🎙️Bootstrapping to Exit, First Principles Thinking, Product Simplicity, and Mentoring the Next Generation w/ Jason Seats, Co-Founder of Slicehost & fmr CIO of Techstars
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On this episode of Outsider Inc., host Ian Hathaway sits down with Jason Seats, Co-Founder of Slicehost, former Chief Investment Officer of Techstars, and a pioneer in the startup and cloud computing worlds. Jason details his journey from co-founding the game-changing cloud infrastructure company, Slicehost, to mentoring and investing in early-stage startups through Techstars. They discuss the importance of simplicity, first principles, and the value of building with trusted partners. Jason shares insights on navigating acquisitions, the challenges of integrating into a large company, and the evolution of the pre-seed and seed investment landscape. His story is a testament to succeeding as an outsider and the power of trusting relationships in entrepreneurship.
Show Notes:
(02:12) The Birth of Slicehost: Simplicity and Innovationt
(06:32) The Importance of Partnership and Family Support
(10:40) Navigating Early Challenges and Learning from First Principles
(13:55) Scaling Up: Hiring and Community Building
(18:31) Unexpected Acquisition: The Rackspace Story
(24:50) Transition to Rackspace: New Beginnings in San Antonio
(28:29) Transition to Techstars Cloud
(32:25) Launching Techstars in San Antonio
(35:47) Evaluating Startups and Investments
(41:58) Macro View on Venture Capital
(49:37) Life After Techstars
(51:03) Beyond the Bio with Jason Seats
✅ Host: Ian Hathway - Co-Founder & Managing Partner, FOVC
✅ Guest: Jason Seats - Co-Founder of Slicehost & former Chief Investment Officer of Techstars
Produced by Spellbinder Media. Executive Produced by Bridge Five Ventures. Copyright ©️2025, Bridge Five Ventures, LLC, All rights reserved.
Listen & subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or at outsiderinc.substack.com.
AI-Generated Transcript
[00:00:00] Ian Hathaway: If you could give one piece of advice to someone who's about to start their founder's journey, particularly someone who's an outsider like you, like, what would it be?
[00:00:18] Jason Seats: Bring a friend.
It's so much more fun. It's so much more rewarding. And two humans who trust each other completely almost without having to coordinate it or think about it, will, will have fall into this dynamic where you're not both low at the same time.
Right. And that is so important to get through some of the hard times.
[00:00:41] Ian Hathaway: Welcome to another episode of Outsider Inc. I'm your host, Ian Hathaway. Today's guest is Jason Seats, a pioneer in the startup and cloud computing worlds. Jason is also my good friend, mentor, and longtime collaborator. So this episode is especially exciting for me personally.
Jason largely built his career far from Silicon [00:01:00] Valley Shadow, operating in places like St. Louis, San Antonio, and Austin, making him a prime example of what it means to succeed as an outsider. Jason co-founded Slice host in 2006, a game changing virtual hosting provider that made cloud computing simple and accessible long before cloud became a buzzword.
He bootstrapped the company to millions in annual recurring revenue within just two years leading to an eight figure acquisition by Rackspace in 2008, where Jason helped define their cloud competing strategy. After Rackspace, Jason turned his focus to building ecosystems, mentoring founders, and investing in early stage companies.
Launching Techstars Cloud in San Antonio and later Techstars Austin, following a lengthy tenure as an investment partner. And then as Chief investment officer of Techstars, Jason has a top-down view from one of the largest pre-seed investors in the world. Under his leadership, Techstars has invested in thousands of companies worldwide with a combined market cap of over a hundred billion dollars.
I'm excited to talk to Jason [00:02:00] about his entrepreneurial journey, his transition from founder to investor and mentor, and what it takes to build and maintain a startup ecosystem. Jason Seats, thanks for stopping by.
[00:02:10] Jason Seats: Thanks for having me, Ian. Happy to be here.
[00:02:12] Ian Hathaway: Okay, Jason, so Slice Host is the company that you co-founded in 2006 with Matt Tennesse.
Patrick Colson, the co-founder of Stripe once said that their early vision for the company was to create the slice host for payments. What was Slice host and what do you think made it so special that it received such high praise from an iconic startup founder?
[00:02:36] Jason Seats: When I first heard the Collisons tell that story, I.
Uh, it was hugely flattering. Just to be a footnote of a footnote in the, the Stripe origin story is something kind of awesome to happen, right? But slices is pretty simple. The easiest way to ex explain it today is that it's a cloud computing company, was a cloud computing company, and really what made [00:03:00] us.
Novel was just the simplicity of the offering at that moment in time. In 2006, hosting was a pretty unpleasant. Experience for most buyers, for technical users, you had to make a phone calls and fill out paperwork and talk to humans, and then they would put servers together and that all, all this stuff took time and, and cost more than it should.
I. The bright idea we had was to, to use this sort of newly emerging availability of open source virtualization tools to just automate all of that pre rack all of the servers, get them all set up so that you can provision servers. I. Virtually and instantly, and that was the idea. And one thing that's interesting about simplicity as an angle, I think what Matt and I were just doing was building something that we would use ourselves and doing it the only way we could figure out how to do it, because we were learning as we went.
And a side effect of that is that it was simple, but the simplicity is really what, what helped us [00:04:00] win for us, the main success metric for. A prospect converting to a customer would be that they end up somewhere in our content or on our website, see what we are, and within 45 seconds they get their first win.
They have a server, you know, they swiped a credit card and they're up and running, and they didn't have to think much about it. It didn't cost very much. That was completely a new concept at that point in time, and it's how everything works today.
[00:04:27] Ian Hathaway: Where did that original idea for Slice host come from?
[00:04:32] Jason Seats: Matt and I graduated from St. Louis University in 2001, and that's how we knew each other. I ended up in a relatively traditional sort of desk job, you know, programmer doing interesting things for myself, but kind of just punching a clock at some point for about five years. So from 2001, 2006. Meanwhile, Matt kind of never.
Gave up this ambition that we had when we were in school that he was going to work for himself and be a [00:05:00] startup guy, although I don't know that we use the startup language all that much. And so he was doing a lot of custom web development just as a contractor and. As one would do, he used the most efficient tools he could find.
It was all about how quickly could he churn out high quality apps and websites that would satisfy the customer need, and that's why he was using Rails. And so he kind of fell in love with Rails, and then he experienced the problem that. There weren't great hosting options for Rails. He could scaffold up a website and have, you know, have something going really quickly, but then he would be stuck trying to figure out a way to, you know, find a place for that to live before he handed it over to, to his customer.
