Bismarck Lepe: Founder & CEO of Wizeline

Episode 269

How do you go from being the child of migrant workers to working at Google then becoming a serial entrepreneur focused on helping companies develop products using your knowledge of international communities? I can’t wait for you to hear this conversation with Bismarck Lepe, Founder and CEO of Wizeline, his latest startup focused on helping companies create the products they need using Guadalajara’s tech ecosystem. We discuss how his upbringing established his values for business and life. And what does it take to move forward despite setbacks? Listen and learn to this exciting show. On this episode of #TheKaraGoldinShow.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be I want to be, you just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control control control. Hi, everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi, everyone, it’s Kara Goldin from the Kara Goldin show. And I’m thrilled to have our next guest. Here we have Bismarck Lepe, who is the founder and CEO of wise line. And if you don’t know what wise line is, you definitely need to hear all about it. And I’m so impressed with Bismarck, I actually met Bismarck as he was going through the EY entrepreneurship awards program. And which she’ll talk a little bit more I think about as well, he was a finalist for the 2020 for Northern California. So really, really impressive. So he is so incredibly impressive that I had to reach out to him and get him on the podcast. And as I mentioned, he is with wise line, the company that he founded, but he’s also the CEO of and before that he was part of what I kind of think of as the first batch of incredible soon to be entrepreneurs, the left Google ready to take on the world or I should say, take the world by storm. And he did that his first startup was a company, I’m probably not going to pronounce it exactly right. But Ooyala. So it’s perfect, perfect. There you go, which was an online video platform company that he built from zero to over $400 million exit incredible. And like I said, why his line is the company you should definitely know about. It’s a global product development company that has kind of an interesting, kind of different tation. There. That is the tech ecosystem of Guadalajara is involved in this. So we’ll talk a little bit more about what why xline does to really help clients and very, very excited to have you here, Bismarck

Bismarck Lepe 2:43
Vokera. I’m incredibly excited to be here. And I was really excited when I saw your email. When you reached out, you know, we had the opportunity to meet during the EY Entrepreneur of the Year event. And so I am glad to hang out with another fellow Marine resident. Yes, very,

Kara Goldin 3:02
very cool. So, so let’s get into a little bit about your background. Let’s start at the beginning. So I’d love to get a picture of who Bismarck was as a kid. I mean, what did you know that you were going to be an entrepreneur.

Bismarck Lepe 3:17
So my parents are from a little village in Mexico, just outside of Guadalajara, kind of central Mexico. And they came to the US as migrant field workers. But always add had in place importance on education. And so until I was seven, we live between Mexico, Southern California, Central California, Washington State and then back to Mexico every single year. And then when I turned seven, my parents felt that it was probably not going to benefit my academic career if we kept moving around. So we settled down in Southern California. And I grew up there and my my parents never had professional jobs. But as I mentioned, they placed an incredible importance on education. They told me Look, if you need tutors, if you need a computer, whatever you need, we’ll work 234 jobs in order to be able to provide you with that. And sure enough, when I was in second grade, the year they made $13,000 They bought me a $3,000 computer so I owe everything to them and their hard work and dedication.

Kara Goldin 4:23
That’s amazing. Who did you think that you wanted to be when you grew up?

Bismarck Lepe 4:27
Well, it’s it’s funny. I learned to speak English. Again, going with my parents. We spoke Spanish Spanish is my first language. And I learned to speak English. watching Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, and lifestyles of the rich and famous. And so there was always this idea and Dallas every now and then which was probably I shouldn’t have been watching it with my parents, but that’s what I was doing. All of these people were entrepreneurs. So I feel like I always have this bug to start something Oh,

Kara Goldin 5:00
that’s I love it. That’s so great. So you, as you were growing up, you’re in Southern California, you, I guess, decided that you were going to go to college and and you ended up at Stanford. So that brought you up to northern California, and then ultimately ended up working at Google, Dan. So share a little bit more about how you started thinking about, you know, after after school. I mean, what were you going to be doing?

