June 8, 2025 • 32 mins
Segment 1 starts at 0:00 with Julia Austin.
When I was an angel investor, people always used to say to me that "I have a great idea for a business, what do you think?" I would reply- "I have no idea" Successful businesses are not about ideas- they are about the execution of that idea.
Julia Austin is a seasoned operator who has served in leadership roles at several technology startups. She is on the faculty at Harvard Business School and is faculty cochair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. As a certified executive coach, Austin works exclusively with startup founders. She is an angel investor, serves on startup boards, and advises many founders through her work with several accelerators. Her new book is "After the IDEA: What It Really Takes to Create and Scale a Startup".
Segment 2 starts at 18:19 with Chris Berdik.
I have always been very sensitive to loud noise in my work and personal environment- what effect does noise have on a person’s ability to be productive or just relax?
Chris Berdik is a journalist who writes about science, health, technology, and education, including two books, - the latest is "Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World--And How We Can Take It Back". Previously, he was a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly, a research editor at the investigative-journalism magazine, Mother Jones, and a senior writer covering science and medicine for Boston University's daily news website and alumni magazine, Bostonia
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-small-business-radio-show--3306444/support.
When I was an angel investor, people always used to say to me that "I have a great idea for a business, what do you think?" I would reply- "I have no idea" Successful businesses are not about ideas- they are about the execution of that idea.
Julia Austin is a seasoned operator who has served in leadership roles at several technology startups. She is on the faculty at Harvard Business School and is faculty cochair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. As a certified executive coach, Austin works exclusively with startup founders. She is an angel investor, serves on startup boards, and advises many founders through her work with several accelerators. Her new book is "After the IDEA: What It Really Takes to Create and Scale a Startup".
Segment 2 starts at 18:19 with Chris Berdik.
I have always been very sensitive to loud noise in my work and personal environment- what effect does noise have on a person’s ability to be productive or just relax?
Chris Berdik is a journalist who writes about science, health, technology, and education, including two books, - the latest is "Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World--And How We Can Take It Back". Previously, he was a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly, a research editor at the investigative-journalism magazine, Mother Jones, and a senior writer covering science and medicine for Boston University's daily news website and alumni magazine, Bostonia
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-small-business-radio-show--3306444/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Getting ready for all the craziness of small business. It's
exactly that craziness that makes it exciting and totally unbelievable.
Small Business Radio is now on the air with your host,
Barry Moultz.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Well, thanks for joining this week's radio show.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Remember this is the final word in small business. For
those keeping track, this is show number eight hundred and
thirty four. You know, it's interesting, when I was an
angel investor, people always just to say to me, Hey, Barry,
I've got a great idea for a business. What do
you think And I would always reply, I have absolutely
no idea, because successful businesses are not about the idea,
(00:45):
They're really about the execution of that idea.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
My next guest.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Talks exactly about this idea in our first book. Julia
Austen is a season operator as served in leadership roles
at several tech startups. She's on the faculty at Harvard
Business School is faculty co chair of the Arthur Rock
Center for Entrepreneurship. She's an Angel investor, serves on startup
boards and advisors many founders through her work with several accelerators.
(01:11):
She's got a great new book out. It's called After
the idea, What it really takes to create and scale
a startup.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Julia, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Do you get that question a lot? What do you
think of my idea?
Speaker 4 (01:24):
Oh? Yes, all the time.
Speaker 5 (01:26):
In addition to the I asked a bunch of people
and they thought it was a great idea.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
And so how do you respond with people say I've
got a great idea, what do you think?
Speaker 5 (01:36):
Very similar to you, Barry, it's a that's great, But
you still have to build an entire company around that idea,
and you have to really validate that the problem really
exists and who has that problem?
Speaker 3 (01:47):
So what's the first thing you should really do? I mean,
should you write a business plan? Should you go out
to consumers, should you sell something right away, have some
minimal viable products.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Should you find other people that want to go on
this trip with you?
Speaker 4 (02:01):
Oh gosh, such a good question.
Speaker 5 (02:02):
So I think the very first thing you need to
do is identify the assumptions that you're making and validate
those assumptions. And so I am a big fan of
moving slow to go fast, so proper discovery work and
understanding that problem at a very intimate level. Anybody can
build software if it's a tech company, but even for
(02:23):
a CpG and a consumer product, trying to go too
fast to get something out there to test without really
deeply understanding the problem you're trying to solve as a mistake.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
So and that yeah, go.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
No, go ahead.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
So and that isn't just interviewing, which I find a
lot of aspiring entrepreneurs feel just talking to people is enough,
and that's.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
A big mistake.
Speaker 5 (02:47):
Rolling up your sleeves, getting into the muck and really
understanding how a problem manifests is as important as the interview.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Well, that's that's what I was going to ask you.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
How do you validate the assumptions because a lot of
people go out and they do surveys and ask people
what they think would they and people say yeah, yeah, yeah,
But when it comes down to it, a lot of
people don't buy it.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Right.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
It's different saying yeah, I'm going to buy it in
a survey versus actually putting your money down.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
So how do you validate these things?
Speaker 4 (03:12):
Yeah, one hundred percent.
Speaker 5 (03:13):
What you're really doing in those cases, like surveys and
interviews is validating interest and maybe there's a potential problem
out there, and you may also be assessing who these
people are right demographically, especially, A lot of founders build
things that our problem they themselves are suffering from, but
the bigger pool of potential customers might not.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
Be them exactly.
Speaker 5 (03:33):
So I think what's important to do is to develop
experiments where you start to test the assumptions that you're making,
for example, doing a very manual process and being part
of the solution yourself, versus doing mock ups and having
people walk through those.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
And imagining that that might be what they use.
Speaker 5 (03:55):
So the more you can embed yourself in the problem
or do ethnographic research, which involves observing people in their
habitats doing the things.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
And that's not just consumers but even businesses.
Speaker 5 (04:06):
If you're building a sales to tool, for example, you
might want to actually follow around a salesperson or be
on sales calls with them and understand what's really happening
them in their customers or how they're logging things in
the DRM before you go and start to build something
for them.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
You know, for me, whenever I was evaluating, I had
an angel group for about five years in the early
two thousands in Chicago, and the question I always asked
you was tell me the pain you solve, and who
do you solve it for? And the who has to
include who can pay for it? Right, because I think
so many people develop nice to haves, not got to haves.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
And we know that.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
People definitely pay pay more for painkillers than they do.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
For vitamins, for sure.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
For sure, and I struggle with the willingness to pay
too early in the cycle, which I think a lot
of founders tend to do is just tell me if
you would pay for this, or they get a false
positive when one unique customer decides they'll pay for it
because it's a big problem for them, doesn't necessarily mean
that everybody's going to pay for it or how much
(05:10):
they're going to pay for it. But to your point,
when you actually identify the pain, the problem that they're
trying to solve, the big test of success is they're saying,
how much can I pay you for this so that
you can keep this going or build your startup?
