High Agency

Jay Giraud 00:00

I can make a compelling argument that that technology is peaking, and that sounds weird because I know it's going to keep going, and there will probably be new explosive areas that become bubbles like the way AI has and before that self-driving cars and before that telematics and before that smartphones and so on. You actually can plot a chart for technology and if you know enough about the LEGO pieces you can predict where it's going. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 00:27

Welcome to High Agency, igniting conversations with inspiring people, leading transformative change. This episode is going to be a little on the nose. This podcast is called High Agency After All, and we're going to be talking mostly about cultivating and being High Agency. High Agency means taking initiative and responsibility to shape your own life and circumstances, rather than passively accepting them.It's this ability to identify what needs to be done, and then taking the action to make it happen, even when faced with obstacles or ambiguity. It's the idea that life is something you create. It's not something that happens to you. And guess what? Founders tend to have High Agency. Not all, but almost all. And people that are High Agency are 2.6 times more likely to start multiple companies, regardless of whether the first venture succeeds or fails. And it's not about avoiding failure. In fact, today's guest nearly ran out of money multiple times, building five different companies. It's about seeing the opportunity where others see obstacles, despite the potential downsides. And it was during a trip to Indonesia, while others might have been complaining about dangerous gas-guzzling motorcycles that were choking the streets, Jay Giraud envisioned something different. Intelligent electric machines that could transform how billions move through the world. And that observation sparked Damon Motorcycles, his quest to revolutionize an industry that kills more people annually than malaria. From coffee shop manager, to pro snowboarder, to raising almost $200 million and taking companies public, Jay's journey defies the neatly organized origin stories of the founder with a dream. And we're going to explore how adversity forges entrepreneurs, why so many startups fail by solving the wrong problems, and what it really means to have the audacity to do the opposite of what's expected. So please welcome serial entrepreneur, inventor, and High Agency poster child, Jay Giraud. Jay, welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. No, I'm really happy to have you here. You had a pretty fascinating life, I think. We're going to get into it. But I want to start with the early life, because I feel like that's always a good place to learn what somebody's about, you know, what motivates them, what their drivers were. And you build multiple companies, you raise a lot of capital. And you mentioned earlier when we're chatting before this podcast, that you're finding yourself on this sort of transitional path. And you're looking to potentially launch in multiple different directions. But I want to start from like the first direction of Jay Giraud, young guy, just entering the world, trying to make things happen. And I want to maybe even start from your first job. You mentioned you were a coffee shop manager. And was that the first job? What came before? Where did you grow up? 

‍

Jay Giraud 03:36

So I grew up in North Vancouver in a little area called Lynn Valley. And I guess my teen years were the late eighties, early nineties and a pretty rough, sounds ridiculous to talk about North Vancouver as a rough place in comparison, I guess, but Lynn Valley was pretty, pretty rough. North Van was a pretty rough place, sixties, seventies and eighties. Uh, and, uh, so yeah, grew up there.

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 04:04

Ha. Define rough a little bit. 

‍

Jay Giraud 04:05

Well, I guess because Canadians aren't allowed to have guns, the street fights are a lot more nasty. It's just like whatever you can get your hands on. So that kind of rough. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 04:17

Wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, I mean, I don't think we have many of those associations with North Vancouver. 

‍

Jay Giraud 04:23

Not at all. I prepared my kids who are now with both teenagers for like high school and they're like, what are you talking about? And they cannot relate. There's no bullying anymore. They've gotten rid of bullying in high schools, which blows my mind for the most part. I'm sure it still happens now and then, let alone street fights and incredible amounts of drug use and loose kids all over the streets with no parents and all of that that I grew up with. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 04:46

So yeah, it was pretty rough. Yeah, I mean, my neighbourhood wasn't that rough, but I think there was, you know, we're from the same generation.I think there was appreciation for being a little bit more, like, feral, I guess, you know, in those years. Yeah, it's good to be feral. Yeah. 

‍

Jay Giraud 04:59

You learn a lot about yourself. It doesn't exist as much as- You don't get to be feral when you're being helicoptered. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 05:03

So, as a feral child in North Vancouver, going into your teens, you find yourself managing a coffee shop at one point. 

‍

Jay Giraud 05:15

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I guess I was hungry for freedom and independence from a pretty young age, and so I was, you know, delivering newspapers, several newspaper routes in a seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 years old, um, in the middle of like grade 10, I had, I had three part-time jobs during high school in grade 10. Um, and you know, I was making cinnamon rolls when I was 14. And by the time I was running out of coffee shop, I was probably on like job number 10 at that point. And so that was 18. So I dropped out of high school in grade 11, um, because I was very clear that nobody in my class wanted to learn anything and it was so out of control in every classroom that it was a waste of time and I will fight that point tooth and nail today, as I did at 17 years old, that it was at no point being in high school because there was nothing to learn when nobody was calm and quiet and the teachers had no control.My mom didn't understand that. So she threw me out and that forced me to turn my three part-time jobs into one job. So I ended up, um, running a, uh, what do you call it? Running a grocery store, uh, at night, the foreman quit the night, the night crew foreman who was like 45 years old, he quit suddenly and made me the foreman. So on minimum wage, I had to manage three people older than me. They were in their thirties and I was 17 and unload semis full of groceries and get them on the shelves between 10 PM and 6 AM. And then go to a gas station and work from there for eight, six hours after that. Um, that's how I, you know, went from out of high school to off the streets. Cause I was on the streets for a little while to getting my shit together at 17. And that was before the coffee shop job. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 07:00

I mean, I was about to ask you why so much work, but I guess that kind of answers it right it was for survival. Yeah 

‍

Jay Giraud 07:06

Yeah, well, I mean, even before I was living on my own, I just, yeah, I think I wanted a car. I wanted to get away, and as soon as I had a car, I wasn't home for two months.It was amazing. It was a great summer. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 07:19

Yeah. And, you know, unfortunately, and I hope you don't mind me getting into this, it sounds like your mom wasn't exactly understanding what the school situation was, but for what you're describing now about what Lynn Valley was then, I imagine if it's such a rough place, then the school is probably just going to be a microcosm of that. 

‍

Jay Giraud 07:37

Totally, it's just a concentration for all the problems that the streets have and you're better off not being there so but my mom she uh She had me and my older brother at the age of 16 and 19. So she had to drop out of high school So for so she didn't get to finish high school So, you know, I didn't contemplate this at that moment, but that was a big deal So she had worked her literal ass off to have us be at school and for me to throw that away She lost the plot. Yeah Understandably, yeah

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 08:06

Yeah fair enough. What I'm curious about though is like how did you know it was supposed to be different?Like if everybody in class is like making a ruckus and it's mostly just like you know fighting and like acting out like why weren't you one of those? 

