Spark of Ages

GTM = "Get The Money"/Bobby Napiltonia - Building a Marketplace, Distribution, Hershey ~ Spark of Ages Ep 27

• Rajiv Parikh • Season 1 • Episode 27

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Welcome to another electrifying episode of the Spark of Ages podcast! Today, we sit down with the legendary Bobby Napoltonia, whose 36-year journey has forever shaped the tech landscape. From bringing sound to computers to democratizing the telecommunications industry, Bobby’s fingerprints are all over the tech we use daily. 🙌 Join Bobby and your hosts Rajiv and Sandeep Parikh as they chat about everything from building Salesforce's AppExchange to why his strategy isn't 'go to market' but 'get the money'.

Find out how Bobby's visionary strategies have reshaped companies like Twilio and Salesforce, and why thinking outside the box is crucial for success in today's fast-paced tech landscape. From leveraging marketplaces to achieving groundbreaking partnerships, Bobby's insights promise to challenge conventional thinking and inspire transformative ideas for your business journey.

Explore the trends reshaping the tech world, from the urgent need to tackle online identity fraud in gaming to the environmental impact of AI. Bobby sheds light on the critical issues of re-shoring manufacturing to the U.S. and the promising potential of robotics to address societal challenges like care deficits in aging populations. Learn why diversity in tech is more than just a buzzword and how it's shaping the future of innovation, as we highlight inspiring stories of overcoming funding barriers for African-American entrepreneurs through ventures like the "Super Foundry."

Expect laughs, insights, and even a Hershey's chocolate quiz! 🍫 Tune in to uncover Bobby's views on scaling companies, the future of AI, and wild stories about traveling with the circus! 🎪 📌  Discover how these adventures translate into valuable business lessons and a roadmap for aspiring entrepreneurs. With Bobby's infectious enthusiasm and wealth of knowledge, this episode is a treasure trove of insights into the tech industry and the entrepreneurial mindset, ensuring you walk away with a fresh perspective on your own journey.


Bobby Napiltonia: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-napiltonia-8b82624/

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Producer: Anand Shah & Sandeep Parikh
Technical Director & Sound Designer: Sandeep Parikh, Omar Najam
Executive Producers: Sandeep Parikh & Anand Shah
Associate Producers: Taryn Talley
Editor: Sean Meagher & Aidan McGarvey


#gotomarket #robotics #entrepreneur #innovation #growth #sales #technology #innovatorsmindset #innovators #innovator #product #revenue #revenuegrowth #management  #founder #entrepreneurship #growthmindset 

Website: https://www.position2.com/podcast/

Rajiv Parikh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivparikh/

Sandeep Parikh: https://www.instagram.com/sandeepparikh/

Email us with any feedback for the show: spark@postion2.com

Rajiv Parikh:

Hello and welcome to the Spark of Ages podcast. Today, our guest is Bobby Nap I'm gonna screw up your name, Bobby. Bobby

Bobby Napiltonia:

Nap. Everyone knows that. You know, most of my notes are hello from Bobby Nap because Napiltonia's a plague and a curse.

Sandeep Parikh:

As guys with Indian names who've suffered many, many mispronunciations, I feel compelled that we gotta get it right. We can do this. It's

Bobby Napiltonia:

phonetic. Napiltonia.

Rajiv Parikh:

Napiltonia. There you go. Now, Bobby's resume is Way too long to go over here. So if you want, look them up on LinkedIn and good luck trying to figure it all out. But it's an amazing background. Bobby Napoletania has over 36 years of experience having built and delivered transformative technologies that we use every single day from creating the global standard for JSON and bringing sound to computers at creative labs to democratizing the telecommunications industry with Twilio. Bobby has a proven track record of scaling technology companies, but most of you recognize. Salesforce's AppExchange that he built for Mark Benioff at Salesforce, which became a foundation for many of today's cloud companies and marketplaces, which has now grown into a trillion dollar ecosystem. Bobby's an authority on go to market strategies and is passionate about cloud computing, APIs, gen AI, robotics, deep tech, open source, and building powerful ecosystems. Just a few things that you do, Bobby. Some of the key takeaways you can expect from this episode, what an expert in scaling growth for technology companies like Bobby focuses on when he's talking about go to market a case study into how and why Salesforce built their app exchange ecosystem, how to build a career with longevity and passion for what you do. So Bobby, welcome to the spark of ages.

Bobby Napiltonia:

Thank you so much for having me. It's interesting. You know, I've known you for a couple of years and I've seen you at a variety of events and we never really got into, it was more like. Friendly stuff like, Hey, there's a G what's happening? How are the kids? What's going on? Are you going to Thursday night at Sean's house? It was never what do you do? And how do you get here? So when you ask me, I was, I did some research and I was thrilled. Um, uh, because a two brothers on an episode, I thought this is going to be very interesting. And now that I know who's older, there's so many questions that I have. But we'll keep that for maybe

Rajiv Parikh:

we can even do a who's older thing. So my

Bobby Napiltonia:

gosh, it's going to be a contest. Okay. This is depressing me. Oh, you can see from the wrinkles. Who's older, right?

Rajiv Parikh:

Wow. Which one are you?

Bobby Napiltonia:

Shots

Sandeep Parikh:

fired.

Rajiv Parikh:

All right, Bobby, you and I have had many, done many fun things together. Um, but. We have been to many 49ers game together. I love how you bring your daughter and make it a thing that you both do. But I think what really got me was when you were at the recent, uh, private equity conference talking about go to market. And I just thought, man, this, he'd be great for the show. So when you think about go to market. What's the first place that you start at?

Bobby Napiltonia:

So I don't call it go to market. I call it get the money and there's a big difference there. If you're laughing, right? I like it. Call it GTM firm to let people sort of know what that means, but it's about getting the money for, for far too often. Everybody thinks. Well, for me to get the money, I've got to go through these mechanics and I got to find my ICP and I got to get this message right. And I got to turn the crank on this wheel and I got to hope that these things work. And there's too many things that must be true. And so I've got a process where we truly look at how we get the money. And we look at that from a zoom out perspective. And how we were so successful repeatedly is we sort of dismantle and don't look at the industry. And we go, if I were to dissect to rebuild, what would it look like? Because far too often everybody goes, I'm going to make this change. I'm going to jump slip stream. And you probably remember because you're older Sandeep's not the EDS commercial where they changing the plane while they were flying it to show that this is what they were trying to transform. And that was a big when we went from mainframes to client server. And it was a big push to be honest. Transcripts So when you think through that, too many companies are parochial, too many of them go to those conferences where I met you and we see how you make cookies. Look, if everybody makes cookies the same way, there's no way you're going to have a skyrocket cookie. Right? I mean, I would argue, speaking of skyrockets, look at what SpaceX, they don't go to market like any other company has. So if you look at even people like Reed Hastings, no rules rules. It's the ones that don't look at what people are doing that win.

Rajiv Parikh:

That's interesting. So they invent clever ways. I thought you were going to go into the whole thing about knobs, dials, and levers. We could definitely

Bobby Napiltonia:

go into that, but think about this, Elon, you couldn't raise money. So he said, listen, who would like to put a thousand dollars deposit on a car? And the next thing you know, he had 28 million of someone else's money. That's called get the money. Basically crowdfunded.

Rajiv Parikh:

No better way to prove that whether you have product market viability than to have non refundable deposits. Right.

Bobby Napiltonia:

That will tell you. So that's a great way. And an example, and we could go on and on, you know, depending on where the money comes from, you'll hear me call it coupon clipping, because it can be that simple. If you, you grease the skids and you truly understand what's going on. What that looks like, we transform industries by taking money from the utilities and then the government and end up getting sensors and ceilings to a billion square feet and didn't pay a dime. It was financed by other people. So when I think about that, we truly like to look at what's the problem. And, you know, you always hear me ask people, well, why aren't you growing faster? In the question of always as well, I'm double, double, triple tripping. I'm good. So you read that in some book that told you about ABCs, a apple, B boys, C cat. Guess what? You're not going to be a breakaway if you follow fundamentals.

