I talk small tech and politics with @FBombs4U

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Greg: Sure, yeah. My name is Greg, I go by Techstoa, T-E-C-H-S-T-O-A. I’m available at techstoa.com or on Twitter. I work in the tech industry, we talked a bit about that last time. But basically, VC is my interest, I’m sort of at the intersection of philosophy and technology. I’ve got user experience working within the tech industry, and I’m looking at figuring out how we should use this stuff better than we’ve been using it.

FBombs4U: Okay. Can you give us an example of something that you’re working on now? We talked a little bit about using tech for communication in places where the material conditions need to be vastly improved.

Greg: In some cases, sure. I mean, last time, we were more talking about the community-focused technology. My goal is to, rather than the big tech we deal with today, to create more of a small tech where… Tech services hosted within the community itself. So, I’m doing less direct work on that right now, but I’m working on building up the capabilities for some of the stuff I want to build.

So, my eventual goal, what I’d love to have eventually, is community fiber, community Wi-Fi, private cloud within the community for hosting tech services, and a vibrant development community here. My goal would be that what I can create here in Worcester, Massachusetts, other communities can create the same things by using the same tools. Some of the stuff, I’m hoping I can create a software-as-a-service platform where I can host the technology, and you are managing that business relationship within the community.

But right now, I’m mostly doing my day job, and at least some of that involves learning how to build these types of services. I manage a DevOps team, so we handle the day-to-day operation of tech platforms.

FBombs4U: Okay. So, the idea that you have for your area, is that something that you would be looking at as kind of like a proof of concept?

Greg: Yeah, kind of. I mean, I tried running the whole proof-of-concept thing. So, I moved here, I spent about a year after quitting my big tech job back in 2018. It took about a year to figure out what my strategy is because my goal was to try to use my existing skills to make positive change.

So, I took about a year figuring out what to do, and then I just sort of went for it. So, July, I think, 2019, I moved here to Worcester. I got a lease for a little shop space on a street called Millbury Street over where the Worcester Red Sox just came in here, it’s a Minor League team.

FBombs4U: Nice.

Greg: It’s an area that was about to go through this transformational change, and I wanted to get in there, open up a space where people can learn about tech, figure out what types of services I can provide in order to meet the needs of the community, and then offer people the ability to get a foot in the door of the tech industry by learning on the job.

So, initially, identify some local people that have talent but don’t have the traditional background, and then hopefully hire some of them to build some of the services I want to build.

FBombs4U: Okay.

Greg: Unfortunately, as it turns out, spring 2020’s a really bad time to do something like that.

FBombs4U: [Laughter] Imagine that, I can’t figure out why.

Greg: Yeah. I held onto the shop for I want to say a year afterwards. I bought this enterprise fiber, so the idea was to spread out internet access from my shop and essentially set up a little micro ISP.

FBombs4U: Okay.

Greg: And instead, I was paying for internet access I didn’t have in order to buy out a contract [Laughter] for about a year and a half.

FBombs4U: Right, I hear that.

Greg: But I’m working my way back up to zero. In the meantime, I’m building up the skills I need and just trying to figure out how to get this thing to the point where it’s a viable business. Because I’ve got the tech experience, I don’t have the business experience. I had a couple people I had in mind to hopefully work with on it, but they haven’t worked out through a combination of their problems and my problems.

FBombs4U: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, let me ask you this – tell me a little bit about the town.

Greg: So, Worcester is one of the bigger towns in Massachusetts, it’s about an hour west of Boston. I worked for years in Cambridge which is right across the Charles River from Boston. That’s where the big tech sector is. A little bit in the 128 belt which is the big circle around the city.

But in terms of where these types of skills can be found, they’re very centered around Boston. So, my thought was to move a bit further west, go into an area where this isn’t the typical skillset. That gives me a better chance of finding work in the area in order to pay the bills, in order to provide opportunities for other people.

I had a nontraditional entry into the tech industry. I got lucky, I was living right outside the Boston area at the big dot-com bubble. I didn’t have a degree or anything, I was right place, right time, and worked hard.

FBombs4U: If there was a revenue model for what you’re doing, where would the revenue come from?

Greg: There’s a few different ways I’ve been thinking about it. I mean, the first thing is is that I want to provide platforms for the local businesses. Some of the places where it would make sense to start is food delivery.

