Monday Manufacturing Motivation – with Nikki Gonzales

Curt Anderson  00:00

Hey Damon. Nicole. Nikki, man. Happy Monday, everybody. David Hey, Renee. Steven, how are you?

Damon Pistulka  00:09

I’m great. I’m great. Nice to see you again.

Curt Anderson  00:12

Damon’s you like how How was last week? Do you do anything special last week? Like what was going on here?

Damon Pistulka  00:17

Yeah, I did look at a couple things last week.

Curt Anderson  00:20

Yeah. What was that?

Damon Pistulka  00:22

It was a whirlwind tour of Alaska, wasn’t it my friend?

Curt Anderson  00:25

Oh my god, you know, is I am so honored. Like I’m literally starstruck to have our guests on today. But I do have like, it’s a little bittersweet because we’re not in person. So we did three live streams last week in person all over Alaska. It was awesome. We’re geeking out with Alaska manufacturers. We’ve got Nicole Donnelly here filling in as guest host Nicole Happy Monday. How are you today?

Nicole Donnelly  00:47

Happy Monday. I got to know is Damon is tall in real life as he looks on screen.

Curt Anderson  00:53

He is theaman who’s tall? Are you taller than me? Are we saying I know there’s like

Damon Pistulka  00:56

I think you’re taller than I am

Curt Anderson  00:58

I sometimes I’d look at Damon and we were like I’d I’d and sometimes I thought he was telling him I don’t know maybe like it’s the hair you know hair he looks like taller than me because the hair so we he is one big dude. He is we were roomies for a week. It was a blessing. It was a gift and we got to hang out with the Alaska MEP just geeking out with manufacturers. And so speaking of let’s slide right into our guest, then this is a powerhouse today. So, Nikki, I wish I knew how to pronounce your maiden name Gonzalez. How are you? Happy Monday.

Nikki Gonzales  01:29

I’m good. Thanks. You want to start off your Monday with the mouthful. Who’s that? Monica? Tuscany Celtic. Gonzalez is the full thing. I go by Nikki for short.

Curt Anderson  01:38

Can you do one more time?

Nikki Gonzales  01:41

Just on my grandpa himself did Gonzalez

Curt Anderson  01:44

in What did you say? What’s the American version of your maiden name?

Nikki Gonzales  01:48

Holograms daughter?

Curt Anderson  01:49

How groom’s daughter so All right, so we just call you hug him his daughter for the rest of the program. I’m gonna stick with

Nikki Gonzales  01:54

I was actually valued over the phone on Friday with someone and I first I say it and then I spell it. And she got so confused. And she was like, Wait a minute. I thought you were trying to tell me that you are somebody’s granddaughter. And I was like, No, I’m trying to spell it for you. It is pronounced like daughter it means daughter but it’s spelled D O TT IR that last portion of it. Some people know this if they watch like CrossFit, we have a lot of women from Iceland that are really good CrossFit athletes and almost every woman from Iceland their last name and son daughter so they they became collectively known as the daughters. I’ve I don’t use it as much anymore now that I’m married to an American and kind of added the console is but yeah, not to take up all the air in the room with with this story. But I used to be asked at like cash registers when you know how you have the loyalty card and they have to say by name like they’re supposed to say Oh, thank you Miss or Mrs. Whatever. They would look at the receipt and go Oh, I bet you can’t wait until you get married a lot because I was not going to change my name when I got married. But you know, never say never right.

Damon Pistulka  03:04

Never say well, you

Curt Anderson  03:05

know what, Nick, I know you and I would have a ton of a lot of chemistry here because and her son when you’re Swedish like everybody’s named like son and so your Iceland daughter thing going so we’ll geek out about that. But hey, we’ve got a we’ve got some fun comments here. Karen is here. She’s a fellow Texan. So Happy Monday. Speaking of Texas, about this wonderful Texan right here. Whitney Houston is in the house. Hey, our dear buddy, Greg Misha was here.

Nikki Gonzales  03:33

While you guys saw him in a while.

Curt Anderson  03:35

Alright, let’s dig in. So Nikki and I are we have a little fun first question on the program theme and I’m just I’m just one right there. You ready?

Damon Pistulka  03:41

Are you ready to stay?

Curt Anderson  03:43

Alright, let’s just but I’m not very original. We’re just gonna go there, Nikki. So Nikki, if I understand this correctly, you’re like 1112 moved to England. And then from there, you became a Texan who doesn’t do that? Right? Who doesn’t start in Iceland go to England to become a Texan. That’s just common math. Right there. Right? So when you were a little girl growing up, let’s see Iceland pre 11 When you were a little girl growing up? Who was your hero? Who was your heroes? Little girl growing up? My dad. You know, that’s fine. And data mining? Or big girl dads, because a girl Mom, we just we’d love that answer for you sure why, let’s hear what my

Nikki Gonzales  04:22

mom was a stay at home mom growing up. And now as an adult, I view that a lot differently. But I used to think like, Oh, my mom is just home here, you know, complaining or telling you what to do or whatever. Right? It’s like she does all the job. And then my dad comes home and is the hero after he’s been at work all day. But I just it was fascinating to me that what my dad was doing, I got to go to his office a couple of times and see. So he was an electrical engineer. He was building control systems for jigging reels in the fishing industry and doing some other cool stuff. And I just always thought like, how cool would it be to learn what my dad does? As in, he used to do all kinds of other things, too. He would like build computers. He, when he was younger, he had a bunch of businesses. So I just always gravitated towards that. And I saw my dad had he had a college degree, right. And my mom kind of stopped in her tracks when she had me. And poor thing now I’m like, oh, you know, I’m the reason you’re not my hero mom. As an adult, though, I definitely you know, it has changed. My mom is my hero in a lot of ways now, but growing up, it was I kind of saw that, you know, my dad was like, somehow doing stuff that I wanted to learn and get to know how to do and he got to travel, you went on business trips overseas, and would bring you things back, you know, from Asia, or from Europe or different things like that. And so I always wanted to do that when I grew up.

Curt Anderson  05:47

That is awesome. So what what’s mom and dad’s name, please.

Nikki Gonzales  05:52

My dad’s name is Husky myth. And how Kim’s daughter or how to get started, he goes by hell here as he as a Texan now. And my mom’s name is Feola, which is the Icelandic word for violet. And but it’s spelled F j, O L. A. The J is like a Y sound in our language. So I think it’s a beautiful name. She always gets shortchanged as well at Starbucks with the for Jolla, or Fiona or whatever. We haven’t been the luckiest with the names translating very well. And she lives back in Iceland now, but she’s actually coming to visit me. I haven’t seen her in three years since COVID. She’s coming this Thursday, to stay with me for two weeks. And I’m so excited. Oh, yeah.

Curt Anderson  06:36

Congratulations, Greg. Miss Chu drops this content. Yeah, absolutely. Greg, artists jobs, at least with the amount of glory. Amen. Brother, Nicole, what did you have?

