Navigating the Business of Visual Facilitation: Peter Durand

In this conversation, Peter Durand shares his journey from a creative upbringing to running, AlphaChimp, a visual facilitation firm. He discusses his educational background, how he discovered graphic recording, and his journey as an entrepreneur. Peter reflects on the impact of AI on creative industries, his role as an adjunct law professor, and offers valuable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and creatives.
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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome back to Rerouted, where we explore unique career paths
to give you the tools you need to create the life you want.
On today's episode, I talked with Peter Durand, the director
of the visual facilitation firm Alpha Chimp.
We talked about Peter's entry into the world of graphic
facilitation, the highs and lowsof leading a creative firm,
Peter's work as an adjunct law professor at Northwestern
University, disruption of AI andcreative industries, and dealing

(00:23):
with imposter syndrome. Let's get into it, Peter, thank
you so much for joining me today.
It's great to have you. Wonderful to be here, Nick.
I want to start off actually, I'm very curious.
Are those paintings behind you yours or did you buy them?
What's the story with those? They are a cluttered mix of
paintings from my sordid past, except for this one.

(00:46):
OK. The monkey or the chimp or
whatever that is. I was bought for $1.00 off of
eBay plus $16.00 shipping so that my company's called Alpha
Jump. So I claim that that is our
founder. Very nice, very nice.
I like that with everything. Else these are all different

(01:06):
paintings from from different eras of life.
Awesome. OK, well, let's start talking
about that life then. How about that?
Let's hop right into it. Can you tell me a little bit
about your educational background?
I grew up in Tennessee and East Tennessee, but I was born in

(01:27):
Kenya, in Nairobi in East Africa.
And the reason I start there when you ask about my education
is my parents were very supportive of my whole weird
educational path because when they met, my father had been,

(01:47):
they were both Americans, white Americans.
My father had been to university.
He went to Yale. He graduated in the mid 50s,
didn't know what he wanted to do.
So he went into the Marine Corps, was in the Marine Corps
for a couple of years, got out, didn't know what he wanted to
do. So he went to law school, went

(02:08):
to law school for a couple of years, got out, didn't know what
he wanted to do. Worked as a lawyer, you know, a
junior lawyer for a year, got really bored and joined the this
weird thing called the Peace Corps.
And that was the first year thatthat was launched in the United
States. And he ended up moving to Africa
for several years and along the way met my my future mother and

(02:33):
invited her to move to Kenya with them for two years.
And while they were there, they were both teachers.
So he was teaching law and she was teaching math.
And so when it came to my education as a young kid, they
were just very open to the world.

(02:53):
And my father was also a doodlerand a cartoonist.
And I think that's what he always wanted to be.
But instead he became a lawyer. But he was always drawing and
doodling. So big part of my education was
sitting with him and drawing. And so I knew I just, I was
always making things and drawingthings.

(03:16):
And even if it was math or science class, I was the kid in
the back doodling and drawing inthe margins of the textbooks.
And I went to a public school for the first part of my
education in Knoxville, TN. And then my mother had gone to a

(03:36):
local private school and all of my aunts and uncles had gone
there. So I went to this small
conservative private school in East Tennessee and fortunately
people were very tolerant of me,especially my art teacher, Miss
DuMont. And but I really struggled.

(04:00):
I had a really hard time with anything that required a right
answer by going through a formula and then getting the
right answer at the end. But really good at things that
were open-ended. So, you know, the theater,
writing, telling stories, makingpictures, being creative.

(04:23):
And it, it was really challenging.
I felt really dumb. I didn't feel as smart as, you
know, other smart kids. And senior year of high school,
the local newspaper, those used to exist.
They had the local newspaper that invited all the top five

(04:45):
students from all the local schools to come to a reception
and dinner and to get some sort of award.
And I was included. So I was one of the top five
students and I was sitting at the table with all these kids
that were in AP physics, AP biology, AP, you know, math AP

(05:08):
this, AP that. And I told them all and said, I
don't feel like I belong at thistable, but my grades were off
the charts in the the classes that I was taking, which were
things like art, art history, European history, English,
things like that. And they said, we can't do what

(05:29):
you do. There's no way that, you know,
I'm sitting across from, let's say, Omar Baldonaro.
And he said there's no way I would get an A+ in art.
And I was like, yeah, I guess you're right.
So, so that was the first time that, you know, I felt like I
belonged at the same table. I did like my father before me,

(05:52):
I did not know what I wanted to do, but I definitely wanted to
go to art school. And my mother was also she was a
painter and very creative. She had a creative business
herself and was well known in what we would call her niche
internationally. So she had published some books
and had a patent under her name and and was an entrepreneur.

(06:17):
So she was on team Peter and, you know, always looking for
opportunities and trying to like, you know, point me
directions, even though I was 17year old, didn't want to listen
to my mom. But she, you know, she was like,
you know what, you you should talk to this person.
You talked to that person and they said you could go to like

(06:39):
the Art Institute of Chicago or an art school, but may be better
for you to go to a university like this one.
And it was Washington Universityin Saint Louis.
And so that's what I ended whereI ended up going through a
series of, you know, just randomevents, choosing that, getting

(07:00):
accepted, ending up going there,getting a couple of scholarships
to, to be able to afford it because it's a private
university and it's an art school.
A very, it's an old art school for the United States going back
to the early 1900s within a larger university, but a small
university. So it kind of fit all the things

(07:22):
I was looking for. And at that time, the art school
was based off the French model, which was very much an, an
Academy Academy. So you had very deep exposure to
the craft of a topic where therewas sculpture or printmaking or

(07:44):
painting and the professors, youknow, they were all very
different, but the ethos was I'mhere to teach you the craft of
this thing, metalworking, etcetera.
And it's up to you to be creative and do something with
that. Other art schools, you know,
every place is different, every professor is different.

