Jacob Johnson | GitWit

From the Tulsa Flag initiative to Elon Musk’s Big F*cking Field campaign, Jacob Johnson shares what has inspired, motivated and humbled him over the years.

Show Notes:

Guest: Jacob Johnson, Co-founder of Gitwit

Topic: Gitwit’s approach to innovation, their work in Tulsa, and the future of the company.

Key Points:

• Creativity as a Business Weapon: Jacob believes that creativity is essential for business success and can be taught and learned.
• Problem Agnostic Approach: Gitwit focuses on finding solutions to problems rather than specializing in specific industries.
• The Gitwit Team: The Gitwit team is diverse and includes experts in various fields, from research to design and engineering.
• Building a Culture of Innovation: Gitwit emphasizes a culture of experimentation, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• Impact on Tulsa: Gitwit has been involved in several initiatives to improve Tulsa, including the Tulsa flag project and attracting Tesla to the city.

19 Days Venture Studio: Gitwit operates a venture studio, creating and investing in new businesses.

Transcript:

Jacob: And he lays out this idea of everyone’s heard the word poet and poem, right? The person who writes it and then the output of it. There’s a third Latin word that got lost in Western culture. And it’s poesis. That’s the process of doing it. And that’s where all that’s where all of the fun is. That’s where all the joy is.

That’s the thing that you need to focus on. 

Narrator: Known as the biggest town you’ll ever experience. With its unique historical background, Tulsa is home to a diverse range of people and businesses with a thriving economy, delicious eats, nightlife and entertainment for all ages. Tulsa is also home to business titans, entrepreneurs, artists, and foodies.

Whether you’re considering a move to Tulsa or just wanting to learn more about the place you call home, the Tulsa is Home podcast is for you.

Roderick: Welcome to another episode of the Tulsa is home podcast. And today we get the pleasure of sitting down with Jacob Johnson with Gitwit. And we’re going to dive deep into everything business wise and kind of your impact on the business community. In Tulsa and just, you kind of had your fingers in a lot of different things over the years.

And and so I was thinking through an intro of, you know, what do I hit on? What, how do I introduce you? Do we start with a initiative for the Tulsa flag? Do we talk about how you helped you know, Tulsa get to the top two city potentials for Tesla? You know, or, , the The multimillion dollar fund that you guys have to start businesses and really invest in the Tulsa business community.

And didn’t know where to start, but kind of where, you know, if there’s a statement that, as I learned more about you guys and your team, everybody interacted with, and if we didn’t have our business and kind of what we were doing, Gitwit would be the first place I would apply. Like I just, 

that’s the ultimate compliment.

Yeah. 

Roderick: Well, I mean, I. I love the, everybody I’ve interacted with the team, everybody there. And I know there’s drama in every company that we don’t ever hear about, but it just seems as you guys are very intentional about what you do. And it’s exciting to hear about. 

Jacob: Yeah, I appreciate that, man.

Roderick: So we get to dive more into that and viewers and listeners get to learn a little bit more about GitWit and kind of what you guys are up to. But first softball question. So who is Jacob Johnson? Where did you grow up? What do you like to do for fun? That sort of stuff. 

Jacob: Yeah, so, grew up in Pryor, Oklahoma.

45 minutes away. And let’s see left right after graduation, literally 24 hours later, moved to Tulsa went to university of Tulsa. It’s got a business degree and minor in art there. It’s where I met my co founder as a professor of marketing really kind of emphasis on consumer behavior.

Yeah. And then started GitWit pretty quickly thereafter in terms of what I like to do. I like to build things like to create. So, I kind of have an insatiable appetite for trying new things and doing new things. And so whether around the house building stuff and then obviously at work through initiatives like the Tulsa flag or building new companies I think I’ve learned entrepreneurship is my creative outlet.

Yeah. And I’ve got a wife and two kids. We live in the Heights neighborhood, just North of downtown. And we work downtown. Yeah. So five and seven year old and they go to Riverfield. So you have a nice small little life here in Tulsa. Awesome. 

Roderick: So you mentioned Dan, how did you meet, how did that relationship develop?

