Foundation 02 // Jeff Smith

smle is the creator of some of the most popular iPhone and iPad apps and a leader in developing interactive music applications for mobile devices many of their apps such as acarina magic piano Glee karaoke and IMT pain are among the highest grossing apps in the iTunes app store Jeff Smith is a Serial entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of smle let's talk to him we rolling M sweet where'd you grow up grew up in Sandy Utah Utah yeah mother's side's from Wyoming Father's Side came across the Rocky Mountains with the Mormon pioneers really there's a statue of my uh you're lying I'm telling the truth are you serious yeah so Joseph Smith is my great great great grandfather's brother ham Smith he's my great great great grandfather Joseph F Smith is my great great grandfather um you are bsing me I am not so you can go down to downtown Salt Lake City Temple Square next to the Mormon temp temple and Tabernacle there's a statue of Joseph and hiron no way yeah wow that's crazy yeah so you're like a celebrity in that world well there's been some delution not only because of the generations but because of uh plural marriages that were practiced you know back then in fact uh one of the more dramatic moments my relationship with my wife was when I was invited posthumously to a a family reunion for Joseph fith and the program cover had Joseph F and then it had five women and those were his wives no way way and um and then you had a a line connecting him to each of the wives and then you'd open up the program and you would see how many children each wife had and uh I know I know the next question so let me just jump in here and get it yeah I came from the first wife I didn't come from the second through five and so yeah but I'm from I'm from Salt Lake City Utah and I'm actually I'm very proud of uh very proud of that Heritage so so tell me uh you know Salt Lake City I've been there a few times doesn't uh feel like a tech Hub uh how did you get into technology well I was encouraged by a high school math teacher to go to the computer science camp one summer at uh Brigham Young University which I did mhm and great school great school loved it and so started programming started hacking away in college or in high school on my Apple 2C eventually popped out of of school mostly in kind of in in need of funding and cuz you wanted to do your own thing oh you just want to pay the bills wanted to pay the bills so I'd worked at um IBM's Research Center in PA Alto MH for a bit and then I worked at hula Packard's language lab for a bit this is when HP was rolling out their Unix workstations and so I was building tools to make it easier for people to build products on on Unix workstations so a cross Linker basically was was was my project which was a lot of fun and uh eventually ended up going back to my um IBM group who had forked off a company that um did well grew and eventually was acquired by Computer Associates and then I left that group and uh joined a group over at ashon Tate that had created a new Macintosh Division and we were trying to roll out really one of the first suits so you're a programmer at this point yeah okay absolutely no no no management at this point just just cutting no at frame this company that's building this high-end desktop publishing systems we rolled out a product frame viewer that allowed people to disseminate the content view it wildly popular and I wanted the company to focus more on viewing and dissemination MH and I felt that the network was just going to change everything and desktop publishing just wasn't going to be as important anymore and um more or the company disagreed and so I took a top engineer with me and we forked off and that's what we built we built Universal viewing technology and we built a business around it that a couple years later was acquired by Noel and were perfect so at 25 uh you really had you held any management positions at that point not not a one so you go in at 25 and you thinking like do you know how to raise Capital no and we didn't we just bootstrapped it and funded it out of our own I have some cash in the bank we're just going to no I didn't even have have that so how did you pay the bills we uh we were very focused on Revenue I mean how could you go from you can't focus on Revenue unless you have a product you can ship though right dude it's even better because we had recently gotten married to you know the wife I mentioned earlier uh I came home one day after we' bought a house in menow park bought a house three months four months prior and I said hey uh hey honey um does your health insurance cover me and uh true story and she goes uh I think so why I go well I uh I quit my job today and John Kristoff and I are going to go start a company and it occurred to me that I might need health insurance so that's the level of kind of premeditation right that just like I'm out okay I see it wasn't one of these things where like you know 3 months of building behind the scenes at night you just like I'm out I'm going do this right and so well it forces you to start kicking right away yeah sink or swim the so pay the bills Microsoft sent me a Consulting contract to help them evaluate this company which paid some of the bills and then my company frame sent me a Consulting contract to help get our 40 product out the door which we did and it was a great product um great people over there there hi Jeff young so uh but 3 months into our new company we had signed our first contract uh six fiure contract to license the technology we were building that's awesome and from that we hired a few people and then we signed another contract and we sign another contract and so was it was that who did that business development deal for you was was that something that you you're good at well I don't know if I would say I'm good at it or not to be honest but let me put it to you this way there were two of us initially and we're both programmers so I'm from Sandy Utah you can at least understand what I'm saying most of the time my