Todd Gagne:

Blas, welcome to the podcast, man. I appreciate you taking the time.

Blas:

Yeah. Thanks for having me talk. Excited to be here.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. Good. Well, I've I've been an admirer of yours for a while. I think you and I connected, online, with your when you were doing kind of summaries online and and really, I think, personally, just helped me, increase the quality of the books I was reading. And so I I attribute that to just, cleaning up my my reading diet, which was good.

And so, and then over the years, we've connected on a bunch of stuff and some of the things we'll talk about today. But you just have an interesting journey, that I'm really excited to kinda dive into today. So before we start and get into too deep, what would you describe if you were to, like, talk to somebody and you're at a cocktail party and they say, you know, Blaz, what do you do and and who are you? What what what's what's the kind of overview that you start with?

Blas:

Yeah. It's a hard question to start with. I struggle defining myself, and part of that reason is because I've very often just followed my curiosity, and I try not to have, like, a 10 year grand vision that I am this or I will do this. It's a little bit of, like, an opportunistic mindset and making sure that I'm really passionate about the thing that's in front of me, And I can't always do that, but to the extent that I have that choice, I do try to lean into the thing that I'm most interested in in the moment. If you ask me now, I would say founder.

Right? But that's 10 years out of school and a bunch of, like, weird paths I've taken, everything from aerospace, you know, manufacturing, to founder in a different company and everything else. So, I struggle defining myself. But if you ask me today, it would be founder.

Todd Gagne:

Okay. That's good. I do the piece that resonates with me is, if you find something you're passionate about, you bring the heat. Like, I I know I feel like that. And so, whether I'm bored or I don't like the work, I'm not a great employee.

Yeah. But when I am when I'm aligned with what I'm curious on, basically, there's no end to what can come out of it. And so I do Yeah. It really deeply resonates with me.

Blas:

I think it's a port a point worth double clicking on for just a second because I think it's it's very it goes against a lot of, like I don't know if it's preconceived notions, but schedules. Right? People have 30 minute calendars, and they're on calls all day. And I think what that kills is that that kind of that moment of inspiration where you're just inspired and excited to go deep on whatever the thing is, writing an article or reading a book, learning about something. And if your life is too preplanned, it's very hard to just go a mile deep on something.

And there's extremes. Right? If you just do that and have zero balance in your life, like, that could be painful as well. But I think that notion, and, I'm sure you read it or saw it, but, like, Paul Graham recently came out with this founder mode essay. Right?

And the thing that ties together a lot of the people referred to was working on the highest leverage problem the moment it needs doing. And that's really hard to do if you just timebox your entire life and, you know, 9 to 11 is just meetings and whatever. So So I think there's a lot of that that is at least helpful to have in the back of your mind and, not overprescribing your life into these little buckets, but, like, really attacking the thing that, you know, fires you up right now.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. No. I think it's good. I think that's, it's interesting and it's important, and I think it's, it's pushing back on society in a lot of cases. Right?

I I worked at a company for 19 years, and you had way more structure maybe than I wanted at times. But, like, creating more space to, like, think and be creative was important because otherwise, I was kind of a dull Korean, in the in the box. And so Yeah. I had to find ways to keep sharpening it. So maybe let's talk about your journey a little bit.

I feel like, you know, knowing you a little bit and some of your genesis, you were a, you know, division 1, tennis, player at Notre Dame. And, you know, I look at my son, who played a lot of soccer, and I think he you guys have some similarities on just the discipline, and the rigor that you got out of that. And to me, this is a foundational, like, element to kind of you as well as to a lot of people. If you like the grind, the outcome is a lot easier to, like, figure out. Right?

Where if you like the outcome but you don't like the grind, you know exactly where those people are gonna end up. So maybe talk a little about about, like, you know, learning, and then basically you had this kind of tennis career that you did. And then what parlayed over that to kind of, like, you know, your ability to kind of learn and grind on building skills? Because I think that is an element that I think is kind of core to, like, some lessons that you learned, but then you applied to it. And so whether it's, you know, all the way through college, and beginning to, you know, division 1 or just in general because I think, you know, even my son never is gonna play division 1 soccer, but I think he got a lot of those skills out of it as well.

Blas:

Yeah. For sure. I I got so much out of tennis. I wrote a whole essay on it, and it's something I reflect on a lot, but it's called the infinite game. But the the couple high level lessons that I got out of tennis personally is just this notion of being very comfortable and actually excited to go all in on something and knowing there's a high likelihood you're still gonna fail.

Right? Yeah. And that's embarrassing. That's painful. That's vulnerable.

You expose yourself. It sucks. But that it's a muscle. Right? Being training yourself to do that time and again, to me, is one of the most valuable things because, again, it's hard.

Like, you don't wanna be embarrassed. Right? It's it's easier to say like, you know, I didn't train as hard as I could, and I lost, but it's because I didn't train that hard. It is very painful to say I gave it everything I had, and Todd was just better than me today. But I think there are certain things you can only access if you go all in on something.

Right? Whether that's a relationship or your startup or whatever. And one of the scariest things to me is a a life of regret. Right? Looking back on my life at x time and wishing I had tried harder or done more.

And, you know, I was a good player. I don't wanna oversell myself. I tried to make it on the tour. I couldn't. It's it's hard.

Right? It's a really hard thing to, like, actually make it, but I have no regrets that I didn't do everything I possibly could, and that stems from, you know, actually practicing on court to sleep and hydration and nutrition and all that stuff. Like, I think I got as much out of myself as I possibly could, and that to me is the best feeling you could ever have. Right? It's not the win.

It's just kind of knowing you got the most. Then to your point, like, do you love the process or the outcome? Ideally, both. But you just have to love the process. Right?

So I asked Jokovich the other day, you know, you've done everything there is to do. You've won tennis. Why are you still out here? And his answer was so, like, silly in a way, but so deep. It's like, I just love hitting that little yellow ball.

Like, I just love it. And it doesn't need to be, yeah, it doesn't need to be deeper than that. Right? He just loves the whole process around it. So being able to go all in while being comfortable or acknowledging that you could still lose and appreciating the grind.

Right? Making it a craft, making it something you look forward to. And, again, that can be scary. It's hard to wake up at 5 AM and train, and you're giving up, you know, going out with friends and all these other things, but it really builds that muscle. What else can I say on that front?

