Podcast

Kasey Devine (00:00.076)
bio time, you know?

Kevin Mooney (00:01.231)
I love that. Super cool. Well, hey man, thank you so much so much for being here. I appreciate it. The way you reached out was so interesting to me. I. You were the first one to reach out through a platform.

And at first I thought it was a complete joke. I'm like, who is this? What is this thing? And I started kind of looking it up, looking into it. I'm like, there's a real person behind it. It's a real email address. This is a legit thing. So I'm stoked that you reached out, and I'm stoked you found me, and I'm stoked that you're here today.

Kasey Devine (00:38.776)
Stoked to be here. Shout out to the guys at Podpitch. It's a startup out of New York that, if you use it correctly, can help you amplify your voice of like, hey, I have this kind of vibe or this story to tell or these attributes. And then they can help you find folks who would resonate with that. And I think that's really important, just given.

how much AI slop there actually is in podcasting and media in general, you can cut through to it. So thank you for being open to actually talk to a complete stranger with like this random mustache.

Kevin Mooney (01:14.159)
Well, your story is super interesting to me because I don't think that there are a lot of people without spoiling anything that we jump into do what you do.

And so before we talk about what you're building, I would love if you could provide some context to who you are, where you came from, and maybe the moment you realized, hey, this thing that I'm doing as a career isn't for me anymore.

Kasey Devine (01:50.127)
Got you. Yeah. I live just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, which has been in the news like crazy the past few years. Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. I back. I was raised primarily by a single disabled mother. Not that I didn't have a relationship with my father. I do and love him, but was primarily with her.

And so like kind of getting into school, went to the University of Missouri through their honors program. I thought I was going to be a high school educator and like a football coach and all that kind of thing. And then I took like the first education course and was scared the living daylights out of me of being locked in a room for like all day, which is hilarious because I'm now locked in my own room all day. Kind of comes full circle. I went to the business school.

Kevin Mooney (02:38.799)
There all day

Kasey Devine (02:45.422)
Mizzou and the advisor was really dismissive and mean and I went to the sport management department because I liked coaching and the advisor was nice. So I became a sport management major and all this like is just meant to show like how weird of a winding road life can be. Met the hiring manager at the St. Louis Cardinals outside of a class once who happened to be spinning up like the first ever part time sales gig for the summer there and got hired.

Kevin Mooney (03:00.847)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (03:13.39)
which meant that my internship for credit that next year was possible. I went to the Kansas City Chiefs and sold non-game day events, which was like weddings. So I went to wedding shows on behalf of the Chiefs a lot, and then got a sales job on accident with a large water park. And then was realizing I was like making zero money, working six and a half days a week. And I had this long-term girlfriend who's not my wife. And I was like, this isn't going to work. And so like maybe we stopped. Cause like basically what I figured out was

I'm now in sales like it or not. And I thought sales was going to be a horrible word. And that was, I interviewed at a few like more professional, you know, entry level sales roles and chose to get into like payroll software, human capital management, HR, employee benefits back in the day through, through ADP. That was 11 years ago now.

Kevin Mooney (04:01.145)
Dang, dang. So wait a minute.

They do weddings at the Thief Stadium.

Kasey Devine (04:09.334)
Yeah, they had this. You wouldn't know it through the news because no NFL team thinks that any of what no professional sports team thinks anything that they do with taxpayer money is ever good enough. But semi recently, they added like and revamped a club level outside of your head. And that was that was back in the day. And so they're like, hey, there's this really big event space for corporate and for weddings sitting mostly empty. It's at the intersection of like two major highways.

It's all ADA accessible, you know what I mean? So it's like, kind of checks a lot of the boxes. If we could get this out and package this, it makes sense. Why wouldn't people be using it outside of, you know, I'm trying to do quick math, 10 to 14 games a year.

Kevin Mooney (04:42.692)
Sure.

Kevin Mooney (04:53.037)
Right. That's wild. And so you land, you land in sales and you mentioned ADP. How did that transpire from, from the internship? And I'm just trying to connect those dots.

Kasey Devine (04:58.232)
Mm-hmm.