‍

Jay Giraud 08:24

Hmm, because I don't know. I mean, I didn't really like high school very much, you know, everyone knows grade eight, nine and 10 don't count. So when, once I was in grade 11, I'm like, okay, I actually have to try now. And so it was the first time I was going from C's to like A's and B's and it's actually trying, but the rest of the class still wasn't so, um, yeah, I just like, okay, I'm not going to get good grades here. This is more importantly, it's a waste of time. I just concluded it was a waste of time.Um, and I could go to adult night school and I was around a group of people who, you know, were already in alternative schools and adult night schools. So when I dropped out and I got the full-time job, I converted one of my part-time jobs to that graveyard job. Um, the following semester, I enrolled myself in adult night school to get my grade 12. So I was, I had two jobs plus adult night school and it was night and day. I mean, everybody at all night school was over 20, they're 20 to 30 years old. They were foreigners. They needed to get their GED or whatever. So they were going to get going three hour long classes. And yeah, they like, everybody was quiet and it became a lot more enjoyable to be in an environment around other people that actually wanted to learn something. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 09:28

And then at some point, um, you know, you, you went through these multiple jobs, this sort of period of survival, uh, where do things kind of level off for you where you were able to say, okay, it's not just survival. I bought the car, I've got a couple of things under me and now I want to kind of decide what to do next. When, when did that start showing up? 

‍

Jay Giraud 09:47

Well, I was, I was making my rounds with different jobs inside of a mall. And when you work in a mall, you get to know all the, all the managers of all the other stores. So I kind of was hopping from one store to another until I got to this coffee shop and, uh, and they wanted me to manage the location. Um, I don't know why they just needed a manager and they trained me on that. So you're literally like filling in paper ledgers when at the end of every day and handwriting check for ledgers and the paper ledgers and doing the calculator to figure out how much CPP you got to take off their paychecks and all that, um, and ordering supplies and bagels and coffee and all that kind of thing. And I got good at it. Like I really enjoyed it. Um, I enjoyed it so much that I lost track of what my plan was.Cause when I was 14, I started snowboarding and this was like before, you know, some of the mountains didn't even allow snowboarders at this, at this point. It was so early, but by 16, me and my best friend were committed to moving to Whistler, um, after high school to become pro snowboarders. So we wanted to chase the dream of being pro riders. So like a year or so into running this coffee shop at one day, I was standing on a road in the middle of the winter, looking up in the mountains covered in fresh snow, and it hit me that I'd forgotten about my plan. So I promptly quit all my jobs and made a plan to move to Whistler. And I got hired at Starbucks and moved from the managing the coffee shop, um, to taking that experience to Starbucks. Cause they had a location at Whistler. This is the early nineties. So like, or mid nineties. Um, so Starbucks wasn't a giant thing yet. Yeah. But, um, I thought I bet I could get transferred in that way. Just have a soft landing in Whistler. So I did that. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 11:19

And the pro snowboarding, even before them though, there was, you know, some recognition cause I don't think, I don't think, you know, maybe there's just too much humility here, Jay, but when you're like, Oh, I don't know. They just needed a manager.I mean, they obviously saw something in you. Yeah, that was 18. 

‍

Jay Giraud 11:35

Yeah. Oh, you know what? It's probably because I'd already been managing a crew of adults at the grocery store. So I had some management experience, I guess, at that point. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 11:45

Yeah. And then at some point, though, somebody recognized something in the young Jejiro and said, we want to send this guy to Anthony Robbins. Oh, yeah, yeah. 

‍

Jay Giraud 11:54

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that coffee shop chain, they were called Roastmasters. And there's still one in North Vancouver, one of the very first. And they wanted to rival Starbucks and they were roasting organic coffee on site, which I loved.We're air-roasting organic coffee. That was the differentiator. Starbucks wasn't giant yet, like I said. It was big, but it wasn't giant. And so this guy really just wanted to train me for some reason. He kind of like had a thing for self-development and that was kind of a newfangled thing in the mid-90s. And Anthony Robbins was young, you know, getting big. And he sent me to this three-day course here at BC Place, you know, with Anthony Robbins and walking over coals and all that kind of shit. Hot coals. And yeah, so I did that. He also put me to like this memory seminar and he was paying for me to go to these things. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 12:45

I mean, the reason why I focus in on that is because, I mean, I think these are kind of odd business decisions, right? When you have a small coffee shop and you have an 18 year old running the place.Yeah. I mean, that seems to be a lot of like, I didn't think it was weird then I was just cool with it. Like somebody's taking an interest. Yeah. But that's a lot of investment into professional development for that role. 

‍

Jay Giraud 13:06

I think it was like three grand that that Tony Robbins thing at the time. It wasn't cheap It was more than I was being paid a lot more 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 13:13

So yeah, and did any of that experience factor into you looking up the mountain one day and being like, Oh shit, I forgot about this and I want to, I want to get back on the mountain. 

‍

Jay Giraud 13:26

I guess I just took it for what it was and did it, enjoyed it. And that definitely set me on a course of self-development.I started reading all the Tony Robbins books and buying kind of the peripheral books, the seven habits of highly successful people and the road less traveled and all that, all those things that were, I don't know if you'd know those books, but they were all big back then, Tim Collins and everybody. And so I was kind of gobbling those up as I was now chasing my dream and Whistler to get, you know, to be a pro rider, to get sponsors. And when I applied to Whistler Blackcomb, it was, well, it was Blackcomb at the time, to the, the Snowboard School Manager, I told him I wanted to compete in the Olympics and the Olympics was still forthcoming, the very first Olympics. And, and I'd also taken all the, well, actually kind of designed the Snowboard Freestyle Coaching Program in Canada with CASI, which is the organization in Canada. So me and the guy that ran CASI designed the first Freestyle Snowboard Coaching Program, which goes beyond like the level two instruction. And so I kind of told the Snowboard instructor that, and instead of being put on the bottom teaching beginners, he put me on the top coaching Freestyle Snowboard Youth. And so for the next three years on weekends, instead of, you know, dealing with people falling on the bunny hill, we were all over British Columbia doing competitions and, you know, in the back country and building jumps and, you know, sessioning in the half pipe. And I got paid to ride. It was pretty awesome. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 14:50

And then why'd you stop? I mean it sounds like a huge caution area. 

