00:50 What do I do with my? All right, here we go. Hey, welcome back to the show. I'm so excited today to have a veteran entrepreneur who has sold, exit, bought, the whole gamut, but he's here to talk about his business and how he's growing this right now. Kit, tell us who you are and what do you do?

01:04 Hey Todd, great to be with you. Yeah, Kip Merker here. I'm the CEO at Plain Sight Technologies, which we turn cameras into spreadsheets. I'll be happy to share more about that. But I've been in the software game for almost 25 years now, I hate to admit. I spent a decade at Microsoft. I worked at Google. I worked on a little open source project at Google called Kubernetes, which is an open source cloud computing framework. I launched that back in 2014. I worked for a fantastic DevOps company called JFrog, which built artifactory. was there from basically Siri C through IPO and was a very exciting growth experience, led &A, launched an IoT business, handled partnerships and expansion strategy and then the last four years I was at Noble9, a software reliability startup that basically we took Google's approach to software reliability and we made it available to the masses so we could help with preventing outages and giving better metrics and service level objectives. My license plate on my car is actually five nines which I get a lot of attention for and so then you know over the last nine months I joined Plain Sight as a CEO to help kind of bring that business forward. That's a little me. I do a little angel investing. I do some advisory work. I've done, do CEO advisory. So those are some of my kind of like side hustles, which is pretty entertaining. But yeah, the computer vision keeps me busy. Yeah.

02:39 I love it, I love it. And differentiating your top, you seem like the kind of guy that is a lot like me where it's like, new product, what new problem can I solve today? Where are we at? Which is fun. Can be fun.

02:50 I wish that I had to wait for problems to come to me. They usually find me pretty proactively, to be honest.

02:56 I get it, I get it, I get it. So with that experience, a lot of our audience is listening to this thinking, okay, how does this relate to me? And I feel like a lot of our audiences is kind of in that launch transition phase is what I call it, where they're trying to climb out of, hey, I'm making money now, I'm somewhat stabilized, I just don't know what to do to take this to an exit, I don't know where I'm even, how do I pull myself out? Those kind of issues that you've dealt with.You come into plain sight as a CEO to kind of reposition itself for some type of exit in the future. How does that even work? Like lot of people are wondering, okay, who the heck hires a guy in a startup to be the CEO? And how do you feel like you kind of qualified for that? what are the common threads you see in tech startup that you're really good at solving that a lot of people have a hard time kind of grasping?

