Meeting Title: Robert Tseng’s Personal Meeting Room Date: 2025-10-22 Meeting participants: Robert Tseng, Surfield Thomas, Jr.
WEBVTT
1 00:02:02.930 ⇒ 00:02:10.609 Robert Tseng: Okay, let’s get started here. So, I’m going to just record this walkthrough of our bi-weekly check-in.
2 00:02:12.170 ⇒ 00:02:15.810 Robert Tseng: We have lots of ground to cover, so, this will…
3 00:02:15.960 ⇒ 00:02:18.139 Robert Tseng: Be something that you can review at any time.
4 00:02:19.020 ⇒ 00:02:23.709 Robert Tseng: I will start by sharing my screen for this deck.
5 00:02:26.330 ⇒ 00:02:44.429 Robert Tseng: And I will share this deck out as well. But yeah, let’s just kind of get started. Some wins from the past week. Couple things, or a few things. One, the Catalyst work. There’s been a lot of noise around there, but, in short, we just switched the Catalyst conversion setup to a true monetized event.
6 00:02:44.430 ⇒ 00:02:47.829 Robert Tseng: This was set up poorly. I’ve shared docs on this already for
7 00:02:47.830 ⇒ 00:02:52.400 Robert Tseng: kind of how we even got into that mess. But yeah, that is now… that is now fixed.
8 00:02:52.750 ⇒ 00:03:05.860 Robert Tseng: From an attribution perspective, we’ve also implemented the edge of the solution. It’s compatible with our current stack, and it’s HIPAA eligible. I have it kind of outlined here on the slide.
9 00:03:06.080 ⇒ 00:03:14.000 Robert Tseng: Just a very basic visual, but showing you kind of how everything stays within a closed-loop system, and how we’re kind of scripting data out at each step.
10 00:03:16.800 ⇒ 00:03:27.050 Robert Tseng: And from there, we would be able to, you know, capture, stitch, and push more data. We’re saying to Northbeam, I don’t think Northbeam will necessarily be able to handle it. That’s kind of the…
11 00:03:27.320 ⇒ 00:03:32.670 Robert Tseng: We’re kind of getting back to the point where I recommended to move off North Beam a few months ago.
12 00:03:33.010 ⇒ 00:03:49.270 Robert Tseng: But here we are, and, you know, whatever end-up tool we… whatever tool we end up using, we should be able to push, data into it. For now, all of it will just go straight to our warehouse, and so we can do stitching ourselves natively, within the Eden Data platform, but we do not
13 00:03:49.700 ⇒ 00:03:54.880 Robert Tseng: But, you know, if we work with other vendors, we should have that flexibility to push it wherever we want as well.
14 00:03:55.540 ⇒ 00:04:05.629 Robert Tseng: And then on the Remo side there, yeah, we kind of concluded our audit, so, Surf is also on the call. When we get to his section, he’ll kind of break down
15 00:04:06.510 ⇒ 00:04:22.799 Robert Tseng: kind of what our findings were and what our recommendation. In short, we’ve pretty much answered all of our outstanding questions, produced an initial assessment, and our recommendation is to extend REMOS development time… timeline, while establishing,
16 00:04:22.850 ⇒ 00:04:28.309 Robert Tseng: more clear acceptance criteria around the project. It just feels like they’re…
17 00:04:29.500 ⇒ 00:04:36.120 Robert Tseng: kind of sprinting to the finish line, without much regard for what state it needs to be in.
18 00:04:36.420 ⇒ 00:04:38.460 Robert Tseng: for it to be usable for the Eden team.
19 00:04:38.860 ⇒ 00:04:45.430 Robert Tseng: We… we do not believe that this will be ready by November 1st for you to use. You will need a…
20 00:04:45.430 ⇒ 00:05:02.149 Robert Tseng: you will need a founding engineering team anyway to be able to set up all the other connectors that are kind of left with their architecture. So, we’ll expand on that in a bit more detail. And then the HIPAA eligibility, we’ll kind of touch on a couple more times throughout this talk.
21 00:05:02.190 ⇒ 00:05:03.530 Robert Tseng: this recording.
