Hello and welcome back for another episode of the Future Ear Radio podcast!
This week, I sat down with Reuben Zielinski, Founder and President of Redux, here at the Oaktree Studio for an in-person conversation about his professional journey leading to him founding his company, Redux.
Reuben’s story is chock-full of wisdom and lessons that are universally applicable to any kind of business professional. Much of his life work has revolved around the theme of designing solutions based on the many different customer types and customer issues he has worked with throughout his career. In essence, his job has been to identify what the customer pain points are and then working backward from there to design the ideal solution.
We’ve known in the hearing care industry for a long time that moisture is one of the biggest culprits of hearing aid degradation. While hearing aid dehumidifiers have existed for decades, Reuben’s “out of the box” thinking led him to design a totally different and novel solution to an age-old problem. As you’ll hear throughout this podcast conversation, Redux really is the culmination of Reuben’s experiences and his philosophy of endless tinkering.
I hope you all enjoy this chat as much as I did. Such an interesting and fun conversation with a modern day Thomas Edison!
-Thanks for Reading-
Dave
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dave Kemp
All right, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Future Ear Radio podcast. I got a special episode today, an in office in person episode with Ruben Zielinski of a Redux. So Ruben, thanks for coming into St Louis to our office here. How you doing today?
Reuben Zielinski
I’m doing just fine. Dave, thanks for being here. Awesome invite. And you know, it’s a beautiful day out here. I think we’re gonna have some fun today recording this and doing some other things.
Dave Kemp
Well, thanks for coming on. You know, I’ve gotten to know you a little bit over the last few years, and along with all the really cool things that you’ve done with Redux, as I’ve gotten to know you a little bit, I’ve actually just been blown away with your kind of life story and your career, the things that you’ve told me, I’ve only heard bits and pieces here and there, but you fit the mold perfectly of the kind of person that I love to interview. So if you wouldn’t mind, maybe just kind of go back to your career start, and then maybe we can just kind of segue it to the point to where, you know, we get to Redux ultimately
Reuben Zielinski
Okay, well, as my wife says, land the plane. So land the plane, if you want to listen to it, and if the listeners, you want to listen to us. So my dad was a tool maker. I grew up on a grape farm, and you know, so I was spinning wrenches as a kid, working on engines. I’m talking five years old. I’m one of nine kids, and, you know, my older brothers helped me and stuff. So I was always working on tinkering, taking stuff apart. As a kid, on the other hand, I was really good at math and science. At school, I was just a really, really good student, and it was just, it came easy for me. And, you know, in high school, I really didn’t work real hard. I wanted to go to vocational school, and my counselor said, Dude, you’re going to college. So he threw that application away, and I, he proceeded enroll me in, you know, calculus and analytic geometry and physics, and that why the clock forward a little bit. I didn’t go to college right away. After school, I worked at a roofing company, so and all these other things I know how to do I can used to put shingles on roofs, put gutters down, put commercial roofs on, you know, like buildings like you’re at right here. And one day, I was thumbing through a book on for there was an engine. It’s a Wisconsin engine company. Was looking at how a magneto works. And of course, my two brothers are electrical, our engine, our electricians. And I’m like, wow, this is pretty interesting. I decided to enroll. So I enrolled in a two year school, State University New York at Alfred, which is about three hours south of Rochester, New York. And I took my first course in circuit theory, and Alan Lowe, yeah. So that was kind of like circuit theory.
Dave Kemp
Circuit theory… What did you fall in love with about circuit theory?
Reuben Zielinski
Kirkhof’s voltage law, kirkhof’s current law, evidence theorem, the method of superposition, you know, of all the residents, I mean, it was just fascinating for me. It was all in the world. Still gives me chills. And that was, you know, I was in early 80s. Anyway, I decided, after it was a two year school associates and Electrical Engineering Technology, that I had to continue on. So I I transferred, and I went to Rochester Institute of Technology, done electrical engineering. So that was a five year program. So one year it was Co Op mandatory, so you had to work a year’s situation. So I had three years ago. So we’re walking it was the summertime, and a bunch of guys were walking around. And I know this is kind of long winded, but this is actually where it kind of started, yeah. And here’s a sandwich sign out in front of the administration building saying, you know, the these companies used to advertise that they’re coming on campus to interview. And here’s a sandwich sign, IBM, you know, the the eight, eight bars, you know, you know, coming to campus, and all my buddies go, man, I’m going to that interview. You know, I’m taking that interview. And me being a Hayseed from Dunkirk, New York, I go, Who the hell is IBM? That’s no joke. And they’re like, that’s the biggest manufacturer, computer manufacturer world. I said, Okay, interesting. Well, secretly, I walked away and I said, Well, if these guys are going to take the interview, I’m going to take the interview. Okay? So interview day comes, let’s say it’s, you know, a week later. And lo and behold, I’m talking to the guy. And he goes, Hey. He goes, I see you’re from Dunkirk, New York. I go, yeah. And he goes, I went to school at Fredonia, which is a State University of New York School right next to dunkers for suing you. We started talking about the bars and stuff. And, you know, how did you go to BJs? You know, this and that son of a gun the next day, if I didn’t get the call. Now, I had the grades, but, you know, that’s, you know, so I started an IBM in a lab, learned the fundamentals reliability engineering, got hired full time, then I asked, and was allowed. I got a master’s degree. Three at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in mechanical engineering, and actually was offered by two professors there. They wanted me to study as a PhD student. Okay? And my daughter was born, and I’m like, Man, I don’t want to go live in an apartment. I was living in the house, I had a new car. And I’m like, I don’t want to, you know, I probably wouldn’t have been talking to you today, you know, if that wouldn’t have and then IBM took a fault there. I decided to get into get close to customers. So I went into sales, and I spent four years in sales. And when I was in sales, I got an MBA part time when I was working at nights. So that’s kind of my, my the education aspect. And when I was in IBM, one of the customer had a lot of customers, Xerox, Kodak, Corning, they used to scare the crap out of me. Fucking those guys. Those guys are smart. Bausch alone, Bristol, Myers, Squibb and a couple of guys at Bristol, my are about Shalom like me. And what were you selling? Actually, I was selling technology. Okay, so that’s actually a very good question, because IBM, at the time, was selling, you know, they’re traditionally mainframes and mid range computers, right? But Gerstner came on and said, We need to use our services on the outside, and we need to demonstrate our value. And so it never ceased to amaze me that every time you’d asked to go for an interview with a VP or a president or just have a discussion one of these big companies, they would always accommodate you, because they wanted to know what this IBM guy wanted. It was freaking awesome. I got into these doors all the time. Normally it wouldn’t get into anyway we’d sell services or technology. So for instance, like Bao shalom, their eyewear division, Ray Ban. They coated gold on some of the Ray Bans, right? And they were wasting all kinds of gold. And I said, Well, I got a guy down in Binghamton, New York, at the Endicott, IBM Endicott facility that is an expert in electrode development. We can design an electrode, specifically electroplating electrode for you, and we could save you ten million a year in gold. What we want for that is we want $50,000 up front for the consulting contract, but we want 5% of the savings, nice. And so that’s the kind of deals like, Okay,
Dave Kemp
interesting. And so was it just a wide variety of these different sort of cost savings through technology.
