Why Boring Businesses Win and Venture Capital Doesn’t with Travis Jamison

travis-jamison-recording

[00:00:00] John Wright: I kinda look at people like you that are successful and I'm like, okay, I see you doing lots of different things, but were you the type of person that was good at many things in the past or did you start getting really good at one project and is that like the secret?

[00:00:13] Travis Jamison: No, I think, uh, I've always been the type to have multiple projects at once and I'm still not convinced that is the best way. Yeah. It's just kind of what's naturally fallen. To me with that, I've always had more than one company. But I mean, yeah, even since like the very beginning, which I was a complete amateur and probably still am, but uh, ever since the first one, I've always had more than one.

[00:00:38] Travis Jamison: It just, I had multiple ideas at the same time. Um, sometimes one would play into the other, like, you develop one skill, like my really early skills, like SEO and that SEO would unlock other opportunities or similar adjacent paths that you could go with that. Um, so yeah, I don't, I don't know exactly what the answer, but, but I've always had more than one thing.

[00:00:56] John Wright: Okay, that makes me feel a bit better because I've tried doing what you just said and failed really bad. And it's not until I actually said, okay, for me it's one project. And where I look at it right now is like, I've got competitors that are doing multiple projects. I'm like, awesome, I'm glad that you're not a hundred percent all in on this against me.

[00:01:14] Travis Jamison: Uh, and again, so I'm, I've definitely had this discussion many times. I wonder. The level of success I would have if I had focused on one thing or if I would do that now, for example. But it's a double-edged sword because if I had done that, then probably some of my largest wins wouldn't have existed.

[00:01:34] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:01:34] Travis Jamison: Like when do you know when to focus on the one thing? Uh, currently, so, so I work with, uh, Taylor Pearson, who's, uh, just a great friend, but also we work together professionally a little bit. Um, and in, in kind of like coaching like sessions and. He's always trying to just get me to like clear my plate so I can find the things that I find interesting and just like triple down on those.

[00:01:59] Travis Jamison: 'cause every time that has happened, like really. Amazing things have come from that. Uh, but it's not like it's going to line up perfectly like, alright, this project's done, or I've sold this company. Now here's the next thing. They always sort of overlap a little bit. And even, even right now I've got two different overlapping things that are just like very, very interesting to me.

[00:02:17] Travis Jamison: And, um, they kind of play into each other a little bit. I'll even say, you know, maybe I'll be working on one specific business and then learning the skills for that business on how to maximize it. Other opportunities from this thing I'm learning pop up and then you can combine them. Um, 'cause I definitely a hundred percent believe that the kinda like outsized returns of like businesses will come from when two unrelated skills overlap.

[00:02:42] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:02:43] Travis Jamison: A hundred percent true. Like, uh, capital pad, you know, my main focus now, um, it exists because I understand finance and investing more than the average person. And I understand marketing and platforms and software. In ways that none of the people from finance do, or very, very, very small amount of people do.

[00:03:02] Travis Jamison: And some of those skills overlap. Like I can do something that most people from finance can't, even if they're better at the other stuff than I am. Um, so that's kinda where it comes from.

[00:03:09] John Wright: Well, I guess you have to be in that position to be that, you know, multidimensional person or investor rather than, I don't think you'd wanna be investing in startups that are kind of like, yeah, I've got three projects.

[00:03:22] Travis Jamison: Yeah, for the, for the most part, I mean for a lot of startups getting venture rounds, you know, they have to basically say like, this is their only thing. This is their only project. Uh.

[00:03:34] Travis Jamison: I don't know if I would do that personally. Um, but they're not wrong. It's still, it's, it's what the answer should be. You should focus on the one thing if it's like a great opportunity, but I don't know, it just hasn't worked for me.

[00:03:45] John Wright: Yeah. Well, uh, to, to kind of flip the narrative, is AI making it more easier to actually be that multidimensional person?

[00:03:52] John Wright: Like, I just built an affiliate site last weekend with no intention of running one. I'm like, wait a minute, this thing's actually getting off the ground. What do I do?

