EY helps clients create long-term value for all stakeholders. Enabled by data and technology, our services and solutions provide trust through assurance and help clients transform, grow and operate.
At EY, our purpose is building a better working world. The insights and services we provide help to create long-term value for clients, people and society, and to build trust in the capital markets.
Why building digital experiences is key to your company’s growth
In this episode of the Decoding Innovation podcast, Charles Fry, founder and CEO of CODE Éxitos, discusses innovations, funding and emerging trends in the digital products landscape.
As industries navigate major changes and disruptions, an increasingly dynamic startup realm is emerging. However, only a select few of these new ventures truly experience success. Rather than merely translating ideas into products for the marketplace, today's innovators and entrepreneurs need to concentrate on creating digital experiences.
To create a meaningful digital experience, a product should be created with the consumer in mind; the end product should foster a sense of enjoyment and affinity for its users. Adopting this user-first mindset will help shape a better outcome and transform the way creators and developers approach work.
Charles Fry, the founder and CEO of CODE Éxitos — a company specialized in helping entrepreneurs craft clear product strategies and business trajectories — shares his vast experience in the field, and discusses the developments and challenges faced by businesses.
Key takeaways:
Only a small fraction of ideas are genuinely ground-breaking. A large number of entrepreneurs believe that their concepts are fully formed, only to find out, during the trial stages, that these ideas still require extensive refinement or development.
Potential investors today demand to see evidence of progress and incremental gains of the company. By building a dialogue history, businesses will be able to nurture relationships with investors throughout the product development journey.
Venturing into entrepreneurship is not suitable for everyone; it offers a chaotic and unpredictable environment. But if you decide to pursue it, it is important you do it with passion.
For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.
Announcer
Welcome to the Decoding Innovation podcast series, brought to you by the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub, where we explore the innovative technologies, business models and ideas that are shaping the future of industries. During each episode, we meet with stakeholders at the cutting edge to discuss innovations in their space, challenges they need to overcome and their outlook on the future.
Mitali Sharma
Hello and welcome. I'm your host, Mitali Sharma, and today, we'll be exploring the topic of digital innovation, nearshoring for talent and working with venture capitalists (VCs). Our guest is Charles Fry, the Founder and CEO of CODE Éxitos, a company that specializes in helping people innovate and then scale digital products. Charles, welcome to the show.
Charles Fry
Thanks, Mitali. Nice to talk to you again.
Sharma
Charles, you’ve had a very interesting career — corporate, technical consultant, serial entrepreneur. Tell us a little bit more.
Fry
Yeah, it sounds like I have a short attention span when you summarize it, but that's all true. I was fortunate that when I came out of university — the University of Michigan — the personal computer revolution was just kicking off. And so, I was fascinated by this. I was a biochemistry undergrad, but computers and programing computers just fascinated me. And so, ever since then, I've been involved in one way or another in the technology world.
And we've moved, you know, of course, over that arc; we've seen companies begin by using them as a functional tool. We had spreadsheets. We had word processors. We had desktop publishing and now, we're really in the age of innovation and digital innovation, where people are saying, “Well, our lives are woven into a digital fabric.”
We have our real life — you know, real-world life — and we have all of these capabilities —digital capabilities. And so that's what I've done. But you're right, I've been involved — I've had some great partners over the years. We've started companies that have received venture capital backing, and done acquisitions and sales. I've never been involved in a public offering. That's probably not going to happen at this stage. But it's been fun, and I've learned a lot, and I've worked with a lot of great people.
Some of the lessons were more fun than others, but sometimes you learn the most from the hard lessons. So, today, we help other entrepreneurs and innovators, corporate clients who want to create a digital product around some type of intellectual property (IP) that they have or market insight. And so, at this point in my career, I've built a company to just keep repeating what I've had so much fun doing all my life. And that's a little bit about my background. I'm here and happy to talk to you today about any topic that interests you. And you've worked out some great ones.
Sharma
Let's talk about digital products. What do you mean when you say digital product?
Fry
Great, great question. A lot of software engineering is thought of as an internal component. Let's take large companies as an example. You know, we have to write a purchase order system. We have to optimize our accounting system or our Material Requirements Planning (MRP) systems. And there's a lot of important work that gets done there. But then if you switch to the entrepreneurial world, you see people coming up with ideas. They want to create literally a product, something that's going to be on the app stores or something that's going to be a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product.
