The journey from being an employee into a leadership role and entrepreneurship can be draining. Founders often lose focus on the importance of oxygen, hydration, sleep and hobbies outside of business.
The journey from being an employee into a leadership role and entrepreneurship can be draining. Founders often lose focus on the importance of oxygen, hydration, sleep and hobbies outside of business.
Scott and creative entrepreneur Marcus Whitney talk about well being and performance as well as the next level of maturity of the Internet and businesses we haven't seen before.
Marcus Whitney is a creative entrepreneur who dropped out of college and taught himself software development, digital marketing, venture capital, deal-making, public speaking, convening, and leadership. Marcus is founder of Creative Power, author of "Create and Orchestrate," and founder of Jumpstart Foundry.
Dive deeper into the episode here: http://bit.ly/2K3HAiT
Have feedback? Connect with Scott Case on LinkedIn
Visit foundersfocus.com to join the live video sessions, watch past sessions, and see what topics are up next.
Scott Case 0:00
Welcome to Founders Focus, a podcast made for founders by founders. I'm Scott Case, CEO and co founder of Upside, and I created Founders Focus to help share free resources and actionable advice. Together, we're building a community for business leaders, entrepreneurs and founders to come together to tackle today's challenges. This podcast is powered by my awesome team at Upside. Please visit foundersfocus.com to join the live video sessions or to catch up on past topics.
Scott Case 0:28
There's like 4,000 things that Marcus Whitney, who is my co host for today, and I could talk about and we're probably only going to get to like four. But, we're gonna go after him aggressively so that we get as much as we can done. Marcus is a super creative entrepreneur. As he says in his book, he's an unlikely one, although I actually think he's more likely than he probably admits. He is currently leading Jumpstart Foundry, which is a health innovation Seed Fund for entrepreneurs, and he's got like 57 other projects. So I'm going to turn it over to Marcus to introduce himself. And then we'll dive in. So Marcus, welcome!
Marcus Whitney 1:06
Scott, thank you so much. Thanks everybody for showing up today. My name is Marcus Whitney. I'm an entrepreneur, I am based in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm a dad, I've got two two boys, 21 and 19. And I love to be an entrepreneur, it's what I've been doing for the last 15 years, I made my way from being a technologist, very much like Scott, you know CTO type into the entrepreneur space. And now, I spend most of my time as a venture capitalist, investing in fantastic founders in healthcare innovation. I wrote a book, like Scott said, called Create and Orchestrate. And excited to be here today.
Scott Case 1:49
Well, for those of you who want to know, this is what the book cover looks like. We've been making our way through it here at the Case household. There's a lot going on there and there's been a lot in your journey. So I'd love for you to start wherever you'd like to begin on your journey as an entrepreneur. And just take three, four minutes to kind of tell us your story. It's always helpful for people, most entrepreneurial journeys are twisting and turning paths as opposed to straight line. So why don't you tell us yours?
Marcus Whitney 2:25
Sure. In the book, I basically tell the story of the last 20 years of my life. And it starts with me arriving in Nashville as a college dropout who was waiting tables six and a half days a week, and needing to find a way to do a better job of taking care of my growing family. And the very first thing that I decided to do was not to be an entrepreneur, but rather it was to learn how to code. So I went about doing that, learning how to code and then getting gainfully employed as a junior developer, and working my way up to being a senior developer director of technology in a fast growing email marketing company here in town. It was while I was at that email marketing company, and I really learned about startups, I was the fifth employee there so I was very close to the co founders, and saw us go from burning money to making lots of money and growing and managing people. And really seeing upfront, Wow this is what it looks like to have a vision, build a team, create a culture, create a product, create value, make money, like wow this is really cool. That was where everything came together for me to find the courage to step out on my own and really start my own entrepreneurial journey. So that started in 2007. Along that way, I've had some successes, an exit, some failures, I write about it in the book. And yeah, it's been a varied experience, launching technology companies. One of the things that I was fortunate to do was be a part of a professional sports organization. So bringing professional soccer to Nashville and what that experience has been like, which is something you can't do by yourself, it takes many, many people, government and people with a lot of money and the fans, you kind of have to figure out how to coordinate a whole lot of people to make something like that happen. So I've had a bunch of different experiences and all doing that while raising kids, getting divorced, getting remarried, cleaning up my life and figuring out like how to make it all fit.
