I'm Will Lucas and this is black Tech, Green Money. Jeff Nelson is known as the Relatable CEO for its ability to take very complex technology solutions and help others understand how and why to implement them to benefit themselves and the businesses. He's the co founder and chief operating officer for Blavity, the leading company for black culture and millennials, and the founder and CEOs and shopping of real time
software platform for data discovery, analytics, and automation. His companies have combined raised over thirteen million dollars in venture funding, generating millions in recurring revenue, and created dozens of jobs for women and underrepresented people. His book, Having to Start a Paradox Twenty Strategies to Build the Business from Scratch is out now. And So I was reading a blog post on your website and you were talking about the pros and cons of outsourcing software development.
Can you share, you know, like real.
Life examples where you may have outsourced something in the positives and negatives of that, like what was your periods?
Like yeah, so and all my different stops. Right. So, even at Blavity, there are times when we outsource. Sometimes when we bring things in house and my other companies and ventures, that same decision making criteria applies, right, And so generally my rule of thumb is that early on it is better to outsource it because you don't know if it's gonna work. Outsourcing is more it's it's a larger initial upfront investment, but you don't carry the cost
over time, right. And so for something that you know potentially may not work or may not be monetizable, outsourcing it allows you to have a very narrow scope. It allows you to get more bang for your buck. Right. You're typically not having to think about who do I need to hire, how many people I need to hire, what are those skill sets which takes a lot of time.
You can work with somebody that has all that and you can just sort of say, this is what I'm trying to do, this is what I'm trying to build, and go and go for it, right, And so that's that's generally my advice there. Now, there are some risks, and I can think, you know, I've had good experiences outsourcing with some firms, even even offshore, right. I think you know, ten years ago, it used to be that people were very wary of outsourcing to to you know,
offshore development firms. If there are no regulatory issues, no sort of like data security compliance issues, then that's that's a viable path. It's very very cost effective. I've had good experiences on shore and offshore, some some bad experiences, and and what I will say, you know, in those bad experiences, what you typically get is you you sort of get bad actors from adversarial countries, right, Like, so countries who are you know, are interested in stealing intellectual
property from US sensities. You get either people who are from those countries who are posing to be US citizens or being citizens of another country, and that really they're in it to one either steal ip or to create backdoors in what you're doing. And early on at Blavity, this was several years ago, I would say, like in twenty eighteen, we had this random thing where we were being hacked and our sites were always going down by from Russian bots, right, Like, we were always going down,
and Morgan was like, Yo, what's what's going on? Why are we always going down? And I would actually look in and see that we are being actively hacked from Russia, right, And a lot of this was because early on when you are trying to get the market quickly, you're trying to build things quickly, and you are outsourcing. Sometimes if you are you know, just going for the cheapest vendor, you may actually be getting some bad actors who are playing a long game. They're trying to put some back
doors in what your a building. You're trying to or excel traate some ip So that that's something to be careful of.
So when you think about outsourcing in those earliest days, and you might even be trying to raise funds also, So it does outsourced technical talent impact fundraising.
Yeah, so it does right and typically and you know this is interesting what I you know, what I talk about in my book, which you know, the startup paradox, the fourth elements that I talk about, right, which is you know, team, product, customers, and then funding. When investors are evaluating a startup, they're really looking at those three other things, right and really honestly all four right, They're
looking to see have you raised money before? Right, because investors kind of have this herb mentality if you've raised or you got money from this other person before, and they may get at like if war if Warren Buffett is invested in something, then everybody everybody's in the right or so. But if you're a startup and you haven't raised money before, then they're looking to say, like, okay, what about your team? Do you have customer traction? Do you have a do you have a good product?
Right?
