[00:00:00] Omer:
Sam, welcome to the show.
[00:00:01] Sam:
Thanks for having me, Omer. I appreciate it.
[00:00:02] Omer:
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you?
[00:00:06] Sam:
Yeah I thought about this. One is that which does not kill you, makes you stronger. I think it's a very apropos to an immigrant coming to a new country.
[00:00:16] Sam:
But another thing that I talk to a lot of my, especially my kids, is. I'm a big sports nut. I'm a sports junkie, and there's a Michael Jordan quote that has a lot of relevance to me, and he says something to the effect of, I've missed about 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost about 300 games in my career.
[00:00:36] Sam:
I've taken 27 game winning shots and missed them all, and I failed over and over again. I've been very successful. Something to that effect. I love that. It's so perfect for business guys. We, we feel a lot.
[00:00:52] Omer:
Awesome. So tell us about Prodoscore. What does the product do? Who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
[00:00:58] Sam:
At its core, Omer, it's a data analytics company that provides tools for employee empowerment, employee productivity, visibility for middle management, and the C-Suite. So what we do is we capture all of the APIs for the cloud tools that are used in their daily scope of work. Email, CRM, telephony, Slack for chat.
[00:01:23] Sam:
It could be Jira and GitHub for the developers, it could be Zendesk and ServiceNow for the call center folks. We capture all of that use AI machine learning to provide intuitive indicated next steps in how they could be more productive employees.
[00:01:39] Omer:
Great. And give us a sense of the size of the business, where you, in terms of revenue, size of team, customers and all that stuff.
[00:01:46] Sam:
Yeah we're in the high seven figures in rough revenue numbers. We have about 150, let's call it logos as customers. And I believe as of last count, about 130, 135,000 employees on the platform.
[00:02:01] Omer:
Great. Now, before we get into like where the idea came from and how this business started, let's talk about your background because this is not your.
[00:02:11] Omer:
First startup, you previously built I guess a similar business and had a successful exit with that, so can you just tell us a little bit about that?
[00:02:21] Sam:
Yeah. I started a company, I was a little kid, crazy to look back. It's, it was in 98. I started a company called DTT at the time. It's been renamed DTIQ and it focused on, it was a SaaS company as well that grew to about 55 million of a RR when I exited it. And that basically did data analytics for restaurants, hotels, and retail environments. And how we did it, there was, we captured video. So all the video and all the third party data points. In a restaurant, so assuming a McDonald's, we capture the point of sale data in the register.
[00:02:59] Sam:
We capture the time and attendance for the employees that clocked in and clocked out. We capture the inventory control modules for the walk-in freezer, the temperature control modules, and aggregated all of those into a dashboard. Way before AI and provided analytics to the franchisee or the corporate stores.
[00:03:19] Omer:
As you said, you were a kid. How do you come up with an idea like that? It seems like a pretty ambitious thing to go and build.
[00:03:26] Sam:
I was hustling Omer. I was a typical immigrant from I'm Iranian originally. I had moved to America when I was 12 and I'd been hustling. I'd finished my undergrad, I was going to law school. I didn't know what I wanted to do.
[00:03:38] Sam:
Windows 98 came out. If you remember I'm old. You do. Windows 98 took the idea of video cassettes, if you remember those VCRs and the surveillance re to digital CDs. I tell my kids this what are you talking about, that CD video? So I saw an opportunity to be able to store video digitally.
[00:03:59] Sam:
And one of the things of immigrants is I wanted to also open five McDonald's. The whole, there was an aspirational aspect to that franchise world that is very rare and unique to the United States. So I had a partner at the time who crazy, he was a liver transplant surgeon, and he said, Sam, instead of opening McDonald's or five McDonald's, why don't we.
[00:04:20] Sam:
Sell this technology into a McDonald's or a Subway or a Burger King. So we married my wish of the franchise world to technology in Windows 98 and started this little company that struggled mightily and had a fortunate outcome.
[00:04:35] Omer:
How long did you work on that business before your exit?
[00:04:39] Sam:
So I was founder chairman, CEO from 90, October of 98 through 2018.
