Why Building A Team That Makes Work Fun is So Important

[00:00:00] Intro Music Plays

[00:00:10] Sam Chlebowski: Happy Thursday everybody, and welcome back to Designing Growth. Samuel Chlebowski here, co-founder of Motion.io and host of this podcast. Very excited to be back with you again today for another great episode. Today I’m joined by Chris Beall, who is the CEO of ConnectAndSell. Chris, How are you doing today?

[00:00:32] Chris Beall: Sam doing great here with you. Couldn’t be better.

[00:00:35] Sam Chlebowski: Amazing. And where are you? joining us from today?

[00:00:37] Chris Beall: I’m actually joining you from the shores of Puget Sound in West Seattle.

[00:00:41] Sam Chlebowski: It’s a beautiful area out there, especially this time of year. I’ve been out a couple times in Seattle, but I was out specifically around this time, I think about three or four years ago. And it is awesome, man. Stuff is like blooming everybody is out and about. It was really cool.

[00:00:56] Sam Chlebowski: We actually did some surfing in like full wetsuits way up north.

[00:01:01] Chris Beall: Oh, I can imagine where that’d be. We actually have a house also over in Port Townsend on Discovery Bay, no surfing in Discovery Bay. It’s protected by this island called Protection Island, but I bet if you go a little ways west of that, off toward the Pacific Ocean, where it comes roaring in, there’s gotta be some good surf over there.

[00:01:19] Sam Chlebowski: so I’m not a big surfer. And I’ll tell you what, it was scary. The waves out there are like hitting you from all angles and ooh, man, I was in for a rough ride as a very novice surfer, but uh, absolutely beautiful either way.

[00:01:32] Chris Beall: lovely country and yeah, we come up here from Southern Arizona. We hang out down there in the depth of winter, cuz here it’s a little bit dark and then we just got back here last week. And enjoying the living daylights out of it. You know, the big issue here right now is actually the sun because this particular place faces west and when you get the sun coming in around 6:30 – 7 in the evening and it’s at eyeball level and it’s reflecting off the water, you don’t have one sun.

[00:01:59] Chris Beall: You’ve got like [00:02:00] 50 suns. been working on installing a shade of all things here in Seattle to keep ourselves from getting fried.

[00:02:06] Sam Chlebowski: I imagine that makes the already notorious Seattle traffic even a little bit worse when that sun like is coming up during rush hour.

[00:02:15] Chris Beall: Oh, I’m sure it is. I don’t know. We work out of our house, so I don’t get out in that stuff. That stuff scares me.

[00:02:21] Sam Chlebowski: Yeah, I mean, I am exclusively work from home too for the time being, maybe we’ll get in office in a little bit, but right now it’s just me and two other co-founders and we all live within 30 or 40 minutes of each other. but with that, Chris, I would love to, get into it a little bit here and kind of, if you could just talk about your background and, What you’re doing at Connect and Sell right now what that product service does for people and how you decided to build it in the first place.

[00:02:50] Chris Beall: I stumbled into Connect and Sell. This is the only company where I didn’t build a product that I, I can remember doing. So I’ve rebuilt it, but I didn’t build it from scratch a former employee introduced me to the c E O. Actually introduced me to the company and I think the phrase I used was do you know what the phrase holy uninterested means? And he pivoted quickly and got me to meet with the c e O at the time, Sean McLaren. And I joined the company five minutes After meeting Sean, I just jumped right in. He did ask me, what if I’m not hiring? And I said, Hey, it’s America. It’s a free country. I can work for whomever I want.

[00:03:27] Chris Beall: You can choose to pay me or not. So, you know, My background is actually in tech, going way back physicist, mathematician type who fell into door to door sales when I needed a job. Once found out I was extraordinarily good at it. Total surprise to me. And I was always interested in business. I had business books around the house growing up.

[00:03:48] Chris Beall: I grew up way out in the desert, north of Scottsdale. No people, just animals and books. The animals taught me one set of lessons and the books taught me another set. I was always interested in business cuz they [00:04:00] were business books in my house. My dad was getting his mba and when this all kind of came together, it’s like, well you gotta do something for a living. I decided not to teach high school. I got a job as a programmer, which was the easiest thing in the world to do, and then immediately discovered that my fellow programmers didn’t know anything about business, which gave me a huge leg up. So I started spreading out my, portfolio a little and software startups have been my life since 83 and uh, just been doing one after another.