And so, what we do at CODE Éxitos is we believe that when you focus on the disciplines of taking a product to market to a customer — it could be a B2B customer, it could be a B2C customer — the innovation and creation process takes on an added dimension that, we think, is important. So, in distinct from just creating internal software products, it's not to take away from internal IT and software development — I've done a lot of that in my career.
But we think that thinking about the software and hardware that you're building as though it were a consumer product forces the team and forces management, really, to think about the work differently than just saying, “Yeah, we're just doing an upgrade to our accounting system.” So, our clients are producing something that has to stand up in the marketplace, or they hope stands up in the marketplace, as a finished product.
And so that's what we mean by digital products, something that's going to get released into the world and you're going to have to win in the marketplace on quality, features and lovability.
Sharma
How do you determine that the product, like you said, is sort of transitioned from being an internal product to now being market ready? What are some of those features?
Fry
I don't know that you define it in a feature set as much as you define it from the standpoint of someone who doesn't have to use this product, would they enjoy using the product? So, let's talk about internal corporate development, for example. If you've ever looked at airline ticketing systems from the standpoint of the person sitting behind the desk, they're incredibly information dense and confusing. And that could be frustrating. It's probably not something that any of us as individuals would willingly buy and pay for to use directly.
And I'm not taking anything away from the airline reservation systems. I know that millions of man hours have gone into those. But the real question is, does it have to be so complicated? Or could they reinvent that concept by thinking about their business and thinking about the people who are using it as customers and make it an enjoyable and lovable experience to use that reservation system, even though no external customer in the common sense of the word is using it?
Of course, thousands of employees are interacting with that under pretty stressful situations. And so, again, I'm using it as an example, not as an indictment of that type of software. But we think that bringing a product mentality and a user-first mentality is the first step in building elegant and wonderful software.
Sharma
So, it's more than the user interface. It is actually the thought goes into the entire product to take it from the viewpoint of a consumer. You're looking at it from a very customer-centric viewpoint.
Fry
Always. I think there’re two questions that you could ask your users. It is really kind of a terrible way to think about people who are working on the systems that you build. But the two questions I would ask would be, one, do you love working on this system? Do you enjoy it? It'd be great if they loved it, but did they enjoy it?
And two, would you be willing to pay your own money for the opportunity to use this product? And if the answer is, “I hate it and I wouldn't give you a penny,” I think you have to rethink the digital experience that you're subjecting people to. And so, when we work with entrepreneurial clients, of course, it's sort of the mindset that they come at it with, because they've recognized some opportunity in the market.
They have domain experience and they're trying to make things better. So, when we work with corporate innovators, who are responsible for taking a piece of intellectual property and creating either a hardware or software product around it to commercialize that — to use a common term — we start the same way we do with entrepreneurs, like who cares? Who wants to use this product? How do we make it an enjoyable experience? What are they going to feel like? Would they be willing to pay for it?
And two things happen. You end up with a different product or output, hopefully a better one. And the second thing is the team approaches the work in a different way. It's less mechanical and project management, spreadsheet and project planning-driven and it's more passion-driven. I mean, that's really what entrepreneurs bring to the table. They bring passion — passion for their idea, passion for their customers and passion for their investors. And that's what we want to inject in all the work that we do. So, that's why we say we're focused on creating digital products.
Sharma
Interesting. Could you also tell us what pieces of that digital product that you touch? Do you touch just the production of it? Or do you get into pricing and commercialization also?
Fry
Yeah, great question. The answer, for us — honestly, the answer is it depends on the client’s need. So, we break our services down into three broad categories that we call innovation, creation and scaling.
And roughly, what we mean by that is, in the innovation phase, we work with clients to produce very, very clear product plans, product roadmaps and strategic direction for the product. A part of what has to come out of that is the ROI or the business model behind what we're going to create, because if you spend US$1 million on something that you want to give away for free, you know, you'd say, “Well, the business plan doesn't really work.”
And so, when our customers are wondering about what their go-to-market strategy is, which comes a lot later, but we start to talk about it in the innovation phase, like how will people pay for this product? How much do you think they'll pay for this product? What does the general P&L looks like for this business and what's the ROI on it? What are the big movers? We start that way early, but the innovation phase transitions into the build phase or what we call the creation phase.
We want to have an idea about how we're going to monetize the product, if that makes sense, or whether our client's going to monetize the product. So, to use the old phrase, begin with the end in mind.