[00:04:00] Travis Jamison: Uh. In a way, I mean, yes. I mean, the answer is obviously yes, but uh, also in a way I feel like it's already helping everyone run quicker. And so what, what was the, what's the, the, um, Alice, was Alice in Wonderland, like the, uh, the queen was saying here in this kingdom, basically like you have to continue to run faster just to stay where you are.

[00:04:25] Travis Jamison: I'm missing that quote, but something like, you get the idea kind of feels like that a little bit right now. There's obviously the people who are embracing and the people who are, who aren't, and that is, is separating with the people who are embracing it. I'm not sure, like a huge edge is coming if everyone's doing it at the same time.

[00:04:41] Travis Jamison: I don't know.

[00:04:42] John Wright: That's a whole other question. Uh, you have a background, obviously in service-based businesses, I mean both with Capital Pad and an SEO agency. Um, I've been reading a lot on X that, you know, there's like a big ship going away from SaaS two service and I actually think SaaS needs to, uh, kind of add service on top of it.

[00:05:01] John Wright: Are you seeing, um, this shift.

[00:05:04] Travis Jamison: I see the narrative, right? Um, I mean, so we can even start from just like the marketing agency point of view. Um, it's pretty clear marketing agencies have historically been a pretty good business. Uh, assuming you can get customers and you're on the premium tier, they've been pretty good businesses.

[00:05:20] Travis Jamison: Uh, you know, they're low CapEx. Um. People like, you're not having to float a lot of working capital. You know, customers pay first, then you do the service. Um, good margins baked in. But with ai, the business model's becoming way, way more attractive because you're selling more of the knowledge and the backend can be fulfilled with AI more instead of as many bodies.

[00:05:42] Travis Jamison: Right. And so like at, at my agency, which, which I still wholly own, even if I'm not like super, super involved with it. Um. We haven't let anyone go, but we've expanded our services quite a lot without hiring anyone new. And, and so you are seeing that, and so in a way, the margins profiles increasing, the margin profiles increasing to that resembling SaaS.

[00:06:03] Travis Jamison: Uh, but it, to back to your original question, I'm not a super bear on a lot of SaaS right now. Uh, the, I think the idea that. Well, this can just be built with AI in a weekend to replace it. Like I feel like those people don't actually run businesses that who are like, the grind is just eating up everything and you just want to pay someone to solve this problem.

[00:06:33] Travis Jamison: Yeah. Or pay a soft, you know, an app to solve that problem. Um, and to solve it. Well, instead of it being kind of half-assed with ai, uh, now there's, there's. Different degrees of that. I, I think, you know, I do way more of my work inside of Claude now than having to go to some third party. Um. So obviously things that integrate with that and how it plays.

[00:06:56] Travis Jamison: I don't, I don't have the answers for that, but again, I just think pure SaaS is still a great model. You could, you could make a couple arguments. One, you could say it's a worse model now. Um, I mean, just the public market comps and valuations, that totally checks out. It's a worse model. You're gonna get a lower exit.

[00:07:12] Travis Jamison: The flip side is you can build a much bigger, better project with way less capital. Infusion upfront. Um, so if you're playing the cashflow game or even still the exit game, like this is, it is just like, it's just a beautiful model that, that's almost more attractive now because you could do so much more with so many less people and create a lot of value.

[00:07:30] Travis Jamison: At the end of the day. How much value can you create for others? Is how much like a representation of how much you get back. And with that, if you can build something in a weekend vibe coating, but it provides a ton of value for others, well. Who cares? They'll, they'll pay for that. Maybe, maybe 1% will go build their own in a weekend, but the rest won't.

[00:07:50] John Wright: Yeah. I know from my experience, uh, just, uh, being able to build these things, uh, I envision what I wanted a couple years ago and now we're here where I can actually do, I've done it literally in weeks. Whereas before I thought I needed four professionals. I'm like, I need a statistician. I need a programmer, I need a designer.

[00:08:07] John Wright: I need a product person. Now that's all me with Claude Code. It's done. And I'm just kind of in shock. I'm like, I actually don't need that, that capital anymore for that particular project. It's, uh, investment can now go somewhere else. And it's, uh, it's flipped the script for me.

[00:08:23] Travis Jamison: I, I think more than ever the, uh.

