Rick Turoczy

Gabriel Flores  0:01  

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the shades of entrepreneurship. This is your host, Mr. Gabriel Flores. Today I am very excited to because I have a Portland startup legend. Rick torossi. Are you with me, Rick? How are you doing?

Rick Turoczy  0:15  

I am here. Thank you for having me. I don't I don't know that I'm a legend. Definitely a myth.

Gabriel Flores  0:22  

Well, I just I just, I just anointed you right there as a legend. Perfect. So thank you very much for joining us on the show. Because I think you have a lot of a lot of information to provide not only myself, but our listeners as well. So first, let's kind of just introduce the world to Rick.

Rick Turoczy  0:41  

Yeah. Yeah. So what troubles me most well known as the co founder and general manager of pi, here in town, which is an early stage startup accelerator, I likewise, grew up is really bad, because it's spent time all over and spent squirrel in Stuttgart Germany, spent kind of junior high and high school years in southern Idaho and went to college in southeastern Washington, and then wound up moving to Berlin in the mid 90s, where I kind of fell in with the startup community here. And they've been working in on and around it ever since.

Gabriel Flores  1:22  

So Germany, what took you out to Germany.

Rick Turoczy  1:25  

My dad was stationed out there for about four and a half years. So we were on an army base, it was a US Army base, but got to spend a lot of time not only exploring Germany, but getting the chance to explore Europe and Northern Africa, which was really, really informative for me at a very young age about the world being a much bigger and diverse place than just my my lived experience.

Gabriel Flores  1:51  

Definitely no, no, that I think that's kind of important, too. I tend to talk about that often of just cultural experience, and how much you grow, you know, during those opportunities. You know, one of the things you mentioned is, you know, when you kind of moved here in Oregon, you got you got into the startup community, let's kind of talk about that a little bit. How did you get into the startup community here in this?

Rick Turoczy  2:12  

It was purely accidental, like I had, I realized, people had started companies, right, like I knew somebody had to start like Coca Cola, and Microsoft are whatever they really felt was something that people kind of actively did. And so I wasn't necessarily looking for that. I was just a recent college grad looking for a job. And I'd been an English major, and wound up just applying to this role where they needed somebody to be kind of a copywriter, editor. And that was at a very small agency, and that agency was doing a lot of work for these very early stage startups. And one of those startups I hit it off with, and they were like, Look, why are we paying the agency to pay you? Why don't you just come work for us. And so I went over to work for that company is called medical logic. And they were very early in the electronic medical record space back in the day, and went over there to work for them as kind of a copywriter editor, but wound up kind of becoming the, for lack of a better term, that kind of deck presentation person for them. And so got to spend a lot of time with the worst founder of the company and the executive team and kind of learning how that kind of stuff worked for venture funded startups. And then that company wound up going through an IPO during the.com days and living through the.com Bust. So I think I learned more in the 18 months at that company than I've learned in the 25 years following.

Gabriel Flores  3:48  

Oh, wow, interesting. It's kind of funny how, like one, you know, opportunity like that, you tend to learn quite a bit.

Rick Turoczy  3:55  

I think, because we're working like 20 hours a day, that was probably crammed a lot of learning into a very short period of time. Well,

Gabriel Flores  4:03  

it's interesting, too, because you kind of mentioned you, you kind of fell into this, right?

Rick Turoczy  4:08  

Yeah, yeah, there was no grand plan. I mean, if you look back at my career, there's there's definitely a through line there. But, but only looking backwards. Like there's never been everything's just been kind of I always refer to it as a series of happy accidents where, you know, I happen to know somebody or happened with notice somebody doing something where I happened to notice a gap in the community and just kind of took the opportunity to either go work with somebody else or start something new. And that's kind of been my career path up till now.

Gabriel Flores  4:42  

Now, it seems to me, you know, I've been able to see from the outside looking in a lot of your work. And it seems to me that you have a lot of passion for what you're doing, like a lot of passion for the startup community. Is there like a huge passion for this or did it fall into kind of, like you mentioned just kind of fell into it. Did you end up growing a passion for As you you're working into it or have you always kind of thought about it

Rick Turoczy  5:05  

more, it's a learned passion, and there's definitely passion, I'm not in it for the money, that's for sure. The the opportunity to work with really German, intelligent, creative people who are trying to either bring something new to fruition, or trying to change the world in some way. And being some small part of that journey is a really, really rewarding experience. For me, I just, I get a lot of emotional satisfaction out of that I had actually tried to start a couple of my own companies back in the day and discovered that I just wasn't really founder, material I wasn't, I wasn't driven and passionate, the same way that founders were, but I was a really good tactical support or sounding board for those founders. And so I kind of fell into that role. And that's the role I enjoy most and looking back, kind of in my life. You know, as a college lacrosse coach, I was a literary agent and an editor for a while. And then this kind of like copywriting editing storytelling for startups just to help me realize that I'm really good at helping somebody else get better or be better at what they do. And that's what I really enjoyed doing.