22 00:05:04.350 ⇒ 00:05:22.210 Robert Tseng: new requests that are coming in, as we’re shifting priorities to other parts of the team. One, kind of on the supply chain side, working with Brad, there’s more need for support on the supply chain analysis, and so, we’re kind of handicapped by what we get in Basque. It’s not… not a new story here. I think we’re just…
23 00:05:22.970 ⇒ 00:05:39.170 Robert Tseng: able… I mean, we want to work with him to give him what he needs to be able to measure SLAs with the level of rigor that we’ve not been able to up to this point. A lot of it hovers around what happens when an order is sent to the pharmacy, and then when it leaves the pharmacy.
24 00:05:39.170 ⇒ 00:05:44.230 Robert Tseng: And it’s considered a shipped order. But in the in-between, it’s still kind of just…
25 00:05:44.280 ⇒ 00:05:48.319 Robert Tseng: murky. So, we have a couple initiatives that are, kind of.
26 00:05:49.270 ⇒ 00:05:57.520 Robert Tseng: directed at taking that work on. Then we also have some affiliate work, just continuing to…
27 00:05:58.190 ⇒ 00:06:10.360 Robert Tseng: Affiliate NCAC, nope, this is done. So this is not a need request, so we’ll skip over that. And then we’re adding a new platform, for conversions, for affiliate tracking, which is… or for paid media tracking through TikTok.
28 00:06:12.300 ⇒ 00:06:18.160 Robert Tseng: So just kind of an overview of the catalyst overbilling issue, just…
29 00:06:18.330 ⇒ 00:06:34.470 Robert Tseng: you know, I’ve sent that doc already, but there’s this fear that we’ve overspent by 600,000 since the time of launch. I think, you know, in short, the… I walked through, kind of, how we signed a poor contract in the beginning,
30 00:06:34.950 ⇒ 00:06:39.150 Robert Tseng: Yeah, like, we… We started sending
31 00:06:39.470 ⇒ 00:06:44.520 Robert Tseng: Conversion events without really fully understanding, like, what we were sending.
32 00:06:45.190 ⇒ 00:06:58.600 Robert Tseng: yeah, I think the person who set it up is no longer here, so yeah, we just kind of caught this, you know, it just fell into our lap a couple weeks ago, and we had to just pretty much redo the entire setup and figure out…
33 00:06:59.310 ⇒ 00:07:00.520 Robert Tseng: how to…
34 00:07:01.080 ⇒ 00:07:14.889 Robert Tseng: reconcile some of the overbilling that was… that was taking place. So, all the solutions are kind of implemented here, you know, the impact has been contained. The recommendation is still to renegotiate the catalyst contract
35 00:07:16.870 ⇒ 00:07:24.030 Robert Tseng: Right now, the entire, responsibility is on the Eden team to be able to validate what… which con…
36 00:07:24.030 ⇒ 00:07:38.220 Robert Tseng: which transactions are actually real order conversions, and that should just not be the case. We knew going into it that not all transactions turn into true conversions, yet that was the contract that we initially signed. And so,
37 00:07:38.500 ⇒ 00:07:57.859 Robert Tseng: you know, if we don’t sign a new contract with them, we’re going to always have to be doing this reconciliation work on a monthly basis, telling them, hey, take out 20, take out 30%, whatever that number ends up being, fluctuating kind of month over month. It just doesn’t really make sense for us to be the only one kind of shouldering that responsibility.
38 00:07:59.850 ⇒ 00:08:03.899 Robert Tseng: And, yeah, I think on the Eden side, you know, there’s… we…
39 00:08:04.510 ⇒ 00:08:09.619 Robert Tseng: The recommendation is that there needs to be a Martech owner, who’s able to oversee
40 00:08:09.620 ⇒ 00:08:26.209 Robert Tseng: truly, with technical expertise, these integrations that we’re setting up. Everything that the Brainforge team has inherited, like, we’ve been able to solve, but it’s just that we’re always kind of late to the punch here. So, we have options for what we can do, managing the situation by moving forward.
41 00:08:26.890 ⇒ 00:08:32.960 Robert Tseng: So yeah, I guess I’ll kind of pause and hand it off over to Surf to kind of walk through kind of the Remo situation.
42 00:08:34.080 ⇒ 00:08:36.760 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I’ll just turn it over to him.
