Brent Bushnell: How the Entrepreneur With Crazy Ideas Turns Them Into Meaningful Revenue. CEO Coaching International

Transcription

1 Brent Bushnell On How the Entrepreneur With Crazy Ideas Turns Them Into Meaningful Revenue We've got another great show lined up for you today on the On Your Mark, Get Set, Grow Podcast of. I'm your host, Steve Sanduski, and joining me today is Brent Bushnell. Brent is the co-founder and CEO of Two Bit Circus, which is a Los Angeles based experiential entertainment company. It is a funny name, and we're definitely going to have a good time on the call today, but we're also going to talk about some very important topics that I know all of our listeners are really going to enjoy. Brent, welcome to the show. Hey Steve. Thanks so much for having me. Well Brent, got quite an interesting background here. You are a lifelong engineer, you're an entrepreneur, you've started multiple companies over the years. At your current company it says that you are trying to make technology fun. I think a good place to start today is to talk about what does your company do? I think that'll really set the stage for where we want to go with the conversation. I think that'll be helpful. What does Two Bit Circus do? If you can believe it, we're literally a high tech circus. You know, you think about what Cirque du Soleil did for circus right? They pulled out the animals. They classed up the show. We really take the humans out and make it all about the technology. We're really using modern tech to get people playing together in fun new ways. We'll do huge events for Amazon, and Intel, and the Super Bowl. We run our own event, which is a big traveling carnival. It's over 100,000 square feet, so think like 2 football fields. It's virtually one half a bunch of high tech entertainment, rooms of laser beams, walls with buttons, we even have a fireball dunk tank. Then the other half is a bunch of hands on projects to inspire kids about science and engineering. Okay, yeah. I was going to ask you about that because it sounds like that in addition to having a fun entertainment component, that part of this is definitely directed to the kids, and to get them excited and interested in science, technology,

2 engineering, math, all of those tough subjects for some of us in high school and college. Yeah, well. You know our whole team here, we're a big band of nerds. There's a term used by educators and politicians to talk about the disciplines that we don't have enough kids studying, which is STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math. Arguably STEM has a branding problem. People think it's pencil ties and lab coats, and just for non-desirable sort of nerds. When really modern day, those tools are awesome. The things you would use to be able to play with that stuff are better than they've ever been. We got really excited about the term STEAM for STEM plus art, and felt like it did a really good job of, by incorporating arts into those things, you bring the creativity, the fun, the excitement, and we felt like there was a good opportunity to get folks excited about this stuff by including the arts and creativity. What better way than a carnival? Let's start where kids like, music, and fashion, and games, and then sort of be able to deliver the learning that we want to have there through that fun. It's like having a little sugar to make the medicine go down. That's a great way to put it. I think this is really fascinating, what you guys are doing, because so much of society today seems to revolve around entertainment. I like what you guys are doing in that you are using entertainment as a way to introduce people to a lot of this technology. I know you have, as you mentioned, a bunch of creative nerds on staff there. What we want to focus on today to talk about is the idea of innovation, and rapid prototyping, and how do you go about doing that? How do you go about coming up with ideas in your business where you can use technology to both teach and to entertain people? I know it's not all fun and games at what you do. Yeah. That may be the outward appearance, but behind the scenes you have some really smart people who are working on some interesting things, and using really advanced strategies to figure out, how do you actually deliver this circus? What is it that you're actually going to be presenting as part of your offering? That's, I think, kind of a framework here so I'm just going to throw it back to you. Great. Where would you like to start in terms of talking about how you go through this process of innovation, and brainstorming, and coming up with ideas, and rapid prototyping? Great, wow. Lot of good stuff there. You know, for our company there are a few thesis that we started with. One is, people are obsessed with their devices. You're walking down the street and you've got these sort of zombies you're going to be Page 2 of 10

