The First Customer - Creating a New Paradigm to Transform Marketing with Susan Coelius Keplinger

[00:00:27] Jay: Hi, everyone. Welcome to The First Customer podcast. My name is Jay Aigner. Today, I am lucky enough to be joined by a visionary, a real marketing person, a real, somebody who'd been there and done it a bunch of really cool places, which we will talk about Susan Coelius Keplinger, CEO of Force of Nature over in Maui.

[00:00:48] Susan: In Maui 

[00:00:49] Jay: How are you? You said

[00:00:52] Susan: Good to see you.

[00:00:53] Jay: you spent half the year ish in Maui. Where are you the rest of the time?

[00:00:57] Susan: The rest of the year I live in Lake Tahoe, California across the street from the world famous mountain previously known as Squaw Valley that is now known as Palisades Tahoe. So half the time I spend skiing and half the time I spend kite surfing.

[00:01:11] Jay: what a terrible life you must live. alright, so tell me though, where did you grow up? And did that have, an impact on you being this titan of marketing and then eventually an entrepreneur and CEO?

[00:01:24] Susan: I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. I bounced around a little bit in college. I started at the United States Naval Academy and then realized I like to break rules too much to be in the Navy. So I graduated from Northwestern University in Chicago. And then moved to San Francisco to kind of chase the internet dream.

And my last company, we did that. We did the whole raise a bunch of VC money, hire a big team, have an office in San Francisco, do all of that, that work. And it's been about a little more than a decade, almost 15 years in San Francisco, in the world of ad tech and MarTech and really in the gut of the engine, I think. and then when I started this company, force of nature was really deliberate about the life I want to live and the accessibility I want my children to have to me and how I want to be. And, it was supposed to be a lifestyle company. I keep joking. Cause my lifestyle company has turned in to a very real company.

but you know, what's cool is because the foundation was laid with intention. Now I'm able to do that and live in places like Maui, and have a great business and live the life that I want. So it's kind of, I was in the gauntlet with Triget, my last business for sure. And now I can be a little more deliberate, about how I build a company.

[00:02:30] Jay: What was your first business? Was it the one you were just talking about?

[00:02:34] Susan: Well, our first business I started, in college, it was called Votes for Students. And we started a non profit that was trying to get out the student vote. It turns out students don't vote very much, which is a problem for lots of reasons. What we very quickly realized was that we were like, why did we start a non profit?

Like, if we're going to put in this amount of work and we're going to be this entrepreneurial and we're going to do all of these things, it's a lot of the same activities for non profits. As it is for profits, it's fundraising, it's hustling sales, it's hiring a team. It's, you know, really thinking about how you're going to market and run your efforts.

And so that effort we ran during college, it was actually very successful. we raised a ton of money from Pew charitable trusts and we had a really big impact and big effort. And then I started that company with my older brother, Zach. And then after we sold that business, that's when we moved to San Francisco and started Trigget, which was a very much a for profit ad tech company.

[00:03:31] Jay: So what was Triget and tell me a little bit more about starting a business with your brother. Is that an interesting dynamic? Is it? I don't hear that often. is it unique?

[00:03:41] Susan: I mean, I think, you know, Zach and I were always starting stuff growing up. He in particular is sort of like embodies the raw. Entrepreneurial hustler. Like he's just always looking to flip and make a buck. just really incredibly bright. and just has that hustle and I'm a little bit more operational, which has been fun as I've moved into a CEO role to really push myself to be vision and to be that really, you know, he's like the most optimistic visionary I think I've ever met.

And so that was just a great partnership that we had. and that trust was incredible and we really set clear boundaries. from the very beginning, which was family is not work and work is not family. And so when we didn't bring family into the office, and even if we had something going on with work, it wouldn't affect our ability to go have dinner with mom and dad on the weekends. And I think that boundary really led us. very successfully build, you know, a couple of companies together. we actually had about three companies. We had, another business we ran at the Olympics, which was my biggest cashflow business. But we did all of this very successfully because we just separated that.

