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Forbes Books presents the Startup Science Podcast
with Gregory Shepherd, brought to you by
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Startupscience dot Io. Greg is an
entrepreneur who has built and sold twelve businesses.
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He's a recipient of four private equity
awards and is a featured ten X
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speaker and Forbes author. Here's Gregory
Shephard. I'm super psyched for my guest
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this week. His name is Victorio
Pelicano. I can't wait for you to
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hear his story of courage, vision
and resilience. He overcame incredible odds to
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found multiple companies. One of his
startups, Verenia, was acquired by Oracle
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last year, and now he's aiming
to transform the world with Aviana by merging
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AI and robotics. Vic, Welcome
to the podcast. I feel like we're
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spiritual brothers and I can't wait to
get going. Can you start by telling
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us a little bit about your origin
story? I appreciate that, man,
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Thank you so much for having me
on. I've been a fan for a
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while now and it's an honor to
be here. Yeah, and I hope
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I tell my story a little bit
that you know, everybody kind of sees
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them a little bit of themselves and
me, I'm just a kid that grew
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up in you know, probably one
step above a trailer park. My dad
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was a truck driver. He left
school in sixth grade. My mom stayed
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at home. She got her ged. She actually had the most education in
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the immediate family. Not exactly the
recipe for founder and CEO of a tech
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company. And yeah, both of
them died when I was fairly young.
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My mom died of terminal cancer when
I was nineteen, after watching that horrifying
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disease and going through the treatment for
a couple of years through high school and
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early college. And then my dad
died about four years later when I was
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twenty three and I was in law
school. You know, he died with
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like three thousand dollars in his bank
account, So I didn't have anybody to
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pay for my college that kind of
went unsaid, but not anybody to like,
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not even any money to like figure
out what to do with my life.
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Right. I was just a college
kid and kind of scraping by as
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it was. And now I inherited
this house that he had refinanced about six
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times, I think, and three
thousand dollars in his checking account, and
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that's that's all I had, and
I ended up they foreclosed down the house.
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I tried to stay there. And
this is like two thousand and eight,
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by the way, a great time
for the stuff to be happy.
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Oh my god, during the recess, Oh my god. And then I
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thought all I had going for me
greg was was just, you know,
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finish law school and I'm going to
be a high powered attorney and I'm going
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to make all this money. And
then my dad had died in the in
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the spring, and I screwed up
my fast foot paperwork and I could and
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then when I went to go in
the fall, I didn't even think about
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it, truthfully, it just slipped
my mind. And then when I went
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to finish my last semester at law
school, three and a half years into
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a four year program night program,
I went to go back and they were
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like, oh, yeah, you
just give us your twenty thousand dollars for
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the semester and you're good. And
I was like, well, I don't
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have twenty thousand dollars. And then
they were like, sorry, you're never
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going to graduate law school. And
so now I'm you know, one hundred
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and twenty k in debt between undergrad
and law school, and no hope for
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the future, no idea what I'm
going to do. It's two thousand and
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eight, the recession. They foreclosed
down the house and I tried to stay
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there as long as I could.
The electricity got shut off, the water
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got shut off. I would go
to the gym to shower and get my
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life cut it together for the day. And then one day I came home
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and somebody had come by and changed
the locks, and then that was that.
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They repulled my car. That was
my only mode of transportation. My
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dad had got married about six months
before he died, and that woman was
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kind enough to lend me a van
shoused for her disabled daughter, and I
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stayed in that for a little while
and delivered pizzas. I didn't have a
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license or insurance or anything. And
it was a total mess, a terrible
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time in my life, you know, me and my dog and peanut butter
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and jelly sandwiches and frankly booze.
And then I took a job at Friedman
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CD Chicago. I had gotten through
a friend that was moving back to town
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who was kind enough to let me
move in with her, and she was
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doing sales for a manufacturing company.
She had done this for a number of
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years, and she said, you
know, why don't you work here with
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me? And instead of doing these
odd jobs like I was, And I
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thought, you know, it's something
right, I mean, it's a bad
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economy, I might as well do
it. And I took the job and
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I ended up loving it. I
fell in love with the people there,
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the leadership my whole life, Greg
I had. I'm bet a worker,
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right, Like. I worked full
time as an undergraduate and double majored in
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computer science and math. I taught
myself to code when I was like thirteen.
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In law school, I worked full
time during the day and which law
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school at night. So when I
was at Freedman, I would get off
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work at five o'clock and I just
had it was the weirdest feeling, just
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having nothing to do after five pm, Like what do you What do you
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guys do all the rest of the
time. I know exactly what you feel
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like, dude, Like sometimes if
I ever get half a little early,
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I feel like anxious, like there's
something I need to be doing some I
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can't believe I'm sitting here. This
is a waste of time. I know.
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I feel you one hundred percent.
It is just like that, right,
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Like, and maybe it's because my
dad whenever he saw me sitting routed
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walking and be like, what are
you doing? You know, yeah,
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yeah from if you're from a fan
I do. I mean I grew up
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the same way, man, Like
it's crazy, like you're telling the story
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that I had. It was gnarly
right, and it was the same thing
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where you're like your family is just
you're the number one thing in my family
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probably the same with yours. Is
work ethic. You work your ass off
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and if you don't, you are
less than scum. And it is like
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a principle. And but look at
you. I mean, like I was
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thinking about, I've done a lot
of research on founders, right, thousands
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of interviews and stuff, and this
pattern keeps emerging. Work ethic, like
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people have the ability to deploy discipline
and just freaking work their ass off.
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And you are like a perfect example
of that. So if you're listening,
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like, it's it's not just talent, it's not just gift, and it's
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not money. Some of it just
to do with grind, just frigging grind
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and clawing with your fingernails to get
one step further. Would you, like,
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would you agree with that? Like, where's your perspective on that?
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Because it sounds like you're just a
frigging machine man, just a beast.
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I would a thousand percent agree with
that. In fact, we just had
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an all hands call at my most
recent startup that we launched on Monday,
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and I told them all exactly that. I said, I am not the
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smartest guy in the world. I
don't come from good stock, as they
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say. My dad was a truck
driver. I tell them all the stories,
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and I say, you know I'm
here. I'm here doing these things
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only because I'm outworking everybody else when
I got into Rennia. When I started
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for Rennia, there was I think
seventy other CPQ companies in the space,
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like combined, and a lot of
them had been around ten, fifteen,
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twenty years. But I just did
all the things they wouldn't. I would
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drive to customers to solve problems.
I would drive to prospects that had no
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chance of closing to try to those
deals. I would write code myself if
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I had to, I would figure
it out till one two in the morning
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every single day. I just I
think of it, like you know,
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they talk about the way humans used
to hunt, right by exhaustion. They
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used to just find a gazelle and
just run it down forever. And that's
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what that's what I do. There's
no science to it. Good analogy,
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man, that's freaking sweet. Yeah, there's no overthinking it. There's no
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science. There's just I'm gonna go
and I'm going to go. I'm going
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to go until you quit and then
I'll win. So how do you let
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me ask you this? Then?
