Unlocking Leadership Potential in Startups.

0:01 Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us in another episode of Arthur's Round Table. Super grateful for the family office insights community dialing in and listening and sharing it as you have. Thank you very much for that. We have a lot of interesting people that have been on and we have another one today. I think you'll enjoy what Logan has to say, especially if you're an investor looking to deploy capital into a company and a company looking to to credential what they're doing on some level. So we're going to learn all about that today. So Logan, thanks for being here. If you want to start at the beginning, that would be awesome. Thanks so much for having me Arthur. And I just love the Arthur's Round table. I just love that as a as a name.

0:44 Easy, right? Takes us back to, you know, days of yore. So my story is that, you know, I've made a lot of observations about people and teams in my profession, which has mostly been in the impact investing world. So I've spent a lot of time in private equity and early stage investing, deploying capital and raising money for financial products and for businesses that make a difference in the world. And that's primarily been in agriculture and forestry in the past, some ocean related investing. And along the way, I made a lot of observations that leadership capacity or lack thereof or team dynamics, we're inhibiting these projects, these businesses, these financial products from being more successful.

1:36 And so even though my training is in mostly in the finance world and business, I started wondering if there was a way, a better way to evaluate leader leadership readiness, improve team dynamics in a more systematic way, and create situations where people analytics and and people dynamics were improved so that we could actually have better outcomes. We've all had experiences where, you know, we didn't get along with our manager or there was some issue in a team dynamic that prevented something from happening that we really wanted to happen. And so this is not like a problem that is small.

2:18 And so going along in my career, I started at an environmental think tank. I, I moved into the investing world in my mid 20s. I went to Yale Business School and got a master's degree in forestry and an MBA. I worked for Morgan Stanley, a family office network, and I started my own sell side advisory firm and that's basically what I did. In addition to a farmland investing, I worked at a Farmland Investing Group private equity firm right before I started this company. Nice. So yeah. So it's, it's not as simple as, you know, when you have people working together, there's a very strong likelihood that people have different agendas and they're not going to get along.

3:08 I mean, it's not that simple, right? Because that happens all the time. And so is your assessment in your business, which we'll talk about in detail if you like, go beyond the leadership readiness or is it totally focused on that? Well, it's as, as you said, it's often, you know, these, these solutions are more complex when you dig in, but the basic problem we're solving is a mismatch of the right leaders in the right place. You know, like whether a leader is ready to take on the complexity and pressure of a role and whether they're going to be successful in execution of, of what they need to do to be successful in that role.

3:56 And so I can break that down a little bit for for startups, we have developed an assessment tool that looks at six kind of core constructs that are relatable and important for an early stage startup environment, which is high pressure and high complexity. And so we're looking at things like how coachable is this person? How good are they at pivoting when they need to strategically, but keeping their eye on the prize? How good are they at relational intelligence? What about team climate IQ? How good are they creating a presence of psychological safety so their team feels motivated to work with them like these are? These are some of the things that we can tease out using the transcript data that we pull from interviews and from presentations.

4:47 So that's that was going to be my next question. Thanks for doing that. So when people do an assessment like I haven't had a job for, you know, 40 years. So I don't know what. It's you're your own boss. Well, I don't know who's the boss, but it's just the, the I haven't had the opportunity to apply for a job. So I don't know what that process is like. And not, this is not about me, but I also don't hire anybody because I'm terrible at it. So I let other people do that. But the often times you can game against a questionnaire, right? But what you just said is really interesting because it's, it's part of it presumably is not a questionnaire.

5:30 It's looking at stuff that they already done that they know they're not being questioned about, right? Exactly. Thank you for digging in on that. So we can take any transcript data of you speaking, whether it's in this conversation or a podcast, a presentation you delivered or YouTube, you know, interview. And we can take, if we have enough content, we can evaluate you on a variety of different metrics or constructs, if you will, and assess this leadership capacity component that we're that we're, that I think is missing in most leadership assessments. And AI is enabling us to do this faster, cheaper and better than.

6:14 I mean, it's you can just, well, you know this already, but you can just drop a transcript into chat TTP and say, OK, pull out the key wisdom notes of this. And and then of course it makes mistakes and all that stuff, but it would take an analyst, you have two days to do that, right? Exactly. They have to listen, they have to listen to the video or read the transcript. And in three seconds, AII has already done that. It's amazing, right? Yeah. So humans develop along a a trajectory and this is studied extensively in a what's called adult vertical development theory. And so it's a body of psychology that essentially can pinpoint where you are along your developmental curve as a human.

