were saying. But my point there would be, look, I view this, I take this as a note from Dave Meyer, he's in this think tank a lot, but look, we're sparring partners, this is to make you even better and point out places that all of us can grow as well as help gain exposure for the stuff that we're working on.

But just a point that I wanna say is, I can't tell just from looking at Buccaneers blockchain that it reflects the values at which you guys are pushing, you know, the, like you really care about making veterans, you know, benefit from this project. But when I look at the branding and I look at how it's talked about, that's not exactly fully clear to me right away. And I feel like in an age of, like we said, conscious capitalism, where people buy with their values, being able to show the values that make your value proposition of your Web3 project different from another 1 and how you guys are driving that philanthropic growth for the DAV, I think that that almost needs to be a key point of your marketing. And I think that needs to be a key point of the communities that you build around because then the timing, those right people at the right time are ultimately there and your values are shared, right? You should put those values on a table on your brand, let's say, stand for that and have anybody circle their wagons around that say, hey, I care about disabled veterans as well.

I care about working in the same setting as well. So I just wanted to share with you guys, I wonder if a function of not getting, you know, the full attention you deserve for the mint is more of a function of not imbuing the values that you guys are running this off of, like what the missionary self, right, Brandon, that Miles is talking about that's imbuing this project. How do you take that and really take it into the branding and the communities that you build, I think is so important. And I think is a function of a highly marketable product and a highly successful product. So I think that there's a whole discussion to be made there.

And I noticed Lydia from your team is raising her hand, maybe in response to what I'm saying. So Lydia, we'll go to you and then Cash Money Kev.

Sure, I just wanted to say that, so ahead of the initial mint, this is actually a question we talk about a lot. That was our bread and butter, honestly, and because of the Mint, we ended up pivoting. So it's a question of, you know, we have a lot of really good stuff that highlights our mission. It's what Brendan sold me on, it's what he got our entire team excited about, and we had all of this momentum. And we're working toward that.

Now, I think that the Web3 space, being what it was at the time, was sort of seeing it as more like a donation rather than a game. And so we made the decision to speak more about how it was a game and how you could actually earn value for yourself. And it was scalable and it's already built, you know? But you know, Twitter's an attention economy sort of. And so I just wanted to know your thoughts on that because we've pivoted it a couple of times in terms of messaging.

Okay, very cool. So you guys have actually, you've tried out a couple of different ways of talking about this in order to yield better results and traction for the men. Lydia, can you even talk maybe about what was the primary strategy in a little bit of detail, and then what was the strategy you guys are deploying now? That way everybody here can listen and maybe even give their 1 too along the way.

Sure, I think, well at a certain point it was Twitter focused. We had partnerships set up, as Brendan has mentioned, we had some collaborations, We had some accounts retweeting us, and the messaging was always, hey, what if a game that could make you a lot of money could also make a lot of money for veterans? And then we went into our true North, our North Star, like which is what if, you know, the question that we spoke about a lot in the beginning, we still talk about it today, is what if the likes of Apple and Google dedicated

25%

of their proceeds straight up to a charity and what better way than the blockchain? So that was our initial, that was our lighthouse.

Okay, no, it definitely makes sense. I think that that's a really, that's a great lighthouse in some sense, Lydia. It's like, I don't know where you guys pivoted to now, but what it seems like more is to synergize more with like the Twitter NFT, like NFT Twitter and Twitter crypto type stuff, where it's a little more like techie. And I'll let you guys kind of use the adjectives that you'd like to talk about your new strategy of doing that. But I want to say, I think that there's some bread and butter there when you're talking about taking the values of the veteran benefits that you're creating and weaving that into the purpose of the game, or excuse me, into the purpose of the marketing and the mission and the community that you're building, that's how you translate those people into actual customers, right?

Because we might get a lot of attention from folks who like what we're doing. And ultimately, I think, as creators, we have to look at the difference between folks who are looking and like what we're doing from the similarities that they see in their work versus the actual inclination to buy our product. And so sometimes when we're working in communities and echo chambers where everybody's like, yeah, I love what you're doing. I love what you're doing, but they wouldn't buy it. Right there.

They're not going to be your customer. They're going to be maybe somebody to help collaborate. So I challenge you guys to think about that original thread that you were on and looking at the values you stand for and building communities around that because those will actually transfer into customers instead of just folks that are on your hype train but never convert, so to say. Cash Money Kev has had his hand up for a moment. I want to hear from him real quick and then, you know, Phantom, and let's keep going on the same thread.

