Sure. Ryan, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation. I'm Jeremy Hartman, and I lead the venture forward initiative for GoDaddy.

I really enjoy doing two things, Ryan. One is to create an understanding. So much in our world today that is new, or that is horribly complicated. And I don't believe anybody likes to permanently live in a world where things are complicated or hard to understand. So to be able to create some understanding of the world around us is something, that I'm passionate about. And secondly, I love to build organizations. I love to tap into what people's superpower is and bring that out into a common shared goal with organizations. So if I can do that every day, I love that. And that has a lot to do, frankly, with why I love my work is because of venture forward and the GoDaddy. We're studying and looking at and measuring the impact of these incredible entrepreneurs in our country. They're having such an amazing impact on our economy. And every day, they're starting something new. They're thinking differently. And be able to work with them is is that in and of itself get me out of bed every day.

I'm so glad I'm so glad you sent me this question in advance so I could be prepared because I just fumbled this one horribly because there's so many I'm a I love I'm a voracious consumer of information, particularly from people who can't explain a period of time or a situation in just amazing terms as a gift to be able to do that. I came across this book a few months ago called the Accidental President, by AJ Behm. Sorry, AJ, if I just pronounce your last name wrong. But it's about president Truman and his first four months in office. And here is a guy who was senator and and horribly uninformed about what was happening with the presidency. And it's his first four months. He dealt with the surrender of Germany, the surrender of Japan, the testing the successful testing of a nuclear weapon, the dropping of a nuclear weapon, the creation of the United Nations, Potsdam Conference, extreme starvation in Europe. This is a guy who had no practical experience or informed view of what was actually happening in the world as president, and he came in and dealt with all these situations with one colors. And AJ does a masterful job of talking about someone who had to deal with an amazing amount of change around him, and I think it was just so applicable to our world today of how a lot of us feel, frankly, have so much change happening and trying to understand and make sense of it and be successful within it.

but I hope I took lessons from it. We'll see how we'll see how applicable they are. I don't think I'm I'm solving, I don't think I'm trying to solve the end of World War two in my job, but sometimes it does feel very challenging.

So, it's a great question. And the way, I'll start, talking about what a microbusiness is to first give a definition of how we typically think of a small business. And we typically think of a small business as being a business that's anywhere from 10 to 250 people. And if anyone who has worked inside a business before, they know there's a really big difference between being 10 people versus being 250 people. Micro businesses, the ones that we're tracking in The US, 94% of them have less than 10 employees. And what's really amazing about these micro businesses, and there are over 40,000,000 of them in The US today, is that to a large extent, our ability to see these micro businesses, like we see small businesses and and economic data or in a census view is just not happening because these businesses are too small or too new to really be seen. So not only do 94% of them have less than 10 employees and and about half of them are solopreneurs. But, one in four make over $4,000 per month, and 31% were created in 2020 or later. So these businesses are new. They are young, and we're the more and more that we see and study them, they are incredibly ambitious, particularly after COVID. They're drawing, entrepreneurs into our economy that if you look at our history as a workforce in this country, we've had a hard time assimilating certain, certain demographics into our workforce, and we have people who have been on the outside looking into our economy now able to participate it from a microbusiness point of view. These microbusinesses, in some cases, do provide all the income in a household. But in many, many cases, they're also supplementary income, really important supplementary income, by the way. This could be anywhere from a $100 a month to a thousand bucks a month who are helping parents pay for college or save up for a trip, a family trip, or just to put food on the table in a better way than they could before. So micro businesses are very different than small businesses. And if I were to ask any of your listeners to take away one thing when it came to micro businesses is that they are small, but much more importantly, they're really different than how we understand small businesses, which is why we need to treat them very differently.