Nicole Donnelly  06:47

Cat Nikki, I’m just so curious. You mentioned that your mom kind of became your hero. What changed? When did that change for you? Like when did you kind of realize all that she did. And I got

Nikki Gonzales  06:59

started after I got my first job. And my parents separated. And I started to talk more about like I all of a sudden, or finally, I guess was old enough to have real conversations with my mom about, you know, the adult things that happened during my childhood, and some of the reasons behind some things that I experienced and things that we did. And just, you know, when you’re a child, there’s a lot of nuances to life that you don’t, your parents don’t explain to you for good reasons, right. And then when I moved out to California, for my first job, my mom came to visit me at some point. And we had a weekend like a girls weekend. And you know, we’re both adults now. So we went out to the bar, and we didn’t went out to rest. And we just started, you know, I started to learn more about my mom as a person. And that’s when I think started to really look up to her as a hero because I didn’t, I had no clue about all the things that she went through all the sacrifices that she made all the, you know, how difficult it was for to make these moves and support my dad’s career and take care of us and you know, coming to a new country and all these different things. And then, secondly, what really I think bumped it up is when I became a mom. And I had to I ended up leaving a startup job, I thought I was gonna go straight back to work and my husband was gonna stay at home. But I was working a really, really, really demanding job. And my daughter was born premature, and I was supposed to go back to work before she was even supposed to be born. So that plan didn’t work out for me. And so I actually stayed at home while also you know, running a business or two and you know, I didn’t I wasn’t just straight up, stay at home mom, but I did stay home with my daughter and then my son, two kids up until he was one and she was three. And that gave me a whole nother perspective and a reason to respect the hell out of my mom and everything she did for us.

Nicole Donnelly  08:53

So much sacrifice for sure. That’s amazing.

Curt Anderson  08:56

That’s perfect. Hey, a couple more shout outs here again guys. I’m gonna give an intro so Hey, good morning. Happy Monday. Happy afternoon. Whatever time zone you’re in Gabrielle Happy Monday to you. Whitney says Greg Miss Miss you preach. So guys, if you’re just joining us, we are here with Nikki Gonzalez, head of partnerships at quote beam we’re gonna take a deep dive into coping. And Nikki, you are a highly, highly sought after speaker panelists keynote and just in again, we are just so honored and thrilled to have you here today. We’ve got so much to uncover about automation, robotics, AI and Nicole like you’re just chomping at the bit to talk about AI with Nicky here today. But before we go there, Nick, I’d love to hear you know, you are so Iceland, England, Houston. You bring your talents, your passion, your expertise to the world of manufacturing. curious minds want to know why what attracted you to manage the world of manufacturing?

Nikki Gonzales  09:49

Good, good question. I didn’t really know it existed. I mean, I knew but most of us like don’t grow up looking at manufacturing engineering in one of the books of like, what do you want to be When I grew up, so I mentioned my dad’s an electrical engineer, and he ended up getting recruited into a marketing job. And then he started his own company. And I started working for him when I was in middle school at a small business, and I started with technical marketing, technical writing, I wrote some user manuals, I helped make some data sheets for some hardware and different things like that. And I got lucky because I got to work for him every summer, and every, you know, spring break, if I wanted to earn some extra money. And I got to see and, you know, touch a lot of different jobs that happen in a small business, from accounting to answering the phone to these different things. And I turns out, I speaking and writing is easier for me than for instance, doing math and stuff. So I ended up like taking AP Physics and things like that. But my, my dad really helped me through all of that. And I saw my dad more at that point, as a business owner than an engineer. And I remember, you know, him being my hero, all these different travels and things. So I was like, oh, I want to do international business. But that’s a really broad thing, right? I’ve never really known what I wanted to do exactly. And it was kind of by chance that I ended up doing some sales in my last internship with my dad’s company. It’s very technical, it was a mobile resource management platform for basically IoT for fleets of trucks, tracking trucks, communicating with them, automating, you know, reporting and different things like that. And I happened to pick up the phone one time a prospect called, and they let me run with it, they were like, just run with it and ask for help when you need help. And I ended up doing a remote demo from my hotel room in Dallas, while we were going to the My first trade show, the American Trucking trade show in Dallas. And this customer was in Walla Walla, Washington or somewhere. And they ended up buying the system. And they were extremely happy with, I guess, the whole sales process. I obviously didn’t know how to sell anything, I was trying to just answer their questions, make sure that, you know, we picked the right system that we solved their problem. And that’s where I was like, Wait, this is the thing, like that was that was sales. That was cool. That’s not what I thought sales would be like at all. And that’s where I discovered that, hey, that’s, that’s called technical sales, you’re more kind of like a consultant than a salesperson, right? I couldn’t have sold that thing if it didn’t solve their problem. And I did get an international business degree, but international business doesn’t really prepare you for any kind of particular starting job. So I decided to go when it was time to try to get a job, right? Go into the campus recruiting portal and pick any kind of technical job that didn’t require an engineering degree. So I applied for technical marketing with Caterpillar technical recruiting with some companies, and then technical sales. And I ended up at Keyence. University, if you guys are at all familiar with the world of industrial automation, they’re one of the they’re a Japanese company, and they hire a lot of right out of college, and they train the heck out of people. And they don’t care what kind of college degree you have, as long as you’re, you know, interested enough and capable of learning the technology that they sell. And they train very heavily on application engineering. And so I think, you know, it was sort of by luck that I managed to find somebody that was willing to hire a person with my type of degree, and train me into a technical role. But really, the first time that I really saw the inside of a factory was after I started my first job.

Curt Anderson  13:21

Wow, okay, then I just

Nikki Gonzales  13:22

got addicted to it immediately, like, going in and looking at the line and looking at stuff being made and getting to observe anything from like, one of my first sales calls I went on, as a joint call was like a ketchup, packet factory portion pack, they were making Heinz, you know, just different little like, packets for fast foods, and got to see all kinds of things being made. And I’ve sort of, you know, gotten in and out of that industry since then. But I always get pulled back. There’s something about that machinery making stuff that we use every day. That really gets me

Damon Pistulka  13:57

it’s always incredible when you see like those those things, how fast it’s made. Yeah, it’s the the speed, the speed. I remember the first time I saw a visual inspection system on on spark plugs. And you can’t see him, it’s just like a blur, right? And these things are working this stuff that, you know, the automation is incredible.

Nikki Gonzales  14:17

So machine vision was my application expertise area, and I got to play with the samples in the lab and set up the cameras and figure out like, what are the and that’s one of the things that like going from kind of like consumer mindset and industrial mindset. One of the things at the time was like, why the heck is a camera $5,000 that only has, you know, one megapixel or maybe half and it doesn’t even have any color. And you’re like, oh, because I have to process this in like, you know, 10 to the seconds. Yeah, and pull out all this irrelevant information, but it can’t have too much because otherwise it’s going to take too long to process. Yeah, it was it was a very, very fun place to be. I loved the machine vision the problem saw Getting involved with that.

Curt Anderson  15:01

That’s awesome. We’ve got some hate. And speaking of your buddy, his here he’s talking about how he just bumped into you recently at automate. So I was at a Chrysler Happy Monday.

Nikki Gonzales  15:10

Yeah. Hey Dave, I wish we could have spent more time together while automate was such a blur for me. That was crazy.

Curt Anderson  15:16

And hey, Gabriel JATO. Great comment. Let’s change that and more automation books for kids. And Damon, how about this, Adam, good morning to Alaska. We met Adam in person last week. He is a high level web designer. He is a guru for entrepreneurs. So a great guy to connect with Adam and look forward to chatting further with you. So Nicky, let’s keep this rolling. So we’re at Quilt beam. And I’d like to get under underneath the hood at Quilt beam. We’re talking a little bit before we went on live here, your co founder, the gentleman that this dream is coming to life at quote, beam Roman was working at Apple. And I caught him a little bit on a podcast with our mutual friend Chris Lukey. And he was talking about like, man, dude, you loved Apple, like how many people leave Apple to start a dream. And he gave a great testimony about you know what, I didn’t want to leave a life of regret. And I want to take a shot. So can you share a little bit about, quote, beam and Roman and how you got attracted to this company? What’s going on there?