03:54 Well, that's what I like to say. That's a lot to unpack, Todd. But I'll do that. So I think the first thing in business is to really understand the fundamentals of business and what kind of business you're in. My focus in my career has been on software. And so the software business is a very particular type of business. It's different than the hardware business. And it's different than the, you Laundromat business. It's a very particular type of business. One of the key factors that I've found in software is that you can command pretty amazing multiples on software companies in terms of software revenue multiples. The reason is because of the fact that software is information. Okay. So the idea that you can copy information, just like you would at the printing press, right, is one of the key factors. And the theory is that you get zero marginal cost for each additional customer. That's sort of the the mechanics by which your discounted cashflow generates this X is excessive multiple that's above market. So if you kind of take that as a core idea, then there's other things that can distract from that. And there's really two areas that I think bring down that commanding multiple. I'll throw a third one in as a bonus. The first is, if you're doing professional services. So anytime that you're doing people dependent software, that is something that's gonna drag on your multiple, it's a necessary evil. Like there's no way to avoid having some form of, of, of a configuration or helping the customer, et If you're charging a lot for it and that's a big part of your business, or it's not going to disappear in the form of time, that's a drag. second, the second drag is, is SAS actually. So when you're dependent on providing a service as a cloud or running and selling hardware in any way, whether it's data center or the, you're responsible for the, the uptime and infrastructure, the software is also a drag on it. And then the third is growth rate. The growth rate is the third one that really can hurt your multiples. So if you've been slowly clawing your way to the top, bootstrapping, etcetera, which is great, you're not going to get the same kind of multiples you would if you saw a rocket ship of growth. So knowing that, you can construct a business strategy that's going to help you build a company that's valuable. one of things to think about in any business actually is that you have really two different products. Product that you sell to customers. And the goal of every business, in my opinion, is to create customers. That's like the goal is to create customers. And then you have a second, it's impossible, right? Creating customers is the job, right? That is the job of the business. And then the second part of it is, the second product you have, especially as a CEO or an executive entrepreneur, is the stock of the company is a product, actually. And so if you think about the stock as something you have to sell to investors, right? figure out how to make the best product you can. You want to make sure that it's understandable how the company makes money, that you can avoid the speculation cycle by saying, okay, look, this has long -term value. you kind of channel sort of like Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett, my personal heroes, you think about the value of the business based on its total future cash flows. So you have to present a case for how you will predict the future cash flows. And it's very hard to predict. have to do the case for. The more you can make the business less sophisticated, so you can attract less sophisticated investors, the higher the value of the business that you can create. the point, yeah, so the point, the reason for that is because, think about it this way, if you have to go to a very sophisticated ex software executive in Silicon Valley to get them to buy in that your AI -based database or whatever it is you're building is going to be a bit of big thing, that's a much smaller pool of potential investors who can understand that. Right? If you can make it apparent from the metrics of the business in terms of the things, know, the simple things we care about, are revenue growth, you know, efficiency, profitability, know, cash flow generation, right? The really boring, you know, quantifiable things that make an investment just brain dead simple, then that means larger pool of investors. Larger pool of investors means more competition. That means higher prices. That simple equation. is lost on a lot of people actually. They think that what they want to do is find people who get the story, who understand what it is they're building. And they end up spending a lot of time explaining stuff that's actually beyond an investor's capability to understand. And so that to me is like a really a big thing I spend time on when I'm thinking about investment strategy, exit strategy, et cetera, really no matter what the exit is, right? There's rare cases where you have a strategic buyer who is, just so dependent on you, they're gonna give you piles of money for tech, you know, it's very unlikely, it's very rare that that happens, right? You wanna build for the largest pool of potential investors, and so that means you have to construct the business in such a way that it generates cash for them, or has the prospect to continue generating cash in a predictable way over the long.

10:29 Okay, I gave you a very loaded question. You gave me a very loaded response and there's so much we're gonna pack from both these things. I love it. You know, one of the things that you talked about there was very geared towards the exit and the buy perspective of the business or the sell perspective, I guess. But I think that that same mentality has to be applied to someone in that two to $10 million range where they're still trying to dial in ICP. I mean, you just described the entire process that to exit the right way, yes, your story's gotta be so dang easy that a bigger pool of investors are gonna look at it and say, plugs in X, gets out Y, I like that, that's a really cool business. And same thing with your client avatar though. As you're trying to build plain sight and some of the other business you've been involved in, even some of your investments, the clear path there is to a problem and the solution that you bring to that problem, the easier it is for client acquisition. And I think that there's a similarity there that we're gonna bridge the gap here now of growth leading to the exit, both cases, the clearer the solution that you bring and the clearer the way that you are the guide that can guide that client to that solution, you win in both ways. You win with client acquisition, you win with investor opportunities. Talk to us about how you think about that and when you jump into a new business like Plainsight, what goes through your head? What are you thinking of? How do you simplify what could otherwise be a very complex solution?

