Kevin Henshaw (00:00) It becomes challenging to maintain that mindset and that enthusiasm when you scale up past 150 people. It's extraordinarily challenging. Your culture is a living entity and you have to defend it. And so unfortunately we have to let this individual go because... Kevin Henshaw has been the president of Together Labs, named in the time 100 most influential companies. You're asking consumers about things that they had never seen and never done before. It's extraordinarily difficult to actually get feedback from customers in that world. Kevin is the former CEO and COO of IMVU, the world's largest Web3 social metaverse and birthplace of the best-selling book, The Lean Startup. Scaled the company from early stage to over 400 employees, driving over $1 billion in revenue, raising $70 million plus of funds and managed for M &A in the process. Diego Calligaro (00:51) Where do you see the metaverse going in this intersection of Web3, artificial intelligence, and overall metaverse? Kevin Henshaw (00:57) you know. Diego Calligaro (01:19) Before starting this amazing interview, make sure to subscribe to the channel so you will not miss the secrets and tactics of the world leaders who will join us in the coming months. And if you have questions, comments, write it here, we will reply to you. And now let's start. So Kevin, before moving to Silicon Valley, where you scale one of the most influential companies in the world, you spend more than 10 years in Asia. how that experience shaped you as a leader back then. Kevin Henshaw (01:52) Yes. Well, it seems like it was a long, long time ago when that happened, but I was in fact the first employee for Adobe in Asia. I opened their office in Hong Kong and literally it was just myself in the earliest of days. Then we grew the firm. We hired, you know, marketing, channel sales reps, pre-sales engineering, finance, all the things you need to run a field sales and marketing office. And it was initially all based out of Hong Kong, but then later started hiring in Taipei, Taiwan, and then later still at Beijing. And that office has grown tremendously for Adobe. It's now an enormous, enormous office with critical impact in the company, but it was really an honor to be associated with that. But those early days were living on a plane, you know, constant travel, meeting with people that had little or no exposure to Western firms. So Microsoft was present, but Due to the rampant piracy, there just wasn't a large domestic software business. So there are not lot of people with a lot of experience selling software. so trying to hire a team, motivate a team in a world where, you know, it was universally thought that software could or should be free was really challenging. So a lot of that came down to how do you build a team? How do you align folks around a shared mission of trying to strive towards, in this case, sales success, because as I said, it was just a field sales and marketing office. And then later it became clear that we were, our ability to really grow. at a tremendous scale was hampered by the fact that the product did not have, in many cases, a user interface that was in Chinese. So there's an obvious impediment. As I think you can understand, you wouldn't pay for software that had only a Chinese user interface. And people in China felt the same way about English language software. then I had to start getting involved. more than I wanted, and certainly more than I think any rational salesperson should ever do in actually modifying the product, identifying partners that could do not only the traditional localization, but the actual cultural changes that were required as well. Right. So part of my thought and growth as an individual was, you know, thinking about the whole solution, thinking about, you know, trying to walk in my customer's shoes. And thinking through what is it that they need? I mean, obviously the fact that they needed Chinese language software is abundantly self-evident, but there are lots and lots of other far more nuanced changes that were required to make the firm successful. And I will say I'm really proud. We enjoyed a great deal of success. Company grew very, very rapidly. Diego Calligaro (04:37) interesting. Tell me what triggered your decision there to move from Asia to Silicon Valley. You literally moved from a large enterprise to the birthplace of the Lean Startup. For the listeners, IMVU is the largest social metaverse in the world. You joined there, there literally a few people, and then you scale that company. Tell us about this. Kevin Henshaw (05:05) As much as I enjoyed working for Adobe and I have great fun memories of both people, obviously world-class products and so on, I really felt like I needed a new challenge. I'd been there over a decade, admittedly across three countries and two different, dramatically different challenges, both in product and in field sales and worldwide sales leadership. But I really, really wanted to participate in helping to find a product kind of more from the grounds up. And I have you afforded that opportunity. I was the first business hire. It was a very, very small company. didn't have a payroll system at the time. So, you know, it was, it was the traditional sort of startup, not truly in a garage. There were, there were already almost 40 people there, but they were all software engineers and 3d modelers and animators and so on. were no, no one involved in, in, in any customer facing roles whatsoever. sort of almost immediately took on running sales there, you know, I hired to do business development and, it was a great opportunity. I mean, you know, when we were talking about business development, they're pretty far from the approach that we had taken at Adobe, which was, know, how can we take our existing product and, and, and work alongside other products and instead move to that, you know, entirely new. innovative approach of how do we define a brand new product for a brand new market and how do we establish the product market fit that we need to really scale a successful software offering. So it was really a personal challenge. was enormous amount of work. You know, all the stories, you you hear about startups and of course it was a very, very difficult time. The firm was still searching for. the revenue streams that it would need to become a self-sufficient product. There's obviously some measure of product market fit and we were following the lean startup methodologies as was popularized by one of IMV's co-founders, Eric Ries. And we were doing pretty well in terms of establishing that people were going to do something that Nowadays would take entirely for granted, but at the time was thought of as being wildly innovative, highly unlikely, because people would optionally pay for content in a game. Diego Calligaro (07:30) Kevin, you were mentioning before about Eric, the author of the Lean Startup. And back then, I believe, was the CTO in IMVU. And of course, today there are many startups that follow this methodology. And of course, this methodology is very much aligned. to emerging technology companies to really find the product market fit and scale. I'm wondering like how this methodology born there in MVU actually evolved across the year because of course the company scaled to hundreds of employees. How that evolve over time? Kevin Henshaw (08:06) Yeah, I think there were some really critical elements there that were retained even as we grew exponentially larger. And one of the key things was this notion of the minimum viable product, the MVP, which was popularized of course by Eric's bestselling book and then the subsequent lecture series and then now of course a whole series of related books. So that mindset, which was really build the absolute minimum required in order to get something quickly in front of customers and then iterate on the feedback and measure their reaction to these changes. That remained, I would say, integral to the company as we grew and grew. So, you know, there was a huge amount of enthusiasm about, you know, innovation, about creating new things. But we were also talking about a world where You know, think back to say 2010, just to pick a number out of thin air. You know, we're talking about 3d avatars, user-generated content, 3d models that were driven by amateurs who were learning how to use the tooling that the company provided. There wasn't a clear firm to follow. were not yet another social network. weren't. You know, LinkedIn for cats. was, it was almost everything was being invented whole cloth by the firm. And so what that really meant was it was extraordinarily difficult to in effect survey consumers. You're asking consumers about things that they had never seen and never done before. It's extraordinarily difficult to actually get feedback from customers in that world. Right. There's no, you know, it's like me asking you like, what kind of food