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SPEAKERS

Jeff York, Brittany Lambert, Brad Werner

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Jeff YorkÌý 00:14

Welcome to creative distillation where we distill entrepreneurship research into actionable insights. My name is Jeff York. I serve entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado, here in lovely Boulder. I'm here today, as always with my co

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Brad WernerÌý 00:28

host. I'm Brad Warner. And I have the pleasure to work with Jeff at the Dunning center. But I am an entrepreneur. Welcome to everyone today. We're thrilled to have you with us. And I think it's going to be a great conversation today, Jeff.

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Jeff YorkÌý 00:40

Yeah, I'm really excited about this. Brad, this is the first time we've done this. So it could be a complete and utter disaster. We don't know. But you know, we certainly hope so for our tampers. I doubt it. We're gonna be talking to PhD students today, we usually are talking to pretty established professors, most of the folks who've been talking to are pretty far along in their careers. They've published a ton of papers, they do these really big, expensive projects, and they've published them and then we've talked to them. Today, we're going to get a view of sort of the other end of the spectrum, right. All these folks are at various stages in their PhD program, here at the Leeds School of Business. All of them are part of our strategy and entrepreneurship research program, except for one who is actually part of our organizational behavior group. But from the field of entrepreneurship, we don't really quite care about those divisions. If I ever can drag you to an entrepreneurship research conference, which I fully intend to do someday post COVID Brad, you will see things where Yes, I am. I'm gonna come on now. It's gonna be in a beautiful place. Munich.

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Brad WernerÌý 01:43

Munich marks. Okay. I love Munich.

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Jeff YorkÌý 01:45

Yeah, the Babson conferences in Munich next year. Okay. So, in any event, we thought we'd start off today. It is the holiday season. Not quite sure when we'll release this episode, but we're all gearing up for the holiday season now. But we wanted to do folks favorite holiday beverage or favorite beverage from Colorado. So here's the deal. We have a bourbon sample and we have a beer sample. What order should we consume these

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Brad WernerÌý 02:11

breads? For me as a bourbon drinker? Let's drink the beer and the bourbon. I'll get rid of that crappy taste.

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Jeff YorkÌý 02:17

But isn't isn't the saying liquor before the beer before liquor know what Jeff are entrepreneurs.

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Brad WernerÌý 02:26

We we break all the rules and beg for forgiveness later. Wow. I'm not even gonna worry about it. So bold. So bless.

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Jeff YorkÌý 02:33

Let's, let's bring our first guest in Brittany Lambert is a doctoral candidate. I'm lucky enough to be on Brittany's dissertation committee, which he successfully proposed yesterday.

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Brad WernerÌý 02:46

Oh, congratulations. You must feel great. Brittany.

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Brittany LambertÌý 02:49

Hey, do five more months.

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Brad WernerÌý 02:51

Oh, that's fabulous. And I love all the prep that we do beforehand in creating an order flow here. And then it just goes all up in the wind. So yeah, yeah, of course.

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Jeff YorkÌý 02:59

Of course we just ditch that immediately. Oh, is the order of alcoholic beverages that had to determine who we introduced. Ah, gotcha. So Brittany has chosen as her favorite Colorado beverage. Now first of all, you're in Ohio. Right, Brittany?

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Brittany LambertÌý 03:12

I'm in Ohio right now. That's correct.

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Brad WernerÌý 03:14

We're in Ohio. Brittany.

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Brittany LambertÌý 03:15

I'm in Columbus. My parents live in us. They're in a small town. Marysville, Ohio. Kind of like, Hallmark Christmas setting, if you will, but I'm with my brother and sister in law today because they have better internet.

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03:29

Nice. Cool. Thank

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Brad WernerÌý 03:30

you for making the effort. We Okay, so we have white rascal.

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03:33

Yeah, Roscoe. So yeah, how

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Brad WernerÌý 03:37

did you how did you land on on white rascal. Are you every fan? Are you even a beer drinker? Normally,

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Brittany LambertÌý 03:41

yes, yes. And yes. Yeah, I moved to Boulder found Avery, which is amazing. And I love just really crisp carbonated refreshing beers. So the white rascal I also love good art. So they have the best art on this can.

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04:00

Yeah,

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Brittany LambertÌý 04:00

let's do this. Cool. Awesome. And it's better. I think they just updated him about two years ago. So he wasn't as rascally

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04:08

version.

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Brad WernerÌý 04:10

So you said you liked the art? Brittany? Are you an artist?

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Brittany LambertÌý 04:12

Not at all, but I am a little more. I'm not entirely left brained. And so I get a lot from art, but I like to look at it. I can't do it, but I can appreciate it. So.

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Brad WernerÌý 04:21

So I'm the same way. I love art. I've loved it my whole life. And just for fun fact, all of the lectures that I start out with my classes every week has a new painting, that we discuss it the beginning and then I tie it into creativity and what we're working on.

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Jeff YorkÌý 04:36

Well, we ironically, you are in good company, Brittany, because Tyler right. Our last guest Professor Horton also chose white rascal as his favorite Colorado beer. Oh, man.

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Brittany LambertÌý 04:47

Well, it's so good. Do you want me to describe it or what or what? Sure.

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Jeff YorkÌý 04:51

I've already described it and gone on excessively about it last time. So why don't you say what you

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Brittany LambertÌý 04:56

really all I got. I can't give you anything technical, but it's a Belgian style white ale and it's unfiltered it's spicy you're gonna get some orange and coriander it's carbonated and if you really want to go crazy on a summer day actually pretty good if you layer on a lemon it changes the flavor a little bit but absolute not only my favorite colorado beer probably my favorite beer of all time

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Brad WernerÌý 05:20

oh that's a lot

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Brittany LambertÌý 05:22

yeah and what's wild is i picked this up in our grocery store in small town marysville ohio last night so it has made its way all the way to small town ohio not bad

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Jeff YorkÌý 05:33

well okay so let's let's actually totally abandon what we said we were gonna do and let's just jump into talking about your paper where are we talking while we're talking to you brittany we have also named jen han on who is a fourth year doctoral student we also have you ping lee who is a second year doctoral student and then we have elizabeth embry who is also a fourth year doctoral students so if you hear other people chiming in i'll introduce them so you guys feel free to chime in mostly because i want to drink the white rascal and not just go straight to drinking bourbon which is you know how these things go downhill very quickly let's uh let's go and talk about brittany's paper first yeah you bet so what are you doing brittany but i know because i sat in like hour and a half long presentation yesterday so but don't tell tell the rest of us about it

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Brittany LambertÌý 06:19

so one thing that might be a little different about me is i come from ob and to translate that what that means is i care very much about psychology so i'm going to be really interested in how people feel what they're thinking and what they do as a result of that in my work and so the particular context i'm fascinated with is the gig economy and i'll just kind of start and tell you like what i think the problem is in this area and what i've done with two papers that that this particular grant has helped me fund to help kind of move our understanding or oh gosh

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Jeff YorkÌý 06:49

i'm sorry brittany let me interrupt you i totally screwed this up you're fine we we would always want to have these lovely folks on to our podcast but i totally forgot to mention we specifically selected these folks because the deming center for entrepreneurship here at leeds that brad and i worked for essentially knott central centrally we do work for funded all these research projects so we have a competitive grant every year and all four of these folks were winners in that grant competition so congratulations to all them so we thought we'd go here about what we were buying so sorry brittany i didn't mean to cut you off i just want to make sure i mentioned that eric our executive director would kill me if i'd left that up