Scott Case 4:42
So let's dive in - you joined, I think the company is called Emma, so you join, you kind of work your way up, kind of grew with the company and your own capabilities. What happened in 2007 that was different from 2006 that wouldn't have been 2008 look a lot like 2006? Like what happened to you that got you to be brave enough to take that leap?
Marcus Whitney 5:10
Yeah, so I think it was a couple things. One, the company had grown to this place where it really was time for a new person to lead technology. You know, it sort of scaled, quite frankly, beyond my capability. And it was time for a more senior experienced person who knew how to scale something to come in and run it. So that was part of it. That was sort of the internal dynamics. I would say, for me personally, it wasn't as fun as it was when I first started, you know, when it was five of us, and I was coding, but also doing customer service, it was like a lot of fun. When it was 50 plus of us and I was much more in a managerial role, it was less fun. And then there was the macro stuff that was happening out in the world. So I went to my first South by Southwest in 2007. And Twitter effectively launched there, and I got to see what the future of digital marketing communication was going to look like. So that was totally mind blowing, as well as getting to meet a bunch of people that I knew online and seeing that there wasn't that much difference between them and myself. So I met Matt Mullenweg, who is the founder of WordPress there, and he was just a guy trying to get people to use his blog software. So sort of seeing that there was a bigger world out there was a big part of it. The iPhone launched later on in 2007. And I remember getting my first iPhone and realizing, oh my god the world's gonna completely be different because of this thing. And then, probably the last thing, and Scott, I think we hopefully we talked about this, was as a CTO who was building a web application and a team around that, I spent a fair amount of my time in data centers actually taking computers in and out of racks, and researching specs on computers and crying when hard drives would fail, and things of that nature. And 2007 was really when Amazon Web Services took off and hit general availability in a meaningful way. And so that was another big shift in the way the technology was going to be scaled and deployed. And so those changes were big enough that they, along with a bunch of other things, kind of created an existential crisis for me feeling that I didn't need to be at Emma anymore, I needed to kind of figure out what was next for me. And so I left.
Scott Case 7:29
And what business did you start? What did you end up going to do after you observed these things, and you said, alright it's time for me to go, then what happened?
Marcus Whitney 7:38
I did the only thing I knew how to do, which was I knew how to build web applications and to lead teams, I have learned that over the previous six years, so I left to start a company that did this for other people. And it was effectively a software agency targeted at working with entrepreneurs. So it was what I knew how to do. And it worked out pretty well for a short period of time, I was good at recruiting good developers, I was pretty good at the initial phases of setting up culture and making it a fun environment, and I had enough of a reputation in town for having successfully built Emma, which was very, very well known in Nashville, to be able to do that first wave of sales. So within 18 months, I had a nice sized team of 10 people, we were generating over a million dollars in revenue, and by all external measures, things looked pretty good. On the inside, it was a house of cards. And not because anything was fake, but more because I was about to quickly run into the limits of my understanding of business. And also, I was in the process of a divorce at that point. So that was the other thing that happened in 2007 for me was my wife and I separated. So that began sort of a two year process of unwinding our marriage. And at that time, our kids were, I guess, eight and six. So over that 18 month period of growing the company, both internally with the employees and the culture and in our line of services that we did, and also the customers and the revenue when I was the head of sales and also client success. It was just a ton of pressure. And it all basically sort of came crashing down around me and around 2009.
Scott Case 9:24
So what you do next? How did you recover from that?
