David Gaz, The Bureau of Small Projects

[00:00:55] Sanjay Parekh: Today's guest is David Gaz, a creative director, filmmaker, photographer, and the founder of The Bureau of Small Projects, a branding agency based in Los Angeles, California. Everyone at The Bureau of Small Projects has worked with Fortune 500 companies, and they bring their knowledge to help small businesses, startups, and non-profits.

David, welcome to the show. 

[00:01:18] David Gaz: Thank you, Sanjay. That was awesome. 

[00:01:21] Sanjay Parekh: So, I'm excited to have you on because, man, you work with the kinds of people I like to hang out with. The entrepreneurs doing early-stage stuff. So I'm sure you've got a lot of stories about this, but before we get into all of that, give us a couple of minutes about your background and what got you to where you are today.

[00:01:37] David Gaz: Oh, I would love to and the thing I love most about my job is exactly what you said. It's working with entrepreneurs. I've been an entrepreneur since I was 16 years old. My first business was an ice cream truck and I've like only had maybe one or two jobs in my whole life, actual jobs. And what brought me here was I used to be a partner in a firm that worked exclusively with Fortune 500 brands, big brands and Fortune 500 companies.

And a few years back, we were politically, in a time, I think, like today, where everybody was treating each other really poorly. And I'm starting to think it's always been like that, actually. But I was reading this article in Scientific American by these two guys, James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis at Harvard University, who had scientifically proven that kindness is contagious.

That if I do something nice for you, you'll do something, statistically, scientifically proven, for four other people. Each of those four people, statistically, scientifically proven, will do something nice for four more people and so on and so on. Being in marketing and branding, we love anything viral like that.

And then I thought that, given the resources that I had at my disposal, that if I were to produce a film about that, maybe I could change things and make people around me be a little bit nicer. And so, I produced a film, Kindness is Contagious, a film all about being nice, but more importantly, the benefits of being nice.

And being an entrepreneur my whole life, we learned that this ‘whole nice guys finish last’ thing is totally bogus. The nice guys actually, and this part freaked me out, they actually statistically make more money than not nice people. There's a few outliers that make a ton of money, right?

If you collectively put it all together, nice people make way more money than not nice people. And then on top of that, of course, they have more friends. They have better jobs because who hires jerks, right? Better family life makes sense. But the other thing that blew me away is they actually live longer.

Nice people physically live longer than that not nice people. Being an entrepreneur, my next question was, "I wonder if there's anybody putting these practices to business." And so, as part of the film, we interviewed Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, startups, healthcare organizations, nonprofits, people whose day job was making the world a better place.

And I started to get jealous because my day job was sucking every last penny out of people's pockets. And I thought, what could I do? And this is the creation of the Bureau, is what could I do to make my day job like them making the world a better place. And so, what I came up with was what if I teach these people making the world a better place, how to suck every last penny out of people's pockets, but put it to use for the betterment of mankind.

And that was the foundation of The Bureau of Small Projects. And who knew everybody liked to learn how to suck every last penny out of people's pockets. But I started it as an incubator within my old company, and after about a year, my partner, my business partner came up to me and said, "Hey, David, why don't you start working with our real clients?" And he did the air quotes thing and everything.

I was like, "Well, maybe you haven't looked at our balance sheet. But it seems like we're now financing your real clients." And so if you've ever been in a partnership and hearing your history about entrepreneurship, you probably had a bunch of them.

We got in one of those founders fights that partners inevitably always get into. And then I decided what we agreed to was he kept the old business. I took The Bureau of Small Projects, and this is about 10 years ago, and we spun it off into its own company and it's been just going like gangbusters ever since. Yeah, we just made the Inc 5,000 list of fastest growing companies in America. 

[00:05:52] Sanjay Parekh: Awesome. Congratulations. 

[00:05:54] David Gaz: Oh, thank you. 

[00:05:55] Sanjay Parekh: So, for people that are listening to the podcast, you're missing out on the video. Because behind David's right shoulder is a movie poster, I think, for the movie that you were just talking about, right?

Kindness is Contagious, with a big yellow smiley face. That smiley face, by the way, always reminds me of the movie Forrest Gump, where he wipes his face and then the guy gets the idea of creating the yellow smiley face that goes viral. But, before we get into kind of the stuff about The Bureau of Small Projects, I want to ask you about the ice cream truck that you did at the age of 16.

So, what happened? Like, how did you get into an ice cream truck business at that age? And how did your parents allow you to get into an ice cream truck business at that age? 

