Entrepreneurship with Jay Clouse

Tim Fulton 0:08Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Confluence Cast presented by Columbus Underground. We are a weekly Columbus-centric podcast focusing on the civics, lifestyle, entertainment, and people of our city. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. This week I sat down with local entrepreneur, project manager, community builder, and writer Jay Clouse to talk about his work and experience in entrepreneurship. We cover the importance of the cross-pollination of communities and ideas, his prioritization of work and managing of time, the similarity between comedy and entrepreneurship, the importance of asking good questions, and we wrap up with advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and the state of affairs in Columbus, Ohio. A little bit of housekeeping on the interview. Since Jay and I recorded it, he's actually announced that he has left CrossChecks to start his own company, The Unreal Collective. You can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theconfluencecast.com. Also, the Confluence Cast is on Patreon. Find out how to support this podcast on our website, theconfluencecast.com, or at patreon.com/confluence. The Confluence Cast is sponsored by Kepri, a full service web and mobile development company specializing in design and programming services. Defined through skill and innovation, Kepri works with their clients to create user-centric, technology-based products that innovate. Kepri provides complete technology solutions with a solid strategy to meet your goals and grow your brand. See examples of their work and explore what Kepri can do for you at kepri.com. Enjoy the interview. Sitting down here with Jay Clouse, self-declared entrepreneur, project manager, community builder, writer. Jay, how are you?

Jay Clouse 2:08I'm good. I'm good.

Tim Fulton 2:09Good. Thanks for taking the time. Jay and I sort of know each other tangentially. We sit on the Create Columbus Commission together, which we talked to Jordan Davis about here on the Confluence Cast. Jay, sort of give us the, give us your mantra. W- who, who are you?

Jay Clouse 2:24Who am I? Well, I'm a self-declared lot of things, as you just read off.

Tim Fulton 2:27Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 2:28What it comes down to is I like to do really cool stuff with really cool people, and I like those experiences to be pretty unique. So that's kind of put me in the position where I'm starting my own things, uh, holding cool positions on cool boards-

Tim Fulton 2:43Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 2:43... like the Create Columbus Commission, organizing some cool events like Startup Weekend. Uh, I just, I, I'm allergic to board- boredom, and, uh-

Tim Fulton 2:51Okay

Jay Clouse 2:52... that's kind of how I deal with it.

Tim Fulton 2:54In your day job you work for CrossChecks.

Jay Clouse 2:56Yes.

Tim Fulton 2:57Can you give us the rundown, sort of what is CrossChecks?

Jay Clouse 2:59Mm-hmm. Uh, CrossChecks is on a mission to create an identity layer for healthcare. Basically, uh, the founder, Sean Lane, looked at healthcare. Uh, he had a background in the military and intelligence and said, "We have all these disparate data silos in healthcare between systems," uh, and they actually intentionally try to protect this data, which leads to, uh, individuals having all these different usually paper records in all kinds of systems that get stale, and you go from one system to another, and it's hard to relate those records to ano- to one another and have one overarching record of note for a person.

Tim Fulton 3:40Okay.

Jay Clouse 3:41So we have hardware and software products traditionally for hospital weight rooms. Uh, we've been developing a software product for larger healthcare organizations called, um, Accountable Care Organizations.

Tim Fulton 3:54Okay.

Jay Clouse 3:54And, um, it-

Tim Fulton 3:55So what is that, the weight room product? Like, what does that look like?

Jay Clouse 3:58It started off, uh, with a biometric fingerprint reader.

Tim Fulton 4:01Okay.

Jay Clouse 4:02And you would go up to a desk. They would tie your fingerprint to your medical record in their EHR so it could verify your identity, and that was to cut down on fraud as well as prescription drug abuse-

Tim Fulton 4:15Okay

Jay Clouse 4:15... but also really served to create that, uh, beginning identity layer to say, "This person is who they say they are." That evolved into a software product that allowed registrars to search more quickly within their EHR to find correct records, because an issue with a lot of EHR, electronic health records, is they create multiple records for a single patient because they may type something in wrong or forget that it was an existing patient.

Tim Fulton 4:41Okay.

Jay Clouse 4:42And so the software product evolved to, A, help them find the right record faster, tie a fingerprint to it, and B, um, resolve duplicate records within their system so they consolidate those and don't miss part of a patient's story because they're looking at the wrong record.

Tim Fulton 4:57Is there some risk of, of merging incorrect records?

Jay Clouse 5:00Well, they all-

Tim Fulton 5:01I just know, uh, when I was living on North Campus, there happened to be a middle-aged Black man named Tim Fulton who lived two blocks away from me. Who, uh, when I would go to the pharmacy, even when I would go to vote, I, I would be confused with this person.

Jay Clouse 5:15Mm-hmm.

Tim Fulton 5:16So.

Jay Clouse 5:17Each of these systems have thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of records in their system.

Tim Fulton 5:21Okay.

Jay Clouse 5:22And so what our software does is take, uh, signals of records from their system, say, "Hey, we think these may be duplicates."

Tim Fulton 5:29Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 5:29And there's still a human process to go through and figure out on their end if that is a duplicate or not and if they want to merge it. But we do the legwork of saying, "These are things we flag as duplicates up front."

Tim Fulton 5:40Got it.

Jay Clouse 5:41And now, um, you don't have to sort through your EHR kind of guessing and doing that work manually.

Tim Fulton 5:46Got it. Cool. Where are you from?

Jay Clouse 5:49I am from west central Ohio, a little farm town called Celina.

Tim Fulton 5:52Okay.

Jay Clouse 5:53Um, went to high school at Celina High School. There's a lake, Grand Lake St. Marys, that is there. That is the second largest man-made lake in the United States.

Tim Fulton 6:02Oh.

Jay Clouse 6:02And, um, also- ... in recent years has been the breeding ground of some blue-green algae that's actually a neurotoxin, which is a fun story if we wanted to get into that. But come from a farm town where sports are pretty big.

Tim Fulton 6:17What's the manmade lake there for?

Jay Clouse 6:19It was-

Tim Fulton 6:20To be a lake, or?

Jay Clouse 6:21It was part of the Miami Erie Canal.

Tim Fulton 6:23Okay.

Jay Clouse 6:24Um, to help transport goods-

Tim Fulton 6:26Got it

Jay Clouse 6:26... on the canal.

Tim Fulton 6:27Okay.

Jay Clouse 6:28So, um, long, long time ago.

Tim Fulton 6:30Just curious.

