There's no perfect book on how to be an Entrepreneur.

Mudassir (00:01.346)

Perfect, so. Do a clap for me please now. Perfect, amazing,loud and clear. All right, we can start now. Hey Oscar, welcome to the show.How are you doing today?

Oscar A Jofre (00:09.547)

Loud and clear.

Oscar A Jofre (00:16.91)

I'm doing fantastic. Thank you for asking.

Mudassir (00:20.022)

Absolutely, it's our pleasure. Where are you based out of?

Oscar A Jofre (00:23.738)

I am currently based out of Toronto, Canada, just north ofNew York.

Mudassir (00:31.678)

Awesome. So usually when I start talking to anybody or likewhoever the guest that we have on the team, I start with the context of theirlife. Because I believe we are sum of efforts. Like that's who we are, all theevents that are happening in our lives. So give us the earliest context of yourlife, who you were, where you started, how did you get up here, like whoeveryou are today.

Oscar A Jofre (00:56.846)

Thank you. You know, you actually made me think aboutsomething that I haven't thought in a long time. People often ask, you know,when's your earliest memory of being an entrepreneur? And for me, my journeybegan in a country called Argentina and Mendoza. And I would sneak out duringsiesta. That's when people would take a nap after they ate lunch, my parentssleeping and my siblings. And I would

tiptoe my way, like sneak out. Why? Because we were livingin a hotel at the time, and every day a taxi would arrive from the country thatI came from, Chile, and they would bring the newspaper. And the newspaper wasthe most valuable asset in those days. So, and in those days I would pick uppeople's baggage and at the, you know, from the taxi or the train station.

So that's my earliest memory of ever being an entrepreneur,earning, working, and actually having to sneak out for my parents to go andwork and to do it. And that journey brought me into Canada. And, you know, as ayoungster, I didn't learn how to read and write English until I was about 18.And, you know, in...

Inside of me, I always knew that I wanted to learn. I can'texplain it or anything. It's not like I kept saying that to myself. It's just,I did stupid things like any other human being, but my lasting of being idioticas a human being didn't last for very long. One day I just woke up, I said,okay, it's time to wake up and go learn. I literally mean that. And I cut myhair, cut it off like.

You know, I had hair down to my shoulders and cut my hairoff and done and moved out of the section of one city, moved it to the downtownof the city and my life changed. And from there on, I worked for two companiesin my entire life, professionally, two companies. And they had the most biggestimpact on me to where I am today. One was a company called Future Shop. Youknow it as Best Buy in the United States. It was started by an Iranian immigrantin Canada.

Oscar A Jofre (03:22.866)

And Zia taught me more about being human, positive, just, itwas so refreshing to be seen as a human being and the possibilities at thatyoung age went up to that point. It was just the opposite and be given achance. Zia, at that time, there was only one store in Canada. This was whenthe mega stores in the early 80s, nobody had ever seen 50,000, 100,000 squarefeet.

stores. Now they're everywhere, but in those days theydidn't exist. And so when he introduced it, it was new. And I'll never forget,I asked for the chance, the opportunity to be part of it. I got hired and everyday we would be at the stores by 6 a.m. and he would teach us about positivethinking, you know, positive reinforcement, how to speak to people positively.

the impact it could have. It was just life changing. It'snot like he was trying to make us into robots. Just to look at life in adifferent way, talk differently, express yourself differently, and believe thatyou can. And in less than six months, I was running my own store, amulti-million dollar store, a kid with no education, given the opportunity, andthen my roots in the company kept growing and growing, but eventually, my timecame where I had outgrown where I was going.

And then I joined another company called Canon. And my bossat the time, he is currently my chief revenue officer in my company. He's thelast person I have ever worked for in my life. And it was enjoyable because, soat Best Buy Future Shop, I learned what it's like to be on the front lines whenpeople come to you. When I went to Canon, I learned...

how to go to people. And it was a different approach, B2B,B2C, and so on. But it was rather interesting because the dynamics of thedifferent bosses I had at Canon were amazing. But Peter was one of thoseindividuals like Zia believed in teaching you the positive way how to buildrelationships. And I'll never forget that. I mean, to this day, you know, he'sworking with me today. To this day, everything I learned from him,

Oscar A Jofre (05:44.97)

I've adopted the way I build my businesses. It's been great.You know, they're not perfect, but. So my journey has been one of, I think Ialways knew I was an entrepreneur. I didn't know when at that moment it wasready to go, but somewhere in 1990, it just clocked in my body. Somethingticked and I went to Peter and I said, you know, Peter, do you think thecompany would ever consider going into the computer industry, softwareindustry? Oh no, no. Canon has no future with computers.

Obviously, in hindsight, that's not the case. But in thosedays, this was the view at certain levels. I'm sure the company would have beenlooking at the future, but where we were at, it wasn't. And I said, okay, it'stime for me to go on. I had nothing. I didn't save. I didn't plan for it. Ijust left and I started my first company in voice recognition. You know, again,these were people that...

I met in my journeys and voice recognition was the next gamechanger. So I noticed something with what I got involved at that moment, what Iwas really doing. I was noticing that I was really looking for things that weregoing to be impactful, not for one person, but for many. So voice recognition,the way I was looking at it in the early days, imagine people who had multipleoscarosis, people who couldn't have use of their hands.

You know what I mean? So there was a love for helpingindividuals. Unfortunately, the technology costs and the need, it just wasn'tthere. So only the doctors and the lawyers could pay for it. But theprogression of my journey as an entrepreneur never changed that dynamic. Andthen along the way, a few other startups, I then ended up creating Babel Fish.Same thing here. Well, the internet was so powerful, right? I mean, look atyou. You grew up in...

Pakistan. Well, English is good but it's not the firstlanguage. In fact, the first language of the world isn't English. It's whateverspoken language, written language you have. So the internet in the early days,people may not know this, it was only English. There were no multilingualsites. So, and people were starting to communicate. So there were programs likeQQ, people don't remember this, but these were the early days where, hello,hola.

Oscar A Jofre (08:11.618)

Privet, Ni Hao, right? It's just one word. It just becamethis opening of a door. So, you know, through all my journeys, it's been notfinding, but being part of opportunities where you're changing, I'm making abig change. And...

As well, you know, the thing that I get often asked, I go, sohow do you go looking for an opportunity? I don't go looking. I do recall onescary moment in my life when I had Babel Fish. It came to an end. You know, Iwas departing and I go, what am I gonna do next? It was really frightening,scary at that moment for a little bit and I don't know what

got me out of it, but what I do remember is that I didn't goout and start thinking, okay, I think the world needs this, I think the worldneeds that. I just went out, started meeting people, and next thing you know,opportunity arose. And so the only thing that I tell people now is I don't lookfor anything. I just keep my ears open. I talk to people just like you and Iare talking today, and I'm going to learn something. You're going to learnsomething. And sometimes out of nowhere, wait a minute.

That sparks my interest and that interest could turn intosomething. I'm not saying it does all the time. I had a lot of bombs along theway. Things didn't go well, but, uh, the point is that that's how you exploreyour, your journey. If it's purely for this, that's a monetary gain. That's whyI got no issues around, but every entrepreneur's journey is different. And somine where I am today is just an evolution of, of everything that I've everdone is how to make change. Um, the chains that we're working on now is

bigger than anything. I mean, we're talking aboutdemocratizing capital. And, you know, it's a big word. That's one. But we'retalking about giving everybody an opportunity to be the one presenters orpotentially be the one presenters, which up until now it's only been limited toa very small group. And you can't tackle the problem everywhere at once, causethat's just not doable. So,

Oscar A Jofre (10:31.266)

The United States was the first country to tackle it. And aman who I was very fortunate. Once again, I'm not gonna say I was looking forhim, but there he was at an event and I hear the word and you're curious, yourcuriosity brings you in and you learn his name is David Wielderforth. And Davidwas talking about democratizing capital, how the public markets weren't what wethought they were. And what we needed to do was invest in the private marketswhere innovation, growth.

jobs and that was the introduction of the jobs act at thetime. It took him 10 years before President Obama signed it in 2012. It tookanother three years before the regulators came up with rules to be implementedfor everybody to use. But what we're doing here is we're changing things. We'rechanging lives one life at a time.

And I can honestly say this one, I can see it, I can feelit, I can point to it, and I can tell you here is what would have been if itwas this way, and here's what it is because of it. And that is real. And nowwe're seeing other countries implement similar rules because they're startingto see, wait a minute, in the last 10 years, the JOBS Act is working. It'screating jobs. It's attracting innovation.

Capital is there. So what is making it so different? It'sbecause the basics of money I never understood. Being an immigrant, the onlything I knew about money, I needed to have it in order to have the cars andthis and that. I didn't understand anything more than that. I saw a rich man ina suit and I assumed that was wealth, right? That in a fancy car, wealth. Thosewere the perceptions that I grew up with. So I learned two valuable lessonsalong the journey regarding money.

One, when I had Babel Fish, one of my investors, one of thefounders of PCL Construction, world's largest construction company, JoeThompson, introduced me to a buddy of his. His name is Henry Gussie. And hegoes, Oscar, you go see Henry. He'll take a meeting with you and go tell himabout what we're doing here and he'll co-invest. You just gotta go and see him,present him everything and I went there. I was ready, you know.

Oscar A Jofre (12:58.478)

in my suit and tie ready to go present. And I get there. SoHenry Gussie, all I knew about him, he was the founder and president and CEO ofa company called IPL, the world's largest pipeline. So if you know the oil andgas, this is the man that every bloody pipe in the world.

Mudassir (13:15.404)

Yeah, I know.

Oscar A Jofre (13:18.846)

So I get there, I'm sitting in the lobby, and I'm waiting,I'm watching out the door, and I see this massive car, 1976 Meteor 4 door. Ihaven't seen this, you know, this is 1990, and this is a 1976 Meteor. And I'mwatching it go, oh my God, that's the same car my dad got when we first arrivedin Canada. So the guy's coming in, you know, jacket dirty with oil.

with a lunch bucket, the steel lunch bucket, and he justwalks by me and I'm, you know, I keep looking for Mr. Gussie, thinking, youknow, and then the secretary says, Mr. Gussie will see you now, and I'll go,well, he must have a back door, right? So I go in and that's the man that justcame in the door. I was, I was, you know, it really shook me.

