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My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality. You know, I'm gonna use these videos to try to improve my storytelling skills. Storytelling is incredibly, incredibly important. Art and skill. One of the things I learned in business is that 99% of the things people are doing uses talking, they're talking with words, or talking with emails, or writing things, the doing of the work is very little of what is happening, and people just interacting. So with that was to amp up this storytelling game here, I'm gonna give it a shot. So this story is about software I created called visualizer. And this story is about let's see a story of triumph, and struggle and expression, and creation, and failure, and redemption. Okay, perfect. So let's see if I can keep that storyline going. So the year 2018. And I had finished building conceptually, at least the knowledge visualization framework, business visualization framework, energy and information systems, and a zillion other things to get to the part where I was ready to convert this idea about energy transfer into software that could model businesses without a person needing a piece of paper, a pencil, and a calculator and a ruler, because that's too hard. Apparently, I had created a website that describes a way to visualize a business using those simple tools. I never promoted it. It was live, nobody clicked on it. And I was thinking, it would be better to do this in software, I have a background in software architecture, I've been a software architect. And I am can write one line of code because I can barely speak English. And learning a computer language is, I would say, I don't want to use the word impossible, not structurally aligned with my way of thinking when it comes to language. Because I model language as a flowchart that I'm reading right now as I'm talking. And different languages have different flowcharts different structures. And I've never been successful and mapping my structure of language to another structure of language, either conceptually, or literally, like this word equals this word, because the sounds are different. And what I'm doing is I'm matching sounds, pictures of sounds, to letters and letters to words, and words to flowcharts that represent grammar. So I can talk right now is a divergence of this story, but not really, because it's about explaining things. So I decided to explain this idea of business visualization in software, my secret sauce, in terms of software development is I can visualize the architecture of what needs to be done. And I can explain it to developers who build things using languages I don't understand. And I can also create, like schematics and diagrams of how the data flows around everything, and see how everything connects together, which is essentially an object model of what would happen in the real world. And then a developer then turns that into magical computer code that runs somewhere on the planet makes things happen. So in 2018, I decided I was going to invest some money in this software development project, to create first case, a single snapshot of a business system, which Dan Rome was he's my friend, genius artist. And he was calling them roofing diagrams, because there's like Fineman diagrams, Ruby diagrams, idea of mapping system, visually spatially color coded to represent what's happening in this system. And the system I was mapping was a business. So I had already at this point had models of the business system animation, simple animations that I made using like the most basic computer tools available. And I had done that myself first and then hired somebody to like tune them up. I've been using the same the same exact models. And and so I created the code specification based on my website, business visualization.com, which is the reason I created that website was to be able to explain this to a software developer, found a software developer online, who was great. His name was Max. And he listened to what I was saying, and I hired him. And we were able to create a PDF If that I could print out and create a poster of a single snapshot in a business in the way that I'm imagining it with the money, the processes and the people. And I thought I was like we did it. Yeah, I've been in this position before with this idea of these ideas. Because I made something something was created. It was on my wall, and I could point to it, it was no longer in my mind. And in the way I see it, in my mind is not the way that I'm explaining it. I translated it into this way, so I can show it to people. And I showed it to people. And as usual, my experience with people with these ideas, mostly the answers, so but who cares? Or that's interesting, what do you do with it? And how does it make money? What I realized, with this single snapshot, which is true, is that this is no different than a spreadsheet with numbers, like a single snapshot of a single period of time, like January 1, today, what happened in this business, that's what the picture was a single snapshot in time. Which is cool in the sense that it represents something accurately, in the way that I'm describing proportionally by sequence overlapping color coded everything was exactly what I had in mind. But it's like looking at a report. And business systems, just like a marble rolling down a ramp is a dynamic system. And looking at a marbles position and time on a ramp with like some kind of diagram or schematic even. That's interesting. But doesn't tell you how fast it's going. It doesn't tell you how to make it go faster, you can't looking at a picture, hear the sound of friction at that instant in time of a marble going down a ramp, I have a visual spatial model that includes sounds and so I can take a snapshot of marble and remember what it sounded like at that instant. But other people can't, don't seem to be able to. So looking at this picture on my wall, this picture, this magical poster that I made after spending by this point, I spent hundreds of 1000s of dollars on this project, trying to explain these ideas. And I got to the point where to me it made perfect sense, it makes perfect sense. Oh, it's a Reuben diagram of like a snapshot in time of visitors how amazing no one care. And what I realized, as I've often realized is that for me, this creative expression, and getting this idea out of my mind is more important to me than other people, unless it can be a practical thing to them. Now I can look at this diagram, I know exactly what to do. That's the thing. I know where it's red. And I know why. And I've also read because I know what the software is doing to create the color coding on the diagram. And red means bad. So So in this diagram, where there's something that's red, that means that something is below a certain threshold, and that I need to do something to improve the performance of the system at that point. And the doing of the something is usually well is always either improving something that people know or people are doing, improving the process that the people are doing to make it more efficient by reducing steps, making it go faster, or throwing money on it, to invest in some kind of new technology or tool or something at that step. That makes it go faster. Because time is honey. And businesses have an income velocity in dollars per hour, listen to US dollars per hour. And that's what I'm trying to maximize. I realized once again back to the drawing board, that the software that I