S03|07: The Relentless Drive to Build with Impact with James Rockwood

James  00:03

How I react anytime that we have pressure or uncertainty is just lean into it. I recalibrate everything around what the definition of fun is, what the definition of relaxing is, what my expectations are. And I'm like, all right, if I'm awake, I'm working, and my fun is working out, and my relaxation is maybe I'll watch a show with my now-wife, then-girlfriend. That's how I work, and that's how I live, and that’s sort of it, and I'm just gonna match this sort of severity of the situation with the dedication that is required to kind of get us through that. 

Leah  00:42

Hello and welcome to Season 3 of The Founder Mindset, brought to you by ATB. I'm your host, Leah Sarich, and I'm delighted to be back for another season of talking to Founders about what it's really like to build a company from that first big idea. If you've listened to previous episodes, you know, I was a journalist for over 20 years, so I'm more curious about why anyone would ever want to become an entrepreneur, not so much about the business model, product, market fit and so on. I want to understand why entrepreneurs keep going, why they think they're the ones to solve a massive problem, why they want to make a real impact in the world. And if you're here, I bet you want to know why, too.

James, thank you so much for being here today. I love that you're on the East Coast. The first East Coast Founder to be on The Founder Mindset.Thank you for being here.

James  01:29

Thank you so much for having me. 

Leah  01:34

This is so fun. So let's go right back to the beginning, as we always do. When did you first know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur, James?

James  01:43

That's a great question. I think, for me, I always knew that I wanted to be a CEO before I knew that I wanted to be a Founder. And so everybody has their own sort of unique upbringing story. Mine is that my parents are very famous experts in frailty research, specifically like Alzheimer's disease and dementia. And so, they've always been really sort of focused on the careers, and I was able to see a few things. Like work was always a big part of our lives, and specifically what they were doing. And it wasn't all about work, but work was sort of always around. And my dad, in particular, was on the road a lot. And so for me, it was always something I thought about, just because it was sort of always present. And I remember that I really liked a few things. I had asked them about their jobs, and they love their jobs, and we’d talk about them. And I was really interested in work from a really young age. And so I remember asking them, you know, what do you really like about it? And some of the things that they said always stuck with me, one being, they don't have to question why they go into the office, which I think is really important for sort of sustained motivation. Secondly, getting to make a difference, which I thought was really interesting. And the third thing is, is that they knew they weren't going to solve the problem when they started. So aging, you know—maybe Alzheimer's disease, likely not—but certainly aging you can't really reverse. And I thought that that mindset of finding something that you knew could be an endless problem to solve was really fascinating. But for me, I… while I was interested in what they did, I wasn't interested in figuring out the nucleus of a sunflower seed and all the various biology precursors you have to do to eventually become a doctor. And so I decided that always stuck with me… I really wanted to find out what my endless problem was going to be. And so in particular, when I saw them doing things with leadership, and specifically, my dad got a lot of uptake with the UK government. So he's in London a ton. He was in Asia a lot, working on this thing that that's called the Rockwood Frailty Index. But in my house, we just called it the Frailty Index, and I saw some leadership in the impact that they could make when they were leading things. And so for me, what that translated to was, I wanted to become the CEO of the largest business that I could get my hands on, essentially, because I thought, well, CEO, you can never really solve the problem. Business is never one. You look at the most successful companies and you see that even now they're, you know, CEOs are still dealing with problems. There's crises that are going on. You know, Facebook's really good example of something that started out, and so they got enormous, and now they're under a lot of scrutiny for a lot of things. And you can just tell the guy's jobs everybody's changed a bunch but, but Mark's job is never finished. He's not… he hasn't won, even though they were so dominant, and there's so much that's going on, so that always kind of became apparent to me. And then leadership, I thought, was something that, you know, is really fascinating, because you can amplify your impact. And so became trying to become the CEO of a large, specific fund that made a difference, and that was really sort of critical for me, is I had to feel good about what I was getting myself into and what I was producing, and feeling like it was generally being helpful. And so early days, you know, my plan was... I thought I would just be trying to become the CEO of a public company. And it sounds so simple, but in my five-year-old brain, when I started thinking about this is literally… When I started thinking about this. 

Leah  05:26

At five. 

James  05:30

That was sort of the idea. Yeah, I can't remember a moment that I didn't want to be a CEO. And I can't remember a moment where I didn't focus on work 100%. Yeah. 

Leah  05:35

Wow. Like, you know, most kids are just going to kindergarten, right? Like, and they're just hanging out.

