Think Differently. Solve the Impossible.

Show Notes

NEXION
Website: www.thenexion.com

On LinkedIn: Brandon Moses, Founder

Transcript

My guest today is Brandon Moses, founder at Nexion, a company whose tagline is, building the future of global networking.

A problem today seems to be as our personal and business networks grow, genuine connections shrink and we're left with a sea of shallow interactions when what we really want are meaningful relationships.

Nexion aims to solve this problem.

Brandon says the most valuable opportunities emerge from warm introductions, curated networks, and shared experiences, not from the superficial interactions we have on today's existing platforms.

Nexion is currently focused on markets in the US., Middle East, and North Africa.

Welcome to my show, Brandon.

Thank you, Daniel, and a wonderful introduction.

I have a recruiter background, so I have a million questions I'd love to learn about yourself as well.

The conception of your podcast and really just what fascinated you about Nexion, by the way.

Nexion, the spelling is not as phonetic as it should be.

But the-

How do you say it?

Nexion, like connection.

Oh, okay.

Like the next connection.

Precisely that, Daniel.

Exactly, exactly.

But thank you for having me.

I'm really excited to just talk shop.

So, you're a startup, right?

Yeah.

And having done startups, I understand like intellectual property, you want to tell everybody your solution to your problem, like how it's done exactly yet because it's kind of not out of the box yet, right?

That's correct.

I mean, go ahead.

I understand.

What I mean is I understand if you don't want to give out too much.

To start, let's talk about the problem.

Tell me like the existing platforms, the frustration with if you want to name names, doesn't matter.

They'll change in a couple of years.

Yeah.

What the problem is.

Absolutely.

The existing problem is at its simplest form, there is a loneliness epidemic in the world.

I'm currently based in Dubai right now, and the president of Dubai every year has a word dedicated to what the government and the social movement will focus on.

And the word for Dubai this year is community.

And the reason I think that is is because in large part, a lot of folks are feeling like they're no longer part of a community.

And so the problem is that we're really facing this severe lack of connection with our neighbors, a severe lack of connection with those that we already know.

And for me, one of the most meaningful components of a life, like when it's all said and done, is who do you leave an impact on?

And who made an impact on you?

That's part of the human experience.

And if there's a worthy pursuit to increase that, sort of squeeze out every little bit of that as possible, I think it's a meaningful focal point.

And in the space of technology, we haven't really seen technology aid that in the fashion that I think is actually meaningful.

It's been the extremely transactional and superficial.

And in the loneliness part, I like your idea of solving the loneliness endemic, because for those who disagree and go, no, I love my phone and my computer and the apps, and I'm socially connected.

Yeah.

Well, then how come people are still lonely and suicidal and doing drugs and alcohol to solve that problem?

So no, it's not.

It's not as good as you think it is.

It could be better.

No, no, 100 percent.

There's this concept Dunbar's method, which is that humans are built and able to sustain 150 meaningful relationships.

That's the capacity in which we're supposed to be able to maintain.

And yet, your LinkedIn connections, probably 500 plus at minimum, you know, you have your actual friends and...

It's almost like we, you don't look credible unless you have at least 500.

That's the baseline.

That's the baseline, right?

You reach out to everybody and anybody that's even remotely a part.

And yeah, it's...

You pray and spray, right?

And it's part of this sort of systemic game that we play to create validity in our own sort of social footprint.

But the consequence of that is that you don't really...

There's no infrastructure or tools to really enable you to know these people.

When you connect with someone, at least on my end, there's a social contract saying, I agree to establish a relationship with you, right?

And at the moment of signing that contract, accepting the connection request, you believe there's merit in maintaining that relationship.

But as life goes on, real world, digital world, you sort of lose track of that.

And that compounds every single day.

And so, you know, and you throw in capitalism and just sort of mechanisms that these apps use to keep you on the phone and off of outside of the real world, and then it gets even more sort of insidious.

And so, through observation and just lived experiences, I really said, you know, post Neuralink, which my time at Neuralink was a huge, huge inspiration for Nexion, decided to put some of my thinking cap on.

