Podcast
27
min read
James Dice

🎧 #151: What we do @ Nexus Labs

August 24, 2023
"We’ve been hearing from people that don’t know what we do at Nexus Labs besides this podcast. So we’re going to tell you about those things here today."​
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—James Dice

Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter and podcast for smart people applying smart building technology—hosted by James Dice. If you’re new to Nexus, you might want to start here.

The Nexus podcast (Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Other apps) is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industry—together. The project is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the Nexus Pro membership community.

You can join Nexus Pro to get a weekly-ish deep dive, access to the Nexus Vendor Landscape, and invites to exclusive events with a community of smart buildings nerds.

Episode 151 is a conversation with James Dice and Rosy Kahlife from Nexus Labs.

Summary

Episode 151 dives into what James and Rosy do at Nexus Labs beyond the podcast. From the pro membership community, to the courses platform, partnerships, and the marketplace, this episode brings you up to speed on all things Nexus Labs. We also hear from people who use these products and the impacts that they have. For more information check out the links in the show notes.

Mentions and Links

  1. Nexus Pro Membership (01:57)
  2. Cory Clarke (02:37)
  3. Tom Balme (02:49)
  4. Eric Larsen (03:57)
  5. Brad Bonavida (04:15)
  6. Nexus Course Platform (05:10)
  7. Danielle Radden (05:58)
  8. John Gleeson (09:34)
  9. Arcadis (09:38)
  10. Joe Gaspardone (13:19)
  11. Montgomery Technologies (13:20)
  12. Leo Glaser (15:03)
  13. SES Consulting (15:08)
  14. Brad White (15:09)
  15. Stephanie Poole (15:10)
  16. Nexus Labs Marketplace (16:41)
  17. Brian Vaughn (17:22)
  18. Cushman & Wakefield (17:23)
  19. Clockworks Analytics (19:46)
  20. Sarah Fisher (19:50)
  21. Shoe Dog (26:10)
  22. 🎧Acquired Podcast: The Complete History & Strategy of Nike (26:57)

You can find Rosy and James on LinkedIn.

Enjoy!

Highlights

Nexus Pro Membership (01:54)

Nexus Course Platform (05:10)

Testimonial on The Smart Building Strategist Course as an individual from Danielle Radden (05:58)

Testimonial on The Smart Building Strategist Course for teams from John Gleeson at Arcadis (09:34)

Upcoming new courses (11:42)

Nexus Labs Marketplace (16:41)

Update on vendor vetting committee with Brian Vaughn (17:59)

Testimonial on the partnership program with Sarah Fisher from Clockworks Analytics (19:50)

Carve outs (25:00)

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Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S470906-15083.

Full transcript

Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!

[00:00:00] James Dice: Hey friends, if you like the Nexus podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are three ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus Pro Membership. It's our global community of smart building professionals. We have monthly events, paywall deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just 35 a month.

[00:00:23] Second, you can upgrade from the Pro Membership to our courses offering. It's headlined by our flagship course, the Smart Building Strategist, and we're building a catalog of courses taught by world leading experts on each topic under the Smart Buildings umbrella. Third, and finally, our Marketplace is how we connect leading vendors with buyers looking for their solutions.

[00:00:42] The links are below in the show notes. And now let's go on to the podcast.

[00:00:49] Hello and welcome to the Nexus podcast. Hey Rosie.

[00:00:53] Rosy Khalife: Hi everyone. Hi James.

[00:00:55] James Dice: We thought we'd change it up a little bit this episode. We've been hearing from [00:01:00] people that don't know what we do at Nexus Labs besides this podcast, which is quite odd because we do a lot of stuff besides this podcast. So we're going to tell you about those things here today.

[00:01:12] Rosy Khalife: Yeah. And at first, when I heard this from a few people that I was talking to, I felt like, what do you mean? You know, we're so obvious with what we do. We always are talking about it. But then it made me realize that if you found us through this podcast and you are a dedicated listener, maybe this is the only outlet that you think we exist in.

[00:01:33] And that's totally valid. It makes sense. So hopefully today. We can share more of what we do, tell you all the fun things that are going on, what we're working on, and just kind of catch up in more of a friendly, casual way. So this will be a short episode, but hopefully you'll go away with a little bit more information about Nexus and that would be great.

[00:01:54] James Dice: All right, first up we have our Nexus Pro product [00:02:00] that we call our community. It has 600 members currently. We just crossed the threshold, 600 members. Blow your air horn here. So exciting. Um, and I think we'll just like quickly outline what it, what it means to be a pro member. So you can connect with all the other members in our private chat room.

[00:02:22] We have a paywall with deeper dive, um, content behind it. And we do monthly events. So I was just going to walk through the events real quick. So we have, um, a subject matter expert workshop each month. We have that next month or next week with Corey Clark. It's on edge cloud computing. And then we have, uh, our, um.

[00:02:45] APAC, um, Subject Matter Expert Workshop that's hosted by Tom Balm in Australia. And then we have our Pro Member Gathering where we're doing a debate this month on IoT sensors. Uh, and that's just, uh, sort of the three [00:03:00] events that we do each month. And those are for members only, so you get those in your calendar, um, as invites.

[00:03:09] Rosy Khalife: Yeah, and the pro being part of the pro community is really sort of the gateway drug into Nexus. I always like to say it's the way that you can learn more about the community, get to know others, network, join the events, just really immerse yourself into the whole world of Nexus. And there's a ton of resources.

[00:03:29] There's a ton of recordings. If you're looking to learn, it's a great place. To be if you're looking to meet people, it's a great place to be. There's just so much value there. So that is our first. Hey, is that actually the first product you've ever created, James?

[00:03:44] James Dice: Yeah. So the, the pro membership started in April of 2020.

[00:03:48] Okay. And so we've been going for a while now. And we just recently did three, three big things. I think one is we have a new community manager, Eric Larson. Uh, he's working [00:04:00] part time supporting our members, uh, improving the member experience, and we have a new APAC lead. I mentioned Tom Balm. So Tom's hosting events and writing about what's going on in that part of the world.

[00:04:12] And then we have the new vendor landscape manager, Brad Bonavita, coolest last name. In the community, I think. Yeah. Um, so Brad is keeping the vendor landscape updated. He's got, I think he's got over 530 vendors that he's cataloged at this point. So we keep making improvements to the community as well and hopefully keep improving the member experience.

[00:04:35] Rosy Khalife: And then one other thing we did recently is we understand that a lot of teams want to sign up folks for the pro membership. So we've made it a little bit easier for you to do that. So if you go on our site under membership, you'll see an option for you to sign yourself up or your team. And there's a ton of discounts if you know, the bigger the team is obviously. So take a look at that.