(08:08):
Some were very open, like, hey, whatever you want to do.
But this was a lot of rigor involved.
So as an example, our I, when I took figure drawing where you're
drawing the human figure, our professor Barry Shockman was
nationally known as a colossal hard ass because even that name

(08:30):
very shocked he, he just, he washe you, that's all he did was
study the human figure and the history of drawing.
And so when we first came in, hehad this chalkboard and he said
OK, And he was from, I'm going to do his accent.
It's terrible, my version of it,but it's from New York.

(08:52):
He was a former boxer in the Navy.
So he's always moving like this.He's like hard, hard.
And he was, they could smoke in classrooms.
So he had two cigarettes going because he was really nervous.
So he'd light one, he'd put it down, he'd forget about it,
light another one. He's like, oh, I got 2.
So he was always grooving and but he had this chalkboard and

(09:16):
he said, OK, if you basically, if you show up, you do
everything perfectly, you turn in every assignment on time, you
are excellent. You get AC, you know, which is
not the top grade. And he said if you are above and
beyond and really excel in the craft of drawing a human figure,

(09:37):
you get AC plus. And he, he drew it.
He wrote that real close to the top of the board.
He said, oh, no more room. So his message was, you know,
that humans have been doing thisfor thousands of years, trying
to look at, understand and recreate an image of the human
figure. You're not special, you know, So

(10:00):
you're here to work. And it was really hard work.
So that was up till that point, art had been a lot of, oh,
that's great, you're doing fantastic.
Here are a couple of suggestions.
But Barry Shockman was like bootcamp, you know, And we all
complained about it, but I definitely loved it.
And that really stuck with me. I'm kind of wondering, honestly,

(10:22):
you're talking about the model of art school we had That was
very structured, much more focused on the craft.
Now that you've been in the career of being a graphic
facilitator for 20 to 30 years, what do you think about that?
Would you have preferred a modelthat was a lot more focused on
the creative elements versus just the How do you draw a human

(10:42):
figure perfectly? Well, I definitely had exposure
to both. So I've in that model at that
time, which was well before you were born, Nick, this was the
80's. the IT was a four year program and the first two years
were called, I think core. But it's, it's the fundamentals.

(11:04):
And it wasn't just drawing, it was painting.
It was 2 dimensional design. This was all right before
computers started to enter the scene that the core were the
foundation elements. And then you chose your major
and you would go into either painting, printmaking, graphic

(11:26):
design. I chose illustration because I
love stories and images and I wanted to make things that had
an audience, so it wasn't just personal expression.
And I, I read a lot of books, graphic novels, magazines and

(11:50):
loved. That's just what I want to do.
I wanted to make images that would be published that would
collaborate with different artists and authors and
journalists. And I also really respected some
journalistic illustrators who would they, they were the

(12:11):
journalists. So they would investigate like
they like the industrial meat packing industry or, you know,
some political intrigue or some social injustice and use
illustration, telling stories with pictures as a way to tell
the story or to reveal what theyhad learned.

(12:33):
And so it was and that I'm trying to answer your question.
So that's where it kind of threaded the needle or brought
together both the craft side, doing things well within a
tradition, and then the freedom side, which was exploring, you

(12:54):
know, a theme or message or a story.
And I have to give credit to Jeff Pike, Professor Jeff Pike.
So he at that time was the head of the illustration department
at Washington University in Saint Louis.
And he emphasized that he he would be giving us assignments,

(13:15):
but it was up to us to execute the final product using whatever
medium we wanted to. So some illustrators, they made
three-dimensional clay like scenes, you know, almost like
stop motion scenes. Others were very painterly, some

(13:37):
were very abstract, didn't matter like.
And so that's where the freedom came in and the collaboration.
And I still carry that today. So jump cut to today.
I've been working as a graphic recorder or visual facilitator.
There are lots of terms to get through and around, but still
making pictures based on people's story or working with a

(14:03):
group that's trying to do something like brainstorming or
ideation or developing a new product.
Late on Friday, I'll be participating in the Houston
Hackathon, in which there'll be about 200 people bringing
different problems that are specific to the city of Houston

(14:23):
into the room and informing teams to develop a product,
service, or solution around thatproblem.
And so I'll be there just as a resource helping to visualize.
It might be the product, it might be the information flow or
how apps and trucks and people and databases all connect.

(14:47):
But for me, it's the same thing that I was doing when I was, you
know, 19 and started studying illustration, which was trying
to understand a story or a system and then use drawings as
a way to understand and communicate that.
I'm curious, how did you discover graphic recording or
visual facilitation as somethingthat you could do?

(15:09):
Well, when you laid the groundwork with, you know, the
studying illustration at school,upon graduation, I was very
fortunate I received the scholarship to travel abroad.
This was 1991, and it was when alot of political changes were
happening in Eastern Europe. So before that period, basically

(15:33):
from after World War 2 until thelate 80s, most of those
countries were under the Soviet influence, the former, you know,
formal version of the empire that included Russia.
And so I was every weekend or sorry, every day, there was

(15:56):
something happening in the news.So I was listening to NPR and
hearing about like the Winza being, you know, he this was an
electrical worker who was part of the Workers Union that formed
a workers movement in Poland that helped to overthrow the

(16:18):
authoritarian communist government at the time.
And now he was being elected president after being in prison.
And the country was under martial law for several years.
And so every week there was a new country that was going
through some form of systems change, big systems change.
And I just knew I wanted to be there.