12:08  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, let's talk about plain sight. the mission of plain sight is to create a distributed platform for running and building and deploying computer vision applications. I'm paraphrasing it a little bit. I haven't quite memorized it. We stole our mission statement from Wikipedia. Because Wikipedia, if you look at the computer vision page, it says that nothing like that exists. And it's exactly what we're trying to build. The fundamental idea is that companies need data about the real world. And if you imagine kind of the journey they're on over the next five years. the first question is, what's the market rent? What is the market and the market trend? One metaphor I've heard is that it's like the surfer, the surfboard and the wave, right? So let's start with the wave, right? That's the first question is like, what is the wave that we're on? There's this thing called AI. We've all heard about it. We all know what it is, but the practical matter of AI in business, okay, let's forget consumer for a second. Just think about enterprises. They have a mission to digitize the world around it. What I call digital world building. Okay. This idea that for them to make predictions and optimizations about the real world, they need to get data about that world. So that comes in the form of sensors. It comes in the form of data entry, ERP systems, other kinds of analytics, barcodes, et cetera. Well, guess what? What if that data could come from cameras? This is really the fundamental idea. You need the data. Let's use cameras to generate that data. Well, why is this hard? Well, computer vision is actually quite a complex discipline. People think of it as a purely artificial intelligence machine learning discipline. It's not. It also has Trigonometry, physics, 3D modeling, lighting, optics, a variety of other disciplines to create computer vision. What for us is very simple is very challenging in reality. So the question is, how do you build these companies that are creating the data? They've got the camera infrastructure. They've got a place to put the data. How do you help them do that? And so as a good software company, we introduced a new abstraction, right? Any software product we saw with the new abstractions, we created a new abstraction. call it a filter. A filter is a computer vision app. We stole the name from Instagram. I'm sure you used Instagram filter, right? And the interesting thing about Instagram filters is it doesn't do everything. It does one thing, right? You can have a filter that gives you dog ears, can have a filter that turns you into flaming hair, right? It's an app, right? So think about it this way, is thatPlain Sight has this notion of a filter, which is a computer vision app. It encapsulates all of the capabilities and basically takes a camera coming in one side and a spreadsheet going out the other. So you get data about your people, inventory, and equipment from the camera that comes into a filter and it gets expressed as a JSON snippet that can go into Databricks or Snowflake or SAP or ServiceNow or some other data system to then complete the flow. Most of these applications that people need, whether it's for, you know, our agriculture, inventory manager, travel, whatever, most of what they need is really about the data once they get it from the camera. And so the camera to data conversion part is actually a small part of the application. This is our opportunity. Right? So the first question is like the market. I think you understand that AI and computer vision, that's on the rise. People need data. People need automated. That's like a clear wave. Then the surfboard, right, and this metaphor, right, the wave surfer surfboard, right, the surfboard is the product that helps us ride the wave. And the theory we have is the intersection between computer vision, which is really complicated and app centric DevOps infrastructure, right? So basically Dockerized apps that are easy to manage and deploy, right? An AI app, a computer vision app is just another app. By marrying those two concepts together, we can ride this wave because what people are craving is ease of deployment, security, update ability and continuous improvement. Right? So we take those two things, we put them together and suddenly we are now riding the wave. And then the last question is like, who gets on the surfboard, right? Who's the team? And, you know, there's two parts to, to, in my opinion, to any great company leadership, especially in software, but in general is that you need an entrepreneur, need an inventor, right? And those could be multiple people, but that, that pairing of entrepreneur and inventor, is who you need riding the surfboard and then you need the early team to do that. I am on the entrepreneurial side. partner is CTO, Andrew. He's the inventor. The two of us work together and divide and conquer. And we talk eight times a day and we kind of build this business slowly and surely. Now coming to your original question, how do I conceptualize what this is we have to do? Well, it's got to be scalable. It's got to be attached to this big market opportunity. We have to take a bet that our incremental costs going to be zero. One of the key things that we're doing differently is this app centric model means we're really building and delivering software. And that is a really important part. We publish these filters to a filter store and then customers can download them and run them in their own infrastructure. That eliminates a huge amount of the burden in terms of the service, right? 

17:07 Go to market strategy, yeah. Right.