I think the since I was maybe 10 or 11 when I got really serious about tennis, I treated it almost as work. Right? So my parents made it very clear. School is your number one job. You do well there.

We'll help you kind of, like, figure out the rest. But you fail at school, nothing else really matters. So they set those priorities and kinda, like, help me work within that that constraint. But then everything tennis wise was my job, like scheduling, you know, scheduling practice matches, going to tournaments, logistics for tournaments. I had to learn all that really quickly, and it was fun.

There wasn't they never told me you have to go to practice or anything. I just enjoyed that whole process. But I think that early training gets you to think maybe more maturely than a normal 10 or 11 year old, and you kinda have to think, you know, beyond step 1. What is the ripple effect of these different things? And I think that still serves me well today, just trying to ask that next question of and then what.

Right? So if this doesn't work, how do we fix it? If this does work, what do we you know, what's the next step? And just trying to be proactive and take that take that initiative.

Todd Gagne:

Okay. Well, that's good. I mean, those are amazing lessons to be learned. And I think the part I love about it is it's not necessarily about, you know, where you ended up. It's about the skills you acquired along the way.

And I think Yeah. 99% of us are never going to make a money, doing any of these sports. And I think lots of parents would be better served if they understood that when they are cheering and supporting their children. It's the lessons that you can pull from that that are important. So maybe talk a little bit about how you parlayed that into, like, learning.

Right? And so you had you know, we go to college. We you know, you have professors. You get homework. You all that sort of stuff, and you learn for a test.

And I think you kind of describe after you graduated, this ability to kind of take some of these lessons that you learned from tennis and apply them to learning in maybe a nonstructured way or in a different way than you did from a college perspective. And I think this really kind of led to where you went with the rabbit hole. And so maybe kinda talk about that transition from the assets and the skills that you acquired to applying it to a learning discipline.

Blas:

Yeah. So, unknowingly, in school, I was very, very good at playing the game. I had a 6th sense for what the teachers would kind of ask on tests. And in hindsight, I kind of had to do it just how busy tennis was that I kind of had, like, I had to figure

Todd Gagne:

that out.

Blas:

Yeah, it was. And, you know, it it served me well. I always did really well in school. But when I look back on my time, I just I don't feel like I got that much out of it in terms of, like, learning. And most of the skills I got were from tennis, to be honest with you.

Like, again, I did well in school. They're great teachers, learned a lot, but the real life skills kinda came, like, outside the classroom. And it wasn't until I, quote, unquote, retired from tennis that for the first time in my life, I felt like I had excess energy and time and motivation to just learn things for the sake of learning. Like, I had never done that, at least to my memory. And now with tennis gone, I kind of felt that excitement and that desire to do it.

And this is a great through line from tennis. I just treated learning as my new sport. Like, I go to the library, and instead of going to court, I go read and learn for a few hours every day no matter what. And I loved it. It was, like, eye opening to learn about everything from philosophy to physics to engineering and, again, like, the basics.

I didn't need to go, you know, become an expert, but you mentioned this just before we started that that notion of no black boxes. I love that. That is, like, a very, very deeply resonant thing to me where it's not that I'm looking to be top 1% in everything, but I think you can get to top 90% pretty quickly. Right? Like, a couple books, a couple talks, a couple conversations with people.

And this will bleed into Lattice and stuff later, but that's when I think the interesting connections across fields, across people, across disciplines start becoming palpable and exciting where you're not just in one lane solely focused on one thing. You have maybe a little bit of a a broader vision and maybe, like, understanding of how things connect, yeah, together.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. That's good. And so maybe take that down one more step. Like, you you basically created a website for a lot of this learning, and it was probably more of a a function from, you were passing some of this information to friends and family and formalizing it and probably creating more accountability for yourself in the process. And then it seemed like it kinda blew up.

Right? Like, then it's like all of a sudden people like myself start interacting with you and you start to build this kind of network and seeing people, get value from some of the work that you had done.

Blas:

Yeah. Exactly right. So I knew going into it, I was never smart enough to just remember everything I read. So the very rational part of my brain said, instead of having to reread this in 2 years, just take a few notes, and you can review the notes later. And that helped tremendously again in, holding myself accountable, getting more out of the time I spent reading.

But unknowingly, this was very much, like, out of sight, out of mind was that other people would benefit from it too. So there was no grand plan. There was no, like, let's build a a blog or something out of it. Just like you said, it was an easy WordPress page that I hosted to just copy and paste my notes on there. And very organically, you know, friends started sharing that with friends.

And the coolest part of it is it's just become this black hole for super nerds like myself, like you. Right? Like, the percentage of people that get excited about something like that website is quite low. But the hit rate of, like, people I find interesting and, like, wanna time with is insanely high. And it's just been this gift that keeps on giving where people like yourself just reach out and wanna spend time.

Right? Like, that's the coolest part of this whole thing is it just inbound interesting people, which, again, is, like, a very cool unintended hack of, kinda like the output of of that system.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. And so maybe talk a little bit. I mean, the scale of this thing, Blaise, is pretty impressive. Right? I mean, I think I don't know.

I haven't looked at this, but it's it's over 600 books, right, that you've done on a bunch of different topics. And what I mean, you would say, again, following your curiosity, and I can almost see I mean, knowing a little bit about what was going on in some of your life around startups, you could see the type of books that you were reading, on go to market and and marketplaces and stuff, which is kinda cool. And so, you know, you're trying to find, you've got problems in your world or your life that you're trying to do. You read some books and interesting things to find figure out what's gonna do, and you you you try them out. And so, you know, 600 books is pretty impressive.

You probably do I don't know how many do you do a month, probably 3 to 5, 4 to 6.

Blas:

Yeah. Most kids, it slowed down a lot. I've had to become much more thoughtful about it. But, yeah, probably about that for the last 10 years is probably kind of the the average pace, if you will.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. And then you have these kind of ones that you wanna re you know, that you've put in the reread section, which I thought was interesting. And that was one of the first areas that I went to too was taking a look at some of those and seeing what resonated, and what, you know, kinda got my curiosity. And And so what would you say? Like, 5% of the 600 are kind of in that ballpark?

I don't know. There's something along those lines. Yeah. That's a tough one. Minority.

