Building a Mission-Driven Hardware Company in a Disposable World

Summary‍

00:00 – Introduction and framing of mission-driven leadership

01:00 – Motivation, community, and choosing meaningful work

05:30 – Product development roots and manufacturing perspective

18:25 – The origin of Paleblue and the battery waste problem

29:10 – Battery innovation, performance, and sustainability tradeoffs

33:00 – Market validation, early challenges, and persistence

39:20 – Partnerships, scale, and unexpected growth vectors

51:40 – Lessons for founders and scaling CEOs

Full Transcript

Jeff Holman (00:01.1)
Welcome back to the breakout CEO. I'm your host, Jeff Holman. I'm with intellectual strategies, a law firm for scaling businesses and startups. And as I've mentioned before, this podcast is all about bringing you scenes from companies kind of behind the curtain scenes, right? So that you get to see a little bit of what's happening with companies as they're going through their growth, maybe stuff that's not always advertised as the successes on LinkedIn or whatever, but you get to see a little bit behind the curtain with what we're doing.

And today I'm super happy to have Tom Bishop with me. Tom, welcome to the show, Tom. Yeah, you were so kind to, I reached out. think what happened is I saw a LinkedIn post. You know, we've been connected for a little bit, I think, and I saw a LinkedIn post and every time I see it, I think of these batteries that I've got sitting on my shelf over here, these pale blue batteries. We're gonna get into that, that's your current company.

Tom Bishop (00:35.688)
Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate it.

Tom Bishop (00:49.835)
No

Jeff Holman (01:00.012)
Before we jump into like your background or your history and your chronology or whatever, I like to sometimes ask some of my guests, know, start out with the easy question or maybe it's a hard question. I'm not sure which, but you know, like all CEOs, you're a busy guy. You've got a lot going on. We were just talking about kids before this. know you're, I know if you've got a 12 year old son, you're in the, you're in the thick of it. What is it though?

despite all the business, all the successes, maybe some of the challenges, what is it that keeps you motivated from day to day?

Tom Bishop (01:31.67)
Yeah, you know, there's a, this is a long one, but there's a series of events in my life and a lot of them resulted in career decisions that allowed me to contribute to the communities that were important to me. And they, those communities have expanded that, you know, kind of more personal communities into larger groups. And you know, what I, what I consider now is like a global effort to help people power their lives better.

And those decisions along the way have just kind of resulted in larger, more impactful, let's say missions. And the nature of those missions has always felt like meaningful enough to get my butt out of bed on hard days or, you know, when you're tired, it's like having that meaningful nature of the work that you're doing. It creates its own energy and not beyond just me, like for the team.

Jeff Holman (02:09.484)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Bishop (02:30.562)
for the vendors, for the people that we work with, for everyone that's involved in that mission. It's a glue that doesn't revolve around me or something or the P &L or those sorts of metrics. It's like we're on this meaningful mission that inevitably is going to take longer than you ever thought. It's inevitable that the hard stuff takes a long time, but the meaningful stuff makes that time fly by.

I think that just comes down to choosing missions that are meaningful near and dear to your heart.

Jeff Holman (03:05.698)
Yeah, I love that. And I love the emphasis on community. Have you always had an emphasis on community or was there a time in your life when, I mean, I'm going to guess most of us went through the normal, you know, youth and teenage years when everything was kind of very self-focused, know, self, we're looking at ourselves when maybe a little bit embarrassed of how we're growing up or whatever. And then at some point, was there a time in your life when, you started to say, wow, there's this broader community. like now I've got to focus on something more than just me.

Tom Bishop (03:18.712)
Ahem.

Tom Bishop (03:35.638)
Yeah, so it'll sound a little bit selfish and kind of a, but maybe for people who grew up in this sort of small background, I grew up in countryside, I found board sports early with skiing or snowboarding, skateboarding, wakeboarding kind of in the early days, late 80s, early 90s. And so my community was a small group of friends that we'd go to the mountain together or we'd go to skate a curb, go in the local grocery store or whatever.

Jeff Holman (04:02.829)
Where were you snowboarding by the way? Because in the 80s, snowboarding, that wasn't allowed everywhere.

Tom Bishop (04:05.304)
Oh, Song Mountain. Yeah, Song Mountain, upstate New York, 700 and something feet of vertical. You had to take a special test to ride the J-Bar. You had to take a different test to be able to ride the chairlift. They would inspect your board for a leash and metal edges. But you found this community of friends that my nearest neighbors were pretty far away, real countryside living.

And those friendships were really meaningful. So those sports became the way to get together with the friends that kind of gave you an identity, a community. You know, I carried that through high school. But the real, I say that all of that to mention, I almost died from a staph infection in my early twenties, you know, as a result from a knee surgery gone bad after a snowboard accident. And I spent

two months in and out of the hospital on my deathbed for most of that. Lost 50 pounds, couldn't walk without a walker and all that. And that was the moment where I came out of that and I started calling friends and I was like, I need to work in something that I care about every day. Like every day from now on, I need to be working on something. I don't care what it is. I don't care if I get paid or not. I need to go work on stuff that I care about. those two months kind of was a...

Jeff Holman (05:11.341)
Cheers.

Tom Bishop (05:31.712)
an emotional reset of sorts where you're just like, what am I doing? What should I do next? And it was like, I need to work on something that I care about. so that was the pivotal change for me kind of as a person.

Jeff Holman (05:46.669)
What were you working on before that, that you felt like maybe you needed a change? Was it like, gotta shift from what I'm doing to something better, or was it just like, I need to focus?