And so yes, your rights to note that in those early days, if you if your team is mostly made up of offshore outsourced talent, that can be a risk, especially as it relates to intellectual property. The investors are gonna want to know like, hey, have you made sure that the work that these people are doing you own it,
that they that they don't own it. But but really the story has to be how are you leveraging your limited resources to you know, if you don't have a strong team, how are you somehow building a great product right? Or how are you somehow getting great customer traction? A more attractive option that I will say that has really emerged and I talk a bit about it in my in the book Having to Start a Paradox, and it's
something that I do and have done. It is this notion of like a fractional cto and so this is really for you know, if you're a founder where you've got a limited budget, You've got somebody to spend, but you can't afford to hire a full team. You have not found that technical co founder, but you don't know
how to find an outsourced development team. What you could do is work with somebody who is a fractional cto, like somebody in my position who has built companies before, who has done it, where their incentive is like, they're not going to charge you what they would normally charge
somebody to do this, right, because you can't afford that. Really, what they're what they're trying to do is say, how can I partner with you in some capacity and be a part of your team and share in the upside, but lend my expertise, my time, my credibility to one help you build and to help you assemble a strong team.
What I've seen recently is that investors, in the absence of having a core team yourself, when you do have this this sort of fractional expertise, that's a good substitute, right, Like think of some of the you know, greatest founders that you can think of who have built strong businesses. If they if an investors like, oh you got so and so spending twenty hours a month with you helping you build or helping it do this, and they've scaled
up and they've built companies. Then cool, like they're they're willing to work. I'll roll with that. And that's a that's a viable model.
And so think let's take that one step further, because if if I am not a technical culte, not not a technical founder, I'm outsourcing technical talent and then I'm also raising money. The fundamental thought there is that I could potentially get funded with an idea because I can't implement the thing. And so that's that's let's take that conversation like are people still being funded with just ideas?
Not black people? Unfortunately, unfortunately it's tough. I mean, if you are if you're a black person, if you're a woman, if you're a black woman, each each of those it just makes it.
Harder, right and so and not technical yeah, and not say oh.
My gosh, you're right. So if you're not technical and you are, you know you've got you are not a white man with a network. You know, I know, I know, you know. I used to work at a company where the founder and it was part of a story I got funded based on an idea, and to me that was that was ridiculous. I mean you in the line of work that we do, you know, we covered on afro tech all the time, tech Crunch covers it. There are so many founders and companies where you look and
they've raised millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, and then they they just their product never takes off, they never make any money. I mean, I can think about all these AI companies you know that have built it, like the AI pen or the little orange looking rabbit thing, like all these companies that raise a lot of money,
and they have not proven that they deserve it. And you get you know, so many entrepreneurs who are non technical, but they have good ideas, but they can't build it because they're black or and because they are black or they are a woman or a black woman, they don't
get those resources. And so really what it comes down to, and this idea of the startup paradox, which you know I talked about as I was mentoring people and then I wrote this book about it, is that if you are a non technical founder, you know, or even if you are a technical founder, and you don't have the luck or the luxury to just be implicitly believed discredible like white men often have. Then building a startup is going to be almost impossible unless you get creative and
figure out how to hack one of these resources. Right. If you just got an idea, you either got to turn that idea into a product, or you got to get some customers who believe in that idea and are like, Okay, I'm gonna I'll pay you to build that for mere order. Yeah, because investors aren't going to be the ones to do
it right. So it's it's really I wouldn't bank on getting funded for an idea, right, you got to somehow either figure out how to get that product built using some of the things I talk about in the book, using automation, using AI, you know, using different tools as a non technical founder that allow you to build a product.
Or you've got to try to build a team when you don't have funding, again using some of the ways that I talk about in the book, you know, you know, bartering your skills, hiring interns or you know, finding co founders or working with fractional service providers, or you got to try to get some customers, right, get those pre orders that you just mentioned, or be an entrepreneur in residents, or you know, get somebody who is going to pay you as a consultant to to to add value you
build the product at the same time. So those are the tactics. You really got to think about.
How much does how something works matter anymore? You talked about IP a little bit ago. In these days, you know, I can take your idea just do it a different way, you know, So how much does IP matter anymore? Or is it the traction that matters more?
Yeah, so I'm gonna say traction from an investor standpoint, traction is what matters. I mean, we look at businesses all the time, and I think most of us can probably relate to this. Apple is a good example of a company from a just what do their products do? Like the iPhone. Everybody always jokes about owing an Android.
