PTW3 050: IdeaScale's Global Impact with Nick Jain and Donna Mitchell

Thanks for checking in the pivoting to web three podcast. Go to pivoting to web three podcast.com to download and listen, or web three game plan to check out the videos. Thank you. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to pivoting to Web three. And today we have Nick Jain. Nick Jain is the CEO of IdeaScale, but he has a real interesting background, and I was very curious and really wanted to have him on the show. And I was glad when he reached out as well, because he's also in the game with Web three, the ecosystems, and he's one of those big platforms that he has experience with the big companies where they're doing a lot of great things and using sas.

Donna Mitchell

00:00:42 - 00:00:58

So, Nick, I'd like to turn it over to you so you can give us some more insight on how you got all of this fabulous big background and the work you're doing today. How did you end up coming into Web three and everything that you're having your hands on?

Nick Jain

00:00:59 - 00:01:42

Sure. So I ended up in software more by coincidence than anything else. When I was working in private equity many years ago, I was a private equity investor in SAS, and I learned a little bit about technology when blockchain was coming out. I'm a math major, and so I actually read the original Sato paper, the original bitcoin paper. I was a bit of a math nerd, so it's really cool stuff to learn when you actually love that. And about two years ago, for the past four or five years, I've been professional CEO. I've helped run a $100 million revenue trucking company, then a small men's shoe company. And then about two years ago, I literally got a random call out of the blue from somebody I'd met a couple of years ago and said, hey, I have a friend who's looking for a CEO for his SaaS business because the old CEO's retired.

Nick Jain

00:01:42 - 00:02:13

Are you interested? And I absolutely jumped at the opportunity because up until then, I've been kind of co CEO or I'm part of like a three person executive team. And finally someone has given me an opportunity to take the, you know, to take the big chair and really run a software company, which was an incredible. A, it was an incredible career opportunity for me, but b, what idea scale this company that I'm at does really aligns with my values. I've always believed that ideas matter more than the seniority of the people who say those ideas. And that's literally our product. So it was like a personal great fit for me.

Donna Mitchell

00:02:14 - 00:02:37

So with that said, with the ideas, because I remember the days where ideas that fly and a lot of ideas would fly and they flew and they get implemented. So with all the ideas and what you're doing today and coming into that space, how is AI and all the emerging technology, how's that impacting your business? And how is your business impacting web three?

Nick Jain

00:02:38 - 00:03:25

Sure. So, on AI impacting us, I think AI is impacting innovation more broadly in three ways. Number one is reducing duplicative innovation. So if you have three different people, let's imagine one person's sitting in Japan working in Japanese, one person sitting in Russia working in Russian, and one person sitting in Britain working in English. They're all part of the same company. They may be working on the exact same idea, but they don't know it because they're all speaking different languages and they're all talking about similar concepts in different ways, even beyond the language barrier. So AI helps those people connect because it can realize that, hey, person a, person B and person C are working on similar ideas and you can link those people and help them collaborate. So that's number one, and that's really happening in our technology, and that's something, a feature that we implemented a couple of years ago.

Nick Jain

00:03:25 - 00:04:02

The second area is AI is purely from a communication point of view. One of the things that a lot of people struggle with when they're about to innovate is what I call stage fright. They're just afraid of sharing their ideas because they think they'll sound stupid. They're not going to use the big fancy ten letter words from SA, they're not going to use SaT words. So AI has really decreased the barrier to entry for people to communicate more effectively. And this could be because you're not a native english speaker or even for native english speakers. You're just, maybe you're just not the greatest writer communicator. It's lowered the barrier for entry and made it easier for everyone to communicate their great ideas, regardless of their faculty, with language.

Nick Jain

00:04:02 - 00:04:44

And then the third thing is AI technologies are helping people innovate faster and better because they can copilot alongside a human being. So rather than a human being sitting in a dark room by themselves and coming up with the next genius idea, these AI tools can help. For web three specifically. I don't know if IdeaScales technology directly works with web three, but some of our clients are actually web three. So there's this organization called Cardano. It's a blockchain based think tank. It's actually one of the biggest blockchain think tanks in the world, founded by the founder, one of the founders of Ethereum, so very prominent organization. They've been one of our customers for, I don't know, a decade or so.