‍

Jay Giraud 14:55

Yeah, uh, um, from about night, well, 20 to 26, 27. So I amassed out of my peak, I'm asked, I'm asked 11 sponsors, um, started making some money in, you know, getting in cover of magazines and into videos and that kind of media coverage is kind of how we paid for our way.And they, they pay for me to go to some trips and flight costs and all that kind of thing. Um, and I was kind of known as the cat among people in Whistler, because if you throw a cat in the air and it looks bad, they're scrambling and everything. They still somehow land on their feet. So even if things didn't go well off the lip of the jump, I somehow would always land on my feet. Um, you know, until I wasn't until, you know, not enough maintenance of the body and things that don't stretch properly and suddenly you're not landing on your feet and you start getting some injuries and those injuries started to compound. So by 26, 27, it was, um, not like I had a peak of about two and a half years, three years. Uh, the big one was a knee injury that resulted in a surgery, but it took a year and a half for them to properly diagnose it. So for a year and a half, I kept trying to go back into competition and I would have a, I would have another recurring injury of a, didn't know I had a fully torn ligament, so when you land on your feet, but not perfectly, you're, you're collapsing. Um, and so there was a year and a half of just trying to get back on my feet, uh, figuratively speaking in the pro arena. And I wasn't able to until I finally got that surgery. And at that point, like a lot of time had passed and kind of just lost my ranking. So. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 16:22

Nothing lasts forever. Yeah, fair enough. I mean, especially something that takes, I mean, such a toll on your body, right? Because it's pretty hard on the body.Yeah. Been working on it for 30 years since. I mean, and you were pretty early days because, like, snowboarding had just kind of exploded on the scene, and then suddenly there was Olympics coverage. Yeah. I forget the guy's name, but there was, like, a very famous snowboarder from here. There was, like, a whole lot of famous snowboarders from here, but it was the one with, like, the pot scandal. 

‍

Jay Giraud 16:51

Oh, Ross Robagliotti. So he was a racer. Okay, he was a racer. It's a different category altogether, and racing never blew up. There were no racing celebrities probably other than him.Maybe as much because of the Olympics as because of the pot. It was entirely because of the pot scandal, for sure. I don't know. Racing's cool, but racing is... I don't know if anyone even races snowboards anymore other than border cross. This was Gates. Gates was a thing very temporarily, which was really borrowed from skiing. That's not what snowboarding's about. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 17:19

So you've you're in your what mid late 20s now you've beat the shit out of your body sufficiently yeah you're like okay let's try to do something else yeah and you know what what was motivating you at the time what were you looking at

‍

Jay Giraud 17:35

So I've recently, like, I don't know, two days ago, put up a post on my Instagram that I've just completed my second chapter in my life. And so at the transition from snowboarding to what was next was the end of my first chapter. I didn't call it that then, but I do now. I do see now my life. So that was the end of my first chapter.Snowboarding was a chapter. And, um, and at the end of that, I ended up building a women's snowboard clothing company with an ex-girlfriend, which if anybody's listening and wants to know if that's a good idea, it's not like when you got all that past tension, don't build a business with an ex. Um, but we thought it was a good idea and we ended up getting all these women on board as sponsored athletes and skiing, mountain biking, and snowboarding that all ended up winning gold medals a few years later, uh, like all of them. So we had this incredible roster of like soon to become huge talent. Wow. Um, and we had great, I think we had great product. We had a great brand. Uh, we just didn't know what the hell we were doing. And the startup perspective, and we had a lot of tension that was definitely problematic. So we ran a clothing company for a few years making women's, uh, snowboard clothing, well, action sports clothing. And the distinction was that women were wearing men's snowboard clothing because it was way higher quality. And all the women's snowboard clothing was always made cheap. Didn't have the good waterproofing. Didn't have good designs. So any really good rider in the, in snowboarding or skiing was wearing men's clothing. So we kind of took that and designed really high quality gear. Um, got it into a number of stores around, you know, Canada and the US. And, uh, eventually that died and, uh, it wasn't until I took the landmark forum in 2005, which was kind of the next phase of my self-development. Um, that really, really set me into a different direction in life. So I guess honestly, gauge clothing was kind of the wrap up of that first chapter. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 19:24

Got it. And that few years. And that died because of Mark. 

‍

Jay Giraud 19:27

change or you guys just couldn't? Oh, we ran out of money. Yeah. And we weren't raising, we were just doing credit cards and lines of credit and we didn't raise outside capital.Wow. Yeah. It was, yeah. And this was kind of pre, you couldn't sell stuff online yet. This was like O2. So, there was no social media yet. And so you're still packing up, you know, $12,000 worth of samples and driving from store to store trying to land dealers. And so it was, it was hard. So clothing is way easier to sell now than it was back in the back. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 19:57

Oh, yeah, and that's why we have explosion of micro brands and totally the rest of it.Yeah Um, I mean it's interesting what you said about chapters So like looking back you can now kind of label the chapters So you went through the landmark form and it wasn't apparent to you at the time But was it pretty soon after that that you were starting chapter 2? 

‍

Jay Giraud 20:17

Yeah, probably. I wouldn't have called it a chapter, but yeah, yeah, it was definitely a big change. So at the end of doing a couple of courses in landmark education, I realized that what I really wanted to do was to help make the world a better place by getting the world of vehicles to go from gas to electric. And I actually really hated cars and thought that they're really inefficient and they don't make sense. And, you know, you're moving around five to six thousand pounds to move one person. It's just, you know, the rest of the world actually doesn't work that way, which we'll get to. But I wanted cars to be electric and I realized that they could be electric now, that there was no reason why they couldn't. And this is before Elon was in Tesla, but the true founders of Tesla, they too understood this. They were using existing technology to make cars electric, meant to make their car electric. So that led me to founding rev technologies, making electric SUVs and pickups.And I was at the time selling cars because I was selling motorbikes for about two years and I was very, very good at it. And I went to sell the cars because I was told to make more money and I was miserable, like migraine headaches are four months straight and I'd never had headaches before. How is the vendor for people buy motorbikes because they want to people buy cars because they have to. So you're selling a passion versus selling a need. And when you're selling when you're 20, I don't know what I was 28, 29, trying to explain to somebody why this is better for their babies. And you're a single dude, you know, I don't get a shit about the seat locks for the restraints for the baby carrier at 29 years old. So pretty hard to be passionate about it. Yeah. Not the most authentic experience. No, it wasn't exactly. And everyone's always said to me my entire life that I can sell anything. And the truth is I can only sell what I really care about. And I know some people can sell anything. They just want to sell. I have to really care about what I'm selling. So purpose and passion matter to me.

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 22:11

So at that point, though, you recognize something, and you're like, OK, I want to change people's relationship to energy. I've been creeping you for a while in the lead up to the podcast. And so, but it's interesting that you recognize it at that point, because there's still a debate in some circles around EV or internal combustion engine.It's not a debate still. Yeah. And I was watching this interview with Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy. And he had this amazing way of kind of a thought experiment of kind of breaking that analysis and breaking that debate. Because he said, if one had been introduced before the other, how would you sell the other? So we have EVs. And now, sorry, we have internal combustion engine. We're trying to sell EVs. And we're debating the validity of EVs. He's like, what if EVs had come first? And somebody came along and said, you know that really clean thing that you drive that accelerates fast and moves well and does all these other things. Well, we want to replace it with this thing that is going to be churning out pollution, requires hundreds more moving parts and maintenance. So we have to set up supply chains in massive industries to just even maintain this thing and keep it going. It's going to provide a worse driving. Anyways, he was listed everything off. And he's like, would you be able to sell it? And it was like, actually, you wouldn't, right? So the only thing that's going to happen is-

‍

Jay Giraud 23:31

But you get to tinker on it and build it yourself and change it and mod it your own way. I mean, it would probably be a niche thing. It would be a very niche thing for people that wanna still tinker. And that's what it will be.I mean, you could still buy records, right? But it's a niche thing now. Very niche. It was mainstream, now it's niche. So I actually have concluded with technology and I find this pretty interesting. A lot, maybe not all technology, but a lot of technology never really dies. It just finds a place to continue to live in a niche. Like, okay, the horse-drawn plow is gone. Well, maybe not. But I would probably farm to still use the horse-drawn plow, to be honest. But then nothing really ever dies. It just kind of carries on in another place. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 24:12

Yeah. And so the, the only thing that internal combustion engines really have going for them beyond that is that they're, they're the incumbent, right?Right. And then comets are very hard to displace. Yeah. But you decided to try. 