There’s Uber, there’s DoorDash, there’s that sort of thing, and they charge a huge premium, and that’s money that gets sucked right out of the community. But the making it easier for people to order from online restaurants, that’s a benefit, and the ability to make extra money by being able to do deliveries, that’s a benefit.

If we can capture the money that’s leaving the community instead, that’s a great place to start, and we can charge a lower fee for the restaurants than what otherwise happens.

FBombs4U: Okay. So, duplicating larger services to make them more community-oriented.

Greg: Yeah, yeah. And then from there, I want to run this thing for my community, but then in terms of how it would operate in other communities, there’s a few different models that could be interesting there. There’s a franchise model where we can just keep expanding into other communities, there’s a software as a service platform, so I partner with a company, they build the platform, or whatever the fuzzy line is between the two.

I run it within Worcester, but there’s a larger company hosting the platform and making it available to other communities. There’s just a straight open source model where release the code and other people can run with it if they want to. There’s options.

FBombs4U: Have you looked into grants and other government opportunities?

Greg: Not really. There’s a couple reasons for that. So, the first off is initially I was self-funding. I cashed out my retirement because I didn’t want to be invested in the stock market anymore. So, I cashed out my investment, I tried self-funding everything. When it comes to grants… Part of this is that I was trying to prove a point about capitalism.

I’m trying to avoid the whole government money thing to see if it’s possible. Can a solution come within this libertarian rule set we seem to be getting shoved down? If you follow what their expectations are, is it possible to succeed? And so far it’s rough. And a lot of it, it’s rough because the government tries to help. The different businesses that got massive amounts of money from PPP in order to save their business, and then someone like me, I don’t fit the mold, so none of that helped me.

FBombs4U: Yeah. The way I was thinking about it is might as well take their money to find a way to reduce the need for capitalism or at least use capitalism and their money to make the impact you’re looking… I believe in harvesting… Resources they’re already putting there that somebody’s going to get, it’s worth harvesting because if they don’t spend that money, either that program’s going to disappear, or it’s going to go like the PPP loans, where the people that have the best attorneys that can figure out how to do it are going to do it.

Greg: Well, yeah. I mean, that’s kind of the thing though. I don’t have the knowledge. What do I have to do in order to get the grant money? I don’t know. I can learn, but do I want to invest my time and effort in learning how to get government money or do I want to…

FBombs4U: No. No. This is what you do. You go to the local university, and you find out anybody… Ante [Phonetic 00:10:42] just said, there’s people that get degrees in that. That’s exactly where I was going, Ante.

Greg: Yeah.

FBombs4U: You go to where the people are and you say, “Hey, does anybody have any interest in making their research project this project, so that it would have an actual tangible real world benefit instead of a hypothetical project?” I did shit like that in my sign business, and it worked regularly. So, there’s one of the easy ways to do it. Find people that are in the process of getting educated for that stuff, and you should be able to get that service for free. The other thing I was going to ask is…

Greg: I try to pay for things of value. And that was the other piece of the coin is that after everything fell out, there’s not too much in the way of money to pay for things.

FBombs4U: Have you also gone to the Rotary, the Chamber, all those things?

Greg: I was a member of the Chamber for a while. That was my goal, to find ways to connect with local businesspeople and socialize. But I didn’t get much value out of it once COVID hit because I wasn’t going to do…

[Crosstalk 00:12:07]

FBombs4U: Oh, right, right, right. I keep forgetting. Because every time I’ve done this work is in the past. I haven’t had to do it in a while except online.

Greg: COVID made it difficult. So the choice I made was to get a job to hold me over until it is time to try again. It’s working out for me, but it’s definitely making forward progress slower. I think it will…

FBombs4U: Oh, yeah.

Greg: …put me in a better position long term though.

FBombs4U: Well, you need stability to get most places.

Greg: Yeah, yeah. The day job provides that. It’s just that no matter how much experience you gain in this economy, they all want the same amount of your time, it’s just that they’re willing to pay you more for it. That’s one of the things I’d love is to be able to find ways to normalize working part time so you can develop your skillsets in order to have more freedom as opposed to just more money.

FBombs4U: Yeah. Well, it’s funny you say that. That’s actually where I was thinking. As far as the value that you’re bringing to the community, does it exceed the amount of effort and benefit, are there other things that that platform could be doing, like not just facilitating commerce but facilitating reeducation.