43 00:08:37.360 ⇒ 00:08:41.959 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Awesome, sweet. Now, on the Reno side of things,
44 00:08:41.990 ⇒ 00:09:01.769 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: I think me and you, Daniel, we talked about this last time. The interesting thing that we find going on there is, like, I think we came up to this analogy, if you’re building a house, what do you have? And initially, you have the framework, and that’s been proven, kind of, time and time again. On our last call via the demo.
45 00:09:01.770 ⇒ 00:09:11.459 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: We showed them exactly how we needed them to demo and what style of demo that is, and we have the recording for that. And they weren’t able to hit it up to…
46 00:09:11.460 ⇒ 00:09:34.710 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: a snuff from a demo’s perspective, perspective. They were still doing the demo in, like, localhost, so there’s no deployed asset anywhere, and then when we tried to look at the data, they actually couldn’t run the script to fill in data, so we couldn’t even CC data, we couldn’t watch any of the flows. It was a lot of UIs.
47 00:09:34.710 ⇒ 00:09:40.000 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: for configuration that it seems like the remote side of the company’s gonna be doing anyway.
48 00:09:40.000 ⇒ 00:09:59.029 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Which is nice that they’ve built the things to make that side of the house easier, but, like, we really wanted to see, like, orders, order flow, can we stand this thing up? So, I guess, from that perspective, I’ll go through it from this document’s perspective. The intake form and all of that sort of flow is not ready yet.
49 00:09:59.030 ⇒ 00:10:15.579 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: So it’s not hosted anywhere, it’s not ready yet, couldn’t demo that end-to-end. On the dosing plans and the therapeutics, the UIs are there, and the data schemas are there, so that should be able to get into some sort of working state.
50 00:10:15.610 ⇒ 00:10:33.420 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: The consultations and the providers, it seems like the Dr. Telex team has not been onboarded, and there’s an entire UI that he says that still hasn’t been built for them to do their jobs. Originally, before our last demo meeting.
51 00:10:33.420 ⇒ 00:10:52.220 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: That was supposed to happen the Monday before that. So it didn’t happen that Monday, it didn’t happen by the time we actually did our demo, so there, again, that’s, I guess, one of the most important integrations, because you need that sort of layer, to get the orders through in the process and, like, reviewed.
52 00:10:52.220 ⇒ 00:10:55.159 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: On the order fulfillment process?
53 00:10:55.250 ⇒ 00:11:13.909 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Again, the stems are there for every piece, it’s not put together, and you can’t see the end-to-end flow, and specifically the intake side of the orders is definitely not together. So it’s like, the beginning isn’t together, the end might be close, but again, you’re buying, again, the studs and the framing.
54 00:11:14.010 ⇒ 00:11:22.159 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: And then the lastly, from an architecture perspective, well, there is no architecture, right? Like, it’s not deployed anywhere. There’s an idea of an architecture.
55 00:11:22.190 ⇒ 00:11:34.099 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: But it doesn’t live, it can’t be shown, it can’t be really expressed other than, here’s how we think we’re going to put this thing together, and here’s how we want to run it on those rails. There’s no…
56 00:11:34.100 ⇒ 00:11:47.689 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: reproducible or deployed way for them to kind of actually show that. So, there’s gonna be a lot of work still ideally needed, so I think there’s a couple of things. I don’t think the November 1st date is…
57 00:11:47.700 ⇒ 00:11:50.139 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: realistic. I think it’s optimistic.
58 00:11:51.720 ⇒ 00:11:59.209 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: is gonna be much later, probably, like, somewhere, I think we have it, written on here as, like, December, I think it’s, like, around mid-December.
59 00:11:59.210 ⇒ 00:12:15.620 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: And then that first thing you’re gonna get is, like, the testable version. You’re still gonna have to bring on an engineering team to do the work of, like, building out the extra pieces, making sure it’s, like, built up to snuff, and that’s gonna take a couple months post the delivery from Remo in and of itself.