Jay Clouse 6:31Yeah, yeah. Uh, fishing's been pretty good. It, it became a pretty big source of tourism until there was that health risk. But, uh-

Tim Fulton 6:38Until you couldn't swim in it anymore

Jay Clouse 6:39... until you couldn't, then you really couldn't. They put a sign up that said, "No swimming, no boating." Uh, it actually has a very pungent aroma that makes the whole area smell pretty bad in the summer when it warms up.

Tim Fulton 6:49Okay.

Jay Clouse 6:50But it's been getting better in recent years.

Tim Fulton 6:52What's the industry there?

Jay Clouse 6:54Uh, there's a lot of, um, manufacturing.

Tim Fulton 6:57Okay.

Jay Clouse 6:57There's Crown and Capt. Uh, Crown makes like all the lift trucks for the world.

Tim Fulton 7:03Okay.

Jay Clouse 7:04Um, and I forget what Capt does, but a lot of manufacturing. Used to be H- Huffy bicycles there as well. And of course, a lot of agriculture.

Tim Fulton 7:12Okay.

Jay Clouse 7:12It's, it's the... At one point, it was the highest agricultural area per capita in the United States too.

Tim Fulton 7:18Okay.

Jay Clouse 7:19Um-

Tim Fulton 7:19And what do your parents do?

Jay Clouse 7:21My parents and my entire extended family are educators.

Tim Fulton 7:24Okay.

Jay Clouse 7:25Mostly high school teachers.

Tim Fulton 7:26Okay, got it. Um, and then how did you make the jump to Columbus, Ohio, or were there-

Jay Clouse 7:32Yeah

Tim Fulton 7:32... places in between?

Jay Clouse 7:33Uh, my parents and my oldest sister, I have two older sisters, they went to Ohio Northern University.

Tim Fulton 7:39Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 7:40In high school, I went to Ohio Northern for our football camps and just really, really didn't like it. My second sister, who is only four years older than me, uh, went to Ohio State, and, um, I've always been pretty close to her and felt like our personalities were pretty similar.

Tim Fulton 7:56Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 7:56And I would visit her in college, check it out, and thought that it was another thing that, it was something that I wanted to do too. The bigger city was more interesting to me.

Tim Fulton 8:05Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 8:06Um, and I didn't know frankly what I wanted to do when I was coming out of col- or coming out of high school.

Tim Fulton 8:10Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 8:10And going to Ohio State's a pretty place, pretty good place to go when you don't know what you wanna do because you have a lot of flexibility

Tim Fulton 8:16Right

Jay Clouse 8:16... to, to just about anything.

Tim Fulton 8:18It's a big place.

Jay Clouse 8:19It's a big place.

Tim Fulton 8:19And what'd you major in?

Jay Clouse 8:21I started in exploration, which is interesting.

Tim Fulton 8:25Not a major.

Jay Clouse 8:25It's not a major. It is what Ohio State calls their undecided program, which I think is awesome.

Tim Fulton 8:29Okay.

Jay Clouse 8:30And then I moved into journalism for about a year as my major. At some point during my journalism experience, I found the entrepreneurship organization at Ohio State-

Tim Fulton 8:39Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 8:39... and got really into the idea of entrepreneurship. Because in journalism, I was, I was writing, which I loved, but I was writing stories about people doing cool stuff, and then when I saw this entrepreneurship organization, I saw people my age doing the cool stuff-

Tim Fulton 8:53Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 8:53... and realized that I could do the cool stuff too. So I switched into the business college, didn't know what I wanted to do. Thinking that money was the goal of life, I switched into finance.

Tim Fulton 9:02Okay.

Jay Clouse 9:03And really, really disliked it. Um-

Tim Fulton 9:05Well, finance is just managing the money. It's not, uh, it's not necessarily making it.

Jay Clouse 9:09Uh, yeah, I just, I wasn't so great at the numbers, the arithmetic, and the calculus. So I switched finally into marketing, and still somehow got out in, in four years.

Tim Fulton 9:19Great. Good for you. Talk about sort of the projects that you've worked on over the pa- so, and I'm sorry, how long ago was that that, that you graduated?

Jay Clouse 9:27Graduated in 2014.

Tim Fulton 9:28Okay. So recently.

Jay Clouse 9:29Very recently.

Tim Fulton 9:30What have you been working on?

Jay Clouse 9:32Um, in college I started a kind of rinky-dink student marketplace that was basically Craigslist for Ohio State students.

Tim Fulton 9:39Okay.

Jay Clouse 9:40You had to log in with an Ohio State credential to get into it.

Tim Fulton 9:43Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 9:43Uh, that was my first foray into, into entrepreneurship. At, at the end of my senior year of college, I got in touch with, um, a guy named Alex Burkhardt who was starting a company in Cincinnati called Tixers.

Tim Fulton 9:56Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 9:57He was a single founder at the time. He was going through an accelerator, and he basically said, "I need a strong number two person, uh, to help me do this. I can't do it on my own." And he reached out to me, um, as president of the entrepreneurship organization at the time-

Tim Fulton 10:11Okay

Jay Clouse 10:11... saying, "I want you to help me find somebody." And so I met with him, and we were doing a small business career fair soon, and I thought, "This is gonna be great. I'm gonna get him to go into this career fair. Uh, there's 100 bucks for your organization. Cool."

Tim Fulton 10:24Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 10:25But I started talking to him, and he was explaining the idea, and having done this college marketplace myself, I thought that meant that I knew something about marketplaces, and it was the level of opportunity that I wanted to do-

Tim Fulton 10:36Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 10:36... out of college. So I joined on, and-

Tim Fulton 10:39So you were essentially the Dick Cheney of-

Jay Clouse 10:42Yeah

Tim Fulton 10:42... ta- tasked with finding- ... the person, and ended up becoming the person yourself.

Jay Clouse 10:47Yes. I, I often consider myself the Dick Cheney of all kinds of things. Uh.

Tim Fulton 10:53And so did that take you down to Cincinnati for a little bit, or were you still here?

Jay Clouse 10:57No. One of the stipulations, and there were... This was, this was pretty serious. This was basically a co-founding arr- arrangement because he hadn't started a whole lot yet.

Tim Fulton 11:05Okay.

Jay Clouse 11:05And so there was this courting period of about a month where we talked and tried to see if it was a good fit. Um, and one of my stipulations was that I didn't wanna relocate.

Tim Fulton 11:13Okay.

Jay Clouse 11:13I wanted to stay in Columbus. Which was fine. The whole thing was digital. Um, I worked remotely for two years, and every month or two I would go down for a few days and spend time in Cincinnati. But we, we learned to communicate very, very well digitally or-

Tim Fulton 11:28Okay

Jay Clouse 11:28... over the phone and talk.

