Ep. 108: Transforming Communication in Home Improvement: Rilla’s Journey from Struggle to Success
Sebastian Jimenez: [00:00:00] There’s been times when we fired some of our customers because we realized like, Hey, and we give them the money, but it’s like, hi, guys, this is not going to be a good product for you right now, you know, because we’re very, very, very, very, very obsessive and very singular and focused. So then it’s like, okay, so reinforcement learner principle number 1, you have to be very, very cutthroat.
Sebastian Jimenez: You have to be very clear about what the goal is, and you have to have 1 goal and that that goal for us is…
Wyatt Smith: Welcome to Untapped with UpSmith. I’m thrilled to be joined today by Sebastian, a new friend and the CEO of Rilla Voice.
Sebastian Jimenez: Hi. Hi,
Wyatt Smith: which camera Sebastian’s an [00:01:00] entrepreneur who’s working on a very important mission. Uh, that’s, that’s gonna aim to transform the way people communicate and ultimately coach and develop and grow as human beings.
Wyatt Smith: And so I’m thrilled to. Have you aboard our podcast?
Sebastian Jimenez: Thank you for having me, man. This is a really cool and great to be here. I am glad we can make this happen. We were in Dallas at the same time. So that’s awesome.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah. Welcome to Texas. Yeah. Good to have you in town.
Sebastian Jimenez: I literally Dallas. Uh, I, I tell my, my girlfriend thinks I have a second family here in Dallas.
Sebastian Jimenez: Cause I traveled to Dallas, Texas, like every single month. That’s right. My second residence is the Dallas Fort worth airport.
Wyatt Smith: There you go all the time. Well, she is always welcomed in Texas. We’d be happy to have. Her come visit with you.
Sebastian Jimenez: She’s
Wyatt Smith: like,
Sebastian Jimenez: why are you going to Dallas? So what will confirm there is no second family.
Sebastian Jimenez: It wasn’t until the 50th time that she started
Wyatt Smith: asking the question. That’s uh, well, you’re always welcome. Uh, New York is home for you. That’s where you live in long Island city. Yes. You’re building a really important company from there. We’re excited to explore that a bit in the conversation. Yeah. Um, Our goal, as you know, is to [00:02:00] help share information with people about the skilled worker shortage and things to do about it.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah. I’m curious about, uh, for you, this problem and, and how you’ve thought about it in your, in your life and your career and in the company that you’re building.
Sebastian Jimenez: So do you mean the problem of upscaling people, or do you mean the problem that real is solving in particular?
Wyatt Smith: I’m the problem that Rilla is solving in particular.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. So, so the way we think about the problem, so, so there’s two, two approaches to the problem. So the very specific problem that we’re solving. So, so realize the leading virtual ride along software for the home improvement industry. So virtual ride alongs, what that means is when sales reps, design consultants, comfort advisors, technicians, when they go out and they talk to homeowners in the home, they record their conversations with a Rilla mobile app.
Sebastian Jimenez: And then we use AI to automatically transcribe, analyze, and give them feedback to help them improve their conversations, the way they interact with customers and ultimately their sales. Uh, and. Uh, to allow their sales managers and their service managers to do what we call virtual ride alongs that are 100 times faster, better and more productive.
Sebastian Jimenez: So, um, you know, uh, the problem that we [00:03:00] solve really is the problem of the physical ride? Right? So, if you have a team of outside sales and service people, like every single home improvement company in the country, um, it the only way to coach and train them and show them how to actually do a great job and and how to talk to customers.
Sebastian Jimenez: Uh, well. Is to literally get in your car and or get in the truck with them and drive up to the appointment and be there with them for 2, 3 hours. And then after the fact, give them some feedback, take them out to lunch and then and then drive back. So, no, physical ride alongs are great. Great resource. We absolutely, I, I, the reason I’m here in Dallas, I’m going to go visit one of our customers at Texas medley, uh, right after this, this interview, I love doing ride alongs with our customers because you get to learn so much.
Sebastian Jimenez: You get to build a relationship. You get to bond with people, physical ride alongs are great. And, and you can actually see a lot of our customers measure this thing called ride along efficiency, where you could see like a technician before a ride along [00:04:00] was here in terms of close radio, where like a 20 percent and after a ride along, They go up to like maybe 40%, 50%.
Sebastian Jimenez: It’s an insane dramatic impact that you see before and after a ride along, because you can actually give them feedback. The problem with ride alongs was physical ride alongs is that they are so difficult to do because they’re hard to schedule. You have to schedule the right time with the right technician.
Sebastian Jimenez: You have to, the time there’s so time consuming, it takes about three to four hours to do a physical ride along when you take all the drive time. And then because it’s so time consuming, it’s so difficult to stay on top. And to stay, uh, on top of all your technicians, you only see like most sales managers that are consistently doing right along.
Sebastian Jimenez: So they’re only seeing like one to 2 percent of the totality of the appointments.
.: Yeah.
Sebastian Jimenez: And, and it’s so difficult to stay consistent. So usually managers are doing right along. So once a week, maybe once a month. You don’t get to see like the single technician that you help that day. You don’t get to see them until like another month, another quarter.
Sebastian Jimenez: Sometimes a lot of time goes by a lot of time goes by. And then the ride along efficiency, it goes out after two weeks because they start going back [00:05:00] to their natural habit. Cause we used to imagine the problem, how we describe it is. Home improvement companies, home service companies, you guys are playing a sport where you can coach your players, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: You can give them feedback like any other coaching, any other sports, and you can track results because they’re field service management softwares, like service site, like, how’s go, how’s go pro and you can track results. But the 1 thing you can’t do, like, any other coaching, any other sport is you can’t be on the field.
Sebastian Jimenez: When the game is going on, right? So Bill Belichick, imagine telling Bill Belichick, you cannot see what’s happening in the game remotely. You can’t see anything. You cannot see what’s happening in the game. You can’t review the game from, you can’t watch it on TV. You can’t be on the field. That’s what happens to most home improvement companies.
Sebastian Jimenez: That 98 percent of the time they’re technician and they’re comfort advisor. They’re out there on their own. Without any coaching without any help. It’s like kind of you figure it out on your own. And that’s what you see. And that that problem that that problem of the right along consistency and the right along time that it takes to review everybody [00:06:00] that turns into lower conversion rates for technicians that turns into lower average tickets that turns into lower customer satisfaction that turns into higher.
Sebastian Jimenez: Cancellation rates and callbacks because the technician didn’t do a good job of explaining the thing properly. That turns into low retention rates when you’re going from apprentice to, uh, to technician. You, a lot of the times, a lot of our customers who are training, uh, uh, technicians, they retain maybe like three out of 10 in a class.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. The 30% retention. Yeah. So after you spend all the time and all the money and all the resources and recruiting and training them, you don’t retain them because they’re not able to get up to speed to where you need them to be profitable for the business because of this fundamental lack of training.
Sebastian Jimenez: Because of this fundamental lack of coaching. Right. And so what RILA does very simply, what RILA does. Is it literally just puts the sales manager, the service manager, it puts the coach on the field every single day, every single time with the technician, every single time they’re talking to a customer, they have a supercomputer in their pocket.
Sebastian Jimenez: It’s analyzing everything. It’s giving them feedback directly and it’s allowing most importantly, their [00:07:00] human coach to give them feedback. Also like every other coach in any other sport, that’s the problem that really solves. Right? The problem of the physical ride along, we turn it into a virtual ride along that is a hundred times faster, better, and more productive.
Wyatt Smith: Have you known this is what you wanted to do for a long time?
Sebastian Jimenez: I, I, no, I, I wanted to do stand up comedy when I was in college. For four years I went to college, I never went to class. I, I did stand up comedy for four years. So I thought I was going to be a comedian, which was very helpful. Everything I learned about business, I learned from stand up comedy.
Sebastian Jimenez: I went to business school in college. I went to Stern at NYU. I, I do, I did not learn anything about business at business. I did not go to class. Almost ever.
.: Yeah, I
Sebastian Jimenez: would just do stand up comedy and stand up. I learned about marketing. I learned about sales. I learned about the creative process. I learned about building products.
Sebastian Jimenez: I learned about a pitching. I learned about, I learned about how to, how to deal with failure. I learned about how to, you know, create something 0 to 1, how to scale it. I learned everything from, from, uh, about business from saying I learned [00:08:00] a very important thing as a stand up comic. Um, because I thought I was going to be a stand up comic for a long time, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: I learned how to prepare myself to be poor because, uh, uh, Jen Zeng Huang, he has a great quote, like a little clip where he goes and tells Stanford students. It’s like people with high expectations have low resilience because they, you know, I go to Harvard and it’s like, not perfect. And if something happens, it’s not perfect.
Sebastian Jimenez: And it was like, they crumble. And it’s like, for us, For me, it was like, I was already prepared to be poor and not make money for like 10 to 20 years of the scene of comic, right? So for me doing real, the fact that I even get to pay myself a salary is like a blessing. It’s like, Oh my God, I get 60, 000 a year of a salary.
Sebastian Jimenez: Right. That’s awesome because everything’s a plus, you know what I mean? Um, so yeah, that was great. So yeah, stand up. I learned everything through standup.
Wyatt Smith: That’s awesome. Yeah. How did you become a standup comedian?
Sebastian Jimenez: I was, oh, Brian [00:09:00] Chesky says you are who you are. Who you are who you were when you were growing up.
Sebastian Jimenez: He says I was always a designer and I say I was always a clown Hey, look, I I’m from the Dominican Republic It’s a very funny funny culture. It’s a very funny place. Yeah, everybody. My family is very funny. Well, my friends are very funny I did a DNA test recently and it’s like I’m like 22, 22 percent African from like, you know, Ethiopia, West Africa, North Africa from, uh, you know, uh, what Iraq, Palestine, Middle East, and I’m from Italy, France, uh, uh, England, Ireland.
