Arash Bormand: [00:00:00] On today’s episode, we have John Mora on. He’s the Chief Data Scientist at Zephyr, an ad tech company that focuses on video that’s based in Los Angeles, California. We discuss his giving first approach to management, how he resource balances for his team, and what he’s looking for when he hires data scientists.
Enjoy the show.
Thanks John for being on the show. Appreciate it. If you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what you’re doing at Zephyr, that’d be awesome.
Jon Morra: So thanks so much for having me. My name is John Mora and I am the Chief Data scientist at Zephyr. So Zephyr is a contextual targeting ad tech company, and our goal is basically to reach out to brands and understand the specific types of content they want to be around, particularly video.
And figure out the best videos that really amplify their message or to actively stay away from those that really detract from what they’re [00:01:00] trying to say. So in my role, I oversee a team of six data scientists and we basically figure out how to extract all the value from the customers and which videos are the best to put in which campaigns and how to keep ’em up to date.
And that’s my job. Awesome.
Arash Bormand: So you’re seeing a lot of data to say.
Jon Morra: We work primarily on YouTube right now. We have some integrations into Facebook and our goal is to expand to video everywhere and eventually content everywhere, not just video. To give you some ideas of scale, we know of roughly four and a half billion videos and our everyday working set fluctuates between let’s say 30 to 70 million, depending on what rules we use to kinda like coal that down to a manageable.
Arash Bormand: Gotcha. All right, great. I know you’ve had a good, successful long career. I was curious, especially right now seems like the growing trend, especially with the coronavirus, is to be working from home. So maybe you can walk through what you guys had to do, the discussion to say, Hey, it’s time to work from home now.
Did you guys have [00:02:00] something already procedures in place, or did you have to ad hoc, go at it and figure. In full
Jon Morra: disclosure, this is new to almost everyone and myself included. Even I could not predict the onset of the coronavirus six months ago. You
Arash Bormand: guys don’t have that algorithm?
No, we don’t have that algorithm.
Jon Morra: We’re working on it, for the next one, whatever it’s, but What I will say is I’m fortunate that I have a couple of things going for me. One, I have a director who reports to me who’s been working with me since my eHarmony days and now works for me from home full-time.
So he actually has direct reports himself and this has been really advantageous cuz for him it’s been basically no shape. I had a little bit of time working from home. I had my own startup from 2011 to 2013 where I was working from my house full-time. Sure. I haven’t gotten all my sea legs back yet, but I will say that like the biggest change for me has been one, keeping a solid office and office hours.
I actually had to go to Best Buy today to buy new routers cuz the internet didn’t reach everywhere in [00:03:00] my home. I needed it to. We also need to do overcommunicate. So basically I’ve taken all of my weekly one-on-ones and I’m gonna make them biweekly. We’re gonna have weekly team standups. We’re debating with weekly happy hour.
I don’t know if that’s gonna go into effect, but just lots and lots of communication at this time and just lots of trust. Like I’m fortunate that I have a relationship where I really trust all my employees and. Even if I don’t hear for them for a day or two, that’s not what I’d like. I trust that they’re, working on some hard problem.
So
Arash Bormand: let’s go back to that weekly happy hour. Hey, you guys gonna do group chat or Google Hangout and just grab some beers at home and just have a happy hour virtually. So we were
Jon Morra: actually debating doing that. I think some other team at Zephyr did it and said they enjoyed it. The nice thing is my virtual office is in my bedroom if I have too many, I just literally, I’m right there.
Arash Bormand: No more Ubers needed. Just there. No.
Jon Morra: It’s very inexpensive.
Arash Bormand: That’s too good. I know you mentioned trust and I know your management style that’s a huge [00:04:00] component, especially when you get to managing a team. So maybe you. Dive into kind of what’s your philosophy around trust and building that with kind of your team and especially direct reports that you have.
Jon Morra: Yeah, absolutely. So I like to my think of myself, although I’ve gotten easier over the years, as a decently difficult interviewer. I don’t have a particularly high pass rate. And the reason is because I really want to find the right person at the right time for the right job. I know that a misfiring could be very cost.
It’s much more costly to not hire somebody that’s good than hire somebody who’s not good, which is unfortunate from, as somebody who’s job seeking right now. But that’s how I view it. But the flip side of that is that, If you do come and work, you know for me, at some point you basically walk in from day one with lots and lots of trust.