Nikki Gonzales  16:13

Sure. So Robin and I actually used to work together at Festo back in the day. So that was my second job after kids. And I was a sales engineer in the Bay Area selling pneumatics and electromechanical Motion Systems. And Roman was head of customer solutions department of the Festo west coast at the time, which is really kind of an internal systems integrator. They build a lot of sub assemblies for other OEMs. They have, they have a panel shop there, do a lot of assemblies for Process Automation valves, and you know, building electrical panels. And Romans. engineering background is electrical engineering, similar to my dad, but he started in machine building. He worked for a machine builder before coming to Festo. So again, a lot of designing specking, panels and custom machines and custom systems. And he had this frustration throughout his entire career that he thought he would be doing engineering. And then he spent a lot of his time doing administrative stuff, and building, you know, Excel sheets, bill of materials, and then getting quotes and finding pricing and availability and lead time. And especially when you work at a big company like Festo when they were specking out and building and even quoting custom systems, is they need to have a cost a hard cost associated with all the components that they quote, they don’t just, you know, kind of ballpark it and hope that something sticks and that they’ve ended up making a profit, which is apparently what a lot of small machine builders do. And I didn’t know this. So myself, I involved him in a couple of projects with my customers. And I was always like, Broman, what’s taking so long? Why don’t we have a bid out, like this other guy gave a bid and like a week, and it’s like, yeah, this other guy out of his garage that just ballpark, you know, his competitive cost. And, oh, I can probably deliver it in eight weeks, right? Um, they’re going okay, well, we need to get exact pricing and dates for all these things. So that we can build a proper proposal and Bill materials and all these things. And so we worked on a couple of projects together like that. And then I ended up out of some frustration at the time with like lead times and things like that. I ended up getting recruited into software sales job. And I thought to myself, and it was in the engineering space, but in design, engineering, virtual prototyping for electronics, and I actually Apple was my largest account at that time when I went over to sell this electromagnetic simulation software. But it was a great, I can sell something and then it’s already made. They, they just have to download it or get a CD, right I was I was doing a lot of things to be proactive to try to help my customers with delivery issues, lead time issues, things like that. And this was back in 2012. So we haven’t even scratched the surface of like the last few years. But that’s where Rahman and I met and Festo was one of those cool companies that helps their employees with continuing education. And they had a program tied to Stanford. And Broman actually ended up getting his MBA at Stanford or going to Stanford for that at the time. And then he ended up getting poached by Apple from Festo and kind of continued that. And then I ended up going to work for a software startup called algo. Miss at the time, they’re called algo. Now, but their predictive supply chain analytics. And that was kind of at the time where natural language processing was sort of in its infancy. With working with data, we built an engine where you can communicate with your database using English language rather than SQL, things like that so that business users could do their own queries. In English, you could pull up dashboards, ask questions of your data in a chat interface. That was all a lot harder to do back then than it is now. But we worked with enterprise companies to help them segment their data and get smarter on how to allocate stock to different locations. So we worked mainly with retail companies. Um, movie studios predicting demand for movies, particularly movies that are brand new releases to go, how will this new release you know sell in different Walmart’s Best Buy’s targets across the country to help them not just ship 100 DVDs to every store and upon release, you know, a bunch of them would sell out immediately. And then a bunch of them would just have that stock sitting around, and then it would get returned eventually, when that promo period was over. But to bucket the stores and look at okay, how did it do in the box office? You know, how did movie theater sell around that area? What is What are the demographics of people that actually shop at the store? Is it you know, a lot of young people with kids that live there? And is it a family movie? Or is it you know, a rom com, and you’ve got it in a retirement community, right? All these different things affect, you know, sales, and we want to predict demand as much as we can so that we can stock appropriately. And we were building a lot of AI and, and I will say AI, right, but it’s a complicated term, mostly standard type of machine learning, right, but partaking in a lot of third party data, in addition to POS data, making some predictions looking at, you know, potential social media, like Twitter sentiment for a particular movie, how do we relate okay, this particular actor was in this movie, and it did really well in this market before. And now we have another movie, but that same actor, it’ll probably do pretty well. And we had an association at that startup with some really smart people at MIT, that built some models, and I ended up presenting some of those papers at conferences and things. And Roman was at Apple at that time and had gone to Stanford. That’s where he met our CTO, Andrew Kaur, who was getting his computer science degree at Stanford at the time. And they started coping kind of as a class project, I guess, Roman drawing on his frustration of his career of like, oh, man, it’s just so frustrating to communicate with all these different regional distributors, emailing and phone calling back and forth to get these PDF quotes and get lead times and pricing. There’s got to be a better way for that. So they got together and built sort of the first iteration of quote, beam. During that time, we got together and had lunch, he was like, Oh, you’re working on AI and supply chain stuff. I have this idea for the startup. He’s like, uh, you know, we’re not doing we’re not taking it full time or anything yet. But if we ever do, we’d love to get your thoughts on it, maybe we can work together. And that just progressed over time. So like, he ended up staying at Apple for five years, because it is a big deal to leave a career like that. And you know, start your own business. It’s a big risk. But it never left his mind. Right. And I ended up like I said, in 2018 had my daughter, I was actually at an artificial intelligence conference when my water broke. Nikki

Curt Anderson  22:48

had the baby for you. Like, is there something today? I don’t know. I’m just ask him that.

Nikki Gonzales  22:55

Just it was it was one of the things that it must be meant to be. Because Roman saw me speak at a conference we got, we both got invited by the same group of VCs, to an AI conference in Half Moon Bay, which is not a place I would expect to run into Roman. But we ran into each other. It turned out this was like maybe three months after my daughter was born three, four months. And we were like, Hey, what’s going on? Good to see you here. What’s been? And I was like, oh, yeah, I had a baby’s like me to January 20. I was like, How did you know when my baby was born? And he’s like, No, that’s when my baby was born. Wow. Yeah. And he was there at the, I guess, invitation of some of his professors from MIT. And this not sorry, that MIT Stanford, and this VC group called Start X. And they were trying to encourage him to, you know, quit his job and raise money for the startup and stuff. And he was like, I ran into you today for a reason you need to be involved in this. And I was just like, Whoa, I just left my other startup job. Like I can’t do this right now. We’d love to, but not right now. So we stayed in touch and he flew up to Seattle, maybe a year later, we had a brainstorming session. And he showed me like they had just been working on coping kind of on nights and weekends. At that point, Andrew was working at box I think, or Venmo. And so I stayed involved and interested, but like, timing was never right. And then they finally took it full time a couple of years ago. And guess what turns out timing was good for me. My My son was like, maybe eight months. And I was like, Well, my son turns one, I’m pretty much ready to get back to it, you know? And I was like, but I’m not necessarily moving back to the Bay Area. And they were like, We don’t care. It’s remote work, right? Be wherever you want. So I ended up moving back to Texas for family reasons. But it was like I couldn’t say no, this had been kind of in the wings for so long. And I had from the very getgo thought like our industry needs this. This was a great idea. And so stars aligned and I was the first employee to join kopien before we in a race to see round or anything, and we kind of, you know, not to take too much credit, but I helped them kind of build the product. And then, you know, found a market some interest from investors and we raised a seed round last year while we were at automate pretty much. And it’s been a really wild ride since then. And it’s awesome. We have a team of eight at this point, and just growing really fast, mostly based off of word of mouth and, and other, you know, customer referrals and things like that. So we still have a whole lot of go when we actually tried to scale up with marketing and things. But that’s kinda Yeah, the back the backstory of coping, it probably could have been shorter, but it could have also been a lot longer.