Nick Jain

00:04:45 - 00:05:07

They run a. Cardano basically runs a big project for how do we advance blockchain, where they're collecting ideas from thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who want to contribute to the advancement of blockchain technologies. And that entire community ecosystem for Cardano runs on our software, which we're very, very proud of.

Donna Mitchell

00:05:07 - 00:05:20

But I would be very proud of that as well, because once you start bringing in the blockchain technology and the advancements, do you see a lot of interoperability happening with the blockchain technology going forward, or has that started happening already?

Nick Jain

00:05:21 - 00:05:48

So, for blockchain specifically, the cool innovation is that you can have two things, right? Number one, you can have decentralized storage of information. And number two, it's really, really difficult to hack, given the amount of computational resources that are required. Now, those two benefits come at certain other costs. Distributed compute is more expensive. Dehashing blockchain is also very. Sorry. Hashing. Sorry.

Nick Jain

00:05:48 - 00:06:33

Computing blockchain hashes is very expensive. So it's wasted energy. It's wasted computational time and resources. What that means is blockchain is not a perfect solution for all use cases. It's great in some areas where you want to get rid of trust and make it very difficult for someone to hack a system, but conversely, it's really, you're doing that at a cost of an enormous amount of electricity and computational power. So there's other situations where traditional centralized systems may actually matter more. What that's meant in a technology ecosystem sense is there are certain technologies that have naturally said, hey, we should be running on blockchain that now that it exists and we're going to switch the blockchain, there's other technologies where you don't need that level of security or decentralized information that'll still stay on centralized servers of some sort.

Donna Mitchell

00:06:34 - 00:07:31

So, with that said, I've got an audience that may be throughout the spectrum. Got some corporations, some big corporations, some brands, and some entrepreneurs. How do they know when they need to be looking at, let's say, blockchain technology, or at least researching it, or thinking about it, or nonprofit? Since you have a lot of the thought leaders in your circle and on your platform, and they're really looking towards the future and advancements, what's the regular old CEO or solopreneur or regular brand that knows they're going to have to keep up. Everybody's like, don't be left behind. Don't be left behind. So they try not to get left behind. And now they listening to pivot into web three, what can you share with them with everything that you stated to help them move forward and not be left behind.

Nick Jain

00:07:32 - 00:08:49

Sure. So for most people who are nothing in technology, it actually won't matter very much because when you're buying your software, that could be Salesforce, that could be AWS services from Amazon, that could be our software. If you're buying software rather than making software, you may not actually have to worry about Web three too much because you're hoping, and this is a little bit of a hope, that the people you're buying software from have been much more thoughtful about whether they need to be on Web 3.0 technologies or Web 2.0 technologies. So if you're an oil company and you're buying a CRM system, a customer relationship management system for your sales and marketing team, you're hoping that your CRM company has done some really thoughtful analysis on what sort of infrastructure they need to be running on and what sort of technology they need to be running on. So I would say two piece of advice. Number one, if you're not in technology, you probably don't need to worry too much about Web three or, you know, because your technology people already are in, your technology vendors already are. And the second thing is if you as a leader, you are genuinely interested in this technology, there's two resources you can do to learn how it might affect you or in your business. Number one is there's a lot of free courses like on Web 3.0 technology that places like Coursera, which you can take, you know, it'll take ten to 30 hours of time to do and totally free.

Nick Jain

00:08:50 - 00:09:32

So you can go learn a lot about these technologies and you can be super technical from a code perspective or just, hey, I'm a layman, I don't know anything about technology coding, and I'll just learn about what the hell this technology is. The second resource is you can go to any of the generative AI technologies, Chat, GPT, Gemini, Claude, Llama, and give it context about your business. Say, hey, my name is Nick, I run a men's shoe company. Tell me, called Xyz. Tell me how Web three technologies are going to affect my shoe business. And it's really interesting because these Jenny and Chat, GPT and similar technologies are actually going to give you very thoughtful answers on how you, despite running a shoe business, are still going to be impacted by Web 3.0.