Tom Bishop (05:48.693)
Tom Bishop (05:56.148)
I needed a willingness to focus. I had been undergrad and this is a, I didn't know what I wanted to study. It took me a while in undergrad to figure it out. I figured it out, studied that, didn't know where that could take me. So I was like, man, I don't know what I could do. What kind of career could I pursue with a physics degree? I guess I'll go to grad school. And so I ended up in grad school and what made sense after grad school.

or after undergrad for physics degree was engineering and materials. So I ended up in material science in the mechanical engineering department. But I didn't know what I was going to do with that either because I wasn't really an engineer. And what do you do with a materials degree wasn't really clear to me. So I had this interest in things that I'd like to study and learn about, but I had not enough applicable experience. I wasn't doing hands-on internships along the way and things I was. And so I'd been

doing stuff that should add up to a career someday or whatever, but I didn't know what I was going to do. that turned into a realization, I just need to get doing stuff that I care about. And for me at that time, what I cared about more than anything was snowboarding. I worked in shops. I'd been teaching since I was 12. competed. I'd done a bunch of stuff. But I was like, I need to go work in the snowboard industry for a few years after I get out of this hospital bed and just, you know,

do that. And so I ended up being very fortunate to make some phone calls to friends and not landed a fun job in the snowboard world for a couple of years. that was, that, I didn't piece it all together. This is all in retrospect. I wasn't that wise at that time to know exactly what I was doing, but the, the dots started connecting for me in my decision-making process about career decisions after that. And I can trace it all. could trace this back if I write a book someday. Trace it all the way back to

decisions I made in junior high school, like, it's obvious in retrospect that the decisions I made that defined the next period of my life were all based on what was meaningful to me. You know, me and me being an individual, a part of a friend group, a part of a sport and an activity in a community and maybe national and global markets when I got into product development and things.

Jeff Holman (08:13.42)
When were you doing product development at the Snowboarding company? Where you at by the way?

Tom Bishop (08:17.144)
I started working for K2. I was working as a tech rep. for those in the ski and snowboard world, they'll understand what that means. K2 and a handful of other brands as a rep group out of the mid-Atlantic. Then after a year there, the rep group moved to Burton, got pulled in with Burton snowboards. so Burton became the driver of the sales rep business about

A year into our work with Burton, the guys at Burton realized that I had a degree in engineering. I was on their sales team. happened to Chinese and the guys in the product team were like, you're the tech rep and you have all of that going on. What's that all about? And so that brought me in-house at Burton. got pulled in by the product team to work on product development and manufacturing.

Jeff Holman (09:08.11)
Very cool.

Well, a lot of us snowboarders have just gotten very jealous of your experience being at Burton. So that's pretty cool.

Tom Bishop (09:17.63)
Well, yeah, it was a dream come true in many ways. An honor, an honor for some random kid from upstate New York to land in what was at the time a very globally dominant brand, like the real driver in innovation in the space. Not that they aren't anymore, but some of the patents that really, really protected that early stage.

for Burton have expired, which has been great because the rest of the brands can utilize those innovations now as the IP has expired. But back then, mean, not only like the origination of the snowboard world, Burton was really a driver, but the culture and the dominance of them from a product innovation standpoint was, yeah, a real honor and just good timing for me where I was at. So got lucky.

Jeff Holman (10:11.66)
Yeah. that's very cool. I've got, I've got quite a bit of snowboarding equipment upstairs, all with the Burton logo on it. So it's a, it's a great brand. Well, so now I'm really curious at Burton. you were doing tech, tech sales or tech rep stuff. were, you move in-house to Burton, probably doing product design and that, and, and what's the path now you're running your own company here. You're, you've designed your own products. You've launched your own products. You're selling into.

Tom Bishop (10:27.362)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (10:39.746)
consumer and defense, think. so there's some, I mean, that's, those are, you might be selling batteries, but I expect consumer and defense product characteristics, qualities, those are not necessarily exactly the same. You're in two different worlds there. What's the path that took you from Burton to where you're at now?

Tom Bishop (11:04.204)
Yeah, I'll try to do a brief summary of that. Yeah, I ended up helping set up a lot of manufacturing in Asia. A lot of the early ski industry and snowboard industry product innovation was driven out of the ski industry out of Europe. And the ski manufacturers in Europe knew skis better, and so they knew how to make snowboards better, right? And so that was just kind of the

Jeff Holman (11:09.869)
We got time. We got time.

Jeff Holman (11:24.238)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Bishop (11:33.164)
the center of the product development manufacturing world for the ski industry. But those who wanted to really innovate, and this is kind of maybe at the advent of more affordable manufacturing in Asia and a lot of the innovation that came out of Asia, helped set up manufacturing, helped set up teams and processes, spent 11 years on the ground in Asia myself. I was in Taiwan for a few years, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Xiamen for a while.

Jeff Holman (11:56.571)
which part?

Tom Bishop (12:02.698)
in and out of Southern China and Zhuhai and Western China and all over. But, you know, I called Shenzhen my home for a long time.

Jeff Holman (12:07.021)
Very cool.

Jeff Holman (12:12.609)
beautiful place. I've been there a times and always love going back.

Tom Bishop (12:16.962)
You know, strange, Shenzhen's a giant metropolis now of, I don't know, it's probably 15 or 20 million now. I was there for the first subway line and a lot of the development of, there was these disparate districts in the city and they kind of all grew together.

Jeff Holman (12:32.971)
Yeah, because 25 years ago it was nothing like it is today, right?

Tom Bishop (12:36.12)
Yeah, it was very different. remember seeing all this dirt and holes in the ground. And now it's just going be like, I don't know, walking into Manhattan and having been there in the 1800s. Just kind like, wait, all this? But it happened really quickly. Like every day, it go out the door and see new buildings, new highways, new malls, new this, new that. So it was an exciting time. But Shenzhen is super cool because you can go surfing in Hong Kong or outside of Shenzhen.

Jeff Holman (12:50.135)
Yeah.

Tom Bishop (13:05.698)
good skateboarding around the city because it's all paved. Yeah, well, Hong Kong's got Big Wave Bay is probably the most famous little spot. Don Misha and Xiao Mesa outside of Shenzhen has decent waves. Not very good. We'd go down to Hainan or whatever, but I could also, there was an indoor snowboard place in Shanghai and there was direct flights from Shanghai and Hong Kong to Sapporo. So we could go to Hokkaido and for anybody that's been paying attention to Northern,

Jeff Holman (13:07.841)
Wait, wait, there's surfing over there?

I didn't know that.

Jeff Holman (13:32.973)
Nice.

Tom Bishop (13:35.362)
Japan, snow. That was, you if I'm to work in the snowboard industry to be able to like go direct flight to Hokkaido and spend some days in the powder up there, just made it all worth it. All of the factory days worth it. So yeah, I ended up in product development manufacturing. Was in close contact with the founder of Skullcandy for a long time. And as they started growing, got offered a position to set up their office and team there. So built out.

Jeff Holman (13:42.807)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (13:50.221)
That's awesome.