That day I learned something that I, everything a disbeliefabout money completely. And I went back to Joe and he goes, what do you think?I go, Joe, I didn't know. And he goes, I know. That's the thing. People haveperceptions. And Henry Gussie was a phenomenal individual. He invested in mycompany and it was great. The next lesson was David Weald and that didn't comeuntil about 2011. What I didn't know about money then.

is that it's what David taught me. And that is that there isno shortage of it. Okay, so for an entrepreneur to hear that, that's sort oflike, what? No shortage, wait a minute. That's one. Number two, money needs tocompete. And that was the part I didn't know what he meant. I had no idea whatdid he mean by compete. Well, money sitting in a bank account doesn't work.That's not money working.

and money working, it needs to work in order to earn. Likeeverything else, it needs to work. And right now, the only money that keepsworking is the one percenters. So money needs to compete in order for it tohave a fluid, open capital markets. And when he started showing me that thegraphs and charts of the one percenters, and I guess the wake-up call foreverybody in the United States was 2008, the financial collapse.

Oscar A Jofre (15:43.442)

Everybody lost in middle America. You lost your companies.You lost everything the only people that didn't were the bankers They got thebonuses. They got cash They went about the yachts and everything else. That wasthe wake-up call and that's when he changed He was a former vice chairman ofNASDAQ. He so imagine having that so I feel so fortunate and when When he toldme what he was working on I that was it for me. I said, this is it This is thelast thing that will change everything

And today I'm 57 years old. In 2022, my niece who's 31 yearsold, she reaches out to me. She calls uncle. I want to start up a company. Doyou know right there at that moment? I know the last 14 years were forsomething. At that moment, it became real for me again, because if I wasn'tdoing what I'm doing today, my niece and her idea, like yours, kids or ourkids, wherever they may be in the world.

All we could tell them is good idea. Okay, let's see if wecan find someone to buy from you because we can't, or I don't know how I canhelp you. That is no longer, I'm giving her the options. Look at all the thingsyou can do and feel rejuvenated as an entrepreneur to make a difference. Notfeel that just because you're in Edmonton, Alberta, where nobody can see you,who cares? COVID-19 shook all that up. So this is my journey as an entrepreneur.It's learning, taking...

good advice, making lots of mistakes. So don't ever haveanyone tell you that it's been flowery and all that. No, it's been theopposite. But one thing is constant for me is I want to leave something behindthat it made a change. It changed people's lives. This is the biggest one thatI've ever been involved with and it's just getting started. 14 years, but it'sjust getting started.

Mudassir (17:37.978)

Wow, what an introduction. Okay, so thank you for that,first of all. Just before, you know, go ahead with that. You mentioned therewere like two things David taught you. So one was like money needs to compete.What was the other one?

Oscar A Jofre (17:52.43)

So money needs to compete and there is no shortage of it.There's $36 trillion, $36 trillion just sitting there every single day inbanks. So what's the problem? The problem is we don't know where it is. Okay,so now we've identified the problem. And up until now.

Mudassir (17:56.35)

Okay, so there's no shortage. Yeah, okay.

Mudassir (18:02.638)

Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (18:20.374)

The only people that knew where that was, they were the onlypeople we saw visibility to and we saw them as the fund managers, the venturefunds and all that. And we saw that that's the way. But they said, well, we'renot just going to take anybody's money. We only want the good money. We wantthe one percent of money. And so it became a club that only they and so, Imean, look at all of us. We watch SpaceX, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook.

I mean, we're smart enough, we would have seen theopportunity that Jesus, putting a thousand dollars into that, why didn't I geta chance to do that, right? And I think that's the part that is the worst, thateverybody had it, had, saw it and never got an opportunity. And not just intech, it could be biotech, it could be manufacturing, cannabis, it could beanything, anything. And that changes. Now with...

Mudassir (18:56.986)

Mm-hmm.

Oscar A Jofre (19:18.614)

democratization, it's starting to change. We're starting tobalance it. And that competition is good, it's healthy. Money's competingagainst itself.

Mudassir (19:30.746)

Okay, you mentioned something which I think I have noticed afew months ago, and here's my thought on that. You look at all these big techcompanies, all these big tech companies, and then you go like who the founderswere. I was reading something on Bill Gates, and then the whole history, likehis mom was in, in Dell, I think, or like IBM, I think his mom was in IBM.Okay, cool, okay, got the access.

A lot of people did never get the access to the college.Steve Jobs had the access to college. Wozniak had the access to college. Soyou're like, oh, okay. So somebody sitting in Harvard, which is like, I don'tknow, 0.01% of the world kids get to Harvard, probably even less than that. Andsomebody can start something. Okay, so there has to be something which isbeyond just good ideas. There has to be something else, right?

Oscar A Jofre (20:25.67)

It does. I mean, Bill Gates, his mom and his dad, I mean,those were two key elements. And I think you're right, every entrepreneur hasgot some sort of connect. But those connections to be made to people that canhelp you take your idea to that level, it's easier today than it was then. Why?Because we have ways of identifying people. There's not just 10 people thatwent to Harvard. There are thousands of people that went to Harvard.

So you could make a person or MIT or maybe they've worked atthis company and so on. So the question is, is your story compelling enough oryour opportunity compelling enough to get you there? Do you always need that inorder to be successful? The answer is no. That's again, success is measured inso many different ways that not every company needs to be a unicorn to besuccessful.

Oscar A Jofre (21:24.414)

And if you achieve that, your success is already there. So Ithink that's another factor people need to consider, because I don't, you know,people ask me, oh, Oscar, you must see a lot of unicorns. No, I don't. But whatI do see is a lot of companies that are happy, the entrepreneurs are happy,they've hired people, they're growing their business. If they get there, that'sgreat, but they never would have had that opportunity to start with in thebeginning. So it's all relative.

I think it's healthy that we have unicorns. This is nothingagainst any of that. It's just saying that we need to see the rest. We need tosee it because it's fairly significant on the impact on society and theeconomic welfare of any country in the world today.

Mudassir (22:15.178)

Do you think people have false perception of success?Because all people get to see is Yachts, private jets, billion dollarsvaluations, something like that.

Oscar A Jofre (22:27.606)

Do you know the, I would say the answer is yes. I think Idid a talk in Montreal, Quebec, not that long ago, and I was in a panel, and Iwas really, really disappointed. At that moment, it broke my heart. Internally,I'm going, this is not what entrepreneurs for. And what happened was a coupleof the speakers, young kids,

Mudassir (22:33.219)

Okay.

Oscar A Jofre (22:57.454)

25 to 30 years old. They were talking about their startup.They, yeah, we built a startup. Me and my buddies, we got together. We came upwith the idea. And within a year, we sold it. And we sold it for $3, $4million. And we're doing OK with successful entrepreneurs. And the next group,the same thing. And I go, and so the questions came out. So who did you sell itto? A US company.

So the irony is that you sold something for a million andyou sold it to someone who's gonna become a billionaire over there. So this wasthe, because all they saw was the quick cash, but I got offered cash, I got $4million, I can go buy a car again, okay. So it wasn't, so it, I'm meeting moreentrepreneurs that are falling short of how to build. It's build somethingquick enough.

Here it is. Look at that. Okay, buy it. Okay, go. And I'mout. They're gone. I'm not saying all entrepreneurs are like that, but I'm justsaying, do we need those kinds of entrepreneurs? Sure. You see something, theywanna get in and out quickly. Are they team players and all that? They'relittle team players. Is there anything wrong with that model? Absolutely not.That model is exactly what's wrong in the public markets. What are you talkingabout? It's not the same.

It's exactly the same, and here's how it goes. In Canada,it's called the CPC market. You've heard of the CPC before? So it's where three

Mudassir (24:26.05)

How? Okay.

Mudassir (24:33.294)

So the CPC that I know is probably a different thing. It'sjust cost per click. So yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (24:36.878)

Yeah. So they call it the capital pool company. So it'sthree, four people getting together. You got $300,000. Whoo! We create a publiccompany. It doesn't have any business and it's all purpose. It's got two yearsto roll into an active business. Okay. So we raised 300,000 from people and allof them came in because we got them in for a nickel a share. So imagine anickel.

Mudassir (24:42.029)

Okay.

Oscar A Jofre (25:03.65)

And you go, listen, we're going to find an acquisition with,you know, that we're going to do it at 50 cents. So you're like, wow, Kim madea nickel 50 cents. I'm in and out. Okay. So this is what we call the work inCanada, public markets. So woo the ride up in the little loop and woo, becauseeventually the company that rolled itself in has to stay there and it sitsbelow five cents a share for three, four years, five years. And then eventuallythey get delisted.

And the question I've asked my own shareholders when theywere investing in my company, they kept pushing us to get listed and go, whatvalue is that? Where is the job creation? You're going to make money quickly,but you have grandchildren. You're trying to build something. That's notbuilding. And they finally figured it out, honestly. It didn't happenovernight. Oh my God, it took probably three years. And they finally realizedwhat we were working on, what all this was about. And they realized thedifference. And I'm not mad at them. I understand.

But now they recognize that what they did, they didn't buildcompanies and they knew that after they got out, the companies were done. Theywere finished. Not right away, but they were finished. And what these kids weredoing, they were doing the same thing. They were selling intellectual propertycheap, right? They were afraid to go any further. Why? Because it'd be harder.Yeah, you know, there's no capital in Canada. What do you mean? There's so muchwealth in this country. There's wealth in every bloody country. You just got towork.

Mudassir (26:23.278)

Hello.

Oscar A Jofre (26:32.022)

You got to get it. You got to earn it. You got to show themthat that's, you know, it's that's more scary. I get it. Then getting we tookthe four million, you know, we all did good. We'll do another one. Sell it foranother four million. We'll keep flipping them like that every year. See,flipping them. These are like those guys who buy homes and flip them. Right.And I think that gives a wrong impression to people. Crypto did a horriblething for people as well. You probably saw that more than I did.

Mudassir (27:00.202)

Yeah, we'll come to that. Yeah. That was a horror show.

Oscar A Jofre (27:03.887)

So horror. Well, I was in Dubai when someone's at the ATMmachine and the police arrest them right there. So I got to see it firsthand.But I tell entrepreneurs, there's nothing wrong with greed. In fact, you needit. It's good for you. But greed is not the primary reason why you're doing this.

Because if that's the case, then everybody's going to be anentrepreneur and not everybody can do it. You've got to believe in what you'reworking on.

Mudassir (27:34.882)

Isn't, yeah sorry to cut you off, isn't that happeningtoday? Is this like everybody is an entrepreneur? Like everybody, I personallythink, I for one think, this word is overly misused, it's been like very, verywell, you know, it was a very good word, had a very definition, very welldefined definition and stuff like that, but now it's just like overly used,overly complicated, and misused in many, many ways, I think, right?