When you look at your life, by
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the way, man, I am
engaged like mad because you're like my friggin
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people, homie, Like, straight
up, this is my people. When
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you look at like all of the
struggle, Like I think of struggle as
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being a real quality thing, right. I mean when you work out at
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the gym, you have to go
to failure and you have to struggle in
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order to have progress, and same
thing in business, and I mean even
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plants evolution is a product of struggle. Right. So on that point,
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how do you feel that your background
and your struggle has benefited you in moving
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through these startups and where you are
today? I think knowing what the bottom
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actually looks like makes you appreciate all
the rest of it. I think people
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are scared of reaching a new low
for themselves. But most people haven't gotten
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low enough. Greg Most people haven't
gone down the fucking rabbit hole far enough.
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You know. I think guys like
you and I that have had to
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dig it out of the dirt,
you know what the bottom looks like.
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And I think, no matter what
gamble I make, I'm infinitely better off
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than I was when I started.
So I'm playing with fucking house money now,
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I know exactly. I used to
eat breakfast at hotel buffets, and
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then I would eat dinner at a
happy hour. I would go to happy
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hour buffets and act like I was
gonna drink then, and I would sneak
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into hotels neat breakfast. But so
I totally get it. My fear is
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actually going back there. I still
have like it's almost like a PTSD,
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like oh my god. No matter
how much money I have, I still
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have this like rain cloud over me, like, oh my god, just
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I have dreams about going back to
that life. That's horrible. I'm sorry
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that happened to you. I don't
have that fear now. My fear is
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that I'll get complacent and start enjoying
the you know, extra things I can
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buy myself now, and so that's
why, you know, I try to
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get up and do the same shit
I did ten fifteen years ago. I
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wake up at four in the morning, I do my workouts, I have
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breakfast with my kids. I try
to drive them to school, and I
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try to live exactly like I drive
a Kia, you know. I try
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to just do everything the way I
used to do it, and then nothing
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really changes internally for me. And
I try to keep the pain level the
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same for myself like it was before. And I try to not get comfortable
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because I want to keep going up. But I'm not scared of going back
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there. That's never going to happen. Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't
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happen to me, but but I
don't know, it's always kind of haunts
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me. I don't know, you
know. But I want to talk about
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your business, right the company that
you started. What inspired you to get
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into technology and launch your first startup? A second part of that question,
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b what were some of the key
strategies and philosophies that you use to fuel
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the growth and success of that startup. So Verrettia was the first company I
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started and that we had sold a
lot of it to Oracle last January.
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And when I got started, I
had never even met a CEO aside from
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like one the guy I worked for
at for even Seating, so I had
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to look up a lot of stuff
about what a CEO even did. Well.
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What made me get into it was
I'm not gonna lie. I'm a
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very competitive person, and I had
never met somebody that I was like,
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that person is better at this than
I am. And people seem to like
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my ideas a lot. When I
would say like, let's do it this
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way, let's do it that way, and working with people to get the
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change management done and stuff, I
really enjoyed that, And I even enjoyed
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the failure part. To your point, like about working out and everything else,
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that's kind of the same. Is
is like hearing ah that idea is
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not good enough or it won't work
because of this, Like I was just
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completely undeterred. I would just come
back and be like, let's do it
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this way, let's make these little
tweaks, let's do that. And people
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seem to appreciate that kind of grind
and motivation. But I think especially making
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a really great technology and seeing people
be happier at the end of the day.
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I'm like a severe people pleaser,
you know. I like creating value
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for people, myself included, but
I like seeing people. I like leaving
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things better than I found them wherever
I am. That's what I tell my
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kids too, is just leave it
better than you found it, and it's
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a great feeling. So when I
was able to do that at ready,
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it was I was a sales rep
in manufacturing, right, so making manufacturing
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sales enablement software was right on my
alley. I made my own life better.
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So as I was helping my customers, I was making myself better.
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I was making different versions of me
and my eyes better. I was improving
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their lives day to day, which
made me really happy, and it made
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me really like. You feel like
you're solving your own problem that everybody else
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has but that you can really empathize
with, and it gives me a really
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good feeling inside to leave that problem
behind. If that makes sense totally.
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So let's back up to go forward. Tell tell the audience about Ranny of
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what you guys did, how you
talked about how you started it, but
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I mean what you guys did,
the growth trajectory that you had the exit
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to Oracle. I mean, that's
a big brand to exit a company too.
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Let's get into that a little bit, and then I want to move
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into the company that you have now
that you started up and start having some
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fun with that. By the way, I'm having a fucking blast. So
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dude, yeah, that's awesome.
Thank you, me too, Soreddia.
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So we started, I didn't know
about raising money or anything else. So
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I started. I just bootstrapped the
thing from soup to nuts, from the
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day it started to the day we
exited. We'd never raise money. I
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tried. I tried, And you
asked me a minute ago, like what
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was one of your motivating factors?
And I'll never forget. There was a
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venture capitalist from a VC firm here
in Chicago who told me point blank,
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had me come all the way out
to his office, spent half a day.
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I got a coffee from the secretary. I sat in this big,
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long boardroom. He came in.
He talked to me for about five minutes
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and he said, you know,
guys, some companies just have it,
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it's in their DNA, and you
don't. And then he said, have
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a good day, and he just
walked out and that was it, and
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I remembered that guy, and so
what I did Greg It's true is I
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printed out all the VC firms that
turned me down, and I hung all
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their logos. I got him framed
and everything and put them on my wall
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in my gym where i'd work out
in the morning, and I just knew
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that they were wrong, but it
was up to me every day to get
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up and prove them wrong. Well, we did it just with customer revenue,
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right, So we didn't take salaries
at first. We took god jobs
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other stuff. I had six employees
before I paid myself a dollar, and
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I was blessed with two really great
co founders whom I'm still very close with.
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I just had dinner with a guy
last night who was a co founder
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there, and it was a grind. It was meeting people learning from the
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market, and I think that's those
lessons of bootstrapping and building the airplane on
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the way up are what I take
into everything I still do. And what
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I recommend to all founders now is
don't make your company on a spreadsheet.
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I mean I didn't, and I
think that's very much an intellectual, academic
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exercise, and maybe that'll get you
an MBA, but what makes you rich
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is making people happy, and you
don't know what makes them happy till you
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talk to them, and to assume
otherwise is condescending. I think you have
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to be talking to people the whole
time, your prospects, your customers,
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people you know in business, talking
to them, refining your ideas, grinding
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through them. But the market is
the decider of these things, not your
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spreadsheet one hundred percent one hundred percent. Let's talk about your new startup and
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what motivated you to focus on AI
and robotics specifically. What do you do,
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what are the biggest opportunities, what's
the most exciting and promising AI robotics
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innovations that you see going on on
the horizon. Let's let's grow up our
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sleeves and have some fun. Yeah, I would love to get your thoughts
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out a I too, if you
wouldn't mind sharing at some point during this
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I'm fine talking, but maybe as
older entrepreneurs like we are. When I
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logged into chat GPT for the first
time early this year, I don't know,
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man, I had like an existential
crisis. I was like, I
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was up at night, I was
telling my wife. I was like am
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I a chatbot? You know,
like, is that is that all it
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is? Is it just math?