Tom Bishop (14:04.792)
Quite a large team with Skullcandy. At the time, we were making about 100,000 headphones a day. So business got big fast and had to build that team.

Jeff Holman (14:11.009)
Yeah. And Shenzhen is a place for that, right? Shenzhen is just electronics manufacturing capital of the world, pretty much.

Tom Bishop (14:16.918)
Correct, Yep, yep, so we did a lot of work and ended up back here in Park City because of that role, I was able to get that all set up and established and come back here and run the product organization here. So got to.

Jeff Holman (14:31.981)
How long were you with Skullcandy? Because they grew from nothing into a huge player. Maybe the player, right?

Tom Bishop (14:38.264)
Yeah, joined. Yeah, definitely the defining brand of the headphone space. I happened to work at a radio station and was like doing some DJ on air and do a lot of performance DJing, say. But I spent a lot of time with headphones. I can go back to high school mowing lawns with my Sony Walkman and I'm going to see cassette tapes and stuff. I spent a lot of time with headphones, which is what led me to reaching out to Skullcandy in the early days.

But Skullcandy redefined headphones because back then it was Sony, Panasonic, Phillips, black and gray headphones. That was it. And then suddenly you had iPod and then the iPhone and like you took your music out the door with you and you put headphones on your head and you walk around in public. So of course they should have some fashion element. And so the fashion part of it came first and then it was like, we need to engineer great headphones. need to incorporate good mechanical, electric, acoustic, human factors engineering into these fashion driven type headphones.

layer on the good acoustics and audio quality. really, like, headphones, people don't give them the credit are a very complicated engineering project.

Jeff Holman (15:43.982)
No, I mean, we see everybody, and we see everybody these days walking around with the big head over the ear headphones. You I've got a couple of pairs sitting around in my office. I won't fly without them anymore. But it used to be like the headphones I remember as a kid, man, you mentioned young MC. Like I'm thinking of sticking the tapes in the cassette player and rewinding and putting those like flimsy little wires with the foam pads, like the really light foam pads. Like that was a...

Tom Bishop (16:04.236)
Totally.

Tom Bishop (16:09.386)
Exactly.

Jeff Holman (16:13.185)
That was the cool thing they have. So.

Tom Bishop (16:14.552)
It was game changing. mean, like, if you're going to spend hours, whether it's like on a bus or on a plane or an airport or on a lawnmower, man, some good music makes that time so much more enjoyable.

Jeff Holman (16:26.571)
Yeah, and I think we had, I'm just thinking back to my childhood, I think we had a pair of kind of thick over the ear headphones, but they came with the record player and the amplifier and the, like it was the home stereo cabinet and everything that was, like that was the only place they plugged into, right? So.

Tom Bishop (16:46.338)
Yeah,

Tom Bishop (16:51.192)
Yeah, I just set up three turntables for my son is 12 and a musician and I was like, let me get all my vinyl from grandma and grandpa's house. I got so much vinyl and record player, you know, turntables in my old Gemini mixer. So I was set up in the basement and he's, yeah, getting to listen to a lot of, yeah, good, music. You know, there's something to the quality of listening to music from, you know, turntable. It's just MP3s kind of ruin the quality of music in a lot of ways.

Jeff Holman (16:59.041)
Jeff Holman (17:17.547)
It's been a while for me. Yeah, yeah, I it's been a while, but I've found myself on Amazon and other sites a few times. I'm like looking at turntables, maybe put one in the corner over here, but haven't pulled the trigger on it. Yeah, that's cool. So yeah.

Tom Bishop (17:29.817)
It's something nice about it. So I didn't finish your question. I went through the Skullcandy experience and the growth and private to public and all of that. And that was meaningful. I mentioned some of the through line here is like the things that were meaningful for me. For me, Skullcandy was a way to contribute to the action sports world actually, because Skullcandy supported athletes around the world to the tune of hundreds of, you know.

Jeff Holman (17:54.946)
Right.

Tom Bishop (17:56.92)
athletes through sponsorships and paying for their competition fees and hooking them up, let's say, but really channel a global market in audio. anyone who has ears listens to music has got an iPod or an MP3 player and channel all that to support this kind of global space. But the next move for me was a company called Owlet. And I'll pause a minute. I went to work for Owlet down in Salt Lake, which was, you know, a pulse oximeter sock for babies. I have, I was a new parent.

Jeff Holman (18:18.781)
yeah.

Tom Bishop (18:26.294)
And was like, OK, the meaningful mission for the next part of my life is to help take care of new parents because this is really hard. And Owlet was on the coolest mission. I missed the early, early days, but I joined like a week before the product launch. So I was in as it became the building time. Before that, was prototyping and engineering time. But it was like, let's build a business. And all the operations side of that was my responsibility, which was, you know.

Jeff Holman (18:33.697)
How far along was Owlet when you joined him?

Jeff Holman (18:41.74)
Okay.

Tom Bishop (18:56.012)
different hats every month, you know.

Jeff Holman (18:57.485)
That's cool. think think Allah if I remember correctly, I was I don't know 2009 maybe 2010 if I'm not mistaken I was it still in an office downtown Salt Lake City and I don't feel like I had a phone call or it might have been an in-person meeting. It's a it's pretty fuzzy. But I think I think

Tom Bishop (19:15.384)
If you have an interview with those guys, Kurt Workman would be a great interview.

Jeff Holman (19:19.219)
I should because I think the last time I talked to them was when they were first very for and I might be I might be mixing up timeframes. So I think they were very first looking for somebody to write their first patent and and I must have missed out on that opportunity for some reason. But but yeah, they were really early on.

Tom Bishop (19:32.472)
I was the old guy. So I joined in 2015 in the product launch, you know, was October 2015, maybe early November. But I was the old guy, right? And at that time, you know, I'm in my like, maybe late thirties, mid thirties. Yeah, mid to late thirties. And so the, to be the guy with all the experience, right? It felt, it did feel like,

Jeff Holman (19:43.981)
You wear the gray hair, is that what you're saying?

Tom Bishop (20:02.218)
I shouldn't be the old guy in here, but it was a really vibrant, young group of people that just had the mission above all else. It was hard, and there was hard technical challenges and hard building challenges and hard regulatory stuff, all sorts of stuff. And so I will let Kurt tell that story.

Jeff Holman (20:14.541)
regulatory issues. Yeah.