Oscar A Jofre (27:38.186)

No, it's okay.

Mudassir (28:04.409)

It's like...

Oscar A Jofre (28:04.762)

I agree with you 100% on that.

Mudassir (28:07.074)

Yeah, everybody is an entrepreneur these days. Everybody isan entrepreneur. I'll give you a quick story. So here's, you know, on thatflipping thing. And this is coming from Twitter, so which is the new, you know,I don't know, what do you call that? Like, you know, I think a year or two ago,people used to think that LinkedIn has something, that everybody's just talkingabout their perfect self. Instagram was doing the same thing. Our lives arehappier. Our careers are happier. That was LinkedIn.

Oscar A Jofre (28:11.769)

Everybody.

Mudassir (28:36.614)

Now it's coming to Twitter now. So here's what's happening.You probably have heard of this company called Acquisition.com and DrewGestacchi. So that guy is building an amazing company. So he built amarketplace where you can actually go sell your business. Companies can acquireyour business. Same thing. So that's a marketplace today. And there's this oneguy, not going to name him. So he's, you know, I was like, OK, so that guy ispopping up on my Twitter feed.

almost every day. So who the heck is that guy? So I justopened it out of curiosity, looked at, so the bio reads something like, I soldseven startups, building my eighth, ninth and 10th are in plant by 2023,December 2023. I'm gonna have a dozen startups that gonna get acquired.

And then, you know, horrible thing to say, but I justclicked that picture, just saw it. I was like, that's a kid, actually, who'sjust talking about that. So who is that? And I was like, I don't know how muchI had that, you know, how I happened to have that much time. So I just wentthrough his Twitter feed, like, what the heck is he doing? So this is what he'sdoing. So he came up with...

something, something around AI, like copy.ai or somethinglike that. Not exactly copy.ai, that's a big company, I think. Any copywritingtool, which I think is like very cheap these days. It's like everybody'sbuilding one of those. So the same LLMs, the same data set model, like he builtsomething. So that's the most recent one that he sold. And then what he did waslike, hey guys, have probably, I don't know, 4,000 followers or something onTwitter. Hey guys, I just built this thing.

Here's the days, download for free, subscription for 19bucks a month, and you can start, you can do this thing. Cool. And then putTwitter ads on that, and then that thing is like gaining subscriber, gainingsubscriber, and then they sold it for $3,000. He sold it, went there, and histrue profile updated that. Okay, so that was the seventh starter that I sold. Iwas like, okay.

Mudassir (30:52.01)

Okay, so potentially what you're saying is you can build awebsite today, and you can say there's like 100 people coming to my website,please just buy that. That's a startup now. Right? So what do you think aboutstartups? Because you've been in and out of a lot of those, built a lot ofthose. What exactly is a startup? And what exactly is just a hoax? Or likewhatever you wanna call that, because there's like a lot of these things thatare happening these days.

Oscar A Jofre (31:18.226)

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, the first one youstarted is the way the word entrepreneur is getting started. So theentrepreneur and startup, that's one category. And they're kind of joined atthe hip. The word entrepreneur has been really being up. People are going toschool, reading books, thinking that you can read to be an entrepreneur. I'vebeen asked so many interviews over and over again.

Oscar, what's the best book you've read to be anentrepreneur? And I go, I'm still working on it. What do you mean? Well, what'sit called? It's my book. I don't know any other book. Well, you must have readBill Gates, but that's Bill Gates. My name is Oscar Joffrey. Your name is JoeSmith. I mean, you cannot, there is no book that you can read. Can you readbooks to help you manage and grow and all that? That's great. So that's fromthe entrepreneur. Startup, I think.

something really crazy is happening right now which ispeople are taking shortcuts. So people feel now that they can take shortcuts oneverything. If I can take a shortcut in this, I can take a shortcut in that. Ofcourse I can start a startup company. I read the same, look I get the same Facebookads. I can do a startup company in 24 hours. Okay, great. Man, that'sfantastic. I can put it in paper in less than two hours. That's easy. That'sjust an idea.

putting it to a startup, that's where you convince others ofthe vision of what you're working on. That takes time. And that's the part thatI think people are taking shortcuts on. I don't diminish them at the momentfrom what they're working on. I try to kind of say, okay, this is your kind ofstartup, this is ours. Because they really believe they're working on astartup. You've seen that, right?

They believe they're entrepreneurs because they're flippingthese things over and over. They're like resellers in some cases. But I justread somewhere today that they're not really entrepreneurs. They're allself-employed. And someone came up with a definition to this. An entrepreneuris building. It's a builder. It's a visionary. And here's a vision for all ofyou. So because you live in Dubai, the vision is Saudi Arabia. They're buildinga

Oscar A Jofre (33:42.286)

1300 kilometer wall.

That is vision. That is innovation. That is not aself-employed individual. That is someone who has a dream of what they want toaccomplish for not just themselves, but for everyone else. That's anentrepreneur. And so most people would be classified as self-employed. They'rebuilding, creating cash, making, you know.

I was just having a conversation with our internal team.They go, but Oscar, what about this company? I go, guys, that's not a company.He's just making enough to make his annual income. Imagine he's got a companyright now that he makes 200,000 a year. That's a good living. That's not bad.He lives good, you know, but that's not a company. A company is where you'recommitting to hiring people, you're committing to building something and keepexpanding it and so on. Not just, hey, I can do this myself. No, I can do thismyself.

I can do this. There's nothing wrong with that. There'sabsolutely nothing wrong with it. It's just the classification. But right nowthere is a lot of startups. Look, even with my own niece, I love her to death.Big age difference between us, of course. But I've had to educate her. Youknow, uncle, I want to get up there right away. Okay, no, Jessica, we got totake our time. You need this. But uncle, okay, what do I need to know then?Well, you need to know how a corporation is set up.

You don't just pay someone to do it. See, that's theproblem. They think they just, oh yeah, I paid a lawyer $1,500. They took careof it. Took care of what? What exactly did they do? Did you even bother tolook? Did you even bother to read what they did? Because that's the Bible yougotta follow. That's the book. That if you go off that book, everything you'redoing has to be reversed. So teaching them the difference between board ofdirectors and shareholders early on. So I took my time with her.

Oscar A Jofre (35:41.138)

Over time, she, you know, she, but uncle, and now she said,I get it. I get it. I truly do. You know, I, I let her make some decisions, goout there on her own and find people and, you know, to, to learn about thequick, the quick, oh yeah, we can do this right away. There's no quick, there'sno something easy. Yes. Things can be done faster if you, if you have the rightpeople. Um, sometimes your best friends, oh yeah, don't worry. My friends areall going to be there. Okay. Now's the time. Go get them.

And they're not there. It's nothing wrong. She's you got tocome to some hardcore realities And she's got to get used to being the realitythat you're gonna be isolated There are gonna be moments where only she will beable to she has to deal with things trying to meet payroll at the same timemaking the tax call and Taking care of clients and keeping your chin up. Hieveryone. Welcome to my shop, right? right while all of that is going on inyour head and

So there is no book for that. There is no descriptor. And Ithink she would have been the, you know, she kept saying, well, if I just go toFiber, I can hire a guy to do this, like for $25. And I can get them to dothat. And yeah, I'll get someone to do social media. And I said, okay, you canget a lot of people to do a lot of stuff for you. It's easy. So what happenswhen you can't pay them? What do you mean? What happens when you can't paythem?

Who's gonna do all that? And then, how do you know where itall is? If you don't run your business, if you don't know every tentacle ofyour business, when I started our company, everything, the social media, thedocuments, the email, the server, everything, it's like macro managing, ofcourse. But you did that and you built it in such a way that you removed thatof yourself. That's what you wanna do. You don't do that.

to be there, you build it so you know. So when you hiresomeone to do something, you know exactly the job and they can respect you forit because you've done it. Every one of the people in my company today, I havealmost 60, when they join the company, they know Oscar has done every role.I've done customer support, I've done training, I've done sales, I've done itall. And I love it, I enjoy it. So I don't preach to them, I tell them myexperience.

Oscar A Jofre (38:06.922)

with it and how they can improve on it. But at the sametime, by knowing that, it gives you an opportunity to see the kind of skill youneed. You don't just hire, oh, they're a social media expert. What the heckdoes that mean? Right? You do social media and you'll figure out what you need.Heh.

Mudassir (38:26.154)

Yeah. Tell me one very interesting thing that you mentionedaround all these opinions. I think that's not very widely popular, I thinkbecause a lot of people would say, yeah, okay, why would you want to learn howto incorporate a company? Why would you want to do that? Just hire a lawyer orsomething, and then he's going to get it incorporated in a week and just payhim $1,500 and then you'll be out of there. And then you do the same thing withFiverr.

find somebody who can file your text, and then you don'thave to be worried about that. You mentioned that you have done everything inyour company. Everything, I think. Why did you do that?

Oscar A Jofre (39:07.922)

I, because you own the company, you owe it to yourshareholders. How could you run a company and not know how it works? It's sortof like asking Henry Ford, you know, why is that boat there? You know, becauseyou need to know every part of your business. You were not C-level executiveswhere we got a thousand employees, we get hired on and you get distinctadvantages. You're building a business. So how are you gonna know?

Mudassir (39:20.899)

Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (39:35.458)

when something is not working. How are you gonna know? And youhave to be planning for the good and planning for the bad. And the bad, youhave to plan for it even better because you didn't pay me, okay, I'mdisconnecting you. I've taken all your social media. Pay me and I'll give youback your social media. See? They don't think of that consequence. So you needto be in control of these items. You need to know what your lawyer did. Why?

Because your lawyer is incorporating your business. When youincorporate, it gives you bylaws. It tells you what you need to do as acompany. And it's even more important when you raise capital, because thebylaws are the rules and regulations that investors can use against you if youdon't follow. So you need to know that. And you need to know when you're makingdecisions, they can't be just like, I don't like you anymore. I want you out.You know? And cha-cha-cha-cha, re-erase you. It can't. So I...

Mudassir (40:29.547)

Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (40:33.55)

I've met a few entrepreneurs lately, just kind of boom. Atleast with my niece, she was open-minded. She understood why I was giving herall of this. And she's now very thankful. I'm very proud of her, I really am.And before it was like, come on, uncle, we gotta hurry, hurry. I go, Jessica,don't worry. The market is not going anywhere. It's still gonna be there. Butif you do it right,

you'll have a better appreciation for what you're workingon. One. Number two, you'll be a better leader. And three, you're learning thebasics you need to make it. You need to surround yourself with smart people.You need to learn how to find these smart people. You need to all of thesedifferent things. Not only do you need to run the business, you need to findadvisors, people who will believe in what, get used to selling your story, yourvision. That's what you are. You're a storyteller, selling a vision. It's likeyou're selling people that we're gonna go to Mars.