Donna Mitchell

00:09:33 - 00:09:54

So when you talk about all the chat GPTs and if you're into technology or not into technology, and somebody's really interested now in looking at your platform, how do they know what makes your platform different than what's out there today? Like, who are your competitors and what makes your platform really unique?

Nick Jain

00:09:54 - 00:10:27

Sure. So we have about nine or ten competitors globally. I think we're the biggest and most well established of them. If you go to Gartner, G two, or CAt, or any of the software rating platforms, you can look up who our competitors are. I think that there's three things that we do really, really well versus our peer group. Number one is our software is really easy to use. We've made it so that my 80 year old parents can log in and start using our software within seconds. The admin who's setting it up for the first time can do it in five minutes.

Nick Jain

00:10:27 - 00:11:03

You don't need to spend weeks and hours configuring this software. That's, number one, super easy to use. Number two is how much we've invested in product quality. So a lot of technology companies spend more on sales and marketing than they do in the actual product that they're building. And we've spent an inordinate amount of resources, money, time, making sure our product quality is really high. And that means it's very low to zero bugs, which is something we're very proud of. It means that we've tried to really focus on the user experience, to make it very easy for the user to understand what's going on and actually participate in software. And I think the third thing is separate from our software.

Nick Jain

00:11:03 - 00:11:21

I think the way our company reacts and supports its customers. So I provide 24 7365 live human customer support. So on midnight on Christmas Eve, if you have a problem, you can come talk to, or you can talk to a real human being who will help you solve your problems with an average response time of, I think, 22 seconds.

Donna Mitchell

00:11:21 - 00:11:21

Oh, wow.

Nick Jain

00:11:21 - 00:11:59

So 22 seconds. Any time of day or night, any time of year. And in addition, for issues that become serious or important, I'm personally involved. One of our customers had an accessibility issue where they felt that our software was not totally available to people with disabilities. And I personally, every day, worked with them to make sure that our standard not only met what our accessibility standards not only met what they asked for, but exceeded it, because we felt was the right thing to do. And that's a level of customer service, whether it be the junior customer support person all the way up to me as a CEO, that we think our customers deserve that and we provide that level of access to us as people behind the software.

Donna Mitchell

00:12:00 - 00:13:04

That's very impressive. So if someone's listening right now, how do they know if they've got the type of business that could be benefit, that can benefit with your software? Or I guess what I'm really asking is, can you give us a use case on what your software has accomplished in that project and what would have happened if your software was not utilized in the manner that it was? Can you, can you paint us a picture of a project without breaking any type of NDAs or anything like that? But so we can really wrap our heads around everything that you're sharing with us. I have an idea what you're saying, and I got some really fine ideas on what you're doing, only because I'm in that software space and have been in that space. But for those listening, I think it would be helpful if you could break it down just a little bit further on. What were some of the projects that you had success and maybe what was a project that got a little out of control which you shared with us and you had to walk them through it, but share with us a couple of things that happened?

Nick Jain

00:13:04 - 00:13:05

Sure.

Donna Mitchell

00:13:05 - 00:13:06

I want a secret.

Nick Jain

00:13:07 - 00:13:54

I'll answer the first half of your question in the second half. But first, who is our software meant? Our software is really meant for any large, complex organization. Typically, I may say that somebody who's got more than 500 employees in their organization, right? That could be 500 or 500,000 below 100 people. Our software is totally free. By the way, if you've got a small organization, you can go out to ideascale.com and sign up and have a perpetual free license for your small organization. Obviously, we're hoping your organization grows, that we get to grow with you as eventually a supplier. So that's where. And that's, we have customers in pharmaceuticals and finance and healthcare and some of the largest us government agencies, us post office, the transportation safety authority, the coast guard, other foreign governments, like we work with anybody who wants to innovate, which theoretically should be everybody is a potential customer of ours.