So, if I'm going to sell my app for US$9.95 on the App Store, that's a different business model. Then I'm going to have a SaaS platform that has a US$99 a month per seat recurring license.
And so, that economic model then impacts the approach to build, it impacts the budget, and it impacts the behavior that we want the product to influence with consumers. So, we follow a very iterative process, where we work through these things and we elucidate both the cost of construction and cost of execution, along with opportunities or ranges in product pricing in the marketplace — competitive analysis and that sort of thing.
Sharma
Let's change the gears a little bit. A lot of people have good ideas or kernels of good ideas, but it's a long journey from a good idea to getting VC funding. So, let's break down that with you.
So, say, an individual has a good idea. What should he do, or he or she do, to make sure that idea is something that he can even pitch to VCs?
Fry
The thing that we see — and you're right, it's a long journey. And I like to quote Thomas Edison, although he wasn't a — I guess he was a technology entrepreneur, if you think about it. It was new technology at the time, but he was actually talking about invention when he said “It's 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”
And I think that's the first thing that people have to keep in mind is that you take that germ of an idea and that's the 1%, and it has to sustain you through a lot of what I call grinding. You just have to grind on the idea to build that product And then to build the company to support that product. So, breaking that down a little bit, this, by the way, is part of the innovation process that we go through.
Most entrepreneurs think they have a clear idea and when we start to pressure test it, workshopping it and really challenging some of the premises, you find out that the idea is maybe not as fully elucidated or developed as it needs to be. But it's this process of finding the raw stone and then cutting away all the junk and getting down to the diamond, and then polishing it and making it as perfect as you can. That process starts by being done on paper and workshopping and you have to do some market research. And there is usually competitive analysis that comes into that, because very few ideas are truly revolutionary — like unheard of before. I've only seen a handful of them in almost 30 years of working.
I've only seen probably four or five truly unique ideas. By the way, the truly unique ideas stop being a unique idea as soon as it's introduced into the market, because then it becomes obvious. But you get your idea polished up and then usually, the next step is to build some sort of prototype, if you will.
So, if you say, “I'm going to build this writing instrument and it has ink that you can erase and it's going to be useful for workshops.” And people will be like, “Yeah, okay. I get it.” If you say, “And it's going to look like this.” And people say, “Aha! I see exactly what you're talking about.” So, that's the role of the prototype; it is to consolidate everyone's vision around some approximation of the idea. Okay, so now you have the prototype and other people can start to explain the concept with the same core idea in mind. All right. So, you're getting some consensus around what this business and product could be. Approaching a venture capitalist is maybe a topic that we want to separate out, because, over time, venture capital is a business. Entrepreneurs forget that they have a business model as well. And the style of venture capital investing has changed and it continues to change over successive cycles. What VCs are asking to see now is market validation.
So, let's take a really simple example. Your idea is an app. It's just a mobile app. It's really simple to execute, and you're going to get it in the App Store. What investors — early-stage pre-seed and seed-stage investors — generally want to see today is some sort of product market fit and market traction. So, they want you to get your first version out into the App Store and be able to show that, “Hey, in month one, we got 25 paying subscribers. And in month two, we had 50 new paying subscribers. And in month three, we had 75 paying subscribers.” I was just talking to some VCs in Austin, where we're headquartered, and they were saying that they're still doing deals, but they want to see some proof points. And it doesn't mean that they need to see that I have, 5,000 users the first month I launch and 10,000 in the second month, But they want to see incremental gains and progress.
So, today, you have to figure out how to get enough of your idea consolidated into both a prototype and then a first commercial release and start to test the market. And that's the short version. And if you have six months of market data and a clear roadmap of what the future is going to be like, then you're ready to go talk to a seed funding VC.
Let's say you and I had a product that we wanted to launch in June. We thought we'd have our product built in June and we would identify the VCs that we wanted to talk to now, not make the big pitch but say, “Hey, I'm working on something. Is it okay if I send you an update email every month?”
And they're going to want to know. And they said, “Yeah, we're interested in this idea. Keep us updated.” Our coaching is build a regular, almost like a newsletter. “Hey, here's what I accomplished this month,” and we send it to them every month. And then when we put it in the App Store, we say, “Hey, this month we launched our app and we had 1,000 downloads.” And they'll see that, but they're mentally going to build up a history. They want to see that there's some history in the dialogue before you just, you know, run in the conference room and hope to do your elevator pitch and get US$5 million.
