Creating Impact Through Innovation: Brandon Kashani on Leading Mission-Driven Startup

Founder Shares – Brandon K_mixdown

00:00:01 – Brandon Kashani

So anytime there’s a post on LinkedIn, every time we’re talking on a panel, every time we’re on a podcast, we’re just sharing all the good things we have in the company and all the customers we just signed and the satisfaction rates. And underneath that, it’s just so many sleepless nights and so many hard days and weekends and holidays that we all work. And I think sometimes it’s not visible.

00:00:31 – Trevor Schmidt

Hello and welcome to the Founder Shares Podcast, brought to you by Hutchison, a law firm in Raleigh, North Carolina that helps founders and entrepreneurs in technology and life science companies start up, operate, get funded, and exit. So whether you’re already an entrepreneur or want to be one someday, or are just fascinated by the stories of how a business goes from idea to success or not such a success, this podcast is for you. Today’s guest is Brandon Kashani, a dynamic entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of TRAKID and CheQRboard. Brandon’s journey into entrepreneurship started unexpectedly during his time as a chemical engineering student at NC State where a class project ignited his passion for building innovative solutions to real world problems. On today’s episode, Brandon shares how a simple idea to help parents keep track of their children at amusement parks evolved into a multi product company with applications ranging from interactive scavenger hunts to AI enhanced QR code technology for venues worldwide. He discusses the challenges of pivoting during the pandemic, scaling a startup and building a mission driven company that balances financial growth with impactful education and conservation initiatives.

00:01:39 – Brandon Kashani

I wasn’t confident there was so much that I didn’t know. So what became really important was to surround myself with people who knew what they’re doing, at least in the domains of Gap that I had. And when you reach a point where when you get a certain level of buy in, when you have the former GM of Walt Disney World, the creator of Alexa and Echo giving you advice when you have locally people like Scott Wingo and Bill Sproul, when you get people like that who are giving you advice for investing in the company, then it gives you the confidence that okay, maybe this can work, let’s keep doing it. And then here we are.

00:02:24 – Trevor Schmidt

Brandon also discusses the integral role of networking in relationship building and entrepreneurship. For him, networking isn’t just an occasional activity, it’s an ongoing commitment to creating genuine connections.

00:02:36 – Brandon Kashani

That’s probably the top thing that I’ve been able to accomplish personally. I full time network, try to meet so many new people every week and it’s because you either network for customers or you network for Advisors and mentors or fundraising and investment, but it’s all networking, it’s all relationship building. We have over a dozen angel investors in the company who a, have never invested in another company before. They’re just high net worth wealthy individuals who are successful at what they do but haven’t made angel investments into startups and then B, we heavily connect with them on the core mission of the company or the things that we’re trying to accomplish. And all that comes from genuine relationship building. So everyone I meet, I think the university network was huge at the beginning. I basically started meeting with everyone that was on the advisory board at NC State Entrepreneurship and one became my co founder, several became my investors, the Poole family. So it just started there and then everyone I met, I try to get 1, 2, 3 introductions out of them. And some people you meet and they can’t really help you, you can’t help them. Some people you meet and they change everything for you and it’s exactly who you needed. And eventually when you develop your network, there’s some people you meet that they can’t help you, but you can help them. And it’s part of that full circle of giving back to people. And yeah, that’s something I’m very passionate about.

00:04:13 – Trevor Schmidt

Do you enjoy that aspect of it?

00:04:15 – Brandon Kashani

I love it. I love meeting people, I love building connection. And so many people went out of their way to help me in the early days. I mean there are people I would meet and I would walk away with like 20 introductions, 20 meetings. And this happened more than a few times. I mean there are like four or five names that come to mind right now who did that for me. And now for me to be able to do that for others, it makes me feel really good.

00:04:42 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah, I bet. So if you could have a conversation with yourself as your younger self when you were a kid, what would he think about what you’re doing now?

00:04:51 – Brandon Kashani

He wouldn’t believe it. No. It’s been a long journey. There’s been a lot of ups and downs. There’s been some really tough moments along. Pandemic was the biggest one which changed everything now. It changed it, I guess eventually for the better. The path we’re on now is significantly different than where we started. But yeah, I think maybe being proud of not giving up.

00:05:22 – Trevor Schmidt

What did you want to be when you were a kid?

00:05:25 – Brandon Kashani

I was pretty much brainwashed by my father to be a chemical engineer, which is why I studied chemical engineering.

00:05:31 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:05:32 – Brandon Kashani

Even When I was 10, 11 years old, I would walk around and say, oh, I want to become a chemical engineer. So before that, probably, like, childhood dream, I wanted to build houses.

00:05:44 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:05:45 – Brandon Kashani

I used to watch people in our neighborhood, like, laying bricks on bricks on bricks. I’d be like, I want to do that, but, yeah, that’s cool.

