Trevor Botkin: 0:09

And, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another inspiring episode of when Leaders Connect, the Corporate Connections podcast, where we explore the journeys, insights and strategies of exceptional leaders who are making a difference in their fields. My name is Trevor Botkin, I'm the National Director for Corporate Connections, canada, and today I have the extraordinary honor of hosting a visionary entrepreneur whose commitment to creating positive change and fostering community well-being is truly remarkable. Joining me today is Josh Leslie, the founder of Real Good Endeavors. Josh's journey is a testament to his passion for making a tangible impact through innovative solutions and community-driven initiatives. With Real Good Endeavors, he's built a platform dedicated to addressing social challenges and promoting sustainable development, all while fostering a spirit of collaboration and collective growth. Today, we're going to delve into Josh's entrepreneurial journey, his insights on social impact and sustainability, and his advice for leaders looking to drive positive change in their own endeavors. So, without further ado, please welcome to when Leaders Connect, mr Josh Leslie. Good morning, good morning how are you?

Josh Leslie: 1:24

I'm well Equally honored to be here. Thank you so much. Are you? I'm well Equally honored to be here. Thank you so much.

Trevor Botkin: 1:27

Well, I'm excited to have you on this episode and I guess the best thing to do is just kind of jump in with two feet and talk a little bit about the vision, of vision of real good endeavors, um, but I think, I think, maybe stepping back in terms of starting, of where this journey began, cause I know, um, even in the small time that I've known you, which I think is almost four years now, almost four and a half almost yeah, let's just call it almost five years, um, and when we met, it was it was around putin nation and uh, building around that content, and and so I've.

Trevor Botkin: 2:16

Since I've known you, you've reinvented yourself a couple of times, but it's always been with this passion around um, helping others overcome these monolith organizations and helping others tap into community and creating opportunities for people who otherwise wouldn't have an opportunity, who couldn't leverage tech or couldn't scale it to their own benefit. So I would just kind of love to start maybe where this passion has come from and maybe take us back to the beginning.

Josh Leslie: 2:49

Sure, yeah. So I would say I'm an accidental entrepreneur. So I, you know, my last gig was at a billion dollar healthcare organization with lots of layers and players, and you know it got to the point that I, you know, wanted to fulfill my commitments, which I basically did, but that, you know, I call it political overhead. So when I started at the organization, probably 10% of my time was spent managing up, and when I finished, at least 50% of my time was spent managing up was spent managing up, and when I finished, at least 50% of my time was spent managing up, and so that was just not a fulfilling place to be, and so I said, okay, well, I'll have to. I gave this organization my best ideas surely I can come up with some better ones and entrepreneurship was the journey from there. So that was back in 2012. And you know, I start with what you know. And so I'd overseen biomedical research at hospitals adult and pediatric across the country for over a decade at that point and saw ways to create efficiency and really leverage tech to streamline quite a paper-based and manual process, and so I dove headfirst into best practices for how to build software as a service, platforms which could have been essentially do the exact opposite of everything that they do in the hospital that you just left and you'll be doing a leading practice, spent the better part of a year and a half building out my SaaS platform. That could really streamline things by up to 88% in that industry and saving literally tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Uh, and saving, you know, literally tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of the time and resources it takes to develop new, new drugs and natural health products, medical devices, that sort of thing. And you know, in the fullness of time, I kind of view my journey differently. At that point I would say, you know, stewardly came from, uh, the the left side of my brain. We don't really have left and right sides of the brain, but stewardly kindly came from the left side of my brain. We don't really have left and right sides of the brain, but stewardly kind of came from the left side of my brain.

Josh Leslie: 5:08

And after spending a year and a half intensively working on that, the right side of my brain was getting a little antsy and needed to do something that was not so stuffy and bureaucratic and administration-ridden, and so that's where the poutine journey came about, and so back in 2014, so Stewardly was 2013, poutine Nation was 2014, where I met my then co-founder for Poutine Nation and we happened to get together over a pint and a poutine and and I had mentioned in passing that I actually have a poutine related business idea, but it requires somebody that knows social media, marketing and things, because that's not really my wheelhouse and he said, well, that is that's mine, so lay it on me. And it's one of these things of and this is the nature of startups that I'm sure we'll get into when we get to real good endeavors in the present tense. But you know, where you start is certainly not where you end, it just is the beginning of your journey. And so the premise for Putination when it started was I see a lot of people invest a lot of time and money building their own restaurant and they might spend six months saying, hey, come see my great restaurant, and then it fails and then I'm sad about it. Or they spend time and then it starts going really well and two years or three years in they say, oh, this is going really well, I should franchise this. But they know nothing about franchising and they pick the wrong franchisees and then it fails, and then I'm sad. And so the starting point for that business idea was well, why not build authority in the space about knowing what poutine or poutine is, depending on whether you're in Quebec or outside of Quebec, and build authority in the space, bring people together over shared love. So find the true poutine enthusiasts and bring them together, create fun experiences and basically build relationships with your future franchisees.