Bismarck Lepe 5:28
Well, I guess first and foremost, there was never a question of whether or not I would go to college, my parents didn’t understand what a state school versus a university versus a junior college like they didn’t understand how that work. And when I got into Stanford, my mom was actually like, of course, you got into Stanford, like your top student, you’re a great athlete, you’re president of all these extra killer curricular activities. And I tried to explain to her I’m like, it’s kind of a big deal. It wasn’t until like many years later that I think a lot of people were like, Wow, your son goes to Stanford, that I think she realized she was like, Yeah, I feel kind of bad, minimizing the fact that you got into Stanford, by time my brother got in psychology, that’s kind of a kind of a big deal. But when I, on my way to Stanford, again, one tries to mimic and copy the people that they know. And the person who was most successful that I knew closely, is my uncle, or at the time was my uncle, who’s an orthopedic surgeon. And he started a hospital in Manzanita, Mexico, little resort town, and he had done really well. His kids always had the best toys. So I’m like, well, he’s, he’s done well, I’m gonna go do well and do good and be a doctor. But I got to the Bay Area, next to the cell phone Valley, and 98, kind of with all the excitement of, of the dot coms and the internet, and I just fell prey to the capitalist machine that is the cell phone Valley. And so although I was going to school, I did switch my major I majored in economics and started to study computer science. But I really spent the majority of my time working at different tech companies, different startups. And one of those startups that I worked at was a company called Elance. And it’s shared to board members with Google Rahm Sriram. And John Doerr. And when Google launched their advertising platform, they invited me to come in and be their first advertiser, their first customer. And so I ended up getting to know the company really, really well. And when I was about to graduate, they came to me and they said, Hey, you should come work at Google, you know, the platform better than our engineers and product managers. And like, No, I think I’ll stay at elands. They’ve treated me really well. I’ve been able to pay for school. And I used to go into the office at two o’clock in the morning, work until 9am, and then go back to school from 9am to 2pm. They go back to the office, and like they’ve been great. And the head of sales says, we’re doing $650,000 of revenue a day with 96 employees, Mike, you’re

Kara Goldin 8:02
right, I should go work, you should go there. And so what were you doing at Google, then,

Bismarck Lepe 8:05
as I initially started off as a kind of a sales engineer, building tools for the big customers and the sales organization. And then I moved into the product organization, working on a lot of the monetization products. So initially, all of the ads appeared on the search results. And as Google’s business, got a little more interesting image ads, and eventually click to play video ads, which led me down the path of helping YouTube become monetizable after Google acquired YouTube in October 2006.

Kara Goldin 8:41
Wow, such an interesting time to be there, for sure. I mean, it’s what, what sort of surprised you about? I mean, I’m just thinking about that time that you were there. I mean, what watching that company grow to, you know, from the time that you started until the time that you laughed, I mean, what was probably the most surprising Well,

Bismarck Lepe 9:03
you have to remember my parents didn’t come from the corporate world. Yeah. And so the, the only thing I knew about the corporate world was whatever I saw on TV. And so my mic growing up in the 80s, Wall Street greed is good. And the best you can hope for is that you only have 20 years of being kind of at the bottom of the totem pole and other people treating you poorly. So eventually, you can become that person on top of the totem pole to treat other people poorly. And I get to Google and it’s completely different. Yeah, I was fed breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was truly a meritocracy.

Kara Goldin 9:40
You can come from everywhere. Plenty a hand.

Bismarck Lepe 9:42
A lot of hint, a lot of hint water. And it just changed my perspective. It changed my perspective so much that for a while there, I’m like, I just hope Google fails. Because this is not preparing me for the real world. The real world is not like this But I think eventually I came to the realization that the real world is whatever you make of it. And what Google was doing in treating people well, allowing ideas to float up and become products and businesses from everywhere, is really the best way. In order to run and build a fast growing company. You need to push the decision making out to the edges.

Kara Goldin 10:24
Yeah, absolutely. Well, that you were you were there definitely at the right time. It’s, it sounds like a very, very exciting journey. So you left and you started your first startup? Who Yalla? Did I pronounce it right?