Reuben Zielinski
We built boards for Corning. They called it a gunfighter project. It was a new type of TV, Bausch and lone back there again, at the contact lens division, we actually built them a $35 million contact lens manufacturing system.
Dave Kemp
Wow. Yes, that
Reuben Zielinski
was one of my first sales The first year I was there.
Dave Kemp
That’s fascinating. So like, you like I was kind of picturing a very, very like commodity based sale, like a cookie cutter thing, but it was like, more like tailoring a solution for you always tailoring
Reuben Zielinski
a solution and trying to understand what they needed, and then take that information, translating it back into our guys, back in the factory or in development organizations, and coming up with a solution, or at least a
Dave Kemp
proposal that’s fascinating. Okay, so was it your job to like, at what point did you determine what they needed? Would they come to you and say, Hey, IBM consultants, we need this thing built, or would it sort of stem from the problem, and then you would reverse engineer it? Um,
Reuben Zielinski
they never came to this list. This. Just with the solution, right, right? It was always, we’re having this problem. And, you know, we had what are called account execs, and each of these companies are for each of these companies, and the account execs knew I was pretty good in front of customers, and, you know, I could talk turkey with them, so they’d want to get me in. And that kind of led to the demise and why I left there. Because, you know, next thing I know, I’m flying down to New Orleans, I’m going to San Francisco, I’m going to Minnesota. You know, you were that guy? Yeah, well, I, I wasn’t the guy, but I was one of the guys, and that got pulled in so many directions. And my kids were younger, and I didn’t want to miss them growing up. Yeah, totally. You know, bottom line, I just didn’t, I just,
Dave Kemp
so that’s a really, that’s a really interesting sort of like foundational learning experience. I mean, because how many of those it sounds like you were kind of like brokering the solution, right? Like, hey, I can, I can solve this problem for you. So first step is I need to sort of develop and design the solution, but then I need to source that more, yes, for you, right? So the amount of connections that you made, and just the interesting kinds of business, like, insight that you garnered at that point, I’m sure, was, like, probably pretty translational into the rest of your career.
Reuben Zielinski
You know, another one we had, this manufacturing Competency Center Technology Center was in Boca Raton on boca. Raton IBM used to make all the laptops and personal computers there. Of course, we know what happened to that business. They gave away the design and, you know, everyone else makes them, and they went to this micro channel, or whatever, what? They goofed the whole business. So anyway, but, you know, they had this technology center there, and they actually, I brokered a deal for those guys. And they actually built the first MRI machine for GE, wow. Okay, all the detectors that go around in the ring. Yeah. Know IBM did that? Yes, oh
Dave Kemp
my gosh. Okay, cool. So this is a, like, a huge history lesson, a huge history lesson on IBM for me, because I always just pictured IBM as, like they made and framed computers and then, like laptops and stuff like that. But no, they were like a solution sort of shop that you would hire like you would almost like a McKinsey today
Reuben Zielinski
or something. And that’s exactly the when I went into it, that was the transition. They would transition to what was called Global Services. So they didn’t have that, you know. But when I was in there, my territory was Western New York, then it was upstate New York, then it was all the East Coast. Then it was, you know, it kept growing every year, and pretty soon it was production industries. I’m part of global services. So
Dave Kemp
like, that example that you gave about the guy with the for Bosch and long the Ray Ban, you know, example. And like they needed, you were able to provide them with cost savings around the amount of gold that they were using. I mean, did you have that connection prior to that? Like, how did you start to kind of develop these solutions, if
Reuben Zielinski
you would. That’s a good question. So how that started is the account exec would introduce me, you know, to either the VP of ops or the VP of engineering or the president. We would start talking about different things. I said, you know, it’s kind of a cliche. What kind of problems are you having? You know, ask that anymore. But, you know, maybe over lunch, it’d be like, you know, hey, what’s your biggest headache? Yeah, we’d start working on that. And, you know, with the very, you know, I’ve always been, like, an innovative guy, so I’d start thinking about, well, I worked on this in the factory, and I worked on that in a factory. I bet you I know three or four guys I could pull together, and I could help with the solution.
Dave Kemp
That’s so cool. I mean, again, I think that, like, that’s a very translatable thing into any walk of life is like building a, you know, Rolodex, of of partners, of people that you could use for different instances, sure you know. So why don’t you share then how you then went from IBM into the next ventures, and what you took with you from IBM into sure and so on.
Reuben Zielinski
One of one of my customers, Mike, and we use his last name, he left, and he went to Bristol, Myers, Squibb, com, Detective, ostomy and wound care devices, okay? And he called me up and said, Hey, I want, I want you to do a little consulting project. And we went to all these different factories, and I think one was here in St Louis, to be honest with I remember it was the first time ever been out here anyway, after I wrote a consulting report and I said, you know, this is what I think we could do. And then week later, I get a call from one of his guys and said, We want to hire you. Turns out they were going through a massive change in the company. They wanted to reduce costs, they wanted to automate, and they needed Mike, needed a guy to sell the organization. I was in sales. He liked me in sales. It was a technical sale that I could sell the people. And so that’s how I transitioned to it. And it took me two weeks to decide, because here I was, I was 13 years into IBM kind of almost halfway. I’m saying to retirement. And, you know, I’m like, man, you know, going into something unknown. What happens if there’s a recession? And Mike goes, Rubin, he goes, they’re medical devices. There’s never a recent and so I said, you got me, yeah? So I went into that, and I did that for almost three years, okay? And I went into a startup company,
Dave Kemp
okay? And so you let’s talk about that. Yeah,
Reuben Zielinski
the startup company was songbird earring, okay? That was started by Sarnoff labs and in Princeton, New Jersey, funded by J and J they were creating, had created the world’s first disposable hearing aid. This was a hearing aid that we manufactured for $8.75 Wow. Okay. Lasted 90 days, every 90 days, because of all the problems we have with them, particularly moisture, okay, which recently we’ll get to, yeah, yeah. Um, you throw them away and you buy a new pair. And they were, they were offered for sale at the audiologist for 3995 Wow. So we would sell them to the audiologist for 20, $20 they would mark them up and sell them for $40 problem at the time was, OTC was not allowed. So J and J’s vision was, they’d be hanging on a book, just like you buy readers. And, yeah, now there’s basically cheers, yeah, exactly. And, you know, we had nine formats, you know, and all this. And I think they were going to fight the FDA at the time, but, you know, they wanted to buy the company, and kind of, you know, shortening the discussion on this one, and our guys said, Oh, it’s worth 2 billion, and whatever they offered, and the deal fell apart, and the company kind of went down to tubes, because no one wanted to fight the fight with the FDA.