Jeff Holman (20:21.677)
But you were the guy, you had legitimate experience, lots of it, for exactly what they needed.

Tom Bishop (20:27.574)
Yeah, enough to see us through the first, I'm not going to say how many tens of millions of sales, but get us to a point where we had an operation and all the functioning parts were working. still, that was back in the days when IoT was not a well-established off-the-shelf product. There was a lot of technical stuff, the baby side and the cloud side. And then you had hardware and software that

Jeff Holman (20:55.757)
Guys are building with a bunch of stuff with raspberry pies all over the place probably.

Tom Bishop (20:55.8)
parent needs to use on a new baby that needs high... In Keurig, in those companies where doing IOT for coffee makers, like the service level requirements for a parent who's worried about their child when they're going to bed are very high. And those service level requirements didn't exist in the IOT space back then. So it required a lot. should tell the stories, but man, you know, so many...

Jeff Holman (21:23.925)
I'll have to reach out to him.

Tom Bishop (21:25.624)
Yeah, you know, I'll mention one thing, just try to to key in on this if you do talk to him. like, I think it's about every thousand units that we sold, we had a parent call up and say, think you saved my baby's life. And when you're selling at some point, selling thousands a week, you're getting phone calls and people showing up at the office saying like, hey, this was our experience. like, man, it just made for meaningful work. you just, yeah, mission above all else just solves a lot of problems. If you don't have that,

you can deal with lots of problems with a certain amount of, I don't know, deep breaths and grinding of teeth and things. But when the mission drives all else, whoever just gets to the table and says, like, this thing is hard, this thing is broken, how do we fix it? And that included investors and everyone on down, willing to go to the ends of the earth for that brand and company and that mission.

Jeff Holman (22:12.545)
Yeah, and the-

Jeff Holman (22:18.189)
That's cool. There's something special too when you're able to see the fruits of your labor. Cause not every business, not every type of, know, I think, I think law is one of those places where we do a lot of good work, but to recognize exactly what was the result of what we did is sometimes hard. You know, people are like, what's your ROI as an attorney? It's like, well, you know, I saved you from a million dollar lawsuit, but how do I convince you that that was the case?

Tom Bishop (22:43.33)
Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Holman (22:45.709)
So to be able to be in a business and a setting and community where you can see that you're actually making a difference, that's huge. A huge driver, I think, for a lot of people.

Tom Bishop (22:56.824)
Yeah, well, the reason I joined was I went down for an interview and I had another offer on the table at the same exact time, which would have led me out to the beaches of Southern California, which might not have been too bad. But they had these testimonials on the wall, like printed out emails and stuff from parents who were in the beta testing program. in the beta testing, biased sample here, the beta testers for often had bad.

Jeff Holman (23:07.821)
You

Tom Bishop (23:24.65)
Outcomes, know, lost a child, you know, things like that. so these tests in the testimonials that they were sending, having used the product now, we're like, you know, I pausing here because they are tearjerkers to this day to read those things and say it. was just like, mean, like I just walked up before I was even sitting down in the conference room with those guys, like I'd read those on the way up the stairs. And I was like, I mean, like, whatever it takes, this is the thing.

Jeff Holman (23:30.167)
They had a reason to be in the program. Yeah.

Jeff Holman (23:52.718)
They knew this, right? They're like, everyone we interview, we're going to set them in here. We're going to show up just a little bit, a few minutes late, them time to read these things. lo and behold, the interviews go so much better after everyone's read a few testimonials.

Tom Bishop (23:57.43)
Maybe.

Tom Bishop (24:07.084)
Yeah, sign me up. Don't worry about anything. Let's just make this thing happen. that led me to the confidence of around product development, supply chain materials, and then the operation side where they deal with finance accounting and setting up ABLs and Silicon Valley Bank and customer service and all of those other parts of the organization. So I kind of had touched all parts of.

Jeff Holman (24:12.545)
That's awesome.

Tom Bishop (24:33.196)
product development and manufacturing by that stage. And when the idea for Pale Blue came up, was like, this is good. I think I know enough finally to be able to take on the challenge. Like I knew my way around P &L and I knew my way around legal and accounting and finance and all the stuff that you would need to, for me confidently, some entrepreneurs going to it like straight out of college, straight out of school, like that without the experience I needed.

Jeff Holman (24:34.274)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (24:48.993)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (24:54.273)
How did...

Tom Bishop (25:02.988)
couple decades under my belt before I could start my own thing. But the idea of Cal Blue was like, it's too good. I'm to have to go, I'm going to have to do this.

Jeff Holman (25:10.189)
What was that nugget? How did that come about? I mean, you're in the middle of this, you're building a cool company, you're making a huge difference. What was the point at which you said, this is something different, I gotta take a swing?

Tom Bishop (25:23.458)
Two.

Three things, the first call I made after I got hired at Owlet was a guy who was better than me. And I said, here's my first hire because I want to make sure there's somebody even better and smarter and more effective than me on this team and operations. So was able to hire a guy who's still the COO down there. And I was like, that bought me some space because otherwise you couldn't bear not to make sure that mission was on track.

eventually years later would allow me to consider the idea of stepping away. There was a company, the Ocean Cleanup System, a guy named Boyon Slot.

Jeff Holman (26:07.563)
yeah, they put the ones that put the huge things out there and they capture, and now they're doing rivers and ocean, right?

Tom Bishop (26:10.966)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Bishop (26:15.384)
Yeah, exactly. Getting at the end of rivers. So the Ocean Cleanup System launched their first prototype. I'm going to guess now because I haven't checked lately. Sometime in early 2018-ish. And there was this lady, woman, girl, Jessie. Hope Jessie hears this someday. Jessie worked with us at Owlet. And she was the design side. And she ran sustainability in the office. She made sure we did our best from the sustainability front.

And we were talking about that ocean cleanup system. And I was like, Jesse, someday we're going to create something somehow that can buy one of those things and just have it out there with our brand on it. And we'll just have it floating around the ocean doing good work. It was just like a comment. It was just like a random comment. I don't know where came from. But it had a.

Jeff Holman (26:58.957)
Very cool.

Jeff Holman (27:05.911)
Do you know, that's such a cool project. I don't want to detract from what you're telling me, but do you know the handle for that ocean cleanup? Because I follow them on Instagram.

Tom Bishop (27:13.408)
I think it's ocean cleanup system is my first guess, but I don't know.