00:05:54 – Trevor Schmidt

So I guess take me to that moment kind of as the pandemic is happening. I mean, because at some point in time, there’s almost just that, well, now what do we do? Or do we close this up or how do we survive? So talk me through kind of that process and how you ended up where you’re at, kind of through that.

00:06:13 – Brandon Kashani

I mean, it was heartbreaking, right? You get the phone call, you have a contract, and all of a sudden they’re like, we’re canceling the contract, even though we technically can’t. But what are we going to do, right? They’re like, we’re shutting down all of our parks and almost being out of money. I think I’m very lucky to have had the people around me who are still around me. My co founder first, Steve. Because we’ve never. It’s now been six years, five years that we’ve been working together, and we’ve never been really down at the same time. This roller coaster of emotions that we’ve experienced, always, one of us is up, one of us is down, and to be able to pull each other up and bounce back is crucial. So in the pandemic, we had a team of people that we loved, and we had some of the best people I’ve worked with on the team, and we just couldn’t let them go. We knew that, okay, even if this product doesn’t work anymore, which ended up not working, we know that the team we have, the people we have around us are the people we want to do the next thing with. So we were just looking for the next thing. I was looking for every opportunity to figure out what the pivot can be. For a brief moment, we looked at Covid contact tracing. Because we were in the wearable space, we’re like, okay, maybe we can track proximity and people who’ve been in contact with each other. Someone tests positive, we can see who they’ve been in contact with the last few days. But very quickly, Apple, Samsung, Fitbit, they all started working on it. And obviously we wouldn’t be able to compete with them. And it was a big unknown of, we thought at the time, we thought, Covid is going to be done in three weeks, four weeks. We couldn’t even comprehend being on lockdown for that long and then still dealing with the effects of it. So, yeah, we were just knocking on every door, looking at every possible angle to see how we can survive and what venues are open, what opportunities do we have.

00:08:23 – Trevor Schmidt

So you mentioned the zoos as being apparent that they could stay open. Is that something that you just found through your research or how did, how did you land on zoos?

00:08:34 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah. So on our roadmap with the lost child product, we knew that there’s a certain number of amusement parks. Right. There’s a cap. And we knew we’re going to have to expand beyond that one day in the future. And on our roadmap we had zoos and outdoor museums, city parks, state fairs, ski resorts. And we sort of started looking into all of those and seeing, okay, which one of these venues are open right now? And we saw that the majority of zoos were open especially in southern states. So started traveling there and meeting with them and we would meet their security teams, they’d say, yeah, we lose a lot of kids. We’d meet their operations team, they’d say, we don’t lose any kids. And then it took a while for us to figure out, okay, what’s the why? And while we were asking them if they’re interested in our product, again, back to the networking and the genuine relationship building, we were just asking them about their work and what do they struggle with. And I think the number one common struggle at the time was lost cell phones, car keys, wallets and all that, which I’m glad we didn’t tackle. And the second one was education focused.

00:09:49 – Trevor Schmidt

So not to make you pick amongst your customers, but do you have a favorite zoo that you’ve been to?

00:09:54 – Brandon Kashani

It’s really hard. It’s a really, really hard question. I recently I’ve fallen in love with our really small zoo customers because the majority of our venues have, I would say, about a million plus annual attendance.

00:10:08 – Trevor Schmidt

Wow.

00:10:08 – Brandon Kashani

But with our new product, Checkerboard, we’ve now started signing some really small venues. I mean, Zootaw Zoo in Utah is one of our new customers. And I think they have 50k annual attendance. So way, way, way smaller. And to go there and one, see the passion that they have for conservation and education and all their animals. But two, the goals that they have and the impact that we can make is way greater than working with a venue that has a few million annual attendance and a team of 400 versus 4. So I’m starting to really like the small ones. But I love all of our venues. That’s something where we’ve been very fortunate with, is Working with good people and venues that truly care.

00:10:55 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. Well, it’s nice when you like the people you work with, you like what they’re doing, you see the vision that they have. It makes it, at least from my perspective, easier to kind of drill down and do the work that you need to do to help them out.

00:11:07 – Brandon Kashani

For sure. Especially in those low moments and the hard times. It just gives you the extra push and the extra motivation to keep going. And I would say every time I’ve met with our customers or I see people engaging with our products in their parks, it fully re energizes me. It’s the fuel I need.

00:11:27 – Trevor Schmidt

That’s good. And you mentioned that checkerboard and so talk about that a little bit because I understand the company and some of its applications have evolved over time. So talk to us a little bit about that change and how that came about.

00:11:39 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah. So with Explore Request wearable Scavenger Hunt product, we grew that product. Last year, 2023, we had 75,000 families that played the game and we had a 98.3% satisfaction rate. So when people played the game, they loved it. Our challenges came from the staffing component. We were relying on the venue staff to fully run and operate our product. And we typically had the lowest tier of staff in the venue managing the product, which led to very high turnover.