[00:08:25] Travis Jamison: The fund strapping model makes way more sense. You know, raise a, a small round to get off the ground, kind of pay the bills, get traction, and you might not need it again. Um, I love that idea. Yeah. And then, and if you do need it again, it's when the product market fits, already found everything's good, and you just need some money to scale growth, basically.

[00:08:45] John Wright: Yeah. Would you say that marketing is now more important than ever? Where if someone can build that amazing product, it's like. You still need to get out to the market. It's kind of like, you know, the best product isn't always winning here.

[00:08:58] Travis Jamison: I've always kind of been in the camp that marketing is slightly more important, but a lot of really smart people completely disagree with me and I wouldn't.

[00:09:06] Travis Jamison: Argue that too strongly now, probably more than ever, like distribution is almost the moat.

[00:09:11] John Wright: Okay.

[00:09:12] Travis Jamison: Um, what I mean, an extreme example, why the, everything the Kardashians launch turned into billion dollar companies. I mean, I'm exaggerating, but like, they do all really, really well. Like, I, I would be, I would love to have even one of those things, right.

[00:09:24] Travis Jamison: Um, distribution.

[00:09:26] John Wright: Yeah. It sounds simple, but I mean, I think you're right. It's kind of like, I think when a lot of people look at marketing, they're not thinking about distribution point of view, and I know from what we're building right now, I'm actually thinking a little extreme going. The new product we're building, I'm like, why don't we just launch it on GitHub open source, build a community around it, make it free, but have the ready to pay models on the side.

[00:09:48] John Wright: I mean, look at Open Claw. Like they didn't have any real models. They just said, Hey, it's open source. And then open AI came, came along and said, Hey, we need you off the market. Uh, you're now one of us.

[00:09:58] Travis Jamison: No, I like that. Uh, I, I tend to think there's quite a lot of people who feel like they, marketing is a checkbox they have to do, and if they do that, they're probably not very good at it.

[00:10:10] Travis Jamison: It's like, oh, I'm supposed to do some SEO, I'm supposed to do some ads post, like post on social media. Like that never really moves the needle. It's really like thinking how to get inside of your potential customer's heads and how to draw them into you. Um, create that awareness. Make sure that they're thinking about you in like your spare time or even like that immediate action and then like expand out from there.

[00:10:32] Travis Jamison: And all these. Tactics of paid ads or meta ads or SEO or social media, all that stuff is, is just an extension of that.

[00:10:39] John Wright: Yeah. So that would've been helpful for me to hear a couple years ago, but we'll, we'll move on. Um, so yeah, you've got capital pad and every time I've looked at it from the outside, like I'm not an investor, I'm like.

[00:10:50] John Wright: What a really weird business, like investing in boring businesses. But you made me look at it in a different way, and sure enough, I got some friends that are just like that and I'm like, you know what? I think a lot of people just kind of disregard them. They're like, oh, you're not that sexy, you know, scaling SAS business, you got a boring business.

[00:11:05] John Wright: That when you talk to them you're like, this is just printing money. Like this is probably amazing.

[00:11:11] Travis Jamison: Yeah. Uh, the way I approached it. I think if you are a builder, obviously not a like hammer and nail builder, but like a builder in, in the tech sense, uh, you'll probably do better building something tech enabled 'cause it can scale.

[00:11:30] Travis Jamison: Um, but if you are investing, I tend to think that the borrowing businesses are probably better overall. I think the, even, even take like the venture capital asset, it's a shit asset class. It's shit. I mean that I'm not, I'm not mincing words, it's a shit asset class. Like maybe the top 10 15 funds do pretty well.

[00:11:49] Travis Jamison: They do okay now, um, and. They get all the deal flow outside of that which Normies like you and I cannot get access to. The returns just are not great. And there, there are exceptions and you hear about those exceptions. Um, and even for angel investors, right? The, the returns aren't the same the way the deal economics have worked out.

[00:12:10] Travis Jamison: The angel investors just getting ground down time and time again. Um, it doesn't come back. Uh, and so I invested fairly heavily in venture and stopped around 2018 and I've done, I've done good. Um. And even with that, I'm like, I'm not doing it again. It just doesn't make sense. Uh, so the, the tech side of this, I think is, is not great and the side of.