So I trust that you wanna be at work. I trust that you’re gonna do your best. I trust that you’re gonna work the right amount of hours to get whatever tasks are assigned to you done in a timely fashion. [00:05:00] I also trust that you’re gonna reach out and say, Hey, I have a problem. Something was going wrong with work or personal things or anything.
And so what this really facilitates is this like great start to a working relationship when somebody comes on board and then it’s basically all you can do is lose trust from day one. So you start with a lot of
Arash Bormand: trust. So you basically have that Gary Vanderchuck method of I give you a hundred percent trust, and then it’s for you to keep not the old school way of, you have to earn it, it’s there, and show me by doing and to.
Jon Morra: That’s exactly right. What you do earn over time is more responsibility. By no means do I think you’re gonna show up on day one. I’m gonna say, okay, design our next gen machine learning system from scratch, right? We are gonna have nice kinda walkthroughs, but the whole idea is that I think that you’re able to do what you say you’re able to do.
Cause you know, we’ve had a long vetting process to get to the hiring point. Yeah. No,
Arash Bormand: I, I think that’s a good strategy. I, When somebody does come on board, what do you necessarily say? Or the environment you create to [00:06:00] have that open door policy for them to feel trusted? Cuz I know a lot of people say they want to have that kind of environment or ideally that kind of culture, but then they don’t really go about growing it the right way.
So is there anything specific that you try to do early on to really establish that with folks that. Yeah,
Jon Morra: absolutely. So the first thing I’ll do is, my mandate is to have a very well defined intro project where it’s a project that maybe somebody who’s been on the team for a while could knock out in a day or two, and you might get two or three weeks to do it, right?
So it’s one something that definitely adds value. Two, that something that definitely has an end goal. And three is something that you can see all the way to completion by yourself, right? So that really, I think, builds a lot of confidence when you start work because I’ve been a new employee many times in my life.
No one feels confident the first day in a new job. Sure. Imposter syndrome is I’m sure at every level, at every job, every time. So that’s definitely real. So we wanna build your confidence. The other thing I do is I openly welcome criticism myself, right? I have one of the [00:07:00] best working relationships I had.
Unfortunately, he no longer works for me, his choice not mine. He was very openly critical of ideas or processes I have. But he do it very respectfully and with lots of data. And he got promoted, right? Because that kind of environment is awesome because I don’t wanna be sitting on a mountain just prescribing work to be done.
I wanna suggest work. And then the reason I hire smart people is for them to challenge me and say, that’s a great idea. I’m gonna go run with it. Or that’s not a great idea. If we do it some other way, I think it could be more effective or faster, or whatever the case may be. Yeah,
no,
Arash Bormand: I think that’s a great strategy.
I guess to me it sounds like that really builds trust. And then in that same. Accountability. So I guess you build trust, you give responsibility, the accountability part. I know you mentioned earlier you guys may be going a biweekly now cuz everybody’s working from home. But when you’re doing those kind of weekly one-on-ones and touch bases with your team, what are you trying to emphasize and get out of those meetings?
Is [00:08:00] it more to understand where they are at from a project-based perspective? Where there might be some fail safes, what is it that you’re trying to get from those one-on-one and drive more accountability? I’ll be
Jon Morra: honest, I don’t need to get a lot, so I view one-on-ones as really for the lower titled employee, and that, applies to myself as well.
So when I have a one-on-one with my manager, my job is to bring an agenda. Say I wanna talk about 1, 2, 3, and four. I want to hear your opinion on this on. And if I show up and be like, I don’t really know what to talk about, he says, great, I’ll see you next week. So when I am in the manager role, that’s what I expect my employees to come with.
Now I know the more, especially more junior employees might not have that ingrained in them yet, so you know, I’ll have a couple of, what do you think we could be doing it better? Its effort. Which project is working for you? Which project is not, I’ve seen that you haven’t interacted with this person on the team for a while.
Is there like something I should know about there? I’ll in a more mature relationship, after somebody’s worked for, six months, a year, I [00:09:00] basically show up and say, what can I help you with today? And they say, this is what I wanna know about. And sometimes it’s project specific.
Sometimes it’s business health, sometimes it’s marketing, sales. I’m lucky in my position that I have my hands in a lot of these different things. It’s basically my job, so I can answer a lot of these. Yeah.
Arash Bormand: And I think that fosters your team feeling like you actually care about them and not just looking for the end result.