Is my brain just doing a bunch of
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math? You know? What does
that mean? What is all this?
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And my wife this is why we
were you know, we've been married now
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it'll be ten years next year.
We got five kids. And she's great,
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and she's like, you need to
stay off the computer for a couple
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of days. What did you think
about all that? When you signed Craig,
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I was like tripping out. But
immediately what I came up with is
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the AI itself. Machine learning is
different, but even machine learning is not
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quite it's not nearly as advanced as
we are right like it will be,
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there's no question, because we're creating
ourselves. I mean, we're acting like
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gods and we're creating you know,
consciousness. Eventually we will get there.
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But right now, you know it
does if then equations like code from data
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that you feed it, and it
just regurgitates what it has. It hasn't
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gotten the point where it starts to
have its own opinions on things yet based
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on data. I think that's going
to be the pivotal point. I think
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right now it's a really fancy natural
way to communicate with a machine that and
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to communicate with data and get data
like you know, you could see like
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Google is really behind the times now
because you know, you should be using
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AI to say hey, I'm looking
for d d da da da dad and
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give it like old bunch of words
and then it will find it and say,
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all right, well, I think
you're talking about this. Here you
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go. But we're using it in
our stuff. And you know, in
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the last keynote that open put out
was pretty epic and scary, but scary
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in a good way. Like I
think the evolution is more human. I
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think that it's it's got a long
way to go. I don't know if
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you've tried to code with it or
anything, but it's got a long way
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to go before before it's like replacing
people. But it's certainly better than the
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chatbots that you see now. Those
bots that they have, they're terrible.
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You know, you could see somebody
like Apple being able to utilize this and
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get it right, but they first
have to clean up Siri because SII sucks.
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You know, that's when you're absolutely
right, Siri, Google Assistant Alexa.
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I was so excited for that tech
when it came out in twenty seventeen,
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twenty eighteen, and I saw the
value in it, and I daydreamed.
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I put together a deck actually on
a project, but I couldn't deliver
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because the NLP just wasn't there yet, Like we didn't have not But then
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when I saw chat CHEPT, I
was like, fuck, you're right,
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it's not all the way there,
but oh my god, is it.
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It's fifty years closer than I think
I would have guessed, and I spent.
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I was shocked. Man, I
was like, oh wow, this
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is much farther along than I than
I thought it was. I was really
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I mean, we're using AI to
try to build a automatic mentor system for
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startups, using all of the data
that we have in the system and all
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the data out there. You know, it's really wordy, you know,
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it's like it's like a It's it's
like me as a neurodivergent nerd trying to
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explain quantum physics. The person falls
asleep before they get the It does have
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a tendency to use ten words when
three will do right. Yeah, yeah,
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yeah. So I started looking at
this stuff and analyzing it, and
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I had been making investments the Oracle
acquisition into hardware because there's this really strong
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labor problem I see persisting forever,
frankly, and I don't think that goes
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away, Like I just don't.
There's there's too many things that need doing,
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and there's too few people who want
to do that kind of work,
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and with the immigration policies, population
decline. I think this is so I
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was trying to build a portfolio of
investments for my kids, frankly, because
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I don't know twenty thirty fifty years
from now what these companies look like,
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but I imagine a lot of work
is done robotically. And I took a
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look at their software and realized it
was it was garbage and just open source
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stuff. And all these hardware companies
are kind of just hacking together open source
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platforms on top of each other,
and I thought they really need a commercial
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system. And now then with the
natural language processing of AI and chet GPT,
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I was like, that's it like
to be able to control these robots
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using voice, using natural language,
being able to have a conversation with your
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robot, where did you fly today? Stuff like that. So from that
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we spawned Aviana have had great success
with that project, but a piece of
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Aviana was what we called fleet AI, and that's where you could converse with
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the robots data right, and robots
produce gigabytes and gigabytes of data, or
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you can converse with the whole fleet
who flew near Chicago yesterday. This is
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the complicated thing, by the way, with like unstructured data and to have
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this kind of conversation. So we
had to invent this whole system to deal
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with this. And then you know
what I realized, Greg, is this
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thing was its own system. And
what we're doing now with Sarah, which
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I lost on I'd launched on Monday, is we're giving firms the ability to
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create their own AIS off their own
private data sets with dealing with ten twenty
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thirty gigabyte, one thousands terabyte size
files and structured data in ERP, CRMs,
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et cetera. We're giving them the
ability to create their own AIS based
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off this, and then role based
controls based off who that person is in
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the organization, what data the AI
has access to to be trained on,
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and creating these smaller AI units for
themselves with their own data separate from chat
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GPT. So you're not telling you
you know the town parrot so to speak
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all your stuff, So nobody goes
into chat GPT tomorrow and says, how
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much does Craig make? Right,
They still can't learn that because it's never
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touched chat GPT. But you know, you can still use the power of
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AI that you want to get from
tools like that by using Sarah, incorporating
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your private enterprise data and using those
and launching them internally as chatbots for different
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roles, different users, et cetera. You know, it's going to create
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this environment where everybody is going to
stop having to log into Salesforce or you
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know, whatever enterprise system has whatever
answer and just be able to ask your
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local chatbot for something like you could
be like, where's the podcast I did
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with VIC last week? Answer?
Hey, can you tell me if I
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have any more calendar invites with Vic? Answered? What was the last email?
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Vixmi answered? Right? How many
views did Vic's podcasts have? Answered?
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Right? But every company all over
the world, every department in every
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company, and beyond that. What
we're excited about it, particularly for me,
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is the ability to help the government. So we're working with the government
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in some ways with Avian on the
robotics project. You can imagine why they'd
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be interested in tech like that.
But this part of it I think is
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going to be a game changer and
help all of us. Right, like,
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how many times has something been built
in your town and you're like,
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what are they building over here?
You don't know, you don't even know
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who to ask, Right, you
should be able to talk to your local
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government because they have the files,
they have the documents. Chat GPT is
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not trained on them and will never
be trained on that. And that's the
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service Seraph's going to provide for all
these government entities too, so that people
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can just log into the website,
use the chatbot and ask it questions and
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it can answer using this private data
store without exposing it to the wider foundational
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models. So cool, so you
could actually, you know, when I
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was in politics, the reason why
I got out is because they could lie.