[00:12:31] Travis Jamison: Even if you were to do more like the m and a side of a lot of like tech-based businesses, it's too able to, it's too easy to be disrupted, I think. I don't think the moat is the same and I want to invest in things that are very lucrative but also like are harder to disrupt.

[00:12:46] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:12:46] Travis Jamison: Right. And so that's why going back the boring businesses, right?

[00:12:50] Travis Jamison: Yeah. These, you know, the HVAC industrial services, just like those are kind of the memes, but there, there's something to those of. They're resilient, they're not going away, and now they're more popular than ever. Well, it's starting to to pick up and people like, oh wow, AI can't disrupt these as much.

[00:13:08] Travis Jamison: That's interesting. Let's go into that.

[00:13:10] John Wright: Yeah. Maybe not disrupt, but definitely enhance. I mean, you must run across a lot of these businesses and go, wait a minute, these guys need maybe some good SEO and some. Some social media and maybe a better booking system and you've got more profit.

[00:13:25] Travis Jamison: I mean, that's, that's the big thing.

[00:13:26] Travis Jamison: You want to invest in these things that can't be disrupted by, by ai, but can be, can benefit from ai.

[00:13:31] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:13:32] Travis Jamison: Um, and you see that with a lot.

[00:13:34] John Wright: So does that how Capital Pad works? Like are you actually part of that weird ecosystem where it's not just capital, it's also trying to optimize that business? Or is that, depends

[00:13:45] Travis Jamison: a little.

[00:13:46] John Wright: Okay.

[00:13:47] Travis Jamison: Not as much. Um, the, we started with smaller deals and with those who were a little more hands-on offering advice, like, I mean, I was getting in, fixing some code myself on a couple of sites, optimizing the SEO. Um, but as we've started doing bigger and bigger deals, which are better actually, also the, the people behind them tend to be a little more sophisticated.

[00:14:08] Travis Jamison: You know, if, if a deal is doing a few, few million dollars a year in ebitda, they can afford to hire pros to bring in and build the right thing. So. It's just not needed as much. Maybe, maybe we'll double down again on that in the future, but not right now as much.

[00:14:19] John Wright: Yeah, so I just talked about using one example of AI where you could optimize things, whether it's SEO book or booking systems and like everywhere I look, it's kind of like you look at a SaaS website, you look at a business or an affiliate, and you can almost tell when they're not even using ai.

[00:14:34] John Wright: Like you can test their customer service and you can. You can create all these metrics. Do you think the next two years is gonna be like some weird cash cow where people are gonna be looking for these businesses to acquire and this is gonna be part of their scouting?

[00:14:48] Travis Jamison: It's already happening, for sure. Um, un the unfortunate truth is when we get these pitches, sometimes they're like, oh, we're going to do this.

[00:14:56] Travis Jamison: A outcomes. I kind of write it off, uh, because so much of it's fluff and so much of this is. It's hard. Um, it's, it's easier to say that you can have these AI synergies than to actually do them. Uh, I, I assume that'll get easier and easier, but there is a lot of, there's a lot of real to it. For example, in some of the service-based businesses, you know, a AI that would improve route-based density of the techs, so they're going the right order of stuff that would be very beneficial.

[00:15:23] Travis Jamison: It's hard to implement that. Um, the. Ai, phone services, AI messaging, AI customer support, that that is very real and having an impact already. But there's, there's, there's nuance to all of this. Um, there's gonna be certain industries where you can essentially acquire some of these businesses and cut the staff in half, uh, which I don't love, but it's, it is the game.

[00:15:46] Travis Jamison: Um, and those will probably do quite well. I mean, if you can double margins. Goodness.

[00:15:51] John Wright: Yeah. Because actually, like just talking about like, you know, the optimization on that part, like one thing we did recently, like we just built a new app to basically build more apps and so we're, we're pulling in all the data in, we took our Jira, our Slack, and our intercom, so this is our SaaS business, and we just ran it through a couple reports and right off the bat we're like, oh, we, we've got two critical things to change right off the bat.