‍

Jay Giraud 24:24

Yeah. Yeah, naivety goes a long way. Like it really does. I just spent an hour before this with a founder with a business in the mobility space, a hardware company. And he comes from urban planning, which was actually fascinating, because whenever you meet a startup or a founder, if they don't have a compelling why, and a compelling why now, and a unique insight that really explains the business that they're in, it's sure to die. But this person has no founder experience, no startup experience, no fundraising experience, he comes from urban planning, which is, you know, bureaucratic and governmental and structured and, you know, you check out a 430. Like this does not jive to the makeup of a founder. Yet, he's got a he's got a compelling thing that that he has unique perspective on, which is the way cities are made. And he's created a product that solves the problem of movement within cities. So I think he's actually got a really hot thing that will be really successful.So he's got the why and the why now. Yeah. Yeah. And so he's got all the naiveties what I'm getting at. Yeah. And that naivety allows him to move forward. If he knew what I know, if he knew what I if he if he could experience what I've experienced, I don't think he'd want to start a startup. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 25:41

There's a curse of knowledge that I think enters in when you have too much information sometimes, right? Or too much scar tissue.Yeah. I mean, we've had conversations on this couch as well where many people say, you know, if they knew everything, if they actually knew the landscape, they probably wouldn't even start because it's so overwhelming to- 

‍

Jay Giraud 25:57

to know all about it. Young naive men sign up to go to the army all the time and veterans don't. Well, yeah, naivety. Right?No veteran wants to go back into the army because now they know what it's like and they're like, oh my God, I don't want to do that. Yeah. I think startup life is brutal and if you knew how much you'd sacrifice and give up, it would not have any allure. So naivety is a beautiful thing. It allows us to go after big dreams. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 26:24

So how much of that naivety factored into like Rev or-? 

‍

Jay Giraud 26:31

Entirely. Yeah, um, you have an idea. So at some point between gauge clothing and ref technologies, I'd had so many business ideas, the startup ideas, and I'd seen quite a few of them come to life somewhere else in the world and be very successful. You get so sick and tired of kicking yourself for not chasing your own idea.Then you realized, you realize, I realized that if you get an inspired idea and you feel it, you know, when it's an inspired idea, cause you get excited, you start telling everybody and then it starts to sound crazy and it kind of fizzles out or you, you get intimidated by it or you don't know where to start. So these ideas kind of die off in our minds, but if you get the idea, it was given to you for a reason. And I don't know what you believe in or where your faith comes from, um, but it, it comes from something and it was given to you and it becomes your responsibility to bring that idea forth into the world. So, you know, what I'd have preferred to get a B2B SaaS idea, totally be a lot easier than building an electric vehicle company in Vancouver of all places. But that was my idea. And so I had to pursue it. And how'd that go? Good until it went bad. All right.So it didn't really go bad. It just, uh, I didn't ever raise venture capital for it, but we got our first customer in four months, which was the province of BC, converting Priuses to plug-in hybrid with a drive system that we purchased, but we still had to engineer it to fit in the Prius. Um, that was crazy. I don't, I didn't appreciate then how, how amazing that was to be in revenue in four months in an EV business. With a government contract. That's incredible.The government contract. And that led to a BC hydro contract right after that, uh, which led to a Burlington hydro contract in Ontario, which anyway, um, and with the, with that capital, I was able to immediately turn it over and invest in the development of, um, some, uh, Ford, Ford Rangers and Ford Escape that were totally electric with our own proprietary drive system that we developed that retrofitted the gas engine and transmission of an existing Ford vehicle that we did. We did Ranger and F-115 and Escape as prototypes that we actually commercialized the escape, which was an SUV. Um, should've been a pickup, but anyway, um, and found military and, um, and municipal and utility customers in the U S with a couple of prototypes that we then started to drive around all over the United States on the back of a trailer. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 28:56

That seems to me like you would very quickly and early done all the hard stuff, right? Like you're talking about actually having like the hardware figured out you had government contracts going you've got revenue figured out Why did it go badly? What like what happened? 

‍

Jay Giraud 29:10

So the revenue was great, but we thought we could get to a $50,000 price point for the package that would convert a customer's existing Ford Escapes from gas to electric. In reality, they were $180,000. So the market shrunk real fast.At 50 grand, I could have had hundreds of utility and municipal customers in North America. At 180 grand, everybody was buying one. Not everybody. A few were buying one. City of Santa Monica, Burlington Hydro, DOD. It was more like a conceptual storytelling thing? Well, they were using it as proof that they were doing something green. So there were green washing. And there was real intent. I think if they were more affordable, they'd want more than one. And they had these few higher income municipalities and utility companies were able to buy one and integrate it into their utility infrastructure, test time of day charging, test load. Things that they were predicting were going to be major problems if suddenly a whole bunch of EVs hit the markets, which took way longer than they thought. But that was the reason to buy one, more to buy four in the case of the DOD. So that was not scalable. There's nothing scalable about that. And the drive system worked, but it didn't work great. We needed tens of thousands of miles of data, probably hundreds of thousands of miles of data to work out all the bugs in the inverter and in the throttle mapping and these kinds of things that made it a reliable enough vehicle for people to buy tens or hundreds. So what we were doing was really in effect just not scalable. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 30:48

And pretty small customer base when people are only just buying them for the concept right yeah 180 grand yeah and so when and how did you decide to let it go when did you say okay you know we've we've done the ride and not viable

‍

Jay Giraud 31:01

Yeah, well, a lot changed between 2008 and 2012. So gas prices went through the roof in 08. We had peak gas prices in North America. And that was really wind on our backs, which was great.But in 2012, natural gas prices fell 15x in March of 2012. And so the kind of customer, municipal or fleet customer, who would turn a vehicle from gas to electric, well, they had already done hundreds of vehicles from gas to natural gas. So natural gas prices fell so much, it didn't make sense to blow five, six figures on an EV conversion when they could just blow four figures on a natural gas conversion. And their natural gas costs were way less than the conventional gas costs. So that kind of killed our market overnight. We'd also just gone through the mortgage crisis in 07, 08, 09. So a lot of municipalities were really, really struggling. And it just was very clear to me this wasn't scalable.And by 2012, we had China, the USA, and some other European countries committed to a million EVs on the road from actual manufacturers. So in 06, General Motors killed off the EV1, maybe it was a little earlier than that. But by 2012, there were something like 300 EV companies, including Tesla, Fisker, and a whole bunch of companies that we all know have died now and some that made it. So suddenly, converting cars from gas to electric just didn't make a lot of sense. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 32:28

All these companies were going to do it from the ground up. Exactly, with billions of dollars. Yeah, that's pretty good incentive, I'd say, to pack up and go home at that point, yeah. 