Curt Anderson  25:42

I love every bit of it. And what’s awesome is a couple COVID babies in there, right? Not only not only did you have a COVID you know, a baby during COVID, but I believe co coping could be considered a little COVID. Baby, if you will, yep. been born, I think 2021. So, I this is fantastic. Guys, again, if you’re just joining us, Nikki Gonzalez, podcaster keynote speaker, she does a little bit of everywhere. And you’ve been on fire at different keynotes this year. Panelists. Like I know, like, if you look at like your list of speaking gigs, there’s a little gap during that little thing called COVID. Right. But looks like You’re like the world’s back open. You run fire? What are some of the trends? Like you know, I don’t know call you want to go there for sure. With ai i Was anybody today I had any news? What? What were what was like some of the buzz at some of the conferences that you’re speaking at? What are you hearing about AI? Let’s Let’s go. They’re a bunch of played little reporter for us. So if you will?

Nikki Gonzales  26:40

Me. Yeah. Oh, sorry. I thought you were asking to cool. No, no. Yeah, I don’t really speak at AI conferences anymore. And I haven’t been to any since about 2018. So it’s been very interesting to kind of absorb that from the sidelines now. Like, I didn’t really know about MLMs at the time, right? We were looking at natural language processing all kinds of different models for that. But large language models weren’t really being discussed at AI conferences in 2018, at least not commercially. Right. And I was yes, I was reading a lot of papers coming out of Google and places like that at the time, because algo was doing what we call applied machine learning. And we were looking at which models coming out of research, can we actually commercialize and do something with because we were developing a product for a vertical and a technology stack for that, not just being a pure, like AI research company, right. But we wanted to be as close to research as possible so that we know which models can give us a competitive edge, what things can we apply to our type of application. So I do remember, like, chat bots were big, a big subject, when we were when I was presenting at conferences, and I talked a bit about chat bots for different types of business applications. Right. And that’s, that’s been an interesting development right now with the with the recent, you know, explosion in general AI, but honestly, like, that meant, you know, in 2018, I guess it was like five years ago. Those were not the dominant models of the time. And there wasn’t really a whole lot of discussion of language models or these generative models, right. And I have this gap. So I can’t put say that I’m any kind of expert in how that developed or why it developed that way. Now, I kind of sit on the sidelines of it a little bit. Now we’re looking at, okay, how do we use this in at Cobian? Because we’ve always thought, okay, there will be an AI element to what we do, for the sake of also like as a as a marketplace, slash platform that aggregates some things. Right? Oftentimes, you can do a lot more when you have, you know, more sources or more participants, as a group, rather than whether it’s an association or a platform or marketplace, right, then then any single company can do with their own data. I’m talking about AI now, I don’t know I can’t I kind of had enough of it to be honest for a while, because it was like, oh, every company is AI. And it was just such a buzzword. And honestly, when I got into it, I also was like, Ooh, the AI can do x. And then you get down into the nitty gritty and like as the person kind of behind what, what the marketing is telling you, you start to your BS detector gets real strong. Yeah, yeah. Let’s say that. So I see my eyes start glazing over when people say, Oh, AI does this, or we use AI for that. I’m like, Well, yeah. Do you really though? Or, or like, really like machine learning? Is AI Right? Or is it depends? Are you talking about, you know, AGI? Or are you talking about, like, application specific things where yes, the models keep learning. Like they keep getting retrained, they keep making some decisions. Are we talking about robotics, or just software? People that are out to you know, in that in these spaces, it’s like, what the heck do we call robotic process automation, like basically automating software tasks coming from the heart? I’d world I’m like, Why? Why would you Co Op that name? Like, that makes no sense to me. There’s no robots here? Um, so I don’t know, I’m, I haven’t been to, like I said an AI conference in five years. And I don’t know what they’re talking about there now, I go to more like industry specific. We’re talking about smart manufacturing and all those things. But honestly, my experience with manufacturers, they’re like, Yeah, I got I got business to attend to you could talk about the CSS somewhere else. Yeah, I’ve already been on my like, year 12 of my 10 year ERP implementation. And that’s been rough enough, like don’t bring up AI to me or some other like lights out manufacturing, or digitalization. If I hear that one more time. I want to attend to at least now I really want to focus on like, the practical stuff. Yeah. What people on the ground that are actually doing things in the plants want to talk about? Yeah, I have a lot more fun, like just kind of talking like realistic steps, small steps. And it turns out most people, if you talk about like a maturity curve, they’re closer to the bottom, most people that I talked to, right, because I’m not at the like enterprise, huge big manufacturers, you know, in their C suite, what they’re talking about for the next 10 years. I’m not in those conversations right now. I’m with the people that are like tearing their hair out because they’re trying to do their day job and the production stuff, or the parts are not there, or, you know, the supply chain people. That’s who I’m talking to a lot. And yes, in the long run all kinds of tools and connections and digitalization and things will help them but in the short run, they just need to get their damn parts.

Curt Anderson  31:40

Was there a challenge in the supply chain during COVID, but like, I heard that rumor. Rumors about supply chain being being challenging during COVID, then you just maybe one or two, maybe just a smidge. So let’s get into it. I’m gonna dig in deeper. I’m really curious about coping, you know, so we geek out about e commerce. And just when I hear like, Man, this is a marketplace supply chain? Sounds like you’re just delivering some really powerful solutions. Can we get like just for like, who’s your product for who like really should be picking up and connecting with you? And like, Man, this is a great solution for us? Who is that person out there? What’s that look like?