7:01 Being super interesting, right? And so we're picking out the way you speak and the the patterns that come out in how you tell stories and share perspective that can pinpoint where you are along this trajectory. And they're kind of just these different post along this, you know, climbing a mountain, essentially there's these different levels that you can reach. And so it's not bad or good where you are, it's just it just is. And then there's things you can do to improve that and improve your capacity. And where do you find so my one of my immediate reactions to this was why would a founder subject themselves to this if they thought the outcome might be detrimental to them either raising money or getting investors? And is it, is it potentially hazardous? I think that's a such a interesting perspective that's come up a number of times and I and I have what I think is a, a good answer to it or at least perspective on it. 1 is that everyone's always getting evaluated all the time. And so how it works in the, in this in the early stage investing world, at least from my experience and from doing a lot of over 125 interviews with VCs and accelerators at this point for this company alone is

8:36 it's warm referrals, it's gut checks and it's a reference check or two or 4. And so it's a pretty informal process like how founders are getting evaluated at this point. And there's this black box in that gut feel that I just mentioned. And so most people wouldn't say what you said, Arthur, that you're not that great at, you know, hiring people and you have other people do it. Most people think that they're really good at reading people. And so we have this situation where, yes, starting a company and running a startup is like, it's, it's risky, but we have 65% of companies failing because of some kind of people problem.

9:23 And so even if not all of that is attributed to leadership capacity, you know, what we're identifying, there's still some mismatch in between, you know, someone's gut feeling and how they're evaluating the team or the leader and the outcomes that we're seeing in terms of success rates or why companies are failing. And so my argument is, isn't this better than not having the information like? You can as an investor for. Sure. As an investor and for founders, my what I'm my perspective is you're getting evaluated anyway. Wouldn't you like to know some of the ways that you're getting evaluated going into this?

10:05 Like wouldn't it help level the playing field a little bit if you had a sense that someone was using better analytics to evaluate you instead of just like a gut feel which could be quite bias? Yeah, I, I would argue that a gut field is very bias. I mean, it's by by its nature, right. Which by the way, is again, it's not about me, but that's how I operate, which is one of the reasons why I don't hire anybody. Right. But but you have self-awareness about the fact that you might have biases. I mean, I think it's OK to, of course you have to pay attention to your what your gut feel is telling you. But I think often these patterns that inform our gut feeling, like where are they coming from? And I don't think enough people question the patterns that are are behind those those instincts and some of them, yeah, so. So use case, right, So what have you found so far that was consistent with your intent to start the company? Are you finding more revenue and engagement from the investors, VCs and accelerators so forth, or more from the people preparing to be invested in?

11:25 So the original intent was very much that the incentive would come from the investor and lead invest, lead check writers essentially because they have more authority to ask, you know, founders to take something like this. And so I think one of the interesting things that surfaced and that we found is that more investors are interested in post check assessment and support. So more investors are interested in, hey, I'm going to make the decision on who I invest in, but then please come in and let's get a baseline of this individual or team's capacity and let's help them evolve over time. Nice, That's actually probably more lucrative. Yeah, for us because.

12:09 Thinking about business case, right? So forgive me, but you know that's probably because the horse has already run out of the barn. So let's help them get better, right? Yes. And I think that mitigates against what we were just talking about where people feel like they, you know, part of their job or part of their role or their special sauce is their ability to read people. And so I think even if that's right or wrong or even if they're good or not, that kind of bypasses that argument or discomfort that we were, I think experiencing when we first went out to market with this. Yeah.

12:50 And so how, how does that work? You're interviewing the the business development part of it. You're interviewing the VCs and the accelerators and you make them aware of your service and then they say, OK, this makes sense. So it's like a coaching model on some level, right? Yeah. So we, I mean this is new to the investing world. I would say assessment tools and leadership development is a lot more accepted in corporate environments like later stage company environments. And so the venture capitalists and accelerators I've talked to have this has been new to them in terms of a tool.