Kasey Devine (05:08.686)
I went to work at a full time at a water park selling group tickets. was my territory for this water park was any group coming to the water park that wasn't in the state of Kansas. It was also the wettest spring in Kansas City history. So it was a very difficult thing because you'd like sell something and then the group couldn't come. So it wouldn't work. And so I just was like, hey, I'm just going to send out my resume through like LinkedIn.

and go look for if I'm in sales now, I'm just going to go like go to a professional sales organization. I could always come back to sport management in a couple of years with better experience if I wanted to. Or this might like lead to a life because I'm like, I have this long term girlfriend. She's going into grad school at the time. And I wanted to make sure that like I actually could potentially like get down on one knee and all that kind of stuff. And I'm like, hey,

Working six and half days a week, making no money is not going to do that. And B, the only way for me to advance my current career is to move cities because like there's not that many entities like in the entertainment industry in any one city. So that's kind of why I decided I was like, they're an insurance company and then like, I don't know, uniforms maybe. And I chose ADP at the time because it was the only place when I went to interview every single step of the way they actually taught me something.

Kevin Mooney (06:24.364)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (06:35.445)
And I like went back and used it at my current job and sold something because of their advice. Yeah. So I was like, I want to go learn there.

Kevin Mooney (06:40.191)
that's rad. I love that. Sure. That's cool. And so you land at ADP and how long do you work there?

Kasey Devine (06:51.159)
Six years. So I was handed like a three zip code territory in like rural to suburban Kansas City, knowing nobody. Long story short, our entire leadership team like blew up from top to bottom. They rebuilt it. That catapulted me really quickly into like mentorship opportunities. I sucked at first and then got really, really good after people were willing to invest time and energy into me early on.

Kevin Mooney (06:53.366)
Ahem.

Kasey Devine (07:22.369)
Um, that kind of led to, were at, like, if you've heard big presidents clubs from some of these big sales entities, I was there in Jamaica. My buddy went golfing with the VP of sales in the twin cities. I had proposed to my now wife because now I wasn't working all the time and had some money. Um, and he offered me a job to come up and lead a team and become like a manager. So I went from like the frontline sales role.

moved up to Minnesota where we are today and she's from St. Paul. So that worked. Leading a team. And then I just kind of continued to try to take advantage in a good way of the benefits that that big kind of a company offers, which are like continuing ed and stuff. I got payroll certified, professional and human resource certified, human capital strategy certified. They paid for the majority of my MBA online. And I kept going up the ranks into like more complex HR outsourcing sales leadership.

before leaving at around the six year mark.

Kevin Mooney (08:21.783)
Yeah, interesting. I think that's super cool how you're able to bolt on all this new knowledge from one company. I've never been employed by somebody that that taught me that much. I might have read between the lines and figured out what they were doing. That's kind of how I got to where I'm at, but certainly never had any formal education in that.

Kasey Devine (08:49.889)
Yeah, man. It's, I think it's what you make it. Cause like you could be in an environment like that, like just because, just because you're a seed that's planted in well-fertilized soil doesn't mean that you're going to be like the best stock of corn. I don't know. That was the first thing that came to my Midwestern mind. And, I think it's what you, like what you do with it, but like kind of going back to the detail I shared first is just like stuff didn't come easy for me, you know, and it always was adversity. And I think that's.

early on what allowed the ball to bounce my way more. I don't think I'm insanely talented or insanely gifted. I think it's just really hard to get me to drop the bone. And especially early on in your career, that's like 90 % of it. It's just like, stop, don't quit before you actually get through to being halfway decent at something.

Kevin Mooney (09:31.79)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (09:42.351)
100%. Yeah, I agree. couldn't agree more. So you're working there for six years and you left.

Kasey Devine (09:50.007)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (09:52.409)
What was the moment that you knew it was time to leave? And more importantly, why did you leave?

Kasey Devine (09:58.004)
I stopped learning and got really bored. I so I had gotten a new leadership role. COVID hit. The leader was like. Doing what she could, but I, my opinion, wasn't investing the same way that my prior leaders had, and it was like there was an amount of time that this person was spending with me, but I could tell that like it was the same thing.

Kevin Mooney (09:59.734)
Kasey Devine (10:27.393)
that she told to somebody else the hour before. was just like the pre, you know, she like asked something and then just go into whatever pre-recorded thing was in this person's head. And there is a role with a company called Trinet. They were opening up like a field sales organization in the Twin Cities. I had swung and missed on that role like two years before that. They reached back out saying like, hey, the role actually is open again. Would you want to like kind of rebuild the mistake?

Kevin Mooney (10:56.899)
Bye.