Nikki Gonzales  32:22

Sometimes about buyers who’s buying product off of our platform, they are manufacturers, as well as machine builders and systems integrators that are doing automation in these factories. So we come from this industry, you know, factory automation, industrial automation. And our pain point was that in our industry, these, these products are not easy to find, right. So you have regional distributors that represent a certain number of manufacturers. So you have rep, you know, manufacturer’s representatives, but it was all very analog and very offline, right? You know, your local distributor, you have a salesperson or two or three calling on you from these different some of them direct, like when I was at Kansas, you get, you know, there’s like five keys reps for every manufacturer, and you probably get 20 phone calls a week, if you’re in their database. Or, you know, you’re dealing with a local distributor, and you’ve maybe got a great relationship, somebody shows up at your plant, you know, once a week or whatever, but you it’s it’s technical, it’s oftentimes consultative in terms of if you have a new project, you don’t just like, run to the catalog and buy a thing, right, you have to figure out what combination of things is going to solve my problem. And it was very much to me anyway, that the situation was whoever you know, was kind of lucky enough to get in your door, whether that’s timing, or you took their cold call, or they got past your gatekeeper, or you got recommended to someone, right. And then the brands you’re buying oftentimes are again, who does your local distributor represent? Or, you know, there isn’t a whole lot of visibility into the entire marketplace and what’s available and getting like trade offs and things right? I think in our in our world, that’s why people came up with the whole, like, I gotta get three quotes because it’s just like, I don’t know, in what I’m operating in a vacuum otherwise, right, I have no idea what the market price should be for something like this. And they kind of did that on purpose, right? It was supposed to be very obscure, and you have to get this amount of help to get it. And I really value the role of a good sales engineer. Because usually in our industry, customers don’t always know what they want, or what they need, they know what problems they need to solve. And they really oftentimes need somebody that knows the technology to help them specify the right thing. But there’s gradients of that right sometimes you know how, like if you’re designing a panel and you just need circuit breakers, for instance, like you don’t need somebody’s expertise necessarily if you know your trip curve and your voltages that you need and so on. You should just be able to go and you know, buy what you need, but it’s not quite like that. And you know, growing up with like, you know, the rise of Amazon and everything. I just became used to, you know, shopping online and being able to find my own info Question. I’ll make an example I leased a car Finally, after I stopped driving, you know, hundreds of 1000s of miles a year in a outside sales job. My husband and I knew exactly which car we were getting before we walked into any dealership, we actually narrowed it down to like three brands and the class equivalent of a car between either you know, this manufacturer that or that, and we had a set of criteria that we wanted. And then we came in, and we talked to the internet sales department. And then we negotiated a price. And, you know, we came in, we didn’t step foot into the dealership until we knew we were buying a car. And then we came in, we finalize the paperwork, and we walked, you know, drove the car off the lot. But I don’t, I don’t come onto a lot and go, help me figure out what car I want or need. And I think that’s a bit of a generational shift. Maybe also, just different buyers have different preferences, right? We I really like to do my own research and to know what I’m doing. And so I think, with coPI him very much the initial idea was, let’s build a platform that makes it easier for us to do this qualitative business, let’s say somebody already has a bill of materials. How do you in the most efficient way project manager essentially, because there’s a lot of stakeholders involved in this process, you have the engineer that does the specifying you have, you know, the buyer, that ends up cutting the PIO. And sometimes, you know, there’s depending on the size of the company, there may be different people involved. But all of this is kind of just happening via phone calls, emails, oftentimes, the distributor has to go back to the manufacturer for expertise, they may not have expertise in all the product lines of all the things they sell, like a standard distributor with like 30 to 100 manufacturers on their line card. And then every one of those manufacturers has 1000s of parts, there’s just no way a single person could fill that catalog, whether it’s from you know, the purchasing specs, to even just understanding how it works, how to spec all of that, right. So it is a big kind of like project when you’re talking about custom machine building. A little bit different than an MRO buyer, that’s just replacing a part in a machine, right? They just need a part number. So we wanted to build a system, that’s where the quote beam name kind of came from, like, how can I in the most quick and efficient manner possible, be my quotes over my quote requests or get them back and facilitate whatever interactions need to happen around that. So like, one thing that I love about Amazon is, no matter who I buy from, I can like go back in my account and see when I ordered it, where I ordered it from, it’s all in one place. We even took that a little further, for every quote that we have, there’s a chat associated with that quote, that gets recorded. So you can always go back and chat with whoever is handling that quote, or, you know, maybe it’s a team, right? But every communication is tied to a project or something. So you don’t just lose this in your email. There’s a history of who accepted the quote, who quoted you, you know, when When did things change? Who who made that change? Because it is a lot of going back and forth. But as we brought this online, right, it was post, you know, kind of like after the first two years of the worst COVID. And they realized, Hey, this is still a need, right? COVID does not mean that there’s not market for this. In fact, it’s probably even more needed now. Because the the in person sales calls aren’t happening as much anymore. How do these engineers collaborate now if they can’t just like show up to a conference room and hash this all out together? In a in a meeting, people are working remotely? Again, more? So you know, how do we project manage a lot of stakeholders around this together? Again, yeah, you can use Zoom and the standard phone calls emails, it just kind of ends up, you know, in our inbox with I don’t know how many I have. Oh, really, right now only have 146 unread emails is crazy. Normally, it’s like over 1000, right? stuff gets lost. I mean, if we talked about supply chain, right, like these messages with like, Hey, where’s my Pio? Where did you receive this Pio? Like, please acknowledge this once the delivery date. I can only imagine like a buyer’s inbox. It just it’s not. But then everybody that we talked to, at that time, when we were trying to validate our product market fit, right? Hey, we’re building this platform to help you communicate with your suppliers, aggregate all your quotes in one place. So you can manage a whole project or bill of materials and deal with your distributors. Find new ones if you don’t know where to get something. Everybody was like, Well, yeah, that sounds great. And yeah, can I cut back cut my sourcing time have a bill of materials from you know, three to four weeks to within a week? That’s great. Like we all need that. It saves us time. But right now, it’s not my time. It’s I can’t get the parts to make something. Yeah, that’s my main problem right now. Yes, in the long run, I want to do it more quickly, but I can’t do it. Whether I do it quickly or slowly right now it doesn’t really matter because I just if I can’t get the parts, I can’t build anything. And so we being as you know, startup company, we want to solve a problem. We’re not here to say oh, we have the best product idea in the world and like you need to do things our way. It’s like we know things are too hard. We want to make them easier. And everybody had this, I can’t