[00:06:43] David Gaz: Well, it was actually my father. Like I was, I've never been terribly employable. That's another reason why I've been an entrepreneur.

[00:06:52] Sanjay Parekh: I think that defines all of us as entrepreneurs. 

[00:06:54] David Gaz: Oh yeah. I think that's one thing entrepreneurs have in common. They can't hold down a job. And so, my father was just touching, he went through a brief period where he got the entrepreneurial bug. With me, it stuck. And so at the time he was, I think it was more his dream at first than mine.

And he thought it would be a great idea for to do an ice cream truck for a summer job. And so, and I think it was the best way to learn entrepreneurship. So, my brother and I ran the ice cream truck and first, I learned so many lessons. I think the basic one for entrepreneurship is I learned that all you do is you buy ice cream for half the price, you double it, you sell it, you take part of the money, keep it for yourself.

Part of it to buy more ice cream, sell it, double it, sell it, double it. And people do business plans when they start businesses and they worry about regulations and all that, which is important, but starting a business, it's just as simple as that. You sell something, you mark it up. You use the profit to buy more of what you're selling and just rinse and repeat.

[00:08:00] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, it's the classic candy bar arbitrage that we talk about so often on this show, that I talk about because I did that as a kid where I would go to the convenience store, buy candy bars, and then take them to school and sell them to other kids during lunchtime, at a markup. And then I'd use that delta there, of course, to buy more candy bars, but also to go fund my habit, which was buying comic books.

And so that was the source of funding for my comic book habits back in those days. 

[00:08:34] David Gaz: And it's really that simple, right? Everything else are stuff you have to do taxes, payroll and stuff, but the foundation of entrepreneurship is literally that simple. 

[00:08:44] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Yeah. Always make sure you're selling it for more than it costs to get. If you follow that axiom, you should be good. There's other things along the way, but basically you should be good. 

[00:08:55] David Gaz: Well, step two is my brother embezzled half of the money halfway through the summer. I had to deal with earning it all back, embezzlement and all of that catastrophe.

So, it was a hell of an educational experience. 

[00:09:10] Sanjay Parekh: Man, embezzlement at a teenager's age, man. Should have reported him to the IRS because if you didn't put that on his taxes, then you know, you get in trouble. You can go to jail for embezzlement and not paying taxes on it. 

[00:09:25] David Gaz: Every business has catastrophes, right? You get to learn it right on the first try. 

[00:09:26] Sanjay Parekh: I love it. So, in launching this, you essentially had, it sounds like a founder breakup that helped you spin this off, as its own thing, your founder friction, maybe not a breakup, but founder friction. 

[00:09:42] David Gaz: Total breakup. It was the best thing that ever happened to us.

[00:09:44] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. So, in doing that, was there anything that made you nervous about going in on your own or was it so well established at that point that you were good? 

[00:09:55] David Gaz: No, it was really challenging. I think anybody who owns a business no matter how successful should always have a little bit of nervousness in there, right?

It keeps you on edge, we had a non-compete thing in place. So, I had to navigate around the non-compete and so I brought a handful of clients with me, but the difficult thing was I had to very quickly get a whole bunch of new clients for it. 

[00:10:23] Sanjay Parekh: So, you weren't able to solicit the clients that you had before for some period of time, I imagine.

[00:10:30] David Gaz: No, we had a non-compete. And I think that's fairly unethical as well. I want to do it clean. 

[00:10:36] Sanjay Parekh: Of course. Yeah. So, how did you go through that process then of finding all these new clients? 

[00:10:41] David Gaz: Well, from a branding perspective, it's really interesting because, we get people, we deal with small business startups and nonprofits. And they always come to us, when they come to us for branding, they really mean a logo, fonts, colors, design things, right? And one of the key things that we bring from our experience with big businesses and Fortune 500 companies is, that has very little to do with it. Brand is all about strategy. 

And so going into this, and to be honest, I screw everything up the first try anyway. So, to go into it, I did what everybody does. I put a portfolio on our website, showed all the beautiful things we did and came up with a clever phrase called Small is the New Big. And I thought, "Oh, this is really clever." No strategy, no meaning to it, anything. And, nobody. I thought our website was broken because nobody was clicking on anything.

And then when you get that nervousness, when your back's up against the wall, I was like, "Good God, what am I going to do?" And then I always have been about practicing what I preach. And so, I went to strategy. And the way that we approach branding that I think is semi unique, I think it's part of this evolving ecosystem with, winner take all economies and the way the world's changed since the internet, since COVID, since all of this.