would you eat on a rocket ship? Well, you've never been on a rocket ship, so it's very, very hard to imagine, like, you're gonna be able to provide, like, you really insightful, really nuanced feedback. You just have no idea. And that's not a criticism, but it was extraordinarily difficult as we invented the future to sort of say, when we think about a persistent 3D space, what's that like? And most people were like, I have no idea. I have no idea what you're talking about. That's not, that's not something I've ever conceptualized. I've never thought of that. It's extraordinarily difficult. So we were building a lot of software, putting it in front of customers and then gauging their reaction. And some of it was, you know, qualitative. We'd asked them after they had the experience, but a huge amount of it was qualitative, right? Meaning we were measuring how their behavior changed when we did these modifications to the live service. So there were, there were some, some bumpy days there. There was a lot of pushing, pushing code to a live service and. And then realizing consumers really didn't like it or in some cases even worse, they really loved it and then crashed the service. So, you know, it was the days of the whale tail, fail tail of Twitter, but we were operating in a very different space, but experiencing many of the same phenomenon. Diego Calligaro (11:07) And it's very interesting as well, the fact that during these changes, during this evolution in those days, because the company grew very quickly, it's fascinating how also the growth culture can change. For example, you know that in early stages of growth, you maybe are looking for employees that are risk takers, generalists. Then as it grows, you look for different people. I'm wondering here, like, Kevin Henshaw (11:22) it. Diego Calligaro (11:37) how you were built, know, that culture of growth and scaling and how you manage as well, you know, to build that motivation given the changes internally that were very fast. Kevin Henshaw (11:49) Yeah, there was a very strong focus by the entire leadership team in building a really strong culture that encouraged ongoing innovation, even as we grew. We did grow quickly in the grand scheme of things, absolutely, but it was more reliant upon customer adoption and establishing strong product market fit than... You know, getting enormous, you know, funds from venture capitalists who would enable us to grow ahead of the curve. But the culture focus was really critical because, as you're pointing out in the very earliest of days, you know, again, driven by this lean startup, there's a lot of enthusiasm for everyone to participate in thinking coherently and comprehensively about the service that we were offering for customers. And then the small teams, you know, going off and building. the minimum viable product that we would deliver to customers. And that becomes challenging to have that mindset and maintain that mindset and that enthusiasm when you, when you scale up past, you know, 150 people. You really need at that point, far more specialists, far more larger number of people who have like very specialized skill sets that don't think about the whole product or absolute world leaders in say 3d rendering or whatever the topic at hand happens to be a virtual currency management, whatever. And, you know, the, the way as, as an executive team and, Myself in particular, tried to approach the challenge was to build a culture where we invested really heavily in making everyone feel empowered to speak to and to propose changing the product. So we never took the idea that even though you're a, you know, a 3d modeling expert, that you couldn't make a statement about the quality or the viability of a new business idea of our. tooling for 3D rendering, like there's a lot of things where we welcome people's input. And I think a lot of people, a lot of companies, I don't mean individuals, but a lot of companies very flippantly throughout this notion that like good ideas come from everywhere. And I don't think anyone would ever disagree with this notion, but firms don't actually invest in making that real. And so one of the things that we tried to do, uh, you know, including during my stint as CEO was really invest in making that possible. And you think, well, what does that mean? So it's not easy to, to empower people to make intelligent and informed decisions unless you give them the information they need to make that decision. So I'll illustrate with an example. If you think like, should make a product for teenagers in France. That might be a great market. That's, that's sort of interesting. So, you know, lots of companies have a suggestion box you throw in like, we should be making a product for teenagers in France. Here's my suggestion, blah, Well, the practical reality is maybe you don't have any adoption in France. So the answer is to make available and the choice that we made was to entrust all of the team members with all of our sales data. So we had a live feed that my team built. was in charge of our big data organization. My team built a live feed of how we were doing in every country on earth, broken down by gender, broken down by platform, and every single employee and contractor could go in and look at how we were doing. And so that service is not free. Maintaining that service as we entered new markets, as we released new language, new iterations, new platforms, you have to constantly add value to this exclusively internal tool. But it did give people the opportunity to go in and say, well, how many French teenagers do we have using the platform today? And if the answer is like nine of them, well, clearly that's not a market, right? We don't need to spend a lot of cycles. Our big investment was empowering people to have the information, make the investment, to make real the statement that good ideas come from everywhere. Because otherwise it's just a throwaway statement where you're allowed to brainstorm and throw ideas in a suggestion box, but... not actually have any idea whether or not it's going to be actioned. And so we took very seriously this notion that like people should be able to contribute to the product. And we did in fact build products and services and iterate on the product based on, on input. And we had members of our customer care team that came up with genius marketing techniques and so on based on what they were hearing from the customers. And they had data and were empowered. Even though to be blunt about it, they're amongst the more junior members of our team. They still had these enormous impacts because we welcomed them to make suggestions about the product, about the marketing techniques used, better promotional efforts and strategies. And then actually when we took on and made those changes, it's an enormously empowering thing. one of the things I'm incredibly proud of is the fact that we won the best places to work award numerous times. In fact, I think we won nine times while I was on the executive team. I'm extraordinarily proud of that because it was a very conscious, very choiceful decision. And at the end of the day, we were headquartered in Redwood city. So famously, so was Facebook. And Facebook has, you know, legendary benefits for employees and chefs and masseuse and so on. And we didn't have the kind of funding that would be required to offer anything even remotely comparable. So it really came down to like, how do we make a difference in terms of building an empowering culture, a culture of respect, of integrity? How do we do that and still win an, you know, still not just have a viable company, but win awards where. employees are voting and saying like, is the best place I've ever. Diego Calligaro (17:57) That's great to hear. And let me just come back for a second to what you were mentioning before in terms of expanding your market, because of course you are expanding different markets. So it's important many times to know to enter a market as fast as possible, but also to know when is the wrong market as soon as possible. So we are mentioning a tactic here to find out which is the best market to enter and how to spot the ones that are good and the ones that are bad as well. What do you say are the main tactics that you use there to really accelerate the entry in the market and spot as soon as possible the ones that are not the good ones. Kevin Henshaw (18:33) We had, we had an internal methodology where we would conduct a retrospective and we had very, very emphatic rules about the retrospective, which was ensuring that we had a blame free culture. So people could come in and have an open discussion about why it didn't work and why it is that we want to make all new mistakes next time. Because the reality is we're going to make more mistakes. It's foolish to sort of say, how do we, how do we avoid making mistakes? Yes, you. You don't want to make the same mistake