Tim Fulton 11:29Okay. I imagine given that you were so young, you were sort of able to... There didn't have to be a whole lot of money involved.

Jay Clouse 11:36No, not at all. I mean, being a purely digital organization, even the, the startup costs of the business were pretty minimal.

Tim Fulton 11:43Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 11:43Um, and when, when we got started, we basically did a budget for both of us. We both, we both did our budget, saw what our hard expenses were gonna be, gave ourselves-

Tim Fulton 11:53Rent, food

Jay Clouse 11:54... very s- exactly.

Tim Fulton 11:54Right.

Jay Clouse 11:55Gave ourselves a very small discretionary income, and, um, just basically covered our own expenses when we were on our own.

Tim Fulton 12:02Okay. And then from Tixers went to CrossChecks, right?

Jay Clouse 12:05Right. So about, um- A few months into Tixers we raised some seed round capital, something like 280K, and that was in 20- that was in July of 2014. In March of 2015, we sold the company to a company in Florida that developed native apps.

Tim Fulton 12:26Okay.

Jay Clouse 12:27And so we had a 12-month period that we were contractually obligated to work for that company to get our full earn-out.

Tim Fulton 12:34Basically hand everything over.

Jay Clouse 12:35Yeah.

Tim Fulton 12:36Yeah.

Jay Clouse 12:36Yeah. Hand everything o- over. We had, we had a set of metrics that we were measured against our performance.

Tim Fulton 12:40Okay.

Jay Clouse 12:41And the deal was, "You get this upfront, cash and stock, and you have 12 months. These are your benchmarks for performance. Based upon how you do against those metrics, you'll get some more cash at the end of 12 months."

Tim Fulton 12:51That was all negotiated ahead of time.

Jay Clouse 12:53Correct.

Tim Fulton 12:53Like, you were aware of it.

Jay Clouse 12:54Correct.

Tim Fulton 12:54You were comfortable with it, right?

Jay Clouse 12:55Exactly. Exactly. So that was, that was really good because we were able to pay our investors back in a very short amount of time with a modest return.

Tim Fulton 13:03Right.

Jay Clouse 13:03And then Alex and I were able to, uh-

Tim Fulton 13:05Well, you've already exited a, a established business as well.

Jay Clouse 13:09Right.

Tim Fulton 13:09Right.

Jay Clouse 13:10Right. Um, which was awesome. That was, that wa- that was amazing. I remember when I was going into Tixers out of college, I was texting my parents and saying this is what I was doing. 'Cause at the time I was considering, uh, consulting. I had, I had done interviews with Deloitte and McKinsey.

Tim Fulton 13:24Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 13:25And I hadn't decided by, you know, April of my senior year when I was about to graduate.

Tim Fulton 13:30Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 13:31And I was texting my parents and saying, "This is the deal. I'm gonna do this. Uh, this is what equity means."

Tim Fulton 13:37Right.

Jay Clouse 13:37If we, if we do well, uh-

Tim Fulton 13:39Not that they're not smart people-

Jay Clouse 13:40... it's what we-

Tim Fulton 13:40... but they just hadn't dealt with that space before.

Jay Clouse 13:42Yeah. Exactly.

Tim Fulton 13:43Right.

Jay Clouse 13:43They're very smart people, but they didn't, they, they hadn't dealt with that at all. And so I was justifying to them because it, I felt like a lotta times in the beginning my parents kind of thought that I was playing house.

Tim Fulton 13:54Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 13:54Like, not actually getting a job or joining the real world, just kind of doing this fake thing that-

Tim Fulton 14:00Right

Jay Clouse 14:00... I wanted to do.

Tim Fulton 14:01Oh, Jay's fucking around with his friends.

Jay Clouse 14:03Exactly.

Tim Fulton 14:04Right.

Jay Clouse 14:04So I had to explain, um, what that meant and what the implications were, and why it was worth chasing. And, uh, unbelievably it worked out in, like, a two and a half year window.

Tim Fulton 14:14Yeah. I mean, that's normally at least an eight-year-

Jay Clouse 14:18Exactly

Tim Fulton 14:18... process.

Jay Clouse 14:19Exactly. And-

Tim Fulton 14:20Did you guys even, and I apologize for not being totally familiar with Tixers, but did it get to beyond an MVP? Was it just-

Jay Clouse 14:28Oh, yeah

Tim Fulton 14:28... um, it was a viable product?

Jay Clouse 14:29Yeah.

Tim Fulton 14:30Okay.

Jay Clouse 14:30Yeah. Um, we very briefly had a full-time CTO.

Tim Fulton 14:35Okay.

Jay Clouse 14:36And during that time we also hired on a part-time engineer, and he was a formery, former Brandery alum. And so we developed quite a bit in that short period of time, but for, uh, reasons of life getting in the way, they both went off to do their own thing.

Tim Fulton 14:50Okay.

Jay Clouse 14:50And so we worked with contractors for that time forward. It was pretty slow development on the product front, but we got really good at finding ways to get scrappy and find third parties to plug into, and APIs to leverage-

Tim Fulton 15:03Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 15:03... to, uh, build this without a whole lot of overhead of people.

Tim Fulton 15:07Okay.

Jay Clouse 15:09And yeah, we were, we were doing tens of thousands of dollars in sales every month, and, um, I think at the end of the two, two years we had done just under a million dollars in sales. Um, it wasn't the flashest product. I mean, your competitors... It was a, it was a ticketing company.

Tim Fulton 15:23Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 15:24And-

Tim Fulton 15:25It was a marketplace.

Jay Clouse 15:26Yeah, it was-

Tim Fulton 15:26Yeah

Jay Clouse 15:26... it was a secondary marketplace. So on the front end, if you're buying tickets, it was very reminiscent of a StubHub or a Vivid Seats.

Tim Fulton 15:32Okay.

Jay Clouse 15:32The differentiator was if you had tickets, instead of listing them and waiting for a third party to come and buy them-

Tim Fulton 15:38Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 15:38... and, like, watching the price and the market and everything-

Tim Fulton 15:40Right

Jay Clouse 15:41... we made an offer to buy those tickets up front in site credit, called a Tixers credit.

Tim Fulton 15:46Okay.

Jay Clouse 15:46And it's like a gift card. The way that manifested itself was we worked with, for example, Xavier University in Cincinnati. They had season ticket holders and package holders that would buy these season tickets or these packages knowing they wouldn't go to all the games.

Tim Fulton 15:59Right.

Jay Clouse 15:59They could li-

Tim Fulton 16:00It's just like people having baseball tickets. Right.