Josh Leslie: 7:12

In the process, um to then launch a you know a restaurant chain, that's where things started. Um, during the process, I met, uh, some you know restaurateurs who you know. The restaurant game is not what you not what it's all cracked up to be, and the pandemic certainly showed us, you know, how extreme that can go and even the knock on effects that are still still being felt. But so it became clear that you know that that wasn't the exact play to make. But when Ravi and I sat down and talked about well, what do we have in common after our love of this?

Josh Leslie: 7:50

This dish was a love of sort of retro video games and sort of Nintendo, super Nintendo, 80s and 90s video games and sort of. There was a charm and simplicity to that world that didn't necessarily transfer over to some of the really high production games now and you've been in the video game world so you have a pretty close and fulsome understanding of this, but anyway. So we essentially decided one night in Montreal that, okay, we're going to figure this out and build a video game. It one night in Montreal that, okay, like, we're going to figure this out and build a video game. And we ended up working on a video game project for over two years that got sideswiped by the pandemic, but in the process I ended up.

Josh Leslie: 8:36

Essentially, you know, something that will become clear about me, I think, through this interview and that you've probably noticed over the time of knowing me, is I'm not afraid to go into a space that I don't know that much about and put real money on the line in real time to do a project, because I think there's no better way to learn how an industry actually works or doesn't work than to dive in and just go full tilt and figure it out.

Josh Leslie: 9:01

Just go full tilt and figure it out, and so that was the case here that you know, put real money behind this, developed a video game demo, went on a whole adventure that took us to Prague and Skywalker Ranch and all kinds of fun places that we don't have the space to explore here.

Josh Leslie: 9:18

But ultimately, at Skywalker Ranch I got the inside track on a reboot of one of the original video game consoles and had the inside track about how that was going and ended up basically working with that company for a few months officially in an official capacity near the start of the pandemic, which is actually when I applied to corporate connections and went through the interview process, and so the only other thread I would tie in here is that.

Josh Leslie: 9:53

So if the left side of my brain was stewardly and the right side of my brain was put nation had a separate pole to build community and build a separate set of, you know, businesses and startups around really helping people to connect with one another and navigate the often lonely entrepreneurial journey.

Josh Leslie: 10:16

And so I work pretty extensively with coaches and different healthcare practitioners and folks that are kind of doing their own thing and trying their best to navigate and figure things out, and so built service offerings for them that were kind of helping them dial in their business model, helping them get clarity on what their signature magic is, that they bring to the world and how to put their best foot forward, and so I share all this to say. Often thrown around is the idea of a serial entrepreneur. I'm a parallel entrepreneur and kind of have always been that way, and so to be working on multiple threads and multiple things is actually just part of my way of being and part of the way that I, you know, I'm in my zone of genius and so when we get to real good endeavors and explaining kind of what that's about, that will come into play. But that's a very long answer to your very short question, so I just want to make sure that I'm not going too far afield here.

Trevor Botkin: 11:22

No, but I think that's really interesting in terms of and I know in the past we've talked about or we've experienced together, I mean, the sense of community, that the work you've done, whether it's with our forums internally or masterminds externally, and this sense of community and even the work you were doing during the pandemic of trying to build an alt or not spotify, where, where the the money was going to the artists and and not to, you know, those who actually aren't artists, um and and kind of like the anti-spotify and and so like.

Trevor Botkin: 11:58

It's just always been a through line, uh for you, which is almost like a counterculture of this idea of trying to actually empower the end user, whether it's the restaurants and the people who love to eat there, musicians with their audience, you know, I think it's always just trying to create platforms that truly empower, as opposed to platforms that are exploitive. And when we look at social media, obviously, or what Google's done, or Facebook, whatsapp, they're exploitive. At the end of the day, it's you are exploitive. What they're selling your data, your eyeball, your time is what is being bought and sold, and so I think it's always been fascinating.