[00:04:57] James Dice: Yeah, we have teams of all sizes at this [00:05:00] point from, you know, a couple people all the way up to teams of, of 20, 25. So if you're a member and you like connecting, that's probably where you might stay. We also have course offerings, so you can upgrade your Pro Membership to a Courses Membership.

[00:05:17] One, one potentially beneficial but also confusing piece is that the courses membership includes all the courses we're about to talk about, but it also includes the pro membership. So you're basically, you're still a member of the pro community if you choose to upgrade and get access to our courses. We have one um, flagship course, It's, it used to be called Nexus Foundations.

[00:05:41] We've since renamed it to the Smart Building Strategist course, and we've had about 500 people come through the course. Um, a couple hundred per year at this point. Uh, it's very popular. We have great, great testimonials from it, and I think it'd be a good time to play one for you all.

[00:05:58] Danielle Radden: My name is Danielle [00:06:00] Radden. I signed up for the Nexus Lab Strategist course, uh, about a month ago, because two years ago I started my career in smart buildings, and the only thing I knew about smart buildings was that sometimes the lights turn on and off on their own. Through this course, the amount of information that I've learned has been incredible, and it dives into details, but it also has a lot of auxiliary information that you wouldn't think you need to know, but holy cow, it has helped so much.

[00:06:32] There's, there's podcasts, there's examples, there's stories, there's case studies, and I couldn't suggest a better course, especially if you're just getting started in smart buildings.

[00:06:43] Rosy Khalife: Wow, look at that. Thank you for the awesome review, Danielle, that we did not pay Danielle for that review. I just want to be clear that was on the Unsponsored.

[00:06:55] James Dice: And I should say Danielle is a newcomer to the industry, um, but she [00:07:00] is not that new. She's been around for a few years. It really does help people that are not just walking in the door for the first time. Um, we've had people from sort of all experience levels, take the course and get something out of it.

[00:07:12] Rosy Khalife: Yeah. And what's really cool about what Danielle does is she works with companies in the smart building space, uh, for, in terms of their marketing. And so this, the course has also helped her. Just figure out how to better sell their solutions to the market and what that really means. What are the pain points?

[00:07:29] And I think that even as a marketer, you can get so much out of the course, which I think is really interesting and or as a salesperson, as well as if you're someone who's actually putting together the strategy and implementing it and actually doing the work.

[00:07:44] James Dice: Awesome. And, um, throughout this whole time since we've been teaching the course since the fall of 2020, uh, we've had several teams come through the course.

[00:07:53] And so we've done, um, Google, Carrier, Wired Score, um, Willow, the list [00:08:00] goes on and on of people that have sort of hired us to train whole teams at a time. And we've just come up with a new way for those teams to buy the course. So we're calling it Enterprise Pricing. Um, it's on our website and we'll put the link in the show notes.

[00:08:17] And we really realized a couple of weeks ago that. If you're a manager, you need your team to keep up, right, with everything moving so fast. But it's really hard to do it on your own. And so we wanted to create this accessible way for managers to sign up their entire teams. And just include that as a line item in your budget for continuing education.

[00:08:38] And, or I'm thinking of it like community driven continuing education. Because what we're going to do moving forward is we're going to have not just our strategist course, but also All types of other courses that we're going to have experts, you know, beyond myself, beyond Rachel, who helps with our strategist course, bring in their [00:09:00] experience and teach topics that they're, you know, world renowned experts in.

[00:09:04] And students can take the course on their own time. Experts can, you know, make themselves available for Q& A and workshops. And the whole platform brings together students that You might be taking different courses, but you get to know the fellow students in each one. And we're really creating this for managers that really don't have anything right now to help their, their teams keep up.

[00:09:28] And so we have one more testimonial here to read now.

[00:09:33] Rosy Khalife: All right.

[00:09:34] John Gleeson: Hey, James. Hey, Rosie. Hope you're well. John Gleeson here over on Arcadis UK. Um, I lead up the technology team for building intelligence in London. Um, we're huge supporters of Excelf Labs, so thank you for all of the support to date. We've put about 20 25 people through the foundations course, so from newcomers with Little or no construction knowledge to 30 years experience in IT integration or program delivery.[00:10:00]

[00:10:00] And, you know, the results are always, you know, really enlightening. People feel a lot more confidence and value and they come back saying, you know, how much, how much. Uh, value the whole course has been they, uh, they, you know, contextual knowledge of this space in technology and building services and, and, and, and what like disruption and innovation there is within it is, you know, hard to get a grasp of.

[00:10:23] You need like battle scars. You need, you know, application mutation. Um, time to get ahead and understand like what that change is and how to influence it or redirect it or be a strong consultant in this space. So Nexus kind of gets people rapidly up to speed. It's our default place to, to bring on newcomers when, uh, when they do join, um, at whatever level it is, um, as it really gets people on the same page.

[00:10:48] Rosy Khalife: Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you, John.

[00:10:50] James Dice: That's awesome. That was the first time I'd heard that one. So yeah, thank you, John. Yeah, it's been really fun bringing all the Arcadis folks in, [00:11:00] um, and meeting all of them, hearing all of their accents.

[00:11:02] Rosy Khalife: We've become part of their sort of onboarding process, which is really cool.

[00:11:06] So it's always fun to meet all the newcomers. That are new to that company and they're coming from different backgrounds or whatever. And it's, it feels really special that we're now part of their sort of welcome committee as Nexus. And, um, we don't take that lightly.

[00:11:21] James Dice: And it's a big perk that managers can give their employees, right.

[00:11:24] To, to bring them into this community. Right. So the next thing we're going to talk about is. People like John, the managers that are putting their, their team through this, we want to expand all of their minds and think about, okay, it's not just a beginner's course. It's not just an onboarding piece. We're going to be adding an entire course catalog of all these different topics.

[00:11:46] And the way I'd frame this is we're going to have different levels. And so if you think about, um, everybody listening to this can think about where they go really deep, um, in the industry, you can get really, really deep. You're the, like, [00:12:00] One of the top experts on that topic. So you might say FDD, or you might say decarbonization, or you might say networking, all of us have that deep area, but then there are a bunch of other topics within the umbrella that are really relevant to what we're doing.

[00:12:13] Maybe it's an adjacent technology, or maybe it's a part of the process that they don't understand. You really need to have some. sort of awareness of what's going on over in those other silos. And so the way we're thinking about our course platform is it's really a catalog of these different levels of expertise that you need to have on all the different topics in the industry.

[00:12:34] So we're going to have an awareness level course. And the way to think about that is you're going to be able to take that course in two to four hours and quickly get up to speed. And then we're going to have the strategist level courses, we're thinking about that, like our current course, it's about 8 to 12 hours of effort.