Gabriel Flores  6:35  

Nice. In fact, you enjoy it so much, you created this company called pie. So let's let's talk about pie. Let's let's, let's tell the listeners at home what is pie and and kind of what does it do.

Rick Turoczy  6:47  

So at its most basic pines, really this ongoing experiment, to figure out how established organizations like corporations or government entities or educational institutions, can more effectively collaborate specifically with the Portland startup community and collaborate for mutual benefit. So we're not looking for something that only the startups are gonna get something out of, or something that only the businesses are gonna get something out of, but we really want to see that collaboration be fruitful on both sides. And so the project originally started with a company headquartered here in town called widening Kennedy, which, you know, folks here are familiar with, but for folks outside the area who might not be familiar with widening, they are a global advertising agency that has done a lot of big brands, advertising, mostly in television. So for example, they're the company that came up with Nike just do it. They're the Coca Cola polar bears. They're the new Colonel Sanders for KFC. They're the Old Spice guy like they do. They do storytelling with brands that have a ton of brand equity, but may have potentially lost their voice. And they can help redefine and recreate that voice. And the reason the widening was interested in starting the project was they saw startups on technology as kind of this new new bastion of creative expression. And they wanted to be involved in the Portland community in that regard, mostly to learn and kind of, kind of figure out how startups did what they did, but also willing to give back to the community and to kind of pay it forward to help the next generation of businesses here. So pie started as a co working space, it was just a bunch of us startup types, kind of sitting in a 3000 square foot concrete floor, kind of very sparsely appointed former retail space in the lightning Kennedy building, that he didn't even work in there. So it's a really good kind of like, uphill in the snow both ways, kind of start a story. But what we discovered was that while having founders sit next to one another, and that that level of peer support and emotional support was really effective. There's still there still are gaps in the knowledge. And so we kind of tweaked the program a little bit to be more of a startup accelerator. And by that we mean an environment where founders not only support one another, but they're also provided with very intensive mentorship from experts in the community, or in that case, from around the world to kind of help them figure out like, are they building the right thing? Should they be doing something different? Should they stop doing what they're doing? And really, really help them figure out the business aspects of what they're trying to pursue.

Gabriel Flores  10:01  

So if an individual, you know, listening wants to get involved with tires interested in how do they get involved? How do they kind of find out this more information about pi?

Rick Turoczy  10:11  

But yeah, I mean, there are a few different ways. We try and do a lot of kind of open community facing events, the Academy, I help people engage at that level, or learn more about the project, you know, q&a, or just kind of social events and you know, obviously, virtual these days, but networking events and that sort of thing. We, if they're if they're building something, and we focus on three specific areas, so we focus on software as a service, web based, mobile based kind of applications, we have a partnership with Autodesk here in town that focuses on hardware or manufactured objects. And then through our partnership with built Oregon, we work on consumer products as well. So very product oriented kind of companies. But if folks are working on something like that we open up applications once a year, and kind of try and figure out a cohort of companies to put together in each of those verticals. And then work with those companies these days, that it's usually four to six months, that we work with those companies. And in the old world, they all sat in the same space these days. It's a it's a fully virtual program, but we're hoping to get back to in person. And another way, if you're not working on anything, but you're like, Hey, I like startups, I want to help. We also are always on the lookout for people who are willing to mentor our startups. mentorship for us, I think it's it's important to be explicit about it. Mentorship is simple listening, and then providing your opinion. There's not, you know, you're not doing work for free. You're not. You're not being tasked with getting something done. It's really just providing your opinion from your area of expertise to kind of help the founders figure stuff out.

Gabriel Flores  12:11  

Nice. You know, one of the things you mentioned at the beginning of this is is talking about focusing on the community, right? And kind of doing the grassroot efforts with the community, why is community involvement so important to you?