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Nothing happens. You go to court, you lie, you go to
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jail. But you're president, you
lie, nothing happens. Same thing with
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Congrean. It'd be nice to be
able to ask the bot, hey,
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so and so lying and then be
like, yes, they're lying. I
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don't know. I think the government's
going to buy that at the moment.
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But that's true, that's true.
I think we may have to put some
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guardrails around it to avoid politically sensitive
charge things like that. But for information
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gathering and stuff, I mean what
a tool, right, Like, And
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I went to law school. You
know, there's entire law firms that practice
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civil procedure, which to me is
insane that it's so complicated that you need
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a lawyer to figure out how to
file a lawsuit. Like you should be
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able to do that. This is
a publicly funded thing that's available to you.
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You shouldn't need an elite group of
people to do this. You should
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just be able to do it yourself. You have that right, right.
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I mean, you're paying for everything
that that system exists, every person involved
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with it, you've paid for.
Why then do I have to pay somebody
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to figure out how to use it? It's insane right right on home slice,
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I'm picking up what you're throwing down. I really did. This is
368
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so cool And I can really see
an application of a AI personal assistant or
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executive assistant right because with mine,
I'm always having to chat her, Hey,
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what's up to all these different things? Because it takes me longer to
371
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figure out what's in motion that it
does just ask, you know, and
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I think that that is I mean, that's an incredible application right there.
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That is epic, right, And
then I think that the same logic,
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to your point, can be applied
to many things that are you know,
375
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have you heard it? The ratchet
effect in politics is where they lay down
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some regulations and then they don't eliminate
the one that was laid down, They
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put another one on top and another
one on top, and over time you
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have tens of thousands of you know, pieces of content laid one on top
379
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of another, and the work gets
harder and takes longer, and it slows
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down everything and it makes it impossible
for anybody to find anything. But if
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you had an AI like that,
it could read everything and you could say,
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ddope, all the shit we've already
cleaned up, take it out right
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now, let's get down to the
meat. What is the what are the
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main principles across all of this ratcheting
that we need to apply for and deal
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with, and then deal with that
and then get rid of all that crap
386
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so people can understand what the hell
is going on? Right, instead of
387
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having to do a history lesson on
one thousand things that don't matter anymore or
388
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whatever. Yeah, totally like stuff
that was put in play and it's not
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even you know, we're talking about
like some of the stuff goes back to
390
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the nineteen forties and you're like those
things don't even exist anymore. Like why
391
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do we have this in law at
all? We're having to manage it and
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the cost, and I think it's
brilliant, man, I I mean,
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you're clearly a freaking visionary genius.
I'm just a guy. I'm just grind
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and don't say that like I'm not. I don't want I don't think anybody
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should think I'm special. I mean
I joke about how great I am all
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the time, but I think everybody
should have that attitude every day, and
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I think the world would be a
better place if they did. Because I'm
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not special, man, I'm just
out there thinking about how to help people
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and what I want. I want
better government services, I want what I'm
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an employee, right, I worked
for Oracle, I worked for that's I
401
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mean Corporate America, right, two
hundred thousand employees or whatever. Like you
402
00:26:32.160 --> 00:26:34.119
want to know how many days off
you have left? Good luck? Like
403
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you got to find the system.
You got to ask this person. They're
404
00:26:37.440 --> 00:26:41.720
never going to answer an email because
Sharon's on vacation. You know, nothing
405
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gets done. I never heard the
term ratchet effect, but I like it
406
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the way I thought about it in
my head. The analogy I came up
407
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with Greg was like, it's like
a regulations and stuff like this. It's
408
00:26:52.279 --> 00:26:56.319
like a bandage, right, And
imagine every time you got cut in your
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00:26:56.319 --> 00:26:57.519
life or you got hurt, you
put a bandage on, but you never
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00:26:57.559 --> 00:27:02.319
took the old one off. That's
exactly what the ratchet effect is. By
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00:27:02.359 --> 00:27:04.519
the time you're by the time your
eyes you're walking out, you can't move
412
00:27:06.000 --> 00:27:08.839
right and then you know you can't
go anywhere. You can't do anything because
413
00:27:08.839 --> 00:27:14.079
you're just stuck. And that's that's
the the I think that's a bureaucracy that
414
00:27:14.119 --> 00:27:17.640
gets created. And I hope AI
is our way out of this. Oh
415
00:27:17.720 --> 00:27:21.319
man. I think I think it
is. I think your application is and
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I love your approach on humility.
And I always tell people that, you
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00:27:26.200 --> 00:27:30.400
know, people always say I have
imposter syndrome and I'm really you know,
418
00:27:30.480 --> 00:27:33.119
insecure, and I say that's good. I want to stay that way because
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00:27:33.160 --> 00:27:37.279
if I'm not insecure, then i'm
and I've got ego and you know,
420
00:27:37.359 --> 00:27:40.359
and if I'm not, if I
don't have imposter syndrome, then I know
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00:27:40.480 --> 00:27:42.400
everything. And my mom used to
tell me, if you're the smartest one
422
00:27:42.400 --> 00:27:47.279
in the room, you're in the
wrong room. You know, that's very
423
00:27:47.359 --> 00:27:48.720
true. That's very true. And
you got to keep finding new rooms for
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yourself. Then right, yeah,
one hundred percent. All right, hold
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00:27:52.559 --> 00:27:56.160
on one second, vic, We
got to stop here, but we have
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00:27:56.240 --> 00:28:00.079
more to get to coming up.
In the second part of my chat with
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00:28:00.200 --> 00:28:04.839
Victorio Pelicano, the serial entrepreneur and
CEO of Aviana, Nick talks about how
428
00:28:04.880 --> 00:28:08.799
he handles the work life balance of
a startup founder, father, and husband.
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00:28:10.079 --> 00:28:14.160
You know, I try to exist
in this work life flow, stay
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00:28:14.200 --> 00:28:18.200
where I'm always working, but I
don't let it bother me because it takes
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00:28:18.200 --> 00:28:21.200
two seconds to answer and email our
text, you know, as a senior
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00:28:21.240 --> 00:28:25.039
executive, and it's not a big
deal for me because I'm always there.
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00:28:25.119 --> 00:28:27.119
It's like in The Avengers when they're
like, how do you just turn into
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00:28:27.160 --> 00:28:30.240
the Hulk in the one movie?
And He's like, the secret is I'm
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00:28:30.240 --> 00:28:34.640
always angry. This Startup Science Podcast
with Gregory Sheppard is brought to you by
436
00:28:34.680 --> 00:28:41.759
Startupscience dot Io. Founders can log
on to startupscience dot io and use code
437
00:28:42.000 --> 00:28:48.200
Forbes to get free access. To
connect and find out more about greg go
438
00:28:48.279 --> 00:29:02.400
to Gregory shephard dot com. The
Startup Science Podcast is a production of Forbes books.
