What Selling a Company for $100M Really Teaches You (Lessons From GoldMine Co-Founder)

Kayvon Kay0:00He started a company with $5,000, never took a dime of venture money or a bank loan, and sold it for more than a 100,000,000. That company was Goldmine, and it helped pioneer the CRM category every sales team now lives inside. About a year after the sale, he was facing a tumor, and everything he believed about winning got rearranged. In this episode, we're revisiting a conversation with John Ferreira because it's worth listening to a second time. He built Goldmine by finding the people who already had his prospects' trust, solving their problems first, and letting them carry his product to scale. Mark Cuban was one of his first resellers. Today, he's running that same play again with Nimble. This is The Vault. Let's unlock it.

Kayvon Kay1:01Alright. And we're back. Today, we have a very, very special guest, John Ferrara. The reason I say he is special, you don't really get to meet people who not only sold their company for a $100,000,000, but has created another potential unicorn company. And it's all because this guy is grassroots. John, welcome to the show. How are we doing today?

Jon Ferrara1:27Kvon, I'm doing amazing, and I really appreciate the opportunity to join you for a conversation. I really believe that we're here on this planet to grow, and the best way to grow is by helping other people grow. So any opportunity that I can have a conversation with another human being or a group of them to find ways to blow wind in their sails is a good day for me. Well, today, we're unlocking

Kayvon Kay1:51the vault. We want to know, really not just the one because there's so much here, but that one thing that got you to go from, obviously, starting as an entrepreneur to selling your... You know, you know, we talked about this, selling your company into the, you know, the multiple 100, you know, million dollars plus. But before we get into... In there, tell us again, who is John? Where does John come from? Where did this all start?

Jon Ferrara2:22Well, there's a lot of ways I could take that, but I think you always have to give props to the people that help get you there. And and I think I'm here through a combination of two mentors that helped me grow. My pops, who was the number one Lincoln Mercury and Subaru guy in the country in the fifties and seventies, and I swore to myself I'd never be in sales. So I I basically said, I'm not gonna be like you, dad. And I followed in the footsteps of my uncle John, who helped and met Radar and Microwave at MIT in the forties and helped build the aerospace industry that we know of in the San Fernando Valley and was president of IEEE, which is the Electrical Engineering Association. These are my two mentors. Right? So old school sales and technology. And and I put myself to school studying computers and working at a computer store. Basically, I found myself in a sales role about four years into my career. I started to use the tools that they gave you back then in the eighties, a day timer, spreadsheets, a piece of paper. I said, this is so stupid because I had a computer science background. I worked in a computer store. I knew every software program in the market. There were only a few 100, and there was no program that integrated email, contact, and calendar, and sales from our automation. Outlook did not exist. Salesforce did not exist. HubSpot, There was nothing. And so I, I quit my job. And with a buddy of mine from college, Elon, we founded GoldMine. And GoldMine pioneered CRM as we know it today, which the heart of it, I think people forgot, is the r in CRM, relationships. CRM stand for customer relationship management, and they were adopted not by management, but by the salespeople that had to go out there and struggle in the trenches to achieve their goals. And that was Goldmine and ACT. These were the tool programs that really pioneered contact management with Goldmine leaning harder on the Salesforce automation, email marketing, and team functionality. Because my dad taught me people who work as a team win games. And and so we started that company on $5,000 in in the South Mountain Valley in in LA and grew it to hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue over ten years. I sold that company and retired and spent ten years raising three babies. And I'll tell you what, Kvon, I think I learned more about relationships in my soul in those ten years. Yeah.

Kayvon Kay5:00I can imagine that. You know, 40 of entrepreneurship. We're not gonna let you off the hook here because I don't think you... Maybe you say this too much, but there's so much here that we have to understand. First is if you heard this, $5,000 investment turned into a $100,000,000 plus company. We're gonna unpack that. But something I think is even more powerful here. You said CRM before CRM. What do you mean by that?