Rick Turoczy  12:25  

I mean, you never know what a relationship is going to turn into. And so much of my life has been based on these random connections I've made, and they're not. I often worry that in the business world, relationships become very transactional. And I think the thing I like about community is, you can have an affinity for someone else, or share common interests, whether there are business outcomes from that common interest or not, or you can kind of develop those relationships. And I always feel like a community is only as strong as its weakest connection. And so kind of helping to inform those connections, helping to kind of kind of, you know, introduce people, or make sure that people are getting introduced and making sure that there's no single point of failure in the community and that a variety of people can connect a variety of other people, I think, is really the magic that that definitely makes the startup world work. And I would like to believe that it helps the broader world work as well.

Gabriel Flores  13:42  

Yeah. Now you You've so you have pie, right, and you're working with the community, but that's not really all Rick does. Right? You've you've also done a TED Talk. Right? You, I believe you. You write a blog. So what let's let's talk about the TED Talk, though, I was very interested in I actually watched it would love to kind of give the listeners at home just kind of a synopsis.

Rick Turoczy  14:04  

Yeah, so the synopsis is, I'm an introvert, I'm probably the last person you would think of to be kind of going this role of meeting new people constantly and trying to get them connected. But the you know, the synopsis of the talk is introverts bringing unique skill set to doing this work. And as do extroverts, I'm not arguing that one is better than another. I think it's just non obvious that introverts can be good at this kind of work. And it's really just the idea that, you know, everyone listening to this podcast, know someone that someone else should know, and it's really our obligation as humans to ensure those connections are happening. So, you know, being thoughtful about connecting people, and really taking the opportunity to it Take a risky, you know, call out of the blue or email out of the blue, because you never know what that may result in.

Gabriel Flores  15:07  

Yeah, and for those listening at home, you can Google it, the rich rosy and introverts guide to building community, it really is a very, very cool kind of discussion about how how important it is to kind of build the network of community and kind of put the pieces together. And this is really kind of going Sorry.

Rick Turoczy  15:29  

Yeah. And I would be remiss if I didn't say, I felt really lucky to have that opportunity, and really enjoy the whole experience. And I look forward to never ever having to do that again. Because in front of 3000 people in person, and who knows how many people were watching on Livestream? Oh, yeah, the most frightening, frightening experience I've ever been.

Gabriel Flores  15:53  

Well, you know, maybe we'll get that many listeners listen to his podcast, we'll get to that. Who knows. But I really did enjoy it. Because it's, it was very unique, because it really kind of it kind of it really bridges what I'm trying to do with the podcast, right. And that's really kind of a showcase to entrepreneurs, and build up our community. You know, America is built on the small business kind of philosophy. Now, what you do with pi and and all of your kind of interactions, what have you like, from an entrepreneurs perspective? What have you kind of what has been some aha moments like things maybe that have kind of, I didn't know that about this world.

Rick Turoczy  16:30  

Yeah, I think early in my career with startups, I was very much a perfectionist. And would would wait until like, everything was perfect, before releasing it or talking about it, or that kind of thing. And I think one of the first learnings I had with the startup community was, you know, get it out there, get it in front of people. And I think, you know, you had lon braza on the podcast, and he mentioned something similar, which is like, talk to people. Like, I think so often, founders are committed about sharing their ideas, or they're concerned that someone might take their idea, when in reality, it's worse to kind of keep it to yourself, like, the more you put it out there, the more feedback you'll get, the better product, you'll develop, in the long run, the better company, you'll develop in the long run. And again, much like building community, you'll never know who you're going to mention it to that's going to say, oh, you know, I have the perfect person for you, or I know somebody else who's working in that space. So it can be really helpful, or I have a customer for you. So just getting out there talking about it, even if there's nothing built yet, even if it's still just an idea, that's really important to do that kind of work. And, and kind of be out and about and participating in the community because you never know where your co founders gonna come from, you never know where your first employee is going to come from, or your first investor if you choose to go that route. So don't, don't be shy about sharing your idea. Don't be shy about getting out into the community don't think there's some barrier or hurdle that you have to cross before you start participating in the community sooner sooner rather than later. It's always better.

Gabriel Flores  18:23  

Yeah, that's a great, you know, advice. And not only that, but what advice would you have for the introverts that do have the idea that, you know, how did you kind of overcome the ability to do a TED Talk? Right, you know, as an introvert, I think sometimes that's very difficult. How did you overcome that?