Bismarck Lepe 10:41
You know, we Allah is one of those names that was just not that great. And it’s like, is it we Allah? Is we Allah? Is it one of those things like, Hey, you’re yella showing like it would just not a good name, but we ended up with it. And it worked out just like that, you know, the origin story of the name was that it means cradle and tick all of their Telugu sorry, and Indian Indian language. And we like the idea of like cradle of innovation. And my co founders girlfriend’s like, no, it’s like, it actually means swing bed, and like swinging and like monkeys, and you guys are code monkeys. And I’m like, oh, then we hired an early marketer. And she’s like, look, this is what we’re gonna say the origin story is we got Yahoo have the double O’s at the end, Google, have them in the middle. And new, Yala hasn’t met the front. And we are just the obvious connection point of all of those successful internet companies I love. So I think that that’s probably the one that is sometimes right. But it wasn’t it wasn’t the best thing. But we started that company, because we identified a problem. When we were at Google. Again, it Google was fantastic, because we got visibility into a lot of secular changes that were happening in pop culture and in business. And one of them was the idea of streaming. So Google acquired YouTube in October of 2006. Prior to Google, acquiring YouTube, YouTube was the center of piracy. You could find anything and everything you could ever want on YouTube. And as a result, all of the media companies had come out publicly saying that they were going to sue YouTube. And Viacom had a lawsuit for a billion dollars to Google acquires YouTube. Now Viacom has a lawsuit against Google for a billion dollars. But what was interesting was publicly, Google was getting scrutinized for owning YouTube. But privately, were holding meetings with the executives at all of those media companies. And they wanted to figure out how they could use and leverage YouTube as a promotional and marketing channel. And technically, they wanted to figure out how they could launch their own streaming service. Because back in 2006, and 2007, when we started Ooyala, like, Netflix wasn’t streaming, Apple was in streaming, nobody was streaming, right. And so we identified that opportunity while we were at Google. And that’s why we started with Gala.

Kara Goldin 13:20
And who did you sell it to?

Bismarck Lepe 13:22
We ended up selling it to one of our strategic investors, who came in in 2012, Telstra. They’re a one of the biggest telcos in the world, primarily focused on Australia.

Kara Goldin 13:36
So interesting. And then you took a little time off, not too much, and decided to start wise line. So tell us a little bit about that.

Bismarck Lepe 13:47
So wise line, the name of the company is wisdom of crowds, and above and below the line. So one of the things that I saw at Google was as the company grew, it became harder and harder to build products for the market. Because you inevitably had heads of sales in different regions who wanted something different for each one of their customers, the product teams felt like product direction should go in a certain way. Engineers may be wanting to go and solve a an interesting technical problem. And eventually, and this is very true for the the entire software industry between 60 and 90% of the software that is invested in having lines of code that are written are going into products that are never used, never sold or never completed. And so we saw that there was a lot of waste at Google at Google, it didn’t really matter because Google figured out a legal way to print money at a gala, we had the same problem, except we didn’t have the little moneymaker. And it ended up really hurting the culture, and it slowed down decision making. So the idea behind why xline was to build a platform that would help companies get better products to market faster by removing Ego of product prioritization. And really focusing on the numbers, we say the numbers will set you free. So companies could build for markets and not individual customers, or the opinions of individuals in the boardroom.

Kara Goldin 15:13
So interesting. And then the aspect of getting talent and you have part of your company in Guadalajara. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Bismarck Lepe 15:23
Yeah. So in 2009, after we realized that we were going to survive, so we got very close within three days of running out of capital. But we signed a term sheet with venture capitalists invested $10 million, and it saved the company. But as we were going through the process of doing that round, we realized, alright, the VCs are going to start to invest again. And in the Silicon Valley, if you remember 2008 2009, the economic crises. There were a lot of VCs that were writing checks. Now, that said, Twitter was growing, Facebook was growing, Google had a low, but was continuing to grow. Apple had released the iPhone at beginning of 2007. And so they were starting to scale the business. And so it had been difficult during an economic downturn to hire and retain talent, we knew it was going to become impossible to do it. Once VCs started writing checks again. And so we hired a consultant to look at Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, South America, to set up an r&d center. And he came back and he said, You know what, Mexico is really interesting. I’m like, really why, you know, my parents left Mexico, because they felt Mexico was dangerous for Rob zero upward mobility. And for them who come from who came from a certain socio economic class that wouldn’t have opportunities, they felt that the US would have a lot more opportunities for them. So for me, I initially questioned it. But I looked at the data at the time, 60,000 engineers were graduating every year, culturally a lot closer to, you know, California Silicon Valley culture than, you know, building teams in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asian countries. And also proximity, it’s much easier and faster to get from San Jose to Guadalajara than it is from San Francisco to Bangalore. Yeah. And so we ended up going on a recruiting trip. And the 15 engineers that we interviewed in Guadalajara, our CTO who had zero connections to Mexico said, you know, these eight are as good if not better than the engineers we worked with at Google. Let’s do this. And so at Ooyala, we ended up building up an engineering team in Guadalajara. And one of the reasons that we were able to get the transaction, the exit for yalla was because we had built an aspirational brand, kind of Silicon Valley, transplanted in Mexico. And they felt like we had a direct pipeline of talent. And so when we started wise line, a we, we started with 100% of our engineers and team in Guadalajara, Mexico, we had more of the commercial product and design people in the Silicon Valley. And then eventually, we moved into digital services. So not just helping with a product strategy, but also the execution. And then we just, can we just scaled incredibly fast in Mexico.