Jon Ferrara5:36CRM was founded as an evolution of contact management. Contact management was created as an evolution of tools that sales reps used for managing contacts, starting with CRM. The Well, I'll argue that I... That our team at Goldmine

Kayvon Kay5:57really pioneered CRM as we know it today. I want everyone to know because you weren't gonna say it. I'll tell you. This is what happens when you when you become, I'm gonna say, as wise and live in the world of wisdom. You do not boast yourself. We are talking to the originator. We're... We are talking to the person who created CRM, the CRM that we all call customer relation management tool, the thing that Salesforce is built off of, the thing that every business today is using. We are talking to, really, the originator, the founder of the entire name, the entire... I mean, you opened up a whole new world of sales, of marketing, of of customer relationship management, of being able to create, which I know is very, very important to you, is the relationship. So we gotta make sure we know who we're speaking to here, John.

Jon Ferrara6:51Thank you. Well, I appreciate that. But I I think more importantly is CRM as we know it today happened as a result of the evolution of the foundation that GoldMine built back in the day. But when we started GoldMine, it was a work group contact management manager with sales and marketing automation features built into it, but it wasn't built for salespeople alone. It was built for the whole company because it was my belief that it was not just salespeople that touched the customer or the constituency around your business. There's a variety of people that any competent salesperson needs to connect with inside their business to the outside people. For instance, in an enterprise sale that I was in before starting GoldMind, we sold to large corporations, and I needed multiple people in my district office and at corporate to interface with those customers across sales, marketing support, management, engineering, shipping, etcetera. And so I... My vision of CRM isn't just for salespeople, it's for everybody in the company, but it has unique features such that the sales and marketing people can do their job, but less than 5% of any company is in sales. Most people are in other roles, and everybody else in the company runs on spreadsheets because CRMs aren't really great for conduct management. And what happened was Goldmine was Outlook and Salesforce before Outlook or Salesforce existed, and then Outlook came out and CRM shifted from having a relationship manager for the whole team to just being a tool for pounding leads till they buy or die. It lost its heart and soul. And salespeople stopped loving to use it because it wasn't built for them. It was built for management command and control and reporting. And so the reason they called Salesforce, you have to force salespeople to use it, and I think that's true. And so there's two twenty five million global businesses today, less than one percent use any CRM, and I'm back to fix that. And I love that. We're gonna talk about that. We're not jumping there. We are not letting you out of here. So

Kayvon Kay9:00speaking more, I just want more on the business kind of venture side and and how this all came together. So from what I'm hearing here is you you you got in the one role you promised yourself you weren't gonna get into, but that one role ended up turning into a $100,000,000 company. So I'm gonna assume without even asking you, you're okay. You jumped into that role. But you jump into this role and you start seeing what I... At that point, I can't even imagine what it was seventies, eighties trying to be a salesperson. You're you're right. Back then, there was no sales. There was no such thing as a CRM, spreadsheets, anything like that. Yeah. Back then, your your sales manager would just throw you out the phone book if you were even lucky to get the phone book. Some some of them didn't even give you the phone book. You had to go figure it out yourself and said go. So here you are, and I could tell you come from the technical side just the way, you know, analytical brain. So here you are. You're watching all these sales guys like me running around with their heads cut off, just do... Just relying purely on hustle and hard work and and I'm gonna call it charisma back then and just trying to create raw, authentic relationships. And you're sitting there going, this is dumb. There's gotta be a better way.