So, you have to nurture those relationships. And what they're really looking for is month-over-month traction.
Sharma
How do you find the VCs? You said send an email to VCs, but I'm assuming it's not so easy to find the right VC who would be interested in your particular kind of idea.
Fry
Well, again, let's go back and realize that they're in business as well, all right? And so, what does a VC fund looking for? They're looking for good investments. And if you hang out with VCs, you'll hear them talk about what they call deal flow. And for them, deal flow is knowing who the entrepreneurs that are doing interesting things. That's their sales pipeline. So, they're out there and looking. A couple of quick things to think about Finding VCs that are investing in a particular space, it's not that hard.
You can get on Crunchbase. There are other resources to find who's making investments in this sort of space. From there, the mistake that a lot of people do is they see a fund — and now I'm talking about professional funds here, not angel investors —that's a little different process. They'll find a fund and they'll go to the website and look it up. And the fund has four partners, and they start trying to communicate with the partners.
The managing partners are not the people you want to talk to. They have brilliant staff people, who are analysts, and they're the people you want to talk to. You want to find out who the analyst that is working in your space, and that's the person you want to connect to. You'll see the partner eventually. But the people that are tasked for finding and tracking credible potential investments are the analyst team. And they want to hear from you. They absolutely want to hear from you.
Sharma
How much funding does an entrepreneur need to actually start out? And obviously, it'll depend on the idea. But how should they be thinking about how they grow and what point is a good point to go to VC, apart from the product itself?
Fry
There are professional funds who do seed investing, and we'll talk a little bit about what that means. So, seed investing typically means you have the product built or mostly built and you really don't have a lot of product market fit. You've tested it and you've got some credibility, but it's going to take a lot more work to start to scale the product up. That's where seed funding typically comes into play. What you hear called pre-seed funding a lot of times is — we would jokingly say that it's two guys and a PowerPoint deck or two women and a PowerPoint deck. And they're looking for that scratch money to get started — bootstrapping money.
A long time ago, we called that money “three F” money. It was money you got from friends, family and fools. And no one's really a fool, but it's the people that are taking the bet on you and your idea. It's probably the hardest money for them to raise is that early seed stage money, that bootstrapping money, if you will — enough money to buy ramen noodles and build your product. Now, as to the question of how much money do you raise, again, the answer depends. If you're building a mobile app, it's probably not a ton of money, because it's a relatively inexpensive thing. If you're building a full-blown SaaS platform, it could be a little more complicated. If you're building a hardware product, it's going to be even more expensive to get started.
So, it really depends. And we have some techniques we take people through, but the general stage would be start with some friendly money. That's probably the best F — the friendly money. It could be money you saved. It could be money you inherited. It comes from a lot of places. It has to get you to the point, where you can start to talk to either organized money or professional money.
I'll make the distinction. Organized money is what we typically call individual angels and angel networks. They're typically high-net worth individuals. They'll make an investment. They're making the investment with their own money. They do it for a lot of reasons. It's certainly an economic return, but also, it's a passion for them for a lot of reasons.
So, I know angel investors who want to invest in minority- and women-owned businesses. They're still going to make sure that it's a good investment, but they have a bigger purpose for that. So, that's organized investors and they tend to be in that pre-seed and seed stage as well. Professional investors are typically what we think of as VCs — venture capital firms — and they're organized firms. They have limited partners, they have a fund, they may have multiple funds and they become much more focused.
Sharma
I just want to follow on one thing. Every time you go, whether it's series A, B or C, or seed or pre-seed money, the angel investor or the VC would want something in return — a proportion of the company or something. I know it will depend, but what's a typical range that the entrepreneurs should be ready every time they go out to seek? What should they be looking at? Because that's a hard one again for somebody who's starting out new.
Fry
Yeah, great question. I always tell entrepreneurs that the most precious thing they have is equity. It's their cap table. You don't want to squander that treasure. The typical range that I see is in the 20% to 30% at each round.
So, if you're trying to raise US$2 million on a seed-stage investment, all of the investors in total that would come in would probably end up owning somewhere between 20% and 30% of the shares after you had the whole US$2 million on hand.
So, if you do a seed round and then two years later, you go out — or you do a pre-seed round and two years, you go out to do a seed round, it's going to be 30% again. But everybody's diluted proportionately, and then you do another one, and you’re diluted again.