Marcus Whitney 9:29
Well, it was a very long time of recovering. So how that business failed was concentration risk. So again, I'm building software and I'm working with entrepreneurs. And that means I don't have that many clients. But I had three clients, one of them really ended up just scaling, they were raising more money, we were doing more services for them. And I didn't understand the concept of concentration risk. So I didn't understand it was a big problem that this one customer was representing 70 plus percent of my revenue and didn't know that ultimately I was building a department of their company, not my own company. It's one of those, like early lessons that you learn in entrepreneurship when you don't know what you're doing. And so that was a big lesson and ended up having to fold my company in as a department and becoming the CTO of this venture backed company. And I did that for four years. So that was painful because I felt like I had let the employees of the company down, it was like, they signed up to work with me not to like work as a part of this other thing. And I had to try to convince them that this was going to be good and we were going to be part of this venture back thing, which I didn't know what that was, Emma was not a venture backed startup. So I'd never been on a leadership team that had investors, had to do board meetings, we ended up hiring a CEO from outside of the city. So I started opening up an office in Boston, in addition to the one we had in Nashville. Being on the road half the time, I learned so much through that process, but it was really, really difficult, it was a really difficult thing to do, and puts a ton of scars on you when you go through all of that kind of whiplash.
Scott Case 11:31
As you point out, it's also how you learn, right? That's how you gain experiences, kind of through those challenges and overcoming them and figuring out how to get past them. You've obviously spent the last, I guess probably 5,6,7 years doing a wide range of things. You talked about bringing a sports club, a soccer club in particular to Nashville, you mentioned writing a book, you've got Jumpstart Foundry and a few other projects that are going. I'm curious, and also sounds like you've also been on the edges of burnout kind of losing it. You power through those things, have you discovered some tips and tricks that you use for yourself to kind of, and we'll start with just kind of survive those moments and then I want to turn to how do you optimize from a performance standpoint? But, like, what are some of the things that have kind of gotten you through those periods of challenges? And that you reflect on now that you've brought into your current projects?
Marcus Whitney 12:42
Yeah. So when I look back, particularly from 2007, until I'll say just even two years ago, the thing that held it all together for me was I kept some form of workout regimen in place. And when I was traveling and spending all sorts of times in airports in different cities, it really distilled down to, could I get outside and run? So there were probably five years there where running was keep literally keeping me alive because everything else I was doing - the lack of sleep, the unhealthy environments, drinking, stress, feeling like an imposter, pretty much everything was probably negative for my health and my performance, and running was the one thing that would clear me out effectively. So yeah, probably running saved my life for many, many years. And then, six years ago, my son and I, my youngest son, and I started doing martial arts. And that really was a layer on top of that, because that added discipline, and I also was with him while I was doing it. We did it together. We got our black belt in hapkido together. And so I had to show up, I had to be responsible, I had to be the father figure, while also being disciplined myself. And so that added a different layer to it. And through that, then I started lifting weights. And that was helpful. And then I was doing all this working out and almost two years ago to the day, not quite there, but almost two years ago to the day, I just realized that I'm doing all this all this working out and that's great, but there's still a bunch of stuff that is not right. And that led me to my first singles therapy session. And then similarly, I think three weeks after that, I stopped drinking, and then everything basically changed at a very, very fast pace. Once I did those two things, then I started meditating. Yeah, I feel like we could go down a rabbit hole with this, but I mean, what kept me alive was working out, basically down to running for many, many years, martial arts was a really important layer on top of that. And then therapy and sobriety were the big, big, big, big levels up.
Scott Case 15:47
So I would like to talk more about the overall performance piece. But you mentioned a framework that I think is from David Sedaris, and I think you've sort of made it your own, but talk a little bit about sort of the four burners and it sounds like you basically kept kind of running on a little bit while you dealt with all these other things. But can you share that framework and how you might reflect on where you were then and where you are now?