Rajiv Parikh:

All right. So you don't follow the fundamentals,

Bobby Napiltonia:

follow the fundamentals, start

Rajiv Parikh:

with the notion of how you're going to get money out of folks

Bobby Napiltonia:

and where that money can come from, and it's usually the most unusual spots, and if you think about it, right, hence the ecosystem play. Think about that. Those are all off balance sheet resources. I don't have to pay anything to you perform. Think about that. Like there's a lot to be said, hence why, why, why, why I'm a big ecosystem pusher, so to speak. By the way, I learned it. I would love to tell you, I made this stuff up. Um, I learned it from the best of the best. Now I'll ask you, who is the company in this industry that guarantees that you don't eat unless you push their product and your kids won't eat and they won't wear clothing and they won't go to school. Who is that company?

Rajiv Parikh:

Uh, I would say, um, if you are a partner of Microsoft,

Bobby Napiltonia:

Bingo, that's the million dollar prize. If you're a Microsoft partner, you'll sit there on the sideline, do they bring the right things to market? You'll wait. You are a captive audience and your kids don't eat unless you push their stuff. And it was really around ecosystem enablement. And if you think back to that meme, we saw. We're jumping up and down. It was developers. Now it's less developers. It's the sellers people want access to in these marketplaces. And that was underscored by where did three of Salesforce's biggest deals come from last quarter?

Rajiv Parikh:

That one? I don't know. You would think it's like the hyperscalers know?

Bobby Napiltonia:

Yeah. Look, which one

Rajiv Parikh:

it should be either Azure or well maybe they won't work with Salesforce anymore because they're doing their own thing, their own version. so maybe AWS?

Bobby Napiltonia:

Bingo AWS, three of the biggest deals came. So now what that tells me is we're back to wallet share market share, like Sun Microsystems and IBM were the two companies and they'd say. You got 10. What do you want? Hardware, software, support, maintenance, services, and then you take it. And as a, as a, cause at the end of the day, CFOs have a budget. It's 10. You don't get to make it bigger. You got to manage your business. And so I believe these marketplaces are going to have a bigger impact in the next 10 years than we even know, because they're going out and securing all the money from a company. And then you can buy anything from them. It's like the new Walmart. So it's like, it's like Amazon

Rajiv Parikh:

in a way, right? And you guys like Amazon on our

Bobby Napiltonia:

credit cards. I mean, how many, how

Rajiv Parikh:

many things like, you know, for Halloween people were like, Hey, where'd you get that cool Top Gun leather jacket? I'm like, Hey, Amazon, Amazon comes to our

Bobby Napiltonia:

house every day. So why would you not do that? Same thing to the business. And you see them look, here's an underscore to make that true. Guess who's going to reinvent this year? Are you going? Andy! Andy's going. We hadn't. Yeah, we hadn't seen the old boss at any reinvention in like a long time. So the fact that the head honcho is now coming back tells you how important AWS is, not to him personally, but the organization, the company as a whole.

Rajiv Parikh:

No, it's critical. I mean, he's the one That started initially, right? Started building it, fell

Bobby Napiltonia:

asleep at the wheel on AI. Let's be honest. If we're really going to use this to be a transparent, trustworthy stewards of the industry.

Rajiv Parikh:

There you go. So, so he's coming back. He sees the power of the marketplace and he's going to enable that to grow. So, so is that the game now? And when you're talking about go to market is to associate yourself with one of these marketplaces, because like you're saying, it. To do go like thousands of companies start up and you can't just do what everybody else does, but you have to figure out some way to get off the ground. Like you can't just create yet another marketplace.

Bobby Napiltonia:

No, can

Rajiv Parikh:

you,

Bobby Napiltonia:

you know, that's interesting. I've tried in every industry. Um, and, and because it takes a lot of unique ingredients to make it happen. And I thought, well, if we can't do it in the electricity space, we're never going to be able to do it. Cause what's the one thing we all consume every day? Electricity. What's the one thing we're short around the world, electricity. And we really thought we had a platform and we ended up rolling about 17 countries became a global standard and sold it to Siemens. Cause then you need some big company to push it around in those slow moving industries, we'll call them. And I passed on a couple of companies. Cause after leaving the app exchange, I got calls from everyone. Hey, zoom would like to build it. Talk about who missed the. That would

Rajiv Parikh:

have been the, that would have been the perfect marketplace, right? For putting up different apps. Oh, VMware had a lot.

Bobby Napiltonia:

VMware, think about what you could have done. A lot of people already talked to Paul when he was running it after, after Diane. And what you realize is that there's very few people like Mark. That could pull it off. And, um, uh, uh, and you, so you ask those questions before you even go in. And I was fortunate enough, Mark and I launched our startups at the same time, at the same conference, the demo conference in 2001. And that's how we met. That's amazing. We didn't get the funding and that's when we open sourced into became Jason. And, um, eventually he convinced me to join him on a mission that we clearly democratize the cloud for the world.

Sandeep Parikh:

Can you go a little bit further into that? What, what, what the big mess for a zoom was just help me. Yeah, they didn't want

Bobby Napiltonia:

to build out. And so if you think about this and, you know, I'm not going to be able to turn why, why do companies like gong exist?

Rajiv Parikh:

Anybody can do recording and transcripting, right. And then take some insights and offer that to a lot of people. Right. And so why do I need a separate thing? Why couldn't I just build that into zoom, which they did way later, right?

Bobby Napiltonia:

Too late. Right. You would argue everyone does things too late because you either have to be the leader. Or a faster follow. And at some point you can't even catch up on your own platform. And so think about those, why do they do it? It's a, it's a big undertaking. If you really want to build a platform and you start saying, you go, do you have the fortitude and stomach to build like it's a 10 year journey. It's not like, let me start it. And it's a heavy front end investment to get people to have a design win on your platform, that you'll actually be able to do it. Our blessing at Salesforce is I had the Holy grail. I own the customers. Guess what? You wanted access to my world, so you would jump ball and do anything I needed you to do to have that access.

Rajiv Parikh:

So in their case, in a way they started to, because they were direct first and had so many customers and had the customer record, they could push people to that, right? You actually had for your customers, every customer record. And then you could say to them, Hey, I'm already here, I'm extending, and then I'm going to build this market. So it was a

Bobby Napiltonia:

weekend away with this guy. You probably know Jeffrey Moore. Yep. And we talk about crossing the chasm inside the tornado. And, um, he beat the hell out of us on what's your core versus context. If you look, you know what that is and you know what the importance, and every CO wants to own everything. And he beat us up over the weekend to realize you just need to own the customer. And I wish we had a different word for that. You know, back in the day, it was called the customer master. The master word's a hard word. All it really means is a source of truth record. If you think about it, what does SAP own the system of record of? Right.

Rajiv Parikh:

Manufacturing. Factored that.

Bobby Napiltonia:

What does it work on financial services? So we had the opportunity to own the customer. System of record, and when you do that, it became complete compliment extend. What are the things you need to grow? And then it was built by partner. We couldn't build it, didn't have enough engineers, had no money to buy it. So the partnering became that. And then we just started this episodic thing of what do we need to make the sale go better, faster. And those were the off balance sheet resources that did my product roadmap completion. Right.

Rajiv Parikh:

You can think about that, right? You had the underlying core elements. You could see people building various things off of it. And because they were selling, you could see where the market was going, right? Where the market was trending, but you still had to put a ton into enabling that infrastructure, which didn't produce the normal ROI you'd expect in the first month or two months or six months, four years. This is really good. This

Bobby Napiltonia:

never came up. And when you said that this triggered it, we were only able to do it because we ran in parallel a product offering called PRM that we can showcase to the world what we were building by eat, drinking our own champagne. And, you know, Eli Cohen was my product manager, and we went out and showed the world. Here's what PRM and a high tech looks like. And today you have companies like. There's companies out actually making a business out of just that and we offered it as a feature and an offering because the partner ecosystem is so important. But not just for high tech, most industries actually have ecosystems that sell for them.

Rajiv Parikh:

All right. So for all of us, for the rest of the world, what is PRM?

Bobby Napiltonia:

Oh, good question. Partner, Resource management. And so what you need to do is managing your people and partners, just like you direct sales, right? You have to, are you trained? Did you sell? Where's the pipeline? Where's the activity? Did you follow up on that lead? What are you doing? Did you deliver? Is that customer happy? I mean, it's just an extension of your exact, uh, it's

Rajiv Parikh:

your CRM, right? It's your CRM for partners, managing

Bobby Napiltonia:

them, giving them, enabling them, and all of those, yes.