Josh Leslie: 12:50

So let's jump on, let's use that as a Well, I think that that's a great context setting actually to then segue into real good endeavors, because a lot has evolved in the world since 2012, since I started on my entrepreneurial journey, and in the world since 2012, since I started on my entrepreneurial journey and what I will say about platforms. So I'm unabashedly apolitical. I simply don't believe in relying on the political apparatus to solve real world problems. I think that entrepreneurs are actually and business folk are the most empowered to actually affect change and that's where I direct my time and energy. But I certainly have opinions about, you know, the big platforms nowadays and I think that these things will weave together, hopefully in an interesting way around when you look at the genesis of some of the big platforms.

Josh Leslie: 13:48

So take Facebook, not to just pick on them, because you can make the same observation argument about any of them. But Facebook started with a certain idea which is hey, we want to connect people and make it easy to stay in touch with friends. Great Seems fairly innocuous. But then you get venture capital and multiple rounds of venture capital into the mix and from my perspective, as somebody who's built web based software for over almost a quarter of a century, at this point, as soon as you take. Well, not necessarily, but there's a real risk, unless there's a values alignment with investors, that when you take money, you're effectively poisoning the well for your software because everything becomes. How do we get the most money back possible for our investors? And that's to me the tale of where these big platforms have have gone of effectively channeling billions of hours every day of human potential off, of siphoning it off the planet and turning it into ad spend and ad revenue. You can make that exact same, you know assertion for any platform TikTok, instagram, etc.

Trevor Botkin: 15:03

Video games, I mean video games are created in such a way to manipulate dopamine addiction so that you know, as you especially mobile games on phones as you get distracted by something else, bing, you know, hey, come on back, you just got an extra 50 points put in your wallet and you're like, oh yeah. So you know the in the social engineering, the, the, the psychological engineering that goes into basically stealing our time, or stealing I mean just hijacking our time. Hijacking our time, manipulating our time, uh, wooing us into spending more time on any given platform, whether it's for entertainment, whether it's YouTube, whatever the metrics are, where they're trying to buy your time to do that. You know it's kind of like when you're on social media and you know it's like stop doom scrolling or, you know, download this app to help you get off. It's like stop doom scrolling. Or you know, download this app to help you get off, and I'm like you're advertising to me to get off Facebook. On Facebook, the irony is not lost. You know what I mean.

Josh Leslie: 16:15

So yeah, if you don't like this addiction, we've got another one for you, yeah, and land in Florida.

Trevor Botkin: 16:22

So yeah, let's take that.

Josh Leslie: 16:39

In Florida. So, yeah, let's take that. Let's take that transition of saying moving into the this is the genesis of Real Good Platforms and what you've been working on provide is that there's been a shift and I would say, democratization of the tools of creation of software, of music, video games, any kind of creative pursuit, even making web series and TV shows and movies. I mean. Ultimately, the cost of doing that now is exponentially less than it was even a decade ago, oh, even five years.

Trevor Botkin: 17:12

Yeah, the shift, the amount of tools, the software, the online like CapCut as an editing tool. It's extraordinary Figma, all these different tools that will enable us to cut and splice and edit. The only thing stopping you from being a content producer is your own discipline, or maybe lack of ideas. But honestly, I think everyone has ideas, Everyone has creativity. The only thing stopping you is yourself today, 100 percent, 100 percent.

Josh Leslie: 17:45

Well, and I think just even the awareness that these opportunities exist, because a lot of people don't know, like a lot has shifted in the world and people just don't realize. And so I see folks running around looking for technical co-founders, for example for software platforms, and it's like, well, actually the resources exist today for free on YouTube to learn everything you need to know to probably build the first version of your software platform. Will it be the most fantastic? Probably not, but will it be functional and be able to figure out? Is there a product market fit here? Does it add value enough value for your end users that they're willing to pay for the product? That much is in your wheelhouse. But I think the pursuit of something or the excuse of I just need this one person or I just need this one thing is a helpful way for people to just not execute on the ideas and sit with it for a while.

Trevor Botkin: 18:40

It's the lies that we tell ourselves as individuals, as business owners, as startup people. It's constantly Anyway. So yeah, again, it's good context. The world has shifted and again I think it was always a matter of ideas in and of themselves are worthless. I mean, there's no value to an idea. It's the execution that matters.