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Because man, this is really important to me.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
How big an issue do you find that a lot
of entrepreneurs try to.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
When they have a certain solution, they try to go
too broad.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
In other words, they don't identify the exact avatar the
target customer that would want to buy this.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
Yeah, so you can end up with a very diffuse
product if you try to solve for too many customers,
or you can do something I talk about in my
book is peanut buttering, which is trying to spread everything
around thick and messy I love it, and not really
focused and targeted on what your business is going to be.
So it can be a real struggle for entrepreneurs when
(05:59):
they're not really sure what's the right thing to do,
and they try to do everything, and then they can't
understand why they're not getting any tractions because they're not
really building anything focused and clear addressing a particular audience.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
And that can take time.
Speaker 5 (06:11):
That goes back to moving slow to move fast, when
we really take a moment to take a step back
and say, who are the possible users of our product,
how will they use it, how.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
Painful is it for them?
Speaker 5 (06:22):
And what are the ones that are really rising to
the surface that we want to focus on first. And
then the second element of that is time boxing.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
Those experiments and learnings.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
To say what will they have to be doing with
us over what period of time for us to say, well,
there's it, they're there, or let's just cut bait and
move to the next one and try to see if
that's there's a better audience there or a bigger pain
point there versus trying to do all of them at once.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
But go ahead.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
No, No, I'm just saying I'm talking to Julie Austin.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
She is Julie Austin.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
She's the author of a new book called After the Idea,
What it really.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Takes to create and scale a startup.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
My wife always asked me this when I was Angel
vest She says, well, you know, do you know that
which ones are going to be successful and the ones
that aren't going to be successful financially?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And I go, no, I really don't. I have hopes,
but I was not very good at predicting. What about you?
Speaker 5 (07:11):
Yeah, So I am founder first when it comes to
making any kind of investments as an angel investor, and
what I'm looking for first is resiliency, humility.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
People who are willing to take feedback.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
They don't have to listen to my feedback or others' feedback,
but that they're willing to take it and process it
and even communicate back why they aren't going a certain
way or why they are That comes before the idea
itself for me, because they really have to have the integrity.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
And fortitude to do this journey.
Speaker 5 (07:40):
So I see a lot of people want to do
something quick with a quick exit and not really understanding
everything that goes into running a business. It's not just
the idea, it's the whole business around it.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
So I'm looking for that first, who are they as
human beings?
Speaker 5 (07:53):
And then from there, the very next important thing for
me is really understanding the discovery work they've done. How
well do they know their potential audience, how much thought
have they put into the problem, how much focus are
they putting into really experimenting and understanding what they're going
to build.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
And then the last part is their true north. So
early stages, they.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
Have no idea where they're going to go, and I
think great investors appreciate and understand that in the early
stages that there'll be a lot of shifts and pivots,
but they at least have a sense of the impact
they're going to make. They're trying to solve a big problem,
and maybe they're doing baby steps to get there.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
But they know what direction, at least for now. They're
heading in and they can articulate that clearly.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Well, the book, you have a lot of founder stories,
which are some of your favorites?
Speaker 4 (08:38):
M gosh.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
I always try to be careful because I don't have
any favorites very but.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Well, just pick the one that you really like to tell.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (08:46):
So one of the stories I highlight in the book
are a couple of students of mine who started their
product are building their concept in my course a number
of years ago.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
Sorry.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
Originally the company called found and the founder Kate, had
an issue where she had lost her engagement ring and
was really stressing out about the value of that ring
and maybe if other people had some kind of app
where they could find the ring and report the rings
found and she could reward them in some way, that
that would be a really interesting consumer app. Now they
(09:21):
were ready to go Bill she partnered with another student, Zach.
They were going to go off and build something Zach
was technical and start building this app for consumers. To
do this, I gave them a big slow down talk
and encourage them to go out and actually figure out
who that audience is, who loses things, what types of
things do they care about enough that they would want
to log something in an app. What is the other
(09:44):
side of the market care about In terms of the finder,
the person who finds the lost item, what do they
want to do? Do they want to meet the person
who lost the item, etc. How complicated is all of that?
And what they found is as they started putting things
out for people to actually find.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
So let me say that again.
Speaker 5 (10:04):
What they learned through their experiments by putting lost items
like both headphones and other things around various places on
campus and at the college on the other side of
the river was a very interesting set of experiments where
they understood what types of items people actually went and
found QR code on these items and were willing to
(10:26):
scan the QR code and figure out whose item this
is and how do I get it back to them.
They also had a learning that a lot of people
didn't want to actually personally deliver the item back.
Speaker 4 (10:36):
They wanted to know if there was a lost and
found or whatever.
Speaker 5 (10:39):
The point of telling the story is they did a
lot of experimentation to understand the dynamics, and what came
out of that was a business that didn't seem very
interesting on the consumer side A and B.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
It was sounding more.
Speaker 5 (10:51):
Like an insurance business, which is not at all what
they wanted to do. And that's a really important insight
which is part of this slowed down and do the
discovery work. Isn't just is there an idea there that's
worth pursuing, but also do I want to pursue it?
Speaker 4 (11:05):
Is this something that I'm interested in? So what they
ended up doing is a big pivot.
Speaker 5 (11:08):
They realized that the QR codes on items is very
interesting to the brands themselves, and they wanted to get
closer to their customers and have people scan QR codes
to get more information on the products, etc. And this
is early QR codes, when QR codes is still not
a thing. So they pivoted massively and now they are
a brand management marketing company. They just closed a big
(11:31):
round of fundraising and it's an extremely different company than
what they had started out with. And I attribute a
lot of that to taking the time to really do
the discovery work.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
I love that story because you never know what the
business is actually about, what it's going to become. What
about money? You know a lot of people right business.
First of all, let's go back to business plans. How
important do you think business plans are and financial projections
are into getting your idea off.
Speaker 5 (11:54):
The ground, So personally, I think that very early they're
a waste of time.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
I do think that you need to do.
Speaker 5 (12:03):
Some proper market analysis and make sure there really is
a big enough addressable market out there for your business.
If it's very niche and you want to grow a
big business, it doesn't make sense to go after it.
And I want to emphasize that if you don't care
how big the business is, but you're excited about the problem,
go for it. But I do think that part of
the business plan is important. So how big is this market,
(12:24):
who are they, how could this market grow? What's the
potential beyond the first thing I'm going to.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
Create is important.
Speaker 5 (12:29):
But in terms of unit economics, you can do a
little bit of a back of the envelope.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
Is it going to be really expensive?
Speaker 5 (12:35):
Especially in the CpG space if you're building physical products
or robots or drugs or whatever it is you're building.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
Of course you have to do.
Speaker 5 (12:41):
Some financial analysis to make sure it's something that's affordable
to build with some reasonable margins.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
But I think in the early stages doing too.
Speaker 5 (12:50):
Much of that work, especially citing this story which was
the found company which is now called bridge ij a
shameless plug for them. If they had done their business
plan and all the economics and started to hire people
and all the other things that come with the business
early on, they would have built the wrong business. So
(13:11):
I think it's important to decide first, is this the direction.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
We're really going in? Is this the thing we love?
Is their real market there to go after?
Speaker 5 (13:19):
Then start digging into your business plan and your financials
and all the other metrics, and how.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Important do you think the idea of fundraising?