Rajiv Parikh:

Yes. So that was critical as part of this, cause you want to see who's performing, who's not, where do you put your resources and then help those

Bobby Napiltonia:

adopted it from Symantec to Veritas to every high tech company world, because we got to showcase, here's what great looks like.

Rajiv Parikh:

Wow. Everybody in the world wants to build a platform, right? Every pitch is all about building a platform.

Bobby Napiltonia:

Yeah.

Rajiv Parikh:

But it's not that easy to pull it off. Um, it's much easier to put off, pull together an application than it is a whole platform. Well, if

Bobby Napiltonia:

the application you solve a problem, I cure diabetes, I stop diarrhea, I top your cough. I mean like those are things you'll pay for dearly, right? Right. Versus the platform. How will it benefit me? What will come on? You know, we had to sell CRM before we could launch force. com because no one would have come to build it. And then one of my tasks for Mark was go find someone to build CRM on your platform. Then I'll know we have a real platform.

Rajiv Parikh:

That's right. So that the platform part of it is the extension of it to multiple, multiple places. It's not a single use application, like solve my, solve my cough. Solve my diabetes was

Bobby Napiltonia:

for CIOs who had a backlog. And for the first time they saw the clicks, not code. So platform. And so they were blown away that they could attack a backlog list. That was how we really, you know, and we made them the chief innovation officer versus the chief information officer. And they got to do things that that role has never done before.

Sandeep Parikh:

That's pretty

Rajiv Parikh:

cool.

Sandeep Parikh:

Awesome. So I want to take a quick step back, uh, Bobby, if I could just to get some basics for the audience. Like, you know, you joked about how your, your resume is, uh, too long to really stay in it, in a, in a bio or in an open and you call yourself a chief helper on your LinkedIn. So, so what is the day in, in, in the life of, of Bobby Napoletania, the chief helper look like? Like what is your day to day?

Bobby Napiltonia:

You know, we all have to realize what are our superpowers that we want to apply to make sure we wake up every day happy. And what is it that we get gratification from? And so I'm a big believer that changed lives change lives. And, um, I grew up poor son of a waitress truck driver in Pennsylvania. And, um, happened to get the right opportunities and took advantage. You'll hear me call it chopping wood. And when you think about that, that's just to burn. So we can have heat, so we don't freeze to death, but you've got to plant those trees and love them and care for them to actually get them to grow, to get the wood, to chop so you could cook and eat and not die. So it is a whole life cycle of things. And so when I think through that. I get my greatest pleasures from helping people and not just like, here, let me help you across the street, right? That's what, why Combinator and Techstars is for helping startups. Let me help you cross the street. Those are just like Boy Scout, Girl Scouts. Here's how you get these WeBelow badges and some make it out. Don't get me wrong. We were doing a comparison at billion dollar company valuations out of the Salesforce ecosystem out of anything else. And 99 percent came from us. So when they say we crank these things out, yes, they got that Airbnb or they got those one hit wonders, which are great. Everyone likes the Macarena. Kung fu fighting. I love those songs, but there wasn't no follow on. We all want those Beatles, those gold standard plans repeated, repeated, repeated. So with this helper role that we have, we tried to identify categories that we're passionate about that we have some experience. So I can call it bullshit and that we believe we're going to make a meaningful impact in what I think is this next two decades of the internet. Cause that's how much longer I want to do this for. And, um, to your point, I kind of joke and we're working on a presentation. I have the Forrest Gump life of technology. If it happened, I was there in the room when it happened. You were laughing. It's really true. It's true. And

Sandeep Parikh:

okay. I was trying to make the connection. So it's, it's just like how stuff just sort of happened or he, he was right.

Rajiv Parikh:

Life is a box of chocolates.

Bobby Napiltonia:

Yeah. Life is a box of chocolates, man. I mean, think about it. Three of the fastest growing companies in the world during the decade. That I was an early executive, not some tag along. Let's hope you can help push the bus down the road, build the bus, tune the engine, make it go faster. That's something credible. And those are the stories we want to help with. So what's a normal day look like today? We're helping folks in robotic space. Why? Because we have to bring manufacturing back to America. We just saw what, how that debacle was. And we've known that for a while, but But we, as Americans are lazy, let's be clear. And we don't mind outsourcing everything if we don't have to do it until we need the stuff that we can get access to. We realized, Oh, it was a what to call it moment. And so, um, that's very important for us. I went and met with every robotics company cause I called the VCs that funded them and said, Hey, look, this is what I'm looking for. Psychologically safe founders that know they need some help and that are willing to listen a little bit. And, um, it's hard to find that individual. And I found one and it's been an interesting ride. We just announced two weeks ago, a hundred million in funding to roll out robots as a service sound familiar so that we can transform the shop floors. Yes. We raised money so you don't have to spend money. Think about that. If you're in manufacturing, you go, God, I got to overhaul my shop floor. It's 3 million and I can do it for 200 K a year, two 50. You have no excuse now. No, by the way, you don't have the shop floor. Guess what? We have these foundries we're propping up across America that you can ship us the parts and we'll do it for you. Just like Apple makes phones, you know, by outsourcing them to those other people. Gen AI was there for no software. So I'm going to be there for no applications. Look, CRM is white collar workflow. Do your job. When I worked at UPS, we had the same workflows, except I cracked a whip and made the people get measured. That's all CRM is. You know that they're just a white collar workflow. And so it's all it is. Let's be clear. And then from that model, we'll start saying, what are the most important things? And this is the one that's been keeping me really up at night. Are you, you. Now you might go, why do you care about keeping things up at night? Well, we sort of talked about why I got addicted to the industry. We wouldn't be here if I wasn't there for the creation of sound. Jason is the number one global standard everyone in the world uses. So now that I know the world can use my technology, I feel like a steward to help figure out what are those next things I can change because you've made the world a better place in general. So why not keep it going is RUU and identity is the biggest problem we have on the net. It's a look game. We're just having this conversation. This point, fraud in gaming alone is going to be bigger than the global drug trade. Yeah, by 2020, think about that fraud, just stealing from games. That's not even financial institutions. We're going to go over those next things. And so, um, I was just

Sandeep Parikh:

streaming yesterday and, uh, you know, sometimes I live stream, uh, video gaming and, uh, one of the streamers was like, Hey, Don't play that game because this game is, uh, it's, it's got some holes in it and, uh, people are getting their, you know, computers back through the game, back, back

Rajiv Parikh:

towards, uh, yeah, yeah. I was trying to, you know, I don't play a lot of games other than just in real life. So you're saying that people are, people are using these games to get deep into your, your systems, ask questions of you, learn your behavior, and then use that against you.

Bobby Napiltonia:

Yeah. From you. Yeah. Fraud. Fraudsters. Click fraud. I mean, we can go down and down. And by the way, that's so important. You know, gaming is never going away. And we now, you know how I know how big gaming is. What did Microsoft play for Blizzard?

Rajiv Parikh:

They paid like what? 65 billion dollars. Okay. That's not like.

Bobby Napiltonia:

Six billion. That's like 65 billion. That's a lot of

Sandeep Parikh:

money. That's, uh, more than 10 times, what is that, 12 times the amount that, uh, Disney paid for, uh, Star Wars franchise. There you go. You know what they get

Bobby Napiltonia:

is they're, what they really bought, in my opinion, is kids are learning from gaming. Tomorrow's education system has to change. What can we learn from all of that? That's really what it takes. Boils down to my opinion. They didn't need the money, right? They needed to understand what tomorrow looks like today and how do I own it,

Rajiv Parikh:

right? So, so you're trying to, so yeah, that's the big win for them is understanding people's behaviors and understanding what drives them. We've

Bobby Napiltonia:

never seen anything like this group of kids and cookies are going away. And where's that marketing money go to and social isolation's real. And they got something, they all have cancer, you know, right? They all have cancer right here. It is. And that cancer eats up the time that they can never get back in life. You've got kids, if you know what I'm talking about, you see it on the employees. It's insane. I look at a 22 or 23 year old working, they spend more time, I'm like, what are you doing on your phone? It's a

Sandeep Parikh:

cancer of attention. I never

Bobby Napiltonia:

thought of it that way. 100 percent cancer of attention. And not just attention, but uselessness that you can't get your real work done. A hundred percent. I

Rajiv Parikh:

think of it as more of a drug, right? It's a, it's a drug. It's you're hooked. It's sucking in your dopamine receptors. You feel like you have to touch it. How many times you touch a phone in a day?