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Brittany LambertÌý 07:25

can take the bar down a little bit i'm a lowly phd candidate still

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Jeff YorkÌý 07:31

candidate though candidates a big deal that's a very distinction and it can be a candidate till you defend your proposal

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Brittany LambertÌý 07:39

it also nice they don't have free access to the rec center anymore so

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Jeff YorkÌý 07:45

go ahead brittany i'm sorry

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Brittany LambertÌý 07:46

all right cool let me get back to the problem here's what i'm fascinated with the problem is that workers in the gig economy and let me just define this a little bit for us but these are independent workers who work on short term contracts so picture of graphic designer working from gig to gig or picture and we're drivers that's working with a platform so there's a wide range here but this section of the workforce is growing at a rapid pace and what i think is that growth is really outpacing our understanding of the lived experiences of these workers so what that really means is is this type of work healthy for these workers or not and this is a problem we don't know this because what i see is that the nature of this work the independent nature of this work leaves these workers very vulnerable they're vulnerable to the uncertainty that's inherent in short term contracts that can come in feast or famine cycles are vulnerable to the isolation and loneliness that can come from working independently they're also vulnerable to being a one man show meaning you know there's no one to cover for you if you want to go take a vacation if you're not working you're not making money and so these aspects of work in the gig economy there's i want to give credit where credit's due sue ashford and brianna causa are doing amazing work they're beyond me and what they're publishing in this area but these are aspects of the work that are inherently precarious to these workers and you know i also don't want to leave out that there are protective factors of this work so we know that if you're working in the gig economy you're not under the administrative control of an organization so that means you can derive more meaning from your work it means you can work wherever you want whenever you want and actually can take that vacation so it's a real mixed bag and what we set out to do what i set out to do and i'm going to talk about one and a half papers today is is to really explore this question around what does work in the gig economy how does that affect the well being and mental health of gig workers here's what we did to explore that first i'm gonna throw some academic jargon at you so we can do a systematic integrative review of the literature and what that means is that my life was held for first Meaning that I pulled every article that was ever written on workers in the gig economy in every academic article, and we categorize them and synthesize them so that we could make some claims about what we know so far about gig work. And so we ended up with 210 articles. What's interesting is 63% of those articles accumulated in the last decade. So this is a new area of research. And we learned a couple things. And I want to hone in specifically on emotions and well being because I want to move that's the project I want to move to next, I'm gonna move through this quickly. And what we learned is kind of what we can Intuit is that gig work is not universally bad or good. That's what the existing literature says. And let me give you some specific evidence that what we know is that workers who might be on film crews, core actors, for example, work in the movie industry, they talk about the emotional highs that they experience from the rewarding aspects of that work. But that comes completely at the same time as feelings of anxiety, come cycles of unemployment that you also experience in that industry. And couple that with lower skilled workers. There's a great study on Uber drivers in London, who also found the same thing where these workers were actually more satisfied with their life with the autonomy that they had in this particular area. But also the uncertainty inherent in this type of work in the jobs, they had made them feel bad at the same time. I'm going to move to my next paper. So that was like I go. So before we will

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Brad WernerÌý 11:39

stop there. Otherwise, I'm going straight to bourbon. Okay, so a couple things, your overall premise? Brittany, I agree with you 1,000,000%. It's very, very interesting to look into. When I think of the gig economy, my brain goes directly to Lyft. And Uber, I mean, gig economy is much larger than just Lyft or Uber. But let's just talk about that for a second in my sensibility. I've thought about this for a long time, not at the depth you have certainly. But yes, it's kind of bugged me a little bit, because it seems to me that Lyft and Uber have developed a tech workaround to avoid paying employee benefits. Yes, right. That that's kind of their, their competitive advantage is, hey, we can get workers cheaper, because we don't have to provide the kind of the safety net security that you were talking about. And then I'm starting to think when you expand the gig economy, there are a lot of characteristics that are shared with self employed entrepreneurs. But I think that there's also some pitfalls where I think an entrepreneur may have more control over their life than some of these other folks. Would you agree with that? Or would you say that I'm full English there?

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Brittany LambertÌý 12:43

No, that's I think that's an accurate assessment. Yeah. Okay.

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Brad WernerÌý 12:46

What you've tackled, though, is a really, really big issue. And I think that it resonates, at least it would resonate with me, if we can be really specific about an example or a use case that you think that might really get your point across.

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Brittany LambertÌý 13:00

You're saying what does this all mean? Yeah. So what I would say is, I've also done about 40 interviews with these types of workers. And so the one thing that I would take away if you're a worker in the gig economy, or considering it is Do not underestimate the amount of uncertainty and isolation that comes with this work, meaning, I think about workers who are do Uber drive, like, they don't have the benefits of an organization. And, you know, the bummer there is they still have to deal with the algorithmic management, you know, of a platform basis.

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Brad WernerÌý 13:33

That's that really surprising finding, though. I mean, that's not like, Oh, my God, is it? No, that's gonna be kind of common sense. ending of your research.

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Brittany LambertÌý 13:41

Yeah, I'm giving you an example of what I would. Yeah. Frankly, like, where I'm at, like, I think the most interesting findings are gonna come from my second study, the evidence that we're finding in the first paper is frankly, most mostly what I read into it about the gig economy. So to me, it just underscores workers need to be thinking about how to resource themselves to handle uncertainty, yeah, and to handle the isolation. So that that's where this research stream is headed. And that's really interesting.

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Brad WernerÌý 14:09

And I would say, though, that any worker, right, 30 years ago, people work for the same company for their entire lives. And that is certainly changed. And my run into that with students and parents all the time where the parents want their kids to go work for IBM, because they think there's security there. And they really, there's not an understanding of really what that means. So I think that's great. Let's talk about Lyft and Uber specifically, because I think everyone that's listening today will really be able to relate to those two companies. Would you say that just in a general sense that there Lyft and Uber have benefited society, or that they've been a detriment to society?

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Jeff YorkÌý 14:43

Cuz that's really what your paper was about, right? Another Lyft or Uber benefit? No, no, but

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Brad WernerÌý 14:48

I think that there's some takeaways that can we can talk and, and make some assumptions. I'm right.

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Brittany LambertÌý 14:53

Yeah, I'm thinking about how to answer this.

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Jeff YorkÌý 14:56

The problem, I think, at least from my understanding of your paper, I don't know, that's even the scope of what you're looking at. We could debate that all day.

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Brittany LambertÌý 15:03

No, this would just be drawing from,

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Jeff YorkÌý 15:06

you know, my right. That's just your your opinion. But like, what about workers themselves? Do you think Lyft and Uber and the gig economy are benefit to workers? Or have actually, you know, as Brad sort of implied, figured out a way to get similar skilled workers to work without getting the same benefits and security?

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Brittany LambertÌý 15:27

I just don't think it's a simple answer. And I think, at least you know, from, from my read on the literature, like everything that I've pulled, like, that's also what it supports, there's evidence for both ways, you know, on the one hand, like you've got, you're giving more people access to work than ever before work they can do when they want, whenever they want. And that's really important. And so I think that's why you see a lot of positive aspects of this work. And the other thing is, a platform based economy is really new. And so we don't have the regulations. I mean, clearly, like the stuff that just went on in California, like, we don't know what we're doing, like how to regulate this. So how to let workers have autonomy, but also be working for a platform. So frankly, like, I just think we're outpacing, like what we actually know. And unfortunately, like that benefits, I don't know, you can say capitalism, it's a result, whatever. It's a result of free markets, and it's benefiting these big businesses. And if you don't have big businesses that are being carefully regulated by how they're treating workers, or with kind of, you know, the Corporate Social Responsibility mindset that includes the well being of their people, like, are going to keep running re book. So

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Brad WernerÌý 16:41

let me ask you this, Brittany, you're just your takeaways. If you had to make one or two policy suggestions to maybe even that playing field, do you have anything that would come to mind?