Which Neuralink is the company that has a human brain cell embedded onto a silicon chip or something like that?

Hmm, not yet per se, but I could definitely see them growing into that space.

If you hear a small dog whining, I apologize, that's my puppy.

She's still crate training.

But Neuralink at the moment is a brain implant company founded by Elon Musk and a team of engineers that decodes neural signals in the brain and then sort of stimulates those neurons to serve and sort of alleviate a variety of disorders.

Their first sort of indication is folks who suffer from spinal cord injury and are oftentimes quadriplegic by enabling them to control computers and phones with just their thoughts.

So think of a mouse in your brain that you sort of think that you're moving the cursor and the cursor moves and this enables them to re-engage, you know, sort of coincidentally with the technology and with the online world and play video games.

And so the sort of ecosystem of Neuralink comprises of engineers, clinical people, you know, surgeons, animal care specialists, you know, from clinical trial standpoint, and recruiters, which is what I was doing while I was there.

And so diverse, high caliber group of folks.

But one thing taught me that they taught me really clearly more than any other company is how no matter how competent and social you are, at the end of the day, they stayed there mainly 24-7-365, in part due to the sense of community and the lack thereof on the outside world.

And it was sort of this summer camp feeling, where everyone was very glued to just showing up to the office.

One, because the mission is a compelling mission.

But two, truly, I believe it was because they had found their community there, and they were able to establish something really special there.

And so I was wondering how can we lose track of that feeling?

And a lot of folks, sort of, I did some user research internally there and learned that it's quite of an epidemic, in a sense, feeling of loneliness and disconnectedness.

And there is a sort of a resistance to meeting new people because there was very little conviction that new people would align with their beliefs.

New people would maybe be more of a burden and like a cup filler, more of a cup depleter.

And so we just really started like talking shop on what's the problem here.

And at one point, there was an idea to create like an internal tool at Neuralink that was solely for meeting other people in the Elon ecosystem, right?

Because they were thinking, you know, if we're cool with our co-workers, maybe we'll be cool with people as Twitter or X or SpaceX, Tesla, right?

And so that idea floated for a little bit.

But then, you know, more market research discovered that there's new platforms for meeting people every single day.

You know, there's sort of meetups for bike clubs, meetups for founders, meetups for you name it, every single day.

And it really brought to my attention that we're in this relationship era where you're probably only one or two degrees away from, you know, anyone in the world at this point.

With technology, the world is so much smaller, but we really haven't processed and optimized our own existing network.

We haven't really enabled ourselves to get the maximum lift or squeeze out of our existing relationship.

So, it's more of a systematic approach to fixing that versus like another superficial layer to meet more people.

Let's fix and define the relationships we have currently because...

So, you kind of got so excited even though the company we're working at was a great place to work.

You know, I got to do this.

Yeah.

No one else wants to do it because of like, oh, there's already enough apps on the market and now we're going to stick with what we're doing.

And you're like, no, this is a good idea, solve this problem.

Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, fortunate enough to, you know, a few of the engineers really resonated with that problem as well and are sort of helping sort of the logic behind this.

Because when we think of it as like a sort of a logic and sort of systems based problem, it all comes to light that there are ways technology can aid and knowing, you know, if somebody has goals in the next 18 or 24 months to, you know, move or start a new career path or just try something different, that their network is oftentimes a catalyst to that potential change.

Want to become a scientist, you know, it might be worthwhile to hang around some more scientists, right?

How many scientists, you know, and so...

So it's going to use what you call behavioral analytics to predict, will it predict who you should have a relationship with or go, you know, spend more time with that person because that kind of thing?

In a sense, yeah, there's this ledger.

It's a feature called the Nexion Ledger, which is essentially a modern day journal.

And you can track your goals, your relationship goals, both personal and professional.

You'll have a network health score that's really determined by that ledger and by your goals, like how much effort you're putting into your network.

And it'll enable you to say if you're going out somewhere, let's say you're going to a conference or you're meeting up with a friend, you can quickly sort of get a summary of what they've been up to.

