Where did the vision come from to transition from the historic background of your leadership skills
to modernizing it the way you're doing? Well, it came, I got on LinkedIn about one
year after it was created. LinkedIn was created in 2003 and I was on it in 2004,
you know, and when I first got on it, I thought it was going to steal my identity, you know,
right, that far back there, you know, you thought, oh, well, it's just going to steal my identity,
you know. But, you know, I could call somebody, I could call the head of marketing and
talk to on LinkedIn and get various ideas. In fact, trying to get military people to join LinkedIn
at that time frame, I got LinkedIn to make me a PowerPoint slide deck that showed them that we
really weren't stealing their identity. Wow. The purpose by putting this data out there,
I still have it, it's 2006 slide deck. But when I was working on... Did you get to meet
Reid Hoffman in the process? Just curious. No, but some of the early people that were,
the early people that started LinkedIn came from eBay. Yeah. You know, and then, you know, that
crowd kind of transitioned out to other opportunities, you know. Absolutely. You
know, because there was new things happening all the time. And so, that was the wild west time of
bringing things up. But I found that when I was working on a project in China to do wastewater
treatment infrastructure over there for a Houston company, and we were trying to find, how do you
find somebody that's got Chinese experience? Well, way back when you had to go back to a search firm
and they had like, you know, 300,000 resumes and, you know, you pay money for that kind of access,
right? And we did. And we didn't get anything. In other words, we paid money, they said they
gave it their best shot and anything. Then LinkedIn came around. And then I saw very quickly,
you know, you could search for people that had Chinese experience. Well, they didn't have the
experience I needed, but I was able to contact them. And once I finally got in touch with them,
I said, well, who do you know? And they said, well, you know, Billy Bob and Susie Q, you know,
they've done that, you know, why don't you talk to them? And so, it was, nowadays that's almost
digital, right? But back then, there were so few people, but once you found somebody in your niche,
you could find, they knew eight other people that work with them back in China. And so, what it
became is a huge resource, because we didn't have to pay these big search firms to try to find these
people, you know, because this was the first element of being able to, you know, look at stuff
kind of across the globe almost. And so, I saw, based on my transition into the private sector,
which was a disaster, you think you know what you know, right? And then secondly, you come out, you
know, fairly senior, and everybody says, well, you know, you're in your 50s. Yeah, you got three
master's degrees in engineering degree, but, you know, you're overqualified to be a project manager.
And so, what I found out, you couldn't pierce the corporate veil, but I did get some good advice at
that time. And somebody told me, he says, look, go find some guys putting a deal together, you know,
on the front end, where you can use your multifunctional, you know, experience to help
them out. And then, you know, you're there kind of at the beginning. And that was really sound advice.
And then secondly, I learned that LinkedIn, as I was working with, I said, man, I wish I had LinkedIn
when I came out, you know, because LinkedIn gave you the ability to take what you did in the military,
and lay it out there. And what I was able to do with people, I said, lay it out on LinkedIn,
and then let's talk about it. And then I would help them after I figured out how to do it,
that you needed to take your military experience and what you brought to the table,
and put it in the vernacular of hiring manager. Exactly. Because if you use all these military
words, I mean, you know, the hiring manager doesn't know, I mean, they want to, they,
they want to help you, but hey, this doesn't look like what I'm needing here.
You know, exactly.
One of the same, that same principle, it applies to so many of us, and, and your, your niche,
often gets out, that applies to a stay-at-home mom, who's trying to get back into the workforce.
That applies to, I mean, I was a.33 GPA, who transitioned to LDS missionary, who transitioned
home to business. And, you know, I was fortunate to have some mentors who said, you know, for that
missionary work, put on your resume, you know, a regional sales leader of an international
nonprofit organization, right, there's certain changes and adjustments that you can make,
certain changes and adjustments that apply. Well, you tell me about sales. I mean, is it harder to
sell, you know, a gym membership or sell God in a foreign language you don't speak to an 80 year
old atheist? Yeah. Yeah. That's some high-powered selling.
There, there, there, there it is.