Greg: There’s a lot of things it can do. So, I mean, there’s open source educational tools. Like I know people who have backgrounds in education and forming curriculum. Really, my fundamental thing is the mindset shift. There’s all sorts of things you could do once you stop trying to focus on short-term personal profit and try to build something larger for the community. There’s all sorts of ways.

FBombs4U: What about this, what about this, and I need a shit-ton of help with it, but for the last five years, I’ve been batting around, and I’ve written some of it out, but I’ve only gotten to fourth or fifth grade because I just… I’m not an educate… Like, I can make educational plans. A curriculum like this is a little beyond my capacity. I’ve wanted to do a K through 12 financial education program that can be accessed by the local schools, the local internet schools, the homeschooling groups, and what it would do is there’d be modules for each year based on the end picture that people need. Make sure you cover the perils of student debt. [Inaudible 00:15:08] listen, just listen.

So, the idea is when I helped coach baseball, I was the commissioner of a five-year-old T-ball league, and it was important to understand how T-ball and that fit into developing baseball players and people that wanted to play over time. I had zero concern about fundamentals of either the game or their techniques of a five-year-old, of a six-year-old. My goal was that they smiled and played because that’s what was going to make them want to learn to get better. But then we had parents like, “Who won?” “What do you mean, who won? Did you see eight kids run after the ball? What do you mean, who won?” So, even sometimes against the thought process of the parents, there’s a way to take the end result and make the building blocks.

So, you have to work forward but then… I mean you work backwards but then it works forward. So, kindergarten basically is about having them pretend to have a shop as just like a fun activity, and they trade fake money for things. The amount doesn’t matter, the fucking what they’re trading for doesn’t matter, you’re simply making a fun, entertaining activity of exchange, the process of exchange. From there, the next grade you can add on, like, saving. So, you could start to give them rewards for certain activities, and they can see the difference between exchanging those rewards for a small thing or exchanging those rewards as a group for a bigger thing.

You can start to integrate the fun and gamification of the building blocks so that by the time they get to high school, they can learn about credit, FICO scores, loans, checking, balance sheets. They can understand personal financing because it’s never taught in school. They can understand student debt by the time it’s their turn to get it. They can understand how having a cellphone plan could impact your ability to get a house later. If there is a way to use a community-based platform where local businesses could advertise and help support that, even host events maybe locally, but to be able to create an elongated plan that schools can use to find benefit of the platform so that you start drawing people to using the thing you’re building. That was a lot, I know. If there’s ways for you to build the infrastructure and have it actually generating a revenue while it’s growing, I think that might make it easier for you to grow it.

Greg: Yeah, and I’m an infrastructure guy, that’s been my career.

FBombs4U: And you’re right. If you try to build out the whole thing before it gets implemented, that’s extremely cost-prohibitive and time-prohibitive, but if you slim down the idea into buildable chunks, then maybe you can build the smaller infrastructure of interacting with education. Which is a little less… I mean, you got to deal with the boards and the bureaucracy, but that’s only with the traditional schools. There’s religious schools, there’s homeschooling that don’t have the same Board of Education to go through. So, there are targets that don’t require the school boards.

But those are things we could talk about, like small details. But a buddy of mine worked for the North Carolina State tech company that was creating a lot of the online school stuff, like how to have homework, how to have interaction. I was there in ‘04-‘05 when they were building these things out, and it was fascinating how important those education tools were to the overall ability of those tools. Does that make any sense?

Greg: Are you talking to me?

FBombs4U: Yeah, yeah. No, you. Does that make sense?

Greg: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don’t know if I would tackle education first myself, but I think that there’s just… The online platforms we have have really redefined what education means. It’s very easy to get caught up in the ideas of degrees because so many businesses require degrees in order to get a job. But if your concern is just the ability to gain knowledge, we have more information at our fingertips than anyone has ever had before. There’s an absolute benefit for people who… If somebody designs educational material, you can do it for a college, but it doesn’t have to be for a college.

FBombs4U: Exactly.

Greg: The real question is what are you training for.

