"Failure can be good!" with Chris Hobbs of TTT Studios

Today I am stoked to welcome to the show Chris Hobbs, President of TTT Studios. Through Chris’ leadership, TTT Studios has grown to become a powerhouse in the Vancouver tech community, creating digital experiences for customers that innovate and leave a lasting, positive impact on every user’s journey.

What sets TTT Studios and Chris apart is their unwavering commitment to deeply understanding every client’s' unique challenges and business needs. From concept to code, TTT assembles an expert team around each project to build user-centric solutions that upgrade their clients’ business.

As exciting as the work being done at TT Studios is, this is hardly Chris’s first go-round driving innovation in the tech space, as he’s been a Founder and Developer on some incredible projects over the past two decades. I’m thrilled to learn more about hwo got into the entrepreneurial space in the first place, his experiences building amazing solutions at TTT, and his sage wisdom for founders in Canada and beyond. 

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

Visit Boast.ai, sign up for our Blog newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for weekly #InnovatorsLive sessions and the latest news to fuel your growth.

Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

Transcript

Paul Davenport:

Hello and welcome to What the Tech? from Boast AI, where we talk with some of the brilliant minds behind new and exciting tech initiatives to learn what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and eventually change the world.

Today I am stoked to welcome to the show Chris Hobbs, president of TTT Studios. Through Chris's leadership, TTT Studios has grown to become a powerhouse in the Vancouver tech community, creating digital experiences for customers that innovate and leave a lasting positive impact on every user's journey. What sets TTT Studios and Chris apart is their unwavering commitment to deeply understanding every client's unique challenges and business needs from concept to code, TTT assembles an expert team around each project to build user-centric solutions that upgrade their client's business. So as exciting as the work being done at TTT Studios is, this is hardly Chris's first go around driving industry in the tech space. He's been a founder and developer on some incredible projects of the past few decades, and I'm thrilled to learn more about how he got into the entrepreneurial space in the first place, his experiences building amazing solutions at TTT and his sage wisdom for founders in Canada and beyond. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Chris.

Chris Hobbs:

Oh, thank you. That was quite the setup. I am so impressed and so honored to be on the show today.

Paul Davenport:

Oh, pleasure is all mine. I know we were having a little bit of a love fest before this, but the team here at Boast, they all know you, they all love you. You're a mainstay in the Vancouver tech scene. We like to think we're mainstays in the Vancouver tech scene.

Chris Hobbs:

Oh, definitely.

Paul Davenport:

I'd love to hear about just your background. How did you get into the Vancouver tech scene? What drives you and yeah, a little bit about the genesis before TTT came to be.

Chris Hobbs:

The genesis before TT. Well, I mean, I actually was at university back in the late '90s, during the dot-com years, I was the president of the UBC Ski Club, which is kind of a unique and weird thing because I don't really like snow and I can't ski, which is pretty rare for people out in Vancouver. But it was a very large social club that I learned a lot from steering one might say. And it was also the years of the dot-com, so it seemed like a great time to drop out of grad studies to start doing a startup. And so I did my first startup, which was a company called Liftpasses.com to sell ski passes globally. And what was kind of the unique thing, and I always like to frame it in the way that I'm an old man, that this is pre-social media, this is pre, I mean, people didn't even know how to use a text message I think, unless you were in Europe, you had no idea how to use that thing until the iPhone came out.

But what we came up with as a premise was instead of just buying a ticket online in 1999 and then just having it delivered to you, which is kind of a superfluous offender, you could just walk up and get it. What we did is we actually came up with a thing called the Buddy Service. So there was a hardened kiosk at the bottom of the mountain that you go and pick up your ticket in and you put in your username and password and say, "Yes, one pass, thank you." And it would tell you, "Hey, did you know your friends Sarah and Anne are also on the mountain, 'cause they picked up the tickets from there?" And then "Did you want to leave a message for them?" And then we had other message machines up at the top in the social parts of the mountain, and that was kind of that social play on the sports. That kind of was a very interesting, unique angle, especially in the time.