Not everybody wants to want, not everybody likes space.Number two, even the ones that go to space, they go, no, we're only going as faras the moon. So now you need someone that wants to go further than the moon. Soyou're just weaning and you're gonna say the story again and again, and you'regonna have to hear the negative, the positive, the maybe so, the maybe youshould go this way and all that, and you're gonna have to. So what it's doingis shaping you as an entrepreneur. Am I listening?

and listening to the signals, the right ones versus thewrong ones. The wrong ones are the, you know, Jessica, I'll give you half amillion dollars, but we got to go this way. I don't really believe it's thatway. So in other words, it wasn't your business. You just this is not a pivot.This is totally different. So there are so many reasons why you need to havethat foundation. Yes, things are easier to incorporate, but it's no excuse fornot knowing things. And you need to know them because as the CEO.

So forget about the word entrepreneur for a moment. Soentrepreneur, that is a term that we use in order to describe us as a whole,okay, as a whole. But now let's talk legalities. There is no word entrepreneurin any corporate records anywhere in the world, none. So what is our word inthe corporate records? So you can call yourself entrepreneur all you want, butthe real record it matters

Oscar A Jofre (42:58.934)

The company name is ABC Inc. And the CEO, President and CEOis Joe Smith. The treasurer is this. The board of directors is this. Theshareholders is that. That is what matters. Now, when you are the President andCEO of the company, your name, when you sign something, it is an officialrecord. You are liable now. Personally, everything. That means you need to knowwhat you're doing. You need to understand the things you're signing and whyyou're signing.

You need to understand why you need to protect theenvironment you're in and the business you have. So those who say, oh, no, youknow what, I got a partner who does that. He's been doing it for me for thelast five years and I trust him. You know, okay, great. You know what, Itrusted my lawyer too. That was in 2003. I trusted him with a lot. I mean, hewas making a lot of money from our company. And we had to file one documentwith the Alberta Security Commission at that time that was in.

2003. We weren't raising money, but it was a document weneeded to file because we were doing acquisitions. And keep in mind what thistrusted individual has. So this trusted individual has what is called the bookof records, called your mini book, the Bible of your company. From the day ofbirth and every single time you came in for a checkup, it's all there. Thereyou go. You get it, right? All the things you've done, everything that's beendisclosed, all resolutions, everything in this month. And who has the data?They do.

And where do they have it? In their office, in their cover.And they're the ones constructing the agreements. So one day, he's constructingthis agreement, and then he's sharing the agreement between us and the board ofdirectors. We're reviewing it. He's our trusted lawyer. I trust you. Whywouldn't I trust you? Everything looks good. Yeah, everybody's good. Okay.Submit it. A year later, we all get a letter from the Alberta SecuritiesCommission. You omitted, in one paragraph, one...

paragraph, one vital information that needed to bedisclosed, and that was, had any board of directors ever filed for personalbankruptcy in the last 10 years? We said no, and the answer was yes. And thedirectors had disclosed that, but it wasn't in the document. And people go, butthat's not a big deal. It sure was. It cost me $3,500 fines. Every one of thedirectors had to pay a fine plus legal fees.

Mudassir (45:15.864)

Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (45:26.242)

But here's the kicker. Are you all ready for this? The onlyperson that didn't have to pay was the lawyer.

Mudassir (45:35.151)

Okay, I agree. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense,yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (45:39.122)

Right? And why? Because they had a nice legal disclaimer onall their emails. Ultimately, it's your responsibility. And from that day on, Iwent on a mission to create a platform where you as a company have all yourdata. Yes, you bring in your lawyer. You trust them. I trust you. Butultimately, I have to know. I have to have all the information. If I have tomake decisions, I have to put my name on it, I want access to it. And that's...

That's what you need to do as an entrepreneur. Every smartperson, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, they all had trusted people, but they readeverything. They were detailed individual. They didn't get there because theyjust trusted everyone. Are you kidding? Yes, they got along the way thingshappen. But I think today, too many entrepreneurs are looking for shortcuts. AItechnology, Oscar, I can do all this fast. Of course you can. Of course I'm afool not to think otherwise.

But AI isn't going to come up with the next innovation. Youare. And you're going to need to build it.

Mudassir (46:42.014)

Agreed. How did you end up building CoreConnect?

Oscar A Jofre (46:48.802)

So, Corconex came from all the years that accumulated to,after Babel Fish, I started building a product for companies to manage theircorporate records, the boardroom, and Brown Collapse. The timing was justbeautiful. But again, human beings, it's like, you need to be reminded over andover again why you need to have tools like this. But along the way, I met DavidWeald and I took everything I knew then.

and applied it to where this was going. So here I had toapply everything as an entrepreneur and go 10, 15 years ahead. So what? 10years, 15 years ahead. So here, try to imagine this for a moment. So 2012, andyou're going to people and saying, I'm gonna build a startup that's gonnamanage a million privately held shareholders. People were laughing at you. Theygo, right? They're like.

Mudassir (47:42.254)

Wow, okay, yeah, yep, exactly. You're kidding? Yeah, yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (47:46.454)

You're crazy Oscar. No, no, no. So for until 2016, we keptit quiet, but we were building. We were anticipating what people couldn'tbelieve. And today, yes, we have a company with 1.2 million privately heldshareholders in 86 countries around the world and more are coming. Some are50,000, 70,000, 30,000, 10,000. These are numbers. People are like, what areyou talking? Yes.

These are real people participating in private healthcompanies. So now you got to build an environment to house all of this. Andthat was the, the emergence of core connects. We, we needed to see the future.So what we knew coming from the public markets is that the privates were notjust 10 times bigger or like a hundred times bigger. So that was one numbertwo, it was fragmented. There was no standard of anything.

Number three, everybody that came from the publics came tothe private, so they were educated. It was the same, lawyers, auditors, all thesame, but the only thing they were all missing was connectivity. Everybody wasbuilding ad hoc systems somehow for their own little business, like buildinglittle corner grocery stores, but nothing for massive distribution. So we cameat the market in two different ways. First, we came in with the application,the top layer, because that didn't exist.

So what that meant was here is a cap table software programonline for free that you can manage unlimited shareholders from any country inthe world, multi-currency and a portfolio for them to log in to view theirinvestment with your company free with a mobile app which we have today. Andthat became the entrance into wow, this is unbelievable. I can manageeverything. It's not that difficult. No, it's not.

technology feasible. So that was stage one. Stage two camein 2017-2018. We introduced it the first permission blockchain technology. Weintroduced it to the SEC, got qualified in 2022 to be able to manage and housethis information in order that so we have immutability, ownership, transparencyfor the private markets. So why did we need that? Because there would be othercore connections building.

Oscar A Jofre (50:13.878)

Which is good, we need that. Why? Because there's 32 millionprivately held companies in the United States, 450 million worldwide. You'dhave to be a real dumb entrepreneur to think that you own it all. So you haveto, but what, everybody was building that layer, somebody needed to build thelayer underneath to glue it. And that was the big key for us, Corechain.Corechain was gluing, bringing the, you know, gluing the broken dealerstogether.

the banks, the transfer agents, the companies underneath.And why? To have the efficiencies of the public markets. So what does thatmean? The efficiency of the public market.

Mudassir (50:52.834)

Yeah, can you, sorry to interrupt again. Can you just breakit down in name and style, what exactly is that coreconx does? Somebody who'san angel investor or whatever, just pick one user persona and then just explainit for us.

Oscar A Jofre (50:56.287)

No, it's okay.

Oscar A Jofre (51:11.906)

Yeah, so for a company who's looking to raise capital, wehave an entire platform for you to manage your company, your corporate records,your book of records, your cap table, to be able to report to your shareholders,to be able to give your shareholders the ability to log in, to view theirportfolio, to be able to digitize all those shares fully compliant with theSEC, and to be able to trade them on secondary market trading.

That's what we do. All of this is provided private label tocompanies and we support both the companies, the broker dealers. So we'reempowering all the participants that need to work together, that aretraditionally being fragmented and we bring them together. How do we do that?We recognize that the biggest flaw in private markets is not money, is the factthat we need to keep rehashing the data over and over and over again.

Mudassir (51:43.714)

Got it.

Oscar A Jofre (52:11.618)

because we don't trust each other. I like you, but you don'ttrust me and I don't trust you. And I tell you, this is a great company, youshould invest in it. And you go, I will, but my team needs to look at it. Canyou send me the documents so we can review it ourselves? And so you send thechecklist to the company, do the listing and the company go, oh my God, it'sthe same thing the other one did. Why do I need to do it again? So this is theproblem private companies have over and again and again and again.

they open a bank account, they get insurance, everybody'sasking. So with CoreConnect's infrastructure, they don't need to because everyparticipant that is inside here already knows that once the data was put in, itwas verified by a regulated participant, meaning a lawyer, an auditor, atransfer agent, or a fin-ro, a broker dealer. So therefore, the nextparticipant getting it knows that it was verified, and two, once it was put onthe chain, it's immutable. So what they were really, where that trust was,

I don't know what you did with it after you got it, Oscar. Imean, I don't know if your team modified that Excel spreadsheet, right? I mean,it makes sense. If you're a risk officer on the other side, you don't know. Idon't know you, I don't know you, but now you're on this infrastructure. I doknow you, I know what infrastructure you're using. I trust it. And that's howthe public markets work. I'm gonna give you an example of this. You're inDubai, I'm over here. I can give you a stock symbol of any company, you know?

I can give you, you know, Overstock, OSTX, and you can pullit up under whatever app you want, whatever app, browser, whatever it is you'reusing, I'll use mine. Here's what's going to happen. We're both going to getthe same identical information. Identical. We're going to see the news release,the company information, the symbol, the pricing history, everything. Peoplego, Oscar, come on. That's easy. That's the internet. No, it is not.

It is not the internet that made that happen. The internetis simply a delivery vehicle for that information. That information was createdby a Canadian company 55 years ago. It's an infrastructure that every publiclytraded company currently sits on. The broker dealers, the transfer agents, thenews wire, everything sits on top. It is not a miracle that the news getdisseminated. Ah, see now and.