And dealing with traditional hosting was a big pain in the butt for him. And so he thought, oh, I think there's something here. I went to lunch with him one day and he kind of had this sketch of an idea that with. Something called Zen XENA virtualization hypervisor that was open source. We could build an automated [00:06:00] provisioning service.
And I told him, this sounds awesome. I wanna do this with you. What would it take for us to just be 50 50 on this? And you know, I went home that day and talked to my wife and said, look, I think, I think I'm gonna start a business with Matt. It really was just sort of on a napkin. There weren't very many numbers to think about.
How much does servers cost, how much does the internet bandwidth cost? How much does power, cost, and kind of sketch up the numbers. And from that. Moment in time, it was probably about four months later that we went live with the first version of the product.
[00:06:32] Ian Hathaway: So in addition to having like this great idea that you were excited about, why else did you want to jump into business with Matt?
[00:06:39] Jason Seats: We'd each have two degrees, electrical engineering at computer science, and we did four years, did did them both in four years at St. Louis University. And I remember sitting in a class and just seeing this sort of mysterious. Long hair, tall guy sitting in the back corner of the room like reading Wired magazine or something, [00:07:00] just sort of in his own world.
And it was just intriguing to me. It was very quiet and reserved and I remember. Mentioning it to our, my, my, one of my teachers. And he, he told me that guy was pretty smart. Like, uh, you, you should, you know, get to know him or whatever. And, and we just kind of hit it off. We were the only two people that were doing these two degrees at the same time.
It's a small engineering school. And so by, you know, fast forward four years later, we had probably taken 75% of our classes together. And it's pretty hard not to build a friendship over that. Have we had very similar sort of up upbringings. We both grew up in Illinois. In the St. Louis area and, and just kind of had similar interests, interest in how the internet works, and it was at a time when not very many people on a relative basis really understood.
How quickly you could make things in software. This was before software started eating the world. It was before the appetizer was served in some sense. You know, like it the tech was out there. Yeah. But things seemed harder than they actually were. And so there was [00:08:00] this window of time when just kind of knowing how computers worked, really what you could do magic.
And I think we kind of shared that sort of amazement for that. And then the other piece I, I think also, not to overemphasize it, but we both grew up sort of relatively modest backgrounds. We didn't come from a lot and we both, I think, had a little bit of an instinct that security, personal security would come from owning a thing that provides for our livelihoods.
And when we first built sizes, besides just being this really interesting technical challenge, scratching our own itch. Um, one of the things that we really did talk about was buying our freedom with this and getting to a point where we owned our time and we owned our choices every day. That was, uh, something that, uh, was exciting to both of us too.
[00:08:47] Ian Hathaway: Yeah. So it sounds like that common denominator and the background and the the families that you came from was fundamental in creating that bond. At a time when there was literally no one at your university doing the [00:09:00] exact same thing as you except this one guy. Double clicking a little bit on that family thread.
You mentioned your wife, Amanda. You had been married at this time, you're about to launch this company. Is that something that you think founders can at times overlook? Yes.
[00:09:16] Jason Seats: And I wouldn't associate any fault to overlooking that. I think the thing about entrepreneurship before you do it is you really don't have an idea of how all consuming it is.
Right. And, and, and how taxing it is. And so I, I think many, if not most people who've not experienced it probably. Are not well calibrated for the effort required and, and the toll that can take sometimes. So I'll agree with you with that nuance, but, you know, I'll give my wife a, a big kudos on this. I mean, I came home that day.
I was excited to say I had lunch with Matt, had this idea. I think I'm gonna start a business with him. I'm not even sure I finished. The [00:10:00] sentence before she clocked in her response, which was, that's awesome. Like do it. A hundred percent do it. And maybe one other thing I'll add here is something that Matt and I both credit the success of Slice, so is that we had the right kind of naivety, right?
I think in a little bit you, it's like, I guess you have to be crazy enough to to, to do it. And if you really knew how hard you had to run at the wall to get through the wall. Maybe you'd hold back a little bit, right? You wouldn't sort of go at it full bore. I think we just didn't really know what we were getting into.
[00:10:32] Ian Hathaway: I wanna talk a little bit about that naivete, because I think it's an important part of your story and there's a ton of lessons that can still be learned today. You know, you mentioned where the internet and computing was, this was almost 20 years ago. It's like literally a generation, it's 2006, you're in St.
Louis. Where did you turn to for early thoughts on going to market, finding customers? Building a team where to figure out how to build this company.
[00:10:57] Jason Seats: We read Paul Graham's essays, which [00:11:00] were phenomenal. I think they all hold up really well. It's worth the time. The, uh, origin of YC was like around that time, and so there was some early content coming from yc.
I had not heard of Techstars yet, even though it started maybe I think a year after yc, but there weren't actually very many voices. People like Brad Feld were trying to demystify this world that I, at some level, I think. Relished in the sort of mysteriousness, but there weren't very many people building startups, and there certainly weren't nearly as many people talking about it.
And so back then the signal to noise ratio was actually really high. But the overall volume level was pretty low. And so Matt, you know, and I would come across articles or content or whatever and we would just find these little tidbits. But the other thing that we did a lot of, a ton of was just figuring things out from first principles.
That's why what we did [00:12:00] was simple. It doesn't matter what the thing is, whether it's a business related. Challenge or a technical one, if you really just chip away at it from first principles that a lot of times the thing you build will be much, much simpler than if you could somehow tap an expert to come and do their version of it.
You know, Elon Musk has his design principles. I think the first one is to question the requirements, like a lot of engineers. We'll start off by thinking, I want to make something go faster. I want to create efficiency, I wanna create automation. But that's, those are at the bottom of his, his list of how he approaches problems.
The first thing is, well, what's the minimal number of things that need to actually exist to make this work? And that's just what we did. And to give you a non-technical example, we didn't have any money. We didn't know anybody who had, who knew how to do anything. And so when you wanna form a company. A lot of times, you know, you're gonna go work through a lawyer or now you could push a button on a [00:13:00] website and do it.
But we went to the library and got a book, uh, the no low book series, no low stands for no lawyer, and it just tells you what to do to fit like, and so we formed the business and did all of our, you know, we handled everything ourselves and it cost $50. You know, it's a little bit like goodwill hunting, like the, get the Harvard Education for, you know, $2 and 50 cents in late fees.