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Brittany LambertÌý 16:51

That is so out of my like, I'm not a policy person, I'm a psych person.

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Brad WernerÌý 16:56

But I'm just wondering, is there like, if you could say, hey, let's do these one or two things that would that would help solve some of these problems? Can you put your finger on any of those?

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17:05

Um,

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17:06

I would say,

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Jeff YorkÌý 17:08

you don't have to answer either. Brittany, by the way.

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Brittany LambertÌý 17:10

No, I know. I mean, it's just a, it's a dual edged sword for workers right now. But you tell them, they don't have the security blanket or the benefits that work in an organization. But they're also being very much managed by an algorithm. And by robots, they still have supervision. And that's not fair. So I honestly haven't studied policy in this particular realm enough to say what to do. But you've got to get rid of that. That's not fair. And it is affecting the well being of these workers. And so

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Brad WernerÌý 17:37

that's a great takeaway.

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Jeff YorkÌý 17:39

But your second study you had people like, that's the one where they kept a diary, right?

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Brittany LambertÌý 17:44

Yes, I don't have results talk. I wasn't. Yeah. So the one I'm most passionate about is we collected 2000 survey responses from 60 gig workers over the course of two weeks, specifically asking them to rate how much different aspects of their work such as financial uncertainty or how much they're working with clients is a hassle. And then also looking at clinical symptoms of anxiety and depression. Because what I'm passionate about is wondering, you know, like, we know that good work is not like bad or good, or it can be bad in some instances. And what I'm also interested in is like, How bad is it? You know, is it uncertainty and isolation to the point where you're having people exhibit symptoms of anxiety or depression that are clinically significant, where we could start tying that to like, hey, up in these rooms, like suicidality is a thing, like actually, not being able to work is also a thing. And what's tricky is with these workers, like they don't have access to benefits to take care of them in these particular situations. And not only that, but we also need to understand like, when is good work actually healthy? And so we have a number of variables at time zero that can help us tease out like, is it when workers are more highly skilled? Or is it workers are lower skilled? Or is it when they already have a disposition for maybe mental health, like mental health disorders? Or is it when they're in a co working space or not? And so really being able to answer this question is what the last chapter of my dissertation is on? I just don't know the answer yet. Because I've just collected the data yet. And I want a

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Brad WernerÌý 19:23

teaser. Okay. Get us there, right. Wait,

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19:27

do you have Do you have a gut?

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Brad WernerÌý 19:28

Do you have a gut feel, though? Maybe where this is going?

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Brittany LambertÌý 19:31

Absolutely. Like I did, I had a colleague, like take a peek at the data. and it is saying that these workers are experiencing pretty high levels of anxiety and depression. And I looked at some of the demographics. And I can't diagnose because I'm not a professional. But if you use these clinically validated norms, like mental health is an issue in this space. And so when I'm telling people what to do, like I've talked enough with these workers, like I absolutely believe my hypotheses are going to come back to fruition and so we've got to get these work. there's more support i mean are you

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Brad WernerÌý 20:01

are you finding the gig workers is it up side hustle is that their primary vocation

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Brittany LambertÌý 20:06

both ends you have a lot of people doing both and typically when we interview like we have a mix of both in our study where we can control for it so and a lot of people there's oh man there's some great research that just came out about people who have full time jobs who end up taking these side hustles and it ends up making them feel more empowered because they're getting to tap in to something else in their identity that's really important and so

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Jeff YorkÌý 20:31

it's not actually working for uber that's making me re confirm my aspirational identity i'll throw in some terms too but it's the fact that now i work for uber instead of working in a cafeteria down the street and i can set my own schedule so i'm able to get the care of my bluegrass band and practice more and play gigs wherever we want

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Brittany LambertÌý 20:56

absolutely or maybe you're maybe you're moonlighting as a painter or a designer you know or maybe as an uber driver you actually get a lot out of talking to people all day long you know in your cab or meeting new people so it's all of that that can end up being a very positive thing for these workers

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Jeff YorkÌý 21:12

going back to brad's question is this good for society bad for society i think the answer is it depends right

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21:19

it depends

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Jeff YorkÌý 21:20

on what axis right

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Brittany LambertÌý 21:22

that is that is what i'm trying to do with my research and i'm so i don't have the answers yet it took me this long to get to it depends and now now then now the next step is actually like when when is it better

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Brad WernerÌý 21:36

so i think brittany's has to come back jeff right where the needles waiting to find out what the answer is it's like the next week's episode and this is

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Jeff YorkÌý 21:45

yeah get money on something brad actually wants to know the outcome of that's

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Brittany LambertÌý 21:49

good i'll come back and

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Brad WernerÌý 21:51

well i'm thinking is a time to short uber and lyft

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Jeff YorkÌý 21:54

i yeah well i think maybe that time has passed right i mean

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Brad WernerÌý 21:58

i don't i don't know but i'm gonna wait for brittany to tell me when to get short when whenever that legislation comes across then we're in

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Jeff YorkÌý 22:05

all right cool brittany thanks so much

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Brad WernerÌý 22:08

that's great brittany thank you

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Jeff YorkÌý 22:09

very cool thanks guys so let's uh let's roll on our second phd student you ping lee

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22:15

correct

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22:17

yeah

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Jeff YorkÌý 22:17

awesome now that you ping you don't drink alcohol correct right good for you that you covered up that's great no i'm serious i actually doesn't go along with my character on the podcast but i actually have been massively cutting down on my own alcohol consumption lately and i know exactly although i enjoy it i'm not sure it's such a good thing sometimes so anyway but you're gonna tell us about your favorite beverage which i thought was just yesterday so tell us about this

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22:47

so um yeah i don't drink alcohol but like people especially in the south of china including me i'd say soccer right sometimes i made it myself at home and it looks like this this is the one that can be bought from agents to the market and the way to make these is to first you need to obtain the free advice and then mix it with some wine is and one water and keep it in one space for about three hours for the two sermons so that it will be localizes and ready to serve and the key thing during this process is to make sure that everything is clean so you don't have any bacterias or fangers except for the us otherwise you will sell it so at this stage it will take like three and sour and have the flavor of wine but the degree of alcohol is really low so like you it's like usual dream and you can't get drunk with drinking it so it's also like an intermediate product of rice wine so if you keep it to mandy for another several days the majority of those rights will be demanded by the user so the and then the degree of the alcohol gets intense so if you want to keep the flavor as it is it's important to keep it in the refrigerator so that the activity of the ease is low or some people also follow it to kill that used to maintain the flavor as it is at this stage

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Brad WernerÌý 24:30

cool that's really cool recipe you paying i think i'm gonna go with the extra three day part of the recipe

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Jeff YorkÌý 24:38

there's also the part where you distill it into soc into into sokhi right so i actually used to make something like that i lived in tennessee we not with rice so we would make it with apples so you just take a bunch of apples and like crush them up but you keep everything goes great with squirrel jeff yeah yeah so we go Well good god a squirrel hunting and I've got a squirrel we come back with it and we put it on the wood stove to heat him up before we did anyway we would we would just crush up apples in a in a bucket like a food grade bucket and add wine yeast to it and then exactly what you're saying let ferment just for like a little bit like just for days you don't get a lot of alcohol and then put it in the fridge it was just give it that yeasty kind of flavor when you were describing if you if you had kombucha like fermented tea no popular here

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25:30

now I know that in China people also like cinnamon was great and others gross

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Jeff YorkÌý 25:39

All right, well very cool that we were able to I should have gone and gotten a sample didn't make it to the to the supermarket to get that but we'll see we'll continue on with our Okay, I

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25:48

didn't make it myself. So as

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Jeff YorkÌý 25:53

I said if you made that yourself you package the heck out of it.