Rick Turoczy  18:41  

I, you know, it took a lot of work. And it's been amazing to me during the pandemic, that all these years of effort to like deal with kind of social awkwardness and social anxiety that I have personally have now completely eroded, because I've been just working solo on my desk for so long. But I think it's really important to and listen, something I always try and remind myself, don't feel obligated to do everything. And look for ways to engage that match the way you enjoy expressing yourself. So for me at the beginning, that was a lot less about going to meetings or like talking to a lot of people and it was just me writing online because I enjoyed writing. And so that was a very easy way to kind of put myself out there in the community in a way that was comfortable. To me. This podcast is another example right? Like you do a great job of interviewing people and bringing on interesting guests and exposing different different facets of the community and I can tell you enjoy this form. For doing that work, and that comes through in the work you do, and for some people, that's Instagram or Tiktok. For other people, it's, you know, going to a bunch of meetups. But I think you just need to choose a venue or medium that best matches best matches your way of expressing yourself. And then don't overdo it. I think as the other part, it's really easy to get burnt out on trying to do too much. So kind of ease into it. None of us who, you know, seem to be anywhere and everywhere. started that way, we all started in one spot, and kind of once we kind of mastered that section, then we kind of added something else on and so on and so on. It's incremental, and it takes time. But you know, don't try and do everything all at once or it won't work out. Well.

Gabriel Flores  20:53  

Definitely. And thank you for the kind words, I do really enjoy this. And I always enjoy the individuals coming on my show, because they do provide such a very diverse kind of vision and kind of view of what entrepreneurship is in the state of Oregon. And it is diverse. Yeah, there's a lot. In fact, you mentioned something right now, during your discussing that you also are a writer. In fact, you're the silicone florist. I believe it is yeah. How did you how did you get into blogging?

Rick Turoczy  21:28  

Yeah, I, I honestly. So I, you know, I was an English major, I thought I wanted to be a writer. And I was a literary agent for two years. And I was like, This business is awful. Like, No, why would I ever want to do this? And, and I never really wanted to be a journalist. Funny enough, kind of tangent. Mike Rabelais, who is the tech reporter for The Oregonian here, when I actually went to college together, he was a history major. But it's just kind of odd that we both wound up kind of covering the same stuff here in town, and I wound up working for a back in the day is called the mining company. And then it became about.com. And that the focus of that site was, it was kind of an early little version of Wikipedia, where they would pick experts and say, just focus on this particular topic and like, build out a blog and a newsletter and a website about this, about this product. And sorry about this topic. And so that is really where I began. And then I decided like, well, if I can do this for somebody else, I can do this on my own, and started worrying. And that was like the late 90s, like there weren't really blogging platforms, you kind of still had to like, write code from scratch and put stuff online. So I started doing that. And then that kind of morphed into a couple other blogs. And, and it really, you know, it was just really a good way for me to express myself whether anyone was reading it or not. Scrolling alert, no one was reading, I was reading that maybe, maybe my mom, everyone stopped, but no one else is reading. And then, you know, it dawned on me that it was while it was all going good to like, spout my opinion out into the ether, I could probably be doing more with that type of effort. And that's really when I hit upon the idea for silicon for us, I'd been spending a lot of time with the open source community and Portland. And if people aren't familiar with the concept of open source, they're, you know, there's proprietary software, which is we're gonna build this thing and sell it to you, but you can't see any of the code or how it works or any of that other kind of stuff. And then there's open source, which is anybody and everybody can see how it's built. People can contribute to improving it or fixing bugs or that kind of thing. And it's really this, how do we work together to build the best product possible. And so that community was really robust in Portland at that point in time. And I wasn't a talented enough developer to contribute to any of the projects. So my epiphany was like, well, I'll just open source my marketing, communications knowledge and I'll just start promoting what I see happening in Portland. And that was really the lightbulb moment where suddenly I've doubled my readership overnight, because not only did I continue to kind of read my own blogs, but suddenly look what I wrote about was really interested in the fact that I wrote about their stuff and and that felt, validating and motivating for folks. And that was really the aha moment for me was, you know, how do I help encourage folks to continue pursuing what, what they want to pursue and to let them know that they're being seen, and that they were valued there was value to what they were doing. And I could do that through my writing. And now it's just, you know, that was 14 years ago, but I started it and that so now it's just like a bad habit. Like, I wanted to,

Gabriel Flores  25:21  

you know, one of the things we've kind of mentioned quite a bit you're do you do a lot of different things, right? You're in the startup community, you're blogging, right, you're, you've done a TED talk. But one of the things you also do a lot is you mentor a lot of these, you know, inspiring entrepreneurs. And one of the things I've heard you state, often is burnout in the tech community, and we were together. Let's talk about that a little, because I think it's kind of important that we need to the listeners need to know that this is this one is an issue, right, that, that that's an issue, we need to collectively work to resolve. But then what, how can we help resolve it?