Like all of that content's available now. I. The irony of the modern era is there is so much information and as a consequence of that, for, uh, an inexperienced entrepreneur, the signal noise ratio is much different Today. It's harder to know which things are the, the right things to listen to, and you almost could spend too much time learning that content versus like, okay, this is the direction I need to go.
Put all that aside and then do the first principle thing
[00:13:49] Ian Hathaway: right. So, shifting gears a bit, I wanna talk about talent Now. You didn't design the company with the intention of [00:14:00] hiring many people or really any people. You eventually needed to do that. Talk to me a little bit about that realization that in order to succeed, you needed to grow the team, who you needed to hire in order for the company to continue growing, and how you went about finding them.
[00:14:18] Jason Seats: We were about a year. Into the business when things were going well and we were making money, we were making money pretty much out of the gate, out of necessity, which is not a bad necessity if, if you can find product market fit that quickly. Our big pain point that caused us to make our first hires is that we were both in the same.
Place, uh, geographically, and our customers were not. And we were selling a 24 7 always on service. And we had customers in a hundred plus countries at that point in time. And so Matt and I were taking shifts sleeping so that someone could always be at the wheel in case something went, was going on, or, or there [00:15:00] were, you know, a flurry of customer support tickets or alerts from the data center.
And so we knew we wanted to hire at least around the clock sort of coverage. And also we knew a really, really big part of our business that organically emerged was the community. And so we thought, all right, let's make two hires. We wanna hire a developer and we wanna hire someone who, who could be like our head of community and have that person be in a very different time zone from us.
Um, and so we came up with these two roles. We drafted what they were, community liaison person and a developer, and made two job postings, I guess you'd say. And then we did what, you know, today, what, what would you do to, to go, you know, post those roles. You put 'em on indeed, you put 'em, whatever. We just posted them to our blog and just waited for, you know, like, we're like, someone's just going to, you know, walk in the, walk in the door.
Yeah. And we, and we also shared them in our, in our community, which is very active and. We hired the first two people who applied, [00:16:00] which sounds completely insane, not how to do it.
[00:16:03] Ian Hathaway: Yeah.
[00:16:04] Jason Seats: Except that the first two people that applied applied because they were active in our community and they saw the postings first and we knew them very well.
A guy named Jared and a guy named Paul, um, Paul Tombs and, and Jared Colt for Paul in particular. Paul was a very, very active community member who had been creating this treasure trove of content, how to articles, how to, how to configure this, how to build this, and it was all on. Slice host, and with amazing step by step, how to do it, and screenshots and configurations and whatever.
And he was hosting all of this on his blog. And when he applied for the job, we were like, yes, instantly. And he is like, all right, well, what do you want me to do? And we're like, well, why don't you just keep doing like exactly what you're. Already doing, and we'll just give you access to the control panel so you can like, [00:17:00] handle customer issues and that's it.
Right? And, and so like he, in a sense, we really just were catching up to starting to pay someone who was already creating all this value for the company and for our community. Um, and so they were easy hires, they were pre-vetted. They were, we, they were sort of cherry picked outta the com self-selected outta the community.
Wow, that's an
[00:17:19] Ian Hathaway: amazing story. So let's talk a bit about capital. Most founders try to raise capital out of the gate, but it doesn't sound like you really needed to. Did you try to raise capital from investors early on? I.
[00:17:33] Jason Seats: So Matt and I did go to this, an angel event, angel investor event in St. Louis where the people would, you know, startups would go and pitch.
I had never been to anything like this before and we thought we could find money there. We, and we would, we were talking to people like, look, all we need is money. Like this business is cranking. We need this growth fuel. And the skepticism of the investor is, everyone says that. Everyone says all they need is money, but really.[00:18:00]
Really, truly all we did was money. And so the, uh, I tell that story sometimes that way to, to startups, especially back in the Accelerator day days, where I would tell people, look, if you come across anyone where that's their actual real problem and they just don't know how to talk about it. Yeah, I Please introduce them to me.
Right.
[00:18:18] Ian Hathaway: So things are going well, right? You're generating, you know, millions in annual recurring revenue. You've got some early hires that amazing early hires that sort of fall in your lap. Lucky. Yeah, lucky. Uh, so let's flash forward to 2008 when the company is ultimately acquired by Rackspace. Was that sort of like a surprise to you?
Um, huge. That Rackspace came calling? Like how did that go down?
[00:18:44] Jason Seats: Yeah. I mean, it's a huge surprise Slice Host was not a startup for us, right? It's hard to really underscore this enough. Slice Host was our exit strategy. The whole, the plan for Slice hosts was, this is going to be an income producing asset [00:19:00] for us that we will own forever.
Like, that's what we were intending to do. And so we weren't building it for an acquisition. And, and hilariously, there was no way to directly contact us. Like all of our, all of our customer interactions were through. Our chat rooms through email, through electronic means that we could manage in a highly efficient way because we could have many conversations going on at once.
There was no phone number to call, you know, there was no office to visit. And so Rackspace, they reached us via a support ticket. That's how they, that's how they contacted us. Right. And like, and uh, and there's a guy, guy named Lou Morman, who's a friend and an awesome emailed and said, Hey, we're fans of what you're doing.
Would you be. Up for getting on a phone call and maybe talking to us about it. And Matt and I had a quick conversation. We're like, well, I don't know what they want. It's probably one of three things. Either they wanna buy us or they want to sell us something, or they [00:20:00] want to just suck as much information out of us as possible to, you know, somehow compete with us.
And we didn't know which of the three, but we, we thought, let's just get on the call. If it feels like it's going sideways, well, we can always just hang up. Right. You know? I'm like, tell 'em to shove off. Right? We talked to him for, it was maybe an hour or something, and all we did was tell them stories about all the things we were building and what was going on and how it worked.
We were so excited about what we were doing. We were thrilled that someone just wanted to talk to us about it. Got to the end of the hour and they said, thanks guys. This was awesome. We'll be in touch. They hang up and Matt and I look at each other like, we still don't even know what the, what the, this call is about right.
And they followed up actually pretty quickly at that same night. I. And said, look, we're just going to, you know, cut to the chase like we think we wanna buy you. We know that cloud is the future. Amazon's coming for us. They're gonna eat our lunch. We need something that looks like this and we like how you're doing it, and we think we could do it together.