You know they've had that sense, you know, twenty twelve or whatever, Right, iPhone just dot, But everybody wants an iPhone, right and and and so it's less of And this is that's an important question because entrepreneurs have to balance this, right, It is important that you have some defensibility to protect
you against bigger companies who can just steal the idea. Right, So you want to you want to have some defensibility, some intellectual property, some ingenuity that is interesting and creative
that protects it. But at the end of the day, if you spend, if you focus all of your energy and attention on how can I build a wheel that is the most innovative and technologically advanced, will Ever, when people just want something that's gonna you know, transport their vehicle, make it, make it roll continuously from one point to the other, you know you have to balance that. And so ultimately what you need to be thinking about is
how do I get some market and get traction. And that's where you've got to focus on workflow, and you've got to focus on experience and usability. You've got to look at as a founder, when you are looking to build a product or into a market, the first question you should be asking yourself is what are the opportunities to make it easier for people to get the value that they want? And value typically is about solving a problem.
And so a good example of this is with like a lot of these AI startups, they're literally one hundred that start a day, and all of them are basically wrappers around chat GBT. They're all just prompting chat GBT and doing something. So it isn't so much about whether you've got the most innovative, innovative AI solution. It's about whether you can understand what are people trying to do, how are they trying to get from one point to the next, and what is the friction there? Where is
it cumbersome, where is it complicated? Where is it time consuming? And how can I build something? Regardless of how it works, but the way users interact with it, it delights them because it's simpler. Right. So that's why so many people prefer iPhones over androids, because, yes, androids, you can do everything under the sun, but I'm not. You know, if you're not a A I don't want to do anything you're not, or I don't want to I don't know how to like root my phone and then install this
firmware and do this patch up dating. Then you don't know what that stuff means. But the iPhone is like, yeah, we came out with it ten years late. But when you do, it's like, ah, man, that just works. That that just works. And it's easy and it's delightful. So you know, you got to focus on that market share, and you get that by focusing on experience of your users and your customers.
You said a couple of things that I want to come back to, and it's ideas and making things easier for people. It was a I think it was ev Williams, one of the co founders of Twitter, who said this, and it kind of changed the way I thought about a lot of things, because when you're working on a startup, you hear often, I'm sure you hear often of people who have ideas and they want to change what people do. Instead of doing what they're doing, they want to make
them do something else. And Evan he was talking about how that's probably not the best idea because you want to make it easier to do what they already want to do instead of trying to get them to change behavior. Can you talk about that from your perspective.
I love that you brought that up, because people who believe what you're what you know, whatever is ever is refuting they're always pointing to I think it was Henry Ford and Steve Jobs kind of would would would would would also mention this, which is the idea that if I ask people what they want, they would have said they wanted a faster horse, right, And so they look at that and saying like, you can't ask people what they want. You gotta you just gotta be so far
in the future that you built that. And really, I think if people actually sit and look at it, when when this idea of like when you ask people what they want, what you really have to focus on is not what product you want, because yes, people are only constrained by what they know, but you have to focus on what what problems are you trying to solve and the problem that it's a horse or vehicle like a
gasoline power vehicle or a self driving vehicle. Ultimately, the problem that that's solved is I need to get from place one point to another and the distances are long, right, I need to get from one place to the other. That's the problem, right. And so if you focus on if you actually look at it from that standpoint, like the core problem that people are trying to solve, what are those things? And then your opportunity to innovate is in doing those is helping them do those things better? Right?
The whether it's a horse or a car or self driving vehicle is just the delivery mechanism for the solution, right. But you have to not focus on delivery mechanisms. You have to focus on the actual problem and figure out where's the space for innovation and that's where your ideas land.
And so what I always encourage founders to do when they come to me and they have an idea, and I would say most nine out of ten founders when I talk to them, their idea doesn't make any sense because it's it's it's it's a it's a problem that only they have. And I always sit back and I say, you know, well, what problem are you solving? Because everybody comes and they pitch a product, they don't pitch a solution.