1
00:00:01.360 --> 00:00:07.120
Forbes Books presents the Startup Science Podcast
with Gregory Shepherd, brought to you by
2
00:00:07.200 --> 00:00:13.800
Startupscience dot Io. Greg is an
entrepreneur who has built and sold twelve businesses.
3
00:00:14.279 --> 00:00:18.879
He's a recipient of four private equity
awards and is a featured ten X
4
00:00:18.920 --> 00:00:25.519
speaker and Forbes author. Here's Gregory
Shephard. I'm super psyched for my guest
5
00:00:25.519 --> 00:00:29.320
this week. His name is Victorio
Pelicano. I can't wait for you to
6
00:00:29.359 --> 00:00:35.280
hear his story of courage, vision
and resilience. He overcame incredible odds to
7
00:00:35.359 --> 00:00:40.039
found multiple companies. One of his
startups, Verenia, was acquired by Oracle
8
00:00:40.119 --> 00:00:44.159
last year, and now he's aiming
to transform the world with Aviana by merging
9
00:00:44.200 --> 00:00:48.399
AI and robotics. Vic, Welcome
to the podcast. I feel like we're
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00:00:48.439 --> 00:00:53.240
spiritual brothers and I can't wait to
get going. Can you start by telling
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00:00:53.320 --> 00:00:56.640
us a little bit about your origin
story? I appreciate that, man,
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Thank you so much for having me
on. I've been a fan for a
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while now and it's an honor to
be here. Yeah, and I hope
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I tell my story a little bit
that you know, everybody kind of sees
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them a little bit of themselves and
me, I'm just a kid that grew
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up in you know, probably one
step above a trailer park. My dad
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was a truck driver. He left
school in sixth grade. My mom stayed
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at home. She got her ged. She actually had the most education in
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the immediate family. Not exactly the
recipe for founder and CEO of a tech
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company. And yeah, both of
them died when I was fairly young.
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My mom died of terminal cancer when
I was nineteen, after watching that horrifying
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disease and going through the treatment for
a couple of years through high school and
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early college. And then my dad
died about four years later when I was
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twenty three and I was in law
school. You know, he died with
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like three thousand dollars in his bank
account, So I didn't have anybody to
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pay for my college that kind of
went unsaid, but not anybody to like,
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not even any money to like figure
out what to do with my life.
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Right. I was just a college
kid and kind of scraping by as
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it was. And now I inherited
this house that he had refinanced about six
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times, I think, and three
thousand dollars in his checking account, and
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that's that's all I had, and
I ended up they foreclosed down the house.
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I tried to stay there. And
this is like two thousand and eight,
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by the way, a great time
for the stuff to be happy.
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Oh my god, during the recess, Oh my god. And then I
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thought all I had going for me
greg was was just, you know,
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finish law school and I'm going to
be a high powered attorney and I'm going
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to make all this money. And
then my dad had died in the in
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the spring, and I screwed up
my fast foot paperwork and I could and
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then when I went to go in
the fall, I didn't even think about
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it, truthfully, it just slipped
my mind. And then when I went
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to finish my last semester at law
school, three and a half years into
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a four year program night program,
I went to go back and they were
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like, oh, yeah, you
just give us your twenty thousand dollars for
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the semester and you're good. And
I was like, well, I don't
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have twenty thousand dollars. And then
they were like, sorry, you're never
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going to graduate law school. And
so now I'm you know, one hundred
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and twenty k in debt between undergrad
and law school, and no hope for
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the future, no idea what I'm
going to do. It's two thousand and
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eight, the recession. They foreclosed
down the house and I tried to stay
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there as long as I could.
The electricity got shut off, the water
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got shut off. I would go
to the gym to shower and get my
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life cut it together for the day. And then one day I came home
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and somebody had come by and changed
the locks, and then that was that.
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They repulled my car. That was
my only mode of transportation. My
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dad had got married about six months
before he died, and that woman was
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kind enough to lend me a van
shoused for her disabled daughter, and I
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stayed in that for a little while
and delivered pizzas. I didn't have a
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license or insurance or anything. And
it was a total mess, a terrible
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time in my life, you know, me and my dog and peanut butter
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and jelly sandwiches and frankly booze.
And then I took a job at Friedman
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CD Chicago. I had gotten through
a friend that was moving back to town
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who was kind enough to let me
move in with her, and she was
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doing sales for a manufacturing company.
She had done this for a number of
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years, and she said, you
know, why don't you work here with
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me? And instead of doing these
odd jobs like I was, And I
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thought, you know, it's something
right, I mean, it's a bad
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economy, I might as well do
it. And I took the job and
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I ended up loving it. I
fell in love with the people there,
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the leadership my whole life, Greg
I had. I'm bet a worker,
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right, Like. I worked full
time as an undergraduate and double majored in
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computer science and math. I taught
myself to code when I was like thirteen.
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In law school, I worked full
time during the day and which law
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school at night. So when I
was at Freedman, I would get off
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work at five o'clock and I just
had it was the weirdest feeling, just
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having nothing to do after five pm, Like what do you What do you
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guys do all the rest of the
time. I know exactly what you feel
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like, dude, Like sometimes if
I ever get half a little early,
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I feel like anxious, like there's
something I need to be doing some I
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can't believe I'm sitting here. This
is a waste of time. I know.
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I feel you one hundred percent.
It is just like that, right,
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Like, and maybe it's because my
dad whenever he saw me sitting routed
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walking and be like, what are
you doing? You know, yeah,
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yeah from if you're from a fan
I do. I mean I grew up
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the same way, man, Like
it's crazy, like you're telling the story
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that I had. It was gnarly
right, and it was the same thing
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where you're like your family is just
you're the number one thing in my family
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probably the same with yours. Is
work ethic. You work your ass off
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and if you don't, you are
less than scum. And it is like
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a principle. And but look at
you. I mean, like I was
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thinking about, I've done a lot
of research on founders, right, thousands
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of interviews and stuff, and this
pattern keeps emerging. Work ethic, like
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people have the ability to deploy discipline
and just freaking work their ass off.
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And you are like a perfect example
of that. So if you're listening,
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like, it's it's not just talent, it's not just gift, and it's
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not money. Some of it just
to do with grind, just frigging grind
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and clawing with your fingernails to get
one step further. Would you, like,
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would you agree with that? Like, where's your perspective on that?
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Because it sounds like you're just a
frigging machine man, just a beast.
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I would a thousand percent agree with
that. In fact, we just had
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an all hands call at my most
recent startup that we launched on Monday,
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and I told them all exactly that. I said, I am not the
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smartest guy in the world. I
don't come from good stock, as they
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say. My dad was a truck
driver. I tell them all the stories,
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and I say, you know I'm
here. I'm here doing these things
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only because I'm outworking everybody else when
I got into Rennia. When I started
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for Rennia, there was I think
seventy other CPQ companies in the space,
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like combined, and a lot of
them had been around ten, fifteen,
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twenty years. But I just did
all the things they wouldn't. I would
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drive to customers to solve problems.