[00:04:47] Sam:
So for 20 years I was actively involved fundraising and all of the, everything about it from zero employees to about 550 employees. Then I became chairman at some family situation that come up and I had to be a single dad and be focused on my children. So I took about a, a couple years off on an active role, and then that company got sold to Cisco's private equity firm.
[00:05:13] Sam:
And then I began my involvement with my current role at Proto score.
[00:05:17] Omer:
Great. And I guess in some ways we could say, technically you are not the. Founder of Prodoscore, but in many ways you are, because it was so early on when it was just an idea in many ways. So tell me about like where the idea came from and then how did you get involved with it?
[00:05:34] Sam:
Yeah, so absolutely. I'm not definitionally the founder. My, my partner Crisantos Hajibrahim. Brilliant. Brilliant product guy. He founded the business. It was his idea. And I had known him, he was like a little brother to me for 20 years. Brilliant product guy. Had multiple products that he had exited, small, never really companies, but more acquihires and products and done very well for himself.
[00:05:57] Sam:
And he came to me and said, Sam, I've got this idea. Would you be interested? And it was probably six months or so before Covid, roughly. Roughly that. The product, the idea all his, I started investing to support him and I'm a big believer in Chris and truly a visionary, and that's how my involvement became initially as a high level board member investor, I.
[00:06:20] Sam:
That morphed into being a CEO about a year thereafter.
[00:06:25] Omer:
Yeah. So how did you become CEO of the business?
[00:06:28] Sam:
As I invested more and more, and we thought that we had a product, we had a company here, it was more than a product that we could build a company that was also very similar to what I had done in the past.
[00:06:37] Sam:
He came to me and said, Sam, do you mind stepping in? I'm a product guy. I'm not a CEO. I'm not gonna, I can't, I don't wanna build a business. So I did step in probably. 2020 ish. 2021. Maybe even, I'd say I think in January of 21 I stepped in actively as CEO.
[00:06:54] Omer:
And the business was still pre-revenue at the time, right?
[00:06:56] Sam:
Yeah we had some beta and pilots. I don't believe we had much revenue, if at all. I don't recall exactly, but minimal.
[00:07:03] Omer:
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[00:07:15] Omer:
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[00:07:36] Omer:
Gearheart's Leadership team even works directly with founders offering deep insight into startup success. Book your free one hour strategy session with their leadership team before the end ofMay@gearheart.io. That's gearheart.io. Great. So you've been involved with the business from very early stages.
[00:07:55] Omer:
You've seen the idea evolve and when you came on board, what were the. What were the biggest challenges you saw ahead of you and where did you focus your time?
[00:08:08] Sam:
Yeah, look, the number one challenge is in this and my other company and broadly defined, has been when you create new categories, there's just, there's gonna be an issue of adoption.
[00:08:20] Sam:
Educationally, you've gotta educate the market. You gotta educate the buyer's sphere of this, the importance of the product. And then you initially have the inherent stigmas. Any new category that is created has an inherent stigma. Initially that did proto score does as well. Did as well. It's been far lessened and mitigated and that was very similar to my old company it for this one as well.
[00:08:42] Sam:
It was the idea of culture, big brother. What will my employees think about if you are watching them? And we had to differentiate ourselves, right? There's been a lot of tools in the marketplace that are surveillance, that are watching your mouse clicks and URL movements and camera movements.
[00:08:59] Sam:
We've seen all the funny gimmicks on YouTube. We do none of that and that was Chris's brilliance. Our founder's brilliance was that this has nothing to do with clicks and big Brother and surveillance, we're only capturing the APIs of cloud tools. If you've got Spotify in the background and listening to music, we don't care.
[00:09:24] Sam:
If you've got a YouTube channel and you're meditating, none of our business, we're only capturing data that is consigned to your corporate email.
[00:09:34] Omer:
So tell me a little bit about you. You said, Hey, new category creation is. It was a big challenge for us and with any new category, there's a lot of education that you need to go through before people even realize, okay, I got a problem I need to fix and this is the solution for me.