00:12:14 – Brandon Kashani

People constantly left, new people came. So we were giving ongoing training all the time. And then the other part of it is that people don’t like downloading mobile apps. Especially if you go to a venue for a two hour visit, last thing you want to do is wait in line, scan a QR code, download an app, create an account, then wait and get a wearable, then pair them together and then onboard and then you start your journey. And we saw there’s a good opportunity around that for traveling models for like three, four, five day events, but just for normal day to day activities. We were seeing a lot of people not wanting to download the app and we’d spend a lot of money on the product to basically figuring that out. And we met with one of our customers a year ago, 12 months ago, and they said, hey, we don’t like your products.

00:13:11 – Brandon Kashani

We, our customers love it. But as we have to scaffold, we have to clean it, sanitize it, charge it, we have to constantly train new people, we have to deal with collateral. But the reason we still continue to work with you is your backend software that lets us create all that content and all those templates and we can directly control what Our visitors are learning inside of our venue.

00:13:37 – Brandon Kashani

And I said, okay, interesting. And they said, is there any way we can connect your backend software to our QR codes or our TV screens? And I said, what do you mean QR codes? And they said, well, since the pandemic, we’ve been using a lot of QR codes and we typically have to go to the IT department, they have to work with our design team to build a front end webpage. Then there are a million tools out there to connect that webpage to a QR code. Then we have to go work with marketing and facilities to actually put that QR code signage out in our gardens or our zoo.

00:14:11 – Brandon Kashani

Then if we want to change that content, we have to go through that whole cycle. But theoretically, could we connect your software to existing QR codes in the field and at any moment we change which template, which content we want to display on that QR code? And obviously I said, of course our software can do that. They’re like, really? How much is it? I was like, all right, Brandon, think. And I said, okay, I would love to get in the subscription space.

00:14:35 – Brandon Kashani

So I gave them a cost and we ended up getting a three year signed contract with them for that product. Now we had been working with them for quite some time, so there was a trust in the relationship and they knew we can deliver. And then I called my co founder, Steve and I said, Steve, we just sold this product, can we build it? And we did. We, we had majority of it done. Again, it was a different way to leverage our backend software, but we built the product, we added some big features to it. We incorporated AI to be able to translate the content the venue creates in 96 different languages. So when visitors go to any of our venues, they scan a QR code, they select their language, no app required, no account creation required. Then they can go on a self guided tour of the venue in their own language. We give them analytics.

00:15:26 – Brandon Kashani

Where do people go? How long do they spend? Where engagement rates. Anyway, with that new product, our TAM increased exponentially. We now weren’t just working with large zoos and large city parks. We were working with indoor venues, museums. We were working with distilleries, wineries, city parks, historic sites, zoos, botanical gardens, conservancies. There were so many venues that we could work with. And yeah, we just started launching in venues. We closed a dozen venues in the first quarter of this year and now we’re over a couple dozen venues just in 2024. And our margins went from 28%, 27% on a good day with the hardware product to 99.2% in the software product.

00:16:16 – Trevor Schmidt

I bet the investors love that.

00:16:18 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah, yeah. And it just came out of nowhere really. It came out of a conversation with the customer and it’s been the best decision we’ve made. And I think the two products eventually can go really well hand in hand. But right now, checkerboards are our number one focus.

00:16:35 – Trevor Schmidt

And has there been any kind of application that a customer has used that for that surprised you or that impressed you the most?

00:16:42 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah, we have a venue that ended up. Because the core main feature of our product, beyond languages, is the dynamicness of the QR codes. So they can control what the QR codes display at any time without changing the QR codes. They can also pre schedule it. They can say in this day and this day, from this time to this time, this QR code will have this content at this time. We’re going to switch it to this content automatically. And they can continuously build that scheduler for each independent QR code. So we have customers that put the QR codes on fridge magnets or coasters and local bars. And now they can control the content that people who are engaging with it see. Every day or every week we have a venue that put it in posters in all their local schools. And every Friday people scan and they read the fun zoo fact of the week or the teacher scans it and reads it for the class. So they’re constantly learning new animal conservation facts and just facts about their local zoo. And that was, I mean, it was a really creative, interesting way to use it.

00:17:43 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah, that’s amazing. I mean, because I think it’s interesting sometimes, you know, you build the technology out and then you let the creativity of your customers show you.

00:17:50 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah. And every day, every conversation I have with our existing venues, I hear of a new way or something. They’re thinking about how to use the product and that’s what’s making us constantly evolve.

00:18:04 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. So it sounds like Checkerboard is your current focus, but you’re still continuing with the trackit as well.