Bobby Napiltonia:

Oh my gosh.

Rajiv Parikh:

Right. You touch your phone more than

Bobby Napiltonia:

I got mine. Like we had a day off a couple of weeks ago and it said you didn't work long, long enough this week. What happened to you? Oh gosh. Versus yesterday it was, you know, 6. 9 hours a day on the phone. I'm thinking, wow, that's a lot of time. When do I do work?

Rajiv Parikh:

Yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's crazy. That's crazy. So

Bobby Napiltonia:

helpers. So we start by looking at the companies we're working with, where they are in their lifecycle. What is it that they need and what are the things that we can do to accelerate them beyond where they are today?

Sandeep Parikh:

You're, you're like hunt, hunting for these companies. No, usually they find me. Oh, they find you. Oh,

Bobby Napiltonia:

okay. Okay. Uh, the VCs is the community that I've been fortunate enough to tap into, but you know, this is a great conversation because then I started learning. VCs spend dollars to get pennies. Okay. Thanks.

Everyone:

Cause it's

Bobby Napiltonia:

not their money and they still get paid and it doesn't matter. Private equity spends pennies to get dollars because they need to make that money or they don't get paid. Then we look at small market cap stocks, they'll do anything to stay alive and save cash. So what we're really doing is looking at who has the biggest need where we can go. We just jumped into our first publicly traded company last week. And so we're going to try to say, is it your product portfolio? Was it management? And can we help superside unstuck you? Right? Cause you're clearly stuck.

Rajiv Parikh:

So Bobby, you're saying, you're saying we, so is it you and a group? Are you saying you are people that you assemble for a particular situation? Are you like the Navy SEAL crew that jumps in and you pull people? Sometimes

Bobby Napiltonia:

we don't even know what the fires like when we jump in, depending on what they are. But yes, I would equate it to the Navy SEAL. So I say the, we. So I've got a partner who, um, I test, we can all build things, but if the world doesn't know, it doesn't matter. Nothing happened. So the gentleman that got me on stage back in 2001 is a media man and, um, he's got his own podcast and we've interviewed, he's interviewed everyone from, uh, Mark Cuban to Heidi Rosen to Nolan Bushnell last week. And so we use a lot of that then for the content, because our industry is the change that stays the same. It doesn't change. Everybody thinks it is. And I meet these young kids. I was just a tech crush disrupt. And they're telling me, seems like, you know, I saw that in the nineties.

Rajiv Parikh:

That's right. It's just in a different form. It's in a different form, right? We're always trying to solve a lot of the same problems in a different form. And we have friends of ours that fund companies that continue to disrupt the, the, the current player. So it's part

Bobby Napiltonia:

of that fun. Here's where I'm going to tell you this time it's different. Then any of the other times before, and it's different. Okay. Is this AI

Rajiv Parikh:

cloud? 100

Bobby Napiltonia:

percent it's AI 100 percent it, you know, cloud computing democratized it so that everybody could have an excuse, right? We can all have gym memberships, right? Sign and drive cloud computing. Maybe she didn't have to have that. And when you think about what AI is going to do, and I've, um, I've got a couple of posts that I'll do from the smarter people than me. Um, Brett Queener who worked with me at Salesforce really wrote, there's no better time to be a founder. One, yes, it's hard to raise money, but it's always hard to raise money, even in go go days, unless you know what you're doing. But if you think about the opportunity, you know, this for your business, uh, Bridget, the opportunity to know everything about your customer through AI or prospect is unprecedented. It

Rajiv Parikh:

is unbelievable. Yeah.

Bobby Napiltonia:

The ability to, uh. Cost effectively touch and reach them we've never seen before. And the second post that I'll do is this guy, Adam Bosworth, who is, um, our sponsor, where I thought we were going to sell, uh, state software to BEA, is he did a post last week. He was super technical person that I respect. There's like 10 I've met in my life and he's one of those. He spoke about how he, he's been looking to write this application and he didn't have a vote at the time. He thought it would take him a week. And so he decided to make the machine do it and it blew him away. And when that level, he created J rocket, the app server that brand the internet. So when someone of that caliber makes the statement that holy, this has happened and the machine wrote the code. And this is like a grade one Google engineer code. It's over. It's over.

Rajiv Parikh:

Oh, things change. I have folks who, uh, when I have a set of folks who do, who write code, who write AI for me, that for our marketing applications, but then there are folks who just are really good structured thinkers and they, with a big ass prompt, basically write an application and it'll ask you questions. It'll give you answers, but they didn't write. One bit of normal code,

Bobby Napiltonia:

right?

Rajiv Parikh:

And that's the change that they knew the English language, the English language, and they knew it well, and they're willing to probe deeply and not have limits in their head.

Sandeep Parikh:

I'm chatting, I'm chatting with a company for, for, for myself and funny. That's, um, They, uh, program, uh, computer games just based off the scripts. So instead of me having to learn how to develop my own game, I can just write a script, which is what I'm good at as a writer. And then their software, their AI software will generate an entire video game universe for me based off that. That's super cool. Pretty incredible. My question is this though, Bobby, um, I wonder about this sort of environmental costs of AI and how, how you think about that. And this is the answer that AI gave me when I asked it about what, what it's, what it's, what it's costing us. It's an, a, you know, the computational power required for. is doubling every 3. 4 months, leading to an exponential increase in energy demand. So I'm using AI to make my video game about booger flinging. Um, is that how we want to burn down the rainforests? I'm asking, you know,

Bobby Napiltonia:

are you asking a loaded question? Cause you know, I spent some time in the energy space. Yeah. So, um, I got a lot of perspective on the utility and the grid on a global basis, having seen it like in a lot of the countries around the world, uh, ours in America is the worst without a doubt. It's insane how crippled it is now are old and decrippling and it's, it's, it's pathetic to be honest with you, but I was blown away. I'm from Pennsylvania when I saw that they're going to fire up three mile Island because we need to get out. bring back a nuclear reactor that leaked just because we need power for Microsoft to run a data farm. And I think what we really should be asking ourselves as we backtrack, we haven't built data centers in two decades. Now they're coming back and they're going to be more powerful and they're going to be put in places that we've never had before. What do you think that my number one concern with us building them besides the need for power, because power will figure out, look, we've got old coal plants that we could fire up. Yes, they're not dirty Wyoming has 44 percent of the coal in America. You add 3 states. We have 70 percent of the world's coal in America alone. So we're not running out of energy and intense and we just choose to have cleaner energy burning. But when you think through the amount of energy needed and necessary, yeah, we've got, I think, better control. It's like the. com all over again. Without controls, but what I'm most concerned if we build these up is the wastewater. So think about this. We're putting them in towns that were never thought of having an AI data center. That equipment requires fresh water to remain cool that you can only use 2 or 3 times. You got to discard it. And it's going to your wastewater treatment plant in your backyard. That doesn't know anything about stripping out metals and what came out of there. So what's going to happen to the towns? They're building a bunch of

Sandeep Parikh:

Flint, Michigan's across the

Bobby Napiltonia:

country. That's like, so I'm worried about that part of it. It's no different than say, how much does it take to make a battery to power a Tesla and you look, you got to dig a hole so deep in the earth just to get the, at some point, I think we've got to be true to ourselves and ask, are we solving problems that don't need to be solved? And creating industries that we need to create to create industries are these real impacts that we can make and look, most American automobile manufacturers shut down their electric plants this past year. Yeah. Think about that. After retooling a hundred percent of them to be electric only.

Sandeep Parikh:

So it becomes the arbiter of that, of like whether or not you're, you know, using AI properly when it's at our fingertips.

Bobby Napiltonia:

The P U C. Is going to, and here's the worst part. I mean, it's no different than asking Congress what you think about advertising or Facebook and they don't even know what like, you know, right. Think about right. You already know how to log

Sandeep Parikh:

into Facebook.