[00:09:50] Omer:
There were just help us understand like why it was a new category, because on, I think you've answered that to some degree that. There were a lot of tools out there that did that surveillance stuff. And so you decide to stay clear of that and focus purely on data through the API and productivity and so on.
[00:10:11] Omer:
But were there not any other tools like. That was similar in the market at the time.
[00:10:17] Sam:
Yeah, no there wasn't an I'll come to that question in a second, Omer, but I'll give my answer in a little bit of a long-winded version, my apologies. But if you go back 25 years ago, salespeople used Excel or their notepads for.
[00:10:32] Sam:
Notes and pipeline and managing relationships. When CRM tools came about, there was initially a major pushback. Oh my God, salespeople are not gonna like this. What are we doing? I don't like this. I was hesitant. I. Then we deployed Salesforce and it's become as any CRM, they've become ubiquitous.
[00:10:53] Sam:
One more analogy, if I told you six years ago that we'd be recording sales calls, transcribing it, giving them next indicated actions, you would've laughed at me. Salespeople would've shot me. Pardon? The saying that Gong is a almost Gong is a $10 billion business. Every sales per person I've hired at Proto score, the first question they ask is, do you have gong?
[00:11:20] Sam:
It's a new category. Nobody was recording sales calls six years ago. So we believe Prodoscore is doing some of that in this broad category of employee productivity. It's a broad category and we think we can get a sliver of it.
[00:11:34] Omer:
Did you find it in the early days when you were having conversations with customers that not only did you have to educate them on the category, but.
[00:11:40] Omer:
People automatically jump to the conclusion that you were another surveillance tool? A
[00:11:45] Sam:
hundred percent. A hundred percent. And that's goes to the product market fit discussion we had and that we focus on is we are very employee centric. The idea the employees get their own proto score dashboard.
[00:11:59] Sam:
So I see what Sam does. I have, when I wake up in the morning, I have in my e, in my dashboard. AI driven indicated actions for my day. How do I work my day to be more productive? How do I compare to my peers in the exact same role? So we bucket employees in the same exact peer group, sales, marketing, customer success, developers, engineers, and we compare them against their peers and give them next indicated actions of how they can improve.
[00:12:31] Omer:
Tell, tell me about, obviously the product has evolved. It's been several years. Tell me about what that first version of the product looked like. What did it do?
[00:12:41] Sam:
Look at its base, it provided simple visibility to what the employees were doing. Visibility into, remember, we're connecting through the APIs, we're capturing all the activity in email, slack, CRM, calendar chat, LinkedIn Navigator, DocuSign.
[00:13:02] Sam:
Very basic stuff. And what has evolved? The transformation of the product in the last 12 months has been remarkable, let alone the last three years. Part of it is just the AI engine. We've built in large language models that are curated and specific, and it's been remarkable the things we're able to surface.
[00:13:20] Sam:
Now, looking back three years ago, it's completely night and day.
[00:13:25] Omer:
So look on the one hand, you're going out there and you're talking to these potential customers and you're, getting objections. First of all, you're having to explain, we are not like this, we are this. And then you have to educate them on why they need this.
[00:13:38] Omer:
But at the same time you, what was the reaction from employees with those e early customers? Because it feels whether they understand it or not, it feels like there's some kind of surveillance going on, and employees can be very good at sabotaging new projects if they really want to. So what was the reaction and was it overall neutral, positive, negative?
[00:14:05] Sam:
Absolutely. Initially there was pushback. There was pushback from the employees concerned that this is Big brother. This is surveillance, and again, I go back 20 years ago, 25 years ago, to that young little young Sam of 27 years old, however old I was. I remember vividly employees pushing back franchisees and owners of these restaurants coming to us and say, oh my God, I can't do this.
[00:14:32] Sam:
I love my employees. My cousin works here, my uncle works here. Don't bother us. And that story changed if we are able to save the employee from an issue. So this was our story, for example, and this obviously presented itself. If a customer comes in and gives you a $20 bill and demands a hundred dollars and res and change.
[00:14:54] Sam:
Start screaming at the employee, right? You have video analytics around that. The employee is exonerated there. The employee. And that those kinds of stories became the groundswell that the next year when we went to a conference, franchisees would run to us. We need this. I'm opening two new stores.