James  05:41

I could always just fire myself up by thinking about the future. And I always had it, you know, obviously, like, when I was young, what it meant, what it meant was totally different than as I as I got older. But yeah, it was, it was been sort of the sole focus of my, of my life. So when I went to university, I thought, Okay, I'll get a CPA, because people can invest in that and, quote, unquote, give me a fallback glamor. That was my parents’ advice. And then if I go into investment banking, try to get, like, a big time MBA from a big school, then I could try to run a public company someday. And that was kind of the like journey, or the path that I was really committed to. And so I got my CPA (or my CA at the time,) and I got into investment banking, and then I realized in banking that, you know, really didn't have the skill set to succeed long term in the corporate environment. 

Laeah  06:30

So what were you lacking that you observed? 

James  06:34

Probably like tact. It's a type of strategy that is… Individual strategy is not my strong suit. And I think in a corporate environment, especially if you're trying to become a CEO, you have to really telegraph your… other people's moves, and you have to, you have to react to your own moves well in advance. And it's really focused on, on what you can do. This is, again, outside coming in. I'm not a big time executive, but I think you really have to be strategic about positioning. And you hear, especially in some of these, these large firms, how tough it can be and how many people are vying for that job. And I think there's a little bit of just, I didn't understand that as well at the time, and my best friend is in a corporate gig, and it's really fascinating. He's really good at it, and he's doing really well, and it's really fascinating to see how he's… his personal strategy is really top notch, and it's really interesting. I think for me, I can, I think there's a combination of that, plus I'm impatient. No one's just gonna let you be a CEO. And the one nice thing about it is, it's the only job you can really invent. And so to me, a combination of sort of realizing, okay, this isn't going to be my strong suit, and who knows now, but time was sort of the assessment. And then I thought, I don't want to wait, and I didn't want to keep doing banking. And so I was like, Okay, well, I have to get out of this, then. Like, if I'm gonna go do this thing I'm thinking about for at the time, like, 20 something years, then I need to actually do it. I gotta get serious about doing it. And so I got, like, kind of a half baked idea, and I quit my job, and then changed it 14 days later, and now, now, this is the business that I run. 

Leah  08:31

So let's, so hang on a second. So you just… so you quit your job with a half baked idea and then changed it two weeks later. 

James  08:39

Yeah, it wasn't like, I mean, the initial idea was this, this sort of Trivago for mutual funds and ETFs. Because at the time, back in, like, in 2016 I was thinking about, 2017, was 2017 when I started to get serious and quit my job. That was the height of the robo-advice boom. And so the media was doing a great job of sort of highlighting the gaps in wealth management, servicing wealth management. And so I thought, okay, maybe there's some people who don't want to go robo, but they want to do it themselves. Can I get sort of like a Trivago for mutual funds and ETFs? It was essentially the the path versus an assisted search. And then I talked to some financial advisors after I quit my job, and I remember somebody said, you know, it's really hard for us to talk about financial products. And I thought, Okay, well, it makes sense then that all these, these industries sort of exposes are doing, because if you can't talk about the product that you are selling and the people are trusting, then that's obviously going to significantly impact their satisfaction, in particular when the products are intangible. And I think the interesting thing too is and sorry, to get back to the meaning component of why I left and started this. I had no experience in this industry before I started this company. 

Leah  09:50

Wow, that's a bold move.

James  09:54

Well, I meaning is important, right? And I think, I think, you know, one thing you’ve really got to think about as, especially when you're starting a company, in my opinion, is what's going to be sustaining your motivation over a very long time horizon and a whole lot of uncertainty? Except the cost of doing it personally is quite high, and that you need to think of something that will continue to stay interesting and continue to be intrinsically motivating for years. And years, in fact, when the effort that you're putting into it has no certainty that it's going to make any returns. And so for me, the nice thing about investment banking and CPA is like, you're kind of sitting outside of companies. So I saw a ton of different industries. I was doing shrimp companies and trucking businesses and pigments and software and laundry, like there's all this stuff I got to see and, you know, I couldn't find meaning in any of that. But I thought people's financial goals and their financial health, and in particular, when I was reading the articles about the rise of the robo-advice, was showing people were really had a lot of pain around wealth management at the time. And I thought, okay, there's got to be something here. You know, there can't be this much pain without… I felt like advisors were going to stick around. I just felt like there's some things that a lot of people are going to want a human to be at the helm of. I don't know if there's gonna be self flying planes in my time, but I probably won't get on them. Right? Just nice to have a pilot. 

Leah  11:29

You and me, both.