Kasey Devine (10:57.261)
potentially. And the leader there, I'm to call him out by name because he was really impactful and helpful. He's a mentor of mine, Gray Wyman. He's an industry veteran and he basically was like, hey man, it came down to it. He was like, I'm going to offer you the job. You're way more junior than the other person I was considering, but like, I want to take a bet on you because it seems like you figure it out and you're really hungry and you're willing to learn. And if you're like willing to shut up and like do what I tell you to, you're, you'll be really successful.

So I decided to jump ship because I had somebody else who was willing to invest in me that had been there, done that, quote unquote. And a really good opportunity to, I got into what's called PEO or professional employer organizations, employment organizations. And that was like kind of the thing I wanted to go do. So I'm like, hey, I have the opportunity to go do that for a top five provider and have somebody invest in me. Like I'm going to go ahead and take that, especially during COVID.

Like field sales wasn't a thing anyway. So I'm like, well, this is actually kind of a good time to potentially pour some more in the development bucket.

Kevin Mooney (12:07.161)
That is, that's so cool when somebody takes a chance on you like that. I've had...

I don't know, I'd say maybe.

maybe one or two people that have taken a chance on me. They're like, you don't know anything. You don't know what you're talking about at all, but I think you're capable of doing this over here. So let's give it a shot. And I would say that one person is responsible for where I am now and how I've learned everything and how I'm capable of doing the things that I'm doing now. But

Kasey Devine (12:25.749)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (12:48.779)
Most people, they don't give you that shot. They look at you on a sheet of paper and say, do these boxes check? Yes. Do these ones check? No. Okay. Therefore you're in this bucket and that sucks. And so yeah.

Kasey Devine (13:01.772)
It does. There's a lot of people who don't have those opportunities ever and never will. To be clear, I agree with you.

Kevin Mooney (13:11.183)
Yeah, you gotta kinda have to make those things happen.

Now you're in this position of startup. Startup company, startup, would you say SaaS company?

Kasey Devine (13:26.538)
It was so it's it's like SAAS plus HR outsourcing plus employee benefits. And again, I get back to the adversity thing because I think people would throw their arms up and say this isn't fair. I had that guy ended up not becoming my leader, being my leader very long because internal shuffling. had five direct leaders in 12 months. Yes, and half the team because of things I didn't do left.

Kevin Mooney (13:49.936)
my gosh.

Kasey Devine (13:56.141)
so like, you know, it's like, it's this startup kind of like market for a publicly traded company in the middle of COVID. And like main reason I said yes to the job isn't there anymore. And I think like, again, honing it in of like the mothership is not going to come save you. Like we don't at the time didn't know when COVID was going to end. I still like, I'm still built in like field sales, field sales leadership. This is now inside sales a hundred percent of the time.

And, um, I was getting my ass kicked. Like we all were, uh, it sucked. And, um, with that actually, you know, built up a really good team and use that as an opportunity to just try to take as much learning as I could, not asking or waiting again for people to teach something, but going, pulling reports internally and figuring out who was the best at this thing and just bugging the living shit out of them until they would take 15 minutes to like, tell me about what they do.

Kevin Mooney (14:28.783)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (14:56.263)
And then go do it, you know what I mean? And then share that with other people and record it so that other people might take it. then so what ended up happening with that role, we actually rehired the majority of the people who left, which was really cool. That territory went from the Twin Cities Metro to they ended up giving me and the team Minnesota down to Louisiana and Kansas up to North Dakota. And then we grew that first year.

Kevin Mooney (14:58.701)
Yep.

Kasey Devine (15:24.488)
376 % year over year in revenue. And then the next year we grew another 60 % year over year. So it wasn't a flash in the pan. We rebuilt the damn thing completely.

Kevin Mooney (15:31.759)
That's it.

Yeah.

That's pretty, yeah, that's impressive. That's wild, man. So for somebody that doesn't know or never heard of PEO, can you walk me through it and maybe even dumb it down for some of us, like me, when they say us.

Kasey Devine (15:41.558)
Yeah, it was fun.

Kasey Devine (15:53.11)
Yeah, of course.