get parts problem. And what we found out is we’re dealing with a lot of these Mom and Pop regional distributors. Apparently there’s like 17,000, independent distributors of industrial products in North America. And a lot of them, you know, started to a couple decades ago, they’re smaller, they’re employee owned, they may be regional, they maybe have, you know, one to five to 10 warehouses. They’re not the most sophisticated when it comes to ERP systems, they a lot of them don’t do any kind of E commerce. Yep. And if they do, props to them, because we’ve talked about this problem before, if you’re a regional distributor, with 100, manufacturers on your line card, and these manufacturers have 1000s of products each how do you effectively build a commerce store? For all these products? You don’t own the data? Many of the manufacturers don’t have good data? Or if they do, they’re not necessarily giving it to you as a distributor? How do you create and manage these listings when you’re already short staffed, like and you can’t take phone calls and emails fast enough for orders? Ecommerce is just not really a possibility for a lot of them, right? And then there’s the question of, okay, there’s everything in the catalog that I could potentially sell. And then there’s what I have in my warehouse. Yep. Right. But if I only have an e commerce Store with what I have in my warehouse, it’s not really going to complete anybody’s project. Because who carries everything on the shelf that’s needed for any kind of custom project? Yeah. So we thought to ourselves, and as we talked with everyone, hey, I know somebody over here that’s dying to get this the sensors, right. And then I know this regional distributor over here that doesn’t have any commerce, and they have their inventory connected to anything that has the sensors and stock, but their local customers don’t want them. They’ve been sitting on the shelf for six years. And this person over here is tearing their hair out, because nobody’s got these sensors in stock. You know, you talk about the big catalog houses that you actually can find online, right? Yeah, but even distributed locators at this point, are heart, they are not usually up to date, between manufacturers, they vary wildly, and how useful they are. Manufacturers reps generally don’t stock anything. And you go to distributors, websites, and their line card is typically a PDF, and it’s typically two to three years out of date. And they’re like, Oh, we actually dropped this line. And oh, we added this line. And it may be out to date, it may not. But we could not find an easy way to find, okay, who are all the distributors of this manufacturers product? And if I could find them, it’ll take me up to a week to call them all and ask them. And so we were like, well, if we’re already bringing all these people to a platform where people can request quotes, right from the from the distributors. Can we aggregate this in stock inventory to help our community right help our distributors sell stuff that has been on their shelf forever, and nobody locally wants and you don’t want their salespeople out there there should be solving problems to try to push stuff that’s just on the shelf, right, they need to pick the right product, the right solution. And then on the flip side, you got these buyers that are just scouring the earth or trying to for something that they the lead time is now 52 weeks or no quote, We have no idea when we can make it or it’s been pushed out three times. So you think you’re getting next week, and then you get in the next month, and then you give me three months from now. You know, none of us when if nobody can make anything, or if lines are down all over the place because we can’t get our parts. So we kind of pivoted our business model. And this is one of the reasons why I said no to doing for instance, a demo. Because we initially released our website and was just like constantly, you know, you can request quote from different distributors and manufacturers and collaborate on your projects. And then we ended up ended up kind of pivoting, our first layer of like value that we offer to people is, hey, we have we can help you find these parts in stock somewhere. Because now what we’re doing is we’re connecting to the ERP systems of these regional distributors. And we’re helping by becoming almost like a reseller partner, to bring their inventory and make it available to anybody that needs it, whether they’re in their territory or not. And then we’re helping them move that inventory, they’re investing that money, they’re investing that shelf space, they should be turning what they have on the shelf, what’s not allocated for special projects for particular customers. And on the flip side, like customer, there’s somebody out there that wants to buy these things and they’re just sitting I call him a call it dark inventory, because it’s just like it’s sitting out there crying to be sold in. We need this in our industry. Like I said that the products are so specific. The criteria for selecting the product is so specific. The engineering sort of the terminology around it, there is no like generic b2b marketplace that really works for the types of products that we have an industrial automation. Sometimes I buy these things off the Zorro or eBay or whatever. But it is not the most efficient it’s very difficult for the sellers to manage the listings because they have to do so manually. And on on the buyer side, you know, you can’t search by the attributes that we need for our industry specifically, except for like, yeah, part number and things. But what we do for the distributors is we help them by we maintain all the product information, we have huge database from hundreds of manufacturers, and it’s growing. And we’re investing that money and time into creating a listing page for each manufacturers part number. That’s another problem in our industry, right? Oh, I have a part number. But it’s specific to my regional distributor. And I can’t actually buy it anywhere else, because that part number is made up essentially, is we have this single source, I kind of hate this term, but whatever single source of truth database of the products, and then the regional distributors, they can just pipe us their inventory, I have this many of this manufacturers part number, and they’re available for sale. And they don’t have to manually create and maintain those listings, they just send us a file, you know, it’s something that is manageable for them. And it helps bring more of that to the surface to make it available to buyers. And then because we’re in this whole business and building tools for bills of materials on the customer side, for online chat for distributors. So again, we tried a lot of chats, I like to do online chat, I’m I’m like halfway I like to talk to people, my sister, for instance, is five years younger than me, picking up the phone is her last last last last resort, like she would never talk to a person if she doesn’t have to. So I love chatting online, for instance, because also it’s a synchronous, but most online chats, they’re like, We made this for customer service. So if you haven’t responded in a minute, we’re gonna assume you’re taking care of and turn off the chat. And I’m like, Oh, I have 100 other tabs open, and I just left for a second. And now I have to start all over again, that’s really frustrating, where I’ll go to a website and chat. And I’m like, Hey, do you have this in stock? And they’re like, oh, email us. Like, what was this chat even? Yeah. There’s just not a competent person at the other end of that job is somebody that’s just like either a bot or a, you know, a customer service agent that doesn’t actually know anything. That’s kind of a frustration of mine. I love chat, but when it actually results in something useful. So we built our own chat that ties with the product information that ties in with the quotes. So if I asked you for, if you ask me for a quote, in the chat, I can actually make you a quote, give it to you in the chat, you can click on it. And then you can check out with your credit card or with the PIO or whatever. These are things that like outside of our industry, they work pretty well. But then you look at the nuances of industrial automation and how that works. And you’re like, wait, none of these tools actually worked very well for us. So as much as I’m not a fan of reinventing the wheel, we’ve decided that there’s a big enough need for our niche to do things in the way that works for us that it is worth it to build it.