Mudassir (54:22.714)

Wow. Yeah. I honestly believe that this is like internet,and maybe you kind of create a profile or something like that. And that's whyit syncs. It's a synchronized information. You know, whatever app you open up,it's the same database that everybody is accessing. That's why you get to seethat. But it's a lot more complex than that. Just tell us a little bit moreabout that. Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (54:45.102)

It is. Yeah. And it's exciting because so a company inCanada developed it, Broadritch acquired it. So everything sits on top of it.Everything, every publicly traded. And by the way, the number of publiclytraded companies around the world never exceed 100,000. We'll one day have todiscover that but it never exceeds 100,000. The number of publicly tradedcompanies in Canada, the United States have never gone. So 500 go up, 500 godown. The numbers never go beyond a certain number.

Mudassir (55:06.562)

Bye.

Oscar A Jofre (55:14.91)

It is what it is. And so, but what is interesting is that,you know, how does a public company make it in Yahoo, Oscar? And how come mycompany is bigger? I got revenue. I go, isn't that interesting? They make itthere and you don't, right? We pay the same news wire provider, Berkshire News,and you know, they charge us $2,500 and boom, and they don't get there. Why isthat? Because everything in this little club.

Mudassir (55:16.927)

Okay.

Oscar A Jofre (55:44.254)

is regulated. And what you didn't realize is that theinfrastructure is an infrastructure of trust, meaning that data from the minuteit came in here, everybody can rely on it. So what does that mean? That lastpiece, so the general public can see it all over the world. So it's not amiracle that when a public company makes a news release, it gets listedeverywhere. It's not. That's a regulated transaction. How? Every news wire, andthere's only six of them around the world, have a choke point.

and that choke point is called Associated Press. And theAssociated Press has three different categories for newses, publicly tradedcompany, PR, and crap. First one, publicly traded. So how can they do it?Because they know that the newswire provider put in the stock symbol of thecompany. Yep, yep, he is the investor relations, yep, you can trust it. Seewhat the word I said? You can trust it.

See, the news wires can be held accountable by theregulators by disseminating false news, because you can break the market,right? So the second category, PR firm. So we hire a PR firm for 20 grand amonth, and they'll use their relationships. So yes, we'll get put on Yahoo Newsthere. So when people search it, it's there. The third one is all of us. Thatmeans we pay a news wire, and what happens? The news, look, we made it toYahoo. No, we didn't. We're in Yahoo. Yes, we are.

But if you go to Yahoo and you search for me, you won't findme. What do you think? That's the news why. So Corechain is changing all that.And it's called the chain of trust. And today with blockchain technology,because again, the market, think about it. I say, it's bigger. It's 32 millionprobably held companies. Like how do I know that company in Dubai? I don't needto know that company in Dubai. I just need to know that broker dealer

that's registered with the Dubai Securities Commission inthat jurisdiction, did their job which was KYC on you, they did it on thecompany, and when they gathered that information which was a third partyprovider like Alexis Nexus or Trulia, whoever it is, boom, it validated, it'son the chain, and boom, the chain of trust began. I don't need to worry anyfurther. I may do smaller due diligence, but every single time data points arecoming in, it's being collected under that.

Oscar A Jofre (58:08.034)

that file and that chain of trust builds and that chain oftrust builds because now we know you're real as a real entity Okay, it's a realimportant thing. Why because how do people know? What to put out there rightand the news wires they don't want to go to jail They don't want to be fine.Nobody wants broker dealers don't want to get into trouble So there are safetynets put in place. So in the United States it is

It's a, the data, all the data is out there. The problem isit's fragmented in so many different locations that the average consumer can'tget it. Well, what does Corechain do? The Corechain brings it all together andprovides it in such a way that when you look at it and you see the Core IDverified, you go, okay, this company's trusted, why, but we're not telling youit's trusted, we're showing you why. Here is the link to the SEC document.Here's the SICK code. Here's the FINRA broker dealer. Here's the broker dealerCRD number, which is their number when they become one.

Here's their SEC number. Here's the SEC transfer agent. Sogiving all the things an investor needs or the company needs to be validated.And as you do that, you're validating the process. And then when youdisseminate it, you're making it easier for the world to see it. And so we arebringing the infrastructure of public companies to private. The only differencehere is because of the numbers, there are more brands.

but we sit underneath. So you don't see us, you see theirbrands, you'll see them under their brands like Energy Shares, ArtX or Rares,and these are places that attract individuals to come in and invest, butunderneath it are being powered and connected through all of this to thebenefit of the investor, to make their lives easier, to the benefit of everyonein the market. That's what we do.

Mudassir (59:51.863)

Yeah.

Mudassir (59:57.046)

Wow, how long does it take, how long it took to actuallybuild this behemoth of a software or whatever the program it is?

Oscar A Jofre (01:00:08.871)

Ah, so.

four or five years of design before coding, and we're stillcoding to this day. You're 60.

Mudassir (01:00:19.511)

How big of a team you guys have?

60. My goodness. Very curious. Yeah, very curious to know,what's the business model you guys have? Like, so you mentioned that they canlog into free, manage the cap table for free, have a look at their investmentsfor free. OK. How do you guys make money? I know it has to be a B2B play, butwhat's the business model?

Oscar A Jofre (01:00:24.038)

60. And what, sorry, go on.

Oscar A Jofre (01:00:44.706)

So not. It is. So we're a SAS model and so 90% or actually95%. So I took all the features. Ninety five percent of all the featuresoffered in Corkin X is free. The remaining five percent are paid based on whatadditional things you want to raise capital. We provide issuance technology andsome there. You're a broker dealer. You need a compliance. So that's where the remainingcomes in.

comes in from that environment. The end user themselves, theeveryday person who is an investor will never pay in our system. We want themto be able to freely do what they do well in the most efficient way possible.

Mudassir (01:01:26.955)

Yep.

Mudassir (01:01:30.55)

Okay, so there's a very strong purpose behind the company aswell. Yeah. Okay. So thinking of AI and all the things that's happening aroundAI, what do you think? How AI is going to change this private market?Especially investment and like all that is happening because I know youmentioned blockchain. I know you mentioned like, you know, how that like thatthing has already changed. It's information, that reliability, trust.

Oscar A Jofre (01:01:34.638)

100%.

Mudassir (01:01:59.106)

which is the most important factor. How do you think AI isgoing to change this entire landscape of the industry?

Oscar A Jofre (01:02:06.17)

It's already doing it. I mean, it's already for usinternally. So we have a policy that our developers have to use AI. And as atool, it's a tool to assist them. I mean, so we, you know, we own a datacompany. We, we have our own AI technology as well. So I'll talk a little bitabout that. I mean, we're a multifaceted organization, but we understand usingtechnology to make things faster. You still need the ingenuity and theengineering.

Mudassir (01:02:18.731)

Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:02:35.234)

that they have the capabilities, this is never going toreplace that. There are certain rules that are going to be diminished by this.I mean, there's no doubt about it. And I do caution people thinking, oh, I gotto get AI, put it out there, chat GPT, and it'll answer all the questions. No,it won't, because it doesn't know the nuances. And right now, it's June 13,2023, 2.25 PM Eastern Standard Time. You need to know what's going on real livewith the regulations. The regulations are living.

Oscar A Jofre (01:03:07.162)

and they change. They change by heartbeat. Somebody got tofind that will have an impact in the way you write. So it's not like somethingthat sits still, you know, stop, go, slow down. It's not like that. So theopportunities are great. Our job in our company with our

Oscar A Jofre (01:03:34.25)

Not from investing, no. Educating. Education is the key.Investing is the outcome. And the only way you can get people to invest is toteach them or get them to understand how it all works. If people do not knowhow it works, why would they put money into it? That's one, because fear. Wealready robbed them of their money already with blockchain. We haven't talkedabout it, but you said we were talking about crypto, but let me just give yousomething.

Mudassir (01:04:00.119)

Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:04:03.83)

that lately I've been thinking a lot about. I was at anevent in New York, March last year. It was a crypto event. Tim Draper wasspeaking at it. And someone in the audience was asking him, what do you thinkabout all these dips? And at that time crypto was crashing like crazy, at thatparticular week or month or, I don't participate. So,

And his response was, this was the price of innovation. And,you know, at first time, I, okay, good. So I'm glad you asked that because I'mgoing, what do you mean the price of innovation? I don't see any of that in anyof the advertising these guys are blowing. I don't see innovation. I just seeit's gonna go from five cents to 10 cents to 15, 20 cents. You're all talkingin US dollars. So we're...

Mudassir (01:04:39.245)

What?

Mudassir (01:04:43.817)

Yeah, what?

Oscar A Jofre (01:05:02.058)

Where is that innovation? And I thought for a moment there,and that's why the regulator said, is enough is enough. You've been sellingthis as innovation, the price of innovation. The problem is you didn't tell theaudience that what you were really doing, you were innovating, but you needtheir money to play with, to innovate. And by the way, you're gonna lose it allfor various reasons. And even if you put it in blind print like that, theystill wouldn't read it because you sold it.

not as innovation. You sold it as something else. So I'vebeen a skeptic about that for a long time. I think crypto has a space. There'snothing wrong with it. But because of that, it's left people's wallets empty. Alot of people. And those people are affected. And this time, you can't blameWall Street. See, Wall Street was 2008. Blockchain was done by us. We did it topeople. Now me personally,

but we did it to people and that is on us. So we need toearn back their trust. You know, our core chain, our slogan is very simple.One, we're here to protect investors and we're trying to make, we're bringingtransparency to the private markets. You using our technology, you're not gonnago to jail. And if you don't go to jail, that means your investors are safe,their investment is safe. And nobody has ever said those words in

the blockchain crypto space. Nobody. That's us. That's whatwe are. Why? Because we took our time. We went to the SEC. We got it qualified.It took almost three years. You go out and do that and get it done and then Ican go to any company and say, use our technology and not a problem. Because Ialready went through it, right? And it's not going to cost you millions ofdollars to get it complete. So

Coming back to where we were talking about trust, it's allrelated to that. We gotta rebuild it. And this time, we gotta rebuild it withwords. They don't trust technology today. And AI is making it even scarier. Solook at that. You stole from them, 2008, that was Wall Street stole from them.2015, 2016, everyday entrepreneurs stole from them. AI, technology, now they'relosing their jobs. Do you see what we're?

Oscar A Jofre (01:07:25.218)

We're creating, and that's the perception. But the realityis AI is something not to be feared, but to be understood, that's one. Numbertwo, always try to understand why any big corporation would want to stop theinnovation of others. Like, chat GPT, I don't trust that CEO. If, you know, thefact that he's now saying we need protection, it's sort of like saying, what ifyou and I had an idea for an LNM that's very...