Rick Turoczy  25:57  

Yeah, I mean, it's tough. So when I started in startups, even to the point where we started pie, like, startups weren't part of popular culture, like you were still, you were still crazy to be doing something like that, you know, people were like, go get a day job, what are you doing? Why would you start your own thing, and at that point, in time, burnout was still a reality, but less so. And I think what we've seen over the past decade or so is, you know, through things like Shark Tank, or kind of like, you know, venture capital becoming this almost celebrity status kind of pursuit we've ever seen. Startups become part of popular culture, and almost be a rite of passage, like, you know, being when a GarageBand or buying your first car, like it's a it's that thing you should do. You know, while you're kind of, yeah, like, figure that out, like, try that. And, and it's not, it's still crazy to do startups, but not as crazy as it used to be. And so because of that, the negative side of that kind of willingness to do startups is there's this like, mythology of the, you know, the founder, who was who was always hustling or the, you know, the, that a company can only be built through raising venture capital, or, you know, if you're not building a unicorn, it's not worth pursuing what you're doing. And I think those, those kinds of negative aspects, that kind of like mythological aspect, is really the stuff that leads to burnout. Because that's not reality. Like nobody's built the company on their own. And, you know, nobody, nobody works. You know, I can say, through experience, no one works 20 hours a day, and is successful in the long run like that. Those are just all paths to negatively impacting what you want to build. And then I think, also looking at the aspect of, you know, founders have a lot of mental, emotional and behavioral stressors, and suffer from a lot of behavioral anguish in that regard, because it is really stressful, and it's really lonely. And, you know, even another founder can kind of understand what you're going through. As a founder, you're always going through it alone, and no one can truly understand it. And so I think the other aspect we've been trying to look at is just like, how do we develop a healthier environment? In a supportive environment where people can people still need to hustle, and they still need to do the work, but they don't need to do it at the expense of their physical or mental health?

Gabriel Flores  28:54  

Definitely. That's a great advice. You know, and I think, I mean, throughout this conversation, you've provided some amazing nuggets of information for the listeners, in fact, you know, for those inspiring entrepreneurs at home, you know, that are interested in starting a business or thinking about going down this route of the startup community. What should they be thinking about? When what advice could you give them to kind of just be mindful of or maybe some good nuggets of, hey, go down this route? You've already provided a lot of great stuff, but maybe, maybe some good golden nuggets for those folks at home that are thinking about getting into this, this startup community?

Rick Turoczy  29:26  

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And like I think, you know, there's a there's the argument like our founders made or founders born kind of thing, like I'm a firm believer that this is behavior that can be learned. I think there's an important aspect of it, which I was never able to really conquer, which you have to balance the a good founder is quite capable of balancing this kind of world changing vision. which is the thing that inspires them or it gets them out of bed every morning? They're able to balance that with very tactical, like, what are we getting done today? What are we getting done in the next hour? How are we? How are we pushing this company forward? How are we getting closer to achieving that vision and good founders are able to kind of balance both sides of their brain. In that regard, I was never visionary. And so I was really good at the tactical side, and I was like I can, I can bang this stuff out, or I can fight this fire, and I can get the stuff down. But I was more inspired by the tactical aspects than the visionary aspects, good founders, definitely have both. And then I think the other aspect that I see most commonly holding folks back, especially in the tech space, is this assumption that they can only start kind of acquiring customers or building community, once they've built the product, or once they've built the first version of the product. And so what I always try and encourage people to do is figure out ways to start engaging that customer base, or to start interacting with the community, before you even build anything. So like, by way of example, if you can go out with this idea, or this, this community that you want to build, and you get 25,000 people signed up for your newsletter, I'm pretty convinced that you're going to be able to build a product that is going to address the needs of that community. Or if you can get a bunch of people on Twitter or in conversations about that topic or following your podcast, like, don't think you have to build something new. To get the process started, you really need to like demonstrate your understanding of the people who will eventually be your customers or your community. And the start back, even when it's just a handful of folks, even if it's like a really discrete group of folks, you're solving a problem for that's better than waiting until you build your product. That's the because you're capable of building your product. And you know, it's gonna take you a while to get there. Or the other thing we've seen quite often is, you know, somebody with an idea that is convinced that they need to find, like a technical co founder to build the idea before they even begin the process. And that's just, that's, that's dangerous. Like, that's really hard to do. And, and anybody can start a newsletter, anybody can start a podcast. So like, figuring out how to do that figure out how to start engaging with your mind, before you worry too much about what product you're actually building. Definitely,