They say I'm gonna build this thing that and they tell you about all the features and everything that's going to do. And I always challenge them to step back and say, Okay, well, what what problem are you solving? Like what solution is? That's good? And then once they get there, it's like, okay, well who has this this problem? And then the last question you got to ask is like, okay, is this a problem? They're willing to pay to solve because I got a lot of problems that I'm not
going to pay any money to solve. I got a lot of annoyances in my life. I got a lot of things that are like, oh, somebody, if somebody fixes that would be cool, but I'm not paying for it. Right, So as to be an entrepreneur, that's successful. Right, you want to make sure that you've you have an idea that it's touching on a problem that a lot of people have, and a lot of people are going to pay to solve. Those are the ideas that make.
It and pay at enough of a rate to make it make sense.
Exactly to pay. They're gonna pay more than it costs you to deliver the solution, exactly. Absolutely.
If you could distill your entrepreneurial journey into a tweet, give you that tweet.
Man, I will, I would. I would say this that my journey is an entrepreneur. This is gonna be not entirely accurate, but it's it's about seventy percent there. One. There's this uh Kanye West line, Kanye West, not yea or yeasy. This is old ye pink post all right, So it's a lyric. Do the wrap and attract triple double no assists, and deadline just always sticks out to me. One now, obviously is the co founder of Blavity. I got,
I got a great team. One. We've got a tremendous leader of Morgan, who is is just a workhorse, who is a is a visionary who none of this happens without her. So anybody is triple doubles, this is Morgan. But I relate to so much to that line, not to imply that I've never had help or that I do this all on my own, but we as founders. And what I think Morgan had to learn, what I had to learn, what Aaron had to learn, is there's
no cavalry coming right. We're not gonna get the one hundred million dollars just for an idea that all we have is us in our community. And so when you think about the story of Blavity and our journey as entrepreneurs, you think about my individual journey as an entrepreneur, which yes includes Blavity, but also includes sin Chappion. It also includes you know, other things outside of Blavity that I've
built and I've done. I've had to be in a space where I had to learn not only yes, I have a technical background so I could build product, but I had to learn how to build businesses. I have to learn how to build financial models. I have to learn how to do sales. I had to learn how to do more. Morgan had to learn how to build product and be a product manager. Nobody taught us these things.
We didn't go to college and learn these things. We had to come out and we had to not only wrap, we have to make beats, we had to mix, we had to go market, we had to go on tour. We had to do it like we have to do all of that. And so that's that's what my entrepreneurial journey has been about. It's been about that hustle, and it's been about not waiting on somebody to come and support you, but figuring out how to do it and doing it on your own.
How involved should a technical co founder be when they're brought in after the idea is already thought up, Like, are they I need you to come in and sit in front of the keyboard or are they involved? Should they be involved in you know the idea of flourishing even further potentially?
Yeah, So I think that the best technology is built when the people building the technology understand the business case for it, because often when technologists are building in a vacuum, the you know, at the end of the day, technology building technology is both is an art and a science, and what technologists and engineers are motivated by is a challenge.
And the most immediate challenge is can I build the most impressive thing technically, And so if you're in a vacuum as a technologist, that's what you're going to do. But as we just talked about, you know, it isn't necessarily do you have the best advanced back end thing.
It's about can you build a business retraction? And so the more you can get the people building the technology closer to the business and at the very least understanding what the challenge is there so that they can get motivated by that, but even beyond that, contributing their ideas and saying, Okay, cool, I understand this is what we're trying to do from a business standpoint, this is the problem we're trying to solve, this is what users are saying.
They can then contribute ideas about how to use technology to do that more quickly, more efficiently, and at a greater scale. So I definitely think that if you're somebody that you're like, look, I got an idea, I've been building this and I just need somebody to come in and do it. The more you can actually involve them in saying like, hey, you know, this is what we're trying to do. What are your thoughts, what are your opinions? Are we all base? Should we be thinking about this differently?
The better ultimately the product is going to be.
So then what makes somebody consider elevating that person to co founder level? Because you don't have to be there on day one to be co founder, but there's got to be some decision making calculus that says, you know what I actually want you with on the cap table?