(16:39):
So that that was that hunger inside of me to be this kind of
investigative journalist, illustrator.
I just wanted to go and see whatwas happening and to, you know,
use my journals and sketchbooks to process that information.
So I ended up getting into a sister city program to teach

(17:00):
English as a second language in Poland.
And so I was working with littlekids, I was working with
doctors, I was working with highschool students, you know, and
my only, and Nick, I was not qualified to be an English
teacher. I was an American who was young

(17:22):
and kind of fun. And so I didn't know what I was
doing, but they did, they wantedconversational English.
So that's at that point you didn't have the Internet, you
didn't have a lot of resources. And parents wanted their kids to
learn English because it was thelanguage of business.

(17:43):
So I was, I did that for a couple of years.
And the program that Saint Louisconnected me to was hosted by
the Foundation in Support of Local Democracy.
And this was a joint American Polish institution or

(18:03):
foundation. And it was basically helping
local municipalities because this this system, this political
system had been very top down, higher hierarchical.
So in order, if people told me that, you know, they're working
in an office and in order to order, excuse me, in order to

(18:27):
get a package of printing paper,they had to go through Warsaw
and have all these things approved in order to buy just a
package of paper, to put it in aprinter.
And so you multiply that times everything.
It was a very centralized communication approval economy,
that sort of thing. Well, then afterwards, kind of

(18:48):
everybody was on their own. So every city, every state or
county was trying to figure out how to keep the lights on, how
to send kids to school, how to attract tourists.
Now, how to rebuild economies, help.
This thing called entrepreneurship happened
because that was a legal thing before the change in government.

(19:13):
So I was just there teaching English, but I was listening to
all these people. I would be in these meetings at
the Foundation and Support of Local Democracy, and they would
have a consultant from, let's say, Sweden or West Germany or
Great Britain or Denmark come into consult about sanitation,

(19:34):
shipping, procurement, distribution of goods, trying to
set up new markets for things like ice cream from Denmark,
stuff that, you know, real simple things like that.
But it was starting from scratchhow to build these systems.
And I'm just listening and doingmy doodles.

(19:54):
And then the heads of the foundation looked over and said,
hey, can we use that? We have a meeting coming up and
this guy's coming in and they'regoing to talk about sanitation.
And can we use your drawing to just tell show them what's going
on? So that is first time I saw that
visual facilitation, graphic reporting was a tool, is a tool

(20:18):
for helping people get stuff done.
So for me, there was a shift from, you know, trying to create
drawings to tell a story to creating a tool with people who
are trying to work on complex systems design or systems
change. And this visual tool accelerated

(20:40):
that work. So that's at the core of all
this is the visual tool helps accelerate the work.
You know, it removes friction and time from people
understanding either a system oran idea or product or service
and, you know, deciding what do we do next, right?

(21:01):
I didn't know that. So I'm just sitting there
drawing. The director said, hey, can we
use the drawings? It wasn't until I moved back to
the United States, to Chicago and was, and I understand your
demographic is young people trying to figure out what to do
with their lives. I did not know what to do with
my life just like my father did not know what he was going to do

(21:23):
with his life after all of his little chapters.
So I'm in Chicago working as a temp making the early stage of
PowerPoints for an insurance company.
And I would felt like a coyote ready to in a trap and just
wanted to chew my leg off because I felt so trapped.

(21:45):
And I was complaining all the time to my temp agent, who was
also my friend. And she said, well, I got this
weird job request. I don't know actually what it
is, but they mentioned drawing in it and you seem to draw quite
a bit. So go check it out.
And it turned out he was workingin an Innovation Center for
Ernst and Young. So this was a a right now, you

(22:10):
know, to say that you work at anInnovation Center, I think
people understand that because they're a lot more popular.
But in 1994, five, it was prettyweird.
So this Innovation Center just had tons of white walls, lots of
materials for leading and creating collaborative design

(22:30):
events. And this was early in the days
of when design thinking was starting to come into the
vocabulary of of different industries.
And this particular part of Ernst and Young was focused on
basically consulting with large brands like Fortune 50 companies

(22:55):
who had purchased SAP to help them with all their procurement
distribution systems. And this is once again mid 90s.
So the software was super clunkyand super janky, and you had to
install them with eight different CDs and have big
manuals. And so they had these

(23:16):
collaborative design events to understand, well, what are you
trying to do, Coca-Cola or what are you trying to do AT&T or
Walgreens, you know, whatever big company they're working
with. And they had people like me.
I was not the first. I was just a lackey, you know,
coming in. But they had graphic recorders
there who were drawing and diagramming all these different

(23:40):
ideas and systems out on the wall to use as a tool to help
people communicate and understand complex ideas, move
the friction, decide what they're going to do next.
So that, my friend, is how I discovered this whole, you know,
little career path. And that was 1995.

(24:04):
So I've been doing that ever since all.
Right. Where'd you go from there?
After the after the temp job with Ernst and Young.
Well, that was I, I was very, very lucky.
People were very tolerant because I was in my 20s.
So I was doing things that people in their 20s do outside

(24:25):
of work and coming in a little tired the next day.
And so, but it was a great collaborative team.
It was a network and a combination of people who were
full time and Ernst and Young consultants, MBAs, you know, web
designers and technologists, andthen this network that was

(24:48):
growing. And I happened to join right as
they had the first Innovation Center in Chicago and they
started to build these all around the world.
So I was fortunate to be on the team that they would say, hey,
Peter, join these five other people and you're going to

(25:09):
London because we opened a new center.
You're going to teach them just how we do things.
Not just the drawing part, but how to fist the back of the
house facilitation part. So there's kind of front of the
house where there's dude or woman up there who's pointing
and gesturing and telling peoplewhat to do.