Curt Anderson  47:45

I have a full

Nicole Donnelly  47:46

Oh, go ahead, Tim.

Damon Pistulka  47:47

Go ahead and the call. Yes, sir.

Nicole Donnelly  47:49

Oh, I was just I had a follow up question. I mean, I’ve been in situations with manufacturers where literally like there’s just a lack of education about what it is that they actually need. And to the point where they’ll literally just send a picture to the sales rep and say, This is my part, I have no idea helped me figure out. And so I guess my question for you is this, I do see that there? Is this like education barrier a lot of times with these parts, especially if they’re custom parts, and they have to be custom manufactured, like, how would you how do you address that? Because I love what you said, and you’re you’re absolutely right on from the buyers perspective, so much of this buying process is happening now online, before people even are ready to talk to a sales rep. And that’s only going to increase it’s like what 75%? So, education just seems like such a big gap, especially manufacturing, of how you address this, like how do you see that going forward? Like with quote beam? Or what do you see to kind of address some of these challenges that manufacturer having where their sales reps are basically serving as teachers to help these people figure out what they need? How can quote, beam or something else solve that.

Nikki Gonzales  48:59

So we really do have plans and hope to become a platform of content, as well as procurement or being able to buy right, find what’s in stock and buy it or communicate with the right suppliers to order things for production. Right? You’re not necessarily going to make a spot by for, you know, a two year production plan. Right. And then yeah, you made a good point about custom parts versus standard parts versus, you know, custom machined parts. We realize we can’t be everything to everyone. Right. So there, we are not a marketplace. We thought about it early on, oh, we should have a section that sells machine parts, right. So you can, you know, but there’s actually already a marketplace for that. So we really plan on partnering with companies that do what they do really well. Right. So there’s marketplaces for machined parts. xometry is one of them. There’s a few of there’s also like software that connects to different companies machine shops that use ERP called paperless parts for instance, they help them do like quick quoting. I think there’s several others. But we, we’re not there yet, just because we have resource constrained a little bit. But we really want to have a lot of education on our platform. So one of the plans we have, for instance, if you’re if you do have a part number, for instance, that you’re looking at, then linked to any third party that you know, reputable, right, whether it’s content from engineers that have YouTube channels about how they use that part, what that part is, we already linked to like the manufacturers, data sheets, drawings, will have 3d CAD downloads for parts, as well. We want that product page to be a hub of any information that you might need to know about the product. And do that same thing on kind of a category level, right? So are we talking about, oh, I’m looking at parts for my electrical panel? Well, here’s some resources for building electrical panels, how tos, depending on like kind of where you are in the in your stage of expertise, maybe as an engineer, or maybe you’re a procurement person, and you don’t understand quite what you’re looking at in terms of drawings. We want to be able to have a community sourced content as well, right, user generated content is huge, we can’t be the experts in everything. And we don’t have the resources to write a very informative blog post about, you know, 234 million products or parts, right. So how can we as a platform become a source that can actually help you? Whether it’s understanding what a term means, or understanding, you know, what might be alternatives to this part number that I can’t get? Or, you know, is this a machined part that you’re looking for? Well, in your bill of materials, so we have a plan for our Bill of Materials tool, ours are all like standard parts, or maybe configurable parts you’re getting from manufacturers already, but that same machine is going to have some machined parts, right? Then we want you to be able to link right out to another marketplace where you can submit your drawings to get your RFQ for machined parts, and then pull it back into the bill of materials you’re managing and quote, beam. Because you can’t say you’re a one stop shop if you don’t actually have everything. But you can’t realistically have everything and be good at it. Like who? Exactly. So how can we, as a technology platform provider, become comprehensive, in our opinion, it’s through partnerships, through intelligent partnerships, where you, we can cut that customer, you know, cut the steps down a little bit in that customer journey, help them not to run into roadblocks, where they go, Well, I don’t know where to go for this next, it may not be us. But hopefully, we can always point you in the right direction or the next step. So that people can stop this whole, like, Oh, I’m constantly running into things where I don’t know where to get them. One of the things that bugs me the most is when people come to us, and they’re desperately looking for parts. Like let’s say a machine is down. And they’re like, I need to buy this replacement part. But the OEM or somebody decided that to keep their customer in the dark, we removed the manufacturer’s part number from this, so you can only buy it from us. If you’re not responding to your customers requests. They need this part now. And what have you done like, that really bugs me, they’re like, Oh, I really need this part. And I’m like, I don’t know where to get this, because nobody actually sells this because this isn’t a part you’re gonna have to call blah, blah, blah, machine builder that made this for you. And people are like, Oh, but they’re not, you know, they’re not responding. They’re not quoting me. I’m like, Oh, that hurts. That hurts my head and my heart for you. So we’re working on building all of our taxonomy to a standard, there’s a nonprofit called E Tim. It’s it started in Germany, in the Netherlands with like marine parts for shipbuilding. But they quickly realized that like, hey, we need some sort of standards so that if you’re buying this part from like supplier A, B, C, and D, there’s got to be some way to know if it’s the same one or not. And so we’re gonna be using that standard at some point so that, you know, it should I don’t see how keeping customers in the dark helps anybody in the long run, right? You want to compete on things you actually you know, your your quality as a supplier, not because they have no other choice, or they don’t know where else they can get something in my opinion that that’s that’s like gone long ago, and anybody that’s holding on to that as a way of doing business or why they should be staying in business. I don’t think they should be. Yeah, that’s my personal opinion. This is

Damon Pistulka  54:25

yeah, you guys, I tell you, you guys have a heck of a year it’s a heck of a daunting task because I have clients where we work with different distributors and that single source of truth you’re talking about in the content and everything getting that together for yourself and having it Yep. Is is is the key to be able to do it because the distributors are horrible at it. And the manufacturers themselves are not that good at it. And I can only imagine on on these automation type products. how difficult that is. and how beneficial it is to your customers on the other side to be able to go, Okay, I need this encoder. And I will call my local distributor in XYZ, they don’t have it, but you guys can go, yes. But this one in across the country has 10 of them, and you can get it tomorrow, which is crazy cool for the people that are that are running into supply chain problems. But it comes back again to that centralized unit. There’s a lot of value in that centralized, single source of truth and inventory across across the globe. Oh, wow.

Curt Anderson  55:39

Man. This is like an hour of my life. And I’d like to Geek it out. We’re gonna keep it short. I promise. I promise, I promise.

Nikki Gonzales  55:49

So that I am I’m the least concise person you will ever talk to probably. So you could be short all you want. And then I’ll talk for an hour and go on. But I do also want to add, please, yes, because we don’t have everything yet. Right? It’s a huge task to get this entire database together. Yeah, we, you can also ask us to help you find anything, because what we don’t have connected up yet. Because when distributors pipe us their inventory, it has to match to a part in our database. And either way, if we don’t have the part yet, we might be getting that feed, or we have visibility into that inventory. But it’s not showing up on the website as yes, you can buy it now. Right? So anybody if you ever see this right, and you need, you can’t find a part on coping. That’s what the chat is for, tell us what you’re looking for. We will add it to the database, we will see if we have it in the system. And if we don’t, we will go find it for you. Because we know hundreds of these distributors all across the country. A lot of them in North America, right, but also international. And it doesn’t make sense for an individual purchaser to like, make an input purchase. I mean, they will if they have to, but it’s easier to just deal with somebody that you know, right? Send a Pio to a known vendor. And we’ll take care of it. So that’s, that’s another thing that like, as we’re building the service, we do a lot of things that are not scalable in order to build that scale into the system. Well,

Curt Anderson  57:10

Nicole, do you have any other questions before? Before we wrap up? Do you have any other I know like, we could talk to Nikki for another hour? Do you have any other burning?

Nicole Donnelly  57:19

No man, Nikki, you have, I’ve learned so much from you. It’s it’s really amazing what you guys are building, I’m really excited about the potential of it. Definitely, there’s a massive gap in the market for this. And I just I’m just thinking about like the time savings for these for these buyers. That’s the time we spend sourcing this stuff like that, to be able to realize some of that time back so that they can spend it on, you know, other parts of the business that they really need to be focusing on. I think it’s really cool. A lot.

Nikki Gonzales  57:48

One thing I’ve learned throughout all this, like supply chain stuff is buyers that focus solely on pricing, have had a really hard time also during this because you can’t have good relationships, where people will go the extra mile for you, if all you’ve ever done is hammer them on price, right? So, of course, there’s so much involved in how much you actually spent on a product. It’s not just what you paid for that part. It’s also how much time did you spend getting it? Right? How many did you have to deal with delivery issues? Right? How do you have to manage that vendor constantly. Like we have some distributors that I always I know, they’re gonna give me the best price. But I also know that it can take them like a week to accept my PIO and another week to ship out. And they’re just not reliable. And they don’t have great communication. So I choose not to buy from them, even though they have the best price. Right? And a question that we often get with this sort of marketplace model or, you know, is Oh, you’re just creating a race to the bottom? Well, no, because we’re not, you know, just showing like, oh, you can get low prices, or we’re really not trying to encourage people to just like, send 10, quote, request and buy it from whoever has the cheapest price. No, it’s about working with your quality vendors in your good relationships. But then having options when you when that option doesn’t work, right. And then encouraging these quality relationships, rather than saying, Oh, just start doing business online and just buy the lowest price from wherever. We know in our industry. Also, that doesn’t mean much right? In the long run. But I’ve also quoted like Bill’s materials where I right off the bat was like, hey, I really don’t think I can get you a great price for all these parts, you’re gonna get a much better price from your local distributor. And the customer was like, Well, if I factor in my engineering time that I would spend actually going to all these different distributors for this because let’s say it’s a customer requests, and I don’t even have local distributors for two of these manufacturers that are on this list. I don’t know where to get them. By the time I spend my time sourcing this, I will have paid like four times the list price for those parts anyway, so you sourcing for me, and even if it’s not the best price I could get for these parts. Trust me, it’s going to be the most cost effective way for me to source this bill of material. So there’s a lot really a lot that goes into that. I think sometimes when we talk e commerce is lost because you people just think oh, ecommerce just means I can just go online and like shop based on price and then just get it delivered. But there’s a whole lot more to it than that.