I would drive to prospects that had no
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chance of closing to try to those
deals. I would write code myself if
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I had to, I would figure
it out till one two in the morning
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every single day. I just I
think of it, like you know,
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they talk about the way humans used
to hunt, right by exhaustion. They
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used to just find a gazelle and
just run it down forever. And that's
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what that's what I do. There's
no science to it. Good analogy,
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man, that's freaking sweet. Yeah, there's no overthinking it. There's no
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science. There's just I'm gonna go
and I'm going to go. I'm going
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to go until you quit and then
I'll win. So how do you let
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me ask you this? Then?
When you look at your life, by
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the way, man, I am
engaged like mad because you're like my friggin
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people, homie, Like, straight
up, this is my people. When
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you look at like all of the
struggle, Like I think of struggle as
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being a real quality thing, right. I mean when you work out at
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the gym, you have to go
to failure and you have to struggle in
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order to have progress, and same
thing in business, and I mean even
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plants evolution is a product of struggle. Right. So on that point,
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how do you feel that your background
and your struggle has benefited you in moving
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through these startups and where you are
today? I think knowing what the bottom
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actually looks like makes you appreciate all
the rest of it. I think people
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are scared of reaching a new low
for themselves. But most people haven't gotten
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low enough. Greg Most people haven't
gone down the fucking rabbit hole far enough.
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You know. I think guys like
you and I that have had to
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dig it out of the dirt,
you know what the bottom looks like.
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00:08:31.799 --> 00:08:37.480
And I think, no matter what
gamble I make, I'm infinitely better off
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than I was when I started.
So I'm playing with fucking house money now,
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I know exactly. I used to
eat breakfast at hotel buffets, and
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then I would eat dinner at a
happy hour. I would go to happy
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hour buffets and act like I was
gonna drink then, and I would sneak
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into hotels neat breakfast. But so
I totally get it. My fear is
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actually going back there. I still
have like it's almost like a PTSD,
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like oh my god. No matter
how much money I have, I still
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00:09:01.799 --> 00:09:03.879
have this like rain cloud over me, like, oh my god, just
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I have dreams about going back to
that life. That's horrible. I'm sorry
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00:09:09.919 --> 00:09:13.159
that happened to you. I don't
have that fear now. My fear is
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00:09:13.919 --> 00:09:18.639
that I'll get complacent and start enjoying
the you know, extra things I can
146
00:09:18.679 --> 00:09:20.639
buy myself now, and so that's
why, you know, I try to
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00:09:20.679 --> 00:09:24.039
get up and do the same shit
I did ten fifteen years ago. I
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wake up at four in the morning, I do my workouts, I have
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breakfast with my kids. I try
to drive them to school, and I
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try to live exactly like I drive
a Kia, you know. I try
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to just do everything the way I
used to do it, and then nothing
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really changes internally for me. And
I try to keep the pain level the
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same for myself like it was before. And I try to not get comfortable
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because I want to keep going up. But I'm not scared of going back
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there. That's never going to happen. Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't
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happen to me, but but I
don't know, it's always kind of haunts
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me. I don't know, you
know. But I want to talk about
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00:10:00.440 --> 00:10:05.720
your business, right the company that
you started. What inspired you to get
159
00:10:05.759 --> 00:10:09.120
into technology and launch your first startup? A second part of that question,
160
00:10:09.200 --> 00:10:16.320
b what were some of the key
strategies and philosophies that you use to fuel
161
00:10:16.600 --> 00:10:20.000
the growth and success of that startup. So Verrettia was the first company I
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00:10:20.080 --> 00:10:26.440
started and that we had sold a
lot of it to Oracle last January.
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00:10:26.360 --> 00:10:30.559
And when I got started, I
had never even met a CEO aside from
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00:10:30.600 --> 00:10:31.960
like one the guy I worked for
at for even Seating, so I had
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00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:35.799
to look up a lot of stuff
about what a CEO even did. Well.
166
00:10:35.799 --> 00:10:39.039
What made me get into it was
I'm not gonna lie. I'm a
167
00:10:39.159 --> 00:10:43.600
very competitive person, and I had
never met somebody that I was like,
168
00:10:43.120 --> 00:10:48.720
that person is better at this than
I am. And people seem to like
169
00:10:48.759 --> 00:10:52.320
my ideas a lot. When I
would say like, let's do it this
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00:10:52.360 --> 00:10:54.919
way, let's do it that way, and working with people to get the
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change management done and stuff, I
really enjoyed that, And I even enjoyed
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00:10:58.759 --> 00:11:03.080
the failure part. To your point, like about working out and everything else,
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that's kind of the same. Is
is like hearing ah that idea is
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not good enough or it won't work
because of this, Like I was just
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completely undeterred. I would just come
back and be like, let's do it
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this way, let's make these little
tweaks, let's do that. And people
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seem to appreciate that kind of grind
and motivation. But I think especially making
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a really great technology and seeing people
be happier at the end of the day.
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I'm like a severe people pleaser,
you know. I like creating value
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for people, myself included, but
I like seeing people. I like leaving
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things better than I found them wherever
I am. That's what I tell my
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kids too, is just leave it
better than you found it, and it's
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a great feeling. So when I
was able to do that at ready,
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it was I was a sales rep
in manufacturing, right, so making manufacturing
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sales enablement software was right on my
alley. I made my own life better.
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So as I was helping my customers, I was making myself better.
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I was making different versions of me
and my eyes better. I was improving
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their lives day to day, which
made me really happy, and it made
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me really like. You feel like
you're solving your own problem that everybody else
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has but that you can really empathize
with, and it gives me a really
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good feeling inside to leave that problem
behind. If that makes sense totally.
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So let's back up to go forward. Tell tell the audience about Ranny of
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what you guys did, how you
talked about how you started it, but
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I mean what you guys did,
the growth trajectory that you had the exit
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to Oracle. I mean, that's
a big brand to exit a company too.
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Let's get into that a little bit, and then I want to move
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into the company that you have now
that you started up and start having some
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fun with that. By the way, I'm having a fucking blast. So
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dude, yeah, that's awesome.
Thank you, me too, Soreddia.
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So we started, I didn't know
about raising money or anything else. So
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I started. I just bootstrapped the
thing from soup to nuts, from the
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day it started to the day we
exited. We'd never raise money. I
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tried. I tried, And you
asked me a minute ago, like what
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was one of your motivating factors?
And I'll never forget. There was a
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venture capitalist from a VC firm here
in Chicago who told me point blank,
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had me come all the way out
to his office, spent half a day.
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I got a coffee from the secretary. I sat in this big,
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long boardroom. He came in.