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Brad WernerÌý 25:55

Yeah, it's looking great. Do you ever make it up yourself though?

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25:58

Yeah, you do.

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26:00

I've made it several times especially in the summer so it's easier for the east to remember the three right outside when Colorado I become a really thin of like cocaine and baking and like doing all the stuff myself.

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26:17

That's great. Well,

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Jeff YorkÌý 26:19

hey, tell us about your research project up what what were you doing?

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26:23

Just so I'm in this study, oh research purpose is mainly how and when suppliers can be incentivized to make relationship specific investments towards their customers. And the problem we try to solve is in a supplier customer relationship, when a customer firm suddenly increased the takeover protection, whether they are suppliers will increase the innovation that is specific to the customer. So we study it by collecting data from the USPTO website and historical segment data on supplier customer relationships. And the major findings of our study is that right up to 99 Madison, when the Intel takeover law change took place in Delaware sulphurs incorporated in Delaware experience a sudden increase in their takeover protection suppliers, they they will unit naturally increase innovation that is specific to the Delaware customers versus non Delaware customers. And we believe the reason behind these is because they also experienced loss of relationship changes with their supplier after being taken over. So increases in takeover protection made suppliers less concerned about losing the customer and therefore losing the value of their investment. So suppliers, they are motivated to increase their their investment towards those customers that extend that increase in their takeover protection. And we also find that such a bat is stronger when the customer is important to the supplier. And when there are social connections between the supplier and customer opportunities that is less likely. Okay.

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Jeff YorkÌý 28:14

Okay, if I can interrupt you for just a second. I'm getting super lost here. Okay, so let's let's slow down a little bit. No, that's okay. No problem. So we got we got a supplier we got customers, right. Okay, so this is b2b one firm is selling things to another firm. Right?

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28:31

So the idea is that when our son is taken over, and here's his relationship with suppliers are usually disrupted.

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Jeff YorkÌý 28:39

So Oh, once I want to make sure I got I'm honestly making sure I'm just tracking so. So we've got these two firms supplier and customer and then the supplier is taken over

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28:53

know the customer, the customer

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Jeff YorkÌý 28:54

is taken elsewhere is the target of a takeover. And then their relationship with their current suppliers is going to be changed or interrupted,

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Brad WernerÌý 29:02

could be good, but not necessarily going to be could be

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29:05

right could be okay, great companies could be changed. So this will discourage their suppliers from making investments that is specific to that cup. Gotcha. Because that means that the value of that investment is very likely will will be lost. Right? If the relationship cannot continue, we'll wait. So, I

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 29:25

have a question you ping before we even go there. So this is this is interesting, what percentage of companies that are taken over change suppliers

Ìý

29:35

are definitely so according to a previous study, like the changes of supplier customer relationship can can be up to 80% after a customer event is taken over.

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 29:48

This was probably a lot of me.

Ìý

29:51

It has lots of variations. It has like lots of variation, but like according to a study by the highest percentage kids You'd like an 80 or 60%.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 30:03

So it could be up to 80%.

Ìý

30:04

Yeah.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 30:06

Okay. But it's a range, it's at least 60%. But it could be 80% just depends.

Ìý

30:10

Oh, no, no, the highest degree can be like 60 or 80.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 30:15

Okay, cool. All right. All right. So this happens a lot. And then that obviously affects their their customer specific investment, and trying to create new things, right?

Ìý

30:27

Yeah. The fact the suppliers intention to make the investment to reach customers. Alright, so so that's the background, the challenge, so that and then what did you guys find, we want to investigate when the customer experience an increase in their takeover protection, so that the customer is unlikely to be taken, whether their suppliers will increase their relationship specific investments, we want to investigate and these in natural experiments contests so that we can identify the causal relationships. So that's why we leverage the anti takeover law changes in Delaware. Yeah, so firms incorporated inside Delaware, they experienced an increase in takeover protection. So customers in Delaware, they are unlikely to be taken over. So we want to observe whether suppliers will increase specific investment to what those customers that is within Delaware.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 31:28

And what's the mechanism through which that happens? Is it that the supplier knows that their customers incorporate in Delaware and this less likely be taken over?

Ìý

31:37

Yeah, we believe so. Because this is a like a major law changes. That is, they were aware of it. Yeah, they were aware. So, we assumed that suppliers know, the incorporation of their customer and they know like how their customers will be influenced by the Lord. They're in the same industry. So they have relationships. Cool. So, do they Yes, we actually find that purpose that for customer friends that incorporated inside Delaware after 99 is that there is a significant increase in their suppliers investment that is to say to learn,

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 32:19

how many companies did you look at you Ping.

Ìý

32:22

So, we originally had, so our observation is supplier customer year of isolation. So, our basic unit is that dialectic our supplier customer dyadic level and originally we have more than 10,000 supplier customer a year of duration. But in order to like make sure that the pair's like the supplier customer parents they are comparable, we make some like a matching process to match the different pairs to make sure that other characteristics of the pairs are comparable. Like for example, they are in the similar industry and they are of similar size and they are optimum performance. So after that we have about 4000 observations of like supplier customer year reservations. And this, this includes about 52% of these observations as their customer inside Delaware and the rest of their customer outside Delaware. So the control and treated group is that's the comparable. Okay,

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 33:30

so tell me how it relates to some of that owns a supply business. What would your advice be to those

Ìý

33:35

folks,

Ìý

33:35

what do you like the reason behind this phenomena is that suppliers that they are less afraid of losing the value of their investment and towards that customer. So we suggest that for firm owners or entrepreneurs or managers alike, because this specific investment, those are specific investments, it's very important for the firm growth and profit generation. So, in order to become a thurible customer, first they need to devise governance mechanisms to safeguard the long term relationship with their suppliers. So that the suppliers will feel safe about investing in these investments, so as to improve the pasamos performance. And we also realize that the implication is not only within supplier customer relationship, it can help also extend to relate the first relationship with other stakeholders such as their employees, because employees many times they may need to make the Civic investments to a firm for example, they need to develop very specific skills to affirm that might be used this if the employees are fired by the firm. So this will be a waste of investment if the employee will be fired by the firm within a very short period of time. So in order to like encourage employees to make Such investment firms, they also need to provide such long term incentives such as higher equity ownership in other like those kind of long term incentive for them to make a specific investment that will be beneficial for them. So this is saying the implication of this study to the firm, and that they can develop public governance mechanisms to safeguard the long term relationship with their stakeholders in order to encourage their stakeholders to make relationship specific investments that will be beneficial to the firm. And I think the implication also applies to entrepreneurial firms as well.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 35:41

Yeah, yeah, no. So I mean, what I'm taking from this is that if I'm an entrepreneurial firm, and I'm really relying on a supplier, right, like, I really, I mean, oftentimes, I advise my students, Brad on Oh, no, you think this is good advice to like, actually try to make potential suppliers stakeholders in their store?