13:35 Very few have been using any sort of leadership assessment or coaching. And if they do, it's the coaching part's very informal or they let the founder decide who coaches them. So it's kind of a an interesting landscape. And I think there's been a lot of education and just a lot of like curiosity and just wanting to dialogue about, oh, I hadn't thought of people analytics as like a layer of analytical capability I could embed into my decision making. And so, yeah, it's been fascinating from that perspective. So is is it, again, forgive me, I look at things in, in terms of business often times because that's sort of my mindset as an investor. But is this require, does the automation of AI make it so you can scale the business so it's not just you doing the assessment and interpreting the assessment? I mean can can you take in 100 companies and leaders to do this on at scale?

14:43 Yes, and that's one of the things we're, you know, like any, any good startup ourselves worth, we're pivoting at the moment and one of the big insights has been getting people to sit down for 45 minutes to take an assessment is quite onerous, especially for busy founders. So it's been great that we can now take transcript data from we, we can't just take a 5 minute clip like we need a substantial body of transcript data, but that again, can come from an interview or, you know, a speech you delivered or a conversation you had. And we can ingest that and get to the same results. Where we would want a human intervention is if it was somebody that we were going to coach. So we'd really want to ingest and like probably listen to the transcripts ourselves and really get into the the mindset of that individual so that we could coach them. But the vast majority of assessment capabilities can now be done with AI at a high degree of accuracy. And what's the assessment is done? What's the next step?

15:51 So we create a with. Just the AII mean. Oh, with just the AI? Yeah, without the where you do the assessment with the transcript and it gives an outcome that you are hoping to achieve, whatever that outcome happens to be and then what? So once we receive the score with the the basically the AI gives us its its readout of the individual or team. We can do this for Co founders as well or or executive teams. Once it does that, then we that goes into a dashboard and so you get a read out of your results.

16:33 And then if you want to go deeper with coaching, then that's where we create a custom coaching road map. You know, it's customizable, depends on how deep or how long you want to go, and then we take it from there. So is the natural outcome to do the coaching on a one to one basis? It depends on since, you know, we have a client right now who's very interested in using our capabilities to look at more kind of more of a quick assessment of people that he's interested in potentially bringing on to the team. And so we haven't gotten to the point where we would coach them yet because he just wants to do kind of the initial assessment. And then others, we have a perspective client who wants to bring this to a larger VC firm that has like 40 companies and they would all need coaching.

17:24 And so, you know, we're kind of just seeing a a variety of different appetites for the the capability. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if the outcome is one that's on the continuing of really bad and really good, somewhere in the top third, is that give someone comfort or does it have to be on the 99th percentile? Oh, I think that's such a good question. Yeah, it's you can get to a, you can run the tools. So it's you can do a high, medium, low if you want to just do a quick ranking, or you can get into the numeric scoring and look at specific flags.

18:13 So for instance, say someone is somewhat low on purposeful agility, which is one of our constructs, which means are they good at pivoting quickly under pressure while keeping the mission in mind or like the the goal of the of the company? So say they're low on that, but high on coach ability. So that would kind of be a nicer combination than the opposite where someone was really good at pivoting quickly, but was very low on coach ability because they might be pivoting and good at like making those quick decisions and being strategic, but they're not taking in information in a way that's strategic to their business. And so they might be making an ultimately kind of run off course with an in a more of an ego driven way and refuse to listen to people as they start to get stressed and so. A bit of that.

19:10 Yeah. So those are the kinds of patterns you can identify pretty quickly using this tool. So without revealing your secret sauce, what is the data set that you're able to put this transcript against that allows you with confidence to come out with an assessment that's credible and I'm not that wasn't a malicious question. No, not at all. I think the, the foundational credibility is, is so important. Well, this is where AI comes in. And then my Co founder is, has studied adult vertical development for his entire career. So he's a psychologist and data scientist with an MBA, which was is sort of like an amazing trifecta.

19:55 So he was able to digest all the literature we could find that directionally. Supported the constructs we we chose, showing that there was a positive correlation between having a higher score on these constructs or or exhibiting these a higher ability along these constructs and positive startup success. So we basically digested the literature and we looked at vertical development frameworks as a mechanism to create the backbone of the assessment. And was any of it also data? Well, I imagine it would be really hard to assess, you know, look at the cohort of companies that were, you know, successful, not successful, you know, wildly successful. You would have had to assess those people to attain that data to to show hold it against somebody's transcript that you've taken.