Jeff Holman (27:17.357)
They're totally worth following it for our audience if you're not. It's just a meaningful project that's going on and just so happens that it aligns really well with, I guess, your transition into starting up Pale Blue.

Tom Bishop (27:33.228)
Yeah, so that was kind of the seed of, think, at least in my memory, the seed of like the hope, desire to do something globally on the sustainability side. But I think the moment that I knew I had to do it, my co-founder and I just got some samples made. We had this concept. We said, know how to make samples. We'll get some prototypes made and see how it goes. And I get these products.

Jeff Holman (27:43.757)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Bishop (28:02.05)
charge them up and let my kids go use them. And I charge them up when they're done and I can them back to the kids. And I was like, wait a minute, you we knew we could put it together and there's, a lot that goes into managing lithium ion batteries, properly electronics and getting that all integrated down to AAA. Like there's a lot there, but like the basic experience of it is like, I need a battery charge battery quickly, anywhere I am. I don't go to the store. I don't buy anything new. I don't throw away any trash.

I'm not left hanging when I need a battery and I can't find one or I scavenge one from some other device in my home. The experience is validating it. Plug it in, charge it, use it. Don't go anywhere, buy anything or throw anything away was my thought. And I was like, no, this is too good of an experience from a validation standpoint when you use it. You're like, I don't have to buy single use batteries ever again. And you're just like, every time I use them to this day, it's like,

Don't go anywhere, buy anything, or throw anything away. And that experience was kind of like, oh, no, we're going to have to pursue this. There's no going back now.

Jeff Holman (29:10.999)
Well, so was this just a whim? You just like, hey, let's try a few things. Maybe I'll try making some batteries or were you pretty focused? You had a design plan. You're like, hey, I think we can do batteries better. Like, was the, what was kind of the theory behind going into the batteries?

Tom Bishop (29:23.81)
Yeah. Yeah.

As a new parent, you run into the need for ever more batteries in the household. It's like Hot Wheels tracks and stuff, And this is something that I think everybody in product development does is like try to figure out what could be meaningful innovation. I assume software guys are the same. never asked software guys. I assume it's the same. It's like, what could be done better here, right? And so this is like, know, Paleblue is like one of

dozens if not hundreds of ideas that we have kicked around with friends over the years. Like, wonder this, you you're at trade shows, you're seeing tackier like in factories, you're like, you're seeing what could be done. But this, this one came from like, hey, we use a lot of batteries, new parents, and everything else in our lives is being made rechargeable now. And the rechargeability, the speed of recharging, the lifetime of those batteries, like everything's gotten so much better.

Jeff Holman (30:00.206)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Bishop (30:23.66)
When you go to the store, all you see is walls of alkaline batteries. And they do a little research, and you go, my god, it is bananas how many single-use batteries are used, and it's 10,000 pounds an hour just in the US alone. Way more. more. I don't know, on a weight-for-weight basis, maybe.

Jeff Holman (30:37.727)
It rivals straws and plastic bags, probably.

Jeff Holman (30:44.171)
Wait, yeah, wait, probably is more right, but just.

Tom Bishop (30:46.624)
Yeah, you're talking like a million tons a year in single use batteries. if they all got recycled and it was efficient to recycle them, you could maybe justify it. But they're not getting recycled because it's not efficient to recycle them. So they're getting landfilled and incinerated. you're like, this is a huge problem. Everything else that's new modern electronics has two general trends. One was lithium ion because that's getting better and better and better. And the other is USB charging.

as convenient as you're going to get. So you get best-in-class chemistry in attributes and best-in-class charging experience, which at the time you had micro USB and lightning ports. like the USBCU legislation was coming in Europe and it was like, OK, if we just brought those together, that might be a rechargeable battery that's so good that people will actually go use rechargeable batteries.

Jeff Holman (31:36.417)
And you have like, I know this isn't meant to be a product demo, but I have this pack that I bought some AAAs and comes with the cord charge all form at once. Like I'm not here to necessarily promote your product, but like I literally use it. I had a remote battery go out on these lights behind me. They have a little remote to them and literally one went out about 30 minutes before our thing. So I'm like switching batteries between the two remotes.

Tom Bishop (32:01.816)
Good timing.

Jeff Holman (32:05.74)
And I'm like, literally without thinking about, you know, our conversation coming up, I'm like, look at my batteries. I'm like, well, I wish I had one of these Pell Blue batteries that was the, what is it? 23A remote battery. you know, I just don't have that, but yeah, it's like, it's such a, you've done a great job. I use these all the time. I mentioned to you before, earlier on the call, my son rotates through all the, I have several double A's and he just rotates through those when he's playing the.

Tom Bishop (32:18.658)
Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Holman (32:34.582)
when he's playing Xbox and stuff.

Tom Bishop (32:36.344)
Yeah, my expectation would be that those batteries far outlast the Xbox controllers. I don't know. I've never done any research on how long Xbox controllers might last, but they're going to get beat up a little bit. I'm still using batteries that we made in 2019. And they're outdoors 24, 12 months a year in the mountains of Utah. It's cold, it's hot, and they're out there all year round. And they're still going.

Jeff Holman (32:41.866)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (32:49.226)
With teenage boys, they don't last as long as they should.

Jeff Holman (33:00.171)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (33:05.772)
So how long have you been doing pale blue then? Is it since 2019? that, or when did you?

Tom Bishop (33:09.176)
Yeah, yeah, I stepped out of Owlet in 2019. We launched the website Amazon Jan 1 of 2020, right before COVID, or during COVID, depending on when it all started. Yeah, so we did a Kickstarter in late 2019. Sorry, I might have stepped out of Owlet in late 2018. I think it was early 2019. Where's my memory? Great, yeah.

Jeff Holman (33:19.98)
Okay.

Jeff Holman (33:23.594)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (33:28.502)
How did that go?

Jeff Holman (33:34.56)
How did your Kickstarter go?

Tom Bishop (33:38.84)
I'm going to try to say this without saying anything bad about Kickstarter. We had an awesome first 10 days of 30 on our way to record setting kind of raise. And then somehow the Kickstarter algorithm decided we were not worthy and we got put below the bottom of the discovery list of below dozens of campaigns that had zero dollars raised. And we were sitting down there with hundreds of thousands of dollars raised. so it basically shut us down.