[00:12:49] And then we're going to go deeper into the practitioner level. So if you're out there doing this every day and you want to train someone to do this every day, you need to go even deeper than that. So we have a couple [00:13:00] courses that are coming out this fall. Um, one is on the business case. So we're going to do awareness and strategist level courses on making the financial business case for commercial real estate.

[00:13:10] And this one's huge for people that are selling into office buildings, multifamily buildings that are really, really cost conscious. Um, and Joe Gaspardone of Montgomery Technologies is a expert. And financial models for commercial real estate. People have heard him out, heard him on the podcast several times before.

[00:13:29] Joe's going to do a deep dive on breaking down the financials of these sort of transactional real estate type of buildings and making sure that everyone, whether you're on the buyer side or the vendor side, knows how to really put together that case to make the technology decision a no brainer. So that'll be fun.

[00:13:47] And then we're going to have four courses come out on decarbonization. So awareness level course on how to decarbonize. So what sort of everybody needs to understand about the overall process. And then another awareness level [00:14:00] course on the building sectors, carbon emissions. So basically how to buildings use, um, and emit carbon and then a sort of business case.

[00:14:08] So why to, yeah. Real estate owners need to think about decarbonization and I would categorize those as like literally everyone in the whole industry needs to be taking those courses. Um, because that's something that's so important to our industry and where we're at. And it's something that a lot of people don't fully understand.

[00:14:25] And then each of those courses are going to have a strategist level version. So we're going to have a Decarbonization roadmap course. So if you're thinking about the portfolio of buildings, how do you develop a roadmap for decarbonization? And then we'll have a building level decarbonization deep dive.

[00:14:41] So people will be able to strategize on identifying and sort of implementing, uh, carbon reduction plans at the building level. So if you think about facility managers and energy managers, all of them, they need to sort of dive in at that level of detail to be able to create an actual plan for their portfolio and for [00:15:00] their building.

[00:15:01] And those courses are going to be taught by Leo Glazer, who's been on the podcast before, and then SES Consulting. So Brad White and Stephanie Poole will be teaching those courses. Sort of teaming up and integrating them together. Um, so bringing in some experts that are out there doing it every day. And I know Rosa, you've been thinking about how we really need those decarbonization courses for, that's a really hot topic right now.

[00:15:28] Rosy Khalife: Yeah. I feel like I want to take the courses, but also everyone I'm talking to from You know, every marketer all the way up to CTO CIOs, everyone is talking about this because there's just, there seems to be so much about it. That's the interesting point. It's not like a subject that if you Google it right now, you're not going to find, you know, hundreds and hundreds of search results, but it does feel like it's hard to find quality information.

[00:15:56] That's not just adding to the noise. That's not it. Just fluff. [00:16:00] So I think that's what I'm most excited about is what do I need to know? Just tell me, and how can you make sure that it's relevant to what I care about? And so that's what we're helping create here, which, which is going to be awesome.

[00:16:12] James Dice: I think the key is that all of these are going to be integrated together.

[00:16:15] So that's sort of my job moving forward is as Joe's teaching a course on the financial case. And then Leo and Stephanie and Brad are putting together these decarbonization courses. I'm not going to let them do that in a silo. They're going to have to put it together and use the same terminology and frameworks.

[00:16:31] Um, so everything is sort of integrated together for the students. Okay. So the last way that we spend our time outside of this podcast is our marketplace offering. So this is where we're bringing together buyers and sellers. So we're putting together a buyer community. So if you're in the buyer world, you're looking for help to buy technology, reach out to us, we'll help you.

[00:16:53] Um, if you're a vendor, you're looking to get in front of buyers. This is for you to purchase from us and we will [00:17:00] partner with you to create educational content and sort of figure out what you do and vet your solution and include you in the marketplace of other solutions in the correct category. And we have one announcement right now, a couple of announcements.

[00:17:16] The first is we're going to be coming out with, um, our vetting committee. So we've been putting together this committee and Brian Vaughn of Cushman Wakefield is the leader of the committee. And he's been interviewing people to join the committee with them. And so they're going to kick off soon with starting to vet.

[00:17:32] Um, different companies, they're going to start by creating category requirements. So if you're, for example, a fault detection and diagnostics vendor, they're going to create requirements that all vendors that are vetted in that category must meet. And then they're going to, um, basically vet each company in that category.

[00:17:53] And Brian has a voice recording here for sort of explaining how that process works.

[00:17:59] Brian Vaughn: Hello, it's [00:18:00] Brian Vaughn with Cushman Wakefield. Just want to provide a quick update on the vetting committee. I've accepted the role of leading this committee and I've spent the last few weeks reaching out to people interested in joining.

[00:18:10] I've had about 10 meetings so far with different candidates. Along the way, we've had some good conversation on what it will mean to vet a vendor. We want to make sure that this is something that's scalable, has a good experience for the vendors, and most importantly, represents The views that we have as part of the Nexus community.

[00:18:25] The initial plans are to establish the requirements alongside the development of buyer's guides. So those are in line and incorporate some input from the community on what's expected of a vendor. We'll develop these requirements, get them published. And then we can provide those to the vendors for self scoring.

[00:18:42] The vetting committee then intends to meet with the vendors to review their responses and validate that what they provided is correct. And the vendors who pass will get the seal of approval to go alongside their listing. Please look out for an update on who gets selected for this committee. Thank you.

[00:18:58] James Dice: Yeah, thanks Brian. [00:19:00] Um, so yeah, we'll be launching the committee soon and we'll basically start to publish for buyers. Um, we've been getting asked for, for a long time, which is give us, you know, I'm looking for this category of solutions, give us three vetted. You know, risk free vendors, we know they're out there.

[00:19:19] So just provide us that list so that we don't have to go out into the marketplace, the full marketplace of hundreds of different vendors, um, in each category. So we have about how many partners do we have today, Rosie, that are in the marketplace? Uh, 16,

[00:19:33] Rosy Khalife: 17, 16, yeah, 16, 17.

[00:19:36] James Dice: And so we've been doing this for most of 2023 so far.

[00:19:40] The program kicked off in March and we have a testimonial from one of our partners here. Clockworks.

[00:19:49] Rosy Khalife: All right.

[00:19:50] Sarah Fisher: You know, the journey of the average buyer or prospect is not a straight line anymore. It's not the old school marketing funnel where they come in the top and [00:20:00] you hope to weed them out the bottom.

[00:20:02] Um, people are researching, they're self educating, they're... Up, they're down, they're talking to other people using the products. So it was really important for us to put out really high quality content that is educational, that brings value, that helps them in that journey wherever they are, um, and The partnership with Nexus Labs was perfect for that, um, as sort of agnostic experts in the field, um, being able to bring our expertise there to the Nexus audience and partner it up with, uh, James expertise has been great.