[00:04:29] Sam Chlebowski: What a awesome trajectory to, and it’s, especially cool I think for somebody like me. You know, I’m 30 years old, I’ve been doing this now just about 10 years. And things have changed a lot and I can’t even imagine, over the course of your career, how much. Change and advancement you’ve seen from, the foundations of those early days of computers and the internet to, you know, now we are into artificial intelligence of all things.

[00:04:57] Sam Chlebowski: You were telling me, actually right before we hit the record button here, that one of your good friends was actually one who created, I believe it was like the earliest version of an ethernet cable. Was that right?

[00:05:09] Chris Beall: Yeah. It was funny. At Xerox Park, they were working on this computer called a Xerox star, this guy Doug Engelbart, came up with the mouse, which was made out of wood. I’ve actually met that guy, he was really something.

[00:05:20] Chris Beall: He’s no longer with us. So anyway, my friend Robert Garner was working there.

[00:05:24] Chris Beall: And uh, he had an opportunity to build the networking apparatus for this particular computer. They called it ethernet. And Bob met, KAF was involved in all of that. Metcalf’s law. I think some people know it. That’s the value of a network increases with the square of the number of. Nodes of connections in the network and he was the boss of that team.

[00:05:44] Chris Beall: And so, you know, my friend Robert just, built the first one of those things. I think the speed of it was just because an off-the-shelf component, one it 10 megabits a second, so well may as well use that. So an international standard was established for ethernet. I was [00:06:00] actually at Martin Marietta at the time all that was going on and we were installing one of the first big ethernets in the world.

[00:06:07] Chris Beall: Being at the, the leading edge of aerospace. And it was pretty interesting to think of this cable that didn’t have any directionality to it. It just acted like, radio waves out there somehow being used to connect computers at high speed. If you think about it, it sounds impossible. the technology that they came up with, the math was called collision detect.

[00:06:28] Chris Beall: And retry, which is. If you wanna say something to another computer on the network, just start talking. If you hear something while you’re talking, there must be a collision stop for a random amount of time and then just start talking again. And that’s how ethernet works. And just to have a friend like that give me a front row seat to some of the most amazing things. The Sun Microsystems, they’re spark computers, they’re spark-based computers. He was the architect of that.

[00:06:55] Chris Beall: And you grow up with people like that and you think that stuff’s normal and then you find out later, now it’s actually over on the edge somewhere.

[00:07:01] Sam Chlebowski: Wow. a lot of this too I think for somebody like me who’s been interested in the, I guess you would call it like lore of, Silicon Valley in a lot of ways, so Sun Microsystem was, the company that almost bought Apple that I know you mentioned in there. And then Metcalf’s Law is something that I’ve heard a lot of times.

[00:07:23] Sam Chlebowski: Closely related to, or like, it’ll be mentioned in the same discussion as Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law. That law that, you know, the number of transistors you can fit in a space will double every two years. it’ll be mentioned in the same discussion as Moore’s Law. I’ve heard Metcalf’s Law spoken about in close proximity to basically explain how this can all functionally work and to hear you name drop some of these things is so cool for me, like absolutely fascinating.

[00:07:58] Chris Beall: It’s always interesting cause these are real [00:08:00] people and and when you get to know ’em, they’re just like regular people who happen to be. A little more intentional about something than the rest of us. I think that’s what’s different about, the folks who founded Son Scott McNeely and that group and Bill Joy.

[00:08:14] Chris Beall: I mean, getting to meet Bill Joy is one of the most amazing things of my life. Just a, long lunch with lots of napkins. And lots of pictures on napkins at the end of the lunch, it’s like, God, I just got to spend an hour and a half with Bill Joy. What was that like? that’s still going on.

[00:08:29] Chris Beall: We still have people who are coming up with amazing new stuff. Look at right now, what? What’s going on with this chat G P T thing? I don’t think any of us really understand it. So anyway I, I think that it’s, it’s always been an interesting industry. it’s always been an interesting industry. Um, I, I feel lucky that I got into it, although I did choose it deliberately because I thought there’s no end to what we’re gonna do with software and hardware. I always thought the hardware would end up settling down, which it’s done in certain ways cause.