But my philosophy on branding, I think it's really powerful, is a brand is your value proposition. It's not so much your story. It's, what do you do differently and better than your competitor? It's the reason for people to do business with you. So, going to practice what we preach, that's where we came up, and I don't want to take credit myself. I've got a co-founder, Mike Newman. I've got Conan who's our COO. We all huddled and was like, "Guys, what are we going to do, with this mess?" And so that's where we decided to focus on Fortune 500 and big brand experience, put to work for small business startups and non-profits.

The second we put that into place, everything exploded. 

[00:12:52] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. So why, in doing this move, why is that the focus? Why do you like working with small businesses, startups, side hustlers, entrepreneurs? Why? 

[00:13:06] David Gaz: Well, two reasons. I'd say the real reason why is I love entrepreneurs. I love everything about it.

I've been one my whole life. With my old company, like Mercedes was a client of ours. And Mr. Mercedes has been long gone forever, and we got stuck with these frustrated MBAs that are very well credentialed, but everybody learned the rules and everything like that.

And when we work with The Bureau of Small Projects, I'm working with people like me with my ice cream truck, that they're breaking the rules. They're figuring it out as they go. We work with a lot of Silicon Valley startups, so they're like inventing the future. It is so cool. That's the number one reason.

[00:13:46] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. 

[00:13:47] David Gaz: And the number two reason that I discovered by accident, was our field is like wide open at this level, right? Because when people get really good at what they do, they immediately go for the Fortune 500 and big brands because they want the money. And not a lot of people go the other way.

And when I got in touch with my young entrepreneurial spirit, it was wonderful. But then I realized that these companies don't have access to this level of work. Because, once people get good, they go straight for the big brands. And it just made the whole field wide open and I've never been in a field where I felt that there was less competition, if that makes sense. 

[00:14:36] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. It's an interesting insight that you have there because I think we see that a lot of times in businesses, in almost any market that they're in. They'll start and they always want to go bigger and bigger, right? You see this with, the example that pops to mind for me is venture capital, venture capital funds.

They'll always start with this small, like $10 or $20 million first fund. And then the second fund is like $50 or $75 million. And then the third fund is $300 million. And the kinds of investments that you can do are very different when you have a $300 million fund versus a $10 million fund because of how quickly you have to deploy that capital. And it has caused an ongoing shift on this kind of like lack of capital on that early stage to almost exactly your point. Because everybody keeps moving upward to work on those enterprise customers and there's those large customers. But there's nobody really servicing those small early stage very much. So that's a fascinating insight and I very much appreciate that. 

Okay, so you launch into this thing. Is this the first time that you're running a company on your own? Or, the ice cream truck is a company, but it's more of a project really. Is this the first time that it's a real company?

[00:15:55] David Gaz: You know, that's an excellent question because, after the ice cream truck, I went to college, I'd say my next venture was, I moved to Paris. I was a creative director at an agency that worked with the Louvre, the Musée de l'Art Moderne. All these really cool museum clients.

But I was in Paris. I was like in my early twenties. I had the opportunity to be a fashion photographer. And so, then I was on my own. And it was very exciting, fun, and very scary. And since then, I think many of the times I always look to a partner to try to diffuse the risk or the fear a little bit.

And so I went through a period where it was with partners, never ended well. They were wonderful people, but the partnerships never really ended well. And maybe it's because I didn't get the right partner. Like the last one. And I think a lot of it was either that they went crazy because I'm kind of crazy and I was a fashion photographer and they want to be doing that rather than doing the numbers stuff, whatever.

But, yeah, it's like I went through that period and now I'm rediscovering the joy of being the founder. I've got partners that work with me, but I'm the decision maker and I highly recommend having one decision maker rather than that two partner situation. 

[00:17:24] Sanjay Parekh: So, then in launching into this, being a founder, work can take up all your time, basically. As much time as you're willing to give it, right? 

[00:17:35] David Gaz: Absolutely. 

[00:17:36] Sanjay Parekh: How do you balance that for yourself? And how do you balance the stress of running a business being the sole decision maker. That's a lot of stress. How do you balance all of that for yourself? 

[00:17:46] David Gaz: Yeah, I think you need to embrace the stress, you know. My wife always, you know family is very important to me and I think that you know that finding the right partner, life partner, is a big part of that. It's somebody that just can live with your personality and the weirdness that comes around being an entrepreneur. And then honestly, I've been through this, you and I were chatting before the show about the movie business, which was the most stress that I've ever had to deal with in my life, right?

