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Alex Hern, a serial entrepreneur based in San Diego, California, focuses on implementing the vision and mission of his technology company, Tsunami XR. In his free time, Alex Hern enjoys a range of hobbies, including sailing.

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Alex Hern, a serial entrepreneur based in San Diego, California, focuses on implementing the vision and mission of his technology company, Tsunami XR. In his free time, Alex Hern enjoys a range of hobbies, including sailing.

On sailboats, sails are either quadrilateral or triangular. Triangular sails have three sides that are attached to the boat along one or two of the sides.

The bottom edge of a triangular sail that runs parallel to the boom of the boat is called the foot. This section of the sail connects to the luff, or the leading edge parallel to the mast. The corner where the luff and foot connect is known as the tack.

On the opposite end of the foot, the sail connects to the leech, which is the back edge of the sail. The leech connects to the luff by the head, which is the corner of the sail the sits at the top of the mast.

The leech also connects to the foot at the clew. The clew is found at the end of the boom. Altogether, the luff, foot, and leech form a triangle.

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Alex Hern, a serial entrepreneur based in San Diego, California, focuses on implementing the vision and mission of his technology company, Tsunami XR. In his free time, Alex Hern enjoys a range of hobbies, including sailing. On sailboats, sails are either quadrilateral or triangular.

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Developing a Strategy for the Consumer Electronics Show

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Developing a Strategy for the Consumer Electronics Show

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The founder of more than a dozen companies, Alex Hern is a prominent entrepreneur who serves as the CEO of Tsunami XR in San Diego. Responsible for leading Tsunami XR’s growth in the area of augmented reality technology, San Diego businessman Alex Hern has showcased his company’s technology at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and other industry trade conferences.

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Mindful Meditation Can Reduce both Stress and Anxiety

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Mindful Meditation Can Reduce both Stress and Anxiety

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Possessing more than 20 years of experience in launching tech ventures, Alex Hern is a successful technology entrepreneur who currently serves as the CEO of Tsunami XR in California’s San Diego County. In addition to his endeavors with Tsunami XR, Alex Hern enjoys exercising and meditating to unwind.

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Possessing more than 20 years of experience in launching tech ventures, Alex Hern is a successful technology entrepreneur who currently serves as the CEO of Tsunami XR in California's San Diego County. In addition to his endeavors with Tsunami XR, Alex Hern enjoys exercising and meditating to unwind.

Maintaining a meditation practice offers significant physical and mental benefits, according to multiple research studies. One of the benefits meditation offers is stress reduction. One study that included responses from more than 3,500 adults confirmed the stress-relieving benefits of regular meditation. These results are likely linked to decreased levels of the stress hormone cortisol through mindful meditation and deep breathing exercises.

Other studies have shown evidence that meditation can help to lower anxiety levels. One study of 2,466 subjects showed that practicing meditation may lead to lower anxiety levels, while another study of participants in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program showed not only reduced feelings of anxiety, but also fewer instances of related symptoms, such as paranoid thoughts, phobias, panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and social anxiety.

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Mindful Meditation Can Reduce both Stress and Anxiety

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Possessing more than 20 years of experience in launching tech ventures, Alex Hern is a successful technology entrepreneur who currently serves as the CEO of Tsunami XR in California's San Diego County. In addition to his endeavors with Tsunami XR, Alex Hern enjoys exercising and meditating to unwind.

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Wearable Technology Is Gaining Popularity across Industries

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Wearable Technology Is Gaining Popularity across Industries

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Serving as the CEO of Tsunami XR, a San Diego-based technology company, Alex Hern possesses more than 20 years of entrepreneurial experience. The driving force behind the development of Tsunami XR’s digital workspace, San Diego resident Alex Hern is an expert in augmented reality (AR) tech and regularly attends the Enterprise Wearable Technology Summit (EWTS).

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Alex Hern Furthers the Interests of New Entrepreneurs

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Alex Hern Furthers the Interests of New Entrepreneurs

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With more than 25 years of experience in founding, acquiring, investing in, and developing tech companies in online, digital, and virtual spaces, San Diego-based Alex Hern serves as the CEO of Tsunami XR, Inc. He established the digital-workspace firm in 2014 after a string of successful ventures in San Diego County and beyond that included developing Inktomi, Inc., Yesmail.com, and the cyber security-focused ArcSight, Inc. Alex Hern additionally created the seed-stage venture capital-funding company MILCOM Technologies, Inc., in 1997.