Kara Goldin 18:22
That’s amazing. So what do you think has been the toughest part of managing a company when you’ve got, you know, two different countries that you’re that you’re really dealing with? Is there obviously we’re hopefully just coming out of the pandemic? And I’m an optimist on that. But we’ll see what has kind of been the most challenging, I guess, especially over the last couple of years for you?

Bismarck Lepe 18:50
Well, I think, because we started wisely with our entire engineering team. In Mexico, in Guadalajara, and kind of the management team and salespeople in the US, we were remote from the start, like we were remote first. And so it required that we have the right tools in place. And so we started using Slack very early on. We were one of the early larger scale deployments of Google Hangouts at the time for video conferencing. But there were a lot of things that we need to work needed to work on culturally, because we didn’t want to be a Mexican company. We wanted to be a global company. And so there are certain cultural nuances that don’t translate very well in in Slack. And which I think is also kind of is one of the foundations of why DNI has always been very important because we’ve always felt like and during our onboarding process, like we have an entire course on empathy. It’s you need to, you need to understand that it’s not what you say it’s what to understand. Do it and what’s processed and what’s heard. And so you need to really have insight into the culture of the people that you’re speaking with. And I think that that empathy that we build into our own culture has also translated very well with our customers. So what your customer says isn’t necessarily what they need. And so you need to dissect it and really figure out okay, you know, this customer needs this thing done, because it’s his job online. Yeah. And it’s not Oh, wow, that that customer is being really, really difficult. And so we from day one started remote first. And as we continue to build out our operations globally, I think we’ve benefited from that. So today, we have, you know, almost 1500 wise liners in Mexico across 40 different cities, our major hubs are Guadalajara, Mexico City get at that. But we have a bunch of other cities with 40, or 50, wisecleaner. In Colombia, we have over 300 people. We’re also in Spain, and we built out a delivery team out of her Chi Minh City in Vietnam. Wow. So they’re not only do you not have, do you have the the cultural aspects that you need to think about? You also have, you know, 16 hour differences.

Kara Goldin 21:10
That’s incredible. Well, and I love the fact that I mean, you’re mentioning places where not many people are kind of pulling people from I mean, that for, for resources. So I think that that’s an incredible aspect to your business, too. So if people are listening, I, when would they reach out to wise line, I mean, when you’re when they’re trying to think of an idea that needs to be worked on, I mean, when would wise line be the company that they wanted to, you know, reach out to, to get some help.

Bismarck Lepe 21:46
So a lot of a lot of companies that are in the technical engineering services business, they have this idea of a single engineer that works on an hourly basis. And when we moved into digital services, we, we started to model out what what a company that we would want to work with, as a product company look like. And so we came up with this idea of a pod, a pod is five engineers, for every two pods, get a UX designer, a technical writer, project manager. And the reason for a pod is because inevitably, people get safe people go on vacation, people leave the company. And so if you want predictability around delivering that product, you need, you know, there’s there’s safety in numbers. And we didn’t charge by the hour, we looked at sprints, because we wanted to give customers something very deliverable and tangible. That’s really the reason that the company grew very, very quickly. Over time. Now we look at the entire lifecycle of software development. And if a company is building technical solutions, there’s a very high likelihood that wise, I can help with the ideation and strategy process, product strategy, the development of the technology in the cloud, if they’re trying to figure out how they can leverage data, to build machine learning driven applications to have a more personalized experience, we can help with that. And we can also maintain application. So once something has been built, do you really want your top notch researchers continuing to maintain something that’s kind of set it and forget it, we can help be that maintenance on for, for your applications. And we work on a near shore agile approach. And so we try to be in the same time zones as our teams, because we want every single person that’s working on technology to be able to get on a slack thread, and work out issues and not make it more of a waterfall interaction process where you send something, you know, to India, and then hope that it was interpreted correctly 12 hours later, and because we think that that matters, and we think that that’s the that’s where the world is, is going

Kara Goldin 24:01
now totally makes sense. And it’s no I love that. Because I think that that is a, you know, the concern when you’re hiring engineers outside of your office that it’s or outside of, you know, the US with your US company that you’re looking for, you know, to make sure that there’s some sort of connection there that they’re really going to understand what you’re talking about, but in a time when it’s hard to hire engineers to so I think you’re really solving problems for people that it makes a ton of sense. So one of the things that I found with in talking to so many wannabe entrepreneurs is that you know, they’ll look at people like you who have come from Google who have started started, you know, multiple companies and and everything turned out perfect. So I mean, you talked a little bit about the 2008 2009 time I heard some pain in there at it, while you were trying to figure out whether or not you guys were going to be able to make it. But I’d love to hear a story where you had a big challenge, you know, whether it’s wise line or, or, you know, anything else that you’ve done to where you really felt like, gosh, that was, that was tough. But I learned a lot about myself, I learned a lot about business. And, yeah, I’d love to.