[00:15:16] Sam:
Immediately we went. We went from zero customers to 90,000 locations. Subway worldwide deployed the solution worldwide. Every store around the world. We're seeing that happen now at Proto Score. The reason I give that analogy is in the beginning we had that pushback of the employees not seeing the benefit to them.
[00:15:40] Sam:
I could tell you unequivocally today, employees see the benefit just like they do with Gong, just like they do with Salesforce. We are now empowering them. Look at the end of the day either you're a good employee or you're not a good employee. If you are a good employee, you want all the tools that benefits you, right?
[00:16:02] Sam:
And if you're a bad employee, you got a foot out the door anyways. Either this tool pushes you out or your manager puts you on a PIP plan and you exit. If we can empower employees to make the most out of their day and for themselves and for the employer, why not have a win-win? And I'll end with this.
[00:16:21] Sam:
Our motto is this. Provide flexibility with accountability. If we're allowing a hybrid remote workforce and allowing the employee to be at home at a Starbucks or whatever venue they choose, Hey, we'll give you that flexibility. Give me some accountability. What better way to have that win-win solution than dynamic, than a tool like Prodoscore.
[00:16:45] Omer:
The new category creation, what were you doing to overcome that and educate the market? Was this more about content marketing? Was this more about how you framed your pitch? Was it getting on LinkedIn? What were you doing to educate the market about this?
[00:17:05] Sam:
Great question. Look, it's a process. It takes time and that's why one of the big.
[00:17:12] Sam:
Advice I give to younger CEOs is having the proper capital, right? Because that's when the, as you know better than anyone, it's the tweaking of your, we're pivoting in the pivot world, and we all use the word pivot. We're, I don't call it, we're tweaking, right? We are not having a revolution.
[00:17:27] Sam:
We're having evolutions. Right? Evolution here. Evolution here. And that requires capital, patience, persistence. We did all of those things, right? We morphed the product. We te tweaked it to be more employee centric. Customers gave us feedback. We got a couple of lucky breaks. We had a couple of big RFPs that we won that led to more opportunities with within legal, within staffing.
[00:17:51] Sam:
So all of those things. And we still have our struggles, right? We're still a very small company.
[00:17:57] Omer:
If you were talking to a founder today who is trying to build a new product category but doesn't have a lot of investment behind them, do you think that is they can succeed or it just a new category?
[00:18:18] Omer:
Creation is, it's just by the nature of the the businesses means you, you need to have significantly more funding to be able to make a breakthrough here.
[00:18:27] Sam:
Look I, I think for, I would say go for it. I tell that young CEO my friend, go for it. But remember my quote that I said in the beginning.
[00:18:36] Sam:
Remember the Michael Jordan quote, he missed 9,000 shots and lost 300 games. So expect a very difficult journey. And I have to be fair in that my experience has been solely. These two that end up ended up being real companies, these two companies that are both new categories. So I don't have a lot of experience creating a startup that's somewhat existing in an, it's analogous to other existing companies.
[00:19:00] Sam:
So my experience has been in new categories, but look, there's a joy and a. Kind of an intellectual high that you get from being able to get this off the ground, get adoption, and frankly change lives. If you are able to create a new category that impacts people, companies, corporations, it's becomes meaningful, it becomes really meaningful.
[00:19:25] Omer:
Let's talk about ICP when you were on that journey from. Going from zero to the first million in a RR who did you initially identify as your ICP And did that prove to be right or not?
[00:19:42] Sam:
Yes. So let me back up and say to you that I. Again, and this goes to the young CEOs as well, I've seen pitch decks that talk about tams and the TAM is $8 trillion and they're, come on guys, slow it down.
[00:19:55] Sam:
So our initial idea, and I pushed back on it a lot, was the Salesforce ecosystem is the right ICP. Anybody that has obviously email, telephony, some kind of a ucas, RingCentral, Dialpad, whatever it may be, and CRM being Salesforce, right? But that's. A massive tam, right? It's just, we're a tiny, little, small startup.