Yeah, so to touch on this subject, I love your point, Josh. You actually asked 1 of the questions I was going to ask, so I don't have to ask too. But I wanted to ask Brendan, because the stereotype in the NFT market is that they're scams for the most part. They're not secure enough. I just wanted to ask you guys what you guys do for security and if you've been third party audited.

And if not, I could hook you guys up with a team that does that for a smart contracts.

Sure. So, so actually the, the, 1 of the primary, you know, the primary focus point is building trust, right. And what is 1 of the, the most significant pillars of that security, especially when you're trying to make a big difference in a space that is rife with a lack of that very security. So what we've done is at every level, baked into the smart contract, insulated security owner only functions and nothing too technical, but the team is made up of security professionals You know, security professionals on the classified, you know, clearance level of former service. And in addition to that, the smart contract itself has been audited twice by OXQuit, who's an extraordinary, probably the most, he's probably the greatest pioneer or subject matter expert of solidity that exists today, for sure.

And the only feedback that we got from him, or like yellow flags, I guess you would call them, right, were, hey, you could minimize some gas fees here by doing this. But from a security perspective, not only is the smart contract and that technology hyper, hyper secure and verifiably so in order to ensure trust, but also each of us have, you know, the entire company has taken extraordinary over-the-top steps to ensure that there's no compromise ability. And even from a social engineering perspective, we're all, you know, we constantly talk through and reiterate the focal points of how to avoid social engineering, how to avoid SIM swapping, how to avoid the newest scam, and how to make sure that we keep our community safe, because if we can't keep them safe, like what we view it as is what we do is an extension of the brand of Disabled American Veteran Foundation. And as such, cannot be anything short of legit, beyond belief and sterling, the shining light upon the hill. You know, and to, you know, so security wise, that's, It could be the most important thing

by far. I totally agree. Especially in the NFT space, credibility is marketability, especially for you guys. I recommend actually getting maybe just a few more audits. It looks really good for smart contracts to have maybe like 5, more than 2.

Even if they're really- Yeah,

I think we have 1 more with Nick Cash as well. So we're gonna have 3 total.

Yeah, I'll send you guys over to the RugDoc. They're a really reputable smart contract.

Oh, great. I would love that. I'd really appreciate it.

Gosh, man.

Thank you.

Thank you for

your answer. So I just want to say 1 thing real quick. There's this aspect of for all innovators with any product that we're working on, take another moment to help folks in the tank kind of grab some sustenance of what we're talking about here and inject that into their own products. So I want to talk about just 4 little points. It won't be long, but I just want to talk really quickly.

So there's 4 aspects that make a project come to life, let's say, and this is separate from the team, the startup to actually build it. But 4 aspects, I want you guys to look at your own project, your idea, your business, whatever you're working in, and try to kind of make some bullet points about these. So the first 1, guys, is feasibility. Is the project, is your service feasible? The second 1 is desirability.

The third 1 is marketability, which is what Kevin just touched upon when he was talking a little bit about security and in this space, the need to have high levels of security is generally pretty important for the marketability. And the fourth piece is scalability. Now some could say there's a fifth, which is sustainability in the new age, and it's actually a piece that I agree with. But the feasibility, desirability, marketability, and scalability, and don't let those just sound like a bunch of ability words, all right? Those actually matter.

Think about those for your project and how those actually relate to getting you to where you need to go. And I think partially what we're talking about here, Brendan, is you guys have a feasible project. You mentioned it's scalable. We don't have to touch too much on that. The desirability for people to want to help the DAV, that we both know that that's real, especially here in the States.

You know, there's a lot of people who would want that to be possible. So it is a desirable thing that you're building. The marketability pieces is what's so important here. To me, it's like I couldn't tell right away from looking at the Buccaneers thing that what I'm doing is helping veterans. Or if I aligned with that in my values, you wouldn't have unlocked me as a customer, at least unless you found another way for me to be interested, right?

So maybe I'm interested in veterans and I'm interested in, you know, other things that you guys are clearly marketing right now, then now you guys statistically are not reaching as many people, right? Okay, now you have 2 caveats to try to get them in there. So I think partially what the issue is, is not a technical bit. You clearly, you don't have a technical team and know what you guys are doing and can build the product. It's about getting people to understand that the product reflects the real life values that you guys all care about so much and that they should too.

They probably already do. And that the way they can contribute to that is through your product or service. And that has to be very clear. It's like what Miles said, it's like, even with the mentor thing, it's like you winning is them winning. And I think you need to kind of create that with your customer base, with those communities.