So a lot of the times I feel like managers just either try to micromanage or just not care. And I think both of those are strategies that typically folks don’t wanna be a part of that type of culture. So it sounds like you guys really do a good 360. To really make sure everybody’s on the same page and also feels comfortable.
I think a lot of times you don’t feel comfortable and you stay quiet, but it looks like you’re okay with people speaking up as long as they can back it up with data, which makes sense.
Jon Morra: I’ve had people who have done it not well, and I’ll say my, this is like managing 1 0 1, is I give criticism in private and praise in public.
So if I feel like somebody criticized me in an inappropriate. [00:10:00] Totally one-on-one. I’ll say, Hey, this is what you said. This is why I don’t think it was appropriate. Here’s what you could do better next time, and we learn together that way. Yeah,
Arash Bormand: I think a good takeaway for folks is have an action plan.
I think it’s great to come up with an idea or even a criticism, but having something behind that to either support your clam and or even better, a combination of support and also action items to help come to a resolution or to get to a better place. I think sometimes, Is missing from a lot of people.
And I tend to think, and you can chime in here when that’s missing. You as a manager, you’re left with do you want me to figure this out for you? And I guess that could be part of your responsibility, but it’s so much better when it’s a team effort and somebody comes with a solution.
Is, do you agree with that?
Jon Morra: Oh, I couldn’t agree more. I actually tell all of my directs and anyone else I happened to mentor at the time that when there’s a problem, you should not go to your manager. I don’t even think you should go to your manager with a problem and a solution. I think you should go to your manager with a problem, multiple solutions, and an opinion about why one is best.
Because in [00:11:00] that regard, your manager, if they’re having a bad day or not paying attention, just be like, yeah, do whatever you want. And great, I’ll do whatever I want. I already have an opinion, but if they wanna. If there needs to be more of a discussion, you already have a point of view.
And you’ve already presented the whole universe. It just makes the focus beyond, okay, the problem exists. We don’t need to focus on that. There is a bunch of solutions. And I’ve presented my case. I just found that’s such a better way to have a discussion.
Arash Bormand: Yeah, no, I agree. And I think what do they say?
There’s just stupid questions. And I think a lot of times just the brainstorming and bringing different ideas leads to even better ideas. So bringing more to the table definitely think will yield better results. Your team, I’m assuming at times, Obviously not wanting to, but they maybe get overworked or feel like you gotta get that sense, you just feel like, Hey, you know what?
Everybody’s not running at a hundred miles per hour in the right direction. When you get that sense, what do you tend to do or what are any tips that you have to re-energize, refocus your team whenever either they’re getting overworked or you feel like. They’re [00:12:00] veering off in the wrong direction.
So
Jon Morra: one of my favorite tools is public speaking, right? And I know that may seem a little tangential, but the reason I like it is because it forces you to really codify an idea into a digestible piece of information. So I will have people do presentations to just the group. I’ll have people do presentations to the tech org.
I’ll have people do public presentations. I recently had somebody come with me and speak at ucla. I have some meetup group that I’ve had people speak at. And I really like public speaking for these things. Because of the forces function, it forces you to think about it. It forces you to defend your position.
And I’ve had times before and I said, can you prepare a 10 minute presentation about why you wanna do X, Y, Z? They come back and be like, I can’t. And I’ll be like, I think we’ve solved our problem. Then if you can’t defend it in a public form, then maybe it’s not the right thing to do, and you find by,
Arash Bormand: I guess, challenging.
Their desires that kind of re-energizes them and gets them to come [00:13:00] back with a little bit more focus and zest to get what they’re looking to get accomplished.
Jon Morra: That’s exactly right, because if you do invest the time to do this, you are gonna defend it. And even if I were to push back on you, like the goal is for you to push back on me as your manager and say, no, John, you’re wrong.
And here’s the evidence why you’re. And we did this recently where I sat down with a couple of my guys and I pushed and they couldn’t defend the project and why they were doing it a certain way. And as a result we pivoted and I’m not even necessarily upset because we did it early in the process and it made them realize that the way they were thinking about it probably wasn’t right.
And this is just advantageous for everyone cause there’s no hurt feeling. And it’s good for the business cause we’re working on something that’s more meaningful. I’d
Arash Bormand: rather fail quickly and find a new path that could be maybe a little bit better, a lot quicker. So I agree with that. Of course.
Yeah. So I guess something else that maybe comes to mind is, You guys have different projects that come to the slate. How do you go about making sure the team is [00:14:00] resourced accurately, appropriately, that there’s a good balance where you don’t have, you’re not too heavy on one side of the house versus another?