Like we could get in a huge argument at work during the day and go out to dinner together at night. and so that boundary was just so important for building a great working relationship and a really successful working relationship. And we had different skills. And so we were able to very clearly sort of segment the workout. So that, you know, we weren't trying to do the same things.

[00:05:01] Jay: What was your business for the Olympics?

[00:05:03] Susan: Oh man, that was a great business. We were young. So when my, when Zach was 16, he's two years older than me, so I was only 14. He rode his bicycle from Minnesota to Atlanta for the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. And he stayed with some family friends who gave him some pins. And he went and traded the pins and then someone was like, I want to buy those.

And so he sold a couple of pins and he made a couple thousand bucks and he's like, Oh, there's something here. So for the Salt Lake City Olympics in, in 2000, Zach and I went to the Olympics together very deliberately. And what we would do is we would buy pins from the last Olympics from at Athens Olympics for 25 cents each. And then we'd go trade those pins with anyone that had pins. So you can buy pins. They cost like 5 each. They're the big collectible from the Olympics or all of the sponsors give their guests pins. All the media has pins. All the athletes had pins. So Zach and I would hustle around and trade our Athens Olympics pins, which cost us 25 cents for any pin that was for the Salt Lake City Olympics, which was worth 5 and you, and some were worth more, right? And then,we hustled,traded, got all these pins. And then we had to figure out how do you sell them? How did we get to sell these pins? And so one day, it was a beautiful day in Park City. They wouldn't let you sell without a license in Park City, but we realized that everyone was walking from Deer Valley to Park City between the venues. And so I ran up halfway in between and held up my rag that had all my pins on it. And someone walks up and I'm in college. I had 300 and 12 in my bank account, I think. I mean, I was like a college kid. I was totally broke. and, I walk up holding my, like, rag with all my pins on it, and someone's like, I want that one, and that one.

And we'd kind of priced them out, like, you know, the athlete pins were worth 20, and, like, the FBI pins were worth 50. And their total was like 160. And I was like, and I had 312, my bank account. So I was like, that'll be 160. And the person takes out a roll, just a roll of hundreds and just peels them off.

And it's like, okay. And it was just one of those moments where you're like, Oh, like, interesting. And Zach and I made about 10, 000, that Olympics. We went to Athens, we did the same thing, and we also scalped tickets. So we'd go early and we'd get tickets, and then we'd come to the event, the day of the event.

We'd sell, you know, we'd buy for half price, we'd sell for full price. And at the Athens Olympics, we each made 20, 000. And when you're in college, like these are big numbers. Like I went from 312 to three weeks later, I had 5, 000. And then at the Athens Olympics, I had a little more money cause I had a job by then and it was doing some things, but we left with, you know, a lot of money and it really helped finance my way through school.

I was able to have my own apartment. I graduated without any debt. and it was just showed me the power of entrepreneurship in a really explicit way, because it was literally cash. Cash in your pocket. It was our first lesson in cash flow. How are we going to get 20, 000 from Europe back to the US? and how are we going to, like, it was all in Euros or, yeah, it was all in Euros then.

So how are we going to get those into American dollars? You know, these are the problems that we faced at Triget when we had our entity in Brazil and we were like, how are we gonna get money out of Brazil, right? Same kind of problems. Really early lessons for us. So a lot of fun. We saw lots of great events.

The Olympics are so much fun. I really encourage everyone to go and be a spectator, but it was such a fun lesson in business as well.

[00:08:21] Jay: Wow. That's a fantastic story. I liked that a lot. It feels like there will be a, Susan Coleus Keplinger book eventually, and that will be part of that book. so tell me about Trigget. What did you, what was the kind of thought behind that, what were you guys trying to build there?

[00:08:38] Susan: Well, we had absolutely no business starting a business. In the space that we started a business. we were, ZI was 24, I think Zack must have been 26 then. this was back in 2005 before really ad tech was like a thing, right? And we decided we were gonna start a marketing ad tech company. 'cause we thought that's where the money is.