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Do you think that people have potended to raise too
little or too much in the first round?
Speaker 5 (13:35):
Oh, the fundraising market is so wonky. It's hard to
answer that in a very specific way.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Give me a minute, because I really think that in
many times people raised too much money initially and they
waste that money rather than raising a little bit of
money trying to get far along in their idea, try
to get a validation of their idea, paying customers, and
then getting more money to scale it. Because I think
you can waste a lot of money, you know, upfront.
I'm always you know, during you know, nineteen ninety nine,
(14:04):
I always said to people, you know, too much money
is going to make you stupid. It doesn't make you
think or be creative enough if you have too much.
Speaker 5 (14:12):
Yeah, I agree with that sentiment. I think that founders
should raise the money they need to do the job
to be done. So, if you're building a tech company,
especially these days with AI, you don't need a lot
of cash to do that.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
You may need some capital.
Speaker 5 (14:30):
For processing or tools that are out there, but you're
not hiring these days. You know a team of twenty
engineers anymore, you're hiring maybe four. And so it's important
to decouple the vanity metrics and sometimes comes with fundraising
to validate you you're building a huge business because you
raised billions of dollars, I would argue, or millions, I
(14:51):
would argue, that's not what matters. It's the fuel to
take the boat to your destination. It is not the
destination itself. And having clarity and I agree with you
and like, raise what you need to raise to run
this business. And depending on where markets are, So if
we're in a particular market like we are now, it
could be hey, you know, maybe now's a good time
(15:12):
to raise a little bit more than you would because
we don't know what it's going to look like in
a year, and you'd rather have that cash now than
try to get it later because the market's really wonky.
And there are other times where when times are proppy
and people are bullish that you may say, take what
you need now to really run your business for the
next twelve to.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
Eighteen months, and then you can go back to the
well when you're ready.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
It makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
The last question I wanted to ask you, Juliet, was
you focus a lot on co founder dynamics and emotional stress.
And I'm really in the three businesses I start, I
really undervalue those things. Of course in the second business
I started, unfortunately I found them in the classified section
of the Chicago Tribune. That's not where you should find
your partners. They kicked me out a year later. And
(15:53):
the emotional stress of running these businesses was a lot
on me and my family and my marriage.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Why do you clue those things? Why do you think
they're so important?
Speaker 5 (16:02):
Yeah, so emotional stress, relationships, all the people's stuff is
most commonly what sinks the business. How people interlate with
each other, what baggage they bring into the business, misalignments
because they're afraid to have hard conversations. Those are all
the things that sink companies. So I spend time not
only telling stories about businesses that did fail or co
(16:25):
founder relationships that broke up because they didn't put that.
Speaker 4 (16:29):
Hard work in.
Speaker 5 (16:30):
Not just upfront and have those hard conversations, but continue
to have those conversations, and I offer frameworks to get
to alignment so that they can continue to grow.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
People are not that.
Speaker 5 (16:40):
You know you're going to be in this business for
seven to ten years on average. You're not going to
be the same person seven years from now than you
are now. Your assumptions will change, how the business evolves
will change, and it's really important to be aligned upfront
not only on where you're going, but how you're going
to work together. In the book, I talk a lot
about it's a lot like a marriage. It's a complicated marriage,
(17:01):
and you know it's not with the intimacy and other
things that come from a marriage, but it's very much
an emotional journey together. And you want to have someone
who's not only complimenting your skills started adding something else
to the business that maybe you can't bring, but also
somebody really feel as your partner through this entire journey.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Yeah. I always tell people it's really not about the idea.
It's not about what you're doing, it's about who you're
doing it with. For me, that really defined the business
I was successful at and the ones I wasn't was
about who I was doing it with.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
So Julia thanks me on the show.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
The title of book is called After the Idea, What
it really takes to create and scale a startup?
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Where can people catch up with you?
Speaker 4 (17:39):
Thank you so much for having me. It was a
lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Where can people catch up with you? What's the best
way to reach you?
Speaker 4 (17:45):
The best way to reach me would be on LinkedIn?
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Okay, Julie Austin, Julia, thanks so much. This is the
Small Business Radio Show.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 6 (17:55):
Thinking of starting your own business, Get on board for
a crazy ride. The first person to tweet Berry at
Barry Moltz and get a free copy of his book
You Need to Be a Little Crazy, The Truth about
starting and growing your own business. You will need the.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Company stick around to get your small business unstuck. More
of Small Business Radio with Barry Moltz.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Well, I have to admit I've always been very sensitive
to loud noise, in my work and personal environment. So
what ef fact does noise have on a person's ability
to be productive or just relax. My next guest is
Chris Verdict. He's a journalist who writes about science, health, technology, education.
His latest book is called Clamor How Noise took Over
(18:42):
the World and How We Can Take It Back. Previously,
he was a staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly, a
research editor at The Investigator journalism and magazine Mother Jones,
and a senior writer covering science and medicine for Boston
University's daily news website and alumni magazine Bostonia.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Chris, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 7 (19:02):
Thanks for having me, Berrett.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
So I love the subtitle how did noise take over
the world?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Because there's so much noise now?
Speaker 7 (19:10):
I know, well, you know, the answer is kind of twofold.
One is simple math. You just have more and more
people living in close proximity, using more noise producing stuff.
You have roads carving up previously rural areas. You have
more and more flights overhead. So there's just sort of
(19:32):
inevitability piece to it. But we've certainly done our part
to complicate matters with kind of a sonic short sightedness.
In how we build our buildings and design our cities
without thinking about the sonic implications of what we are
building and how we're building them, and that has kind
of led us to kind of bungle into a lot
(19:54):
of noise.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
In addition, I.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Keep thinking back that, you know, years ago, only the
sounds could be created are the sounds that nature made,
or a sound a person can make on their own.
But now, of course, you have all sorts of mechanical, electoral,
technolgical devices that can make sounds on their own. I mean,
I swear everything is always beeping and buzzing at me.
Speaker 7 (20:16):
Yeah. Well, I read an article not too long ago
somebody's saying, maybe we've reached peak beep all all the
devices now that call out for us, just like a toddler,
you know, at our sleeve thing, you know, pay attention.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Do you think that Chris people have gotten so used
to the noise that when there is no noise? You know,
it's interesting because I live half the year in Chicago.
I live half the year in rural Scottsdale. So in Chicago,
of course I hear all the sirens and the ambulances
and things like that.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
And that's what I fall asleep to.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
And then when I get to Arizona, I fall asleep
to pretty much nothing right, And I really enjoy that
the quiet.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Do you think too many people are uncomfortable with the quiet?
Speaker 7 (20:58):
I think that, you know what, I what I like
to think about noises, not just unwanted sound, but unwanted signals.
And so you can be in a very quiet area.
You can be in a noisier area, like a city,
and let's say you have decent windows, and you know,
the city is sort of this constant churn, maybe the
occasional siren, but it's just this kind of it might
(21:20):
as well be waves crashing on the beach. And then
you go to a rural area and you can hear
every creak of the house, you can hear the owl
hooting outside, and these are signals that are now more
intelligible to you because there is no kind of overall masking.