00:18:10 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah, we’re not selling it into any new venues. We’ve pretty much held the venues that we were profitable in with the wearable products. And we’re just selling Checkerboard right now and then next year there is a world we’re still exploring. We need to make sure we have a profitable, high margin business business model for it. But we’re exploring for the venues that we’ve already signed with Checkerboard for doing seasonal events with Them for the wearable product as an added experience. And that moves us towards the vision of the company of becoming a platform like a guest experience platform, where Checkerboard is a component of it. Explore Quest is a component of IT mobile apps. With Checkerboard, we’re entering the donation platform, the ticketing software, survey tools. There are a lot of components to the whole guest experience that we’re building into the platform. So QR codes are just one way to connect with your visitors, but there are a lot of lot of other ways.

00:19:10 – Trevor Schmidt

Now, as this business has changed and as you’ve gone through kind of the pandemic and all these other kind of transitions, tell me a little bit about how you feel you’ve changed as a CEO of the company. How have you learned and grown?

00:19:25 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah, we made a lot of mistakes in the early days for sure. I mean, we still make mistakes and we learn from it. And when we were working on the wearable products, my co founder and I would constantly talk and say, I can’t wait for the next company when we have our exit, because now there are all these mistakes that we wouldn’t make. Imagine if we would start here on day one. Imagine. Imagine if we knew what we know now. And Checkerboard started last year. And I think one of the reasons we’ve been so successful with it in a short period of time is that it was essentially a new company, right? It was essentially a new product and we were able to take all the lessons we had learned in the older product and directly leverage them for Checkerboard. And we didn’t make a lot of the old mistakes and we made new mistakes that we’ve learned from. But I think our ability to not repeat mistakes that we’ve made was a big one. And then the other big thing we’ve learned is around team building. I think team building for a startup. And I talk about this all the time, I think it’s the hardest thing out there and not enough people talk about it. Just in the entrepreneurship world in the early days, you want the best people out there for the least amount of money. You want them to take the most amount of risk for the least amount of equity. You want them to leave their high paying, cushy corporate job for low pay, no benefits, no health insurance. And it’s just really tough. So you need to, again, build relationships. And the mission and the work of the company is critical at that point, finding people that resonate with it. But then a step further is when you have a little bit of money and you can actually hire people, but you don’t have a lot of money, and you want that money to go a long way. You don’t want to run out of money in three months and six months. So you end up hiring more junior people that fit well on the culture side, but they’re just junior. They don’t have the experience and all to save 1, 2, $3,000 a month over the next candidate. That was really good, but they were just expensive. And what ends up happening is you have a really fun team. You have really good dynamic. It helps during tough times, but you pay for learning curves, and after a year, they get the project done, and now they’re a senior developer or they’re really good at what they do, but it took you a year to build that versus hiring someone who is a master in that field and paying them more. But now instead, you have that product done in two months versus 12, and now you’re generating revenue way earlier. And that’s something you just. You learn by trying both scenarios or not hiring that person who’s very experienced and then saying like, wow, I just spent a year and a half on payroll to get this product. I think that is another really big lesson we’ve learned well.

00:22:29 – Trevor Schmidt

And it’s tough to balance too, because like you said, sometimes it’s trial and error, sometimes it really is people specific, and sometimes just because they’re junior doesn’t mean they can’t grow into the position. But, you know, talk a little bit about how you. How do you figure that out as you’re talking to a candidate or as you’re interviewing or, you know, do you have a thought process around that?

00:22:52 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah. One thing we’ve gotten really big at is it’s a really common thing you hear in startups that, okay, you wear so many different hats, right? We don’t need someone who can just do accounting. One day they might be on customer success, one day they might be there. And it works to some degree. But what I’m leaning on now is I try to find someone who’s really good at the area where we need them, and then we will figure out a way to surround them with people who complement their abilities. Instead of saying like, hey, I want you to enroll in this course and I want you to go learn project management or learn that. I rather double down on what they know really well and then find them either people on the team or mentors and advisors through the network that again, will complement all those gaps and knowledge that they have. And that’s been working really well, for us. And the second part is we just need people who believe in the mission of the company who are impact driven, at least more than transactional driven. I guess the right word is relational versus transactional. With the work we do is such a key component and we need people who have both sides of it so they balance it out. Because if we didn’t have people who are focused on the finances and the revenue and our investors, then we would just be giving the product away and helping every zoo, museum, nonprofit out there with it at a very low cost. But also there are a lot of opportunities we’ve had to maybe bring on a customer on our highest tier of subscription, but they didn’t need that. And so there was no reason for us to sell them on that tier because they’re low budget. For smaller nonprofits, it can go a long way. So both of those sides combined is something we really look at when we continue to expand the team.

00:24:52 – Trevor Schmidt

Well, as I’m listening to you talk about that, it brings to my mind what is your why? I mean, why do you get up each morning and come to work and do what you do with track ID and checkerboard?