Marcus Whitney 16:13
Yeah, it's almost certainly David Sedaris' thing, but it's hard to actually source it correctly. I think I just said in my book, like I think it's him but no one can actually officially source it back to him, but I think it is him. So basically, the four burners - the metaphor is it is hard to cook with all four burners on, right, because you're going to lose the ability to pay attention to something and something will probably burn, right? That's the metaphor. So the idea is, can you actually effectively cook a great meal and have alternate four burners on? Very, very difficult, very few people can execute that. And so then you take that metaphor, and you approach life with that, and you say, okay, the four burners are your health, family, friends and work. And it is very difficult to focus on all four of those equally and have them all do great. And so then you start getting into this mindset that most people can only truly excel at two at a time, maybe do three, but usually one of the burners is always turned down a little bit. And so at various points, I've had various burners turned up or turned down, I would say over the last two years, I probably turned the work burner down the most. And I say this in the book, I assume if you're reading this book that's about entrepreneurship, you're an entrepreneur, your work burner is probably pretty high so now we're more talking about the other three - health family and friends, right.
Marcus Whitney 17:53
And for me, the health one is the trickiest one, because it is the one that can actually enable the other ones to be a little bit more functional. And I think you learn that through experience, and also just aging, you sort of take you take health for granted, when you're in your 20s and in your 30s. And again, my story was a 20 year story. I'm 44 now. So I started when I was 24. And so as I was going through that first 10 years, early mid 20s into my early mid 30s, I wasn't thinking about health, I was young, everything on my body worked well, I didn't need to think about it, if I had a hangover it didn't last very long. Hetting from my 30s into my 40s much, much much different, right? Much different. So health became much more top of mind. And then also as I started doing venture capital in the healthcare space, I'm talking about health care all the time. And, it becomes really clear that where all the expenses in health care are is chronic disease. Helping people take care of chronic care management - diabetes, heart disease, stroke, all these things that are not 100% but have a lot to do with lifestyle and behavior. And so when you hear enough pitches, you talk to enough executives, you learn it and talk to enough clinicians, you can't hear that all day and not do some reflection on yourself with that.
Scott Case 19:34
I think that you said something you kind of breezed by it, but it's worth kind of pointing it out. And yeah, you have those four burners, sometimes you can turn them off or turn them way down, but you are making adjustments. And I think being intentional about that almost declarative. And just setting expectations for that - whether it's health and being more intentional saying well, I can only run now so that's what I'm going to do versus just kind of defaulting into it or I'm not going to miss any of my kids activities, but sort of everything else from a family standpoint is thrown overboard, or whatever it is to be both intentional and communicate the expectation to yourself first and then everybody else. Because one of the things I see with entrepreneurs is they find themselves in the hole, but they kind of almost don't know how they got there. And it's just much harder to recover from that standpoint, it does take lots of life experiences to get there.
Scott Case 20:34
So you said everything changed when you made a couple of changes two years ago, as you both study all those startups and those clinicians and others, what do you think the big performance enhancers are? As an entrepreneur, we're often going to be at this for a while, right? These tend to be multi year investments of time and energy. You're at it the whole time and yet, you have to make really smart decisions constantly. Are there performance maximizers that you've either discovered or that you have identified as things that you think are like the keys to kind of optimizing for those performance outcomes that most entrepreneurs are trying to get out of themselves and therefore their business?
Marcus Whitney 21:26
Yeah, so I think it's very, very much like you said, it's important to have the intentionality and the whole point of the four burners is to give you a framework upon which to be intentional, right? Once you know, hey here are these four burners, these are the four major areas of your life. If it's not laid out for you, you may not be thinking about it that way. I think performance is the same thing, right? So for me, I took performance for granted early in my career, because I was just working and totally relying on talent, and effort and passion, whatever that's supposed to mean, right? It wasn't until I started doing martial arts and had to study and prepare to achieve via performance at belt tests like, I have to sleep the night before if I'm going to actually remember all the things I need to do or if I'm going to break through these boards, or if I'm going to cut through this with a sword or whatever, right? It was that reframing of oh yeah, performance and performance is something you prepare for. And you prepare by, you know, have you studied? Did you get a good night's sleep? Did you eat the right things? Are you properly hydrated, right, you know, sort of thinking about performance, just performance itself.