Jeff Holman (34:00.962)
Really.

Tom Bishop (34:06.008)
So I don't know what happened at Kickstarter, but we spent weeks begging, pleading, yelling, trying to get those guys to give us the attention we needed. we did it to validate that we weren't crazy, because when you create something new, you might be onto something, or you might be crazy. And creating a $30 pack of double A's when Amazon Basics were out for $0.20 of double A could have been crazy. Could have been a terrible idea.

from a business standpoint. So we wanted to go out and just see outside of our friends and families. You can share samples and people that you know are going to give you good feedback, almost no matter what. Yeah, it's hard to get to like ground truth. Exactly. know, as alkaline batteries have gotten more expensive, we're, you know, anywhere from 1.2 recharges to call it five recharges to get your money back versus a name brand alkaline that retail.

Jeff Holman (34:46.794)
Right, right. these are the best thing in the world. But will you pay for them off the shelf?

Tom Bishop (35:03.736)
Like a nine volt nowadays, what, 450 per battery and ours is, you know, 15. So that's four charges. A C or D battery, you know, could be, could be a few bucks in the, you ours are, you know, three times more. CR 123 is six or $7 and ours is like eight. So it was like 1.2 recharges to get your money back versus a single use. And so the ROI is there. And I think for most people, they, they see that they understand and we more, more often than not we hear like,

They understand the product and they say, oh, I thought it'd be more. If they don't know the price first, you can describe the product to somebody. It's like, oh, that sounds like that was going be really expensive. $30, that's not bad. And I mean, don't know how many times your son's used them, but if you were pumping in single use.

Jeff Holman (35:49.166)
So we rotate. literally have two here that are charged. He swapped a few out the other day. I don't know if it goes a week or two weeks with him or sometimes if he has friends over that's a lot less time.

Tom Bishop (35:58.016)
Yeah, but you could be dozens of times per year. Could be hundreds for some kids. But if that was hundreds of alkaline batteries, assuming you bought them at bulk during the holiday, you might get them for.

Jeff Holman (36:03.236)
yeah.

Jeff Holman (36:13.271)
Well, but pricing aside, right? Pricing aside, there's that impact that we're all, we all know it's there, whether we think about it deliberately or whether we just let it simmer in the back of our mind, we know it's there, we know it's an issue. So, hey, you keep saying, we, when you do this, did you start this with somebody else helping you or what did the evolution of your team look like from kind of concept to where you're at?

Tom Bishop (36:33.036)
Yeah, I have a co-founder who also specializes in consumer electronics product development manufacturing. His claim to fame was helping launch the Motorola Razr back in the day. So he's been around and at it. But we've got a team of, call it seven of us now, a lot of guys that.

Jeff Holman (36:43.439)
great.

Jeff Holman (36:52.577)
And what's the size of the company? I don't know if that's revenue or some other metric. How do you guys measure the size of your company now?

Tom Bishop (37:01.556)
I tend to think of it in terms of how many batteries we've sold and how many batteries that could replace. That's because that like if it's really about the impact, it's like, well, how many because if every battery we sell can replace 1000 alkaline batteries, every battery we sell means, you know, that's a bigger company and its revenue. But the revenue question gets complicated because the services work that we do as well. So that doesn't represent the impact of the battery side. But yeah, we've sold about three and a half million batteries. And so

Jeff Holman (37:25.317)
okay.

Tom Bishop (37:31.256)
If you do the math on that, let's say if they get used 1,000 times each, that's 3 and 1 billion alkaline batteries that weren't needed to be used. If they get used 100 times each, getting through 1,000 times is once a week for 20 years. That's a long slog to get through 1,000. But let's say that maybe they get used up to 200 times. It's still 350 million batteries that are prevented on average, call it AA 20 grams.

Jeff Holman (37:31.776)
Awesome.

Jeff Holman (37:55.831)
Yeah, huge, huge, huge impact.

Tom Bishop (37:59.192)
There's a huge impact on the amount of waste and the dollars saved for original concept new parents. for anybody who's using especially products that require a lot of batteries, whether it's an Xbox controller or a professional musician or someone using trail cameras. We work with Vital Grounds, a Grizzly Bear research group, and they use tons of trail cameras. And we've got a battery.

Jeff Holman (38:06.39)
Yeah.

Tom Bishop (38:30.297)
a stem research thing that's related to NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab. they send our battery powered downboard computer in a payload that goes up to the stratosphere. And they're sending balloons up to the stratosphere, 99,000 feet, with our batteries powering the onboard computer. you're like, I don't know, kind of neat, special, cool stories that happen all around. I could go on for an hour just on these little cool stories that we hear.

Jeff Holman (38:41.014)
That's awesome.

Jeff Holman (38:51.788)
That's super cool.

Tom Bishop (38:57.08)
But that's how I had to think of the growth. Obviously, for the P &L and investment and all that other stuff, we have to grow. And we've been probably on average growing north of 50 % per year since started. So we're still on that trajectory. And that's meaningful. But the work is still ahead. As much as we've done, the number of alkaline batteries still being bought and sold and discarded every day is obscene. That's a good word for it.

Jeff Holman (39:12.576)
Well, this is

Jeff Holman (39:21.492)
Is obscene. Yeah. Well, we've been, I just looked at the time where we've been chatting for a while now and I really appreciate it. This is a really cool, fascinating kind of origin and evolution story. I'm curious though, as far as maybe a breakout moment that you've had, like, there a time in the either, you know, maybe it was with Alette, maybe it's Pale Blue, maybe it's somewhere else in your journey, a time when you kind of felt like you were running up against a wall.

you were kind of, know, every direction you turn, there's obstacles perhaps. And then all of a sudden, lo and behold, you make that magic move or you bring on that team member or, you know, you find that investor or customer, like something that kind of just unlocks a new trajectory for you. Have you had any of those experiences along the way?

Tom Bishop (40:08.888)
Yeah, I would say starting, it's probably not this way for all, but I would hazard a guess that this is a, I'm gonna make some general statements here that probably apply to most entrepreneurs. It's like, when are you not running up against a wall? Like you're running, it's this or that. We ran into COVID, we went out for a fundraise the day that Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. We went out for a fundraise, then when tariffs hit, we've, you know.

Jeff Holman (40:21.078)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (40:25.207)
Fair enough, fair enough.