21:05 Now does that make sense that. Yeah, like this question. But I think you get my point. This is by no means a perfect a perfect approach, you know, like there's always more validation we could do and it because this particular construct of 6 didn't exist as an assessment before. We can't with, you know, perfect confidence say, yes, if you have high scores and all of these, you're going to have a successful company. Or like even if you have four of them, you're going to have a more successful company. But what we saw in the literature is this, if you tend to exhibit higher abilities in these various areas, you're more likely to have a successful outcome, whether that's raising an additional round or having an exit. Like leaders who exhibited these qualities, we're more likely to have a positive startup outcome.

21:59 And so you can't perfectly say it was because they had emotional. But I think there's also this dimension that I keep trying to point back to from a business perspective, which is wouldn't, A, wouldn't you rather know this about someone than not know it? And B, doesn't it seem kind of intuitive, if you will, or makes sense? A sense, A sense that you, if you're more coachable, if, if you're more emotionally resilient, you're probably not going to break down under pressure as much as you would if you had lower scores on that. So I think there's still validity in knowing this about a person or team, you know, aside from perfect correlations in in the literature.

22:44 Well, I think what you said a few times is it's you're better off knowing it than not, right? And so does it cost $5000 to know this, $20,000 to know this? How does it work? It depends. I mean we have a couple dimensions to our pricing. One is volume 1 is fully automated versus some human scoring and then the the third component is coaching or not. So it ranges from, you know, a couple $100 to multiple $1000 depending on where you are in that need or or range. Yeah. Yeah. And there was, I'm not going to remember the name of this, but there was AVC that pitched on Family Office Insights that only invested in companies that would engage some sort of coach that they had on retainer.

23:46 OK, Yeah. That was their prerequisites that you know, and I can't remember the name or I tell you, I mean it, but it was just it, it was the first time that I had seen something like that, right? And I've seen thousands, but which doesn't mean it isn't happening. It just. That's what I'm saying it's it's surprising how little this is how how little support that companies are given, you know, even post, you know, post check writing. I think a lot of venture capital firms have or the industry itself has accepted that 9 out of 10 companies are gonna fail and that they're just gonna focus on one. And I think that's an interesting assumption or just interesting acceptance.

24:33 And so yes, we're dealing in a risky asset class, but at the same time, what if you could help just one more of those if it if most of its people problems? What if you could help coach or support a team that could have made it, but they just fell apart because of their. Oh, well, I'm going to go on record and say because they just don't care. And that's one of the issues that people have with Venture presently. And and you have to break Venture into multiple silos because there's and recent Horowitz, there's the next level down and then there's everybody else, right, right. So of course there's some really amazing professionals out there. Yeah. And so the, the, the VC business for and it's changing and I can't tell you whether it's good or bad or how it's changing on, but it's changing on some level to, you know, not flushing 90% or 95% of the investments.

25:30 And you know, the, the whole model was based on, we'll give you as much money as you need. And when you don't perform because money's the only solution, then we'll just flush it because we have two that is going to be, you know, unicorns or Deca unicorns, and that'll make up. And so be it. And so that was like, you know, Silicon Valley culture, not just Silicon Valley, but largely, yeah. But it seems like the I'm really, I have a curiosity around this, which is what are the LP's saying in the equation like family offices or you know, other LP's that are coming into the venture firms like I wonder why or what those conversations are looking.

26:14 Like why would they put up with it? Yeah. It's the same reason why you paid Stevie Cohen 4 and 40 to manage in his hedge fund, because he produced, you know, 65%, you know. You but if most VCs aren't outperforming the market. No, that's true. And there's was Silicon Valley. And again, I'm going on record. I don't care. You know, I have friends that OB CS, you know, they're they did an amazing job of creating FOMO. Like, yeah, that was was their, their they perfected it. They said, oh, I'm not sure you can get in, but maybe you can. And so that's how I, you know, and then when you have some performance numbers behind you, you had a couple of those unicorns, then all of a sudden the institutional money comes in that shaves off 2% of their AUM and gives it to you because you performed and they accepted as did the family offices as did not as much because family, it's hard to generalize about family offices, but they tend to think longer term and, and they tend to that if they're going to go swing for the fences on something like that, it's a, you know, very, very small increment of their assets.