You can also, you know, have a recommendations engine that's a little bit smarter than the traditional, you know, this is the profile of Daniel.

So one of the things I do besides engineering and mountain climbing, I'm a songwriter.

Oh, nice.

I always told people, we could write so many hit songs if you gave me personal access to your email.

Data scraping.

Because then I'd know you're heartbroken or you're in love or you lost your job, you've got a new one or this or that.

Real human stories.

Would this have to have access to that kind of personal data?

No, no.

And during our market research, there's maybe three things we determined that many people are missing from technology, and one is safety and trust.

And so safety and trust is at the forefront.

So it's incredibly personalized in terms of what you want to permit Nexion to have access to.

So an email isn't even on the list of sources that we scrape information from.

It's more so existing social platforms.

So no personalized data on that degree.

The other component is the extremist landscape that we see on social media these days.

It's like extremely liberal or extremely conservative, and then the folks who are sort of straddling the middle are awkwardly present, right?

Yeah, don't talk politics at work.

You know, when you're getting a job interview or something.

Right.

And so there's that awareness, and I think that that's left folks somewhat with a nasty taste in their mouth.

And then there's the sort of the data privacy component.

And the other is sort of the very templated lack of customization that you see on any social profile.

Back in the day, Tumblr, Myspace, you were able to put a song on your profile for how you're feeling, or on Slack, you can still leave a status update that says like, I'm feeling like Monday blues or whatever.

But there's not much customization you can do these days in terms of fonts, things of that nature.

So we're trying to bring back an element of humanity in the sense of personalization to sort of say like, welcome to my, this is my door mat, for instance.

We want to ensure that trust and safety is there.

What's the biggest challenge so far when you're launching your startup here that you're running into?

The biggest challenge, so any consumer app demands aggressive user acquisition.

But the cool thing is that if you join a platform that you like, you want other people that you also know to use it, right?

And so individuals will be sort of the marketers for you.

However, there is an extreme level of fatigue that people have with apps and applications in general.

You know, we're so busy in our lives and there's 50,000 apps.

And so what I foresee to be the biggest challenge is just that initial step to user acquisition.

We have some ways we're going to combat that we really are obsessively focused on a specific niche, like a user group that we have really good indicators on.

We're using their market research to hone and refine our product.

Speaking of like reverse engineering it, I'm always fascinated by how did Instagram get to be so popular?

The moment it comes out, there's like 500,000 users.

Is that advertising or how do you do?

Because you can pick Instagram, Twitter.

There were already three or four other apps already on the market.

When they came out, how is it possible?

And yet people will be okay with, okay, I'll do a fifth one now.

Yeah, I think Twitter was one of the more unique platforms because it was the first town hall where it really welcomed just the real-time feed of information.

I think it found its value in being almost like a news provider.

I just have this really great anecdote of I was in San Francisco.

There was a big boom that happened down on Market Street, which is like the main vessel of San Francisco.

And it was 3 a.m.

and I had no idea what was going on, so I was just able to go on Twitter, type in Market Street, boom.

And it was like, oh, fireworks because of some event that just wrapped up.

And I got to see anybody who tweeted something about San Francisco like hashtags, right?

Boom, San Francisco.

And that's just something that the news would report maybe at 9 a.m.

the next morning, but you got this real-time feed.

So I think that the Twitter sort of...

Yeah, now that you mentioned it, the Instagram kind of similar.

There wasn't one thing simple like you pick your niche.

In this case, it's photos.

And keep it simple.

And same for YouTube.

Yeah, you know, they were dating at first, and then they didn't get enough women to post videos, to advertise themselves.

And so they said, OK, anybody can just upload any video.

YouTube you're speaking of, huh?

That became, yeah.

So long story short, the goal, I mean, the way I think attract mass users quickly is by doing what your competitors can't do, simply put.

And so when I look at the landscape of organization tools, like when's the last time you used your phonebook contact book, like the actual contact book in your phone, not many people utilize it.

It's just alphabetical.

It pulls from email contacts and whatever else sort of APIs are plugged in.

But it's not really giving you meaningful optimization of your network there.