Tom Bishop (40:37.664)
We were at True Value, our biggest customer was True Value when they went bankrupt. It's like one random event after another comes and kicks you in the knee and you're just like...

Jeff Holman (40:42.159)
wow.

Jeff Holman (40:47.178)
Maybe I should have renamed this podcast and said the breakout CEO would be the breakdown CEO. Then we'd have so many stories.

Tom Bishop (40:51.288)
Yeah, We all want to tell the hero story of that's the moment that things changed. For us, a lot of it's been a grind with lots of really meaningful wins along the way. Getting into REI was really cool. Ace Hardware has been a really good partner.

Jeff Holman (41:11.928)
What is it like to get into one of these? what's the, if it's REI or ACE or True Value before they went bankrupt, like what is the, what is that process for you? Is it just going out and pounding the pavement, making the phone calls or, you know, explain that to me.

Tom Bishop (41:26.646)
Yeah, some are one phone call. Some people bring us an opportunity. REI was many years of trying to get to the buyer. They shut down their corporate offices during COVID and you couldn't even... I knew guys that worked with REI for 20 years and they couldn't find REI. So a lot of them are like, you're like, we want to work with them, we're going to go get it. And some are like opportunistic. They walk up to you at a trade show and this is amazing, we should do a test. We've got some really cool opportunities that just...

came to us. Some just show up in your inbox. I'll point to one. We just launched a partnership with a company called Ernie Ball. And if you play guitar, you'll know Ernie Ball. And if you don't, you won't. But they invented rock and roll guitar strings in 1960s, like third generation family business, and guitar accessories. And they called up one day and said, hey, we want to make better batteries for musicians. And so we launched this partnership. We made better batteries with them. They walked us into Guitar Center and Sweetwater and all this. And our batteries are being used by Red Hot Chili Pepper, Jack Johnson.

Not just Nails, Miley Cyrus, all these artists. It would have taken us decades to have the ability to go even find the guitar techs for these artists, let alone just walk us into all this retail and all those things. We did, yeah. It's been about a month now, and it's just been incredible. So I'm going to call this a breakout for us, even though it's too early to say. But to partner up and use our tech stack to solve an issue that's existed for decades for musicians.

Jeff Holman (42:35.245)
think you announced this on LinkedIn recently, right?

Tom Bishop (42:54.338)
better batteries for them specifically.

Jeff Holman (42:54.957)
I don't want to over or understate this, but the issue is just like battery consumption, Like, okay.

Tom Bishop (43:02.904)
Well, more than that. Battery consumption for sure. You want your batteries to perform the same in rehearsal as they do on stage. so stability of performance matters. Alkaline batteries, the voltage decays and so the performance changes over time. So essentially, if it's you putting it in an electroacoustic guitar, your application of the signal from your pickup to your preamp and amp in your speakers is going to change. And so the audio is going to change throughout time.

Jeff Holman (43:14.304)
Okay.

Jeff Holman (43:17.963)
What does that do to the performance?

Jeff Holman (43:31.935)
It actually, the battery voltage actually, like there's not some isolation circuit that normalizes. Interesting.

Tom Bishop (43:36.76)
No, no, mostly not, no. You'd have to put other circuitry on board the product, and then you'd have to tune it for a specific alkaline battery, for any. So there's a bunch of different ways musicians will mess with an alkaline battery. They'll either pre-treat it so that it hits a voltage plateau where it's generally stable, and then it gets thrown away at the end of every performance. So you often on stage, like backstage, there's a bucket.

Jeff Holman (43:47.575)
Compensate for that stuff,

Jeff Holman (44:03.425)
Really.

Tom Bishop (44:06.722)
from every performance and all the batteries from all the in-ear monitors, microphones, the pedals, the guitars, everything comes out, boom, in the trash because you can't risk starting tomorrow night with yesterday's batteries. And there's other issues with alkaline batteries that have to do with noise, signal to noise ratio gets in the music, it gets beat up because there's electrical noise that's coming out of the battery because it's not designed to minimize electrical noise. It gets pretty technical, but it's a very clear target of like,

Jeff Holman (44:18.507)
on old batteries.

Jeff Holman (44:31.831)
So this is super technical.

Tom Bishop (44:36.908)
here's the things we want to solve. And because we have a sophisticated tech stack on top of a sophisticated battery cell, like we can do things that your average battery company can't or won't. And so that phone call from Ernie Ball was like, know, a godsend of sorts, because you're like, my God, yeah, we didn't even, we knew musicians were super users. We got a lot of outreach musicians, but we didn't understand the details because we weren't three generations of family business focused on the problems of musicians and solving those.

Jeff Holman (45:04.833)
Right, right.

Tom Bishop (45:07.218)
And so that was it.

Jeff Holman (45:07.895)
So did they introduce you to some of these technical issues that you hadn't known about in detail before?

Tom Bishop (45:11.724)
Yes, I mean, we knew stability was important. We made a decision early on to regulate our voltage at a stable voltage. And we knew that that was really appreciated by certain users. Because if you have a regulated power curve, you have a stable power curve. And then you have stable performance in the device you're using. So it's like things you would think for.

Jeff Holman (45:28.951)
Well, I'm going to borrow this. I'm sorry. I'm going to borrow this. If I ever play my son in Xbox and win, which would be a rare moment, I'm going to be like, well, the secret is pre-treating the batteries and the alkaline stability of the batteries. I'm using it in the sweet spot. And I'm going to try to give him some technical explanation that would totally apply in the music world, but maybe not to Xbox controllers.

Tom Bishop (45:42.744)
Probably the battery.

Tom Bishop (45:55.158)
Yeah, there's a opportunity there to at least plant a seed of doubt in his mind that he's, yeah. So we've had a number of phone calls like that along the way, a number of kind of fortuitous, serendipitous people walking up to us at a trade show or send an email. This, happens pretty regularly, I guess. It happens regularly.

Jeff Holman (46:03.839)
Exactly, exactly.

Tom Bishop (46:25.132)
Hey, we're doing research in the Amazon. use a of trail cameras. We can't take the canoe down the river two days to get more fuels. We want to be able to charge batteries in the field and we're using your batteries.

Jeff Holman (46:35.339)
And then they just pair that up with solar and.