Bobby Napiltonia:

I don't even know what Facebook is. They're looking at the people's faces around them, right? Um, it's a big concern. I think we're taking it for granted because we're all looking at the upside and the hype associated with it, right? Who would be the governing body? There is no OSHA for the environment. Right. Right. So it would be the PUC. And if they end up saying, look, we're going to control who gets energy and utility. And by the way, you build that data center, you're going to spend 72 cents a kilowatt. Cause we got to take that money from you to prop up some clean, to make sure that the, where you're going to be as good for the society in which you're living in. Otherwise we don't want the next Flint, Michigan, or pick some town or something that will happen. Like an eyes wide open moment. Right.

Rajiv Parikh:

No, I think, yeah, I think there's like a, there's a notion to this that you have to create a, a regulatory, I hate doing regular regulations, but maybe there's a way to create a market based mechanism, just like you do credits, right? We did emission credits for acid rain. We have this notion of emission credits here in California, you can do trading systems so that people are getting the carbon credits. Right. So you create a, you create a way to let the market figure out the most efficient way to solve particular problems. And if that's one of them, if one of them is, we need power, but we need clean power and we need power that where the water is clean, we have to, you know, that becomes part of the solution,

Bobby Napiltonia:

right? You say that we need the clean power. Who's the weed, right? Cause I'm going to look and say, we're only what 360 million Americans. Yeah. And there's what, 7 billion people. So we're much, I mean, I know we're 12 or 14 percent of the global GDP with 2 percent of the global population. But when you start thinking about that, unless we control China and India, what we do here is not going to matter. Let's be clear. We don't manufacture enough stuff to matter.

Rajiv Parikh:

So you're suggesting a global trading system?

Bobby Napiltonia:

Well, I mean, if you think about it, if we're going to go and make clean power and the rest of the world's not, uh, uh, compliant to clean power, we're at a disadvantage.

Rajiv Parikh:

Well, but wouldn't you, wouldn't you argue that China, because it saw, because it has an issue with a, with a balance of payments because of oil, right? Ford exchange leaves them to buy oil and they saw an opportunity with solar energy. They decided to really invest in that. Decided to invest in EVs. And so they're way ahead of the rest of the world, right? If, if we didn't have tariffs on Chinese, Chinese vehicles, we all might be driving one today.

Bobby Napiltonia:

We would be. Yeah.

Rajiv Parikh:

So China, when it sees it in its self interest may, may surprise us. Right. Didn't they build more, more, more solar and wind last year than the U. S. did ever?

Bobby Napiltonia:

I, here's what they did do in a matter of three, two, two and a half to three years, they poured more concrete than the rest of the world did in 99 years. True. Think about that. Wow. More concrete than the rest of the world in the last hundred years. They poured in the last two years, they built cities that are still desolate and open. You know, they built the roads to nowhere. Um, they did that to put the people to work so that they would actually have an economy and you can't do that because no one's living in, by the way, they're going through this problem right now that the government's trying to figure out how do I prop this back up? Yep. Because America stopped buying dollar store spatulas.

Rajiv Parikh:

Yep. No, it's going to be a big issue. 30 percent of their GDP is in real estate. All right. I'm going to take you another direction. We're going to go a little bit to your past. So not too long ago, you recently sold Okara to Databricks. A data access platform enabling secure and scalable data governance of the cloud. It was your second successful exit along with live objects by Zora. So are these the spaces you're going to jump into? Robot as a service, uh, energy, AI, identity. What's the, which, which one is the one that you're really excited about? I saw one, I saw something recently about, um, cities and sensors and data.

Bobby Napiltonia:

Those are all things that are going to change the way in which we interact with the world.

Rajiv Parikh:

Okay.

Bobby Napiltonia:

That's what excites me. That's what gets you going. What do I mean by that? If you take robotics, we, especially you and I, Rajiv, we need it to work because in 20 years when we retire, there's not going to be enough nurses to take care of us. Let me be clear with that. The aging population, there's not enough people to help us. Studies have already been shown releasing robots and memory care centers and old stuff. They've started seeing things because there's not enough one on one care. I can get a, uh, a Cobot or humanoid there in the next two or three years to be doing that work. If you look at the life cycle of things, you're going to pay 25 for a hamburger. No. No. What's the minimum wage now? 21. Yeah. 21 in California. Right. You see where I'm going with this? So we have, have to solve that problem. So that's what drove me there. The second problem we have to solve is more diversity in our industry. And so you see me do a lot of work with first time female founders. I teach a class at the NASDAQ entrepreneurial center. That's where we created the knobs, dials, and levers content so we could teach you from the get go. Here's things that will make sure you succeed. Follow these and you're going to win. Sounds like Candyland game wired. Um, or shoots and ladders, it's always a fun ride. And so, uh, that's one, um, I shared with you before you

Sandeep Parikh:

move off of that, cause I love that you're pursuing diversity, um, but in terms of your philosophy for get the money, right? Like that, that's like a longer scheme potentially to get the money because you are privileging or speak to that. Like, you know, it's not the fastest path to getting the money if, if you're thinking about, Hey, how do I bring in players that are, you know, not typically, you know, Uh, in, in a space.

Bobby Napiltonia:

Maybe it's to shine some light on some really badly broken processes. Yeah. I don't mind breaking glass and saying things. I think one of the things that was in your questionnaire, I'm very opinionated and I got a lot of shit to say. I don't care what you think about it, right? No filter, no throttle. It's just who I am. And I feel like I've deserved or earned that right. And you don't have to like it. So it's a perspective and an opinion, usually fairly grounded. I don't like losing arguments. So you won't see me argue stupid.

Rajiv Parikh:

That's why we like you here, by the way,

Bobby Napiltonia:

I was dying to find an African American founder. Do you know how hard it is? Just period.

Sandeep Parikh:

And

Bobby Napiltonia:

anything. Okay. Yeah. So I found one. I looked at a thousand startups. I'm a, uh, University of Alabama. I went through a bunch of startup things, sec challenges. I mean, I like, I like to start where I go to, I see probably more than most VCs a year just because of where I go. And they're too selective to look at what they want to look at. So I found an African American man, Gavin. He was beyond accomplished. He's a lawyer. He was in the military, speaks multiple, learned four languages in 11 months. So like, this is just not your run of the mill entrepreneur. And he met this guy at a cocktail party who happened to write a paper on the Blythe. This is the beginning of the end of a city. And all of a sudden it was picked up in the small map paper called the wall street journal than the new york times. And he all of a sudden became well known for that that they put and said, if we could stop cities from falling apart by identifying early. Well, how would we do that? Very simple. We'd throw a camera on a trash truck that goes around the city every day. And I'll get to see 100 percent Google Earth. Let me see down that helped me ring. Let me see out. Just imagine if I could see the city what I can see.

Everyone:

Hmm.

Bobby Napiltonia:

Thank God we did Asheville before the storms. FEMA called us up and said, we'd like a before and after blueprint so we could see the damage. So that one's having to blow up. That's the worst part. Sandy. I personally looked on the internet who says they found fund black venture, black this, that, the other thing. And I wrote to them all and called them of the 20 that said they did it. How many of them returned my, and you see, I have at least a background that you should return my call or at least be like, off. Tell me that at least I'm fine with that. How many of the 20? How many did I get? All right. So

Rajiv Parikh:

what do you, what do you say? Three?

Bobby Napiltonia:

Bingo. Yeah,

Rajiv Parikh:

I was going to tell you. No, I just guessed I was looking at 15

Bobby Napiltonia:

percent and I was blown away. I actually had to call their boss's boss, yeah. To say, Hey, you at insight capital, Jeff, do you mind asking this person to return my email? I know he's not there. Hey, to these people over, if I named the venture firms, you they're all tier one. You'd be like, there's no way that person didn't return your call. And it's either they're overwhelmed. They don't get it. They don't know, or they're all lip service and saying they fund African Americans because they don't, they're bullshit. Hmm. So we've got him funded. It's a non-traditional way and we're starting to crush it. When I met him, he was doing 60 k. We have a, that was last year at this time we've got a $3 million backlog 12 months later. That's fantastic. That's more than double, double. Triple. Triple. So, um, there's a bigger story. We, we can, we we're gonna eventually launch this thing called the Super Foundry. I don't know if you know Ali Tabi. He's over at DCBC and he wrote a book called Super Founders. Mm-hmm . And he interviewed a thousand of 'em to find out. What they did, and I thought to myself, I've built a thousand, so I don't have to interview them. I'm going to go out and help them with what my scar tissue is. And no, so hence, that's why we really created the get the money firm. And I could go down 99 ways. We got money without it being venture money or how we funded things and why we did this, why we did it differently and why that allowed us to win and become number one.