Nick Jain

00:13:54 - 00:14:33

Now, examples of how a difference are software ranks. I'll give two examples. Firstly, I'll give a fun example from us. And then secondly, I'll give a more serious example from our customers. So I was in Japan, I think, back in May, and in Japan, I don't know if you know, but pretty much every Japanese company has an acute little mascot, right? It could be an animal, it could be a fruit, something like that. And they put on, you know, they put on costumes for this during company events or organizational events. And I came back from Japan and said, hey, wouldn't it be cool if IdeaScale had a mascot? Now, at a normal company, the way you'd figure out your mascot is the CEO would sit down with his or her marketing team and say, okay, somebody come up with an idea for a mascot. Let's go do that.

Nick Jain

00:14:33 - 00:14:57

That's not what we did. We said, okay, anyone in the world can suggest how IdeaScale's new mascot should behave. Your customer. If your student is sitting somewhere in Taiwan, if you are an employee of IdeaScale, suggest ideas. I personally submitted three ideas, and two of my ideas people hated. They got voted down. People thought they were stupid ideas. One of my ideas was actually a finalist, but the winning idea was from a new employee from South Africa who just joined six months ago.

Nick Jain

00:14:58 - 00:15:52

And so his idea became, got chosen as our company wide mascot. So, number one, imagine the decision making process was not three marketing people and the CEO, but the entire company, and pretty much anybody who wanted to contribute in the world, not just in the company, but you could have contributed. And then secondly, the idea that one was not the idea of the CEO or of a senior marketing person or people involved in design, but just a random guy who cared enough to submit his idea. He used one of the generative AI tools to actually drop a sketch, and that was the winning idea. So we'll be actually announcing our new mascot in like, a week or two. But that's a fun example of where the decision making process was different and the result was better. A more serious example is one of our customers, and I'll be a little bit vague here, just too, because we're talking about custom, but one of our customers was one of the biggest fast food chains in the world. It's a place you've probably eaten sometime in the past couple of months.

Nick Jain

00:15:52 - 00:16:42

Have you eat fast food at all? Probably half the people in the world have been there at least once. They needed new menu items, and they have all these great chefs on staff, but they said, okay, let's go out and talk to our millions or hundreds of millions of customers around the world about what our new menu items should be. And that has two benefits. Number one, you tap hundreds of millions of people's brains. And number two, you get people excited because they get to participate in contributing to their brand, into your brand. And so this company collected hundreds or I forget whether it was hundreds or thousands of ideas, and they came up with a new menu item that they actually put on the menu and that you or I could eat, which is kind of imagine that, you know, the a, they got just a better menu item as a consequence. B, they got all of us engaged as consumers because we cared about this restaurant and their brand enough to share ideas and realized, hey, my idea could be the next great menu item.

Donna Mitchell

00:16:44 - 00:17:13

So it sounds like I like this. I'm sure someone else is thinking about this. So it sounds like it's one big idea place where everybody is there together instead of in their own little space and place. GPT everybody's there together. AI is running it back and forth. All the statistics, all the words, all the predictive, all the generative, all everything is there together. That was a good idea. Who did, who designed that platform?

Nick Jain

00:17:13 - 00:17:34

So the original two founders were Rob Hoenn and Viv Posca. Run. So the idea skills been around about 15 years long, you know, so we've been around about 15 years. That's why we're pretty well established at this point. But yeah, these two guys came up with this idea way back in 2009. They founded the company and we've been off to the races ever since.

Donna Mitchell

00:17:35 - 00:18:15

Yeah, it's a good idea. It's an excellent idea. So what in this space makes you nervous? What have you seen? What has happened that's made you nervous or giving you a jaundice? I, or it's like, hmm, I didn't realize all that could happen. And then on the flip side, what's on your wish list? It seems like you've experienced so much and you, and you're in a platform, in a software that is very robust and expansive globally, so you can make significant impact quickly. What concerns you on the flip side, sure.