So that was sort [00:21:00] of how, how that started. It was a total surprise. Total surprise. Then they said, let's. So let's meet in person. Why don't you guys fly down to San Antonio? And, and we could sit in a room and Matt and I said, look, I don't know how we could pull that off. We couldn't fly to San Antonio. That was like, who, who does that?
And who would watch the servers? Like, who would, who would like that? We, we needed to be physically where we were. They could hear that hesitation and they're like, okay, don't worry about it. We'll come to you. Can we meet you, you know, tomorrow afternoon? And we're like, who on one day's notice flying somewhere?
What? Like, this is this world. We, we were not even, you know, used to, but that was the beginning of our, our engagement with them. Really loved the Rackspace team. Rackspace itself was a great story, but that was sort of the, it just a huge surprise that just landed in our lap again.
[00:21:53] Ian Hathaway: Okay, so they were about to go public.
It's 2008 and here they come knocking on your door to buy. What [00:22:00] you and Matt set out to just like be the thing that was going Support you. For us. Yeah. For you. Yeah. So how did you, you ultimately sold the company to Rackspace. How did you and Matt make that decision? I.
[00:22:12] Jason Seats: Yeah, well when they did come to visit, we had a great first visit.
It's funny to hear the story told from their eyes. They walked into the office that Matt and I had built out for ourselves. 'cause it was just the two of us and there's probably no better way to describe what it looked like other than a fancier version of the. Apartment that Tom Hanks lived in. And big, it's like what you would do for yourself if you're like a child, a man child who's just trying to make a space that's fun for you to be in every day, because that's what it was for us, right?
And so they walked in the room. And they're like, oh, you like, this is a company that has, you know, thousands of customers supposedly run by these two schmos who look like they're just goofing off all day. This must be a scam. They couldn't comprehend something doing [00:23:00] what they were doing in software because what they had built a business that was sort of the old school way of just doing.
The hard work as people. And so we, you know, we had this back and forth. We walked them through everything we did. Matt and I took this approach of just being completely transparent. We felt like we didn't have anything to lose here. And they were also very transparent that, you know, no matter what happens in this negotiation, we need to enter cloud.
We like, we need to compete with Amazon. And so if we were to not complete. This acquisition, we will need to launch our own product and we have an internal effort to build their version of cloud. And so what they did was separate out the team that was building their version and didn't let them have access to anything that we had shown them so that they could sort of keep that, that isolation there to protect us, which that sounded good to us.
But then the thing that didn't sound as good to us, and then I don't think they meant this with any. You know, as a threat or anything, but when they're like, look, bottom line is we're gonna buy [00:24:00] you or. We're we, we will be future competitors, right? And so they don't mean that as a threat, but when it's just Matt and I, and this is our livelihood, that does sort of challenges that foundational security of what we thought that we had then.
And then on top of that, their plan was to IPO. Three months, I think from that point or something, or it was May might've been a little bit more, they said, look, we've also had a very compressed timeframe to figure out how to get this deal done before we, or in the sort of go dark period before the IPO.
And so there was time pressure, there was this existential. Are we just arming the behemoth that's gonna crush us if they don't buy us? So we had all of that going on at the same time that Matt and I needed to personally grapple with selling this thing that we built that was special. And there were lots of elements to this.
There's no way we could have known to somehow think about them in advance.
[00:24:50] Ian Hathaway: So you've sold the company, you're moving to San Antonio now to go work and be a VP at Rackspace. That's right. Right. To to lead this transition for them, you and Amanda are [00:25:00] going, starting a new life in San Antonio. Matt did not join you.
Matt did not
[00:25:03] Jason Seats: go.
[00:25:04] Ian Hathaway: Yeah. Right. So, you know, you're leaving this, I guess we'll call it the janitor's closet startup, and you're moving into this like large public company as a vp, what was that transition like for you?
[00:25:15] Jason Seats: It was an adventure, like it, you know, showing up in, I mean, I had never lived anywhere else in my life.
I had never really visited any anywhere else. And we really loved San Antonio and kind of fell in love with Texas in, in San Antonio. So that was really cool. There was a lot of energy in Rackspace. I mean, they had just IPO'ed. Everything was excitement and, and future and possibility. And they had this, they had, and they had a really.
Healthy, positive culture, but they were a big company. It was both exciting and an adventure, but I was not personally, uh, well equipped to work in a large company. I think now it's easier for me to recognize that that's just not my cup of tea, right? Like I'm, I am, I'm a little more, I'm much more of a zero to one.[00:26:00]
Person, uh, versus a, you know, 3000 to, you know, 4,000 person or whatever.
[00:26:05] Ian Hathaway: Well, the best founders are always the worst employees. So maybe that
[00:26:08] Jason Seats: describes
[00:26:08] Ian Hathaway: you. Yeah,
[00:26:08] Jason Seats: that's right. Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to think of myself as basically unemployable. Right. And I think I was probably then too, you know, and I'm not sure what their expectation was for what I would grow into there or become, but I certainly was not an executive.
Um, and, and probably had no business running a, you know. Couple hundred person engineering team and, and I don't know that I had exactly the right mindset because trying to figure out how to do a good job of having 200 people build products is vastly different than trying to figure out how to do a good job of having three people build products, right?
That mindset shift was something I don't know that I really gained enough perspective on until well after the fact. So I would maybe break my time at Rackspace. It was about two year stretch. Into like the first year and the second year. You know, the first year it was all new and [00:27:00] excitement and even the things that that now would maybe sort of ruffle my feathers from a sort of too corporatey feel back then didn't bother me because it was all new and new was interesting.
But then somewhere along the way I'd have these moments where. My day was just so dramatically different than what it was when I would ride my bicycle to the janitor's closet and Matt and I would high five each other and have the best day ever where I'm, I'm managing this, you know, a couple hundred people and.
I hear about a bug and I can, I can, in my mind, I can picture like I wrote the book, like I know where, I know where this is in the code base, and I want to, you know, parachute in and pair program with, you know, this junior developer who turns into a statue when I walk up to their desk because it's their boss's boss's boss.
And so I, I think something that didn't feel great to me. About Rackspace. Then I guess some of this could be just my lens on it, but I felt like I was one of a very small set of executives that. [00:28:00] Actually was technical and had spent time in the data center and built and wrote code and really understood how the business worked versus just being good at management and talking and, and leading people and building presentations like that stuff I was not good at, right?
I mean, so I, I felt a little like a fish outta water. I think by the end, right?
[00:28:20] Ian Hathaway: Yeah. So you're in this new city, right? Like, you know, you're, you're at this big company and you're slowly realizing that it's not for you. I know it eventually leads to you launching Techstars Cloud, but how did you get to that?