No, we can't anymore because they already did it and they'rethe only ones. So it's sort of like this is before your time, but I remember inthe early 90s, if you went to someone and said, you know what, one day there'sgoing to be something better than Microsoft. Get out of here. You don't knownothing. Microsoft is going to rule the world forever. Right? And it's sort oflike saying the same thing about Google today or Apple. We need to stopthinking this way.

That's not innovation. Innovation means that it's gonnahappen and it's gonna, you know, these companies will survive, but we needthat. And so when they're creating this fear-mongering component, do we need tounderstand AI? We do, but it's out, it's the cat's out. You cannot undo whatyou already did and you can't stop other companies from, but people need to useit properly, number one. Number two,

For those who fear it that they're gonna lose their job, youshouldn't. The only reason you would be fearing it if you didn't do your jobthe way it was intended. And that, I'm sorry, but you're gonna lose your job.And in our own company, we had to do that. We had a couple of individuals thatwould just call it in the days, we're a distributed team. I have no way ofknowing what you're doing nine to five, and I'm not keeping hours. But when thetechnology comes and it can produce...

and you're not, you're scared of it, that's because you'renot doing it. If you're doing it, you would see the value, hey, I can do thismuch faster. And guess what? I can do this other thing over here. That's whatthis is going to do. It'll evade you from doing other things. It does, thething, it still needs instructions. I don't think people understand that. Andmaybe you do, but I don't think other people do.

Mudassir (01:09:29.356)

Yeah.

Mudassir (01:09:47.778)

The problem is, so I'll go back to the crypto thing becauseI was like right at the time, you can say that when my business understandingwas developing, that's when the crypto thing was happening. So I would saythat. So this is what happened. I was around the time when there was this wholething about Bitcoin was happening, and I am talking about when Bitcoin was at$250.

That was like way back, so I'm just talking about that.Ethereum was $1, $2, that's it. I still remember the day Ethereum hit $9 andpeople were like, that's like, that's the end of the world or something, okay?And then we get to see like, you know, all the heights it's touched. On crypto,so here's what I think. A lot of people, and by a lot I mean 90%, if not 95%,never understood what crypto was.

never understood what blockchain was. And going to yourprevious point, but you mentioned that, you know, paying a lawyer 1500 bucks iseasier so he can get you incorporated. But you have never read those bylaws.Like you don't know what's written in there. You don't understand anything.Exactly the same thing happened. So I know a lot of people, a lot of people whobought Bitcoin at $500. And then they sold at $20,000. And they were like,

We're not going to sell it until it hits 100k. It never did.So drop down to 20k, and they panicked, and they sold it. So I know a lot ofpeople. They still made a lot of money, but they have righted the way. Comingback to the point, most people never understood what crypto was. They don'tknow what crypto was. So all the things that a lot of people mention, oh, it'sa blockchain. It's a technology. It's going to be a mode of payments. OK, cool.So Bitcoin is one of those things.

Ethereum is okay somewhat of that. And then there comes aplethora of all these weirdly naming coins. Like some of them is just likefunny. People have invested so much money in them like people don't even knowwhat they do. And then there's comes a thing, oh that's a meme coin. Nobodycare like what the heck is this meme coin? Like why am I investing whatever myheart and money is in that meme coin? No, you cannot say that you know, to alot of people I think people are gonna hate that.

Mudassir (01:12:11.282)

hate me for saying that, you cannot say that the overworthis so innocent. You were looking for a shortcut. So you were looking for alottery actually. So every single day, and I'll tell you a story after that,every single day is just like, I'll invest $10, I'm going to turn it into athousand, I'm going to reinvest that thousand, I'm going to turn it into 100k, reinvestthat 100k, I'll be a millionaire in a week.

Oscar A Jofre (01:12:35.791)

Mm-hmm.

Mudassir (01:12:36.29)

That was the plan, that was the roadmap, right? That was theproduct roadmap that everybody had in mind. And that's what people did. Weknow, what's the name of the guy? The Luna guy, you know? Do Kwan or likewhatever. Yeah, he did the same thing. Did anybody ever, you know, sat down andsaid, okay, let me look at Luna, like what the heck are they actually doing?No, nobody did that. And then funny is that, there's this,

Oscar A Jofre (01:12:42.345)

Oh.

Oscar A Jofre (01:12:49.028)

Oh, yeah.

Mudassir (01:13:04.214)

I don't know the name of the guy, he's an influencer, he wastalking about, so when this Shiba, I and you, you know, whatever that thing is,when this one came down, and he was like, so we were sitting as cryptoinfluencers, so we were sitting in a party or whatever, and then it was goingup and up, that thing was up 5,000% and they were like, let's dump it, and hewas like, I was part of that thing when they dumped it, so we dumped it.

And people were like, you know, opening longs, they're likewhatnot and stuff like that. And there are some stupid people who had like 100xleverage of this, they wiped out, like totally wiped them out. So a lot ofpeople, you know, lost a lot of money, hard earned money, not because, becauseof two things. One, the greed was like way too high. They were thinking of, youknow, turning something into a huge amount of money, and it never works. Foranybody who's listening.

you know, getting rich quicker, this thing, like thisdoesn't exist. It has to be certain aspect of that. And then the second one isnobody is willing to read or learn like whatever. So that's what I think. Andthat's exactly the same thing people are doing with AI. People are like notgetting into the depth, looking into like what exactly it can do, what it cannotdo. It's just like, okay, let's just, you know, it's the hype. How can we?

make a few extra bucks around that. That's what I thinkaround AI.

Oscar A Jofre (01:14:36.574)

Yeah, it's, you know, it I went through the personally withmy son, my 20 year old son. I remember I was visiting him and him and hisbuddies that were all buying these coins and go, Dad, look at it. This one wentup 400 percent the other day and I go, Oscar, did you? His name is Oscar. OK, Iknow all of you are laughing. Yes, I named my son Oscar, but.

I said, look, what is the company doing? He goes, but dad,look, it's going up. You haven't answered my question yet. You gotta go. And mywife came to me and she goes, you gotta let him. I said, I know, but it's just,okay. He was working hard. He was going to school part-time and his buddieswere showing him. So a buddy that already made the money came and told him, youget the idea. This is like multi-level marketing. Gotta get in, get the otherguy in. And so he got in.

because I'm going to go in at that, I can make some money. Isaid, okay, all right. And I apologized to him for the way I reacted. And then,you know, shortly thereafter, he lost everything. And we talked about itafterwards and it goes, I understand, it goes now, I want to know everythingabout the company that I'm investing in. I like Apple.

They're expensive, but I'll buy one share at a time and justkeep it. And I go, that's look, it's. I go in many ways. I'm glad you wentthrough that. Um, and I'm glad you only lost a couple thousand, but imaginepeople who lost 20,000, 200,000, $2 million. Um, they weren't able to bounceback like you were and you bounce really quickly. And the most important thingis you thought that you were going to get rich really quickly and others toldyou they were. And what you didn't realize is that.

They needed you to know that because they're being told thatthe way to get the price up is to get other people to come in and buy more.Because that's how it works. You know, if you commit a dollar, you need someoneto come in and to buy it at five. And the only way you can get someone at fiveis to tell them that you're making money to come in at five so you can sell itat five. And now it's their problem and you come up with money. Right. Sothat's how it works. It's so it really is unfortunate. It's but it's comingdown. Look.

Oscar A Jofre (01:16:59.222)

It's right in front of us. Many times I've been called thatlittle canary and canary in the mines. I've been telling everybody, mycolleague in Dubai, Edwin Lee, we've been together, he's been with us for thelast 10 years and goes, but Oscar, but Oscar, it was always about Oscar, butlook at Oscar, look at the momentum. And I would always say, Edwin, mark mywords, this is gonna happen like this, like this, like this, cause ultimatelythis is-

And it was about three years ago when it all started andgoes, I get it. I get it now. I, and I understand why I was, because whenyou're in a wave, you don't, you don't move and I'm going to give you anexample of this, Benny Hinn. Have you ever heard of Benny Hinn? Benny Hinn is areligious evangelist and he's just one of many. But what makes Benny Hinn sointeresting?

is that he brings in a congregation of people, tens ofthousands into his church. And during the session, he can cure people of thingsand people in the audience believe it. And at that moment, at that very moment,whether the human being even thought for a moment that no, yes, it didn'tmatter, at that moment it happened to them. So first it starts with themovement of their arms pushing, why? Because the blood.

He knew every dynamic of the emotion, the lighting, themusic, and just at that moment, he would push his hands into someone's head andboom. And just like that, it was like a domino effect. The person right beside,whether they realized it or not, they became part of that movement. Whetherthey believed it or not, they did. And they felt like it was happening. Theycouldn't question it.

They were just their body became part of that and that iswhat's happening with AI and blockchain and everything else So how do you breakout of that? How you just got to keep waking yourself up wake yourself up wakeyourself up You know it you got to do that the information is out there tolearn I'll share another story with you I got lots of stories my life is verycolorful because I try to get out So I went camping with my wife and my twoyounger ones. I got a three-year-old and an eight-year-old So I'm anadventurous individual

Oscar A Jofre (01:19:22.538)

And we were camping at a lake about two or three hours awayfrom the city. And, uh, just a month ago. And, um, so we arrived at nighttimeand we set up our tent and you know, where this was so such an experience formy kids. I'm teaching my son how to use an ax, right. Properly. Cause you know,and how to build a fire. And the next morning, some of the neighbors come tous. So.

They're all with their $250,000 trailers, big trailers andall that. And here we are in the little thingy little tent and they're going,wow, you guys made it. I go, yeah, we had fun. We were all curious if you guyswere going to make it. Go. OK. Really nice people just to the earth. Love them.They were so friendly. They they brought their dog over. They it was just nice.And the more I sat down with them, you know, most of them were retirees, firemen.

people working at nuclear plants and all that. And it was,but you know, late at night, we put the kids to bed and I'm having aconversation with them and so then they start having a little bit of wine andthen the conversation takes a little bit of a turn and you know, one of theladies asked, so when do you think the purge is gonna happen?

Oscar A Jofre (01:20:43.799)

I'm okay. I'm okay. Twilight Zone here. I go, okay. I go,what do you mean? What do you mean? She goes, well, you know, you're intechnology, so you must know what's going to happen. What's going to happen?Well, the purge. I mean, with all of this, people are going to, they're goingto uprise and the revolution is going to begin. And whoa.

Mudassir (01:20:47.342)

Hahaha!