(21:40):
And I'm not saying that's exactly what happens to everyone,
but that is definitely a phenomenon that can to make
quiet disturbing people when they're trying to get to sleep.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
But I gotta tell you, I love the owl and
when I'm in Scottsdale. At night, I hear the owl
and then of course they hear the woodpecker pretty much
exactly at five point fifty five every single morning.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
That's really quite incredible.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
But you say, you know, in the book, you say
that decibels don't tell the whole story. You know how emotion, identity,
and equity shape our perception of noise. Talk about that
because not everyone reacts to noise the same way.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
I remember when my son was little in.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Chicago, they have an Aaron water show right where the
military jets come in you see them, and we took
them down. We thought it'd be so excited to see it,
and as soon as the jets started coming over overhead,
he started to cry because it was just too much
noise for him. So how do we perceive it differently?
Speaker 7 (22:29):
Well, I think, you know, just to start with decibels.
They are one measure of sound, and like any single measure,
they can tell us quite a lot. But when we
over rely on them, they can kind of lead us astray.
They're like, well, here's what they do measure. They measured
the acoustic energy intensity of the sound. They don't deal
(22:51):
with the frequency of it. They don't deal with the
timing of it. Is it ubiquitous, is it episodic? What's
the context of it? Are you listen to this sound
in a crowded restaurant or are you listening to it
when you're trying to study for an exam. They don't
deal with some of the what we call psychoacoustic pieces
of it. Is this a rough sound? Is it a
(23:14):
warm sound? So all of these aspects of sound impact
how we perceive it, and the loudness is just one.
It's like the blind men trying to understand the elephant
just by grasping one piece of it. That's what decibels are,
and then you know they're very useful, but they've been
overrelied on for kind of understanding what this problem is.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
You also say in the book one of the problems
is there's an environmental justice imperative that marginalized communities are
often exposed.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
To higher levels of a harmful noise. Tell us about that.
Speaker 7 (23:47):
Yeah, So this is a lot of this is broad
based research that kind of looks at the noise that
you can study at that scale, which is often transportation noise.
So these are highways, other noise producing infrastructure at a
large scale. And what happened was there were a lot
(24:07):
of communities that were you know, redlined that kind of
fell into a cycle of disinvestment and concentrated poverty. And
they couldn't put up a fight as much as their
neighbors could when you know, the highway administration went to
you know, ram an interstate through their neighborhood or another
industry that caused you know, maybe a steel mill or
(24:28):
something like that. So these noise sources got concentrated in
some of the most vulnerable areas or more.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
That's where the housing went. That's the only place I
coul afford to live was near the Steer mill or
in Chicago, the elevated train, right, it makes a huge
noise as it goes by, and that was.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
The cheaper housing.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
What's interesting about that is one of my friends lived
on the elevari train for fourteen years and after a
while she even hear it.
Speaker 7 (24:55):
She might have gone death.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Well, I held you on death.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
But I guess you just kind of absorbed the sound. Yeah,
But in your book, you're saying that people are starting
to address these issues, and there are some cities that
are trying to pioneer these quiet zones. Is this being
driven by the people that live there or the health
benefits of it.
Speaker 7 (25:15):
It's being driven by the people that live there, and
it's it's only starting to get traction. The one thing
that I write about are these sort of crowdsourced attempts
to find quieter areas in a city through There's an
app called hush City, for instance, that does this. And
(25:38):
this Hush City was pioneered by an urbanist named Antonello Roddicki,
who worked with the Berlin City government to try to
figure out how to get quiet places recognized. They weren't
simply the lowest decibel spots in the giant park on
the edge of the city, you know where you know
(25:59):
how you can't get there very often. If you just
need a quiet spot, where can you go? She called
them everyday quiet areas, and rather than try to define
them herself, she figured she would ask people who lived
in the city to kind of go out find their spots,
take the decimal reading, but also talk a bit about
what's there. Is it a very green area, are there
(26:22):
people there? You know? Take some pictures, and try to
put together kind of a database, crowdsourced database of these
quiet areas and then she's working with or she was
working with the Berlin government to try to find some
way to reckon with them or distill what actually makes
these places restorative for the citizens.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
And what does she find was, I assume it's not
just about the ambient noise.
Speaker 7 (26:52):
It's not just about that. In fact, there are you
know a lot of places that have a fair amount
of decibels. You know, nothing is going to blow your
ears off. But she found that people really liked places
that had other people that were conducive to that. If
you were in an area that was kind of abandoned
(27:14):
and there wasn't a lot going on, it would be
very quiet, but it wasn't It wasn't relaxing. It wasn't
what they were looking for. You know, if you had
a place where you could hear the birds singing or
maybe a waterway coming by, that was relaxing. But it
was also She found that hearing traffic, like high levels
(27:35):
of traffic sounds was one of the worst defenders for
people being feeling like they could sit down and you know,
take a moment out of their day and get some
some restoration.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
So what are the health benefits really?
Speaker 3 (27:49):
You talk about in the book about the sound redesign
for hospitals or schools or people that are in transit.
Speaker 7 (27:57):
Well, the health benefit, hopefully would be to reduce the
chronic stress that some of the sound, some of this
noise leads to. Now, these the studies of stress and
noise are based again on transportation noise, because that's what's mapped.
You know, you can tell where people live, and where
(28:17):
the highways are, and where the trains go through, and
where the airplanes fly over. You can't tell, you know,
how often they are trying to get a job done
at work and they can't focus because you know, their
office mates are on a video conference call, and then
there's all kinds of machinery going. Those things, though, they
(28:38):
add up all of those disturbances. You know, when you're
trying to when you're in a restaurant and you're trying
desperately to hear the people that you're talking to or
that you've gone out to dinner with over the din,
that's exhausting. And so the idea is that if you
can think about the sound when you are designing your
(29:00):
restaurant or when you are laying out your office space
to be more conducive to what goes on there. In
a restaurant, you want to eat, but you also want
to talk. In your office, you want to places where
you can collaborate, but also places where you can focus.
And there are technologies that can help you do this.
But it's also just a matter of taking it into
(29:22):
account from the start rather than just waiting for the
noise to be a bother.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
And is that really the way you suggest in your
book to as it says in the title, how we
can take it back? Is it just have to be
cognitanvet that this is an important factor.
Speaker 7 (29:37):
I think that's that's a huge piece of it. You know,
there's no way and I don't advocate for living in
a noise free world, you know, that's that's not what
we should aspire to. But you know, like I said,
we bungle into all sorts of noise that we could avoid.
(29:57):
And if we think about noise as more than just decibels,
then we can understand the problem better. For instance, this
is another thing I should mention. All the data centers
that are going up to handle all of our internet traffic.
They create a noise that people are really bothered by,
but it's not because it's like super loud. It's loud inside,
(30:19):
but outside it's not super loud. But the problem is
it's it's this low frequency kind of hum that you
can feel in your chest and it goes on twenty
four to seven. But the noise codes of the areas
aren't set up to handle that kind of noise. They don't.
They're not. They're designed for loud, high decibel, episodic noise.