Yeah? Deep, Yeah, it's like that that decision when you know you decide to give somebody a ring or accept somebody's ring, Right, it's similar to that. You know, it's I and I do talk about this in in my book Taking On a co Founder. It is that's that that is a relationship that is significant. And so because you are now no, yes, there's hierarchy, right, there's CEO and and you know even with co founders, right, somebody's
got to be the leader. But you are now moving from a place where you are not just giving direction and and and holding people accountable to execute. You're now entering a partnership where you are collaborating on vision. I mean, it's sort of like if you have if you have a if you're married, or you have a life partner, you have you know, you have kids with someone you're collaborating and you're sitting and talking together and saying, well, you know where we're gonna live, or how are we
gonna raise the kids? Or are we gonna let them eat these foods? Are we gonna make them do this thing or this happen? How are we going to discipline them? You're you're having those questions where it can't just be your way and it can't just be their way. And sometimes what you want is not going to happen. Sometimes what they want is not gonna happen. You have to come and compromise or come and figure out like, Okay, on this thing, you feel more strongly, so I'm gonna
let you have it. Or on this thing, we're gonna you know, we're gonna figure out a way where we come to some consensus and compromise. And so the point at which you decide to elevate someone to that, I think it's when you realize that one thing practically speaking
is that you want them. You don't want to lose them, because when you have somebody who is just either helping you on a fractional basis, or they're just an employee or they're a contractor, it's trans it's purely transactional, right And if they if they get somebody better, if something better comes along, I mean it really is like Dayton.
If if somebody else is it comes along that's better, or that you know, is making me feel more motivated or more challenged, or you know, pay us better, whatever the case may be, then I'm they're probably gonna go there. So one is like I can't lose this person. They're too valuable to what we're doing. That they need to be, they need to feel and I need to recognize them
more as part of the team. And then two is when you really when you are able to work with that person and you really feel as though they make your life easier, right, Like it's sort of like when you manage people. We've all managed people where where like managing them is a job in and of itself, like
your job is just to manage. When you get people who are like, hey, I'm no longer at a point where I'm managing you, but it's like you are adding so much value that yeah, I may be checking in on you, and I may be, you know, holding you accountable to things, but you're coming up with ideas and you're driving things forward, and you're doing this without me having to tell you. You're making my life easier, You're you're giving me time back, You're you're doing those things.
So when you get to that point that that's when you consider it. And I would say only after you've had conflict with that person. Like in any relationship, you don't want to marry somebody you never had a fight with because you know, you want to make sure that that y'all can disagree and and still work together and still be productive. So so that's how I would think about it.
You know, the book is Hacking the Startup Paradox, which you know, which effectively just says a lot of things don't make sense to start ups.
Here's how you navigate it.
Here's how you navigate exactly. And you know, some things may be intuitive some things maybe you know backwards, just because of the way it works. You're trying to build something out of nothing. And in that regard, what are common mistakes you see technical co founders make.
The common mistake that I see technical co founders make is trying to build the most complicated, complex, technically impressive product before it has any market validation. And by market validation, I don't even necessarily mean traction. Though it's good if people are paying for it and using it. But people, you know, they don't do customer discovery, which is the process of going out and talking to people and saying like, hey, is this a problem? Do you know, how do you
try to solve it today? What are the opportunities to do that better? And is it a problem you're willing to pay to have solved? You know, Like I often try not to pick on product, I often try not to pick on actual companies. So so forgive me if I'm out of line here. But you know, just contemporarily, there is there is all these AI products, and some of which I bought off the hype. But there's one
now I think called friend. Right, there's a story about the person paid a whole bunch of money for friend dot com. And basically it's a it's a it's a it's an imaginary friend. Uh that is AI powered. It's always watching, and it's always and and you can just sort of talk to it and it will use AI as a wrap around AI that's gonna gonna talk back to you. And and look, I don't know if that product is gonna work or not. I'm not the target user.