[00:16:15] John Wright: And if we hadn't have had this, we wouldn't have known. Now we're gonna add even more. Like we've got a whole other backend. I've got all my Calendly data. Um, there's a couple other things. I got my QuickBooks data, so we're gonna have like a pure insight center and like it's making real change quickly.

[00:16:29] John Wright: And what's cool is that I'm not meaning to turn this into another business, but that whole recipe of what we built is actually really easy to replicate. We can actually just share it and say, Hey, internet, here's this. And if you don't use Intercom, you can use your whatever, like your Zen, or I mean, just replace any of them.

[00:16:46] Travis Jamison: I think there's a lot of value for those recipes.

[00:16:48] John Wright: Yeah. So what would you do with those recipes then?

[00:16:53] Travis Jamison: Um, I don't have enough solid knowledge on like specifics to give anything for that. Uh, it depends. I mean, you can give it away just and build up other things or I think there's, there's still just a lot of like monetary value into.

[00:17:10] Travis Jamison: I dunno, as Peter thi would say, like the secrets.

[00:17:13] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:17:13] Travis Jamison: Right. Like, you know how to do this thing. People will pay to do that thing to make their life easier, make things run better. So however you wanna do it.

[00:17:20] John Wright: Yeah. I'm thinking about doing that where the software is open source and then the plugins are open source and the plugins could either be we build them and we can monetize them somehow.

[00:17:29] John Wright: Or we can basically say, Hey, if you want us to build your plugin as a company and put you in the marketplace, then that's kind of like a weird way they can grab more customers. What I'm hoping from a flywheel point of view is like how do we get these, all these SaaS companies and data companies to send people our way and saying, Hey, you can, you can basically get like the equivalent of like free analytics, but where we could make money is by being a hosting company saying we have it for free.

[00:17:53] John Wright: But if you don't wanna mess with GitHub and you don't know what you're doing, you're not comfortable. You're one click away from paying a like, you know, a pretty painless SaaS pricing.

[00:18:02] Travis Jamison: I'm gonna be honest, that business model sounds really hard to me. Um. It doesn't mean it can't be successful, but it's definitely not an easy swing.

[00:18:11] John Wright: Yeah, it looks easy, but I mean, when I look at examples, I mean, there's companies like Grafana or N eight N that have printed a lot of money, like Grafana does 400 million a r, and their data is, and it's like we think we can. Do a better product, but it needs, it needs, uh, the market share, I think.

[00:18:29] Travis Jamison: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:18:31] Travis Jamison: Um, I don't know, but also I don't have enough insight there. You, you clearly have more.

[00:18:35] John Wright: All right. I'll keep researching, but, um, I, I like the skepticism.

[00:18:40] Travis Jamison: Um, I like the easy swings.

[00:18:42] John Wright: Yeah. Um, yeah, I've definitely not taken easy, uh, moving on, uh, the investment LA landscape. I, I think it's different. Like, I've noticed a change in us trying to raise money.

[00:18:53] John Wright: Um, like it's just been a weird ride the last couple years and, you know, I'm always on X and going, what are people doing? Like the, the markets are doing One thing that's really weird, I'm seeing a lot of criticism, as you've already said, like the, the venture space where. I feel like sometimes these people maybe don't know what they're doing.

[00:19:09] John Wright: Like they're all chasing the same recipe and it's kind of like there's only, there's only so much that can go around. Like, how are you guys making this work? I don't know.

[00:19:18] Travis Jamison: Uh, alright, so what do, what is the question?

[00:19:22] John Wright: The question is, uh, what does a retail investor do? Uh, what does a pro investor, let's start with angel investors.

[00:19:28] John Wright: Like, what do they need to do to, to get in the good space?

[00:19:33] Travis Jamison: Stop angel investing.

[00:19:35] John Wright: That's probably true.

[00:19:37] Travis Jamison: I'm serious actually. Like the math just doesn't make sense anymore, in my opinion. Uh, but there's really smart people who have a lot more money than me that would disagree. So,

[00:19:47] John Wright: yeah,

[00:19:49] Travis Jamison: take that for what it is.

[00:19:50] Travis Jamison: Uh, I just don't think you're gonna, most individual angel investors will be able to get into the, the deals that matter, right? There's 10 deals a year. Matter and all the others are fluff. And why can you get one of those 10 deals? I mean, if you're plugged in like that. Sure. Right? Sure. Uh, I'm not plugged in like that.