While under Alex Hern’s leadership and afterward, MILCOM Technologies brought in venture funding in excess of $600 million from well-known funders such as Bessemer Venture Partners and IBM to support the development of 14 emerging tech companies. MILCOM took on the task of conceptualizing and launching these firms in collaboration with R&D-driven organizations such as government-agency laboratories and contractors focused on military-defense work.

Alex Hern has also served on on the boards of directors for such firms as the Canada-headquartered, privacy-centered software company Zero-Knowledge Systems, Inc., and the network-security service provider CloudShield Technologies, Inc.

In addition to his leadership of Tsunami XR and the messaging firm Tags, Inc., Hern continues to enjoy mentoring and advising newer entrepreneurs throughout the tech sector.

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Alex Hern – CEO of San Diego’s Tsunami XR | Inspirery

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Alex Hern – CEO of San Diego’s Tsunami XR | Inspirery

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Alex Hern is a serial entrepreneur who has been in the business of creating companies for over 25 years. He specializes his work in the development of early-stage technology and life science companies, focusing his work today on incubating startups. He co-founded and served as the director of Inktomi, the company that helped power the search engines for MSN, Yahoo, and AOL. He also co-founded and served as the director of Yesmail, the email marketing and web directory system. Less than a year after the founding of Yesmail, the company sold for $650 million to ModusLink Global. One of Alex's most successful business ventures was co-founding and serving as the director of ArcSight, a cybersecurity company which was sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.5 billion.

Most recently Alex Hern has founded Tsunami XR in order to explore his long-standing passion for virtual reality.
Where did the idea for Tsunami come from?
The idea to create Tsunami XR came from the transition that is currently taking place in the computer industry. We are moving from a CPU-driven era to one that is GPU-driven in the computer as well as the mobile world. With this transition, there has arisen a need for new software applications and platforms - ones that can effectively leverage the capabilities of more powerful graphics cards that come with today's PCs, tablets, and mobile phones. Tsunami is creating a powerful collaboration platform for engineers and scientists that is rooted in such advancements in graphics technology.

After I studied the virtual reality market, I saw that VR was valued at around $6 billion two years ago. Market experts today predict that this industry is going to reach over $200 billion in the next four short years.
What's one trend that excites you in your industry?
There are several current trends taking place in the industry which I'm excited about. AI and machine learning are both intriguing as far as seeing what kind of

tasks we can teach computers to understand and perform. Cloud-based computing for graphics-intense applications is also exciting because it can be applied directly to what is happening at Tsunami, including endpoint devices in areas like augmented reality.
What are a few of your passions apart from business?
I enjoy mentoring others and sharing the experiences I've had to help others succeed in their own endeavors. I also enjoy writing. I'm very focus-oriented, which is a difficult trait to achieve in today's world, but it is indispensable and very gratifying. I think it's impossible to multitask effectively, even though we all attempt to do i

t every day. Writing helps me concentrate on what's important and gives me that focused mindset and a linear thought process.
What advice would you give to others aspiring to succeed in y our field?
Focus on your goals. As I mentioned above, we tend to try to multitask a lot, which can really break your concentration when you're working. It's a very straightforward thing to advise but a surprisingly difficult mindset to achieve.

I would also advise anyone to do what they love to do and put forth all of

your effort to make it into a career. Figure out a consistent time and place where you can think about your ideas on how to do precisely that. Escape your distractions like your mobile phone while you're in that mindset. Sticking to a routine can help you set aside time to pursue your career goals as well as personal goals.
What are some common misconceptions about your industry?
With so many startups receiving a lot of fame and investment money, I think a lot of people fail to recognize that not everyone succeeds. Startups are difficult to create and manage, so very few people make it in the industry. Building effective teams of people, staying patient and staying focused are all essential traits, and not everyone has them. Of course, good luck and excellent timing don't hurt success either. Most opportunities with pursuing end up being time-sensitive so stay focused and you won't miss

out on them.
What predictions do you have for your industry over the next 5-10 years?
Cross reality (XR), coming from a mix of virtual reality and augmented reality, is something that is going to be at the forefront of computer hardware and software in the near future. Advancements in AI and machine learning have paved the way for what's to come in the next decade. I think that the next big leap forward in computing will be cloud-computing for graphics-intensive software and applications.