James  11:31

Yeah, call me old school that might age like milk, but I don't know. We'll see if I get off someday, but I would say that, you know that that really showed me that there was an acute pain in something really important. And then when I got in there and realized that the software that a lot of these advisors had, it wasn't their fault, really. There's working with what they had, the tools they have, and financial products, investments, et cetera, are intangible. So here's something that you have, a financial goal that's really important to you: sending kid to school, buying a house, retiring on your own timeline, retiring and having more money than you need is important. So these are all critically important. You have to trust these intangible products to get you there. You'll never see a mutual fund. You will just experience the returns (or not) of that fund. And so the thing that I felt like software could really help with was the experience around that. You can't necessarily control the performance of investment products, but you can control people's experience around them, and so when I found out financial advisors were having trouble, it all made sense to me, and I pivoted the business from this sort of Trivago for mutual funds and ETFs to powering financial advisors to have these discussions with their clients, and that's really what we've been working on. You know, the product launched just over five years ago, and we work with basically almost all the largest banks in Canada, most insurance providers, but 20,000 financial advisors across North America. We're now in the US, which is really exciting. And generally speaking, the mission hasn't changed. That's really what we're focused on, entirely. We're better at it now. Our interpretation of it is, is we were listening a lot to the market. Now we're pushing some things forward. We think the market is ready for but hasn't thought about, which is awesome, but that's really been the the journey.

Leah  13:39

That’s so exciting. Okay, so give me the sort of the elevator pitch, if you will. What is exactly CapIntel? You've already sort of outlined it for us, but give us it in a nutshell. What is CapIntel?

James  13:50

Yeah, we help financial advisors explain investment products to investors in a way that lets them make decisions and feel as confident as they can trusting these intangible products.

Leah  14:08

Yeah, I love that word trust. We'll dig into that in a minute. But I didn't want to skip over the 20,000 financial advisors that are using your product. I mean, that's a massive number, James. How do you feel about that?

James  14:21

Thanks. Yeah, it's… really, really proud of all the effort. I think that's, you know, a ton of good decisions, a ton of luck, a ton of hard work that went into that. And I think we really feel like this is such a enterprise software and financial services in particular, such a momentum-driven game that you you get the ball rolling, and then the more customers you have, the easier it is to get the next customer, because the risk overall goes down as it's perceived by the buyers. And so the more firms we get, the more firms we want. So we really feel like 20,000 is awesome. Just really getting started, starting to feel the momentum a lot now, which is great, but we should see that number really explode in the next few years. 

Leah  15:08

Oh, that's so exciting. That's so amazing. How many employees do you have right now?

James  15:12

In and around 80 right now. By the end of the year, should be closer to 100 than 80.

Leah  15:19

Wow. That's incredible. And do you mind sharing how much money you've raised so far?

James  15:24

It's a great question. I don't mind. I'd have to remember…

Leah  15:29

I'm asking you all these hard questions. 

James  15:32

No, no, it's okay. I'd say it's around 30 million bucks, something like that. So far.

Leah  15:36

Amazing. And do I have it right that you did your series A in June of 2022? 

James  15:38

Yes, you're correct. 

Leah  15:41

Wow, that's amazing. So that's incredible. Look at you go with this company.  And correct me if I'm wrong, here: are you in five cities now? Halifax, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and New York, have I got that right?

James  15:56

Right, yeah, those are what we call our hubs. So those are where we have the largest concentration of employees. We have a small contingent on the west coast of the US, as well as actually growing contingent now in Kitchener, Waterloo, but yeah, generally speaking, those five are kind of the core hubs where we have an office footprint, or have plans to get an office.

Leah  16:17

Wow, office space, or plans to have office space in five cities across North America. That is a huge deal when I say that to you. I mean, how do you respond to that? Like, does that seem real to you even?

James  16:28

You know, it's funny. Like, yes, I think, I wish we were bigger. I wish we were bigger faster. If I think about the scale of the business I'm trying to achieve, it's really, it's really a lot bigger. So I'd say it's not surprising to me. I'd also say I have trouble celebrating, and I'm not very good at it, so, you know, there's a bit of and maybe that's a small window into that. But I'm very proud of what we've done, and I'm very proud of the team, and I know how much we can achieve. And I have a goal that I'm really serious about getting to and so for me, every you know, everything before then is sort of, we're putting in a lot of work, so I kind of expect it, to be honest. Like this is a lot of people trying really hard and I'm happy and I'm grateful, but I'm not surprised.

Leah  17:22

Amazing. We're going to get to that big goal that you have in mind a little later in the podcast, because I want to hear more about that. But the one thing you did talk about was building trust for and I think that's a really important thing for a lot of Founders and entrepreneurs. I mean that trust with your client is essential, isn't it?