What do you typically go through your process to make sure, everything’s a checked and ready to rock? Yeah,
Jon Morra: so basically we have any engineering org kind of a force rank. So I work very closely with product to make sure I basically act. More or less a data product person. When I’m in tech, when I’m working with other tech people and say, a combination of this is possible and this is how long it’ll take, and then because of my interactions with sales and marketing, I can understand the value to the business of certain endeavors we may undergo.
I’ll give you an idea. We recently discovered through our own custom embeddings that we’ve learned a multilingual representation of video, which is really powerful because it allows us. Sell our architectural targeting solution all over the world potentially. And this could be game changing to the value of the company as a whole.
And so when you compare that to a project that says, Hey, our [00:15:00] retraining pipeline is a little fragile under certain conditions, should we address it? I could basically help make the call as to force rake. What’s more I. And then this is really my job is just to establish a force rank and then try and have everyone swerve.
I’ll tell you the hardest part of this is that data scientists talents are usually very diverse, which could be really good if you have a lot of projects to work on. But in a swarming, kind of system can be challenging sometimes because it might be, Hey, our, again, our training mechanism needs help.
That’s a heavy engineering task, and if you are more research focused, maybe you’re not equipped to do that. So we have to figure out what’s the next highest priority task that is a research task that maybe you would excel on. So figure out that right balance between swarming and also keeping everyone on track for what they’re best at is it’s a balancing.
And
Arash Bormand: is that a skill that you’ve acquired over time or you just had to train it?
Jon Morra: Sometimes painfully,
Arash Bormand: definitely. Oh man. So I [00:16:00] guess question to follow up on that, do you feel like that’s maybe one of the toughest leadership skills that you personally have had to develop along the way?
Or for you, what’s been most difficult in a leadership skill that you’ve had to develop along?
Jon Morra: Probably not the toughest. I’d say a hard one. I’d say the toughest is common amongst other people that I’ve talked to in this role, which is letting go. I was a pretty good developer back in the day.
I have a doctored machine learning, like I, I’ve done a lot of stuff and as a result, I’m very opinionated about how to do things. I’m opinionated about what frameworks we use, what languages we. What, machine learning libraries we use, how do we measure it? All these kinds of things, which ironically is exactly what I want when I’m hiring an individual contributor.
I want strong opinions about these things, but as a leader, they’re not as good. In fact, they can be detrimental because if I impose my own biases, like I like language one more than language two, and I mandate it, all of a sudden somebody appears who’s an expert in language two, and I can’t hire them.[00:17:00]
And this is bad for the. Potentially. So that’s probably the hardest thing is learning when I should be hands off and say, okay, you wanna use, we use light gbm. I’ve read about it in a blog article. And other than that, never touched it. I would never use it, but go ahead. Versus coming down and being like, I really think you should do, you know this instead.
Finding out that balance of when to let. That’s the hardest thing and you
Arash Bormand: feel like your ego is definitely tied to maybe wanting to do it your way and also maybe having had best practices doing it that way. When somebody comes to the table and maybe has a different idea, obviously it sounds like you want them to substantiate it and bring the data and everything else.
What component of you gives you that confidence to say, Let’s try that. I think a lot of people would probably say, you know what, why don’t we go with my way? But what kind of gives you that? Let’s go your way. And then secondly, what are you doing to manage when maybe option number two was, Hey, you know what, maybe that way’s not the best way.
What’s your kind of touch [00:18:00] base to make sure that another way is definitely the right way? Yeah.
Jon Morra: So again, I’ll call back to what I said before. Public defending is great because again, Let’s take the light GBM example. We use Gradient Boosting Machines as our base learner. If you wanna defend that versus Cat Boost or Psychic Learns Boost.
These are all different boosting implementations. The hope is that somebody else on the team, myself included in this instance, would say, Hey, I prefer Cat Boost versus Light gbm. Here’s why I like Cat Boost. And the presenter could say, here’s why I like G B M is better, and here’s my own experience to say why it’s better or, In which case we’ve again, collectively decided one way or another.
So figuring that out. Again, I really like to do this in a public forum. Nevertheless, there are certain times when I’ll let people go down paths, especially those who have a lot of confidence, have worked with me for a long time to make some what I would think are mistakes in order to be proven wrong.