Jacob: Yeah. So I met Dan doing undergrad at TU. Like I said, I got a business degree. I kind of liked all things business. I liked the finance side. I liked, you know, statistics. I really enjoyed it all. But creativity again has always been my outlet. Even before I knew how important creativity was to me.

Entrepreneurialism was my, outlet, Venture. I think I was eight years old and I started a carnival in our backyard. It got shut down by my mom. She found out I was planning to charge people to come and she wouldn’t allow me to do it. Like, why else would I do this? So that thrill of like creating something new and then getting people to want to pay you for is the ultimate validation of the thing you did is valuable.

So I learned that in early age before I could articulate it, obviously. , so all this to say in business school, I liked it all, but I knew I wanted to do creativity. So I took some entrepreneurship classes, creativity when I was in undergrad around 2001 to 2005 really meant advertising, right? It was the thing at the end.

Of make this thing look pretty. And then I met this guy and Dan Fisher, who’s this professor who kind of professed that creativity is the ultimate business weapon and it needed to be taken upstream into the insights process. And I just, I latched onto that. I love that idea. I got introduced to companies like IDEO who were doing ethnographic research to go find new problems to solve.

And I just, I’ve. It just can’t overstate how quickly I latched onto that concept because it was the first thing that I was like, this is, this allows me to do everything I’ve wanted to do, which is, you know, the whole spectrum of business, but through the lens of doing something new. So, and at that point he was the smartest person I’d ever met.

I mean, he’s Still probably the smartest person I’ve ever met. So yeah we did a consulting project after I had, you know, done some piddling around after undergrad and that’s really what kicked off. 

Roderick: So what does in a nutshell? Explain what it is that you. Do you focus on, and actually I have your vision statement here that we’ll read and kind of break down, but kind of overall summary, what is, what does Gitwit, 

Jacob: yeah, we’re a company that’s designed to go into the unknown, come like, find new original insights, come up with concepts based on those and get them into the world.

And so, I mean, you look, there’s, if you draw a quadrant of ways to grow a business, there’s either. You know, your existing product or a new product and existing market or a new market, right? And so the most basic form of growth is selling your product into your market and doing more of it. And so we help companies come up with new ways to grow within their existing markets.

We also help them develop new products for their existing markets. And then we help people take their products and go find new markets with it. And then that top , Quadrant is really kind of startup world, taking a new product into a new market. And so everything we do is helping companies in service of growth.

But kind of have the full team to traverse going from initial insight to idea, to validating it, to prototyping a concept, to then actually getting it into the world and growing it. 

Roderick: Well, they’re really cool. So I’ve got your vision here of Gitwit is to build a company rooted in the fundamentals of creativity Be problem agnostic and assemble the entire team needed to ideate and build innovative solutions So the first part fundamentals of creativity What does that mean?

Jacob: Yeah. So, at its most basic concept, the fundamentals of creativity are coming up with as many ideas as possible and a diverse set of ideas possible. It’s just how creativity works in the world, how nature works, right? It generates a lot of different permutations of a similar idea and then some of them take hold and some of them don’t.

And I think a lot of the world views creativity as something. Ultra gifted people like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs just have like this stroke of genius and they get it. And it’s not how it works. You come up with good ideas by coming up with a lot of ideas and a diverse set of ideas. And that is something that can be taught.

It can be learned. It can be built into processes. So if you come to us, Saying, Hey, I want to build a new concept in this space. We view it as our job to help take you on the journey to come up with as many different diverse set of ideas as possible and good ideas almost always are counterintuitive.

They don’t look great at the beginning. And so going through that process of coming up with a lots of them and ensures that you skip over kind of the obvious ones. So the fundamentals of creativity are truly not just hire smart people and they come up with ideas, But design a process that’s guaranteed to unearth a lot of ideas with the idea that you’re likely to find the best idea through that.

Roderick: I like it. The second part is be problem agnostic. Let’s explain that. 

Jacob: Okay. So, In our world. So we do a lot of things, but you know, the foundation of our team works in a professional services capacity, which means you come hire us to do things. And a tried and true way to grow a professional services firm is to become experts in a lane, right?

And so if you’re an attorney, right, you could be an MNA attorney. And in our world, people do maybe they become specialists in building healthcare software or specialists in helping veterinary and clinics grow. Right. And when you do that, you’re hiring them for their expertise. And we fundamentally.