Curt Anderson  1:00:08

Well, Nikki, I don’t know if everybody you know, I don’t my my Iceland language, native tongue is not real strong. But I don’t know if everybody knew this but quote being in Iceland stands for make your life easier. I don’t know for sure that you’ve got the easy button for everybody, right? So.

Nikki Gonzales  1:00:25

And you’re catching us at a time like we’re early on in this journey. When Airbnb was young. They went to all their host houses and took pictures of their listings, because they were bad at it. Right. And we’re in the stage right now, where we do stuff like that, whether it’s for customers, or for distributors, or for manufacturers that we work with. We’re in the stage where we’re willing to do a whole bunch of stuff that’s not very scalable, for the sake of building our community and building our tech so that when the tech is ready to take over, it can do things well. Because there’s, I have this whole background in automation and AI and there’s nothing worse than automating a bad process. Right. So oftentimes, you have to know exactly what you’re doing before you ever tried to automate it. You will never see a bot on copings chat, for instance, like Yes, probably have some AI in there eventually, when we know that it’s 100% only doing something that a bot should do. Like helping you read a datasheet or answer a question from a PDF or something. Not something that a human person should do. Yeah, that was a quarter of

Curt Anderson  1:01:29

the day right there. Nothing worse than on meeting a bad process. Brilliant. I love it. So yeah. Okay, Nikki Gonzalez, let’s do this. Alright, first, let’s unpack a couple of things. And I know you are super busy. You’re busy mom, you’ve got a podcast. I don’t know if you ever sleep. Okay. His daughter didn’t fall far from the apple tree that she so this is a master class. E commerce marketplace. I just absolutely love what you’re doing. This is a thrill camp. I would be remiss if I didn’t share Damon Are you sitting down? Damon? Are you? It does look like you’re we stood up the whole week man where we did my feet sore dude. So let me share a couple of things about Nikki and I know we’ve Nikki we need to let you go. Nikki, if these are some things that people say about Nikki and I’m going back like yours, okay. Ultimate professional above and beyond expectations, exceptional entrepreneurial skills, and we just saw that first. Hardworking Nikki is enthusiastic, tenacious and able to quickly grasp and communicate complex technology. Nikki Gonzalez, we want to thank you, we appreciate you we applaud you for for taking time Dave chrysler says hey, that was my favorite quote right there. And how about this Mr. King of process but how about you know if you guys were sitting down catching Nikki for the past hour? How about we all stand up and like, let’s give Nikki a big whirring round of applause for just blown everybody. So this was just phenomenal. I don’t know if we covered half of what I wanted to cover but this was just so there’s great gotta have

Nikki Gonzales  1:03:05

I’m sorry I thought I yeah. Good stuff.

Curt Anderson  1:03:10

Like I’m this a compliment. This was a perfect meeting you need to get you back over and over so automation ladies, you want to check out her podcast she has to read like if you really enjoyed this just a fraction as much as we did. You have to check out her podcasts go to quote beam check it out, even though they’re kind of new. And you know, she she said that, you know they’ve got new things on the horizon. Check out her website connect with Nikki on LinkedIn. Nicole, Nan Donnelly. Any parting thoughts for Nick for Nikki today?

Nicole Donnelly  1:03:40

Oh, any parting thoughts? Man? Just from one mom entrepreneur to another I’m just I love what you’re doing. I think it’s awesome. And keep on keepin on man. The world needs it. Great job you

Curt Anderson  1:03:55

Damon words of wisdom parting thoughts for our crowd today.

Damon Pistulka  1:03:59

No, I’m just I’m soaking it in today. Because Nikki this is this is cool stuff. You guys are doing it. Kobe.

Curt Anderson  1:04:05

This was awesome. Now, Nikki. Now correct me if I’m wrong. I caught a little bit of your podcast. Field goal is it like if I say the word field goal was somebody trying to kick a field goal on one of your pod? Like was that you? Yeah,

Nikki Gonzales  1:04:17

it wasn’t me. It was my guest on the podcast at that time. I was at Mia manufacturing in America, which is a yearly event hosted by Electromatic and Siemens in Detroit. It’s at Ford Field. And so I did a live interview with Amanda Beaton, who is director of the Siemens cooperates for education or cooperates with education which is one of the arms of Siemens that works with like colleges, students things like that. And yeah, they have so at if you ever go to Mia is free to attend every year, you can actually try to kick a field goal at Ford Field as part of the event which I thought was really cool because that technical trade shows you generally don’t get you know, things like that happen and so on. I was not wearing shoes appropriate for that at all. I saw somebody totally eat it out there on the field. And I was like, I’m not gonna embarrass myself this year. But I did make a commitment to try to wear some better shoes next year and give it a shot. So I’m gonna be terrible at it. But I’ve learned that, you know, that’s not a bad thing. I enjoy myself at the bottom of a steep learning curve. And I’ve gotten over the fact that I’m bad at most things a long time ago, and I don’t get embarrassed by that anymore. So I’m gonna give it a try next year.

Curt Anderson  1:05:30

So Nicky, here’s my last question. I promise more. The So who’s your team beat? Are you are you a football fan that you’re going to be kicking this field like who’s your team? They have a team or Houston Detroit, whatever. Okay, so if Nikki Gonzalez gets called out onto the field, the kick the winning field goal, you’re down by one point, okay, you’re on like a 30 yard line. And like all the pressure is on Nick. They’re like Nicki Gonzalez says martyrs marching on the field to kick this winning field go What’s your walk up song What song do you love this question I then I’m expecting a really good one. Nikki Gonzalez

Nikki Gonzales  1:06:17

on the spot. And this brings up a very traumatic I applied for business honors, when I got to UT the Macomb School of Business, and they did a group interview thing. And they asked me, What’s my favorite song? And I didn’t really know my favorite band is Belle and Sebastian, and they have a song that I don’t even remember the name of at the moment, because I don’t have a life anymore. And then they told me to sing it out of the interview. You couldn’t do it. I was like, Hey, I wish you would have told me what like why I was picking a song because I definitely picked a song that I can’t say what does that have

Nicole Donnelly  1:07:01

to do with business? My goodness? Yeah,

Nikki Gonzales  1:07:03

yeah. And it was mortified because I to say my life now could be

Curt Anderson  1:07:10

like, it could be like wheels on the bus or daughter watches frozen or like could be like a Disney. I’m just teasing you so I

Nikki Gonzales  1:07:19

pressure from an Konto Have you seen heard that one? Great. That’s, that’s, I relate to that very well. Right now. I feel like oftentimes, you’re off the hook. How

Curt Anderson  1:07:32

do you pass you got the job. Thank you. Well, hey, Nikki, thank you. We appreciate you. We salute you in just this was awesome. And again, I pulled this one up so yep, great job Nikki. Thank you guys. Thank you everybody that joined us today. If you’re on replay boy, we encourage you go back and just hit rewind and catch Nikki from the beginning. Again catch catch Nikki’s podcast connect with her on LinkedIn. So Nicole Donnelly, thank you for joining us today appreciate you as always, Damon, we gotta get we gotta get back in person enough of those like virtual to get back side by side doing our live. So Nikki, thank you for hanging out with us for one second. We wish everybody an amazing incredible week. Man. Do we have a good guest this Friday? It’s gonna be trouser man. Manufacture so yeah, I guess we’re gonna wrap up getting Nikki back on with her day. Have a great day. God bless you. And thank you guys.

Nikki Gonzales  1:08:26

Bye Nikki. Hi.