(30:41):
And so if you think about what is actually bothering people,
and you, like in Virginia, I know they've been trying
to come up with a way of getting people that
want to build these data centers to have a site
assessment that understands that type of noise and reckons with it.
So it is it's partly being proactive, it's partly understanding
(31:03):
the problem as more than just a sort of loudness problem.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Well, Chris, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Tell the book is called clamor How Noise took over
the World and How we can take it back.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Where can people catch up with you?
Speaker 7 (31:14):
Oh, they can catch up with me on my sub stack.
It's called clamoring. And they can take a blue sky
as well in there.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Chris, thank thanks so much for joining us, and I
want to thank everyone for joining us for this week's
radio show. I got to thank our incredible staff, our
booking producers Sarah Schaffern, our sound editor Ethan Moltz. If
you are serious about being more successful in twenty twenty five,
you got to give me a call, I said our
private line seven seven three eight three seven eight two
five zero, or email me at Barry at Molts dot com. Remember,
(31:45):
love everyone, trust a.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
View, and pal your own canoe. Have a probable and passionately.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
If you can find Barry Moltz on the web at
Barrymolts dot com or more episodes of Small Business Radio
at small This Is Radio Show dot com
Getting ready for all the craziness of small business. It's
exactly that craziness that makes it exciting and totally unbelievable.
Small Business Radio is now on the air with your host,
Barry Moultz.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Well, thanks for joining this week's radio show.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Remember this is the final word in small business. For
those keeping track, this is show number eight hundred and
thirty four. You know, it's interesting, when I was an
angel investor, people always just to say to me, Hey, Barry,
I've got a great idea for a business. What do
you think And I would always reply, I have absolutely
no idea, because successful businesses are not about the idea,
(00:45):
They're really about the execution of that idea.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
My next guest.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Talks exactly about this idea in our first book. Julia
Austen is a season operator as served in leadership roles
at several tech startups. She's on the faculty at Harvard
Business School is faculty co chair of the Arthur Rock
Center for Entrepreneurship. She's an Angel investor, serves on startup
boards and advisors many founders through her work with several accelerators.
(01:11):
She's got a great new book out. It's called After
the idea, What it really takes to create and scale
a startup.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Julia, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Do you get that question a lot? What do you
think of my idea?
Speaker 4 (01:24):
Oh? Yes, all the time.
Speaker 5 (01:26):
In addition to the I asked a bunch of people
and they thought it was a great idea.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
And so how do you respond with people say I've
got a great idea, what do you think?
Speaker 5 (01:36):
Very similar to you, Barry, it's a that's great, But
you still have to build an entire company around that idea,
and you have to really validate that the problem really
exists and who has that problem?
Speaker 3 (01:47):
So what's the first thing you should really do? I mean,
should you write a business plan? Should you go out
to consumers, should you sell something right away, have some
minimal viable products.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Should you find other people that want to go on
this trip with you?
Speaker 4 (02:01):
Oh gosh, such a good question.
Speaker 5 (02:02):
So I think the very first thing you need to
do is identify the assumptions that you're making and validate
those assumptions. And so I am a big fan of
moving slow to go fast, so proper discovery work and
understanding that problem at a very intimate level. Anybody can
build software if it's a tech company, but even for
(02:23):
a CpG and a consumer product, trying to go too
fast to get something out there to test without really
deeply understanding the problem you're trying to solve as a mistake.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
So and that yeah, go.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
No, go ahead.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
So and that isn't just interviewing, which I find a
lot of aspiring entrepreneurs feel just talking to people is enough,
and that's.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
A big mistake.
Speaker 5 (02:47):
Rolling up your sleeves, getting into the muck and really
understanding how a problem manifests is as important as the interview.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Well, that's that's what I was going to ask you.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
How do you validate the assumptions because a lot of
people go out and they do surveys and ask people
what they think would they and people say yeah, yeah, yeah,
But when it comes down to it, a lot of
people don't buy it.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Right.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
It's different saying yeah, I'm going to buy it in
a survey versus actually putting your money down.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
So how do you validate these things?
Speaker 4 (03:12):
Yeah, one hundred percent.
Speaker 5 (03:13):
What you're really doing in those cases, like surveys and
interviews is validating interest and maybe there's a potential problem
out there, and you may also be assessing who these
people are right demographically, especially, A lot of founders build
things that our problem they themselves are suffering from, but
the bigger pool of potential customers might not.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
Be them exactly.
Speaker 5 (03:33):
So I think what's important to do is to develop
experiments where you start to test the assumptions that you're making,
for example, doing a very manual process and being part
of the solution yourself, versus doing mock ups and having
people walk through those.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
And imagining that that might be what they use.
Speaker 5 (03:55):
So the more you can embed yourself in the problem
or do ethnographic research, which involves observing people in their
habitats doing the things.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
And that's not just consumers but even businesses.
Speaker 5 (04:06):
If you're building a sales to tool, for example, you
might want to actually follow around a salesperson or be
on sales calls with them and understand what's really happening
them in their customers or how they're logging things in
the DRM before you go and start to build something
for them.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
You know, for me, whenever I was evaluating, I had
an angel group for about five years in the early
two thousands in Chicago, and the question I always asked
you was tell me the pain you solve, and who
do you solve it for? And the who has to
include who can pay for it? Right, because I think
so many people develop nice to haves, not got to haves.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
And we know that.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
People definitely pay pay more for painkillers than they do.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
For vitamins, for sure.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
For sure, and I struggle with the willingness to pay
too early in the cycle, which I think a lot
of founders tend to do is just tell me if
you would pay for this, or they get a false
positive when one unique customer decides they'll pay for it
because it's a big problem for them, doesn't necessarily mean
that everybody's going to pay for it or how much
(05:10):
they're going to pay for it. But to your point,
when you actually identify the pain, the problem that they're
trying to solve, the big test of success is they're saying,
how much can I pay you for this so that
you can keep this going or build your startup?
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Because man, this is really important to me.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
How big an issue do you find that a lot
of entrepreneurs try to.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
When they have a certain solution, they try to go
too broad.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
In other words, they don't identify the exact avatar the
target customer that would want to buy this.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
Yeah, so you can end up with a very diffuse
product if you try to solve for too many customers,
or you can do something I talk about in my
book is peanut buttering, which is trying to spread everything
around thick and messy I love it, and not really
focused and targeted on what your business is going to be.
So it can be a real struggle for entrepreneurs when
(05:59):
they're not really sure what's the right thing to do,
and they try to do everything, and then they can't
understand why they're not getting any tractions because they're not
really building anything focused and clear addressing a particular audience.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
And that can take time.
Speaker 5 (06:11):
That goes back to moving slow to move fast, when
we really take a moment to take a step back
and say, who are the possible users of our product,
how will they use it, how.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
Painful is it for them?
Speaker 5 (06:22):
And what are the ones that are really rising to
the surface that we want to focus on first. And
then the second element of that is time boxing.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
Those experiments and learnings.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
To say what will they have to be doing with
us over what period of time for us to say, well,
there's it, they're there, or let's just cut bait and
move to the next one and try to see if
that's there's a better audience there or a bigger pain
point there versus trying to do all of them at once.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
But go ahead.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
No, No, I'm just saying I'm talking to Julie Austin.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
She is Julie Austin.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
She's the author of a new book called After the Idea,
What it really.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Takes to create and scale a startup.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
My wife always asked me this when I was Angel
vest She says, well, you know, do you know that
which ones are going to be successful and the ones
that aren't going to be successful financially?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And I go, no, I really don't. I have hopes,
but I was not very good at predicting. What about you?