Well, this this venture forward is part, is an initiative that comes from the company GoDaddy, and we work with, we have 20,000,000 customers around the world who are entrepreneurs. And we care so passionately about our customers that we thought it was important, in a very obvious sense to get to know them better, particularly what their economic impact was because we felt that they were wholly different than how we looked at a lot a lot of other parts of the economy. And not just to better understand how to service them better, but also to make sure that other parts of our country, we're seeing them as well, other parts of the world, whether it be policymakers or academics or influencers, that we're studying them and trying to understand them just like we would other parts of our economy. We started this work in 2019, and it took us about a year and a half. If any if any of your listeners are are really into data science or hardcore data scientists, they'll understand, this when I say it took us a year and a half just to get the data right. We needed to find data that obviously protected the identities of all of our customers, and nothing that is available anywhere publicly from venture forward, in any way, betrays the confidence, the information that our customers have and that we have of their information, but also allows us to see with great accuracy, where these businesses are all the way down to a ZIP code level and what kind of impact they're having and be able to update that information monthly. Took us a year and a half to figure out how to do that with 20,000,000 of the micro businesses that we serve in The US. It took us as I said, took us a year and a half to do that, and suddenly, we're in we're in twenty twenty. And, suddenly COVID hits. And up until COVID, we've sort of been asking ourselves, like, what's the real power of this data gonna be? Who's who's gonna find it useful? We knew as a company would be useful because we'd simply understand them better. Better. We understand where they are and what their migration patterns may be around the country. If if one state changes laws, tax laws, or, or new broadband policy, would that shift where micro businesses might wanna be in the country? We'd be able to see those sort of patterns. We're able to see we'd be able to see what kind of impact micro businesses have on economies. We know they raise income levels across the community. We know that they create more wage jobs. We know that they lower unemployment. Particularly, they lower unemployment amongst the low income unemployed, part of our economy. But we didn't know who would be, the quote, unquote, the buyer of this information. We give it away for free, but we didn't know who'd be most interested in this information and what they would use it for. And then when COVID hit, it became really clear who was gonna use this information, and that was cities. Cities all over the country, I'm sure we all felt it in our own cities. You would walk down the streets and see businesses closed. You'd see businesses having to change their business model overnight for maybe being a restaurant that served people in person to only offer takeout, or a chef who no longer had a job at the restaurant, but then turned to do online courses through Zoom. Stories of like that, we all have dozens of them. But our data was able to show a picture of this, a view into this that you couldn't get anywhere else. And so COVID was horrible for all sorts of reasons, but it really shined a light on how important this data was for policymakers to understand what was happening in their communities and then also how do they actually need to support it. Many of the policymakers that reached out to us city on a city by city basis, it would if it was an hour long call, we'd spend forty five minutes on the call just giving them insight into what was happening with their micro business community and economy. The last fifteen minutes would be like, well, what what can I do to help them? In the two years or so since we've been sharing this data through COVID, that percentage of time has flipped. We're now more and more cities and policymakers understanding who these microbusinesses are simply because the their economy and their communities have been so impacted by them. Then now we're spending the most of our time talking about a lot of how do we actually support them. So it's been in a very hard time. It's been very rewarding to be able to help city officials and and and business advocates and economic development development folks, give them some data and some insights they didn't have otherwise to really pay attention to how the economy is shifting underneath all of our feet.

Well, the the one of the first instances that we had, this was so boy, this was, like, in the first few months of COVID, city called Denison, Texas, a small community, I think about six if I remember correctly, about 60 miles north of Dallas. And, unsolicited, we got a a press release from the head of I think it's Tata was head of economic development there. Just unsolicited out of the blue in our inbox. It's a press release, and he sent it to us because he found this off of our venture forward website. And he said, thought you might wanna see this. And in it, it was a press release, saying that the town had used our data to create a business case, spend money on, basically, consultants to get their small businesses downtown up and online. Because these were brick and mortar businesses that do not have a website to be able to do transactions or sell or market their goods, and this town made a business case to, I think, to get I can't remember the amount, but it was a it was a 5 figure amount, for a very small town to get those businesses up and online. And we work with far bigger communities on on and help support far bigger projects. But that was probably the most rewarding because, one, it was unsolicited, and, two, it was just this incredibly entrepreneurial economic development director in a relatively small town outside the huge town of Dallas who just took it upon himself to do something in the very early stages of COVID and get I think it was the 100 businesses in in and along Main Street, get them up and online. It was awesome.