twice. That's self-evident. But the goal was never like, how can we learn from this mistake? And who can we, you know, burn at the cross and who needs to lose their job? And instead we came together in a collegial way and sort of said, what could we all have done? And again, coming back to this, this phenomenon of the culture, if someone came in and said, well, you know, it was obvious, like we shouldn't have ever to go back to my old example here, we shouldn't have ever built a product for French teens. We had the opportunity to sort of say, you also had the data. So that's also your flaw. That was your shortcoming as well as my shortcoming. But we were able to turn around and look at people and say, like, you can't throw stones because you had the data as well. And so we came together in a collegial, open, learning centric rather than blame centric environment and sort of said, hey, how can we do better? So I can share with you a funny story. And some of these things are, you know, live and learn. we decided when we began to localize the product for the first time ever, and this is a long time ago now over a decade ago, but we looked at some of our larger communities and we were doing exceedingly well in, in Holland. So the Netherlands, not exactly certain why, but had like really, really rapid adoption, obviously widespread. Broadband was, you know, at the time was a really important phenomenon. We're doing moderately well in Germany, but relative to the population sizes, was nowhere near as successful as Holland. Obviously we're thinking that in part this is because the German community was accustomed to seeing German software, German menus and so on. And the Dutch were far more open-minded about like, you know, we can use more comfort with the English language UI. That was our hypothesis at the time. So we decided we would hire a firm that had specialized in business software localization and created German product. So that's what we did. Gave them, a check. They translated all the menu items and so on. And then we began our user exceptions testing, you know, found a bunch of our existing German users and to a person, they were laughing their head off. was, you know, just endless tears of laughter. It turns out of course that all of the terminology selected by this professional firm was this professional terminology. So all of these, all of the chat menus and so on were more akin to maybe Microsoft Teams than a consumer software product. So, you know, we're interviewing these people who are using the product for fun, for socializing, to have a good time. And, and I guess the entries and of course the words are all 27 letters long and nothing that I can understand to read. But anyway, all of the terms, of course, are these very formal, very academic, very business oriented terms. And so we decided to take an entirely different approach and we crowdsourced the localization into initially German, but then of course also Dutch and Polish, Bahasa Indonesia and Chinese and so on. it was, you know, it was, was a whole extensive journey where You know, we actually invited the community and a true sort of like web three model to come forward and actually directly contribute to actually the, you know, I'll say localization here, but it was also culturalization. Diego Calligaro (22:30) Okay, clear. thanks a lot for sharing, Kevin. And it comes to many questions here because it's impressive how you managed to create this culture. So it looks like the employees internally were very much into providing feedback as well as receiving and implementing, which is a very important... aspect of many successful companies. Sometimes though it's difficult to find those people that are aligned with this principle and create that environment of providing constant feedback. Can you provide us a practical example on how you build that specific feedback loop environment? Kevin Henshaw (23:18) I'll share with you an example that is still to this day sort of a painful memory for me, which was that a very successful leader in our product organization who was in some cases tasked with leading these retrospectives. And this individual at a point in time laughed and was in my mind dramatically undermining the process. They would go through this sort of performative thing where they're like, yes, yes, I agree with your observations and I will try and do better and we should explore this idea. And then left and would tell his team, like, you know, that individual is a knucklehead. not going to waste time on it. You know, so in the public sphere, was this very, you know, I'm supportive of this open, great ideas come from everywhere. Everyone wants input. And, know, that's one those things that. You know, your culture is, is living entity and you have to defend it. And so unfortunately we had to let this individual go because they were at every turn, sort of undermining the process, but they were very good at the performative part of showing up at meetings and saying, that's a great idea. Diego, you're so insightful. And then leaving the room and behind closed doors saying, you know, Diego hasn't a clue. don't know why we listen to them. We're not going to invite them to the next meeting. You know, that all the things that lead to. They closed, you know, not open decision making process. And so that was, it was really hard because this person was a strong performer, actually good at everything except the culture. And so I think they would be tremendously successful at another firm. And unfortunately I had to let them go because it was, you know, one of those situations where you're not supportive of what we're trying to accomplish here, even though you're quite efficient and effective at the task of getting what we're asking you to do done. you're going about getting these strong results in absolutely the wrong way. And as a consequence, I think decimating people's ideas and belief that myself as part of the leadership team was in fact committed to open and transparent process where we were all contributing to and all had an understanding of You know, the status of projects and so on. And I have to tell you that the, again, coming back to this notion that the culture is this living entity. It is no great joy to be the C C O O and stand up and explain like, you know, we're having really difficult times or we've launched this major project and it is not going well. Like there's a lot of times when you think like, maybe we could live without an update this week because I got no good news to share. I don't want to be the guy to constantly be delivering bad news or whatever it is. And you have to take that deep breath and say, no, like, you know, owe it to the team trying to build and sustain this culture that will allow the company to scale. I have to share with them this bad news. know, was a lot of, a lot of conversations. lot of ugly statements came out of my. Diego Calligaro (26:26) Kevin, can you give us a practical example here on how you actually deliver that type of bad news in this situation? What do you usually say? Kevin Henshaw (26:36) I don't think there's like the one way, but what I will say is, you know, normally I would preface the, you know, bring to mind why it is that we're sharing the bad news. We're not sharing the bad news to panic people or to encourage them to update their LinkedIn. That's not why we're sharing the bad news, right? We're sharing the bad news because we're committed to transparency because we're all shareholders in the company because we want to have, you know, the respect of our colleagues and so on. And therefore, unfortunately, I'm here to share this bad news. Like here's the negative results of the experiment that we undertook or a new marketing initiative or whatever it is that weren't there. But I'll say people are vastly more receptive to bad news that they understand why they're being told bad news. And I had lots of people tell me like, Hey, I love knowing what's going on. And I'm committed to making a difference because you're telling me. We're having difficulty. I'm going to say that an extra hour after work, I'm going to do this, that, and the other thing. Like they understand like, it was, whereas, you know, if you hide this or like, it's not going well, it's just not pretend it never happened or not talk about it. The project just goes away. Next time when you ask people to volunteer for somewhat risky project, everyone looks at it and goes, Oh, everyone else that worked on another weird risky project. never heard of them again. So I don't, I don't want to be involved. And that's exactly what you don't want. You want everyone to feel like, Hey, Even if I don't participate, I work at a company where I'm allowed to opt into projects that I get to choose some measure of my workload. That's a huge win for everyone involved. But the downside is you have to deliver bad news. You have to be honest