You talked about setting an end goal and then working towards it essentially. But someone is always setting the end goal, and it’s so key. The whole philosophical discussion around what should that end goal be is so important. And then there’s how do you educate people towards it, but first you have to have that conversation, you have to come to an agreement as to what you’re going to do or have enough power at your fingertips or ability at your fingertips that you can just run forward with what you want.

FBombs4U: Well, so what you just said was interesting because that made me think another opportunity for you in the local area is to help offload some of the education needed. Like even if it’s a mechanics shop. Just as an example, I grew up in the car business. And back then, every six months, people were getting a new certification, and they went to those trainings. If smaller businesses in the area needed a more systematized method of onboarding or training or any of those, all the things that the larger companies do that these companies don’t have access to, if you make those tools and they’re not cost-prohibitive because they don’t have to onboard a whole company like you to do this ongoing, but you can create their modules with them. Just as an example – whatever it is that you find is most valuable to the community or whoever’s dictating what’s most valuable to the community that you want to service, I guess, in your mind, for what you want to do, who’s going to determine what that future looks like?

Greg: Whoever does the work.

FBombs4U: Well, so that’s you, isn’t it?

Greg: I’m trying.

[Laughter]

FBombs4U: Okay, okay. That’s fair. Other than overall, do you have specific groups or specific people in mind that are most apt to benefit from what you’re doing?

Greg: Like I said earlier, I think restaurants would be a good first target because there’s just so much money going to groups like DoorDash and Grubhub. I think that once I build the tech in order to enable tracking of drivers, that would apply very well to an Uber alternative. That’s a whole path I could go down. The path I initially took was the whole, “Let’s start an ISP and a small public cloud for the community.” That was my first thought. That’s still something I may pursue. It all depends on how this stuff lines up. I’m flying by the seat of my pants, making it up as I go.

FBombs4U: From a straight business mind, one of my most important things to understand is who my target is. Because something I find that is most beneficial to running a business is not excluding other targets but truly knowing the shortcomings of that target so that I’m not only fulfilling the need, but I can present the benefits in a way that seem almost, “How did we not think of that?” So, like if you were going to do the delivery thing, where would you get drivers? What are the offloading parts from restaurant responsibility dealing with Uber to restaurant responsibility dealing with you?

Greg: I’m not sure I totally understand the question. You’re asking what value I’m providing there…

[Crosstalk 00:26:47]

FBombs4U: Well, so like if I order from DoorDash and something goes wrong, if I’m ordering through the platform you’ve created and something goes wrong and I’m the restaurant, how does that affect me?

Greg: I think it depends on what goes wrong. So, one of the nice things going with a more community approach is that there is a lot more visibility. If I’m dealing with a driver that’s constantly failing to live up to the needs, I can fire them. I can hire people as employees as opposed to taking them doing the more DoorDash model, or I can go to that DoorDash model. But the thing is is I’m there and I can actually work with the businesses and try to solve problems with them and work with the drivers and try to solve problems with them. DoorDash and Grubhub, they’re global. They have a limited set of what they can do. What they usually end up doing is issuing a refund or something, which works for the short term, but I don’t know how they address the more systemic problems – this restaurant is constantly screwing over customers, this driver is constantly doing something.

FBombs4U: And that’s kind of where I’m… So, it’s funny because I was in some networking group a long time ago, and this guy was telling me he wanted to start grocery delivery. And this was before grocery delivery was a thing, and I was like, “I just don’t get it. I can’t understand what you’re saying.” And I haven’t been in a grocery store in like four years. Other than to get prescriptions, I order my groceries because the amount of time I save, and on top of that, I don’t just grab things off the shelf like impulse buys. There’s no impulse buys when I order my food.

So, ultimately, even the 8 to $10 more that I pay, it saves me the time value of money plus the impulse buys. But to put that whole thing together like a DoorDash would require a shit-ton of moving parts between hiring drivers, doing backgrounds, all the accountability, all the incoming customer service for the bad transactions. There’s a lot of moving parts to that, that if ironed out could be extremely viable, but then the scaling of that would end up just making you them in the end.

Greg: Well, “them” at a very local scale. I wouldn’t expect that my business would extend beyond Worcester. Instead, Springfield, Massachusetts, a bit further west of here, they could have their own instance, and there would be someone like me running the local one, as opposed to me running all of them.

FBombs4U: So, the real difference would be a franchise model over a corporate model.