Sebastian Jimenez: And then I was like, what is all this? And then I was like trying to think of like Irish in the Caribbean. I was like, Oh, we’re descendants of pirates. This is just a bunch of blackwatch pirates. And so, um, yeah. So then it’s a very funny culture and everybody’s very hustling. And, and so [00:10:00] I, I’d always been the class clown.
Sebastian Jimenez: And so when I came to NYU, I went to NYU for college. And when you go to NYU, it was like the perfect mix. I’d always been a clown. Went to NYU for college, you go to NYU for college, like the joke is, like, nobody goes, you’re just in New York City, and it’s like, you’re just like, the people who thrive at NYU are usually the people who find their own path, because you have to, and the people who don’t, they kind of get depressed and stuff like that, and I was never one for getting depressed, I was always like, okay, so I started doing standup, and it was the first time I, I, um, naturally I just gravitated towards it and then when I did it the first time I kind of got addicted immediately because it was the first time I did something that I thought it wasn’t bullshit, like something, it wasn’t a test.
Sebastian Jimenez: It wasn’t like a stupid class that you had to take a score, you know, like in high school. Most kids are like, what, why am I doing this? And everybody’s pretending that this is important. Um, so when I did stand up, it was the first time that [00:11:00] I kind of like, saw the zero to one thing, the art of creation. And like, I did a joke and people laughed.
Sebastian Jimenez: And then I thought, oh, wow, like, if I hadn’t sat down and written this down in a piece of paper, people would not have left. Like, so this thing that I created is net new. This would not have happened if I didn’t do all this work. And, and I was like, wow, that’s really cool that I can just do that. I can create things and bring value to people.
Sebastian Jimenez: So when I saw that, when I, I was like hooked, immediate, I was like so addicted to it and I stopped worrying about anything else. I just wanted to do standup. Right. And so, yeah. And then I, from the first time I did it, I was like, I’m just gonna do this .
Wyatt Smith: And so put me, put me back in New York City seven or eight years ago.
Wyatt Smith: You’re, you’re like the comedy cell. Like, what, what’s going on? No, no,
Sebastian Jimenez: no. I, I, I think I did the comedy seller one time, like. Like on a Wednesday at 3 30 p. m. I did. I was not like I, I was, I was, I was [00:12:00] good enough that I was like getting so like when comedians get started, people tell you, like, usually most comedians, they really suck.
Sebastian Jimenez: In the first three to five years, they really suck because most people don’t even know how to do public speaking. So they get really nervous and it takes a while to break the fear and be yourself on stage. Luckily for me, I had already done a lot of public speaking, so I never had that fear. And I would always been like making jokes and stuff like that.
Sebastian Jimenez: So I, I kind of came up, so I was like good enough from the beginning. I would say. Uh, where I was like, ahead of most of the people that I could see and doing the comedy. Um, and so, like, in my 1st, uh, 2 years, I was already doing, like, I was already doing hosting gigs and doing regular gigs at New York comedy clubs.
Sebastian Jimenez: I would do the stand was a regular gig that I had. There was this thing called the climate lounge, and it did the Broadway comedy club a few times. Um, but in New York, it’s like the best city to do stand up because you’re like, literally it’s every single bar in the West village. Every [00:13:00] single bar in the East Village, they have a little open mic stand to bring people in.
Sebastian Jimenez: So you can literally in New York City do three to six shows a night. If you’re more, if you intend, if you want, you could, you could go to West Village, East Village, Brooklyn, and there’ll be shows from like, there’ll be shows from 3 p. m. until 4 a. m. in the morning. So you could just, so you could just do shows and shows.
Sebastian Jimenez: And that’s where you get really good. And most comedians, if you think about it, they go to New York to practice to get You know, to get really good. Yeah. Because if, even if you’re in la, which is like the second comedy city, you have to drive places. Maybe you could do one show a night. Yeah. In, in, in New York.
Sebastian Jimenez: You’re just, and that’s, and that’s another thing I learned about standup comedy. It’s one of the core operating principles at Rilla, um, which is, uh, we try to operate rilla like a high speed reinforcement learner. Um, so reinforcement learners, a machine learning algorithm that. Um, this is how most AI systems learn today.
Sebastian Jimenez: It’s a really good learning method for AI systems, which is it’s an algorithm. When you break it down, uh, what it is, it’s it’s a very stupid algorithm that doesn’t know anything about the world. Doesn’t [00:14:00] know much about anything. All it knows is that I went or did I fail? And so usually reinforcement learner algorithms are great for video games because you, you can just tell it exactly if it failed or if it won.
Sebastian Jimenez: Um, and then what it does is it makes random decisions. Literally randomly, and it says, okay, let me try to win the game. It makes a random decision and it fails. Usually fails like a lot and you see it playing a video game and it dies like an idiot. It’s just like, doesn’t know what it’s doing. So then it fails and it says, okay, let me try.
Sebastian Jimenez: Let me not do that again and let me try another random set of decisions. That’s not the same 1 that I took because then I feel and then it just does it over and over again. It just keeps failing and failing and failing and failing and failing and then eventually after the 1, 000, 000 try of doing the.
Sebastian Jimenez: Of doing of attempting, then it becomes unbeatable and the best human players who are talented and creative who know a lot about the game and the reasoning they get beat by this, like this literally random generate like this, this reinforcement learner that doesn’t know anything about anything. It just knows if it’s failing and it’s trying not to fail.
Sebastian Jimenez: And [00:15:00] so instead of comedy, it’s very, it’s 1 of the great things about stand up that I learned was it’s it’s 1 of the only art forms that you have to practice in front of a crowd. So, like, a lot of musicians, a lot of artists, uh, poetry, painting, writing, you can do in your room. You can practice in your room and not have to interact with anybody.
Sebastian Jimenez: Stand up, you cannot do that. So, as soon as you have the joke, you write the joke. You literally have to, and you get addicted to it, you have to tell the joke to a crowd. You have to find a spot. In New York City, you gotta go to an open mic and you have to tell a crowd, you have to go up on stage and tell the joke to see if it works, even when the joke doesn’t have legs.
Sebastian Jimenez: And that’s why the best comedians fail, like, 50 percent of the time, because they’re trying out new material all the time. That’s how you come up with new material. And so it forces you to, like, literally get yourself. I learned that viscerally from stand up, but like, the best way to learn anything true about the real world is to go and attempt it to try it out.
Sebastian Jimenez: You can’t. Most of the world’s problems, you cannot sit the smartest people in the world in a room and just like, Oh, let’s think about how to solve these problems. You know what I mean? Because the world is not rational, right? It’s not math [00:16:00] that you could just like the perfect forms and bind them together.
Sebastian Jimenez: You have to go into the real world and test things out and because the world is not perfect. It’s not rational. So, so the only way to get things done really well into and to and to produce amazing things and and beautiful things is to Um, you have to go in and test it out, out with the real world. And a lot of startups, entrepreneurship is that as you have an idea, you go and try it out, MVP, you launch quickly, you fail, you learn from that.
Sebastian Jimenez: You do it again and again and again. And so that’s kind of what got me hooked on tech, which was, I, I had an internship with a Forbes author when I was a junior in college. We interviewed a bunch of tech founders. He needed somebody who was funny to punch up his interviews. And when I interviewed all these tech founders, the way they talked about building their companies and their products was very similar to what I was doing in standup.
Sebastian Jimenez: It’s like you, you just try something, you fail, you learn again and again and again and again and again and again. And then that’s how you become like unbeatable.
Wyatt Smith: All right, that’s it. So how does that play out in a company culture? [00:17:00] How do you build the right structure?
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah.
Wyatt Smith: Adrela to perform in that way.
Sebastian Jimenez: So the first operating principle is we’re trying to build a human reinforcement learner as an organization. That’s the 1st operating principle. And so I, I read the biographies of Walt Disney, Steve jobs, Nikola Tesla, Edison, Westinghouse. Um, I just read the 1 from Elon Musk. And what I saw that I was trying to figure out.
Sebastian Jimenez: What was it that made these people so special and their company so special? What made them so special? And I was like, Oh, maybe they were the smartest people in the world. And I read their biographies and they were not, they were really smart, but they were not the smartest people. They had smarter people around them.
Sebastian Jimenez: Uh, were they the most hardworking? They were really hardworking. Amongst the top most hardworking people, they were not the most hardworking people. There’s people who work in teaching and eye banking and journalism who work just as hard as they do. There’s so many hours in the day. So you can’t, you know, that there’s like, that’s not very bound on that.
Sebastian Jimenez: You can’t be the most hardworking person of all people. Cause people could just do that, you know? Um, and then it was like, well, they’re the most creative. And I was like, [00:18:00] no, they were really creative, but they were not, they had more creative people on them. And I was like, was it the combination where they really creative, really smart, really hardworking?
Sebastian Jimenez: Uh, yes, but there was also very creative, very smart, very hardworking people around them that they were just as creative. If not more, just as smart. If not more, this is hard working. And then I was like, okay, what’s the critical sauce here? And then I realized reading their biographies, it became very clear with Edison and with Steve jobs, everybody, Elon Musk, the same thing.
Sebastian Jimenez: The thing their superpower and their company superpower was that they were willing to fail more than anybody else. That was it. They were just really Edison with the 10, 000 tries to get the light bulb to work, right? It’s like, you find out the 9000 times tries. It doesn’t work. And then the 1 that does, that’s a reinforcement learner.
Sebastian Jimenez: Elon Musk with, like, trying to go to space. You crash down the 1st, 3 rocket ships and then the 4th 1 works and then you keep doing it and doing it and doing it. And so, and that’s the other thing about these people. It’s that not only did they fail. Enough like versus like, they had an insane tolerance and insane appetite for failure because it hurts them like anybody else.