with the teams. You have to deliver the bad news. But I think the context of we're delivering bad news because we want your input, suggestions, innovative thinking to maybe course correct. to pivot, to think about how we might alter this, or to be very blunt about it, to reassign the resources. So we still want people's input, whether things are a huge raging success or they're a dismal failure, we still want people's input. think a lot of companies and companies that I've been involved with in the past have this notion like, it worked well, so we don't need to focus on it. And our experience was inevitably the opposite was true. Things are going well, almost always can be improved. You're moving from strength to strength. You have more resources to double down, right? There's so many occasions where I think about, you know, things that are going well and we don't just say, hey, we did this thing, it worked well, revenues went up, everything's up and to the right, all right, next topic. It's like, hey, let's really dig in. Let's actually really understand the success. Yeah, it's a success. We're not digging in, we're not. is not a post-mortem, we're not trying to tease out where the shortcomings are, we're actually really exhaustively examining where are we successful? And then if it turns out like, know, teens in France are not adopting the product, like why not? What are we gonna do that moves us from very good to truly excellent, right? Or from truly excellent to life-changing, like what's that next step? And again, you need the data, you need to make that data available to the teens if you want their. Diego Calligaro (29:51) Yeah, it definitely goes back to all this mindset of the company, which would spend hours on it. But I would like as well to touch now also on our key important topics. One of these is the metaverse. Why this? We know IMVU is the largest social web-tree metaverse in the world. And I like to start before, from your perspective, what actually is the metaverse? Yeah. Kevin Henshaw (30:19) It's a great question in that I don't know that we have come to a truly, you know, single sentence everyone agrees upon. We all have a mental model of what a zebra is, but I think if you ask 10 different people, you get 10 different like mental models of what the metaverse is. So it's a great question. Like how do you define it? I think about, I think about some of the defining characteristics. So I think the, the, the, the notion of it being three dimensional. you know, otherwise we're into this strange world of like web browsers are actually in some strange way, the metaverse, you know, you have this notion of, of persistence that the space, the environment, the 3d environment is there, whether you're there or not, it's available, whether you're present or not. so that persistence element. And then I think the notion of, of, ownership is also really critical and you get really you know, strong overlap here with the Web3 community, which is why so many Web3 games in particular are metaverse driven or metaverse adjacent, if not metaverses altogether. So this notion that, you know, in this online persistent 3D environment, You actually take ownership and own the assets that are present in the world is really critical that you have a persistent identity that, know, persistent display of self. These sort of notions are strongly tied to ownership and to identity. And so, you know, this idea of like unique identity, persistence online in a 3d environment. Those I think are in my mind are like the most critical and defining elements. And then they get a stretch a little bit and you can get into debates like is Roblox a metaverse and is it sufficiently 3d and is it this, that and the other thing. So. Diego Calligaro (32:17) Yeah, of course. And it's developing as well very fast. For example, if you're taking consideration all the developments and synergies that can be created with AI, where do you see the metaverse going in this intersection of Web3, artificial intelligence, and the overall metaverse? Kevin Henshaw (32:35) question. Many thousands of smarter people than I have wrestled with this for time immemorial. I do think that AI is giving us, generative AI in particular, is giving us the opportunity to make authoring vastly easier. So if you think about my three defining characteristics, That really means is you're probably going to have a metaverse for work, more likely a metaverse for every project at work, or maybe a metaverse for every major client engagement at work. These are easy things to say, but they're actually extraordinarily difficult things to deliver upon. Cause if I turn to you Diego and say like, can you please now that we've adopted, you know, whatever companies, metaverse, can you quickly spin up 12 persistent virtual spaces and make them compelling and. immersive, please. Like, is there an army of designers that are assigned to my team now? Because like, that's what I'm going to need to come up with 12, 15, 20 different metaverses, some for projects, some for company meetings, some for client meetings. Are you kidding me? Like I need enormous, enormous amount of resource in order to do something that's innovative, creative, sustains your brand, employee engagement, like all the things you'd want to accomplish with, with a persistent 3d space. And so AI comes. comes along at a time where, you know, we're struggling with understanding the copyright issues. You know, there's a lot of legal things that need to be determined here. You know, how do we, how do we provide fair compensation to the creative individuals that went into the seed works that creates this? But I think, I think you can envision pretty readily a way in which generative AI is going to play an incredibly important role. If I say, Hey, I'm, I have a critical meeting with. Boeing corporation, can we please have something that's like compelling that talks to the Boeing culture, that talks to Boeing's products, that, you know, is, going to, is going to feel welcoming for them, you know, to, be involved in, in a virtual space and acknowledge their importance as a customer of ours, obviously speaking completely theoretically here. So that effort is going to rely, think a great deal on generative AI in order to make it. compelling, immersive, engaging, these things that need to happen to make the metaverse a practical reality. I think we've all seen the silly Mark Zuckerberg videos of the metaverse and legless humans and it is not compelling. Maybe that's the nicest thing I can say about it. It's just not very immersive. It's not very compelling. There's no world in which I think I'm actually in a room with Diego. Like there's absolutely nothing about the technology as being delivered today. I think generative AI has the opportunity here to come up with vastly improved user experience. Diego Calligaro (35:34) I see. And what do you think are those limitations or challenges in this way? I'm thinking about all the amount of resources, for example, in cloud computing that are going to be exponential, even for emerging companies in the field. What do you think are those roadblocks on the way to develop these technologies? Kevin Henshaw (35:57) I think the planetary concerns, environmental concerns about the impact of AI are very well documented and they're truly terrifying. I think, know, widespread adoption of... Metaverse, you, again, coming back to my example of like, you know, you, you, you, an individual, Diego, as, as the CEO, you, might be involved in 10, 12, 20 different metaverses for your company. You probably then go to a series of conferences over the course of the year and maybe a set of concerts for entertainment purposes, viewing experiences. might engage in with a hundred metaverses and each of those are providing to you, at least in theory, some amount of personalization and ownership of the personalized. assets, which are generally speaking 3D, you're talking here about, and then of course they need to be made redundant, right? If you own it, you're probably going to back it up in the environment, which you utilize it, probably going to back it up. know, think about concerts, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people attending it. You you're thinking, wow, like you're backing up like millions, tens of millions of 3D assets. You're really speaking about a world where bandwidth, storage, electrical demand goes enormous, skyrockets, right? It's an enormous, enormous burden. So, so many of those things are going to be, I think, improved. think storage, bandwidth, IOs, you know, like these are all things where, you know, we're going to apply science and, and, and make great improvements. All of those improvements though. are going to be based on improvements, largely in algorithms, in processing and so on. mean, there's a reason Nvidia is the planet's most valuable company now, right? It's a relatively