Greg: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a fair way to think about it, although “franchise” has certain implications for an option, but it’s not the only option. It can be a SaaS model where someone is hosting a platform and they are a customer of the platform. There’s no business relationship between me and them, it’s just that we both have the same vendor. There’s options there.

FBombs4U: Yeah. If somebody set up the service, you’d have… Basically, in a dumbed-down version of what you’re saying, you would provide the IDX feed for the realtors so that it could pull from the MLS to their pages, and that IDX feed is duplicatable in all markets that have their own MLS.

Greg: I’m not 100% on what an IDX feed is…

[Crosstalk 00:31:17]

FBombs4U: Okay, so all of the realtors in an area are part of the multi-listing service.

Greg: Yeah.

FBombs4U: Okay. And then there’s a tech company that partners with that multi-listing service that takes the tech and feeds that into like the realtor.com searches. It feeds that into the local web pages you can buy, the local companies. So that if I’m in California, I don’t have to find a realtor that’s part of that MLS to look up homes for me, I can put in that zip code, it’ll identify the MLS, and allow me to access the database through that, what originally was called an IDX feed.

Greg: Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. Ultimately, what I think it would look like further down the road where this is already implemented is that there would be a local food delivery company, and there would be a tech company that provides them with a platform. The tech company could be local… Well, I’m picturing a local tech company but with some… It’s not global. Some vendor involved as well. At the end of the day, I don’t want to own all of these businesses. I don’t want to be an alternative to a taxicab company and a food delivery service and all of these things. I just want to maintain the platforms that allow that to work across the community.

FBombs4U: That’s where my disconnect is coming from is my brain automatically runs things out. I’ve seen a couple from like my own personal family do martial arts studios to other businesses that that expansion, if they do it internally, eventually you get to a point where there’s too much duplication of effort. You’re doing accounting in three different places when you could do it in one. You’re doing marketing in three different places when you could do it in one. That there becomes, relatively quickly, a reduction of productivity because of duplication, and that’s when you start to scale into the corporate mindset. And I’m trying to…

Greg: If the goal…

FBombs4U: Go ahead.

Greg: If the goal is to do as much business as possible with the least amount of expense and effort, then that makes sense, and that is the model we’ve been going down for 40 years or longer. But there’s some real down sides to that. When they talk about increased efficiency, what they’re talking about is less jobs. If it takes three times as much accounting work, you need three times as many accountants. And you don’t want to centralize that cost, but as long as all of this is as distributed as possible, there’s going to be more work involved, but that means that more people are able to participate and benefit.

FBombs4U: The opposite stance I would take is when you reduce it to one accountant from three, you can afford to pay that accountant two-and-a-half to three times the money but that…

Greg: But do you?

FBombs4U: But that’s what I’m saying. That’s where the corporate exploitation comes in. It’s the profit maximization of efficiency instead of efficiency while reducing exploitation. You can still do a corporate model as long as you’re just not doing the corporate greed portion of it.

Greg: That’s a huge “if” though. Essentially, you’re talking about human behavior. People love finding their place in hierarchies of power.

FBombs4U: Even though I had me and four people, I’m not a profit maximization person. And when you’re not a profit maximization person, you can overpay people, you can give them benefits they didn’t get before, you can give them time when they need it, and that becomes a culture. And when you don’t have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, then you’re allowed to keep that culture. And what I think may be possible is one starfish at a time, we can change what corporations can be, but by example. Like if you think about… I think it was Google. Originally, it was known for overpaying people, providing these benefits that were amazing, and creating this orig… But now it’s changed. But originally.

Greg: Well, they still overpay people, and the effect is destructive to everyone who isn’t them.

FBombs4U: Well, maybe.

Greg: The high end sets the cost, that’s why it’s so expensive to live in Silicon Valley, and that’s why it’s so expensive to live in New York City.

FBombs4U: That’s a good point. I personally struggle to turn down efficiency for the sake of reasonable wage jobs for more people at the expense of more wages for less people. It’s just a tough one for me.