And unfortunately that dot-com blew up, made it a little difficult to continue that mission, but I'm pretty sure to this day, should that dot-com blow up not have happened, I think we would've solved some even more interesting problems. But once I got the bite of startup land, and this is something actually the bite, with my twin brother and co-founder of every company I've had, we just kept on going from a SaaS before I even knew what SaaS was. In the year 2001, we founded a SaaS play in the United States, actually, that helps realtors get their real estate license and where everyone was traditionally doing it from a CD, where you buy a CD and you have it shipped out, we said, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if you just inverted that and did it online?" And lo and behold, that's been going for 22 years and it's actually a pretty amazing business because I think I have to reflect on it about three minutes a year.

So if I can tell anyone, SaaS is where it's at people. I hate to use, well I hate to say at at the end of a sentence, but it just works that way.

Paul Davenport:

I love how, when you said CD too, it's been so long and we've been so immersed in the SaaS world that I immediately didn't even think compact disc. I was thinking, I'm like, oh, a customer delivery method? That's how far we have come. And again [inaudible 00:04:29]-

Chris Hobbs:

Oh, very much so.

Paul Davenport:

... such an early kind of, not even adopter, but just proponent of SaaS before we even had the terminology and before everything was as a service too. I just love that you had that foresight and again, it's the diversity of tech and solutions that you started out building. So again, it was the social stuff on the ski side. I very much relate to the not being a skier and not being an athlete. I went to Emerson College. We don't have real sports teams. I think I was on the Quidditch team for a semester or something like that. So very similarly, it's about the social interactions and it's also about the opportunities to understand how you can really rally people around things. And I think that's important for founders, that's important for entrepreneurs. And I think hearing your story, just that genesis pre TTT, it tells me a lot about why you're doing the work that you do at TTT today.

So if we could talk a little bit about that, about how TTT came together in the first place-

Chris Hobbs:

Sure.

Paul Davenport:

... specifically. Sounds like your brother probably helped you out a little bit on that front too. I'd love to learn more about that too.

Chris Hobbs:

For sure. And you're bang on about the brother because what we actually did is, so around 2008, obviously there was that little schism where people weren't getting their real estate licenses quite to the same number. And on top of that, while I was, that business was my business, again, I didn't need to be anywhere and people didn't know we were even in Canada as opposed to the States, I would actually take six months of the year off and travel the world. So my kids, by the time they were, well right now they're 16 and 17, we just did our 79th country for them. So what we would do is we take six months off and go to Africa or go to South America or this sort of thing. So all of a sudden we had two things hit me at once, one, 2008 housing crisis. So people weren't buying the realtor exams or doing them quite to the same level.

And two, my daughter had to start preschool or elementary school, so I was stuck somewhere. So what we started doing is the iOS app store was just kind of announced and it was just kind of new and fresh. And so my brother and I started programming actually a native mobile or iOS app for our real estate play. And it was the time where everyone was riding the same wave of bugs. It was very, very new. So David and I went down to Seattle to do a bootcamp and that's where we thought an overpriced bootcamp will say, because we didn't really learn that much. We just thought it'd be a good place to ask people, "Hey, have you come across this problem or that?" Unfortunately, I guess especially in my brother's take because he's a little bit more technical than me, they actually contacted him after and asked if he would do the bootcamp in Ohio, if he would teach it.

So we started realizing, oh, well maybe we know more about this than we think we do. We started getting a lot of questions about mobile because people knew we were pretty technical. And also I had the Graces, the luck, the peer, I don't want to say the luckiest person in the world, to come across my other co-founder, Josephine Wong, who is honestly the most talented human being and most loving human being you could ever have in the world and we're just like, "Hey, you know what?" And she's such a great designer and David with the engineering and me with the blah blahs, I can, you know, why don't we start this and see what we can do with these mobile experiences? And right from day one, we built it, the company being family first where we were recognizing we all had young kids, we're going to do this, but we're going to do this right for our souls first, which I think was really important to our culture.