James  17:43

Yeah, in particular, I would say, in enterprise software selling companies. So, we only work with large firms. It's just what we're good at, it’s what we figured out it's a need in the market. And you know, there is always… what I always coach our team on and what I know to be true is that the people who are making the purchasing decision, in particular on the new startup, we’re bigger than we were, but we're still in certain markets, not very big. They're taking on a lot of risk to work with you. Personal risk. And that's something that you have to be really empathetic to, and you have to be willing to help build trust, not just among your champion, who is probably that person taking the risk, but also among the reams of different teams that are going to assess you and assess your company for the opportunity to sign a contract with that firm. So it's got to be on the individual demos that you have. If you have a focus group, a user group, it's got to be a back group. It's got to be with the security team, compliance teams, things like that. You have to be really sort of bulletproof. We have a I read this book called What You Do Is Who You Are, by Ben Horowitz, and he has this idea that of what's called a shocking rule, which is a rule that explains the culture of your company. It's like sort of uncomfortable to hear, but it the explanation of it explains your business and the culture of your business. And so our shocking rule is your best is not enough. And, yeah. And it sounds really harsh, but the idea is, is that our clients are super fickle. They can work with anybody in the world. They take on a lot of risk, bringing us on. And individual heroics are not going to get you a bank deal. It's gotta be the whole team coming together, bringing their best as a team. It's gotta be folks working in lockstep. That's really what's going to allow us to get the trust of these organizations to work with them. And so I remember when I unveiled it, I was super nervous saying it, but I'm more comfortable now because it's just, it's just true. Like it isn't really when I remember right came up with it. We had these, like we had this week, where it was, I think, two or three snowstorms one day apart. It was brutal. And so I was out shoveling my driveway for hours, and I put his like audio book in, and I decided to read it. It was funny, because it came up against… I had booked a couple days off to just work on some more, some cultural driven changes I wanted to make. And that stuff you need to think about for a while. It's not just gonna, like, “Okay, I'm gonna set our company's virtues and boom, here they are.” You really gotta think about them. And so it's actually kind of the perfect distraction. Ton of hard work. I was burning like 4000 or 5000 calories. I had my Apple Watch on the whole tim, was great, and just shoveling, and I was in so much pain by the end of his life that that shocking rule kind of came. It was one of the only things that really showed up and came to me first time. And I just… I realized, like, hey, this isn't, it's not really my rule. It's just sort of the standard that you have to hit. It's… this is just the customers we work with. You know, we're sitting in a room with a large five bank in Canada. Think of the biggest software, most successful software companies in the world. They're kind of executives sitting in that same lobby, just as terrified as you are, because these firms can literally work with anybody, and so you can't give them a reason not to work with you. And that means you gotta bring your best, and so it sets the right standard internally in our business, and I think our clients feel it, and I think it's a big reason why we've been successful so far with these large firms.

Leah  21:34

That is very exciting, but you have to explain to me how you got to the place where you were able to pitch that in front of your team. You said you were really nervous to do it. How did you move through being nervous and getting it out there?

James  21:48

Kind of like your Buckley's, I guess, like I needed the change to happen. We had to set that standard. You know, we're a hub-based business, but we're still primarily remote. And so setting a culture is so much harder and has to be so much more prescriptive and so much more memorable than what you can do in an office setting. And so for me, it was nerve wracking, because anytime you… you're putting yourself out there, and I really want people to enjoy working with our business, and to get a lot out of it. And it sounds controversial when you say… I don’t want to lose the room. I announced it at our retreat in front of the whole company. And we do get everybody together once a year for like, a week. And it was, I think, the first thing I opened with, or one of my first things I talked about, because it was there to set the tone for the rest of the retreat. And I unveiled these new, what we call virtues. So instead of values, which could say, you know, let's say transparency is a value. People have to interpret transparency. They have to interpret it. And so for somebody, transparency could be… what you mean. It, you know, it's being honest, or in a feedback session, or some other people, transparency can mean, hey, if the team is scrambling all night and up until 10 minutes before you had to step on stage for a client demo, because the demo environment broke down. And you step on stage and tell the client, oh yeah, software is just, you know, failed 10 minutes before I got on stage. That's probably not the level of transparency necessary, or is going to help you in any way. And if you deliver the demo, then it's fine, and you make sure, you make sure that everything works when it needs to work. I think, for us, virtues are sort of sentences, and they give a lot more… Our virtue that generally covers the idea of transparency is we owe each other transparent communication and a listening ear. And that really lets you understand. “Okay, I'm expected not only to be transparent in what I'm saying, but I'm also expected to listen to people when they're speaking to me.” And so that's something that can be a lot more, sort of stress test, and it's a lot harder for you to do something that goes against it, because it's way more prescriptive. And in particular, again, in a remote environment, I think you need a lot more of those guiders, because you don't have that in person time and that the coffees and the water breaks, all that kind of stuff. And even if you do, because we are hub-based, and we've got five different cities. Not everybody on the same team is always going to be in the same room, even when, when they're in the office, right? And so you need to be really thoughtful of how you connect people together. And so we have six virtues. We have the shocking rule. These are some of the things we do to try to embed that culture in our business.

Leah  24:22

I love that. That's amazing. 

Leah  24:47

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Leah  25:09

I love talking about culture in startups because sometimes it's overlooked or it's, as to your point, it's just kind of, you know, a couple of things on the wall and nobody really pays attention to it. But I've, I've found, certainly talking to Founders that have a very clear understanding of what their values or virtues, in your case, look like. It seems to work. It seems to really help.