Connect With Alex Hern - CEO of San Diego's Tsunami XR:

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Alex Hern - CEO of San Diego's Tsunami XR - CEO

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Alex Hern is a serial entrepreneur who has been in the business of creating companies for over 25 years. He specializes his work in the development of early-stage technology and life science companies, focusing his work today on incubating startups.

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Interview Alex Hern Tsunami XR San Diego California

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Interview Alex Hern Tsunami XR San Diego California

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The Art of Focus with Alex Hern
this guy that's on this podcast to go do twenty things, to delegate all this stuff to other people.' Well, take a minute, go find some people that might want to do it for equity, because there are a lot of people that will do it for equity, focus on the things you need to focus on. Welcome to The Art of Success podcast. I'm your host Daniel Budzinski and I'm excited to be interviewing personalities from all different backgrounds on how they've learned and earned success. Our goal is that the stories would equip you to achieve success both personally and professionally. Please note that there may be explicit words or conversational topics in this podcast. So, if you're underage or listening with a child Lastly, please note that all the views, beliefs and opinions are not always a reflection of the host's. Ok, let's jump in. Alex Hern, welcome to the Art of Success. Been looking forward to this conversation. I really enjoyed our pre-call, and some of the challenges you had put out there on principles you live in your life and business. But you've got a lot. We've got a lot that we can talk about and you've got a lot that you've done in your past, so maybe start with a little bit of how you've gotten to where you are today and maybe some of those really awesome milestones So, I have been a serial entrepreneur. I started very early. In Marvel the characters from the Marvel Universe for internet start a kid's safe search engine. And this was back in the early days of internet era 1.0. So, I actually found a technology that at UC Berkeley that had been DARPA funded. And I contributed my license to all the Marvel characters for internet use and for search use. They contributed their IP and we started a company called Inktomi. And Inktomi became the first big search engine So, Inktomi was the company that powered search for MSN for Yahoo and for AOL search. So when you type in the box, we actually brought you back the answers and what that opened my eyes to was this big universe of DARPA funded technology at universities. DARPA stands for the Defense of Advanced Research Projects Agency and universities often apply for grants when they're trying to build future technology. scalable super-computing and there were two big projects. One at Berkeley called Now Network of Workstations, and one at Illinois called Cal, a former Berkeley guy, called a Collection of Workstations and they were the first people to really innovate taking small computers and networking them together to tackle big problems. The country was trying to build a missile defense shield
and you had to track in all those missiles like missile
command. But there wasn't enough supercomputing to make that possible, so DARPA was sponsoring work that would allow people like the folks at Berkeley to build that type of technology. We reapplied it and use it and applied it to the internet because to us it was just about documents and was like a giant container or filing cabinet that kept getting bigger every day. Every time somebody added something, and we applied that technology to manage and track the web. And as the web got bigger you could just add another Lego to it and expand the way that you searched it and crawled it and brought back I spent the majority of my career taking that type of an
approach in finding technology in universities, spinning it out
or at research institutions and commercializing it. Man, that is super fun. Tell us a little bit about what you did So that was a company that we started. I actually wrote on a
white board 'air traffic control for security.' And that's what
my team and I often do. We start from the very beginning, you know, looking for big problems that need to be solved. security on this had started because people were plugging holes if you will, right. So, think of it as every time something came up that was a new vulnerability somebody would stick their finger in the dike, build a new piece of software and create a new type of security software to solve that particular The problem with that approach is that there's nothing that is
a top-down view of all of it. So, we wrote on a white board
'air traffic control for security' and the idea became what is now category Enterprise Security Management or ESM. And our team essentially built a piece of software that allows IT professionals, C-suite, to really understand the overall picture of security. We have put in the first 17 million ourselves and then we had both the In-Q-tel which is the CIA's investment arm and Kleiner Perkins which is one of the tier-one VC firms invest and the rest is history. We were the only tech IPO of 2008, during the recession. Morgan Stanley took us out and then we ended up selling to Hewlett-Packard for what became a 1.5-billion-dollar So, I'm probably proud of that one the most. We started that company literally two weeks before 9/11. And then had to go through the depths of the recession and all the issues related to the turn down in technology during that period. We were able to survive it because we built fundamentally a good company and that's part of what I think is an important
approach is a lot of us entrepreneurs go out and build things