3 running into looking down at their phones all the time. New parents are constantly complaining about the tablets and how much time their kids are spending on devices. So one of our early motivations was, how do we get people off their devices? Right? We are social animals. We like to be around other people and nowadays sort of need new opportunities to be able to do that. That leads us into sort of our second thesis, which was, out of home entertainment, stuff you don't do at your house, hasn't changed much since laser tag and mini golf. You know? It's a lot of the same old stuff. Hey, I love going to the movies, and going bowling, but there's all this great new technology. Why hasn't that been applied to entertainment also? Computer vision, and cheap sensors, and laser projectors, virtual reality, there's all sorts of great new toys to play with and it's really fertile ground for innovation. To take this kind of full circle to your original question of what some of our process is, is you know, we really look for things that are social. How can we get games that get people playing together again, looking each other in the face, not mediated through a chat room or whatnot. Let's get people together in real life. A lot of places we'll start is, "Hey, this game's got to be social." We also look to things that maybe people have a little bit of familiarity with. If we're talking about making a new game, can we start in some classic game that people know? Say the game of Asteroids. That's a classic game, maybe not that kids will recognize, but adults definitely will. Or maybe Pong. Or maybe Pong. Exactly. What we'll do is, we'll take that classic game, let's make the controller huge. Let's make it multi player. In the case of Asteroids we took a laser projector, we mounted it in the ceiling, and then using a connect camera to track where you are, we make you the ship so now the asteroid's being projected on the ground all around you. You're the ship. You're having to move around. One of my favorite parts is rather than, instead of a button to be able to cause you to fire, you have to make the sound with your voice. "Pew, pew." You're moving around. This ends up being a really social game because people are crowded around you and they're saying, "Hey, look out behind you. There's an asteroid coming." Really kind of fun and pretty hilarious. Yeah. What I find really interesting about this is that you said that you want these to be social. You want to get people away from their device, which I think is awesome because so often we can just get so wrapped up in that thing that's in the palm of our hand. They're looking at that thing, and chatting with someone, or trying to play some kind of game. I think this probably plays right into the millennial generation where they're really into experiences. Now, did that play at all into what you guys came up with? That the next generation, the younger folks, typically are all about experiences that go beyond, "Hey, let's go to a movie tonight?" Yes. You know, Steve, you nailed it. That was really our third thesis. There's this generational, there's really a shift in consumer appetites. That's away from Page 3 of 10

4 consumption and much more into novel life experience. Millennials in particular, as you nailed, are looking much more for novel life experience than for buying stuff. You're seeing all sorts of interesting indicators of this. A lot of brands are looking at immersive activations to engage folks with their brands. Some of the really fun stuff happening in a lot of cities now are these pop up dinners now where it's not a regular restaurant that you go to. It's something that takes over somebody's house, or is in a weird loft downtown. It just happens every now and again. This stuff are fun. They're things that I can now share with my friends and say, "Hey, did you hear about this?" It's special. It's transient and appetites are really moving in that direction. I wanted to really be able to provide more of those kinds of experiences, get people off their couch, and playing together. As you were thinking about starting this company, did you just, you and your cofounder or co-founders, just sit around one day and brainstorm and say, "Oh hey. I got this idea. What do you think?" Or did you pick up on some trends that you saw happening? Did you do a traditional focus group? What was the process for you to come up with the idea of this business? Gosh, awesome question. You know, I think oftentimes, in retrospect, 20/20 hindsight, people are like, "Oh, yeah. It was so clear. Oh my gosh. It just went from A, to B, to C." It really wasn't that way with us. We knew that the sort of general domain that we wanted to play in. That was out of home entertainment and using modern technology, but really it didn't start as a company. My co-founder and I met at really what was a drinking club with an art problem. We were just a bunch of nerds that would get together in downtown, and share projects we were working on on the side. Erik and I started to, literally the first night we met at one of those, went back to his place and started collaborating making an interactive whiteboard. We pointed a camera and a projector at this whiteboard, and you could draw on it, and then the camera would pick up what you'd drawn and the projector would project a physics simulation that would then bounce off of what you had drawn. It was kind of a fun fusing of physical and digital. We were just doing this for fun. We had no profit interest. We were just building it for a party. We were taking it to a event. Once we installed it there people really enjoyed it and were having a good time. We thought, "Gosh, this was really a lot of fun and people are enjoying it. Let's make another one." We made something different. It was sort of a 6 player game table. Sort of like a classic arcade, but rather than for 1 or 2 people, it was for 6. That kind of guaranteed you were meeting somebody new when we brought it to the next event. People come to parties in 2s and 4s. 6 is sort of a nice number. We kept challenging ourselves to make something new every month for events. Sort of a TED like conference in downtown LA. It was after having done, I don't know, 8 of those events or so that Brands started calling saying, "Hey, we saw that stuff that you were doing. Mind doing our holiday party?" Intel was a really early customer, and then Microsoft said, "Hey, we've got our whole team in for E3, the big video game conference. Would you guys do the whole Page 4 of 10