James  25:30

Yeah, it's incredibly productive. Like I think people who don't think about it are missing something. And if they have an amazing business without a great culture, then kudos to them. Imagine what it's gonna look like when you get the culture down. But what I would say is culture is, is how people work when nobody is watching, right? And that's the majority, even in in-person, that is the majority of people's work. Right is when no one else is directly staring at them. So what are they doing, right? If they're in the office, are they scrolling on their phone, or are they actively working? If they're having a meeting, are they paying attention and giving you 100% of their attention? Are they distracted? These are all things that are going to happen when not necessarily someone's standing over them. They're having a dinner with a customer by themselves, and it's just them and the customer. They're your representative. You want to make sure that people know what they're supposed to do in those moments, because that's the vast majority of the time spent in the business. So yeah, culture's super important.

Leah  26:27

Super important. Cool. One question that I ask every Founder that I chat with is about a “do or die” moment in the evolution of their startup and their business. I know I've put this to you, so I'm very curious, what story can you tell me about a do or die moment for the evolution of your company?

James  26:47

Yeah, so our platform, in earnest, launched at the beginning of 2020, and that was a culmination of, yeah, awesome timing. That was a culmination of a ton of work. I was really bad at fundraising early days, and I had this great team, and we had these great designs, and we had finally raised a bit of money. And we were launching the software, and I was in just like I've launched it now, we hadn't really started. We were doing okay on revenue. I think we're like 10 grand a month or something. And from zero was felt like amazing. And then I remember that I was going to do, I think, our seed round at that time. And then everything happened with the pandemic. And so we were really staring at some, you know, not a lot like of timeline or a lot of runway in front of us. I think we had, it was maybe January. We had comfortably til July. And then I had all this money sort of starting to come in. I think we wanted to raised a million bucks. And I think we had, like 5-600,000. I wasn't going down the VC route. I was still in the heavily in the angels. Yeah, it was just felt like the right timing for that. So I was, I was in that road. We had just graduated from Creative Instruction Lab. We just got into next, yeah, it was really going well so and then everything faded disappeared. And everybody's like, hey, like, sorry, I don't know what the heck's going on here. Can't give you money. And then we had a bunch of small contracts we were working on, and they all disappeared. But two things happened in that. One is two of our investors didn't go away. And the second is that we were trying to do a deal with a part of Scotia Bank, and they said, “Hey, we got to figure out how to make 100,000 people work from home, and then we'll come back. And so, like, we're gonna do the deal, but like, we just need extra time.” And I remember thinking, okay, hey, enterprise is a really important metric here and or, sorry, this is a really important metric here for enterprise, because they're not freaking out when everything else is sort of running away. Like they're like, hey, hey, it's fine. We work on years, year timelines, not quarters. We are going concerned, sort of no matter what, like, it's gonna take a lot to disrupt us really significantly. And while it can happen, it was a signal to me that, okay, there's something going on. We also signed another enterprise contract in March of 2020, like the 17th, or something like that. Yeah. And because they're on this exact same timeline, they're like, Hey, this is, this is really scary, but like, we're gonna do this deal. And so I remember that I called those investors back, and I was like, “Hey, can we just close something and get us into a good spot? Here's how much I need.” And I found a third investor, and I closed that money. And then we realized, okay, we're not gonna hear from anybody for a while, as far as customers and contracts. So now is our golden opportunity to just code as much as we can, design as much as we can, to just build as much as we can, so that when we see them next, we've transformed ourselves and the business, and we're so much better. That was a really important decision, because at the end of that year, growing our revenue by 500% and then by the year after that, we had grown already by about 800% on top of that 500% and it was all because we switched to thinking about enterprise. We invested the time, which was super hard, but knowing that no one was going to talk to us, we had just enough money to get through. We ended up, you know, really driving a lot of our success from that, from that pivot. So it's really scary at the time. It's really tough. It wasn't fun, but I think once we got over it, it was it was okay.

Leah  30:41

Okay, but we need to dig into that a little bit. So first of all, you're telling me that everybody's disappearing. You have no idea what's gonna happen in the next little while. So first of all, how did that even feel? Like you said it was a bit scary, but like, what does that look like for you? Are you curled up in the floor, in a fetal position? I mean, how did you process that, even emotionally? 