[00:20:12] Travis Jamison: I can't get those. Um, there, there are the, the hybrid angel investing, which is where. You can influence the company a lot. Like say you have a huge following in a certain space and somebody in that space wants you to invest. Like that's a, that's a great deal, but I don't consider that to be like the traditional angel investing.

[00:20:29] Travis Jamison: We're just finding a startup and investing in it and moving on. Um, but I don't know, I mean, at the same time, companies are doing really big numbers really quickly, so I could, you could make an argument either way. Um, yeah. It just doesn't compute to me.

[00:20:44] John Wright: Yeah. But that's what I, I, I think, I think we're getting a weird volatility that people are not really sure what to do.

[00:20:50] John Wright: It's like, I know for the last couple years it was like the, the carrot was ai. It's like, oh, we're an AI company, and then everyone's just dumping money into ai. And I think now everyone's sort like, well, if AI's gotten that good, it's like, how do we know that you're not replaceable tomorrow? And I think smart people know that.

[00:21:05] John Wright: But I think there's a lot of people, I don't know, maybe there's just a lot of, uh. Opportunistic money out there.

[00:21:12] Travis Jamison: Yeah. I mean, at the same time, I think if you're not an AI company, you're not getting funded right now.

[00:21:17] John Wright: That should be true unless it's a boring company.

[00:21:20] Travis Jamison: Yeah. No, but that's a legitimate thing.

[00:21:22] Travis Jamison: The boring companies, uh, the, the VCs are starting to enter the space.

[00:21:26] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:21:26] Travis Jamison: Um, they think roll-ups are easy and just combine. I've, I've heard some really funny stories of this. Um, it will not end well probably. Yeah. Um, for a lot of the ones doing it, but, um, you know, they're interested, but I don't know.

[00:21:40] Travis Jamison: There's infrastructure plays going on, there's energy plays going on. There's interesting things. I, I think the venture industry in general is like a great service to humanity overall as like building innovation. Um, but the returns, I don't know.

[00:21:53] John Wright: Yeah, it should be with the exception of, uh, some of our experiences where I'm like, okay, these people want, uh, really unfavorable terms.

[00:21:59] John Wright: And I think if we accepted some of them, I don't know if we'd be where we are today, but. There's other companies where the opposite is true. Like that that venture capital really did everything for them.

[00:22:10] Travis Jamison: Yeah, yeah. Both for sure.

[00:22:12] John Wright: Yeah. Uh, last question I wanna, uh, wrap this up with is what do you think about the younger generation that's going through having to leave high school and going, okay, am I doing college, university, I did university, but as soon as I graduated, I went from engineering to professional gambling.

[00:22:27] John Wright: I pissed off all my friends and family. They're so disappointed. Now they're like, can I borrow some money from you? And, uh, so it's a whole other discussion. I, I just think that these kids are going through like this pressure that you have to get the degree and the software that I just built in a short period of time, I'm like, there's people taking courses in business intelligence to your diplomas, spending anywhere from 10 to $40,000.

[00:22:50] John Wright: And I'm like, this software is free and probably better.

[00:22:55] Travis Jamison: Yeah. All right. So I think we can dissect that in a few different ways. One, like university still is probably a really good time and a really good way to develop as a human, right. It's a, it's a stepping stone for a lot of people. They leave the house, they're still kind of connected to their parents, but they're still kind of not, they're doing their own thing.

[00:23:13] Travis Jamison: They're learning a lot of new experiences, getting introduced to new stuff. Um, so there's that. And that's definitely not to be discounted.

[00:23:21] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:23:21] Travis Jamison: Um, I think. I think moving into the world that we are now, um, a players are gonna be more valuable than ever. People who are doers and builders and are self-motivated are gonna make so much money they're gonna do great.

[00:23:38] Travis Jamison: Um, it's the C players and below that, um, I, I am more worried about. And the ones who are not self-motivated, who don't. Learn about things in their own time and, and take that initiative, maybe they should go to college more. Um, because at least you have like that, uh, I mean it's, it's terrible, but what, like 95% of like.