Yeah. And so, talk to me about, like, you know, this now kind of leverages, a bunch of domain expertise where you you've got elements of all these books and stuff that you've read. And I think what you started to do was then say, use kind of the Charlie Munger analogy of a lattice work or about how to take these pieces and put them into a framework that you could really think through different problems with them. And so to me, this is like the raw material of kind of what you were trying to do with latticework. And so as you start to build out this kind of, like, independent domain expertise and then put them into a framework, maybe talk a little bit about how you go from, individual pieces of information that you've read in these books to, like, an organizational system that really tries to make this something you can leverage, as a framework to apply to different problems.

Blas:

Yeah. Yeah. So you're a 100% right. The evolution was, like, reading haphazardly taking notes into rabbit hole, which over time kinda like morphed into the lattice work, which is, again, this community of fellow super nerds, if you will. And it was a really interesting process, actually, Todd.

So x number of years ago, 5 or 6, let's call it, I started getting the feeling that the marginal book was being way less helpful and interesting than it was early in my journey because, like, everything was new. Right? I was, like, a baby and, like, I, like, I just had everything was novel and interesting. And as I learned more, the marginal book just started feeling less helpful, less interesting. What became much more powerful was making those connections between books, between concepts, between disciplines.

And I didn't have the language for it at the time. Again, I have wasn't, like, that well read. I didn't come across Charlie or anything at the time. But I literally took all my notes on books, which I think was, like, 15 or 20000 pages. And I just started compressing, compressing, compressing.

And something really interesting happened where these themes just came up over and over again. Right? Like, this author, 800 years ago, had said something about this and, you know, someone more recently said in a different language, but something about, you know, something similar. And seeing those trends and those patterns kind of emerge organically. And, again, there's bias to the things that I selected to read and all that stuff.

But it was the kernel. It's the skeleton for this lattice work that I built that just kind of emerged naturally. I had no, like, preconceived notion that there'd be these disciplines and these ideas within these disciplines. It just kind of popped up. And this will obviously never be complete or correct.

Right? That's not really the point, but just like a rough scaffolding, that awareness that, hey. Here's, like, you know, a couple of tangible practical ideas from physics that could be helpful in business or your life or whatever. And I'm no academic. Again, I'm no expert in any of these things.

The athlete mindset that I think drove a lot of this was just what is useful. Right? Regardless of, like, which area it came from or who wrote about it or do I agree a 100% with what this author says. I almost don't care about that. Right?

If there's a kernel of something useful in there, I'm gonna take that and mine it. Right? So I think that that's been a really fun process for me is just seeing these patterns emerge over time and having that be, yeah, like, an organic emergent output of the process and not a preconceived notion that this is kind of what I'm building towards.

Todd Gagne:

So maybe talk to me a little bit about the format because I think what's interesting about it is it's not just about the concept. You try to really give a real world application to it. Yeah. And I think in a lot of cases, that takes that bridges the gap from something that's academic to something that basically I know in the real world is a problem or I can, you know, synthesize that. And then the other part that you do really well is, you know, either have some quotes and or the books that those came from.

So if you wanna deep dive even further, you can. And so maybe just walk through it. Like, maybe there's more to your format than that, but I do think that, you know, me as a consumer of some of that has really resonated where it's like the concept that you can get academically and the application of it sometimes isn't always as, is is linear as I would have liked. And so and I think you've done a really good job of trying to connect those dots.

Blas:

I appreciate that. Yeah. Again, the I have a worldview where trying to make things as simple as you possibly can. Right? The Einstein quote of, like, simpler but not too simple.

Right? Yeah. And that's where I hope I can add a little bit of value to people's lives is totally understand, like, not everyone's interested in reading, let alone the scale I did, let alone the notes and everything. So if I could take the things that I just do for fun, right, getting back to that inspiration point, I was inspired to do this. It was fun for me.

You know, there are things you do that are fun for you that would be boring for me and vice versa. Can we bleed into those spikiness that spikiness that each person has? So, really quickly, the the framework I found someone described that resonate a lot with me was adept. So that's an analogy, a diagram in, plain English, in technical language, and then there's the, let's call it, like, the other resources. Right?

The quotes that you mentioned, the books if you wanna go deeper. And that very simple framework forced me to really understand these things. And, you know, if I can't tell you an idea and give you an analogy to it, I don't really understand it.

Todd Gagne:

If I can

Blas:

draw a simple diagram, exactly. Right. So it really forces, again, like, most common denominator, like, simplest version of this idea, but kind of attacked from different perspectives. And maybe this is another thread to dive into, but the downside for me was this process would hammer home these things into my head better than anything else. And if no one got value out of it, like, that would suck.

It took a lot of time and effort and love. But at the very least you. It worked for me. Exactly. Exactly.

Right. So that's that's a rough framework. And again, different from the rabbit hole, which is just the blogs, like, you know, the the book summaries. This was really an attempt to take all those notes, all those summaries, all those ideas, and make it practical, make it something that you could sort of dive into and implement in your day to day life. You know, a stand alone summary might be helpful in the moment, but it's more of, like, the philosophy, the framework that sits behind that that I thought was, like, potentially most useful to put out there.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. I think it's good. And then, you know, you started to create a community around this. Right? And so, you know, you made it, kind of a subscription.

And, you know, I think what's interesting is you put a little friction on the front end of it. Right? You can't just sign up. You basically have to have a little one on one time with with Blas. And so maybe talk to me a little bit about using that friction.

You you knew this wasn't gonna be something that's gonna grow into, you know, 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of people, but you were looking for those people, that had this kind of innate interest in this, and you created a little bit of friction just to have a conversation with them. I don't know how many people are in lattice work, but you've had 1 on 1 conversations with every single one of them. So can you talk a little bit about that kind of calling process and the value you get out of that?

Blas:

Yeah. So exactly right. I think there there's an obsession with friction removal, which is correct in, like, a lot of social consumer apps and everything. Right? Like, every tap matters.

Everything matters. And that's part of my life right now, and I'm, like, super deep in that world. But it's a different optimization function here. Right? Like, this was never intended to be my my soul work, if you will.

Right? It's a labor of love. And friction in this case is super helpful because, actually, like, the fewer people, the better in a way. Right? Like, we're at about 400 some, and that's, like, an awesome size.

And, like, I'm very happy with that, and there are certain things you get with scale and everything. But I'm not interested in thousands of people for this thing. I think it loses a it would lose a little bit of its magic. So like you said, there's friction in that people have to apply. There's friction in that people have to pay.