[00:20:18] Sam:
We gotta focus. How do we dwindle that down? And I think as we winnowed that down, we realized that, look, it's great for email telephony, Salesforce. They need, they should have Slack because we could show a lot of organizational network analysis, kind of collaboration tools around that. And then we'd focus more, dwindled it down to furthermore, to more mid-market to enterprise, right?
[00:20:43] Sam:
So we realized that sub 100 seat companies we don't have a lot of efficacy for, so we should go north of a hundred. To multi thousands. So I, as we evolved that ICP started, we started having more focus. And furthermore, I never thought a year ago staffing would be our number one ICP.
[00:21:04] Sam:
Today staffing is unequivocally our number one ICP. And as you may know, instead of a CRM tool, they use something called a TS or an applicant tracking software tool that's analogous for their CRM. So that those are bullhorns, the big one, Avante Tracker. And we integrate with all those and capture all those data.
[00:21:26] Omer:
So going from to get getting to the first million in ARR, what were the the main growth channels that work for you? Was it mostly outbound? Was there anything else?
[00:21:38] Sam:
Yeah, clearly outbound, but I will say that we got very lucky Omer in that covid hit and in some ways lucky in some ways. Unlucky, obviously a horrible event for humanity, but.
[00:21:51] Sam:
What happened is we got a lot of outsized press, right? The Wall Street Journal interviewed me and I was on CNBC, and I'm like. What am I doing? This is it's like it's a four person company. Like we don't even know what we're doing, but I'm on CNBC's, like mid-morning show. It was idiotic in the sense that the, but because the category was hot and remote work and can't go to the office and the world closed.
[00:22:18] Sam:
So I think we got a lot of outsized press, which I'm very grateful for. Obviously outbound marketing, cold calls, LinkedIn, SEO, all the normal broad categories that we applied and, and continue to.
[00:22:31] Omer:
Let's talk about finding product market fit. So you've got this initial product. You get some early traction, you get to first million in ARR.
[00:22:42] Omer:
What were the biggest challenges? At the time in terms of finding the right product market fit.
[00:22:50] Sam:
Let me start by saying I'm not sure we at least have the perfect product market fit yet. I think we're very good. I think there's a great product market fit that we have. Is it perfect? I don't know.
[00:23:04] Sam:
I don't think anybody knows anybody has, frankly. I think that's the iterative process of the evolution of our products for any software company and I we're, we are in the same boat, w would, its evolution have been, has been very customer centric, customer feedback, customer driven in areas that we could help them.
[00:23:24] Sam:
For example, an area that we focused on recently in the last six months has been employee engagement or disengagement. We call it kind of the attrition risk. And the attrition risk could be twofold. Either burnout or checked out. The two pendulum of, so we're able to now 90 days before employee Attrits show with over 90% certainly that they will attrit.
[00:23:59] Sam:
And it's, it came out of conversations with our, some of our heavy users. You have all of this data, there's all this analytics you're doing around our data. Can you show us be a leading indicator to potential attrition? It doesn't mean the employee's gonna leave. They may be. Having an issue at home.
[00:24:18] Sam:
They may be sick. Their child may be sick, so it's not an imperative issue that they're leaving, but it's a foresight. Have a conversation with Sam, see what's going on. Motivate him, engage him, or if he's gonna exit, exit him.
[00:24:33] Omer:
Yeah that, that's it. That's a great example because you have good attrition and bad attrition, right?
[00:24:37] Omer:
If you've got some kind of prediction of somebody who's going to leave and you consider that bad attrition, you have enough of an opportunity to do something about it or have a conversation, right?
[00:24:49] Sam:
Correct. Somebody's burned out Omer, who, somebody's working 16 hour days, they're not, they're exhausted.
[00:24:55] Sam:
They're looking to exit. You wanna do everything in your power to keep that employee. So this is not a negative. Alert. It's an alert to, Hey, talk to Sam. You, he may need a week off, he may need an assistant. He may need some help. It's not meant to be punitive at all. It's meant to be a coaching environment, a coaching tool.