I think the reasons are tremendously varied. I think sometimes we like to be monolithic in why they do it. But I I because these businesses are so personal to the entrepreneurs that start them, I think all the reasons where they come down to personal reasons. And we call these entrepreneurs everyday entrepreneurs. We we we think about them when we classify them in our own head at GoDaddy as differently because an entrepreneur could be the person on Inc Magazine or it could be Elon Musk or could be the person who secures VC funding. Those are the entrepreneurs that we're serving. And we call them the everyday entrepreneurs because they're all around us. I mean, Ryan, in some ways, you're one because you started this podcast. Right? There are people who have an idea. They have a dream. They have a hobby, and and they wanna try and turn it into a business. I mean, it's really that simple. And at GoDaddy, because of what we sell, we're able to see what is generally the very first step that these everyday entrepreneurs take in their business, and that is to get a domain, cupcakes.com, for example, and they say, I wanna think I wanna I'm great at making cupcakes, and I wanna sell them. There was a that my first day on the job or my my second day on the job, I flew down and I sat down. We call them guides, and they're folks who are on the calls with our customers every day. And about two thirds of the GoDaddy workforce are guides. And I was able to, hotwire into his calls and listen to a call he was having with a woman in Omaha, Nebraska. And she was a she described herself as being a homemaker, and she, really loved making candles, and she had for most of her life. She She was telling all this to the guy, by the way. It wasn't like we had this in my files on her. And she loved making candles, and her sons were were getting to the end of their high school career. And she thought, maybe I could sell a few candles. And she was trying to figure out she was so passionate about the candles, but she had no idea about how to go about creating, a website in order to sell them. So she's on the phone with us trying to figure out how that thing that you and I might know is the URL at the top of the screen matched the images that were on her screen and how they controlled each other. It was an amazing conversation because she was so terribly passionate about her candles and wanting to sell them to people who love them as well. She wanted to do that to make some extra money, not to become, quote, unquote, unemployed, not to, quote, unquote, join the workforce because she loved making candles and sharing that love with a community who might enjoy it as well. And the word she used to describe her business was so different than what you'd hear from sort of any other business person. And there are just millions and millions of people like her. My second call that day was with two gentlemen from, I think it was Alabama. It was Alabama or Georgia. I can't remember which. And they had, they were brothers, and they had two pickup trucks that they weren't using as much as they thought, and they wanted to create a business to rent them out. And I don't know how much money they expected to make, but it clearly wasn't a business that was gonna change their fortunes, overnight. But it was still a business, and they were still being entrepreneurs. And it's that kind of spirit, that people take very personally and comes out in very personal ways that is the root of of all GoDaddy customers.