Jay Clouse 16:02Mm-hmm. They could liquidate those very, very quickly-

Tim Fulton 16:04Okay

Jay Clouse 16:04... and then use those towards other tickets. And-

Tim Fulton 16:07And were, were the third party partners like Xavier University, like, you got them to buy in, in that they sort of allowed you to accept those tickets?

Jay Clouse 16:16I- right. We had a, we had a formal arrangement with Xavier University. Um, we, we had some relationships with the Reds and the Bengals as well.

Tim Fulton 16:23Okay.

Jay Clouse 16:24And that was, that was 2014 and 2015, which were banner years for Xavier University and the Cincinnati Bengals. Best years in, in program history, which was amazing timing.

Tim Fulton 16:33Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 16:34Um, but on the front end, if you're buying tickets, it looked a lot like StubHub or, or whatever. So, um, it's a, it was a brutal industry. Super competitive space.

Tim Fulton 16:44Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 16:45Um, but, you know, we, we built it and we, we competed. We th- we found ways to market it that were cost-effective. We, we were really, really good about our burn.

Tim Fulton 16:53Good. Couple of terms that we've dropped that people may not know about. MVP that I mentioned earlier, minimum viable product, and then burn rate is simply the amount of money that you're spending. It's while not making money, right?

Jay Clouse 17:06Yeah. K- I mean, even if-

Tim Fulton 17:07Mostly

Jay Clouse 17:07... you're making money, it's, it's looking at your monthly expenses.

Tim Fulton 17:09Right.

Jay Clouse 17:09How quickly are you going through cash?

Tim Fulton 17:11It's the money that's going out the door.

Jay Clouse 17:13Yeah.

Tim Fulton 17:13Right.

Jay Clouse 17:14Yeah.

Tim Fulton 17:14And then how did you end up with Crosschecks?

Jay Clouse 17:17So at the end of, uh, Tixers, and we were pur- the company that purchased us was called OneUp Sports.

Tim Fulton 17:22Okay.

Jay Clouse 17:23We were getting to the end of our 12-month earn-out, and I was just at a point where I didn't wanna work, uh, for that company anymore.

Tim Fulton 17:31Could you have continued to work for them?

Jay Clouse 17:33I could have, yeah.

Tim Fulton 17:33Okay.

Jay Clouse 17:34I could have. And I, I, I was kind of jaded with the ticketing industry. It was a gross industry, frankly.

Tim Fulton 17:41Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 17:41Uh, I wasn't super interested in it. And I was looking around at my options, because to this point, you know, I'd gone through college, I had helped start a company that then sold, and a lot of my identity was wrapped up in this idea of being an entrepreneur and being basically a co-founder of a company.

Tim Fulton 17:57Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 17:58And it, it, that was actually a pretty hard time to figure out what I wanted to do, because my identity was so much wrapped up in that. And I thought, you know, I have all these relationships in Columbus with other founders and CEOs of companies that I feel like I'm a peer because I, I'm doing it too.

Tim Fulton 18:13Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 18:13If I don't start something on my own, which I didn't know what I would wanna do for five to 10 years on my own-

Tim Fulton 18:19Right

Jay Clouse 18:19... how do I maintain those relationships and not fall into this, like... What I thought to be an invisible but present hierarchy in the community.

Tim Fulton 18:27Okay. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Jay Clouse 18:29Yeah. I, I recall there was, there was a conversation I had in college with an entrepreneur that came to talk to the, uh, the Business Builders Club, the entrepreneurship organization.

Tim Fulton 18:40Okay.

Jay Clouse 18:41And I don't know why this stuck out to me so much, but he said basically, "You guys can start companies very inexpensively at your age, and you can get an email response from just about anybody because you can say founder in your email signature."

Tim Fulton 18:54Right.

Jay Clouse 18:54"And that puts you on a level." And I've always kind of worked with, um, had relationships with people that were older than me-

Tim Fulton 19:02Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 19:03... and doing really cool stuff. And I felt like I could prop that up by being, uh, at a high level in an organization myself.

Tim Fulton 19:12Okay.

Jay Clouse 19:12And leaving that, um, now I'm relying on, yeah, that experience, but it's still a pretty shallow experience, a couple of years, and I'm still pretty young. How do I join an or- organization at a high level and still maintain these level of respect from CEOs, founders of companies here locally?

Tim Fulton 19:31Right.

Jay Clouse 19:32Because let's, let's say, let's say I'm a startup founder and I want to get in touch with the CEO of Nationwide.

Tim Fulton 19:38Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 19:39I have a pretty good shot at working through people and getting a conversation with the CEO of Nationwide because I'm the founder and CEO of what I'm doing.

Tim Fulton 19:46Right.

Jay Clouse 19:47If I, instead of doing that out of college, join Nationwide at an ent- entry level, it's actually harder for me, in my estimation, to have the same conversation with the same person.

Tim Fulton 19:59That's fair.

Jay Clouse 20:00And I thought that hierarchy would exist outside of that organization too. You could peg somebody and say, "This person is this level at this company. I can see where they are in relation to me." 'Cause humans just love heuristics.

Tim Fulton 20:12Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why didn't you make the choice to go off and start something else? Just simply because you couldn't identify that, that market entry point or?

Jay Clouse 20:19A little bit. Hav- having done this experience with Tixers, I realized that we were exceedingly lucky to get out in two and a half years.

Tim Fulton 20:27Yeah, you were.

Jay Clouse 20:28And if I really wanted to make a go at it again, I would be looking at a 5 to 10-year window.

Tim Fulton 20:33Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 20:33And I didn't know what that was. I mean, my experience was college, where I was thinking about small world college problems of people who don't have money.

Tim Fulton 20:40Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 20:41Followed by the ticketing industry, which I got to know pretty well, but also realized I was not interested in.

Tim Fulton 20:45Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 20:46So I didn't have the industry experience to find a problem that I could solve, and I didn't wanna just go make a pro- product for making a product's sake because I know how hard that is now.

Tim Fulton 20:54Okay.

Jay Clouse 20:55And I, frankly, I just, no, I didn't know what I wanted to do on my own. I, I wanted to take some time off.

Tim Fulton 21:00Okay.

Jay Clouse 21:01Was, was my plan. I was gonna take several months off, think about it, go on a 10-day silent meditation retreat in Wisconsin.

Tim Fulton 21:08Okay.

Jay Clouse 21:10Um, and then some plans changed because I got in touch with, um, the VP of business development at CrossChecks. They had an open position that sounded a lot like my skill set.

Tim Fulton 21:22Okay. And what is your role at CrossChecks again?

Jay Clouse 21:24I am, uh, the head of our network products.