[00:25:15] Omer:
You, you were also telling me earlier about some of the other things that you have built into the product now, like helping. Your customers understand the ROI and effectiveness of meeting times and so on, and in, in many ways. It strikes me as, I'd love for you to explain what those are, but I, I'm curious how you navigate through this sort of maze where you're getting feedback from customers.
[00:25:45] Omer:
And a lot of these sound might sound like great ideas, but how do you decide what's on strategy and what isn't? Because there's a lot of stuff you could build.
[00:25:56] Sam:
Great question. Great question. And we just had a product called two hours ago, and here's the. Here's what's happening, and I, the exact same thing happened in my old company, right?
[00:26:07] Sam:
The product is meant to be used. The heavy users are what I call middle management, VP level, director level. They're in the product all day. They're in proto score. They know their teams. They're looking on all the analytics. Okay? The C-suite is not gonna be in the product. Guess what? I'm not in Salesforce all day.
[00:26:29] Sam:
I don't look at Salesforce pipeline review. I have a Monday morning sales review with the team. My VP of sales melts makes a dashboard for me, talks about new pipeline creation, new opportunities, revenue coming in, attrition, my 4, 5, 7 KPIs. I'm not looking at Salesforce all day. The same exact same thing here.
[00:26:52] Sam:
C-Suite is most likely not gonna be in. What we do for the C-Suite is provide a weekly report. In that summary report says these seven people are at risk of attrition. These six people are not using the cloud tools. We are spending $1,200 a month for each employee. These six people are. On excessive meetings.
[00:27:17] Sam:
For example, I want my inside salespeople to have 90% of their meetings externally. If my inside salespeople have half their meetings internal, there is a problem. My friend, they're not selling. I don't want them to be on calls with marketing and with customer success, they gotta do outbound. So we provided those in highlight dose for the C-suite.
[00:27:40] Sam:
So that's how we bifurcate the utility of the product because as you said, it could be overwhelming. Overwhelming, i'll give you one more example. I think CEOs would appreciate this. We do a lot of work around organizational network analysis. We call it ONA. Historically companies, when you have a layoff or you have a riff, or you hire people, an onboard, be it through an acquisition of another company, or you hire new employees, you want to incorporate them into the fabric of the company.
[00:28:13] Sam:
There is no visibility for anyone at all. That shows all communication, real time between all your employees. We are the only company that is capturing every data point, live email, calendar, chat, telephony, all of it. So we put all that, what we call it, ONA, and show real time that if you were to terminate Sam, who does Sam communicate with all day?
[00:28:43] Sam:
Who are Sam's bridgers and ecosystem and show the ripple effect of Sam terminating or Sam's onboarding. How do you tether Sam to other employees to ensure his success?
[00:28:57] Omer:
The one thing it strikes me here is that you're collecting all this data and. You have the opportunity to create these different types of solutions like you've described here, right?
[00:29:10] Omer:
So we talked about the employee productivity kind of measurement. Then there's this ROI on how the product is being used and how maybe licensing is, or licenses of software are being utilized, or the effectiveness of meeting times. And it strikes me like that, on the one hand, that makes complete sense because you have access to all this data, so why not do this and create this value?
[00:29:40] Omer:
But on the other hand, it feels like many of these could be standalone products themselves. And so do you get into a situation where it becomes harder to explain the value prop because you're doing all of these different things. Has that been. A challenge.
[00:29:57] Sam:
No I look we tell, our pitch has always been, and this.
[00:30:03] Sam:
To mitigate the concern of culture. All of what we're capturing the company already has. We're not doing anything. All of the data are in these silos. Email, telephony, CRM, slack, LinkedIn Navigator, Zendesk, JIRA, GitHub. They have all of that. We're capturing it all, aggregating it in one dossier, one. Kind of location and then using our magic of AI machine learning to massage it, to provide a scoring system to be able to trend analysis and measure the employees, so can they log into Salesforce and look at all the activity individually? Sure. Can they log into email one by one and see? Absolutely. You're never gonna be able to aggregate it all into one dashboard, see it all, and do the analysis that we do in a broad, large scale. And that's what we hope is our differentiator.