Dave Kemp
Gotcha. Okay, so then you, you get your first exposure to the audiology market
Reuben Zielinski
test. Yeah, audiologist met, you know, understood how they think. You know they’re, they’re, they’re mostly stem people. You know science, you know technology, engineering and math, right? And so, you know, they got, they got scientific background, so I knew they had to convince them scientifically, because there’s, I mean, their industry is based, their professions based on science, okay? And that came back, you know, recently started,
Dave Kemp
yep. Okay, cool. So, yeah, I mean, I, I find it interesting that your your road, then. Started to kind of lead this way until audiology, but then, as I understand it, you kind of deviated and went back, you know. So what happened after that? Yeah.
Reuben Zielinski
So, you know, songbird failed. It failed because, you know, we didn’t have the sales, you know, here we are. We made a production line to make 6 million hearing aids a year. And, you know, I worked many nights till eight o’clock at night, and got back there at six in the morning. You know, whatever. That’s sawdust. You know, it’s history. So, yeah, then I had the startup bug. I went to a company viteras, which was up in fairlaw, New Jersey, and they made antic patch, which is a patch that takes a battery boost it up to 30 volts, and basically pulses, and it drives drug into the skin. So we were driving lidocaine into the skin. It was originally started by Becton Dickinson. They wanted to put insulin in the skin without taking a shot. Now they have needles and everything, or little, you know, pumps and everything, but at the time it was interesting. So we had a hydrogel patch, you know, electrode, and it would it would pulse. It would put lidocaine. So it would numb your hand about the size of a quarter. And that would be for kids to get a shot, if kids were afraid to get a shot. So it numb it maybe about an eighth inch down into the derma snippets, numbing up, so the kid would shot. I found a problem with the product. I didn’t know. We validated the line. I brought the product home, I tried it, and the thing shocked. Oh boy. And I said, and I go back. And I won’t use his name, but I said, you know CEO. I said, Hey, we’ve got a problem. He said, go talk to the R D guy. None of them would put it on. None of them invalidate what I said. And I said, You know what, I’ve been down this road with songbird. I know it’s gonna fail. These guys are gonna get this thing back and dump the truckloads right from the customer. And, you know. So I started
Dave Kemp
looking around. So, okay, so there you go. So you had a couple of different startup failures, yeah,
Reuben Zielinski
which was immensely important, by the way, yeah.
Dave Kemp
What would you say is important about that period? Because you were kind of riding high 13 years. IBM, yeah, all made your hand. You were traveling a lot, yeah, made the active decision to go elsewhere and take that experience with you. But that had to have been a little bit, I don’t know, a little bit of louder, a bit of a downer that, you know, here it is. And, oh, I’m so smart, and yet I’ve, you know, kind of entered into back to back startups that failed. Well, this
Reuben Zielinski
is kind of humbled, yeah, yeah. This is, this is where you’re, you know, you got all the tools in your tool bag. You got the education. And so, you know, you got to say, you know, yourself, I can, I can basically do anything I want, anything I want. So the HR director that was working at songbird. Okay, his name was Keith, super guys still stay in contact with him that he went to Cardinal Health, you know, just north of where I lived, and New Jersey, and I didn’t know anything about pharmaceuticals. And he said, You know, there’s a lot of stuff here, Ruben, that’s technical. We could use a director of engineering, perfect. So he sends me a couple emails. Next thing I know, I’m interviewing job. I don’t know anything about a glass fluidized bedroom at the time. I don’t know anything about a compound or I don’t know anything about micronizing spray balls. I don’t know anything about this stuff, you know. And by the time I left there, I spent, let’s see, I went there and oh four, and I left in oh seven. I was an expert, yeah. And so I jumped into it. Feed first. It was awesome. It was a pharmaceuticals, technologies and services. So it was like a $50 million division of a, you know, I don’t know, at the time, Cardinal Health was probably $80 billion yeah, so you could get all the capital you needed. But they left you alone. It was awesome. So it was just, it was kind of like a playground every day, you know, interesting, a serious playground, though, because we had big customers, yeah. So we’re making batches of product for Merck, for j and j, you know, for, you know, all of these big companies. And, you know, we kind of liken ourselves. It’s kind of called, we used to joke about bottom feeders. These are all the products that these big companies don’t want to make. Want to make anymore. Kind of a pain in the butt to make. Oh, we take them on because there was good money.
Dave Kemp
And that’s, that was Cardinal Health’s business model, yeah, that was Cardinals that pharmaceutical
Reuben Zielinski
technologies and services. Okay? So they acquired 16 companies, and that’s how they made PTS, right? One of them was a soft gel company. Was shear. That guy’s first name, but he started, he invented soft gels down in Florida. Intro, I actually got a couple patents on soft gels. Okay,
Dave Kemp
all right, well, we’ll get to that. But I guess I’m curious. Like, so you go in, you said I knew nothing about pharmaceuticals, and then you you joined carnal and but you did kind of have like, all this technical experience, and that’s your aptitude, more or less, is you’re kind of a technical guy, technical sales guy. What was that like, learning curve, like getting into that whole pharmacology side of things? Um,
Reuben Zielinski
well, my boss was a PhD pharmacologist. His boss was a PhD pharmacologist. Just, there was 200 scientists that worked there, mostly PhDs. So I just started going to meetings, and I absorbed it, man, osmosis. Yeah, yeah. I mean, in six months, I kind of knew the process, what you had to do, what you didn’t, what you couldn’t do, and what you had to do, and all this stuff. And, you know, it became a lot of fun, because I was, like, a personable guy, you know, I had that, that experience in sales, so, you know, selling people and just, you know, the rah rah approach. But, you know, also, with the technical background, it was a lot of fun.