We also were going to be very user-centric. So we weren't going to be thinking about what the business... We were thinking about what the business need was, but not what the people behind it were going to tell us to do. We're going to be asking the hard questions of "Is it even a good investment?" "Does it even make sense to do it?" And then we just got really good at building these applications for clients globally. And as time expanded and I'll say mobile became kind of just a part of a project, we expanded our team and grew it out. And to this day, we're doing a lot on the AI side. We're one of Unity's 13 development partners, global development partners. So we're doing on the 3D side, less on the games, mostly on the digital twins and the business application layer.

So we've really kind of expanded our skillsets to be pretty broad in what we do. In fact, I think the biggest thing we don't do is games. Whereas Vancouver is a very good game hub, there's a lot of great people here. I like to say that we're all frenemies. Why don't you guys do the games and we'll do the business that supports them?

Paul Davenport:

I love that. And we are friends with a lot of those gamers and a lot of those developers too, they work with us better at Boast.

Chris Hobbs:

Oh I bet.

Paul Davenport:

And it is amazing. I'm not going to go down that tangent, but I mean I've learned so much talking to them on this podcast.

Chris Hobbs:

I bet.

Paul Davenport:

I had no idea Vancouver was such a hub for that.

Chris Hobbs:

Oh, very much so [inaudible 00:09:16].

Paul Davenport:

And I want to go back to a few points that you mentioned too when you were talking about going to that bootcamp in Seattle and then how they asked your brother to literally run the next one in Ohio.

Chris Hobbs:

Yeah, good value eh?

Paul Davenport:

Yeah, that's huge value. But I mean, it's incredible too, that you guys were almost getting in on the R&D early before you even realized you were doing your R&D. You were asking the hard questions that became part of the business model down the line very early on because you want to actually solve an acute problem. You don't want to just have tech for tech's sake. Of course, it's fun making cool tech. We can all do, well we can't all do it, but we all have the ideas about what would be a flashy bell and whistle, but we want to solve problems. And so even if, again, it might not have been the most valuable in the immediate short-term, but long-term, you've got such a good gut check I imagine from just getting the exposure, being elbow to elbow with that business community. And I love that that again, is so one-to-one and so simpatico with what we do here at Boast because that's how we built it.

We asked folks in Vancouver, across Canada, now in the States too, what is the challenge around R&D tax credits, for instance? Our small lane, again, we're not going to do the whole tax book, but we will do your R&D tax credits. We're frenemies too with the other guys.

Chris Hobbs:

Oh yeah.

Paul Davenport:

So I love hearing all of that.

Chris Hobbs:

Well, I mean, I just want to say one thing about Boast actually, because they're such a big, I'll just agree, they're huge community of people. You see them everywhere and it's kind of funny, but they'd be on the podcast, but your guys' company name came up three times yesterday. And I was actually reflecting on that thinking that's with three different parties. And I thought that was actually quite interesting. And again, it's not just the service, it's because you have become such a big part of the community that you deserve to be in that conversation. So I'm not usually that kind of advertising side of things, but I just wanted to reflect on that, that you're doing something right to be forward in that conversation in multiple different channels.

Paul Davenport:

I love it. And again, that's why I really love working for Boast. I don't think I mentioned this at the top of the show, but I'm based here in the States. I'm actually in Boston. I am on the complete other side of the continent from everybody. But there is no opportunity that I've had in my career like I've had with Boast to, again, I have a journalism background, I'm talking to the founders who are doing the coolest stuff and Boast gives me access to that. It's because we are invested in your innovation too. It's something that we really want to see, not just the local community, but just in general, problems being solved, global change for the better. And I love that.

And even going back to how you brought the company together, family first, but also focusing on too just the user needs, asking those hard questions, bringing it back to the R&D of it all. Could you tell me a little bit about how maybe the goals have evolved since you first started TTT Studios?