Rajiv Parikh:

That's cool. So is there a court when you, when you, when you go to what motivated you to go do these sorts of things, right? You weren't doing things in a traditional fashion. You got yourself into these worlds that you talk about being the Forrest Gump, right? You found your way, you got your way into it and you were very passionate about it. What got you there?

Bobby Napiltonia:

So destiny had me on a path that wasn't this. I already told you what my dad did. Uh, so I figured, uh, my senior year, he got cancer and they gave him six months to live. So I didn't go away to college. Now, the reason that's important, same thing happened to him and his dad died. He dropped out of high school and he ended up digging ditches and he moved from graveyard digger to truck driver. So here I am thinking that's going to be my life. I'm not going to be digging graves. I'm going to be, uh, I'm going to work at UPS and I got a job working at UPS. Um, And I realized I'm not a laborer. I thank God got the unload and end up within six months, learned the zip code so I could be a sorter and make another dollar an hour. And then about 90 days later, I qualified for an exemplary employee that I got to apply to be a supervisor. And I did that till I was 20 years old. And I saw a call center and I thought I had a little call center exposure, which we didn't talk about yet. And I thought, that's what I want to be part of. And I looked at who, what call centers are in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and are there any things out there and I saw this company D and H distributing. And so I apply for the job. I get a job in the call center. I was, I was hesitant to leave my job where I was getting benefits and I sort of saw a path and at UPS. All of their executive management came from within. So they promote within. So I'm seeing these people that look like me, you know, no college degree making 250 back then, you know, 250 a year was real money. It's like a million dollars a year now. So they do pay their people well because they need to keep you. Cause where are you going to learn that business unless you come from the inside? And I joined DNH and they had been in business at this time for over 70 years. So what does that tell you? They do. Reinvent themselves. The grandparents of these people started a company in Williamsport, Pennsylvania with retreaded tires. They were Jewish immigrants. When I met them 70 years later, they were the largest Whirlpool and RCA distributor in America. Now I'm going to ask you smart people, why? Is that an important fact in our lives?

Rajiv Parikh:

They were the top brands of their time. Those were the first things we bought after a house,

Bobby Napiltonia:

we bought a house, first TV, bought a car. Then we needed washing machines and TVs and stereos. And so this whole dealer network had to be set up and everything went through distribution because there was no direct salespeople. So what I got to see is I call it the customer coverage model and they nailed it. And by the way, why don't we shop at Amazon today? It's customer coverage model. I'll get it tomorrow. So it's this. Change that stays the same change today. That's an 8 billion ESOP privately held their children run it. I communicate with them regularly. So I'm friends with them. I think that's a testament to the type of individual that I am. And, um, uh, I learned a lot of my framing from there. And therefore you put anything in the model. Look, if they did retreaded tires and spatulas and games and computers and got to 8 billion, I sure as hell can figure out how we do that with tech.

Rajiv Parikh:

So what you saw on them was that they had a way to get products to the market without. Leveraging their own balance sheet, they can use others to help you get

Bobby Napiltonia:

there. That, plus they also got distribution, which is razor thin margins and understand customer support, customer care, the importance to have training, don't touch the product, don't ship it, no returns, like all of those fundamentals that are very important for margin, which is how we all live by margin.

Rajiv Parikh:

Right. So when you say, when you saw that level, when you saw those elements, right, understanding the distribution game, understanding how to drive it, how to, how to see it, how did you. Take that forward. Like what

Bobby Napiltonia:

if you think about it today, we call those pivots. They're just reinventing themselves because they got the machinery and you just put something back in the machinery. And so again, I'll go back to it to the change. It stays the same.

Rajiv Parikh:

Yeah.

Bobby Napiltonia:

We were only able to do that 10 times because it's a process, right?

Sandeep Parikh:

But, but situate me in the, so how old were you when you got this, this job, I want to look at it from your lens. Cause now you're, you're speaking with all this wealth of experience with all these really sort of catchy bits of wisdom. But as the 20 year old, how are you looking at this operation and how is that influencing you to then go to the next stage versus just being like, well, I'll just be, you know, climb the ranks here. Or. You know, just, uh, you know, take a really good question.

Bobby Napiltonia:

So it's, uh, it couldn't come better timing. I hired 1 of our 1st employees, uh, to the firm and, um, he's from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and from the Jewish community. So, when I tell you that I'm a giver and give back to the things that make me who I am. It's really true. The women things I do, I had a strong mother that put me in a position that if I can enable women, we can talk about some of the ones and where we've made impact, some of they are, um, it's a passion driven Sandy, hence the chief helper, helping others growing up, poor and Catholic. The one thing you knew how to do was give. And sacrifice. I mean, we might be laughing about that, but those are fundamentals. I always say my mother gave me the most priceless things in the world. Manners don't cost us anything, right? Things that greeting people, engagement people, things that you don't have to have money to have that can set you apart from those that do. Yeah. So I saw the power of a call center that led me to believe what's out there. I spent seven years at the beginning of the birth of the PC, which I'll get by the way, Microsoft went through distribution, HP, Compaq, Apple, everybody. They use rep firms and we're starting to see some things. If we did a follow up, I'm going to project what the next decade looks like. And it's not like this in the next two years is going to, we're going to see that change all, all because of the AI comments we had.

Sandeep Parikh:

So, cause you're not going back to college at this point, you're, you're in the workforce and you're, and you're, and you're going from here. Right.

Bobby Napiltonia:

I do teach at colleges. So I don't know if I go back. My daughter's at the university of Alabama. So I immediately knew.

Sandeep Parikh:

I'm saying back when you were, you know, in your twenties and you're, you're, you're going from call center to the next gig.

Bobby Napiltonia:

Right. Great. Good, great question. What college could have taught us this?

Sandeep Parikh:

Yeah. No, I don't know. Yeah.

Bobby Napiltonia:

I got none. Which is why I get invites to go to MIT and Harvard to come speak about the digitization of industries. Cause no one's done these things before.

Sandeep Parikh:

No, it's super inspiring. So I kind of want to put people in the perspective of you at that age and, and to really think about how I want to hear what you thought about

Bobby Napiltonia:

the real question was. I was beyond curious and they afforded me every opportunity and literacy is telling the story of the gentleman that I hired. They allow me to work weekends. Listen, I learned how to do punch panels, twisted pair. I did cat5 cables, crimping. They gave, there was no shortage of work. And if you were a worker, if you know anything about that community, it's all about work hard, work hard. And they allowed me to do that. There was no stopping what I could learn there.

Rajiv Parikh:

Yeah. And then

Bobby Napiltonia:

how did you get from there to Silicon Valley? Great question. So during this, I got to see all the seven years. So you've got to remember the beginning of the PC, we're talking green screens, core data names, people here never heard of our orange screens. And so I got to see the birth of the X 86 to 86, 36, 46, 10 megabyte hard drives to where we are today. And so you saw a lot of roadkill and I've been offered a lot of jobs in that seven years there. And I thought to myself, I'm never leaving here. I see how you treat people. You've been in business 70 years. I'm going to retire. This is great. I love it here. And then they treated me so well like a family member. We joke around. I was Bobby Napolstein to pronounce. I like that. I like that.

Rajiv Parikh:

That's kind of cool. Yeah. Right. And so I

Bobby Napiltonia:

was part of the tribe and all of that. And they really welcomed me in. But back to the essence of your question, they afforded every opportunity to work. And you heard me chop wood. If you work hard, things will pay off. Work hard, work hard. It will pay off. You know that.