Yeah, I completely agree. And not to cut you off, but to further that point. Ahead of Mint, we, we, up, you know, ahead of mint, our focus was, you know, this is, this is like it was, it was very heavily on the supporting veterans while supporting the space and supporting yourselves with real calculable value and the ability to win money, right? But it was heavily focused on front and center was DAV and veterans, right. We got a lot of love for that that didn't translate into mints.

And disappointingly so. And so we pivoted obviously to try to communicate that like, hey, check this out. You can verify all of this money. Everything that we said that we were going to do, we've done. And it's all verifiable.

And here is the amount of money in the treasure chest that is, you know, end counting, all this stuff. And we try to communicate that value to the market that we had established a footing in, or at least a following in, because it became apparent that what they cared about was less so the philanthropic piece and more so what do I get? And so that's that was that would be the route why you know a lot of a lot of the recent messaging specifically Over the past like 2 or 3 weeks 3 maybe 4 weeks has been less so on the veteran piece But I think it I think you're right about the synergy aspect of it not The Gosh I'm blanking on the you know combining those 2 pieces now at the right time.

Yeah, yeah, because I mean, I really think if you lean into this aspect of that big, that big value add that you guys have, It sounds like something you've been harping on and you were frustrated that folks weren't converting from that community or that language to the minting phase. And so I think it's worth dissecting that a little bit because I don't think that means change how you display your values or what's valuable to, like part of your missionary self, right? That's driving this. I think really what you need to do is then start dissecting why aren't these guys in this community converting, right? Is it because they're not educated on how this stuff actually works?

And so when we ask them to go from supporting, right, disabled veterans to actually minting the coin or let's say, sorry, supporting our mission in a community verbally to actually the physical mint of a coin, they're not doing that. You know, is that a function of education? They don't know. Or is that a function of what you're saying, which is, look, they need to be told right up front that they're going to be profiting quite a bit off of that. And I don't think that's true.

I think if you put your values out there that you are helping veterans and there's money to be made, and it doesn't have to be absorbent amounts of money, that that's a very great value proposition and even makes you different from the other NFT projects that are just claiming that you can make absorbent amounts of money. Right? So you're saying, hey, there's like a modest return here, but still impact. And I think that's probably a huge problem.

My question back to you is this, because I think that the dissection of, like a mistake that we made was, well, first of all, there's some uncontrollables, but there are controllables. I guess my question would be, if you find yourself in a position where you have a value proposition that isn't resonating where you've been cultivating the following and the exposure, how would you then pivot, Or how would you evaluate alternative methods of reaching new audiences? Because I know what that what we've done, and what we've what we've put out there. But I also think that with the nature of this, this project is getting eyes on it as we continue to mint the value that is in that pot. It's a critical mass where it's like, well, this doesn't make sense for me not to get 1 of these things.

You know,

I do. And I guess the first thing that kind of comes to my mind would be, you know, start cultivating those communities. And if that's if, if you guys are in communities now where it would be taboo to bring up those values, then then it would be taboo for those folks to be looking at your product and get to the point where they finally see it supports veterans and then maybe them not being all in on that. So I think that you guys need to, especially with your concentration from, you know, what was it, 25% of even the mints and the capital here going that direction, that it needs to be a main component of what you're talking about. And if it's, like I said, taboo in those communities to start standing for those values, I think what it shows you as a business leader is you're in the wrong communities that aren't gonna convert you, or at least have that alignment between your customers and your product that should lead to conversion, right?

So, I mean, that, and so what you guys, you know, as a team maybe can do, and maybe even folks here have ideas on that, is, you know, start looking into the communities where there's a clear presence of disabled veterans of when they're trying to help that of other other movements that maybe aren't part of web 3, right and part of this technology space, but still in the same thread of helping disabled veterans and say, look, we're all on the same team here. We're just a younger team coming at this from the tech point of view, and we want to help get money for these folks. You may underestimate the number of folks that will support your mission that don't actually understand Web3, but understand helping veterans.

That's exactly what I was going to get to. I've been pounding the pavement, cold calling, generating mints from people that are not involved in Web 3, and they're much happier, much more receptive. I'm going back to old school sales moves on this thing. And the amount of quote unquote, web 2 people that resonate with it and understand almost from like a financial accounting perspective, even Just the benefits of it, but also the passion around it has been phenomenal. Then you're presented with a different obstacle.

That's onboarding people to Web3.

Maybe you have to look into the labor time to do that or what videos or programs you can help for that exact selling tactic you're talking about. You're reaching out to folks who don't have the education to mint, but what can you do to make that easier for them could be a whole nother point of innovation, right? Because you're essentially increasing the adoptability of folks who know how to leverage these new types of technology, while also playing on the important value proposition that you have here. You're dead on,

dead on asterisk, dead on asterisk.