Are structured very differently. We’re saying you come to us if you want to do something new and we’ll help you come up with the insights. So therefore our expertise in any one given area is not what you’re hiring us for. It’s our ability to go find original insights. Whereas other firms you’re hiring them because they already know the way and you want to adopt their way.

And so we’ve kind of tried to reject that notion that we are experts in anything other than just learning. We’re, we think we’re experts. In learning faster than anybody else and coming up with insights faster than anyone else, and then being able to transition that into a strategy and a concept and moving forward.

So when we say we’re problem agnostic, it’s to say we can apply our process no matter the vertical, no matter the space that we’re 

Roderick: in, then assemble the entire team. So who’s on your team. Is it, you’re referring to your internal team or are you talking about your client’s team? Explain that a little bit.

Jacob: Yeah, that’s a good question. So, at the root of that, I think any statement like this, you’re just trying to answer, how are you different than everything else that’s out there. And you can have ideas and insights, but if you can’t get them into the world and learn, you can’t feed the loop of ideas and insights.

And so from day one, we’ve said we want not only the team who can do the primary research. When I say primary research, I mean things like ethnographic research, of which I’ve said before in this, but I’ll just define that. That’s just. Primary getting in the field, observing somebody in their environment.

We think you learn a lot more, not just by asking questions, but actually viewing the environments that people work in, watching them do their jobs. We do digital versions of this, of, you know, watching people use software. We do a lot of on the ground versions of getting in people’s environments. So there’s coming up with insights and then there’s the strategy of what else is in the world?

What are you competing with? But we didn’t just want to be able to do the kind of insights and consulting part of it. We wanted to be able to actually build things and get them into the world because then that’s where you learn the rest of the lessons of what the market wants, what they don’t want. And being able to do all of that with one team allows you to move further and faster than anybody else is kind of our whole thesis.

It’s actually in the name. Git wit t represents the ideas and the insights and get. represents the ability to just move and go impact things. And it’s being able to do both of those together that allows you to get traction. So that’s what that part of that statement means is having the entire team is something that again, most people don’t do.

They specialize in one of those areas versus trying to bring the full team together. And so it’s a wildly diverse team. Starting up front with discovery team led by someone whose background is in shopper marketing, which kind of. Came out of the Bentonville area of a lot of these big consumer packaged goods, brands, hiring research firms to understand the buying journey of going from your couch, watching an ad for Crest toothpaste to the buying behaviors in store.

We have an investigative journalist who joined that team and they’re just deep researchers. So they do all of the ethnographic research, all of the Consumer interviews with user experience researcher. So that’s helping understand how people interact with, you know, the digital products, largely we have a strategy team.

So that’s combination of brand strategy, which brand strategy is just, how are you different than. Everything else that’s out there. It’s how are you positioning your brand to be different than what’s out there? And then business and venture strategy, which is largely where I spend my time. And then we have an analytics team.

So both kind of deep quantitative analytics, as well as the data engineers who can kind of connect all of the systems, they’re the team who. Once we have an idea and an insight, they just go learn and prototype faster than anybody else. So that’s kind of the upfront insights and consulting team. And then we have a product team.

When I say product, I largely mean digital products. So, that’s product managers UX strategist. So that’s somebody who, after we have an idea starts to kind of sketch through, here’s how these workflows might work. Here’s the user journeys, here’s the actual interfaces and then product designers.

So these are actually user interface designers who are designing the apps, the websites, the dashboards, the experiences, and then an engineering team. So software engineers who actually build these things. And then last is a marketing team. So, that’s growth marketers. So these are people who understand all the channels, where to go find your users, a content team.

These are people who understand how to take that brand strategy, turn it into messaging that appeals to your target audience. Then design video. And content teams who can then build everything from the websites, web experiences, ads everything that we need to then tell the story to convert users.

So it’s a long answer to the question because it extends all the way through. And as you can see what I was talking about before the entire team that started with, we don’t even have an idea. We just observing and it ended with, we’re actually acquiring users and getting them to use the product. So, 

Roderick: Yeah, that’s fascinating.