60 00:12:17.460 ⇒ 00:12:25.520 Robert Tseng: Yeah, so, a couple more things that I’ll kind of add to that. Yeah, I think another,
61 00:12:26.120 ⇒ 00:12:32.769 Robert Tseng: kind of something I didn’t anticipate when I was kind of going through the demo was that a lot of the setup
62 00:12:33.050 ⇒ 00:12:50.129 Robert Tseng: has to be pre-configured by the remote team, and so I think there is already this expectation that they have that they’re going to stay on and set everything up in the way that you have BASC configured, for example, just as for an analogous comparison. And it’s not going to…
63 00:12:50.350 ⇒ 00:12:54.780 Robert Tseng: Like, so that shifts the operational setup burden from
64 00:12:54.780 ⇒ 00:13:14.289 Robert Tseng: the Eden team completely to the Remo side, and I kind of hesitate with that because, you know, yeah, they have a UI that’s, like, helpful for them to go in and set up these configurations, but nobody else on the Eden team knows how to use it. There’s no docs for how to use… how to use this thing. It’s a lot more heavyweight than Basque is. There are so many
65 00:13:14.290 ⇒ 00:13:16.569 Robert Tseng: Honestly, extraneous features.
66 00:13:16.840 ⇒ 00:13:23.110 Robert Tseng: Yeah, it’s like they’re… they feel like they’ve just kind of tried to woo you with a bunch of, like, buttons and, like…
67 00:13:23.160 ⇒ 00:13:33.250 Robert Tseng: things that they can… changing color schemes and features that are not really core to what this application needs to deliver. So,
68 00:13:33.260 ⇒ 00:13:45.609 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I guess, like, more… more details can kind of be fleshed out in… within the doc that was also kind of shared out with Remo Audit, but that’s kind of… yeah, I think this is our best realistic estimate of kind of where things are.
69 00:13:46.660 ⇒ 00:13:51.669 Robert Tseng: Kind of moving through the rest of the month.
70 00:13:52.020 ⇒ 00:14:09.120 Robert Tseng: We still have a couple weeks, kind of, on contract with Surf, kind of advising on the Remo side. They did commit to a couple other demos before they launched. They haven’t set up a call this week like they promised, so I think that’s something we’ll push on, and we’ll really see what they’re able to deliver on November 1st. And so, maybe some of these,
71 00:14:09.120 ⇒ 00:14:14.459 Robert Tseng: Gaps will change, but generally, like, we’ve seen kind of, like, what the app is supposed to do.
72 00:14:15.670 ⇒ 00:14:21.450 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Yeah, ideally for a November 1st Freddie day, that would be… what is it, next week?
73 00:14:21.690 ⇒ 00:14:22.300 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
74 00:14:22.460 ⇒ 00:14:26.159 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: So yeah, it’s a lot of work to do for one week.
75 00:14:26.490 ⇒ 00:14:27.930 Robert Tseng: Cool.
76 00:14:28.140 ⇒ 00:14:40.190 Robert Tseng: All right, well, yeah, thanks, Surf. I think that’s really kind of… and if you need to jump off, that’s all, it’s all good. I’m still gonna go through, like, these other five slides. Do you think? I’ll jump. Okay, alright, see ya.
77 00:14:43.330 ⇒ 00:14:57.800 Robert Tseng: Okay, so then the next piece is kind of the edge layer solution, and kind of talking through, like, what we actually did. So, yeah, the objective here was to get campaign tracking to a stable place, so that we’re reducing data loss that happens from, like.
78 00:14:57.800 ⇒ 00:15:05.189 Robert Tseng: leaky UTMs, and then, obviously, relying on one client-side, tracking solution.
79 00:15:05.190 ⇒ 00:15:14.709 Robert Tseng: is not… it’s not stable. So, having the edge layer solution, having different reroutes, that just produces more stability because data can come in.
80 00:15:14.710 ⇒ 00:15:30.279 Robert Tseng: If data… if the client is not able to… client size is not able to connect, it’ll get rerouted multiple times through Cloudflare Worker until we’re able to establish a secure connection, and then it captures the telemetry. So, overall, we’ve seen this work multiple times, that this improves attribution accuracy significantly.
81 00:15:31.450 ⇒ 00:15:44.120 Robert Tseng: So one was setting up the cloud for a worker. There was a snag in, kind of, like, deploying it at scale. Obviously, it ran into our limits. It’s a very basic plan. We were able to get past that. And we’re monitoring, kind of, the impact on the rest of the data platform.