figure out if there's actually a need for it. You know, it's ok to fail over and over and over but you're really should understand what the market's all about and it's a good thing to spend a little bit of time, you know, figuring you're building is relevant, if the thing you're building is too early, because that also kills entrepreneurs. Running out of steam because they can't raise the capital to make it You've got to be the right product at the right time. And the fact that you were the only funded organization in 2008 or the only-- what specifically was it? right, when things were going not so good. But we were able to make it out and then we were acquired. And how fast was that turnaround from start to finish of the building of the organization and the ideation process? months, but the actual company because of it being the recession and because it was an enterprise-focused company: we were a B-to-B, not a B-to-C company -but they That's another thing. If you're going to go sell to business as opposed to consumer, it's a whole different ballgame. You really have to raise enough capital and have the resources to go call on Global 2000 or even mid-market. And that takes a lot of time and it takes more capital than your typical consumer play. So where you can get virality to give you, pavement and go knock on doors and get people to try your That's super cool. Ok so, let's kind of lead into what you're doing right now because your story is so interesting the things that you've accomplished is remarkable and even some of these principles, I really want to deep dive into them. Tell us about Tsunami XR. Tell us about what you're doing, and I know you talked about some of the rounds that you're in right now. Share with everyone, given the high- level detail of what it is. So, we've built the next generation of collaboration. We're on a Skype call for example right now and at the end of the day when this stops, the only thing that lives is what you record. There's no notion of persistence or co-presence. And I'll explain what those are in a second. Persistence is that space lives after we get off the call and if There are videos that we watch; there are notes that we made. Maybe we ingested a jet engine from CAD and we've exploded it and we've changed materials on an intake valve or left a note for a colleague that's collaborating on the next ideation or innovation session. So, in our world, these actual spaces continue to live. Tomorrow I can pick up exactly where we left off or tonight or at any time and I can meet you back in that same room or I can go there by myself, continue to work. Maybe you're in a different time zone and you pick up where I left off right. So, these spaces persist. They live and breathe. You can undo unlimited undo's because we journal everything that happens in them. And so, it's for the first time you really can collaborate with someone as if you're in the same space without being in the same space. It's not a The second part of it is this notion of co-presence. Co- presence means that while I'm in that room with you, this virtual space I can go and do what I want to do, and you can go and do what you want to do, or I can follow you. So that's like how we behave in the real world. If you and I are in a breakout room or in an office together and I'm one or preparing a power point while I'm doing that. We don't have to be doing exactly the same thing or watching but do it digitally and that's going to be transformative because it allows people to for the first time really feel like they're together even when they aren't. It's a much more different experience. It's always on
Than for example, your traditional telepresence like Skype or
other things that are Skype-like. So, what we're doing is we're leap-frogging what people like Zoom are doing which - all they've really done is made it easier to do to the function easy the invite easy, it's free at the beginning Well we've taken that a step further and said how do people really work in the real world and how can we transform the way that we work digitally to make it feel more like we're in the same room at the same time. We got lucky to have some great early adopters. Honda is using it to innovate at Honda innovations. We have folks like Ford using it. We have people like Lockheed using it, and So, we're being used as a product by people that are solving really important problems and they can do it with our Super cool. So, it's essentially, kind of like Skype/Go-to- Meeting or you know you use the other one. But more in that there's persistent time. It's a virtual space that's always available to revisit but it has everything in it, everything you've worked in. Is that kind of what it's like? Correct, but it's not just document sharing. Yeah, it is but it's right? We're both in it and then I can also bring other tools But we're both sitting in a room with that refinery at scale. So, it's truly a virtual cross-device platform. That's the other part about it. We made it XR which means Across-Reality. So, you could be on your phone I could be on an oculus rift in VR. Another person could be on an augmented reality device and all of us are sharing the same space virtually. So we see things in 3D. It's not a 2D space only -like you have on a Skype session where you have these flat boards. I was going to say --it seems like much more like virtual Yeah, it is but it isn't because you can access it from anywhere. We made it so that, the mistake that I think a lot of entrepreneurs made in the VR space or are making even in the augmented reality space today is that they're really making it only for those devices. So when they build And the problem with that is that there's an adoption cycle that has to happen with those devices. Your software is only install that software on. We took a different approach. We said there are billions of mobile devices; tablets, phones, etc. Let's tackle collaboration on those so that companies can then also at whatever the next great point solution is to our
platform so that people can connect across any device.
What that does then is that opens up all devices that are out just waiting on an adoption cycle for devices that are new, use but they're needing to experiment and are going to figure out where it fits in their ecosystem. That's why we've been well-received by large companies. Because we didn't go in there and go 'hey - you've got to throw out all that stuff you've invested in and now we're going to do everything in VR and AR.' Well, nobody thinks like that in big business. They think about a change in decades, not in days. They need to think about 'how do we leverage what we have?' and then 'help us learn about the new stuff.' That's exactly the way we approach To your point instead of layering it very flat and you and I are
doing a screen share right now and I'm showing you my