‍

Jay Giraud 32:38

What did you do next after that? So at the time, we were also integrating our EVs. So we had four on an army base in Hawaii. We had four in a test bed with a Pentagon in the Detroit area in Michigan. And they were actually being used as mobile battery banks.So we could see on a cloud interface that we built, we could see the energy stored in all the vehicles and the available capacity. We could feed that energy back into the market, into the wholesale power market to balance supply and demand. So it's called vehicle to grid. And that required telematics connection that we developed. So we had a cloud, we had the telematics connection, and we wanted to scale that, which was going to be largely a software play. So we were hacking into Chevy Volts and Nissan LEAFs, electric cars that were now available from dealers, and seeing how we could scale turning your car into a generator to back up your home or to absorb power from the roof. And that telematics platform, we then saw if your car in the driveway was internet connected, there's actually like 200 things you could do with that that were valuable. And this is going to need a scalable platform where anybody could build an app for any car. And that led to me founding Mojio. So I pivoted Rev to Mojio. I carried the software component from Rev to Mojio. I gave all my shareholders in Rev free stock in Mojio. And three months after killing Rev, Mojio was born.Yeah, it was a crazy pivot. Now, isn't that the SaaS platform you wanted, though? Yeah, Mojio is a SaaS platform. It's a hardware-enabled SaaS platform. So Mojio now is in nine countries around the world. And it's been running for 15, 13 years. I was the CEO, founder and CEO, for about five years. Took it through to Series B, raised, I don't know, 25, 30 million for it, and got it into a couple of wireless carriers and then brought Deutsche Telekom on as our Series A lead. We also brought in investment from Amazon and Microsoft and some incredible Bosch. And then T-Mobile came in as the first customer. Deutsche Telekom scaled it in seven countries in, or not seven, five or seven countries in Europe. Sounds like it was easy. Took four years to get product market fit and to get traction because there's so many things you could do with an internet-connected vehicle that, like, what's the beachhead use case? Yeah, actually, that was really, really hard to nail.

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 35:01

Yeah, I mean, hearing you describe it again, you know, this is hindsight, you're listing off countries and names of like, you know, massive like Fortune 500s. Yeah, we had so many.And getting to that fit, it sounds like it was probably one of those, you know, sounding like an overnight success story of, you're killing yourself for years. And then finally the thing clicks and it goes, yeah. But once the company found its footing and started growing, you mentioned that you were CEO for five years. 

‍

Jay Giraud 35:32

move on from there. So Deutsche Telekom led the Series A, and they wanted to grow hard in Europe. They loved it. I pitched the board members and the CEO and chairman. It was crazy that I got that opportunity.But six weeks later, we had a term sheet for the Series A, which, by the way, is a bad idea. We'll get to that in a second. But you don't always get competing term sheets you take as you get. It's that I run out of money. And Deutsche Telekom wanted to grow it hard in Europe, and that would require me to spend almost 50% of my time in Europe. And I had young kids here in Vancouver, so I just couldn't be away. So we wanted to find a growth CEO that would help scale it in Europe who was willing to spend time or had experience. So we found a guy who actually had worked with Vodafone in Europe for a number of years. So already had Telekom experience, understood the landscape, the way I sell to these kind of partners. And so he was the perfect guy to grow the company. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 36:21

And why is a term sheet in six weeks? Why is that such a bad idea? 

‍

Jay Giraud 36:25

No, there's another one with a term sheet in six minutes. So if you're raising money, you've got financial investors. Financial investors motive is to sell the company, right? Or take it public, right? So get a return.Strategic investors motive is almost never to sell the company. It's to benefit their existing business. So they don't really have motive to sell the company or to monetize their investment. So if it gets 5x or 100x return, you know, that's nice. But it's not why they're investing because that's just going to sit on their books anyways. So totally. So and in a series A, a lead will take 25, 35%, which is decision making, power and control. Whereas in a series B, a strategic might take 2 to 10%, which is not, you know, control. So once Deutsche Telekom came in, that in the series B that brought in Bosch, Trend Micro, Amazon again, BDC again, which is kind of a strategic for the government of Canada, T-Mobile, Telus Ventures, they all invested in the series B. So suddenly the company is ran, is invested in and controlled by a whole bunch of strategic investors who have no exit desires. So 13 years later, Mojo is still a private company, probably should have gone public by now or been bought or been acquired by now by maybe Bosch, one of its major strategic partners. And so I've got all these shareholders who are all locked up. And so there's no liquidity event coming. There's no liquidity event. I don't think there ever will be. Great company, but I don't think there'll ever be a liquidity event for the shareholders, which is not why we all do this ultimately. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 37:53

Fair enough. So you saw the writing on the wall with Mojio and said, okay, there's no liquidity event coming. 

‍

Jay Giraud 38:00

Well, I didn't see the writing on the wall then. Oh, you didn't? Well, maybe I did, because there was a Series B, what do you call it, a secondary round, and I sold more than half my stock then.So actually, me and some other people got an exit through a secondary round, which was great, but a lot of people just didn't take that window of opportunity, and there hasn't been one since. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 38:20

Yeah, and then was it because you were now enticed by something new or totally you got bored or? 

‍

Jay Giraud 38:27

Well, I didn't have the idea for Damon right off the bat. I actually tried to resurrect my friend's company doing a co-presence video, which oh my God would have been huge if I had known COVID was coming. If anybody had known COVID was coming. Oh man. But that company was saddled with too many problems with its previous shareholder base. So I tried to resurrect that with him for about six months. I loved it. So I'm still passionate about it.Like I'm not even going to explain how it works because I think still, you know, maybe I'll do it one day. It's still, it would be revolutionary in offices today. But then I went out to Indonesia for my best friend's wedding and was totally excited to ride motorbikes with a whole bunch of other bikers. When you're riding around on a bike in, you know, a North American city, you just wish all the other cars were bikes. And as soon as you do it in real life, you're like, this is a nightmare. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 39:24

It's not awesome. I've ridden motorcycles in Punjab India. Yeah. Yeah, so I've fully got these 

‍

Jay Giraud 39:30

Yeah, it's crazy, you know, and you get used to the crazy which is the really crazy part is how much you just like wow I'm just going with the flow. It's like a flock of birds and sometimes birds bump into each other, right?They do. Yeah But you just carry on and I kind of love that chaos, but it's not like riding a motorbike here It's very much just definitely to be and try to survive as opposed to doing it for the enjoyment yeah, so kind of had that experience and Came away honestly thinking could you make motorbikes move in a in a controlled manner like a flock of birds using using software? Using like self-driving software. That's where the idea began

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 40:08

I wasn't aware of that. That's actually fascinating because it makes me think of what are they, the starlings, they kind of have like murmurations, you know, where like, like millions of them will move as like one body, but they're not actually colliding.They're just, you know, so in tune with each other, they're able to move. 