Just quickly wanna pivot over to Phantom because I know he has some great points to share as well. And guys, I'm gonna be going to a wine festival here in Colorado here in the next, you know, maybe 30 or 40 minutes. So this won't be as long of a think tank as we normally planned. And look, I know that we had a couple of speakers on this panel, TSI and Planphile, that we had planned to open up their business and get rocking. What I'd like to do is I'd like to offer the floor here in a couple minutes for Planphile and tech in schools to share a little bit about what they're doing, get folks to follow them and kind of look into more of their mission.

And then we'll invite them to come be speakers next week to lead off the think tank. And we'll certainly try to find value that we can add to them for all the time that they've been kind of sitting off on the side, but Fantum, I want you to go ahead and rip it up, man, whatever you gotta say, and then we'll go ahead and start doing a little bit of a closing in some sense.

Yeah, thank you, Josh. So I definitely believe in sort of onboarding the people first. I believe that in blockchains, we will be able to sort of do that sort of price discovery of people's actions and sort of show that sort of data through blockchain in a transparent way for companies to come and sort of, you know, access, right? So it's not it's like we have to integrate technology in a way where, like the companies don't already have defined all the parameters of the systems, right? So we need to create new decentralized systems in which, let's say, the public has that freedom, the public infrastructure, quote unquote, right?

What happens, I believe, is that each of these emerging companies, instead of being just a company, become an entire ecosystem, whether it be Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Meta, like whatever it is, right? So when they become that ecosystem, there are like sub-companies that create business models in sort of servicing different aspects of this ecosystem. And then, you know, they sort of create new ways of money creation. So it is not that we have not, you know, done this before. Crypto is offering us just a new transparent way of looking at how the value is being traveling.

So in systems engineering, we have this thing called the Pareto principles, where 20% of causality and 80% of execution forms the 100% of the total impact. So the thing is 20% of the planning and organization needs to happen purely from deep thinkers and experts, but it's the 80% that is the general public that has to do the job that you ask them to do. It's not just about saying, hey guys, this is the plan. You need to have them on board and willing to do the job. And that will ultimately be decided by the value proposition.

So create a good value proposition. And when you create good value propositions, people will gravitate towards it. When you create philanthropy as a value proposition, people will gravitate towards it. But I do believe that your profit motive will kind of come in the way there. So it's about how you balance the messaging there.

And I wish you the best in sort of balancing that ethicality of profit motives as well as giving back. The GiveFi concept is very intriguing. I want you to sort of push into that and sort of make that your cornerstone of, you know, how to sort of give back to the community. I love the whole, you know, messaging, the mission, and that's great. You know, you found that new thing to do.

So, you know, create that new ecosystem for yourself. You know, good luck, Brendan.

And thank you so much. I appreciate that a lot. And, You know, I think 1 of the best parts about what you said is the challenge of profit. Well, profit is, you know, it's necessary, but when, you know, borne out in the numbers, what we, a successful project for us looks like, or any, even if it's unsuccessful, frankly. The amount that is given back to the community and the amount that's given to veterans is respectfully 2x what we receive, no matter what, the way it's set up.

And I really, truly appreciate your perspective on the ecosystem, because what we're trying to do is take this Give 5 framework and make it the legitimate framework for the space. And I think that there are a lot of new wave thinkers out there trying to make it easy for people to get on board to new technology. But at the end of the day, what our goal is to, and has always been, is to take what the original automobile was, which probably took a mechanical engineering degree, and all these cranks and levers and all this stuff, very complicated machine that didn't really do anything and all that, turn that into a Ford F-150 that anybody can drive, but is exponentially more complex, yet simple. And you don't need an engineering degree to drive it. And guess what?

They sell 1 of those bad boys every 31 seconds in the United States for the last

25

years. That's our goal and that's what GiveFi represents. It's finding a way to match all these things up. It's difficult in this space, but timing wise, look, I think there was a lot of frothiness, but we're on a slow burn and we're picking up steam in terms of minting, I have no doubt that we will mint out and we're reaching the right people. It's just about the distractionary aspects and the targeting just needs to be there at the right moment and we're finding that and we're finding the right people because you truly are some incredible individuals out there who are both selfless and savvy.