Jon Ferrara10:10My vision was to run a wire through all the day timers so that everybody was on pay... One page. So that no matter who picked up the phone, you know who you're talking to, what happened, who did it, and then what... What's gonna happen and who's gonna do it. And that if you have the context and insights on every single connection that you and your team members are making with everybody outside your company, then you're gonna be able to deliver consistent experience. And that is critical to business success is providing a a customer journey that is consistent and delightful, and that people follow-up on what they say they're going to do. And I think that's what we've forgotten as as business people. And so the... I basically took that vision of a contact record with a pending what's gonna happen, who's gonna do it, and a history what happened, who's... Who did it, plus the ability to manage pipeline and drip marketing and web lead capture, all the things for sales and market automation. And I drew the screens in something called Dan Bricklin's demo, which is a guy who built VisiCalc, which most people don't know what VisiCalc is, but it pioneered spreadsheets. This guy, Dan Dan Bricklin, made this demo program. I I laid out the thing in DOS, and it was actually 1989. So it wasn't the seventies or eighties. That's a long time ago. Yeah. It was the nineties. And and so we're sitting in this apartment, two kids, you know, fresh out of college with no sales and marketing experience per se, except for I worked at the Computer Lens store for a couple years. And how are gonna sell it? How do you sell people something they don't even know that they need? Is what we wanna know. Now we're getting here. Thank you. This is gold. So our target was small businesses that needed to share contacts and outreach to them and connecting close and manage their relationships. And back then, there was no Outlook as I shared before. There was just computers, printers, and hard drives that were connected to something called Novell, which was a network file server, and they were sharing standalone applications and spreadsheets to do all these jobs because file record locking wasn't created. So we built the first networkable program that was sellable to consumers, let alone CRM or email marketing or SFA. And so how do you get that to the consumer? It's a lot easier if somebody else recommends you than if you go cold call a prospect, And the trusted advisor is the best person for you to connect to your prospects at scale. And my trusted advisor for those customers was the guy or gal that sold them the Novell network, so the Novell reseller. And back then, there's this guy named Mark Cuban, who was the local Novell reseller, and I called on Mark and I signed him up as a reseller, and and slowly built this sort of reseller community. And we basically got almost every single Novell reseller in the country to use Goldmine, and people sell what they know and they know what they use. And they started recommending it to their customers, and that's how we got to our first $100,000 a month in revenue.

Kayvon Kay13:35But it wasn't overnight like that. I mean, it took It was it was it I mean, there's some gold here. Let's let's really dissect some gold here. Again, I don't think anybody probably picked up what you just said. The Mark Cuban, you sold... Mark Cuban resold your product. So I just wanna understand everybody here, the Mark Cuban. Okay? That's pretty cool. But what I just heard you say is, again, instead of working hard hard, instead of working smart, you decided to get resellers. What's a way to say that today? Like, instead of you trying to sell your product, go find out other people who are selling your prospect already and get them to sell your product for you. So that's the tip one. Today today, we call that influencer marketing. Right? Influen... Yeah. Well, exactly. Influencer marketing. Yeah. So Yeah. You're the creator of influencer marketing too. Might as well put that there. So... And I... And you you said some powerful stuff. It didn't happen overnight. We know. There's no such thing as overnight success. But we we talked about this offline, and I do wanna bring this up. You you said, I think it was 10. Like, how hard was it? Like, how much pain and, you know, the struggle and the hard nights, all of that? Like, how long was that before this really took off where where we started seeing, okay. Now I can breathe a little bit and I could see that light.