James  31:00

It's unfortunate there's no video, because if there was anything you could see, there's, there's a squat rack in my background, as well as an office. But I would say fitness is the glue that holds me together, for sure. And I remember the first day that this was coming back, my parents, you know, had the latest and greatest because of their roles. And my dad was actually the head of acute care for the Province of Nova Scotia at the time, I was living in Toronto. So he was, like, really, really knowledgeable of everything was going on. And was, you know, sort of saying, hey, like, people are gonna be home for a while. Just be ready for that. And so the first thing that I did was order a bunch of fitness equipment. Because I was like, well, I'm not gonna go to the gym. So that was, like, the smartest thing is, I got it all for regular prices, which just wasn't that expensive at the time. And how I react anytime that we have pressure or uncertainty or like some other sort of darkness hanging over me is just lean into it, right? And so I recalibrate everything around what the definition of fun is, what the definition of relaxing is, what my expectations are. And I'm like, All right, if I'm awake, I'm working, and my fun is working out, and my relaxation is maybe I'll watch a show with my now-wife, at the time girlfriend, on the couch for an hour. That's how I work, and that's how I live, and that's sort of it, and I'm just gonna match this sort of severity of the situation with the dedication that is required to kind of get us through that. And so harder now with kids and other things. But that mindset, I think, is a really important mindset to be able to tap into. Even now, like, like, we're in the middle of not very because there's a lot of really great stuff, but it's very busy, and there's a lot, as I mentioned at the lot of planes we gotta land, and a lot of effort has to go into getting those things done. And so right now is, like, one of those sort of crunch moments for me where I'm really leaning into it. You know, the obligation calls a certain level of commitment, and you need to be ready to to produce that. So you can guarantee that, like, right now, I don't miss the gym, or I'm, like, straight on my diet, or, like, it's all kind of going into working a lot. And I've, you know, with the kids and stuff, you've got to, like, pair off and and whatnot. But I mean, makes you cherish the time you have with them more. And so it's one of those things that I developed for the first time during that, and then I've used a lot ever since, and hoping never that much of a crisis again. But if one comes, I am ready.

Leah  33:35

And that has got to be empowering to know that I have been through this, something like this, something real challenging, and I figured out what to do and how to perform at my best, even at that time, that's gonna feel pretty good to know you have that capacity.

James  33:48

Yeah. Since the pandemic, there's been 1000 sort of mini-crises that everybody's gone through and and I'm not the only person who has, by any means, and we got out really well from it, but I would say that I can constantly reassure the team and tell them, like, hey, look, you know, don't worry. We've been through X, Y, or Z, and you know, even we had something difficult recently. And I remember being thrown like, this will be a notch. Sucks right now, but at some point this will just be another notch in the belt, and we just carry on. And I think that that in particular, long view, especially as a CEO, it's what you have to have, because everybody's looking at you for certainty. And while you may not have certainty yourself, like you do, need to pick a direction, commit to it, show that you're committed. That commitment gives people certainty to it, you know. And so I think that's something that's really important. 

Leah  34:40

No kidding. So essentially, that time, that crunch time for you during the pandemic really informed how you continue to build to this day. 

James  34:44

Yeah, everything since then defined, defined the business 100%. And it has defined our success, really, including remote. Like we were all in person at the time. There was no plans to be remote, there's no plans on hybrid, there's no plans on any of that kind of stuff at all, and then everything happened. And, you know, we needed to save the money on the rent, and so it all just, sort of, we were just co-working spots. We bailed and all that kind of stuff helped. But, yeah, it wasn't certain at the time. It reminds me of a funny quote that I grabbed a couple just before this. I'm a big like, ancient history buff, in particular stoke philosophy, antiquity. A lot of different areas of history, certain areas I know better than others. But it's a really interesting book from 1994 called Achilles in Vietnam. And it basically like goes through the Iliad, and then it talks about through my psychologist and talks about or psychiatrists, but it talks about, essentially, how if you read the Iliad in a certain way, you can actually see a lot of the trauma associated with battle that people see in patients coming out of war, coming out of the Vietnam War. It said, “Ancient and modern war are alike in defining the relationship between victory and the Army's dead after the fact. At the time of the deaths, victory has not yet been achieved, so the corpses’ meaning hovers in the void until the lethal contest has been decided.” And as really, as I though, I was like, wow, that's an incredible… but if you if you switch that something less dramatic, and talk about effort, there's a defining, you know, relationship with effort. So efforts meaning all the stories you're gonna read typically and hear about are people who have won, right? Sayings like, “History is written by winners.” And so anybody who's talking about it after the fact, after they're successful, the effort makes sense, right? But before they were successful, the effort’s sort of sitting in that void of, hey, was this a giant waste of committed time, or am I actually going to get something out of all the time I just sank into it? And so I think that that's something as well that is just important to recall in this sort of role, when you really have to put a lot of effort in, and there isn't necessarily any, there certainly isn't any guarantee of success. There may not be any signals that you're successful. And I think it's something that is a really interesting way to think about it, where it's like the effort has meaning after the fact, and so you have to be comfortable putting in effort consistently, where it's going to hang out in void. I don't know if this worked or not. We'll find out. You know, at the end enterprise contracts, and feel like that, because you'll put months into stuff, and then it all comes down to a decision. And, you know, hopefully it's a yes, but sometimes it's a no, and all that stuff just goes away, right? And you got to reevaluate. Okay, where do we put the effort in? You know, was that, right? What did we miss?