Maybe they did some customer discovery, but for stuff like that, I'm just like, you know, you paid a lot of money for a domain, you paid, you paid a lot of money to to sort of market this thing. What problem were you solving? And is it a problem that people are willing to pay to solve? Right? And yes, maybe yes, I don't know their data or not. I don't know what they've done. And maybe they they've done
some research. And you know, there is a an epidemic of loneliness, especially I think coming out of the lockdowns that we had, and people were yearning for connection and whether that connection is artificial or not, Hey, you know, I don't know, but but I think that's a good case study and making sure that whether you know, for technical founders even non technical founders. Make sure that you were talking to real users and not just saying like, Hey,
I'm building this product, will you buy it? Don't pitch your product, go and say like, look what what? What are? What are the things that you wake up frustrated by? Like what what when you when you wake up in the morning and you think about your day, what are you dreading? Cool, let's dive into that. Okay, why do you dread that? What? You know? What is it? Is it?
In in the book I talk about this problems problems or when peop people buy things, the reason that they buy it is either because it's cheaper than what they're doing now, it's faster than what they do now, or
it's better it delivers better quality. Right, So when people are frustrated by something, it's either because this thing that I have to do or that I want to do is too expensive, or it takes too long, or you know, I got to do this thing, but I'm not really getting the results back that I want from it, and you know, and so you really got to kind of hone in and figure out like what's my lane of opportunity? Right, what is the thing that frustrates you why does it
frustrate you? And what do you do now? And what are the opportunities to improve what you're doing now and build a product that does that. Not enough founders do that. They just go and say I've got this idea, and they build it and they waste a lot of money on it. They spend a lot of money, they spend a lot of time, and it's to waste.
Yeah, there's you got me thinking about like MVPs and his name escapes me now, but read Hoffman and he has said, you know the famous if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you know you've launched too late. And when he said that, you know, it was what ten years ago maybe when he said that. And I think about it this way is as you know,
a technology has gotten so much cheaper. It's a lot easier to get things done than it was ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, and the bar has been raised on what is minimally viable. And I wonder my question to you is is the ugly site, the ugly app acceptable anymore? Is that minimally viable anymore?
Yeah, So I think there's a literal way to look at ugly and there's kind of a figurative way, so the literal way, which is like something that's not attractive, I do think that users associate, you know, now, you're exactly right in twenty twenty four, the way things look the it implies as a level of sophistication. And so can you just launch with a you know, website with a white background in the textbox and people are like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna do thislist last today? Yeah, you could you
launch craickflist today? Rights, that's a good question nine times out of ten. No, And the good news is that building sites, building apps, building AI tools is easier than ever ten years ago, fifteen years ago, building a Craigslist even though it looks like, you know, it looks like somebody just doing together overnight, it involved a lot of work. And not only did it involve a lot of work, but it involved a lot of expertise. It's very cumbersome.
Now you can build that literally in an hour or two. Right, And so yes, the bar for what is minimally viable, as you as you said, has been raised just because
it is so much easier to build things. Right. So, in the literal sense, I think can you launch with something that's probably not but ugly in the figurative sense of when you have a grand vision And this is where founder struggles like they have a grand vision of all the things that they want to do, all the things that their product is going to do, and it's very hard for them to launch with something that only does one thing. It's ugly in the sense that it's basic.
It could look pretty, but it's so basic, and that I think is still true. I think that you you know, you have to well, we look at the tools we use now, you know, there there are so many examples, whether it's Netflix, whether it's YouTube, whether it's Instagram, whether it's TikTok, whether it's Uber, whatever we use now not looking at the interface being ugly, but if you look at when they launch, they all really only did one thing well, like Uber interface aside. Uber just made it
easier for you to get a taxi. Yeah, you imagine the stories of being in New York, especially if you're black and you live in New York a little bit where you go to fifth Fab and you're trying to held down a taxi. You don't know the taxis for higher It drives past you don't know if they're being racist or not. Uber just made it. Uber did one thing. It did one thing. It made it easier for you to get a taxi, regardless of how it looked. That's
the one thing it did. And now we look back and we're like, oh, like you you could build app around that. That's that's kind of simple, right, like all the things that Uber does, Like that is such a minimal and small use case. But that's what they launched with, and it solved a real problem that people weren't willing
to pay for. Right if you could tell me that I don't have to waste like I don't have to waste ten minutes trying to hell down a taxi, but I could do it from our apartment, from my brownstone and order it to know as soon as I walk out, it'll be there waiting for me. Yeah, I'll pay a couple extra bucks for that. And so in the figurative sense, I do think that, yes, you gotta you have to watch for something that's ugly in the sense that it's basic,
stripped down. It does one thing well, and then you got to incrementally be that up over time.