We're like, that's where all the money's at. I think in retrospect that was a pretty dumb decision because it's, turns out it's more complicated than that. But that's what we did. And we were able to raise our first. 300, 000 from an incredible, angel investor, real estate investor named Charles Sprintzen in San Francisco, and he really just invested in us. And we paid ourselves nothing, like we paid ourselves 36, 000, which was enough to cover like rent and food costs, you know, in San Francisco. This was before San Francisco boomed and you could get a, you could get a room and a house for about 500 a month. I hope it goes back to that. Actually, I'm actually kind of, I'm personally kind of excited for San Francisco to soften so that it can be accessible to entrepreneurs like me again. and so it was super cheap and we just hustled and we just tried to learn everything. We didn't know anything about advertising. I was reading blogs about like, what is a pixel? Like, what is a cost per click? Like, what is a CPM, right? We knew nothing. and we spent our time in a coffee shop called Ritual Roasters, which at the time, I think all the startups in San Francisco would gather there because there just wasn't very many startups in San Francisco in 2005, like right after the bust before it climbed again. and we tried a bunch of different business models and we were able to raise a little bit more money based on some of those ideas. and in 2009 programmatic came out, we had a million dollars in the bank and we said, we think this is where we should go and spend our time and invest. We hired a small team.

There's now 4 of us, Ryan, Bobby, Zach, and I, and so we went for it in the programmatic space back at the beginning of Google X and, and these types of things. And really, we found our product market fit at Triget when FBX launched. So when the Facebook exchange launched, we had really gotten good. At being quantitative marketers at using data at helping companies use data, you know, Home Depot and Best Buy.

And we had some really big, great clients and we'd help them get their data onto these platforms. and it was a great, it was a great journey. And, you know, the demise of Triget was we sold the business in 2014 after Facebook decided to, turn off FBX. And so that was sort of a, we realized that there was no way we could replace the revenue that we had running through our platform. so we sold the business and, and moved on to Greener Pastures. Zach became a venture capitalist. It's very successful as a VC right now. and I have subsequently kind of stayed in the marketing space and started my own shop.

[00:11:20] Jay: Wow. And I see you're advising on like 50 different things. do you still do that? Are you still in that role, a bunch of, across a bunch of different businesses?

[00:11:28] Susan: Yeah, I think I, I advise a lot of companies. I love advising. I particularly love advising young female founders. I think I have a deficit of mentors that are female. And as I've realized that I'm the one now that is living the life that a lot, that I aspired to when I was 25, definitely could not afford to live the life I live now then, with two kids and like thinking about that.

So I really love advising young female founders. but I also just love advising hyper growth companies. I think I do more companies I bring on as clients to my business now versus that sort of advisory role where we actually are really running the media and helping them think quantitatively about their business, but love helping companies grow, right?

I think that's the sort of the crux. and so I've done a lot of that work and really that was the transition from Triget, right? We sold Triget and my, like a week after we sold Triget, I got a call from Jamie Siminoff down at Ring and he's like, I need help. And I was like, absolutely not. I just sold my business.

I am just free after nine years, like absolutely not doing anything. And he's like, come on, come to L. A. And I was like, I don't like L. A. He's like, come to L. A. for just a weekend. I'll pay you a ton of money. So he flew me down to L. A. And I looked at his numbers and I looked at what they were doing and I was like, Oh, this is interesting and ended up kind of being a consulting CMO and helping Jamie grow that business over the course of the next year. And it was so much fun. I needed to end up having to take a little bit of a break after a year for some personal health reasons. I was just done. I was exhausted and, so fun to watch that business and that team grow. and that's the joy of being an advisor is that opportunity to help get something strong in place and then watch it just explode. And I think that was, the first one. It turns out I really like LA and the right places. So I'll go back to Santa Monica and Venice anytime. and so that was so much fun helping Jamie and then did that for a few years where I was really focused on getting myself, you know, recovering from a lot of burnout.