82 00:15:44.120 ⇒ 00:16:07.799 Robert Tseng: Specifically, segment will receive more events, obviously because we’re sending higher volume than we were before. So far, it looks stable. We’re not having to, you know, we already adjusted for, kind of the spike that we expected. I expected a 30% spike. We’re hovering around that. We may exceed that in the next months if we continue to, obviously, grow, our paid ad spend and drive more
83 00:16:07.990 ⇒ 00:16:13.789 Robert Tseng: more eyeballs to these different landing pages, but it’s kind of going as I anticipated there.
84 00:16:14.050 ⇒ 00:16:24.550 Robert Tseng: Integration with BigQuery, all done. All the data lands in BigQuery, and so now we have this environment where we can stitch, the attribution we want in the warehouse natively.
85 00:16:24.580 ⇒ 00:16:48.060 Robert Tseng: We’ve captured some additional, kind of, identifiers, that help us with stitching to a greater extent. So, things like hashed IP address, we were not capturing before, obviously for compliance reasons, but… but now we have some sort of proxy that we can use to match multiple devices, off of a hashed IP address that doesn’t really identify the user, but that
86 00:16:48.060 ⇒ 00:17:05.620 Robert Tseng: That’s a big win, and we’ll see the impact of that later on. So, there’s a couple other items, but generally more technical details here. Overall, you know, this solution’s been tested, validated, and it’s live. So, I’m excited to share kind of the impact of this, maybe, like, a couple weeks or a month from now.
87 00:17:06.859 ⇒ 00:17:20.840 Robert Tseng: Yeah, and then what I also want to spend some time talking through is open opportunities, or what we consider to be our backlog. I would say the past, month, we’ve been just kind of reactively plugging up Martech-like holes.
88 00:17:20.930 ⇒ 00:17:38.700 Robert Tseng: And this is just not the way that my team is set up to run. And so, I think we’re kind of driving towards, like, kind of the crux of, like, in order for this to kind of keep going effectively, and so that we’re not dropping the ball on the full scope, we have to just acknowledge that, you know, these are some of the open opportunities we’re not able to take on.
89 00:17:39.730 ⇒ 00:17:40.740 Robert Tseng: So…
90 00:17:40.970 ⇒ 00:17:48.030 Robert Tseng: We have some of these things that we’ve already scoped out. The pharmacy visit, we’ve already set that plan to Rebecca, she’s approved it.
91 00:17:48.190 ⇒ 00:17:53.329 Robert Tseng: Henry and her are scheduling, and it’ll probably be, like, a one-day in-and-out kind of situation.
92 00:17:53.640 ⇒ 00:17:57.199 Robert Tseng: I think this will help when we’re thinking about integrating with
93 00:17:57.390 ⇒ 00:18:00.250 Robert Tseng: Eat in… eat in pharmacy directly, and…
94 00:18:00.640 ⇒ 00:18:07.180 Robert Tseng: You know, regardless of whether or not we’re using FASC, or, or, or Remo.
95 00:18:07.660 ⇒ 00:18:12.670 Robert Tseng: Just having a clear understanding of, like, what are the different
96 00:18:12.830 ⇒ 00:18:20.510 Robert Tseng: touchpoints that we actually need to capture once an order is sent to the pharmacy before it gets shipped. That’s, that’s, that’s the main objective there.
97 00:18:20.800 ⇒ 00:18:32.479 Robert Tseng: And then kind of pharmacy performance-enabled analysis. I mean, we’re kind of working on this already, so there’s new basketball hooks that were kind of, sent out. We’re… we’ve been pouring into that, and
98 00:18:33.390 ⇒ 00:18:50.249 Robert Tseng: yeah, I think there’s… they’re just continuing to beef up the reporting on that side to assist with Brad’s objectives. And then, yeah, whether it’s North Beam or… the team’s optimistic that they can make Northbeam work. I… I don’t…
99 00:18:50.400 ⇒ 00:18:57.580 Robert Tseng: We just want to make sure that this platform isn’t really leaving any money on the table, so, we’re trying to kind of figure out a solution there.
100 00:18:57.860 ⇒ 00:19:02.630 Robert Tseng: There’s ask for demand and supply forecasting, both of, so…
101 00:19:02.780 ⇒ 00:19:18.000 Robert Tseng: that’s work that we’ve just kind of kept kicking down the line. It’s something that I think is very valuable for the team. It’s something that Danny and Jonah have requested before, but we just haven’t been able to take it on.