Yes, Brandon, and

you know what I wanna say, I bet a number of those folks, well, they're probably in here right now, and they may listen to this tank back. They may be your future customers or future employees. You know, I'd love to just kind of take a moment, if there's anything that you'd want to say to anybody in this tank, you know, or anybody that will listen to this back, in terms of a question or resources you guys want or your team there that you could just share with the larger innovators community. Love to give you the opportunity to say that Brendan and share, you know, yeah, any of that, please. Floor is yours.

Sure. You know, First of all, thank you to anybody who's either listening to this or in the audience and everybody who's contributed. There's too many to name and I truly value all of the inside so, so very much. What I would say is that, look, there's a stigma around technology that can do really great things. And there are people who do things above board and there are people who do things below board in any industry.

But what we're trying to achieve and what we've put out there in buccaneers of the blockchain is something that has never been done before and has the potential for unprecedented impact and a new benchmark for how Web3 is not only looked at from the outside in, but from the inside in, and what it can really do. So, my message would be, please, by all means, join the discord, reach out to me directly, I will speak with anyone about it. Um, and, and, you know, I'm not afraid to take 24 hours, uh, of my day. For anybody who wants to get involved because the day that we fail to keep our promise to DAV in delivering value is the day that I'll stop breathing and not before. And even then, I think the team will continue on if that happens.

But If I could ask 1 last thing, it would be to, if not donate, you know, donate your time to exploring more information about the project. You know, mint out 1 of these things, check out the art, take a risk, and at the very least, have a write-off on your taxes for .025. But Buccaneers.io, please help support a project that's really trying to make Web 3.0 legitimate.

I love this. And anybody who has feedback for Brendan on his marketing, on the product, on any aspect of that, I'm sure he welcomes that to the most extreme extent. And it sounds like Lydia, a crucial team member for him here would be a great point of contact as well. But giving him that feedback is just so important. And I think it's part of what we were doing here today with you, Brendan, was not only learning about your job, your project, your service, but to give you feedback and then use that as a template for other innovators in their work to say, hey, this is not so far from the tree of things that we're all facing.

So I appreciate how kind of humble you were along the way of bringing up where your challenges are, but where your love for all this is. And then allowing folks to kind of, you know, iron sharpens iron 100%. And so it just shows the strength that you have being able to take notes from all sorts of different speakers and all sorts of different backgrounds. So, you know, anybody joining the Innovators Think Tank right now, I wanna do a quick recap. We're coming up to a close, but you should know exactly what's going on here.

Innovators Think Tank week number 10. That's right. We've been doing it for 10 weeks in a row. It's all about bringing anybody with the project, a business, an idea to the front of this stage, and we help them collaborate with folks who have a different perspective, education, expertise, resources. And honestly, guys, over the last 10 weeks, I have been completely moved and learned more than I would have ever imagined by, you know, kind of starting this mission.

And I do want to share that the think tanking does not end here, guys. We do have up in the nest right now the Discord link. If you guys go in there, you can add your page, your information to the networking tab and start networking with other innovators and bringing your project to life. Find folks with a different strength than you and see what you can do to get some advice from them. There's also a place where you can incubate your ideas, just talk in general.

And then also I'll be putting this think tank in that Discord as well. We'll have a thread specifically for this tank and maybe Brendan will come up in there and answer some questions if anybody has them along the way, anybody who listens back to this. Sounds like he's got a hard up over there. So yeah, we'll make sure he

gets in. Joining the Discord right now, it's gonna be amazing.

That's great. So anybody else, you know, get up in there. The idea is to have a full community of innovators helping each other take their projects to the next level. Collaboration's the new currency and it's something that we can all do together. Look, I'm not, you know, Discord's not my native platform.

It's not something I use, but it's free. And I've realized recently that it's a really good tool for, you know, it doesn't matter where you live around the world, it's a good way to collaborate. So hopefully, if you're not tech savvy or don't think that you can tap into Discord, I think you can. Send me a message on there, send me a message on here. Let's get you into the community and make sure that we're helping you get to the next level, regardless of what you're working on.

We wanna help you do so. So I just wanna say for both Lydia and Brendan, the fact that you guys, you know, took 3 hours to chat about your project and ultimately help innovators understand more about what they do. I know we had a couple speakers that are no longer on stage, so I will say Miles and Aniti. These guys, the reason in a lot of ways we wanted them up here is because their perspective is just invaluable. They lead huge communities, guys, and have a lot of really great content.

So if It felt like they had the floor for a long time. It's because they deserved it. We had so much to learn as innovators from those guys in the tank. So if you guys know anybody else that has a project, a business, or wants to be a speaker, come present. Send them our way.