Tim Fulton 21:28Okay.

Jay Clouse 21:28Basically, though, if you wanna relate that, it's a product manager role.

Tim Fulton 21:31Okay.

Jay Clouse 21:33So-

Tim Fulton 21:33And let's get into that. What does product manager mean specifically?

Jay Clouse 21:36It's, it's kind of a, it's kind of a new discipline. And it's, I like to think of it as-

Tim Fulton 21:42You can make a mean spreadsheet, I know that.

Jay Clouse 21:45I'm getting better. That wasn't so good when I was in finance in college, but I'm getting better. Um, I look at it as kind of the glue between a very cross-functional team that's bringing a product to market.

Tim Fulton 21:55Okay.

Jay Clouse 21:56So we have a team of engineers who is building the product.

Tim Fulton 22:00Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 22:00We have a, we have, uh, user experience designers who find ways to make that product beautiful and functional to the user.

Tim Fulton 22:08Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 22:09Um, we have a marketing team that has to message that product to a user, find the way to position it so it speaks to their needs.

Tim Fulton 22:15Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 22:15And a sales team to go out and sell it.

Tim Fulton 22:17Right.

Jay Clouse 22:18The product manager-

Tim Fulton 22:19Let alone the stakeholders within the company-

Jay Clouse 22:21Yeah

Tim Fulton 22:21... and externally.

Jay Clouse 22:22Yeah.

Tim Fulton 22:22Right.

Jay Clouse 22:22Let alone all that. But between those four functions, the product manager is sort of in charge of the vision of that product, being a champion for the users, understanding who the user is, what they want, so you can interpret that into product requirements, how this should be built so it solves a problem-

Tim Fulton 22:41Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 22:42... that you can relay to the engineering team, and also the user experience designer, so he can build that for form and function.

Tim Fulton 22:47Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 22:48Engineers build it so it actually is a reality. I speak to marketing to say, "This is what the profile of the user is. Let's build out what this looks like-

Tim Fulton 22:56Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 22:56... and how we can position that message to them." And then we speak to sales with that same kind of, um, intention as well, so they can go and sell it properly.

Tim Fulton 23:05Okay.

Jay Clouse 23:06And day to day, you know, I do technical project planning. I, I break in, break down all the requirements of the product into what are called tickets, small bite-sized chunks of functionality that engineers can pick up and, and, and work on-

Tim Fulton 23:21Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 23:21... uh, uh, with the code. And I pr- I project the product roadmap, the timelines, when this will be completed based on the requirements that we're writing.

Tim Fulton 23:29And is it an agile process to an extent in that you're, those tickets are sprints?

Jay Clouse 23:34Exactly.

Tim Fulton 23:35Got it.

Jay Clouse 23:35Exactly.

Tim Fulton 23:36Um, and I will inc- I'm not gonna get into it, but I'll include-

Jay Clouse 23:39Yeah

Tim Fulton 23:39... a link to explaining the agile-

Jay Clouse 23:41That's-

Tim Fulton 23:41... work process and, and scrums and sprints and all-

Jay Clouse 23:44Yeah

Tim Fulton 23:44... of that stuff, uh, in the show notes. Um, so i- is it fair to say that you took the job sort of to almost formalize a little bit your skill set and, and sort of prove out not only can I do this, I have done this?

Jay Clouse 23:57Mm-hmm. The way the role was described was it was a lot of product validation.

Tim Fulton 24:01Okay.

Jay Clouse 24:02It, it was we're gonna have ideas internally. We want you to come up with some ideas. We want you to approach the market and find, uh, how we can build that product, just validate that idea.

Tim Fulton 24:11And customers are gonna have ideas and request-

Jay Clouse 24:13Exactly

Tim Fulton 24:13... functionality.

Jay Clouse 24:15Exactly. So when I joined in June of 2016, there was a concept and a target market, and they said, "We want you to go and talk to independent physicians and figure out how we can position this product to work for them." And so for the first month plus, I was in my car all day visiting 20 physician offices a day.

Tim Fulton 24:34Okay.

Jay Clouse 24:34And trying to talk to office managers, receptionists, and ultimately doctors if I could-

Tim Fulton 24:39Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 24:39... to find a way to validate this idea and, and position this product. I came back and I had some suggestions and s- a lot of findings based on a lot of data.

Tim Fulton 24:48Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 24:48Hundreds of interactions, and they said, "That's great. Uh, we're gonna build that product, so we want you to basically product manage that."

Tim Fulton 24:55Okay. So you did... You were the validation for the product?

Jay Clouse 24:59I was.

Tim Fulton 24:59Okay.

Jay Clouse 24:59It was actually closer to a sales role when I joined.

Tim Fulton 25:01Yeah. And so is the product in the market at this point?

Jay Clouse 25:04It is.

Tim Fulton 25:04Okay.

Jay Clouse 25:05Uh, what we found was-

Tim Fulton 25:06Does it work?

Jay Clouse 25:07It does.

Tim Fulton 25:07Good.

Jay Clouse 25:08It took several months to build to the point where the validation that I had received was for a product that had a, a set of functionality that took literally, like, six months to build.

Tim Fulton 25:18Okay.

Jay Clouse 25:18And we, we put that out into a lot of doctors' offices, both in Columbus and in Albany, New York.

Tim Fulton 25:24Okay.

Jay Clouse 25:25And what we found was the sales process took a lot of, uh, high touch person-to-person selling.

Tim Fulton 25:33Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 25:34Which is an expensive technique for acquiring customers.

Tim Fulton 25:38Great.

Jay Clouse 25:38And so while we validated that market, we needed a better way to sell it that was more cost effective.

Tim Fulton 25:44Okay.

Jay Clouse 25:45And the same time we were discovering that, we had an opportunity in a different market that was high revenue, and so we kind of shifted to, to go after that. So we ha- we have customers that are still using that product that's in the market, but we've, we've put a little bit of a pause on developing that-

Tim Fulton 26:00Got it

Jay Clouse 26:00... itself.

Tim Fulton 26:01And so what, in terms of your philosophy, I've learned a lot from, you know, the daily email that you send out, which there'll be a link in the show notes for people- ... to subscribe to that as well. You seem to me like the kinda person who has a five-year or 10-year plan. What does that look like for you right now?

Jay Clouse 26:18I want to spend more of my time making things that connect with people.

Tim Fulton 26:24Okay.

Jay Clouse 26:25And the way that looks is, and I think this is a lot of the reason that I was drawn to product managing in the first place.