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 35:56

Yeah, I was gonna get to that in a second. I totally agree with you. So I mean, from what I'm hearing, what you're saying is saying, if I'm a supplier, and I have a large company, that's maybe one of my biggest customers, I'm going to look somehow also into making an investment into that company, to let them write to. So first of all, if there's an upside, and they get taken out, and I've made these investments that that's in a sense, maybe a hedge against that investment, is that common? You paying in your research? Have you found supplier equity investments in some of their customers?

Ìý

36:28

In the research, it is not very common to have suppliers own the ownership of the customer or customer owner ownership of the supplier, but it's more common to have a third party common ownership example, a third institution can own the equity of both the supplier and customer. So this can align the incentives to some extent, because they have like, same institutional, they hold it close. Interesting.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 36:57

Another thing I was thinking is if I'm a customer startup, right, that it would be wise for me to invest the time and energy to put things like poison pills and other remedies for hostile takeovers in place. Perhaps even more importantly, if I want my suppliers to make firm specific investments and innovation that would help me, I need to make them aware of that.

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 37:21

Relation between the customer and supplier in some of those instances is absolutely necessary.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 37:27

I wouldn't have thought about that. I certainly want to told my students to think about that. But that's pretty cool. We got an actionable insight.

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 37:34

Yeah. And you know what, normally, I would say the suppliers, the way that they can help their customers, certainly the entrepreneurial early starters, is they can provide easier terms, instead of saying you got to pay money today, you know, 90 days or whatever they want to do to help them along, especially if they recognize a large market on the other side of that transaction. And this could really be growth for the supply chain and their their company. Right. That's

Ìý

37:57

exactly right.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 37:59

Cool. Well, we better keep rolling because we got it right. We got actual insights from our

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 38:03

God. frickin there,

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 38:06

man. Yeah, we're gonna wonder that we do it full professor sometimes, right? Sometimes we may get into some rather obtuse conversation. We ran

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 38:13

a half marathon and got there and that was good. Sometimes it takes a full marathon.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 38:18

Alright, so we have. Thank you very much. You think that was awesome. Yeah. So next up, we have the chin Han. He goes by Hans, that's called Han. You are a fourth year student. Correct?

Ìý

38:32

Yeah. fourth year students here.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 38:33

And you're just as all good fourth year students do. You're drinking coffee this afternoon. Right?

Ìý

38:39

That coffee? Perfect.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 38:42

two in the afternoon. Perfect time. Here we go. But that's not your favorite beverage. Your favorite beverage you were gonna tell us about was

Ìý

38:49

kind of like a scotch turn of Irish Coffee. So basically, scotch plus coffee. And a little bit of sugar. That's it. scotch? Sugar. Yeah. Awesome.

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 38:59

Throw a little bit of red bull in there. And you're going to be just well on your way.

Ìý

39:02

Oh, yeah. Actually, I know guy from Master program. actually does that. So right blue plus coffee plus gosh. Oh my god. Yeah,

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 39:14

that's terrible. messages. Not yours. Yours. I can understand. Red Bull, scotch and coffee. Oh, yeah.

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 39:23

It's like 4am in Vegas. What are we going to do?

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 39:28

I mean, at that point, you might as well just go buy some drugs. I mean,

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 39:31

just talk to the guy in the corner over there

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 39:33

is cut to the chase. I mean, you know what, um, anyway, that's not what we're talking about. So Hon, I assume you're not drinking scotch right now. Maybe you are. I don't know. Probably.

Ìý

39:44

Not right now. But

Ìý

39:45

probably. Perfect. Love it.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 39:47

Great. Good. And what kind of scotch do you put in your coffee?

Ìý

39:51

The one that I have? Right now? Is the MacAllan 12 years. What's a coffee?

Ìý

39:56

Are you kidding me?

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 39:59

You're right. in your mind it's nothing you should get thrown out of the program just for that hobby i don't

Ìý

40:04

drink the office so it's a luxury it's a luxury but just say

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 40:10

are you guys setting me up is this there's a camera in my office is there something else going on here

Ìý

40:17

just say let's

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 40:18

take some mixing with coffee oh my god

Ìý

40:22

i'm a foreigner and that's my excuse

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 40:27

there is no excuse i'm sorry

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 40:28

anyway let's get the hands research so that critiquing his choice of what to do with this scotch what's your research project time tell us about

Ìý

40:37

this research is as a joint collaboration with myself professor tony tong at euro cuarto professor general from tulane university so it all start was a phenomenon basically we're observing increasing prevalence of duplicate imitation in today's digital economy right so we will all this kind of property cast parroted applications and party all software's so the common we're asking what the question is we're asking is how firms actually protect themselves from this kind of duplicated mutations and to be precise still imitation is complete copy of original product is extremely proud in today's digital car you can basically see everywhere so it is challenging because this kind of imitations offers three or vastly cheaper alternatives was no economic cost and extremely short production time right so the common belief we have to deal with all kind of information is management is basically through innovations so we just keep inventing new things to hopefully stay ahead of the computers right but is that true for this kind of particular type thing in this digital context or not that's our question so we focus on a particular context the jailbreak of ios seven in 2013 at least influences our existing ios developers at that time so we collect our data from stack overflow it's an online coding community where developers exchange knowledge and search for solutions to technical difficulties and use that to attract developers knowledge search behavior that's basically loaded so what we find is to deal with this threat of duplicate mutation or this kind of increasing number of industry competition existing app developers resort to narrow and deep search basically in their own domain or adjacent domains to stay ahead of imitators cool and because narrow and deep search for existing developers with efficient access to external knowledge due to the low cost of doing so because they already know or if they're already familiar with topic and at the same time this kind of type of research house of bringing useful new ideas to innovation this kind of whole new revision process because innovation as we all know is a process of search and knowledge recombination right so knowledge foundation basically is built on overlapping and distinctive knowledge components at the same time so that's the best ideas and our findings so what recommendations actually we have for entrepreneurs especially for app developers you know 80% of app developers actually are single person or basically small firms right to basically send out on app stores or google play stores right right so how should they do it when there's imitators so emails are basically inevitable and fast and useless there's no way to escape right so new products or new technology is not a solution and in this case because once they have something that is profitable even heroes can always call me stupid right that's i did so our recommendation is to start with knowledge around you and dig deeper and try to dig a trench around you and the state covered in there right the cost and time are the key to stay ahead of the mutaters just build on existing technologies and differentiate with specialization that's basically our recommendation for them in this case

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 44:08

you know what i'm thinking about that i'm thinking about one of the companies that i'm a co founder of and it's a optical engineering company we have 45 patents and our patent portfolio strategy kind of seems to be the strategy that you're talking about when it actually comes to this narrow and deep research you're talking about for these developers but when i think about narrow and deep research i'm thinking that becomes an iteration of your product that you continue to improve it however doesn't really broaden your customer base and that to me seems to be fighting with each other because right you're looking to expand your base right you start you dig in you find your early adopters all those folks that like this iterate to approve based on their feedback which i think that you're talking about how do you broaden the scope of customers that you're trying to get versus in a sense just i think that you have this core group of customers that become more entrenched maybe not better word is loyal because you do that so how do you how do you rectify those two concepts