There's friction in that I have to meet them. And, you know, I say no to, I don't know, 10 or 20% of people who apply because they aren't willing to schedule a call or whatever it might be. And, again, the optimization function in this case is just people who joining this community is a hell yeah. Right? It just has to be one of those feelings where, woah.

Like, BLOS takes this really seriously. Maybe I don't know anyone or that many people here, but the opportunity cost is worth it. Right? Like, if I meet one interesting person or, you know, we can talk about the the intros or the deal flow or the connections, whatever. But, like, the way I hope people think about it and the way I've tried to structure it is if you just hit one of those things a year, this pays for itself multiple times over.

And Yep. Hopefully, it's much more than that. But and the other thing I I guess, like, that has been a good lesson for me is almost everything we've done has been pulled out of me. Like, people are telling me they wanna pay for a community. People telling me they're, you know, lonely or missing a group of people to go super deep on a topic with.

Very little of this has been premeditated, and it's been cool again. Like, none of these were my ideas. It's the community. They're telling me what they want. They tell me what they were, like, willing to pay for or whatever.

And it's just, again, like, solving my own problem in a way, but also just listening and being empathetic to what the people who are close to you are telling you they want.

Todd Gagne:

So, yeah, maybe talk a little bit about how this has evolved. Right? I mean, you started off, where the primary value was the lattice work and the that, and then now it's really kind of morphed into a a community with a bunch of WhatsApp channels. There's a bunch of different topics from parenting to book club to finance. Maybe just talk about that evolution, which you're already kinda doing.

You're saying people are giving you ideas and feedback. People are self grouping because they have, you know, an a need or an interest. And and maybe the last piece of this is, just kinda what you're doing with the kind of serendipity, survey where you're basically trying to connect people in this network to help solve problems and and kind of that theme. Yeah.

Blas:

So quickly on the evolution, very much started as, like, come for the content, stay for the community. And I think that's become way more imbalanced in terms of just, like

Todd Gagne:

The community.

Blas:

It's really just the people. Like, again, I really hope the content is helpful and people ingest it and that it's useful. But, again, like, you tell me you're part of a community, but I think it's really, like, 90% just the other people who are there at this point, which is really fortunate that, you know, when I travel, this is the first group I reach out to to say, hey. I'm gonna be in London for a few weeks. Can I, you know, grab dinner with someone or whatever?

Like, those those things are energizing to me. And there's so much low hanging fruit, so let's go into the serendipity survey and just, like, the little experiments I'm trying to run and where I hope it can take us. But this this has been a a problem I've been trying to solve for myself for a decade now, 5 years now at least. But I think there's just the thing that excites me is just this notion that the world is so small and so connected, and the potential for you to know somebody who could drastically help me very like, relatively quickly is quite high. Right?

It's really like a search problem, and it's too hard and people aren't good at maintaining, you know, thousands of connections in their head, whole Dunbar's number thing. But I think there's a world that will exist pretty soon where you have a networking copilot that scours, you know, your network and LinkedIn and what people tweet about and whatever to just be able to say, like, you know, we're dealing with sensory stuff for my 2 year old. Who is the best person in my network to talk to? And to get relevant contextual recommendations of not websites, but literally people. Right?

So, like, if Google has PageRank, this is People Rank in a way, right, where Yep. It can kinda, like, take these random amalgamations of data and say, hey. Todd may be an interesting person to talk to. His kids are x years older, but blah blah blah blah, and being able to connect with those people faster. And the other thought experiment I did, which I'll I promise I'll tie back to the the the community and everything, but even with this awesome community, even with, like, my network minded focus and trying to kind of be a connector and enjoying doing all that, I still very much find myself power lawing a lot of it, right, where I think of the same 20 people almost no matter what.

Right? Like, Todd, if you come to me, like, who's smart on, you know, x? There's a pretty high likelihood it's I'm gonna think of 1 of those 20 people. Of course, that's not correct. Of course, that's not appropriate.

Right? Like, all the interesting stuff would be in the long tail of someone I haven't spoken to in 2 years, and I forgot about what they did and whatever. I don't need to hold that in my head anymore with this copilot AI networking thing that I think could and should exist, and that excites the crap out of me. Right? Like, I think the opportunity for that to become an engraved part of people's lives, and, it's more personal than just googling something or chat GPT ing something.

Right? Like, of course, that's amazing, and that'll exist, and, like, I use it all the time. But there's very much still a world where that human connection matters more than getting the right answer. Right? Like, ChatChica could tell me, you know, these are some things you could do to try to deal with a child that has sensory issues.

But a half hour conversation with another parent that has gone through that recently is so much more delightful. So the little experiments I'm trying to do is to understand with a simple type forum, like nothing fancy with AI or anything, but just, like, what does that process look like? What are people, like, willing to share? How can we, you know, maybe scrape a little bit of LinkedIn or Twitter to find interesting connections? Who in my mind comes up, you know, searching through our partner directory based on what people have answered.

And it's super manual right now. Like, I probably did 10 or 15 of these surveys out of 400 people, and it probably took me an hour and a half to get through that, to, like, really give thoughtful feedback and think about it and not just think of those first ten people, but search my LinkedIn and but I think that's the right first step. Make it manual. Try to make the quality bar as high as it possibly can be. Take notes on, like, what worked and what didn't.

But, again, the the hope would be that one day, you don't have to wait for my survey to come out. You can just kinda, like, go to Lattice GPT or whatever the the UI eventually looks like and find those relevant people within the community or your LinkedIn or whatever. And I'm not approaching this as, like, a a startup that I'm building. It's, like, a problem I want solved. So if somebody's doing this already, like, please, I would pay for this, like, very gladly for that, but I haven't found it.

So, you know, in a way, I'm trying to just keep building and making progress. And worst case, I understand the problem set very deeply. And best case, you know, maybe this ends up becoming something interesting in 5 years too.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. I guess I I wanna put more of a fine point on some of this. I I honestly think that, you know, use your sensory example. Right? You're dealing with it, but, like, you have no kind of academic or training in it.

And so your your base knowledge is so small, it's just you have the child in front of you. Whereas you talk to somebody who's an expert that's willing to give you the time, the gap for them, it's nothing. Right? Like, this is what I do every day. And so the gap to fill that, in a way that's a 30 minute conversation, is so impactful, and it just gives you so many more tools in a much quicker mind.