recent phenomenon, but here it is. That is in my mind is one of the reasons it's so unbelievably valuable that stretches beyond simply the currently observable demand created by AI. Ultimately though, there's no escaping the demand, the electrical demand. If we improve compression, And therefore storage a hundredfold. That seems attainable to me, but storage needs electrical power to be always on, to always be available, to continue to exist and be persistently connected to the internet. There's just no world in which I can envision us not having just skyrocketing demand for, for, for, for electrical power. So it's, that's the one, you know, one resource here that I don't know that we can science our way out of. Diego Calligaro (38:28) Yeah, this is also why the biggest multinationals, tech multinationals are investing in nuclear power now as well. Kevin Henshaw (38:37) Yeah. And so, you I don't think I'm the first to come to this conclusion by any stretch of the imagination. So, but you're right. No, no surprises were, you you see some of the most valuable companies in the tech world actually bypassing the public utilities or the private utilities. And they're limited relative to the Facebooks and Googles and Microsoft's of the world. are limited resources and sort of saying, Hey, we cannot wait for you. to get a bond issuance done and to raise hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars. We need to go much faster than that. So we're directly participating. We're going to give you in some cases, you know, billions with a B, which is an astonishing statement, right? I never thought I'd live in a world where Microsoft is writing a billion dollar check to incredibly old school, you know. In some cases, coal burning, cases nuclear, you mostly of course, leaning into it, going nuclear, going for a cleaner future. you thought I'd see a world where Microsoft is writing enormous checks for some of the most mundane, you know, I don't want to be too negative here, but boring old world utility companies that, know. set things on fire in order to turn turbines. it's like, wow, Microsoft is in that business now. Diego Calligaro (40:00) And it makes reflect on how the speed and the transformation of technologies also pushing this company to think ahead and not rely on the state to change. It's impressive to see this development and how fast they go. then wanted to ask you, let's now imagine Kevin that we are six years ahead of us in the future is 2030 and we are having this conversation now. and we are in the metaverse. So how does the conversation look like? Kevin Henshaw (40:34) Hopefully both have legs, right? I'll open that quip. You know, six years in astronomically long period of time, right? Relative to our thinking about what the metaverse could and should be, how we'd like to interact online in a more persistent manner. I'm going to say that, you know, a lot of people are inclined to sort of say, Hey, it's, it's going to be wildly different. It's going to be, you know, enormously. Um, enormously different from our current experience. My thought process is much more that, you know, you're going to want to be able to recognize me, you know, going back to our example where we're going to a seminar or a trade show, something like that. I know you're going, you know, I'm going, you're going to want to know me at site. So we're moving around in a 3d space. You want to know what I look like and what I see is a ton of people that, you know, They look like they're demons and they have wings and there's like all this phantasmagorical like all the constraints are off and so on. That's wonderful and delightful if you're in the entertainment business and you want a visual spectacle. It's completely impractical because at a trade show we're going to walk by one another. No idea that that guy that looks like he's a schnauzer dog is actually Diego. I have no idea. I have no way of knowing. And then you're looking at me and saying that that guy looks crazy. He's got wings and smoke billowing out of his ears. Actually it's Kevin. I mean, you have no idea. Right? So, so I think that the actual ideal experience is more that it reflects as much. And I'll say, of course, as a little, maybe you do want to be that demon. Maybe you want to go and say, I very specifically don't want to be recognized well at this trade show. I don't want these salespeople to follow up with me. I just want to go and look and I want to preserve my anonymity, right? That's, that's, that's, really critically important to me, but also, you know, mostly when I go, I want to, I want the vendors that I've worked with in the past to recognize me and want my colleagues to recognize me and so on. I want it to look like more, a great deal more like me. And I want my reactions to be more akin to, you know, the social cues and so on. They're so absent today. So, you we, we, we joked a lot at IMVU about the cadavers, right? They were like, they were actually cadavers. They, know, as soon as you stop animating them, they just sat there blankly. And so you'd enter into a room. was like, 20 zombies just like rigid in space, unmoving. That's not compelling. That's not immersive. That's not lifelike. There's nothing that says I want to be around what appears to be 10 of my dead colleagues, although they're still standing up. It just isn't very, very, you know, uncompalling. So I think going forward, you're going to have a world, hopefully, will live in a live in a world where, you know, I don't need to get dressed up. I don't need to like do the ironing before I go to the meeting. But my body language, my appearance is informed by my actual self, right? Whether if I grow a beard, you're going to see that, you know, it's going to reflect my actual reality. And then, you know, the social signals, the cues that my body language is, will be reflected if I choose to provide that to you. So I think we're going to get, you know, I think we will have an environment more akin to what you're seeing on mobile phones today where there are multiple cameras, you have a 3D ability to provide a lot of 3D input and therefore more information about your actual body language, know, information is being received and so on. And those very, very subtle cues that make it so hard today to communicate because you don't get any actual body language input whatsoever. There's no read, there's no ability to gauge how the things you're being said. You know, what sort of reaction you're getting, you know, the avatars never look away because they're bored, right? Like all the things that make going to an actual trade show to an actual seminar, an actual educational event, like powerful, impactful, know, that provide the speakers with the cues like, I'm losing my audience. They're not interested. Everyone's leaving. Like, you know, I was checking their phone. Like those are powerful cues you get. And you're speaking to a large audience, completely missing as soon you go into 3D space. And I think as a consequence, the impact of education, the ability to close sales, all of those things are going to be impacted unless we solve that problem. So I think, you you go in six years, you're going to find it's more, you know, and you can have a positive or negative reaction, but it's in many cases, especially in a professional setting, there'll be a lot more like Zoom than, than what we're seeing coming out of, you know, some of these firms are dedicating huge resources like, like Facebook. Meta, is there no now? Diego Calligaro (45:29) Very interesting. And then let's switch again topic here and take us now to when you close, you know, those 35 millions in a serious. Bring us back to that day and tell us how it was. Yeah. Kevin Henshaw (45:45) So we had been raising funds for, for a while and we had a reasonable amount of interest because IMVU is user generated content and we tend to operate a pretty high margin. So it was a very profitable business when it scaled. So we had a reasonable amount of interest and we were struggling to find a lead to find someone that would, would really take the initiative. We had a lot of, you know, I'll say interest, but people that wanted to participate, but not. but not lead the round. the big, more than the day that the wire finally came in and the money arrived and like the bank called us and so on, it was much more the news that we had found a lead investor and that this would catalyze. That in my mind was like, that was the day where, you know, cause we'd gotten to several yeses already. And it was like, yes, but. Right? So was like, we want to come along for the ride, but we want to drive the bus. And I'm like, okay, fantastic. And we hear that several times. We were like, okay, we got something here. We need something. We need a catalyst. need something, someone to lead this that will like really, really bring it together. And I remember that day as being, you