Send them over to the Discord. Come to the Twitter community. We have a, you know, even a group you can join right here on Twitter, so you don't have to leave Twitter, go to Discord, and you can just comment, you know, anybody that should be a speaker or a presenter. So guys, what I want to do is give folks on the panel an opportunity to kind of give closing thoughts. And then what I will do is have the Tech in Schools Initiative and PlanFile, both just kind of share a little bit of what they're working on.

And for those of you who have been in multiple innovator think tanks, you'll know that the Tech in Schools initiative was a big part of ITT number 6. And since then, we kind of have done this segment with the executive officer over there, Ross, we call it AI with Ross, and we explore more of the tools that they have there. I apologize, we didn't do that today in this segment. That's, uh, you know, my dad to, to all of you guys, we were doing the best we can to kind of meet the timelines that we're in. Um, some tanks can be 4 and a half hours.

Some of them can be, you know, 3 and a half. Some of them can be 5. Um, just depends on what we have going on Saturday evening. So I want to take this moment real quick just to get Phantom. Your last thoughts will go around the speaker panel.

If anybody has any more notes, this is your time to join our speaker panel right now and give those. But guys, thanks again for being here. Innovators Think Tank week number 10 has been absolutely amazing. I can't wait to hear some final notes. You guys have been killer and you guys are, you know, taking Saturday to come be better innovators and I couldn't be more thankful for that.

So, Fan, I'm over to you, sir. You got the stage. We'll make our way, you know, kind of around the bit. And yes, sir, it's all you.

Yeah, thank you, Josh. So my basic idea that, you know, I've been sort of cooking in my head and I want to give this sort of thought out to the innovation think tank, because I see the number 10 as the double digits. We finally made it past the single digits and now we're the double digits. So these kind of milestones are very important. It is sort of a measure of our success and commitment and sort of resilience.

So the main thing that I will say is that humans are inherently very resilient. We are the most resilient that's why we have survived. So I believe that every human is an expert on himself or themselves. So it's just like they are the best experts. So when you have to integrate them into any system, you have to take that expert's reality into account.

So the more experts there are in any system, the more robust it is. So that's why you need diversity. You need all sorts of free thinking to happen. But constrained thinking is about figuring out the right order, the right priorities, the right objectives. So we figure out what is the right knowledge amidst all these subjective observations that people are claiming is reality, and then we drive humanity on that wave right so it is not about the time right it is about creating our own waves waves of networking right people will come and organically connect they will be your you know sponsors I think that was 1 of the terms used.

They will come and want to be your sponsors because they believe in the same messaging. That is what makes people missionaries. Make a strong mission, and people will come along for the mission because they believe in the mission. Right, you're not making it about yourself, you're making it about the mission. And, you know, I come from the space engineering community, so we have very strong missions.

We believe in global things. But there are also ethical things there about what we enable. We have to be careful there. Anytime anything goes global, We have to realize that there are many perspectives to be taken into account. And that is going to be the most important thing.

The human perspectives that have to come into the nature of the limited perspectives of technology today.

Thank you so much for sharing those notes, Raja. Always a pleasure to hear your thoughts there and certainly things I can contribute myself, given your background and everything that you know and part of the reason why collaboration's that new currency. Hart, power over to you, my friend, for some final notes and then we'll go to our businesses as well.

What a fantastic space this was again this week you know I found you last week and I do not regret this 1 bit There's only 1 other space on Twitter I've ever found that even remotely compares to this space and so we call it the genius room and also we say iron sharpens iron in that room so definitely a lot of similarities and a lot of people with a lot of similar backgrounds as to what your community here has and for that I want to thank each and every single 1 of you for your time for it is the most valuable asset you will ever own And I can't think of no better place to be.

Thank you so much for sharing that. My gosh, that is like a really, really cool note to hear from the community, that this space just resonates them with them in that way. And, you know, I've been to a lot of spaces as well and I just love what we are building in this community and everybody that shows up to collaborate, you guys make this what it is. And I just want to double down on that, Arthur. I'll be, I thank you for everybody's time.

It is so valuable and the fact that you guys are spending it here with us is just absolutely huge. I do want to take a moment, plan file. We had them on the back burner. We'd never know how these tanks are going to go. Sometimes we have enough time for 3 businesses, sometimes only 1.

And so, you know, we kind of leave some of that flexibility just because innovation doesn't have any timelines to it. What it does have though is collaboration. So PlanFile, I want to give you an opportunity to go ahead and just say a little bit about what you guys are working on, maybe tease it. We'll have everybody give you a follow and then we'll have you here at the beginning of next week to kind of kick off the space and learn more about what you're doing, why you're doing it. And I hope at least what you got was a sneak peek at like how the tank is run and how it'll be going during your session.