co-founder was from tulo France nobody could understand a word he said right so you're the one you're the front man right so we'd go into a restaurant with all the contextual clues in front of you of what he might say like what would you like to drink and he' say Jean Kristof would say I'd like a CO and they'd say what and they'd say I'd like a c right and then I'd finally say he'll take a Coke right right right so one of us was going to have to sell it wasn't going to be him right I ended up in business development or even as CEO because my co-founder um it was hard to understand him that's why so it wasn't like again hey I got to go start a company I'm going to go do this no was like holy cow the Network's going to change everything we got to do this right and then do I want to be a CEO I don't care um but somebody had to somebody had to do that in the early days so fast forward from there did you start another company in between there that was the one that you took public right right So eventually that that first business the assets were purchased um and it was a great deal and then we started another company that would focus on email security software and that one we went to perhaps some different route of not just bootstrapping it but we brought in Venture funding and that business we took public on the NASDAQ in 99 tumble weed and uh grew that business to 400 something employees and 50 million in sales and when we were getting the point where we were consistently uh producing an operating profit kicking off I don't know six million in cash off of the 50 million um I stepped down and I went back to I went back to school to go get a PhD in computer computer music at Stanford yeah but um any so there was that growing that growing that business so before the you saying the previous business had been just a handful of people taking a a new business that you start growing to what you say 400 people yeah you know a lot of these entrepreneurs that I meet they have no idea how to scale a business myself included when I was scaling dig uh where do you pick this stuff up I mean handling a handful of friends and handling you know a handful of VPS that manage directors that manage employees is this just kind of like making a bunch of mistakes along the way is this coaching from other people like where are you picking up these skills I think I think it's both of those points and more I think number one is just trying to be honest about your limitations and honest with who though I going to your board or you going yourself with your board with your management team and and so that means that gosh I don't understand Enterprise sales I better go find somebody who does or you know consumer marketing which is what we're doing now we don't know a thing about consumer marketing so how should we approach this problem none of us has a consumer marketing background well let's be honest about it we don't have consum marketing background so maybe what that means is that we shouldn't go out with conviction of what's going to work M and instead we should simply have a hypothesis we should be very data intensive in testing the hypothesis to confirm whether it works so I guess may maybe that's maybe that's one thing um but or two things really it's trying to be honest and and and and to look at what the data is telling you rather than to believe that you have some magical Insight because more often than not that insight's wrong but I think also it's you know can you go find great people that could help you build a business business as mentors or as as managers and in my case I was I was fortunate to find both not always the first time um certainly there's plenty of mistakes along the way and we can go into lots of those it's kind of interesting to talk about it in hindsight but one of our early investors a guy Nam Dave maror guy named Dave maror over at August Capital he's he's probably one of the best mentors on sandill road extremely gifted investor but just great guy who's willing to take young entrepreneurs under his wing and and help groom him and grow him which he did with uh with me every step of the way m is this something where you were meeting with him you know once a month did you call him up when you had an issue or yeah we'd meet we'd meet for board meetings once a month but we'd be on the phone all the time I mean he'd be taking his kids out to the ski cabin in Dear Valley and he'd be calling me he he'd usually call me when he'd go through Salt Lake because he knows of the the Heritage I have there amazing uh but uh we we chat we chat about stuff all of the time um during the really difficult times in the business and the great times in the business but he was he was always a person that I could call and talk to so do you think that's a is that a really important trait that you look for or you would suggest that new entrepreneurs look for when they're taking on investment from you know an angel or a venture capital firm that you find a good partner yeah I have I havex feelings about Venture I have mixed feelings about whether that's a right decision for an entrepreneur or it's a right decision for all entrepreneurs I think in some instances is extremely valuable value ad in my in my case it was what is it about I mean what I mean if you just look at what you're getting from an angel or a venture capital firm you're getting cash for your business yeah what's the difference between taking Venture funding and Angel funding I mean other than just deal terms is that the deal terms that are sticking points that you're like this wouldn't make doesn't make sense I think there there are a couple of substantive differences I think one is is that with Venture you almost have established a pedigree with your firm that you're legitimate with whereas with Angel you don't have that same pedigree although perhaps that Gap is closing a little bit and so if you're going off and recruiting so and so hi I have an August Capital backed company I how I have a sequoia backed company I have a benchmark backed company and