So with all those different types of people, cause you just listed a whole bunch of different personalities. How do you how do you find these people? How do you manage them? Yeah. How do you keep everybody excited about. Each, maybe each new, I mean, I guess it’s easy to get excited about new things.

Jacob: Yeah. 

Roderick: How do you keep people excited about maybe the long term vision? Yeah. Of GitWit? 

Jacob: Whew how do you find people I think you write really compelling. I mean, storytelling is everything. I think writing really compelling job ads and job ads cuts it short. Like we really try to paint the vision of here’s the opportunity.

Here’s what you do. Here’s what your life will be like. Here’s your, that gets a quality of candidate into the pipeline. In fact, I think it’s probably the place where most people, Way under is telling the story right in a way that captures because you’re we’re looking for just the best of the Best and I know that’s an easy thing to say, but we’re truly looking for Greatness and people who and a lot of times we don’t even know what that looks like until we meet somebody So so it starts with drafting through the opportunity in a way that the right person is like That sounds fun and that sounds intense and that sounds challenging and that sounds like I would love to show up to that.

So I think the finding those people starts there. And then I think you then have to be humble enough to know you don’t really know what the fit looks like. And so you’ve got to be pretty open minded through the process. So we’re really intentional. We give people assignments to understand how they approach problems, to understand how they think these are assignments that don’t have a right answer.

They’re highly ambiguous. They just allow us to see how your thought process and how you connect the dots and how you tell that story and what directions you went. And so that really helps us to find kind of, we, our vision in the hiring process is unearth the hidden innovators. There are some brilliant people out there that probably in your life that you have no idea how incredibly capable they are until they get that opportunity.

So that, that’s just the first part of the question. How do you manage this team? I mean, that’s obviously a broad broad topic. Anything specific that you want to double click on that? 

Roderick: Let’s say, I mean, this question is probably more geared towards you know, business owner type viewers, but do you have company wide meetings on a regular basis?

Do you have individual meetings? Do you have daily huddles? Kind of those types of words that, that people. Use. 

Jacob: Yeah. So, we’re incredibly intentional about process. And that’s usually done at a project level. We do an all hands kind of 30 minute meeting on Mondays. That’s just kind of for high level company updates.

Any we do an OKR process where we’re setting quarterly objectives and doing read out on those. We’re pretty transparent on the process. financial progress side. Not like full blown open book, but pretty close and people have questions. We’ll show them pretty much anything. And then we organized by those three groups that I mentioned insights and consulting product marketing, they self organize on the project level.

And then we spend a lot of time. So when we talk about we’re operating on the fundamentals of creativity, Designing specific processes for an engagement. So we don’t have these just kind of off the shelf things. We will design through sprints. And when I say a sprint of very intentional taking six or seven people plus three or four people from the client team and architecting a five day process to go from day one, uncovering the problem and journey mapping it day two, Coming up with ideas and concepts and sketching through day three, picking our top one, prototyping it day four, really designing through a full fidelity prototype and day five, bringing in end users, doing testing and actually recording all of the results.

And so you can traverse in five days, what most companies can take, you know, six to nine months to do. So that’s largely how we manage at the initiative level. Then at the company level, you know, we’ve tried various things like any other company, it’s just a constant moving target of, are you flat? Are you a matrix?

Are you, what level of definition do you need? Sometimes the lack of it gets in your way. Sometimes too much gets in your way. So we try to just constantly change. If you work, with Gitwit, that’s the thing constantly changing. We’ll come up with a new way to organize and we’ll throw it out. As soon as it’s not working, try something new.

So 

Roderick: awesome. And then the last part of your vision. ideate and build innovative solutions. So that’s probably the bulk of what you’ve already hit on a lot. Is there anything specifically I’m trying to think of anything, the ideate part, you said it’s more of a process of getting as many things as possible and many options and many problems.

Is that after you’ve selected an industry or is that even you’re trying to select. Even an industry and he threw out a whole bunch of, 

Jacob: yeah. So, , you know, look, our story gets more and more confusing the more you dig in because it’s just got layers and we, so we not only do work for clients, like we have our own fund and we do our own things as well, and we can talk about that if you want, but at the core of the idea and innovate is what I was talking about earlier of.