Jon Ferrara14:59A few years of of of blood, sweat, and tears. So we started out an apartment and... Two bedroom apartment, and we worked out of that for the first year. And then we moved into a sublease space in Canoga Park and worked out of that for a couple years. And we had a we had a postcard of the Santa Monica Bay, and that was our vision, was to have an office on the ocean. And and after a few years, we were on on the ocean at... On PCH. And I really believe in that. If you if you have a passion and you build a plan to achieve it and you make a purpose on a daily basis, you can achieve anything. I learned that from Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. Yeah. And many of the guy... Many of the people I know who retired and built businesses attribute him. So so what I did was I started the process myself so I can learn it. So I was cold calling the Noviro resellers, and I was getting them to to basically use it and then start selling it. And then all I do is I hire another sales rep and I give them a chunk of the country, and then I hire another sales rep and get... And eventually, I had, like, six people North North Northwest, Southwest, North Central, South Central, Northeast, Southeast, And, you know, we eventually grew that base of of resellers. But the thing is is eventually as you're growing these resellers, they sort of tap out on their existing base of customers that they can recommend to and you need... They... They're asking me for leads. So how do you get leads if you don't know how to advertise? You know, I have money to advertise. And so I look for the influencer of my prospect in and around their areas of promise of the product and services on how they can get better, smarter, faster around those services. So technology publications and business publications and entrepreneurial publications, where my prospect might read about what they need to do to grow their business. And so I contacted all those editors and I said, how can I help you write more stories? And they said, tell us stories about how people are using technology to grow. So I started telling stories and then they started telling those stories And this is how we won PC Magazine Editor's Choice six or seven times in a row Wow. And got more awards and more print than all the other products combined because of our relate... Pay it forward to relationships we built with the editors of these business and technology publications where we help define what CRM was. So today, John Taschuk, who's head of strategy for Salesforce, who's been head of strategy for Salesforce for probably twenty years or so, They started in 1999, the year I sold Goldmine. John Tasich was the editor of PCWeek and PC Computing. And and so a lot of those editors, we were helping to define this whole category and because of that, they were telling stories about us. That got us to the next sort of growth level. Right? Like that got us to not being in the basement of that building on PCH, but having all three floors of one of the buildings. Right? And so about this time, our customers started saying, John, we need to scale this to thousands of users and billions of records, and we want to run this on an enterprise level across multiple plan sites, and and we want more secure email transport. And the resellers are saying, wanna make more money in every gold mine dollar, so how can we sell more services and products? And Microsoft came to us and they said, John, we want to eat Novell. We're going to build NT server, SQL server, and Exchange server. So we want to eat Novell and Oracle and and the and the e... Internet service providers doing email. We want all of that, and we're gonna build small business server. We want you to integrate with that. So I basically put together in my head, I can have Microsoft sell their crown jewel, which means they're gonna push the crap out of me. Yeah. I can help my my end users who are getting to be, you know, 50 to a 100 of Fortune 500 companies scale even bigger. Like we had JPMorgan and Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, all those guys. And my resellers, I can help them make $10 every go $1. So we integrated to Microsoft small business server. SQL Server became our database instead of dBase. Exchange Server became our email instead of POP. Yeah. And INT Server became our our file server instead of Novell. And that's what got us to that $100,000,000 a year in revenue is by biz dev, partnership, storytelling, and a lot of chutzpah.

Kayvon Kay19:38I I wanna I wanna take a step back here because to me, I want... There's... The the whole thing here for me is I wanna find couple... There's so much gold here, but some of the things that people can start thinking differently. This is not just about the whole tech and building all the tech. That's a whole different avenue in itself. But how? So in this case, I wanna take a step and go, how did you get the resellers to sell this in the first place when this was something they've never heard, they've never seen, it wasn't trusted, Nobody even knew what it was because you weren't... You were going to an unaware market, completely unaware, and you had to get them above the waterline to aware and then to the point where they can trust you. How did you get that to happen for the resellers?

Jon Ferrara20:28Well, number one, our technology was pioneering. So there wasn't anything else on the market that was a networkable relationship manager with sales and marketing automation built into it. Act was the closest thing and they were a plug into Symphony in its early days for individual sales reps. Even when they became a DOS program, DOS became... Was before Windows, by the way, they didn't have our depth. And so we were unique in the marketplace and it was a small marketplace, but the biggest thing that I would say is people sell what they know and they know what they use. And if you get people to use it and they love it, it's easy to sell. Nobody likes to sell something they don't know Yeah. Because they... You can't support it, right? It's your reputation. Yeah. But if it's something that you use and it changes your life and helps turn your contacts into gold, well, you're gonna sell the crap out of it. And you have to remember that Novell resellers were selling plumbing to plumbers. They were selling IT infrastructure to IT decision makers. They weren't selling business solutions on top. And for them to differentiate themselves from every other Tom, Dick, and Harry selling Novell, which is not that big a bar to get over, they needed to start selling business solutions to business decision makers. Yeah. And that would basically change their life because their relationship would be more sticky with the customer because they're solving more problems, and they're making a lot more money. And so we transformed those Novell resellers into solution sellers, and basically built the CRM reseller industry. In fact, when we sold Goldmine in 1999, Microsoft launched Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce launched Salesforce, and they both went after all of our resellers. In fact, Microsoft hired my whole... My VP of sales and the whole outside sales team after I left. And so we we we basically built the foundation of not just the technology and the user demand, but also the channel

Kayvon Kay22:36and the strategy. Yeah. And so There's a Darmesh

Jon Ferrara22:40Darmesh Shah is an investor in Nimble, and he's a founder of HubSpot. Yeah. The side. Yeah. And and he in many times acknowledged and credited what we did at Goldmine as have my conversations with Mark Benioff from Salesforce. So they they kinda all acknowledge that we built the foundation and they're kinda happy we left. Yeah. I I hear that. I hear that. We're gonna take a short break to thank today's partners.