Speaker 5 (07:11):
Yeah, So I am founder first when it comes to
making any kind of investments as an angel investor, and
what I'm looking for first is resiliency, humility.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
People who are willing to take feedback.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
They don't have to listen to my feedback or others' feedback,
but that they're willing to take it and process it
and even communicate back why they aren't going a certain
way or why they are That comes before the idea
itself for me, because they really have to have the integrity.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
And fortitude to do this journey.
Speaker 5 (07:40):
So I see a lot of people want to do
something quick with a quick exit and not really understanding
everything that goes into running a business. It's not just
the idea, it's the whole business around it.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
So I'm looking for that first, who are they as
human beings?
Speaker 5 (07:53):
And then from there, the very next important thing for
me is really understanding the discovery work they've done. How
well do they know their potential audience, how much thought
have they put into the problem, how much focus are
they putting into really experimenting and understanding what they're going
to build.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
And then the last part is their true north. So
early stages, they.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
Have no idea where they're going to go, and I
think great investors appreciate and understand that in the early
stages that there'll be a lot of shifts and pivots,
but they at least have a sense of the impact
they're going to make. They're trying to solve a big problem,
and maybe they're doing baby steps to get there.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
But they know what direction, at least for now. They're
heading in and they can articulate that clearly.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Well, the book, you have a lot of founder stories,
which are some of your favorites?
Speaker 4 (08:38):
M gosh.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
I always try to be careful because I don't have
any favorites very but.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Well, just pick the one that you really like to tell.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (08:46):
So one of the stories I highlight in the book
are a couple of students of mine who started their
product are building their concept in my course a number
of years ago.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
Sorry.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
Originally the company called found and the founder Kate, had
an issue where she had lost her engagement ring and
was really stressing out about the value of that ring
and maybe if other people had some kind of app
where they could find the ring and report the rings
found and she could reward them in some way, that
that would be a really interesting consumer app. Now they
(09:21):
were ready to go Bill she partnered with another student, Zach.
They were going to go off and build something Zach
was technical and start building this app for consumers. To
do this, I gave them a big slow down talk
and encourage them to go out and actually figure out
who that audience is, who loses things, what types of
things do they care about enough that they would want
to log something in an app. What is the other
(09:44):
side of the market care about In terms of the finder,
the person who finds the lost item, what do they
want to do? Do they want to meet the person
who lost the item, etc. How complicated is all of that?
And what they found is as they started putting things
out for people to actually find.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
So let me say that again.
Speaker 5 (10:04):
What they learned through their experiments by putting lost items
like both headphones and other things around various places on
campus and at the college on the other side of
the river was a very interesting set of experiments where
they understood what types of items people actually went and
found QR code on these items and were willing to
(10:26):
scan the QR code and figure out whose item this
is and how do I get it back to them.
They also had a learning that a lot of people
didn't want to actually personally deliver the item back.
Speaker 4 (10:36):
They wanted to know if there was a lost and
found or whatever.
Speaker 5 (10:39):
The point of telling the story is they did a
lot of experimentation to understand the dynamics, and what came
out of that was a business that didn't seem very
interesting on the consumer side A and B.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
It was sounding more.
Speaker 5 (10:51):
Like an insurance business, which is not at all what
they wanted to do. And that's a really important insight
which is part of this slowed down and do the
discovery work. Isn't just is there an idea there that's
worth pursuing, but also do I want to pursue it?
Speaker 4 (11:05):
Is this something that I'm interested in? So what they
ended up doing is a big pivot.
Speaker 5 (11:08):
They realized that the QR codes on items is very
interesting to the brands themselves, and they wanted to get
closer to their customers and have people scan QR codes
to get more information on the products, etc. And this
is early QR codes, when QR codes is still not
a thing. So they pivoted massively and now they are
a brand management marketing company. They just closed a big
(11:31):
round of fundraising and it's an extremely different company than
what they had started out with. And I attribute a
lot of that to taking the time to really do
the discovery work.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
I love that story because you never know what the
business is actually about, what it's going to become. What
about money? You know a lot of people right business.
First of all, let's go back to business plans. How
important do you think business plans are and financial projections
are into getting your idea off.
Speaker 5 (11:54):
The ground, So personally, I think that very early they're
a waste of time.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
I do think that you need to do.
Speaker 5 (12:03):
Some proper market analysis and make sure there really is
a big enough addressable market out there for your business.
If it's very niche and you want to grow a
big business, it doesn't make sense to go after it.
And I want to emphasize that if you don't care
how big the business is, but you're excited about the problem,
go for it. But I do think that part of
the business plan is important. So how big is this market,
(12:24):
who are they, how could this market grow? What's the
potential beyond the first thing I'm going to.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
Create is important.
Speaker 5 (12:29):
But in terms of unit economics, you can do a
little bit of a back of the envelope.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
Is it going to be really expensive?
Speaker 5 (12:35):
Especially in the CpG space if you're building physical products
or robots or drugs or whatever it is you're building.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
Of course you have to do.
Speaker 5 (12:41):
Some financial analysis to make sure it's something that's affordable
to build with some reasonable margins.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
But I think in the early stages doing too.
Speaker 5 (12:50):
Much of that work, especially citing this story which was
the found company which is now called bridge ij a
shameless plug for them. If they had done their business
plan and all the economics and started to hire people
and all the other things that come with the business
early on, they would have built the wrong business. So
(13:11):
I think it's important to decide first, is this the direction.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
We're really going in? Is this the thing we love?
Is their real market there to go after?
Speaker 5 (13:19):
Then start digging into your business plan and your financials
and all the other metrics, and how.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Important do you think the idea of fundraising?
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Do you think that people have potended to raise too
little or too much in the first round?
Speaker 5 (13:35):
Oh, the fundraising market is so wonky. It's hard to
answer that in a very specific way.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Give me a minute, because I really think that in
many times people raised too much money initially and they
waste that money rather than raising a little bit of
money trying to get far along in their idea, try
to get a validation of their idea, paying customers, and
then getting more money to scale it. Because I think
you can waste a lot of money, you know, upfront.
I'm always you know, during you know, nineteen ninety nine,
(14:04):
I always said to people, you know, too much money
is going to make you stupid. It doesn't make you
think or be creative enough if you have too much.
Speaker 5 (14:12):
Yeah, I agree with that sentiment. I think that founders
should raise the money they need to do the job
to be done. So, if you're building a tech company,
especially these days with AI, you don't need a lot
of cash to do that.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
You may need some capital.