[00:20:45] We've, you know, gotten our customer stories out, which is really important to us because there's nothing more important than hearing True success stories of real people in the real world in real facilities, um, making a change in their buildings and, uh, their [00:21:00] maintenance efforts. And so, um, it's been great to get, we got our Iowa case study out there and, um, also a podcast.

[00:21:10] Just hearing those real voices has been so valuable to building our brand and building the trust, um, and that's what we want to keep on doing.

[00:21:20] Rosy Khalife: Thank you, Sarah. So Sarah runs marketing at Clockworks Analytics. She does a phenomenal job as I'm sure many of you have seen the things that they put out. She's also such an amazing person in terms of her personality and her energy.

[00:21:34] So we're super lucky that we get to partner with them, but we have a lot of awesome partners and a lot of great people that we get to work with. And it's, it's really fun to get to tell their stories. We often hear that the stories that we're able to share from our partners are ones that they could have never shared themselves because.

[00:21:53] You know, their customers don't want to talk to them in this way, and it's not as credible, and it's not as a raw, and it's not as [00:22:00] authentic. And so we come in, we're that third party where the customer can really chat with us and tell us what they're, you know, why they chose the solution, what they had chosen before that maybe didn't work, right, and their process.

[00:22:13] And it's, it's really important information for us to share with the community, specifically with buyers. So Uh, great to hear that from you, Sarah. We love doing that. Um, and then in general, just a quick update on our partner program, some of the things that we've learned. So, you know, the way that we've thought about the offering has really been comprehensive.

[00:22:34] So we, we really put ourselves in your shoes as the buyer. We put ourselves in your shoes as the tech or, or service provider. And we thought. You know, what do we need to create here? And so the various components from, you know, the podcast, customer stories, or from the buyer guide webinars, or the deployment section of our site, if you haven't seen that, check it out.

[00:22:54] All of those different things, you know, are ideas that really came from listening to what you all want [00:23:00] to see and us trying to be the most helpful. So we are kind of approaching it in a multifaceted way. Uh, in terms of how we're telling our partner stories, and I think that's what's making it the most successful.

[00:23:13] So that's been really fun and exciting for us. And then the other part is that we really want this to be a tool for us to help you, you know, attract buyers, like James was saying, and then vice versa, if you are a buyer, for us to really help you source. The next technology or the next service provider that you need for whatever you're looking to do, uh, and we and we're really happy to say that we are helping that happen.

[00:23:36] We were doing that before the marketplace came to came to be, and we've kind of continued to do that through this. Uh, and so what's happening now is the leads or the folks that are kind of raising their hand saying, Hey, we're interested in Clockworks or, Hey, we're interested in, in Butler or whatever, whichever one of our partners, uh, we're being able to send those directly to those partners and they're high [00:24:00] quality.

[00:24:00] Folks, you know, they're not just your regular Joe Schmo. They're educated buyers. They're folks that have already looked through our entire marketplace. And so for them to raise their hand, it means that they already know kind of what they're looking for. And so happy to share. And we'll kind of keep sharing updates on this.

[00:24:15] But a lot of those have turned into pilots. And that are hopefully soon turning into, you know, full blown portfolio customers. So, very interesting to kind of see the quality of the people that are coming in through Nexus. No surprise, but it's always nice to get validated. So, that is a quick update on the Marketplace, on how we're working with partners.

[00:24:37] Um, if you are interested in wanting to be involved, we obviously have the vetting committee that you just heard about. We have an application. So, You can fill that out. It's on our site and that will give you kind of the first step into the process. Uh, and then we will kind of take it from there. We'll reach out to you and we can always have a call and go through all the specifics.[00:25:00]

[00:25:00] James Dice: All right. That's it. Those are all the things we do, the two of us. Outside of this podcast. Um, Rosie, it's, it's summertime. What else have you been up to? Let's, let's hear a carve out. What do you recommend people check out that you've been checking out?

[00:25:15] Rosy Khalife: So many things. It's been, it's been such a fun summer.

[00:25:19] I'll have to say I've been. Just trying to soak it all in. I, every email that I send, and if any of you have gotten an email from me, I'm asking everyone like, what are you up to this summer? Cause I'm trying to just live everyone's summer, live through them. Uh, so that's been a cool change, but what am I up to?

[00:25:36] Um, I've been mostly tending to my garden on my time off. I have a little garden outside my window and I've been doing a lot of that, which has been really fun. I have tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant. A lot of bunch of stuff. I'm also feeding, you know, all of the animals in the neighborhood, unfortunately, from my garden.

[00:25:55] So that's happening, but, you know, it's expected. It's all good. [00:26:00] Um, so that's one big thing. And then in terms of a car, a proper carve out of what I'm reading or doing these days with, with regards to. Enlightening my brain. Um, I'm reading Shoe Dog. Great book. If you all haven't read it, um, it is by the founder of Nike.

[00:26:17] He's amazing, amazing guy and just love the way it's written. Just a great book. So definitely check it out. Very inspiring. And, um, let me know if you like it. All right, your turn, James.

[00:26:28] James Dice: I'm going to throw a carve out on top of that. Uh, the acquired podcast, they did a four hour episode on Nike. Uh, shoe dog was the basis of a lot of their research, but they also read like three or four or five other books and like interview people that were there.

[00:26:44] So people should read shoe dog, but then also, obviously if you're interested in business and you're interested in, you know, this storied American company called Nike, you can. Then dive deeper into that with the Acquired podcast. Um, my carve out [00:27:00] is I've been doing a lot of, um, landscaping here at home. My wife and I are about to move to Boulder, Colorado, but we're getting our house ready.

[00:27:08] And I realized I love landscaping, so that's fun to do on my spare time. Um, and then I'll say, um, I'll just give a shout out to all the people that are soccer fans out there. Hype is high right now. If you're an Arsenal fan, like I am, they bought three new players this summer. And, uh, yeah, like I said, hype, hype in the Arsenal fan world is very high right now.

[00:27:33] Watching every game and super excited about all their games right now. Cool. All right, everyone. Thanks for joining us. This is what we do at Nexus.

[00:27:43] Rosy Khalife: Yes. Thanks for listening. Reach out if you have any questions.

[00:27:51] Okay, friends. Thank you for listening to this episode. As we continue to grow our global community of change makers, we need your help. For the next couple of months, we're [00:28:00] challenging our listeners to share a link to their favorite Nexus episode on LinkedIn with a short post about why you listen. It would really, really help us out.