102 00:19:18.560 ⇒ 00:19:21.619 Robert Tseng: Then there were some other, kind of, requests around…
103 00:19:21.970 ⇒ 00:19:30.869 Robert Tseng: integrations, AI insights, yeah, I mean, we have a… we have an AI team, engineering team, that’s ready to go and tackle these things, but I need more,
104 00:19:31.230 ⇒ 00:19:38.549 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I’m gonna need to restructure the team in order to pull them in so that we can execute on this.
105 00:19:39.860 ⇒ 00:19:53.319 Robert Tseng: And I’m sure there are other things on your mind, for other opportunities, so let’s just kind of move into kind of the meat of this… of this call. Really, I see a few risks that we’ve kind of… kind of… going back to some of the things that we’ve talked about.
106 00:19:53.320 ⇒ 00:20:00.409 Robert Tseng: One, on the Eden OS side with Remo, product is way less mature than expected. There’s no way that we’re going to be able to,
107 00:20:00.660 ⇒ 00:20:15.259 Robert Tseng: comfortably receive something that’s working by November 1st. And so, I think, it’s a given that we would need to extend CERF past his, his contract date. He was only contracted for 2 months. He’s happy to stay in the current role that he is in at,
108 00:20:15.390 ⇒ 00:20:28.380 Robert Tseng: at 5K a month. But then, you know, you’re going to still inherit something that’s not really going to be usable by mid-December, even with extension… extending surf. You’ll still need a founding engineering team.
109 00:20:28.380 ⇒ 00:20:36.970 Robert Tseng: who actually can get it set up. Like, I still don’t believe that there are any, you know, real orders that are being processed through Remo. And so…
110 00:20:37.280 ⇒ 00:20:41.229 Robert Tseng: You’re still going to need to hire a founding engineering team.
111 00:20:42.510 ⇒ 00:20:48.850 Robert Tseng: Yeah, so I think at some point, you have to make the call whether or not you think that Remo can actually be that family engineering team.
112 00:20:49.150 ⇒ 00:20:57.159 Robert Tseng: you know, managing the different egos and the projects, like, Surf can help, orchestrate that, and obviously I kind of help,
113 00:20:57.620 ⇒ 00:21:04.089 Robert Tseng: put together the technical audit and the project management side, so we’re willing to kind of work with you to
114 00:21:04.640 ⇒ 00:21:09.209 Robert Tseng: the Explore solution here, but, yeah, this is just not going to…
115 00:21:09.620 ⇒ 00:21:16.609 Robert Tseng: That’s something that we need to be proactively talking about, because there’s no way the software is going to be ready by next week.
116 00:21:17.640 ⇒ 00:21:31.689 Robert Tseng: And then kind of, like, on the risks, the Cloudflare Edge worker requires maintenance. Things are always changing in MarTech. You need somebody who really understands, like, how to do maintenance. And, you know, you’ve seen the cost of, like, not having a MarTech expert.
117 00:21:32.450 ⇒ 00:21:41.110 Robert Tseng: And people who just work in silos. We’ve, you know, we’ve run risks of millions of dollars on overspending on various affiliate platforms.
118 00:21:41.520 ⇒ 00:21:57.259 Robert Tseng: kind of cycle through a bunch of Google Tag Manager people who still… you know, Google Tag Manager is only one skill set. It’s not enough to really, manage all the different integrations that the marketing team needs. And so, I’ve shared that diagram of, like, what
119 00:21:58.250 ⇒ 00:22:00.310 Robert Tseng: Kind of a trifecta of…
120 00:22:00.920 ⇒ 00:22:10.459 Robert Tseng: you know, creatives, software vendors, tech consultants, and then some people in the middle, kind of a CMO and a CIO, being able to orchestrate it all.
121 00:22:10.810 ⇒ 00:22:16.569 Robert Tseng: you know, functionally, there are no CIOs in a consumer product good company at this point.
122 00:22:16.720 ⇒ 00:22:21.569 Robert Tseng: So it’s probably more like a fractional CTO person, or some sort of technologist leader.
123 00:22:22.000 ⇒ 00:22:34.059 Robert Tseng: I think Zorad is that guy, he’s proven that he’s solved the hardest problems, you know, under… with our team. And so, yeah, I think we need to move into a direction where we’re budgeting properly for him.