It was like, take medication to deal with the stress level. And in that environment of making movies, I've had a crazy career. I also went to therapists as most people in the movie business do. My last therapist ever, which is a testament to how good he was, I had millions in the bank. I was feeling pretty successful, but I still felt like one step away from being a homeless person. 

I think entrepreneurs in general feel a little bit of that pressure. One deal goes bad and I'm out on the street or something. And this therapist gave me this nugget, stress nugget. That was, I think the best thing that I've ever heard in my whole life.

Well, he just asked out, frankly, "Do you think you ever really will be homeless?" And I said, "I'll probably figure it out. I'm a hustler." And they said, "What you do is you catastrophize things." And that was the nugget that really helped me overcome stress. Now when I'm in a really difficult situation, I remember what he said and I go, "I'm probably catastrophizing things."

I can figure it out. And I've been through all these crazy careers that, these crazy businesses in my whole career and I've made it this far. So, there's no reason why it's all going to fall apart now. And so, I just go back to that thing and you just live with the immediate stress. But then knowing that, it's going to probably always work out because it always has, gets you through it. 

[00:19:52] Adam Walker: Support for this podcast comes from Hiscox, committed to helping small businesses protect their dreams since 1901. Quotes and information on customized insurance for specific risks are available at Hiscox.com. Hiscox, business insurance experts.

[00:20:13] Sanjay Parekh: David, since you touched on the movie business, we were talking, like you said, before we started recording. Let's talk about that worst experience that you had in the movie business and tell me a little bit about what happened there and how you dealt with it. 

[00:20:27] David Gaz: Oh, the losing a million dollars of my own money part?

[00:20:31] Sanjay Parekh: That would be it. 

[00:20:34] David Gaz: I did one of the dumbest things ever. At the time I was a very successful photographer, and it was right around when photography was going through the change from film to digital. And it's very much like what people are dealing with AI right now, where the whole industry is changing.

And I'm convinced that AI is going to change everything profoundly, as did computers and digital change photography. I had literally the best job ever. I was 25 years old, fashion photographer in Paris, single, working with top models. It was just like making $10,000 a day at 20, 25 years old.

It was like, literally I lucked into the dream job. And then digital took over and everybody, not just me, it was everybody, it just changed everything and pulled the rug out from under me. And once you get used to 1$0,000 a day, your spending habits, your lifestyle, it revolves around that.

And I was like, "Holy crap, what do I do now?" And I made the dumbest thing ever, but it was it's part of the beauty of life is, I said, "Making movies can't be that much harder than doing a photo shoot." Big photo shoots like, Levi's is a client of mine and we do $250,000 a day photo shoots with the models, the studios, all of the stuff, the team around it.

And I thought, "This is pretty much the same thing as making a movie. How hard could it be?" Turns out, very hard. 

[00:22:17] Sanjay Parekh: Famous last words. How hard could it be? 

[00:22:20] David Gaz: And so, I had agents, I had a whole system in place and the agents helped me put together the deal, got investors and now investors, when you're looking for investors, it sounds like the dream.

But as I'm sure you've had investors before. It is a nightmare. All they do is hound you all the time. And so, my agents put together investors. To show the commitment, I put up a million dollars of my own money and turns out I'm terrible at making movies.

[00:22:52] Sanjay Parekh: So it sounds like, the only worse option you could have made for yourself is instead saying, "Eh, how hard is it to start an airline? It's fine. I'll do that." Like that's the saying about how to make a million dollars in an airline is to start with a hundred million dollars. And that's how you make a million dollars in an airline. 

[00:23:13] David Gaz: That's what I love about entrepreneurs, right? I'm by no means alone in this, I'm not by far the only person that's ever lost a million bucks on an entrepreneurial venture. 

[00:23:26] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. 

[00:23:26] David Gaz: And then, once you've done it and you've gone through catastrophes like that and succeeded, life gets a little easier because you still figure it out, and if you lose a million bucks and you're still okay.

[00:23:41] Sanjay Parekh: Exactly. Yeah. Everything becomes this "Well, at least it's not as bad as that other time," because you're always referencing back to that other time where it was so much worse. 

[00:23:52] David Gaz: Well, and I think life, you realize too, life isn't about money at all. It's about experiences and I'll tell you the whole experience going through that, learning, the excitement, the ups and downs, the craziness, it was worth a million bucks.