He talked to me for about five minutes
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and he said, you know,
guys, some companies just have it,
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it's in their DNA, and you
don't. And then he said, have
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a good day, and he just
walked out and that was it, and
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I remembered that guy, and so
what I did Greg It's true is I
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printed out all the VC firms that
turned me down, and I hung all
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their logos. I got him framed
and everything and put them on my wall
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in my gym where i'd work out
in the morning, and I just knew
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that they were wrong, but it
was up to me every day to get
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up and prove them wrong. Well, we did it just with customer revenue,
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right, So we didn't take salaries
at first. We took god jobs
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other stuff. I had six employees
before I paid myself a dollar, and
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I was blessed with two really great
co founders whom I'm still very close with.
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I just had dinner with a guy
last night who was a co founder
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there, and it was a grind. It was meeting people learning from the
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market, and I think that's those
lessons of bootstrapping and building the airplane on
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the way up are what I take
into everything I still do. And what
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I recommend to all founders now is
don't make your company on a spreadsheet.
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I mean I didn't, and I
think that's very much an intellectual, academic
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exercise, and maybe that'll get you
an MBA, but what makes you rich
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is making people happy, and you
don't know what makes them happy till you
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talk to them, and to assume
otherwise is condescending. I think you have
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to be talking to people the whole
time, your prospects, your customers,
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people you know in business, talking
to them, refining your ideas, grinding
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through them. But the market is
the decider of these things, not your
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spreadsheet one hundred percent one hundred percent. Let's talk about your new startup and
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what motivated you to focus on AI
and robotics specifically. What do you do,
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what are the biggest opportunities, what's
the most exciting and promising AI robotics
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innovations that you see going on on
the horizon. Let's let's grow up our
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sleeves and have some fun. Yeah, I would love to get your thoughts
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out a I too, if you
wouldn't mind sharing at some point during this
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I'm fine talking, but maybe as
older entrepreneurs like we are. When I
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logged into chat GPT for the first
time early this year, I don't know,
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man, I had like an existential
crisis. I was like, I
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was up at night, I was
telling my wife. I was like am
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I a chatbot? You know,
like, is that is that all it
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is? Is it just math?
Is my brain just doing a bunch of
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math? You know? What does
that mean? What is all this?
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And my wife this is why we
were you know, we've been married now
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it'll be ten years next year.
We got five kids. And she's great,
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and she's like, you need to
stay off the computer for a couple
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of days. What did you think
about all that? When you signed Craig,
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I was like tripping out. But
immediately what I came up with is
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the AI itself. Machine learning is
different, but even machine learning is not
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quite it's not nearly as advanced as
we are right like it will be,
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there's no question, because we're creating
ourselves. I mean, we're acting like
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gods and we're creating you know,
consciousness. Eventually we will get there.
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But right now, you know it
does if then equations like code from data
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that you feed it, and it
just regurgitates what it has. It hasn't
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gotten the point where it starts to
have its own opinions on things yet based
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on data. I think that's going
to be the pivotal point. I think
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right now it's a really fancy natural
way to communicate with a machine that and
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to communicate with data and get data
like you know, you could see like
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Google is really behind the times now
because you know, you should be using
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AI to say hey, I'm looking
for d d da da da dad and
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give it like old bunch of words
and then it will find it and say,
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all right, well, I think
you're talking about this. Here you
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go. But we're using it in
our stuff. And you know, in
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the last keynote that open put out
was pretty epic and scary, but scary
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in a good way. Like I
think the evolution is more human. I
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think that it's it's got a long
way to go. I don't know if
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you've tried to code with it or
anything, but it's got a long way
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to go before before it's like replacing
people. But it's certainly better than the
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chatbots that you see now. Those
bots that they have, they're terrible.
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You know, you could see somebody
like Apple being able to utilize this and
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get it right, but they first
have to clean up Siri because SII sucks.
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You know, that's when you're absolutely
right, Siri, Google Assistant Alexa.
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I was so excited for that tech
when it came out in twenty seventeen,
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twenty eighteen, and I saw the
value in it, and I daydreamed.
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I put together a deck actually on
a project, but I couldn't deliver
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because the NLP just wasn't there yet, Like we didn't have not But then
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when I saw chat CHEPT, I
was like, fuck, you're right,
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it's not all the way there,
but oh my god, is it.
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It's fifty years closer than I think
I would have guessed, and I spent.
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I was shocked. Man, I
was like, oh wow, this
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is much farther along than I than
I thought it was. I was really
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I mean, we're using AI to
try to build a automatic mentor system for
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startups, using all of the data
that we have in the system and all
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the data out there. You know, it's really wordy, you know,
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it's like it's like a It's it's
like me as a neurodivergent nerd trying to
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explain quantum physics. The person falls
asleep before they get the It does have
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a tendency to use ten words when
three will do right. Yeah, yeah,
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yeah. So I started looking at
this stuff and analyzing it, and
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I had been making investments the Oracle
acquisition into hardware because there's this really strong
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labor problem I see persisting forever,
frankly, and I don't think that goes
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away, Like I just don't.
There's there's too many things that need doing,
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and there's too few people who want
to do that kind of work,
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and with the immigration policies, population
decline. I think this is so I
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was trying to build a portfolio of
investments for my kids, frankly, because
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I don't know twenty thirty fifty years
from now what these companies look like,
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but I imagine a lot of work
is done robotically. And I took a
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look at their software and realized it
was it was garbage and just open source
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stuff. And all these hardware companies
are kind of just hacking together open source
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platforms on top of each other,
and I thought they really need a commercial
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system. And now then with the
natural language processing of AI and chet GPT,
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I was like, that's it like
to be able to control these robots
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using voice, using natural language,
being able to have a conversation with your
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robot, where did you fly today? Stuff like that. So from that
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we spawned Aviana have had great success
with that project, but a piece of
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Aviana was what we called fleet AI, and that's where you could converse with
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the robots data right, and robots
produce gigabytes and gigabytes of data, or
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you can converse with the whole fleet
who flew near Chicago yesterday. This is
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the complicated thing, by the way, with like unstructured data and to have
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this kind of conversation. So we
had to invent this whole system to deal
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with this. And then you know
what I realized, Greg, is this
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thing was its own system. And
what we're doing now with Sarah, which
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I lost on I'd launched on Monday, is we're giving firms the ability to
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create their own AIS off their own
private data sets with dealing with ten twenty
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thirty gigabyte, one thousands terabyte size
files and structured data in ERP, CRMs,
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et cetera. We're giving them the
ability to create their own AIS based
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off this, and then role based
controls based off who that person is in
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the organization, what data the AI
has access to to be trained on,
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and creating these smaller AI units for
themselves with their own data separate from chat
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GPT. So you're not telling you
you know the town parrot so to speak
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all your stuff, So nobody goes
into chat GPT tomorrow and says, how
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much does Craig make? Right,
They still can't learn that because it's never
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touched chat GPT. But you know, you can still use the power of
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AI that you want to get from
tools like that by using Sarah, incorporating
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your private enterprise data and using those
and launching them internally as chatbots for different
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roles, different users, et cetera. You know, it's going to create
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this environment where everybody is going to
stop having to log into Salesforce or you
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know, whatever enterprise system has whatever
answer and just be able to ask your
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local chatbot for something like you could
be like, where's the podcast I did
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with VIC last week? Answer?