00:25:04 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah, mine falls back into the same conversation. I’m as close as you can get to the 5050 split. I am very financially driven. I’m also very impact driven. I wouldn’t be able to do work that was pure impact. I also would never be able to do work for a big company or start a big company where it was just purely financial outlook and there was no real impact being made, which is nice. On the financial side, my biggest goal obviously is an exit and that comes from wanting to give my investors who took a big risk on us, especially in the early days, a nice return on their investment. One, as a thank you for trusting us. But two, then I have a network of people who would give me money for the next company, no matter what I’m working on. And on the impact space, we aren’t curing cancer, we’re not solving world hunger, but we are educating the public on impactful topics in a fun and gamified way. So it’s conservation at a zoo, it’s history at a museum, it might be sustainability at a city park. And we’re making a difference from young ages till much older demographics that we’re working with now. We are able to cater that messaging and that education to so many different languages where normally people just wouldn’t be able to learn that material. And that is really rewarding for me. It’s Something where we grow to be even more passionate about every day when we see the results and like I said earlier, when we see people engaging with our platform and that’s what drives me every day. I think it’s both of those components.

00:26:57 – Trevor Schmidt

How often do you get to go out to one of these venues and watch people just like, I don’t know, as a fly on the wall, watching people use what you’ve created.

00:27:07 – Brandon Kashani

More often now than in the past, Especially now we have a partnerships function. We have great people working in the company, working on onboarding new customers. So a big portion of my focus is on our customer success function and building relationships with our current customers more than new customers. And it’s proven to be very valuable. I mean one, at least introductions, but two, it prevents churn and it helps with product growth, especially being this early in the product life cycle. Every conversation I have there, there’s 1, 2, 3 new potential things that we discuss that can take the product from here to here. So yeah, I get to travel quite a bit and I really enjoy it.

00:27:58 – Trevor Schmidt

What’s one aspect of your job that people don’t really appreciate or that you wish you had known earlier on?

00:28:07 – Brandon Kashani

It’s a good question. I think the hard work that goes on behind the scenes, it’s not just me. I see it in my co founder, I see it in other people on the team. We had our whole team till yesterday here working in Raleigh for an event we do every year with Pullen Park. Like more of a community give back event. But it’s a lot of hard work. It’s a lot of hard work behind the scenes and a lot of times just the nature of startups, you only try to share good news. So anytime there’s a post on LinkedIn, every time we’re talking on a panel, every time we’re on a podcast, we’re just sharing all the good things we have in the company and all the customers we just signed and the satisfaction rates and our pipeline and the money we’ve raised. But underneath that, it’s just so many sleepless nights, it’s so many hard days and weekends and holidays that we all work. And I think sometimes it’s not visible. And just having a good team makes that makes it really nice. There are so many days where I wake up and I’m not motivated to work at all. I mean, we’ve had maybe a really rough week and when things go bad, usually there’s three, four, five things that happen at the same time. And yeah, I just wake up, I’M like, I don’t want to work today. But the reason we get through it all the time is I still show up to work. I still show up, I get in the car, I come out, I work all day, and then same cycle the next night. And then at night, you don’t know what to do. You’re like, oh, my God, I just don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. And then you wake up in the morning, you’re like, we’re going to figure it out. So it’s just this constant rollercoaster of emotions. And I think it’s okay if some days you don’t feel motivated, you don’t feel like working, as long as you still show up and you have people around you that can lift you up when you’re down. That’s really the key.

00:30:15 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah, I think it’s super important and probably not talked about enough. It’s just, I do think it sounds like you’ve got a great team around you, but I do think I hear from others that the role of CEO so often is isolating because like you said, you’ve got to put on a good face for investors. You got to put on a good face for your team so that they’re encouraged to continue what you’re doing. And sometimes there’s not somebody else to kind of just lean on and say, hey, today was a rough day.

00:30:40 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah, it can be very lonely. I mean, it can be very, very lonely. What has helped me through that process is having founder friends who I know have gone through the same stuff in the past generally helps me in those really lonely moments. But you’re right. I mean, you can’t when. When you wake up and you don’t know how to make payroll the week after. I mean, the last thing you want to do is tell everyone in the company and then everyone’s like, what do you mean? But you just have to believe that we’re going to figure it out and we’re not going to miss payroll and we have it. So. Yeah.

00:31:18 – Trevor Schmidt

Well, that’s great. So maybe this segues into it a little bit. But what are your current biggest concerns for the company?