5 E3 party?" That stuff started to get momentum. We started doing more and more events and became really a Cirque du Soleil for games. We were like, "Gosh, maybe there's a real business here." But it didn't happen overnight. We continued to sort of know we wanted to play in that space, but not enough that we could go raise money for it. We became basically a consulting shop. We could definitely take those games out to people's events, but that wasn't enough to sustain all of us. We also took on consulting, but it was consulting at a time where a lot of agencies had copywriters, web developers, and project managers, but we had like welders, and physicists, and robotocists. We could build big custom activations. We almost were like an imagineering for companies that weren't Disney. Yep. With that consulting work always sort of angled to take on projects that had us building some IP that we could keep. We filtered for those kinds of projects. Over time kept investing in our own stuff, and things like our traveling carnival birthed out of that. We actually launched it on Kickstarter. The money to fund the PR, and make the video, and all of that we sort of eked out of the process of our consulting business. Okay. Now, I want to talk about the actual process of innovation itself. Was this a formal process? I mean, if you think about traditionally how a lot of firms go about trying to improve things they might do a focus group, or they might ask their best customers, and sit them down and say, "What do you think? What would you like?" Of course, you're probably going to get more incremental changes when you go through that route. What thoughts do you have? What did you guys do as you go about your innovation? Is it a formalized process or how does it work? Gosh, also a really awesome question. It happens sort of a few different ways. At times a customer comes through with a pretty clear idea of what they want, and we will then have a clear domain. We've got a couple different ways in which we'll brainstorm. We do quite like the Disney method, which is he actually had, Walt Disney had 3 different rooms. The first room is the dreamer room. In this room think Cambrian Explosion, right? No idea is bad. You're allowed to just put everything on the wall. Just really go to town. This is an important step because you want sort of the widest funnel from which to draw inspiration. There's a excellent, just an excellent talk on creativity. John Cleese talks about intermediate impossibles. The thing that's so special about, and what he means by intermediate impossibles is, okay, we might be brainstorming on say a new kind of washer machine, and you say pirates. Right? Ostensibly pirates has nothing to do with washing machines, but by sort of planting this sort of weird seed out in the world, it gets everybody else sort of thinking, "Well, yeah. Pirates is sort of ridiculous, but hooks. Maybe there's some way we could incorporate a hook in order to be able to pull this off." All of a sudden that sort of gets us thinking in a new direction. That intermediate impossible, pirates, landed us at something that is actually possible. It wasn't until Page 5 of 10

6 you sort of had allowed your thinking to sort of stray from reality to be able to land at that thing. You know? Innovation is something that by its very nature is not normal right now. It's not in existence so you need to sort of allow yourself. That's why kids can be so creative right? They haven't been sort of sanitized yet by sort of that kind of thinking. Intermediate impossibles. That's the dreamer room. It's the biggest set that you can have. Then you go from that into the next room. This is the room for the, this is now reality. Of all the things that we had in that room, what are the things that are going to actually that we do need to adhere to the laws of physics, and they have some financial return? We start to apply some filters to be able to cull that big set into something much more reasonable. Finally, the last room is, "Okay, of all the things that made it through that filter, what are we actually going to work on? What do we really care about? What do we think makes a ton of sense?" That's sort of one approach, that kind of brainstorming approach. Another place, if we have fewer constraints and we're just trying to come up with a new game, or have a more open ended place to start, is tools. What sort of tools do we have? What do we have right now that is maybe sort of interesting? Wow, maybe there's this cool new piece of technology, the Leap Motion, or Intel's got this neat new Real Sense Camera. You start with some sort of neat new innovation and say, "Wow. Now that we have this thing, what can we do with it?" That's another fun way to sort of come at solving a problem. "Gosh, we can do a motion tracking. What if we could put that in front of a bunch of people and figure out who's the cynic of the bunch?" Or, allow yourself to sort of run from that little seed crystal. The last sort of thing that ends up being really great is multiple disciplines. When you get people with varied backgrounds together, that's really powerful. You have a physicist, and an educator, a game designer, and a unicyclist, circus performer. Those are a lot of different backgrounds and they're going to have lots of different sort of realities to be able to bring to this discussion. Almost in the same way that intermediate impossible people are going to have those. They're going to bring that sort of eclectic-ness to the discussion in a way that's really powerful. Now, one thing I didn't hear you say, Brent, is you didn't go to your potential customers, or existing customers, and say, "Hey, what do you think? What would you like to see?" For example, if you go back 30, 40 years ago and you asked consumers what they would like to see in their car, they probably would have said, "Well, I'd like to see more cup holders." Right. You'll get this incremental change because they don't know what's possible, whereas the methods that you were just describing you get people from multiple disciplines in a room. You look at the different technology that's available. Get creative people together. You think about the dream room, as you mentioned, and that's where these things can happen. Is that fair to say that it's really more you guys coming up with it as opposed to trying to figure out what you think your Page 6 of 10