um it's like it's almost like you know an education you know hi I have a degree from Harvard and so you know I have this level of credibility at face value and maybe you don't get that so much with an angel and I think it comes into play mostly for me for recruiting Because it speaks to you know how much risk does an engineer want to take in joining this firm and you know if it's backed by these Deep Pockets um and and you've had this test where you've been able to raise institutional money so all right somebody passed their test yeah somebody thought the business was going to make money eventually MH that that's a difference I think also though that in the Venture instance For Better or For Worse is it's much more of a Hands-On thing it's much more of a managed thing whereas in the angel thing it's just more of a hands-off being helpful thing right so you're saying you know you take Venture cash you take board seats yeah you got board seats and I think good board members are active I think good board members are rolling up their sleeves and trying to make sure that the CEO is doing their job and I think board members aren't doing that but I also think bad board members are trying to do the CEO's job right which is also a gigantic it's a gigantic mistake and you'll see that you'll see that in a lot of these ventured capitalists where you almost feel like they're playing a war game and they got these toy soldiers that are on the board that they want to move around every day and those those guys are deadly um instead you need the dude I think like a Dave Mart that's going to say okay sink or swim but you're the guy right right I'm not going to tell you to move here to here I'm going to ask you the question right and you can come up with your own answer and just so long as you're learning yeah it's all good yeah H so I don't know maybe maybe more to say on that topic but so take me to take me to SM let's talk about SM yeah SM is it's a really fun creative Journey for me at at this stage in my career and it's a business we want to make money we want to dominate a market in this case it's the market of mobile social music um but there's something exciting about building products that inspire people that tap into the creative potential of people and allow people to connect to one another through this expressive audio in unpretentious ways in ways that it's authentic there isn't this agenda it's at some levels it's almost the antithesis of Facebook where I'm just going to do a bunch of stuff with my friends because they're my friends and you know help me earn more Farmville cash or whatever no in this distance is like hey there's some dude over there in Kyoto playing in Ocarina he's awesome who is he M never heard of him before in my entire life and there's something kind of beautiful about that and so it's hard to package it up and describe exactly what what it is cuz it doesn't fit into what we Define today as social media what's even more interesting well not more interesting but just more Curious for me is that when I started playing with your applications and you start seeing the globe spinning and you start seeing the different people playing all around the world it would be a lot easier for you to just launch an application sell for a buck 999 and leave that feature out I mean the real time world streaming yeah it had to be quite the engineering feet to go in and say okay we're going to take all these streams and and allow you to connect and tap into them in real time yeah why build that why build that feature if it wasn't really you know one that's directly tied to to revenue I mean yeah and the the credit there is our creative team and uh our co-founder Dr go Wong on the faculty at Stanford finishes dissertation to Princeton he's a co-founder I was taking classes from him at Stanford that was one of the reasons why I wanted to start the company because I was looking at his research and his passion around hey music's reached this inflection point and these devices they actually can not only connect to everyone else but they can be expressive on their own right let's explore what that means and I felt gosh this is interesting but but back to the Ocarina I think this was g g saying gosh don't we want to try to connect with more people in these new ways and kind of almost empathize with with more people would it be interesting to initially have this perspective from space that then kind of Zooms in on the world and where you have these notes floating from Tera up into the up into the sky up into the heavens up into the cosmos and one of the most interesting features of that product was you're not sharing you're not saying okay I'm recording something and then I'm pushing a button and I'm sharing what what God designed what we designed was no you're playing you're playing this instrument eventually you're going to discover this globe thing and then you're going to listen to this globe and you're going to hear these people playing the ocarinas all over the world and then you're going to think yourself gosh some of them are really horrible right and then you're going to realize only then you're going to realize wait a minute am I one of those people that's sharing my content on the world and so it was a way to try to take the inhibition out of sharing the content and the way we did it in that product was hey everybody's doing it yeah it's not like hey I want to go to Facebook and here's my Ocarina song now we did some of that with our Glee and our tea paint products because they're different products but for the Ocarina no that ended up being one of the most interesting features into the question I think what we wanted to do was to truly allow people to connect with one another in this new medium this new expressive medium but we also wanted people to be uninhibited in that process we wanted them to kind of venture out of their comfort zone a little bit and we felt we could do that by sharing with them what everybody else was doing so you you've done GLE app IMT pain acarina Magic Piano Magic