Marcus Whitney 22:45
And then also doing the pro sports stuff, and it just hit me like, oh, entrepreneurship is a competitive endeavor. And it is more like a endurance sport than it is a sprint, but it is still a competitive endeavor. And I need to be thinking about how would an endurance athlete prepare for competition, and it was that framework that started me thinking, Oh well an endurance athlete would consistently do the things to train, right, so that they would have the endurance, the capability, the muscle memory, in order to be able to perform. So okay, that's one thing. They prioritize sleep, their diet matters. They know they have to blow off steam every once in a while, so they go and they have fun - so they fit that in, they study ways to be more efficient over time. They know that as their body ages, they can't do the same things they did when they were younger. So how do they work smarter? How do they work better? How do they use age to their advantage, and I just started applying all that stuff to my to my life as an entrepreneur. So for me, my sleep and my diet, which I don't get perfect all the time but I do track pretty closely, my sleep and my diet and running and stretching and meditating and lifting weights, all of that to me factors into my performance, and I've now done it consistently enough that I can tell when I'm not doing it. I can tell. It's an energy thing, right. So today, I had a brief window where I could fit in a two mile run, but I knew I had two sessions today - I had this one and I had one earlier this morning on LinkedIn - and I was like that two miles is going to be key. You know what I mean? It's going to make sure my energy is right for these sessions. So I got it in and lo and behold, it works. Whereas if I had just stayed here, been sluggish sat in the chair, compressing my spine more, not to get too too technical, but like this stuff it all plays in. And so I just think entrepreneurs need to recognize this is a competitive endeavor - your body and your brain are your tools, just like it is for an athlete, and an athlete would not prepare for an endurance competition treating their body like crap, they wouldn't do it. So why would you do that?
Scott Case 25:38
Absolutely, I think one of the things that we forget is that if we want to optimize for performance, even if we just want to perform on par, if you're not investing in your body and your brain, you're going to have poor poor performance, and you're likely in a business context to make poor decisions or decisions that have enormous costs to you, your investors, your employees. And it's astonishing to me around around being, as you said earlier, being intentional about what those performance expectations that you have for yourself, and what are you trying to get out of it? And how do you make sure that you're investing in them?
Scott Case 26:25
You talked about sleep, hydration, nutrition. You didn't just happen upon that. So how have you changed your own lifestyle to sort of bake those things in? And how do you basically have the discipline to sort of stick with it because these things accumulate on the negative and on the positive?
Marcus Whitney 26:54
Yeah, that's exactly right. So I think the first thing was, I had to hit what was a bottom for me. Where I was just like, Look I'm done, you know what I mean? Like I'm not gonna be able to continue to do this this way. This is not sustainable. I might head into a really bad place if I don't stop. And so I kind of just said, Uncle enough, I need to change. And I think the most important thing that happened for me in my very first therapy session was I went in, and the way that I say this is I went in and I said all the things, right, so I said all the things that I had not said to anyone where all the shame lived. I said all the things in like the very first session. And what has been an incredible two year run for me since that day possible is my therapist was like, Okay cool. You know what I mean? And did not go like, Oh my god, woah, what, hold on, I wasn't prepared to hear you say that. She really normalized it. Which basically removed all of this weird conversation I was having in my head about this stuff, and was like, okay yeah like we can do something about this, we can do something about this, we can do something about this, you know it's going to be work but all these things you can make progress on. And that was it, like once that happened then all of a sudden, I started finding the resolve to make decisions that were in my best interest. And then it was a matter of layering in habits and building a flywheel of momentum there, where now it's at this point where things that before would have just been normal, like if I do them they would totally throw me off, you know, like honestly the biggest the biggest hangovers I get today are when I only get like five and a half hours of sleep, I'm like pretty wrecked the next day. Whereas before that would have been very normal. So my body is way more sensitive now. Because I just treat it better. It has come to expect bette and it gives me better as a result.
Scott Case 29:29
It's a big deal. And the more you track it, even if you get a relatively low cost basically like a watch or a Fitbit or something and you track your sleep and you see how much it is and then you track your day and you sort of say, Wow the days where I'm getting seven and a half hours are much better than the days where I only got five, it starts to play that positive feedback loop. It can be annoying to significant others and family members as my family experienced last night when I looked at my watch and said it's 9:30 I'm going back now. We were on a walk, and they're like wait we're not done. I said, I'm done, I gotta get in bed. If I'm not in bed by 10, I'm miserable. So let's not be miserable. But you know it, and it's like, Nope I'm done.