I think super important to acknowledge How burned out I got after 10 years of a startup, and it was really important to step back and take the time to heal. And so I could find the energy that I have now for my current business, for my family, for everything in my life. But that was a, you know, it took about a year to really, or maybe even 2 to really recover.

So I did a lot of advising and a lot of kind of consulting CMO work during those years while I was. Kind of healing from, you know, a decade of like the startup grind, which is real, very real.

[00:13:52] Jay: if you were. I'm telling a young aspiring. Let's just go with female in college, who's trying to do the marketing path. what would you tell him? What would you, how do you get to do some of the things that you get to do? And everybody's not going to be living in Maui half the year and Lake Tahoe the other half.

But, how do you be successful and in marketing? And how do you kind of set yourself apart and not just be another, you know, VP of marketing that sits at a company for 10 years and does the same thing? how do you really kind of break the mold a little bit?

[00:14:24] Susan: Well, if you want to be an entrepreneur, so there's two things. If you want to get into marketing, there's one bucket. If you want to be an entrepreneur, there's a second bucket. I think if you want to be an entrepreneur and you're in college and you're really young, don't discount the incredible experience that you can get working from another or for another company, particularly when you're young. And so I think, but I'd say go join that early, early stage company. Especially if you're a female, we saw it trigger 10 to one applicants. When we were super early stage in hiring, I call it less than 20 people, right? Not super sexy. You weren't going to get paid a lot of money, but you know, when you're coming out of college, you don't know how to live on money anyway.

So take advantage of that reality. don't go and make a bunch of money, make nothing and get the experience. Cause you know how to do that. You know how to be frugal. You know how to live off ramen's once you get into the lifestyle that I'm getting into now, it's. I don't think I can go back to that.

So, so do that and don't discount that ability to go join that company. So at Triget, we got 10 to one applications from men than women. We were like seeking, I mean, come on, I'm a female founder, right? I was, I ran hiring at our company. I wanted to hire all women all the time and I couldn't because they didn't have enough applicants. So you're going to have a leg up if you're a female. So go and find that early stage, super technical, super quantitative startup and go join them. They want you. They want to say yes and that risk is okay because it's okay if you don't make any money because you know how to live on nothing. And you're going to learn so much by having someone else solving a lot of those problems.

So that would be my first set of advice and I actually almost wish that Zach and I would have done that. Gone and found a hyper growth company that was really early and joined them just to learn. But if you want to go at it yourself. And just be dumb like we were, which is not the end of the world.

First of all, there's way more great programs today than there used to be that all want great founders. So there's Y Combinator, and there's tons of other incubators, Techstars, etc. So, you know, look at those programs and consider those. You're going to get access to mentorship and guidance. And don't get caught up in the details.

Just say yes, right? You're going to get access to mentorship and guidance. But the last piece is, and the reality is, if you want to do it, just do it, right? Just hustle. Find a way to hustle. Find a way to be frugal. We got all of our furniture for our early office off Craigslist free. Like it kind of stank some of it, but it was free. So we didn't spend money on equipping an office and we made it super cool. It was like super cool and funky. And we met some really incredible characters. We had all air on chairs, like we had nice stuff, but it was funky. And so I think just do it and find that frugality and find that hustle. Now, if you want to go into marketing in particular, and let's say you're 18 years old, you're like, I'm going to be a marketer. Well, the first wake up call I want to give all marketers is most people who major in marketing because they don't like math. Marketing today is math. So if you want to get into marketing, you better decide you like math and then go study math. And I'd say those math tracks that you can study that we see people have a lot of success with include obviously mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering. some computer science, so I don't know that we see as much with that, as well as economics, and things like that. So if you want to study something in school and you're like, I think I want to be a marketer, don't go study marketing, go study math and get really good at how you're going to think about numbers and making these decisions.

That's a hundred percent the best marketers we find. And the, when I'm looking at a resume, I want to see a math or stats or econ major on that resume. if you didn't major in that, well go figure out how to get comfortable with math, because today marketing is all math. And so it really is all about being able to interpret these quantitative results and make decisions.