And so you just look at all the different areas in our lives where we have and I I know I filled out the survey. You gave me some really good feedback. I was actually really kinda blown away by just the the thoughtfulness and the and the depth that you did, and so I'm appreciative of it. And I do think that, like, you getting in helping me get in touch with people that I can actually solve these problems, and for them, it's not much. Right?

Like, it it's kind of like it's time, but it's not like it's these are top of mind type things. And I think that is the interesting part of this is, for me to go do this and to invest that time to get to that level is going to be a much higher investment. And 9 times out of 10, I'm probably not getting there, to be super honest, because your spread's so thin. And so right. Totally right.

I I just think that you're onto something. And if you can create an environment of like minded people that are willing to donate time in their domain expertise areas, I think we can really kind of elevate the group as a whole. I really do.

Blas:

I appreciate your Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, that that leverage to me is the thing that could make this, you know, 10 x, 100 x type experience. Right?

Where, again, you're thinking about x all day long. This is what you love. This is what you do. I in a 5 minute conversation, you could save me tons of time, effort, money, stress, whatever. And it doesn't matter to you.

Right? Like, it can literally be, like, a 5 minute conversation. So, yeah, that that's the that's the imbalance. That's the friction that I think could be solved for that, again, tremendously helps, like, everyone in that equation, which I think is fun.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. So let's pivot a little bit because all of this knowledge is interesting, and we can geek out on the on the on the people that love to do this, but it's the applied piece of it. And I guess the part that I was kind of interested in in talking to you about, and this is, you know, where we talk mostly about startups, is you've now kind of pivoted and you opened, which was great by saying you have to classify yourself today, you'd be a founder. And so now you're taking this knowledge and you're applying it to startups that you're participating in. And, you know, there's a couple of them that you and I have talked about, blank, the app that you've been working on is is one that you've been working on with your wife, social media, one with the Maven, that I think is interesting.

So why don't you pick one of these to kinda start and saying, how do you go from knowledge that's gone from kind of book to this framework to this network to now being a founder and applying it. Because, like, that's where people are, like, rubber meets the road. Right? You gotta apply all this stuff to a problem that you wanna go solve and in a need that you see in the marketplace.

Blas:

Yeah. Totally. So that that's the crux of this whole thing is just is it useful. Right? I again, I have no interest.

I'm not defending a thesis. I'm not an academic. I have I have no dogma to defend. If if I find one of these ideas is wrong or stupid, I discard it. Right?

Exactly. So there's there's definitely become, again, getting back to Pareto and power laws, there's definitely, in my world, a group of, call it, 10 to 15 ideas that I come back to kind of most often. Right? And that is a function of me being an angel and kind of investing in certain things, me being a founder, me being a dad, all those things where maybe in 10 years there'll be a different set.

Todd Gagne:

Set of problems, for sure.

Blas:

Exactly right, exactly right. Yeah, I mean, are there certain ideas that would be helpful to dive into first, or, like, what what do you think would be most useful for the

Todd Gagne:

Well, I think maybe just, like I'm curious about maybe just talking about, like, let's pick, blank, from an app perspective and talk about the genesis of that. You know, is that one of your problems that you did? And then basically, if there's any areas that you think you could have hide that, like, you had some leverage learning from all of the work that you've done that you applied to this because I think those are interesting evolutions. The genesis story is always interesting.

Blas:

Yeah. So this you're helping me find a theme in my life where, it's a very selfish theme of, like, solving my own problems. And I think I could do a better job of that because when I decide to try something, it's coming from an authentic place. Right? It's not a it's not a made up thing of, like, I think someone should build this.

It's like, oh, no. I'm facing this this issue myself. So to, to start with blank, it's a very simple concept. We wanna make gen AI accessible to everyone. We wanna be help people be more creative every day, and the genesis was actually with my daughter.

She was 4 at the time. She was interested in learning how to read. We were doing bedtime stories. It was, you know, kind of typical parent stuff doing nighttime books and whatever, and we had this experience, Todd, where, we started doing bedtime stories with Chat CPT, and that was kind of interesting, right, and, but the proverbial 10 x moment was when we took one of some of her stories and just made AI images with it. And you could literally sense and feel this lean in experience that we had with her where her eyes widened and, you know, she had this alter ego of jaguar girl, and we created simulations of jaguar girl in every color.

But the cool experience with that was making learning feel like play, where for her, it wasn't there was no notion of learning how to read. There was no notion of, like, what is a verb and what is a noun. It was her own curiosity that was propelling her to ask a bunch of questions. Right? Like, oh, how do we how do we make this green?

And we talked about the different AI styles. And, what if we tried this? And, you know, I kind of, like, poke her a little bit. Like, let's not think of a jungle. What's a different landscape?

What's a landscape? And we'd talk about that for a bit. And that whole flow was super interesting, and we did that for a while. Started talking to other parents. How do you spend time with your kids?

How do you think about reading and learning? And, are you introducing AI? And no one had a really good answer, and that was just interesting to my wife and I. She, you know, has her master's in education, and we just talk a lot about these things. But the overwhelming reaction was we would use something like this.

We want something like this, but a lot of the AI websites still are, like, quite graphic. Right? Like, I wouldn't want my daughter just, like, surfing through some of these Gen AI websites. You know, she just don't know what she's gonna find. So we kind of started puzzling putting pieces of this puzzle together of something that has to be super simple to use, something that's fun, something that makes it social.

Right? I think that's another element that a lot of these apps aren't using. And it's been really interesting that, again, we came from this at a as a perspective for as parents, kids, maybe like a reading tool, and all that. But as we built blank and take a quick step back, it's basically Mad Libs with AI. Right?

We give you a daily story. You fill in the blanks. This gives you your AI image, and you're kind of thrown into a feed with other people's images. You get inspired. You see what other people do.

Even though we approached it from a parent perspective, the demographic has exploded, like, way beyond that. So it's maybe like an interesting wedge that, you know, we had hypothesis a, and parents still use it. It's a nighttime routine for a bunch of people. It's really cute and really cool to see. But the vast majority of people using it now are gen c casual gamers type.

So it's we're still learning really a couple months into the journey. But as we get back to ideas and what maybe helped, like, I think it's just as simple as it sounds, a scientific mindset. Right? Like, not going into it with a preconceived notion. This is a problem, and this is the solution, and this is how it looks.

But just asking questions, like, would you use this? How do you spend time with your kids? Do you use AI? Why not? And forming those kind of rough questions, if you will.