Dave Kemp
I really had a lot of fun. What, what? What were the, some of the things that your fingerprints were on within Cardinal, like, that year
Reuben Zielinski
I started the metrology lab. They were, they were spending a crap ton of money on the outside, having all this equipment, okay, calibrated and like, and pharmaceuticals. And maybe in your business, it’s not our business, no big deal. You move scale and a pharmaceutical company, if you move a scale up, what you have to have it recalibrated. Interesting, I can imagine that, yeah, because green, you know, and pharmaceuticals, recision, well, you’re baking a cake, basically, yeah, yeah, you know, you get the, you know, the powder out, you get the egg out, you know, it’s all of these different things. And you know, it’s done by check by you weigh this stuff, you look at the time, the clock, you write the time down. Another person checks everything you just did and writes that down. So, I mean, it’s serious stuff, because people are ingesting this, right? Yeah, yeah, you know. So, um, yeah, you know, I forgot where I was going with that.
Dave Kemp
Well, I mean, I think it’s like, what? So they were spending a ton of money on, well, right, the
Reuben Zielinski
metrology, right? So I said, You know what? We ought to buy some instruments. So we ought to start doing this ourselves. So we started a whole Metrology lab. Well, of course, there was a couple quality people that came from other industries there, and they’re like, Well, we know how to do this better. Ruben, you know? And they were just power hungry. And, all right, you want to take it over. When I started that one there, there was a couple products that Cardinal didn’t want to be made. Didn’t want to have made, the PhD, the formulation guys did not make them. And I came up with ways to make this was in soft gels. One of them was, was called a liquid conveyor. Okay, it was rather in this thing. It was myconazole nitrate had fallen a conveyor and it flatten out. It was like a football, and there was a suppository, and I said, we ought to use the oil that we use, fractionated coconut oil, make a liquid conveyor, chill it, drop in there. These things came out perfect. We’re able to charge the customer, I won’t use their name. We were able to charge the customer a $400,000 a year technology access fee just for developing that, wow,
Dave Kemp
okay, that’s, it’s a really cool career. I mean, these are, like, huge seismic deals, and you were kind of cashing them one after another. It’s, you
Reuben Zielinski
know, another one on that was, we transferred a line from Swindon, England. Cardinal Health had a plant there, and it was for Claritin, okay, Claritin ready tabs. So those are the lyophilized tabs that you put on your tongue, and it just dissolves like that. So I learned all about lyophilization and vacuums and vacuum dryers.
Dave Kemp
Okay, so we’re getting there. Yeah, we’re kind of getting we’re getting there. Okay, cool. So I just find this all to be just so interesting in terms of, like, you know, I just keep thinking about like, you know, Ruben that graduates college, that you know, you’re at the career fair, you come across IBM, you know, it’s like life just sort of happens. You end up there you were pre positioned. Well, I mean, it sounds like you had, again, the right sort of skill set and the right aptitude to take this kind of thing on. But I just find it so cool that it’s like, you know, you do this, this first part of your career is really building that foundational skill set, and then, you know, you wind up at a place like Cardinal Health, $80 billion company, but you’re able to, kind of, like, treat it like, it’s like you and your words like a playground, you know, it’s a lab, more or less, that you’re basically doing what you were doing at IBM, but in just a sort of a modernized format, and with, you know, you had these, you had this big backing, but, you know, ultimately, at the end of the day, you were like a solutions engineer. You were kind of like Willy Wonka, but, you know, developing, like, all these different pharmacology solutions and stuff like that. But I guess the root of the common denominator across all of it is just kind of like clever ingenuity of like us. I think that I can come up with a more efficient way to do this, this or that, like you’re just more or less identifying problems and trying to figure out a better solution for that.
Reuben Zielinski
So I, um, first of all, one is I always the fundamentally is anything I do or work on, i It can’t involve new physics, so I stick with the physics that we know right now. Anyway, right? Known physics, yeah, known physics. So I’m not one of these guys, dark matter. Yeah, yeah. Forget that. You know, I’m saying I want, if I’m going to come up with a solution, it better be something that we know about, I can read about, and I can prove. And, you know, second thing, you bring up a good point. I’ve always had the knack of, I’ll look at something and I’ll just turn the problem like 13 degrees and just look at it from a little different angle. You know what I’m saying? And say, okay, I get that. But what if we tried this? Or what if we tried that? And all these different experiences, I know all about this different technology. And so I can plug some. And then just, you know, lickety split, you know, and we got something we’re working on that exactly what we’re gonna do next year.