Even if you're creative, even if you're creative, you need to be able to look at what the market is saying is working and then be able to interpret that into a creative vision. Right, so it's no longer like, Oh, I just am going to sit on a beach and drink a margarita and come up with a brilliant idea. You're going to put that into the market and it's going to flop. So when Jamie Siminoff introduced Shaq at ring, which I thought was one of the boldest marketing moves that he made, he paid Shaq a ton of money. He said, well, the numbers are going to tell us if it works or not. And if it works, we're going to double down.

And if it doesn't work, well that was a lot of fun. It was a, you know, it was a risk. You had to invest a particular amount of money. And he only cared if it worked. And it actually worked profoundly well. And it shows you that there is still this incredible ability to take moonshots. But you gotta still trust the data. You know, another example is over at Tonal. They, they had two types of marketing where they paid LeBron James a ton of money for all this. Creative and then they went and did a bunch of user generated content that cost like frack like 1 percent of what lebron james called what do you think won the user generated contract content, right?

So like you gotta be a math person, even if you're a creative person, right? And so I think that's the advice i'd give is like if you're already graduating from college Go find an early stage company or join an incubator or just figure out how to be frugal as you hustle Right, and if you're in college Study math, stats, math, econ, and get comfortable with it.

Cause those are the skills, those regression analysis, the cohort analysis, those are the tools and the language you're going to need to be able to speak when you're in the real world.

[00:19:35] Jay: What is quantitative marketing that you do at Force of Nature? I mean, it's very easy for you to rattle those things off and say quantitative marketing. what does that mean, you know, to the layman's person? I mean, even myself, I've lived in the space enough to kind of know what it is. But you tell me, what is it and how are you guys using it for your customers at Force of Nature?

[00:20:00] Susan: So, so we believe, and I believe all marketing is quantitative and all marketing is performance marketing. Even your biggest brand campaigns, even Coke, you have to sell Coke. Right? So regardless of the marketing you do, the marketing expenditure has to have a result, and there's lots of ways to measure that result.

And we can have lots of conversations around all the ways to measure the output of that result. But every dollar that a business spends, if it's for the Barbie movie, which had a huge marketing budget, or if it's for the smallest and most scrappy of startups, all of those should have some sort of measurable result.

You should be able to say, I believe that this dollar. Had this result and the quantitative nature is in that measurement and it's figuring out ways to measure It gets a lot more complicated and messy at the biggest companies Although i'll tell you what the biggest companies and the biggest agencies are most hungry for people who can think Quantitatively because this is where it is and this is where the future is at the smallest of companies.

You must be quantitative And so this idea is that everything is measurable, like every dollar is measurable, and so you build dashboards, and reports, and data infrastructures, and ways to ingest and organize the data from lots of sources, so the sources are going to be your website, the sources are going to be your ad platforms, the sources are going to be All these places and you're going to organize it and then you can start to ask questions against it. What worked better Facebook or Google? How much does it cost to acquire a new customer? Versus someone who maybe has already visited our website or maybe already made a purchase historically. These are the types of questions and this lets you determine the best ways to allocate dollars and allocate media against those dollars. And if you don't have those insights at your fingertips as a marketer, And you don't have the ability to ask those questions as a marketer, then you're behind the curve because today it is easy. It is not simple, but it is easy to get access in real time to all of your data about all of your platforms, about all of your customers in real time. And ingest that into a place that you can easily see exactly where your business is at. Maybe not on a second by second basis, but absolutely on an hourly basis. You can say okay This is how many sales we've had. This is what came from Facebook. This is what came from Google This is what came from tik tok This is what I got out of my email and you got to be able to think about that and then from that You can start to say wow Facebook is working really well to acquire new customers. how could we make that better? How could we run some a B tests to think about that? And that's where the a B test may be in creative messaging Or they may be in thinking creatively about different audiences. So there's lots of creative thought that happens, but it comes back to this idea of trusting the data, trusting the numbers and deploying resources, time or money against those things.