created that created a single snapshot in time was not adequate to describe the dynamic model, which I knew anyway. And this was a stepping stone to that. That's all we're talking about here energy transfer potential money to kinetic money, potential energy to kinetic energy and knowing the state of every single step along the way. So I decided I was gonna bet big on this and spend hundreds or hundreds of 1000s of dollars more money with no ROI, no business model, no plan to connect this idea to Salesforce, which is which is software that manages half of this model, which is the sales funnel, which is the front end of the process with the potential money, the money that's flowing into a system and you haven't captured yet the potential money. The reason I picked Salesforce two reasons. First of all, was the biggest tool that did what I'm describing, and they had an API and the API wouldn't They want me to connect to it and and automate the generation of these models. The downstream after the sales funnel, you have the income statement, which is the kinetic money. And that can be modeled using QuickBooks Online, which is a tool that is an accounting tool, because that's the money you have. Once the money comes in, then you measure it on the income statement. And when it's potential money, you measure it on a sales funnel. Just like you have potential energy and kinetic energy, same ideas. you're converting this to that through processes. So I hired a few developers, whole team of people super cool people in India, and it worked out and they built components of visualizer, along with Max, and I built a software that does exactly what I'm describing. And I have some images below some videos below this offer. And made it from one meeting. One meeting with a guy named Peter Schwartz, who was the visionary at Salesforce. I got connected to him through Dan Rome, because Dan Rome had done work for Salesforce at different times. And I had this meeting at the Salesforce tower. In San Francisco, beautiful buildings, gigantic, beautiful building. I wasn't on the top floor, but I was close. I was up there, looking out through windows looking at, you know, the city. Super cool. We had a good demo, I was super excited for my one meeting at Salesforce. And at this point, I had spent $400,000, I guess, on this software piece of this project after spending a ton more on other things, trying things. Again, no ROI. No business model. But it seemed important. It seemed important to explain this idea ever since I was a kid. So I met with Dan and we had rehearsed, we had a little deck. And what the objective of the meeting was, was just to get Salesforce interested in this idea, because my goal is today, as well. Am I architecture tactic 250 Get this idea to Marc Benioff, who is the CEO of Salesforce, because he has an objective to plant 1 trillion trees to improve climate stability and create habitat. Now, I like that philosophy is as part of Project light is creating habitat. And whether or not trees are the best use of money, I don't know. But I liked the philosophy of it. And this seemed like a good direction to pursue. And so I was gearing up this tactic to to meet Peter Schwartz, so that I couldn't get an introduction to Marc Benioff, and give him this technology plus some other technology that I'll describe later called Cloud miner to optimize the sales funnel, and take a certain percentage of the money that's created this way that would never have been created. If this didn't exist, and do something good for our shared habitat, like planting trees, or whatever he would want to do that he would think would be good. That was it. That was the entire plan after spending four grand on this. So I show up at Salesforce with Dan I got my little new bag, my leather bag, I got you know, my my 3d printed gears, I got my pitch deck. Funny thing, my laptop brand new died on the way out there. But Dan had a backup. So I used it. So it's already like my plan was already derailed. The first thing this is so this is the like one of the funnier parts. We get in this meeting, I meet Peter Schwartz. Now Peter Schwartz. And one of the things he did was he designed the user interface for the movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise movie, which I liked. And it's a super cool user interface with like, you move your hand and like things visualize and stuff. And I liked that because it'd be the perfect interface for visualizing perfect interacting with your business in the same way. And the technology exists today to do that, like in VR. So basically, I was thinking like, Okay, I could get like a user interface out of this introduction of Marc Benioff. And you know, what a good trajectory, a path through the system to achieve the world I imagined. So, the meeting, we do introductions, everything's cool. One thing about Peter Schwartz was the picture I saw of Peter shorts was from the year 2000. And this was 2018. So it's 18 years later, and it didn't occur to me the picture that I saw was from the movie Minority Report. He was older than I had imagined. Because I saw the picture I just assumed that was like, what he was but in the first thing he said the first thing before we said after he said, Hello, how you doing introductions? You said before you start I just want to tell you like I'm retiring and like three days and I'm leaving this job. And I was crushed. Because I had spent all this money off as ever. flew out there was super excited and I knew In the first five minutes before I started, that it wasn't going to work. And he was letting me know in a polite way, like no matter what I said, or how great this was, that was the beginning of it of this discussion. And if I had known that before, I don't think I would have gone in this direction. But that's how life is full of twists and turns. So we did the presentation, and I never heard from him again, which I knew was going to happen. And the lesson, there's so many lessons in this one is I have invested in things, taking risks for this project, in a way that is out of calibration with the rest of the risks that I have taken in my life. And that's like a personal, I guess, reflection for me about, I don't want to say being realistic, because that's not what this is about, but about the risks I'm willing to take with the money that I have, and the time I have left to live on this plan. And what could I learn from each of these things, to try to improve the likelihood of success and reduce the costs of being wrong at strategic points. So that's what I learned from this story about business visualization. But the other thing I learned, which was more important, was, it doesn't matter how accurate my model of businesses is visually spatially. And it doesn't matter that this matches a model of knowledge visualization. And it doesn't matter that there's a generic way of using this to explain the motion of enter anything through any system like a generic way to visualize thermodynamics. None of that matters. What matters in the context of the meeting that I was in, was how does this make money? Has this make money has always been a weak area of my explanation? Because I know I can look at the diagram and know the answer to that, but other people can't. Because I know what's creating the diagram. So what I learned from this is I have to make something practical, something practical, that I can create that someone can push a button and it produces money. And that's what I did next. If CLOUD NINE