Were you. Involved in the ecosystem in San
[00:28:38] Jason Seats: Antonio. I had a baby, my wife had the baby, actually, my daughter and I took paternity leave and that was a mental reset for me where when I came back to the office, it looked and felt different and I, and I started asking these questions like, oh, this is where I really want to be, you know, I'm not sure.
And I just had one day where I was moping around the hallway and this guy, I won't say his name 'cause I, he doesn't love this [00:29:00] story, but he's, but he saw me and he is like, look, you don't, you don't look like you feel good man. You want to sit down and talk. And as soon as we, we get a loan, he, he's like, you're not thinking about quitting, are you?
And I told him that I was not thinking about quitting, but. Now that you mention it, that is exactly what I need to do. And that day, that day, I went, I think I actually went immediately to Lou's desk and I'm like, look, man, I look, I, I think I made good on the, on the deal. You don't need me here. This is not the next inning of what you're doing.
It doesn't, obviously should not involve me. I think my, my time here is done, but what I, what I didn't have a plan for was what I was going to do next. And so I spent probably close to a year. Trying to promote various hobbies into full-time occupations and, and kind of flailing at it. And I was actually feeling kind of lost in a weird way because I just didn't know what to do with myself and my identity was so coupled to what I had spent my time doing over the past, you know, five [00:30:00] years and one day.
A little bit outta nowhere. Graham Weston, who was the chairman of the board of Rackspace, texted me and said he was gonna go visit YC and meet Paul. Graham. Did I wanna come with him? Yeah, of course. Right. This is like, I definitely wanna do that. And so I, he, uh, and I flew, it was a private jet. It was awesome, like little experience for me to just ride in this private jet with Gram, it's not, it wasn't his jet.
He like shared it with somebody. I don't know. Gram's a billionaire at that point in time from the Rackspace, you know, IPO. And, and I'm gonna go meet a personal hero. And Paul didn't know me by name, but he knew slices by name because most of the startups were hosting on us. We won a lot of that audience, um, at that point in time.
And so we flew there, met with Paul. I didn't know what the, what the whole context of the meeting was. Part of it was they were trying to position Rackspace, you know, offerings, you know, discounted offerings to YC companies, that sort of thing. But then there was this other angle where Graham. Thought. [00:31:00] I, I mean, I love the ambition of this, uh, but he thought he was gonna convince Paul Graham to expand YC to San Antonio, right?
Like, like in his mind it's like, well, I mean this is a, this is a place where we can build ecosystem. And there was no tech ecosystem at that point in time. There were two I. Venture-backed startups in the history of the city, one of which was Rackspace. There were no angel investors. There were certainly no VCs, and there just weren't really a lot of traditional entrepreneurs.
Rackspace to its its credit had an awesome program of hiring high aptitude people and teaching them the skills to do their job. Inside of Rackspace, that's what they had to do. They had to build a university internally because they, they wanted to hire technical talent and it didn't exist. And so they were terraforming the, the talent pool already, um, in Rackspace for many years.
And I think Graham thought we can do this outside of these walls and that it would be transformational for the place, which is exciting. I mean, so Graham didn't, what Graham didn't tell me until the plane ride back is [00:32:00] that he was talking to this other. Organization called Techstars that was in Colorado and had expanded to a couple of cities and they thought that they could get them to expand to San Antonio.
So I get home and I look up Techstars and I'm like, oh, all right. This Techstars is, uh, I'd never heard of, of them. And I just, I kind of marinated on just those bits and pieces for a little bit. Then one day, you know, I, I just kind of felt like, look, if this is gonna happen, if, if he wants to bring, you know, if Techstars is gonna open an office here and run an accelerator and invest in startups, specifically internet infrastructure focused startups, like a, a thing I knew a lot about, I didn't know anything about Venture, but I knew a lot about the internet and I live in San Antonio and I'm not doing anything else.
I should help. And I didn't expect it was gonna be a long-term thing for me, but I kind of raised my hand and said, look, I think you. You probably need someone to run this who looks like me at in some [00:33:00] form. And I don't know that there are a lot of people in town that that that kind of fit this. It was sort of, you know, slum dog millionaire into the profile.
I think that could. Work for exactly what was needed at that, that moment in time. And so that's the origin story. You know, Nicole Ros, uh, wonderful dear friend, uh, and David Cohen, who was the founder of, um, Techstars, came to visit and actually they came to, uh, a demo day, I think, for Capital Factory in Austin.
And I, I started working with them probably a week later or something. Not knowing what I'm doing again, and just sort of some of the similar fields to the beginning of Slice Host, where you're just making it up as, as you go along and, and doing things from first principles.
[00:33:41] Ian Hathaway: Speaking of those first principles, just for listeners who don't know, Techstars can be compared to yc, maybe also 500 startups.
What's special and different about Techstars and why was that compelling to you?
[00:33:54] Jason Seats: David and Nicole were compelling to me out of the gate. I mean, I, I had a lot of fear that I brought with [00:34:00] me. That one of the things that was critical for making this really work is someone who knew and was extremely well connected in the venture world, and I neither was well connected in the venture world, nor did I understand how any of that I.
Worked. And you know, what Nicole said to me was, that's the easy part. Like that part's not actually the hard part. Sure if you had that better, but the, but really what they want, um, what they were looking for. And the most important thing is how do you pick people you wanna work with and how do you figure out how to build things?
And that resonated with me, my internal narrative. At the time was that Matt and I really built slices, very much feeling alone, like we were on an island and we didn't know anyone who was doing anything like us. We didn't have, you know, peers or mentors. And Techstars was an opportunity for me to find people.[00:35:00]
Who re reminded me of myself at that moment in time where I could be the mentor that, that I wish that I had had. And I think a little bit, that was the, I think the ethos of Techstars. It's, you know, the, the mentor model is a very, very big, you know, sort of differentiator, at least at the, at the time of the model, which is maybe I could try to describe as sort of transferred experiential.
Knowledge. It's not classroom learning. It's not, you know, having a professor teach you how to build a business. It's finding really high quality entrepreneurs who know how to just work through problems and getting a little bit of their mind share donated to. I. Up and coming entrepreneurs and building in that way.
And so that organic sort of transfer of knowledge was a really, um, special part of the model, I think.