Instagram, you already know what that does.

And so as long as we create a delightful product that brings maximum value the minute you open it, I think that those who need that, who see the value in that, will certainly come to us.

And so that's our user acquisition strategy.

And where are you at in terms of the process?

Like, do you have a user interface design?

I noticed something about VR and AR in there, what I was reading about it.

So, the UI is getting built.

It's not fully fleshed out.

A lot of the reason why is because I think there's a lot of attention on the logic and the reasoning, and that drives the UI.

The more we think about how this workflow achieves itself.

How to solve the problem.

How to solve the problem.

That really does marry a symbiotic relationship with the UI.

The founding engineer, full stack focus for that reason as well.

We have some amazing consultants, folks who've done AR and VR and a lot of cool companies in the past, and even social apps in the past.

And I think that the future will be a world in which our user insights are digitally overlaid on whatever interface we're looking through the world at.

So if I'm walking up to you, and I want to see if you're a second, if you're a stranger at a coffee shop, but maybe you're very close to my brother, that's an warm introduction that I otherwise would not have, right?

And we go to the same coffee shop we frequent.

You know, I love that because you asked me, like, what's about me, like, what I'm up to with my podcast, it's to solve problems and loneliness is a huge one.

And when I go into a coffee shop, if I see somebody by themselves, I immediately say hello, especially if they look by themselves.

Most people don't.

And I don't know if it's scared or uncomfortable or have bad social skills.

So something that could recognize, I'm in this environment, there's someone who actually knows my brother or a co-worker like a second or third degree.

And it could help, yeah, kind of like a dating app, but just a socialization app would help.

Information is important, you know?

And I think about the biggest changes in my life.

You know, I have sickle cell anemia, it's a blood disorder.

I've been referred amazing, amazing medication through relationships.

Most of the jobs I've taken on have been through referrals.

You know, my partner, I met her through LinkedIn.

And so there's an, there's like this immense value that relationships bring, you know, and yet a lot of it comes by chance.

And so we just want to really push the intentionality forward to something that we think is an incredibly noble feat, which is just improving the infrastructure for relationships.

Why, on that note, why do you think you're wired to, you know, be proactive and approach people in even in this era where, you know, it may not be the most common?

I feel, I intuitively, I walk into the room, like I walk into Starbucks.

It's real busy and chaotic, but then you calm down because you're in line, you got nothing to do.

Instead of being on my phone, I intuitively sense the loneliness, or even if they're not lonely, even if it could be you.

And I'm just by myself.

I mean, it's a human thing to do.

I have to ignore it.

Like, what makes me do it is I just feel I sense it.

It's just being alive, being human.

I started in semiconductor, by the way, as an engineer at Motorola.

So I used to build computer chips, ironically.

I never saw this much technology taken over people's lives.

The balance between being helpful and making our lives better and less lonely versus we're stuck in the technology.

We're not even enjoying life anymore.

No.

In many ways, I don't think we're even enjoying the technology.

You know, I think it's race and addiction.

And there's a deep concern that I have and a lot of the folks working on this have that.

Where does this go?

Like, we see the sort of the road, the signals, you know, hazard, hazard, flashing lights on this road, but we are pursuing technology at a rapid rate without much consideration of the sort of the long tail of the negative.

Which, you know, it comes to mind, it's driven by money, the competitive nature of a product.

But as you say, people really don't want the product, they want a better life.

So if you can design a product with your Nexion, I'm going to try to say it right, Nexion, Nexion?

Nexion.

Nexion.

Nexion, there you go, yeah.

Then you're basically giving people what they really wanted in the first place.

Yeah, it's a utility.

I'm thinking of this more less and less like a social app.

And I mean, it is a social app from one standpoint, you will be able to network with friends and sort of see their statuses.

But in a lot of ways, it's a CRM.

That's why the verbiage is the human CRM.

It's supposed to be utility driven.

And that's another reason why the UI isn't really built out is, there's a lot of thought behind, how do you maximize just the utility and mitigate this sort of consistent...

Interaction, all the user interaction.