Bismarck Lepe 25:38
Well, it’s always hard. And you know, right now we have two other companies. One is servi security company that I am lowercase founder of that one with our former CTO from wise line, and my younger brother, who was also co founder at Ooyala. And this telehealth company that’s targeting the US Hispanic population, that’s leveraging the wireline business model where you have doctors who act as health coaches in Mexico that provide services to the Spanish speaking population in the US, and we have doctors in the US if there’s a handoff for prescriptions in persons or Lansing. And the thing is, it’s always hard. It’s always difficult, the numbers are stacked against you, your family, your health, your friends are all going to suffer. And that still doesn’t guarantee success. You know, when we, when we first started, we all out there was a very large competitor in the space that had raised 100 times the amount of capital that we had raised. They were 200 times bigger than we were and every day, we would read press releases of a new big customer that they would sign. And you know, as I would drive home at midnight, I would wonder like, How in the world are we going to catch up. But by 6am, the following morning, you need it to have a positive demeanor, because you have people who are counting on you. And you needed to deliver and you needed to work much, much harder. Now. The hardest part for me is when you are working that hard. And there are these external forces that happened to you that you just cannot have an impact on like, for us it was the economic crisis. The good news is we had raised just enough money to survive just enough to get that next round of funding. But during that period, know as the finance global financial markets collapse, October 2008, our board came to me and said, You know what, no one has seen this since 1929. And so I think we need to get I’ve been there done that CEO to help us navigate the waters like okay, you guys are. And they were guys to two men. And like, Well, you’re the professionals. Okay, let’s let’s go through a process. And I started to interview candidates. But October 2008, that year 2008. We, we, our revenues were $300,000. So you can just imagine a backdrop of the world’s economic crisis since 1929. And a company that’s only doing $300,000 in revenue, we weren’t able to attract the best talent total. And so eventually, I pushed back on the board and like, look, this just gonna be a waste of time, we’re not going to get great talent, and we’re probably going to run out of money and going through that process. They got really upset at me. month over month, revenue improved quarter over quarter revenue improved.

And then around March of 2009, because we weren’t yet profitable. I went out and started fundraising. And after the 50th, no, like, in 2008, we did $300,000 in revenue. In 2009. We did $3 million dollars in revenue. But there was still so much uncertainty in the market, that I couldn’t get any VC to commit it. And so I went back to the board, I’m like, the business is actually really, really good. The only thing we can change is the mouthpiece. So Mike, I’d like to initiate the search for a CEO. And I don’t know if it’s an imposter syndrome. But I felt like I needed to get someone who did not look like me. I want it to get the prototypical cover of a Business Week article, Bloomberg article, right tall, full head of hair white, looked like a football player look all American. And that’s what I found. i We i ended up hiring. This great executive Jay Fulcher, who had been the CEO of agile technologies, had been the CEO as a public company sold it to Oracle, all American. And he joined out about the ADF know about the hundreds of pitch to VCs. We continue to pitch. Eventually, we ended up Getting about 170 nose, the 100 and 71st was the yes, that saved the company. But it was a that process was hard. It was a lot of pitches, a lot of rejection. But the personal angst for me was, I had been the CEO, I no longer was the CEO. Okay, if that happens, but then the biggest part, and the hardest part for me was, I felt like I had let down all other founders and tech workers who looked like me, because there weren’t a lot of Latinos in tech. And so my failure I was assigning to the failure of everybody looked at me like, oh, it’s gonna be less likely that VCs are going to trust another Latino coming in. That was tough. And I and I almost left Ooyala. I ended up staying. And it was a great experience to learn from Jay, how to manage the board, how to fundraise much bigger tickets, how to build out an enterprise sales team. But it was tough, it was really, really tough.