Leah  37:42

It's an opportunity for learning, though, right? All that effort. I mean, it's not for naught. You're gonna learn.

James  37:48

Absolutely not. Yeah, it's so true.

Leah  37:54

Okay, you mentioned very briefly girlfriend to wife and now kids. I'm always curious about how being an entrepreneur actually affects your personal life. Do you mind talking a little bit about that?

James  38:05

I mean, look, like it's a team effort, for sure, especially if you're going to have kids. You have to have a great support network running a business. Or I'll say this more generally, especially coming from my own family. Like, if you're going to be dedicated to what you do and you want to be excellent at it, it's going to require a lot more effort than most benchmarks you're going to see as far as the amount of effort other people put in, right? So there's going to be less time in the evenings, there's going to be less time in the morning, there's going to be more time thinking about it, when you're not working necessarily at the computer. There's gonna be probably more travel. Certainly, you know, it's going to require a lot. And so you, in my experience, you need somebody who's going to help you counterbalance that. You know, I think you need somebody who's really going to help make sure that you are achieving other goals too. And so, you know, my wife and I have, like, our own kind of joint goals that we're working on together for family and things like that, and we have our roles, and they're supportive of each other. And, you know, I think that that's something that that is it. So I think it's, it's just not mourning the loss of, like, not having a fear of missing out, and especially early, like when you're young. It's easy when you have kids, like, that's, it's you know as… I don't know if anybody has FOMO who has kids, unless… Not with your kids, right, right? Exactly the new benchmark, but I would say that you know, for early days, you want to just not worry about not being able to do all the things that other people have time to do, and as you kind of carry on, I think similar to you got to get more from less. You know, you're going to be putting in some consistent hours. And sometimes it's just thinking and you're just not present. Sometimes it's just actual work itself. It depends on the time, and you're gonna have crunches and stuff, and you're gonna need somebody who really gets that and understands and is going to support you through the ebbs and flows of work. And then when you aren't required, as insecure as that can feel, but when you aren't required for a period of time, also investing in, like taking a minute to recharge, or taking some time because you don't know when you're going to get it next. So I think… we always coach culturally in our business to just not be a hero if you're not needed. Because if we need to call on you, we will. And if we need to ask you to work a lot, we will. But it doesn't mean that, you know, if you've been crushing it for six weeks straight, and this thing is delivered, and there's nothing imminently on your on your plate right away, like, okay, maybe you don't need to be a hero in week seven, because that's not going to help you. And it's certainly not gonna help you put another six weeks in right after that, if that's what you need right away, right? So it's always about being sort of ready in the ready position to the extent that you can, and then being prepared to put in the hours when they're needed.

Leah  40:55

So you mentioned a little bit about how for you, exercise is one of the ways that you stay well as well, moving through this world of entrepreneurship. But how do you think about staying well and healthy and so that allows you to continue to do this important work?

James  41:11

Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty single tracked on this. I'll be honest, like I said. I mean, fitness is sort of like the thing, you know, fitness, to me, brings in mindfulness. Fitness can be a bunch of different stuff. I mean, I've done Brazilian Jiu Jitsu on and off for years. I really like that. Martial arts has always been a big part of my life, and that's like one form of fitness, but I think it's, you know, working out or running, anything particularly hard, that gets you to stop thinking about work is, I think, really engaging. So if you don't like fitness, you know, but you love playing the flute, like do that. But you need something you kind of get lost in and you need to be able do it consistently, and it needs to be something that travels well. And so that's true, right? Flute’s not a bad option. I'm thinking about it.

Leah  41:56

Gotta go pick up a flute. 

James  42:00

But I think anything that really lets you kind of disappear into your own head or just away from work, because that's the sort of mental clarity that I think you're going to need to do. And then the other thing, more recently, and I think this is only as our business has gotten bigger, that I've benefited from, is not the idea of always having to read or do something for a particular point that you're going to get out of it. So if I'm reading an article, and they're, you know, Harvard Business Review has, every article has summary now, and which is, you know, AI-driven summary. That's awesome. But, like, sometimes, if you want to know the four things or whatever that they say. But generally speaking, if you're going to read about something, you're going to invest the time. The point is to put your head in that topic for a period of time and then wait to see what comes out of it. Because I find that, you know, I can read an article, or I can be listening to something else, or even that book, you know, has total interest book… had nothing to do with entrepreneurship, got a great quote that is totally applicable to it. These are things that are going to help, I think, give you a bit of distance to be more strategic, to be more more thoughtful, to think of problems differently. And so I think a combo of of spending some time doing something that gives you that mindfulness, or that space, that empty-headedness that you need, and then. It’s something that has to require effort, like, in my opinion, efforts the only thing that's really going to get you away away from it could be like really sort of detailed movement, if you're doing, like calligraphy or whatever, or it can be something a bit more like a squat, right, which is sort of my where my head goes. But I think that stuff's all really important. And the other idea of being comfortable at certain points, just putting your head into different spaces and seeing what comes out. Because a lot of those thoughts, the appeals, talk with shower thoughts, and they talk about staircase thoughts, and that stuff can also be pushed in a little bit more as you're just reading books that might be, you know, related to something you're interested in, or that may not feel like they're related directly to business, but that can make that those neurons fire.