Rajiv Parikh:

That's great. So then you found yourself in Silicon Valley. You got your sense. No, I'm

Bobby Napiltonia:

looking and I pass on all these jobs and we have a multi me. I get to launch the software division. We're getting into software at the time because we was mainly hardware and it was gaming at the time at the beginning, early productivity tools. And we had a multimedia event at our facility. And so a bunch of companies came to it and sponsored it. And I met these two gentlemen, and we were going to the off site, which was you could go off at the Hershey country club or go to Hershey park. And so they asked me, where are you going? I go, I'm going to Hershey park. Why aren't you going golfing? I go, do you see where everyone else is going? I don't want to go off and spend my day with you in a cart when I could go spend my time with all of those people and have fun in the park. And they're like, Oh my God. Two weeks later, they made me an offer. I turned it down. They came back and made it sweeter. I joined them at a company was doing about 30 million. Uh, a year. So small. And when I left seven years later, we were doing a billion form or the fastest growing company in the world. The third after Microsoft and Intel to reach a hundred million users selling a 99 product. And we cracked CAC and LTV before this, this industry even knew what they meant by selling a 16 chip to an OEM manufacturer to own the floor. Then that got us the sound. Then I upgraded you a 16 bit, a 32 bit, a 64 CD ROM drive, a DVD drive, speakers. There's a great, we almost bought Nvidia until Jensen turned us down and we ended up buying 3d effects, who knows what it would have been like. And it wasn't until this company in Cupertino stole our technology and wrote us a half a billion dollar check and the MP3 player was born otherwise we would have probably owned that as well. And that's a true story. Wow. It's an awesome story. Have you written a book? Um, that's just chapter one,. Sandeep Parikh: It's time, time We'll do an audio book or we'll do chapters. Books are dead if you, in my opinion, people write books to be heard. I'd rather share these stories and have a subscriber, you know, like I have a look at it, rather write a book. I'd rather gimme $10 a year for a subscription. I'll tell you stories throughout the entire year. You go, there it is.

Rajiv Parikh:

Yes. Extended podcast. Alright, so now we get to go and do the game. Let's do the games. Yes. So

Sandeep Parikh:

speaking of Hershey, I think it's a perfect segue into this, Bobby. I'd like to welcome you now. You, I hope you've been enjoying your time in the podcast. Cause you're about to enter the spark tank. Okay. So this is a, you know, the whole world has changed here. Um, this is where the lights have shown down on you. They're bright, they're hot. Um, this is where two marketing mavens enter. And, uh, one gets crushed and it's going to get tarred and feathered, except this time the tar is going to taste a little sweeter because it's going to be chocolate. Today's game is focused on the life and times of the chocolatier and confectionery mogul, Milton Hershey, labeled as one of your heroes. So in one corner, we've got Bobby and Appletonia with 36 years of experience in tech, having shaped and transformed some of the most innovative and influential companies in the world. And as we stated, loves Milton Hershey. And then we have my brother, Rajiv, CEO of Position Squared, who inhales autobiographies like they are chocolate bars. So, you know, I think this is a good head to head matchup. I will, I don't

Bobby Napiltonia:

know, I'm at a disadvantage.

Sandeep Parikh:

We'll see, we'll see, we're going to play, we're going to play two truths and a lie. Um, and so I'm going to read you a list of three supposed facts about Hershey, two of which are true and one is fake. I'm going to then count down from three to one. And when I say one, you're going to show me your answers at the same time, one, two, or three, so that there's no cheating off of each other. Does that make sense?

Bobby Napiltonia:

And we're going to pick the fake or the truth.

Sandeep Parikh:

You're picking the fake. Two of the true, two of them are true. All right. One is a lie. All right. All right. Round one. Uh, Milton Hershey's life is an inspiring, much like yours and inspiring rags to riches story. Uh, which of these statements about his inspiring early life is the lie. Number one, Milton Hershey only had a fourth grade education, but he was determined to learn a trade and become successful, so he apprenticed for a printer before he was fired for spilling ink on the printing press. Number two, after failing at his first confectionery business in Philadelphia, Hershey eventually moved out into a frontier town in the 1880s, Denver, Colorado, where he struck gold in a very unusual way by learning to make caramels with fresh milk. It was. White gold. Number three, Hershey took a huge gamble by ditching his then successful caramel company to focus entirely on making milk chocolate. And to fund this, he sold all of his personal possessions, including his house and furniture, and bet it all on Brown. Alright. So, so this is like a connected set of

Rajiv Parikh:

questions in

Sandeep Parikh:

a way. It kind of is. These are three statements about his early life. One of them is false. Two of them are true. Three, two, one, go. Okay, you both say that one is the lie, that he only had a fourth grade education before he apprenticed for a printer. Well, I gotta tell you, that is true. Oh, so fa wow. I knew caramels were true. He, he didn't, and I knew the milk chunk. So, you know, I guess the devil's in the details on this one. He didn't leverage his, all of his personal possessions and in house his furniture to, uh, to then bet into the milk chocolate. He actually sold his company, uh, for staggering $1 million, the equivalent to what's $34 million today. Wow. Um, so he wasn't, and he bought,

Bobby Napiltonia:

he bought the 30 acres in Dairy Township, which became Hershey.

Sandeep Parikh:

Correct. So, so I just, I got you on a little fine print there. So you guys are still zero, zero here. We go round two. Tied at zero. Hershey wasn't just an innovative chocolatier in the lab or a brilliant operator, he was also a marketing genius. He had many great marketing moves. Uh, which of these though is not one of those great marketing moves. Number one, to promote Hershey's Kisses, the company set up kissing booths in major cities where customers could receive a free kiss in exchange for a kiss on the cheek. Number two, to promote his chocolate and the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, Milton Hershey had a trolley car built entirely out of chocolate. It was displayed at various events and exhibitions, drawing crowds and generating buzz. Number three, An early Hershey slogan was more sustaining than meat, emphasizing the nutritional value of chocolate at a time when it was considered a treat. So which of these three marketing moves was in fact not one that Milton enacted? Here we go. Your answer in three, two, one. Wow, you guys are just, like, you guys go to too many 49ers games. We gotta separate you two. Okay, you both said three, which is the ridiculous slogan, which is in fact true. True. I knew you were gonna say that. He did, in fact, want to, yes, yes, there was, Morse's Sitting Meat was a terrible slogan. It's pretty wild. Pretty wild. Well, in fact But it must have worked back in those days. The false was the kissing booths. That was not, that was not true. So that didn't happen. Uh, but there was singing telegrams of Hershey's kisses, uh, that were, that were delivered by a person dressed as a Hershey's kiss. So it's based in some truth, but they didn't actually say

Rajiv Parikh:

you and I are zero, zero,

Sandeep Parikh:

let's get some offense going here, uh, in 1906. delightful trait emerged from the Hershey's Chocolate Factory and that was the Hershey's Kiss. So we're gonna double click on that. Okay, so, there, people don't know the exact origin of the Hershey's Kiss, why they called it the Kiss. There are many rumored ideas that have become famous lore. Uh, two of these rumored origin stories are, are true. Real or rumored origin stories and one of them is entirely invented by me. Can you pick which one is the fake one? Here we go. Number one, uh Milton Hershey a man of few words believed in simplicity and quantity He often referred to the acronym KISS Keep it simple sweetheart to represent his business and marketing philosophy and it was an employee who then suggested Calling that silver wrapped Treat a kiss. Number two, the Hershey's kiss was inspired when Milton witnessed an assembly line chocolatier who after accidently dropping a dollop of chocolate on the assembly line kissed his hand after he cleaned it up. Number three, the sound this machine makes when it deposits the chocolate onto the conveyor belt. People say that it makes a kissing sound like a quick peck. So which of these three rumors. are actually in the lore of rumors of how the Hershey's Kiss was originated. Three, two, oh boy. Do you want to pick it? I'm going to let you choose. You're the guest. You get, do you want to stay where you are and force Rajiv to change his answer? Or do you want to potentially change your answer? I'd

Bobby Napiltonia:

like to keep mine. So I'm happy to change

Sandeep Parikh:

it. Okay, I got it. I'll go one. Well, we do in fact have a winner now. Number one is The Lie. So, yeah, that's the one I made up. There is no actual acronym. Congratulations, Rajiv. I can't believe it. Third week in a row. Third podcast in a row. Bobby, I was really holding out hope that you would take him down.

Bobby Napiltonia:

Yeah, me too. I knew it was from the sound of the machine. It was the truth. Yeah. Um, I mean, some of them you heard as kids, you know, the stories and going to the top of the theme park and all of that, but it was the best babysitter. I think a hall pass was 35 a year and that's where your parents would drop you off and pick you up at the end of the day. Right.

Sandeep Parikh:

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, how about this real quick? Because I hate it when Reggie wins double or nothing. Bobby, if you can answer this, what movie was Hershey's chocolate syrup used? In a famous shower scene, instead of blood.