It’s not such a linear process. I think you look at a lot of consulting firms, they run a very linear process to kind of back into the calculation of that’s the opportunity. And we view our processes much less linear than that of when you do run a much more kind of reductive process like that you end up with the obvious answer backed by all sorts of good logic and reasoning versus the moonshots rarely come from that style of, you know, consulting of expert of there is the answer versus a process that’s designed to generate, you know, a lot of ideas to choose from.

So, 

Roderick: so the typical process is going to produce the typical result. And so you guys, I 

Jacob: think you need that. You need that. Sometimes I think you need, if you’re a large government, a large organization who, you know, has got a lot on the line, you need to you need to take a really considered approach to making decisions that are irreversible.

And like those types of consultants are very valuable when it comes to breakthrough growth and new ideas. That’s rarely the right way. 

Roderick: So what have been some of the big milestones of GitWit over the years? Cause you started in 07, is that right? 

Jacob: Yeah yeah, that sounds right. Okay. Yeah, 

Roderick: 07 that way, yeah.

And then, yeah, so what are the milestones over the years? 

Jacob: Man, I’m I’m notoriously bad at this question, cause I don’t look back very much. 

Roderick: Well, you don’t need to nail down dates, but more so just the memorable markings of, okay, this happened and then this happened. 

Jacob: Yeah. So, you know, like a lot, we started with one big client and kind of grew within there.

And so I did some really cool stuff there and got to do a lot of international travel and work. And then, you know, our first startup was probably 2010. And I’d say that was a milestone. It was ultimately failed and failed for reasons that product market fit reasons. Like there were some simple things that we could have tested early that we didn’t, but it was kind of with, it was a, Local group who they had an idea and instead of going back and being problem first, we just helped them run head first into trying to build a solution to a problem that didn’t really exist.

I’d say that’s a milestone. I mean like everyone else, getting your first office is a milestone or going out of the back of your house. 

Roderick: Started in. 

Jacob: Started out of the back of my house. Yeah. And then our first office was on Greenwood Avenue, 118 North Greenwood, scrapped together a little two room office.

There’s three of us working out of there. Then we moved over to what is now Antoinette’s little like a bigger, it’s actually maybe Tulsa bread shop anyways, right there on They’ve changed the name. It was Brady. Then it was MD Brady. I forget what it is now. And then ultimately moved to where we are on Archer and Detroit.

Now milestones. Yeah. Building, getting our first app live was a milestone. Launching our first venture was a milestone. Buying our first building that says a milestone raising our first capital for a venture was a milestone. Hiring our first CEO for a venture and spending it out raising a fund.

I’d certainly throw a Tulsa flag in there as well. 

Roderick: Well, since you introduced that let’s hop into that. How did you guys get involved? What did someone come to you and say, Hey, we need this. Or did you guys see it? And like, let’s do this for Tulsa. How did that come about? 

Jacob: A client had sent over a TED talk.

Done by Roman Mars, that was, the topic was the ubiquity of terribly designed municipal flags. And he went on to kind of tell the story of how most cities are completely breaking all the rules of vexillology, which is, you know, the principles of good flag design. And they’re just putting corporate seals and names that make no sense when you see them flying.

And he got to the slide to show examples, and there was Tulsa’s flag on there. And you know, I’ve always had kind of a personal thesis when it comes to doing a pro bono or social work. And it’s, I only do things if I’m uniquely suited to add value and in a way that I think can have outsized impact.

I view my giving from a money perspective this way, but certainly my time. And there’s largely a thing to guard myself from the trap of making emotional decisions when in any type of charitable work. And so I got to thinking about it and like, we might be the team to tackle this head on because it’s not a design issue.

It is a. Issue of how do you run a good creative process? Like that’s ultimately what this should be about is how do you run a process that’s inclusive of all Tulsans? How do you run a process that really sources what are the right things that should be memorialized in a flag like this? And you need to do that.

You need to run a campaign to get input and you need to design the process to filter through. And and so, The only part of it that I wasn’t so sure about was navigating the political side of it, of what it would take to get it approved at a, you know, municipal level. And that’s where my buddy Joey Wigneraja came in, and he had worked in politics.

He has a public policy background and a business background. And him and I had become buddies, and we’d wanted to work on something together. So I sent it over to him, and I said, should we do this? So we kicked it around for a couple months. And then there was this grants through TIPROS that came up and we said, we should apply for it because if we get it, it’ll force us to just go with this thing.