Yeah, you don't want folks scrolling on it and having just doom scrolling their life away.

There needs to be...

Back to the time in Starbucks, it recognizes that I know somebody and that they have time to talk because it knows they don't have to be at work yet or whatever.

And they're my uncles.

I have a relationship with them.

Yeah.

Before I get stuck back on my phone pushing buttons, like go talk to them or have a human interaction.

Yeah.

Right.

And if you do, and this is in an ideal world, the journal, the ledger functionality is so important because that data-driven, I want to be more social in these spaces, or I want to grow further into this part of my network.

It'll reinforce that when you have those moments.

Let's think about three, four, five years in the future when there's passive listening devices.

It can let you know if your conversation was meaningful.

It can help you instill better principles behind the way that you network, and it can improve that network health score.

And so I really think of what Nexion can be in the future as a really important tool for proving the way that you communicate, because sometimes intent and outcome are vastly different.

So you're a recruiter, looking at your background, a lot of recruiting.

Did you do like the Steve Jobs when you left Neuralink and your friends go, come on, come over, come here.

Kind of like a guy who starts a new restaurant and he goes around town, gets all the chefs from the other good chefs in town, come over, work for me?

Not really.

I don't have the sway of Steve.

I think Steve was quite successful before Apple.

But in a way, I think that what helped me a lot to be just really fair, I worked late and I worked with a lot of the people who worked late, which I think were some of the most vicious people.

And they saw this idea go from a really ambiguous abstract haze to something much more polished.

They saw the way it sort of attracted a lot of folks in that organization to my desk, and we sort of branched off it all night long.

It sort of grew legs at Neuralink.

And then afterwards, I really wanted to learn more about just incubators and having my own company.

I had never done it before, so I had a few friends and colleagues who started YC companies, and I just lended my recruiting skills to their organizations and said, hey, I'll help you sort of build.

I want to be plugged into this incubator ecosystem.

And then when I left full-time Nexion, I had a lot of people that I trusted and knew their abilities, have faith in the direction of the product, and we're happy to join.

And so I have, I think my one skill set is my network, and that's no coincidence that I'm building a product that enables people to do it.

Do you have a launch date, like your investors or yourself, even though you don't quite have it all mapped out yet?

Yeah.

So there's a roadmap to end of Q2 2025.

We should have a working model.

I'm in Dubai here, so both launched in California and Dubai.

I think by the end of Q4 2025, we'll have ideally users across the country, both countries, with full functionality.

The AI components, specifically the intentional proximity feature, which is a feature that says, based on you being at this event, you connect it with Daniel.

Here are other people that also connect it with Daniel at the same time and place.

The user's journey behind here, why this is important is, let's say I'm a Series A founder and you're a Series A investor.

I connect with you, Daniel.

Maybe I don't want to see a bunch of other investors.

I'm looking at you specifically because you really meet the needs of my stage.

The recommendations here will say, here are other Series A stage founders that are also connecting with Daniel.

And this is sort of a birds of a feather flock together.

Meta for that, it might be more important to be aware of other people at the same stage and era as yourself.

And it's just a smarter way of looking at networking.

These features are at a premium.

They take a little bit longer from a training and data perspective.

And so we think by Q5, we'll have them rolled out.

Q2 2025, and we'll have our sort of beta test launched both in San Francisco, my home, and Dubai.

Yeah.

I like the examples you were given.

I hadn't thought to ask you for examples are great.

Do you have another one, maybe a personal one?

Because that's a business one, which is really good.

Like it will help you with if you're in business or whatever you're trying to do creatively, innovation.

What about personal?

Absolutely.

So there's two features that I'm really excited about.

The first one is, and this could be useful, I think all of them can kind of be used for business, but from a personal standpoint, let's say I'm catching up with you, and it's been six months since we've caught up.

I'm in the car, it's a 10-minute drive to the place that we're meeting, and I can prompt Nexion to say, hey, what's Daniel been up to over the past six months?

And I'll get an immediate sort of digital social footprint of maybe your tweets, or your posts, or any sort of social activity that you've been up to.