Dave Kemp
So there you get to that. Yeah, there you go. Okay, cool. So let’s carry on. So you’re at, you know, you add this stand at Cardinal, Cardinal
Reuben Zielinski
Health. And, you know, my wife, my kids are getting older. My daughter goes to college, and my son’s about to go. My wife, as I told you, in the car, she was concerned that I was burning myself out because I was getting there, I was I was going, I didn’t have any time during the day to go to the gym. I’m a big, you know, exercise guy. I like to lift weights and get on an elliptical, you know. I’ve never been a run or anything like that. I don’t want to wear on my knees and my hips, yep, yep. Plenty of those. My kids gonna be an orthopedic surgeon. He’s placed set these are replacing those every day
Dave Kemp
anyway, disposable hips, yeah, kind
Reuben Zielinski
of they only last 15 years. Okay, all right, you want my I won’t do it on a guy like you or me, and it’s got to be a little wet anyway, maybe me. So she’s thinking, I’m getting burned out. And right about the time, you know, the company was acquired by Blackstone in New York City, Schwartzman. We renamed it catalyst cat Catalan. Catalyst for talent Catalan. I was on a retention package. I could have stayed there, but I was getting burned out, you know, because the pressure now was up, and a buddy of mine, Randy Camillo, he’s a recruiter. He said, Hey, I got a wonderful opportunity out in Noblesville, Indiana. And I said, Geez. And so, you know, I go out there and it was, it was breathing circuit company, what time it was King systems. And since it’s been bought by Ambu. But they made intubation tubes. Okay? So when you go under operation, they intubate, you know, and you know, they they haven’t put it on your on a breathing machine. And those plastic airlines are what we made. They were like corrugated and they made the preeminent breathing circuits and masks and intubation, you know, in United States and in the world, we ship them everywhere. Well, really, we want somebody to automate this. Okay, everything was being made. So I looked at, you know, typical room, I said, Well, yeah, I’m sure we can do it. Sign up for this, you know. So I get there a week after I’m there, they lay a consultant document on me, and they say, Well, your job is there was three plants, one in Noblesville, and then we had a rubber plant that made the rubber part of the mass, the gloves. And what else do they make? I can’t remember anyway. And then we had a CPAP company out in San Diego. Your job is to move all three of these plants to Mexico in the next 18 months. Oh, wow. Displaced 1200 jobs. And I’m like, come on, you guys didn’t tell me this was so anyway, so I go through the document, and there was a whole bunch of assumptions that were labor assumptions, and so that, anyway, I convinced the board that we needed to re engineer, then to automate, and then we could consolidate into one along the way, came along, first got along, and I ended up late because he wanted I’d say, I’ll never forget, went to a board meeting, And I said the board, the board of directors, said, You know, this is chairman of board. Said, Ruben, this is a wonderful three to five year plan. And before I could even answer, my boss said, we’re going to do it in 18 months. And I’m like, Oh, this is, you know, so we were, we were hiring people, high salary guys. Anyway, I left, I transitioned, but Santa Fe events. But in between that time, okay, that’s kind of when Redux started. My neighbor, Joel trustee, his wife, locked her phone in a front load washing machine and washed it. And when it came out, it was entirely waterlogged. They went to, you know, the mobile phone retail store, and they said, you know, there’s nothing we can do. He took it to work. This guy, oh, sorry, took it to work. This guy, his dad, invented the dead blow hammer. And he knew water couldn’t withstand a vacuum or heat. And he did this all day. And he recovered the phone anyway. He
Dave Kemp
did it. He did it with, what? With that blue hammer that No,
Reuben Zielinski
no, there was he. They make deadball hammers at this factory, okay? They use heat and they use vacuum, okay, to Degas the plastic. And so he brought it there. He worked on this all day in this chamber and see, and like, 10 hours later, he was able to recover the phone, and he took it back to the store, and he said, if you can figure out how to make a machine, he goes, we get these in here all the time.
Dave Kemp
What time? What year is this?
Reuben Zielinski
This is in 2012 Okay, so he tells me about it. You know, we get together all the time. Our wives are friend. He tells me about and we start thinking, I’m like, well, we need to create a machine that we can put in the stores. And that’s how we started working. Wow. The next day I got. Some parts, and I started replicating it in my in my kitchen. Then we then we bought a camera at Walmart, and we bought a nano pod, and all this stuff and everything that we put in the process that we we made the little chamber, we recovered, and we knew we’re onto something. So we got a patented we the Indiana Business Journal ran an article on us, somebody from rising sub agent sauce and said we
Dave Kemp
Yeah, wow, that’s so cool. Again, just kind of thinking about the whole problem differently. I know that at the tide you weren’t thinking about the audiological market, maybe, I mean, I don’t know how quickly your mind went there, because obviously you started with with smartphones, but I think it’s just a fascinating sort of, you know, natural arc to your, you know, all of these prior experiences, like, again, your your solutions engineer, you’re just coming up with different things. So, of course, I can only imagine, your wife is probably like, oh God, here comes another invention. But every it just must be non stop. I’m just looking at things and saying, you know, I bet we can figure out a way to do this better. And so, you know, lo and behold, you you have this, you know, neighbor that has this problem that presents itself. Oh, I have a waterlogged phone. How do we solve for this? And sure, and lo and behold, you guys software well, and you have a new business,
Reuben Zielinski
yeah. So I skipped over a couple things there. One is probably six months prior to that, I was working on something else in my basement, and I had a lab in my base. I’ve collected, you know, you know, Fluke meters and this and that, oscilloscopes, all this stuff, a microscope. I got a pretty nicely outfitted lab. I can’t, kind of do anything in my basement, you know, my workshop, and I was working on something, and he was down there, and I didn’t know his name is Joel trustee. I didn’t know him too well at the time. And he went in my workshop, and I was working on, you know, a couple secret things. And I came up to him, I go, What did you see? Because he thought it was the bad Rubens secret, yeah, yeah. And it was, it was just a real funny interaction. So he was like, Wow, man, look at all this stuff you got in here. So he kind of knew that I could do this, okay. And so that’s why he immediately came to me with it, you know,
Dave Kemp
interesting, yeah. Okay, so you were just literally, like the neighborhood, like the inventor, yeah.
Reuben Zielinski
And so, you know, we built one, and then we built another one. And next thing, you know, we got a partner. And, you know, way it went. But the one thing I recognized when we got that partner was these guys are going to generate instant sales force. And so we didn’t have that in the other two startups. That was one of the big lessons I learned, right? Well, you had a whale of a customer. Yeah, you got to have sales. You know, that’s the only way this is going to work. So, you know, for anyone that’s listening to this, you know, coming up with the product, you ever listen to the, you know, Shark Tank, they always say that’s the easy part. And I know why, because I’ve experienced it, coming up with the idea, and it’s coming up with a new product, is easy one, selling it, having that transaction for people paying you money. And you know, you’ve taken your product, that’s the difficult. So what you got to make sure that is the product’s got to be right, right,
Dave Kemp
right? Well, and so you had this huge whale of a customer horizon. And so that gets Redux off the ground. And again, the initial use case was for dehumidifying phones. Well,
Reuben Zielinski
they brought an interest, interesting twist to it. I’ll never forget this. So the first, the first dryer we made, it was $5,500 that’s what it cost, and it weighed 90 pounds. Okay, it was ridiculous. We called it the toilet. Looked like a black toilet, short, but like a black toilet. Then I decided to join full time, and I said, you know, we got to drop this thing. It’s got to be less than $1,000 it’s got to weigh eight pounds. Got to weigh eight pounds, 10 pounds. And so as we did exactly that, we we designed all this ourselves, you know, with SolidWorks. I know a guy, a friend of mine, that helped us with it, and we did the whole thing. We own all the designs. And we created what’s called the Gen X dryer, Gen 10 dryer. It weighed eight pounds, and it was $700 to build that side. We could probably build that for 200 Wow, yes.
Dave Kemp
I mean again, though it’s like, how do you even start down that path of bringing something to life like that? You know? Okay, so you got your friend who is like, Hey, I have this new technique because I work in a I have a very specific job environment that we are degassing plastic right in a very specific method. And he’s like, I’m gonna go to the neighborhood inventor, the neighborhood, you know, Henry Ford, and then, but then, like, how do you take something like that in that that, for me, is a gap. I don’t know a whole lot about OE, I mean, but like, I just find that to be so interesting. Of like, developing the prototype and then actually going in, getting that thing made at some scale. What’s that process?