So, yeah, if you go to a D round or an E round and you've done five or six raises, that dilution continues. And you may find that you only own, as a founder, you may only own 10% of the company or less, but the company's worth hundreds of millions of US dollars conceivably. And you're probably the largest single shareholder even after all of that. This is another one of those things that kind of takes a spreadsheet and whiteboard to figure out. But each time around, it's usually around the total equity’s starting point is in that 20% to 30% range.
Sharma
So, just to clarify, even the original seed funders’ equity gets diluted in the subsequent rounds.
Fry
Yeah, ideally, yes.
Sharma
Interesting. So, then the incentive of the entire team whether it's a funder or the founder, is to be more efficient with rounds.
Fry
Absolutely correct. There's some strategizing that goes on early on or should happen early on around the idea of how many rounds do we think we're going to need to raise and how much total money do we need to raise to achieve the business goals that we have. And then you work backward, because the first money you take is the first step on a journey that's hard to correct.
But you're exactly right. When done correctly and done well, the incentive is for everyone to help the business get to the next level, because even though they're going to take a dilution on a percentage basis, because the pie only ever has 100%, they take a dilution on a percentage basis. But they’ve increased the value of the enterprise.
So, their resulting shares, even after the new money coming in, their total share value increases. It doesn't decrease. And that's exactly a healthy sequence to go through.
Sharma
That gets us to CODE Éxitos. Tell me a little bit about your motivation for establishing this company.
Fry
CODE Éxitos is motivated by the opposite of everything I've been talking about. The idea of starting a company from scratch and raising VC money, and having outside stakeholders and setting these giant goals, like US$100 million in ARR. There's nothing wrong with that. But it was time for me to stop doing that and try to do something different.
What I wanted to do was build what is now CODE Éxitos. We are a certified B corporation; we're a public benefit company, and that was important to me when I was forming the idea. And the B corporation gives us specific benchmarks for how we give back to our community, the environment, and our stakeholders and employees. So, I wanted to incorporate that kind of thinking. We talk about CODE Éxitos being a 100-year company. We now like to think about CODE Éxitos lasting 100 years.
I think that we took those general thematic ideas and then I wanted to continue to live in the world that I love, which is entrepreneurship and innovation — taking ideas and creating a tangible thing and finding customers. That's just my thing. I love that. So, that's why CODE Éxitos works for companies that are thinking about building a product, building a company and achieving market share. Some of them raise money and some of them don't. That's not a requirement. But our services are aligned for much of the technical — really, all of the technical — aspects that an entrepreneur would face in the journey of getting from zero to typically A or B round funding. And our model then takes the work that we're doing. It sort of transitions to the client as they scale up into this A and B round, if you think about it from a VC standpoint. So, the principles behind CODE Éxitos were really 180° opposed to the things that we were doing, when I was doing high-growth, early-stage and VC-backed companies. Not because there's anything wrong or better or worse than one vs. the other, but this is how I wanted to spend my retirement.
Sharma
In terms of the technical services that you provide, is it around technology, or when you mean technical, it is all those decisions that they have to make as they're trying to navigate this journey to series A or B?
Fry
Our focus is generally toward technical execution of the requirements, such as building the software and building the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, that sort of stuff. We don't profess to be consultants.
But we try to meet them where they are. The entrepreneurs come to us with their dose of passion, their idea or market insight, and their ability to iteratively shape their ideas into something that can then be taken to the market.
Sharma
Now, when most companies think about finding talent outside of their four walls, the usual countries that come in mind are India, China, Indonesia and the Philippines. You chose Honduras. So, tell me about why.
Fry
Well, I've been one of those people that's traveled all over the world and had teams in all of those places that you've mentioned. The problem that I was trying to solve with CODE Éxitos was — you can't change the shape of the world and it takes a long time to get to India. It's an arduous, expensive journey. I'm a big believer, right or wrong, I'm a big believer even through pre-COVID-19, through COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 pandemic, that in-person interaction is worth — a minute of in-person interaction is worth 100 times its weight in virtual sessions. As much as I love engaging the audience through your podcast, it's always so much different if you're giving the presentation in an auditorium for a small group of people. I think you know that as well.
It's a different level of engagement. And building a product and working with innovators is such an intimate process, that physical access to talent was a key consideration for me. And so, you look at a map and you're like, “Wait a minute, what if I go up and down vs. around the globe?” A lot of things start to fall into place. So, I have time zone alignment. I have ease of access.