124 00:22:34.330 ⇒ 00:22:38.360 Robert Tseng: Otherwise, we’re gonna take them off the project by the end of the month. So,
125 00:22:38.360 ⇒ 00:23:01.859 Robert Tseng: yeah, I think that’s kind of, we’ve talked about this past couple weeks, but, yeah, in order to keep him on, we need to extend. He wants to, now that he’s ramped up, he understands the complexity, he sees the scope, he would be able to take on all three of these risks and, you know, additional scope on the Martech side. But this is… these are his rates. And so, yeah, I think this is, you know, this is,
126 00:23:03.190 ⇒ 00:23:05.890 Robert Tseng: We’ve been able to, kind of.
127 00:23:06.140 ⇒ 00:23:11.159 Robert Tseng: foot the bill for the, kind of, transition period, be from… from,
128 00:23:11.270 ⇒ 00:23:15.360 Robert Tseng: Sebastian, to Andrew, and then now to Zoran.
129 00:23:15.680 ⇒ 00:23:18.720 Robert Tseng: And we think that Zoran is probably the best
130 00:23:18.960 ⇒ 00:23:38.810 Robert Tseng: has the best skill set to be able to take this on in the short term, until you’re able to hire someone internally, which maybe you don’t need to. Maybe having him part-time is enough to be able to do that, because he’s integrated with our team, we’re able to kind of get him everything he needs, but yeah, I think this is kind of the pitch there.
131 00:23:39.190 ⇒ 00:23:53.260 Robert Tseng: And then, I think, yeah, if you want, we risk narrowing our data team’s scope. So, because we’ve been so marketing… MarTech-focused, we’ve not been able to execute against our roadmap, and the way that I’ve structured my team, having
132 00:23:53.380 ⇒ 00:23:59.689 Robert Tseng: you know, data engineer, having, kind of, somebody, a strategist, analyst at the Henry’s level.
133 00:23:59.690 ⇒ 00:24:14.199 Robert Tseng: they’re not meant to just do kind of, like, one thing. Like, it’s just kind of not a great use of time and budget. So, I think, we’ve already talked about this, but really, drawing the lines clearly, separating out the budget so that we can keep
134 00:24:14.440 ⇒ 00:24:20.629 Robert Tseng: like, the folks on our data team. Otherwise, you know, at 30K a month, I have to restructure the team.
135 00:24:21.020 ⇒ 00:24:32.429 Robert Tseng: If we don’t take any action, I’m gonna pull Zoran off the project, and I would pull Dim Milade off the project. And so we would only have, Awash, Henry, and then me in an advisory capacity. We’d have to run it with 3 people.
136 00:24:34.220 ⇒ 00:24:49.039 Robert Tseng: But yeah, I think a lot of things probably break down from there, so I don’t really think that that should be the way forward, but just kind of giving you the heads up that that’s… those are the adjustments we will make, by the end of the month, if we’re not able to kind of
137 00:24:49.070 ⇒ 00:24:57.009 Robert Tseng: kind of find a way forward. Otherwise, if we’re able to kind of restructure the budget so that we can actually,
138 00:24:57.820 ⇒ 00:25:02.110 Robert Tseng: Hold these different pieces, that we’ve, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve added.
139 00:25:02.350 ⇒ 00:25:04.149 Robert Tseng: Over the past… past few months.
140 00:25:04.450 ⇒ 00:25:14.559 Robert Tseng: I think this is… this is my best estimate, that we would be asking for, 10K a month additional for… to have Zoran, specifically, just be the dedicated MarTech person.
141 00:25:14.880 ⇒ 00:25:22.719 Robert Tseng: and anything MarTech-related, he and, obviously, with support, project management from my team and with my advisory, he’ll be able to handle.
142 00:25:23.190 ⇒ 00:25:24.530 Robert Tseng: And then…
143 00:25:25.090 ⇒ 00:25:34.030 Robert Tseng: Yeah, with surf and going on Remo, we’re gonna shut them down by, you know, mid-November if we do not have a, we don’t have a way forward here. So…
144 00:25:34.550 ⇒ 00:25:42.990 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I think those are the main takeaways here. I’ll share the slide deck out. Hope you get a chance to read it. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks.
145 00:25:43.250 ⇒ 00:25:44.060 Robert Tseng: Right.