00:31:24 – Brandon Kashani

Revenue is certainly one. Trying to close as many deals as possible as fast as we can. We don’t really know the economic outlook for 2025. A lot of things we hear is that it’s trending in the right direction. There’s a lot of IPOs happening, which just means more money coming down and ultimately helps early stage companies. But it’s still a Big unknown for us. So our biggest target right now is reaching profitability, which I believe Q1 is very likely. And that would just be a huge, huge milestone for us. And just a challenge getting there right now, which is why end of the year we’re just trying to sign as many deals as we can to inch closer there. The second biggest challenge is around again. Staffing. The team is so critical and the people that we’re going to need for the next stage of the company starting to identify who they are. And we’re not necessarily hiring right now for it, but we can’t wait to get to that place where we have 50, 60 customers and then we start looking for who to bring on. So I think starting to look at that piece of it is going to be. Is going to be really important as well.

00:32:45 – Trevor Schmidt

And are you currently staffing local or do you have a remote team and how you manage that?

00:32:50 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah, we are all over. We. Initially, when I started the company, we were all local. At one point, we had 14 people in the Triangle. But over the last couple of years, we moved our dev team offshore. Now we have someone in the US we have a VP of software and my CTO who’s local, but our VP of software is in the US and then we have a team in Mexico and a team in the Philippines, and we work with them every day. We were on video calls with them throughout the day, and they’re just part of the team and they’ve been fantastic. And that came because we had a couple new investors in the company that locally who own these offshore teams. And it’s probably been one of the best decisions we’ve made. We’ve consistently gotten high quality, reliable work and really at a fraction of the cost than what we would pay onshore. But everyone else, we have someone in Florida, we have someone in Utah. We may be adding someone from California. It’s just all over. And I think the pandemic changed that. You can have people from all over the country as long as they’re really talented. Everyone’s used to the hybrid remote work style now and how.

00:34:10 – Trevor Schmidt

I mean, it is a challenge. I just know it from kind of our office. But like maintaining culture, maintaining kind of that connection with people. And you’ve talked about being a relationship business, so talk a little bit about how you kind of intentionally maintain those relationships when you are remote.

00:34:28 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah, I hate remote work personally. The results have been good right now. And again, it opens a pool of people we can higher because now you’re not just looking for that role. In the Raleigh area, you’re looking all over the country, so the quality of talent that you might find all of a sudden goes much higher. But I’m a very relational person. I love meeting people and I just spent a week in Utah with my VP of software that lives there. Just because it’s super important to keep the relationships and it’s completely different than meeting someone on Zoom every day. So it’s been a challenge from, from that component, I think the dev team, the tech team, it goes pretty well, but probably because it’s more. Developers are more used to working remote and they’re actually more comfortable with it. But from an operational standpoint, yeah, I think there’s a balance we’re going to have to find at some point. I would love to eventually be fully in person. I think you get more work done when everyone’s in the same room collaborating and working together. You don’t have to schedule. One of my biggest pet peeves is 30 or 60 minute Zoom calls. Like why can’t you schedule a 7 minute Zoom call? But you don’t have to schedule that 30 minute block on a calendar to ask or discuss a quick topic. You can just walk over and talk about it. So there’s certainly trade offs. I think there are pros and cons to every component of it. But right now we’re just dealing with what we have and it’s working.

00:36:04 – Trevor Schmidt

That’s great. So tell me a little bit about your fundraising experience. I know you’ve talked about raising money at different times. How has that been and what would you suggest to other founders out there who are thinking about having to go through that process?

00:36:16 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah, we’ve been very lucky and fortunate with the people we’ve met over the years. We have just over 20 investors in the company. We’ve raised over $4 million to date. Now a big portion of the money we raised went towards the old products, Explore requests and the initial child tracking product. So along the way, as we’ve had pivots, we’ve had less and less money to spend on it. But networking was probably the, the root of all of the money that we’ve raised to date.

00:36:53 – Brandon Kashani

The majority of our investors, we started building a relationship with most of our investors. I had pitched on our first round of funding out of school, out of NC State and they had passed due to traction or a lot of people passed because of the hardware component. And then now that we have Checkerboard, then we started getting a lot of the investors back then who had a relationship with us. They passed on us, but we continuously kept them updated. I met with them every once in a while just to get advice, just to give them updates on the company. So they knew where we started, where we are now, the obstacles that we had to overcome, and they ended up cutting checks and investing. So that part’s been really nice and helpful. We also, more than money, we needed smart money. So we’re very fortunate to have brought some really smart investors. A lot of our investors are or were founders at some point. I would say most are founders and CEOs. And it helps a lot having real operators, people who’ve gone through exits, who are giving you advice. And it further de risks us going and looking for new investment because they’re like, oh, wow, this person’s your investor.

00:38:07 – Brandon Kashani

So it all plays into each other. But finding part of your mission that resonates with the investors is probably the biggest advice I can give. We have investors who are very passionate about animal conservation. And obviously it’s a huge component of what we do. We have investors who are passionate about family and product for children. We have investors who are passionate about software technology companies, B2B SaaS companies.