Chris Hobbs:

Sure.

Paul Davenport:

Why you've kept that family first ethos. I imagine that that is still very baked in there and just how things have changed since you launched with that team, with your brother and your co-founder to today.

Chris Hobbs:

Mm-hmm, sure. Well, I mean a big part of it actually is our CEO. We were so blessed to have a fellow by the name of Jose Hernandez who was actually our first MBA intern. And after knowing this guy for, this was six years ago, and after just working with him for a couple of months and recognizing how much, not only did he want to improve the company, but also prove himself, and I'm going to tell you this, he does not need to prove himself. This guy's incredible. He has an MBA, he's a lawyer originally from Mexico. He's a blessing for Canada, I'll tell you this. But he came in and started with things that I hadn't even thought about. So for example, I thought when he originally came, I'm like, okay, let's figure out how to scale the sales, 'cause we'd never actually had a sales team. It was always just inbound people that were always interested in saying, "Hey, we want to work with you."

And I said, "Let's scale the sales." And then he shows me in a very MBA way, "Do you see the bleed? Do you see how much money we're losing on certain projects?" He goes, "We got to fix that first before you start scaling anything because all you're going to do is, the bottom line is going to just keep rising." And it was that short of genius of almost, just kind of formalizing the company itself to be a more professional machine. And then we took in some people on the design of the UX side, not only was Josephine always looking for the bleeding edge in terms of philosophies and processes and all that, but we also have Mark who is our UX director, and he's the one that really came in and really tied the processes down where it's not, and this is how we talk ourselves out of business sometimes because we don't think we want to build products that aren't going to be loved.

It's all about building the right product over the product right. So for us, it's about understanding the business use, the users and not conflicting and confusing them with who the funders or the founders are. Because quite often, and sometimes there's crossover, don't get me wrong, but quite often they're building it for themselves and they're not even ever going to be the users, and that's when you get things wrong. So it's actually the processes that remove yourself from that. UX is a science, UI is an art skill, literally, but UX is a psychological science and anyone can learn that. There's books out, Ideal, all these wonderful leaders in the world that we aspire to be, but you're not going to see it, it's right back there, but we came up with a philosophy maybe about five years ago, which is we build software that impacts a billion lives, and that's actually how we see everything in what we do.

And instead of seeing it from a monetary perspective, we actually see it from a scaled use case perspective. So there's only, say for example on your phone, there's only five to seven apps you use daily. We want to create two of those. That's our mission is we want to understand you as the user so well that we're solving your daily problems in a way that you become addicted to it. And then we do that at scale.

Paul Davenport:

Love that. I'm going to repeat the point that you made earlier too. Building the right product over the product right. I think that is fantastic. And again, you're reiterating a point that I think I need to emphasize on every one of these episodes too. Make that solution that it doesn't necessarily have to be addictive, but that it delights people and that it solves a problem while also delighting them too. We can have some very, very stale solutions to things. I think that's something that we learned at Boast when we're like, hey, tax credit, it's boring. If we don't try to make it something that also people can really visualize what they're going to get out of all of it, we're not going to hit our targets. We're not going to scale it. So I love that philosophy that you had that, and also, again, thank you so much for talking about how your team came together and about those complimentary skillsets.

Chris Hobbs:

Oh yeah.

Paul Davenport:

I think that's super important. We've talked to some founders who've had better luck since they've been on the show too than others, and some who have not seen everything pan out as they expected, which is par for the course. I mean, the economy's tough right now. I think that's putting it lightly, but it's always tough and there's always going to be reasons that things don't turn out well. But I really think it all comes down to those teams. And again, having people who compliment what you do and who you want to spend that time with. So [inaudible 00:16:28]-

Chris Hobbs:

And you trust.

Paul Davenport:

Exactly.

Chris Hobbs:

You trust. Sorry, I need to add that, that trust is the most important thing because you have to trust that you're going to do what you say you're going to do and you're going to do it perfectly.