Sebastian Jimenez: But it’s almost like, it’s like [00:19:00] almost this masochism. They got addicted to like, let’s fail again. Let’s fail again. Because what you see is that Edison with the light bulb when he figured that out. Right. You could have been like, Oh my God, you know, that’s enough for a lifetime. Right. Like you’re done, man.
Sebastian Jimenez: You brought electricity, right? A massive, like you’ve made the light bulb, like good job. You know, like go rest of these. No, it’s like, after that, he made up, created the power plant. So you can actually have the distribution channels and like people that could actually turn up these iPhones. Then it was like, okay, he got fired out of his company by JP Morgan.
Sebastian Jimenez: Got acquired. Then it’s like, okay, now I’m going to invent the, he invented the phonograph before the light bulb. And then he invented, I don’t remember the name of the device. But this thing that was literally what started the movie industry, and he invented that and it’s like these people get almost like to whenever they get to a steady state, and it’s like they figured it out and they’re winning and they’re getting and they’re winning 100 percent of the time.
Sebastian Jimenez: They’re like, I don’t like that. Let me let me go and fail again. Push myself. Let me let me go to the uncomfortable and then Steve Jobs [00:20:00] with the Mac. Like Macintosh, you would have been like, Oh my God, I ushered personal computing. Awesome. Let me know. Let’s go and start Pixar. Elon Musk, the same thing. It’s like, okay, uh, we did PayPal and now I’m like, he’s so addicted.
Sebastian Jimenez: He’s almost like masochistic in that sense. He always goes to war. And so we try to, and then that’s what I was like, that’s the important quality that they have in people like Edison. When people think about the night, the 10, 000 tries to get the light bulb, they don’t realize he was working in a lab. For 10 years, just trying to make this little light bulb work, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: Just in trying and failing and trying and getting the copper wire and getting all these different materials. And how do we get this thing to not blow up and getting the, it’s, it was really hard for 10 years and it wasn’t working right. Most people would have given up. You know what I mean? I try 100, I try 500, I try 1000, like three years.
Sebastian Jimenez: And Oh my God, five years in Jesus, you know? So they have a really Big appetite for failure. Mr. Beast is [00:21:00] another one that I, that I look up to, uh, today. You, you see him, his journey on YouTube, 10 years of failing, and then it finally starts working. And so how we try to operate Rilla is we try to emulate those, how we try to.
Sebastian Jimenez: We try to turn ourselves into human reinforcement learners as individuals and then as an organization in the way we do that. We have a set of 8 operating principles. The 1st, 1 is, uh, and we try to follow those, like, to the T, we hire for those principles. We fire for those principles. We promote for them.
Sebastian Jimenez: The 1st principle is the reinforcement learners. A very it’s a very simple algorithm in a sense. The goal, it just has one goal. It’s a unique, like you cannot give the reinforcement learner multiple goals. You have to give it one. It’s like, do you win or do you fail? Right. And you want to win. Yeah. So for us at Real Ed means we don’t have a lot of goals.
Sebastian Jimenez: We have one goal and our goal is to solve our customers pains. That’s it. We, we are not in business to be on deck crunch and to be on the [00:22:00] 430 under 30 or whatever the help. We’re not in business to have a high valuation. We are not in business to we’re not in business for anything else other than solving our customers pain.
Sebastian Jimenez: So we’re very customer obsessed in terms of that singular lens. And so people ask me, like, oh. So does that mean that but revenue is a good metric? It’s a good proxy to see if you’re that’s a good metric, but it’s not perfect, right? Because if you’re really obsessed about solving your customers pains, uh, and and and you’re not just revenue obsessed, but obsessed, obsessed about your customers, then what it means that real, for instance, we can do it.
Sebastian Jimenez: Reject a lot of our pipeline because we don’t think that those customers, we are going to be able to help them solve their problems because they’re not the right fit for us right now. So we’re not obsessed about revenue. We’re obsessed about, Hey, can we actually help you solve your problems? If you’re not the right fit of customers for us right now, we will say no.
Sebastian Jimenez: And people say, Oh, so then retention is a great metric. Retention is a great metric, but it’s not perfect because what if you launch with a customer that you realize it’s not a good fit for this product right now, if you’re obsessed about [00:23:00] retention, you’re going to try to retain them, even though you know that you cannot solve their pains.
Sebastian Jimenez: So we actually, there’s been times where we fired some of our customers because we realized like, Hey, and we give them the money back. It’s like, hi guys, this is not going to be a good product for you right now. You know, because we’re very, very, very, very, very obsessive and very singular focus. So then it’s like, okay, so reinforcement learner principle.
Sebastian Jimenez: Number 1, you have to be very, very cut. You have to be very clear about what the goal is and you have to have 1 goal and that that goal for us is our customers. And so then it’s speed. We try to move fast. Not there was this old adage people say, like, oh, if you move fast, then and you’re, you’re, you’re doing it at the expense of quality sometimes and it’s like, yes.
Sebastian Jimenez: We believe that fast gets good before good gets fast. So that’s a
Wyatt Smith: trade off you’re willing to make. Yeah.
Sebastian Jimenez: 1, 000%. We, we are willing to launch something very quickly for the sake of it being very quickly, even if it’s, even if it doesn’t have a high chance of working out, because again, we’re trying to test it.
Sebastian Jimenez: We’re trying to see if it’s going to work out. Then it’s like we maximize our productive time, [00:24:00] uh, maximize productive time. That’s like going back to like, we work six days a week at Rilla. So, um, we, we do that because we want So he’s like, okay, you’re obsessed with one of these hustle culture, like grinding, blah, blah, blah.
Sebastian Jimenez: Well, we don’t work seven days a week. We work six days a week. It’s very specific because we want to maximize our productive time. What does that mean? If we believe, if we believe. Like we do, we do believe that that true learning doesn’t come from being the smartest of being the, you know, we don’t believe in work smart, not hard.
Sebastian Jimenez: We do not believe that we believe the harder you work and the faster you work, the smarter you get, because that’s true intelligence. True intelligence happens in the world, not in your head. Right. So if we believe that, then the reason we like to work a lot, the average real employee works like 72 hours a week is that the more swings at the bat that you get to try out new ideas, the more, the more you’re going to fail and the higher chances.
Sebastian Jimenez: You’re going to get at finding that 1 critical idea. That’s going to give you a 10 X or the 100 X [00:25:00] return, right? Because that’s what the reinforcement does. It’s like, you see a fail a bunch of times and then somehow it learns the particular path. That’s going to lead it to a local maxima. Yeah, that’s going to start winning over and over and over and over again.
Sebastian Jimenez: And so we maximize our productive time because we’re trying to maximize our because people say, like, oh, that means that people say, like, oh, you work on the weekends. That means you’re 20 percent more productive than the average company. No, no, no. Yeah. We’re not 20 percent more productive. Well, in fact, we work twice the number of hours that an average company, but we’re not twice as productive because what happens is because everybody’s doing this, you like, you maximize the chances that somebody is going to figure something out, whether it’s in sales or marketing or product, that’s going to unlock a hundred or a thousand X return.
Sebastian Jimenez: And we’ve seen that multiple times at RILA. And the more we do that, because it’s like learning compounds faster than interest rate. It does. So if you’re learning 2x faster every single week that after a year of doing that, you’re actually the learning is going to compound so much that you’re going to be so much more ahead of anybody else that that was not [00:26:00] doing that.
Sebastian Jimenez: And, and, and, um, and, and learning is also like kind of like, you know, when you play a sport and like this happens to even athletes, when you play a sport and you’re like, At the peak of your, you know, performance, it’s almost like you’re in the flow all the time. It’s like you go and play a game and it’s like muscle memory, everything.
Sebastian Jimenez: But let’s say that you stop playing for like a while, right? And then you have to get back on it. You’re gonna be a little bit rusty. It’s gonna take you a little bit of time to reset and to re and to, you know, and to get back in it. So what we try to do is get everybody in that flow state where where all of these learnings, it’s like in your short term memory and your long term memory and your muscles and your in your veins.
Sebastian Jimenez: It’s like you just know all of these things that without even knowing that you background knowledge, it’s just you just know them because you’re so invested and you’re so obsessed and you’re so consumed by the work that it just takes you on. And that’s what we’re trying to do. Try to generate. And then the fourth principle, I could go through all of them, but I’ll just stop here.
Sebastian Jimenez: No, they’re
Wyatt Smith: all great. No, keep going.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. So the fourth principle is, is unafraid of [00:27:00] failure. That’s a num, like that’s critical because the reinforcement learner just, it literally has no shame. It doesn’t care. It just keeps failing. That infinitum it, that’s what it does. It just does not care. It fails and it dies in the game and it goes back and does it again and it fails again, and it does it again
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. And so we are not afraid, and that’s one of the hardest ones that I’ve seen. Mm-Hmm. , uh, for from, from. Because we hire a lot of smart kids that come to from these, like, really, really, uh, great universities. And they, they have obviously very high ambition. And I literally saw that what Jensen Juan said from NVIDIA.
Sebastian Jimenez: I literally saw this, um, at my company. I’ve seen this where a lot of these kids we hire out of college, they have a really hard time with this principle. Because the fear of failure is embedded so deeply into them, especially when you have very high expectations, especially when you’re very ambitious, you fear so much that you’re not going to be great that you’re not going to be perfect.
Sebastian Jimenez: And that’s horrible. That is actually horrible. And I think, you know, talking about, and I think that’s for a lot of reasons. Obviously, there’s a biological fear of failure, [00:28:00] but a lot of it is, is this. This weird game that we make everybody play in modern society when they go to school.
.: It’s
Sebastian Jimenez: like, I read a book called The Art of Game Design where the, the author basically said, like, if you think about the game of schooling, it’s such a horrible, such a horribly designed game, because as a designer, You would never design a game where the player starts with 100 percent of the points, and then every time they take a risk, they lose points away from them, you get taken away.