Josh Leslie: 19:05

Execution is everything, and the only other little bit of context that I think is relevant is that, with this democratization of the tools of creation, I believe we're in the most revolutionary time since the industrial age where, instead of you know, I have a kind of, you know, mass-produced coffee mug. It's, you know, not common, not that many people have it, but this is a mug that somebody prints something on and sells. I mean, that's the premise of the industrial age of hey, we can mass produce things and sell them to a mass audience. Where we are now is that we can produce bespoke things and provide them to a bespoke audience, which means that, you know, you've probably heard the saying that software is eating the world, and in the case of the bigs and some of these giant platforms, they literally are devouring the world. But the you know, the potential that's here now is for software to take little strategic, value-added bytes of the world. Uh, and I'll just give you a simple example. So constant contact or active campaign or any of these kind of um mailing lists are so the, the first generation of platforms like them, are developed in in an industrial age mindset. I'm going to build this thing. It's going to work for everybody.

Josh Leslie: 20:30

There are whole categories and subcategories of users where there's an opportunity to go get those people as your clients. Developer or even a plumber, let's say, that is sick of these tools being, you know, over-engineered and having way too many features and not really speaking to your life as a plumber and a trades person. You can go build the constant contact for plumbers and go market that to plumbers and get entire percent. So a vertical slice which you're familiar from the video game world, a vertical slice of that market that you can get 100% of if you want it and you can go after that and there's, you know however many plumbers in the world. You can have a very profitable business just by focusing on that.

Josh Leslie: 21:14

But to me that's a shift in production from you know, mass produced to almost like matching neurotransmitters, neuroreceptors, which is a very bespoke process that you know it takes a lot of effort to really dial that in and to be clear on how you get the right people to your insert, the blank product service. But that's really where the world is headed. I believe it's already headed there. I mean you can kind of look around and see it. But that's my belief and that's kind of what set the stage for real good endeavors.

Trevor Botkin: 21:51

Beautiful and obviously we could deep dive into the tangents that could take up hours of conversation just on, the constant contact being an example.

Trevor Botkin: 22:05

But CRMs right Like Salesforce, which is the battleship of CRMs conversation just on, and the constant contact being an example.

Trevor Botkin: 22:07

But crms right in, like salesforce, which is the battleship of crms. And then you have a company like uh, go high level, which is in a great job, uh, at empowering agencies to niche and say, no, make the crm work for plumbers and don't don't make it go plumbers, accountants and graphic artists, just just focus on plumbers and don't don't make it go plumbers, accountants and graphic artists, just just focus on plumbers. And then do lead gen on that, because you, you cut through the noise and you make something that they need and the verbiage isn't oh, we can tailor that to you and say it's tailored for you, it's set up for you, and so I, I think that's um, I think it's beautiful and it and, as someone who I love etsy and and so you know, and and the reality is is you have to sort through it, because there's so much stuff on there that is not bespoke, it's factory, but they're selling it on etsy they're relabeling it or whatever.

Trevor Botkin: 23:03

Yeah, and it and it's just going. And then, so you know, it's the same way where eBay used to be individuals and now it's massive organizations just using eBay, right, and so it's those things of going. There's the early adopters, there's that grassroots or marketplace activity, and then the bigger platforms will catch up and we'll figure out how to leverage it to their own needs and that.

Josh Leslie: 23:35

Well, but I think the only thing I would add to that I agree, is that the big platforms may catch up or try and catch up, but ultimately you'll then be competing on community instead of competing on features, which is a much different game.

Josh Leslie: 23:52

And so if people feel seen and heard and that this is for them and the work you know to be able, they'll be able, just like Etsy, I believe I have an overabundance of trust in humans and their ability to see through things, but that I believe that if a large platform starts, then you know creating little micro sites, micro versions of their software for plumbers and for other people. That will be seen through as oh, we see what other people are doing and we're trying to play in this market through as. Oh, we see what other people are doing and we're trying to play in this market, but really our heart is not in it. Unless they go the full way and invest in the community manager and really provide the supports and assets there that are required to deliver a comparable value, I personally believe that they'll be wasting resources trying to catch up when these people are far out of the gate perfect, okay.

Trevor Botkin: 24:49

Well, let's jump. I think we have enough context. I hopefully, um, and hopefully everyone's keeping up with where we're going. But, uh, let's jump into real good endeavors. And what's the vision, uh, or, or what's what, what is it first and then? And then we'll get's the vision, or what is it first, and then we'll get into the vision and what you are excited about. So let's just start with what is Real Good Endeavors.