[00:35:47] Ian Hathaway: So how do you
[00:35:48] Jason Seats: determine
[00:35:49] Ian Hathaway: who you wanna work with? Which I guess really in this context is to say how do you evaluate and discover talent? What are the attributes that you look [00:36:00] for that make for
[00:36:01] Jason Seats: great early stage founders?
Brad Feld one time. Gave me advice on investing, and he said, it's no more complicated than this. Two things. The first is, is this a problem I care about? Like, am I interested in this problem? I. And two, do I wanna work on it with these people? And that's it. And so if you're on the far naive end of that bell curve, that sounds ridiculous.
But if you're on the Jedi end of that bell curve, like Brad doing that with his mind, he's bringing with him and his, you know, filter for what's interesting and people who wanna work with are carrying all of this collected experience of. Well, what, what could be big and who are great executors, but he doesn't have to think about those things.
He just thinks about, am I drawn to the people? Am I drawn to the problem and do I continue to feel that way on multiple interactions? And so that's probably an easy way for me to maybe summarize. But I mean, [00:37:00] the longer version, like I think the Art of Entrepreneurship is this dance between. Being really hard-nosed and stubborn and pushing against just this what might feel like is insurmountable barriers, while at the same time being able to sense a shift in the wind, off in the distance.
You know, a leaf flutters off to the left and all of a sudden you just turn on a dime and you're moving 90 degree angles to the direction you were going. And how do you know when you need to be? A hundred percent? Flexible and change and, and, and how do you know when you need to be a hundred percent stubborn and push and the dance between those two things I think is one of the hallmarks of the great, the great operators.
[00:37:48] Ian Hathaway: What was your best performing investment as an MD at Techstars?
[00:37:52] Jason Seats: I've had a couple of unicorns that I picked out of these classes of 10. One is a company called DataRobot based in [00:38:00] Boston. They're a machine learning platform, and back when I invested in them and when Techstars invested in, the founders were top ranked.
Kaler, you know, and Kawell at that moment, you know, I don't, I don't remember how many people, I mean, 50,000 people, you know, competing on, on for Kaggle prizes. Kaggle is a marketplace of machine learning problems where people can put problems up in data sets and, and often bounties to have, uh, models built that would solve these things.
And they appealed to me be because they reminded me of Matt and I, these were scrappy, low pedigree, brilliant humans. They didn't go to fancy schools. They just were really good at this stuff and they. We're winning these competitions by building better systems, and their approach was to not sit down and bespoke design the machine learning model that's going to solve this problem, but to build a machine learning model generator that can attack these [00:39:00] problems much faster and iterate on them, and they're sort of building up from.
This to basically in effect, have agents go build your models for you, is how you'd probably talk about it now. Right? And so it's very obvious now that that kind of thing is, well, that's how everything works, right? But back then it, it wasn't, and that really was a bet on those people. And, and all I needed to see was that they had this prior demonstrated success and that they were gonna try to build a product out of it.
I'm like, awesome. I'm, I'm in. Um, and so that was one. And then another company here in Austin, where I currently live, self Self Inc. They are a. Credit repair, credit building service for, for consumers a really interesting model where someone who wants to improve their credit rating with the bureaus and their credit capacity can basically buy what looks like a subscription service and in a can't lose approach as long as you're making the monthly payments.
Your credit score goes up and the behind the scenes, what they do is they, they open a bank account on your behalf. They take out a loan on [00:40:00] against that account, and then there's money that's put into a cd and like it, basically, it's the, there's debt that's created with your name, that's paid back on time, and every one of those on time payments gets reported to the credit bureaus and you get this lift in, in your credit capacity over time.
Really? Simple business that as they've scaled, they, they haven't had to change that core engine. It's a really successful company. I think it helps a lot of people get, you know, car loans and, and mortgages and things like that. So those were two that I, I picked when they're, you know, they were pre-product and sort of got to see them get off to a trajectory of success and then get to watch from the stands and root for them as those companies have become big.
And then one that went through Nicole's program that I spent a lot of time with was Digital Ocean Dig, digital Ocean in some. Sense is almost like Slice, host 2.0 and they wanted to fill a gap that they felt like still existed in the market At that point in time, this would've been maybe 2013 'cause Rackspace had fully integrated slice host in, but still [00:41:00] was very much aimed at the business buyer and there was a gap in the market for.
Developers who wanted to buy compute, uh, and do it in a simple way that didn't have the full reach and scale and utility of Amazon, but was sort of easier to think about. They're again, scrappy founders, the Urky brothers in New York and had the absolute privilege of, um, serving on their board as the independent board director for, I don't know how many years, seven years or something like that, all the way up to their ramp, up to, to IPO.
And so that was a really. Fun one to watch because I got to live vicariously through them and sort of see what an alternate path for Slice Os could have been. Watching something turn up into, you can grow up into a sort of the big version of, of what we had. And I had a playbook that worked for them too.
You know, the how to build a community and, and how to sort of create this content feedback loop that actually fueled a lot of slice house's growth. Um, digital Ocean was able to replicate that playbook.
[00:41:58] Ian Hathaway: Let's move out [00:42:00] to the macro, which is sort of like the next phase of your career In 2015, you move sort of from the periphery at Techstars running programs to the, a central role on the investing team, which is of course where you and I would later intersect, uh, at Techstars.
But I think this is like one of the coolest perches in the venture ecosystem where you had this macro view where you got to see. The evolution of pre-seed and seed stage investing during the most unique period in that segment of of venture. So kind of walk me through, like after having done that for nearly a decade as a partner and then chief investment officer, what's your perspective on how things evolved in pre-seed and seed and what do you think is coming next?
[00:42:47] Jason Seats: Something I really gained. A lot of perspective on from the perch as you describe it, is just the macro, [00:43:00] probabilistic sort of outcomes, right? And really we are all in business, living in this power law, distributed sort of existence where the very, very biggest companies. Are not just very big, but they're, they're bigger than almost all the rest of the tail, you know, sum together.
And that that's true for the sort of next tier down. And that's true for the next tier down. And that's just what the shape of the curve is. The bad and the ugly part of that is just how many, um, entrepreneurs are gonna have negative outcome, personal outcomes. You know, I was fortunate enough to have an in of one, you know, success story early on, and that really skews your perspective for how likely that was to have occurred.
Right. And then when I went to running, you know, accelerator program and investing in a small, you know, class of 10, you know, 12 companies at a time, that's not much bigger. But then when you start to zoom out and it's the [00:44:00] aggregate portfolio across. All of something like Techstars where it's hundreds, you know, to thousands of companies, you can zoom out and look at it with sort of fluid dynamic laws versus laws of particle motion, I guess would maybe be the metaphor and, and you can kind of see how things move at that higher aggregate level.