Sebastian Jimenez: They’re like, that’s our whenever you design games that you can earn points and momentum. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and then literally from when kids are young, you, uh, Everything’s like a multiple choice answer. And if you get it wrong, you lose points. And so you get literally conditioned to not want to get things wrong, but that’s horrible because if you’re going to innovate, if you’re going to invent, if you’re going to create anything interesting in the world, you’re going to have to get it wrong.
Sebastian Jimenez: Cause if you don’t get it wrong, then you’re not inventing anything.
Wyatt Smith: Yep. If you get
Sebastian Jimenez: it right,
Wyatt Smith: a hundred percent of the time, there’s no, it’s not interesting. The other [00:29:00] thing I love about your insight is that it presumes that there’s a fixed pie and that you’re, you’re decrementing away from the top. I was a teacher before business school and a lot of times students are conditioned to say if you’re being called out, it’s because you did something bad.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yes.
Wyatt Smith: And if you flip that on its head and you only get called out for doing things that are good.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah.
Wyatt Smith: That changes their psychology. So you behave in a different way.
Sebastian Jimenez: So then people come, come, people come with all this baggage to, to, and it’s, it, that’s the hardest one. It’s not failure. That fear, the fear of failure is the hardest principle for us to.
Sebastian Jimenez: To really seep into people’s heads. It’s not even the productivity. Productivity is easy for people. There’s people that are willing to work like the six hours. Like there’s people in eye banking who work more, who work a hundred hours. We don’t like that either, because we don’t think that maximizes that productive time because then people are, if you’re going to do creative work, you, your brain needs to be powered up.
Sebastian Jimenez: And if you’re not sleeping, we want people to sleep and work out. And that’s why we say six hours, you take one day of break. That’s how a lot of human beings work for a lot of history. A lot of the big religions, half that it’s like, you take one day of rest. You know what I mean? So we think that’s [00:30:00] actually an optimal schedule.
Sebastian Jimenez: For for a lot of human beings, we don’t think that the 100 hour work week or the 120 hours and you’re going to start giving up sleep and you’re going to start giving up working out and eating healthy. We don’t want you to do that because we want you to maximize your product at time. So 72 hours, anything above 80 hours.
Sebastian Jimenez: We’ve seen. It’s like, it’s like hard for you. You just have to give things up and we don’t want you to give up sleep. We don’t want you to give up. So, um, so, but that was easy for people, like, literally 72 hours. A lot of people are going to do that. The heart part is like, oh, my God, like, like, we’ve had people at really cry.
Sebastian Jimenez: Because they fail and we’re like, what are you doing? Wait, what? Reinforcement learner. We’re going to celebrate this. We clap when people mess up. We start clapping. So that it’s kind of like a baby when it falls. And you’re like trying to convince it. You’re good. You’re strong. And the baby’s just like, oh, okay.
Sebastian Jimenez: I’m good.
Wyatt Smith: I have two little kids. So I’m familiar with this concept. You’re still tough. Yeah, you’ve seen it. They
Sebastian Jimenez: like fall flat on their face and they’re like about to cry and you’re like, [00:31:00] so we have to, we have to condition people for that. It’s a very thing. It’s a very hard thing. Yeah. So we have, we have a bunch of principles, but we’re all trying to emulate the, the reinforcement learner.
Wyatt Smith: That’s great. So what’s the fifth principle?
Sebastian Jimenez: Fifth principle is, um, we are, um, unconventional. We try to, uh, uh, we, it’s like, we, we like to follow the unconventional path. Uh, conventions are. We will take conventions. It’s not like we are against conventions. It’s just that we find them boring. We don’t find them very interesting.
Sebastian Jimenez: We’ll use them, but it’s just boring. It’s not exciting. We get so excited for the unconventional and I think unconventional needs the excitement. You can’t just treat the unconventional the same as like, we give a premium for unconventional. We love unconventional because unconventional usually doesn’t work out, but we love that because we give it the premium and it’s like our preferred.
Sebastian Jimenez: Child, you know what I mean? If you have a conventional child and uncon, we’re gonna go with the one that’s, we love the unconventional child.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah.
Sebastian Jimenez: And, uh, the, and the reason for that is when you see the reinforcement learner, like open [00:32:00] ai, you see that a lot of these, uh, reinforcement learners, they were trained playing video games, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: Um, there’s all these parallels between AI and video games. It’s Nvidia video games. And, and so, uh, you, you look at the open ai, they, they came out with Dota. With this, uh, with this, uh, a I system reinforcement learner that could play Dota and it played against the best players in the world and it beat the crap out of them.
Sebastian Jimenez: It just beat the crap out of them. And they were the best players in the world playing together in this against the open AI system. And it wasn’t even a competition. It was a, it was a bloodbath. It wasn’t like Gary Kasparov against IBM deep blue. It was like a close match. No, no, no, this was a, this was a master and don’t as a very hard game to understand and to play.
Sebastian Jimenez: So the fact that this game won, everybody was like, that was one of those moments where everybody was like, Ooh, okay, we got some here where they are. Right. And you see that the reason why I was winning is that the human players, they play using their reason and their talent and their logic. This game doesn’t know any of that.
Sebastian Jimenez: It doesn’t know reason or logic. It just knows if it’s failing or winning. That’s all I know. It doesn’t reason, right? It’s just like. I’m just making decisions, try to win. [00:33:00] And a lot of the times it wouldn’t make these really weird moves that the players were like, huh? And it will confuse them. And it will confuse them.
Sebastian Jimenez: Bam. And, and, and you see it make these really insane, like, like the human player would never come up with them because they’re so out of the, they’re so wacky and you see a play in it and you see that it’s like not following a pattern, right. And it breaks the pattern really quick. And so the reinforcement learner.
Sebastian Jimenez: Some of the, some of the times the local maxima for winning the game is something that you would have never even thought of. You would have never thought with logic. So you have to, you have to, um, you have to support the unconventional thinking. And, um, at Rilla, we, we do this thing. Walt Disney used to, uh, used to have this whole, Uh, uh, there’s a, there’s a few companies in history that, that really have a true respect for the creative process.
Sebastian Jimenez: Most companies don’t respect the creative process. Most companies are not even creative [00:34:00] as an organization. Uh, but there’s a few companies in history that really respect the creative process and Walt Disney was one of these companies and the way that you respect the creative, he segmented it. Uh, so like there was idea.
Sebastian Jimenez: Uh, there was idea stage, right? And in idea stage, there’s a dream world. It’s like where anything goes. It’s yes and. Yes and territory. There’s no constraints. There’s no skepticism. There’s no, there’s no, there’s no barriers. It’s just like your imagination can really run wild. And this is where they would start.
Sebastian Jimenez: It’s brainstorming. We’re gonna make a new cartoon. And you see Mickey Mouse doing all this crazy stuff. You know, because it comes from my, and you have to let idea world run wild. Right. And, uh, because you’re going to get so many, because if you put logic on it, then you’re going to miss out on so much value.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. You’re going to miss out on so much value if you, if you constrain ideal world. So then you do ideal world. And then after you do ideal world, after you’ve had a great session of like just going wild, then you bring the skeptic hat on, right. You start pointing out why all these ideas are not going to work and blah, blah, blah.
Sebastian Jimenez: And then finally, once you put the [00:35:00] skeptic hat on, then you put the practical hat on and you say, okay, from all of these different things. What can we actually get done? Right? Yeah. Let me put my practical hat on. Let’s see. What can we actually do? Right? Based on the potential of the idea and based on the constraints of what we can and cannot do, what could I actually really push forward to get done?
Sebastian Jimenez: And, uh, you know, Brian Chesky, like, he recently came out with a, uh, there’s like a viral thing. He came out with the Airbnb icons.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah,
Sebastian Jimenez: uh, where he literally you can go and live in the up house and it goes up like that. Yeah, that’s that’s something that’s my deal world. You know what? I mean, if you don’t have that respect for the creative process, you’re going to miss out on so much.
Sebastian Jimenez: And so, uh, the fifth principle, it’s like, we would love to travel the unconventional path. We love it. We take, we know that it’s not going to work. Most of the time, we know that it’s not going to work. It, but, but if we just love it, we just, we just love it. And anytime somebody has an unconventional idea, especially when you work with a lot of engineers, engineers love to put the skeptic hat on because they’re like, [00:36:00] Oh, they love constraints and they love systems and they love, and we try to beat that out of our engineers will be like, no, no, no.
Sebastian Jimenez: And we say, no, no. Hey, we say, Hey, we’re yes. Ending now. Hey, no, no. Don’t get me that crap. Don’t get me like, no, no, no. Don’t do that. We’re in idea world. Like, you cannot do this. No constraints. We’re like, we’re like with Spongebob and Patrick where they go in their imagination box. It’s like, hey, we’re just an imagination.
Sebastian Jimenez: Okay? You’re, you’re weird engineering logic. I hate that right now. So take it out. Take it out of here. And so, uh, that was a hard one also to, to beat into people. Uh, principle number six is infinite learning. Infinite learning means you, you, you find a local maxima, the reinforcement learner, even though it finds a local maxima and it starts winning the game over and over and over again, it doesn’t stop trying to fail and learn, you know what I mean?
Wyatt Smith: So, you differentiate that from high speed learning by saying, it creates the idea that you’re never done. Yeah, yeah, correct.
Sebastian Jimenez: The reinforcement learner is never done. It’s always programmed to continue to learn and to continue to fail, even though it found a local maxima, [00:37:00]
.: right? Yeah.
Sebastian Jimenez: Um, it continues to try to, there’s never, the whole point is that there’s never, you can never find the universal maxima, every maxima that you find that you start winning, it’s a local maxima.