[00:22:51] Jay: there was so much valuable information in there. I feel like people should pay to listen to the last 2 minutes. if I do have a question though, so I have an agency, a bunch of my friends have agencies. And we don't have marketing, right? Like we do business a bunch of different ways. If you were going to tell a company.

Specifically B2B, 'cause I think B2C and B2B, you know, just totally different monsters. If somebody's not doing marketing, what would be your first step to tell them? Like if they're not putting ad dollars out, if they're, maybe they're doing some outbound email or they're doing some other little things, how would you tell them to start the process of marketing a B2B agency?

[00:23:36] Susan: if they're not doing it at all. what's base level square one for you? I mean, I think some of this depends on, it's more, it's obviously like a more sophisticated question that every business owner should ask and that we have to ask ourselves, right? So we do lots of auditing work where we go and audit people's big companies, MarTech stacks, and. We were just having this conversation this morning because we're starting to get some traction with some of our efforts, but we have capacity issues. Like we just aren't going to be able to service all of those clients. So I think to start with for a B2B, particularly a B2B agency or services business, you need to be honest about the realities of your capacity. How much room do you actually have and how many clients do you actually need to acquire? Are you a business that has capacity in which case you can think about scale and think about getting bigger and think about this kind of like growth or are you a business that actually has some capacity constraints? Like maybe I need like two or three more clients, but I don't need 20 or 30 more clients. And from there you can start to think about, okay, assuming that is true, I only need a couple of clients. I have a good understanding of who my ideal client profile is. Like I know who that, those people are. Then you can decide if the best effort for your efforts is going to be in a little bit more of like an ABM account based marketing type strategy, or if it's going to be in something that's more like a paid strategy. Paid is going to bring you lots of inbound, but lots of crap, right? And you're gonna have to parse through and qualify those leads. And you're looking for like the diamonds in the rough. You know, an account based marketing strategy might be being really targeted at saying, okay, I only need three clients and I think that any of these thousand companies would work and I'm going to go on LinkedIn and I'm going to be like, I'm going to do ads against those, or I'm going to do something thought leadership pieces against those.

I'm going to be very explicit against those companies. So I think those are the types of questions you have to ask. If you need to be able to be You know, build something at scale. We do lots of B to SMB business, right? So lots of B to like lots of companies. That's going to almost be treated more like a B to C, right?

Because that's going to be like there's just thousands and thousands of potential customers. So for example, one of our customers is MileIQ that targets, Like truck drivers and stuff like that. there's tens of thousands, maybe even millions of those people. There's not hundreds of millions, right? So if you're a B2SMB, put yourself in the B2C bucket, go do some marketing. But if you're really a B2B, right, you're gonna have capacity constraints, right? You're probably, like, that's probably reality. Then just be really deliberate in how you do that marketing and don't think, Oh, I'm just gonna throw some Facebook ads and all my problems are solved. Cuz you're gonna throw up some Facebook ads and you're gonna get a hundred crap leads. Maybe you'll get one good lead, right? So just be more deliberate in how you're gonna take that action.

and how you're gonna go about doing that.

[00:26:10] Jay: Love that. right. I feel like I could talk to you all day. I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you one more question. And I'm very, I'm always curious. The really successful people, this is where I perk up a little bit. Because I'm curious what your answer is going to be. Non business related. Nothing to do with your business or anybody else's 

[00:26:27] Susan: oh. 

[00:26:29] Jay: If you could do anything on earth, and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:26:34] Susan: Oh, go to space. Go to Mars.

[00:26:36] Jay: My god, what a great, what a quick, great Answer I don't get space enough. I'm an astrophotographer and I'm a space nerd. So like I love I feel like maybe a couple people say that and I love how quickly you would go to Mars, even though maybe you're not coming back.

[00:26:51] Susan: As long as I can bring my family

[00:26:52] Jay: Oh, you can't fail. So I guess you can do whatever. I 

[00:26:55] Susan: And take my family.

and colonize. I mean, I just, and you can't fail. I mean, what a adventure, right? I mean, I have I obviously, like many people, have big concerns around what's happening to our world, and I think that we just, let's think big, right? Let's think big.