7 consumers would actually want? You know, this is really an awesome thread. Yes and no. First, it's easier than ever to get to a working version of what we're talking about. Right? There's definitely that first phase that us just brainstorming, figuring it out. But once we've got an idea we can have a working prototype by the afternoon. If we had that this morning, desktop fabrication, and all the programming libraries, and electronics kits, and whatnot allow you to really have something working in a way that you haven't been able to with that sort of speed at any time in history. A really important early next step is getting in front of people because you learn too much by having the public weigh in on it. Erik and I often joke that our favorite things are often the things that we're the most excited about, the things that we are just like, "Oh my God. This is going to be totally awesome." We put it in front of people and they're like, "Huh? What? This is stupid." Then it's the stuff that is just sort of like a random toss against the wall, something totally ridiculous that's still in debug mode, and people are like, "Oh my God. This is amazing. Wow." We're sort of like, "Really? You like that?" There's really something special to putting it out as early as possible. We try to engage with customers as fast as possible. In fact, our workshop is in a big artists community in downtown Los Angeles, and twice a year there's an art walk where anybody in this whole city block who's got space can open up their doors, and the LA public floods in. They show their paintings, and whatever. We basically have it as a big focus group. We'll set up all of our newest stuff and we'll just see what people like or they don't like. In general, as a company, we try to get our new stuff out in front of people as fast as we can because there's just no substitute for live feedback, and engaging with your potential customers. They're just going to give you, they're going to share with you a perspective that you just hadn't thought about at all. I think this speaks on a much higher sort of level. You probably heard a lot of people talking about diversity. Diversity in the workplace. That's not only about inclusion from a societal and a cultural level. It's also about, when it comes to building a solution, or drafting some new piece of legislation, or building some new piece of technology, you want all of the different stakeholders who might be using that thing at the table. You want to be able to have their perspective sort of realized. If that hasn't been possible in your creative process, well then you better have it be early in the process when you start putting it in front of potential customers so that they say, "Wow. Hey, this is super fun for a 20, 30 something, and grandma can't read that at all. That contrast is not there at all." Or, "Little Johnny, he can't reach up high enough." Whatever. You're going to learn really fast what works and what doesn't. Yeah. Well, I like how you mentioned here that yeah, you guys certainly come up with all these really great and interesting ideas that you think are terrific, but then you quickly want to get it out into the marketplace. I'm hearing a lot of the lean startup methodology here where you come up with your idea, with your hypothesis. You test it, get some feedback, iterate, test it again, iterate. Is that sort Page 7 of 10

8 of your thinking as well? Yeah. That iteration time, it's so funny. We have this wall of buttons that is one of our games. It started out as just sort of a general game for as many people as could fit on it. You wouldn't think there's a lot of room for iterating a wall of buttons. We've got to be on version 10 of this thing now. It's slowly evolved into a 2 player game and then we saw, we were like, "Wow. What if we put it on spinning gears? It'll make it harder." Well, that was true, but people's fingers got caught in those gears so we had to do another version. Each time that we did it the game got better and better. The sort of willingness to iterate, and continue to iterate so that you're constantly getting feedback is what really makes things awesome. As you think about the different ways that you are using to come up with your products, to come up with your ideas, how can the methodologies behind how you do that, how can those apply to other industries? For example, a trucking company, a staffing company, a food distribution business. What are some of the principles behind what you guys are doing that you think would be relevant across other industries? I think a lot of these approaches are true for almost any industry. You know? I mean, hey, is there a lot of opportunity to engage with your customer if you're working on a new medical prescription drug? It's not completely my background, that domain, but I think the more that you are engaging and figuring out those customer stories, and what their problems are, hell it might be that the drug is not the right solution and there's a more holistic answer to the problem that's preventative. You know? I mean, just throwing out some ideas, but the opportunity to engage early and often not only gets you interesting feedback from your customers, but I think also gives you, is fertile ground for creativity. One of my favorite things to stay creative is to go conference crashing. You know, our industry, arguably, the conference we should go to is like the amusement park convention, and maybe a game convention here or there, but there are so many other conventions out there, and so many innovations in the packaging industry, or in the manufacturing industry, might have real applications to your own industry. A lot of creativity comes at the intersection of domains. The more that you can sort of draw from other people's industries, I think the more you find interesting creativity that can be applied into your own industries. Yeah. I think that is a great idea to visit or attend other conferences that are outside of your industry because then what you can do is, you can connect the dots, you can apply things that are being used in another industry and figure out, "Yeah, okay. I can see how conceptually we can apply that to our business and bring some type of innovation to the industry that we're in." Exactly. Yeah. As you have put on these events, and what kind of feedback are you getting, Page 8 of 10