Sebastian Jimenez: And so, but you could always, and we’ve seen this every single time, our product. Uh, every single time like I go to market, we have seen that over and over again that you could always make improvements and you and you can only make improvements if you’re willing to go that extra mile and take. Okay. We got it to a steady state, but let’s go.
Sebastian Jimenez: Let’s go again and try to try to go to failure land and try to try to try to fail again so that we can improve. And so. And then principle, uh, number seven is, uh, we, we work, we grow, and we learn together as a team. Uh, the only way that you can emulate a, a, a, a reinforcement learner as a human is really you, there’s no way to do it, but unless you’re working with other people, because the machine has way more memory than you do, and you have very limited memory, our short-term memories are very limited.
Sebastian Jimenez: Actually, we can only focus on a few things at a time, like seven bits of information at a time. So, so, uh, if you. And [00:38:00] division of labor, that’s one of the greatest inventions, I think, in history is division of labor. The fact that we realize, like, oh my god, if I focus on this, and you focus on that, and then we trade, and we, and we work together, we can actually make the, the whole, like, our teamwork better than the sum of its parts.
Sebastian Jimenez: That’s what happens when people trade. It’s a, it’s an amazing, magical thing. Um, and so, I’m the CEO. I focus on building teams. I focus on culture. I focus on hiring. I focus on fundraising. I focus on the vision for the future. I’m not focused on, you know, like, how do I make I designed the demos originally for sales, but I’m not focused on how do we improve the demos right every single day.
Sebastian Jimenez: That’s my salespeople. They’re doing that and they’re. Encourage to go and learn. And so, uh, I’m not focused on how do we make the, I’m focused on it from the high level, but I’m not focused on the nitty gritty of how do we make a customer success bearing onboarding better? Right? I’m focused on the product a lot, but I’m not focused on the nitty gritty of the engineering details.
Sebastian Jimenez: Right? So, um. People are focused on different things. It’s great. And so what happens is, but and everybody’s encouraged to go and [00:39:00] continue to fail and continue to fail and continue to fail and to take what they learn from real and we give them things like a baseline, but then go and start building on that.
Sebastian Jimenez: Everybody, every single person, every single person is encouraged at Rilla. One of the things is like. Not only do we allow you to fail, that’s good, but we expect you to, we expect you, if you’re not failing enough at rhythm, you’re not trying hard. It means that you’re not part of the culture. You’re just like not getting on board with this principle.
Sebastian Jimenez: You see what I’m saying? Yeah. Because you’re not, you’re not actually improving.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah.
Sebastian Jimenez: The, you’re not improving the company.
Wyatt Smith: So, will you asked that in a one-On-one. When was the last time you failed? We, tell me back your most recent failure. We
Sebastian Jimenez: asked different, we asked, we, we tell, tell me your top three fuck ups.
Sebastian Jimenez: Okay. And then if they cannot come up with three, then we just reject them.
Wyatt Smith: You didn’t, you didn’t perform.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah, we don’t get in. If you don’t have three times, you don’t have three times that you screwed up.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah, then we don’t take you in. Yeah, well, that’s in the interview phase. I’m asking like, when you’re coaching people, you’re talking to you.
Sebastian Jimenez: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And one on once and one on one. So, like, what we do is, well, that’s the, the, the principle of learning and growing together as a team. We start all of our meetings with, um, [00:40:00] the, if you’re the manager, the, you tell the direct report, do you have any feedback for me? Yeah. Right and we tell people this is we took that we stole this from Netflix.
Sebastian Jimenez: Um, they have a great culture for negative feedback. We love negative feedback. Negative feedback means that somebody’s sharing a failure that you’re doing and they’re wanting you to improve. But negative feedback people get so defensive because again, they’re afraid of failure. And also you just think so.
Sebastian Jimenez: We the way we start our meetings is, uh, if I’m meeting with a direct report, I say, hey, do you have any feedback for me? If they give me some positive crap, I’m like, hey, what are you doing? What, uh, what are we? Like when the Teletubbies like, what are we going to sing songs? Like give me negative feedback.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. Like, what do you like? This doesn’t help Adam. We’re doing great. Okay. What do I do with that? It doesn’t help me. It doesn’t help me improve. Give me negative feedback. And so we try to keep 80 percent negative feedback, 20 percent positive feedback.
Wyatt Smith: Oh, that’s very unconventional.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah, we don’t, we do not like positive, positive feedback is so useless.
Sebastian Jimenez: Most of the time it’s like, so stupid. It’s like, Oh, you did great. And that’s like, and that’s part of the, I’ve noticed I’m not American. That’s part of the American culture. [00:41:00] I’ve noticed when people give negative feedback here, they go and they say, Hey, you did this so much. Oh, you did great at this and this and that, and you’re doing a great job here.
Sebastian Jimenez: But we don’t, we skipped the crap. We were like. Give me negative feedback and we make that we enforce that from the managerial standpoint, we’re like the manager’s asking for negative feedback first to let the direct report know that it’s okay, right? So it’s okay to be constructive. Yes. And then the manager goes, okay, let me give you negative feedback.
Sebastian Jimenez: And that’s how we start all of our meetings, right? All of our meetings, right? And people at Rilla, then they get addicted to that, which is great. You know what I mean? Because when they ask you, hey, do you have any feedback for me? Okay. And you’re like, not really at the moment, sorry, you’re like, cause then that means
Wyatt Smith: that they have some negative feedback for you.
Wyatt Smith: You didn’t bring enough constructive feedback.
Sebastian Jimenez: I’ve gotten that feedback before be like, I need you to give me more feedback. And I’m like, I know, I know. So, so, yeah, we, we, we learn, we grow and we went together as a team. What that means [00:42:00] is you have to have an insanely transparent culture where people can have access to information at any single time.
Sebastian Jimenez: Right? Because if I expect them to be learning on their own, then the most if if you have an organization and everybody’s playing their own reinforcement learner and trying and failing and trying and failing, but these. little entities are not sharing the information with each other, then it’s a waste of time because you’re going to have people learning about the same things and you’re having to relearn things, you know what I mean?
Sebastian Jimenez: So it’s even the reinforcement, the algorithm, the algorithm literally learns like that. Also. The only reason the reinforcement learners able to play the game so many times over is because you have a bunch of computers playing the same game over and over again, and then it shares the learnings. Yeah. To the algorithm, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: You know what I mean? So it’s the same that you, you have to share the learnings. You have to be insanely transparent at Rilla. Everybody has access to our finances. Everybody has access to all of our metrics. We give them, we give everybody an onboarding where we give, we give them any person at Rilla can tell you exactly what, what, where we are in terms of our growth rate with everybody has access to.
Sebastian Jimenez: Everything [00:43:00] because we want them to have all the context so they can make the best decisions possible in their own domain, right? Yeah, and then share that back to the team and we encourage people to share. That’s what we Share feedback openly to your managers. I think we’re doing this wrong because of this and this and that, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: Thank you for the feedback.
.: Yeah,
Sebastian Jimenez: you know what I mean? So we have all these ways to and then final principle is a capital efficiency. Unlike the reinforcement learner, we don’t have a limited trial and error, so we have or we are constrained by resources. So and that’s a really weird principle. Like, how do you how do you how do you have a.
Sebastian Jimenez: If you learn, if you just hear all of the principles that I just told you, except for this last one, eight, you would think, Oh, realize one of these startups that’s like high growth growth at all costs, kind of like burning a ton of money cash in the
Wyatt Smith: middle of the table. Yeah.
Sebastian Jimenez: We’re actually one of the most capital efficient startups ever in high growth.
Sebastian Jimenez: We’re very high growth. We’re insanely high growth. And we’re one of the, so if you look at real as growth rate, we went from like, uh, um, we went from like zero to two, eight [00:44:00] figures in like two years. Um, and so we’re like, Growing fast in Salesforce, faster than Figma, faster than Apple computer, right behind Amazon, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: And a lot of startups are doing that now. Like the best startups of this generation, I think are going to be the fastest growing startups ever because of AI, because people have learned perplexities. One of these startups has grown insanely fast, right? I think perplexity might be one of the only companies that I’ve seen that’s growing faster than Rilla today.
Sebastian Jimenez: Um, uh, so, so, so we’re one of the fastest growing startups in the world right now, uh, and in history. Right. So, so that’s true, but what’s also true is that we did this with a team of like 28 people. And, and you know what I mean? So we’re also one of the most capital efficient start. So both are true. Like we are an insane, we prioritize speed over anything.
Sebastian Jimenez: We are unafraid of making mistakes. So we make a lot of mistakes. We like to do unconventional things that are likely to fail. How do you, how do you do, how do you, and how do you do that? Well, keeping capital efficient culture. That sounds insane, actually. Yeah. But both of those are true in the outcomes.
Sebastian Jimenez: [00:45:00] We grow really fast and we do try a lot of things and we do do a lot of unconventional things while keeping up. We don’t burn anything. We’re actually a casual positive company. We don’t burn anything like our burn multiples. Like, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve raised less cash and we have AR. So, like, we don’t like, so, so those two, how do we do that?
Sebastian Jimenez: That’s such a weird thing to do. And it’s like, it goes back to this thing. We do two things. We practice extreme focus, so we constrain all of our experiments and all of our conventional thinking on, on 1 to 3 key areas that we know are going to have the highest impact at this moment right now. So we don’t just try anything everywhere all at once.
Sebastian Jimenez: No, we say. This is the area, this is the domain and product. This is the domain and, uh, in, in, in market that we’re going to try all of our experiments. And then we encourage everybody to like, try a bunch of ideas. And then one of those is likely to work. You know what I mean? And so we keep a super focused and then number two, we try minimum viable tests.