Tim Fulton 26:31Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 26:31One, I was doing it at Tixers because I had to. It was two of us. We had to plan the product, and somebody had to help build it, and I really, really liked that. And so that, that experience played into what I'm doing at CrossChecks now. Um, and I've always been drawn to the aspect of, I can talk to people, find out something that's useful for them, and make a solution to solve that, and that just, like, feeds me. It feels great.

Tim Fulton 26:55Okay.

Jay Clouse 26:56The problem is, as a product manager, I, I'm a step removed from the making.

Tim Fulton 27:01Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 27:02There's a lot of hands in the pot, and it's, there's just something very cathartic about creating something on your own and not needing to ask permission or not needing to, you know, get buy-in from other people. You make it 'cause you wanna make it, and you put it out, and the people that like it like it, and the people that don't, don't.

Tim Fulton 27:16Right.

Jay Clouse 27:17So what I like to do, and, and this is kind of the overarching theme of my philosophy, like I was saying at the beginning, I care about meeting really cool people, really interesting people, connecting with them genuinely, authentically-

Tim Fulton 27:31Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 27:31... and doing cool things with them

Tim Fulton 27:34Okay

Jay Clouse 27:34... frankly. And so the, I think that manifests-

Tim Fulton 27:36And so that feeds into the stuff you've done with Startup Weekend and that sort of thing.

Jay Clouse 27:40Yeah. Yeah. I, I haven't really articulated it. It just gets me excited. I like, I like to learn a lot. I like to do new things, meet new people, and there, there's just an innate human desire to connect with one another, right? And so I, I'm really in that space. So I don't know, five to 10 years is a long time, but I, I do have a little bit of a plan for what I'm doing with, with these daily emails I'm sending out.

Tim Fulton 28:04Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 28:04Some of the other ideas that go along with that that I'm slowly building-

Tim Fulton 28:08Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 28:08... that I hope to be sustainable on its own, that I can do that for, for a while.

Tim Fulton 28:13Gotcha. Talk about some of the community builder work that you've done.

Jay Clouse 28:17Mm-hmm. Well, I, I think that started, uh, with the Business Builders Club as well.

Tim Fulton 28:20Okay.

Jay Clouse 28:21Uh, senior year of college, I, I took on leading that organization, and part of that was membership. How do we build up membership for it? At the same time, I had begun organizing Startup Weekend. Startup Weekend is a 54-hour community event-

Tim Fulton 28:35Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 28:35... where it's basically experiential education over a weekend teaching people what it's like to ideate and start a business.

Tim Fulton 28:42Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 28:43And that's really cool because we, we've impacted hundreds, probably thousands of peoples' lives telling them, "Okay, you have an idea. Now what?" And showing them over the course of a weekend what that looks like and what the next steps are, and I've really, really enjoyed doing that. Through that work and work with, uh, the CREATE Columbus Commission, which is making the young professional community better in Columbus-

Tim Fulton 29:05Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 29:06... I've met a lot of people, and I really like that. And I've seen that by finding people in different communities, these circles, like you have the arts community, um, which could be music, it could be painting. You have the entrepreneurship community. You have the craft brewery community-

Tim Fulton 29:22Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 29:22... retail, fashion, all these communities. It's great. What you find in common in these places are people are passionate, and they know a lot.

Tim Fulton 29:31Right.

Jay Clouse 29:31And it's really magical when you find people like that from different communities that haven't met, and they meet, and they find ways that they are related, and their ideas and philosophies can be morphed to a different topic.

Tim Fulton 29:45Okay.

Jay Clouse 29:46And so I've really enjoyed over the last two years finding ways to cross-pollinate those communities, and it started with music and entrepreneurship because musicians are consummate en- entrepreneurs, probably some of the oldest entrepreneurs that have existed.

Tim Fulton 30:00Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 30:01And where they struggle, they make great product.

Tim Fulton 30:05Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 30:05What they don't understand is-

Tim Fulton 30:06Or that they think is great product.

Jay Clouse 30:07Yeah. Right. Right.

Tim Fulton 30:09They make a product.

Jay Clouse 30:10It's a very crowded market.

Tim Fulton 30:12Yeah.

Jay Clouse 30:12And so you have to differentiate yourself in the market, and a lot of that could be messaging. It could be marketing. Um, a lot of stuff that people who are artists- A lot of times look at and say, "I don't wanna be slimy and pushy and salesy and sell these things." But-

Tim Fulton 30:26Because this is their art.

Jay Clouse 30:28Exactly.

Tim Fulton 30:28Right

Jay Clouse 30:28Exactly. But for anything to succeed and, and be, make some money, you have to catch some breaks, you have to make sales.

Tim Fulton 30:35Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 30:35And in my opinion, you can manufacture a lot of that if you, if you go about it the right way, and that's what marketers do.

Tim Fulton 30:42Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 30:42And so I, I try to help musicians look at their, their art as, um, a business, and, um, people who listen to their music as customers, essentially.

Tim Fulton 30:51Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 30:52And, and, and bridge that gap so they have a better chance of doing that full time, 'cause that's what they ultimately wanna do.

Tim Fulton 30:57Right.

Jay Clouse 30:58So yeah, I just, I really like the, the community building work, making new relationships, being the bridge between two people. I didn't realize this wasn't something everybody did, but I'm just constantly sending introductions to people.

Tim Fulton 31:09Okay.

Jay Clouse 31:09And saying, "You should meet this person." Because I'll, I'll get coffee with somebody, and they're working on a project that touches on something I've had a conversation about with somebody else.

Tim Fulton 31:18That you know somebody else is doing.

Jay Clouse 31:19And I'm saying, "This person knows way more about that. You should talk to them about it and not me." And that's kind of a magical thing.

Tim Fulton 31:26So we've gone through sort of the, the silos of your work, and frankly how they overlap a lot. Can you talk about how you prioritize your work and sort of manage your time?

Jay Clouse 31:36Mm-hmm. And this is, I, this is a skill. Time management and prioritization is a skill that I think comes, um, naturally to a lot of people that get into product management, or they wouldn't get into it in the first place.

Tim Fulton 31:47Okay.

Jay Clouse 31:47And being in product management makes you more attuned to do it. So-

Tim Fulton 31:53'Cause there's finite resources, and-

Jay Clouse 31:55Exactly

Tim Fulton 31:55... they have to be allocated.

Jay Clouse 31:56Exactly. Everybody starts out with 24 hours in a day. You're probably sleeping like eight, a third of it.

Tim Fulton 32:01Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 32:02Um, if you work 40 hours a week, that brings you down to 100 and, well, sorry, it brings you down to 72 hours in a week that you have for free.

Tim Fulton 32:10Got it.