Paul Davenport:

Mm-hmm, yeah. I mean, it's probably in the mission statement of many companies, but I'm thinking back to one that I used to work for that got acquired down the line, but transparency, trust and just respect. Again, be transparent. Say what you mean mean what you say. It's not something that's easy to come by when you're looking for partners. And again, Josephine, Mark, the whole team, sounds like you all compliment each other, but you also enjoy each other-

Chris Hobbs:

Oh yeah.

Paul Davenport:

... which is fantastic.

Chris Hobbs:

You can't believe how much we enjoy. In fact, Jose, our CEO, my brother and I go do a tour every year of, we do the places our wives will never want to go. So we did, last year we did Albania and what do we do? Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia. And this year we're doing Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. So we're basically just renting cars and going around because we enjoy being with each other. And so that's our May trip that I'm looking forward to.

Paul Davenport:

Oh, that is exciting. We were talking to a partner yesterday who just got back from Estonia, and I was like, I know that for at least tech innovation, there's a lot of people who are building it.

Chris Hobbs:

It's amazing.

Paul Davenport:

Yeah.

Chris Hobbs:

It's amazing. Yeah.

Paul Davenport:

You could do a whole nother episode just discussing what they're doing over there, but yeah.

Chris Hobbs:

Well, I love it there. I actually did my undergrad in Russian and Russian History and-

Paul Davenport:

I saw that, yeah.

Chris Hobbs:

... and so I worked in St. Petersburg for a while, and when things got a little nutty, and believe me, I'm sorry, Russia, things got nutty.

Paul Davenport:

Yeah.

Chris Hobbs:

I would run to Estonia and it would just be like, Hey, you know what? German comforts with Russian intrigue. So it's a great place. It's a great place.

Paul Davenport:

All right, look, German comforts with Russian intrigue. That sounds badass. I want to go now. Now obviously it's probably picking a favorite child. So this is the hard question, but tell me about some of the really, really cool stuff that you guys have built at TTT. I mean-

Chris Hobbs:

Oh sure.

Paul Davenport:

... yeah, it can be a favorite bell and whistle, something that's actually scaled to success or just something that close to your heart you really enjoyed helping build. Love to hear about it.

Chris Hobbs:

Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I'll talk about one project that we're doing right now and mostly because it's very long in the tooth. This is a multi-year project, but it's with the American Medical Association, and it's something that I believe in. I think there's a lot of challenges no matter what country it is, there's a lot of different challenges in the medical fields. And I think the people at the AMA are trying to really solve a lot of these problems and we're just really honored to be part of that journey. And so one of the projects that we're doing with them is actually not as medical as you think, it's more of a business service, but it's really around giving doctors the freedom of being able to work in multiple states because their credentials will be recognized. So this is the ability for them to basically say, "Hey, if I want to move, I don't have to retake a test."

It gives a little more liquidity and fluidity in their ability to go across those 50 states and a couple of territories. And that's something I'm really proud of. Another one we've done, so we do a lot of science experiments, let's just say. And so we've got a couple of projects. Unfortunately this one, COVID did kick in the butt pretty bad and you'll understand why, but one of the things that we tried to create, this is maybe five, six years ago, 2017 we started, okay? 2018, is we had this funny problem. I don't know if it's a real problem, it's an interesting challenge, which is my brother could open up my iPhone, but I couldn't open up his, okay, with the facial recognition. So we're like, you know what? We're going to write a facial recognition algorithm for twins. And we created... I mean, the way we solved it, which is kind of like how they're doing it now, but what we were doing back then is we created synthetic data where we just had small alterations of pictures of people.

So we actually created twins of them with small, we actually used generative AI capabilities to do this, and it worked really, really well. So my son's hockey team, there's two twins who are like, I mean I'm embarrassed because I'm a twin, but they are complete same people and it nailed them. So we're like, "Oh, this is cool," but this is a science experiment. What is this? So what we did then is we actually put it on our wall and we kind of tied it to a couple more things.