Gabriel Flores  32:53  

hey, I can start a podcast, anybody can start a buyer. And you know, one of the things you said that's so important, too, is, is knowing the consumer and knowing their needs, you know, we've heard this so many times on this podcast is that the need to really know what the what the consumer is willing to buy and what they're willing to pay for it. Because you may be working on a product, like we know talk about Steve Jobs, and he made his first Apple computer that he made the super computer, but nobody bought it in the 80s. Because it was so advanced. And he didn't really know why it was like, well, we didn't need that yet. Right. But now everybody is like waiting for the new innovative thing, right. But at that time, innovation, it was just too innovative. But you know, look,

Rick Turoczy  33:38  

the other part of it, and I just don't want to lose this because I think you touched on something really important. I think he he, Apple weren't at that time. Have you voted to not be precious with that concept. And I think that's another thing that a lot of founders stumble over where they're like, well, it was my idea to build this product to do X. And customers seem to be doing y with it. And rather than focus on what the customers want to do with the product, they were mean, kind of like obsessed with what they want the product to do or what they design the product to do. You always have to listen to the market and just kind of figure out where the market is taking it. You can look at it, you know, a wide variety of products that are super popular now. Twitter is a good example of like, Twitter started as a as a way just to let fans know like are you at work? Are you at lunch? Well, I can I can do some other stuff with that so, so don't, again, don't be too precious with your concepts. Like definitely get it out there. But be willing to change course if the market tells you something different that's needed.

Gabriel Flores  34:49  

That's great point. I mean, like Instagram when it first came out. I felt like that was almost used religiously to show me what you're eating that day.

Rick Turoczy  34:59  

That's a great insight. And the only time into this is because the first community manager for the first person who's kind of dealing with community for Instagram, went to read. And we had some radios in PI at the time. And so he would be on PI, from time to time just kind of hanging out. Instagram was originally called bourbon is you can look it up. It's like being you are be and like some of the ballots were missing. But then was originally if people remember Foursquare, which was like, Where are you kind of check in with him was originally a Foursquare competitor. And, and what they discovered was, they're like, way, people using this an awful lot to take photos and put filters on those photos. Maybe we just focus on that. And then then it became Instagram.

Gabriel Flores  35:54  

And see, again, it's when the founder notices that and pivots. Right? It's important, but it's also important, you know, you mentioned something to during that advice that you're giving is, it's okay, if you're not a founder, as well, right? Fine. You can find other areas, you know, I'm not a founder, but I'm definitely hoping I'm can help some people find either their passion or maybe get intrigued or inspired to do entrepreneurial things to really help boost their local economy and help them right, find their passion and in what they want to do. But you don't have to be a founder to be an entrepreneur, right? There's, you can be so many different things you can still, you know, be an entrepreneur just doing different things.

Rick Turoczy  36:35  

Yeah, well, and some of my most rewarding collaborations that I've had the chance to experience through Pi has been with people who are terrible entrepreneurial within like a much larger corporation. Yep, like they put up today. Yeah, they still have that passion and that kind of vision, they just happen to be working for, you know, a publicly traded company or whatever. But you can still you can still use those skills in really meaningful ways, no matter what you're pursuing,

Gabriel Flores  37:07  

is very true. So Rick, looking back on everything, you know, looking back on going to school, growing up in Germany, pie TED talks, you know, writing blogs, all of it. What advice would you give your younger self?

Rick Turoczy  37:26  

You know, I think the, the one that held me back the most, and that I kind of touched on earlier, is it doesn't have to be perfect. Like, no one's paying as much attention to this stuff as you are. And no one has the same level of expectations that you pay you're kind of holding yourself to. So let go of it being perfect. And just work toward good enough. Like, get it done. Get it out there, get it in front of people and see what happens.

Gabriel Flores  38:06  

Yeah, that is great advice. In fact, Vice I might even take place. Rick, thank you again. So what I

Rick Turoczy  38:15  

do on this podcast episode was not edited at all. We just put it out because it was given that

Gabriel Flores  38:21  

exactly. Rick, Rosie, thank you again, so much the co founder of CLI it's been such a pleasure to speak with you. I look forward to actually collaborate in the future. So thank you again, for those listening at home please follow us a follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and have a great night.