Cuz I love being proven [00:19:00] wrong cuz it means that, we gained more than I could have provided by. Again, it’s a balancing act to see, how far down paths we want to go. And as long as everything’s done publicly and in the open with good data, the whole idea is that we fail and succeed together.
So if something doesn’t work, it’s everyone had an input, we decided to go this way and it didn’t work. And in a research org, that happens all the time. I always tell my guys, I would never judge you by successful experiments. I will judge you by experiments. Because you wanna do a lot of experiments, but I cannot mandate that one out of every 10 experiments has to work and that’s not reasonable.
Cause I have no idea what’s gonna work. That’s what being a researcher
Arash Bormand: is. Exactly. No, that makes sense. Yeah. I know you had mentioned doing maybe a virtual kind of team building happy hour. Is there anything that you look to. Consistently, or maybe quarterly or anything like that to foster better team dynamics and growth, just as people enjoying who they’re working with.
Jon Morra: [00:20:00] Yeah, so we certainly have some team outings. I have an entertaining budget that we use to go out, at least once a quarter we’ve done, oh, what did we do less? I think we went to a Dodger game. We’ve done a ropes course. We’ve done other like traditional team building things. But the other thing that I.
Encourage is the other engineering managers and product leads to take the individual data scientists out. So it’s not uncommon for a data scientist to be more or less embedded in a product squad for a little bit. And I actually wanna foster that relationship maybe even more temporarily than with other data scientists.
Because I know that when data scientists get very insular, we can speak a different language, we can move at different paces. We can have lots of times where every two weeks during sprint presentations, we have nothing to say. Cuz all we did was fail experiments all week, right? Or two weeks. And if I can embed it, then we’ll develop more healthy relationships throughout the whole org.
And so that’s really [00:21:00] something that I strive. Yeah,
Arash Bormand: especially if you guys have different business units and different stakeholders. I think understanding kind of what they do and knowing who they are outside of work a little bit allows you to go back to them if you have more research questions or more data points you’re trying to get to them.
If you know them a little bit, hopefully they’ll be a little bit nicer when you go bug them again.
Jon Morra: That is very much so true. Cause I do bug them sometimes. Oh man.
Arash Bormand: All right. Very cool. Very cool. I. Something that I think is always important and I think interesting that you noted you like data scientists that are strong, opinionated.
I would think there’s other managers out there that don’t necessarily like those types of folks on their team. But having said that, outside of that, what are you looking for when you are. Hiring, are you looking just at, technical chops? What’s that hierarchy of they have to hit this bar first?
Secondly, I know you guys have a high bar and you personally have a high bar for people that join your team, but is there something that kind of you look for initially that kind of is a differentiator or what’s that process for you?
Jon Morra: So I, it [00:22:00] depends on what level I’m hiring for. So most of my recent hires, especially have been frontline individual contributors.
Somewhere between data scientists and senior data scientists. And basically I’m looking for technical acumen. So you definitely have to be able to do the job. So the interview will consist of at least one or two coding exercises, either algorithmic or systems design. We’ll have at least a couple on machine learning tooling in particular.
And this’ll include stuff like problem setup because that’s a big one. A business person never comes to you. We are gonna do, forecasting and we’re gonna predict X number of days in the future and we’re gonna judge ourselves by means squared error. Something like that. That’ll never happen, right?
How do you deal with somebody proposing nebulous requirements and turn it into an actual problem? And then for me, when I meet with people, I do a lot of curiosity, right? What I wanna see is that you are intellectually curious. So these are questions like, do you. Have any blog articles you read, do [00:23:00] you have any academic conferences you’ll like to attend?
Tell me about the last research paper you read and why it was cool. So the way that we foster this internally is we have like a reading group that, one of the data scientists at Zephyr has decided to spearhead, which I love, and he just proposes papers every other week and we get together as a team and read them and discuss them.
So this is really what I’m looking for, is basically like a basic technical acumen, machine learning acumen, and then lots of curiosity. And the ability to basically understand when you’re wrong, right? That’s a big one too. So like sometimes I’ll describe a problem that I’m currently thinking about, and I actually don’t expect you to have an answer.
I expect you to think with me, have a wrong answer, and recognize, hey, that doesn’t make sense. And pivot because a lot of people. Along with that opinionated trait have problems coming off of an opinion. So I wanna make sure that you have a balance where you can be like, this is what I think and why I think it, and what presents it with evidence can be like, okay, I can change
Arash Bormand: my opinion now.