So Planphile, over to you, if you'd like to have the floor for a quick minute and talk, we'd love to have you.

Yeah, awesome. Thanks Josh, I appreciate it. And thanks everyone for listening. I support this group, I think it's awesome. I think collaboration is the new currency, But I also do believe that People's Times is their bank account.

So next week, I know this is new and starting out, but maybe if we could have a schedule or something. So that, because I originally had my co-founder here, but we weren't aware it was going to be 4 hours he had to drop off. So I kind of like got only half the product here with me now and so what I'll just give you with is Planfile. It's a document management system. My buddy and I have been working for large corporations.

He's with GM. I'm in healthcare with Ascension. And in our jobs, we've realized that succession planning and really just organization of documents and projects and files is never really done well in large companies and enterprises. And enterprises. And so what we're offering is a streamlined, easy to use, easy to implement, and safe way to collaborate and keep business processes up to date.

And I'm trying to pack a lot into a little

time here. I can imagine. No, I definitely hear you. Any more notes there, Planned Files? Sorry to cut you off.

I just I can imagine you're trying to pack a lot into a little ending segment, which I apologize for.

Yeah, no, that's okay. I would say just until next week, feel free to reach out to me at any time. My name's Don, Don Cherry, and my co-founder's name's Charles Quinn. But you can reach out to this account and yeah, I'll just save anything else for next week.

No, we're really excited to have you next week and I couldn't agree more. Time is so valuable And in this tank, I love the idea of it being, you know, kind of rigid and having a framework of timing, but also I love keeping it open-ended. So I take your feedback, you know, with so much respect and I will absolutely consider, you know, doing more of an agenda to keep us more on and maybe even tell the speakers that are coming in, you know, when we have folks that are wanting to present and you know, are locked in for that week that it could be many hours of hanging out. And so we can always have the co-host send you a message once we're getting ready to rotate your direction as well, PlanFile. So if that, you know, and anybody else in the tank, if you, you know, are wanting to present that week but can't hang out with us starting at 2, but do wanna chime in around 3 or 4, we can always set it up so Cash Money Cover, Matia can send you guys a message once we're wrapping up with 1 business we're working on and as we're pivoting into the other.

And I certainly didn't make that clear enough to you over at PlanFile. So my sincere apologies, you know, in front of our whole community on that 1, sir. Didn't mean to waste any time. I hope there's a lot of value that you got though from this discussion And hopefully some things that can help you guys kind of drive to the next level as well over at PlanFile.

Yeah, no, definitely and I don't mean to like discredit anything that was stated previously. I was just, um, had to kind of work to put together this time slot for, well I know it's your time, but for my buddy and I to join, but no worries, we'll be back next week and thank you guys for listening.

Yeah,

we can't wait to see you next week And you have to tell your co-founder as well, we're really excited to have him next week. Hopefully we can kind of synergize on some of the topics we explored this week with you guys in the tank. It won't have to maybe beat any dead horses when it comes to a couple of the key points that we were talking about. Although it's so important to reiterate along the way for all of the innovators in this tank, you know, when we're talking with businesses, there's clear templates of challenges they're going through of wins that they've had where it correlates to your business. And you know, it just, it makes so much sense to be in here listening, working with each other to try to hit that next threshold.

So, So stoked to have you next week. I wanna rotate over to Ross over at TSI. If he doesn't mind maybe just for 1 minute just sharing very briefly what TSI does, what you guys are about so everybody can know. And then guys, we're gonna go ahead and let the innovators have a great Saturday. It was amazing having Lydia and Brendan here in the tank with us.

And you guys already know that we'll get some closing notes from the co-host. But Russ, if you had anything to say, sir, I'd love to hear from you as well. And then we'll go ahead and start marching on out of here.

No, I have some really cool demos coming for next week. We're just putting together our new cluster of GPUs. Now it's faster than ever. Image generation is down to 3 seconds, which is just crazy. And with tutor, we have 2 huge updates.

Claude 2 is now available at 100, 000 tokens per prompt, Which is crazy. And Botcraft Pro is officially launching with the ability to create a Discord bot with 0 code.

And these types

of things... Sorry, Ross, I didn't mean to cut you off.

No, no, go ahead, sir.

No, you're good. I was just

gonna say, these type of things are just gonna make creating your own large language models even easier. And by next week, I'm hoping to have your own logo on the chatbot, customized colors in the appearance tab, and the ability to ingest GitHubs. So you can talk to your own GitHub and ask how to build something.