Well, it so I'll I'll give you there's two ways to think about well, actually, I'll give you three ways to think about impact. I mean, one is just on the economy in general, and, again, I'll I'll plug our website, at Venture Forward. But there are the economic impact of microbusiness on this country is tremendous. It offers a level. We we've looked at the impact in microbusinesses going all the way back to the 2008, recession that we had. And those communities, even back then, that had a greater density of micro businesses, I mean, all things being equal, population, education, employment, etcetera. All things being equal, those communities that had a higher percentage of active micro businesses did better in terms of getting through the recession faster than those that did. When we took a look at what was happening during COVID and the depths of the COVID economy, those communities that had a higher percentage or greater density of micro businesses, the unemployment amongst the low income population, that population which was being hit the hardest was significantly less. It was heavily mitigated than not. We did not see that in areas that had high densities of small businesses. We did see in areas with high densities of micro businesses. So micro businesses, they can start quickly. They, they are inexpensive to start, because, generally, they're started online. You immediately have a marketplace that is the world, whereas a lot of small businesses are started from a brick and mortar perspective, and their marketplace might be three square miles around them. And so there's all sorts of things that can happen with a micro business that doesn't happen with a traditional small business. We've also seen that when you start a micro business and you're online, that your ability to get mentorship or community support happens so easily, where if you start a small business and you're in a community that's not doing very well, you may walk outside of your shop and look to your left and your right, and you're having people in the same same boat you're in, which sometimes might not be a very great boat. And they might not be able to help you as opposed to being able to easily click a world away, or a couple states away to find someone who might be in a different situation to help you and yours. So the economic impact, is significant. The personal impact is tremendous as well. We have some of our favorite customers that were just highlighted in our latest ad campaign, the the Cupcake Sisters. They started, an organization called Furlough or not Cupcake, Cheesecake Sisters. They started an organ a company called Furlough Cheesecake. And during the, I forgot the what year this was. It was, I think in the early two thousand tens that the the government, went through a period where they were furloughing government workers. And these two sisters based just outside DC decided, while they were on furlough, they needed to make some income. They're really good at making cheesecakes. They decided to try and make some money selling cheesecakes. They started their website. We took notice of them very early on. A wonderful, wonderful entrepreneurs. Wonderful to talk to. Super inspiring. Well, from just selling a couple dozen cheesecakes every week, now they have a brick and mortar store that's opened up. I believe it's in Maryland. They have a thriving online business. They have distribution deals with Walmart. They're just a force to be reckoned with. And from a personal experience, I look at what happened with them and with their families. It's pretty remarkable what they're able to do when they took their careers into their own hands. I'd say the third area, Ryan, when you see when you talk about impact is just how inspirational this is, I think, for everybody to see it. Back to the top of of our conversation, There's so much change happening in the world. There's so much it can feel out of our control. When you get on the phone or on Zoom or in person with an everyday entrepreneur, they are taking that portion of the world that they can control, and they're bringing it within their control. They're doing something amazing with it. It's just so inspiring.

to get to try one of their, their cheesecakes? I have. Absolutely. I, we I first started working with them well, I first heard about them right after I started, and we wanted to do a a customer profile for some early ventures forward work. And I reached out to them, and and so I formed a better relationship with them early on and ordered cheesecake, and it was excellent.

High recommendation. If even if you are a fan of cheesecake, go meet them. They will they will light your world up. They're amazing.

What kind of role have I seen from

I don't know if I've met any of our, everyday entrepreneurs where they think technology first. And that's one of the the hardest things about the GoDaddy business and serving them is they don't think about technology. They don't wanna think about technology. They wanna think about the amazing product or service they're creating. They wanna serve their customers, and everything else is second order priority. And so at GoDaddy, we like to think that the websites we're helping people build, the amazing commerce tools that we have, the arrays in which they can personalize their content on a brand or the center of their business, and in many ways that that they are. But our customers really would just love that technology to work as simply and as powerfully as possible without them putting a lot of time into it. In terms of the, automation, I don't know if if automation, I'm not sure it's anywhere on the radar screen of our of our customers. Maybe it is if if they get a whole lot bigger. But right now, get on some of those calls with our guys and our customers, and a lot of them are just trying to make sure I I see the right number of email boxes. I want I want some security layers on my website that will stop me from getting hacked. I wanna be able to sell my products on 10 different marketplaces that only have one control center by which to control it. I wanna create a brand that's beautiful, but I don't know how to do Photoshop. How do I do that? These are the the hard questions, that they're asking themselves and really looking for someone like GoDaddy to help them out with.

Well, everybody, I think with every generation and when I I can look at we all have we all have stories we all have stories of of helping our parents. If you're of a certain age, helping our parents get online. We all have stories if you have a certain age of of a generation or two below us being able to work a piece of technology that that seems completely foreign to us. I think we all adopt and embrace technology in our own way and in our own time, depending on a lot of factors. And that's true with all the everyday entrepreneurs they get to come in contact with. For some, it it happens really naturally, and for some, it doesn't. For some, they get they get blocked at certain areas of of it than it does for others. I think what we've learned at GoDaddy is try and make it as accessible as possible and allow people to go at their own speed. That's the best thing we can possibly do. You know, it's it's, we just started this ad campaign that is really it was really inspiring to see for me, and I've been at the company now for four years that talks about all the firsts all the firsts that, every entrepreneurs go with. You have your first sale. You have your first customer in place you never heard of before. Maybe you have your first thousand dollar day or thousand dollar a month. Small business people have a lot of firsts. And at GoDaddy, we're trying to create technology and tools that help our customers deal with all those firsts, and they're all gonna happen at different times in different ways in different levels of importance to our customers, and, we're trying to hit them all.