Reuben Zielinski
Well, you bring up a very good point. A lot of people, they like, they say, wow, you know, that’s a great idea. I. I got a great idea for you. Oh, this would be a great invention, but a lot of people can’t put the prototype together. That is so tantamountly important, you’re able to put the first proof of principle together for you know yourself. If you had to do this on the outside, it cost you $200,000 I’ve seen that happen, yeah. But if you can build that yourself, that’s why I got that lab. Huge, huge savings, huge savings. What these guys brought to the table was, and what was, ha moment was, you know, we thought we would just, you know, dry phones. Had people bringing wet phones. No, they said, We’ll sell memberships. I looked at my co founder, Joel, trustee, and we couldn’t believe I heard that. So what they do, what they’ve come up with, is they’ll sell a water protection package. When you’re at the store, you’re about to do a transaction and buy a new phone or update your contract, they’ll ask you if you want a water protection package, it’s $30 Yep, okay, and it’s zero inventory product. We just have our dryer in the store. There’s 2700 dryers around the nation. And so we split the revenue between revenue Redux, and they get a piece, and we get a piece. Wow, yeah, that’s so amazing, yeah. And so they have an SKU for the membership, and your membership number is your mobile phone number goes in a database, so we know that you have a membership. So if you stopped at 820, 700 stores, you could dry your phone if you have a
Dave Kemp
water barrel. Wow. Okay, cool. That is a very interesting aspect to this. Okay, so then you, you want to maybe get into, like, how it then goes from cell phones and how you then you’re you shuffle back over to audiology, yeah,
Reuben Zielinski
so we, you know, we were trying to figure out how to get into more stores, you know, you know, the big network, and, you know, the competitors network, you know, team only. And, you know, there’s probably a lot of reasons why that didn’t happen. It doesn’t matter for this discussion. But then we did some SWOT analysis, relying on my MBA, did a SWOT analysis. Where else could this be used? No, I could. It could be used in audiology, known potentially could be used to dry key fobs for, you know, cars and things. But the audiology really stood out because of my knowledge and background of that, because I knew that all hearing aids get wet. And so right about that exact time that this happened, that we were doing this analysis, we get a call from a gal up in Wisconsin, Samantha and Sikorsky, you know, give her Hats off to your shot. She went into a Verizon story, she saw one of these dryers and said, You know what, why can’t I have this in my office? Why can’t I get complete water removal? So she called us up, my guy, James shrink, and I would take a ride up there. February snowstorm, you know, it was crazy, a two hour snowstorm, right? Snow was two foot deep. Country. Brought a dryer with us. Okay? It was a cell phone dryer, and she took some hearing aids out of cabinet that she did everything she could to recover them. Nothing would happen. She couldn’t recover them. She put them in her dryer, and they all recovered. She couldn’t believe so we knew we’re onto something.
Dave Kemp
That’s unbelievable. Yeah, because I, I found that to be I’ll let you keep going. Because I do want to interject one anecdote about Wisconsin, but I’ll let you keep going. So Okay, you guys were, you knew you were onto something here. Obviously this is like a novel way to dry sure devices. And I right like it’s an inevitable thing. I think even the manufacturers might admit that now that there might not be a such thing as a waterproof device. And so anyway, why don’t you continue on and talk about how you continued to, kind of, I guess, move into this, sure.
Reuben Zielinski
Well, that was in 2019 of course, we know what happened the latter part of 2019 and in 2020 we had, you know, the covid 19 virus hit and had everything shut down so but we went to the IHS conference down in Nashville, international hearing society. And if, if we were on a boat at our booth, it would have probably capsized from everyone being on the side, on our side, that’s how many people we had in our booth. Okay? It was just so awesome, because what we were doing is we were drawing people’s hearing aids, and every one of them walked away and said, Oh my god, I can’t believe it. Okay, and we had custom tailored one of our smartphone dryers for a hearing aid dryer. We made the chamber smaller one. One thing that I wanted to point out here is I knew I remember I mentioned earlier about I knew audiologist scientific background, so I wanted to make sure that there was a cause and effect. What do I mean by that, if the hearing aid sounds better? Why? And so I thought it was absolutely positively necessary that we measure the amount of water content coming out of that. And so I forgot to mention we had a we have a humidity sensor in there. That’s how we get the endpoint detection. And we integrated the area under the curve, under the humidity sensor the response, and we’re able to measure it down. To attempt them, right?
Dave Kemp
And that’s always a fun sort of, whenever I’ve had, you know, seen demos, and, you know, you guys are talking about the, you know, relative amount of water that is to, you know, if it’s a bathtub, like, how much that would be in house, or something, two bathtubs in a house, yeah, one microliter, right? Yeah, one microliter, exactly.
Reuben Zielinski
So at that conference, there was another buyer there on what he was, who they were from, and they said, you know, this thing is great. Now, this is a size of a shoebox, they said, but some of our, you know, locations are small, and we’d like to have it about a quarter of the size. I said, Fine. I took that back, and we came up with the Redux Pro. And the pro Lake, which is actually a quarter size of our it’s a four and a four and a quarter by four and a quarter by four and a quarter. And that machine uses exactly the same technology and runs the same way as the first one we developed that cost $5,500 yeah.