That’s awesome. I think Knowing what you need from your team is [00:24:00] number one. And then being able to make sure your hiring process and what you’re looking for matches up to that ensures or hopefully ensures that you’ll get to the right person sooner. And also sets expectations.
I think a lot of times, people get wind and dine in interviews, but then day one and the subsequent, weeks on the job or not what they were sold or what they were told. And I think starting off, as you said, building that. Through the first steps in the interview process. Just sets the tone for the rest of the relationship, if that person gets hired.
I think so too. Sweet. I was gonna ask you, I know when you start off at eHarmony your principal machine learning engineer, you ended up moving up there, becoming a director. When you went into that position, were you I really wanna move into management, or would. Hey, I’m here. It’s an awesome job.
I wanna do my best. Did you have that thought process of, this is my end goal, or was it just something that kind of came about and fostered as you started to work there?
Jon Morra: Yeah, I actually started as a senior machine learning engineer. So I actually got promoted to principal and then promoted to director.
Basically when I started [00:25:00] there, I was in a weird spot in my career, and the reason I was at a weird spot was I was coming off starting my own company. That unfortunately did not make me. So evolving.
Arash Bormand: Yeah. I had to
Jon Morra: go back into the workforce from basically wearing every hat, everything from, technical to product, to legal, to hr, to sales, to everything.
And so what I wanted within anything at that point when I first started eHarmony, was job stability, right? Which obviously, that could offer me. I needed job stability and I needed the ability to focus, right? So my first task at eHarmony. Hey, we have a ton of photos that we’re not doing anything with.
What information can you extract from the photos to help our customers find better matches? Gotcha. Because I had a background in image processing, so I was, qualified to do that kinda work. And basically what happened was, as I looked around the org, I really enjoyed being a force multiplier, right?
And this was one of the reasons I started my own company, was I wanted to take an idea and get it everywhere, build a. [00:26:00] Build something, right? And so I knew that I wanted to be a manager at some point. And early on in my tenure, Athar, I let both my manager at the time who was a director and his manager, who I developed a pretty good relationship with, know that not, inappropriately just Hey guys, I really, want to grow here.
I’d like to, have this role at some point. How do I get there? That kind of stuff. Asking. Fortuitously for me. I was upset at the time, but looking back, it was fortuitous. My manager left and I basically went to his manager and said, I really think I could do this. I think I, I’m ready for this role.
I was there for a year and a half, two years maybe at this point, and I was like, here’s why I think I could do it. And by the way, I’m a safer bet than hiring somebody else cuz you know me. He said yes. And so that’s how that happened.
Arash Bormand: Yeah. The reason I bring that up is I know there’s a lot of folks that have a startup doesn’t always go the way they want to and they gotta go back to an IC role.
So it sounds like for you that transition [00:27:00] back to being an I C U still came with a good focus. And also it goes back to I think your just. Point of your ethos sounds like it’s being honest and trustworthy in saying, Hey, this is what I really wanna do. But also when the opportunity presented itself, bringing up again, data points, factual evidence to say, look in selling yourself based on that.
And I think a lot of times people struggle when they’ve had their own company. To go back to an IC role, it’s difficult, right? Being your own boss is way different than having a boss. So I think that’s a good point for people to recognize. Take those risks when they present themselves. But if you gotta go back with the right mindset and a fresh mindset and really be honest about what you’re hoping to aspire with, whoever is your direct reporter or their boss
Jon Morra: or whatever the case is.
Very much I would agree. There’s a lot of good things for working with other people. I spent years talking to myself and not, I don’t mean that in a bad way. That’s what working for yourself is I go out and go on walks and talk to myself and try and figure stuff out. Now I have other people to talk.
Arash Bormand: Yeah it’s good to bounce ideas off of your other people other than yourself. [00:28:00] You start going crazy, listening to your own thoughts. I’ve been there, so I totally sympathize with that. Very interesting. I was gonna say, maybe a good closing question for you is there something that you think maybe looking back at your career, Something that you think, Hey, if I could go back and do this a little bit better, or a piece of advice that you think you would’ve wished you had the John 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago.
Is there something there that you think might be interesting for people to learn from?
Jon Morra: My only regret, I would say professional regret, we’ll give the personal stuff aside. Professional regret is that I started my own company at the wrong. And I say that because I was, how old was I? 25, 26 at the time.
I started my own company and I was just in this spot where I’m like, okay, there’s a problem that presented itself. This other guy over here says it’s worth a lot of money. I trust him. This other guy says he can work. Technically. I trust