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**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So this is in many ways -- you're an idea person. You were there from the inception. So in many cases you're there to get things moving, and may not necessarily need to be involved as they get moving. You're a mover and a shaker, not so much a doer on the long-term. You seem to jump around, based on... |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So what do you do day-to-day? What are some of the things -- maybe that's not even worth going into, I don't know. I'm curious why this is a challenge for you, I suppose. Are you struggling with this? Is this an identity crisis, to some degree? |
**Ian Bernstein:** Maybe... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Not so much a crisis, that's overly dramatic... But you get what I'm trying to say... Where you question yourself. I've done this myself, "How can I be most useful right now?" |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, exactly. That's where I'm at. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Ian Bernstein:** My day-to-day - some of it is working with our leadership team, trying to decide what our direction is, what are we gonna focus on... I would say that's pretty consistent. But other than that -- you know, there's chunks of time. Like I said, right now I'm working on a website, but maybe before that I... |
\[44:13\] I deal a lot of manufacturing. I spent about three years in my life in China, working with our factory there, where I can be pretty effective, because I can make decisions on the product, I can do enough of all aspects of the engineering side, on the electrical side, on the mechanical side, QA testing, test f... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. It's not an easy, like "This is what you do. This is what you do", yeah. |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. And there's a really good article, I'm sure you've read it... I forget the exact title is, but it's basically like "Giving away your Legos." It's part of the first round blog. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Hm. I haven't read this one. I'm gonna look it up though. |
**Ian Bernstein:** It's really good, and it kind of talks about how as you're scaling, a lot of times you sort of get attached to something, and every certain period of time you need to give away your Legos. Basically, give away your tower that you've been building to somebody else, and start building a new, bigger tow... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, the cool thing is if you build the right kind of company, you can do that again and again and again, inside the same company. It's not a good thing when you have to start a new thing, literally a new thing. It's different when you can do it within the company. |
I'll say two things. One, if I was on your team and I was somebody who can give you direction, so let's say like a peer - not so much somebody over you, obviously - I would find ways to use your dangerousness in wise ways for the direction of the company... Because I think someone like you is multi-faceted; you need to... |
Let me ask you a second question to that, which is - have you heard of read the book Linchpin, from Seth Godin? |
**Ian Bernstein:** No. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. I'll summarize it by saying that Seth in that book essentially says -- the point of the book is to make you feel like and understand what it should be to be a linchpin. Do you know what a linchpin is? Physically, not the metaphor linchpin. The literal linchpin. A linchpin is the thing that hol... |
It sounds to me like you enjoy being a cog. And it's this new thing of -- I wouldn't say "new", it's just sort of an evolving idea, I suppose, to have this cog mindset. And what I call cog mindset is -- this is a quote from me... I'm very sharp, I'm a very highly-specific, very purposeful -- purseposefully purposeful c... |
**Ian Bernstein:** I like that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...where you don't need to be the person that is the most important factor. You build a Lego, hand it off; build a Lego, hand it off. |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. I think that's spot on. And luckily, I have a really awesome team at Misty. In our last leadership \[unintelligible 00:48:05.24\] we talked about this as well, and everybody is super-supportive... Being open to letting me engage at different levels, and work with them to make things happen... W... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[48:20\] Yeah. You've got a big mission. A part of your mission is 1) be a platform, which is interesting; that was discovered -- I don't know how long ago you said. I think it was about a year ago or six months ago, you discovered \[the need\] to be a platform. You can correct me on the time range... |
**Ian Bernstein:** No. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's like a decade, at least, right? |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Would you agree with that? |
**Ian Bernstein:** Oh, yeah. I mean, it's gonna take a long time. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you do that? How do you mentally prepare for that kind of mission? |
**Ian Bernstein:** I guess personally you just can't think too big. You've just gotta think one step at a time. And it's easy to think even too big, as in like things that don't even seem that big. But it's literally like "We need one customer building something. Let's get one. And then let's get two. And then three." |
So I think if you think about it in just super, super-simplistic steps, it kind of becomes manageable... But you've gotta always have that North Star in the back of your mind, like "Where are we going with these steps?", making sure those step one, step two, step three are going in some sort of direction that you think... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Have you seen Frozen 2, by any chance? |
**Ian Bernstein:** It's been a while, but yes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's on-topic, but off-topic. Frozen 2? |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Frozen 2 is new. |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, then I haven't seen it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, unless you saw it in a theater. The reason why I bring it up is -- it's kind of funny, because we have kids, so we obviously have to see Frozen 2... Otherwise I probably wouldn't be like "Oh, I've gotta see Frozen 2." And you'd mentioned the next thing, and there's a song in there that's reall... |
**Ian Bernstein:** A couple, like, Disney things I was thinking about... Bob Iger, when we got to spend a little bit of time with him in 2014 when we were at Disney - he gave us this antidote that was like "Don't create trombone oil." You could be the best trombone oil manufacturer in the world, providing everybody wit... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Pretty close. |
**Ian Bernstein:** So we hadn't even released BB-8 yet. This was back in 2015. But I think we'd announced something... I'm trying to remember. But somehow, some guy at Disney reached out to me, just cold-email, and he's like "I heard you were working on BB-8. Can we talk?" So I talked to this guy, and it turns out he w... |
\[52:11\] So it turns out he was working on the Frozen theater show at Disneyland in L.A (or Anaheim). I basically took all the stuff that I had created this BB-8 with and created this rock... And it turned out to be the trolls. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Hm. Yeah. |
**Ian Bernstein:** So I got invited out, and he showed me backstage, and I got to see the actual show, and they were using it halfway through... It's like, the curtain closes, this rock rolls out on stage and does this dance to some music, and then rolls off, and then the curtains open and all the trolls come out. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Ian Bernstein:** So he just used some of our BB-8 technology in a Frozen show at Disneyland. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Ian Bernstein:** It was kind of cool. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That is pretty cool. That is pretty cool. Those trolls - the rock trolls are pretty interesting. And it's interesting how you've had so many opportunities to work with - at least two, I suppose, that I know of - to work with Disney. It's interesting. |
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