Sebastian Jimenez: So anything and go to Jeff Bezos says, failure is actually very cheap to innovate, to start something new. The only time something gets expensive, it’s when it [00:46:00] works because that’s when you start scaling in and that’s when you start, but failure is very cheap, cheap to fail. I mean, Uh, and if you practice the concept of MVP every single time, the MVP of Rilla, when we started Rilla, we had an idea, Oh my God, we’re going to capture all these billions of conversations happening in offline commerce.
Sebastian Jimenez: We’re going to make offline commerce as searchable as Google did for the web, right? Because most of commerce is people interacting with each other face to face. And so if we can capture it and analyze it. We can give all businesses the power to understand their customers that Google and Amazon have.
Sebastian Jimenez: And so we were like, Oh my God, we need to build an AI system that can deal with noise from face to face conversations that can separate speakers. We kind of had an idea of all the problem sets we’re going to work on. We didn’t do any of that. We didn’t go out and start building an AI system. We just went out, me and my co founder, we started listening to face to face conversations and seeing if there was any insights to them, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: That was our MVP. That was very cheap. It just costs us like a couple of all nighters, right. Of us staying up and listening to audio and like putting the, you know, the things on the, on a spreadsheet and then giving the insights to the customer and being like, Hey, what do you think about this? I’m like, Oh my God, this AI is great.
Sebastian Jimenez: I was like, yeah, it’s very smart. [00:47:00]
Wyatt Smith: And so not so artificial,
Sebastian Jimenez: but we don’t have to build anything. You don’t have to buy any servers. We don’t have to, you just, you know what I’m saying? It’s very cheap. But then when it worked, then it started, you know, so, so you can actually fail really fast, very cheaply.
Sebastian Jimenez: Most people think that failure is expensive. Failure is not expensive if you’re actually doing it the way we’re doing it. Because, um, the, the, the way that we do it, the most that, yeah, we do it so quick, you know what I mean? And so small, so it doesn’t matter. And, and Jeff Bezos says like, Oh my God, I have like billions of like literally tens of billions of dollars of failure.
Sebastian Jimenez: Of an Amazon, which is literally you think that’s waste. That’s not waste. That’s not waste. That’s that’s just part of the process of the creative process of learning. Right? So so that’s not waste. And of course, you’re going to see. Oh, and if you look at the micro, you’re going to see, like, we waste money on this.
Sebastian Jimenez: We miss money on that. No, no, we didn’t waste it. We learned from it. We didn’t do it again. Right? And so then the next time it was much better.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah,
Sebastian Jimenez: but it allows us to unlock all these, all these 10 X and 100 X and 1000 X online. And so, yeah, those are the eight principles.
Wyatt Smith: Those are awesome that you were [00:48:00] sharing.
Wyatt Smith: Yes, that’s great. No, that’s, there’s a lot of wisdom packed into that. I also, I really love your reflections on history and on people that have built important things creatively through time. I was, I’m a big fan of David Sinra’s founders podcast, and I was listening to his story about David. He does, um, stories about people through history, and then he synthesizes it and then tells the story he’s great.
Wyatt Smith: You would love it. And so, um, On the way here, I was listening to his recounting of Walt Disney’s story. And he would, he writes about something called, um, uh, sadistic perseverance. Yeah. He’s working so hard and it’s almost like it’s a taxing him, but for, for the area that that’s give some joy. Yes. Cause his bar for excellence is so high.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. Yeah.
Wyatt Smith: And it was almost, uh, Steve jobs like no one will ever see this, but you’ll know how good the motherboard was and the design and how elegant it was. And that’s a really, really interesting insight that draws from history. And build your company with it.
Sebastian Jimenez: And even those people, like, when, when you think about Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, [00:49:00] they also prioritize speed to an insane degree.
Sebastian Jimenez: Sure. Even these people that you think of like, oh, quality obsessive, but my God, man, they were just moving so insanely fast.
Wyatt Smith: The time between Walt Disney launching the vision for Disneyland An opening was a year and a day.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, these people were just cutthroat in terms of speed.
Sebastian Jimenez: They just did not July to July. So, and they were quality obsessive, too. So, they really cared about quality, but they knew that you had to get things out there and put it in the hands of people. What made Walt Disney be able to, like, create Snow White is that he had, I don’t know, I think it was like five, five to ten years of experience.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah, because he made Snow White in 1930 something, or 1940, yeah, so it was probably like 10 years, more than 10 years of experience of making cartoons, quick cartoons that he could go and test out people, so I gave him all of the, you know what I mean, to make a big, um,
Wyatt Smith: so. It’s fascinating that his best work, arguably Disneyland, comes 20 years in.
Sebastian Jimenez: That’s what’s so funny about Disneyland. You think about the capital efficiency thing, Walt Disney, like his company was always not making money. It was always cartoons [00:50:00] were a very difficult business. So everything he was, he were well, Mr. Beast is to me, reminds me of Walt Disney. Cause it’s the same thing.
Sebastian Jimenez: Very low margin business. They were invest everything. They grow everything. They become like, and then they try. Uh, so, uh, and it’s like super creative people, but he literally made no money for like the first I think it was like 40, 30 years of his career. It was like he was a worldwide celebrity, but his margins, he was always scrambling for money for all his life.
Sebastian Jimenez: And it wasn’t until Disneyland. Uh, that they actually started making money and they found the business model. I was like, okay, this is a very profitable thing because people are making an investment and there’s so, and that’s still Disney’s model today. It was like, they make this marketing with the new characters and they make you go to the system, the park’s revenue is, is the most profitable.
Sebastian Jimenez: And it’s like, so, and he figured that out, like, but, but that’s, do you see what I’m saying? That’s the guy who started with a cartoon. Okay. Were they black and white cartoon with, with, with, with, um, where the sound wasn’t even synchronized. Right.
.: Hmm.
Sebastian Jimenez: And, and he, and then [00:51:00] he created Disneyland. You see what I’m saying?
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. And the reason we was able to do that is because this insatiable appetite for failure. Yeah. Like this guy could, and you read the biography and there was times where he would just get bored.
.: Yeah.
Sebastian Jimenez: He’s like, Oh my God, this, I know how to do this. And he would get sent, he would always need a big project to work on to like satisfy his insanity, his, his appetite for.
Wyatt Smith: Yep.
Sebastian Jimenez: So, yeah. Yeah. As a reinforcement learner, man, it’s if, if you get, if you get hooked on that, it’s hard, it’s hard to get. It’s
Wyatt Smith: powerful. Elon
Sebastian Jimenez: Musk, when you read the biography, you’re like, why didn’t he do Twitter? He did Twitter because he was tired of, of, of being at the really profitable companies that were growing and like Tesla, SpaceX, best, you know, most valuable companies in the world and he’s like, I want to go back to war, man.
Sebastian Jimenez: I want a new challenge. Literally, that’s what are like, what are you doing?
Wyatt Smith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s hilarious. And one thing I love about your culture is that you’re constantly iterating, you’re evolving, you’re failing, you’re getting better. What was the process of arriving [00:52:00] at that definition of the problem?
Sebastian Jimenez: Uh, oh my God. So like, you know, Uh, so I realize we, we follow this concept of reinforcement learner. We, we try to fail really fast. We try to fail forward. Um, most founders make the mistake when they start that they believe that product market fit is a one sided equation and they pick the wrong side of the equation.
Sebastian Jimenez: Finding product market fit is a two sided equation where actually the market side of the equation matters more than the product side of the equation, right? Um, a lot of founders are technical, so they, you know, they, like, go into doing products. Yeah. I used to do CNM comedy, so, to me, validating things quickly was, like, second part, like, it was second nature.
Sebastian Jimenez: And so, what we did at Realist, so, Realist, we started in 2019. October, 2019, from two October, 2019 to January, 2022, we had, we, we, it was zero traction. Like our first three years of business was just us going out of business. We had [00:53:00] nothing, right. The idea was it, it started in, in, uh, in field marketing. We had a field marketing management software that we’d helped companies like Red Bull and Molson Course and Heineken.
Sebastian Jimenez: Do field marketing field marketing is when you get a bunch of college kids and uniforms. You send them out to college campuses. And then the idea was like, they had millions and millions of conversations happening outside, uh, face to face every single day, every single month. Sorry. And they were spending a lot of money.
Sebastian Jimenez: Heineken, Molson Coors, Coca Cola, Red Bull. They were spending millions of hundreds of millions of dollars on surveys on consumer insights that they got from research from Nielsen and IRI on focus groups on social media analytics for firms like Sprinkler. And they were only capturing like 500, 000 points of interactions from consumers every single month through social media, through surveys, through everything.
Sebastian Jimenez: And the first problem they really identified was that there was a lot of money being spent on this. Spend on consumer insights with very little data in return. And the data was very slow. It would take like three months to run a survey and get results because who fills out a survey, like less than 1 percent of people fill out a survey and focus groups, it was such an inefficient way.
Sebastian Jimenez: And what we realized is like, well, you have 4 million [00:54:00] conversations happening every single month through field marketing, through your brand and masters talking to consumers. That’s 10 times more data than you’re capturing online. What if we could capture those 4 million conversations and process them?
Sebastian Jimenez: Because people are talking about your products and understand the brand sentiment, what people like, what they don’t like about your products. And so you can kind of get consumer insights more faster, better, more high quality from real people. Right. And that was the idea for Rilla. We called it Rilla because it comes from guerrilla marketing, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: Because it comes from field marketing. And the idea was we’re going to capture the, and then we thought, well, from field marketing, we were like, Oh, Well, there’s field marketing behind it can also have sales people that go into the field and sell in restaurants and bars and supermarkets. And then we were like, Oh, why stop?
Sebastian Jimenez: If we don’t beverage, what about the people who go outside and sell windows, siding, plumbing, doors, HVAC, electrician, solar roofing. What about the people who sell in retail stores? And we’re like, Oh, there’s 12 million outside sales and service people in America, they’re having 10 billion conversations with consumers every single month, what if we could capture all of those and make all of these conversations insightful for businesses so that all [00:55:00] businesses, not just.