And then another solving your own problems, we talked about as well. And then another equation, let's call it, is just like this notion that friction removal equals value. And there's healthy friction, as we spoke about with Lattice. Right? Like Yep.

Total zero friction might not be the right thing, but it has to be at the right time. Right? This is a a silly example, but maybe it gets at my thinking a little bit. Betty Crocker had the cake mixes. Right?

And when it first came out, you literally just added water, and you had your you had your cake. And it didn't sell well. Nobody liked it. It was too easy. And probably some intern at Betty Crocker had the stupid idea.

Like, let's remove eggs. Let's remove one of the ingredients, and now they have to add eggs and water. And that seems totally paradoxical. Right? You're making it harder.

Why would people do that? And Rory Sutherland would probably have a funnier answer than I do. But there's an element that, like, you have to take pride in it in a way. Right? If you're serving your cake, it's I made it and not just out of a box or whatever.

And there's an element for us in there as well. Right? Like, we could build an app where you just open it and get a random image, but you don't care about that. You're like, that's not your image. Why should you care?

So there's that healthy tension of, like, where do you add friction? You add a little friction in the onboarding, or if you opt to think of a of a color, of a location, of their favorite brand of ice cream, whatever it is, and that generates an output that feels personalized to you. Meaning

Todd Gagne:

to you.

Blas:

Yeah. I'll stop there, but let me know if there's anything you wanna double click on.

Todd Gagne:

No. It's kinda interesting, and and and I think, like, just the genesis of where where it goes. And you and I brainstormed a couple times on where it could go over time. Right? I mean, that's there's a lot of opportunity from, like, the road map exploding into other kind of avenues on this.

And now you're kind of out raising capital to, you know, support it. And so, maybe talk a little bit about that experience. I mean, again, you're probably your network component of it that you had, that you've been developing is probably a great use of that as well. But, again, you kind of pro programmatically thinking about, like, why is this a good investment for somebody, and putting yourself in that shoes and and being able to pitch it. Is there a lot of lessons learned?

I mean, you you probably haven't done this, but you've been on the other side of this where you've actually seen, startups, and so you know what you want to see. But, like, talk to me as a founder raising capital versus somebody who's been evaluating deals on the other side, which you did. I I don't know if it was an internship, but you you had some experience in that as well. Yeah.

Blas:

The first thing that comes to mind is the tennis days of going all in and just failing over and over and over again. Right? That's, that's the nature of the thing, and that's okay, and I'm not comfortable. Lots of those. And it just takes 1, and, you know, that's that's part of the game.

But, yeah, I think this at the at the edge of the frontier, humans are just storytellers, right? That's probably one of the last things that will be kind of stripped from us if ever is we love hearing stories, we love telling stories, and at this stage, that's mainly what I'm doing. Right? Like, we only have a few months of data. In the grand scheme of things, we're super small.

We're super early. I'm not going to sell you on my revenue. I'm not going to sell you on those sorts of things. So it's it's what could this thing become? And telling a simple story that sequentially makes sense, logically makes sense, that this is happening, which means this is possible, which means if we act on it, we can achieve this.

And each of those being true and non obvious and simple leading to an unexpected outcome. Right? So that's kind of the way I think about how to, like, try to craft a story. So, none of those things should make you say, like, no. That's wrong, or I don't agree with you.

Or if you do, you at least know which vector to attack, and we can have a conversation about that. But at least the kind of hypothesis is clear. These couple things have happened. I think that presents this opportunity. We're attacking this wedge in this way, and I think the, call it, 5 or 10 year vision is to do x y z.

Again, rough formula of how I think about those things and what I appreciate from founders is, you know, like, I'm like, why could this be big? Why now? Why this team? Those rough three buckets, I think if you can answer those concisely and compellingly, you at least have the framework for a good story.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. I guess one of the pieces that you didn't put in there that I I think is always, an element to anything that we look at either from an investment or from an entrepreneur is just the execution. Right? It's like, what's your track record of executing And what do I you know, you you've kind of just outlined a series of stage gates. Right?

You tell the story. You say, here's what I've done. Here's where I think I'm gonna go. And really, what it is is a belief on, do I believe in your future? And then secondarily, do I believe that you can get to your future?

Right? Because a lot of entrepreneurs, I think, see the future okay, but they don't do a great job of executing against that. And so maybe do you have anything that you use in that talk track that basically is it just the historical? Like, how do you show people what you've done and, like, get them to commit to believing that you have the ability to execute on the vision you have?

Blas:

Yeah. It's it's a little circular, unfortunately, I think, but the best predictor of future success is what you've already done. Right? So show me something impressive, something cool. Right?

Have you built something for fun on the weekends? You know? Have you become number 1 at, you know, Mario Kart? Like, it's like you can you know, if they're 20 years old, it's something kind of different than, you know, someone in their, you know, late thirties, is it their startup, whatever it is. But that that track record of past success, I think, is important.

And or there's either references and your understanding of this human on the other side. Right? How compelling are they? Why are they the right person? Have they built something like this before?

What's their insight? I think that's just, like, an interesting question you asked this to me. It's like, why are you building this? Why are you the right person for this? But let me pose the question to you.

Like, how do you how do you think about that?

Todd Gagne:

I guess so I I mean, I think what you've done in the past is certainly a a big portion of that. The problem is when you're 22, 24, 25, you don't have, like, you don't have a big body of stuff. And so I guess the next thing that we look at is, how, what's the minutia of the plan they're putting together? Do they understand kind of the details, and the accountability? Do they have kind of a project mind management mindset, right, is a lot of what you're trying to do.

So you have a big problem that you're trying to do. Can you deconstruct it into smaller chunks? Do you understand what's in those smaller chunks? Do you have good ownership and accountability? Do you understand dependencies?

I think we look for a lot of that stuff. Specifically, I do, especially early stage stuff because I think things morph and things like, your initial idea can pivot. Right? And so you're betting on the individual at most of the stage of what I do. Yeah.

And so I don't really care I mean, I care about your idea, but I don't care that much about it. I care about your ability to execute more than anything else. And so we look for 3 things when we do this. We we we look for, somebody who has some domain expertise. We look for somebody who has, coachability.