[00:28:08] Make sure to tag us in the post so we can see it. Have a good one.

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"We’ve been hearing from people that don’t know what we do at Nexus Labs besides this podcast. So we’re going to tell you about those things here today."​
‍
—James Dice

Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter and podcast for smart people applying smart building technology—hosted by James Dice. If you’re new to Nexus, you might want to start here.

The Nexus podcast (Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Other apps) is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industry—together. The project is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the Nexus Pro membership community.

You can join Nexus Pro to get a weekly-ish deep dive, access to the Nexus Vendor Landscape, and invites to exclusive events with a community of smart buildings nerds.

Episode 151 is a conversation with James Dice and Rosy Kahlife from Nexus Labs.

Summary

Episode 151 dives into what James and Rosy do at Nexus Labs beyond the podcast. From the pro membership community, to the courses platform, partnerships, and the marketplace, this episode brings you up to speed on all things Nexus Labs. We also hear from people who use these products and the impacts that they have. For more information check out the links in the show notes.

Mentions and Links

  1. Nexus Pro Membership (01:57)
  2. Cory Clarke (02:37)
  3. Tom Balme (02:49)
  4. Eric Larsen (03:57)
  5. Brad Bonavida (04:15)
  6. Nexus Course Platform (05:10)
  7. Danielle Radden (05:58)
  8. John Gleeson (09:34)
  9. Arcadis (09:38)
  10. Joe Gaspardone (13:19)
  11. Montgomery Technologies (13:20)
  12. Leo Glaser (15:03)
  13. SES Consulting (15:08)
  14. Brad White (15:09)
  15. Stephanie Poole (15:10)
  16. Nexus Labs Marketplace (16:41)
  17. Brian Vaughn (17:22)
  18. Cushman & Wakefield (17:23)
  19. Clockworks Analytics (19:46)
  20. Sarah Fisher (19:50)
  21. Shoe Dog (26:10)
  22. 🎧Acquired Podcast: The Complete History & Strategy of Nike (26:57)

You can find Rosy and James on LinkedIn.

Enjoy!

Highlights

Nexus Pro Membership (01:54)

Nexus Course Platform (05:10)

Testimonial on The Smart Building Strategist Course as an individual from Danielle Radden (05:58)

Testimonial on The Smart Building Strategist Course for teams from John Gleeson at Arcadis (09:34)

Upcoming new courses (11:42)

Nexus Labs Marketplace (16:41)

Update on vendor vetting committee with Brian Vaughn (17:59)

Testimonial on the partnership program with Sarah Fisher from Clockworks Analytics (19:50)

Carve outs (25:00)

‍



Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S470906-15083.

Full transcript

Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!

[00:00:00] James Dice: Hey friends, if you like the Nexus podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are three ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus Pro Membership. It's our global community of smart building professionals. We have monthly events, paywall deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just 35 a month.

[00:00:23] Second, you can upgrade from the Pro Membership to our courses offering. It's headlined by our flagship course, the Smart Building Strategist, and we're building a catalog of courses taught by world leading experts on each topic under the Smart Buildings umbrella. Third, and finally, our Marketplace is how we connect leading vendors with buyers looking for their solutions.

[00:00:42] The links are below in the show notes. And now let's go on to the podcast.

[00:00:49] Hello and welcome to the Nexus podcast. Hey Rosie.

[00:00:53] Rosy Khalife: Hi everyone. Hi James.

[00:00:55] James Dice: We thought we'd change it up a little bit this episode. We've been hearing from [00:01:00] people that don't know what we do at Nexus Labs besides this podcast, which is quite odd because we do a lot of stuff besides this podcast. So we're going to tell you about those things here today.

[00:01:12] Rosy Khalife: Yeah. And at first, when I heard this from a few people that I was talking to, I felt like, what do you mean? You know, we're so obvious with what we do. We always are talking about it. But then it made me realize that if you found us through this podcast and you are a dedicated listener, maybe this is the only outlet that you think we exist in.

[00:01:33] And that's totally valid. It makes sense. So hopefully today. We can share more of what we do, tell you all the fun things that are going on, what we're working on, and just kind of catch up in more of a friendly, casual way. So this will be a short episode, but hopefully you'll go away with a little bit more information about Nexus and that would be great.

[00:01:54] James Dice: All right, first up we have our Nexus Pro product [00:02:00] that we call our community. It has 600 members currently. We just crossed the threshold, 600 members. Blow your air horn here. So exciting. Um, and I think we'll just like quickly outline what it, what it means to be a pro member. So you can connect with all the other members in our private chat room.

[00:02:22] We have a paywall with deeper dive, um, content behind it. And we do monthly events. So I was just going to walk through the events real quick. So we have, um, a subject matter expert workshop each month. We have that next month or next week with Corey Clark. It's on edge cloud computing. And then we have, uh, our, um.

[00:02:45] APAC, um, Subject Matter Expert Workshop that's hosted by Tom Balm in Australia. And then we have our Pro Member Gathering where we're doing a debate this month on IoT sensors. Uh, and that's just, uh, sort of the three [00:03:00] events that we do each month. And those are for members only, so you get those in your calendar, um, as invites.

[00:03:09] Rosy Khalife: Yeah, and the pro being part of the pro community is really sort of the gateway drug into Nexus. I always like to say it's the way that you can learn more about the community, get to know others, network, join the events, just really immerse yourself into the whole world of Nexus. And there's a ton of resources.

[00:03:29] There's a ton of recordings. If you're looking to learn, it's a great place. To be if you're looking to meet people, it's a great place to be. There's just so much value there. So that is our first. Hey, is that actually the first product you've ever created, James?

[00:03:44] James Dice: Yeah. So the, the pro membership started in April of 2020.

[00:03:48] Okay. And so we've been going for a while now. And we just recently did three, three big things. I think one is we have a new community manager, Eric Larson. Uh, he's working [00:04:00] part time supporting our members, uh, improving the member experience, and we have a new APAC lead. I mentioned Tom Balm. So Tom's hosting events and writing about what's going on in that part of the world.

[00:04:12] And then we have the new vendor landscape manager, Brad Bonavita, coolest last name. In the community, I think. Yeah. Um, so Brad is keeping the vendor landscape updated. He's got, I think he's got over 530 vendors that he's cataloged at this point. So we keep making improvements to the community as well and hopefully keep improving the member experience.

[00:04:35] Rosy Khalife: And then one other thing we did recently is we understand that a lot of teams want to sign up folks for the pro membership. So we've made it a little bit easier for you to do that. So if you go on our site under membership, you'll see an option for you to sign yourself up or your team. And there's a ton of discounts if you know, the bigger the team is obviously. So take a look at that.