So we did that. So TIPROS, shout out to them. They were a catalyst. As well as a low back Taylor family, they were the first to say, yeah, we want in Elizabeth Ellison and Kathy were the first people to say, we want to help with that. So now we’re like, all right, well, if we’re going to take other people’s money now, we got to do this.

So then we designed a process and our team just ran an absolutely incredible campaign, everything from designing the process to source input to then running You know, campaigns on Facebook, even load balancing those campaigns to ensure that, you know, mid towners weren’t an outsized audience and make sure that we got all the fringe areas.

And it was just, it was so beautifully executed by our team. And then ultimately did a call for not just so it didn’t start with flag designs that started with, what do you think our flag should represent? Even went so far as to A B test. What type of questions do you ask to get good input? Because if you ask people, what should our flag represent?

Well, they start giving you ideas for flags. And so we did A B tests, multiple versions of that, ultimately came to a version that just sourced input on, like, what are the historical moments, things, objects, people that have, you know, impacted and influenced Tulsa to what it is today. Took all of that, put that in a design brief in that design brief, also laid out kind of the principles of vexillology of if a good, an objectively good flag needs to follow these guidelines.

There’s a vexillogical society of America as we took that. And then we did a call for designs. But we didn’t just rely upon public input. We also ran a professional design process with eight designers of critiquing to make sure that there were some really high quality things in there put together a panel of one person from each district.

So some designers, some art historians to then filter it down to the top 10, and then ultimately put it out to vote and yeah, landed on a Incredible flag, a flag that’s been rated by the vexing module society as one of the top three in the nation. Municipal flags. Great story. 

Roderick: Yeah, it’s cool. And then ultimately for two very different reasons.

Yeah, absolutely. How many of the submissions did you have at the very beginning? I think 

Jacob: like three, 400, something like that. 

Roderick: That’s a lot. And then next we talked about the the Tesla campaign. 

Jacob: Yeah. 

Roderick: So, You know, tell us about how that got started kind of similar, just on with the flag.

You know, was it y’all’s idea? What did someone come to you did? And then how did you come up with such a wild campaign? 

Jacob: Yeah. So, it’s become pretty popular in, well, and maybe the popularity is Wayne’s, but Amazon did this where they just kind of put out an open statement of we’re looking right.

Because we’re trying to get all these cities to throw in tax incentives. We had seen this happen with multiple, well, Elon kind of did it in his own way. Right. Just through Twitter of explaining what they were doing. And anytime that happens, you’ve got various different organizations who all want to try to help attract that, right?

That’s why they exist. And so whether that’s. The chamber, whether that is you know, stuff within the city, whether that’s, you know, private organizations or this type of all kind of kick into gear of like, how might we get on the radar? And so inevitably people reach out to us from these different organizations when something big like that happens and say, like, do we have any ideas of how we might go after this?

And it sounded like a fun one to get involved in. And we said, look, we’ll kind of run a creative process to see what we can come up with. And We started with kind of an initial strategy session of like, what does this look like to get on their radar? And we knew the typical economic development plays of going through their team didn’t matter.

You had to get on Elon’s radar. And we also knew that, you know, the way you get on his radar is through, you know, Twitter and memes. Attracting the people who he responds to. And so we did some research to see who are the news outlets, who he’s constantly responding to. And that became the goal is like, how do we get on their radar?

How do we get them to write about something that’s happening here? And then I actually think Dustin, who who introduced us was the person who came up with the idea and he’s an ops person, right? Let’s show you the creativity. There’s not just a couple people. I think Elon had talked about BFR big f*****g rocket was the name that he had given one of his projects.

And so we took that and ran with that and came up with this idea of BFF, a big f*****g field. And then just did all sorts of kind of insane things just to try to get on his radar. And yeah, ultimately did and it ended up with him coming here and putting Tulsan How serious of a consideration?

Nobody will ever know. But certainly I think it was good from a press perspective. The fact that there was the perception that we had made it into the final two, so. Awesome. Yeah. 

Roderick: And so you guys have a is it a fund? Is it a, an effort? How would you describe 19 days? 