Nick Jain

00:18:15 - 00:19:04

So what concerns me first is I think every one of our customers is looking for a silver bullet, right? Hey, can, you know, can we, if we hire this one person, can it solve our innovation problems? If we add this new technology? And look, as much as I would like to believe that our software will solve every problem in the world for you, it won't. Right? Nothing does that. If you want to get, for example, if you want to improve your fitness, just eating healthy is not enough. You actually have to exercise a bit and sleep properly. You have to do many things, and that's true with innovation, too. So I wish our customers realized that if they want to become truly innovative, they have to take a multifaceted approach. And I think we're a core part of that approach, but there's other changes that they need to make around people, around processes, around incentives, around culture. And I think that's a longer term realization that most organizations ultimately achieve.

Nick Jain

00:19:04 - 00:19:41

But everyone's looking for the silver bullet on day one. And again, I would love to be that silver bullet, but there is no silver bullet in anything in life. And then on my wish list, I don't know if I have a wish list, but I'm kind of looking forward to the fact that about a year ago, IdeaScale was really a one product company. And we've evolved over the past year to becoming a two product company. And then we'll actually have a couple more products coming out in the next six months or so. So these products will each try and hit different parts of the innovation problems that our customers are challenged with or faced with.

Donna Mitchell

00:19:42 - 00:19:56

So as customers share their information on the innovation side, how does copyright and intellectual property, how does that play into this whole software? Sure. Who owns what? Do you own it once you come on, once you come on this space, or who owns what?

Nick Jain

00:19:56 - 00:20:39

No, I own nothing. So, I mean, we own ideascale, the software platform that it's running on. But whatever's in there, it's always our customers data. So customers. So I don't even have access to my customers data unless they give me in writing permission to go in and take a look at something. Our customers typically run two types of campaigns, either internal campaigns, where only their employees can see the data, their ideas, or sometimes they run public campaigns, like when that fast food company was reaching out to all of its customers. So the IP, the intellectual property, the secrecy of those ideas really belong to the company. And they can choose to make those private to their employees, or they can say, hey, we want all these ideas available and visible to everyone in the world.

Nick Jain

00:20:39 - 00:20:46

They're the customer's choice. But certainly none of it belongs to me. That's, you know, our promise. We don't even look at your data unless you ask us to.

Donna Mitchell

00:20:46 - 00:21:13

So if, so, if you have companies that are starting to do a lot of virtual assistants and have all these support globally, nomad, digital nomads and everything else, they can still keep control of their information. It sounds like there's a level of security in this whole thing along with international property. Can you share some information about that?

Nick Jain

00:21:14 - 00:21:46

Yeah, so we are incredibly secure. We have something called a Fedramp qualification, which is one of the highest levels of security clearance that you have if you want to work with the US, government as a technology provider, so that's incredibly difficult to obtain. It means our software is really good. It means our servers are secure. It means that there's no single point of failure. So even though I'm the CEO of the company, if you stole my phone and computer, you couldn't hack our systems because I don't have all the passwords. So our system is incredibly secure, and it's designed that way, which is really good because our government cloud customers demand it, and most of our enterprise customers require it. And they want to know that there's idea.

Nick Jain

00:21:46 - 00:22:44

Data is really sensitive sometimes, and so they want to know that their data is secure. In terms of digital nomads, what I'd say is this, whether you have a workforce that's all working out at the same office or workforce that is distributed all over the world, at the end of the day, no software technology, no security protocols can protect you from bad actors. If you don't trust your employees, then they can certainly do bad things to your systems and your data. But that's true of any technology. So it's really incumbent on any company to make sure that they are, a, they're hiring employees they can trust, b, they're monitoring their employees, and c, they're only giving their employees access to the systems that those employees need access to. A really simple example is, look, I trust all my employees, but does every employee in the company have access to our bank accounts? No, that would be. That would be crazy, right? Because you just need one person to do something bad that could have devastating impacts on your company. So you restrict system acts.