[00:04:57] James Dice: Yeah, we have teams of all sizes at this [00:05:00] point from, you know, a couple people all the way up to teams of, of 20, 25. So if you're a member and you like connecting, that's probably where you might stay. We also have course offerings, so you can upgrade your Pro Membership to a Courses Membership.

[00:05:17] One, one potentially beneficial but also confusing piece is that the courses membership includes all the courses we're about to talk about, but it also includes the pro membership. So you're basically, you're still a member of the pro community if you choose to upgrade and get access to our courses. We have one um, flagship course, It's, it used to be called Nexus Foundations.

[00:05:41] We've since renamed it to the Smart Building Strategist course, and we've had about 500 people come through the course. Um, a couple hundred per year at this point. Uh, it's very popular. We have great, great testimonials from it, and I think it'd be a good time to play one for you all.

[00:05:58] Danielle Radden: My name is Danielle [00:06:00] Radden. I signed up for the Nexus Lab Strategist course, uh, about a month ago, because two years ago I started my career in smart buildings, and the only thing I knew about smart buildings was that sometimes the lights turn on and off on their own. Through this course, the amount of information that I've learned has been incredible, and it dives into details, but it also has a lot of auxiliary information that you wouldn't think you need to know, but holy cow, it has helped so much.

[00:06:32] There's, there's podcasts, there's examples, there's stories, there's case studies, and I couldn't suggest a better course, especially if you're just getting started in smart buildings.

[00:06:43] Rosy Khalife: Wow, look at that. Thank you for the awesome review, Danielle, that we did not pay Danielle for that review. I just want to be clear that was on the Unsponsored.

[00:06:55] James Dice: And I should say Danielle is a newcomer to the industry, um, but she [00:07:00] is not that new. She's been around for a few years. It really does help people that are not just walking in the door for the first time. Um, we've had people from sort of all experience levels, take the course and get something out of it.

[00:07:12] Rosy Khalife: Yeah. And what's really cool about what Danielle does is she works with companies in the smart building space, uh, for, in terms of their marketing. And so this, the course has also helped her. Just figure out how to better sell their solutions to the market and what that really means. What are the pain points?

[00:07:29] And I think that even as a marketer, you can get so much out of the course, which I think is really interesting and or as a salesperson, as well as if you're someone who's actually putting together the strategy and implementing it and actually doing the work.

[00:07:44] James Dice: Awesome. And, um, throughout this whole time since we've been teaching the course since the fall of 2020, uh, we've had several teams come through the course.

[00:07:53] And so we've done, um, Google, Carrier, Wired Score, um, Willow, the list [00:08:00] goes on and on of people that have sort of hired us to train whole teams at a time. And we've just come up with a new way for those teams to buy the course. So we're calling it Enterprise Pricing. Um, it's on our website and we'll put the link in the show notes.

[00:08:17] And we really realized a couple of weeks ago that. If you're a manager, you need your team to keep up, right, with everything moving so fast. But it's really hard to do it on your own. And so we wanted to create this accessible way for managers to sign up their entire teams. And just include that as a line item in your budget for continuing education.

[00:08:38] And, or I'm thinking of it like community driven continuing education. Because what we're going to do moving forward is we're going to have not just our strategist course, but also All types of other courses that we're going to have experts, you know, beyond myself, beyond Rachel, who helps with our strategist course, bring in their [00:09:00] experience and teach topics that they're, you know, world renowned experts in.

[00:09:04] And students can take the course on their own time. Experts can, you know, make themselves available for Q& A and workshops. And the whole platform brings together students that You might be taking different courses, but you get to know the fellow students in each one. And we're really creating this for managers that really don't have anything right now to help their, their teams keep up.

[00:09:28] And so we have one more testimonial here to read now.

[00:09:33] Rosy Khalife: All right.

[00:09:34] John Gleeson: Hey, James. Hey, Rosie. Hope you're well. John Gleeson here over on Arcadis UK. Um, I lead up the technology team for building intelligence in London. Um, we're huge supporters of Excelf Labs, so thank you for all of the support to date. We've put about 20 25 people through the foundations course, so from newcomers with Little or no construction knowledge to 30 years experience in IT integration or program delivery.[00:10:00]

[00:10:00] And, you know, the results are always, you know, really enlightening. People feel a lot more confidence and value and they come back saying, you know, how much, how much. Uh, value the whole course has been they, uh, they, you know, contextual knowledge of this space in technology and building services and, and, and, and what like disruption and innovation there is within it is, you know, hard to get a grasp of.

[00:10:23] You need like battle scars. You need, you know, application mutation. Um, time to get ahead and understand like what that change is and how to influence it or redirect it or be a strong consultant in this space. So Nexus kind of gets people rapidly up to speed. It's our default place to, to bring on newcomers when, uh, when they do join, um, at whatever level it is, um, as it really gets people on the same page.

[00:10:48] Rosy Khalife: Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you, John.

[00:10:50] James Dice: That's awesome. That was the first time I'd heard that one. So yeah, thank you, John. Yeah, it's been really fun bringing all the Arcadis folks in, [00:11:00] um, and meeting all of them, hearing all of their accents.

[00:11:02] Rosy Khalife: We've become part of their sort of onboarding process, which is really cool.

[00:11:06] So it's always fun to meet all the newcomers. That are new to that company and they're coming from different backgrounds or whatever. And it's, it feels really special that we're now part of their sort of welcome committee as Nexus. And, um, we don't take that lightly.

[00:11:21] James Dice: And it's a big perk that managers can give their employees, right.

[00:11:24] To, to bring them into this community. Right. So the next thing we're going to talk about is. People like John, the managers that are putting their, their team through this, we want to expand all of their minds and think about, okay, it's not just a beginner's course. It's not just an onboarding piece. We're going to be adding an entire course catalog of all these different topics.

[00:11:46] And the way I'd frame this is we're going to have different levels. And so if you think about, um, everybody listening to this can think about where they go really deep, um, in the industry, you can get really, really deep. You're the, like, [00:12:00] One of the top experts on that topic. So you might say FDD, or you might say decarbonization, or you might say networking, all of us have that deep area, but then there are a bunch of other topics within the umbrella that are really relevant to what we're doing.

[00:12:13] Maybe it's an adjacent technology, or maybe it's a part of the process that they don't understand. You really need to have some. sort of awareness of what's going on over in those other silos. And so the way we're thinking about our course platform is it's really a catalog of these different levels of expertise that you need to have on all the different topics in the industry.

[00:12:34] So we're going to have an awareness level course. And the way to think about that is you're going to be able to take that course in two to four hours and quickly get up to speed. And then we're going to have the strategist level courses, we're thinking about that, like our current course, it's about 8 to 12 hours of effort.