17:10 And then the second part is our vision is to turn this into an application development platform. So that third party developers can build and manage their own computer vision apps. And we take away all the repeatable heavy lifting and toil. So that's a big part of it. then, so like, does it mean in terms of growth? Well, all of a sudden, this story is completely different than I think anybody else in the market for this. And in fact, it puts us in a position where companies that would be competitors under a different conception become customers actually. Because if you're trying to build computer vision, We want to be the best tool set to build computer vision so a lot of people who you would kind of previously thought of as competition actually can be a great beneficiaries of the tech we're building and we're gonna focus on this one thing and Make it super solid and like I want to make the you know, jokingly say it's like the Twilio of computer vision, right? It's like one API, you know Twilio they do if they're claim to fame is text messaging, right? We want to do that but for computer vision applications

18:08 Amazing. And so you are integrated. You are the surfboard, right, for other companies to ride the same wave as you.

18:17 Exactly right. exactly right. Yeah.

18:18 Okay, okay. So I like that. And I think that's a really brave way to think because you are riding a new wave in a lot of senses because AI driven camera integration is something that a lot of people are confused about. I like, as I mentioned here, before we started the show, I've had other people on the show who are doing AI camera overlays, not calling it a filter per se, but I think it's really wise. You know, the way that you described the product, the problem, the way you devise the solution and the way you're inviting other people to participate with you is very, very smart. Awesome, awesome. Yeah, no, I love.

18:58  Sure. Well, thank you. That's nice of you to say. I don't know. I don't get enough of the compliments, so that's very nice. Yeah.

19:06 No, it's a very, very clear solution. I think that, I think part of the reason you came up with it, and I'm just injecting here, but I think part of the reason you think this way is because it is such a big blue ocean. You're creating a solution that will be better if other developers and other people are participating with you on the journey, and you're just providing the mechanism to do that. think it's, think it's, most people fear their competition, whereas you're embracing them saying, Guys, let's do this better together.

19:32 So I think, you know, yeah, I think my, my perspective on this, you know, is, it's definitely informed by my experience at Kubernetes. You know, I was a very early PM on Kubernetes. just had our 10 year anniversary. got to go to California and I gave this talk at Google, Google Glass, which was a lot of fun because Google Glass and Kubernetes came out the same year. So that was like a little fun joke I got to do. But the thing about Kubernetes is that it really was a community effort done through so many companies and there's a lot of power to that. And, you know, at this point, You know, we're not really building an open, open source community around plain site. That's not really where we are yet. I hope that someday we'll have, you know, the pieces to be able to do something compelling there, but even leaving aside open source, the whole concept of developers and, and getting, you know, empowering people to be able to do something that allows them to focus on the things they care about and simplifies the repeatable things and does it in way by giving a set of, of primitives and abstractions and tools that now allows them to build better infrastructure. that I think is definitely informing the strategy here and how we want to maximize the value of the business. I guess the thing to remember is it all sounds good when you pitch the story or whatever after the fact, which is important, but there's a lot of mistakes along the way. And one of the things that I found is what helps the business is how quickly can you get feedback? How quickly can you test your ideas and who can you talk to that will give you that feedback? And then how do you prove it with money? Because at end of the day, like people will say all kinds of stuff. Like the real question is like, you know, will they, you will they pay for it? Right? Even paying a dollar is different than saying, you know, yes. And that's, you know, that's an important part of, you know, the entrepreneurial experience.

21:26 Love it. Now, this is different than a lot of people because I feel like I actually got very involved with the Google ecosystem in about the same time from you were there with Kubernetes in 15, 16 is where I started engaging with them all the way up until 2020. there's a, I would say one of the biggest valuable lessons I learned from the way that they operate and the way that they do their acquisitions and the way they build product, which I think would be helpful. And maybe you can validate this for me is that I saw teams at Google were master delegators. They were so good at keeping this department doing this one set of things that it did really well, and then assigning out the things that they really weren't gonna be efficient at, and pawning that to another group that would then compliment instead of compete, but compliment with that action or that service that was being rendered by the first group. How did that engagement with them, either through Kubernetes or through other engagements that I'm sure you were involved in in that ecosystem, change the way you think about entrepreneurship and building, staying channeled and niched, as opposed to just being, blah, I'm all over the place, you know?