I can read the car, it can use my ledger, sort of my journal that I track where I want to be on my relationship goals, to give me insights like maybe you have a similar food, you've been to the same restaurant that I've been to over the past six months, or we both picked up songwriting.

And so when we meet for an hour and 10 minutes, I'll have a much better conversation than if I had to ask these preliminary questions in 10 minutes with you.

And so the goal there is to really maximize the time.

I get a quick summary of what you've been up to, it sort of gives me insights based on what my personal goals are.

You could do the same and then we have a lot more meaningful data to talk about.

Versus if we don't have that usability.

Yeah, and then of course, you'd have to be honest, because if you don't put it in your journal, I'll only get the stuff you...

I won't get the good stuff possibly.

It depends on how good a friend I am, but you don't want your neighbor to know everything about you.

So that's the privacy settings.

Permissions is another really big engineering problem.

We want to think about private journals because maybe I want my own personal journal to give me better insights, but I don't want to share this with the world.

And then some facets of my journal, I do want to share with the world.

And how does that UI look?

Look, you have a scale of 1 to 10 on how personal, how business or something like that.

Yeah, it really does vary.

I think there's also just layers of relationships, you know, like first-degree connections aren't always on the same level of they're not equal.

I have deeper connections that I would like to reveal.

It sounds good because you take Facebook, and I know people have put everything mixed, their most personal, like pictures of their dog on the professional Facebook.

And yeah, I mean, dog's probably okay these days.

Just I'm at the beach in my swimsuit with, I'm at a conference presenting a technical paper, because that's all you do on Facebook.

It's one posting, right?

There's no in between.

So either don't post it and people don't know it, or you do and you're like, I don't know if I want, I want to take that picture down now.

So this app seems like a better way to manage that.

It is.

And I think we want to be less focused on those real-time updates and really enable the UI to function more like a content, like the yellow pages.

In the long run, in an ideal world, this is the modern, you know the yellow pages, correct?

Like the big books, right?

The paper yellow pages.

Yeah, exactly.

I haven't seen one and come to think of it though in a while.

Very long time.

Yeah.

I mean, we have Google, you can search a name and a number, but more so in a modern day contact app that just enables you to, when needed, prompt your network's happenings, give you ideas of where they are.

You know, I've had a lot of coworkers, a lot of Neuralink actually flew into Dubai over the past three months.

I caught two, three of them.

But Instagram is more of like a postmortem, like, hey, this is where I was.

You know, not really the same.

No, I mean, you didn't know they were coming or were there until they were gone and posted on the Instagram.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And so looking for a tool to suffice my needs, I would have loved to catch up with all of them.

But again, life goes on.

That's a good way to use that experience as how could I solve this, like retro solve the building my app going forward, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So exciting times.

Exciting times, grueling times.

I'm not an engineer.

I did not know the complexities of focusing on this, and first-time founder as well in a lot of regards.

And so stretching my abilities, learning a lot, reading a lot of Peter Thiel, and just really getting my-

How are you doing finding someone who knows front-end and back-end and UI, and also can think in terms of mapping stuff out, the algorithm and stuff outside the box, not just inside the box, but seems like if you're a startup, you really need to start small.

And how are you doing in terms of the staffing with that?

So far, so great.

So far, so great.

Mainly relying on my network.

So almost like working with friends, it's been a really big joy.

I think the first formal role, the first non-founding team role is posted.

And we're looking for someone to enable us to get to a production level scale.

It's a fantastic looking job.

It's a dream job description for those who are...

It's been a dream interviewer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But from a system's, really, just beta testing and strategizing, using the user research to build a beta prototype, and going from 0 to 0.5, it's been fantastic working with fellow engineers I've recruited for various organizations, folks that I've always kept in touch with, that I now get to lean on, people who also resonate deeply with the problem.

But now it's time to build for product and put them in the hands of-

Now it's time to, it's about the money, like it's a product.

About the money.

At the end of the day, it absolutely is.

And we think we have a really good viable solution to a deeply resonator problem.

So yeah.

Is there anything I haven't asked you that you'd like to mention?