Leah  44:02

Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. That's really interesting. So let's just talk a little bit about this notion of impact. And I think you've really talked about it when it came to even just setting up your organization and your startup. But how do you think about impact and creating impact in the world? 

James  44:20

Yeah, great question. So there's sort of two ways that I think about it. The first one is, in our particular business, is with those end investors. People are using our presentations to receive advice and to get advice explained to them, and our job is to make sure that in that moment, that they need to make a decision, that these intangible objects feel really tangible to them. They feel like they understand it. They feel like they have confidence. And we're giving that advisor the best asset to articulate their advice as possible. We want something that's going to make the advisor really proud and really happy to be putting in front of somebody, because that confidence and that pride is going to flow directly into that person who used to make a stressful decision. Money decisions are very stressful. Money decisions are very consequential. And so for me, building confidence in advice and building confidence in the person's financial future. Or showing them they need to take action when they do need to take action, which is also a thing, is really important. So for me, it's that building investor confidence, I think, is one way to make impact, because, as I said, like, while we, like our company, can't change necessarily performance, we can change the experience. And so everything we want to do is give advisors the best tools that they have to to make that happen. I'd say on the… that's externally. Internally, it really comes down to giving people who join our company like the best experience that they can. An opportunity to learn, an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to make an impact as well, you know, to be able to be seen, to have a difference in the business, to be able to put your hand up for things and to be trusted, to have autonomy, to be really happy and with what you're doing, and to be putting in a lot of effort into something you really care about. You know, I think the key, for me, is, in life, is how to stay engaged. I think happiness is probably the wrong thing. I think engagement is probably the right thing. And engagement can be stressful, it can be fearful, it can be all the things. It can also be elating and very exciting. But how do I help give these people an opportunity to stay engaged consistently and really get a lot from the work that they do? You know your job is so much of your life, and I love what I do, and I've watched my parents love what they do, and I just know how much of a gift that can be for people. And so for me, it comes down to building impact with them as well, and trying to give them the best possible opportunity and environment to succeed and to love what they do, even if it is going to be stressful and all these other things and try to normalize some of that. Because, you know, when you're when you're a small business, working with huge businesses, and you're really pushing the technology and you're really advancing, it's competitive and all this kind of stuff, things are changing, this uncertainty, you really want to have people anchored in, going at it with a lot of engagement and excitement. And, you know, uncertain, sure, but fun as well.

Leah  47:28

Amazing. That's incredible. All right, so you are the Founder of your company, CapIntel. We're going to wrap with this question, and how do you hope the story for CapIntel goes?

James  47:40

I'm on this mission of trying to build a business that's really big and that makes an impact. And I think we're certainly starting to make an impact. The technology has still a lot of place to grow, which I'm really excited about. So getting CapIntel to become a meaningful name in the space and to be known for being really good at what we do, for pushing technology, for being a really trustworthy partner, for growing globally. I think this is a massive industry with a massive reach, and we have a ton of potential in it, and to make it really large on an absolute scale, in a way that I think could drive on impact. At the same time maintaining, I think this, this culture that's really good, improving it, getting it better, having a lot of people engaged. I think if I can have a company that's doing those two things and helping a lot of investors feel confident in their advice, and giving a lot of people an awesome place to work, I've achieved what I set out to do.

Leah  48:39

Wow, sounds like you've answered this final question, but as the Founder, what do you hope as a Founder? How do you hope your story goes?

James  48:49

I think, showing that it's possible to create a scalable and like, really great culture that can endure difficulties, for example, like remote work and that can create a really great impact. I think for me, I want to be shown as somebody who’s a good leader, who created great environments, gave people a lot of opportunity to grow, gave a lot of people opportunity to make an impact and be successful. Not so much really just about me, as much as just about advancing how to lead and being a good leader, and trying to help people understand and learn from myself, as I start to develop this. I think it's already developed my understanding of leadership. So that's a funny question, that's a tougher question. It is always really easy. Yeah, I don't personally, haven’t thought about it as much. 

Leah  49:38

Well I’m glad I can help you think about it a little bit, because it sounds like you're doing an incredible job. James, thank you so much for this conversation. 

James 49:43

Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

Leah  49:52

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