[00:24:05] Travis Jamison: Undergrad university degrees now are just a checkbox on an application. Yeah. But that checkbox matters in a lot of places. Um, a checkbox doesn't matter to me, to the people I hire really either, but definitely like, you know, if I wanted to get a job somewhere, like they, no one would care if I went to university or not.

[00:24:22] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:24:23] Travis Jamison: Um, but in a lot of places, like, I dunno, Europe like. Good luck if you don't have that four year degree and a lot of other places too. It still really matters in other areas of the world. It still really matters for a lot of jobs here unless you have something special. So,

[00:24:35] John Wright: yeah. But I think there's, you know, just a lot of companies, I know for me it's like I've stopped caring about anyone's degree a long time ago.

[00:24:41] John Wright: I'm like, wait a minute. This guy I hired as a programmer has no degree and amazing, and this one I hired with a degree was just entitled and not putting in the hours.

[00:24:51] Travis Jamison: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. Um, now interesting correlation. So many of the deals that we look at we're investing in are, are from people that went to some of the better schools, went on the, um, NBA path, um, a lot of Ivy Leagues and.

[00:25:08] Travis Jamison: They're impressive people.

[00:25:09] John Wright: Yeah,

[00:25:10] Travis Jamison: right. Like they are more impressive than the average. Maybe that's because of the path that they went down. Like you don't pursue the finance esque, finance related, um, path without kind of being like plugged in a certain way. But I don't know that they're impressive individuals doing impressive things.

[00:25:25] Travis Jamison: So there's something to it. Um, even if it wasn't learned in school itself, which a lot of it probably is, um, the, the mind. The mind shift that they're getting to like be in this certain space is, is quite meaningful, right? The things that they're being introduced to and are thinking about and and pursuing, they probably wouldn't have done if they hadn't gone to that university path and been around that.

[00:25:50] John Wright: So would you say that a players are maybe gonna be more difficult to find, like if they've got AI tools and they could be like a one man show, build their whole company. Like I'm just looking at this going, you know, how do we retain our A players? Like I'm a little nervous.

[00:26:06] Travis Jamison: You are not wrong. You're not wrong.

[00:26:08] Travis Jamison: Yeah. Uh, the, there's, there's a pretty big divide between people who are kind of entrepreneurial though, and people who aren't. There can be really good A players that the world depends on, I depend on, but they're not necessarily entrepreneurial. Um, I don't know what the world looks like for them, but they might not build things as much.

[00:26:28] John Wright: Yeah. Maybe it's just the security, but I, I kind of believe there's truth in that. Like, you know, I see both sides of it. And for me, I've always been that crazy, you know, person to be, Hmm, I don't know. I just want to just keep building and doing, and I've made a ton of mistakes along the way, but now I'm starting to learn from those mistakes and I try to watch what other people do.

[00:26:47] John Wright: So, um, I'm trying to put together what I think is my best skill and pattern recognition and be like, okay, you know what? I've been watching a lot of successful people go really far. I'm like, it's time to put some of this stuff in practice.

[00:26:57] Travis Jamison: I like it.

[00:26:58] John Wright: I like it. Travis, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

[00:27:02] John Wright: And, uh, also appreciate the, the group you put together, the Snowball Club, and looking forward to seeing what else tell you come up with.

[00:27:08] Travis Jamison: Oh, thanks so much. I don't know how much value I gave today, but appreciate talking either way.

[00:27:12] John Wright: For me, what I always say to a lot of people, it's like, you know, if I had to pay my guest money, which I don't wanna do right now, uh, but if I had to, um, yeah, this would be worth the money.

[00:27:21] John Wright: Every time I interview someone. Uh, not only, it's not just networking. It's like I get a chance to ask like all my dumb questions and really good questions that, you know, help me get better. So I appreciate it.

[00:27:31] Travis Jamison: Yeah, I love that. I was looking through your list of guests and I was like, oh, I wanna talk to him.

[00:27:34] Travis Jamison: I wanna talk to him.

[00:27:37] John Wright: Awesome.

[00:27:38] Travis Jamison: Alright.

[00:27:38] John Wright: Thank you so much.

[00:27:39] Travis Jamison: Thanks so much. Appreciate