[00:24:08] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, it's good that you can appreciate the price of admission for that experience there now, this many years later. Okay well, let's talk about, we and we touched upon this a little bit, let's talk about boundaries for yourself and how do you think about boundaries between work and life and how you set them. Do you have a schedule each day of things that you're absolutely like I must do every day? This is how I start my day or how my I end my day. 

[00:24:36] David Gaz: I love that question too, because I came, after just doing what I do for my whole life, I realized that I'm not a goal person or a boundary person, right? I'm a path person and it's a lovely way to live your life rather than set goals and focused on things. You just go down a path. 

Now you put boundaries, like you have meetings to go to and you don't want to be late for meetings. It's disrespectful to other people. You got family to take care of. You've got certain built in boundaries, but I try to avoid anything that puts in goals or boundaries in my life because one, it's interesting because my next documentary that I'm working on is going to be about luck. And there is this guy, Richard Wiseman, who I haven't talked to yet.

If he's listening, please, let me use you in the movie. But Richard Wiseman did one of the coolest experiments, scientific experiments I've ever heard of in my whole life. He took 200 profoundly unlucky people and 200 profoundly lucky people. And he said, I'm going to try to figure out what this luck thing is.

And his conclusion at the end of this was it is nothing to do with anything supernatural. It's nothing magical. It's behavior. If the lucky people had a very different type of behavior than the unlucky and one of those behaviors that leads me down to this path thing, was that lucky people are always looking for opportunity.

Whereas unlucky people, they just do the task at hand. One example he said is when, there was this, he had all these really cool scientific experiments — I’m a science geek. And one of them that you might have heard of, but maybe not known it was part of this particular study is he had all these people, the unlucky people and the lucky people go into a room and he gave them all a newspaper.

"I want you to count all of the photos in the newspaper. You've got five minutes to do it. And whoever succeeds and gives me the correct number gets $20." And so all these people went into the room, and by and large, all of the unlucky people, or pretty much every one of them, didn't make it. There was a lot of pictures in the newspaper.

And the lucky people tended to go up after a minute, and hand off the newspaper and say, "There's 427 pictures in this newspaper." And what was interesting about the experiment is the headline on the newspaper said there are 427 pictures in this newspaper. Unlucky people focused on the task at hand and the goal, and they went in and they looked at all of the little pictures and started counting and they just went one two three and did what they were told to do. The lucky people took it more relaxed, kicked back, read the newspaper and go, "Oh, look at that." And then dropped it off, took their 20 bucks and left. 

Another similar experiment that they did that kind of highlights the behavior, is they told the lucky people and the unlucky people one at a time. They said, "Hey, there's a gentleman in this cafe that you need to talk to. It'll just take five minutes. Go in and speak to him. It's very important for the study". So the unlucky people took a beeline to the guy in the cafe, talked to him, did what they do. The lucky people just casually strolled in and noticed there was a hundred-dollar bill on the ground in the door before the cafe.

So, the lucky people were the people that tended to look around at all the things around them and meandered towards their goal, but the unlucky people just beelined to it. 

[00:28:25] Sanjay Parekh: Huh. Fascinating.

[00:28:26] David Gaz: And to me that's the path versus goal, I think if you go to a goal, like one of the things we know as entrepreneurs is businesses almost never do what they set out to do in the first place.

In Silicon Valley, they call it, the pivot. All of our successful clients, and we work with a lot of small businesses and startup, they, all of them, what they do is they stick with it. They just don't give up, right? They change their plans. They change their mind all the time.

Jeff Bezos has a saying that he said, one of the things that really, people who are right a lot, was his words, what they all have in common is they change their mind. And I think that's the way like when you're on a path, you give yourself the option to change your mind, you can go to the left, you can go to the right, you do that lateral thinking that creative people are so good at. But if you have a goal you tend to go straight for the goal and not see anything around you. 

[00:29:22] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, it’s that random luck that startups often have right? So you're just meandering until you actually get to the goal and figure out what it is that you were doing in the first place.

[00:29:33] David Gaz: Yeah. And it seems like the really successful ones, it's kind of like that, right? A lot of times, it's never what they started out to do or they branch off into other things that are phenomenally successful. Apple started selling computers and they made all their money on phones and apps. 

[00:29:49] Sanjay Parekh: The classic example of that was, back in the day, it was Twitter, and I've now forgotten what it was called originally. But they were working on some other product, and it was a disaster. It failed. And they offered to give all the money back to their investors, or they could roll it over into this new thing that they figured out that they wanted to work on.