know, like when we finally got to that, yes. When someone said, you we'll lead the round. talked to all the other folks and they are legitimately interested in. We felt that to be true too. And we'd been representing for some time. Like we have other people that want to come on board. You know, you're, going to get to the valuation that we want. We're going to get to the funds that we think we need to continue to grow the business. So we felt like we were going to get there. And then it was like that one day when someone finally said, yeah, we talked to the other co-investors and we'll lead. And that was, that was like the truly like that emotional release of like, we had heard yes, but like three or four times and to hear. Yes. And was this enormous, enormous breakthrough and it felt inevitable. But of course, every time that we had a yes, but it felt like we were taking not necessarily the step forward that it really represented. we needed that, that, that lead actually to, catalyze all the other participants. Diego Calligaro (47:56) Which is something that happens, of course, probably almost always when rising funds, really finding that lead is really the most difficult part many times in which, know, it's many conversations are, yes, we give the commitment, give it a soft commitment, but then finding the one that leads, you know, is always, you the big challenge to go ahead. And what would you say for those that are currently rising now and what would be your tip to really find? as soon as possible that lead to drive the round. Kevin Henshaw (48:28) Yeah, well, I think if we could do it all over again, we would probably rather than go out and look for people that wanted to invest period, because when we started, we were, we were like, Hey, you know, any port in the storm, we want to raise money. Do you, would you, would you want to participate? think if you had a chance to do it again in the best of all possible worlds, you'd identify a lead, get that commitment and then begin the broader approach and sort of say we're doing around. It's being led by, you know, ideally someone like very prestigious, you know, or, know, huge strategic importance. You know, do you want to join? And that's a vastly more compelling story than we're raising money and, know, you, you can participate. And in fact, you could be in charge, even though, you you haven't historically had a relationship with, with the firm. So one of the challenges that we had, uh, at the time was that. The firms that had previously invested in us while they were very happy and were willing to participate, they didn't want to lead because they'd been invested in the firm for a long period of time. So another bit of advice I would share is be mindful of the timelines that the venture capital community operate on. So they tend to have fairly fixed timelines for their funds. it's not a discussion where you can sort of say, just tell your limited partners that you're going to, it's going to take two more years. mean, that's not an option, right? It's they, they, they have a lit fuse and there's a certain duration and nothing on planet earth can change that. So be very, very, very, I think one of the key pieces of, of, of advice I would offer is just be very, very mindful of the needs of the. venture investing community, their timelines are fixed and are rigid and are unyielding for the most part. So being mindful of that, really, really important. Diego Calligaro (50:24) If you look at those challenges as well, because of course, when rising, are always new challenges. And the thing that many times, you know, is that they're almost unknown because the investors themselves don't share the real feedback. Like they don't share like what they really think. Maybe they tell you, well, look, it's actually, it's not our target. This is not the right moment, but they don't really share the rooted reason why they're not getting on board. What do you think are the best ways here to find and figure it out as soon as possible? What is the right route and to find out as well as soon as possible, know, those points to drive the lead and of course the fundraising itself. Kevin Henshaw (50:55) What? It is an endemic problem in the industry that you don't generally speaking get feedback beyond no. And then some. You know, the classic one is this is not our focus. You know, always bitter to hear that feedback because if it wasn't their focus, I'm not sure why they took the meeting. Yeah. You know, a little bit like, well, you knew, you knew what your focus was. Like it's not a new focus. Correct. I mean, we're, you raise monies from your LPs. Like you have a focus and then we had a long discussion and then a subsequent discussion and then maybe you some diligence and then it's not your focus. Like you, it's a very surprising statement, right? It's, know, that's a very, very disappointing. I think in the best of all possible worlds, you want to get to the level of transparency with potential investors. For the most part, people are going to wind up spending a lot, a great deal of time with. You want to get to the level of transparency where you're like, no, it's fine. Give me the ugly truth here. Like you don't find, you don't think I have the capabilities. You don't think the team has sufficiently experienced. Like what is it? Like what's the real, real thing? Because We're not going to get to yes, unless we actually address it. and we're still, if, we're leaning into like, wow, we've got this incredibly experienced team and they're thinking, wow, they lack experience. The venture capital community is, a pretty small fraternity. Right. And I do use the word fraternity on purpose here. It's a mostly men, unfortunately. And they're for the most part in close communication with one another. And so if they, they largely know like, did you, did you talk to Diego? Yeah. Yeah. I talked to Diego. Why you pass? Like, why did you pass? Why didn't you invest in Diego's firm? you know, they, they lack leadership team. You're thinking, wow, I went to a meeting and they, they're bragging about all of their industry experience. They're talking this up as a huge strength. Like, what am I missing? Like it's this huge question mark where, you know, maybe with a simple feedback, you don't have to agree with it. Maybe you do agree with it. Maybe you go and get them. more experienced member of the leadership team. Maybe there are steps you can take or maybe it's just simply as simple as, here are the three key selling points of the firm and we're not gonna include this thing that you're not gonna agree with. It would be exceedingly helpful if the VC community was more forthcoming and that in turn, You know, there, there, a lot of their reluctance, of course, stems from the, you know, this guy, this individual, I shouldn't say guy, this individual, unfortunately, mostly men, you know, felt, you know, gave me this negative, probably hurtful feedback. I lacked experience or, whatever it was. didn't find my pitch is sufficiently compelling. wasn't good enough at public speaking, whatever that painful negative feedback is, they're going to say, well, like next time I'm never going to deal with that person because, he's, he's, he hates me. You know, he's, he's a horrible person. said all these hurtful things. It's exactly the wrong approach, right? The exact right approach is to say, Hey, the person was like very upfront with me. was truly transparent. That was providing me with painful, but effective and powerful feedback that I can choose to act on or not, that's the person you want backing you. They're going to give me that clarity and that guidance. even though it's painful, look, it's no great joy. You and I both know, because we've delivered a of bad news and negative employee reviews in the past. It's no great joy to be like even inadvertently hurtful. Even if it's a fact-based delivery. Like you're not meeting our company needs. Like that's a painful sentence to say to a person, but that's the only way they're going to get better. And then the same is true of the venture community. So, you know, that the, this idea that like, going to, I'm going to give this like vague, uh, you know, input about why we didn't invest in hopes that, you know, if you ever have another startup, you'll come back to me again, because we, we, left as friends. It's exactly the wrong approach. Yeah. Diego Calligaro (55:23) We speak often with the investors as well. And one of the reasons they say they don't give that feedback is that they start giving the feedback. But then many times the founders are actually resentful of that feedback and don't take it because they're not used to that feedback. And that's why, know, which is of course counterproductive. Going back to the cultural topic of feedback, we were speaking before, which is counterproductive because that's the best thing that you can get. It's better I