Speaker 5 (14:30):
For processing or tools that are out there, but you're
not hiring these days. You know a team of twenty
engineers anymore, you're hiring maybe four. And so it's important
to decouple the vanity metrics and sometimes comes with fundraising
to validate you you're building a huge business because you
raised billions of dollars, I would argue, or millions, I
(14:51):
would argue, that's not what matters. It's the fuel to
take the boat to your destination. It is not the
destination itself. And having clarity and I agree with you
and like, raise what you need to raise to run
this business. And depending on where markets are, So if
we're in a particular market like we are now, it
could be hey, you know, maybe now's a good time
(15:12):
to raise a little bit more than you would because
we don't know what it's going to look like in
a year, and you'd rather have that cash now than
try to get it later because the market's really wonky.
And there are other times where when times are proppy
and people are bullish that you may say, take what
you need now to really run your business for the
next twelve to.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
Eighteen months, and then you can go back to the
well when you're ready.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
It makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
The last question I wanted to ask you, Juliet, was
you focus a lot on co founder dynamics and emotional stress.
And I'm really in the three businesses I start, I
really undervalue those things. Of course in the second business
I started, unfortunately I found them in the classified section
of the Chicago Tribune. That's not where you should find
your partners. They kicked me out a year later. And
(15:53):
the emotional stress of running these businesses was a lot
on me and my family and my marriage.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Why do you clue those things? Why do you think
they're so important?
Speaker 5 (16:02):
Yeah, so emotional stress, relationships, all the people's stuff is
most commonly what sinks the business. How people interlate with
each other, what baggage they bring into the business, misalignments
because they're afraid to have hard conversations. Those are all
the things that sink companies. So I spend time not
only telling stories about businesses that did fail or co
(16:25):
founder relationships that broke up because they didn't put that.
Speaker 4 (16:29):
Hard work in.
Speaker 5 (16:30):
Not just upfront and have those hard conversations, but continue
to have those conversations, and I offer frameworks to get
to alignment so that they can continue to grow.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
People are not that.
Speaker 5 (16:40):
You know you're going to be in this business for
seven to ten years on average. You're not going to
be the same person seven years from now than you
are now. Your assumptions will change, how the business evolves
will change, and it's really important to be aligned upfront
not only on where you're going, but how you're going
to work together. In the book, I talk a lot
about it's a lot like a marriage. It's a complicated marriage,
(17:01):
and you know it's not with the intimacy and other
things that come from a marriage, but it's very much
an emotional journey together. And you want to have someone
who's not only complimenting your skills started adding something else
to the business that maybe you can't bring, but also
somebody really feel as your partner through this entire journey.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Yeah. I always tell people it's really not about the idea.
It's not about what you're doing, it's about who you're
doing it with. For me, that really defined the business
I was successful at and the ones I wasn't was
about who I was doing it with.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
So Julia thanks me on the show.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
The title of book is called After the Idea, What
it really takes to create and scale a startup?
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Where can people catch up with you?
Speaker 4 (17:39):
Thank you so much for having me. It was a
lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Where can people catch up with you? What's the best
way to reach you?
Speaker 4 (17:45):
The best way to reach me would be on LinkedIn?
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Okay, Julie Austin, Julia, thanks so much. This is the
Small Business Radio Show.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 6 (17:55):
Thinking of starting your own business, Get on board for
a crazy ride. The first person to tweet Berry at
Barry Moltz and get a free copy of his book
You Need to Be a Little Crazy, The Truth about
starting and growing your own business. You will need the.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Company stick around to get your small business unstuck. More
of Small Business Radio with Barry Moltz.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Well, I have to admit I've always been very sensitive
to loud noise, in my work and personal environment. So
what ef fact does noise have on a person's ability
to be productive or just relax. My next guest is
Chris Verdict. He's a journalist who writes about science, health, technology, education.
His latest book is called Clamor How Noise took Over
(18:42):
the World and How We Can Take It Back. Previously,
he was a staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly, a
research editor at The Investigator journalism and magazine Mother Jones,
and a senior writer covering science and medicine for Boston
University's daily news website and alumni magazine Bostonia.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Chris, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 7 (19:02):
Thanks for having me, Berrett.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
So I love the subtitle how did noise take over
the world?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Because there's so much noise now?
Speaker 7 (19:10):
I know, well, you know, the answer is kind of twofold.
One is simple math. You just have more and more
people living in close proximity, using more noise producing stuff.
You have roads carving up previously rural areas. You have
more and more flights overhead. So there's just sort of
(19:32):
inevitability piece to it. But we've certainly done our part
to complicate matters with kind of a sonic short sightedness.
In how we build our buildings and design our cities
without thinking about the sonic implications of what we are
building and how we're building them, and that has kind
of led us to kind of bungle into a lot
(19:54):
of noise.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
In addition, I.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Keep thinking back that, you know, years ago, only the
sounds could be created are the sounds that nature made,
or a sound a person can make on their own.
But now, of course, you have all sorts of mechanical, electoral,
technolgical devices that can make sounds on their own. I mean,
I swear everything is always beeping and buzzing at me.
Speaker 7 (20:16):
Yeah. Well, I read an article not too long ago
somebody's saying, maybe we've reached peak beep all all the
devices now that call out for us, just like a toddler,
you know, at our sleeve thing, you know, pay attention.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Do you think that Chris people have gotten so used
to the noise that when there is no noise? You know,
it's interesting because I live half the year in Chicago.
I live half the year in rural Scottsdale. So in Chicago,
of course I hear all the sirens and the ambulances
and things like that.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
And that's what I fall asleep to.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
And then when I get to Arizona, I fall asleep
to pretty much nothing right, And I really enjoy that
the quiet.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Do you think too many people are uncomfortable with the quiet?
Speaker 7 (20:58):
I think that, you know what, I what I like
to think about noises, not just unwanted sound, but unwanted signals.
And so you can be in a very quiet area.
You can be in a noisier area, like a city,
and let's say you have decent windows, and you know,
the city is sort of this constant churn, maybe the
occasional siren, but it's just this kind of it might
(21:20):
as well be waves crashing on the beach. And then
you go to a rural area and you can hear
every creak of the house, you can hear the owl
hooting outside, and these are signals that are now more
intelligible to you because there is no kind of overall masking.
(21:40):
And I'm not saying that's exactly what happens to everyone,
but that is definitely a phenomenon that can to make
quiet disturbing people when they're trying to get to sleep.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
But I gotta tell you, I love the owl and
when I'm in Scottsdale. At night, I hear the owl
and then of course they hear the woodpecker pretty much
exactly at five point fifty five every single morning.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
That's really quite incredible.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
But you say, you know, in the book, you say
that decibels don't tell the whole story. You know how emotion, identity,
and equity shape our perception of noise. Talk about that
because not everyone reacts to noise the same way.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
I remember when my son was little in.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Chicago, they have an Aaron water show right where the
military jets come in you see them, and we took
them down. We thought it'd be so excited to see it,
and as soon as the jets started coming over overhead,
he started to cry because it was just too much
noise for him. So how do we perceive it differently?
Speaker 7 (22:29):
Well, I think, you know, just to start with decibels.
They are one measure of sound, and like any single measure,
they can tell us quite a lot. But when we
over rely on them, they can kind of lead us astray.