[00:08:58] Chris Beall: you can get small, but it gets harder and harder to get smaller and smaller. But software has the opposite kind of quality. It can get more interesting and more powerful just by connecting to other software. And that’s kind of in a way, what these this large language model generative ais do is they connect to a lot of history by reading everything.

[00:09:21] Chris Beall: And to a lot of software by these, multilayered neural nets. I’ve always been a neural net book guy, by the way. I built my first application with a neural net in 1992, so some people would think that’s a little odd. It’s like, oh, come on. Computers couldn’t do that back then, but they could. It’s just, they can do a lot more of it now.

[00:09:39] Sam Chlebowski: What did that functionally do in 1992? Now you have me like fascinated. I want to know all about this.

[00:09:45] Chris Beall: Well, the problem I had at that time was categorizing parts that were found in a parts database. So it doesn’t sound like a big problem, but say you’re a General Electric, And you want to know, can we reuse a [00:10:00] part from a screw say, or a flange or something from one product in the design of another product?

[00:10:07] Chris Beall: It sounds fairly trivial, but what if you had 10 million part numbers and all you have is some text descriptions that were put in different times by different folks. So I built a neural net using a product called Brain Maker. And its purpose was to try to categorize parts based on their text descriptions.

[00:10:26] Chris Beall: I ended up building a more of a tournament kind of approach to solving that problem. But what I found was it was clear that it was gonna take a lot wider neural network. It’s the kind of thing chat G p T does now, rather casually, you could give it a whole bunch of parts and say, categorize these, and it would go, okay, you have so many of these, so many of these, so many of these, and so many of these, it would do a really good job.

[00:10:47] Chris Beall: But this is 1992 we’re talking about.

[00:10:50] Sam Chlebowski: an interesting discussion that I actually saw online, just like the other night where a startup founder was asking on this forum, he said, what do you all think of these?

[00:11:02] Sam Chlebowski: Applications, these SaaS products, all of these tools that are being released in sort of like rapid fire, that are built, specifically on open AI’s model.

[00:11:12] Sam Chlebowski: And there was a huge discussion about what will be the most valuable products from where we are now through the development of AI and through this massive period of growth and progress we’re seeing with it.

[00:11:27] Sam Chlebowski: the leading comment on the thread are going to be the ones that integrate with ai, but were not built for ai. And I thought that was a really interesting take because I think if the product becomes so focused on someone else’s technology and using that technology just for the sake of shipping something, I think that you miss a big part of product development Because if you build a product basically before AI and you integrate with it, or you at least take that approach, it seems like it’s gonna [00:12:00] be better suited for your users and it’s gonna stand the test of time What do you think about that?

[00:12:05] Chris Beall: Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, there always is this sort of, explosion of activity whenever we come up with some new way of building something. And I actually think that’s the heart of what you are bringing up, which is if you don’t work backward from a problem that’s worth solving.

[00:12:20] Chris Beall: You’re not gonna last very long at all with anything. It’s gotta be a real problem. you know, I always do this thing, I will, I go to the whiteboard and I circle and say, okay, here’s what we’re gonna build. And I draw an arrow coming out of the right side of the circle. It’s a simple arrow.

[00:12:33] Chris Beall: It says, this is what it’s gonna produce. It’s gonna produce one thing. And then there’s a little stick figure. This says, who’s gonna consume that thing? And then there’s a little dollar sign that says, and every time they consume one unit of this, how much money do they save, or how much money do they make?

[00:12:48] Chris Beall: If you start there, it’s really easy. Then most problems you find are not worth solving, and so you don’t bother to solve them because it turns out the commodity. You know, one way or another, whether fiat currency or crypto that tells you whether you’re doing something worthwhile is will somebody pay for it directly or indirectly?

[00:13:09] Chris Beall: And so I think it’s pretty simple to look at these new technologies or the, these old technologies that are now more ubiquitous or easier to access, like open AI’s technology and ask the same question. What’s the circle? What’s the thing that it produces? Who’s the little stick figure?

[00:13:24] Chris Beall: how many dollars are saved or gained every time one unit comes out. Now, I think, by the way, this speaks to the current AI situation and suggests the most interesting products at first that P folks will pay for are gonna be decision support products.