‍

Jay Giraud 40:24

They're somehow consciously or unconsciously communicating with each other and they become a single body. And if you've ever been on a motorbike riding alone and you suddenly catch up to say five other bikes, you don't know who they are, but you catch up to them and they're riding information and suddenly you all move information and it just happens. So it happens with humans too. Maybe there's other examples in some sport where you join with a group of other people doing that sport and you suddenly start to move like one unit without communicating with them. It happens.And it's a really cool feeling. And so I kind of thought, could we make vehicles do that? Like a coordinated convoy. So they're doing this with, you know, platoons of trucks now, autonomous trucks, but they're just in line. They're not moving like a flock. No, it's pretty linear. Yeah. It's pretty linear. So, you know, a lot simpler. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 41:10

And so you got this inspiration of getting motorcycles in Indonesia moving like a flock of birds. Right. 

‍

Jay Giraud 41:18

Well, you start with crazy and you work your way to doable. I think every idea starts out crazy and you work your way back to what's doable, what's the MVP.If you're following a process, like a discipline, you want to get to an MVP, what can I get to market now? Or fast. And it was a

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 41:35

Was that immediate for you? Did you see it and be like, okay, this is the crazy. I'm going to go figure out the doable or what? 

‍

Jay Giraud 41:40

happen after that? Well, you dabble in crazy for a while, you think about it, you process it, you do some research and you start getting more and more ideas and eventually I was like, okay, so it's kind of like lidar radars and cameras are the tools here that we're gonna need. Of course, we're gonna need really fast processing. Is it edge? Is it onboard? Is it localized? Is it cloud? You know, how are you gonna process that kind of data? What kind of data processing volume are you gonna be required? How do you do it in damn near real time? Like, do you need kind of 20 milliseconds tops? And the answer is lots of everything that you just said.Right. And the answer was so much more complex and we didn't even have enough processing power that you could stick in the back of a car back then, let alone on a motorbike. So, you know, crazy still sits in the world of crazy right now and we concluded that cameras and radars were where it's at. But we played with lidar, so when we finally launched Damon, the first goal was to make motorcycling safer. And a lot of people have tried. And I would meet, almost every investor would say, well, you know, what about helmets? What about doing it in your helmet? What about yellow vests? What about, what about, oh, I would love it if a thing beeped on my dashboard to let me know that motorbike is coming up behind me. Yeah, that shit doesn't work. And I could get into why. We actually did start by thinking we could resurrect Scully. Scully was a motorcycle helmet company out of Silicon Valley that had a little heads up display with some built-in processing and stuff. And there's reasons why I believe it's still not appropriate to do it in the helmet. Heavy battery life problems. Like if you're running a safety system, you're going to change your riding behavior to adapt to that system. You can't have it work sometimes. So imagine driving a car where sometimes blind spot works in the car and sometimes it doesn't. You're glancing over at the mirror and you're like, okay, you're working right now? Or did the battery die inside the mirror? Like you can't do that. It's got, if it's going to change your behavior, it has to work a thousand percent of the time. Otherwise it becomes intermittent. And so we concluded then to not do it in a helmet had to be to be on board the vehicle.And by the time I was there with the fact that had to be on board the vehicle, I had a pretty strong hunch from my previous two automotive companies that we would have to build the whole vehicle. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 43:56

They're on the technology and it's fascinating though, because you mentioned LiDAR, Tesla famously made an engineering commitment to actually never use LiDAR. 

‍

Jay Giraud 44:06

Yeah, which may have been a mistake at this point in hindsight, but they didn't think so then. The Lidar has come a long way, cost has come a way down. 4D Lidar, the resolution is insane now. It was pretty bad at 2016 compared to now, but it still needs Lidar on a site.There's really nowhere to put Lidar on a motorbike except on the top of the rider's helmet in order to have 360 Lidar on a site, or you have got disparate Lidar front and back. But yeah, a bunch of reasons why Lidar wouldn't have worked back then and probably still isn't the right solution for a motorbike now. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 44:38

you started off with Damon being this like AI, incredibly data intensive safety system initially. And then that company kind of morphed and pivoted. Yeah. 

‍

Jay Giraud 44:48

Yeah, like we spent like no kidding. We spent three years trying to commercialize these prototype collision warning systems that we developed Ford collision rearward collision warning and blind spot and Camera in the back camera in the front radar front and back and then processing on board and you know even camera didn't need it a fair bit of processing but not a ton and That we took to Honda Yamaha Suzuki Ducati a Whole much of other hero. I met the chairman of hero in India presented it to them saw the factory Dozen of the motorbike companies Royal Enfield like the list goes on and then nobody bit down Into like we were we actually put it on presented it on a track in Cantill, California at the proving grounds of Honda America for three days in 2019 2018 and and like, you know OEMs move slow This was what I already knew OEMs move incredibly slow If you go elephant hunting, you're probably gonna starve And and that's what happens to way too many companies who think that they can sell to a tier one in the auto industry or to an OEM You're gonna run out of money before you get a commercial contract and that has happened far more times than it's been successful So I was pretty Clear that this was gonna be futile But you have to validate it and prove it and you've got Stakeholders who don't want you to build the whole vehicle because you know, that's gonna be super capital intensive. That's it got its own risks Yeah, that's a whole other company.Yeah, it's a whole other company but long story short by the end of 2018 we knew we had to make that pivot and we spent 2019 building a prototype and We brought it to CES in January 2020 and it exploded Incredible until kovat came in two months later. Yeah So that explosion was short-lived. Yeah two months Yeah, we crawled on hands and knees like almost having to suck gas out of somebody else's vehicle to fuel ours to get the prototype To California like at this point Nobody hadn't gotten a salary for three months like none of our small engineering team We're all working for free for three months to make it to CES in January 2020 On the hopes that we could launch our own crowdfunding campaign to get orders in on our own website We thought about indigo indigo go and all that concluded. We needed the data to build, you know, a successful Recurring pre-ordered campaign on our website. So we did it internally on our own site Hacking Wi-Fi from CES to try to do live Instagram and live Facebook that we were unveiling this motorbike The unveil was so popular on opening day of CES that we started to do the unveil three times a day for four days We thought we're doing it once we did a three times a day We were live on Facebook and Instagram three times three times a day for four days And at the end of the four days,

‍

Jay Giraud 47:33

we had a million dollars in orders But like deposits and we were in the Blackberry booth because we were using their software as the backbone the qnx software But cool fluke we were right beside the Honda booth and every time we unveiled the motorbike we showed a transforming and we ripped the rear wheel and We people would get get near it and the handlebars would vibrate from the radars bouncing off their bodies 200 people setting the Honda booth would empty three times a day and Genda come around our booth It was it was super cool Honda must have loved that.Yeah, they loved it What we learned about it was all the all the show-and-tell concepts you see at CES Virtually never are they real? They're literally being faked in some way or another and what was so exciting about our prototype besides being the only motorbike there was it was real You sure you could you could see the wear on the tires. I got ridden that bike all over Vancouver. Mm-hmm incredible. Yeah

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 48:28

Yeah, it was cool. And so, Damon Motorcycle obviously got to a point, and then COVID introduced all sorts of its own complications. Yeah, it was brutal.Yeah. Yeah. And so, where is that company headed now? 