Kayvon Kay23:07Let's be honest. Most people spend more time researching a new laptop than they do researching their own investments. That is a mistake. If you're a business owner, investor, or someone who follows markets because you wanna understand where the economy is headed, you need good information, not more noise. That's why I wanna tell you about Weiss Ratings Plus. Weiss provides independent ratings and research across stocks, ETFs, cryptocurrencies, banks, and more, helping investors evaluate opportunities using data instead of hype. If you're looking for a smarter way to research investments and make more informed financial decisions, Weiss Rating Plus is worth a look. Go to weissvault.com and learn more today. That's w e I s s v a u l t dot com. So there's a common theme here I really want people to understand because it goes through one of my cardinal rules is this, is when you when you put yourself first, you'll end up at the bottom. When you put your prospect first, you'll always end up on top. What does that mean here? When you are going to the resellers, it's very important for people to understand. Whether it's marketing, sales, relationships, the way you think, you are not going there and thinking about how can I get my product into their hands? You were going, what do these need people need? What do they need? What don't they have? How can I solve their problems? And in the interim of selling those problems, how can I get my product to help them solve those problems and become more valuable? Because when I can make them more valuable, then they'll make me more valuable, really, is what happened. Then Yeah. You did it again. You started growing this thing, and then all of a sudden, they tapped out. So then you went to the next level and asked the same question. This was the the the major in the in in the publications and asked, what was their problem? They probably don't have enough con at that time. There wasn't a lot of content. There wasn't a lot of talk... Content around con... Technology. Nobody was using technology. They didn't have the stories. So you said, let me solve your problem. Became a problem solver. So then all of a sudden, you're now on the boulevard in a... What you thought was great to be on the bottom. You own all three buildings. Am I with you? Have I lost you? Yep. Right? No. No. No. Was actually

Jon Ferrara25:28visualizing the view from my office.

Kayvon Kay25:32Well, then I I can ask you this. This is so important. When you visualize that view right now, what did you... What came up for you? What were you thinking? How did that make you feel?

Jon Ferrara25:44It felt amazing and fortunate and also stressful. Amazing because I'm looking at dolphins surfing in the waves of the Santa Monica Bay. Fortunate because I was at the right place at the right time and with the right skill sets. And that doesn't happen in the universe that often, right? And stressed because even when we got bigger, it was still stressful because you had to keep that bar chart going up into the right. Yeah. As you, you know, maybe get in the first million or two or three per year, you know, 30, that's great. You know, a 100, oh my God. You know? By that time, you know, the market was so frothy, just like Yeah. The 1990 the market. We helped create the market. Yeah. You helped create the market. Let let... Let's We call you never where it's took a dime of venture. No bank loans. We just did it all ourselves. 5 and... Thousand to 100,000,000. And everybody else was taking a lot of money and they were basically having these crazy stock valuations. And I just said to myself, you know what? These numbers just don't add up to me. This doesn't really feel right. So I sold it.

Kayvon Kay27:14Who... Can you tell who you sold it to?

Jon Ferrara27:17So we were in conversations with a number of people, including Microsoft, and I wanted cash. Okay. And so there was a Microsoft distributor out of Zimbabwe. Okay. Because Microsoft couldn't distribute in South Africa at the time. And so he was the Microsoft distributor for South Africa. And and he had cash, and he knew the business, and he knew the opportunity. And so we sold it to him.

Kayvon Kay27:53Okay. And we sold it for a $100,000,000

Jon Ferrara27:56plus people. A little more than that, but, yeah, right around there. Okay.

Kayvon Kay28:01I have to ask the question, unfiltered. What did it feel like the day you sold that company for a 100,000,000 and more plus dollars and when that hit your bank account?

Jon Ferrara28:16It was fucking amazing. Sorry. What was that? It's fucking amazing.

Kayvon Kay28:20Yeah. Yeah. It should be. I mean, what was that fucking amazing, I would say so. What came over you? Like, what, like, what was the flashback? Like like, I wanna know what that feels like.