Hey, can you tell me if I
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have any more calendar invites with Vic? Answered? What was the last email?
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Vixmi answered? Right? How many
views did Vic's podcasts have? Answered?
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Right? But every company all over
the world, every department in every
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company, and beyond that. What
we're excited about it, particularly for me,
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is the ability to help the government. So we're working with the government
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in some ways with Avian on the
robotics project. You can imagine why they'd
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be interested in tech like that.
But this part of it I think is
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going to be a game changer and
help all of us. Right, like,
340
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how many times has something been built
in your town and you're like,
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what are they building over here?
You don't know, you don't even know
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who to ask, Right, you
should be able to talk to your local
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government because they have the files,
they have the documents. Chat GPT is
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not trained on them and will never
be trained on that. And that's the
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service Seraph's going to provide for all
these government entities too, so that people
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can just log into the website,
use the chatbot and ask it questions and
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it can answer using this private data
store without exposing it to the wider foundational
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models. So cool, so you
could actually, you know, when I
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was in politics, the reason why
I got out is because they could lie.
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Nothing happens. You go to court, you lie, you go to
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jail. But you're president, you
lie, nothing happens. Same thing with
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Congrean. It'd be nice to be
able to ask the bot, hey,
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so and so lying and then be
like, yes, they're lying. I
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don't know. I think the government's
going to buy that at the moment.
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But that's true, that's true.
I think we may have to put some
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guardrails around it to avoid politically sensitive
charge things like that. But for information
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gathering and stuff, I mean what
a tool, right, Like, And
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I went to law school. You
know, there's entire law firms that practice
359
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civil procedure, which to me is
insane that it's so complicated that you need
360
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a lawyer to figure out how to
file a lawsuit. Like you should be
361
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able to do that. This is
a publicly funded thing that's available to you.
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You shouldn't need an elite group of
people to do this. You should
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just be able to do it yourself. You have that right, right.
364
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I mean, you're paying for everything
that that system exists, every person involved
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with it, you've paid for.
Why then do I have to pay somebody
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to figure out how to use it? It's insane right right on home slice,
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I'm picking up what you're throwing down. I really did. This is
368
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so cool And I can really see
an application of a AI personal assistant or
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executive assistant right because with mine,
I'm always having to chat her, Hey,
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what's up to all these different things? Because it takes me longer to
371
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figure out what's in motion that it
does just ask, you know, and
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I think that that is I mean, that's an incredible application right there.
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That is epic, right, And
then I think that the same logic,
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to your point, can be applied
to many things that are you know,
375
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have you heard it? The ratchet
effect in politics is where they lay down
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some regulations and then they don't eliminate
the one that was laid down, They
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put another one on top and another
one on top, and over time you
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have tens of thousands of you know, pieces of content laid one on top
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of another, and the work gets
harder and takes longer, and it slows
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down everything and it makes it impossible
for anybody to find anything. But if
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you had an AI like that,
it could read everything and you could say,
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ddope, all the shit we've already
cleaned up, take it out right
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now, let's get down to the
meat. What is the what are the
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main principles across all of this ratcheting
that we need to apply for and deal
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with, and then deal with that
and then get rid of all that crap
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so people can understand what the hell
is going on? Right, instead of
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having to do a history lesson on
one thousand things that don't matter anymore or
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whatever. Yeah, totally like stuff
that was put in play and it's not
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even you know, we're talking about
like some of the stuff goes back to
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the nineteen forties and you're like those
things don't even exist anymore. Like why
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do we have this in law at
all? We're having to manage it and
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the cost, and I think it's
brilliant, man, I I mean,
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you're clearly a freaking visionary genius.
I'm just a guy. I'm just grind
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and don't say that like I'm not. I don't want I don't think anybody
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should think I'm special. I mean
I joke about how great I am all
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the time, but I think everybody
should have that attitude every day, and
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I think the world would be a
better place if they did. Because I'm
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not special, man, I'm just
out there thinking about how to help people
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and what I want. I want
better government services, I want what I'm
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an employee, right, I worked
for Oracle, I worked for that's I
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mean Corporate America, right, two
hundred thousand employees or whatever. Like you
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want to know how many days off
you have left? Good luck? Like
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you got to find the system.
You got to ask this person. They're
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never going to answer an email because
Sharon's on vacation. You know, nothing
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gets done. I never heard the
term ratchet effect, but I like it
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the way I thought about it in
my head. The analogy I came up
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with Greg was like, it's like
a regulations and stuff like this. It's
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like a bandage, right, And
imagine every time you got cut in your
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life or you got hurt, you
put a bandage on, but you never
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took the old one off. That's
exactly what the ratchet effect is. By
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the time you're by the time your
eyes you're walking out, you can't move
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right and then you know you can't
go anywhere. You can't do anything because
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you're just stuck. And that's that's
the the I think that's a bureaucracy that
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gets created. And I hope AI
is our way out of this. Oh
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man. I think I think it
is. I think your application is and
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I love your approach on humility.
And I always tell people that, you
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know, people always say I have
imposter syndrome and I'm really you know,
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insecure, and I say that's good. I want to stay that way because
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if I'm not insecure, then i'm
and I've got ego and you know,
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and if I'm not, if I
don't have imposter syndrome, then I know
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everything. And my mom used to
tell me, if you're the smartest one
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in the room, you're in the
wrong room. You know, that's very
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true. That's very true. And
you got to keep finding new rooms for
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yourself. Then right, yeah,
one hundred percent. All right, hold
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on one second, vic, We
got to stop here, but we have
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more to get to coming up.
In the second part of my chat with
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00:28:00.200 --> 00:28:04.839
Victorio Pelicano, the serial entrepreneur and
CEO of Aviana, Nick talks about how
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00:28:04.880 --> 00:28:08.799
he handles the work life balance of
a startup founder, father, and husband.
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You know, I try to exist
in this work life flow, stay
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where I'm always working, but I
don't let it bother me because it takes
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two seconds to answer and email our
text, you know, as a senior
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executive, and it's not a big
deal for me because I'm always there.
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It's like in The Avengers when they're
like, how do you just turn into
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the Hulk in the one movie?
And He's like, the secret is I'm
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00:28:30.240 --> 00:28:34.640
always angry. This Startup Science Podcast
with Gregory Sheppard is brought to you by
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00:28:34.680 --> 00:28:41.759
Startupscience dot Io. Founders can log
on to startupscience dot io and use code
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00:28:42.000 --> 00:28:48.200
Forbes to get free access. To
connect and find out more about greg go
438
00:28:48.279 --> 00:29:02.400
to Gregory shephard dot com. The
Startup Science Podcast is a production of Forbes books.