[00:12:49] And then we're going to go deeper into the practitioner level. So if you're out there doing this every day and you want to train someone to do this every day, you need to go even deeper than that. So we have a couple [00:13:00] courses that are coming out this fall. Um, one is on the business case. So we're going to do awareness and strategist level courses on making the financial business case for commercial real estate.

[00:13:10] And this one's huge for people that are selling into office buildings, multifamily buildings that are really, really cost conscious. Um, and Joe Gaspardone of Montgomery Technologies is a expert. And financial models for commercial real estate. People have heard him out, heard him on the podcast several times before.

[00:13:29] Joe's going to do a deep dive on breaking down the financials of these sort of transactional real estate type of buildings and making sure that everyone, whether you're on the buyer side or the vendor side, knows how to really put together that case to make the technology decision a no brainer. So that'll be fun.

[00:13:47] And then we're going to have four courses come out on decarbonization. So awareness level course on how to decarbonize. So what sort of everybody needs to understand about the overall process. And then another awareness level [00:14:00] course on the building sectors, carbon emissions. So basically how to buildings use, um, and emit carbon and then a sort of business case.

[00:14:08] So why to, yeah. Real estate owners need to think about decarbonization and I would categorize those as like literally everyone in the whole industry needs to be taking those courses. Um, because that's something that's so important to our industry and where we're at. And it's something that a lot of people don't fully understand.

[00:14:25] And then each of those courses are going to have a strategist level version. So we're going to have a Decarbonization roadmap course. So if you're thinking about the portfolio of buildings, how do you develop a roadmap for decarbonization? And then we'll have a building level decarbonization deep dive.

[00:14:41] So people will be able to strategize on identifying and sort of implementing, uh, carbon reduction plans at the building level. So if you think about facility managers and energy managers, all of them, they need to sort of dive in at that level of detail to be able to create an actual plan for their portfolio and for [00:15:00] their building.

[00:15:01] And those courses are going to be taught by Leo Glazer, who's been on the podcast before, and then SES Consulting. So Brad White and Stephanie Poole will be teaching those courses. Sort of teaming up and integrating them together. Um, so bringing in some experts that are out there doing it every day. And I know Rosa, you've been thinking about how we really need those decarbonization courses for, that's a really hot topic right now.

[00:15:28] Rosy Khalife: Yeah. I feel like I want to take the courses, but also everyone I'm talking to from You know, every marketer all the way up to CTO CIOs, everyone is talking about this because there's just, there seems to be so much about it. That's the interesting point. It's not like a subject that if you Google it right now, you're not going to find, you know, hundreds and hundreds of search results, but it does feel like it's hard to find quality information.

[00:15:56] That's not just adding to the noise. That's not it. Just fluff. [00:16:00] So I think that's what I'm most excited about is what do I need to know? Just tell me, and how can you make sure that it's relevant to what I care about? And so that's what we're helping create here, which, which is going to be awesome.

[00:16:12] James Dice: I think the key is that all of these are going to be integrated together.

[00:16:15] So that's sort of my job moving forward is as Joe's teaching a course on the financial case. And then Leo and Stephanie and Brad are putting together these decarbonization courses. I'm not going to let them do that in a silo. They're going to have to put it together and use the same terminology and frameworks.

[00:16:31] Um, so everything is sort of integrated together for the students. Okay. So the last way that we spend our time outside of this podcast is our marketplace offering. So this is where we're bringing together buyers and sellers. So we're putting together a buyer community. So if you're in the buyer world, you're looking for help to buy technology, reach out to us, we'll help you.

[00:16:53] Um, if you're a vendor, you're looking to get in front of buyers. This is for you to purchase from us and we will [00:17:00] partner with you to create educational content and sort of figure out what you do and vet your solution and include you in the marketplace of other solutions in the correct category. And we have one announcement right now, a couple of announcements.

[00:17:16] The first is we're going to be coming out with, um, our vetting committee. So we've been putting together this committee and Brian Vaughn of Cushman Wakefield is the leader of the committee. And he's been interviewing people to join the committee with them. And so they're going to kick off soon with starting to vet.

[00:17:32] Um, different companies, they're going to start by creating category requirements. So if you're, for example, a fault detection and diagnostics vendor, they're going to create requirements that all vendors that are vetted in that category must meet. And then they're going to, um, basically vet each company in that category.

[00:17:53] And Brian has a voice recording here for sort of explaining how that process works.

[00:17:59] Brian Vaughn: Hello, it's [00:18:00] Brian Vaughn with Cushman Wakefield. Just want to provide a quick update on the vetting committee. I've accepted the role of leading this committee and I've spent the last few weeks reaching out to people interested in joining.

[00:18:10] I've had about 10 meetings so far with different candidates. Along the way, we've had some good conversation on what it will mean to vet a vendor. We want to make sure that this is something that's scalable, has a good experience for the vendors, and most importantly, represents The views that we have as part of the Nexus community.

[00:18:25] The initial plans are to establish the requirements alongside the development of buyer's guides. So those are in line and incorporate some input from the community on what's expected of a vendor. We'll develop these requirements, get them published. And then we can provide those to the vendors for self scoring.

[00:18:42] The vetting committee then intends to meet with the vendors to review their responses and validate that what they provided is correct. And the vendors who pass will get the seal of approval to go alongside their listing. Please look out for an update on who gets selected for this committee. Thank you.

[00:18:58] James Dice: Yeah, thanks Brian. [00:19:00] Um, so yeah, we'll be launching the committee soon and we'll basically start to publish for buyers. Um, we've been getting asked for, for a long time, which is give us, you know, I'm looking for this category of solutions, give us three vetted. You know, risk free vendors, we know they're out there.

[00:19:19] So just provide us that list so that we don't have to go out into the marketplace, the full marketplace of hundreds of different vendors, um, in each category. So we have about how many partners do we have today, Rosie, that are in the marketplace? Uh, 16,

[00:19:33] Rosy Khalife: 17, 16, yeah, 16, 17.

[00:19:36] James Dice: And so we've been doing this for most of 2023 so far.

[00:19:40] The program kicked off in March and we have a testimonial from one of our partners here. Clockworks.

[00:19:49] Rosy Khalife: All right.

[00:19:50] Sarah Fisher: You know, the journey of the average buyer or prospect is not a straight line anymore. It's not the old school marketing funnel where they come in the top and [00:20:00] you hope to weed them out the bottom.

[00:20:02] Um, people are researching, they're self educating, they're... Up, they're down, they're talking to other people using the products. So it was really important for us to put out really high quality content that is educational, that brings value, that helps them in that journey wherever they are, um, and The partnership with Nexus Labs was perfect for that, um, as sort of agnostic experts in the field, um, being able to bring our expertise there to the Nexus audience and partner it up with, uh, James expertise has been great.