Josh Leslie: 25:18

Sure, yeah, I think one common thread so we haven't talked about social impact, but one common thread between me finding kind of social purpose businesses and that community and real good endeavors is that when I first became an entrepreneur, you know, I felt that it's important to have the social dimensions of you know, what we do in business in mind and a lot of the very first things I found were very focused on just make money through by hook or by crook and all kinds of ways you know to, in some cases deviously deceive people to get a bunch of money didn't really resonate or appeal with me or appeal to me. And when I found, you know, there was a whole community of social purpose businesses and social impact, that did quite resonate with me and that's sort of how I found my, found my niche, I guess you could call it, or found my community around this. When it comes to real good endeavors to provide, you know, relevant framing for that, I went on kind of a an internal introspective journey with some business mentors over the last couple of years and as I focused on you know what, what is the unique value that I can provide and what would be the structure that would best lend itself to. You know me creating that value and spending more time in my zones of genius and less time doing other things that are not. That. Where I landed in terms of the structure that I came up with is a thing I just didn't know it at the time. So, in a similar way, with social impact, I'm like okay, I didn't know what to call it at the time, with Stewardly, but I'm like it's not just a business, it's a social purpose business. I finally knew what to call it.

Josh Leslie: 27:06

So in this case, where I landed at in terms of what is the structure and how would this all be set up, I came to know that, oh, there is a thing out there called Venture Studios and it's actually becoming, you could say, all the rage in the VC and startup community over the last few years. And so back in 1996, I think it was Bill Gross founded Idea Labs, which is credited as the first venture studio, and they've actually spun out some pretty big platforms and businesses that are household names. But so he's kind of been over there doing his thing in California and 20 years later, the concept of a venture studio starts to catch on, and so there were maybe a couple hundred in the world, like three or four years ago. My last, what I heard from last year is it's pushing 1000 now and that there will be 1000s of these in the world in the next few years. Again, I kind of didn't know about this, I just figured out that oh, wait a sec, I'm not the only person coming to these conclusions and tapped into this whole idea around venture studios.

Josh Leslie: 28:15

But the basic premise is people go out and build startups and if they fail and they have to go take a job or go back into the working world, all of the knowledge that they've gained is lost. I mean, it's organizational knowledge, essentially is just gone. So there's nobody to relay the you know, the, the mistakes that they made or the hard earned learnings that they had along the way. Um, that just doesn't exist. And a venture studio basically is a way of abstracting away. So first you have some people that have the institutional or organizational memory around. Okay, you've got a great idea. Well, guess what? The telephone was invented in two different places at the same time. So probably there's somebody working on the same or very similar idea to you. So just, you know, recalibrating some you know startup founders who are really keen and eager and believe in their idea. Just to say it may. It's probably not as unique as you think it is, and that means that it's even more pressing for you to figure out if there's a product market here, product market fit here, sooner than later to to get established and get some traction and so essentially to have a leadership team that has some institutional memory and knowledge around this and to abstract away all of the functions that are not really unique to a startup. So there's legal, financial accounting, branding, all this kind of stuff that has to be done. They're necessary parts of a business, but those can be abstracted away as a back end or back office. Yeah, bark and back office are very close and so can be abstracted away as a back office function, where now really the startup founder has their prime initiative is to spend almost all of their time finding product market.

Josh Leslie: 30:15

Fit is a venture studio head in in the uk that I talked with last week but he shared, you know, minimum viable segment. So it's, it's fine to have a minimal, minimally viable product, actually, like adam grant's, a minimally lovable product, more um, but it's, it's all all well and good to have that. But if you can't find your minimum viable segment that appreciates and is willing to pay for that. Well, you don't have a product market fit, and that, quite honestly, is quite the undertaking, even if you have none of those other things pulling your time and energy away, including perhaps raising capital or finding a way to cover the burn rate of your startup.

Josh Leslie: 31:01

That's still a difficult job just in and of itself, and the reality for most startup founders they have to do that plus all of these other things, which is really setting them up to have more likelihood of failure than success, and the early data out of venture studios is that they're, I would say, exponentially more effective at finding product market fit and getting startups off the ground because they don't have to relearn everything. People can be way more focused. They don't have to worry about paying their monthly bills, and so, as I set out for figuring out what was next for me with Real Good Endeavors, part of the set of problems I was trying to solve is I don't want anybody to have to go through a lot of challenges that I went through because they're well, they build character and maybe build tenacity. They don't really add value to the end process of getting a valuable startup out the door and finding market traction and then scaling it up.

Trevor Botkin: 32:04

What's the difference that you see between a venture studio and, say, an incubator?