Ìý

45:06

right so basically especially in today's platform economy or ecosystem con idea is just winner takes all right it doesn't exist multiple competitors at the same time to to try to fight for each other basically once they're there they're there is loads of code the challenge you can unless you can find it under this niche segment or market so to acquire an example of some of the companies you

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 45:27

looked at so that i can kind of really follow you there

Ìý

45:32

so basically it is i don't have direct link well i don't have a compilation of companies so because stack overflows is a community for for app developers only tried to is quite difficult to to try to connect them was their companies so i can't really tell if there's a real company that's doing that right now based on just observing okay developer a developer b on the other hand github which is another online community for for coders is much better on that way because they can basically mesh that was their companies so to say based on my observations in the sample basically is all kind of tend to be smaller firms the large firm because based on the question they're asking there so i can't really give you a real company based on my sample but i'm just saying it's word of culture to manage falsework to balance this kind of acquiring new customer base without losing the existing customer base that's quite different because the reason they acquired this consumer base or existing network is because they have certain product features that this people love if you drop it or even tweak it a little bit it may last it's magic or original ingredients that make you so successful as the first place

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 46:46

i would say that if you stop innovating that someone else will out innovate you right so that you're right you're putting yourself at risk

Ìý

46:53

and so what we're seeing you know waiting here so better deep analysis is why for example software patching that's one way to do it right and so basically just to improve your product quality or application quality without sacrificing the features that every law that's what we're talking about we're not exactly dealing with try to expand into new markets that's a whole different story that's why i'm saying just okay now if you have the existence of several applications and you have imitators at the same time just do nothing but to improve yourself because that's probably the best way to stay ahead or to keep a lie it doesn't that seem kind of common sensical to

Ìý

47:30

a

Ìý

47:32

yes and no so basically we talked with how tough all this kind of duplications so why would you choose expensive copy if you have the choice of free one right that's the question we're asking and that's what's going on here what we're saying just because of the extraordinary service you're providing you can retain this people from moving to the free copy if you lose that they probably just gonna choose a free cup anyway right when you think about a microsoft office in asian countries right i'm not even sure what's the percentage of people actually using what microsoft is selling right i'll say 50% to 80% will be just be knockoff really oh yeah okay we'll think about it because you know microsoft office is just way too expensive for us right before out of universities we can't actually afford it whatsoever unless you actually installed it on your laptop we actually purchase a laptop wow i'm speechless

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 48:30

on this i don't i don't know what to say i don't i actually i don't know what to say

Ìý

48:35

yeah i mean that's a horrible facts right basically from news reports from other journals are these looking 14 billions every single year for app developers because of parallel applications wow that's the number back in 2014 and 15

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 48:51

yeah so it's probably higher now

Ìý

48:53

that's probably higher now because there's no way to state if you have a successful product just think about is digital content athletes can actually copy it right yeah it's just take one coders and your original idea is gone so hon

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 49:06

i know brad prizes the same thing i have so many student projects that are about developing an app and you know when i'm teaching i'm just like that's great guys you know you pour your blood sweat and tears into creating this app and it's all great i mean my take on it is unless you scale super fast with huge influx of capital such that you can build a customer base that makes you a better acquisition target than just google or whomever copying you what can they do though i what would you tell those students i'll just say stop it

Ìý

49:46

it's not that they don't listen it's not 10 years ago right we'll ever just try to develop an application right five years ago i tried it personally it fails big time right unless we can scale it extremely fast Which I don't know how to do it. There's no way to compete these days. Because right now, even haters are not just small emitters, right, Google aibel. They do it by themselves. Yeah, sure. Yeah. The other thing,

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 50:12

you can sue Google over your IP, right? Oh,

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 50:14

yeah. Cuz he's like, he's my password base that once everything, all the features or other benefits from their feature sets for free. And so they may pay for a little bit and wait for the free app to come out or the free competitor, whatever that is. Exactly. So it sounds like a crappy business to even be involved in.

Ìý

50:31

Yeah, exactly. Right. Not unless you try to do some games. Just say, that's the only way to do it. Anything other than games, any kind of universal or utility applications is a terrible time to do it. Because Google can do it can do it much better and can do it much faster. I can do it free. That's Yes. Yeah. That's what's happening right now.

Ìý

50:50

Oh, good. I'm

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 50:51

glad to hear I'm giving my students the right advice, which is just knock that off. No, don't do that.

Ìý

50:56

I mean, I don't see any core competitive advantage for applications. Nowadays. It's just a terrible idea.

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 51:04

So I look at the business differently, though. I look at businesses that have platforms, and that the application, the little thing on your phone or on your iPod or iPad, I should say, is your channel to your customer? Sure. So. So I really for me, grouping them all into one thing is Oh, yeah,

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 51:22

I don't I mean, I mean, when the business plan or pitch starts off, we're going to create an app that does this thing.

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 51:29

So that happens on the first day of class on the last day of class, they would never dare say that.

Ìý

51:35

Depends on what let me take it back a little bit. It depends on what kind of application you use. If you just interface for other contents. That's a different story, right? You have an education app or artificial hours, something something complex, that's a different story, but just saying for utility applications, basically, like say, example for alarm clocks, right. That was the thing 10 years ago, but that's nothing anymore, because everybody said doing it on cost right now, right?

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 51:58

I have never had a student or have seen an investor pitch for an alarm clock. So that would be a first for me to say

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 52:08

thank you so much. Thank you enjoy your beverage don't

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 52:11

want to call my son right now and tell him to stop developing that the alarm clock app that he's

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 52:18

alright, cool. Wow, we are running short on time. I just realizing I have to be somewhere in a few minutes. Oh, no. But let's let's introduce our last guest and Brad. If I have to leave then you're going to have to take over as emcee here.

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 52:34

Okay. I think I can handle it.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 52:36

I think you'll be okay. you'll survive. Our last guest today is Elizabeth Embry, Elizabeth or Beth as she goes by, is also a fourth year doctoral student.

Ìý

52:47

Hey, hi, Beth.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 52:48

You had your dog earlier.

Ìý

52:50

I did. I had had Tim with me. But you know, he tends to get excited when I get talking. So I figured he'd be better in the other room for a while.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 52:58

My dogs like literally laying on the floor snoring right now. He is so uninterested in what I'm doing that you you either know, Brad well, or you just pick something. So what was your beverage today?

Ìý

53:13

I do know Brad? Well, I have sent Brad chapters of my husband's book. And so when the opportunity came to pick a beverage I figured I would pick one of our favorite bourbon. So I picked Breckinridge bourbon, which during our honeymoon, it was one of our first stops because my husband was working on the tasting chapter of his book on bourbon

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 53:35

replug. His book, Beth of you know, how do they find this book? Because it sounds great to me.

Ìý

53:39

So this is his pet project. And he Oh, the stories I can tell. When we first started dating, I didn't think the book was actually a real thing. I thought it was just an excuse to get a bunch of bourbon and have it hanging around the house. But it started because he's from Kentucky. And when he moved to Colorado, round one before I knew him. Everyone was asking him for bourbon recommendations because they assume you're from Kentucky, you know what I should get my father in law for a president. And so he found himself doing all these reviews and writing up about you know, bourbon as a gift guide and whatnot. And Soon it became what's now 14 chapters all as an introduction to bourbon and tasting guides, with the different breweries or distilleries.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 54:24

That's awesome. I didn't know that. This is a public demo. It's

Ìý

54:27

still a work in progress.