27:43 That's true. They tend to you know, you don't have to swing for the fences when you've got $4 billion. You know what for what? For what purpose, right? What's the point, right? You don't need to make a billion. You just want to keep your stay rich money. Absolutely. It depends, yeah. I think you're in the right spot though, although if I think about it for a minute, there are private equity firms that actually, besides aggregating businesses and then improving their multiple because they're of scale and they sell them off to BlackRock. You know, private equity might be a really good place for you to do this because the private equity people are, again, I'm generalizing and people criticize me and I just don't care. But they'll they tend to be more thoughtful about their operating companies.

28:38 Like they tend to say, let's talk to Logan because you can improve your dynamics within the company so you can grow and we can get better multiples. And when you sell, you know. Yes, and we are very interested. In private equity might be a better place for you. I that, and you know, I don't think I finished my sentence on the on the other thread, but we are pivoting essentially to what we've been looking at is middle market companies, but certainly open to private equity. But yeah, we're finding that you know, venture is a bit informal and doesn't is just isn't used to using assessment tools and things like that. So while we definitely still have clients in that, in that space and we'll continue to sell into that market, we're we're pivoting so.

29:25 So tell me a little bit about you founders and leaders in companies, more so founders than the leadership that you hire in the C-Suite are usually pretty egomaniacal, which is part of the reason why they're successful, because they're running through walls, right? How has it been so far on their acceptance of the coaching? Your question is. And then they decide they want coaching. How is that working out? Yeah, I mean, it's mixed again, I think, I think we usually see a correlation.

30:10 If someone is hesitant to take an assessment, they're probably a, they're probably going to score lower on coach ability and then they're not going to want coaching. I've heard a lot of responses at this point across the board, as you might expect. But I've heard people say I'm afraid to take this. I've heard people say, you know, I don't do this kind of thing. I've heard people say this was too long. I've heard, you know, but I've also heard we've had great testimonials, you know, from founders and investors saying, wow, this was blew my mind. This was incredible. I can't believe how much information you got about me. So I think what I take it as is if there's, if someone's willing to take this assessment, I think that says something in and of itself.

30:52 And so those people are more likely to be coachable or have used coaches in the past. And I think one of the things with coaching is that such a broad term, it's really the Wild West at this point in terms of what it what is a coach. And so we're trying to bring some stability and rigor to the coaching industry as well. Not to denigrate coaches, but I've had a multitude of different experiences with coaches myself. And what we're doing is establishing a capacity baseline along this vertical development trajectory. And it's very clear how you can move people up. And so it's, it's clear where you're headed. And I think that's where there's a mismatch with a lot of coaches where they're not necessarily like taking you on a journey that makes sense or that you can see the the next step in I've it's kind of been all across the board. Yeah.

31:46 Super interesting. It's a little woo woo and I'll admit it, but I've done the human design evaluation. Do you know what that is? I haven't actually done that one. And it was massively valuable. Oh, that's great. I'm glad you had a good experience. It was, it basically pointed out what I already knew. But you know how when you read a book and it you have the story and you go, wow, I could never put that in the words, but that's exactly what it was. It was more of that type of experience. And it also was spot on in its valuation like this categories. And I'm a manifest generator, which is exactly what I've been doing all my life, right? You know, I can't work for anybody and you know, all that kind of stuff.

32:35 But it was, you know, it's woo woo, I admit it. But it was really, really interesting. And I went into it with a little bit of reluctance. But once it you know, it was a good evaluator, it really pointed out some massively valuable things that I then took and accelerated, right? That's amazing. Yeah. And did you use a coach or did you just implement? So you can get it, You can. It's you can get a $100 one online that's actually pretty good, but I used somebody that knew exactly what to do. OK, OK, OK. So you took that next step and and worked with somebody. Yeah, Yeah.

33:20 It made sense. If I was going to invest the time, I wanted to have, you know, somebody that knew what they were doing. No, that's, I mean, I love hearing these stories. I think just to kind of point out my perspective on the current status quo of assessments, they don't typically include this vertical development component and they're not using AI. So that's really what's they're static. They don't give you a road map for how to grow and they're not using AI. So it's hard to scale and easy to game like you were talking about before. So if I want to be an ENTJ in the Myers Briggs, I can ask Chachi BT like how do I answer these questions? And so that's kind of what we're mitigating, being able to just take this transcript data or interview someone that's.