Josh Leslie: 32:11

So a venture studio typically is producing and incubating its own ideas. So there's two other kind of concepts in the world that are adjacent to venture studios. So one is an incubator where essentially some startup comes in and maybe they give up a small slice of equity, which is already, you know, kind of a dicey play, because valuing those companies at that point is not easy to do, um, but but anyway they get into an incubator and the idea is that they bring experts, um to help, they might be on their team and then they really help to try and get, you know, connect these people with potential clients, with potential investors, with, you know, help them take those next steps and perhaps provide some legal or accounting or other kind of value added services as part of it. So I would say they help for part of the journey, after the startup has kind of de-risked some of the the uncertainty around whether there is a market for their product or whether they're able to execute and build a product or service, and so it's coming later stage and you know they can help, but they're it's. It's different than building from a solid foundation of like, from day one you are supported, you know you, financially, you're, you've got at least enough to pay your rent or pay your you know the minimum amount that you need to live and that you've got these kind of supports. So it's it's similar, but I would say it's more of a connecting function and that they're helping after you're probably nine months or a couple of years into this journey, which you probably waste a lot of time and effort and money getting there, and now you've got probably other financial pressures on you that you didn't have when you, when you first started.

Josh Leslie: 34:11

An accelerator is a similar kind of of concept, but it's more education based. So, uh, like there's mars, uh in toronto, um, they'll provide kind of baseline training and leading practices and and try and help at least make sure that there's a, a foundational knowledge amongst their startup founders to have a better chance of going out into the world, but they don't put any resources in, they don't tend to put in capital, they don't help with any of that stuff. And so, yes, it may, it may accelerate in some cases it does accelerate, but it's it's much less hands on, and I guess you know the biggest. The closest thing to a venture studio would be when venture capital firms invest in, like scale ups, or businesses and their partners are actively involved in coaching and have more of a advisor role. That's the closest thing to a venture studio, and part of it is that the venture studio has real skin in the game here. So they're effectively bankrolling this. They're going through all the effort to get the money to do the idea to begin with, and so they have at least as much riding on it as the individual founder or I call it entrepreneur in residence that's going to come and do this, and I guess that's the if I were to provide.

Josh Leslie: 35:43

One key differentiator and one of the opportunities that I saw over the years is that there are people who have the entrepreneurial chops but maybe they have a mortgage or they have a kid or they have both, and they just can't go away. You know they can't step away from a full-time job with benefits because that's just not going to work with their life, even though they might be super talented and a perfect fit to get an idea off the ground.

Trevor Botkin: 36:06

Well, it comes back to that idea of risk, but it also comes back to execution. Right and honestly, my experience over the last 10 years is that to be an entrepreneur, you have to be a little bit insane. Honestly, it's all the risk and oftentimes it's none of the fun of running a business. So it's pretty interesting when do you see Real Good Endeavors in five years?

Josh Leslie: 36:46

Yeah. So the thing that's unique, and I think has not yet been done before, about Real Good Endeavors is that. So now there are perhaps, you know, perhaps a thousand hundreds of venture studios out there. To my knowledge, real Good Endeavors is the first venture studio collective. So there's, you know, insane. And then there's my particular flavor of Insane, which is okay, it's a lot of work to set up one venture studio. Why don't I set up four or five at the same time, which sounds, you know, like a particular brand of insane?

Josh Leslie: 37:18

Um, but the underlying premise is over the pandemic I made a lot of connections with, you know, the world got a lot smaller for anybody who was paying attention and who was, you know, spending their time online. As, as the world got smaller, um, there were opportunities to connect in ways that were unprecedented, and so I built networks, new networks of people in different. So if I was in the software space before, continuously, and then I was in the, you know, poutine space, but let's call that food-based interest community space, um, those were places that I already, you know, had a foothold and an understanding can we call it gastro tech?

Josh Leslie: 38:05

gastro tech. I like it okay, yeah I mean, it's not always tech, sometimes it's products, sometimes it's experiences, but yeah, I like the sound of gastro tech. Um, I haven't heard it in investor circles or anything else, so we'll we'll copyright that there's fintech, there's there's all these different techs, but no one ever. Well, I guess, food tech um, yeah, that's tends to be more like manufacturing and production. I like gastro foodie tech?

Trevor Botkin: 38:34

I don't know, but I like gastro tech. I once had gastro tech and it was three days on the couch. Um then I was fine, keep going, keep going, ignore me. This. This, this part will edit out this. This is this, doesn't? This doesn't serve anyone.