And ours is, like, we will, string you along a little bit in our application process where we basically give you some research and stuff to go do after every one of the calls. And the question we're just trying to see is do you understand a good idea when you hear it? Are you willing to go do the work? And are you willing to kinda listen and kind of reiterate your your ideas? Entrepreneurs are hard because you you you you've been told no in so many cases, and so how do you take good information that's accretive to your idea without saying no to everybody?

And then the last one we we talk about is just execution. So if you're good at executing, I and you're good at coaching and you have some domain expertise, usually, that's a good mixture of things for us. We could do something with you. And so, but to me, that level of execution and understanding execution is super important, and it's not just about the past. It's about how you think about the future.

Blas:

I love that. Yeah. The resonates a lot. I think, is this person on a hyperlearning curve? I think it's just an interesting question.

Right? Every time you talk to them, they've learned something new, they've experimented with something, that progression. There's a few people that come to mind who's, like, every time I talk to them, they're, like, a different human, which is super interesting and really powerful. And then, again, getting back to your your words, not mine, but no black box. Right?

If you ask them, you know, about go to market or, you know, your, acquisition spend or something. Right? Like, if they don't know, next time you talk to them, they will know, or they get back to you later that day. Hey. I thought about it.

I looked into it. That's kinda like how I think about it. So that gets into coachability and execution, but those those came to mind too as you're talking about it. And I

Todd Gagne:

think just to be honest to say, I don't know. Right? Like, I mean, the confidence. Right? Because I think we you know, I think everybody feels like they wanna have all the answers, and it's like you're just like I think it's the it's even more impressive that you said, I don't know, but I'm gonna come back to you in a week, and I'm gonna have a better formed opinion.

And then you're gonna basically beat it up and try to make it better even further. Right? Like, if you have that mindset, like, I wanna give you a big virtual hug. Right? You're just totally That's what I love.

I love that. Yeah. And so, I mean, that that's definitely a piece that we look through. So, maybe talk to me a little bit about Maven because I think Maven's kind of an interesting start up that you have. It's, know, in the social, media space, but it's not traditional social media.

It's it's, really the concept of of really trying to not follow people and and like ideas. It's or it's it's about concepts and ideas, not people. And and I think that's an interesting thing in the world that we live in today. Again, is it gonna be the predominant social media platform of the world? Probably not.

But, again, it's this niche of people that value learning and these topics that they wanna follow. And so maybe talk a little bit about the genesis of that and kind of, kind of where you are in that kind of progression because that one, I think you started before blank. Right? And so and that one's kind of got a a team around it that you're kinda building out. So maybe talk a little bit about, because I think that probably came out of your community.

Right? Some of the Lattice work community and some of the topics.

Blas:

Yeah. It's it's very much a a combination. My cofounder is this guy, Kent Stanley, who, has done a bunch of amazing research on serendipity. He's kind of a a grandfather to the AI field in this open endedness research. And he's written a really interesting book, which is how we got connected, actually, called Why Greatness Can't Be Planned.

And I'm gonna butcher it, and he you should have him on, and he'll he'll explain this better. The main thing I got out of it is just that the there are helpful objectives, if the path is known. It's really helpful to have a goal. You know, I wanna execute on 1, 2, 3 so that I can achieve, you know, tangible goal a. But if it's a truly innovative thing, something that's never done before, being too objectively driven can be harmful.

Right? It's really, really hard, Ken would say, impossible to say, I'm gonna start this company. Here are the 50 objectives I need to accomplish, and I have a successful company. If it could be formulated, VCs would maybe be out of a job, and, you know, like, there there would be a lot of implications to that. So I kind of take it as true that what he's saying.

The vision for Maven is to increase the amount of serendipity in people's lives by helping them build an interest graph of sorts, right, to help understand for Todd to understand, you know, you're interested in things 1 through 10. Because of that, you might be interested in this person, this blog, this post, this whatever. So it's kinda like a serendipity recommendation engine, if you will. And where objectivity comes to mind is a lot of social platforms are driven by a popularity contest of sorts. Right?

How many likes does this post have? How many followers does this person have? And, again, there's nothing wrong with that, but it does kinda lead to a maximization problem that, maybe doesn't give you the results you want. And what I think is super interesting with what Maven is trying to accomplish is to attack the problem in a totally different way. Right?

Social media without likes and follows seems paradoxical. How could that work? It might be wrong. It could be wrong, but it's at least different. It's at least weird.

It's attacking the problem from a different way. And I think if you can solve that, if you can legitimately provide serendipitous recommendations, that there's something really powerful about that.

Todd Gagne:

And so maybe talk to me about, like, just how you're getting people on the platform. Right? You you got the people in the lattice work that was probably the kind of it was the genesis of starting this. But as it's kind of expanded, how how is kind of word-of-mouth, how do how do you find the people that you think would be resonating on this? And has it kind of evolved in the way you want outside of the core group of people that you knew, you know, to the point where it's, like, you know, concentric circles of close people, beta to a community to, people I don't know, and is it interacting in the way you expected?

Blas:

Yeah. Yeah. A lot of lessons there. I think the an initial mistake was maybe to be a little bit too horizontal. And I think one of the most interesting things we've seen is, like, very deep technical niches of people.

Let's just say, like, deep AI research have probably gotten the most out of Maven at this point because we've tried to structure it so that it's better. It's more conducive for longer form conversation. It's there's no character limit, like Twitter, we don't do a bunch of stuff. And because of that, there aren't like, honestly, the closest comp in a lot of cases is like an old school forum, right? Like, from 2 1000.

And in some ways, maybe that's an interesting comp. Like, there are forums that have gone on for 20, 30 years that don't have likes, that don't have follows, that have millions of people in it. That's super interesting. So in any case, I think that the groups the niches that I've gotten the most are those that don't have a conducive place to go super deep on the topic that they enjoy for whatever reason. There's a subreddit that can't support it.

There's whatever. Right? There's some friction to that thing. The interesting question will be, can we drastically expand that niche beyond, like, super technical, nerdy people? If not, this will not be a social network that can scale.

Right? We will need to rethink the business model and the go to market and all those things, and maybe it just becomes a a very prestigious community. Right? If you have the 10,000 most interesting AI researchers in the world on the

Todd Gagne:

All good.

Blas:

All good. Exactly. Yeah. So it's it's there's a really good post I actually come back to a lot. Brian Balfour wrote it.

I forget the exact title, but it's something like going from 0 to a 110,000,000 or a $100,000,000 in sales, something like that. I'll send it to you. But Yeah. He does a good job of kind of explaining, you know, your your channel, your market, your product, your business model, and that those are all very deeply intertwined. Right?