fiddle I mean there's a few more Leaf trombone Sonic lighter uh how hard is it to build these apps I mean is it is it extremely difficult call when you're when you're talking about like we're talking about like 20 30 40 developers I think it's harder today than it was a year ago and again harder than two years ago two years ago there's there's nothing and the space of innovation is pretty wide open um I think today there's there's a higher bar in terms of Polish in terms of I'll call it backend sophistication around some of these sharing and social features which means you have to have logic running in the cloud that's managing this in scale which again introduces another level of complexity but uh how big are your teams like how many people would you put on like IMT pain the IMT pay team had seven or so folks probably five developers an artist and then somebody focusing on the design who who was it I mean were you like I got to I got to go after Tain and like make this happen like how did you are you a big Tain fan like what happened here well um we uh one of one of the early people in our company Turner who's the mule so we have a mule and the mule goes around muing music to the masses um you can sometimes see him riding his tricycle in downtown San Francisco with a big SM Banner on his back and he's usually wearing like a a white polyester suit with a with a top hat so every company needs a mule but we started with the mule as one of the first people we hired was the mule mhm but the mule came to me came to me one day and he said it would be really cool if you could do autotune on the phone like Tain and it'd be even better if we did it with Tain and uh I didn't really know what he was talking about when he brought this up to be perfectly honest dug into it looked at it and said you know he's brilliant because we had done this product called Sonic Vox which would real time change your voice into Darth Vader mhm or into a kitty cat or into a baby and product ended up being pretty popular but it's like can we take that to the next level and and merge that with our musical background and so we then had Rebecca who was she just finished her PhD at Princeton but at the time she was still working on it come into the office and build prototypes for pitch correction it was the most surreal experience because imagine this woman sitting at her desk all day long intentionally singing out of key to test it and so it it would be like this and at points in the day the rest of us would just kind of stop what we were doing and then we'd look at her and we'd just go what is this this is insane so you would have her start working on stuff even I mean just a protype stuff oh yeah it was a prototype can we work can can we can that work real time on this device so you didn't talk to the aune folks at this point no no did you ever talk them at all oh yeah but but initially it was like proof of concept can this work and we said yeah the latency on this device for duplex audio full round trip pretty darn pretty darn good in fact much better than Android here we are you know two years later and this was you know the iPhone one wouldn't listen but uh so then we we kicked it around we said yeah this will work let's throw it into the queue of potential products we might do um and then the folks at nappy boy T pay's label contacted us and said hey we want to do something together and initially we said look guys uh we're busy because we just shipped Ocarina and we're getting ready to gear up on Leaf trombone and they said no hey we really want to do something so we initially said why don't you go work with some other guys because you know we're going to we're going to do things in a way we think makes sense and I'm not sure that's kind of what you sign cre control yeah well they trying to push a different kind of idea on you or you know they ended up being great great guys and Tay is just he really is off the charts talented in so many ways um in a musical sense but even kind of technological Instinct but and a consumer marketing Instinct as well um and so it ended up being a real positive collaboration but initially it was like look we're not going to see creative control to anybody and moreover this is this is our stuff so um you need to get comfortable with that and if we're comfortable with that then great let's go do something together if not we're not your guy and so we literally introduced them to some third parties and then eventually they came back and said no we want to we want to work with you we said all right great and so it was a you know six-month collaboration where we would come up concept idea art exchange ideas with Tay and and nappy boy and eventually came to something that we really liked and launched the product in um at the end of the summer in 2009 and took off took off has been to this day one of the most popular products on mobile so let's talk about popularity in the iTunes Store um you know like you said early days handful of developers I mean thousands of developers now it's just insane uh how does a new app developer break into that top 50 like everybody wants to get the top 10 top 15 I've heard it's a little shady it's a little underground right now like that people pay for those spots not not to Apple but they pay promotion dollars to get downloads so they can break into those spots how how much is that is is that true what's going on there the bar is much higher it's much more complicated the early days the distribution was completely democratized wide open and now as businesses have begun to create critical mass they're now using that as leverage and almost buried to entry for new folks to come in and tap into that distribution so in our instance we have we have 10 million customers right and so we could put a couple hundred, eyeballs on a new asset at launch if you're to how how do you do that is that through ads in your other products we can cross promote through our other products we have a customer base that we know how to address and how to communicate with outside of our existing