‍

Jay Giraud 48:41

it now. So yeah, Damon grew to, we ended up raising $85 million for it, got over $100 million in orders, built up patent book of 40 patents in across the end-to-end spectrum of the technology, wrote it, I wrote it at several racetracks all over the US, I mean, doing close to 200 miles an hour in some cases on it, and took it public on the NASDAQ in late last year.That was you doing 200 miles an hour? In some of the pictures, well, we did 200 miles an hour on dynos. We didn't find a track in the US where you could do 200 miles an hour. And I don't have the balls to do 200 miles an hour, but I think the fastest I've ever gone in my life was 276 kilometers an hour, which is, I don't know, 160? It's pretty fast. I mean, 80? I don't know, it's fast. But I haven't broken 200 miles an hour myself. You need to be an incredible rider with an amazing braking ability, because at the end of a front straight is a very sharp corner. So when guys can do 200 miles an hour, they can brake like gods. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 49:39

I mean, I wasn't even thinking about the speed. I was just thinking about like the legal counsel, the investors, the risk. Oh, you got like the CEO and founder like ripping down the road. 

‍

Jay Giraud 49:46

But if you're going to be a motorcycle CEO, you better be authentic. You better be able to ride your own, eat your own dog food. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 49:53

So you, yeah, so David grew to a point and then you exited at some point. So. 

‍

Jay Giraud 50:01

Took it public on the NASDAQ, and now my co-founder is running the company, trying to push it down into more of an asset light model. They've got a few focuses on the software and getting into racing and eventually commercializing the vehicle, I guess. I think we encountered enormous challenges. We had a very short window where there was enough money to really build this properly.And I don't know, like a thousand investor groups, big VCs, honestly said, I think you'd have an easier time raising money for a car company than a motorbike company. And there's a weird irony in that because you need billions to build a car company, but everyone can understand the need for a car, like whether it's a self-driving car or whatever. Very, very few people understand the need for a motorbike. And so people say, okay, well, you should be raising your money out on the other side of the world where motorcycling is the norm, not driving. Yes, but, and we presented to many of those investor groups and we did get some pretty big investment out of Indonesia, but they don't want the 200 horsepower super bike. They want a scooter plus, like a thousand dollar motorbike. And there's no room for innovation on a thousand dollar motorbike. You can't differentiate. You virtually can't differentiate. Go Go Row raised a ton of money, but they crashed because of how hard it is to be competitive at the thousand dollar price point.So there's an oxymoron. So we needed to be the Tesla model. Start with the roadster and go down market to a mass market vehicle. Yeah, totally. And even then you can't go that far down as we're learning because what is it? The Tesla Model 2 is going to be a Y? Ta-da! It's the same vehicle. It's not a $30,000 car. And even Elon learned that. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 51:41

Yeah, I mean, it's price point as much as it is culture, right? Because I mean, I was joking when I say scooter plus, but like, yeah, in Asia, motorcycles are A to B things, and if somebody could strap a lawnmower engine to a piece of cardboard and get it done, they would.For 200 bucks. Yeah, and they do. And they do. 

‍

Jay Giraud 51:59

They really do a lot more engine to a piece of cardboard. Yeah, as long as it's got wheels It'll go and you'll get from A to B The the successful company was a cold Well, I'm honestly successful Forgot their name now, but they they got like a million unit orders for an EV scooter overnight and and they went public at like a two billion dollar val in India and they're just Crashing right now like I don't think they're gonna survive and you know They've got the most affordable EV electric scooter with a million order book or greater than that Probably they've shipped though tens of thousands hundreds of thousands and they're still struggling in India Like they've got all the right ingredients. It's still really hard.Yeah, so so yeah, so took Damon public on the NASDAQ Left the the you know hand of the reins to my co-founder and And that was the end of chapter two for me. Mm-hmm. So now looking back. All right, chapter one was snowboarding chapter two was EVs and mobility and now Chapter three is me being more of a founder whisperer So my goal now is to work and deliver high touch and eventually high-impact Coaching and mentorship and guidance to founders who are on their first or second venture

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 53:14

And, you know, with the experiences that you've had, how do you kind of balance the curse of knowledge that comes with that? The curse of knowledge? Yeah, knowledge is a curse when there's too much of it, right? You mentioned the, like when I look back at even my own life in many categories, it's like it was actually the ignorance that fueled me. Totally, the naivety.The naivety, yeah. And so how do you balance the fact that you've got a shit ton of experience and knowledge and like you wear the scars for the rest of your life? Yeah. And working with that, you know, bright eyed, bushy tailed, new founder who's got the idea. Like the cynicism, ever kind of creep into that? 

‍

Jay Giraud 53:51

Is that what you're getting at? Yeah, totally it does. Yup. Yeah, that's a really interesting one to unpack.Um, I've been recently, recently spending quite a bit of, you know, honest, like wandering around nowhere, reflection time, um, like, I mean it, like just going off into the woods and, and trying to deal with some cynicism because, you know, some of the mistakes you make that you can't stop dwelling over, you really do curse you, um, and, and like, how do you not pass it on to that other founder that you're going to coach is kind of the question, right? Um, I mean, recently I think I've been getting back to being a little too optimistic, like I was as a first and second time founder, like really optimistic and even before that in my twenties and snowboarding, like everything was possible and, and you should go after it all and like, there was no hesitation to chase after any one of my dreams ever. And like, like to a detriment, I would say, but there's actually a lot of beauty in that actually. Okay. So here's the answer. When I was like 23, after I read all the self-development books, I started to migrate towards Taoism and I read the Tao of poo, you know, Winnie the poo. So somebody wrote a book, how Winnie the poo is like a Taoist and teaching Taoism. And I'm actually reading it again, just like the last couple of weeks. And it's reminding me as you're reading some of the passages in the book, it's reminding me of the time I read that passage when I was like 23. And you're, you, it's weird. Like I'm being transported back into the mentality of that 23 year old. I can actually see through my eyes as that 23 year old, like physically through my eyes, I'm remembering where I read that book and what I was doing, then what I looked like and how I thought and what kind of things I worried about is all coming rushing back from 26 years ago. And, uh, and I was like, oh yeah, I was like crazy optimistic and always happy. And I'm just kind of becoming that again. And the cynicism is just kind of washing away. It's cool. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 55:50

it's fun. Sounds incredible.So I mean, when you say it, you know, I'm entering my next chapter as kind of a founder whisperer. The other change though, is that the other two chapters was you looking back and saying, ah, okay, there's a chapter, there's a chapter. So maybe you're being a little deterministic by saying, okay, this chapter is going to look like this. Yeah, that's fair. Are there new things opening up besides that, besides you just kind of, you know, coaching and sharing your experience with founders? Is there any ventures that you're looking at? Any areas of technology where you're still seeing peaks and valleys and you're saying, okay, this stuff is starting to max out. Maybe let's pay attention to some something new. 