Marcus Whitney 30:09
Can we talk about that really quick because I think that that stops people from doing it. Often because they worry about how others will accept them. These types of behavior changes, either in social settings or in family settings. And that fear I think is absolutely real. But I think in terms of friends, the friends who don't move along with you, that's for the best, right? The friends that actually care about you, they might razz you in the beginning, but ultimately, they're going to be really happy that you're making those decisions. And then I would say really ultimately, they're going to end up being inspired by you when they see you stick with it over time, and they see the benefits it's playing out in your life. That's what I found is all of a sudden I have friends just changing things about their life. And I know that's the power of our friendship is like we spend time together, I'm not trying to inspire them or influenced them, but it's impossible not to. And the same is true in your household too. And so it's like, sometimes I feel like, it doesn't really happen anymore, but my wife definitely would be like, oh my god this and that, and now, she's like, totally on board with all of it. Because it's paid benefits for her. We get along 1,000% better now than we did before. And so she's like, Oh this is great, don't ever change, you're eating, you're not drinking, the sleep, if it's time to go sleep, go to sleep. You know what I mean? Because she has seen over a period of time, it's sustained. Right? It's sustained, and it pays benefits for her as well.
Scott Case 31:47
Absolutely, absolutely. And I started eating vegan almost 10 years ago and I don't talk about it unless people ask me, like I'll go out to restaurants or we used to, and they'd go, Oh you don't eat meat, why is that etc. But I learned a long time ago not to try to convince anybody of anything. And just be the way I'm going to be and I tell them that's what I do, it works for me, it could work for you or not work for you, but just sort of have it be you.
Scott Case 32:16
So I want to jump in before we run out of time to two questions that have come up and maybe a third one. But I mentioned Jumpstart Foundry. Can you talk a little bit about it? Is it an accelerator? Is it an investment vehicle? What is it and how does it work?
Marcus Whitney 32:33
Yeah, so it was an accelerator. And then my partner and I evolved it to be an early stage, really a pre Seed Fund. So it still invests in batches, but it doesn't do the 12 week programs with the mentor nights and the pitch day sort of all of those things that are pretty formulaic for accelerators, we don't do those things. It's our earliest stage investment vehicle. We actually have other funds under our jumpstart health investors umbrella. We have Jumpstart Capital, that's a series a fund. I'm launching a new fund that will be announced in January. So we're early stage investors in the healthcare space, we invest pre seed, seed and series a. Reason why healthcare is because Nashville is a very, very strong healthcare ecosystem as far as like health care services go. So hospitals, behavioral health, ambulatory surgical centers, many of those around the country are headquartered here. And so that's what we do, you know, venture capital business, but I love it because healthcare is endlessly interesting. It is continually the number one issue in this country, certainly in 2020, where we're seeing that in dimensions that far supersede the Affordable Care Act, which is what it has been for the last decade has been about now. It's about public health, global health, vaccines, so it's just endlessly interesting. Social determinants of health, why are certain demographics dying at a much higher rate from the same disease than others? I mean, it's such an interesting thing to work in. And also a great way to get to work with founders is to be invested in them. So I love it. I'm glad it's my day job. That's what it is.
Scott Case 34:26
That's awesome. So you talked about 2007 being kind of a hinge moment for you, you had some personal epiphany, you had some observations out in the world. You just talked about 2020 kind of heightening a bunch of our sensitivity. I'm particularly sensitive to the public health message, because we talked about our own health but we didn't talk about the fact that our health and well being impacts other people, and how that goes on, and we're clearly faced with that today. I'm curious, are you observing or have any insights right now that you look at and say, you know, the next decade is going to be shaped by kind of these things? In 2007, you said AWS clouds, no more racks, right? Do you see anything either in technology or in healthcare that you see as being very important for us as founders and leaders to be paying particular attention to as we think about the future?