Greg: So, that’s sort of an ancillary thing for me. I mean, the core thing for me is that our economy, the larger national and global economy, has been taken over by people who put short-term profits over survival, and my goal is to help people not participate with that. Like, that’s what my goal is. There’s that thing going on, and we want nothing to do with it. So, how do we avoid taking part in the larger economy with them? And the answer that came to my mind after a bunch of looking into a lot of stuff – history, philosophy, economics – the answer that comes to me is small local economies that are self-sufficient. That is something that is horizontally scalable. Otherwise we jumble everything up, and then some people with a lot of power siphon as much as possible, and the rest of us are stuck with what remains.

FBombs4U: The idea of reducing the amount of cash that flows out of a neighborhood is essential.

Greg: Yeah, I agree. You need to have enough money coming in and prevent money from going out. What you really want is some sort of equilibrium. So, preferably, if we were just working for each other in the local area that would work really well. In the short term, having extra money coming in is useful, which is why I have a tendency… I’m currently working for a Canadian company for a few reasons, one of which being that that’s my escape route. And the other being that I’m bringing money into the community from outside. I’m also, I get my groceries delivered, I order out for dinner, and stuff like that. The goal is to pay people for their labor, make these opportunities available for people to make money because they’re going to need it. Costs are going up quickly here which is partially because of outside money coming in, but where the money gets spent is very important.

FBombs4U: Yeah. Okay. So, as a way to wrap up, what would you say… Oh, shit. I froze you, hold on. Okay, yeah. What would you say would be the things you need the most soonest? Like what are the next steps you’re taking from here?

Greg: So, those are two very different things. There’s what would be best in order for me to succeed here, and I think the biggest thing is freeing up my time. Because right now, I am working 40 hours a week for someone else, in addition to having my kids and stuff like that. So, freeing up my time, getting to the point where I have outside income would be great. Someone with business experience, I need a business partner. I bring the technology experience, but I don’t know the legality aspects of running a business, I don’t how to get investors, I don’t know how to get grants, I don’t know how to do any of that stuff because I’ve always been a corporate guy. The whole concern about corporate lifestyle, that’s from experience.

FBombs4U: Oh, yeah, okay.

Greg: I was with a big tech company for 20 years. I see how people build little fiefdoms and prevent the things from happening because they disagree with them, and so they just sort of like sabotage each other. Humanity is… When you give people power over other people, it tends to go badly.

FBombs4U: Yeah. Yeah, without checks and balances, yes.

Greg: Yeah. So, that’s kind of… What would be great, like getting investors, getting my time and stuff like that. What I’m doing is continuing with my day job because in addition to the fact it pays the bills, I am working on gaining the types of experience I need, like running these sort of platforms. My previous job was at…it was a big company that in terms of how they do things, was a lot more old-fashioned compared to… There’s a whole bunch of modern tools we weren’t leveraging. So, I need to gain some firsthand experience because these are the things I’m going to need to do in order to do it.

FBombs4U: Okay, that’s good.

Greg: My day to day is learning how to run a successful software engineering team the modern way. So, that’s what I’m doing for now, but eventually I want to connect with the right people to be able to make my business work. And maybe I can [Inaudible 00:42:39] my job. Every once in a while, I give that a try but so far that’s not working out.

FBombs4U: Right. Sneak little parts of your project into like… Now, do you have any SBAs or business incubators you can look into around you? That would be where I would go. So, see if you can find any small business associations or business incubators because that’s literally their specialty is the things you’re looking for. Even if in the incubator, they’re just helping incubate a tech company, that may be exactly what you’re looking for.

Greg: So, part of my concern there is that my strategy and my methodology is very not typical. And like trying to get someone who sees what I’m trying to do without trying to interfere. I’m worried that I’m going to lose a lot of control.

FBombs4U: Possibly.

Greg: Yeah. I have been looking at… There’s a local maker’s space, I don’t know how they’re doing right now, they were getting ready to open before COVID. If they’re still around, that could be an interesting possibility. Because I mean, one of my big goals is to provide a place for people to go and learn about tech, and that seems like a good place, if they are up and running.

FBombs4U: At a bare minimum, might be good networking.

Greg: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Last time I was there, I talked to them about… One of the things I was focusing on was social networks. Are you familiar with Mastodon at all?

FBombs4U: I’m not.

Greg: Okay. So it’s a peer…

[Crosstalk 00:44:20]

FBombs4U: Unless that’s a porn star. No, I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.

Greg: There’s a band with that name, they’re pretty good. No. It’s like a Twitter alternative but it’s peer to peer, so you can host your own instance, someone else hosts an instance, and then they connect with each other.