Tom Bishop (46:37.514)
Exactly. And so we end up through our 1 % for the Planet membership, sponsoring lots of nonprofits that do work like that and supplying them with our solar chargers and batteries. it's like that drives the meaningful work in the kind of cultural glue of the company. But how cool is it to think about like, I get emails after the balloons come down from the stratosphere. And I'm like, just tell me before. I want to come out and see this.

But you get these really cool stories, bat researchers in Miami using them in these acoustic devices for studying bats. like, cool. All right, awesome.

Jeff Holman (47:13.943)
Wow. Yeah, you're making me think I've got a good friend. He listens to the podcast. So Nate, is for you, Nathan. His wife studies, if I got this right, his wife studies bears in Northern Italy or something like that. And you're making me wonder, I wonder what kind of batteries they got in their equipment. if they don't have the right kind, if they're not using pale blue, he'll know where to get them from here.

Tom Bishop (47:31.522)
Cool. See you soon.

Tom Bishop (47:38.732)
We can have the Europe office send them some samples for sure.

Jeff Holman (47:42.488)
That's awesome, that's awesome. Well, this has been super informative. I think we've just touched the surface to be honest of some of the... no, well maybe we do a follow up sometime. What's that? for sure, yeah, anytime. mean, we get some actual snow this year, it's coming, it's coming. But yeah, no, love to.

Tom Bishop (47:50.84)
I warned you, I could go for days.

Yeah, on on chairlift we can do it on chairlift

Tom Bishop (48:05.43)
Yeah, good point. Good point. It's definitely good.

Jeff Holman (48:10.103)
But yeah, no, this has been super informative. There's way more to the battery world than I would have known. And that's one of the reasons I got into. So I actually have an engineering background, electrical engineering. I didn't use it much except to go into law school and become a patent attorney. And when I talk to inventors about their inventions and the businesses they're building around it, there's always so much more about, it's not just like, I mean, maybe it starts out, let's do rechargeable batteries, but you get into it and there's just so much more depth.

technical depth, business depth, all of these things, which is really where the fun starts with business, right? The business opportunities, the business strategy comes in when you start to get into those deeper moments. And same with the innovations. That's where the innovation, you can't just be like, I'm gonna like make a rechargeable battery and get a patent on it. No, but if you're getting patents on the control circuitry, and I haven't looked at your portfolio, I don't know what's in there. If you're getting patents on the control circuitry for

know, lengthening stability timelines and stuff like that. That's where it gets really interesting and there's still real opportunity I would expect to create meaningful innovations, protect those with patents if that's your philosophy and build a company with a strong strategy around that. So super cool.

Tom Bishop (49:11.245)
Hmm.

Tom Bishop (49:29.888)
I'd say there's far more opportunity ahead than there's been progress before in the battery space. not just chemistry, know, it's the full tech stack approach. it's like, yeah, the roadmap doesn't write itself, but the funnel just keeps filling up with opportunities to make really meaningful innovations.

Jeff Holman (49:52.392)
and we haven't even really touched on any of the defense work. I bet there's a whole different level of technicality on that side of it.

Tom Bishop (49:58.712)
Very much so. Far more than we ever thought we'd end up working. I just had no idea. then, yeah, that was the same phone call that we got from Ernie Ball. We got it from DoD. whenever, just recommendation for anybody, if you're in a position to have a phone call from anybody that says, hey, do think you could do this? Just say yes and see where it goes. Because, man, saying yes just sometimes is the smartest decision. Although it's not the easy one, but it's always the

always turned out to be the right decision for us is like.

Jeff Holman (50:29.985)
Yeah. And there's a whole world of grant funding and research and develop that that's I've seen. I've seen entire companies powered for decades off of researching, you know, projects and stuff for the government. Not that that's necessarily your business model, but it's some people's it's a part of a part of some people's business model. So.

Tom Bishop (50:49.634)
Totally. Yeah, for us, it's an opportunity to fix many problems that have existed for far too long and use our engineering capabilities to go do that. so meaningful work, totally different than the sustainability efforts we do. On the other hand, the sustainability outcomes from this project will also be on that scale.

Jeff Holman (51:17.323)
Yeah, that's awesome. Well, so parting words for another, you know, a lot of CEOs we work with and they're out there, they're experiencing the same growing pains, growing opportunities, maybe not in the same order all the time, but you know, any parting words of advice or tips or words of motivation that you want to leave with our audience?

Tom Bishop (51:39.242)
Man, it's too simple to say don't give up. If you give up, it was probably not the right project from the beginning, because if it's the right project, you'll never give up. For me, it's like because it's got the core of meaningful impact on many levels, it's like there's no giving up. just going to fight through that.

the bank failures in the government policies and shutdowns and all of the challenges, because it's like, what else are going to do? You're not going to give up on the best decision or the best opportunity and the best idea you had in your career. You're just going to go for it. And you're going to say like, we got to solve it. We got to solve the problems and keep moving forward. So keep moving forward. Sounds cliche, but.

Jeff Holman (52:26.091)
No, I love it. mean, everybody is saying startup success is usually just persistence long enough, right, past all the problems to actually see some of success. So there's an art to it, I imagine.

Tom Bishop (52:38.904)
I believe that's true. Dodging bullets along the way helps, but yeah, if you're live long enough, then the phone will ring with an opportunity or you get on the road, meet people. Rick Alden, founder of Skullcandy, used to say, if I'm talking, I'm selling. It sounds crazy, but if you're talking, you need to sell the vision. You're not selling literally. You're selling the vision of, hey, this could be amazing. Imagine the world that we could create together. And you could argue Skullcandy created

all of the audio innovation after because it just sparked innovation in a space that had been stagnant for decades. And yeah, we hope to do the same.

Jeff Holman (53:18.517)
cool. You've been a part of some fun things and I really appreciate you coming on the show to share some of these with us and I love hearing the insights and getting to know you better. It's been it's been a real pleasure for me. So thanks for coming on the show.

Tom Bishop (53:28.888)
Yeah, same. Appreciate you reaching out. as soon as it stows, I do mean let's get on a chairlift and we'll get out the office for a couple hours.

Jeff Holman (53:37.003)
Let's do it, I'll see if I can keep up. Until then, for our audience, thank you for joining us today on The Breakout CEO. It's been a pleasure to have you. Hopefully you've picked up a few of the nuggets that Tom has shared today and we're happy you're along for the ride and we hope to see you again next time.

Tom Bishop (53:55.554)
Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate it.