We have a client in Detroit, Michigan. And to get from Detroit, Michigan to our office, you go from Detroit to Houston and Houston to San Pedro Sula, which is the city outside my window. The flight from Detroit to Houston, Texas, takes longer than the flight from Houston, Texas, to San Pedro Sula. We're actually closer to Houston than Houston is to Detroit.
Central America also has a lot of challenges in its economy. There are brilliant men and women here, typically young men and women who are of the digital generation that are graduating. They're bilingual — English and Spanish. They're graduating with degrees in international business,
computer science and electrical engineering. And the local economy doesn't have high-quality jobs for them.
So, there's a scarcity of opportunity here. And so, a part of our public mission is that we hire a lot of people in this market and then we connect them working with entrepreneurs in the United States. The entrepreneurs gain the advantage of — a cost advantage, because our labor rates are a lot lower here.
And everyone benefits by just sort of this mixing of ideas and culture and energy and everything else. If one of our clients wants to come and visit, and they do, it's an easy trip. If the client, for time constraints or whatever, doesn't want to come all the way to here — doesn't want to come here to Honduras. We can meet them in Austin, Texas.
Sharma
Are there any challenges that you've encountered as you've grown your company in that specific space with the talent around you?
Fry
I don’t think of any specific challenges. So, you have sort of the obvious stuff, like language. Being bilingual and being fluent are two different things. And being bilingual and being fluent and being — like Americans think differently about problems and they communicate differently than people in other countries. It's, again, not a right or wrong, but syncing that up. So, you have some of those obvious things to work with.
We're actually starting to help companies in the US who want to have that, the term of that now is nearshore team. We can help people set up nearshore technology teams here and we do that. The workforce is great. I can't think of anything specific that was challenging or difficult.
Sharma
What's the kind of cost advantage, just rough percentages, that one sees in Central America vs. if you were to compare it with India or China?
Fry
Yeah. Service rates in India have been creeping up, because that industry has become huge and the labor pool is getting stretched. We're actually, a lot of times, we're at or below Indian rates. We come in somewhere between 35% and 50% of comparable US rates. And I can safely say that that's a skill match and will be 35% to 50% of the all end loaded rate for the equivalent US developer.
Sharma
And when you think about protecting intellectual property, I'm assuming it's sort of the same checks and balances that any company would need to have when they're trying to work with an external provider.
Fry
Yeah, that's right. We have, not surprisingly, technological ways around some of those concerns. Like we can have people working where the data never leaves the borders of the United States, if that's necessary. But yeah, there are laws and treaties in place that are reciprocal in recognizing things like patents and trade secrets and all of that sort of thing.
The one thing that people should always kind of be careful about when they're looking at any offshore provider, nearshore, offshore, non-US, and non-captive provider is, does the entity you're working with take the care to keep those kinds of things intact? So, for example, we have sought to security compliance, we have sought to security certifications. All of our employees have background checks, but they're local to Central America background checks. But we use the same vetting process that the US government does for immigration purposes, for example.
So, you want to make sure that the entity you're hiring is taking reasonable care to preserve that chain of care and custody that the people are talking about when they talk about things, like IP protection and cybercrime and data theft and all of that sort of stuff. The laws are generally in place and generally better than the care that companies put into it, or they’re just neglected altogether.
So, the due diligence is really on the buyer to say, “Tell me that you've thought about these things. Tell me how they apply in our commercial arrangement.” But we're very particular about all of that. Those kinds of protections are in place.
Sharma
One last question. As you think about your journey and all that you've learned, you're applying it now in your own company. What is your advice to entrepreneurs and people with a new idea?
Fry
It's a wonderful question and my answer hasn't really changed for the last 20 years. So, here it is. Do it because you love it. The money will take care of itself, whether you need investors or you don't need investors or you get VC money or you don't get VC money. Do it because you're passionate about it and you love it.
And so, the more people that have passion about it, the more people that can get it in and get a start and create some opportunity for other people, that's the magic that I like to see.
Sharma
Charles, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for your generosity of your time.
Fry
You're welcome very much.
Announcer
The Decoding Innovation Podcast series is a limited production of the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub based in Cleveland, Ohio. For more information, visit our website at ey.com/decodinginnovation. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe, leave a review wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to spread the word.
Mitali Sharma
Former host, Decoding Innovation podcast