Jacob: Yeah. So 19 days is a, it’s called a venture studio.

And so a venture studio is a subset of venture capital. So whereas venture capital, takes people who have ideas and they invest in exchange for equity in that company to help them grow a venture studio actually built concepts in house, right? So you’re not taking external people. You’re investing in creating something new from the ground up.

And so you’re creating new equity and the studio owns a hundred percent of these new ventures. And so we had naturally done this without ever raising outside capital. Over the years, we’ve partnered with multiple people who’ve, you know, invested in things. We’ve helped people raise money, but then I guess four or five years ago, we spun up a venture.

Had some initial success with it, hired a CEO, spun it out on its own. And later got introduced to the venture studio model through a Tento capital who is shares the building with us. Founded by a guy named Michael Bosch, who experienced investor who kind of posed this idea of you should serialize that process.

And if you were to raise a fund, you could do multiple of these ventures, a few a year and they’re high risks. A lot of them are going to fail. And so if you take a portfolio approach, you can afford to have multiple fail because you only need one or two to return the fund with, you know, great opportunity for investors.

So. To with Michael’s help and introductions I went around and interviewed multiple venture studios wasn’t sure at that point how much I wanted to bring an outside capital to do this, the thought of it was a little scary, even though we had done some other stuff, it’s still scary to this day.

And the more we interviewed other venture studios, the more we realized that we’ve already have this full team. And other venture studios are raising, you know, 40, 50, a couple hundred million dollars to be able to employ the entire team needed to go from inside to idea, to getting it out into the world where to have this team in a professional services capacity.

So we really felt we could be more capital efficient that because we didn’t have to have all these people in the payroll of a fund, we could use them fractionally. Throughout a project, we felt like that was a competitive advantage. Also is hard to then do that internally. And then along came Joey, my collaborator in the Tulsa flag, he is background and private equity.

He understood much more of the kind of fund structure dynamics, how to raise the fund, how to how to manage it, all of that side. And he was at a point where he was ready to kind of, do something new as well. So that’s kind of what broke it loose is him coming in. And so. He’s the managing partner.

And then Dan and I are the other two thirds owners of it. And so it’s basically a fund that then for lack of a better way to put it, just kind of hires GitWits to build new ventures, right? So it’s far more integrated than that, but that’s fundamentally what it is. And so, we’ve been doing that for two years now, have Launched a couple.

We’ve got one that is really exciting and it is taken off and we’ve got one that we’ve already pulled the plug on and Another that kind of we killed in discovery phase. Yeah, we’re kind of constantly coming up with new concepts and The ones that start to get momentum, we ultimately will do a fundraise, hire a CEO and spend it out of the studio.

So it’s called 19 days after the Einstein quote. If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I’d spend the first 19 defining it in the last day solving it. And that’s kind of our answer to the traditional venture model, which takes solutions and invest in them. And whereas we deploy most of our capital kind of finding new insights and new ideas.

Yeah, 

Roderick: that’s amazing. You know, we’re all glad you picked Tulsa. And yeah, that you’re in Tulsa and I just help them so many different levels. What are you excited about Tulsa business wise? And why do you like building your team here? 

Jacob: I mean, I like living here. I’ve, So it’s not as strategic, like, like it’s not a, Oh, like you did this overview and you chose Tulsa.

It’s just home. And I think there was a period where I thought I would need to get out and go to San Francisco. And that got to do a lot of travel. And that’s where I really started to appreciate how great Tulsa is. In terms of just living a simple life I get to do more than I would.

anywhere else. I have more time. I have more resources. The opportunities that my kids have, like there’s, yeah, Tulsa is a rare combination of offering a lot of the culture and experiences of larger cities with just the quality and simplicity of life. I love the, When asked Bob Dylan about how he felt about having his archives in Tulsa, his comment was, I’ve always preferred the subtle hum of the Midwest.

And I think that’s how I feel. Cause I, I love New York city. I love San Francisco. I love these and they’ve got a vibration to them that like is inspiring and, but. Here is a much easier way to live a pretty centered and humble life. So yeah, Tulsa is great. I live next door to my parents and we share a backyard.