Dave Kemp
I mean, it’s a I remember that 2019 conference that you alluded to, the Wisconsin one, because I remember that so clearly, because I actually did a infection control presentation there. And in the first slide, I talked about, you know, sort of the history of infectious diseases, debilitating society. And I talked about the Black Plague. And this was January of 2020, and I remember, I got the funniest email from Matt hay, you know, about three months later. And he goes, Hey, dude, I, you know, I just keep thinking about your presentation. Did you know something? Why were you presenting on plagues? But, you know, the the reason I wanted to tell that was because that was the first time I ever, I ever met you guys. I met you and I met Matt. And, you know, I remember he had the glass of water, and he’s dunking the the hearing aid in the water, you know, you know, with zero regard, because he knew that, you know, I was just gonna put it in show this extremely powerful demo, sure, of me restoring this, this product. And, you know, I remember I in some of those subsequent conversations that I had, you know, based on my perspective as, you know, you’re I sit at Oak tree. And, you know, growing up in this business, I remember just the whole drying category being a pretty prominent thing. And, you know, obviously there’s been variety of different manufacturers and different designs for dryer, but I just remember thinking, you know, this is really interesting, that it’s a totally novel approach to a age old problem, sure, but you know, now that I’m kind of sitting down and I’m talking to you, this makes total sense, that, you know, you again, the solutions engineer, you just kind of looked at the problem and said, All right, you know. And I think that’s so interesting, that you had this outside, sort of, you know, expert come in that understood problem solving in a really unique way. And like, boom, here we are today. And there’s three different versions of this, and it’s one of the more popular methods of drying, both for the professional and then now with the read at some unit, you know, it’s, it’s having a lot of success there too. So I just find this to be so cool. Of like, you know it’s, it’s just really, we only know what we know, because it’s what exists. And you know, for without you, it would just be the the other, more conventional methods of which, at the time when those were invented, were novel, right? And so I just think this is really cool that, you know, the ingenuity that takes a lot of different versions in this small little industry. You know, all you need to do is kind of look around and you’d be amazed at the backstory and, you know, kind of the genesis of how a lot of these products kind of came to market to begin with. There’s always a story there, and you guys have a very unique one.
Reuben Zielinski
Well, in general, I like helping people, and this is going to help a lot of people, yeah, and that that’s kind of the fire in my belly on this one, you know, the money aside and all that, seriously, you know. I mean, you only need enough money to live, you know, comfortably. You don’t. I mean, that’s kind of what’s wrong with society. We don’t want to get off. People get so greedy and SMS, you know, listen, man, what’s wrong with helping people? And I just want to help people. I would love to help the whole world hear better. I think it’d be awesome. And you know that that home unit that you’re you’ve alluded to, that one there that that escaped me for about it took me three months to come up with that. Why is that? Because our our professional unit, has a pretty high performance vacuum pump and a valve in there and some special electronics. And you know, those three, those three alone, are $100 and I wanted a low cost home unit. I wanted to, you know, manufacture it for low cost. So I had to come up with a way to create a three way valve without vacuum. And you know, if you ever looked inside the guts of that, you know, I mean, it’s really. Really, really slick way, how we do it. We move this around. We create an airtight chamber. And that’s kind of the jumping point for the next product I’ve gotten. We’re gonna what I’d like to do is, I’d like, even though that’s a home unit, I’d like to make another home unit that you can use for everything at home. So you can, you can dry anything that you want at home, whether it’s, you know, your smartphone, your your smart watch, your hearing aid, your iPod, you know, anything,
Dave Kemp
yeah, okay, well, I mean, again, it’s, we live in an age where you have all kinds of different pieces of technology that are on your person, yeah? Live Without them, yeah, all day, every day. So it’s makes a ton of sense that you would kind of continue to branch onto that, you know, I when we were kind of driving over here from the airport, you know, you had mentioned the vision that you had around the branding, which I found was really interesting about kind of the concept of and some of the different, you know, I guess case studies and other products that you were, you were, you know, kind of taking some views from more or less. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so,
Reuben Zielinski
from the beginning, we wanted to leverage our brand. We want to, you know, I mean, we’ve had all kinds of ideas. Let’s create, you know, cleaners. Let’s create this. Let’s create that. Now. Redux is a drying system. That’s what we that’s what we want to be known for. And when we broke into the industry at the audiologist, I knew that we had to convince them that’s how we were going to make this stick. Okay? And so now that we’ve done we’ve done exactly what we set out to. We set out to create a preeminent dryer that works like no other dryer, and that the audiologist support. I view the audiologist very much like dentists, and our product very much like a Sonicare toothbrush. Okay, at first the Sonicare toothbrush, toothbrush was very expensive, was marketed and sold through dentists exclusively, exclusively, yes, yeah. Now they’ve come down in price, like we talked about in the car. You know, I don’t know, you know, you get them at a, you know, a super center, something. You may get three of them for 119 Right, right? And, you know, everyone uses those, whether it’s Sonic here or will be, you know, that’s, that’s the kind of it’s been proven to be the best toothbrushes, sonicating toothbrush, whether it’s circular edges, migratory, right? We want to do the same thing with our dryers. You know, we want to. We the audiologist and the dentist. You still go to the audiologist to have your hearing checked. Still go to the dentist to have your teeth checked, but you know, you got your home dryer to keep your devices tuned up, and you’re going back to the audiologist or whoever to have them checked out.
Dave Kemp
Well, like I said to you, I said, you know, it’s, it’s, it really is a clever approach, because, you know, you think about the the ideal customer is the guy or the gal that’s going into the audiologist with chronic issues, saying, you know, I, I sweat a lot, my my device is constantly waterlogged, or, you know, it’s getting impaired in some fashion by the amount of moisture that’s in there. So these are the people that are already probably on the edge, that are seeking out through the audiologist because of this. And then, you know, they’re the ones that early adopters. They’re the early adopters. They’re the ones that are actually even aware that this, yep, exists. And I was telling you, I said, you know, one of the initial aha moments I had with your device was, you know, in some of the early conversations that I had with Matt was and James was, you know, kind of this, like struggle of like, how does this thing get positioned? Is it? Is it something that you charge for, you know, is it a membership kind of thing? And what dawned on me was like, wait, no, this is a clinical tool. This is, like, an audiometer. This is, like, you know, any other piece of equipment that that professional relies upon on their day to day. But the really interesting thing now that you have the home dryer is that you can basically say, you know, hey, you know that that tool that we have that basically dries out your device. There’s now a home version of it, you know, and that’s the soniccare model that I think is super interesting, where you’re able to actually kind of drum up some, you know, really organic awareness of the brand. Those then become your major advocates out of the field, because those are the customers that need it the most right. Need it
Reuben Zielinski
the most, exactly right. They can’t hear without if their devices go, you know, and give on to Fritz or whatever, they can’t hear that that affects their quality of life. It’s clinically proven. If you suffer from hearing loss and it’s not correct and it leads to dementia, absolutely clinically proven. A couple things on what you said, there’s a book I can’t remember the name of the author. It’s called crossing the check chasm and Clayton Christensen, yeah. Christensen, exactly. And where we’re at is we want to get this majority. We’re after the majority. Okay, how do we get that? We need to broaden the use and reduce the cost yet again. Because what we’re after is there’s 1.7 billion, 1.7 billion smartphones sold around the world every year. Are 7 billion in use. There’s 100 almost 200 million total wireless hearable sold every year. Yeah? Uni, Galaxy, everything, everything, right, everything. I mean, you look around, I mean, everyone has these in their ears. Oh, yeah, you know. I mean, so we’re gonna, we’re making this a legitimate drying solution through professionals that say, Yes, this is the legitimate, this is the best drying solution. If it works for hearing aids, by God, it’s going to work for air pods and phones. Oh, one, because that’s how we started. Yeah, 100%
Dave Kemp
and again, I think that it’s a it’s a great, really a great tool for the audiologist and the professional to lean on and again, kind of be the point of access for that device. And say, you know, it’s a terrific way to sort of establish a relationship with a potential patient, or, you know, just another member in your community that can sing your praises. I mean, to your point earlier, you know, if you’re if you’re genuinely happy. If you’re genuinely making the customer happy and you’re helping them, they’re gonna sing your praises without you knowing it all the time. Sure you know what I mean. And so there’s a compounding effect there.