Jay Clouse 32:11Free time, if you sleep ei- eight hours a day and work 40 hours a week. So how do I prioritize it? It's, it's kind of a gut feel. Obviously you do the things that you're completely obligated to do to other people, like I, I'm obligated to work at Crosschecks-

Tim Fulton 32:25Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 32:25... for the majority of my week, and so that comes first pretty much all the time. If you look at your hours that are outside of the working hours, it's, it's sort of run on deadlines. For CREATE Columbus Commission, if we have, uh, an event coming up that needs organized or, uh, a timeline with a, a key metric of success that needs to be done-

Tim Fulton 32:47Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 32:47... I basically look at, what is the most pressing deadline? What is my status on that item? And I attack those things first. It's, it's very linear to me.

Tim Fulton 32:55Okay.

Jay Clouse 32:56Um, and that comes pretty naturally. But my, my whole life is run on deadlines, and that was taught to me in journalism.

Tim Fulton 33:02Okay.

Jay Clouse 33:02'Cause in journalism, if you are writing a story, uh, it's gonna get printed that night, and it's gonna be out in people's hands the next day. And if you don't have your story written and to the editor by, it was 3:00 PM at that time-

Tim Fulton 33:15Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 33:15... they can't edit it. It won't get run.

Tim Fulton 33:17Right.

Jay Clouse 33:17And so you just couldn't miss deadlines.

Tim Fulton 33:20Right.

Jay Clouse 33:20And so for a long time I've been running on deadlines, and that's, it's just very strict. It's ingrained. It's this is the time this needs to be done, and there are no excuses and no way around it. You find a way. Um, same thing comes up when you work with a, an engineering team building a product. If you have a deadline and, um, a certain amount of functionality still to build, you kind of have to look at it as, how can this get done?

Tim Fulton 33:46Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 33:46Because getting done is a foregone conclusion. It has to get done in a way. So-

Tim Fulton 33:51Right

Jay Clouse 33:51... how do we do it to get done by that time, and what do we define as done?

Tim Fulton 33:55Right.

Jay Clouse 33:56Um, so pressing deadlines first. If I have some slush time, it comes down to what do, what do I care about doing at that, at that moment?

Tim Fulton 34:05Gotcha.

Jay Clouse 34:05Uh, personal projects, going to the gym, refilling my tank by hanging out with people that I enjoy hanging out with.

Tim Fulton 34:11There you go. What do you find inspiration in? In addition to the building things that connect with people and connecting with people one on one, what are the other th- unique things that you find inspiration in?

Jay Clouse 34:24I pay a lot of attention to comedy.

Tim Fulton 34:26Okay.

Jay Clouse 34:27And I do that because, um, well, for a, for a period of time I thought that I was gonna get into comedy.

Tim Fulton 34:32Okay.

Jay Clouse 34:33But lately I listen to a lot of podcasts, and my two favorite podcasts involve comedians interviewing other comedians, and that is You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes-

Tim Fulton 34:43Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 34:43... and WTF with Marc Maron.

Tim Fulton 34:45Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 34:46They do an excellent job of interviewing, which I think is important. But comedians, to, to be successful, what they're doing is finding absurdity in the real world and then pointing it out, knowing that you've also noticed that but maybe not registered it-

Tim Fulton 35:00Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 35:01... and making a joke out of it. Entrepreneurs do a lot of the same thing. They find absurdity in the real world, but then they find ways to solve for that absurdity. And by listening to comedy, it kind of tunes my eye to be present and notice things.

Tim Fulton 35:15Yeah.

Jay Clouse 35:16But also because those comedians notice things and they ask great questions, they get a lot of really interesting information out of the people they talk to.

Tim Fulton 35:24Right. Just like very similar to what you were doing with Crosschecks when you first started and sort of going out into the marketplace-

Jay Clouse 35:29Right

Tim Fulton 35:29... and saying, "Do you need this?"

Jay Clouse 35:32Right.

Tim Fulton 35:32'Cause I think a lot of the times, especially with the company I'm working for right now, you know, we identify a new product, and we start talking to potential customers, but also start talking to potential partners. And you sort of start realizing what additional opportunities that are in the marketplace that we weren't seeing, either because we're not fully ingratiated in it or because we're so close to what-

Jay Clouse 35:52Mm-hmm

Tim Fulton 35:52... we think is supposed to be happening-

Jay Clouse 35:55Mm-hmm

Tim Fulton 35:55... that we, you know, we can't see the forest for the sake of the trees, if that's the way that phrase goes.

Jay Clouse 36:01Yeah. Asking good questions is so very important in a lot of ways.

Tim Fulton 36:05Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 36:05I learned this in journalism too because you couldn't write unique stories without getting unique quotes and crafting-

Tim Fulton 36:11Right

Jay Clouse 36:11... them to your story. But-

Tim Fulton 36:13Well, and then you end up being the guy that's always asking, you know, how, what kind of music do you play?

Jay Clouse 36:18Yeah.

Tim Fulton 36:19And yeah.

Jay Clouse 36:20Yeah. Or the, the end of halftime at a football game when you ask like, "What do you need to do to, to win this game?" "Well, we need to score more points. We need to execute." And it's like, "That's nothing interesting." So it also helps when you're talking to potential customers because you need to ask- Non-leading and non-biased questions so that you get actual good data.

Tim Fulton 36:39Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 36:40And where I see that manifest a lot is let's take a startup weekend event. Teams will form around an idea for a product-

Tim Fulton 36:46First of all, talk people through how, how startup weekend goes. Es-

Jay Clouse 36:50Sure

Tim Fulton 36:50... especially the first part of it so that there's an understanding of how it all works.

Jay Clouse 36:53Sure. So at startup weekend we allow anybody to pitch ideas, and these people have all kinds of different backgrounds, designers, engineers, marketers, lawyers, teachers, very diverse. On Friday night we invite all of them to pitch an idea they have, and they have 60 seconds to do so. Then the group of people, which is usually 100 to 125, vote and narrow down their favorite ideas and form teams around them.

Tim Fulton 37:17Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 37:17Usually 12 to 15 teams in a weekend. And they go validate that idea, build an MVP as we were discussing earlier, and try to form a business model by the time they pitch that on Sunday.

Tim Fulton 37:28Mm-hmm. So but, like, 75% of the ideas that get pitched aren't happening.

Jay Clouse 37:33Right.

Tim Fulton 37:33Right?

Jay Clouse 37:34Right.

Tim Fulton 37:34Okay.

Jay Clouse 37:34Um, it's, it's... They're usually novel ideas or it's not really necessarily. Like, if you, if you go to a startup weekend and pitch a ride sharing service that takes people from point A to point B, that's not gonna get off the ground versus Uber that exists now.