One of the first cities that we got in front of was was Gilbert, Arizona, and this was before COVID. This was, I think, three months before COVID really hit. And Gilbert, Arizona, when we met with them early in 2020 actually, early in 2020, I think. Very early, like, January. They were a ton of 250,000 people, and they were doubling doubling their population every ten years. They were, according to many economic measures, one of the most, prosperous, healthy towns in the country, not because they had a lot of income per se, but because they were highly educated, highly employed, healthy migration patterns, lots of educational opportunities, good schools. And they were doing great as a town, and the mayor at the time, mayor Daniels, came in to get a briefing with us. GoDaddy has a big presence, in her backyard. And so she took the meeting, and we were trying to figure out just how do we make this data important to someone like mayor Daniels. And so she said she'd give us some feedback. When we told her that she had 36,000 micro businesses in her city, That's when everything changed for her because 36,000 micro businesses is a big number. And and from from that point of the conversation, she started rallying off all these people that she knew, but she hadn't really thought about about these micro businesses. And what's important is she's coming from a town that's doing really, really well. But, clearly, the people in that town really loved having a side gig because it was just important who they were, what their identity was. You have conversations like that with mayor Daniels or you have conversations with the mayor of Chicago where her focus when COVID hit, but she was thinking very hard about the South Side Of Chicago where the economy was a little bit less resilient than in other parts of Chicago. And how do I save those small businesses there that might otherwise be in jeopardy because it's a part of our a part of her community that economically wasn't doing very well? So my lesson one that I've learned is micro businesses aren't about helping a certain segment of your of your population. It's about helping all segments, all demographics of your population, and they can be helpful in a myriad of ways. When we went and met with the mayor of Boise, Idaho, her filter, her lens for thinking about micro businesses was, hey. The cost of living in Boise has gone up so high. I don't wanna force out people who've been here for a long period of time because they can't afford it already. I want them to be able to stay, and micro businesses might be able to support giving them that extra 2 or $300 a month to deal with the rise in the cost of living that's happened in Boise. So venture forward and GoDaddy, how can you help me get more, micro businesses here? So think about all demographics, and then two, be really clear on what's the problem you're trying to solve with micro businesses. So these come at this from very certain problem statements or very certain opportunity statements. And then I'd also say that if you look at the the top challenges by mic that micro business, every entrepreneurs will tell you they have. And this has been consistent across all the surveying that we've done. Those top three include they want more training, more learning, upskilling, access to capital, and they want, technical help. So the top three are things that their local communities are really right to be able to help provide them. When it comes to upscaling, they would much rather they would much rather be learn from each other than they would from a company like GoDaddy. We would love to help them anytime that they want, and they they know where to reach us. But they really love to learn from each other. And city leaders are in a great position to try and form those networks within their cities. And so we work with a lot of cities on how exactly do that. What's the coalitions of of NGOs and policymakers and city leaders to create that kind of ecosystem within a city where micro businesses can be in touch with each other and learn. And then how do you deliver the kinds of skills training into that ecosystem that these micro business owners will just completely eat up and will greatly support their business. We have such a strong ecosystem and infrastructure around supporting small businesses, but we don't have something similar for micro businesses, and they really do need different things. Just quick antidote for you. I was in Long Beach. Talking to some economic development officials about a year ago, and, I think the head of economic development and no. It wasn't him. One of the economic development officials started started saying that he had created a jobs fair in his community, really wanting to reach out to this population and support them. And, my answer in the friendliest way possible was, these people aren't looking for jobs. That's not how they think about their micro business. They think about their micro businesses as as following their passion, as starting something new. They still need help, but they're not gonna be attracted to something called a jobs fair. It's like that woman making candles. She would never go to a jobs fair. And then another question I got was, well, how do you think about, microbusiness verticals, like services or manufacturing or restaurants? I'm like, I don't think microbusiness entrepreneurs think of themselves in verticals either. Again, they're just doing something they'd love to be able to do. So the cities, what do we suggest? One, really understand what you're trying to solve, micro businesses. Two, create that kind of ecosystem and infrastructure where you can easily engage them. Three, give them the kinds of skills that that they want from their very own community. And four, realize that they're very different than small businesses and educate yourself on how they're different.