Sebastian Jimenez: Google and Amazon all business. Cause I understand their customers as well as Google and Amazon do. And so that was the vision for Rilla, the use case, right? Very different than the, than the virtual ride along use case. It was consumer insights, you know, powered by AI, powered by real life conversations.
Sebastian Jimenez: That was a use case when we started in field marketing, true to our kind of reinforcement learner practices, we, we launched our MVP was like me and my co founder listening to the audio. And, uh, and we realized the field marketing use case didn’t work that well, not because of the product or anything, but because of the market side of the equation, when we launched and we listened to these conversations.
Sebastian Jimenez: There was one where it was this girl, Caitlin, just screaming at the top of her lungs. Everybody signed up for cash up. We have free pizza. And she just screamed that for like three hours at an event, just shouting. He was just screaming that because they’re in an event and be like, everybody signed up for cash up.
Sebastian Jimenez: We got free pizza. And that was, that was a pitch. And then, and then, and it was just college kids screaming and pitbull singing in the background. It’s a frat party, right? So it’s a mess. And so we’re listening to this and I’m like, [00:56:00] Okay. If we were to build this AI and it could understand everything. And we asked it, what insights can you capture from this conversation?
Sebastian Jimenez: It would say your brand has a high association with the word pizza, because it was a mess. It was, it just didn’t, there was no, it’s nonsense, right? It was just screaming. So we were like, okay, that’s not a product. Problem. That’s a market problem. The other problem that we found is that the field marketing brand ambassadors, they were college kids that were doing a gig for the weekend.
Sebastian Jimenez: They were not full time employees. So every time that they would use Rilla was their first time of using Rilla. So it was impossible to get retention impossible because every time that they were using Rilla, they were like, Oh my God, what is this recording? And we could never get over that hump because it always was the first time that they were using Rilla.
Sebastian Jimenez: So then we thought, okay. We need to find a different markets that has more insightful conversations, less noisy conversations that make a little bit more sense where the people are full time employees. And that’s what’s January, 2020. We went to retail because retail and we tested out in retail. It worked.
Sebastian Jimenez: The retail conversations are way more insightful. They, [00:57:00] uh, They actually provide us a lot of instance, because you’re talking at length about what you want to buy, what you want, what you need, the features of the product, all these different things, but in retail, first problem is we launched in January 2020 with non essential New York retailers.
Sebastian Jimenez: So that’s going, yeah. So COVID came kind of, uh, was difficult. We didn’t pivot out of retail because of COVID. We pivoted because we realized in retail, the margins are way lower. So a product like this, it actually requires significant costs at the time, back in 2020, we had already started to process these guys.
Sebastian Jimenez: It wasn’t just us manually listening to the audio, like we used to before. It was us trying to build the AI that could actually do this. And what we realized is that the cost, there’s a marginal cost of processing these conversations, the audio, the transcription, the analytics and the natural language processing, it’s very expensive.
Sebastian Jimenez: And the margins that the retailers, like the price that the retailers are willing to pay. Was not enough to cover the marginal cost. Right? Because when we realized, like, if you go to a retail store. There’s a lot of value in all the conversations on aggregate, but the value per conversation per [00:58:00] capita, like the value per capita of a single conversation is not that much to justify, but it costs you the same money to transcribe it.
Sebastian Jimenez: And so we were like, okay, we need to hide, find higher margin industries where the microphone is easier to set up because in retail, the other problem was the microphone. Imagine you walk into a Zara store and you talk to the sales associate at the Zara store. And then, you know, you, you talk to them, you go change, you come out, you talk to somebody else.
Sebastian Jimenez: It’s very difficult to keep track of the conversation, right? Yeah, because you’re talking to so many different people and then the microphone, where do you put the microphone to capture? This is very difficult. It was a very difficult problem. We were like, okay, what if we find a market that has a better microphone set up?
Sebastian Jimenez: Uh, that is very clear, it has a clear beginning and a clear end to the conversation and and and the employees and their higher margin sales or higher margin services, uh, and at a higher ticket. And that’s when we started going into field sales, right? So, so we, and we, every single time that we would launch in a market, we would look at the product problems and we will look at the market problems.
Sebastian Jimenez: And we would say, is there a market that kind of solves these market constraints that we have right now? And every [00:59:00] time we would launch in a new market, we had, we would solve the previous constraints, but we would buy new ones. And then we were like, okay, we literally tested 17 different market verticals before we landed on home improvement on the virtual ride along use case before the vision was still the same.
Sebastian Jimenez: The vision is still the same as the beginning, but the original use case, wow, it changed so many times because. We were trying to, to find that product market fit. And when we found product market fit with the virtual ride along use case, oh my God, that’s when things just started. Well, we started selling in 2022 and we went from like zero to eight figures and we became one of the fastest growing companies in the, in the, in the world right now and, and, and in, in the history of, of company.
Sebastian Jimenez: So, but that’s because we, we were very meticulous about finding the right market at the right time and the right use case for this type of product.
Wyatt Smith: What was the first home improvement company you deployed with?
Sebastian Jimenez: Uh, storm guard roofing company, uh, storm guard roofing company was the Home improvement company that we launched with.
Sebastian Jimenez: I did not know. I’ve been living in New York all my time in America, man. I did not know. I remember going to my first roofing conference and people were just like shingles, this shingles that. And I’m like, what the hell are these people talking? I don’t want your shingles, man. [01:00:00] Is this like a medical conference?
Sebastian Jimenez: Are these people sick? What are they talking about? You know, it was like a shingle, right? And then, and I, I launched with, and we launched with them. That was the first time that we knew that there was market pull. Because I talked to, I remember talking to chat Arnold, he was this manager. He was a sales manager for the storm guard roofing in Appalachia.
Sebastian Jimenez: And I asked chat chat, how did it go your 1st week of using? And I knew already that there was something because we reached out to them on a Monday. They got back to us on a Tuesday. They bought on a Wednesday by the next Wednesday. We already had a case study with them and we had never seen that with any other vertical.
Sebastian Jimenez: We had never seen that with any other vertical that we launched with. And when I talked to Chad the following Wednesday, I said, Chad, how did it go? Your first week of using real chat said last week’s about, I’ve never in my, in my 10 years of being in sales management, I’ve never seen a tool to save me so much time.
Sebastian Jimenez: I said, why? He goes last week, I went on, I don’t know what on one ride along with one guy today, I was able to coach all my six guys. And I said, okay, that’s a six times improvement. And he goes, no, no, no. Last week it took me, uh, six hours to go on [01:01:00] one, right. On, on, on, on two appointments with this one guy today with real, I was able to watch everybody’s two appointments.
Sebastian Jimenez: So like, uh, it’s 12 appointments total. I was able to see all their analytics. I was able to do this in less than 50 minutes. So we went from six hours to less than 50 minutes from one person to six, we’re talking about a 30 to 40 times improvement in the productivity of a sales manager. Even when we were starting our product, that’s when I realized we had something big.
Sebastian Jimenez: And then we started growing in roofing. Um, and then we came into home services. Uh, our first home service company was Dave Geiger with a preferred home services. Uh, Dave is the founder of Verizon services and he was the one who brought us into home services at the end of 2020.
Wyatt Smith: That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s awesome.
Wyatt Smith: I think certainly we serve a lot of home service companies at UpSmith and one of the learnings I’ve, I’ve had from that is around. You know, there’s a real big challenge on motivation that is tied to like, what kind of recognition you’re offered? And, um, are you, are you given feedback at all? And these companies are like highly chaotic sometimes because there’s so many things happening at [01:02:00] the management team.
Wyatt Smith: And so I’m curious when you’ve seen places where the adoption was really great, like what were the things that were true about that? It rolls out.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. Great RILA is a, a, uh, Realize a naturally contentious product, not even product is a naturally contentious concept, and you’re literally recording people, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: So people don’t like that naturally. They don’t like that. And then by people, I mean technicians, uh, customers, consumers, they don’t care, consumers are totally fine with it. In fact, We actually saw, we were surprised by this. Most consumer interactions between homeowners and, and, uh, home service companies is usually a female homeowner interacting with a male technician, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: That’s most interactions in home services, female homeowners actually. Cause we have customers who literally tell their homeowners, Hey, we’re recording this meeting for quality and training purpose. Like literally they say it like that. And, and it’s, and you, you kind of hear the interaction. It’s like, and it’s almost like a relief.
Sebastian Jimenez: For the female home. It’s like, oh my God,
Wyatt Smith: I’m glad that it’s
Sebastian Jimenez: been so, yeah, because I’m [01:03:00] not, I’m not just alone with this man in my house. You know what I mean? Like, this is a company that’s doing their service, you know what I mean? Like, I feel comfortable. So the consumers actually, you know, either they don’t care or they actually appreciate it.
Sebastian Jimenez: Like 99% of the time, of course there’s gonna be, it’s kinda like the call center. People already kind of assume it. Technicians don’t like this product at first. They do not like this, uh, at first. Um, and so Real is a very naturally contentious product. So, so the biggest problems in implementation come from, like, how can you get your team on board this idea that we’re going to be recording every single interaction?
Sebastian Jimenez: It’s kind of similar to when you do the samsara cameras, where you put them on the trucks and people don’t like the, you know what I mean? There’s always friction. This one’s more friction because you’re, you’re recording the interaction at home and you’re saying things. It’s not just you’re driving. So it’s like, very contentious at the beginning.
Sebastian Jimenez: And so what we’ve seen from the people who implemented the best. Before they implement RILA, they just have great cultures. They have great team cultures where they’re super transparent. The man, the technicians trust their managers, the technicians trust their managers. So when they say important, this is a tool that is, that we [01:04:00] want this really.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. So I mean, this is, I see real as like a very difficult pill to swallow. That’s going to make you so much better at the beginning, right? Because after five recordings, people lose a fear completely. And then they started loving that we literally have testimonials of Um, what happens is They just get on it.