[00:30:58] Omer:
I'm curious, given the 20 years you spent building the last business. What do you think was one big lesson you learned from that experience that has turned out to be a really useful guide as you go through the process of building and scaling? Proto score
[00:31:18] Sam:
a hundred percent. One answer only.
[00:31:23] Sam:
Be well capitalized. The most important advice I can give any young CEO new startup, 1 million of revenue, 10 million of be well capitalized, right? Look at the times we're in right now, right there. It's indecision. There's chaos in the marketplace, and I think if you're well capitalized, you weather storms, you are able to again.
[00:31:46] Sam:
Evolve. Not a revolution, but an evolution. It provides that flexibility, right? So I'm all about being well capitalized and look, if there's one bit of advice besides that, I would give laser-like focus. We throw a lot of stuff on the wall and see what sticks when a couple of them stick double down.
[00:32:06] Sam:
Triple down on those items. Sometimes young CEOs tend to wanna continue throwing more wall stuff on the wall because they see that fake broad TAM of the world truncate the tam, narrow the TAM laser-like focus, be well capitalized. You maximize your chances of success.
[00:32:24] Omer:
Love it. All right. On that note, let's wrap up.
[00:32:27] Omer:
We've got the lightning round. I've got seven quick five questions for you. You ready?
[00:32:31] Sam:
Go for it.
[00:32:32] Omer:
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
[00:32:36] Sam:
Don't have regrets. Mistakes are okay. Regrets. Kill and cripple.
[00:32:41] Omer:
Yeah. I love that. I've seen that. You talked about being a sports fan.
[00:32:44] Omer:
I've seen that with the best athletes and sports players. It's like this play by play. And then once that play is over. It's out of their head. And where the rest of us have this ability to ruminate on this stuff, if you let it, it's crazy. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
[00:33:01] Sam:
I love autobiographies. I, so I don't know. Churchill's, Aristotle's, nietzche, I can't name a single book. Come back to me on that.
[00:33:14] Omer:
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
[00:33:19] Sam:
Calm under the stormy times that inevitably come your way.
[00:33:23] Omer:
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
[00:33:26] Sam:
Morning routine.
[00:33:27] Omer:
What's the new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue? If you had the time?
[00:33:32] Sam:
How to replicate productivity for college students.
[00:33:36] Omer:
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
[00:33:41] Sam:
I sold Cuban cigars as a 19-year-old kid to pay for my college tuition.
[00:33:47] Omer:
Wow.
[00:33:49] Omer:
That's why now it connects back to why we were talking about cigars at the beginning of this session.
[00:33:57] Omer:
Finally what's one of your most important passions outside of your work? My children.
[00:34:01] Sam:
Absolutely. My children. I joke around and say that people ask me, what do you do for work? And I inevitably say, I'm a dad.
[00:34:08] Omer:
How many kids do you have?
[00:34:09] Sam:
Two, four step, but two of my own. Do you have kids?
[00:34:12] Omer:
Yes. Yeah, I've got two.
[00:34:14] Omer:
They're both teenagers now. Oh, good luck. How old? 16 and 19. And they don't wanna spend much time with you when they get to that age, right?
[00:34:21] Sam:
Yeah. No I'm a little ahead of you. I've got 22 and 19. 20 just turned 20.
[00:34:27] Omer:
Nice. Nice. Great. If people wanna check out Prodo score, they can go to prod oco.com and if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
[00:34:37] Sam:
Yeah, it's sam@prodoscore.com. Go to our website. There's a lot of information there. You can access me, our marketing folks, and again, Omer. I really appreciate this, buddy. This was a lot of fun.
[00:34:47] Omer:
Yeah, thank you. I I appreciate you taking the time to do, come here. I know we had a few technical issues getting this thing started, but you made me laugh while we were going through that.
[00:34:56] Omer:
So definitely made things entertaining, so I appreciate that. Yeah, thank you so much and I wish you and the team the best of success.
[00:35:04] Sam:
Absolutely. You as well. If there's anything you need further, ping me and I'll get back to you.
[00:35:09] Omer:
Thank you so much. Cheers.