Yes. Yes. And yes. So, we have a lot of trial and error on this at at GoDaddy as well because something that we pride ourselves doing really well is is not just selling great products, but also supporting our customers outside of that selling cycle with things like support and training and so on. And so we have a great library online, frankly, of videos that you watch anytime that you want on how to do certain things that we think will be very applicable in micro business and we're never entrepreneur. But you know what? The the the passive dreaming video approach to learning just isn't all that effective. And that's just example of a lot of ways trying to pass on skills to a hungry audience can be effective or not effective. I was doing a series of interviews a couple months ago, and it was like a lightning round with a lot of, reporters in different parts of the country. And they all were asking me at the end of the interview is the same question. You know, what what's next for GoDaddy in terms of helping the everyday entrepreneur? And and I said, it's really I don't think the everyday entrepreneur wants all this continued help from GoDaddy outside of our great products. I think what they really want is they wanna be more connected to the entrepreneurs that are across the street from them, across the city from them, or even a couple cities away from them. And that's who they're gonna learn the best from, and that's they're gonna find common ground with. And so with cities, they oftentimes want to be at the center of the training. They want to be the one offering the training. In some cases, that is useful. In useful. In other cases, setting up the infrastructure so that micro business entrepreneurs can talk and work with each other. It's all allowing them to network with each other. It's it's meeting places. It's online forums. It is it is content you can go grab online and then share with other people. It's it's not hard to figure out the kinds of content everyday entrepreneurs need to be successful. It's much trickier to figure out where it's easiest for them to get it and what's the best way for them to absorb and digest it. And that's frankly where we spend a lot of time working in the cities.

It's a really great question because it it it raises it raises a really important point we've been seeing. Sorry. It raises it surfaces and, something we've been seeing in the data over the last six months that we haven't seen before. And that's that people starting micro businesses post COVID are way more serious about them than they were before COVID. We asked a question in some of our surveys around the ambitions, how big they want them to be. In this last round, 14% wanna had aspirations for their micro business to be a unicorn, which is a with evaluation of a billion dollars. Now 14% of all micro businesses are not gonna become a unicorn. But if you have the ambitions to become a unicorn, another 14% went said they wanted them to be a mid sized business. So if if you're the candle maker, from Omaha, Nebraska, and you're the person who wants to believes that your micro business can be a unicorn. On day one, two, and three, your actions may look kinda similar to each other. But I bet not too many days after that, your actions in starting your business are gonna begin to look very different. And you're gonna start thinking about, wow. Maybe I should have an EIN. Maybe I should start thinking about hiring people. Maybe I should start thinking about having a better profile in my local community if I wanna become that big. Like, you just go on a very different kind of trajectory, which means that your relationship with your community and your government suddenly becomes on your radar screen. Whereas the woman from Omaha, Nebraska, the candlemaker, that was probably nowhere on her radar screen whatsoever as being important, or something that she ever really wanted to deal with. So we're now dealing with, to a large degree, a very different class of everyday entrepreneurs since COVID, and they are gonna be looking to their cities in ways that previous everyday entrepreneurs did not. So our message to cities is get ready because now they're gonna have expectations of you. They're gonna expect that you understand, why what they're doing is important, that why what they're doing is gonna be significant, and the kinds of helps and services they need from you. And that's gonna become one of their priorities in terms of how they feel about their local government. So I can't speak to the amount of trust people have in government or don't, but it seems to me that trust is oftentimes about being able to deliver on what you said you're gonna deliver on. If you have an elected official who is talking about creating a solid, broad based, inclusive economy in her city, micro businesses had better be part of that plan. And if it's part of that plan, she should have a good idea of who they are, where they are, what they're doing, and how they're different.