Most of them just asked for their money back and moved on with life. Some went on in, with that team and into what became Twitter. And clearly that was in the end, the right choice. 

So, you've had a long career now, and thinking about all the things that have happened if you could go back in time and do something differently, other than making sure your brother didn't embezzle from the ice cream truck, what would it be and why? 

[00:30:40] David Gaz: Yeah, that's a real interesting question and I think I've got the answer to that I carry with me every day because I've often thought with the movie. But gosh, should I, because when I wasn't a rich, rich person, a million dollars to some people is nothing for me. It was a lot. And I always think, "Gosh, if I had done things differently, I probably shouldn't have done the movie." But then, as I mentioned, in retrospect, it's worth the million bucks.

And there's not a lot that I would go back and really redo, but going through that thought process with the movie led me to the most beautiful reason to not want to do anything over. I've got a 12-year-old son, Eli, who's just the most beautiful, perfect thing in the whole world.

And whenever we have kids, I hope as a parent, we always, love our kids that much. And, I mean, he's smart, he's talented, he's like everything I wanted to be in life on steroids at 12. And going back and I thought, if I didn't have that movie, if I didn't do the movie — because he was born after the movie — if I didn't do the movie, I wouldn't have Eli. 

If I changed one iota of things, the whole butterfly effect, I wouldn't know Eli. So, I wouldn't change anything in the entire world, going back. Maybe small things post-Eli because I got him already. But I wouldn't change even the slightest thing, not even what I ate for breakfast some morning because any path that changes does not include Eli.

[00:32:26] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Is there something that you've learned since doing the movie that you feel like, if I'd known that then I would have been better at doing the movie? Or has it always been like, you just reinforce that learning of, I'm not good at making movies? 

[00:32:41] David Gaz: No, there's one thing that I wish I could, or I would love to take back if I didn't have Eli, right? Because it would have messed up Eli, for sure. 

But one thing that I would take back, it's a learning that I think is the key to everything. It’s that, creating a company, the most important thing you can do is that messaging. You need to learn about your competitors, learn what they do well, learn what they do poorly, and then articulate what you do differently and better than those folks you just learned about.

And I think as a photographer, had I been able to articulate what made me different and better than my competitors — and not different and better at everything, but different and better for the people that I would work for or do business with that would be meaningful for them — if I had understood that the way that I do now, I think I'd probably be a hundred times richer and more successful financially and business wise.

[00:33:39] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, interesting. Okay, last question for you, for our listeners. If somebody's out there thinking about launching a company like you did or launching a side hustle, what kind of advice would you have for them? 

[00:33:53] David Gaz: I would say it just start it. Don't think about it too much. Just start it. We had one client that had a biotech company, and it was actually, the client was doing these videos about people imparting nuggets of wisdom that they learned in their career, actual career moments of nuggets of wisdom.

So, this guy wasn't a direct client, but it was one of the most beautiful and important nuggets for an entrepreneur. He just sold a biotech company for $500 million. And he teaches at Harvard University and his students would always ask him, how do you sell a biotech company for $500 million? 

And his answer was, well, luck is getting hit by a freight train. It only happens if you're standing on the tracks. And if you want to sell a biotech company for 500 million dollars, you have to start a biotech. And I think that's all it is. It's the advice is just start a company. Doesn't matter if it's an ice cream truck or if it's a biotech company or whatever.

Just start it. 

[00:35:06] Sanjay Parekh: Just start it. I love it. David, this has been fantastic. Where can our listeners find and connect with you online? 

[00:35:13] David Gaz: Do any combination of ‘bureau,’ ‘small’ and ‘projects’ in any order whatsoever, it will be the first one to come. And then just email me. There's an email address there or fill out the form and say, "Hey, I saw you on Sanjay’a podcast." And I'll give you a call right back. 

[00:35:31] Sanjay Parekh: Awesome. Thanks so much for being on today. 

[00:35:33] David Gaz: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. 

[00:35:37] Sanjay Parekh: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Side Hustle to Small Business podcast, powered by Hiscox. To learn more about how Hiscox can help protect your small business through intelligent insurance solutions, visit Hiscox.com. And to hear more Side Hustle to Small Business stories, or share your own story, please visit Hiscox.com/side-hustle-to-small-business. I'm your host, Sanjay Parekh. You can find out more about me at my website, SanjayParekh.com.