screen on some platform or program that shows the 3D
animation design or the CAD design for a car piece. We can
actually go into the system real time and it's all right there.
It's not like you and me sharing a screen it's like you and me see each other like this Skype call. It's full voice and video. I thousand people in a training session, for example. In those spaces though, I can now ingest over three hundred file types. So, any CAD file that is relevant to large organizations we ingest. It sounds like its straight like Iron-Man stuff. It's totally like that stuff. That's exactly it. We've totally done that. We build exactly that. Like in that movie, where he's moving things around and he can bring in a 3D object, It's an alternative reality, though right? Because if you're saying it's persistent time or persistent space, it means that it's always there. Right? happen as we move forward, and all of this evolves is that it's going to be the physical world and there'll be these layers right onto the real thing and those things are called digital twins. Or, they're just spaces that live virtually that allow us to extend where we are to unlimited places and unlimited possibilities that you can ideate in without taking up physical So, wouldn't it be nice if instead of having to rent another 10,000 square feet of office space about a third of which is going to be breakout rooms and rooms if I can dedicate that space instead to people and turn all of those breakout rooms into a virtual environment where I can meet anybody anywhere at any time. But I'm not paying real estate for that. That's essentially what we've built. You know when you solve that problem you first have to think about what the customers' needs are going to be. In our case we said: customers are going to need to bring in share their screens, share video, see each other, ingest whatever, to do their jobs and their work. easy feat and then we also built these spaces that allow you to launch a room. You dedicate it to whatever the work is that you are doing in there. You name it, so maybe it's 'Jet Aircraft Design.' And I can now invite people into that room. But that room is 3D. Now I can have 2D-like experiences in there, but it's also 3D in there. Meaning that its unlimited in size and scale so, I can keep adding information to it and It sounds like Inception meets the Matrix meets Iron Man. That's actually a kind of good way to think about it. I never thought about the Inception part of it but it's kind of true. I think of the Matrix which I just rewatched this last weekend with my wife and a few friends. And the whole idea of when they go into that white world, that blank white world and then they bring in all the guns. All the guns fly through, all the gun racks fly through. And then from your thing, this might be people looking at the design of an entire building that's a manufacturing plant or they'd be able to see the layout And I think about when I was reading Steve Jobs' book. That had to create with millions of dollars that he had to get approved through the board. The design of his warehouse -
or no sorry the design of the Apple Store, before. And now a