Oscar A Jofre (01:21:10.634)

I mean, these are educated people. These are not nothing.These are educated people. And I'm going, what's going on here? And so the morewe spoke, I started learning where all of this was being grounded from. It wasthe haves and the have-nots. Again, this is that whole issue, right? That'swhat happens when the have-nots don't get to participate. They start creatingthese things. And then the second part was AI is going to take over everything.But how? How can AI take over everything?

Mudassir (01:21:12.694)

Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:21:40.278)

I'm just curious, how do you think it can do that? Well,it's already taken over jobs and people are losing their jobs. Educated people,no, educated people are not losing their jobs. Educated people, jobs areshifted. So this is no different than the industrial revolution. We're goingthrough another revolution. This is another one, right? But their way they werelooking at it, there's gonna be an uprise. And I said, okay, well, I mean, I'vedone nothing for planning, but what do you mean by planning?

Mudassir (01:21:58.079)

Exactly the same.

Oscar A Jofre (01:22:10.302)

And that's when the shocker came out. So one of thehusbands, who's a farmer, they have 65 acres of land, he goes, so how many gunsdo you own? I have young children. He goes, yeah, how many? None. I mean, Ihave young children. I don't own any. I live in Canada. I came to Canadabecause of that problem. Why on earth would I ever want to own guns, right? I'mthinking, so I said, no, sir, I don't own any and, you know.

I do have a firearms license. I went and all that, but no.And it goes, yeah, cause we have a stockpile of bullets. What? Yeah. We haveover 10,000 bullets stockpiled already. And they were competing how manybullets each of the two husbands were creating ready for the purge. And I'm atthat moment, it became more real to me.

Mudassir (01:23:05.73)

What the hell?

Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:23:10.443)

And, you know, my wife looks at me and she goes, whathappened? I go, I don't know. I mean, this is, I mean, these are not poorpeople. These are not non-educated people. These are people every day that youand I see down the street driving a $250,000 Mercedes. You know, we can't evenafford that. We're sitting in a tent and they're thinking of putting thestockpile bullets in

waiting for the purge because they see AI taking over. Sothose are the different extremes. One can laugh at it and I was really beingvery sensitive to them, I was being respectful because it's obviously, theyinvited us, we're neighbors there, but I was respectful because I didn't wannatreat them as ignorant, I wanted to give them a perspective of what AI does andwhat it can do.

And yes, it's going to disrupt certain people, but that's noreason for people not to rebel that way. Yes, there will be a few people thatwill go out there, oh, I lost my job because of it. Well, how many of you havenot ever wanted a government employee fired because they're just sitting therewhile we're all standing in line to get our bloody passport? Right? How many ofus have looked at Dubai? I mean, Dubai is one of the most efficient airports inthe world.

Mudassir (01:24:28.267)

Yep.

Oscar A Jofre (01:24:34.506)

And the only reason they did that is because Emiratis don'twant to work. Right. And you and I can't be trusted. Right. You know this,right. And there's nothing wrong with that, but imagine the motivation. Theydon't want to work. So you got to, and the only people that can do this areEmiratis. So, um, so all of us, we, we hate going to the drivers to get ourdrivers on because my God, you got to, you got to waste a whole day to go getthat. So you go, that's inefficient. So why not put something in there to makeit efficient? Isn't.

Mudassir (01:24:38.08)

Exactly.

100% Yeah, yeah

Oscar A Jofre (01:25:04.298)

I mean, we complain about that. Oh my God, this takes solong. So now that you've been asking for it, the efficiencies are there. Nowyou think because it's gonna hurt certain individuals. So it's a, we're at acrossroads right now. We really are. We're at crossroads because now the mostvaluable person is going to be the skilled labor. You know this already. Theshortage in the world today.

is people who can grab a hammer and a nail, boom, right? Andwe need that because things can't be built. Yes, machinery, robots can do alot, but we still need human beings for that. And we need them to fix them. Imean, so look at that. You need to fix them. You need to transport them. Youneed to, all of that, they don't do that by themselves. It's not there. And thenthere's the one that's educated. So where's that happening? People who arewriters and...

Mudassir (01:25:33.586)

Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah. Scale level, yep. Yep.

Oscar A Jofre (01:26:02.566)

and editors and saying, well, AI, OK, so it does it betterthan you, but it does have a weakness. It doesn't write like you do. Right. Soit.

Mudassir (01:26:13.791)

One small thing is, so we're also spinning up a digitalmarketing company, content based company or something like that, and one of thewriters that I have on the team, he went like, do you know if you were tomarket this thing, we can write 10,000 words blog like that in a day. I waslike, okay, and then what? And there's a whole bunch of nuances in that.

Google's going to recognize that, and then it's going tochange the algorithm. The SEO is going to mess it up. Like, you know all ofthat. And I was like, why would I want to do that? Oh, because you know, if youput like 10,000 words today, you put like, I don't know, 300 K words, like in,in a month, you really is going to be through the roof or something like that.I was like, but that's not me. Every single time we're working with a client,that's not them. They don't have a voice. AI does not have a voice.

you can give them a prompt, they can give you the data, theycan write for you, but does not have any, you know, genuineness or somethinglike that. They does not have a voice. And that's a problem, and they don'thave a voice, they don't have a voice. It's just like, you know, somebody, likeyou don't know, Oscar wrote, I don't know, 50% of the email, I wrote 50% of theemail, and somebody else compiled that email and sent it to somebody else. Soit's just like, whoa, who said that? What exactly is the meaning?

So that's a problem. And a lot of people, a lot of people Ithink, especially in this particular domain, creativity in many ways, likewriters, designers, people that are creative. Now they are thinking like, okay,their jobs are in danger. But the ones, as you mentioned, the educated ones, theyalready know, okay, so these things are like superhuman abilities for us.

if we know how to use them properly. If we know how to dothis thing, so it's gonna just like turn the whole thing into a superhumanpossibility, right? Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:28:16.198)

I'll give you one example. I needed to create a businessplan for one of our businesses. Normally I'd sit on a weekend and I'm not gonnalie to anybody. I went to chat GPT. I gave it all the parameters and it gaveme, you know, my 20 page business plan. Not in all the detail that I needed,but it gave me the framework to go in. Did you see what I mean? I think this isthe missing piece. It doesn't have all the answers.

Mudassir (01:28:21.965)

Okay.

Oscar A Jofre (01:28:42.566)

And the answers are limited up until 2021. So that's anotherthing people need to factor that in. So 2021, it's already two years now, andthey can't go back out there again because the cost, I mean, this is the thing,the number of queries and the cost per query, man, it's, we're in the hundredsof millions of dollars. So, but you're right. In our team in particular, Dr.Krangademela, whose his PhD is in artificial intelligence and Dr. DanielConway, another data expert on our team.

Mudassir (01:28:42.655)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:29:12.218)

and Bilal Hussain, who's from Pakistan originally. Ourbelief is really simple, is that this is a tool that you need to know how tospeak to it for it to make your life faster. So give you some ideas. So, Karanand I sometimes will sit at night and work on some data problems. And usuallyhe'll come up with data problems. It'll take him about four to five hours to dothe programming on this specialized tool.

He'll give the same instructions to chat GPT in seven oreight minutes to give him all the information. He still needs to tweak it, butit made it less, but he still, people go, but see, it did all the programming.No, you didn't hear it. He did the programming. He already knew you need toknow what it is you're asking for. Saying, build me a website. For what? Itcan't build you a website. Just, you need to give it all the parameters. Youneed to learn the language that it's speaking. There are cheat, cheats, and allthat. So, you're right.

the individuals that know whether you're educated or noteducated, but the educated ones should get it. How this can be announced. Theones that are going to fear it, they're the ones that are going to run from itas fast as they can because they just don't understand how it can be applied.And we're applying it everywhere in our company. We're not running from it.We're not going to use the same, uh, chat GPT for our AI because it, the largelanguage model doesn't, doesn't work in what we're doing.

Mudassir (01:30:39.074)

Yeah, not applicable, yeah. Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:30:40.122)

We're very not applicable. And again, people go, but Oscar,I see these business apps with AI. I'd be very careful with that. How can itgive you investment advice when the data died in 2021? I mean, seriously, Imean, investing technology.

Mudassir (01:30:56.034)

But the chat, yeah, but now they allow you to browse theinternet. It's not efficient, it's not accurate by any means. It's still inbeta, but they do allow that. So maybe in future, it can just go over theinternet and yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:31:10.29)

It could, but that's a lot of data that it needs todisseminate in order to. So I think that we're going to see, we're going to seevery specific generative AI for medical, you know, general practitioner,radiologist, pathologist, and I'm going to go back 30 years for everybody. RayKurzweil, Dr. Janet Baker, and these names for some people may not know them,but they were the original people building neural networks and voice recognition.

Mudassir (01:31:31.819)

Okay.

Oscar A Jofre (01:31:38.582)

And what was it all based on? Patterns. Well, interestingenough, this is, it makes it both these two. And in order to make it reallyefficient, you couldn't do the large language model because it was just theamount of processing. But the minute you broke it down to radiologists,cardiologists, you broke it down. The vocabulary went from 100,000 to 2000words. And now you can be efficient. The predictability, it was there. Samething here. But we need more, we need more.

Innovation, but you know, another example, I visited beforeyour time as well in the early 90s, there were people in Silicon Valley in theUnited States, my God, technology's gonna destroy all our jobs, I'm notkidding, you can Google this. It's gonna destroy all our jobs. We're gonna loseall these accounting jobs.

Mudassir (01:32:30.81)

So these are the ones, the Ku Klans ones, the one with thepointy hats. They had these ones. Yeah, yeah, I saw those images. Like, theywere like, you know, there was a rally or something like that going on. It wasjust like billboards are up, yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:32:37.32)

I'm sorry.

Oscar A Jofre (01:32:42.174)

Well, this happened when accounting software were coming inthat it was going to get rid of accounts. I don't know about you, but theamount of accountants that they can create because of computers, it'sastronomical. So in fact, this doesn't remove, it just takes away things thatare rudimentary, things that we don't. Yes, it can be smarter, it can do itfaster. So we're threatened. So it's no different than when people go to a barand...

Mudassir (01:32:53.781)

Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:33:11.434)

You know, you look at that individual and you look atyourself and you're threatened by them because they're better looking, betterbuilt, all that. Okay, that's a natural instinct we have as human beings.There's nothing wrong to be threatened, but another part of you needs to alsobe strong enough to understand that being, you know, threatened by somethingdoesn't mean that you need to react in a negative way. You can take that threatand make it into a positive just by...

approaching it differently. And I think that's the approachwe need to take. I may be naive in my way of thinking, but I do see it as weare moving into the most innovative times of our lives. I mean, look, you andI, we're gonna see things that we've never been seen possible. You know, wehave vehicles, the Hyperloop.