They're like, well, here's what they do measure. They measured
the acoustic energy intensity of the sound. They don't deal
(22:51):
with the frequency of it. They don't deal with the
timing of it. Is it ubiquitous, is it episodic? What's
the context of it? Are you listen to this sound
in a crowded restaurant or are you listening to it
when you're trying to study for an exam. They don't
deal with some of the what we call psychoacoustic pieces
of it. Is this a rough sound? Is it a
(23:14):
warm sound? So all of these aspects of sound impact
how we perceive it, and the loudness is just one.
It's like the blind men trying to understand the elephant
just by grasping one piece of it. That's what decibels are,
and then you know they're very useful, but they've been
overrelied on for kind of understanding what this problem is.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
You also say in the book one of the problems
is there's an environmental justice imperative that marginalized communities are
often exposed.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
To higher levels of a harmful noise. Tell us about that.
Speaker 7 (23:47):
Yeah, So this is a lot of this is broad
based research that kind of looks at the noise that
you can study at that scale, which is often transportation noise.
So these are highways, other noise producing infrastructure at a
large scale. And what happened was there were a lot
(24:07):
of communities that were you know, redlined that kind of
fell into a cycle of disinvestment and concentrated poverty. And
they couldn't put up a fight as much as their
neighbors could when you know, the highway administration went to
you know, ram an interstate through their neighborhood or another
industry that caused you know, maybe a steel mill or
(24:28):
something like that. So these noise sources got concentrated in
some of the most vulnerable areas or more.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
That's where the housing went. That's the only place I
coul afford to live was near the Steer mill or
in Chicago, the elevated train, right, it makes a huge
noise as it goes by, and that was.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
The cheaper housing.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
What's interesting about that is one of my friends lived
on the elevari train for fourteen years and after a
while she even hear it.
Speaker 7 (24:55):
She might have gone death.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Well, I held you on death.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
But I guess you just kind of absorbed the sound. Yeah,
But in your book, you're saying that people are starting
to address these issues, and there are some cities that
are trying to pioneer these quiet zones. Is this being
driven by the people that live there or the health
benefits of it.
Speaker 7 (25:15):
It's being driven by the people that live there, and
it's it's only starting to get traction. The one thing
that I write about are these sort of crowdsourced attempts
to find quieter areas in a city through There's an
app called hush City, for instance, that does this. And
(25:38):
this Hush City was pioneered by an urbanist named Antonello Roddicki,
who worked with the Berlin City government to try to
figure out how to get quiet places recognized. They weren't
simply the lowest decibel spots in the giant park on
the edge of the city, you know where you know
(25:59):
how you can't get there very often. If you just
need a quiet spot, where can you go? She called
them everyday quiet areas, and rather than try to define
them herself, she figured she would ask people who lived
in the city to kind of go out find their spots,
take the decimal reading, but also talk a bit about
what's there. Is it a very green area, are there
(26:22):
people there? You know? Take some pictures, and try to
put together kind of a database, crowdsourced database of these
quiet areas and then she's working with or she was
working with the Berlin government to try to find some
way to reckon with them or distill what actually makes
these places restorative for the citizens.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
And what does she find was, I assume it's not
just about the ambient noise.
Speaker 7 (26:52):
It's not just about that. In fact, there are you
know a lot of places that have a fair amount
of decibels. You know, nothing is going to blow your
ears off. But she found that people really liked places
that had other people that were conducive to that. If
you were in an area that was kind of abandoned
(27:14):
and there wasn't a lot going on, it would be
very quiet, but it wasn't It wasn't relaxing. It wasn't
what they were looking for. You know, if you had
a place where you could hear the birds singing or
maybe a waterway coming by, that was relaxing. But it
was also She found that hearing traffic, like high levels
(27:35):
of traffic sounds was one of the worst defenders for
people being feeling like they could sit down and you know,
take a moment out of their day and get some
some restoration.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
So what are the health benefits really?
Speaker 3 (27:49):
You talk about in the book about the sound redesign
for hospitals or schools or people that are in transit.
Speaker 7 (27:57):
Well, the health benefit, hopefully would be to reduce the
chronic stress that some of the sound, some of this
noise leads to. Now, these the studies of stress and
noise are based again on transportation noise, because that's what's mapped.
You know, you can tell where people live, and where
(28:17):
the highways are, and where the trains go through, and
where the airplanes fly over. You can't tell, you know,
how often they are trying to get a job done
at work and they can't focus because you know, their
office mates are on a video conference call, and then
there's all kinds of machinery going. Those things, though, they
(28:38):
add up all of those disturbances. You know, when you're
trying to when you're in a restaurant and you're trying
desperately to hear the people that you're talking to or
that you've gone out to dinner with over the din,
that's exhausting. And so the idea is that if you
can think about the sound when you are designing your
(29:00):
restaurant or when you are laying out your office space
to be more conducive to what goes on there. In
a restaurant, you want to eat, but you also want
to talk. In your office, you want to places where
you can collaborate, but also places where you can focus.
And there are technologies that can help you do this.
But it's also just a matter of taking it into
(29:22):
account from the start rather than just waiting for the
noise to be a bother.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
And is that really the way you suggest in your
book to as it says in the title, how we
can take it back? Is it just have to be
cognitanvet that this is an important factor.
Speaker 7 (29:37):
I think that's that's a huge piece of it. You know,
there's no way and I don't advocate for living in
a noise free world, you know, that's that's not what
we should aspire to. But you know, like I said,
we bungle into all sorts of noise that we could avoid.
(29:57):
And if we think about noise as more than just decibels,
then we can understand the problem better. For instance, this
is another thing I should mention. All the data centers
that are going up to handle all of our internet traffic.
They create a noise that people are really bothered by,
but it's not because it's like super loud. It's loud inside,
(30:19):
but outside it's not super loud. But the problem is
it's it's this low frequency kind of hum that you
can feel in your chest and it goes on twenty
four to seven. But the noise codes of the areas
aren't set up to handle that kind of noise. They don't.
They're not. They're designed for loud, high decibel, episodic noise.
(30:41):
And so if you think about what is actually bothering people,
and you, like in Virginia, I know they've been trying
to come up with a way of getting people that
want to build these data centers to have a site
assessment that understands that type of noise and reckons with it.
So it is it's partly being proactive, it's partly understanding
(31:03):
the problem as more than just a sort of loudness problem.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Well, Chris, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Tell the book is called clamor How Noise took over
the World and How we can take it back.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Where can people catch up with you?
Speaker 7 (31:14):
Oh, they can catch up with me on my sub stack.
It's called clamoring. And they can take a blue sky
as well in there.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Chris, thank thanks so much for joining us, and I
want to thank everyone for joining us for this week's
radio show. I got to thank our incredible staff, our
booking producers Sarah Schaffern, our sound editor Ethan Moltz. If
you are serious about being more successful in twenty twenty five,
you got to give me a call, I said our
private line seven seven three eight three seven eight two
five zero, or email me at Barry at Molts dot com. Remember,
(31:45):
love everyone, trust a.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
View, and pal your own canoe. Have a probable and passionately.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
If you can find Barry Moltz on the web at
Barrymolts dot com or more episodes of Small Business Radio
at small This Is Radio Show dot com
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