Nick Jain

00:22:44 - 00:22:53

It's always good protocol to restrict system access to the people who actually need to use it and make sure that the data in there is not something that could ever cause catastrophic loss.

Donna Mitchell

00:22:53 - 00:23:25

Okay, so let me ask you this. Where. How does it fit with, like, you know, like. All right, I'm familiar with pharmaceutical aviation, airlines in those places and spaces. How does that. Can you give us some use cases in, like, some industries like that, that you might have a client in? You know, is it used in diagnostic or is it in the farmer or the medical device or consumer products?

Nick Jain

00:23:26 - 00:23:55

Yeah, we have customers in every space. We have toy companies, we have pharmaceutical companies, we have financial companies, we have accounting companies, because everybody needs to innovate and come up with new lines of business, new products and continuous improvement. So we have, one of. One of the biggest three pharmaceutical companies in the world is one of our clients. And I. I think they use it for R and D purposes. They're using it to come up with new ideas for what their new drugs or biologics should be, so they can cure more diseases or alleviate pain and suffering. That's what our software does.

Nick Jain

00:23:55 - 00:24:05

It helps you come up with new ideas and identify the good ideas so you can really focus on the good ideas rather than get lost in the crowd of bad ideas that exist.

Donna Mitchell

00:24:06 - 00:24:37

So I'm a consultant, business development, let's say. Now, I may not have the 500 people in the employees, but it does sound like you've got a platform that could really help certain places and spaces. If you've got major Fortune 500, Fortune 100 client lists and you're working with them and you need to do some type of innovation on supply chain or anything high level, you're the place to be.

Nick Jain

00:24:38 - 00:25:27

We are, yes, very. We are definitely the best innovative idea management innovation management platform that exists. I can say that with a straight face. But look, if you're a one person consultant or a five person consulting firm, you should still use our platform. Because right now, whenever you have a great idea, where are you putting it? You're putting on a piece of post it note, maybe you're emailing it to yourself, sticking it on a notepad, like a digital notepad somewhere. Then it's sitting across like 100 different chats on chat GPT. Why not stick into a centralized idea management platform like ours? That way, even if your idea is not useful to you today, you'll remember it five years from now, because it's written in a place and you can manage your entire idea portfolio no different than you'd manage an investment portfolio or your CRM context. The analogy I like to use is we are the CRM for ideas.

Donna Mitchell

00:25:27 - 00:25:39

I am so glad you on the show. I know I'm going to start getting emails and texts like I got from this last episode. So if somebody wanted to reach you, how do they reach you right now?

Nick Jain

00:25:40 - 00:26:04

Sure. Three great ways to reach me. Number one, you can go to www.ideascale.com, which is the company website. Again, you can sign up totally free if you're with a small organization. The two other ways if you want to reach me personally. Number one is you find me on LinkedIn. Nick Jane, I respond to 100% of LinkedIn messages, so feel free to contact me. Or second, you can email me directly at Nick dot janeaskill.com.

Donna Mitchell

00:26:05 - 00:26:17

Oh, this is wonderful. So is there anything that I didn't ask that you want to share with us? What's going on? Something that you really want to talk about that I didn't think to ask. Why don't you share with us? You've got a lot going on in there.

Nick Jain

00:26:18 - 00:26:22

I'm going to be a first time father in two months, so that's something I'm kind of excited about.

Donna Mitchell

00:26:22 - 00:26:50

Oh, that's really exciting. Oh, my goodness. Well, I am so glad that you're on pivoting to web three and you reached out to get on the podcast. I am excited about IdeaScale. I am sure this is really exciting for those that are listening in our audience. So once again, we are shaping tomorrow together with Nick, Jane, and thank you for coming. And thank you for listening to pivoting to web three podcast.

Nick Jain

00:26:51 - 00:26:52

Thanks so much.

Donna Mitchell

00:26:52 - 00:27:03Exclude

0:00 - 27:03

Thanks for checking in the pivoting to web three podcast. Go to pivotingtoweb three podcast.com to download and listen, or web three game plan to check out the videos. Thank you. We're shaping tomorrow together.