(25:30):
But then there's a team in the back that's listening, that's
preparing the next set of exercises, that's doing research
based on what they said or heard.
That is maintaining the environment, printing,
publishing, photographing things, creating notes, all
these things that the AI note takers are now tantalizing.

(25:54):
We had humans that had to go andwrite stuff down.
And so there was the facilitation team and the people
that tended to get it were people like theater kids, people
that have worked in restaurants,teachers, former military,

(26:16):
anybody who was in a context where they were on a team in a
that had a process. And it's a chaotic environment.
So you you have to be, there's alevel of situational awareness
to borrow, borrow a military term.
But it's like, Nick, have you ever worked in a restaurant?

(26:39):
Yeah, actually, yeah. OK, You have to walk into a room
and quickly scan and get a senseof how things are going, right?
Is that table waiting too long and getting fidgety?
Did these people just come in? You know, did somebody call out
sick? So that means that the team
that's there has to cover a lot of different parts of a

(27:02):
different job, you know, is there a big wedding party that's
coming in in two hours? And so you have to flip the
whole, you know. So my point is the people that
had a lot of challenges going into this world of real time
collaborative design environments were the ones that

(27:23):
needed a lot of clarity and a lot of direction and a lot of
status. Because that was another problem
is we'd have this team and we'd be working 12 to 18 hours for
these pretty massive events, like 3 days, 100 participants, a
lot of things being produced in real time.

(27:47):
And we'd get, you know, a young,earnest accountant, maybe
somebody who just got their MBA and the the lead, we call them
sponsors. So it's the lead accounting team
would say, hey, Chad is going tobe on your team.
He's just going to observe and, you know, just find stuff to do.

(28:08):
And Chad would freak out becausehe like, he's like, I have an
MBA and I'm very important. And I don't want to be bussing
tables and cleaning up papers and handing out assignments
because I'm important. We'd have to haze Chad and break
him in a little bit. This is part of it.

(28:29):
Like if you want to be a leader,this is part of it.
You have to understand the system and how it all works.
So they wisely began to realize,even if they had, let's say a
new managing director come in, who is going to run one of these
innovation centers in Mumbai or Germany, Munich, Germany or

(28:55):
Sydney, Australia, they had to start at the bottom.
So they had to start handing outassignments, bussing tables,
doing the quote grunt work in order to really appreciate all
the work that goes into making the system effective.
Because if they just started at the top front of the room giving

(29:17):
orders and didn't understand howthe restaurant worked, use that
metaphor, then they would flame out, you know, the, the team
wouldn't respond to them. They would start making demands
that were unrealistic or destructive.
So I don't even know what your original question was, but this

(29:37):
is where I went, you know, starting to being one of the,
and this was only within a couple of years, you know,
because I was doing a lot of events to being one of the
coaches and teachers, you know, bringing in new people.
And so jump cut to today. That's one of my roles and

(29:58):
passions is we have a large international network of
facilitators, graphic recorders,they're called solution
designers. So people who work with a client
to figure out what are you trying to do and then help them
design events and a process for bringing people together to

(30:23):
design something pretty complex that involves a lot of
stakeholders. So the solution designer feels
invisible because they are not from the room.
They're not somebody like me that's up there drawing or
facilitating, but they're reallyessential because they're like
the the the showrunner or the stage manager of a movie or a

(30:47):
play. You know, they're figuring out
all the pieces that need to fit together and who needs to be on
the training team. So anyway, there's this network
around the world that has been apart of these different
collaborative innovation Centersfor Ernst Young, Cap Gemini,

(31:08):
Price Waterhouse, Coopers, KPMG,you know, all kind of the big
consulting firms and then smaller companies that are more
boutique and may work with tribal communities or municipal
governments or, you know, pick your domain, but applying the
same collaborative design process to solve problems in

(31:32):
designing solutions in those domains.
So we have this network around the world, and I and some other
of my colleagues as volunteers, we help manage the learning
community and host conversationsto look at different aspects and
models and philosophies around making it a healthy system for

(31:54):
people to work together. Sure, there you go.
Plus I had some kids, I got a dog, whole bunch of other stuff
there. OK.
OK, very nice. So I'm wondering now, so a
little bit as well before and kind of around your stint with

(32:15):
EY and then also now into currently you mentioned at the
beginning your company Alpha Chimp, how did that start?
Now their short question with long answer, but the I've
already planted the seeds. So when I was in Poland, that's
where I was teaching English andI was gallivanting around
hitchhiking all around Eastern Europe into the former Soviet

(32:37):
Union, Crimea, all all that area.
I randomly got a job at the first Nationwide Rocks station,
radio station Poland MFFM and they basically wanted some goofy
Americans to host a show and be goofy Americans.

(33:00):
And the guy I asked to be my partner was not a goofy
American. John Finns, very serious, very
well educated man, spoke 3 languages.
He wanted it to be more of a NPRFresh Air kind of show.
The managers of the radio station were like, no, we just

(33:21):
want you to be stupid Americans.So I was perfect for that.
And so if we would make up little radio plays in in Polish
and English like Star Wars, but in bad Polish American mash up
playing, that was called Monkey Business.
So when I was in Chicago and I was working in ertz neon and

(33:45):
there was a point was like, you know what, I think I want to
start my own thing. I got a Commission to do a
poster for a big conference and they were going to pit print
10,000 copies. And I was like, this is my
opportunity to put my name and aURL.
So the URL existed before the business and we were just, this

(34:09):
is once again back in the early 90s.
We were back there trying to find at a.com name in the 1990's
the Internet was pretty much sports stocks and pornography.
So every like URL that I typed in, it was like a porn name.