Tim Fulton 37:47Right.

Jay Clouse 37:48Um, so usually pretty novel. And to validate that they will write surveys and send them to people they think are their users. But a lot of times they'll basically spell out their idea, like, "We are this service that will take you from point A to point B but it's in a different city. Would you use this?"

Tim Fulton 38:06Right.

Jay Clouse 38:07And that gives unrealistic data because the answers are yes or no, and, you know, people may be thinking maybe, but you haven't given them information on what's that gonna cost, what, what are more-

Tim Fulton 38:18What is that experience like?

Jay Clouse 38:19Yeah. Um, and even if it is something that sounds like they're gonna use, the real indicator of whether or not somebody will use a thing is if they pay money for it, or if you actually get it in front of them and they use it without you asking them to.

Tim Fulton 38:32Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 38:33So asking questions is very important so you can, you can lead these conversations with questions like, "What are three problems that you face frequently in your work?" And then you start to look for patterns. If you ask that question to 20 people that you think are your target user, and 15 of them mention the same thing, and that is the problem that you think you're trying to solve anyway-

Tim Fulton 38:55Mm-hmm

Jay Clouse 38:55... that is great information that says you may have found a real problem that people are aware of. If they're not aware of a problem, it's not a very painful problem, and they, they're probably not gonna use it. Of course, there, there's exceptions to this, like Snapchat nobody was saying, "I wish I could take photos that would disappear in 10 seconds."

Tim Fulton 39:12Right.

Jay Clouse 39:13But those are kind of rare and not, not the, uh... They're the exception, not the rule.

Tim Fulton 39:17Right. While you have sort of settled back into, I would say, a more comfortable space because you're earning a paycheck, you're working for somebody else, it's not nec- it's not all on you to make sure that Crosschecks succeeds, what advice would you give to somebody who's sort of in a space where they're thinking, "I wanna forge out on my own and, and be an entrepreneur, and I have this great idea." What advice would you give to them?

Jay Clouse 39:47The best advice is to start. And that doesn't mean start filing an LLC and, and, and running the company, quitting everything and doing it. Start means start making steps towards that reality.

Tim Fulton 39:57Okay.

Jay Clouse 39:58Meaning if you have this idea, talk to people about it, people that you think are going to be users of it. Run some validation. Run a pilot if you can if it's easy. I, I have this idea for, um, an events format that I wanna run.

Tim Fulton 40:12Okay.

Jay Clouse 40:12And in a couple of months I'm literally just going to do that-

Tim Fulton 40:14Okay

Jay Clouse 40:14... and see how it goes. But the beauty in something like that is I can do those things while I'm still working at Crosschecks, making an impact, and being valuable there. I can do it in my free time, and I'm not putting all the risk on my back because it's not necessary yet.

Tim Fulton 40:30Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 40:31But if you're just talking about this idea, talking and talking, there's no novel idea out there. Somebody else is thinking the same thing somewhere. And so time may be limited, it may be a first to market thing, or, you know, an idea just isn't really worth much. You have to do something with it so that other people can be impacted and value can be created. So really you need to start working towards it, whether it's conversations with people, whether it's running a pilot, uh, it's very important. Um.

Tim Fulton 41:00That's good enough. Talk about some of the other... In addition to Startup Weekend and the other things you're involved in, what are the other positive things are you, do you see happening in Columbus?

Jay Clouse 41:10I'm involved with the Create Columbus Commission, which is making great strides in helping young professionals serve as co-creators for the city. We, we're in the conversation about transit, but also we've been providing sort of micro-seed funding through our grant program.

Tim Fulton 41:24Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 41:25Um, we've been improving financial literacy and wellness, and, and even trying to amplify the urban pulse, making Columbus a better place to, to play.

Tim Fulton 41:34Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 41:34Outside of that, I'm involved with, uh, the Columbus Songwriters Association, which has been really, really cool. Uh, I, I was previously the host of the monthly showcase where we had something, sometimes 20 artists come and share two new original songs with a, with an audience of strangers where they could provide feedback to that artist.

Tim Fulton 41:52Okay.

Jay Clouse 41:52That was awesome. There's an events, uh, group, kind of an underground events group that, uh, I'm starting to help run some of their things, and I'll keep that kind of... Yeah, I probably shouldn't have even said it.

Tim Fulton 42:03Okay.

Jay Clouse 42:03But they do some really cool stuff and it's, it's... They, they keep it quiet, and it's just, um, it's just exciting and, and fun and new. But I, I see a lot of cool things happening in Columbus. The Smart City Grant.

Tim Fulton 42:16Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 42:17What I like about Columbus a lot is s- as opposed to, like, a Pittsburgh or a Cleveland, there's not a lot of, uh, historical baggage to the city. There wasn't a, an industry that thrived and now we're trying to re- reidentify ourselves.

Tim Fulton 42:32Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 42:33It's, it's kind of a blank slate, and it's growing quickly. We just crossed the two million mark in population, and the three million mark is gonna happen much faster than the last million did.

Tim Fulton 42:42Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse 42:43Um, the, the people who are driving that change are still very accessible, so you can be a part of it. I think there's gonna be some real strides made in public art in the city, which is a huge positive. Where we're sitting right now, the Idea Foundry, is an incredible asset to the city. It's beautiful. It looks like a mixed-use space that you would find in New York or San Francisco. Little plug, we're gonna be doing our next startup weekend here.

Tim Fulton 43:09Oh, great.

Jay Clouse 43:10As a maker-themed event. Every idea that's pitched will be a maker idea, and the teams will have to create something.

Tim Fulton 43:15Physical?

Jay Clouse 43:16Yeah.

Tim Fulton 43:16Okay.

Jay Clouse 43:17That's June 23rd.

Tim Fulton 43:19Okay.

Jay Clouse 43:19But that's... There's a lot of fun things happening here, I think. A lot of construction all the time. Ohio State's building new dorms and growing and getting bigger all the time.

Tim Fulton 43:28Yeah.

Jay Clouse 43:29But I think it's a good time to be here.

Tim Fulton 43:33Great. Jay, thank you so much for your time.

Jay Clouse 43:35Yeah, thanks for having me.

Tim Fulton 43:45Thank you for listening to the Confluence Cast presented by Columbus Underground. Again, you can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theconfluencecast.com. Please rate, subscribe, share this episode of the Confluence Cast with your friends, family, contacts, enemies, your favorite entrepreneur. If you're interested in sponsoring the Confluence Cast, get in touch with us. We can be reached by email at info at theconfluencecast.com. Our theme music was composed by Benji Robinson. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. Have a great week.