applications that have registered with us that we can communicate we have a growing following on different social media sites Facebook and Twitter so um we yeah we can cost effectively put hundreds of thousands if not millions of eyeballs on a new asset at launch and not only that um we're somewhat known you know we we're not right necessarily the biggest name out there and that happens let's say that happens on day one a new app comes out you use your own promotion juice bam that will hopefully Propel you enough to break into that because it's based on downloads right so hopefully you'll break into that top 25 or so and then if you have staying power you kind of just stay in there is that is that pretty much how it works yeah so our tpain assets been top 50 for almost two years now um and Ocarina will do 4 000 downloads today is a paid app and it was launched over two years ago so there's some staying power behind both of those assets that is independent of that initial push which is a broader question so how how does it stay and yeah there there there's some art and some science behind that art being word of mouth is still the single most important marketing channel for any of these assets and it's something that is an obvious thing to say you it's it's something that's really hard to track we try to measure it through these market research surveys after the fact so you do still that's that's methodology isn't perfect but how do you do a post install survey um we'll go back to the customers over email and we'll we'll say okay hi we're SM or we'll even hire a third party which we've done hi we're so and so um how' you find the product it allows Word of Mouth yeah word of mouth's huge think about it this is an ultimate demo platform I take it with me wherever I go oh for sure and I Hey Kevin check out my new Sonic lighter yeah I you could blow out the flame the the bulk of my apps have been installed because a friend has something so cool and you're like I got to get that and that's that's something that's really exciting and interesting about mobile where it's not a pure virtual spread it's a face tof face kind of marketing um impact it's some level and so so then the question is well why would I want to show that to you why would I want to tell you about that and that that comes down to product experience which you know it's it's hard to to get that right but what one of the things we try to do in our products is at least we try to think about that right and we try to think about that even before we fund the product before we put resources on it it's like all right what's the 22nd demo why in 20 seconds um am I going to show you this product and how am how am I going to do that that's tough sometimes that's really hard because you'll have a great idea distill that down into a 20 second elevator pitch but the thing is if you can't distill it down into the 20 seconds then good idea that is just new that you can't figure out how to cut it down oh yeah but if you can get that 20 seconds right then then maybe maybe you got a chance on the word of mouth yeah and then maybe you could push that up to YouTube as well where you could capture that same experience and so you could propagate virtually as well as physically physically but and then it gets down to the why would users continue to provide those testimonials and what are the different avenues that they could do that so like in Tay unlike Ocarina yeah you can you can push to Facebook and it turn actually push your audio clip that friends can listen to it right so we I think we were the first company that was doing that from phone to Facebook for audio and we did it first with Twitter with uh rela trombone and then Facebook with Tay and so this was you know September of 2009 people loved it though and we built this uh 3D flash globe that could be embedded in Facebook as a Facebook app widget that provided a more immersive experience around gosh what's really going on with this 19-year-old kid who's cut this new wrap um and then you know that drove our engagement um per widget from 40 seconds to about 4 minutes which ended up kind of being an inflection point of sorts of to how how many people were then going to come back into the product having been exposed to it from um from that experience so and that's another reason why that asset continues to drive significant downloads so easier said than done um we've been fortunate certainly but that asset I think it's a great product it's fun and there's still a lot of Word of Mouth there's still a lot of YouTube there's still a lot of Facebook that continues to drive traffic back into it awesome so a couple last questions for you that I'll let you go one of the things I'm always trying to get to is for new entrepreneurs how can they avoid some of the mistakes that we've made in the past and and so two questions one thing you would avoid and never do again you're like oh this would be my first piece of advice I'd give to a new entrepreneur and then something that you would always do no matter you know what new company you start practice or something that you would always take with you I just don't want to gosh that that's a long list on both of them if you tried to th it down to maybe one guiding principle per perhaps the thing to avoid is that tempting new idea that you want to do when you haven't kind of finished fully baking the existing one describing my life right now cuz it's really hard and plus we we sometimes we're terrified this might fail this might fail and if I have three coals in the firewell gosh if that one goes out there's still these other two and it almost becomes this delusional dream because what you're never really doing is you're never giving each one of them a chance to succeed it's so hard though oh tell me about it dude I know I know what kind of ideas you have and so right yeah we we brain store some of your crazier ideas you some crazy ones yeah so and I'm I'm certainly not claiming that I'm I'm the one that's figured this out just that I'm aware of I have the problem