(34:31):
So monkey business porn site. I was like well my nickname is
Sneaky Pete, Sneaky pete.com. And so we were just like
brainstorming and my friend Andrew Park, who is an amazing
artist and the creator of the RSA animates from he's from
England, we had studied in Polish in Poland together and he

(34:52):
was visiting in Chicago. And he's actually the one that
thought up Alpha Chimp. So alphachimp.com existed before
the company Alpha Chimp, but I wanted a name that could lean
any direction and be anything so.
And I did not want to be mistaken for somebody who

(35:16):
actually knew how to do stuff. So I didn't want to be, you
know, the Rand consultants or something like that.
In fact, we at a certain point we had a bunch of old guys that
we wrangled into being our advisors and they said you got
to change your name. It sounds too silly.

(35:37):
It's like, well, what about Google and Yahoo?
Those are ridiculous names, you know, should we call it Duran
Duran Consulting? You're like, that's not great.
It's like I think Duran Duran's already ticking alpha. chimp.com
started that way. It started out as a poster URL
on a poster, but has been aroundsince 1998 and has done has

(36:02):
stayed in that zone. Actually, in this interview, I
figured out from rambling to you, it all goes back to that
first class and illustration. It's just like, it's what I want
to do, work with people, understand their story, make an
image that helps communicate it.And so it's been a fun ride all.

(36:27):
Right, that's awesome. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm really
happy that you kind of, you know, connected it, tied it back
a little bit and that you're kind of, you're gaining things
from this as well almost, you know, I think that's really
nice. So that's great.
Can I add something else and this is advice for young people?
So I have a 21 year old who's a senior in in college and

(36:48):
university and I still wake up every day and I feel like I'm 21
years old and things are just getting started and I don't know
actually what I'm doing in my life.
And the advice that I gave her based on just my experience and
my father's experience as well, is everybody's going to ask you

(37:09):
what do you want to do after school?
You don't have to tell them because you don't know what
you're going to do after school.And you don't have to have an
answer because that's not the point.
The for me, the point of education is not to become a
specialized person in an industry, especially now they're

(37:30):
the industries are all disrupted.
It's to be an interesting personand to be a person who's
interested in a lot of differentthings and, and pursue them even
when the path is not clear. And then to have a lot of
friends who do a lot of different things that you can
call on to bring in for advice or to commiserate or to, to hear

(37:57):
how they're solving their problem.
Like that's the best thing aboutgoing to school and being young
is to explore and to explore in parallel with others who are
exploring. So the one of the pieces of
advice I gave my daughter when she was going off, she, she
originally was going to study engineering and the first day of

(38:21):
orientation in the engineering school, she just kind of looked
around and she's like, I don't really think I'm an engineer.
And she realized she did not invested.
I, I, this is my interpretation.She may have a, you know, a
different way that she would describe her experience, but
from my perspective, she had thethought of being an engineer,

(38:43):
but she wasn't deeply experienced in robotics,
programming, building rockets, engineering type stuff as a kid.
And she was in the room with allthose kids who had, you know,
they already had the 10,000 hours of being really interested

(39:06):
in deep making and designing of,of hardwired things.
So she went across street to thethe science school and is
majoring in biology. Ended up spending 2 summers in
the jungles of the Caribbean looking for lizards as a paid
researcher, trying to find thesecreatures that don't want to be

(39:28):
found and doing the grunt work of science.
Similar to you know, I was describing the grunt work of the
collaborative design. Grunt work of science is is
pretty gnarly. You got to pack everything in,
you got to live in a tent, you got a grid off a section of
jungle and then go and find living animals.

(39:51):
They want to don't want to be caught.
You got to do it safely for them, for you.
So she didn't that wasn't ever on the the To Do List.
It just like that's where she ended up going in in her career.
So and she has lots of friends and you do too.

(40:14):
We're doing a lot of different things.
And that's the best is like hearing what people are doing
and what twists and turns there are coming up on their path.
But where were the points where they thought this was the
direction? And then a door closes or they
get burned out. They're like, I don't think I
want to be an engineer, you know, or a doctor or computer

(40:37):
program or pick your topic. And then they have to pivot and
jump off a Cliff into uncertainty.
Those that is the hero's adventure.
Those are the moments you're you're like entering into
unfamiliar territory. Yeah.

(40:57):
All right. Thank you for sharing that.
Appreciate that. And I mean, I as well, I'm at
that point where I'm a junior inengineering.
So that that resonates with me alot as well.
And I know that will resonate with a lot of our listeners.
So thank you for that. OK, so my next question for you,
I'm wondering about your processof growing alpha chimp into what

(41:19):
it is today. It started with URL.
I'm assuming it's not just URL at this point.
Sometimes. I'm curious, what were some of
the, you know, the, the trials and tribulations of kind of
getting your own thing off the ground and what were some of the
key steps along the way? Well, the so Alpha chimp has
gone through many, I'm going to borrow a term from biology,

(41:42):
morphologies, which means how something looks.
So it's I started as an independent working with
friends. Today I'm an independent working
with friends, you know, on different collaborations,
projects in between that have gone through a lot of different

(42:03):
stages. So at one point got married to
my girlfriend who was one of my friends working in the company.
And so we ran the company together as a partnership for 12
years. In in that phase, it would rise
and fall. So sometimes we'd have

(42:24):
employees, sometimes we'd have to lay employees off.
We'd have a gas space location in one city.
And then something happened, or we made a decision.
We moved to another city, or we'd scale up too fast or, you
know, so, or we'd outgrow a space, you know, we'd say, OK,