[00:13:42] Chris Beall: So Hites Shah, who’s our cto, texted me today and said, Hey, I’m taking my voice to Hawaii today. I said fantastic. And his kids are college age and doing fantastically wonderful. And he just said You were going to Hawaii today. I don’t know when he decided to do it. And I said what adventures will [00:14:00] you go on?

[00:14:00] Chris Beall: What do you think? I got back, his prompt to chat g p t asking what to do. It’s seven days on uh, the island of, Honolulu, it was beautiful. That’s decision support. Think about how long it would’ve taken this very, very busy senior technology executive to go through and do the research to put together a trip that’s one 10th is good as what chat G P T did in two minutes, right?

[00:14:24] Chris Beall: That’s decision support. Who makes money? Well, He saves a bunch cuz his time is worth whatever. I don’t know what it’s worth. 5,000 bucks an hour say. The airlines, the hotels, all these other folks are making money, which is ultimately why Satya Nadela. Dump 10 million into open ai. As he said, if we can get a little bit of the most valuable thing it’s ever been built, which is search, that’s pretty good. And we start from a small base here at Microsoft, so we can only go up, right?

[00:14:49] Chris Beall: I had a customer the other day say, Hey, we wanna talk to the CEOs. Of all the companies in America, the small medium sized businesses that are using e o s, the entrepreneurial operating system that’s been made popular in the book Traction.

[00:15:04] Chris Beall: Well, How would you find those folks? Well, There’s no database out there that I know of. There might be one, I don’t know what it is. So while he was saying that to me, I just want to chat G P T and asked it the question, and it surprised me by saying here’s some companies. And I thought, oh, that’s not in the right format.

[00:15:20] Chris Beall: Please format his first name, last name, you know, whatever. It gave me hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of CEOs of companies that might hundreds and hundreds of CEOs of companies that might be using this operating system to run the company this, this business framework. And then I could take that. And while I did it manually, we can automate it.

[00:15:39] Chris Beall: And I took it off to one of our databases and said, give me all their phone numbers. And then we drop it into our system at Connect and Sell. We have a system that lets you talk to people and within four minutes on the clock, I had 250 CEOs with phone numbers loaded in our system. You could push a button and [00:16:00] within two minutes talk to one of them.

[00:16:01] Chris Beall: That’s decision support with a little action kicker at the end. So there’s gotta be a lot of decision support out there.

[00:16:07] Sam Chlebowski: Absolutely amazing. So, One of the questions I really want to ask you, and even for my own kind of personal, knowledge and growth. I’m a younger founder, I’ve been at motion now, we’ve been building this thing and this product for about a year. But I am a first time founder.

[00:16:23] Sam Chlebowski: If you could give me one piece of advice for the next 20 years, what would that be?

[00:16:31] Chris Beall: Don’t hire parasites. That’s it. The problem with doing something that’s valuable is it’s a funny math problem with the social element to it. So when you build something, as it starts to succeed, it starts to attract different kinds of people. So some of them will call, you know, on mission. True believers, they want to be part of it, hire them.

[00:16:52] Chris Beall: Unless they’re really bad people, so there could be bad versions of them, but they’re probably good people. So they’re on board with the mission. They probably have some skills, hire em, slot ’em in where the skills are good and make that happen. But the flip will happen. There are people who are highly skilled at something, but they’re actually parasites cuz the company’s bigger than them.

[00:17:12] Chris Beall: They’re looking to attach themselves to it and get what they can out of it, and that’s a problem. Because when you’re doing startups, I compare a startup to rowing across the Pacific. So you know, you and your co-founder are getting a rowboat, right? And you each take an OR and you’re rowing along and you have a belief.

[00:17:30] Chris Beall: A way over there somewhere is where we want to go, but you had a lot of stuff you have to do, learn how to catch flying fish and where am I getting a water and all this kind of stuff, right? So at some point you need somebody to be the baler or the fisher or whatever they happen to be. So you’re looking for a skill.

[00:17:48] Chris Beall: It’s okay to bring a skilled person on, but it’s not okay to bring a skilled person on that sees you and what you’ve built as a source of value for them to suck out of it. [00:18:00] Everybody’s gotta be doing whatever job needs to be done, and you can tell where the parasites are coming from when they say no, that’s not my job. It’s eh, we’re in a rowboat. We’re going across the Pacific, mary over here is she’s not feeling too good. Somebody else gonna have to pick up an or not my job. That’s a parasite. So don’t hire the first parasite cuz if you hire one, they will hire the second parasite.