and I'm trying to go through programs to try to manage the problem right but if you could do that then you just learn faster because you're isolating variables you're zeroing it on this one thing and then you're kind of building more cumulative value behind it mhm so maybe that's the one thing to not do is to learn how to say no yeah and to have kind of have the courage to just put everything behind this one thing and say we're going to succeed or fail if this if this one thing happens what's the one thing that you would you would take with you in any new startup I guess to think about culture almost above almost all else and to think about are you creating a culture are you creating a culture that that goes beyond compensation that goes beyond the specific product you're building today that is a broader Vision enhanced perspective of of what's going about it what you're what you're trying to do so what is what is it I mean what is in in involved in I mean there's books on culture tonyy Shay from zapas has a great one delivering happiness uh you know most people think I'm going to start a new company I'll get some people together we'll sit around we won't be corporate we'll let our dogs in the office you know like what what is it what does culture mean to you cult culture is just it's everything it's attitude it's it's buyin it's for us it's creativity for us it's it's honesty hum in the office is this something that you have guiding principles for for the company no this is something that we just try to practice as far as our management and in particular in our interviewing process so um that's critical a year ago we let two Engineers go and um it was clear 3 six months in that there just wasn't a cultural fit and like here would be an example gosh it would be really cool if the flying SP saucer was spinning let's try it N I don't think that'll work well look you don't know right are we willing to at least test it right and so maybe you just dtill it down into almost attitude being kind of a important aspect of culture just a a willingness to try MH a willingness to explore versus an attitude of well no let me collect my paycheck and write my code and get out of here and I think it's really hard to build companies where it's a kind of more professional mercenary type of thing so you're you're a lot less on the like here's when you got a punch in when you got a punch out it's like just be part of the team yeah do you buy into what we're trying to do yes or no and if you do you're going to work hard anyway that's right and if you don't buy in then then don't then don't come here right I mean I could we had a really good engineer who left and started a company and I was trying to convince him not to do it this was like a year and a half ago and I go I was talking to this co-founder of the new company so why are you doing this and his answer was gez I'm about to turn 32 and I haven't started a company yet I have to do it so how do you build a culture around that right I think that's really hard to build a culture around that and I think they'll realize that yeah get a lot of early not quite 32 year old people and say hey we're not quite 32 company right we need to but it it would be the same thing as saying our goal is to go public on the NASDAQ you know of course that's great but yeah I've heard that a lot that's one of the things said I try to avoid when investing in potential you know Angel investment new companies a lot of guys will come in and say you know well we're really excited we want to build this and we'll sell for 20 million you know we want we want to take Angel funding we don't want to take VC because we want the option to sell it for 20 million it's very clear that they're focused on that number right they focus on the outcome rather than what they're trying to build yeah and I think that's devoid of culture there's no culture around that whereas if it's instead look I have an opportunity to redefine the music genre entirely to think about how music has changed in the past 100 years because of the recording cylinder and also recognize the fact that people want to participate they want interactive entertainment now they don't want to just be spoonfed they want to engage and they want a social experience around it and so perhaps the recording industry is extremely vulnerable now and there's an opportunity for us to redefine what this whole experience means um I don't know may maybe that's a better reason to to to join a company than um gosh I want to get to that 20 million number without too much delution yeah y that's an obvious thing to say but yet I I think if if I were an engineer thinking about where to go that would be my litness test because ultimately the company that has the culture they're going to get to that 20 million faster anyway oh absolutely right y cool well thanks for being on the show appreciate it any uh new new things to plug any new apps coming out soon you can talk about dude I just enjoyed following you and everything you're doing and exciting for the new advent next adventure for Kevin Rose oh boy we'll see um at SM yeah we're we're we're we're having a we're having a grand time but um we're getting ready to open up more of our backend Network to help a bunch of smaller firms that maybe don't have some of the assets that we have but still have just great ideas awesome and so that's that's what we're trying to do is try to open it up so that there's more of a Level Playing Field for for folks that want to come in and innovate but maybe don't have the 10 million customers or the 50 servers running up at Amazon mhm awesome well we'll talk to you soon thank you Kevin thanks that's it for this episode of foundation Foundation is always free but if you want to help support us and get the podcast a week early sign up for the newsletter at the URL below thanks a lot

Channel: Kevin Rose

Views: 29,533

Keywords: foundation, kevin rose, jeff smith, smule

Id: HZLNyrFow5Q

Length: 39min 45sec (2385 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 08 2011