22:36 Yeah, yeah, think what you're getting at, think focus is incredibly important. And actually, think people don't even appreciate, people who think that they're being focused actually underappreciate what we really mean by focus. I think it was Steve Jobs, I'm not sure, I'm gonna Bush or the quote, I'm sure, but I think it Steve Jobs' quote that said, focus isn't working on the most important thing, it's also not working on good ideas. Like also, it's not just saying no to bad ideas, it's also saying no to ideas that are good but are not the most urgent.And providing that level of clarity and focus and being able to say no is one of the most important entrepreneurial skills I think I've ever discovered. And you can't do that without conviction and confidence and frankly, some luck and guessing, but saying no is the thing, actually. It's like the thing. And so what you're describing about sort of the way that think Google's organized and there's a of processes like OKRs and other things and, know, cookie licking and one way to do things like certain principles of the organization structure that are, I think are good. I think are also can be, can be challenging. And, know, what I've found is that, yeah, it's like entrepreneurship in the, know, without the net is very different than the kinds of things you do to get review performance in a big organization. mean, one of the, think one of the big criticisms of the Google approach to product development is that they're not long -term committed because the incentives for maintaining products is much worse than the incentive for launching products as an example. I think that's something that you really have to wrestle with in a company, especially at a small, early stage is like the culture for decision -making and focus and alignment. It's like, you know, No skunk works. know, everybody talks to each other every day, you know, like there's certain little rules that you can put in place. you know, I just talking to my team about eating the frog, you know, like every day you gotta eat the frog. It's like the worst thing you have to do every day. Do it first, get it out of the way, right?  which was, think, pretty funny, which I shouldn't say tweet, I guess, anymore, whatever X about it. but, you know, someone said that strategy is just a code word fofvprocrastination. And I think that's a pretty profound idea actually, because we don't really need to spend that much time on strategy, to be honest. like strategy is all about overcoming obstacles. So it's not something where it's like, let's go off and strategize about what it is like, you know, just do the work, you know, like stop. I hate to say it like that. I mean, this is to me is the difference maker is like, are you making progress every day? Are you putting, you know, your back into it? Right? This is the, this is the question.

25:17 Well, I was gonna say the compromise to what you're saying is that strategy without execution is just dry. But when you're executing, looking for key things and key indicators that will drive the next decisions, that should be the strategy, is understanding, yeah.

25:36 I'll give you the full quote. started the quote, I'll give you the full quote. The quote is, tactics without strategy is the longest road to victory. Strategy without tactics is the death cry before defeat tactics is what matters, the execution is what matters.

25:59 I like that. Where is that from? I think it might be. Yeah, know, apocryphal quotes are all over the place.

26:01 I believe it's Sun Tzu. It may be an apocryphal quote for Sun Tzu, but it doesn't really matter. The point is action. I'll tell you another, we're spitballing a foreignism here. So I was talking to someone today and it's like they know what they have to do, they've made the decision, but they haven't taken action. And my view is that stress. The stress, because, it's so stressful, right? We're always so stressful at times. The stress comes from the gap between decision and action. You've decided that you need to do something and you haven't taken action on it, that is where the stress comes from. And if you can shorten that gap, and there's all kinds of reasons not to, it's risky, it's scary, what will people think, blah, blah. If you've made the decision and you can't take action, you're only increasing your own stress and the stress around it, you have to solve it. Action is the key, to be honest. And the faster you can make that feedback loop of reorienting the OODA loop, the Observe Orient, Decide and Act, the faster you can run that loop for yourself personally as well for your company, the more compounding, all values created through compounding interest. It's just that simple, I'm sorry. Anyway, yep.