Kara Goldin 31:00
Well, and I think you took all of those learnings and went and did it. Again, and, and it’s you know, why xline is such an incredible, incredible, incredible company that probably I always think like, the journey that came before is always something that, you know, you are going to pick up pieces, whether that’s, you know, who to allow to invest in your company, or, or in some cases, whether or not, you’re going to, you know, allow a new CEO to come in to so I’ve had founders who have said that, that, you know, they I just had Chip Wilson, from Lululemon on. And, you know, he told an interesting story about when he decided to step down and had a new person come in and and, you know, it was challenging, it was really challenging for him initially, but then it was challenging for the company. And at what point do you start to, you know, like, see whether or not it’s going to work out or not, and, or at what point do you sort of say, hey, we need to regroup. So there’s a lot of different challenges that I think people replacing yourself is definitely not easy. But I think it’s, it’s sort of, you know, along the way, so many learnings, I think, for so many founders, so that’s a, that’s a really great one. So what has been the most rewarding part of starting wise line.

Bismarck Lepe 32:37
So I grew up poor. And I have absolutely no problem saying that the reason I was going to be a doctor was to make money. Again, the most successful person I knew, doctor, and that was, that was my goal. Once I got to the Silicon Valley, I realized that there was another path or other paths to, to getting financial security. And then I was lucky enough to be Google pre IPO. And when Google went public, I obviously, I was still very junior, I got a lot of pre IPO stock options, which are great, not enough to go out and buy an island or retire or focus on just angel investing. But it didn’t give me the security to go out and start a company and not need a salary. But after the this, this push this drive for my entire life of just getting to financial security was realized. I was at at a bit of a loss. But then in 2010, we, when we were opening our operations in Guadalajara, Mexico, I realized that there was so much talent in Mexico now obviously now, the world that wasn’t able to tap into the same opportunities that I had had being in the Saucon Valley. And so for me, I feel like I like I had purpose again. And so this idea of, you know, some people call it conscious capitalism, I think of it as doing well and doing good totally, and so with with wildlife, one of the things that we’ve done because we’ve scaled very quickly, and we scaled in a country that wasn’t on the forefront of everybody’s decision making criteria. And this is where I wanted to set up a development center. We had to invest in the local community. And I really do feel like why zine has been a key component of terraforming, the tech ecosystem in Mexico, and how did we do it? So about four years ago, we needed to hire 15, UX designers, and our head of UX had interviewed over 100 designers. She came back she’s like, look, none of these have experience building applications that have you know, 3 million concurrent video streams. After 10 million uniques. Like, but are they good? Like, yeah, some of them are pretty good. Like, do you think we can train them? And just like I don’t know, like, well, let’s try it. And so we opened up the six week course six nights a week, four hours a night. And we had about 300 people sign up for the program, we looked 25 People in 24 completed the program, we ended up hiring 15 to 24. We saw that it worked really well. We tried it again for another skill set. And now we’ve expanded why zine Academy where we’ve taught over 40,000 people. And these are free programs, free, completely free programs, everything from weekend courses on Alexa skill development, to your long paid apprenticeship programs for UX or data engineering. And that, to me, is what really drives me. I feel that through Wiseman, we built a platform that you know, it’s a fantastic business, it’s continuing to do well, but we’re bringing more people into tech, because talent is evenly distributed experience and opportunity as it and I think through wisely, we’re able to do that

Kara Goldin 36:09
now and you definitely are well thank you so much Bismarck. So where do people find out more about why xline

Bismarck Lepe 36:16
wy ze l i n e.com. And you can always email me [email protected] bis ma RC K or you can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Kara Goldin 36:26
Terrific. Well, I really enjoyed our conversation. And I appreciate you making the time to do this. So thank you so much. And thanks, everybody, for listening and for subscribing to the Kara Goldin show to definitely give this podcast five star rating are this episode I should say definitely helps the algorithm. And just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. And if you haven’t already picked up a copy of my book, undaunted, shares a little bit more about the story of building hint, definitely do that. And it’s also available on Audible. We’re here every Monday, Wednesday, and now Friday, we just added another day because we have so many incredible founders and CEOs that we are interviewing and and people who are sharing so many stories, for failures, challenges along the way that I think just help all of us to learn. So thank you. Again, Bismarck. Thank you, everybody for listening and have a great rest of the week.

Bismarck Lepe 37:36
Thank you, Kara. great honor. Great pleasure.

Kara Goldin 37:40
Before we sign off, I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders. But achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. Successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on in order to move forward. This is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted, the book.com and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams. For a limited time. You’ll also receive a free case of hint water. Do you have a question for me or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight send me a tweet at Kara Goldin and let me know. And if you liked what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kara Goldin. Thanks for listening

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