Ross, if there's 1 man that I know who is constantly innovating his company, his products and his team to deliver value for not only schools, but for business owners and creators, It's this guy, Ross. Guys, get over to TechSchools Initiative, check out what he's doing. This age of AI is so interesting in the tools that come to help us streamline our ideas to impact. Tools that can help us code, help us generate art, generate text, execute tasks. Obviously this needs to be moderated by real world impact with humans and so on, but I love having TSI and Ross in this tank because giving innovators the tools to be successful in the age of AI is paramount, paramount.

And having Ross here to talk about that is just all the better. So Ross, thanks for joining us. We're really excited to do those demos next week. Everybody mark your calendars, Innovators Think Tank number 11, lucky number 11 will be next week and we'll do a couple of AI demos with Ross.

Yeah, and next week I'm gonna also talk a little bit about the process that I learned recently about the way to get into Y Combinator, which is really interesting.

We can't

wait for this. A lot of People

don't really understand that it's actually pretty easy. And there's an opportunity right now that is huge. That if you capitalize on it, you can get in their new, they have like a new cohort that they're forming all around AI. So no other businesses allowed.

That's incredible. Tech, I just sent you a DM. Would love to connect with you offline. We're trying to educate veterans. And I'd love to speak with you about how maybe we could work together to make that happen even more efficiently.

Returning veterans, trying to get them involved in learning how to be in this new technology space.

I'll shoot you a demo so you can try some of the stuff.

Awesome, awesome. I love that

point of contact. Brendan, we had somebody in, I think they were from Africa and doing some work there. And they had mentioned that getting the, using kind of the same template that the Tech in Schools initiative has put together to help students understand AI, that he thought it could be useful there. I definitely see the use with veterans as well. So can't wait to hear about that.

Guys, we gotta go ahead and, absolutely. Guys, unfortunately, Innovators Think Tank, week number 10 has to come to a close. Again, guys, this is a space where Anybody who's working on a project, a business idea, gets to come to the front of this tank, right where we are now, and collaborate with big bankers. If you ever have somebody who you think would be a good speaker, or if you want to present, or know somebody who wants to present, send them our way. Tag them in that Twitter community.

Make sure they join the discord. Let's go ahead and get these guys up here and let's get into the next level. That's truly what collaboration can yield. So guys, this has been a wonderful session. I wanna give Cash Money Kev or Matia the floor to say any notes that they have there before we head on out for a nice Saturday night.

Guys, look, 10 freaking tanks of doing this, 10 weeks in a row. You know, it's not 10 tanks in 1 week, guys. This has been like a fifth of a year, right? Like a sixth of a year just doing this. And it's nothing, we're just getting started, but we're so excited to have you guys coming back week after week.

We can't wait for your business to be up here and we can't wait to help you get the exposure and the connections and the problem solving that you deserve. So real quick I want to go over to Matia if you have any closing notes sir to you and then we'll go to Cash Money Kev and then we'll close this popsicle stand. Cool, no problem for Matia, Cash Money Kev, any closing notes for us, sir?

Yeah, I got you, man. Sorry, I don't know what's going on with the lag maybe, but everybody that joined today, this was honestly the best thing I think we've had so far. And I say that, and everybody says that here, co-host and host, we say that every time. And I hope next week it will continue to do the same. The collaboration here was just wow.

It was at a golden level today. Brendan, you were awesome. I know you took the chance to come up on the stage today in Mt. Dix Falls, man. So I shout that out.

Phantom, you're a great speaker as always. And I mean, whoever said earlier, we just had so many speakers today, I can't even shout them all out. And the host with the most, Dasha Boy, you know, getting her done today as always.

I love it, Kev. Thanks so much for that hype. Thanks so much for those notes. It has been a total pleasure to have each and every 1 of you in the Innovators Think Tank week number 10. And look, I know I'm beating a dead horse, but get over into that Discord, get into those Twitter communities.

It helps you stay in touch with the next Think Tanks that are coming. It also helps you connect with other people in the community who are working on incredible projects that have different strengths than you do. And look, collaboration is the new currency. I'll say it till you get it tatted. Guys, this has been Innovators Think Tank week number 10.

And I'm so glad everybody had the opportunity to make it here with us. And guys, I hope you have an excellent rest of your Friday, an excellent week. We will see everybody next Saturday. It'll be the 22nd at 2 p.m. You guys have an excellent, excellent rest of your day.

Innovators, out.

Bye, everybody. Thank you.