34:04 Amazing. Yeah. Because you can't game that. It is what it is, right? Yeah. So how much of A transcript do you need? 30 minutes an hour. More is better. More is better. I it's a good question. In terms of like the bottom threshold of what we need, we haven't run into an issue like we usually have at least 45 minutes of someone speaking or doing a podcast or something like that. So I would say that's kind of our minimum of like 45 minutes of speaking content. If you did 5 podcasts from that person would that be better? Yes, it would always be better to. You can get more and more accurate, but you get the general pattern from, again, this is this is where the art of like the scoring comes in and there are certain things you can more easily evaluate than others. So our full assessment is ideal because we're getting everything we need for the full assessment, but there's many things we can pull out just from the transcripts. Yeah.

35:08 So what's the delta? Is it thousands of dollars for the full assessment and 200 for just a transcript or two? And I'm just curious. I'm not trying to back you in the corner. Just give me a range, yeah? It's in the order of I would say. So like the fully automated transcript is there's a bit of a setup fee, but it's in the order of hundreds of dollars between like just the transcript and taking the full assessment and getting like if you want a human to be involved in the report out. It's it's a bit more, it's there's a bigger delta, but it's, you know, all, it's not thousands of dollars to do all of that.

35:50 Yeah, yeah. It's really the coaching that gets you into the higher price bracket. Yeah, no, I that, well, that totally makes sense because you have a person involved, right? Well, you know, ultimately we want this to be a systems chain. You know, we want this to be infrastructure and investment decision making or company decision making where people analytics are a lot more accessible and people can make better decisions off of them. And then we have better innovation outcomes and Better Business outcomes and better investing outcomes because the people side is more functional. We can create better effective teams and know like this person is not very strong in their emotional relation, emotional intelligence.

36:31 Let's bring in someone who is on the team that can kind of liaise for them. I like that. So are you. I know it's early on in the business, but have you found a type of company, VC, accelerator, private equity more interesting for you to do than others? I mean, for me personally, groups that are, you know, in the impact investing world that have some sort of like mission related investing ethos tend to be more interesting because the people that choose to go into those firms often have like a bigger mission in mind that they want to achieve. And that tends to correlate to higher levels of vertical development if you look at the patterns. So I think, yeah, so the visionaries that are, you know, in the impact investing world, it's been interesting to see that correlation in the data.

37:37 Wow, so altruism makes better leaders? Well, I think, I think it makes for, but they have other, you know, often may have other hang ups. Like we assessed one of my good friends who's running a very progressive, I wouldn't say it's very visionary platform for coaches. And you know, he's very visionary and he scored high on a few of the constructs, but he has trouble making difficult. He scored lower on the purposeful agility because he tends to have this harmony bias where he wants everyone to agree with him. And so he takes he listens really well. But then when it comes to making hard decisions, he struggles.

38:17 And so we see that in a lot of the higher levels of development where you're almost taking too many things into consideration and it can stall your the speed in which you can make decisions. So it's about becoming conscious of those ways in which you might stall out as you as you evolve. Yeah, I I see that as super valuable if you're willing not to lie to yourself. Yes. And this is a lot of this is predicated on a lot of self reflection and willingness to see yourself objectively, which you know is, is I think a really important aspect of especially moving into the speed and complexity we are in our marketplace today. It's we need leaders who can stay grounded and hold a lot of different pieces while they while they move and maneuver.

39:08 I think it's fascinating that you're able to assess people without them doing the assessment themselves, because that's so easy to game. Oh, to game. Yeah. And I'm saying it's, I think it's really valuable that you could take a transcript of somebody, let's just say a prospective employee, right? Have a YouTube or podcast transcript with them, drop it into your system and use that to with, with or without their knowledge to evaluate where they can fit into your organization without them taking a Myers Briggs or whatever the one that people use now, which they clearly can game against, right?

39:53 Yeah. I think it's we're moving in a really exciting territory. It's essentially like a disruption of the assessment industry for a large degree. Really, really now we now we just have to be confident that the person's. Publicly available presentation isn't just an AI bot. Right. Exactly. Yeah. You know, I don't know how to solve for that yet, but. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how we're going to solve for that either, because it's getting increasingly difficult. What? What a circle we've come. You can't trust the media because they're making up stuff all the time and they're really not journalists. You can't trust the social media posts because there's so many bots and you don't know whose agenda they're trying to. And it's not even the social media companies. It's that, it's a, it's a, it's a fertile ground for people to launch their agendas, right?