(42:46):
we're going to go small again. We'd get small again.
Then suddenly we'd have a lot ofprojects and we're bringing in
interns and employees and virtual assistants.
And then it gets really big. So it's gone through a lot of
morphologies and probably at thelargest and by what I put that
in air quotes, the largest, it was 11 full time people, which

(43:09):
is for small businesses. That's one of those inflection
points. I think 12 is one of the
scientific. You're the engineer, you know,
like when you have a network andwhen you hit 12, something
happens. There's a step change in the
system. So at that 1112 mark for me as a

(43:32):
as the lead project deliverer, as the lead partner with my wife
at the time, and as the businessperson who had never gone to
Business School, you know, it was a lot.
And then we had younger employees, they had young
families, they were having babies, feeling of

(43:52):
responsibility. And then a lot of blurring of
work, relationships and friendships.
There was a time where things needed to change financially,
but I didn't want to fire anybody because I care about
them and I enjoy them and I careabout their spouses and their
kids. And we're all kind of one big

(44:14):
mosh kid of of friends and family.
So if there was that stage, thatkind of messy middle stage, and
then unfortunately the marriage did not survive, not because of
the business, just because of us.
Two people get married, two people decide not to get
married. So the marriage ended and there

(44:35):
were geographic changes involved, but also in the that
middle part, I formed a partnership with a friend and
they were in another country. I was in the United States, and
we started to scale up the whiteboard video business.

(44:58):
You know, the hand comes in start, there's a voice over,
they start writing. It was all done like this.
You know, there's a camera and lights and trying to Draw
Something in slow motion, storyboarding, everything else.
So that really that credit goes to Andrew Park.
He's the guy that really he named Alpha Chimp and then he's

(45:19):
the pioneer of that whole business.
So he brought me in to try to grow the US business, which we
did. So there was a partnership just
focused on that for a good solidyear.
And then we decided, you know, this, this isn't working.

(45:40):
Two different countries trying to figure out who's doing what
and who, where the money's goingand what people are involved.
But we continued making those films as well.
The whiteboard explainers full time for another couple of
years, not doing graphic recording.
So within Alpha Channel, the focus, the business focus and

(46:04):
product services shifted. And then for what grew out of
that is I, I my true love is teaching is working with people
and seeing the lights coming on and excitement.
And so for several years I was just teaching online and
teaching workshops in person. So all of this to say, you know,

(46:28):
the, the business was always alpha jump from that first URL
to today, but the focus of activities has shifted over
time. And also right now we're in a
huge period of excitement and disruption with AII really wish
that AI would do my laundry and my dishes, but instead it's

(46:52):
helping people generate images, right?
And now video with, with VO3, like it's really incredible.
You can just type in a couple ofprompts, you get a script and
then you get a full 3 dimensional video.
So all of that is is really disrupting the business model
for creatives that are focused on telling stories with with

(47:15):
pictures. So we're me being my friends.
We're all trying to figure out, well, what's our role now?
You know what, we're not going to give up because people still
need help telling stories visually.
There are all these new tools that enable people to make
things quickly and there's a lotof, you know, it's not so good

(47:36):
stuff out there. So it's, but this has been the
history of technology and, and art and, and production and
printing and animation forever is new technologies come in,
there's a very disruptive period.
And then people figure out, well, how do we use this
disruption in a positive way? And so we're, I personally and

(47:59):
our, my friends, you know, we'reall trying to figure out how to
ride this next wave and still dowhat we like to do.
Yeah. Do you have any idea of what
that's going to look like yet orany thoughts?
I know it's a heavy. Question Every morning it was
like what am I doing today? How's it going to go?
I don't know. Yeah, it's, well, the since I

(48:24):
mentioned I was born in Kenya, Idid not grow up there.
When I was a infant, we moved back to the United States, but
I've been back to East Africa several times.
And when I noticed in a place like Kenya is you have 10,000
years of human tools all stackedup together.
So in one day you can drive thisdirection and you'll see you

(48:50):
like a Maasai. She herd her kid who's 8 years
old and he's just out in the desert basically with a couple
of goats or sheep. He's got a stick and a piece of
cloth and that's it. And his older brother or dad may
walk by and he's got, you know, a stick or a spear.

(49:14):
He's got a piece of cloth. He's got an Apple Watch on.
So it's just like it is 10,000 years of technology all stacked
together and this is the top of the stack now.
So we've got AI and all AI is such a broad field.
I mean you, you are probably living in this and creating

(49:36):
things right now. It's just it's 2 letters.
That means like a a gabillion different technologies that are
all being vented right now. And that's on top of everything
else. So why did I say that?
I'm still being asked by people,hey, can you show up at our
meeting and just, you know, drawon paper while we talk, which is

(49:56):
a very old way of working. And for them, it's very useful.
Like that's it, you know, now wecan take that and make
decisions. So there's, there's still the
need for humans to work with humans and there's all this
automation, machine learning algorithms, prompts inspired 3

(50:19):
dimensional videos of the Sasquatch vlog, which is one of
the rabbit holes up. Maybe you shouldn't go down to
down, but I've gone down on YouTube.
It's, yeah, it's how to use thatwell, 'cause they there's still
the design process of what are we trying to do and who are we

(50:42):
trying to do it for and what is the ecosystem or the economic
environment in which that product or service is going to,
you know, try to survive. And those are hard questions for
everybody to answer right now. Yeah.
All right. And then the first question is,

(51:03):
how do we pay for it? Yeah, yeah.
Do you mind if I pivot to something a little away from AI?
All right, I'm curious. So you have been working as well
as an adjunct law professor at Northwestern.
I am very very curious what you do and how you got that and why.