While underneath of it all, there's still humans having very human experiences and the majority of those experiences are failed outcomes. So how the industry has evolved though in the capital landscape, it is so much easier to raise money now than it was back when I started Slice ost. And it was much easier than when, back when I started, um, with Techstars.
And I think that's a great thing. I think I'm of a viewpoint that the funding and or the bootstrapping. Of net new shots at creating something that didn't exist. I don't think there's enough of that happening still in the world, and I think there is [00:45:00] a room for an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude, more of that.
And so I think that the trend, I'm happy with the growth of the industry. Venture has a way of being so forward looking that it's almost all sort of feels like it's feast or famine. But VC is, as an industry is, is actually still really only a small portion of people that are trying to build things and people are trying to, to create new things and people that are trying to solve problems.
So I'm thinking about it even more abstractly. I wish the friction were even lower for people to take shots at building something that they see should exist in the world.
[00:45:36] Ian Hathaway: You mentioned viewing startups through the lens of probability distribution. When people ask me about the, the time we spent together working on the capital team, I say, well, I got to sit on top of the most interesting data sets in, in venture world, a high fidelity large data set given the scope of Techstars companies and the, the data that we had on, on all of them.
And so I think during that [00:46:00] time, like building models, thinking about probability distributions. We uncovered some things that are not necessarily, uh, commonly received wisdom in the venture world. What are some of those truths that you discovered or you know, came to light during your time at Techstars that aren't necessarily in the mainstream of how most people in venture think?
[00:46:22] Jason Seats: Yeah, I mean, a huge one is just the consequences of that power law distribution. There's still humans underneath having inspiration. I. Seeing a problem in the world being these unique actors that are capable of doing amazing things. In other words, it's not a set it and forget it somehow, this just magically happens if you've got enough startups in a portfolio, right?
Like you still have to do everything from the ground up. You know? One of the questions we set out to ask was if you wanted to optimize that from the portfolio's performance standpoint, and therefore the investor in the fund that funds that activity, if you wanted to optimize that return profile. How big should that portfolio [00:47:00] be?
Right? If you're gonna place bets on early stage startups, how many bets is appropriate and what are the trade-offs you're making for risk and reward there? And depending on how steep that power law distribution is, sort of just the characteristics of it, you end up with conclusions that there's not actually.
A trade off on risk and reward there, and that the bigger the portfolio is, the better it performs, which is dramatically counterintuitive to traditional wisdom and certainly. Is counter to the narrative of venture, which is a, an industry of, of magicians and pickers. The reason why you give money to a venture firm to invest is that you think they're really good at picking these outliers.
So as a an institutional investor, you think I wanna be an outlier picker of. Outlier pickers. You're trying to somehow self-select into the very tippy tip of this power law distribution with a very [00:48:00] concentrated portfolio, and know that depending on stage, that is a hundred percent the right viewpoint.
But when you're talking about pre-everything, you know, pre-seed, pre-product, market fit, pre first line of code, the movement of those individual investments looks different enough that you don't actually. Sacrifice performance to continue to take additional shots on goal. Maybe a way to think about, it's to picture the biggest outcomes that you can imagine.
You know, like Stripe scale, you know, a hundred billion plus outcomes. The outcomes on those are so huge that being an investor in them at any stage is just a huge win. It not only makes the fun, it makes the career, it creates the firm and. When that's true, taking a view that those are one in a thousand opportunities or one in a hundred, whatever the, whatever the ratio is, if you really know it's a one in a hundred opportunity.
With firm data, the way we pick a one in a hundred [00:49:00] opportunity is gonna be a multi-billion dollar a. Outcome, how many companies should be in the portfolio? If you invest in a hundred, well, you might miss the one, right? Just because the one in a hundred chances that mean it automatically happens after the first a hundred.
And so we ended up with, uh, a very rational, very analytical basis for not only justifying, but embracing incredibly large diversified portfolio, which is absolutely counter to most venture firms approaches. And, and because of, that's counter to. The institutional capital landscape. Um, and so that, which was an interesting thing to sort of navigate.
[00:49:37] Ian Hathaway: I know you recently stepped away, you know, from your full long time run at Techstars after a very impressive run. What are you spending time with these days? I.
[00:49:47] Jason Seats: Yeah, so I left Techstars really about a year ago and very, very consciously tried to, to not do anything sort of worky, I guess, [00:50:00] let my mind clear and let my curiosity sort of rekindle.
I've spent a lot of energy on music. I play piano and try to play other instruments, and with a friend, it built out a little sort of just for fun. Music studio that we play with, and probably a core group of maybe 10, 15 people. Um, it's a, that's a hugely fulfilling, completely orthogonal to thinking about business or technology to just sit and, you know, play music and have fun.
So that's been a, that's been a, a good outlet for me. And then relatively recently. I kind of started answering emails and taking meetings and just kind of becoming, again, curious about what people are up to and, and you know, I've come across some, you know, some interesting startups that I've been spending time mentoring and, and now I'm doing it as a free agent, which is awesome.
So I guess I'm sort of looking for things like that where I maybe, you know, I don't know that there's a template for what's gonna. Catch my interest, but, but I'm, I'm kind of just doing the free agent thing and uh, it's back to building, I guess. [00:51:00]
[00:51:00] Ian Hathaway: Yeah, it's time to build. Okay. So look, so we're about out of time, but on Outsider Inc.
We like to finish by going beyond the bio. These are questions that we can get a little beyond your resume and work experience to just kind of dig into the person. So what's a quick piece of advice from a mentor that's kind of stuck with you
[00:51:20] Jason Seats: on your journey? This is not business advice, but there, there might be people that, that need to hear this, the best advice rolls around and kind of doesn't go away, right?
But, uh, this is parenting advice, which is that it's quantity, not quality. I think the most important thing and rewarding thing, and you can't predict when your kids are gonna need you, trying to figure out how to spend as much time with them as possible is, is what it takes. I don't know why that one popped in my head and I got that from Mark Solan, actually another great Techstars person I worked with, uh, a great investor.
[00:51:51] Ian Hathaway: Who's an unsung hero in your life and what has been the impact they've had on, on You
[00:51:56] Jason Seats: Go With my dad? Yeah. Personal [00:52:00] origin story for me. Christmas Day, 1987. I already covered that. I grew up sort of modest background. Christmas present for me was Apple Computer, which was a very big expense for my family.