Bobby Napiltonia:

Hey, I don't know that one. I was gonna guess it was a sex movie of some sort. And there's like water for chocolate.

Sandeep Parikh:

That's your definition of a sex movie?

Everyone:

It's

Sandeep Parikh:

raining chocolate. I

Bobby Napiltonia:

was trying to think. Kind of like American Beauty, it's raining frogs. It's 50 shades of gray and I didn't, I didn't know. Watch the movie. And therefore it was in that movie or was it, you know, last night,

Sandeep Parikh:

it's like, no, okay. Uh, any hints there? It's psycho. Yes. Psycho. Psycho is the movie where, uh, yeah, cause it was black and white. Right. It was black and white. Exactly. So they used Alfred Hitchcock used Hershey's chocolate syrup instead of blood. All right. Well, that makes, unfortunately, makes Rajiv the double winner. Uh, congratulations, Roger, on your three podcasts in a row win streak. And Bobby, thank you so much for playing.

Rajiv Parikh:

Thank you for making it. Thanks for having me. I'll listen to Rajiv every day. As long as I get to hang out with you, Bobby. All right, Bobby, we have a few questions that you're going to answer super fast, all right? Here we go. This is our final few. What's your anti portfolio? We all have a company we wish we invested in or a company that hired us or a company that you founded. Give me two of your anti

Bobby Napiltonia:

portfolio, meaning that I'm assuming about places I didn't go to work.

Rajiv Parikh:

That's right. You wish you could have been, you could have worked there. You wish you had invested in it. Uh, something you wish you could have founded that you came close. There's

Bobby Napiltonia:

too many. There's far, far too many. Um, nest is one. And I thought no, one's paying three 53rd thermostat. And they weren't, they wanted the data from the people's homes. That's definitely one that I passed on. I actually did the commercial version of that. And that's the company we sold to Siemens. I wasn't far off new. Interesting part was husband and wife. One was at Kleiner Perkins, one's at foundation and one had a consumer and one had the commercial and they were both vying for where I would go to work. And it started with the people first. Uh, I chose her over him. Anyway, uh, that's probably the first one. I don't have many regrets.

Rajiv Parikh:

Uh, you don't have any regrets. Well, I like that. I like that. Here we go. What's your personal moonshot? What pops to mind immediately?

Bobby Napiltonia:

Um, owning a sports team.

Rajiv Parikh:

That's

Bobby Napiltonia:

awesome.

Rajiv Parikh:

I love that. Do you have a favorite life motto?

Bobby Napiltonia:

Work hard, play hard.

Rajiv Parikh:

Work hard, play hard. Love it. Next great thing you plan on starting? Book tv show movie podcast video game money's no object money even making money is no object

Bobby Napiltonia:

great question so i recently moved to the pacific northwest and i discovered what i think could be a gold mine that we we haven't seen anywhere else in the world i've been trying to figure out how we take silicon valley dna i talked to nicola who runs the entrepreneur program over at the nasdaq and we say if you could just get certain things You out of Silicon Valley and repeat them. And I think here in Bend, Oregon, there's a lot of the things that will, that, that could make Silicon Valley absentee a university, although there are two, not far from here. The amount of wealth is here. That is Silicon Valley. Wealth has blown my mind away. It's a bunch of startups. And so I got to keynote at the Bend Venture Conference a couple of weeks ago. My goal would be to coalesce the community and see if we can get like a real moonshot out of here. Now, why do I believe that? Listen, I'm hanging out with a guy that ran AI at Apple for nine years. He lives in my backyard. Like there are other people like me that have come here. The guy that runs KKR software has got a place up here. So I start thinking, if you had to take the pieces that would make it happen, we have them. How can we assemble that? And can we make this microcosm? And can I build a bridge to Silicon Valley? Cause we need outposts. You know, it can't be the heartbeat forever.

Rajiv Parikh:

I'm a big, whenever folks say, Oh, uh, we're starting here, maybe Miami, Austin, Boston, wherever I'm, I'm just thrilled. I think we need more competition. Competition's always great. And it's important to create this ecosystem that goes around the world. So I love the idea. So Bobby, thank you for having us here today.

Sandeep Parikh:

Oh, I got, I got one, I got a one final, final one for the final fast four or whatever we're calling it, which is I have down here that you traveled with the circus for three years. Give me your big takeaway from that

Bobby Napiltonia:

experience. Oh, wow. It was the most incredible experience of a lifetime. Uh, well, first of all, the animals, I fell in love with elephants. I spent a lot of time with the animals. So that part was a blessing as a young man. And the takeaway though, was I ended up getting on the business side of it. I ran the joint, I ran a joint. And so my, my sophomore, my second and third year, second year, I was on cotton candy. So I learned from a gentleman, Billy Rawls. And what I learned was a cotton candy, you sell for a dollar, your cost of goods is 3 cents because the cone costs one flossing to human labor. And by my third year, by I'm 15 years old, I have four people working for me. And I'm running probably a Couple hundred thousand dollar little enterprise. Yeah. Yeah. And I have four people working. So I got to understand at a very young age, margin dollars, cost of goods, people work for me and how I make money. And that's really the Genesis that I've applied that every company for the last few years. 50 years since I was 13.

Rajiv Parikh:

Awesome. No, I love it. Bobby, such a thrill to have you with me today and Sunday, but we just had a blast to the spark of ages audience. We'd love to hear from you. So thank you so much for joining us.

Bobby Napiltonia:

Thanks. Hit me up on LinkedIn. Listen, follow, share. I appreciate you guys having me and I look forward to meeting in person someday, Sandy.

Rajiv Parikh:

Yes. Same here. Bring it on. Right. Well, that was just a lot of fun. Bobby is just like a, you know, It's like drinking out of a fire hose. He's right. Instead of

Sandeep Parikh:

water, you're just drinking like, you know, information on the history of, uh,

Rajiv Parikh:

tech, it's a mega stream of technology, chocolate. All right. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the pod, please take a moment to rate it and comment. You can find us on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere podcasts can be found.

Sandeep Parikh:

Hey, this show is produced by moi, Sandeep Parikh, and Anand Shah, production assistance by Taryn Talley, and edited by Sean Maher and Aiden McGarvey.

Rajiv Parikh:

And I'm your host, Rajiv Parikh from Position Squared, a leading AI based growth marketing company based in Silicon Valley. Come visit us at www. positionsquared. com. www. position2. com. This has been an effing funny production and we'll catch you next time. And remember folks, be like Bobby, be ever curious.

Sandeep Parikh:

For our, for our listeners. We generally, there's a pre show where I run down a list of housekeeping and then, you know, we ask, I ask, Hey, you have any questions before we begin? Now, Bobby, our guest today decided to ask a question right off the top that I think is worthwhile answering on the pod. So let's go. Give us your question. Certainly.

Bobby Napiltonia:

Who's the most interesting interview that you've had and why?

Sandeep Parikh:

Yeah, that's see, this is obviously a charged, potentially charged, uh, a lot of crap for this. Yeah. We could, we could use a lot of your buddies here, but, um, I don't know, Rajiv, what comes to your mind? I think about a

Rajiv Parikh:

couple of, when I think about the highest performers, uh, Ankur Srivastava did really well. David Yakubovich did really well in terms of just raw numbers. He really rocked it. He's got an amazing community. I really enjoyed. Two of the women, uh, on the podcast and the geest and was awesome. That was on my list. Uh, Joanna strober of midi health. I, she made me confront an uncomfortable topic about, um, middle age women's health and menopause. And I think that was fun for me to learn to be natural about it.

Sandeep Parikh:

And then we have fun ones. We had that we had, uh, the crispy crunchy chicken lady rock. She rocked it. Yes. Which was just like a totally kind of for us. kind of out there topic that we never really get to talk about, you know, uh, Uh, crispy chicken distribution. That's right. And so that, that, that was cool. I think it's whenever it sort of really sparks our curiosity and you can feel yourself leaning into the conversation because either they, you know, bringing in insights that you had never thought of before facts or data that, that just surprise you, that's, that's the stuff that, that really, you know, Gets me personally going

Bobby Napiltonia:

well, especially with being a history buff. I'm sure that those curve balls come at you and then you can validate whether it's true or not. Right. I think so. Thankfully we have the internet at our disposal as well,

Sandeep Parikh:

just in case to make ourselves look like history buffs.