So it's not just change your business model, everything remains the same. No. Like, that will impact everything else. Right? Yes.

He has some good graphics in there. Just, like, understand where you fall on the, like, mouse to whale quilt, like, you know, graph, if the spectrum, if you will. Are you if you're trying to acquire, you know, a million mice, as he calls it, and you're spending a $100 per like, you're not gonna get there. Like, there's just not enough capital. So he just does a good job of kinda, like, walking you through that sequence to help understand, you know, your market changes.

That's gonna impact everything else beyond that. So, anyway, maybe that's useful.

Todd Gagne:

Yeah. That's interesting. So maybe, like, to wrap this up, like, you've gone from the discipline you started with in learning to building, you know, the, like, the lattice work where it's it's a a sequence of all this data to now applying it to startups. If you had to go back and tell somebody that's, like, you know, early in their life, I think one of the things that I I think from a theme standpoint is this continuous learning. Right?

I mean, I think that's like a a key theme that you've got in all of this, a community component of it. What were some of the the takeaways that you would say of of kind of your last 10 years if you were to talk to somebody who's maybe not interested in doing the exact same thing, obviously, you've done, but apply some of the concepts to being a founder with some of the elements that you had, where would you start?

Blas:

Yeah. I think I the first thing that comes to mind is just having this approach that asking for help is an active service. That's kind of a a line that comes up sort of in my head a lot where I think I was insecure and not willing to ask for help when I really needed it. And going back to what we said, you know, if I came to you with an ask and you're the right person, 5 minutes can change my life, right, and vice versa. So I think just being more comfortable with that and, you know, obviously, you need to be thoughtful and, you know, do basic googling and chat GPT ing and whatever.

Right? Like, you don't wanna ask an expert something that you can Google in 2 seconds. But I think if you genuinely approach someone on Twitter, cold email, through a friend, whatever, hey, Todd. I've read every post you've done, and I'm really struggling with my go to market, blah blah blah blah blah. Do you have 10 minutes for a conversation?

Your hit rate's gonna be pretty high. And that continues to shock me, right, just reaching out to amazing people that I learn from on podcasts or via books or whatever it might be, and just really leaning into that. And I I think it's one of those things that's much easier in your twenties than it is in your thirties and forties and fifties. Maybe it shouldn't be, but Yep. I think you can get a I think you can get away with a lot more in your twenties than you think you can in the moment.

Right? Like, you think you're old and you think you should have all the answers, but, you know, someone in, let's say, our positions, if a 22 year old just reached out with, like, a semi thoughtful question, odds are we're gonna get back to them in some capacity. Right? And

Todd Gagne:

Yeah.

Blas:

That's, like, that just keeps getting easier and, like, more interesting. So I think just, like, lean into that. And then I think the the question that is maybe helpful to pose weekly, monthly, whatever, is just are you on the steepest learning curve? And if you're not, think about that. Right?

It doesn't mean you need to, you know, start stop your start up or quit your job or, you know, leave your partner, nothing like that. But I think it's a helpful thing to have in the back of your mind of just, you know, are you stagnant? Are you learning the things you want to learn? Are you building the things you want to build? And if not, how do you change that?

Right? Sometimes it can be a simple experiment. You can try something every once in a while. You can, you know, run a app. You can post something.

You know what? You can run experiments daily. You can do that for free, and it doesn't have to be this whole elaborate scheme that you have to, you know, spend months months thinking about. It'll tie in with maybe one one last thing from my end at least is just this this idea that action produces information. And you can especially for people who are maybe, like, more intellectually minded or whatever, I think it's easier to just sit in your head and brainstorm about things ad nauseam.

Right? That can cause anxiety and worry and all these things, and you just don't know. And I think a hard thing, but a very, very valuable thing is just put something out into the world. And, yeah, again, it could be as simple as a tweet. If I were to start this community and do this thing that offered these services, would you pay for it?

And if nobody does anything, you can listen to that. Yeah. Like, maybe maybe listen to that. So I think there's a lot of cheap, fast iteration you can do that helps you learn really quickly. It doesn't take months of planning and raising a ton of money to, you know, do most things, and you can get that feedback cycle going pretty quickly these days.

Todd Gagne:

You know, it's it's interesting to me, like, the three things that you outlined, they all have a theme of, like, you can't have fear or failure. Right? Like, in every case, if you're asking for help, like, what's the failure of of saying no? If you want on the steepest learning curve and you wanna try some things, you need to be okay with it doesn't need to happen, action versus, you know, like, there's always a fear to this. And so I do think this is one of the things I think society wise, we're afraid to take some of these risks, and we really shouldn't be.

I mean, the the ramifications of anything you just talked about is is nothing, right, in in the grand scheme of things. And so I think getting over this stigma of what does success really look like. I learned more from my failures than I probably did my successes, honestly. And so I think, you know, whether you're an entrepreneur or you're just a learning machine, the ability to put yourself out there without, like, expects with a high expectation of the outcome, I think, is an important piece to and I think the theme of what you just kinda said in some of these three items.

Blas:

Yeah. You probably just perfectly psychoanalyzed me of, like, perfectionist who, like, doesn't like to lose or fail, and, that's been my, like, hard lesson is, like, that's okay. Right? That's probably the Right. My right or my bias, if you will.

But I

Todd Gagne:

think it's great. I mean, I think, like, that's important. I think, you know, if more people had that sort of attitude, lots of things get easier. Right? You just gotta put yourself out there, and then you have to take a little bit of risk.

So Yeah.

Blas:

I think that's right.

Todd Gagne:

Well, Blas, I really appreciate this. I mean, your progression is this kind of a fun thing to look at over the last 10 years. Right? I mean, you you've come a long way, and then seeing you apply it to the start up world, is really kind of interesting and obviously near and dear to my heart. So I appreciate you taking the time to to share your wisdom and your journey with us today.

And I think there's a lot of great actionable nuggets out of this. So thanks for taking the time.

Blas:

Yeah. I appreciate it, Todd. And, you know, let's, let's do this again in a year, and we'll see the progression and, you know, have these ideas played out, what's right, what's wrong. So, anyway, thanks for having me today.

Todd Gagne:

Okay. Well, sounds good. Thank you.

Blas:

Cool. Thanks, Todd.