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 54:29

I will be published. Oh, okay.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 54:30

I was gonna say like, put a link in the below subscribe. I

Ìý

54:34

talk about it enough. Maybe he'll Hurry up and like finish it and publish it.

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 54:38

Well, if we could put some pressure on them through the podcast happy to do that because I really want to read the damn thing.

Ìý

54:43

We say the first few chapters though, Brad? Yep. Yeah. So Breckenridge was was my choice for the day because it's a snowy, cold day and that also makes me Just think of the mountains isn't actually made up there it Breckenridge is it is they have a great little distillery. Awesome tour. Well, not at this moment, but post COVID It's a great tour and they do a really good job of breaking down the whole process. The preserve, I have just their their standard bourbon, but it's to me it's one of the best smelling Bourbons like I could just sit here like by a fire and just smell it because it smells so good and rich. And it's an interesting kind of blend. I think of like citrus and a little bit of chocolate in and how you taste it, but you guys might taste a little bit different. That's the other nice thing that I like about bourbon is people's palates. Break it down differently.

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 55:37

I've had Breckenridge bourbon before and this doesn't taste like what remember it tasting like, Oh,

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 55:41

I think this is the reserves. So yeah, that's why that's why I only gave you a very little bit sorry about the small sample but I get a lot of brown sugar from the smell of this.

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 55:50

You guys. I don't know. This just tastes awesome. Okay, so the beers the beers are fun, Brittany, I think for me a white rascal, like on a hot summer day would be perfect. I also went with the night Warden, which I didn't tell you guys about who Okay, so I would highly recommend that really good winter beer. Speaking about fireplaces and barrel aged out? Yeah. It's great. But Beth, this is fantastic.

Ìý

56:13

I thought you would enjoy it, Brad.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 56:14

Oh, yeah. No, we can talk out

Ìý

56:16

now. Now we can talk about something completely different. The paper I want to actually share with you guys today is one that the Deming center fortunately funded for me two years ago, the grant that you guys gave me this this past year was to work on a green building paper that I was working on with Jeff. And I think we're going to table that for another conversation. So I wanted to talk about the project that I actually started two years ago. It's a continuous project right now with Janet berkovich. called new money new friends, can you contract for innovation? And I want to talk about it because we've How did you come up with that title?

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 56:51

Let's let's find the longest frickin title pass. I mean, I got I got that I wrote down new by the time you went through the whole thing, and then I'd forgotten the rest of it.

Ìý

Jeff YorkÌý 57:00

But then there's a colon and something else, right?

Ìý

57:02

Money, new friend, colon just for you, Brad, because I know how much you love the colon. So new money, new friends kolon can innovation be contracted. And this paper really looks at the process for medical research to be accelerated. And I wanted to talk about it because with the COVID vaccine coming out, is nothing short of miraculous as to how fast the timeline has been to see this vaccine get distributed. And that's the crux of this research that we're doing is how do we put the processes in place to accelerate medical research for these diseases that are debilitating and fatal, but don't necessarily have the same type of pandemic motivation, like what we've seen with COVID. So when we come to medical discovery, and innovation, whether it's a vaccine, a new pharmaceutical, a type of medical technology, that all goes all the way back to basic scientific research that's at a lab understanding cells, DNA, the whole chemical processes. And so what is going to motivate and accelerate it, when it comes to the fact that it's a long process, we say, you know, going from a lab bench to a patient's bedside, long clinical process, you have the actual research, tons of failures, tons of lessons learned, gets into a discovery, which takes you know, gears, then it goes through clinical trials, and then it goes into medical creation, and then it goes into patient use. And we know, within the literature, a lot of work has been done on the clinical trials and the medical use in the patents. But when you look at where there's a hold up innovation, it's actually at that earlier stage. It's the basic laboratory research. And we know that there are researchers all across the world that are working on the same disease. But the way that the system is set up, is they don't talk to each other. And so one scientists in Boulder could be stumbling and have a failure. And the same scientist in Massachusetts could have that exact same failure, a year and a half later, but there's no conversation and there's no lesson learned that are shared.

Ìý

59:36

Is there a shared library or anything

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 59:38

best about how people are progressing with these things? Is there any kind of shared literature or, you know, would that failure is in the process? Do you post that anywhere and say, Hey, we tried this, this doesn't work.

Ìý

59:49

No, people don't usually take the time to publish failures because they want to move forward and they're taking the lesson learn from that failure, turning around really quickly, and medical journals medical research they publish the success stories and scientists aren't going to take the time because they're pumping out tons of experiments all the time so just sit down and i mean it'd be great to say we have all this time to read lessons learned but they're not out there easily accessible so to get to this title new money new friends where are we seeing a change where we're seeing changes actually from the funders and this is what gets me really interested in is because these private philanthropies so think about your foundations multiple sclerosis societies susan g komen foundation they fund a lot of this research and they are now saying time out we want our scientists to be talking to each other we want them to be sharing this information we want them to be collaborating how do we do that and so a group of these foundations have started writing into their contracts that if they provide this funding the people who they fund have to share their research share their reagents share their lessons learned attend meetings attend conferences talk to each other and build this community with the hope that it accelerates that pipeline because it's accelerating the learning decreasing the failure rate and building this collaboration that these scientists don't currently operate it

Ìý

Brad WernerÌý 1:01:33

so let me ask a question i know you're gonna go but isn't the financial rewards so large for the person that actually discovers gold that in a sense is holding them back from sharing anything

Ìý

1:01:46

that has been one of the biggest barriers and so what these foundations are doing are saying we don't want it to be do you make the end money at the end game when you get the reward we want to support it from the get go

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1:02:00

okay we

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1:02:00

want to change change the game in a way that universities aren't changing it private companies aren't changing it but here let's do our piece of making a difference and so the question is does that work can you contract these communities of innovation can you get these scientists to start working together and to start researching together and publishing together to accelerate this pipeline and that's what we're looking at and so we're utilizing what's called a difference in difference models so we're comparing researchers who are funded by these foundations that contractually require these different community components to researchers who are funded by philanthropies that don't have these contractual requirements and we're looking at if there's actually a behavior change in what's happening within their research and their publication streams i'm going to kind of give you the cliffhanger that brittany did as well because it is a research you know it's still in progress we're looking at eight years of funding across these foundations but for the researchers we're comparing who they're working with before during an after funding so we're looking at their entire research history and we're looking at all of their publications so each of these foundations fund anywhere from 200 to 2000 and so it's a huge database that we are physically building to ask these research questions what i will tell you is the first four foundations that we have analyzed through using networking analysis it does show that this works it does show within this kind of sub sample that you can accelerate communication across these scientists by putting these clauses into their contracts obligating them to share this type of knowledge and to share this type of information that said this is only four of our foundations that we wrote mla so far the balances if in fact by the time we get to these other eight foundations those four were an anomaly and we find that the results are actually the opposite that's also important to know because we could be actually wasting the scientists time right like if we're making them do all these extra steps and we're making them share all this information and attend these conferences that aren't actually benefiting them then we need to remove those clauses because we're actually slowing down the process and doing the opposite of the end goal so both findings have significant implications for the medical community and as we're seeing right now with the COVID vaccine if we can accelerate the conversations that are happening across scientists we can make significant changes in a shorter a period of time than what we're doing right