days we're saying, 'why do that? Why buy the furniture when
you can actually do it?' And that's a possible other use of it. Yep, we actually do have people using it to do planning of factories etc. Or there are automotive manufacturers saying that they are going to build the factory of the future. But, you know, if I put this big piece of equipment a little bit closer to the guy installing the windshields, is he going to be able to to build life-size prototypes of that over and over and over. That's the way it used to work. then you can put on a set of VR glasses or you can access it even from a tablet or your PC and actually see the proportions of what you've done in real life but not real life. But when you go and build it and install it at the factory you've already iterated all of the things you needed to do to create the efficiencies you want for the manufacturing floor without ever having to prototype anything. The prototypes now live in these virtual environments and it's pretty exciting. It's going to really impact everything from design to how people buy things. Yeah, shopping, the consumer experience. Why not have Macy's have stores online and you just -- building supply companies in the world. Everybody has this CAD that's trapped in ugly engineering designs- meaning to the engineers, to the guys that use it, it's about function not form. And what they did was they prototype stuff.
Well what we do is take those CAD files, we export them and
turn them into beautiful objects. It could be a window, for example. Or maybe the customer has 20 types of windows and then we've taken that CAD and really brought it to life. We've added textures, materials, big lighting, all the things that the consumer wants to interact with, because consumers don't want to buy products that look like ugly So, what we've done is we've brought them to life in configurators so that, at the end of the day a consumer can interact with that object and change the colors, change the Now that is something that is useful for marketing. So we've taken the product out of CAD, and maybe now it lives on the website. But we now take it further even and we say, 'why don't we take that information and throw it into workspaces,' which is what our product is. And now that becomes a show So, I can dedicate a single showroom to an individual customer and then that becomes their custom showroom. Not a general showroom, which what a website is. once, but you may only care about certain things. So, what we now can do is invite you only to a space that has the things in it that you care about. They're 3D. You can see them and then as I follow you as a customer over life, I can continue to add things to that space that you care about as opposed to being a generalized experience that is what we experience on websites today. Unless we filter through the things we want, we can't find stuff. It's shopping cart - that's as custom as it gets. Yeah. But also the experience is flat. It's not customized. not a single event, especially complex sales of big things. If I'm buying jet engines or I'm buying anything thing that's complex- an automobile for example. I want to take time. I don't want to have start from scratch every time I go back to I want more information, but I also want to review the information that I've already seen. I may want to go back to it and ask more questions. Well today, the way sales works
is people have to start from scratch every time.
We have information that we've captured in CRM. But from a customer experience point of view on the marketing side, ingesting that information, it feels like the guy's always starting from scratch every time I talk to him or her. And so, what we've done is said, 'no - that experience is something that you can pick up where you've left off and all that data should be there.' to remember what it is I showed Daniel. Yeah, I should be able to go right back to where I was with ...and see the whole picture. See the whole picture and I've added stuff to it, right? And that's what we've built we've built a place that all that stuff lives so that we're picking up where we left off and we don't have to go back and rebuild the past every single time, which is what it feels like often in sales experiences. So, I want - and I agree with you on that. That that would be very revolutionary. We all do that. Anyone that's listening is going to be like, 'yep that's exactly what I do because we're having so many conversations.' We have to go back and remember what was talked about. I want to turn a little bit now towards you raised the first round, 25 million and now you're going through your next round, correct, pretty soon? That's correct. That's true. And how much is the next round? We're going to raise 50 million in this next round. Okay, and will there be another round after that? No, this should take us through cash flow break even. We might take some more money just because we have done an acquisition and we may have our eyes on a few others. But that's all going to be valuation-dependent. If we get the right price, as an entrepreneur what I would say is you have to take the money when you can get it because these are when the doors just shut on you because of things beyond your control, like the economy. And so what you want to do is raise the money you need and then have some in reserve because not everything goes as planned sometimes, right? And you have to be able to have money in reserve in case things don't go as planned. conversation is this idea of multitasking and the trick or the lie attached to it. But more importantly to me would be this idea of focus that you talk about. 4-5 hours. I was even sharing with my wife and a few friends about our I know that when you're raising money, fundraising is not easy. Building a company is not easy. Knowing your Building a team around whatever you're building is not easy. So how do you do it, and maybe talk about these principles and how they've served you. Sure, I think that that's a good question. So, there are two kinds of things you have to think about. Number one, you have to be able to delegate, and if you can't delegate it means you don't really trust the people with. So, try to find like-minded people like you. Interview, and really do the deep, deep, deep interview. The biggest mistake people make is hiring too fast and it makes getting rid of people that are problematic way, way harder than it is to find a good person. So, what you should do is spend all the time you possibly can talking to folks that have worked with that person before, making sure that they're the right fit culturally, that they're the right person. Do the homework. Spend the time to do the background check. Do all the things that really matter because people that you think you know may not be the people that they are. So, it's really, really important that the person is a cultural fit and exactly the right fit for what you want to do. If I could give any entrepreneur this advice it's probably the most important advice, I can ever give. Take the time to do the
homework before you let someone inside that garden wall,
because it's way harder to get rid of them than it is to let them in. And they can really be toxic to your environment. Once those people are in, trust them, because you took the time to really do the homework. And then delegate things that you want to delegate because you hired them for a the reins because you did your homework, and now trust those people to do what they do. When you do that, then it frees you up to focus on the things you need to focus on. If that's fundraising for some period of time, then that's what you have to focus on. You don't have time to do everything else. So, you need to hand off the sales process during that period to someone that you hired that you trust to do that. But that allows you to really really put in the time that's necessary to do what you need to do. Whatever that is, it's going to require 4-5 hours of your concentration a day, We live in these cube farms now, which is all cool and distractions every 5 minutes. People that talk loud on the phone or people that are coming to talk to you about how the Vikings did, or the Bears did. So that you have these constant distractions in these open environments and what you need to do is find a place or find
a space or let people know that you're deep into what you're