27:05 Now, I'm right along with you there, and I gotta say that I did a live recently with a guy that we were talking about overwhelm, and it's that next step of that stress you just described, that inaction or inability to act quick enough, it builds that stress into overwhelm, which is incapacitating. And so, a lot of people listening to this do find themselves not only feeling stressed, but feeling incapacitated because they're not quick enough to action, they're not quick enough to actually see that did this work, did this not work? Being quick to

27:39 I'm probably trying to do too much. mean, me be honest with you, most people who are in that position are probably trying to do too much. They're trying to please people. They're trying to take it on and work harder, grunt through it. I I just declare bankruptcy, frankly. mean, part of my ritual, if I do have that feeling, is, obviously I have that all the time, I'm constantly bewildered by the amount of things that I have to do. I literally get out, I get out a blank piece of paper. I open a new Google Doc for myself. That's it. And I just literally write down, whatever's on my mind and you can call it journaling if you want, but I just like, these are the things I have to do. And then like, okay, yeah, these, okay, this is tractable now. And then I go do those. I don't go back and check some other lists or whatever. I just don't worry about it. I just try and focus on the things that are bothering me and try to take as much action against it as I can. And you know, yeah, I'm not perfect. I get overwhelmed too. Of course we all do. We're anxious, we're stressed out, we're quick to emotions and anger or whatever, but like, you know, it's not worth it. The fun is the journey, you know, is the whole point. It's like to do the thing. It's not to get to the exit. Like the more you focus on that exit goal or the outcome or like what you're trying to do and not on the process. Like, look, okay, winners and losers have the same goal. Okay, winners and losers have the same goal. They both want to both, we all want to make a billion dollar business. We all want to be rich and famous. We all want to, okay, we all have the same goal. What separates the people who achieve their goals and the people who do not is the consistency of their process. And if they have consistency and they know what they need to do to win and they put in the work, they will be successful. There's no question about it. Focusing on the goal is the same thing that losers do. It's not what winners do. It's not the way to win. And I think this is such an important mind shift change. And it's infectious to your team because the more you create these insurmountable, impossible, expectations of what we're gonna be able to achieve, and you don't focus on what's right in front of you, which is like checking the next item off the task list and saying no to the eight items that you're never gonna get to anyway, the less likely you are to succeed, actually. It's not very philosophical, Todd. It's like...

29:41 Amen. I don't even know how to add on to that. mean, that was so well said. And so, know, those of you listening, a lot of you find yourselves in this boat of wanting to win, not having a strategy. And okay, not strategy, but having a plan to execute. 

29:58 Yeah, a plan. I don't even have a plan, right? Yeah.

29:59 Just knowing how to execute and what needs to come after the thing you just finished and the thing that comes next and next. That system and that plan or strategy or whatever you want to call it.Don't spend all your time wasted in ideating strategy, but have the next step lined out and the next step after that, at least two or three steps so that you know where you're walking. You know where the end goal is, but you know how to walk to get there, right? Yeah, love it. so much easier said than done. And I gotta ask you, Kit, because, and we can close with this, but I mean.

30:27  Yes. So much easier said than done. It's, it's, it's kind of amazing. Yeah.

30:31 As you think about your previous investment opportunities, things that you've thrown some money at entrepreneurs before, you've been the entrepreneur before, you've been in a larger organization like a Google acquisition, things like that, as you look at these opportunities, what is the difference maker between one that you say, I'm gonna pass versus one that you're like, yeah, this could be fun. And what does that look like to you?