I think any program that is built by one for many to absorb is is maybe always run the risk of of breaking that breaking expectations because it's very hard to do one thing and make it applicable to many, especially in today's world. Now I get I I'll even have GoDaddy to be part of that one. We have really great content, online to help people deal with a lot of very current issues around the micro business, but that content isn't always accessible to everybody who might need it. It may not be in the right place, or it may not use the right kind of of language. It may not it it just may not work for their ears or how they digest information, and so that may miss their expectations. I I think the the best way around it is to really set up the ability for these entrepreneurs to work with each other and then give them the tools to be able to do that and the space to be able to do that because people will find people who will help. People will find people who they will form their own communities, and they will engage with those communities, and they will create their own content. And it's amazing to watch it happen. So I think you need both, frankly. I think you need the experts who might have a really great field of view like we do on what's happening and what's coming down the pipe for private entrepreneurs, the trends in commerce, for example, the ability to talk to you about how to get your products on the eBay, the Pinterest, the Etsy, the Amazon, the marketplaces all at once. Like, those are great things for someone like GoDaddy to be able to talk about how to do it and and where to go and what tools you need. But there's a million other questions that we can always foresee or always know the answer to, and that's why creating these networks and these communities are so important for us to do or we're not in the middle of it. And we think that cities are a great place for that to happen because people have a natural affinity to their city. They have a natural affinity to where they live. They're gonna walk outside their homes and their offices and they'll talk to other people, and that's where really wonderful and amazing and powerful information and sharing happens.

I would I would applaud and love for that to see that to happen. I would applaud it even more if someone took build a model that was highly flexible to learn what works best for micro businesses. We're doing some work with with Las Vegas, this the city and larger area around Las Vegas. And Las Vegas, their the density of micro businesses in Las Vegas for a metro of that size is 2.5 times the average. Las Vegas has over 300,000 micro businesses in it, and, this was also a city that had 30% unemployment, if I have my facts right, during the depths of COVID. And a lot of these micro businesses were started during then, and they have I I met, two months ago about 40 business leaders from the Las Vegas area. And I gotta tell you, they they're like game on when it comes on no pun intended. They're like game on when it comes to supporting their small micro businesses completely separate of The Strip and the entertainment that goes on there. But they were so in tune with what was happening with their economy outside of the Strip and the hotels and how many people relying on that and starting these businesses and and how powerful it could be. And and they, on their own, brush the idea of starting something equivalent to the chamber of commerce before micro businesses. And to their great credit, they realized that we can't do a chamber of commerce for a chamber like micro businesses because you it's just it's not a parallel. It's like an analog and a digital in some ways. So they're trying to wrestle with this very question, and, frankly, they're the best peep best people to wrestle with it because they're so on top of what's happened with their community. I think they'll remain really flexible with with whatever model they come up with, but they're trying to do this exact same thing because they realize how much a part of their economy is tied to micro businesses and how many people in a rapidly growing city are wanting to start these micro businesses and how important it is to the economy?

When we, when we first started when we first raised the idea of trying to measure the impact of micro businesses, We went out and we talked to a lot of academics about how we might do that. And the vast majority of them said, oh, it's already been done. All you have to do is look at broadband data. Like and if you understand broadband data, you'll understand everything you need to know about about micro business activity because where there is broadband, the assumption was there would be micro businesses, but that is not true. The data does not actually bear that out. If any of us have either been in schools or have kids lately or have kids in schools now, you'll know that just because, some school gets a donation of a 100 iPads doesn't mean that those iPads will immediately be successful and used properly. It takes training. It takes curriculum. It takes someone to manage those iPads. It takes someone helping explain them to the students. It takes a lot of work to make just that bit of technology, something that's powerful. The second thing is about broadband. Is it it is a technology. It is very powerful, and most micro businesses would not occur without it. But it doesn't mean that there's actual engagement with the technology. It just means that it's there. And, as you as you heard is go back to the the candle maker from Omaha, Nebraska. Like, she had broadband. That wasn't her problem. She had a lot of problems on top of that. So, yeah, technology is really important. I don't mean to minimize it, but way too often, we hear from policymakers and from, you know, from principals of schools and school administrators to say, if we can just get broadband in here or if we can get everybody a laptop, our problems will be solved. That's not the case. And that's why we hear again and again from our everyday entrepreneurs that in their top three concerns, one of them is I wanna continue to learn. Like, this stuff is changing every day, and I need to get better at what I do. And as I grow my business, I have so many firsts that are happening every day, every month, every quarter, every year, and I need to learn how to apply this technology so I can have more firsts. And that's why broadband, is not the end all be all important, but it's not what actually solves the problem.