So at the entrance, what you would do is if I knew you were coming, I would throw in your LinkedIn photo and say who you are. And then if it came in, it would say, "Hey, oh hi Bob." Chris would recognize you. "Chris is here," or "Chris knows you're here" 'cause it would look in my calendar and then go to Bob. And then on Slack I'd have the picture of Bob and I could unlock the door and Bob could come in, or if it didn't recognize you, it says, "Hey, welcome to TTT Studios. Who are you here to see blah, blah, blah?" And that was interesting. It was kind of a good way of doing it. But also what we were doing, and this is the Amanda part, well, it was called Amanda because that was a middle name of our front desk helper or person. I don't know what the official title is of that anymore. I don't want to be offensive to anyone, but an amazing human being that stood at our front to make sure that the right people came in.

Then what we could do is, this is where the science experiment comes in, is you actually don't need face, you can actually have low resolution of people are, maybe they'll take off the jacket of the system smart enough, it'll know that. And now I'll start asking Amanda, because we have choke points in the cameras in our office. "Okay, what time did David leave?" Or "Is this meeting room available?" Because it would catch if anyone's in there or not. So that was interesting. And then we, so we are on the 12th floor of KPMG's building downtown, okay? And then across the hall from us is their ignition center, which is kind of like KPMG's, hey, if you can dream it, we can build it sort of thing. Great idea, great organization too. Awesome people, I got to say.

But they saw that and they're like, "Well, that's really interesting. Can you do that for events?" We're like, "Yeah, I guess." So they started using it for booking their events where they would pre-fill in people so that it would greet them, print out their badge and it would know who it is. That's really cool, right? I wasn't sure that works at scale, but then they actually had the wonderful people of Singularity University come through and they said, "Hey, we've got our Canadian AGM coming up, could we use that?" And we're like, "Okay, it's not really a product, but sure, let's do that."

And to be honest, I didn't really believe that facial recognition would be a big win. I thought people would be a little afraid of it. You hear about the fears of it back then, not really the utility, but it was in the wonderful city of Edmonton. Please go if you get the chance.

Paul Davenport:

[inaudible 00:22:53].

Chris Hobbs:

Yeah, but what they did was something that really allayed my concerns because they had two lines, those who opted in, which is about 30%, and those who didn't, which is about 70% okay? Early days, I dig it, right? And these are hoity-toity people, okay? It was about 1200 people, okay? Hoity-toities, and there was a 30-second line in those who were using the facial recognition, the Amanda platform, because they just go in, it prints out their badge, they go in, when the other line, which was 45 minutes to log in because they'd have to go in. It was the traditional, we print out your badge, we look at you, who you are, you see your ID, all that. It just took forever.

And I was watching people, very big people that I look up to actually registering their faces to go in the faster lines. So I'm like, huh, well that's interesting. So I mean, I guess fear is always usurped by utility. If it's something that really helps you, this is great. So we round that out into a product for events, and we were even building out the analytics side with the opt-in so you could actually build out where they went and who they went to. And we were doing pretty large events. And then that COVID thing came in. Done. So anyhow, unfortunately we rolled that project out. It's an orphan project, the wonderful team behind it, the fellow that it was his vision, he was our VP of engineering, and he's a brother to me. I went to his wedding in China, he's an amazing human being. He's now one of the lead, the engineering leads of Google Music. So he's down in the valley.

So even if I wanted to do that, I would never do that to him anyhow, so that's a dead product. But we've had a couple of these that actually come out of science experiments.

Paul Davenport:

Yeah.

Chris Hobbs:

And then they move into quite unique things that either we killed because, just like what you said, we built it because there was no need for it. It didn't come out as serving a problem. It was tech for tech's sake, which was wrong. So you want to kill those quickly, believe me, you, though the one that we did was actually amazing because it was a, in 2015 when the iPad 2 just came out. Nerds who are listening, don't go, "That wasn't 2015." I'm just guessing, okay? I had some time around there, and I love you nerds, don't get me wrong, I'm one of them. But what we did is we actually created the system that we called Think Together. So it was the ability to share any form of media on an iPad, and again, an iPad 2, which didn't have very fast processors or anything like that with up to, well, we only tested on a hundred and something, but theoretically we figured the bandwidth you could do probably a 100,000 engagements at the same time.