I wanted end this talking about the book you just released just a little bit ago. I don't want to date the podcast, but you just just look recently, you've released this recently. What made you say, you know what, I'm going to document this stuff and put it in a binder and put it on the shelves. What makes you do that versus you know, just continuing to speak like you speak and all these things.
So as often that happened. Often is the case in my life. I am I'm somebody that thinks, you know, will have random thoughts that I just kind of leave on the on the on the shelf, so to speak, and then I'll randomly get these ideas seemingly out of nowhere.
When I decided to become a full time entrepreneur, I remember I was sitting at my job at the time and it just hit me, like I wasn't disgruntled, I wasn't upset, I wasn't you know, I wasn't uh, there was there was no trigger in the moment, but it just hit me. And so with this book, it was a similar thing. I remember exactly where I was. I was. I was at the airport, as is often the case since I'm always on the road. I was at the airport.
I was at DCA Reagan Airport boarding a flight back to Atlanta, and as I was boarding the flight, something just hit me. It was like start up paradox. I should I should write a book about that, because in my mind, it was the framework itself, this idea of you've got, you know, a team that helps you build a product, the product that helps you get customers, customers to help you get funding, funding helps you a similar team.
It was so crystal clear in my mind, and I was like, you know, like I really need to write this down. I talk about it and I've never written it down before. I just I just know what I've memorized that I've talked to people about it. But it was so clear, the language was clear, the consistency of how I thought about it, how I just gribed it, how I talked about I was like, you know, I need to write this down. And if I'm going to write it down, and I might as well, I might
as well like do something with it. And my initial idea was like, yeah, I'll just like put together a little pdf, get somebody to design it and make it pretty, put it as a downloadable on my website. But then as I got into it and I actually started doing it, it shifted from just like let me write down this idea and like kind of make some collateral, like an asset for it that I can give people to like
writing a book. And that's ironic because you know, as I talk about in the book, I don't read books, and I always get I get a lot of flak for this, like I've I you know, people are always sociock that like what you don't read. And I remember growing up my dad would always give me books, and I had the break. It's hard when I was like, you know, you know, I don't read those books. You give me what you know? Everybody, everybody assumes that if you are a if you're any kind of intellectual, you're
a well read person. And always what I mean by I don't read this, like that's just not how I get information. And the way that I get information is I'm a doer, right, so like I will I'll deep dive on something and I'll just i'll do research, like I obviously will read things, but I don't read books. I'm much more like this is what I want to know, and I'm going to go down the rabbit hole and
and find it out. And so for me to decide to write a book, what's interesting because I have to sit back and think, well, like why don't I read books? I have to sort of do what I advice founders to do is like, well, what's my problem with books? And my problem with books was that books, you know, one, don't just get to the point. They don't just say here's the problem, here's the solution.
It wouldn't be a book.
It wouldn't be a book, right, It's just you know, authors have this idea of like it's just too it's just too much. They it's like I want to open it and I want to be like, this is what I'm trying to do is on this page. I wanted it to truly be like a reference book. And and so it was really a challenge for myself to be like, look, can I communicate this idea in a manner that I would even read it, like I would even read this book. And for me, what that had to be is that
it had to be one. It had to answer a specific question, which was as a as a founder without resources that is struggling to get over the hump one, why am I struggling, and then too, how do I stop struggling? And then it had to give you specific things to do. And so that's why the book is the reason this book is one hundred pages, because the startup paradox is I you know, I tell you what that is in two pages, right, But the reason this book is one hundred pages is because I'm giving you
twenty strategies to do it. And when I'm giving you those twenty strategies, I'm not only saying this is you know what to do. I'm telling you how to do it, and I'm telling you what website to go to, what things to download. You know how to think about it. And so it was really important for me to write something that I would read. And when I knew I was ready to read the book, I took. When I knew that I was ready to release the book, I had been working on it and I'd stopped for about
three weeks. And again, I remember I was on a flight to Costa Rica shout out to to Morgan and CEO spring Break. I was I was going to see her retreat for CEO CEO spring Break, and it had been three weeks. I was like, all right, I'm just gonna read the book and and see what I think. And I was reading the book and I was like, damn, like I actually kind of like this. I'm really happy with it. I was like, Okay, we're ready, let's go. Let let's let's put it out there. So that was
the process. I love that.