Yes, I got you. I got you. That's what I do professionally. like, you're familiar with getting paid as an employee and that goes through a payroll system because there's taxes that have to happen. there's like payroll as a service that small businesses, medium sized businesses, anybody has to do and nobody does it by pen and paper. There's software providers that do that. Then there's all the HR compliance stuff with the forms and regulations you have to do.

stuff that somebody has to do. Even if you have an HR person on staff, there's not like literally going to the Department of Labor and downloading forms and then like doing that manually anymore. Then you have usually when you get to any sort of size, medical insurance, workers compensation insurance, all of these things that have to happen to offer dignified employment. What a PEO is, is it's a construct. So every individual

in the United States that's like a legal citizen has a social security number. That equivalent for business entities is called a federal employer identification number or an FEIN. What a PEO is, is it allows employers to actually share their FEIN. And so you as the business retain all of the decisions that you want to make for the business and you're actually sharing your employees, co-employing your employees with another group called a PEO.

What that means is for all of those things that I just talked about, they're expensive. I don't know if you've seen that like medical insurance is going up like crazy one way or another. This isn't a political statement, but every time our pendulum swings in the country and changes happen, businesses have to figure out how to deal with that. And they don't have like full-time law like departments and you know what I mean? Like they have to figure that out. So like.

Kevin Mooney (17:40.046)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (17:47.214)
Yep.

Kasey Devine (17:48.266)
What a PEO does is it outsources the HR and gives the infrastructure completely. And even if you have an HR person, it just does all the have to stuff. So they get to do the want to stuff. But then when it comes to like insurances as well, you actually share that risk. So let's say you have five employees, let's say 500 employees, doesn't matter. If you're going to go negotiate for those things, do you think like,

rhetorical question, a five or 500 employee company negotiating with these gigantic insurance carriers is going to win more or less than somebody who's negotiating on behalf of 20,000 all the way up to like 700,000 employees. Like Walmart and Amazon are going to beat you in a negotiation every day. What a PEO does is allows you to join a group like that. So they, they outsource all the HR and you pay, you help pay for that by doing

Kevin Mooney (18:31.404)
Yep.

Kasey Devine (18:43.083)
by sharing the risk on this. so, so what that's PEO, there are actually 500 plus PEO vendors in the United States. It's like the biggest industry that most people don't know exists. It's a $414 billion industry that grows 15 % year over year and has quadrupled in size since 2012.

Kevin Mooney (19:02.657)
Yeah, that's wild. I mean...

Kasey Devine (19:04.521)
Yeah, so like 20 % of small businesses use a PEO today and most wouldn't even know it.

Kevin Mooney (19:09.423)
Yeah, I had no idea what it was. Like I had to really kind of look into this before talking to you because I mean, I get it conceptually, you know, from a distance, right? Because I have my own business and I've had employees in the past and payroll is a big giant headache and HR stuff is a big giant headache and insurance is a giant headache and

Kasey Devine (19:14.271)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kasey Devine (19:29.567)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (19:37.579)
I've always had to figure that out. I figured it out for a team of seven at the most, right? So it's not the end of the world, but it's still a lot of work. You find yourself working on that stuff more than you'd like. So I understand it. I'm maybe, I'm maybe interested. I have a whole slew of questions. I'm sorry, I'm babbling here. But.

Kasey Devine (19:49.557)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (20:01.183)
can answer all of them, or try to.

Kevin Mooney (20:05.857)
Aside from the problem that I just described, know, what problem exists that companies don't realize that they're about to step into as they're beginning, as they're starting their business and they're hiring people, what's the problem that exists there?

Kasey Devine (20:09.867)
Mm-hmm.

Kasey Devine (20:25.579)
Good book among many there is gonna be like the E-Myth, that like entrepreneur myth revisited, I think it's called. That's a good thing. Think about like, if you start a business, you're thinking that you can do something new or better or cheaper, basically. And like to use another triangle.

And I'm going to lump nonprofits into this too. If you're going to be an operating entity, you need three things. You need a product or service that somebody will give money for willingly. You need.

to have cashflow or liquidity necessary to keep the doors open to even fund that. And you usually need people. And I know there's like a tech bro that's gonna listen to this and be like, you can outsource everything with AI. Not yet, actually. Not yet. AI hasn't built AI a company yet. People still have to do that. So like my whole thing is, all right, you go out to do this thing, this new, better,

Kevin Mooney (21:19.417)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (21:26.051)
Right.