So what you could do is I would be the first, the person that would create the session, and this works locally, remotely, and a combination. So you can be in the room, out of the room or combined and say I would put a video on my iPad, okay? And then I'd start sharing that, and I would talk to you and then everyone would join. Now, what was unique about what we did is everyone that joined, and we filed a patent on this actually, is everyone that joined gets their own layer. So I'd have voice and markup that I can choose to listen to or choose to engage in, because I could put a sticker on top of the movie or I can put a heart on it while I'm talking to people. I can flip that out, make it a PDF, and then everything we're doing and everyone's layers, they can do their notes on top of what I'm seeing. But because I'm not watching their layer, I don't see it unless I choose to see it.

And also, I could push people's layers to each other. So in an education thing, I'd say, "Hey, bill, what's answer to five?" And Bill would be writing, "It's 15." Okay, perfect. And this was a really cool application, and then you could actually do it out of time too. I mean, this is a bit of a, I took the blue pill sort of problem because you could all [inaudible 00:26:37] out of time. So actually all those sessions you did were recorded, so then you could actually watch it again and choose a different perspective to watch it in because you could turn off the layer of that perspective. So it's something that we thought was very unique. It worked really well, like shockingly well, because everyone thinks we're doing the view port, but we're actually just sending the deltas of every movement. So we're using actually video game philosophy to make it very lightweight in the transition layers or transmission layers.

And so it was great, did it, but we were never able to launch it. I mean, I got to meet Vinod Khosla, all these great people who were looking at it like, that's awesome, but we could never really figure out how to productize it. And so we killed it. But with that said, we always say, "Well, it probably got us $5 million of the work because you show that." And people go, "Yeah, you can create my dashboard."

Paul Davenport:

Absolutely.

Chris Hobbs:

That sort of a thing.

Paul Davenport:

Yeah.

Chris Hobbs:

Yeah, so unfortunately, the utility was cool, but the problem it was solving was a difficult one. And mostly because I think it was a very difficult problem to explain because it did so much. You see it, you go, "Holy cow, that's amazing." But at the same time, if we couldn't really boil it down to say, this is the problem it solves and this is what it does, well then you know what? You've got some cool tech that does nothing.

Paul Davenport:

Absolutely. I mean, I like the way that you kind of framed all of this too, in that your team likes doing science experiments.

Chris Hobbs:

Oh yeah.

Paul Davenport:

And I mean, again, we're in the SRED business, but one of my favorite things about SRED is that it doesn't necessarily have to be activities that go towards productionalization. They want you to do science projects. The Canadian government wants you to just poke around until you find something really cool, then get [inaudible 00:28:13]

Chris Hobbs:

Failure is good.

Paul Davenport:

Exactly.

Chris Hobbs:

Failure is loved by them. So that's why we like to do it. And you know what? I'm going to actually put my Canadian flag on. I got one on my chest, actually. I'm a lifeguard, and it was something that I had to get.

Paul Davenport:

Awesome.

Chris Hobbs:

But at the end of the day, you know what? SRED is one of those, it's one of the funds, the tax credits that actually allows me not to lay off at any time, because you know what? We have a downtime. It's all about employment, and that's how the Canadian government sees it. And I got to say that is a very good way of looking at it because instead of me going, "Oh, you know what? I have downtime. I don't know what to do." These people, I'll lay them off and pick them up again later, which I think is a heartless thing to do. And I've been very blessed not to have laid off people. I would say instead, "Hey, you know what? Let's just kick the can in a couple of experiments. We'll do a couple of UX idea sessions, ideation sessions, and let's just try a couple things." Fails, it fails. And again, it's awesome because the government's going to look at it and go, "Yeah, it failed. Great. That's totally fine, but if it works, we have some interesting assets."