I think this is my last question. I want to be respect for your time, but this one is this one. I'm I'm I believe there's something special here. And so this is quote I love. I just looked up who wrote it, who said it. It was Lady's name is Joan Didion and she said, I don't know what I think until I write it down. And I love that quote. And it got me thinking about that quote when you just said what you said, like, you know, you know, I'm number one how to read here? But then you
were going through these twenty different strategies. What did you learn having sat down to write out your thoughts? Yeah, what became clearer to you?
What that you have? So there were a couple of things. One, I just want to say that I really rock with that quote and that concepts. As an engineer, I always tell people the hardest part about writing code is figuring out what to call things right, And I actually spend a lot of time before I write any code, I think about, like, Okay, what am I naming this project? What am I naming this variable? Is? What? I like, will write the documentation for it out first, and not
a lot of people approach it that way. But the reason I do that is because, as you've alluded to, when you can communicate about something and you can actually write it down, it clarifies. Yeah, it actually clarifies, guy, what the purpose is, what the intent is, what the strategy is, and what the approach is. So before I embark on anything, I name it. I bring it to life by naming it, writing it down, writing what it is, writing what its purpose is, because that is so clarifying
to me. And writing this book, there were a couple of things that were clarifying. One was my voice, and I think that's so important because when you get to a place where you you know, you are asked to speak you're or you're asked to write things and submit stuff there, you know you unfortunate that you know you have a team of people who are like especially now with a I, they will write it for you. They're like, hey, you know, here here's your speech, or here your remarks. Here,
here's the blog post we're gonna do. And I always hated that because nobody, Yeah, I would read things and I'm just like, ah, this is like this, this does not sound like me and I do a lot of things that blavity. But but one thing that that's so interesting, you know, in me and me and Morgan's relationship is that whenever Morgan like is gonna publish something or write something, she always has me copy edited, like I've got it, Like I'm like the executive copy editor for a lot
of everything. And that's because I realized what was clarifying for me is like I am so intentional with my voice and how I say things and wanting to say things in a way that is authoritative but relatable. And what I hope people get from reading this book is that you know, there there there are those books like the Four Dummies series that like really dumb stuff. I don't want to say it dumbs it down, but it really makes it plain code for dummies. Like I didn't.
I didn't want this book to be like that, right. I wanted people to read this be yo, this dude like knows some stuff like he is, he's an expert, like he knows what he's talking about. But I wanted it to be so understandable and relatable, and I think that that is a very it's a very tough thing to balance, and writing this one clarified like, yes, that's how I want people to see me. I want them to see me as somebody that knows what he's talking about,
does deep research, is very very knowledgeable. It's not surface level at all. But I understand what he means. I get what he's talking about. He makes these things that were complicated makes sense because they are logical, they are relatable. I can understand how to apply it to my specific situation. And so that was very very clarifying for me and writing this book.
Jeff Nelson, so glad to have you on the show.
Appreciate it. It's been great, long time coming. Happy to be hearing. And let's not make it the last time.
Oh it won't be the last, that's for sure for sure. Black Tech Green Money is a production the Blavity Afro Tech on the Black Effect podcast Networking Nightheartmedia. It's produced by Morgan Debonne and me Well Lucas with the Ad Digital production support by Kate McDonald, Sayah Ergan and Jada McGee. A special thank you to Michael Davis and Lovebeach. Learn more about my guests and other technist is an innovators
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Peace in love,