know and why I know. That's why we often what we do, we put in front of the startups investors so they can throw that feedback so they can take it and improve it as soon as possible saving months of work. Kevin Henshaw (56:04) Absolutely. And, my comments were entirely informed by, by many of same things I've heard from, from members of venture community, which is, you provide this hurtful feedback is hopefully constructive criticism. mean, nobody wants to be hurtful. Nobody wants to be unnecessarily negative for no good reason. They, they will, you know, have had the life lived experience of like providing negative feedback, even inadvertently in, in hopes of being of being productive and then having that come back and result in a negative, like, well, that person was hurtful to me, so I'm not going to do business with them in the future. That's quite literally exactly the wrong approach to take. And I think, if you were able to sit down with these highly motivated people, right? Most founders are enormously dedicated, enormously heart set on doing the right thing and said, if you hire a member of your team and they weren't. performing or they're doing something wrong, would you tell them? And certainly I think you're going to 100 times out of 100 here. Like, yeah, absolutely. You have to tell them, you have to be direct. have to be, you know, you want to see them succeed. So you want to give them, even if it's hurt, even if it's, it's sometimes hurtful to hear these negative comments, you need to give them constructive, but powerful and effective feedback. It's like, and that doesn't apply to you somehow. So That's very surprising news, right? It's, I wish there was a world in which the venture and founder communities were more transparent with one another. Yeah. Right. I will say on on the entrepreneurial side of the equation, hear tons of discussion about board management. And, there's a lot of science that goes into how it is that you most effectively, most efficiently present information to the people that ultimately own the company. Right. So you go back in your company and so on. That's really important. I hear an unbelievable amount of conversation online and in my personal life, where there's an awful lot of board management, which is really about like what not to tell the board and how to position. and obfuscate negative news and so on. it's enormously, enormously negative, enormously hurtful. Like it's like that, that damages the ongoing relationship that you have where I think people are legitimately transparent or trying to do the right thing or being damaged by like, never hear this bad news from this other organization. You're like, well, yeah, they're obfuscating. Diego Calligaro (58:37) Kevin, what's your take? Let me understand on this. Because of course, when you manage that relation with investors, maybe it's an investor that is going to give you a follow-on investment. So you rely on him or her, and at the end of the day, the information that you share are going to impact as well your potential follow-on. So where do you strike? Because it looks like you are more towards full transparency, but what's the right balance? that you go for full transparency or you try to find something in middle to deliver an information and more balanced information. Kevin Henshaw (59:12) Yeah. So I think we need to make the, I think we need to make the distinction here between, you know, being forthright and, you know, complete providing complete disclosure and being completely transparent. mean, look, there's, think many firms fall into the trap of involving the board in conversations and topics that they don't actually need board level input on. And so, you know, if you're having struggles with. Diego Calligaro (59:42) Can you give an example of topics? Kevin Henshaw (59:45) A classic example is, especially I find with younger entrepreneurs, they'll have a member of the executive team, part of the leadership group, and there's a member of the leadership team that has interacted with the board and they're thinking it's not working out and they want to make a change. And then they want some counseling, some coaching or something for the board. Ultimately, it's not a board level decision. And by involving the board in the like... I seemingly have self doubts about my ability to like assess skill sets and to make, make painful and sometimes unpleasant decisions and so on. You're going down a path that, that is not helpful. Now, if the discussion with the board is, know, I'm evaluating alternatives because you know, if my head of sales isn't working out. Still need a head of sales. We're not eliminating the role. We still need to make sales. We still have sales targets. So like what options exist? Are you aware of better candidates that would inform my decision? Cause maybe this is the best person, right? That's maybe a board level decision where we're looking for like your assistance in a network, your knowledge and expertise in hiring and pattern recognition and so on. that, those are, those are, that's a good and positive conversation to have with the board, but scrimmaging, what do you think I should do? You know, the sort of like interpersonal conflict discussions, like these are not board level topics, right? I think a lot of the decision has to be made in, in, know, air quotes, managing the board is in fact, do I need the board level input and would they ever be in a position to, provide effective and impactful input? So just go back to my example, like, Hey, I don't think my head of sales is working out. I'm spending six hours a day with this person. You've, you've met them for 45 minutes when they did the. 2014 sales update. So I think you should make the decision. You've heard from them for 45 minutes of your entire life. What do you think? I mean, I understand if he sees it like I probably the right answer is I have no idea and I don't want to be involved, but unfortunately there's a lot of ego in these topics. And when they're asked, people generally will provide an input VC or not. Right? Like most people when asked, we'll give you, we'll give you, we'll try and attempt to be helpful and provide input. Reality is You spent hundreds of hours of the course of 2024 with your head of sales. They've seen the individual once twice, he or she, you know, almost a complete unknown. Why are you soliciting input on whether or not they should be continuing in their role? Diego Calligaro (1:02:14) It maybe goes back as well to the actual setup of the board on the rated roles, responsibility, what and who does and says take action on. But that's definitely a very important point because many companies that are actually struggling with this saying over-complicating, like you mentioned, well, it looks like, as you say, the ideal scenario is definitely to be transparent, but being also effective. and sharing what and when creates a valuable. Kevin Henshaw (1:02:46) Yeah. Well, I would say if I had one piece of advice to share, especially with people that are relatively early, having been through, you know, we're for a series Z startup relatively early in their career interacting with the boards is ask the question, why, why am I presenting this information to the board? What do I want them to do with this? And you know, if the answer is nothing, be super explicit about that. Say this is an inform. I'm going to tell you about our expensive initiative, trying to address teens in France, whatever the topic at hand happens to be, but it's an inform. I feel like you deserve to have this knowledge as shareholders, but I'm not actively soliciting input. I want you to be aware, but not, I'm not open for feedback. don't, I don't need guidance. think the team is executing appropriately, et cetera. Unfortunately, so many of the board meetings that I've been in, as I think I sent on a number of board of advisors as well. You know, there's a huge amount of information. here's this random spray of information and I'm an advisor. I feel like I need to participate. Like I'm not here in the meeting in order to just sit here silently. I was put on the board for a reason. Now I want to ask questions and poke at things and you know, it's these sort of things. And in many cases, some of the people that doing the presentations are astonished. Like, you know, why are you asking? I don't know. felt like it would provide clarity. not sure why I'm listening to some of these data points. So you're giving us a lot of data. What am I meant to do with the data? And again, if the answer is, simply like, want you to know that's great. And if the answer is we're doing great and numbers are going up. So I just want to brag, spare everybody. Everyone's time is too valuable for that. Like it's, that's not helpful. Right. So, so transparency is important, but this isn't a world of radical transparency where you share absolutely everything. Ask the