Jon Ferrara28:34Well, it's it's sort of unbelievable. You sort of pinch yourself. Like, is... Did money really hit the bank? Do we have the money in the bank? Is it really, really in the bank? But I didn't have a whole lot of time to think about that because my baby was born the day... My second baby, Colin, was born the day the deal closed, 04/19/1999. Wow. And and I still have the front page of the the LA Times, you know, articles there that day.

Kayvon Kay29:00And... A child's born, You sell the business for a $100,000,000. Yeah. And at that point, most people say, you're set. You live the perfect life. You live the dream life. But what happened?

Jon Ferrara29:15Well, about a year after selling, I got a head tumor and I was facing pretty dire straits. And I went to a number of different medical experts to get opinions on how to deal with my head tumor. And I found a doctor at UCLA that had a brand new methodology where they can melt the tumor inside your head using radiation, kind of like you melt a leaf or burn a leaf with magnifying glass. It's like you focus the beam at the center of your head and using an MRI map bypass melting your taste buds, salivary glands, and nerves because you need all that to eat and stuff. And that technology is the key technology today that people used it back then. It was sort of bleeding edge, but I'm a bleeding edge kind of guy. Yeah. But I also did some spiritual work, Kvon, and I came to the conclusion that I'm on this planet to grow my soul in the brief period of time that I'm here, and that the best way for me to grow my soul is by helping other people grow theirs. And and the most... The the best way to grow your soul is by being present with the people you love, like your children, because they will reveal your shit to you. And if you're willing to look at your shit in life and work on it, that's real that's real opportunity of growth there. Let's just stop that right now because this is so important.

Kayvon Kay30:46You just said something so powerful. As a father of of a a 1.5 year old and almost a a five year old now, you just said the kids will reveal your own shit to you, aka kids will be a direct reflection of what's going on on the inside. Can we talk about this? Because I know how important this was. I wanna hear this, guys. This is you. Here is the man who I can't imagine. I can't imagine the stress, the days driving home when you wanted to quit, when you didn't know what was going on, when you had all of the pressures from all these companies before... This is before the $100,000,000 comes through. Then you get the $100,000,000, and you think life is great. And not even a year later... And let me tell you, I'm sure that year flew by. I'm sure it flew by. And, again, I'm very happy you're here with us today. You find out you have a tumor. And I'm sure in that moment, without even having to say, you would have gave up all that $100,000,000 to just ensure that tumor would be fixed. Yeah. And you realize life is more about the business and the spreadsheets and making sure that bar keeps going to the right, and you go through a spiritual journey. What happens in that journey?

Jon Ferrara32:09Well, I think you come to the realization that life's not about making as much money as you can, but building as many memories out of the moments that you can get from the... With the people that you dig. Yeah. And that's all you're gonna take with you. Nobody's going to say godfather CRM, you know, made all this money, built all this stuff, pioneered this or that. They're gonna say, on my grave head, beloved husband, father, friend. Right? Yeah. That's all you got. That's all you leave. And so so I decided to dedicate the the the... My time to being a present father, husband, and member of my community for as much time as I could. And, you know, I was blessed to be able to do that. And I was able to change diapers, get kids up, walk them to school, work in the classroom, coach sports. I was his assistant scoutmaster for my boys who are both Eagle Scouts. I did the YMCA princess program with my daughter. I mean, all those things that most dads never get to do because they're on the hamster wheel of life, and they're just... They don't they don't they don't get those moments. Right? Yeah. And

Kayvon Kay33:32and so I'm forever grateful for that. I... I'm I'm so happy. I'm so grateful that you got to. Not many... You just said, how many people get to enjoy that life and get there? And, you know, I don't wanna get too much about down this road, but, also, not many people are willing to do what you did to be able to enjoy that life. So I'm interested now because here we are. You're you're living that life. How how long are you... I think can we talk maybe ten years? You you go ten, fifteen years of this life? Ten years. Yeah. Sold it in '99,

Jon Ferrara34:01and and I started Nimble,

Kayvon Kay34:05you know, close to 2011 or so. 2011 comes around. You're looking around. We're just gonna jump ahead here. Kids are off to university,

Jon Ferrara34:18and you're Well, they're not in university yet. Right? They're in they're in grammar school,

Kayvon Kay34:23middle school, and high school. Okay. But they're... We're out of the house. I have time. You have time. They're out of the house. You have time. And you say, well, what do I know? What what can I start again? So here comes the new venture, Nimble. What does Nimble do? What was the passion behind Nimble? How is Nimble working right now? We talked about it becoming potentially another unicorn company. I mean, my god, not many people can even build a unicorn company, and you're on your second unicorn company.