31:02 I'll give you maybe a slightly funny answer and then I'll give you a little bit more detailed answer. So I think the slightly funnier answer is that being biased or fooled by the opportunity and wishful thinking is the thing that leads to the less successful ones. To be very honest, like it's very easy to hear a great story and think, yeah, this sounds awesome. I'll put a couple of bucks on that one. That sounds good. And the problem with early stage investing is that it is speculation, almost by definition, because you gotta kind of imagine. mean, there is a certain, well, there's a certain argument to be made, I'll just say, that the early stage venture capital market is very similar to the subprime mortgage market because It follows the same principle that you take a bunch of very risky investments, you package them together, and then you grade it as a high grade investment portfolio. If you kind of think about it that way, it's literally the same thing that occurred. Now they get away with it because there is a slightly better selection process and this is why it's second time entrepreneurs get included, et cetera. it is a very high risk thing. tell people, you need to like, if you make an angel investment or something like that, you're never seeing that money again. Just assume you'll never see the money again and it's a donation you'll be pleasantly surprised, right? That's kind of the idea. In reality, as I've gotten a bit wiser through my mistakes and like, I plan for real money, because it's the only way to learn actually. You can sit on the sidelines and pick stocks without actually buying them, right? You can do that all you want. doesn't actually teach you anything about the way the world works. It's like, you kind of have to just be a little bit better than the, you just have to be a little bit better. And you have to also contemplate your risk very broadly as well. mean so so like Diversification is so important and so it's really easy to invest in things that you know, I fall into this I like to invest in companies that do dev ops infrastructure software security like all these things that I really know deeply but that means I have to balance that in my You know public markets portfolios because now it's like I have to buoy against that and be more conservative Otherwise, you know, I would have aggregated risk. So those are those are some things you really have to think about but I'll tell you, like the really maybe trident answer is like people are what matter. When you see people who lead these organizations that are smart, humble, hardworking, know, analytical, that they bring people with them, you know, and I, and I really, if you really be honest, I believe in teams. just like, I just believe in teams. My definition teams, people who trust each other, share a common mission. If you can build people who trust each other and have a common mission, like they're kind of ensemble. And the big problem I see in so many organizations, they're not made out of teams, actually. They're made out of bureaucracy. They're made out of imaginary silos of roles and paperwork. It's not a real thing. It's not teams, right? And when you build teams where everybody's got each other's back, and you know, look, no team has all the skills. No team has, no organization has all the, I think no one has enough resources. Like no one has enough time to get anything done. But if everybody is mission focused, has each other's back, are honest with themselves and with each other about the situation and are focused on process toward the goal, then they can succeed. So when I, mean, as weird as it sounds, like when I'm, especially for early stage companies and teams, I look for people who've got a great track record, who bring their teams along, who like have the complementary skills. That's what I look for. And I try to, you know, I try to, I try to do what I can. I try to help where I can, but anyway, so bottom line, computer vision is coming. We're here to help developers. If you want to learn more, come play in Cite AI. I'm happy to chat. If you want help with talking about how to plan your exit or what would a buyer look at? I love listening to people pitch ideas. I love giving constructive feedback on pitches. I really do enjoy it. I've been on &A side of things. I've been on investment side of things and I've been on executive teams what else do you ask for, right? I'm an honest guy, so there you go.

35:08 There's not a lot more of this lacking there and you're a one man powerhouse of a good free console is what it sounds like. I'm just kidding.

35:16 it's all free. Don't worry. It's all free. Yeah. I'll just take, I just take a commission. Yeah. No, not really.

35:23 Well, I love the conversation, man. I feel like you brought a lot of value to our community and I wish you the best of this launch and in the potential exit that you have ahead of you because what you're building sounds like an awesome rocket ship for even other developers listening who may be dabbling in different AI plays. Hey, jump on this ship because it's led by someone who's been there, done that. And I think it's awesome. Go check out plainsight.ai. understand what Kit's up to, but look at his profile and all the other stuff. But Kit, thanks again for your time, and we really appreciate you being part of our community.

35:56 Thanks, Todd. No accident in sight right now. I got a long road to build first, but yeah, we're doing it. We're making it happen. Appreciate it a lot. Good to see you.

36:02 Well, but it does sound like some awesome people could jump on with you. So thanks a lot. All right, Kit, how did that feel?

36:37 Yeah, thank you.