question, why am I providing this? And what am I hoping is a positive outcome? What would I want to hear? And what's the conversation I don't want to, you know, go down that path, right? I don't want to struggle with, we have the right advertising agency in France? I don't need input from these people who have never set foot in France. I don't, I don't want it. Right. It's, it's fine. We should move on with their input. So, you know, when that conversation starts to devolve or head in that direction, you have a chance to manage the conversation and start to say, Hey, I'm not, I'm not looking for input. from a bunch of Silicon Valley based individuals about the quality of advertising agencies in Paris. I don't need that input at this time and just move on to the next topic. Diego Calligaro (1:05:18) Thanks a lot for this very useful information and takes from you. It's been a great conversation. I would like to end with a simple questions or reflections from your side. The first one would be to tell us about the lesson that you wish you knew before you started working in Vue. Kevin Henshaw (1:05:37) You know, wow, that's a, that's a thought, thought provoking question. wish I think to a larger extent, I wish I understood better the needs of the owners of the company, the venture venture capitalist community. met those, I met those individuals and you know, of course to me they were these, know, incredibly important people that had written multi tens of millions of dollars of checks. It was at that point in time making my job. possible to exist because at that point we were still a very significant loss making company. And I met them and approached the relationship as I did other people that I met rather than what they really are, which are, are in effect representatives of their firm that has its own agendas, its own focus, its own biases and so on. I wish I'd understood that better instead of sort of saying like, Hey, I should really get to know this individual and like talk to them about. their aspirations and so on and not appreciate the context that they, they're doing a job when they come to our board meetings, they're doing a job. They're not just, you know, owners of a passive investment. They have an agenda and they have goals and concerns and so on. They're not informed by their personality. They're informed by their employer, their employees, just like the rest of us. So, so I wish I, I wish I had known that, that was a good thing. And then I guess I. It'd be nice to be able to travel back in time, but there are two phenomenon that enormously changed the world and that as a leader, you know, it was, it was exceedingly hard to perceive and understand how impactful some of these technologies swings could be. And so the first was when Facebook became, and I have choicefully using the word Facebook here, cause it was known as Facebook at the time. When Facebook became available to the public. And we, know, at that time, you probably remember there was a series of smaller struggling social networks. And then of course the music driven MySpace. And I think we realized the power of like photography and experience sharing that changed the world. And in the context of IMVU, what that really meant was it led to this, that social graph led to the rise in enormously impactful games that introduced the notion of free to play gaming. And ultimately firms like Zynga went public on the back of that social graph, being able to introduce people to this notion of optionally paying. We had been doing that absent the Facebook social graph and had enormously struggled with it. There was no way to get validation that paying money for a thing that was otherwise free made life better. And so because we were a worldwide service, our paying community members relatively rarely connected with other paying community members. And there was very little validation, very little feedback where you could see like, Oh, Diego pays for this. Apparently it's totally normal. I should pay for it as well. Diego's a smart guy. He likes the game. I should just pay for it and keep up with Diego so we can compete more. Or maybe I can beat Diego if I pay. you know, like all those sort of things. That validation. I wish we had, and I had as a leader, been more understanding of how this changed. One quick final comment there. One of the phenomenons that changed the company forever was entirely driven by the Facebook phenomenon, which was the rise in prepaid gaming cards. which did not exist when I joined IMVue and four years later we're at the checkout at Walmart and all the leading car for all the leading retailers planet wide. And that was a brand new phenomenon. And it was entirely driven by the rise in these free to play games on Facebook. And we were eventually able to coattail on that. And that turned into tens of millions of dollars worldwide for us. were. in like 16 countries selling physical cards and so on. And I think back to the earliest days, if you had ever said like your product is going to be for sale in, in Carrefour and Walmart and Target and 7-Eleven worldwide, you know, it would have been, you know, flabbergasted. So I would, that would have been an unthinkable phenomenon for me that, that, you know, a relatively small company would ever aspire to. Now, of course, we were one of 32. I don't want to get carried away here, but the notion that that change from a .edu only Facebook phenomenon to being available to everybody, to all comers, would have such an impact in the gaming community was outside of my ability to comprehend. Diego Calligaro (1:10:33) And reflecting on this, Kevin, there's this phenomenon of accelerating pace of change of the technologies accelerating over the years, Recursor as well, speaking a lot about this. looking at this and how we can see that the technologies are growing, the impact as well in the society moving forward. What do you see? Like, what do you think are those, the main concern for you looking at the future? And also the main excitement as well about this development, rapid change in the society. Kevin Henshaw (1:11:08) I'm a huge proponent of the quality of change. you know, I think about my undergraduate studies and what life was like then and the quality of life that I enjoy now, availability of information, of entertainment, connectivity. It's unbelievable to me that I can call my 80 plus year old mother and see her across the continent. Like it is astonishing phenomenon. again, I think back to the days when I had a computer, but I had no hard drive when I was an undergraduate student. And I was one of the rare ones because I had a computer. knew how to use a word processor. And, you know, like it was, I was on the bleeding edge of, of technology adoption because it was sort of a passion of mine. But you think about that and then today's world. So I'm a huge fan of the change and the positive impact that these. technologies can have in our life. So I'm excited for what the future holds. There's a lot of things about our world today that are problematic. You know, I think about the role of cash, ease of which payments are made planet wide. Like there's a lot of things that can actually make it. better for all humans and that disproportionately impacts those that can least afford it. Right. So emerging markets and the ease at which I can transact with, send money to send payment to someone that's in, in an emerging market. I don't want to pick on any one country, but it enormously, enormously difficult today. enormously time consuming. There's an enormous amount of friction. The intermediates take almost all the money. It's a very, very negative experience. I think the technologies that are coming about today, be it the Metaverse, Web3, blockchain tech, they can address things that will greatly assist us in leveling out the playing field planet wide and enable people that have intelligence and ambition and creativity to participate in a way that was previously impossible and was gate-kept by the need to have an incredibly expensive laptop computer and a broadband computer connection just as table stakes just to get started. And that's kept, ultimately, tens of millions of people that could and should be participants in what hopefully will be a future that has a far more inclusive element to it. Diego Calligaro (1:13:31) Thanks a lot for this conversation. It's been very insightful. It's been amazing talking with you. And definitely I'm going to speak again. Kevin Henshaw (1:13:41) Excellent. look forward to it, Thank you for your time. Diego Calligaro (1:13:44) Thank you for watching this incredible interview. Leave us your comment with what you think about this episode, what you would like to discuss in the future or any guest suggestion. And remember you can follow us on social media. You will find the description of the links. Thank you again for your time and I see you to the next episode.