00:38:35 – Brandon Kashani

So we check boxes for different people based off of what they care about. And that’s why it’s so important to maintain that balance in the company of where we focus on and what we, what we do overall in the Triangle. I will say raising money in the Triangle is really challenging. I remember in 2021, 2022, when I was raising the 2 million round, I was at 1.7 million and I was stuck there.

00:38:58 – Brandon Kashani

And we had just gotten done with three months of diligence with a local firm in Raleigh who 90 days of diligence and they gave us 30k, 30k check. And it wasn’t uncommon. I mean, that was on the lower end. But typically it was a few months of going back and forth and lots of meetings for a 50k check, sometimes 100k check. And I remember going to Atlanta and I met someone there who set up a bunch of meetings for me and I raised 300k in 48 hours and I came back.

00:39:32 – Brandon Kashani

Now, I was probably lucky with the people I met and just right place, right time. But man, I pitched 10 people, three invested, boom, done two invested, and then done. So we still have a lot of catching up to do. I know a lot of founders who leave North Carolina because of this reason, but I also know a lot of founders who stay because of this reason. Because if everyone leaves, how will the Triangle grow? And that’s Something I’ve become increasingly passionate about, connecting founders with resources, helping startups grow, access to capital. And we have to stay and have an exit and then reinvest in the community and start the next company.

00:40:15 – Brandon Kashani

And there needs to be a lot of this happening over and over and over to eventually grow. And right now, again, Bill Spruill with two NDF and Scott Wingo with Tweener, they are leading something really, really nice. I think they both know the struggles with the Triangle and they’re trying to address it. We just need more people like that and more capital coming in. We still have a ways to go for the Triangle as a whole, but just looking at access to capital now compared to four years ago, five years ago, we’ve come a long way.

00:40:54 – Trevor Schmidt

Yep. And I think some of those macro conditions, at least in the last year and a half or so, haven’t helped us. Matters worse. But it’s always. Yeah, it’s been tough even before that.

00:41:05 – Brandon Kashani

For sure. For sure.

00:41:06 – Trevor Schmidt

So talk to me a little bit because you mentioned it as part of what you want for the success of the company, but talk to me a little bit about kind of the pressure of taking on investors money and wanting to perform for them and help them to have a successful exit. How do you think through that and how does it change how you approach your company?

00:41:25 – Brandon Kashani

Well, it affects the risk matrix because when you have other people’s money, it makes me rethink every decision we’re making in the company, especially during the two pivots that we’ve had. Now, the second one wasn’t as big of a pivot is the first one, even though it’s drastically different. Checkerboard and Explore Request, it came from different use cases of our backend software. But you have to think really hard because they’ve trusted you with their money, especially if they invested for a product that you were working on. And all of a sudden you’re like, hey, I’m taking your money and I’m working on this other thing. You need to be really, really sure. You need to know your stuff. It’s pressure, but it leads to a good place. It makes me know all my financials. If someone’s like, how many zoos are there in the country? Okay. What percentage of them are over X attendance? Or what are your margins? What happens if you do this? It makes you truly understand what you’re dealing with. And only good things can come from that. So, yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s been bad. We’re very fortunate. We’ve never had an issue with any of our investors. Everyone’s been really supportive through the whole process. We have investors that challenge us in a good way, but we’ve never had someone who’s caused any issues or didn’t agree even, or we didn’t get their buy in in the direction.

00:43:00 – Trevor Schmidt

I mean, that’s great. And I think it goes to what you talked about earlier, that you found good people to work with, you built them as a relationship, and then once you have buy in kind of to what you’re doing, you don’t just take money from people. You’re looking to have people who are additive to your company for sure.

00:43:17 – Brandon Kashani

And I think sharing bad news with them right away is something I had to learn a little bit the hard way. I always try to only present the good stuff in the company and I wouldn’t say hiding the negative stuff, but I just wasn’t communicating it or putting a big red flag on it as much as I should have. And it’s a lesson I learned over the years where anytime we’re struggling, I bring it up right away because we have a lot of really smart and talented people around us and 9 out of 10 times they can jump in and help. Even if it’s one of the 20 plus investors who are like, yep, I can help you with that. All of a sudden what would have been a big problem or was a big problem is now fully resolved because of that. So communicating challenges, bad news, negative things that are happening is also very important.

00:44:17 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah, I think it’s great advice because again, you talked about having kind of former operators as investors. They’re going to have people who’ve been through similar situations or know somebody who has. And so you have again, a network of committed individuals who are looking to help you be successful. Why not make use of those?

00:44:35 – Brandon Kashani

Yep.

00:44:36 – Trevor Schmidt

So what do you view as next for the company either in 2025 or kind of five years beyond?

00:44:43 – Brandon Kashani

Obviously we’re working towards an exit. So right now we think three years is a really good estimate for us. So a lot of what we’re doing, short term milestones, hit profitability, then a million in ARR is a big mark. But then working towards that exit and the long term goal, we are working on developing a lot of strategic relationships with companies that could eventually acquire us. And that’s going to be a really big focus of mine this coming year.