I’ve got little kids and yeah, you can just design the life that you want to live here in a way that can be hard in other places. So 

Roderick: yeah, that’s really cool. So what’s next for Gitwit. Is there anything that you feel like is another milestone that you refer to some of the other ones in the past?

Or are you guys focusing head down on kind of where you’re at right now and just trying to get better at this process? 

Jacob: Yeah, I, look, I think most goal setting and strategic planning is, it’s largely futile. The world kind of serves up the opportunities it serves up. And I think more and more I’m just focused on the process.

And having fun in the process of doing it. And I think I get so much fulfillment from creating and building things. And a lot of times setting goals, whether that’s revenue, whether that’s growth, you need to do it to plan, right? You functionally just need a plan. Otherwise you get behind on your hiring plan.

So like those things serve a purpose, but they aren’t the purpose. And I think most people get. Confuse that. And I think even I did maybe over the past couple of years. So for me, success is just trying to maximize the process of just getting to like step back and be like, this is incredible that I’m getting to build these ventures, that I’m getting to participate in this level of creativity.

And the goal is just to keep playing the game. One of my, one of my favorite philosophy books ever is a finite and infinite games by a guy named James Kars. And he lays out this idea of Everyone’s heard the word poet and poem, right? The person who writes it and then the output of it. There’s a third Latin word that got lost in Western culture.

And it’s poesis. That’s the process of doing it. And that’s where all that’s where all of the fun is. That’s where all the joy is. That’s the thing that you need to focus on. So for me, That’s what I’m trying to double down on is focusing on like the day to day and having fun doing it after you’ve raised a fund and you’re recruiting people and you’re raising millions of dollars.

It can feel big and full of pressure and the fear of failure is real. And so So I think what comes is going to come. My goal is just to, you know, in fact, when there’s three of us on Greenwood Jeremiah Maloney, who’s still a very key member of our team today he had come up with this mantra of like one more day, because we were both at a point in our career where we were just like, if we can just keep doing this, like that is success.

I think that’s success for me is just continuing to get to work with people and create things. And the rest of it is, I live in Tulsa. We live a simple life. Economically, yeah, life sure could always get better, but. It’s a diminishing returns at this point. Yeah, sure. 

Roderick: One more day. I like that.

Jacob: Yeah. 

Roderick: So what are the next steps for people who see this or listening to this? How can they get involved or who are your ideal clients to reach out and kind of take those first steps? 

Jacob: So look from a client perspective, our constant refrain is, Oh, you should have called us in earlier. And so if you, I think.

If there are people who have ideas of the ways they want to grow their business or a new thing that they want to do the answer is like, come in, let’s chat. We’re really good at just helping people navigate. Even if we’re not a great fit for everyone. And we’re pretty good at helping people navigate that though.

Here’s what you might do or pointing them to resources or a lot of times. There’s, you know, software out there that can help them and they can get going. So we’d like to just help people. I personally get a lot of fulfillment of just helping people unlock and get going. And I can get excited about nearly anything.

So, I think, yeah, any, anybody who wants to chat about a new idea, new initiative, whether that’s nonprofit for profit, I mean, obviously we’re, when it comes to hiring us We’re expensive, whatever that means, right? We can add a ton of value, but when it comes to, you know, engaging in this process, I mean, we have a lot of expensive people.

It takes a lot of time to run the process. But I don’t want that to be prohibitive of people starting a conversation. Cause a lot of times people feel like they’re wasting our time and we’re pretty good at just being up front with people and can have a 45 minute chat and a lot of times unlock people.

So yeah, if there’s a way to approach us, it’s just, if there’s anything new you’re trying to do, we’d love to be a a support along that process. Even if there’s no immediate economic benefit for us. Yeah, it’s a It’s a fun part of what we do. It’s just getting to meet with new people and hear their ideas.

Yeah. 

Roderick: Well, good deal. Well, I appreciate you coming today. And yeah, I appreciate 

Jacob: you taking the time to learn more 

Roderick: about you the history of Gitwit. And yeah, I just, I appreciate your time and 

Jacob: look forward 

Roderick: to kind of maybe working together on something in the future. We’ll be coming by for sure.

The headquarters again. And 

Jacob: yeah, 

Roderick: I appreciate it. 

Jacob: Yeah. 

Roderick: Thanks Roderick. Yep.