So we're doing some very interesting stuff and some internal expiation projects right now leveraging AI to expedite our own work so that we could be hyper competitive. And because the Canadian government allows that SRED coverage-

Paul Davenport:

Right.

Chris Hobbs:

... we can do that with peer confidence.

Paul Davenport:

I might have to cut this out. I don't want to put my old employer on the spot, but even when you were talking back to the computer vision, application, the Amanda Program, I worked for a computer vision company, and all I could think of was when you were saying that, they loved doing the science experiments. They loved making fun little videos that we would share on LinkedIn and get a lot of clicks, but when it came to actual applications, we weren't finding it and they had to lay off most of the company and it didn't work out-

Chris Hobbs:

[inaudible 00:30:03].

Paul Davenport:

... because, but I mean it's kind of a layup to the Canadian tax credit system versus the US. I know that they're not at battle heads with each other, but I just really want to emphasize, again, just the opportunity that's in Canada that really isn't necessarily there, depending on who's in office or who's running things in the US, it gets really contracted. And yeah, I just really want to emphasize that point, that SRED helps you avoid those layoffs while you're still driving innovation and if it's not a product today, and if it's not a product in a few years, it's not wasted effort. You're keeping people employed, you're keeping folks happy, and you're also working and you're getting something that is innovative and it will pay off in the long haul. And I love that Canada is behind people for all of that too.

Chris Hobbs:

Oh yeah.

Paul Davenport:

Now, I know we're a little past time, but I do want to know what's on deck for the rest of the year with TTT. I actually am going to INNOVATEwest next week.

Chris Hobbs:

Oh, awesome. I hope to see you.

Paul Davenport:

I would love to [inaudible 00:31:02], yeah, I was going to say, I'm like-

Chris Hobbs:

For sure.

Paul Davenport:

... I want to cross paths while I'm in town.

Chris Hobbs:

Okay, great.

Paul Davenport:

We've got quite the dance card, but we're going to be there, Boast [inaudible 00:31:10], but I'm going to going to be with my camera wearing this, if not a T-shirt. You'll see the Boast logo, you'll see me come in. I'll be taking a selfie with you if that's cool, Chris.

Chris Hobbs:

Oh, please do. Yeah. You know what? Not only do we have a booth there, but I'm also in charge of the hackathon, so-

Paul Davenport:

Amazing.

Chris Hobbs:

... I'm running that along with AWS. We're doing this AI-enabled race cars with some universities that are going to be competing against each other, and I get to be the MC of that, and I'm looking very forward to it. I've been really lucky to be part of the really early days with INNOVATEwest. One thing that I think they've done really, really, really well is really talk to the people on the ground here in the community and see what sort of flavors and colors that we can add to it. And because they've been open about that and not top down, it's really been bottom up, it's really taken a grassroots approach that I think a lot of the community have really, really taken to. And yeah, this is the first year they're running it. I'm sure there's going to be interesting things that come out of any first years running, but you know what? Their heart's in the right place and I think this is going to be a great event and I'm really glad you'll be attending.

Paul Davenport:

Oh, I am so excited for it. I was at SAAS NORTH in Ottawa over the winter too, and it's the same crew.

Chris Hobbs:

Yep.

Paul Davenport:

I loved it. I keep going back to, we had a lot of female founders and that was a big push during the Ottawa event most recently. And I just loved that they really were catering to the audience there. They were getting the resources in front of people and these speakers and the events. I digress, but I am so excited for INNOVATEwest.

Chris Hobbs:

Fantastic.

Paul Davenport:

You are the perfect person to be hosting a hackathon, Chris. I will be there watching along.

Chris Hobbs:

Oh, I love it. Love it.

Paul Davenport:

Yeah, this was fantastic.

Chris Hobbs:

Sounds great. Thanks so much. Ciao!