after. Is is that kinda what I'm hearing from you? Yeah. It's the engagement. I mean and and we're we we're we've had a lot we do a lot of work with academics because they're just they just have this freedom to sort of understand data in ways that, you know, a lot of us have to tie it to something different, don't have. And so we've done a lot of work with academics and hand them hand on the data and said, tell us what you see. And one set of academics we work with at the University of Iowa took the micro business data and said, this is really an understanding, not just of business, but of technology engagement, of successful technology engagement where technology was actually engaged with in a productive way. And I started toying around with that idea, and I thought that was a really beautiful and powerful concept aside from everything else that we're learning, which is technology by itself is is like steel. It's just like any other sort of tool, but it's how you engage with it is where we get the benefit. And, the fact that our data played a little role in that is a lot of fun.

Well, first, we would love to talk with you. Everything all the data we give away is is free. Any advice good advice we have for you is all free. We also are starting a new program called GoDaddy open where we are partnering with communities to offer the upskilling and the training that we do all all for free. So we'd love to work with you. And part of what we what we learn from those engagements is that we get to hear the kinds of challenges and opportunities that a city is facing relative to their micro businesses, and it just gives us a more complete understanding of what's happening out there. So we get a lot from it too, but everything we will do for you is free. And if we were to get on the phone, the first thing I would do is try and help them understand just what is the profile of micro businesses in their community. How many are there? Where are they? We were working with the mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, and and he frankly was really surprised at where they were at a ZIP code level across the city on which we're able to show and how that's changed over the last couple years. That's a really helpful understanding when you're thinking about urban development, and economic development. And the second thing is just take a look at let's get to know who these who these entrepreneurs are. What do they care about? What affects them? What are their what are the levers that you can pull within your own community to help them? Is there a very specific problem or challenge you're facing? A quick a quick anecdote from Detroit when we're looking we're we're working with the officials in Detroit of what was happening there. And whenever we work with this city, we're really trying to understand the the the problem statement, the opportunity statement that they're coming to us with because every city has them. They didn't just call up because they were suddenly interested in micro businesses, but they're facing something. And the folks in Detroit were were were talking about how in certain portions of the city of Detroit, they did not want those people to leave those neighborhoods. We see so often that neighborhoods that might not be doing well economically might have cities might try and up economic them. They might try and bring in a much wealthier class in, or they might bring in chain stores or chain restaurants. Detroit wanted to avoid that at all costs because they believe the real power of Detroit was when the people who were in Detroit and the people who were in these old neighborhoods, these people who really created this presence and this culture of Detroit, and they wanted to find a way to make them, more successful economically and have them stay where they were. And so their job was, we actually wanna get the small businesses that are not online. We wanna get them online, which was a very great like, it's a fantastic problem statement to have. It's like, we can help you with that because I knew where these small businesses were, and we knew how to get them online. And that's a problem and opportunity statement that Boise didn't have or that Atlanta doesn't have or San Diego doesn't have. And so that's the next question we get to them is what what are we trying to solve and what's some of the challenges that we can solve now and learn to go.

and take into their day. Ryan, thank you. It was a pleasure being here, and, we look forward to talking to any of our listeners because we'll probably learn as much as as they will in the conversation. So thanks, Ryan.