I'd like to, I mean, I really would love to know your thoughts and really pull the room.

When it comes to relationships, whether it's personal or professional, if this problem resonates with you in the way that I've assumed, it does with a lot of the world, and why do you think there isn't much attention to fixing what I think is a problem that relates to one of the deepest issues or deepest values of the world is who we know and how we connect with each other from a human standpoint.

So I'd love to know your thoughts there and really just leave that as a closure.

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is money.

Most of these venture capital things are driven by, can I get, and I don't even know the numbers, I'm just making this up.

Because if I say a million users, they were like, no, we need a billion users.

Yeah, yeah.

And then you've already diluted it to where, well, that's how can I sell that to a billion people.

And so it seems like when you start with the top thing, money going down, which is venture capitalists and whatnot, that's part of the problem.

Can we solve the problem first and then follow the money afterwards?

Or maybe people just love it and it's huge.

Your band making an album, trying to chase what's popular.

Nashville's doing this right now, right?

With country music, it sounds like rap and rock, and you're chasing it for the money.

Instead of going back to the roots, like, let's just make some good country music and people will buy it.

Yeah.

So that's what came first.

Ask me the question again now that I got that out of the way, because it is-

I love that.

Yeah.

I think that in a lot of ways, capitalism can be stigmatized, and it can also sort of dissuade people from doing the best thing, you know, like pursuing money over-

I think people have to experience your product to get it.

Yeah.

It's like a dating app, and then it gets blown, like the intention was to find a meaningful relationship, and they realized that, well, the real money is with the young people who just want to hook up.

Yeah.

We're out for the money again, so let's tweak the algorithm, and then it loses the people who really want to get a relationship, and then you have the competitors who follow up on that.

But I think it's still missing all the people we talked about at Starbucks, who are just normal people.

They're not looking for love, and they're not looking for a job, they're just looking for a human connection.

Yeah.

And at the same time, integrating that into the business and the social.

I forgot your question.

Oh, the question at the root is like, the reason I ask it, and I'll frame it in a better way.

I speak to a lot of investors, right?

And one of the main sentiments that I get from the investors that say no, are this isn't painful enough.

The problem you're trying to solve on a one to 10 scale isn't painful enough.

One investor who I didn't say no, sort of helping me actually, really generously helping me along the way, but also had this sort of same similar statement, was he gives us an area where he's like, a skill to six level pain is he's at work, his wife calls and says, honey, fix the dent in your car.

There's a dent in your car, go fix it.

And months will go by and he won't fix the dent in his car.

It's a six level pain.

And then he gives an alternate scenario where it's like a nine level pain where he's at work and his wife calls and says, honey, there's rats that are infesting the house.

And by the time he's home, he's called to exterminators.

He's picked up a bunch of materials to exterminate the rats himself.

He's just gotten really ready within like a past hour from the news to action.

And that's what a nine level pain will do.

It's very easy to sell to the pain than to sell proactively.

It's easy to sell Tylenol to people with hangovers than it is to sell vitamins that boost your resilience.

And so a lot of investors have this classical methodology where they're looking for the pain point.

It helps them market it, find their target audience, right?

Yes, exactly.

I'm more on the side of seeing the future before we hear that.

Well, you can't tell if you tell investors, my target audience is everybody, then they don't know how to market it.

And that's why they don't want to hear.

I get this too with my podcast and stuff like, what's your niche?

Are you business?

Are you science?

I'm like, you don't really get it.

Yeah, but those who do do, right?

And not everything's for everybody.

And I read recently that the future is however for the world to look dramatically different.

If the future flying cars or whatever is one year away, then the future is one year away.

If it takes 100 years for the world to look dramatically different, then the future is 100 years away.

And you don't really know how painful something is unless you know there's a solution.

So if this was an existing world we lived in where...

I'll give you a max pain point for the investor.

Yeah.

One of their family members goes into Starbucks, just found out they were denied, say it's one of their kids, just got a rejection letter for Harvard University, the last college on their list.

Yeah.

Feels suicidal, has the last cup of coffee, and goes out never to come back.

Yeah.