(51:24):
Well, I'm embarrassed on how I got it, but all the best things
in life happen when you least expect it.
So I was creating a very large mural at in Orlando, FL at a
giant Conference Center for the health information and

(51:46):
technology conference. So these are all the, the, the
engineers in the healthcare world that are working with,
with data. And I'm making this big mural.
And a woman walked out to ask mewhat I was doing.
Chit chat, chit chat. I was in Chicago at the time.
She was in the Chicago and she said, I have this incubator,

(52:07):
business incubator. And this is a good lesson.
So it's not about what happened to me, it's what could happen to
you. So business incubator and we
have a lunch and learn every Thursday.
Would you be interested in maybetalking for 30 minutes?
I was like, all right, you know,it's free, got a free lunch.
So I showed up. I talked about visual learning,

(52:27):
graphic recording. I had worked in healthcare for
quite a while. And so just, you know, spoke and
there was somebody there whose whose eyes lit up and said the
head of our program would love this Leslie.
And so he connected me with Leslie Oster, who is the head of

(52:50):
the Masters of Science in Law program at the Northwestern
Pritzker School of Law. And this is a one year graduate
program at the end of which you don't go and practice law.
It's not AJD, but it is for, let's say somebody like you or

(53:11):
your peers who maybe they are inengineering or product design,
they realize I'm going to be moving into life sciences and I
need to get smart about the FDA approval process, contract law,
you know, working with patients,anything that affects that

(53:34):
middle part of business science and law.
Because it was, it was a missingpiece of, of knowledge and
qualification. So that's why they created the,
the program. So my, my role.
And after talking with Leslie a couple of times, she said, yeah,
we'll come in and teach a course.
So I'm a professor, but I have to like diminish my

(53:55):
professorship down to this bottom line because, you know,
some of my peers, they're they, they are, they are law
professors. So they have invested hundreds
of thousands of dollars, hundreds of of thousands of
hours in the study of law. I'm teaching the same thing I've
been doing since that age of 19 in the first illustration class.

(54:19):
How to understand complex systems.
What are some different visual tools to use to communicate how
to tell stories and how to do that well for your audience?
So I teach a class once a year and it's it's basically that.
It's visual storytelling for systems change.

(54:44):
Yep, that's it. And and I have major imposter
syndrome every time I enter thatvenerable building.
You know, I wonder if those law professors kind of like the
story you were talking about when you were invited for that
local newspaper and the people around you were saying, man, I
could never do what you're doing.
I wonder if they feel the same way, those law professors.

(55:05):
That's thank. I'd never thought about that.
But that is a theme, isn't it? Yes, yeah.
And it's. And I start off my presentation
every year with a picture like this of my father, who's drawing
in a chalkboard in Malawi in 1965 as he is teaching law in a

(55:30):
school in Malawi. So, you know, I, I try to tie it
back and that's, and I, I try toacknowledge my ancestors and my
teachers as well as like, I didn't invent any of this.
I'm just a practitioner. You know, when I pick this up
from all these different places and when I teach, I tell them

(55:51):
I'm going to dump out so much stuff.
It's going to be like a big floor covered with Lego pieces.
And it's up to you to build something awesome, you know?
But all right. So I wanted then I want to go
back to the advice portion of this.
Normally I like to save it to the end, but I love how you did
it where we threw it right in the middle.
So I want to ask if you have some advice for someone who's

(56:14):
looking to start an independent firm similar to what you did,
whether it's creative or not, just doing their own thing.
Well, get ready. That's what I would say.
From what I've seen, there are different constitutions in like
internal constitutions. So I grew up in an
entrepreneurial family. My parents ran their own small

(56:36):
construction firm. My father was a, you know,
partner in a small law firm. My grandfather had a cement
business, and I ran as far away as I could from that saying I
never want to go into business and I definitely didn't want to
go into law. And here I am running my own
business and teaching in a law firm.

(56:57):
So there is something that's internal, you know, and a lot of
that is. So this is my advice.
If you feel that tension where you're just like this thing
needs to get made and nobody's making it and the people I'm
working for don't get it, you know, that's a signal you may be
kind of built to be an entrepreneur.

(57:19):
The second thing is it's so mucheasier now not it's not easier
in terms of making it successfulor money, but in terms of tools,
access to information. You know, there's so many
incubators and Co working spacesand mentor programs.
So to find advice is I think a lot easier.

(57:41):
The flip side of that is the volume of advice.
So you know, you can receive allthe advice in the world.
In the end, if you are the entrepreneur or a partner in a
startup, you guys, you know, youand your team are the ones that
still have to make a decision onhow to go forward.
And then the third thing is, andthis is something my mother

(58:04):
always said, So before I went off to college, we were eating
at a like a chicken restaurant, and we were talking about the
dangers of hardcore drugs. And my mother got very intense.
And I thought she was going to say, you know, I was like, I was
ready for the lectures, like, don't do drugs.
But she said whatever happens, ever you do in a strong business

(58:30):
background because she was not in a business and having all
those problems. And I fell out of my chair
laughing because like, I'm nevergoing to spend business.
I'm going to art school. I really wish I'd gotten a
little more business background.Fortunately, my mother having
run her own company for a while,she's been an advisor and I have

(58:52):
other friends. So.
So find your peer group that is not invested in what you're
doing so you can you can find your blind spots.
That's where I'm going with thisis a lot of times in like in
engineering, software development, product
development, creative services, we love to do the thing, but we

(59:17):
have all these blind spots abouthow do you actually hire people?
What is the law around what you're actually doing?
What is a contract and what doesit mean?
You know, so there's all this stuff that we just didn't learn
because we haven't learned it yet.
And we're focused on the, the, let's say, the technical or the

(59:39):
craft side of the thing that we want to build.
So that's where having peers andyou know, let's call them older
mentors who have lived through some stuff.
I think even the older mentors, they live through stuff in their
era, which is different from theera today that you're in.
So that that's the hard thing isit's still up to you.