Sebastian Jimenez: They absolutely hate. Here’s what happened. I’m just going to give you the debrief. Top performers absolutely hate RILA at the beginning. They don’t like it. Top performers. Top performers do not like RILA. Because RILA is by design. It’s literally designed to figure out what the top performers are doing and share it with everybody else.
Sebastian Jimenez: That’s how RILA coaches people. It literally says, top performers are doing this and that. You do the same. So you can be like, top performers do not like that. So they hate it. People in the middle, they’re, they’re, uh, slightly concerned. And the people at the bottom and people who are new, they embrace it faster than anybody because if you’re new, you have no expectations that it’s like, oh, this is what we do.
Sebastian Jimenez: And if you’re at the bottom, you can, you are going to take any help that you can get right? Because you don’t want to get fired and you want to really improve because you want to be successful. And so the people at the bottom, people who are new, they get on it. 5 recordings, they lose the fear [01:05:00] completely because it’s, it’s called the Hawthorne effect.
Sebastian Jimenez: When, when you know, you’re being recorded or reviewed or studied, or you’re speaking in public and people are watching fight or flight number 1, fear of people as being public speaking. Right? And so fight or flight kicks in. But after you get exposed enough, your brain cannot stay in fight or flight for that long.
Sebastian Jimenez: So it burns out and the Hawthorne effect goes away after a few hours. Interesting. Same thing with the recording. You record 5 times. This is a magic. It was like, record 5 times fear goes away. You forget that it’s even there became second nature. And then what happens then is the bottom performers and the new performers, they start improving and they start coming up in the leaderboard in the first month, always 30%, 50%, a hundred percent improvements.
Sebastian Jimenez: And when that happened, because they have a supercomputer in their pocket installing them exactly what to do and what not to do, and they have a coach that’s coaching them every single day. When that happens, the top performers, they, the one thing they fear more than not be that, then, then, then, then the recording is not being the top performers anymore.
Sebastian Jimenez: And then they get on board. And then after a quarter of being on really the top performers actually become the most power users [01:06:00] because they’re naturally the people who want to, they’re naturally the people that are going to go in and listen to all the recordings that they’re going to look at all the data.
Sebastian Jimenez: And they’re going to try to improve every single day because of performers. And so what we’ve seen this period of friction, which is in the first month, in the first two months, And we usually get over it. I mean, our retention is like insanely high, uh, uh, uh, over 95 percent local retention after a year, uh, over 150 percent net revenue retention.
Sebastian Jimenez: So it’s like our retention is really good, but, uh, it’s just a matter of like how much friction is there in the beginning month and two months is usually what the difference between the best companies and the, and the ones that are not. Uh, that don’t implement it as well. The difference within the companies that have the least friction and the ones that have the most is the internal culture of the team before launching Rella, if there’s an insane degree of trust with the sales managers and with the service managers that we’re like, Hey, when they tell me that they, they want to give me this tool so that I can improve and I believe them, if you believe them, then it’s like, there’s everything I just said, there’s usually no hate, [01:07:00] there’s usually no fear.
Sebastian Jimenez: There’s usually no hate. It’s just like, it’s like, Oh, okay. You know, I trust Mike, Mike is not going to do wrong by me. He’s my manager, my guy, you know, so I’m going to, I’m going to get on this. And, and, and, and it is true that you do get better. And so, so, um, yeah, so, so that’s what it’s internal team culture, I would say is the biggest difference.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. I think, um, finding ways to help people be successful whenever they’re trying something new, it’s such an important insight and for a lot of people that new to home services or skilled trades generally. The thing that separates the winners and those that are struggle is often interpersonal.
Wyatt Smith: Yes. So having a chance to get coached on how to be better in a person. Oh, my God.
Sebastian Jimenez: Like there’s so many. Because of this nature of the product that is a contentious product where only the bottom performers and the new performers get on at first, like the amount of stories that I’ve heard from technicians who were literally thinking about quitting the whole profession and quitting their career because, you know, it’s usually younger, like the people that get into the [01:08:00] trades who are new, they’re usually very young,
Wyatt Smith: you
Sebastian Jimenez: know, they’re getting out of college, they’re going into trade school, they get They get the whole thing, which is true, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: Like, Hey, you could literally pursue the American dream. You can get your license. You can make really good money, more money than all of your friends were going to college with worthless degrees like that. All of that is true. Only if you make it past this like critical 180 days,
Wyatt Smith: those six
Sebastian Jimenez: months. How can you make it pass?
Sebastian Jimenez: How can you make it pass in the amount of people who would be amazing? And even some of the top performers, you talk to them. They, they all have stories of somebody, some somewhere along the line in their story kind of gave them that push that they needed or gave them the feedback or gave them the time, believe them, them enough that they could do it.
Sebastian Jimenez: And they kind of went through and they got through that, through that little hump. And so. Uh, realist, just it’s, it’s not doing anything different. It’s just making it more likely that that happens because you’re getting more interactions with your coach. You’re getting more time. You’re, you’re, you’re just getting more coding, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: And so, um, the amount of [01:09:00] stories that we’ve heard from people saying, like, I was about to quit. I was, I was closing 10 percent of the time I was not making money. I was, I was like, I don’t know what I was going to do. I got on this and not our customers share these stories with us. It’s like, like almost like that’s, that’s what we, that’s why we exist as a company for that, because they share these stories of people who bought their, their, their first house, because they now got to a point where they actually doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
Sebastian Jimenez: They got really close to the top performers. Now they, they bought their first car, they paid off their loans. It’s like, That is that that’s, you know, you talk about the ride along with solving that particular problem, but the ripple effects of that, man, that that’s,
Wyatt Smith: yeah, that’s real impact. Yeah. Yeah. Real impact.
Wyatt Smith: Um, I’m grateful to have you aboard. I can talk to you all day long, right? I think we have a shared mission about impacting people with the work we’re doing with technology. Um, a couple of quick lightning round questions. Yeah. Wrap it up. You shared a number of book recommendations of people through history who’ve done important things.
Wyatt Smith: What’s a book that you’ve read that changed your behavior?
Sebastian Jimenez: Uh, [01:10:00] That changed my behavior every month, every book, uh, uh, blow the psychology of optimal experience. I say that one because I just read it, but there’s a bunch of others in business crossing the chasm. Uh, Walt Disney changed my behavior, how the biography, the triumph of the American imagination.
Sebastian Jimenez: But the most recent one I read was flow the psychology of optimal experience.
Wyatt Smith: Okay.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. We’ll put that in the
Wyatt Smith: show notes.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. People to check out. It made me much more. The main thing that I learned from the book and how it changed my behavior is that people. You can actually measure the span of a human lifetime in terms of like bits of information processed and the span of a human lifetime.
Sebastian Jimenez: It’s, you can process in like, maybe like 80 years of life, 185 billion bits of information. And when you’re in the flow, it’s because you’re using your entire brain capacity at that particular time. And most people, they’re not in the flow most of the time. So they’re not using the most amount of the processing power that their brain has.
Sebastian Jimenez: So the 185 billion bits of information, they are only processing like [01:11:00] 20 billion bits of information. Yeah, so you’ll that’s what you’ll meet, like people that are 25 years old who feel who it feels like they’ve lived, like, you know, 3 lifetimes already with all the experiences. And it’s like, so if you look at it, bits of information, um, and you realize how much time you waste watching TV, which is not using most of your brain power, it’s actually very or scrolling through social media.
Sebastian Jimenez: Um, you actually see like, holy crap, I’m like actually wasting my life doing these things that are not in the flow. So reading that book made me, um, it made me believe that the, the, one of the main purposes of human life is to try to be in the flow as much as possible so that you can actually maximize your time in this, in this, in this world.
Sebastian Jimenez: And so I started doing things much differently since I read that book. It’s important insight.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah. Yeah. If you could go back in time and give advice to your younger self, what would you tell them?
Sebastian Jimenez: I would say. Um, I say 2 things start doing stand up comedy earlier, even in the, and then the 2nd thing I would say.
Sebastian Jimenez: Um, uh, the most [01:12:00] important thing when you’re starting a business is the people that you do it with. Um, yeah. And so my first company, I, I, I made mistakes with the people that I worked with before. And so, yeah, I would tell them that they won’t be watching one of my top three screw ups. I say, like, I worked with the wrong people.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah. Yeah. Fix that problem.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. Yeah.
Wyatt Smith: And, uh, my last question for you, what are ways that our listeners could be helpful to you right now? Um, what would be a thing that would be.
Sebastian Jimenez: Uh, yeah, so if you, uh, are a home service contractor and you’re looking to level up your coaching and, uh, your training for your techs and your comfort advisors, uh, go to Rilla.
Sebastian Jimenez: com, R I L L A. com and check us out. Uh, we have, we also have a podcast. It’s called the Rilla Labs. It’s kind of like, uh, Huberman Labs, but we try to unpack the science of, of, of selling. We have a YouTube channel. We Uh, at real media, you can find us there and if not on Spotify, the real labs. Uh, and, uh, yeah.
Sebastian Jimenez: And we’re also, if you’re a, an engineer or if you’re in tech, we are hiring [01:13:00] a bunch of people, uh, we’re based in New York. So if you’re, if you want to work with one of the fastest growing companies in the world right now, and you’re down to move to New York city, we’ll help you with relocation and everything.
Sebastian Jimenez: And so, yeah. Uh, come give us a shout out. It’s a Rilla. com slash careers.
Wyatt Smith: Awesome. Sebastian. Thank you for coming aboard. Thank you, man. This was fun. We’ll get you next time on I’m tapped for those. But