‍

Jay Giraud 56:32

Yeah, I think I'm still developing this hypothesis, but I do think that technology is peaking in a way. I think I could make a compelling argument that that technology is peaking.And that sounds weird because I know what it's going to keep going. And there will probably be new explosive areas that become bubbles like the way AI has and before that, stealth driving cars and before that, telematics and before that, smartphones and so on. Um, you actually can plot a chart for technology and if you know enough about the, the, the, the Lego pieces, you can predict where it's going. And if you want to get really into it, read the founder of Wired magazine's book, what technology wants by Kevin Kelly, it'll blow your mind. It was read, written in 2006, it'll blow your mind and it's pretty freaky. Um, so as yes, technology is going to keep going, but I think it's also peaking and I don't mean that it won't keep evolving and growing. I mean that the, the rush, the gold rush for making money and technology is sort of dying off. Um, and I think venture capital is really struggling with this and, uh, and so because of that, I don't know if I would start another technology company. Um, yeah, so we're, we're looking at, uh, a drink company right now. Actually that's another little side project is building a non-alcoholic drink company, and I'm not going to unpack the details of that because I don't want to give it away. But you know, that's nothing to do with technology. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 57:59

Well, there are some other observations actually being made out there as well where when the money in tech, especially for investment was more free flowing, I mean, frankly speaking, you did have a lot more like bullshit startups, right? Like we're going to optimize this random thing or we're going to create a new way of doing some weird thing for productivity. 

‍

Jay Giraud 58:20

or whatever it is. A lot of things that were features that shouldn't have been companies. They're a feature, maybe they're a product, but they're not a company. Yeah. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 58:26

or maybe a delightful sort of toy almost, but to try to turn it into a whole thing. And what I've been hearing a lot about is that as there's a lot more consolidation happening, a lot more downward pressure economically, that actually even in tech space is people are getting back to fundamentals, right?So during company at our U, food and beverage, right? Of like nutrition, how are we feeding ourselves? Energy, transportation, communication, like getting back to the fundamentals of what are the things that are actually gonna make an impact, right? Because technology, I think for a while, I'm actually realizing now that I agree with you because I was gonna start off by disagreeing, was that I think within itself, the chip tech, the software, that's becoming more and more advanced and will continue to, but the peak is probably how much it's impacting our day-to-day experience, right? Yes, exactly. You know, I think smartphones are an example of like in their form, how much better could this bloody thing get? We can make it fold. Yeah, amazing. So what, right? Yeah, you know, I shutter to read the next camera spec. Like really, like how much? 100 megapixels. Yeah, like when I'm looking at this thing, how much better could it get? So on the impact to society, impact to life, I definitely feel that. I think there's peaks showing up for sure. Yeah. While within itself, the tech is getting more and more advanced, but I kind of appreciate the fact that, some amount of, I guess, like it's not fully austere, it's not fully, what's the word I'm looking for? Like it's not that there isn't capital free flowing, but there is enough restriction now that's pushing people to focus more on the fundamentals again, right? Yeah. 

‍

Jay Giraud 01:00:09

And like how much that really gonna benefit society, how needed is it really? That's the biggest mistake I think so many founders make is they just don't fully understand the need they're solving and that it's big enough. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 01:00:22

Mm-hmm. 

‍

Jay Giraud 01:00:22

and and and and therefore like does it deserve to exist lots of lots of startups don't deserve to exist 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 01:00:31

So, what would be, I'm coming to you as a startup founder, what would be your first thing that you would say to me both either as advice or inspiration as a startup founder with an idea? 

‍

Jay Giraud 01:00:44

totally depends on what you're doing and what resources you've got, and yeah, like the gentleman I was just with for an hour before this meeting, you know, he comes from urban planning. He's developing a product that gets, that moves things from A to B and he's been able to develop prototypes on his own with some of his own money. He got to a point where he can't get a prototype good enough to put in the hands of customers so he needs to raise a bit of money. So that constraint there immediately defines his next step.Now if he could get it to, if he could get some product market fit with a prototype on his own, that would totally change his capital strategy, which would change the look of his cap table in the beginning, which would change how he develops his seed in Series A, might influence the desire for an early exit versus an IPO, which affects the timelines, which affects, you know, who he looks for for first and second rounds of capital, like it all depends, you know, also the market he's in and what the competitors are like, how much he can leverage his position now to, you know, to bring in that first capital or get the first customer. Like if you can get customer before you get capital, oh my God, you should do that. You should kill yourself to try to do that. But you may not have the constraints to do that. So that would change my advice. Yeah. It's quite a complex beast of organic components that determine, you know, the initial go to market strategy. And every one of them is just so different, which is actually probably why it's so fun and interesting all the time. Thank you. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 01:02:24

What are you most excited about right now?

‍

Jay Giraud 01:02:30

My future. And, you know, you said, oh, well, you know, your third chapter may not be how you think it'll look. It never is. You know, when I finished with Mojio, I didn't know I was going to be in the motorcycle industry. But when I, I don't know, it was like 2021 or something, and we had a working prototype and I'm coming back from the racetrack in Southern California. And I look at my vision board from 2008, which was all about electric cars and making the world a greener place. There was an electric motorbike on it from a company called Vectrix. It was just a bike I wanted. And then I looked, and then the mission motorcycle that I was so horny for in 2012, 13, 14, 15, we acquired that company. We acquired the assets of mission motors. Like I just, you don't see how your future is going to unfold. You have a, you know, a lighthouse out there, a beacon that you go towards. It's some murky idea. It's pretty nebulous, right? But you have to have a vision and a vision is not crystal clear. It's, it's murky and nebulous, but you, you go towards it and then unfolds. And I think oftentimes it's much bigger than you think it's going to be. And that's what's exciting. That's what, yeah, that's what I'm most excited about. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 01:03:41

So, Jay, whether it's to seek your advice and your experience or learn more about what you're going to do next, where should people go if they want to learn more about Jay Giraud and what you're going to do next? 

‍

Jay Giraud 01:03:53

Uh, well, I'm going to start posting fairly prolifically on my Instagram @jaygiraud and on LinkedIn and maybe on X we'll see, I hate that platform. Um, yeah, Instagram and LinkedIn mainly. 

‍

Mo Dhaliwal 01:04:08

Amazing. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming in, man. I really appreciate you spending the time with us. Yeah, it was a good conversation.Nice to be here. Thank you. Well, hopefully we've given you a lot to think about. That was High Agency. Like and subscribe, and we will see you next time.