Josh Leslie: 38:51

Um, yeah, so so the the two groups that I would say I built, uh, you know, new connections with during the pandemic, primarily were uh creatives, so people who uh might be, you know, considered influencers generally they don't like the title, so the content creator is a more generally accepted term and people in the music space, so different kind of creators, but people that produce electronic music. So I'm big into electronic music and basically had the opportunity to connect with people who had been on my I don't have a playlist per se because I resist a lot of these platforms but who had been on my manual, on my, you know, manual playlist for many years.

Trevor Botkin: 39:35

Did it have been highlighted on your life soundtrack?

Josh Leslie: 39:47

Yes, well, well put, and I see common threads between the experience. I mean everybody's leveraging or being leveraged by the same platforms, right, and so the general observation that I think can apply across the board is that the people creating the value for social media platforms, for video platforms, youtube, for live streaming, any kind of context, and even in the music world, the people that are producing it, are getting the least compensation and the companies that are putting it out there are getting the most compensation. And what I observed across kind of different industries is that, you know, there's only so many ways that humans really connect and have common experiences. One is through the entertainment and media and experiences we consume. One is through games tabletop games, video games you know hybrid types of games, and then the other card games and then the other is through food. And so when you think of, you know why these venture studios? Why am I building multiple venture studios at the same time? The idea is there is a common thread here. Is there is a common thread here? I have an integrated business strategy to see there are resources and connections that these different groups of people have that can be leveraged in different contexts, and one of them, quite frankly, is an audience.

Josh Leslie: 41:03

So, when it comes to content creators, many of them have an audience and very few of them have a sustainable business model. Right, when it comes to creating video games, you can create the best video game ever, but you are now in a competition with huge budget companies. It's like creating an indie movie and then trying to get it on the big screen. Good luck, um, so they're, they have the, the product. They're missing the audience, and so there's a pretty obvious connect there for me of that if you can parlay the audience of one into the other, well, now you've got more of a sustainable business model, um, but the other part is so the other observation, I guess, is I I think that you know, hollywood's kind of jumped the shark at this point and the appetite for, um, the general public is in more real things made by real people with less gargantuan budgets, and in many cases not in all cases but there's a subset of content creators who are actors, who can't get a real gig in a TV show, a commercial, a movie, and so they have taken short-form content as a creative outlet and happened to build an audience that is endeared to characters they've created, et cetera, and so I see a real opportunity there to just by giving them the opportunity and the budget and the space to create longer form content and higher quality productions. They already have the audience and the audience is waiting for this content.

Josh Leslie: 42:35

But they're they have their constraints above within big social that they can't do certain things within community guidelines or, you know, telling off color joke because you know it might be interpreted a certain way so that they can't. There's whole categories of content that they can't create that there's an opportunity to, you know, build effectively new school let's call it new school startups that costs no more than $50,000, including the marketing which is not. That's not been a thing before like that. It would have been at least 500,000, sometimes a million dollars in the past to do what's possible now. But it's moore's law of the.

Josh Leslie: 43:18

You know the cost of production and connection and and audience, um obtaining an audience has significantly decreased and the ability to target and hyper target has increased. And so, to answer your question about, you know, five years from now, where do I see this? I see, you know, a group of values aligned, real good investors that see the value in having a slice of a diversified portfolio of startups working in different but complementary spaces with an integrated business strategy to give them a good return on their investment. But also the values. Alignment is about how those businesses and how those startups are being created and how that value is being created for the world. To hopefully balance out the seesaw a little bit in terms of the structural inequities that I see in the content creator space and in the product creator, software creator and take any slice and anything that needs to be promoted to end users through some big platform falls subject to this inequity structural inequity.

Trevor Botkin: 44:31

That's amazing. We're almost out of time and this is going to run longer than most of our episodes run. But that's just because you're one of those people that I don't think uh processes information uh, in sentences. I think you process them in paragraphs.

Josh Leslie: 44:47

So yeah, that's accurate um.

Trevor Botkin: 44:53

What is your biggest fear? Moving forward?