9 or what kind of trends are you seeing out there that people are really responding to when you have these types of events? Just kind of staying on this idea here of how these ideas apply to other industries. Are there any trends or things that you have picked up on in terms of the feedback that you get from your services that you think other industries should be picking up? As we talk about, "Hey, attend a conference in another industry," what are things that you think people can learn from your industry that they could take back and use as innovation in their industry? Well, the desire for interaction is, I think, really one that's strong and runs deep. You know? As I mentioned earlier, we are social animals, so we want reasons to be able to interact with each other. I think we are increasingly insulated and losing some of those abilities to be social. So ways that we can facilitate that interaction in natural ways I think can apply to a lot of industries. I'd also say, what else? Desktop fabrication is better than it's ever been. Something like 3D printers get a lot of air play out there in the world right now, but really what people mean when they say, "Hey, 3D printers are awesome," is really all of desktop fabrication is getting easier. That means the tools that you would use to design something, the tools that you would use to then prototype it and get a test version whether it's in metal, or wood, or plastic. All of that stuff. That whole design loop is collapsed and much easier. No matter your industry I think the speed with which you can take an idea from concept to working prototype that you can put in the hands of a user is radically collapsed. You go to the toy industry and they're like, "Oh my god. It's going to be 18 months before this is on the shelves." Well, but that's a real old way of thinking. I mean, something like Kickstarter really turns that whole model on its head. We don't have to sort of create the thing, get it on the shelves, and then decide if people like it. We can describe the thing, make a video about it, and put it out on the Internet, and share with people, and see, "Hey, if we built this would you like it?" That's a really powerful reversal because if the answer is no you might have saved yourself 12 months of development and millions of dollars. I think those are a few threads that are super helpful. How about in your business? What's the biggest challenge that you're coming across and what are you doing to try and solve that? Oh man. You know, I would say a thing that we personally, my co-founder, we're rapid prototype-rs. We love to be able to iterate on new things. The concept of focusing on just a couple of things is something that I think is going to be a lifelong challenge for me frankly. Yeah. Well, looking at the number of companies you've started it appears that you do like to start things, and very very creative. Well, thanks. It's definitely a blessing and a curse. Page 9 of 10

10 Yeah. Well Brent, is there anything that I haven't asked you yet that you'd like to share? Well, you know, I would say maybe just from a real general high level thing, I'd encourage everybody to be a mentor. We've been talking a lot about creativity, and where creativity comes from, and I think that in children is a really sort of fertile ground for the world, and the more... our current education system is not optimal. It's not this whole sort of 1 teacher for 30 kids because that was the best way to do it. Right? That was the efficient way to do it. There is no substitute for 1 on 1 interaction, teaching a kid something. Everybody has something to teach and there's no shortage of programs for ways to be able to pull that off. What you'll find is, of course it's valuable for the kid, but it's really valuable for you. You know? You learn a lot. Even the other people that you meet, the other mentors, are likely working on interesting things. Just the sort of exposure to the way children think about the world and approach it is so powerful. I think just the oxytocin alone will really be special. I would encourage everybody to be a mentor because it's awesome. That sounds great. Well Brent, I think that's a great way to wrap up today's show. I thank you for your time, and I look forward to having one of your events coming to a town near all of us hopefully. Awesome Steve. Well, we're taking our carnival across the country this year. We'll be in 4 cities, Seattle, Charlotte, Dallas, and Chicago starting around November. Can't wait to have that stuff to you guys. Hey, I can't thank CEO Coaching enough. It's really wonderful working with you guys. It's helped grow our business tremendously, so thanks so much. Fantastic. Well Brent, again, thank you for being on the show. We'll look forward to catching one of your events here over the course of the next year. Beautiful. Sounds great. Thank you. Bye. To inquire about our coaching services and programs, please call CEOCoachingInternational.com Page 10 of 10