(01:00:02):
You know, you're still going to be the person making a good or
bad decision and you and you really don't know what is, if
it's going to be a good or bad decision till a little later.
The final thing I'll throw out there that I learned from
hanging around AWS. Amazon Web Services is they have
a, a couple of, or they have a lot of internal mythology and

(01:00:27):
models and sayings that they share among their teams.
And one of them is which kind ofdoor is it?
So there's a door. You have a choice, you know, are
you going to get married? Are you going to go into
partnership with this person? Are you going to drop out of
school and start your business? And, and that's a door.
So you're going to go through this door and you ask yourself,
what kind of door is this? Is it a two way door?

(01:00:50):
Like if I make this decision, let's say to drop out of school
and start up tech start up, can I go back to school?
Can I say, well, that didn't work in in reverse?
Or is it a one way thing? Like after I do this, you know,
I just got to keep going until Ifind the next door or or the
next opportunity because some things, most things imply for

(01:01:14):
two way you can try it didn't work.
OK, maybe you lost time, you lost some money, maybe you lost
a friendship or relationship. You're still alive, you're still
alive. You can, you know, reboot.
But some things may be a one waydoor where after which you're,
you know, you got to keep going all.

(01:01:35):
Right. Is that helpful?
It's very helpful, very helpful.Thank you.
And I have one more question foryou as well.
What about advice for someone who wants to start a creative
career? Well, that so my daughter who
was going to engineering school,went to biology, is majoring in
biology now. She her first job is as an

(01:01:57):
illustrator and she has a motherand a father who both have done
this for their whole careers. So, you know, we can't tell her
she can't do this and she's going to, she's started doing
that. She's still in school, but she's
getting paid to do that. So the we are humans and we are
naturally creative. So that's not going to go away.

(01:02:20):
But creative business, two different things.
So for creative business, you know, go for it if you want to,
if you want to start a business,but know what business means and
what does business mean today and run things as cheaply as
possible. So one of the, and I right after

(01:02:44):
this, I'm talking to a friend ofmine that we met in a business
boot camp for creatives through Chris Doe is we, we acknowledge
that here's a trap a lot of creatives fall into.
They start, they get their firstclients, their first, they get a
little bit of money, they get busy and they like I need to

(01:03:08):
hire somebody. They hire somebody either part
time, virtually in person and they're like, I need a cool
space. So then they get a sign, a lease
on that loft space. And then they have to buy a cool
chair, Then they have to buy a cool desk and then a cool desk
set up and then some lining and then some fancy plants.

(01:03:29):
So there's like a metabolism that starts to grow, especially
in the design and creative spacewhere there's an identity around
space and the things that signalthis is a creative business.
And that metabolism can become very expensive.
So that's and sometimes you needit.

(01:03:52):
So if you want to attract other creatives, they and you want
them to show up in your space, they're going to have
expectations, but make those choices wisely so that you don't
create an overhead, the metabolism.
Like if it's your body, you need6000 calories a day, but you can

(01:04:14):
only eat 2000 calories a day. You know, there's, there's going
to be a differential. So that's the business part of
it is just like if you're going to be creating something, you're
creating it for somebody who's going to pay for it.
And when they pay you, do you have enough left at the end of
the month after you've paid for the cool space and the cool

(01:04:37):
people and the cool air on chairs?
Or are you going into debt? It's the same thing as any other
business, you know, is understanding the metabolism of
the business and what's requiredand then trying to keep things
as flexible as possible. So like working in a Co working.

(01:04:59):
And I feel like things that I'm saying are very well known
today, they weren't as availableas, you know, a decade ago or
two decades ago. You know, working virtually is
no big deal now. We're getting Co working spaces,
no big deal now. So keep it light, light and
smooth and easy so that you can concentrate on the creative

(01:05:23):
business or the creative part, because the creative technology
tools, ways of getting things done.
There's a, there's a steep on ramp now and it's all being
disrupted. So you need to keep very fast
and flexible and not have the business part take up so much of

(01:05:45):
your bandwidth and your brain power and your pocketbook all.
Right. Thank you for sharing that.
This has been an incredible conversation.
I don't know about you, but I'vehad a lot of fun.
So thank you very much for for joining me today.
Is there anything else that you'd like to share or promote
or anything like that? Found piece of advice, plug your
business anything before we go. Well, you want to make something

(01:06:08):
creative, higher creative, Thereyou go.
Don't just be lazy with ChatGPT.I'm tired of seeing all that
slop out there. The other thing is for you and
for all young entrepreneurs out there is take care of your
health. Keep moving physically, keep
connected with friends. If you're, if you're having

(01:06:31):
trouble now, the troubles are not going to go away unless you
take care of them. So take take care of them with
other people. That's my advice.
Like find good people that you can talk to.
Thank you Peter, like I said this has been a lot of fun.
Have a great rest of your day. Thank you, Nick.
I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you have any thoughts,
feedback, or just want to say hi, shoot me an e-mail at

(01:06:53):
nickreroutedpod.com. If you like the show, leave a
review, give us a follow and subscribe.
You can find links to our website and socials in the
description below. I'm looking forward to seeing
you next week.