Jon Ferrara34:57So I think only moms can fully appreciate the mush your brain goes into by being a parent because it's constant chaos and you lose yourself in many cases, even your identity. And so by being a present dad, I kind of was just focused on that in this small little circle of my kids and their friends and their parents of those friends. And so when they're all in school and I had time, I remodeled our old Spanish home from the twenties in Santa Monica. And in the three years or so of doing that remodel, that sort of polished my product brain back up. Right? Because you gotta sort of get back into shape. And about that time, media was beginning to hit Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And I started to reconnect with the people that I had already been connected to ten years or so earlier. And it was really great to get reconnected with these people. But as I was doing that, I saw the need to manage those contacts in a more effective way than on those separate platforms, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, AngelList, whatever. And and I wanted to consolidate them into my own contact manager, but maybe a social contact manager, social CRM, and that didn't exist. So I started looking at contact managers to see if any of them had integrated it. And the contact manager is basically Outlook, which at the time was on prem with Exchange, or Google Contacts, which was in the cloud, and neither of them integrated with Social, and they weren't good contact managers. Because to be a good contact manager, you need to have a team of people sharing contacts and history and pending with the tracking of what happened and who did it. And Outlook and Google had separate contact databases for every single team member. So there was no system of, there's no record of, system of, of record of truth or, contacts in a company. And then I started looking at CRM, so it wasn't about relationships, was about command and control and reporting, and, none of them were integrated with social. So I started to explore it, I went up to LinkedIn, and I built a relationship with their head of biz dev and product and stuff, and I got them to give me their public and private APIs, which they they had never and never did give to anybody else but me. And and then basically I built a team, and we basically pioneered social serum and social selling by not only integrating email, contact, and calendar from the only cloud based solution for that, which was Google at the time, but also integrating into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, AngelList, Crunchbase, etcetera. And not just integrating to them, but fully integrating. So Nimble can synchronize in all your LinkedIn contacts and the messages and send messages and invites and and enrich records and and and not just work inside Nimble, where Nimble automatically builds your CRM for you and enriches them with the people in company datas. You don't have to Google, you mean Nimble them, but I built a plug in to your browser. So Nimble lived inside your inbox, inside of Google. So if I open up an email, I can see who the person is. If they exist, if they don't exist, I could build it. If I go into LinkedIn, I have a thing that plugs in. I could basically build records there, but I didn't have to because if I had a friend or did a message, that contact automatically went into Nimble because we were sales navigator before it existed. And and then I got some friends to invest. Mark Cuban, one of the founders of Goldman Sachs, Dharmesh Shah from HubSpot, Google Ventures. I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of great people. But before I did that, I I invested my own money, millions of Yeah. Absolutely. And then it brought in investors, and we just sort of blew up. Like, we basically... Like, we were it, and and we're riding that wave of social

Kayvon Kay39:02CRM and social selling. And how many users do you have right now in Nimble?