doing and to not disturb you and it's ok to do that in a nice And over time, people will respect you through that because they see the output of what you're doing. If you can't do it at the office, then do it at home. Spend those 4 or 5 hours where you're not going to get interrupted. That's the key. Because people always want to set you up on their track. Because they're all trying to do things and they want you to make decisions. Sometimes they just want you to do their job for them. And again, that's what you have to try to avoid and so I've found that-- and I didn't learn it early in life. I learned it through trial and error. I used to want to help everybody all the time and answer their questions, or I was afraid to delegate because I thought they'd drop the ball. But I learned over time by hiring great people that the way you succeeded was trusting those people, taking the time to hire them correctly and giving them the jobs they need to do to learn or change, because if you hire great people, they should be able to pick up the ball. Now that doesn't mean that you don't have to train them or they're just out of college, or that they need to go through formal education and integrating into your company and all those things, they understand the culture, etc. But if you hire a senior professional, like a vice president of warble corporation and After two quarters you don't see evidence of them moving the ball or the needle, you need to fire as fast as you hire. make the decision to fire. It's not easy because they're a it's not easy, but it's smart. You like people, but what you're doing is hurting the organization if you don't. It's not about being Machiavellian that's what an organization is. A company is like a whole When things go wrong you can't sacrifice the rest of the organization because of the needs of a single individual. You have to be able to protect the whole and that's what cruel or not liking someone. It's really about, 'is this person the best fit for the rest of the people whose jobs are feeding their families and everything else.' the organization as a whole. You have to let them go. I really like that too -just so you know. It's very applicable to sometimes even the idea focus. So, instead of focusing on the organizational need you're focusing on each person's individual needs to make them stay on the bus, and if you hired right, you should be focusing solely on just what the So, talk to me about this multi-tasking thing, though. It's not controversial in a sense but it's not something that maybe everybody's heard, is that the idea of multi-tasking is just I think it's a myth quite frankly; this notion that we can take on lots of things at once. What you end up doing is a lot of things poorly as opposed to-- and I've argued and it&#39;s entrepreneurs that think they are just great multi-taskers. They're deluding themselves. No one can really do a lot of things right at the same time. And if you think about the best athletes in the world. How many of them are multisport athletes? You don't have two of those guys and even those guys if you really think about their careers, they didn't do both sports - they weren't who played lacrosse and football at Syracuse. Outside of that who has really really done a great job at multisport, where they're at the top of their game, top of their field, trying to do everything at once. It's near impossible. And yes, there are a few exceptions to the rule. But you know, but the majority of the rule is that you're not the So, for what I've found, and I can only speak for myself, is that I used to take a lot of things on. I used to spin all the plates, mostly because I was afraid to delegate, or I thought that I'd do a better job than the other person. That's just ego- driven kind of stuff, or insecurity sometimes. But what I've learned is that instead if you hire the right people as I said earlier, and you let them do their job, then that leads you to be able to focus on the things that matter Now in business, those things change over time. At the end of the quarter what matters is making the quarter. If you hire the right people and if you've fed the funnel and if you're monitoring all the metrics along the way and the people that are supposed to be doing that are doing that, and if you routinely review, then you don't have surprises at the end of Anybody that surprised at the end of the quarter is a terrible operator. Because you know going into the quarter what your funnel looks like, what the deals are building up to be. And if you're truthful to yourself, and if people are honest about what those opportunities are or aren't, then you know at the beginning of a quarter what the end of the quarter's So, what I do is I look at what the organization needs and say, 'what is the most important thing over the next span of the week or a month usually?' And then when I identify what those things are and then I rank them, I then pick the one that's the top one and I delegate the rest. I focus on that one thing until it's 100% done, and then I move on to the next thing once I've done it. If that's fundraising, then that's all I'm going to do. Because fundraising is what keeps the try to race it but if you run out of fuel then your Ferrari's So, if fundraising is what's important, you have to focus on fundraising. But it might not be fundraising; it could be something else. It could be sales, right? It could be patents that you want to file, that are important to file --all that. But what you can't do is think you can do it all because you can't. I've never seen anyone that's really efficient at multitasking. You have to really focus on the very core things that you think are important, and then give it 5 hours, 6 hours, no less
than 4 hours a day, and really just do that in a way that's
uninterrupted. I was at the office all day on a Sunday. That doesn't sound appealing to a lot of people, but it was great for me because I'm there an no one's bothering me. What I get to do during that block of time is do what I need to do without anybody trying to distract me or take my time. Now, my people know me well enough now to know not to do that, but because we live in these modern, open environments in an office, there's just a lot of noise and other people talking, and customers come in and people want to happens and I can just focus, focus, focus on the things I So, find that time. That block of time. Don't give up working out or having dinner with your kids because of it. Just find that time, put it on a calendar, put it on a block and stay consistent, and stay at it and use it for the things that matter the most, and I guarantee you that your productivity will triple, quadruple as a result. Because we always end up not completing. That's what happens when we're distracted; you move on to the next thing, but you left the last thing. So, what you need to do is reevaluate what you needed to thing because you feel like 'I'm hitting a wall, but I'll get back to it.' But you really don't get back to it. I mean, you may get back to some of it but not all of it. Yeah. And I mean, I know it's hard because what I've started a lot of things by myself from scratch and at the beginning you are doing a lot of things. But what you're really doing is your main things is you're doing the start-up phase of what you're doing. And that's just distracted and help your other buddy with his stuff start-up while you're doing that. As much as he may want you to and you want to, you can't do that. You have to focus on the What I would also recommend to entrepreneurs is because that you trust and like that you want to bring on as co- founders. Because those people will take on some of the things that you need them to take on. And that doesn't mean you have to pay them a salary at the beginning they might be willing to do it for stock. this guy that's on this podcast to go do twenty things, to delegate all this stuff to other people.' Well, take a minute, go find some people that might want to do it for equity, because there are a lot of people that will do it for equity, focus on the things you need to focus on. that I knew I needed so that I could get to the end game because at the end of the day owning a lot of nothing is So, it's important when you're trying to build something to bring on people that can help you and there are lots of people that are willing to help you that you don't have to pay vision and they share the vision. Gosh, man. I wish we had so much more time. We're up on I've got one more question for you to maybe end the show. This is like million-dollar knowledge here. You learn a lot of problems that you don't have to actually engage with or mistakes that you don't have to make by listening to a But one of the things that's interesting to me is the emotional roller-coaster sometimes of the experience of being an entrepreneur. What do you do when you handle difficulties or setbacks or let downs or just the daily grind of being
inspired to tackle big problems? What do you do just in a