Kasey Devine (21:37.471)
cheaper, you get successful at it. You now, because you had this vision started in business because you have the vision and you care deeply about the problem usually. Or you think it's at least gonna make you money. The more you're successful at that as a small business owner or any business owner or any leader,

the less you actually do anything about the problem. Because I am successful at this and I go get 10 clients, I can only handle five. I hire somebody to help me with the next five or to offload this thing I have to do so that I can take on more clients. And then you keep doing that, whether they're employees or contractors or vendors, until you are a professional employer, not the practitioner you got into. Where the problem lies is because

Kevin Mooney (22:32.623)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (22:35.185)
Nobody taps you on the shoulder and says, this is the day where you've crossed the X, Y axis. You know what I mean? Like nobody tells you that you wake up one day because your revenue model is failing or you're miserable in your business or you're losing your key employees or your key customers or your key donors. And you're trying to figure out why this isn't fun anymore and why it isn't working.

Kevin Mooney (23:00.675)
Yeah, that is a real problem.

Kasey Devine (23:03.637)
Yeah, which like anybody who's ever been in like anything scaling, intrapreneur or entrepreneur is like, yeah, I've been there. We call it burnout.

Kevin Mooney (23:08.879)
Yeah, I've been there. Yeah. I just came out of a big burnout phase myself, so I completely understand. And it wasn't maybe all of those problems, but I did wake up one day and I was like, this isn't fun anymore. What am I doing? This is not sustainable. I don't like it. So now that we have a really good background, clearly you're knowledgeable in...

Kasey Devine (23:29.461)
Not sure.

Kevin Mooney (23:38.529)
other areas of business amongst sales and PEO. Tell me about what you're building. This is the big part of the show.

Kasey Devine (23:49.419)
Yeah, I want to go slightly backwards first because I think you will want to wonder why I did it. I think so. Try not was going really well in my one of my groomsmen in my wedding. I was like, hey, I have this guy who works for a sister company in my company, works up there. He's in the PEO HR industry. You should meet him for like happy hour. And I met him. And he starts like grilling me.

Kevin Mooney (23:52.31)
I love that.

Kevin Mooney (23:58.785)
Yes.

Kasey Devine (24:19.338)
I had no context for why we were meeting. He starts like grilling me really hard to the point where I was like, this feels like an interview. Turns out he's the founder of a PEO in Minneapolis that I'd never heard of. They serve like a specific industry that I wasn't involved much in. And after several conversations, I agreed to come on as VP of sales. They were backed by this big private equity firm.

Kevin Mooney (24:26.562)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (24:48.456)
I was like, cool, this is my dream. I'm 30, just had our first kid recently. Here's my dream job in my dream industry. And it's 12 minutes away from my house. And I didn't know it existed. It feels like a blessing from on high. And then like got in there, started building. And we kind of mutually came to this understanding after almost a year that just wasn't working. Like what

Kevin Mooney (25:02.915)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (25:17.074)
I think their assumptions for what they needed were wrong and I helped prove them wrong, but that also meant that I wasn't really the person to solve the problems that actually existed. Because they hired me to do the thing that they thought was there, if that makes sense. And the founder, like we kind of like mutually parted ways, but the founder initiated it. And the founder was like, hey, I'm going to give you like a compliment that's not going to feel like a compliment.

Kevin Mooney (25:32.943)
Yeah, it does.

Kasey Devine (25:45.162)
He said, you're not employable.

Yeah, and I was like, what? You know what mean?

Kevin Mooney (25:53.081)
I've been told that too, I know the feeling.

Kasey Devine (25:56.265)
Yeah, he was like, you need to figure out how you can like work for yourself. You're and he was like, and the positive thing here is, there isn't a single thing you did over the past year that I would have thought to do. And also, we need really repeatable, like, private equity style processes that you're not going to deliver. You like, that's not you, and you'll be miserable. So they took care of me, I left and like,

Kevin Mooney (25:58.799)
Ha ha ha ha!

Kasey Devine (26:23.786)
I think that's like the initial part of where I think I started thinking about becoming an entrepreneur. But I was like, all right, we have some runway through severance. I do need to take care of my family. I also don't know what I want to do. I've been in sales leadership or go to market leadership now for years. I'm like, do I even want to do that? I just got my dream job at 30. It turned out to be the wrong thing.

Is that because of the company? Is that because of me? Was that person right? Is that wrong? It's easy to just say, go start a company, but like, what the hell am I supposed to do about that? And what kind of company? I don't have ideas coming out of like my ears. A really good friend of mine back from ADP had a direct sales role open and it was a really fun thing selling like research and development tax credits, primarily to startups. Especially at the time, cash for startups was really tight with investments, still kind of is.