[00:18:23] Sam Chlebowski: The analogy I think really helps me frame that too, of in a rowboat, trying to cross the Pacific because, you know, if there’s a weak link on that team that could break things and it could really lead to, a lot of problems or, you know, and even things like vacations too, if this person goes on vacation, who steps in to cover them.

[00:18:42] Sam Chlebowski: And if you have somebody who says, I am unwilling to do this, it’s not part of my job. I think that, could become catastrophic. So I think that it’s really sage advice.

[00:18:51] Chris Beall: My view is yes, regard to skills. Outsource specific skills that are gonna plug into the company. At the skills level, hire the people that you want to go on the hard journey with. So one of the things to avoid is just hiring somebody cuz of skills. You can always outsource that skill always. It might cost you a little bit more, but you can do it and it keeps you safe.

[00:19:12] Chris Beall: The way these things break is everything’s unpredictable or you don’t know what you’re gonna have to go through in the startup. I mean, folks have got these models. Oh, I had the technical co-founder, I’ve got this, I’ve got this. I go through the series A, the series B, the series C. It all looks great on paper, right?

[00:19:27] Chris Beall: As, Mike Tyson, I think famously said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the nose.

[00:19:33] Sam Chlebowski: One of my co-founder’s favorite sayings, by the way, In just about every other weekly meeting that we have, our all hands meeting, he quotes that.

[00:19:43] Chris Beall: he has a very good point. Your roadmap is a set of intentions and reality is gonna rear its ugly head every day. And that’s the fun because if you aren’t doing something that hard, you’re not doing something that safe. It turns out your safety is in doing difficult things that solve real problems, doing easy things to solve [00:20:00] problems isn’t safe at all.

[00:20:00] Chris Beall: Then somebody just walks down that path, right? Bad enough that you’re gonna walk down the path and show somebody how to do it really bad if it’s easy. So you gotta love the problems and now you have the problem, which is, do we work together to solve the problems? Or do we start to silo out and work for ourselves?

[00:20:18] Chris Beall: you really end up. In a I’ll call it a fundamentally lonely position as a company, when you’re going out to do one of these very difficult things, your probability of failure is very high. The challenges you’re gonna face are mostly unknown. How well you stick together is gonna determine whether you succeed or fail much more than any one thing that you do.

[00:20:40] Chris Beall: and part of it is, is it fun? If it’s not fun working together it’s, way too hard to me. If you’re not having fun, you’re not taking it seriously enough.

[00:20:48] Sam Chlebowski: I like it. I think that actually will have to be the name of this episode you know, if you’re not surrounded by people you like working with every day that you can have fun when things are going well. Or even if they’re just going okay. That team’s gonna fall apart once things go bad.

[00:21:05] Sam Chlebowski: But if you have those people that you can, lean on and you can all support each other and, compliment each other’s skills in a way as well. I think that’s you can’t ask for anything more as a team.

[00:21:17] Sam Chlebowski: thank you so much, Chris, for coming on and just like lending your time and your expertise.

[00:21:22] Sam Chlebowski: It’s been. Really fun and, you know, incredibly insightful. With that, wanted to ask you just one final question before we sign off here, which would be if people wanna learn more about you, about the things that you’re doing where should they go or what should they check out?

[00:21:36] Chris Beall: I’m pretty easy to find on LinkedIn, although I’ve been a little absent recently. Chris Beal, CEO of ConnectAndSell. My podcast I actually think is a good place to go. Corey Frank and I have been doing the Market Dominance Guys Podcast. We’re 178 episodes in. If you are interested in the theory and practice and a cookbook for dominating markets, using the human voice — and for the good of others – you should check it out.

[00:21:56] Chris Beall: Then of course, the ConnectAndSellWebsite I [00:22:00] would recommend going to for anybody who’s running a business. Take us up on our test drive. It’s free.

[00:22:04] Chris Beall: So those are the three places somebody could check it out.

[00:22:06] Sam Chlebowski: Amazing stuff. Amazing stuff. And we will put links to all of those things in the show notes of this episode. With that, everybody, this has been another phenomenal episode of Designing Growth.

[00:22:17] Sam Chlebowski: My name is Sam Chlebowski, signing off. Good luck. Have fun and go crush it. Take care of everybody. Bye-bye.