Jon Ferrara39:06We've added over a 100,000 people sign up for the platform. One of the key things that we did was when LinkedIn Sales Navigator decided to build it as opposed to buying Nimble, which we had that discussion, they took our API away for LinkedIn. Then eventually all the social APIs kind of started to disappear because Facebook wants you to go to Facebook so they could sell your eyeballs and your data. And we had to begin to sort of pivot away from social. And, because when technology's new, like when the internet first became always on, it was e toys and iContact, and now it's just toys and contact. And when social came out, it was social marketing, social sales, not just sales and marketing. And so I knew that that would happen. And so Microsoft was coming out with Microsoft three sixty five because Microsoft doesn't innovate, they iterate. They wish someone else to build the market, and they come in when it's big enough, and they use their muscle, billions of users and hundreds of thousands of VARs to dominate, and they build something good enough, and they do that. So I knew when Microsoft decided to build Microsoft three sixty five that they would eat Google email contact and calendar, email productivity suite. And so I went up to Microsoft and I rebuilt the relationships with the people, it got me access to the programs, and now Microsoft is our global reseller throughout the world, and they're paying their distributors and resellers to sell Nimble. Why? Yeah. Well, Microsoft has a CRM, Microsoft Dynamics. But Microsoft gives that CRM to every one of the resellers and none of them sell it. Not, I mean, none, some, right? The old goldmine resellers that they recruited, some of them are still selling it. But the reality is that Microsoft Dynamics isn't built for the the common Microsoft user, which is a small business. It's it's a much more enterprise, complex, expensive, requires a lot of rollout, and most of the business out there, it doesn't suit them. So today, resellers are in the same boat that the Novell resellers were in before, in that they're selling plumbing to plumbers. They're selling IT infrastructure to IT decision makers. Microsoft resellers sell Microsoft three sixty five backup security migration. They don't sell any front office or back office business solutions. Front office is sales and marketing, back office is accounting. Yeah. So for Microsoft to hit its numbers, they need to sell more than Microsoft three sixty five because they don't make that much money on Microsoft three sixty five. Make their money on Power BI, Power Apps, on Azure and Dynamics and the Microsoft AI. How can they turn their resellers from selling plumbing to plumbers to business solutions to business decision makers? Well, Nimble is a natural add on to Microsoft three sixty five because Microsoft Outlook isn't really a good team contact manager, let alone sales and marketing automation. And so they could easily sell with every single Microsoft seat, a gold mine, a Nimble seat, and then begin to learn how to sell business solutions to business decision makers. And because Nimble is now based in Azure, fully integrated with the stack and all their tools, when the Microsoft resellers sell Nimble with Microsoft three sixty five, it automatically unifies the email connected calendar. We live inside Outlook, but we can still live inside LinkedIn and do prospecting and all that. And so we're basically kind of replicating what we did with Novell resellers

Kayvon Kay42:37with the Microsoft resellers. Was just gonna say the one thing... The whole thing this is all about is, like, what's that one thing? And it's very, very clear. And it comes down to we can go 30,000 foot view, and you you are always looking way... For ways to solve other people's problems and then giving your product part of that solution. If we go deeper, you found out who could sell your product already had the network or the people to sell it to, solve that problem for them, and then gave your product for them to sell at scale. And then you you rinse and repeat, and there's no reason why and or no doubt that you now also have a second, which we can call maybe potentially a unicorn company. So we're at the end here. I mean, we can go on forever, and I I am so grateful, and I loved all of this. I want to ask you one last question. If everything went away tomorrow and you had to start all over again, what is the one thing you would do?

Jon Ferrara43:45You know, I I think that I might teach because I like to grow people, and and I believe in America and in our youth. And I wanna help shape them and

Kayvon Kay44:03help them achieve their dreams. That was... I saw that was very emotional when you thought about our youth. That hit something today. I

Jon Ferrara44:11think it's pretty scary to be a young person today. Yeah. And I don't wanna get into all all all the all That's a episode. But but they're the future of of our country, and and I think that they're struggling. And and they could use a little bit of inspiration.

Kayvon Kay44:30I agree. I agree. John, Nimble, where can people sign up for Nimble and learn more about you?

Jon Ferrara44:38Well, they can go to nimble.com, sign up for free. It's a two week trial. And if after, using nimble for two weeks for free, if they feel like they wanna become a subscriber, use the code John 40. It'll get you 40% off your first three months and reach out to me. Let me know how I might blow some wind in your sails. My email is jon@nimble.com. Let me know how I can help you grow.

Kayvon Kay45:05John, I'm gonna leave it there. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule for being with us. You heard it. You have it. Again, congratulations on all of your success.

Jon Ferrara45:18Kevon, thank you so much for this conversation. You make it really easy. I love your energy. I'm I'm happy to be here with you and your audience.