00:45:16 – Trevor Schmidt

So I understand that, I shouldn’t say in your spare time, but I understand that you are a competitive skydiver as well as the CEO. Do you see any relationship between those activities and entrepreneurship, or are they completely separate in your mind?

00:45:29 – Brandon Kashani

I think I’ve become very good at calculated risk.

00:45:36 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:45:38 – Brandon Kashani

And that might be the overlap. The second part is team bonding. Maybe not team bonding, but team dynamics is the right word, because even in skydiving, building a team is really, really challenging, especially when you get higher up. Now, I’m on the U.S. national team for competitive skydiving, and you typically have four to eight people, depending on two disciplines. Four person or eight person. But you have eight people who are type A personalities, who are really, really good skydivers who have thousands of jumps. I have 4,000 jumps myself, but I have a teammate that has over 30,000 jumps. So people who are really good at what they do, all having their own opinion, all being really accomplished and trying to coexist and trying to make decisions together, and especially when you disagree on what technique to use or what path to take, it can be pretty challenging. And it’s a skill that you learn on how to deal with conflict and how to move past things, how to bring things up so they don’t constantly build up and become a bigger issue. And I think all of that has really helped me with managing the team over the last couple years, especially.

00:47:02 – Trevor Schmidt

Interesting. So, I mean, how did you get into skydiving to begin with?

00:47:05 – Brandon Kashani

I fell into it. I did a tandem skydive when I turned 18. Okay. And absolutely loved it. Started getting my license. Once I got my 25 jumps and got my license, I was at the Dropstone every weekend, every Saturday, Sunday. Fell in love with it. Got into the competition. Side was just really a hobby. Maybe when I was in school, I thought I would do this full time after I finish, until I took the entrepreneurship class. And, yeah, it’s just still doing it.

00:47:48 – Trevor Schmidt

That’s amazing. Some people have hobbies of ballroom dancing or whatever, but no, you’re jumping out of place.

00:47:54 – Brandon Kashani

It’s really good therapy. What is going on in my life, it can be the worst day. And once you go jump out of the plane for at least a minute, there is nothing else going through your head.

00:48:09 – Trevor Schmidt

Yep.

00:48:10 – Brandon Kashani

The second you’re out, there’s nothing flowing through your head besides being in that moment. And then you land and you go back into it and you’re more calm and the adrenaline’s taken over. So I wish insurance would cover it, but it doesn’t right now.

00:48:27 – Trevor Schmidt

There you go. We got to figure that one out. So we are the Founder Shares podcast. And so I’d like to ask all of our guests if you had One piece of advice that you would share with somebody who’s thinking about starting a company, what would that be?

00:48:39 – Brandon Kashani

I would say, just do it. There are a million reasons why you can’t do it. I remember at the beginning I would go to my mentor, Marshall Brain, who helped me start the company. I would go to him and say, hey, Marshall, I don’t know if I can do it. How would I find a technical co founder who can help me build it? What about money? How would I get health insurance? How would I pay for rent? What am I going to do? How do I hire people without money? How do I find investors without a product? How do I get the money to travel to customers to sign them? All that and you always figure it out. You always figure it out. Every reason you have not to do it, there is a solution for it. And if you just commit to it and go after it, I promise it will work out. Now, maybe that idea won’t work out. Maybe you have to pivot along the way. But with the right network, the right people around you and the right mindset, it always works out.

00:49:41 – Trevor Schmidt

I love it. And it ties back to what you said earlier. Sometimes you just gotta get up the next day and do it again and you’re gonna figure it out.

00:49:48 – Brandon Kashani

Yep, that’s great.

00:49:50 – Trevor Schmidt

So how can our listeners connect with you? Learn more about the company, or how can potential customers reach out to you?

00:49:55 – Brandon Kashani

Yeah, LinkedIn is always fantastic. You can reach out LinkedIn. Brandon Koshani, Instagram. It works, but yeah, or email.

00:50:05 – Trevor Schmidt

Sounds great. Brandon, thank you so much for taking the time. I really enjoyed the conversation and can’t wait to see what happens next.

00:50:10 – Brandon Kashani

Thank you.

00:50:18 – Trevor Schmidt

That was Brandon Kishani. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or learn more about Track it and Checkerboard by visiting t r a k I d dot com. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Founder Shares podcast. If you’re a founder or business owner and need legal advice, be sure to check out our team@hutchlaw.com that’s hutchlaw.com we have the capacity to help you out with just about any legal need your company may be facing. We’re passionate about the innovation economy and ready to help you on your entrepreneurial journey. The show was edited and produced by Earfluence. I’m Trevor Schmidt and thanks for listening to the Founder Shares podcast.