Reuben Zielinski
I think one of my mantras is customer service, and that goes back to my IBM days. They had three basic beliefs. One was customer service excellence, in everything we do and respect for the individual. So, you know, everyone needs to be treated with dignity. You need to provide the best customer service you can, and you got to make the best products you can. Yeah,
Dave Kemp
those are good words to live by there. I love it. So, you know, as we kind of come to the close here again. Thank you for coming in and doing this. I found your whole story to be so interesting. And again, just the you know, kind of like learning about you as a person, and you know, your knack for just kind of being an ingenious, you know, inventor, you know, always just coming up with different ideas. It’s, it makes total sense now, of like, why this thing exists and and what you’re going to do with it into the future. But I guess, you know, for anybody that’s listening out there that might have an idea, you know, I’ve got this invention that I want to move on, or I want to start a business, I’m sure, with that, I mean words of wisdom in terms of that, if you’re just getting started out, you know, what’s some wisdom there for somebody to just consider, probably
Reuben Zielinski
the best thing that someone can do is learn how to tinker. Tinker. Okay, I like it. Okay, iterate exactly, and so, yeah, okay. You want to, I don’t know. I want to design a new type of paper airplane. Okay, well, you don’t just sit there and draw the darn thing. Start making them right, fly them right, yeah, change the tail, change this, change that, until it’s like, wow, man. I can sort this thing 50 feet, and I can make it out of paper, and it might only cost me 13 cents. Then you might have something. So I don’t want to it. You have to be able and willing to put the time in to tinker. Yeah. I didn’t talk about it, but I had this product one time. It’s called trailer tracker. And now we got cameras on trailers, but my brother gave me idea that when a tractor trailer turns a corner, you know, they lose the blind spot. They can’t see, you know, you can. You can just visualize that. I came up with this. I put it in colder on the fifth wheel and a track on the trailer, and I had these movable mirrors, and I spent literally, probably 1500 hours in my basement and the workshop, building that machining, and I bought a little machine center, all developed the microcontroller code, all of this for this, you know, and it kind of went nowhere. And there’s reasons for that, but that was just another lesson, but you got to be willing to tinker. You got to be willing, willing to put the time in to come up with a proof of principle. And, you know, and once you have that, the next step is, is even bigger, but at least you got that.
Dave Kemp
What about where to turn to, you know, from like, a mentorship standpoint, an advisor standpoint, I mean any lessons there and from your history and your experience of how to cultivate that, how to identify that, and well, the right way to sort of, you know what I mean? I think that I just continue to put myself in the shoes of the aspiring, you know, entrepreneur that’s never really embarked upon this and might be incredibly lonely.
Reuben Zielinski
Well, that’s an awesome segue into the next phase. That’s really hard. I tell everyone I meet, any engineer that is under my tutelage, anyone that works with me, you need a stint in sales, because there is nothing more humbling than being in sales, I’m told no, but there’s nothing more satisfying that when you learn how to get that transaction and make that sale, it’s just an awesome feeling. I remember when I first went into sales in IBM, it was and this will be the last story. I got a million stories, but I remember this story like it was yesterday, and it was right after the holidays. It was in. The Rochester, New York branch office. You’re talking 300 people in the sales office, right? And, you know, it was a Monday, and I just started now. I started in January, the first week I’m there in the sales starts in a Monday by Friday, I’m the only person in the office. Think about that. I’m the only person in the office because I didn’t have any customers to call on, and I stared at that phone for hours waiting for it to ring. Well, no, wondering what I should do, yeah, who’s I should call? And my boss, at the time, he goes, come here. I got I’ll help you. And he actually had some real good relationships at Corning. He called him and said, I got a new guy. He wants to come down and make a sales call on you, and that’s how I got started. That’s awesome. Lot
Dave Kemp
of words of wisdom, a lot of lot of things to kind of, you know, take for anybody out there. I think there’s a lot of things here that are interesting and then also potentially applicable. Yes, because I do. I think that one of the things that I found to be really satisfying about doing this podcast is meaning, I’ve just been blown away that we live in this, or we operate in this small little industry, you know, relatively speaking, and yet I feel as if every day I’m meeting a new, really interesting sort of entrepreneurial kind of person. And so I know that that that energy, sort of like exists, these people exist. And I always wonder, how many people are sort of like, waiting to start, how many people have an idea? How many people are ready to take that plunge? And like, they’re they just need, maybe a mentor. Maybe they just need a nudge in terms of, like, am I Do I have permission to start? You don’t need permission. You can just start, right and just so I feel like this is, you know, one of the common commonalities across all these conversations is just people’s own sort of decision making and how they got to that point, to where they made the decision to take that leap. And I’m trying to kind of understand, like, what is what? What’s universal across those different divisions, well, and there’s not a lot of damage. Well, I
Reuben Zielinski
can tell you, you can’t be afraid of failure. Yeah. I mean, I, I’ve had a couple failures, as I mentioned in these startups. And you know, you just can’t be afraid that you just, you gotta, man, you gotta get right back up on that horse and start riding again. What’d
Dave Kemp
you say? It’s sawdust.
Reuben Zielinski
It’s sawdust. Yeah, I saw that word, man, that sawdust. You know,
Dave Kemp
it’s sawdust. It’s in the past. It’s in the past. Well, Ruben, I couldn’t thank you more for coming on today and coming in saying to St Louis and doing this in person. It’s it’s a lot of fun to do the podcast, even more fun to do it in person. So thank you for coming on. Thanks for everybody who tuned in here to the end, and we will chat with you next time. Dave, I
Reuben Zielinski
gotta say it This Bud’s for you. This
Dave Kemp
buzz for you. Boom. And on that note, we’re out!