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1:05:01

now

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Brad WernerÌý 1:05:02

really interesting and totally timely so i think that everyone on this on our podcast today plus the entire world has been watching how the vaccine and the race for a vaccine has progressed the one thing you didn't say or mentioned which we could talk about was the us government was highly involved in providing funding for lots of different areas to see where they were going you didn't mention it but before we talk about that i want to talk about one thing first i would say over the last 20 years my understanding of the biotech model is it used to be all in house that they would do this stuff and it was so expensive that they've kind of left it for entrepreneurs to fight it out in the midwest right and whoever wins they buy them for crazy multiples and they make those people and their families rich for generations and everybody else is a loser i mean financially speaking right now they're probably a lot of great learning that happened in there and who knows what that learning does for the next product but just overall to oversimplify so how does that come into play when we talking about just the business model of some of these large biotech companies

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1:06:07

they have to get funding to start these projects right and so that's where the philanthropies come in that's where these philanthropic foundations are saying we're gonna fund the preliminary baseline research that's needed to even get to that

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Brad WernerÌý 1:06:25

interesting so when you talked about the friction for the basic lab research that's what we're going back to is there an average funding size what what kind of chunk are we talking about for this early kind of research are people getting

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1:06:36

you know it varies it varies by project it varies but we're talking you know hundreds of 1000s of dollars for these longer grants but they're also given a different chunks and increments so some of them are up to a million dollars for 10 years of funding for a lab and some of them are here's $25,000 for one year for one project so it really varies that's one of the things that we do control for in our modeling is is the extent of time and the amount of money given but it's significant chunks of change

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Brad WernerÌý 1:07:10

that are okay so it's really interesting because because i think that's previously up until the COVID vaccine it was somewhere between five and 10 years to research launch and launch and rollout of vaccine and i think the public has become very used to that timeline and so with the advent of technology and maybe cash being infused in some of these friction points that we're dealing with now we have a vaccine rolled out in almost eight months of critical vaccine and i think that that's leading the public to be skeptical or a segment of the public to be skeptical about even taking this vaccine which then if you right if you change so quickly without informing the public of why you've been able to change so quickly they assume it's shortcuts and if you don't have the whatever percentage of the population you need to provide that herd immunity or wherever you're going in a sense the purposes is wasted so how do you what do you think about that

Ìý

1:08:03

yes and no right like we know that COVID and you know we could break down the science of COVID but we know that COVID has you know it's rooted within sars and there's a lot of knowledge that pre existed for a particular pandemic we also have all the science behind mrna vaccines those are not new it's simply taking these different chunks of knowledge and bringing them together really what's taken the longest time that actually has been accelerated is the clinical testing but when we piece together very little was unknown at the very beginning it was really breaking down this virus and understanding the critical components to it then pulling from our knowledge base of existing diseases existing pandemics how they've manipulated as well as our knowledge of vaccines and that's where you know when people are comparing this to you know the spanish pandemic right it's very different because what we know now is so different than what we knew right back then and the science that we had so we're building on all of this basic laboratory science and all of this discovery that's been happening for decades and fast pacing it where it has been fast paced is that the money that's been infused has brought scientists together who normally wouldn't collaborate it's brought conversations across these companies that normally wouldn't talk to each other and that's a very similar model and i bring it up to compare to what our study looking at it makes sense and it's the exact same conversation of if we bring these people together that don't normally talk to each other can we move this forward

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Brittany LambertÌý 1:09:46

faster

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Brad WernerÌý 1:09:47

do you think because of COVID and the speed at which we've been able to ramp up a vaccine that the model will change just because hey this works

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1:09:56

i wish i could be so optimistic the challenge is so amazing in our study i should also preface by saying our study looks at non communicable diseases

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1:10:05

so

Ìý

1:10:06

that's a different it's a different reality it's a different gravity who's impacted by multiple sclerosis is a much smaller subset of people then who's impacted by this pandemic and i mean the squeaky wheel gets the oil and so i would love to say yes this is a big push for science and this is a big push for change in how we do medical research i i'm not as confident i think you know hopefully it awakens people to some of these other issues like pre existing conditions and how there's the need to push scientific research in these other areas but a lot of the history if we go back into the philanthropic community a lot of how these foundations came to be is because there wasn't money coming out of government agencies or wasn't money coming out of other funding sources to address these different diseases

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1:10:56

it's really

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1:10:57

that's another conversation social social you know funding is is different

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Brad WernerÌý 1:11:01

oh yeah no but i mean talk about a timely topic i'm going to be hopeful i'm going to i'm going to play a role that i don't normally play i'm going to be the hopeful one and i'm going to say you know what maybe this todd all of us science community public everyone a lesson about actually how collaboration and that's a great entrepreneurial message to write how collaboration gets you there faster than telling it alone or going right and kind of forging your own path and and i tell you truthfully for my career when i first started i was always going alone person and didn't realize i thought that through the strength of my intellect and resources that i could get things done faster and i've proven again and again that it just doesn't work i've been in i keep trying i don't know if it's nature whatever it is but it's bad but you know what you got to be self aware and know this about yourself or you don't survive it but i do think that that message that you just provided is timely and i think it's freaking awesome actually

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1:11:55

and it's the crux of if we don't talk about our failures we don't learn from each other's failures and that's the biggest you know what when i do the same thing that you just did a month ago it doesn't help any of us succeed

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Brad WernerÌý 1:12:06

no i totally agree i love that there and that's a great lesson for entrepreneurs of failure actually can be a really good foundation to move forward whichever way you're going with that i'm going to have to wrap up our afternoon i'd like to say thank you for all of the folks attending joel you can jump in and say hello i'd like you to just give us a quick update on how your business is going and plug it for our listeners as it has the bike business going joe

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1:12:32

the bike business is going about as well as you'd expect the bike business to go in the winter time

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Brad WernerÌý 1:12:39

for our team here we you just kind of explained to them what you've what you've started

Ìý

1:12:43

yeah so this summer i launched a new company called jds joy rides offering e bike tours of boulder and the feature tour is the wall to wall boulder e bike mural tour which covers a couple few dozen murals scattered around town and it's a really lovely way to see boulder enjoy the bikes take in this really impressive public art collection that we've got in boulder i am excited though because monday we're looking at about 60 degrees and ryan van duzer who is a local kind of adventurer biker and he's got a youtube channel and he's coming out to take the tour with his mom and he's gonna video the tour for one of his episodes on okay user tv so

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1:13:32

i'm looking forward to that do you have a website

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1:13:35

jadis joy rides.com

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1:13:37

jd s joy rides.com

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Brad WernerÌý 1:13:40

awesome so if anybody's listening out there jts joy rides i would highly recommend it I want to ride on the winner

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Brad WernerÌý 1:13:49

that's okay we've got gift certificates for the spring is that even works just as good so i wish you well um to all of you that came today just from the bottom of my heart i thank you the deming center thanks you and i'm speaking for jeff he thanks you as well how can you ping brittany and beth it was a real pleasure this was fun it's really interesting to hear what you're working on i think that that's great all teasing aside i'm honored to have all of you here so thank you very much for that but that being said i wish everybody that's listening happy holidays we'll be back soon after the first of the year and hopefully that you're getting what you're looking for out of creative distillation you can reach any of us through the deming center for entrepreneurship at cu boulder and i'd just like to say thanks great to having all of you and looking forward to talking to you soon and seeing how all this research plays out

Ìý

1:14:38

thanks everyone have a great holiday

Ìý

1:14:40

thank youÌýso much