daily practice to reward yourself or inspire yourself?
You know, I think that it's really about, don't isolate yourself. Especially around payroll time when you have people looking at you. You may not have the adequate resources to do what you're trying to do, etc. I think it would really be super-challenging to manage expectations, etc. But I think what you have to do is make time to still have support outside of what you do. Whether that's your family, your kids, your friends, your dog; you need related so that you can blow off steam with people that care And to do that, and what we often end up doing, what you do your friends become the people you work with. Well, that's a big mistake. You should have friends at work, but you should also have friends that you don't work about things that you can't talk to people at work about, sometimes, right? So, I think it's super important to maintain have conversations and free your mind from the stuff that you're going to pick up when you go back to work no matter what. But to me, I've found that to be the most important thing that I've done, which is to maintain relationships that are not work related so that I can have a life. Because life is important too it's not just all about work. That's super cool, man. I love that that's an amazing ender and I do agree that&#39;s it's a different level of something that energizes your everyday life. It inspires you and encourages your venture and seeing it grow and become something amazing and commercialized for all the other individuals that would love to have something like that. Any final thoughts for the listeners? No, I think I've covered it all. You know, it's ok to live your dreams but it's important to live your life. I hope you're more successful in life because of this episode from the Art of Success. If you haven't already, go ahead and subscribe for the future updates released. Also, if you enjoyed what you heard today share the Art of Success with a friend, colleague or family member. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch you on the next episode. Read More about Alex Hern and Tsunami XR in this recent Patch article.

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Interview Alex Hern Tsunami XR San Diego California

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this guy that's on this podcast to go do twenty things, to delegate all this stuff to other people.' Well, take a minute, go find some people that might want to do it for equity, because there are a lot of people that will do it for equity, focus on the things you need to focus on.