[00:20:45] We've, you know, gotten our customer stories out, which is really important to us because there's nothing more important than hearing True success stories of real people in the real world in real facilities, um, making a change in their buildings and, uh, their [00:21:00] maintenance efforts. And so, um, it's been great to get, we got our Iowa case study out there and, um, also a podcast.

[00:21:10] Just hearing those real voices has been so valuable to building our brand and building the trust, um, and that's what we want to keep on doing.

[00:21:20] Rosy Khalife: Thank you, Sarah. So Sarah runs marketing at Clockworks Analytics. She does a phenomenal job as I'm sure many of you have seen the things that they put out. She's also such an amazing person in terms of her personality and her energy.

[00:21:34] So we're super lucky that we get to partner with them, but we have a lot of awesome partners and a lot of great people that we get to work with. And it's, it's really fun to get to tell their stories. We often hear that the stories that we're able to share from our partners are ones that they could have never shared themselves because.

[00:21:53] You know, their customers don't want to talk to them in this way, and it's not as credible, and it's not as a raw, and it's not as [00:22:00] authentic. And so we come in, we're that third party where the customer can really chat with us and tell us what they're, you know, why they chose the solution, what they had chosen before that maybe didn't work, right, and their process.

[00:22:13] And it's, it's really important information for us to share with the community, specifically with buyers. So Uh, great to hear that from you, Sarah. We love doing that. Um, and then in general, just a quick update on our partner program, some of the things that we've learned. So, you know, the way that we've thought about the offering has really been comprehensive.

[00:22:34] So we, we really put ourselves in your shoes as the buyer. We put ourselves in your shoes as the tech or, or service provider. And we thought. You know, what do we need to create here? And so the various components from, you know, the podcast, customer stories, or from the buyer guide webinars, or the deployment section of our site, if you haven't seen that, check it out.

[00:22:54] All of those different things, you know, are ideas that really came from listening to what you all want [00:23:00] to see and us trying to be the most helpful. So we are kind of approaching it in a multifaceted way. Uh, in terms of how we're telling our partner stories, and I think that's what's making it the most successful.

[00:23:13] So that's been really fun and exciting for us. And then the other part is that we really want this to be a tool for us to help you, you know, attract buyers, like James was saying, and then vice versa, if you are a buyer, for us to really help you source. The next technology or the next service provider that you need for whatever you're looking to do, uh, and we and we're really happy to say that we are helping that happen.

[00:23:36] We were doing that before the marketplace came to came to be, and we've kind of continued to do that through this. Uh, and so what's happening now is the leads or the folks that are kind of raising their hand saying, Hey, we're interested in Clockworks or, Hey, we're interested in, in Butler or whatever, whichever one of our partners, uh, we're being able to send those directly to those partners and they're high [00:24:00] quality.

[00:24:00] Folks, you know, they're not just your regular Joe Schmo. They're educated buyers. They're folks that have already looked through our entire marketplace. And so for them to raise their hand, it means that they already know kind of what they're looking for. And so happy to share. And we'll kind of keep sharing updates on this.

[00:24:15] But a lot of those have turned into pilots. And that are hopefully soon turning into, you know, full blown portfolio customers. So, very interesting to kind of see the quality of the people that are coming in through Nexus. No surprise, but it's always nice to get validated. So, that is a quick update on the Marketplace, on how we're working with partners.

[00:24:37] Um, if you are interested in wanting to be involved, we obviously have the vetting committee that you just heard about. We have an application. So, You can fill that out. It's on our site and that will give you kind of the first step into the process. Uh, and then we will kind of take it from there. We'll reach out to you and we can always have a call and go through all the specifics.[00:25:00]

[00:25:00] James Dice: All right. That's it. Those are all the things we do, the two of us. Outside of this podcast. Um, Rosie, it's, it's summertime. What else have you been up to? Let's, let's hear a carve out. What do you recommend people check out that you've been checking out?

[00:25:15] Rosy Khalife: So many things. It's been, it's been such a fun summer.

[00:25:19] I'll have to say I've been. Just trying to soak it all in. I, every email that I send, and if any of you have gotten an email from me, I'm asking everyone like, what are you up to this summer? Cause I'm trying to just live everyone's summer, live through them. Uh, so that's been a cool change, but what am I up to?

[00:25:36] Um, I've been mostly tending to my garden on my time off. I have a little garden outside my window and I've been doing a lot of that, which has been really fun. I have tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant. A lot of bunch of stuff. I'm also feeding, you know, all of the animals in the neighborhood, unfortunately, from my garden.

[00:25:55] So that's happening, but, you know, it's expected. It's all good. [00:26:00] Um, so that's one big thing. And then in terms of a car, a proper carve out of what I'm reading or doing these days with, with regards to. Enlightening my brain. Um, I'm reading Shoe Dog. Great book. If you all haven't read it, um, it is by the founder of Nike.

[00:26:17] He's amazing, amazing guy and just love the way it's written. Just a great book. So definitely check it out. Very inspiring. And, um, let me know if you like it. All right, your turn, James.

[00:26:28] James Dice: I'm going to throw a carve out on top of that. Uh, the acquired podcast, they did a four hour episode on Nike. Uh, shoe dog was the basis of a lot of their research, but they also read like three or four or five other books and like interview people that were there.

[00:26:44] So people should read shoe dog, but then also, obviously if you're interested in business and you're interested in, you know, this storied American company called Nike, you can. Then dive deeper into that with the Acquired podcast. Um, my carve out [00:27:00] is I've been doing a lot of, um, landscaping here at home. My wife and I are about to move to Boulder, Colorado, but we're getting our house ready.

[00:27:08] And I realized I love landscaping, so that's fun to do on my spare time. Um, and then I'll say, um, I'll just give a shout out to all the people that are soccer fans out there. Hype is high right now. If you're an Arsenal fan, like I am, they bought three new players this summer. And, uh, yeah, like I said, hype, hype in the Arsenal fan world is very high right now.

[00:27:33] Watching every game and super excited about all their games right now. Cool. All right, everyone. Thanks for joining us. This is what we do at Nexus.

[00:27:43] Rosy Khalife: Yes. Thanks for listening. Reach out if you have any questions.

[00:27:51] Okay, friends. Thank you for listening to this episode. As we continue to grow our global community of change makers, we need your help. For the next couple of months, we're [00:28:00] challenging our listeners to share a link to their favorite Nexus episode on LinkedIn with a short post about why you listen. It would really, really help us out.

[00:28:08] Make sure to tag us in the post so we can see it. Have a good one.

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