FBombs4U: Interesting.

Greg: Truth Social is actually using Mastodon as its core.

FBombs4U: Okay. That’s where I heard the name.

Greg: Yeah. Which is kind of weird because they’re trying to build a centralized platform with a decentralized tool, and I just don’t know if it’s going to go well for them. The fact that the SEC’s investigating them is really interesting. This is not a billion-dollar IPO in any way. So, I was trying to push the idea of these distributed social networks that work together. They like the idea of connecting together all the different maker spaces around the country. If each of them can run their own, and they can connect together, it could be an interesting collaborative tool.

FBombs4U: Nice. Nice. That’s interesting. So, I guess what I’d want to do is let’s check in in like a month.

Greg: Sure.

FBombs4U: Find out if you find anybody that has some resources you’ve been looking for, what kind of progress you’ve made, and if you have things we could spread around our community that you’re looking for, whatever it may be, from programmers to whatever, who knows?

Greg: Yeah. I mean, to start with, what I need is business partners, someone with existing business experience. I’m open to that. If there’s any investors who want to invest some money, I’m open to the idea, but I don’t really know how that would function. That would be a lot to figure out.

FBombs4U: You’d need some sort of pitch deck by then that would have a revenue model in it.

Greg: Yeah. Those are the sort of things that I’d like help from a business partner.

FBombs4U: That’s where I think the SBA would help.

Greg: That could be. How would I get in touch with them?

FBombs4U: Just look up SBA Worcester and see what comes up. It’s just the Small Business Administration. Typically, a lot of them are government-funded organizations that are literally funded…designed to help people that want to start small businesses get the tools, stuff, structure that they need. There’s – I can’t remember the name of it – there’s one here that offers free business coaching to people just like you, and it’s all government money stuff that’s available that people just never know about. I’ll see if I can find some resources. If I do, I’ll send them over.

Greg: Okay. Well, thank you.

FBombs4U: But let them again know where they can find you. I’ll repost your Twitter link.

Greg: Yeah. The license [Phonetic 00:47:29] is techstoa.com.

FBombs4U: Okay. Which is the same name on the Twitter.

Greg: Yep. Yeah, I have some other sites too, but that’s the core one I’m focused on right now, and I try to provide links to the other ones that make sense.

FBombs4U: Awesome. You got anything that you want to leave us with or ask us before you go?

Greg: No. I mean, in terms of the January 6th stuff, we got to focus on justice not power. I’ve been saying this for years, and I hope that’s finally coming.

FBombs4U: The sad thing is we didn’t elect those people. Like, we didn’t even pick the people that are in charge of saving our democracy. That’s the thing that scares me.

Greg: Yeah. Yes, we have deep underlying problems that we have yet to address. It’s not do we like this guy or that guy because if that’s the only question, neither of those is a positive.

FBombs4U: Yes. The focus on Trump is what I keep trying to tell people to stop doing. It’s not about him. It’s the whole thing is like just a crumbled tree ready to fall.

Greg: Yeah. The core question is how does our system of government operate, and that’s it operates very badly.

FBombs4U: Very poorly.

Greg: We’re witnessing what that looks like, but the underlying problem is the system of government, not just the implementation currently going through. Because the next guy’s going to be worse. As much as we dislike Trump or whatever, yeah, I certainly do, but someone like DeSantis is more worrisome than someone like Trump. Although, like, Trump is chaos. DeSantis is just authoritarianism.

FBombs4U: I say they are the raptors testing the weaknesses in the fence. They will attack on all sides as often as they can until they find something they can exploit, and then they will CRT all over the country and they’ll, like, groomer all over the country. It’s just what they do. It’s relentless, and you cannot stop it without…

Greg: They think they’re right.

FBombs4U: You need accountability for the crimes. Are they wrong? If there’s never accountability, were they wrong?

Greg: Well, I mean, they were certainly right that Washington is a swamp, so they have that going for them.

FBombs4U: [Laughter] That’s true, that is true. All right. Thank you so much. I will catch up with you on Twitter, and we’ll schedule something for about a month from now.

Greg: Sounds good.

FBombs4U: Awesome. Thanks, Greg.

Greg: Talk to you later.

FBombs4U: See you.