40:55 Exactly, Yeah. So it's kind of like, you know, freedom is good, but there are limitations, right? Yeah, we live in a wild, but I think vertical development, you know, and, and this psychological research that we brought into the fold is really powerful because I think at higher levels of development, you kind of your orientation towards the system and your, you know, ethical guardrails really show up because you realize that you're part of this ecosystem and that you are connected to everything and that, you know, the influence you have. You want to be in an integrity and you see yourself just as one point in the system instead of being so self-directed and so ego, self ego driven.

41:43 And so, you know, I would hope that everyone would be more conscious of where they were along this developmental curve. And, and I think that our society would see a lot of positive benefits from that. So aside from my company, I'm just excited about the work. Yeah, yeah, I could totally see how that would make look. What did Tony Robbins say? Or whoever he stole it from with, you know, life not examined is not a life well lived or something like that. Not a life worth living. Yeah, that's a good quote. Yeah. And so, I mean, if you're, I mean, there's, there's endless amounts of people that are not interested in lifelong learning or improvement, just be for a whole host of reasons, they're complacent, not interested.

42:35 They've never been taught that that's a good thing. But there's lots of people that are super interested in that, right? Right, yeah. And, and I think it's great to be able to identify them and, and give them money to lead companies and so. Especially in this country, you know, it's, it's fertile ground to grow companies. I mean, it's, you know, there's all kinds of things that are aligned. You know, we have our problems, but you know it. It arguably is the best place in the world to build a business. Absolute law. You don't have.

43:17 You know, you got bribery, but you don't have it. Like I own a coconut plantation in Brazil. I haven't made money in 13 years because I have to pay everybody off, right? Yeah, is there a real? Roadblock, right? Yeah, absolutely. And there's no way around it. It's just the way they operate, right? Yeah, it's, it's really interesting. It's fertile ground to build businesses here. And you're seeing it, right? You're well, you've seen it in your career how people have succeeded and failed. But you know, there's opportunity. Just you can't sit around and let it happen to you have to make it happen.

44:01 But you know, the opportunity's there. There's no question about it. Yeah, and we're and then. No, I totally agree with the. This is the arguably the best place in the world to start a company and it's like, and still we have 65% of companies failing because of some sort of people problem. Can we help improve that? Like can we do better? And I think we can it. Really makes sense. Do you have stats on the the level? The percentage of failure not attributed to people problems, that'd be. Interesting from this This was a Harvard Business Review study that's based on about. Right.

44:41 I couldn't find the McKinsey source for it. Oh, I. See, yeah, but it was it's based on like 14,000 ish companies. And so I would assume the other 35% would be, you know, market lack of problem, you know, product market fit, running out of money, go to market strategy. But I think again, some of that, some of that comes down to did the person freeze under pressure and stress? Did they not get along with their Co founder? You know, I still, I still think the other side that's 35% still probably has some connection to the individual and the team that was leading the charge. Some business ideas are bad or they're badly timed and I'm not arguing with that.

45:30 But I do think even more than we think are are connected to the leadership. Yeah, look, we see, like I mentioned, we see 200 applicants a month and there's a lot of them that are just dumb. Like we just right, that was that's not, that's not going to work. And it's not because we're so smart. It's just that we've been around for a little while, right? Yeah. And that pattern recognition is valuable. And I'd be delighted if they succeeded. Like I, I'm not trying to wish them any ill will, but I just, you know, based on my experience, there's probably better things for you to do, right? So well, this has been awesome. I I I'm super curious so forgive all my questions, but it was really interesting to hear about this.

46:18 Thank you so much for hosting me. I was a great conversation and then thank you for your your curiosity and and follow up questions. And yeah, if anyone wants to find me, I'm at founder ready dot IO. Oh, great. Make sure everybody knows that. We'll, like I said, we'll share this with you and share it with the group and and then we'll make sure they know how to get hold of you as well. Logan, that was awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Arthur. All right. Thank you everybody for being here. See you next. Time, all right. Appreciate it.