Marcus Whitney 35:22
Yeah, so being a healthcare investor has been interesting for the last six years because coming from the digital marketing space that was kind of crowded and flooded with a bunch of me toos, it was an industry constantly being pushed to the edge of innovation, almost to the point where it got pretty dull. Whereas healthcare has a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of regulation that was holding up innovation. And so in our space, we were more like, ah when's it going to happen, when's it going to happen? But we had this eye to it happening about five years out. And I was also looking at similar industries, where regulatory boundaries were sort of holding up innovation, education being one of them, and then not exactly in the same way, but to a degree finance was sort of a high regulatory threshold so innovation is sort of throttled a little bit. And I would say in all three of those spaces, innovation has leaped five years in the future. I see it directly in healthcare because I invest in it, but I have a child who's in college right now, I'm seeing it in college, I'm seeing we're never going to be able to unsee what we've seen this year from colleges and we're going to have to rethink the economics. We now know there is so much more that we are able to do remotely than we previously thought we could. And so we're gonna have to rethink how to allocate those resources in that value relative to the distributed capabilities that we have now. And in finance, it's very, very close to having everything just blown off off the roof with it. And I've been watching that because of venture capital. But the SEC and the accredited investor status and the crowdfunding just being pushed from 1 million to 5 million and cryptocurrency and stuff. I mean, we're very close to seeing finance, I think, sort of having the top blown off of it. So I think those three industries, we're going to see massive, massive disruption. And in an interesting way, we're going to see things that were previously global, taken all over the place from outsourcing and globalization, re-domesticated, manufacturing I think, developing talent is going to be re-domesticated. But those three industries I think the barriers are going to be dropped. And those are going to go much more global - health, finance and education.
Scott Case 37:53
It is interesting to think about just touching on the investor side of things. It used to be very highly localized, very geographically centered. And now I think venture investors realize, well we've made investments over the last nine months and we haven't seen anybody and the fact that they're not three miles away hasn't really changed anything. But the pandemic has highlighted the digital haves and have nots, the number of communities that don't have access to the internet, or don't have access to computing power that's capable of doing these things. How do we sort of reconcile that because that also has been elevated to a whole nother level. And it would be very easy for the haves, probably everybody on this who's watching this, to just say, Oh well we don't have that problem. Have you either observed solutions? Or are you thinking about things in that zone?
Marcus Whitney 38:49
The really interesting thing about a moment like 2007 or a moment like now is it really is incredible how much power lies in the hands of so few people. And that's both in terms of the haves and have nots, but also where the solutions come from. It is remarkable how many things Elon Musk has shown us this year. It's remarkable, like I I don't know how to quite wrap my head around it. You know, neural link, skylink, NASA launches, battery day, it's like I don't understand how all of that is coming from one human. But if you take all of those things, there's a real shot at like reinventing rural America. Yeah, neuralink probably the least important of all those right but skylink and the battery's massive. It’s massive what can happen when we can drop broadband without needing to rely on AT&T or Verizon for the infrastructure anywhere because it's satellite driven anywhere. That could be unbelievable. Right? And so, yeah, I mean, I've just been watching him and just being like, goodness gracious man this is a lot. This is a lot and I know a lot of people have been very distracted between COVID-19 and the political thing to not necessarily maybe know about something like skylink but I would say like, go Google it. If you haven't seen it, it's going to be dropping satellite internet that's pretty good. Pretty much better than what you can get today in areas where you can't get cell coverage. So that's a massive breakthrough.
Scott Case 40:44
Absolutely. I also think that things like 5G which multipurpose could change some of those things as well. Well, Marcus Whitney, thank you for being here and for being an Elon Musk fan, superfan even. Really appreciate you spending the time with us.
Scott Case 41:02
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Founders Focus. What did you think? You got any feedback for us? Got a topic that you'd like us to discuss, or maybe a future co host? We'd love to hear from you. Just hit me up on LinkedIn at T Scott Case and join us at foundersfocus.com to stay up to date with the latest episodes. And join us live every week at our Founders Focus sessions. Hope to see you there.