Really, if I was giving the financial advice at that point in time, it probably didn't make sense for them to buy it, but. I learned how to program and, and I think that sparked a lifelong, you know, skill, asset, interest, et cetera. My dad never, he didn't finish college. My parents had me relatively young, but he's, it was a smart guy, good thinker, you know, math and science and I, and really an engineer at heart.
And I think a lot of the way that I think, uh, and move as a tinkerer is really from, from him.
[00:52:44] Ian Hathaway: Who's someone in your local startup community or you know, broader network who doesn't get enough credit and deserves a shout out?
[00:52:51] Jason Seats: Rob Taylor. I was in San Antonio doing the Techstars thing and it becomes clear to me that it's an important place to be.
Four [00:53:00] Techstars is Austin. We needed to move up the road and, and set up shop here and, and that the locus of Techstars activity in Texas probably needed to be Austin. And when I came to Austin, even though it's just an hour. Away from San Antonio. It's a different ecosystem. I didn't really know anybody here, and Rob was one of the first people I met.
And Rob introduced me to almost every person I knew with a couple of common traits. One is that they were all amazing people, these entrepreneurs, investors. He brought me all the investors that invested in the fund, that made the Austin program go, but also. They all fought the world of Rob, right? Like, and so as I'm meeting all these amazing people that think so highly of this guy, I'm like, God, this is a special.
Special guy, again, huge privilege for me to be, uh, an investor in a company he was a co-founder of. And then on the board of that company for many years, a company called Convey, had a good outcome and exit. And this was a Techstars company that went through one of my programs with a husband, wife team, super [00:54:00] green, but amazing hustlers.
And Rob connected him with him as a mentor. Fell in love with him and joined the team early and it was just really awesome ride along on that one as well. So Rob Taylor's a gem of a human.
[00:54:13] Ian Hathaway: Tell us something most people don't know about you.
[00:54:16] Jason Seats: Well, I guess the music thing, right? I mean, uh, that's hobby and guilty pleasure.
I mean, I don't know that there's audience for anything that we do, but when we sit and play our fan club is, is fully integrated 'cause they're in the room. Like our biggest fans are the people that I play, play music with and it's just a fascinating. Hard, quirky thing to spend time on. So I, I love music.
[00:54:38] Ian Hathaway: That's a great segue to my next question, which is, what are one or two songs you'd like to add to our Spotify founders playlist?
[00:54:45] Jason Seats: Oh,
[00:54:47] Ian Hathaway: um, and why are they both Phish songs?
[00:54:49] Jason Seats: Yeah. What Phish songs do you have on there already?
[00:54:52] Ian Hathaway: We have none.
[00:54:53] Jason Seats: None. Uh, but dude, I mean, so, so. So hard. I, I love theme, theme [00:55:00] from the bottom is the, is the name of the song.
There's so many different layers you can sort of peel back on the meaning of Phish songs and lyrics. The, uh, idea of that song really speaks to the entrepreneur and sort of what can be done with small things, right? And, and so it's, I don't know all the lyrics by heart, but the idea that there are. Sort of quote unquote bottom feeders that are just, that are making a living at the bottom of the, the sea on the stuff that falls through the cracks that nobody else cares about.
Same idea, different jam band. I'll do, uh, St. Stephen Grateful Dead, which has this amazing line, which is, you know, one man gathers what another man spills. Uh, and it's just the world. The world is full of unobserved opportunity. And that resonates with me and I, and I think that that's present in both of those songs.
[00:55:50] Ian Hathaway: I'm so glad you chose those. Uh, not only because I love both of those songs, and not only because of my very unnatural love of Phish, but actually what's the special thing [00:56:00] ever? Yeah. The theme ever, the theme from the bottom was actually one of the naming, like in the early days of this show's concept, I was kicking that idea around.
And
[00:56:10] Jason Seats: so for, for the, for that reason, like what does theme from the bottom mean mean for you? I.
[00:56:15] Ian Hathaway: Yeah. Well, I think about it from the sense of, well, first of all, it's a song I love and it's catchy, but also this show is about like people who, I don't know, I don't mean this like diminutive, but come from the bottom, right?
Yeah. And make it to the top. And I think you're going a couple clicks lower. With some of those lyrics, but to me that's really essentially what we're trying to do here is we're trying to tell the stories of people who have persevered and maybe the world doesn't know enough about them and, and we want that to happen.
Okay. Last question. If you could give one piece of advice to someone who's about to start their founder's journey, particularly someone who's, you know, an outsider like you, like, what [00:57:00] would it be? I
[00:57:01] Jason Seats: bring a friend.
[00:57:04] Ian Hathaway: Amazing.
[00:57:04] Jason Seats: It's so much more fun. It's so much more rewarding, and two humans who trust each other completely.
I. Almost without having to coordinate it or think about it. We'll, we'll have fall into this dynamic where you're not both low at the same time. Right. And that is so important to get through some of the hard times.
[00:57:25] Ian Hathaway: Yeah. Awesome. Well, look, Jason, thank you so much for, you know, joining me today. This was an awesome conversation.
I enjoyed our time together and I can't wait to share it with our listeners. This is super fun. Thanks, Ian. That's a wrap for today's episode of Outsider Inc. A huge thank you to my friend Jason Seats for joining us to share his fascinating journey and insights. I was deeply inspired by our conversation, and I know that our listeners will be too.
What stuck with me most about Jason's story is the power of simplicity, the value of first principles, and the strength of building with someone you [00:58:00] trust. Jason's journey from a napkin sketch in St. Louis to pioneering cloud infrastructure and investing in the next generation of builders worldwide at Techstars.
Reminds us that you don't need pedigree, proximity, or permission to start something meaningful. You just need the courage to begin a partner who's in it with you, and the persistence to keep going when things get hard. That's what being an outsider is all about. If you want more from outsider, inc, don't forget to subscribe to the platform@outsiderincsubstack.com.
It's packed with highlights from today's episode. And bonus insights you won't wanna miss. You can follow Outsider Inc on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn at Outsider Inc. Pod. You can also follow me on X at Ian Hathaway Outsider Inc. Is produced by Spell Binder Media. We'll be back soon with another fascinating outsider conversation.
Until then, thank you so much for listening and remember, great entrepreneurs can come from anywhere. See you next [00:59:00] time.