[00:27:10] Jay: I like that. All right. You wanted to talk about the fires a little bit over there because that is close to you. Right? I mean, you're 

in it. And so tell me about what do you want to, what do you want to talk about? Yeah.

[00:27:21] Susan: so the Maui fires are absolutely horrific, and I think the biggest thing that I want to stress is the town of Lahaina, that was absolutely decimated, was decimated, it's a huge tragedy, and there was a lot of human error that happened, and a lot of finger pointing that happened. But the people who were most impacted are the working people of Maui. This is not a rich enclave of Makenna where Bezos lives, right? This is where we had a lot of affordable housing. Almost everyone was a renter. And these are the people that run our economy, right? They're the hidden, they're the hidden talent of the world that run the hotels that run all the things no one wants to talk about.

They're not sexy. They're not fun. They're definitely not living the lifestyle that I'm living. And their lives just got destroyed. And so the thing I want to stress is to have empathy for that profile of person that literally they had 11 adults living in a single house because that's the only way you could afford it, right?

Maui's a very expensive place. And for these people, housing is the number one cost. The average income was 30, 000 a year. So the people that were hurt and that really lost their property and lost everything, like, really lost everything. Like for them to go, they can't go buy a new car, right? Like they don't have the resource to do that. And so I think to find that empathy around a community that really got decimated in a place that we as a country love and enjoy. And so if you enjoy, if you come to Hawaii and you enjoy what we have in Hawaii and in Maui in particular. Just give with your heart. I know there's all sorts of natural disasters and tragedies, but if you're someone that really loves this place, give.

And I think there's a couple of great places to give, but I'm a really big fan and a really big advocate of what Oprah and The Rock are doing with, I think it's called the People's Fund of Maui, and they're giving directly to the people of Lahaina. So each person who gets signed up and they're vetting it, and it's a whole process that's very legit.

The overhead is covered by Oprah and The Rock. So all the money that's donated goes to the people of Lahaina. they're giving them 1, 200 a month as living expenses. They're trying to do like six months. For these people, that is extraordinary. That hopefully will help them get back on their feet. I don't know what they're gonna do.

There's no housing in Maui. It's a huge catastrophe. It's a huge problem. But if you're someone who's loved Hawaii, loved Maui, or just, you know, have some empathy in your heart, then just give. It was just a historic catastrophe that was largely caused by a lot of mistakes. And it's not The people who got hurts mistakes that caused that problem

[00:29:48] Jay: Right. All right. 

Well, we'll link 

[00:29:51] Susan: you can google that

[00:29:52] Jay: I say people Google it. We'll link it. I think, I think people, you know, like you said, assume that if it's Maui, it's the, the Bezos and the, Zuckerberg's of the world that don't, you know, need the help. But, I think it's like you pointed out, it's the exact opposite.

So,

we will link 

[00:30:08] Susan: thirty thousand dollars a year. That was the average annual income of a resident of lahaina

That's crazy. It just was not it's where the workers lived. It's

not where the rich people lived.

[00:30:17] Jay: right. Well, especially as you said, it's expensive. it is it is over there. that's not exactly going to get you very much. So, we'll link all that stuff in the bio, but, on a better note, positive note. Susan, you have been fantastic and I am very jealous of your lifestyle.

I have a bunch of kids myself and I'm, saddled down here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I'm not going to be moving them out anytime soon, but, I think you're a very. Great example. I have two little girls and I, you know, somebody like you is who they would look up to. and I can't thank you enough for your time today.

I hope you keep doing your thing. and, you know, have a good rest of your week. All right.

[00:30:55] Susan: Awesome. This was such a fun conversation So thanks for what you do and let's keep in touch

[00:31:00] Jay: Let's keep in touch, please. All right. Be good. Go, kite surfing and we'll talk again soon. All right.

[00:31:05] Susan: awesome

[00:31:05] Jay: Thanks. 

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