Josh Leslie: 45:00

My biggest fear, um, I think, at this point is that, you know, for some reason I don't or can't get up and execute every day on what's most important, and that's kind of where the endeavors idea came from. Of I see lots of, I know. You know I've tried, I've seen lots of different approaches to time and project management and a lot of them revolve around quarters. So you separate your year into quarters and then you've got 90 days to do XYZ. The challenge with that, from my perspective, is one okay, well, well, where's your vacation happening? Or what if you're sick? Or you've got five days to play with, essentially outside of those 90 day, you know four 90 day windows, yeah, and so my friend, edwin frondoso, who I think came out to a cc meeting at one point, um, in the during the pandemic, he was working on an idea that he called a hundred day epic. So for those hundred days he would only work on the things that he said and everything else got parked to the side. Um, and you know me being me and and having a background in, you know, overseeing clinical trials and clinical research and things, I took that and you know, a it didn't divide evenly into weeks and B. I like the idea of having three different phases, so I extended it by five days, call it an endeavor, and it's essentially a 15 week, three phase undertaking where I decide what it is that I'm going to do and that these are the priorities for you know, this, this part of my year, and being able to undertake three of those in a year with some space in between to, you know, reflect and have a retrospective discussions and then, you know, some, some recovery time and vacation time, feels a lot more spacious to me and that's kind of the foundation for my next 40 years, like that I can see doing, you know, 100 of these. I'll be happy if, god willing, I get to, you know, do 100 endeavors between now and the time that I'm 80. Let's go Wow, and yeah, I get.

Josh Leslie: 47:09

The only thing that I would say is or the only other aspect of that I would share is that I've tried many times to come up with my kind of perfect time and project management system, but I felt like there's always an AI that's short circuiting when it came to my commitments to myself and prioritizing, you know, self care, go to the gym, sleep, all these kinds of things, and I think one of the challenges with any time and project management approach is that what matters the most are the things people don't see, that are not glorious, that are easy to do and easy not to do, as Jeff Olson says, and in the slight edge.

Josh Leslie: 47:51

And what I'm doing with my endeavors is to, you know, publicly declare here's what I'm working on, and then to a group of peers and friends, do a weekly report, say here's where I said I'm allocating my time and energy. Did I do it or did I not do it? And I'm the type of person that if I make a commitment to someone else, a way higher likelihood that I'm going to do it, and so it's kind of flipping that on its head. So my greatest fear is that I won't do the thing, and so I'm going out into the realm of discomfort to put this out there and say you can call me on this, you can check in, and just the fact that somebody that I respect may take a look at my you know, two minute report on how I did, I think will be enough to move me in the right direction.

Trevor Botkin: 48:36

Yeah, I think this public accountability is such a powerful driver and I know, anytime I say I'm going to do something, whether it's in my form or it's to my family especially if it's to my wife way more likely to do it just for fear of looking like I can't do what I say I'm going to do. So I get that 100%. Well, look, josh, first off, thank you so much for taking time to sit down with me and for sharing your incredible journey and, I think, more importantly, your incredible vision. You know, but to come from the biomedical space, and I love this idea of this parallel entrepreneur, but also your dedication to creating social impact. I think it's really a testament to the power of innovation, purpose-driven leadership.

Trevor Botkin: 49:28

So and I see, I'm really excited to see the difference that you make. So I'm just really grateful to have you here and I think, more importantly, I'm grateful to to see the difference that you make. So I'm just really grateful to have you and I think, more importantly, I'm grateful to have you in the community, because you're one of those people that also holds me accountable. When I say, hey, let's do this If things don't move on that, you're one of the first people to call me and say hey, just holding you accountable. You said this was coming, just want to see where we stand.

Josh Leslie: 49:56

So I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for that your continued commitment to add value for the CCC Canada community and the community globally, involvement in the global conventions that are now going to transition to a different format. But you model the type of leader that you walk your talk and it's very heartening to be in community with someone like you, and so I appreciate your steadfast support of me and my particular brand of insanity over the past five years, if we call it that.

Trevor Botkin: 50:33

I love your brand of crazy. It's not for everyone, but we talked about it before we started recording just the lack of sleep.

Josh Leslie: 50:46

I'm working on it.

Trevor Botkin: 50:47

The hours that you keep Beautiful. Thank you, josh. And again, as always, I really want to acknowledge the members of Corporate Connections Canada and just throwing out there that the commitment to fostering meaningful relationships and driving impactful initiatives within your organizations, but within our community, is commendable, and that's through these collective efforts that we continue to learn, grow and hopefully contribute to a better Canada and inspire a better world. And it's not just about achieving personal success, but also creating a positive impact and driving, as I said, meaningful change. So thank you to everyone. Thank you, josh, thank you to everyone who's listening today. Stay tuned for more inspiring conversations with leaders who are making significant impacts in their fields and next time and until next time, keep leading with vision, integrity and commitment to making a significant difference. And, as always, this is where leaders connect.