And if there was some way the connection could have told them, somehow had somebody reach out to them at Starbucks, like you say in your journal, oh, you applied at Harvard.

I went to Harvard.

Oh, it's not that bad, you just apply next year, whatever.

Yeah.

You would have a dead child right now.

Yeah.

Is that for a pain point?

That's a really good point.

No, that's a really good point.

I think that you're touching on something that's very acute and very, very precise to the importance of understanding the human essence, right, and lending that hand, reaching out to one another, being more neighborly, going back to our roots, like you said with Nashville.

Then the question is, though, how do you market that pain point?

That's a little dramatic to make into an ad.

But you can get pretty close these days with some really serious issues that you could solve that are because of this root level lack of connection.

I mean, the goal is to solve the hard problems.

I think that that's where we should, as a people, put our time.

And truly, it's not an unrealistic outcome of what this app could do.

It's a very realistic outcome.

The more we know, the better we're able to apply it.

In the information age, all the data that we have didn't make any sense, wasn't useful.

We had all the data in the world, but no use unless you refine it, process it.

So if I'm a venture capital guy, which money is not my business, I'm not driven by money at the top end, so I've got to think that way.

I can't because I've been in business myself for 30 years.

I switch hats from being creative to business.

What comes to mind is the trickle down like Facebook has Facebook ads.

If in that scenario, we're in the Harvard scenario where now somebody recognizes I went to Harvard and you mentioned listening, so we're tied in, you can immediately come up with, for example, other colleges you could apply for, other internships you might apply for in the meantime, a whole roadmap of what could I do instead of this being my last cup of coffee?

Yeah.

You can matrix it out.

You could use what's worked in the past.

I think that-

Then you're tapping into AI and stuff like that, the database.

Yeah.

There's a million scenarios.

And again, I think it just comes to having more information at our fingertips and applying it to fixing something as meaningful as relationships.

You really don't know.

I mean, again, I think when I look back on my 35 years, most of the most important positive life-changing experiences I've had were based on a person that helps catalyze.

So I want more of that for others.

I think that we've done ourselves a disservice in resting on chance, and the systems that are in place aren't here to serve us.

And so we have to do something about it.

Oh, and it reminds me, one of the things I started my podcast was, because after studying health and environmental science and figuring out what makes people sick, I came to the conclusion that not doing what you really want to do is the root cause of a lot of stress, illness, disease.

And so to help people bump them forward, not like a life coach, but it's some kind of tool like, why are you stuck?

Why are you stuck?

And it just comes back to the connections again, because most people are stuck, they don't have the right connection, they don't have the right person at the right time.

So it has potential to solve a lot of problems.

Absolutely.

To move to a better place.

There's a focus of pathways to connect, right?

Like you want to do this, and then what's the pathway to connect to people who want to do that?

My mom's a farmer.

She's doing vertical farming in South Carolina.

And she's like, next year, I really want to get into like the Georgia, the Southeast Georgia markets, right?

And she's like, I know, I know people from Georgia, but I have like some cold calling and research.

And so this just comes to mind in so many conversations.

If you had more tools to connect with people, I gave her a few of my connections and just said, I reach out to these folks, but we don't need to be so sort of stone age with the way this works.

And it-

Yeah, you don't just send people e-mails, pick up the phone and call them, or if we have your-

I'm going to focus on Sanit right now.

It's like connection, but it's Nexion.

Nexion?

Nexion?

Nexion.

Nexion, yeah.

Brandon's company's website is thenexion.com.

It'll be in the show notes.

Brandon, thanks so much for being on the show.

Daniel, I really appreciated this conversation.

Follow up with me after, I'd love to learn more about your work.

Real quick, you mentioned it.

Recap, when could we expect to see it?

And of course, anything that comes out, it's a beta test.

Even Facebook was really bad to start with.

When's the estimated drop date?

No later than May 2025 for beta for full release.

You're going to get some visuals, you're going to get some marketing in the next few weeks.

Awesome.

Thanks, Brandon.

Have a great day.

Thank you, Daniel.

You as well.

Take care.

Thank you so much.