Mudassir (01:34:08.659)

Agreed. Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:34:10.402)

We got people going to Mars. I mean, we got Saudi Arabiabuilding the largest wall in the world. I mean, people, unbelievable, right?Unbelievable, but believable because it's happening. That's the most important.Unbelievable from the context of, oh my God, no way. Believable, it's beenbuilt. It's happening. The Hyperloop is already there already in UAE right now.And...

Mudassir (01:34:17.186)

Unbelievable things. Yeah.

Mudassir (01:34:28.382)

Yeah. It's happening. Yep.

Oscar A Jofre (01:34:38.218)

You know, SpaceX is already working on rockets to go to thenext stage. So that means we need to be ready. So what it is, it's our minds.Our minds are the best friend and our evil friend at the same time.

Mudassir (01:34:42.254)

Yep.

Mudassir (01:34:53.174)

Yeah. Okay, so a few very personal questions that I wannaask you just from life standpoint, okay? So with all the things that you havedone in the life, and I'll give you some context of that because I initiallysaid that I'm a big fan of context. So.

I have met, you're probably third or fourth guest that wehave on the team that's from Canada. Like that's in the podcast that's fromCanada, okay. You probably know Ben Joskovich of Highline Beta. So he used torun Incubator and then a friend of Alistair Crowell, you know, they wrote a lotof books together or something. So I was talking to him, he was, you know, aguest on the podcast and then he mentioned so many things along exactly thesame line that you mentioned. Like people are building products, they don'thave a vision.

People are building products that does not solve anything.It's just like, yeah, okay, I have a cool idea. I'm just gonna build it. I'mjust gonna build a website. I'm just gonna sell it. People do not have a visionfor that or something. Almost did out toward all the things that you said. Sopart of me actually thinks that maybe, no offense to anybody, but maybe theentrepreneurs in Canada are a little bit more visionary compared to people inthe US, but that's just, I'm kidding. So the question that I wanna ask you is,

with all the things that you have done in the life. And youknow, all the, throughout these 90 minutes, all the things that you talked,looks like you're a very purpose-driven individual. My question is, are you happywith whatever you have done, wherever you are, compared to wherever you wannabe? Are you happy with your life?

Oscar A Jofre (01:36:34.622)

100%. I live with no regrets. I treasure my life. My lifehas been a rollercoaster as an entrepreneur. I'll give it to you in 30 secondssummary. Going from my first startup to success to failure within a few years,losing everything, filing for bankruptcy, to then coming right back up and thenfailing again. What in marriage, losing your family. So you take every momentand you learn and...

Mudassir (01:36:36.4)

percent.

Oscar A Jofre (01:37:05.242)

I've been fortunate. I found an amazing woman that believesin me. My children believe in me. And I've made them part of my life. So now Iknow what I want. I have three beautiful children. I have three sisters. I have10 plus nieces and nephews. I have colleagues. I don't have a lot of goodfriends. I have some good friends.

But I want something to be different than just like money isimportant. Don't get me wrong, I have children, I have to pay for things, rent,everything, cars, all that. It is. There isn't a moment that I'm not remindedthat we need to bring that in. But I'm also reminded that in life, you need todo something that matters. So when I lay down in that bed and we say bye tothis part and you go to the next.

I don't want to be the one and I know I won't be saying,what if, what if I did this? What if I've done that? I don't. What I do now isI make mistakes. I try to correct them. I work on correcting them. I couldalways better myself. Of course, just recently I said, okay, you know, I, I'vebeen at home since 2019 because of COVID. I've let my, my physical sense get.

you know, carry it away, it's time to change. And the mostthing that I tell my children is the mind is everything. You tell it, it takesa while, it's not gonna be easy. But everything I have is a purpose, 100%.Purpose all the way through. I don't do it for the money. If I did, I wouldhave done what a lot of people have done in this sector, take the money, makesome money really fast.

And it's easy. When you're dealing in a trillion dollarmarket, making millions, it's not hard at all. People go, what are you talking?It's really, really simple when you know what you're doing. It's not thatdifficult. When you're trying to build something that will be, and some peoplecan't see it, no matter how many times you keep rubbing it there, do you see itnow? No. Do you see it now? No. But the more you unveil it, they start openingand opening. And even internally, sometimes are.

Mudassir (01:39:08.348)

Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:39:33.418)

my team just go, how do you see you? I don't know. I have noidea. I don't purposely go out of my way to, I love reading, I love learning,and I see where we're moving. And people like me, and I'm sure there arethousands of me, millions of me, that see things like this. The only differenceis, some of them are happy what they're doing, and I applaud you, and keepdoing that as long as you're happy. If you're not, then...

Do something about it. Do make the change in your life thatyou want to. I do get asked a lot if I'm happy with what I do. I've been on myown since 1990 as an entrepreneur. I wouldn't change it. I think I was anentrepreneur from the day I was born. I would never change it for anything inmy life. I don't regret anything. Living.

living without a home, living outside in a park, living in atent, I don't regret any of that. It just reminded me more and more every againthat what I was doing in my own way, I know people are gonna think it's weird,that it's not that I was right, that it was just, I needed to learn that. Itshook me up. Like, what did I do? Like, I didn't blame others. I never blamedanybody. It was just me. What didn't I see? What didn't I do? What didn't Ilisten to?

and you try to make it better and better each time.

Mudassir (01:41:08.47)

Yeah, I used to play professional athletics and used to runin a semi-professional 400 meters. And I had a coach who, yeah, that was afunny story for some of the time. I had a coach once and he told me one thingwhich I still remember, even in this business world, he was like, he had tennisball and then he was like, he just dropped it from five feet or something likethat. Bounced, bounced, the floor came back up.

like maybe four feet or something like that. He grabbed itagain, dropped it again. And then he was like, one time he just had the ball,he just threw it on the ground like so hard, the ball bounced like, I don'tknow, 12 feet or something like that. And he was like, that's the lesson youneed to remember in your life. The harder you hit the floor, the harder yourceiling is gonna be. The higher your ceiling is gonna be. So I think all thethings that you mentioned in the life, those dips, they need to happen. Likeall of those dips, they need to happen in order for you to just reach the newhigh.

So it's exactly the same thing, right? And I think it justtells a lot about experiences and all that. Well, it's been lovely talking toyou. Oscar, thank you so much for all the time. We do have this ritual on thepodcast that we ask all our guests a question for our next guest withoutknowing who the next guest is gonna be. So we have a question for you, and thenI'm gonna ask you a question which is obviously not gonna be part of therecording. So the question that I have for you is,

Oscar A Jofre (01:42:10.623)

Exactly.

Oscar A Jofre (01:42:17.718)

Yeah, likewise.

Mudassir (01:42:37.294)

coming from a very, very intellectual person. And he askedthis question, like, what is your why? And he also said, I could go on andexplain this further, but I won't. I'll leave it to you. So yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:42:51.074)

sure why. Damn, that's deep. In particular, what I waswatching last night. The why, you know, the why, the why of existence. Yeah, mywhy is, yeah, it can, it can, it resonates even further than, than what I'm doingtoday. Today is the why in, in business and high.

how to make it more efficient and why it was like this andall that, but my why is more of a, you know, the overall why do we have theseconflicts that we do and we live in such a small planet in the entire universewhen there are, what do they say, 32 trillion other universities.

Mudassir (01:43:33.026)

Why do we have that many conflicts? Why do you think so?Yeah, yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:43:37.102)

Right. And we fight for lines, imaginary lines. Yeah. Youknow, I don't know why I see it that way. I don't know it because I'm animmigrant. I came from a country that was disruptive. And you know what that'slike. I sympathize with anybody. We I'm a child of that. So for me, it was verydisruptive. You took me from one world and I had to come to another, learn anew language and all that. And I adapted. And here I am. But.

Now that I'm an adult, I'm asking myself, yes, we cametogether for all of this. Is it really all about this? Is that what it is? Itisn't. It's far beyond that. These are just steps we're taking as the evolutionof where we're moving to. Where that is going to evolve us to, I don't knowyet. But what I do know is that fear is growing amongst people everywhere.

And why? Because they are, the why is becoming clear everysingle day. You know, there are people who believe that if you take a spaceshipto space, it's because you're going to go visit the devil. I respect theirchoice, but think about what that means now that it's going beyond the space,it's going to the moon and then Mars. Imagine anything coming back from thatwhere others will see it. Wow.

look at the minerals and the stone, the geology and theopportunities, right? So everybody, 10 people will look at that opportunity 10different ways. Why is that? And that's what makes us so uniquely different.Um, will we all be synchronized to think the same way? The answer is no, weknow that already. That's why we're able to see the world in the different waysthat we do. If the majority of us can see clarity that we need to live togetherand remove.

the hatred, which is really fear. It's not hate, it's fear.That's what it is, just fear of the unknown. When we remove that, then it'sbetter. And I'll tell you why it's fear, not hatred. Because all you need to dois go to a kindergarten class, put children from every single country in theworld.

Oscar A Jofre (01:46:04.81)

and watch them play. Watch them eat, watch them learn, andwatch them love each other, hug each other, and boom. No fear, no hate,nothing. That tells you everything about us that you need to know. It thatmeans we're not born to hate, we're not born to fear. So from that point tothis point is where that development occurs.

and that is all externalized. But it's clear now thatchildren at that age are not affected that way. I see it every day. I mean, mythree-year-old is at a daycare, kindergarten. He goes to school with peoplefrom India, Tibet, China, Korea, Pakistan. I think it's fantastic, and he lovesthem. They hug each other. He knows them by name.

He's got no fear, no hate on anything. The same way when Icame to Canada, none. Do you know what it does to you as you get older? I don'thave those animosities that others do. So that's my why. My question that Iwould ask someone else coming on here is what do they think is the turningpoint

Mudassir (01:47:10.486)

Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:47:31.598)

for AI where we will need to reevaluate.

everything that we have now constructed ourselves in the waywe live as human beings. It's a hard question, it is, but it's my question.

Mudassir (01:47:54.826)

Okay, we have a very, very cool guest and he's from Canadanext. So I can give you that. Yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:47:59.646)

Oh, Canadians are cool, aren't they? Aren't we cool people?We have different perspectives in viewing the world.

Mudassir (01:48:05.934)

Oscar, thank you so much for the time. I appreciate it.Great stories. We should do it some other time as well. Thank you for the time.

Oscar A Jofre (01:48:09.983)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oscar A Jofre (01:48:19.318)

You're welcome. Thank you as well.

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