And went over there and that did really well because it's just like giving people money they didn't know they had back from the federal government, which most, most folks didn't know they would do that. So, that, that allowed me some space to do a couple of really important things. was like, number one, I think it was humility, which is like, don't trace the title. I actually accepted the job offer that had the least guaranteed money because I trusted my friend.

a lot and I also wanted time and space to be able to figure things out. And by what ended up being the case was talking to entrepreneurs again every day and getting back to the root of it helped me realize that they're not really all that special. They just actually go do the thing and they try and they fail mostly. And I'm like, well, I could potentially do that. And that is the seed. Now, I think to your question of where I even decided, I think I might want to go be an entrepreneur.

Kevin Mooney (27:55.898)
Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Kevin Mooney (28:11.663)
That's so awesome. love hearing that from somebody else who's gone through it. I learned, I don't want to hijack the story. I just want to provide some context. I learned at like 25, I was not employable. And I was also helped out of my job at the time by the owner who just fired me, straight fired me. And he had every right to fire me, but it made me...

Kasey Devine (28:23.049)
No.

Kasey Devine (28:28.735)
Haha!

Kevin Mooney (28:41.579)
It made me say I'm not employable, but I can do exactly what this guy is doing here. I could do all this other stuff. I think the reason why more people don't do it is because it is hard.

but you just have to go do it. So I went and did it and I figured it out along the way and I failed so much. I lost $400,000 at one point and ruined relationships and I've experienced that I know what it feels like. It's so wild and crazy and heartbreaking and awesome all at the same time. So kudos to you for doing it.

Kasey Devine (29:23.978)
Thank you. relevant detail as of 2021, I'm a Catholic convert and I was reading, trying to figure all this stuff out and like, was like, hey, this job is going really well. I could stay in it. We're making good money, a good work life balance. Second kid at the time's on the way. Just got here a month ago. And so like, I could keep doing this. I'm back at a company I really like working with people I really like. I could like.

weighted out and become get back into sales leadership transition within the company. Life's good. Like I was like, feel like I got my mojo back and a really inconvenient thing happened that I still can't explain. I was reading a relatively new book from a psychologist I really respect, Dr. Jordan Peterson. was we who wrestled with God and he was going through the big overarching narratives of the Old Testament and

Kevin Mooney (30:13.839)
Ahem.

Kasey Devine (30:22.001)
specifically Abraham, which I think is like widely known because Abrahamic religions are most people on earth. And like taking that risk, taking the step because the story goes that he's a very old man in a pretty good well-to-do family. And to bring this out of religious terms for a sec, something compels him to leave the current

comfortable state of his tent for a better potential. And I was praying with that and I kept hearing, leave your tent, leave your tent, leave your tent. I'm like, it's cozy. And then I would like read another thing and it was like, no, like do this. And I'm like, I don't have an idea except for this one thing, like my, which is what Entravia does. And it kept getting so loud.

Kevin Mooney (31:03.841)
Yeah, yeah.

Kasey Devine (31:18.683)
that a week before our newborn was born, I quit and decided to do this and with no backup.

Kevin Mooney (31:31.119)
Good for you. I'm so stoked. I love the story and and I you know, just from the little that we've talked, I know that you're going to make this thing happen. I'm I'm stoked to see where it goes. OK, so we have in Travia. Enter the enter the big hairy audacious goal. Let's talk about it.

Kasey Devine (31:48.541)
Yes, Entravia.

Kasey Devine (31:54.642)
Yeah. since basically Entravia means Entra and Via, it means like the way forward or the entrance to the path. It's like the idea that we've already hit on taking like the moment in time or the place where you depart from the past and you're going to a better future. So the one idea I had

And I have had, and it's not unique to me because a lot of people in my industry at like happy hour said that this is something that somebody's going to do. And if I had one business idea, it's that because, I can't even claim it. It's because anybody in my industry would be like, yeah, somebody was going to do that. But nobody did. Uh, and, and I, I did some Google searching. I'll explain what it is. I did some Google searching, had chat GPT go on agent mode to help me figure it out. like, somebody has to have done this.

Kevin Mooney (32:47.951)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (32:48.263)
Nobody has, they flirt with it, they kinda did it, nobody did it. So what it is, is like this idea of, and I think it's more applicable broadly than this, more broadly than this. So we have this big $414 billion industry and there's 500 vendors plus, and they all basically serve small businesses who are overworked and crazy. And in order to even get pricing for these lines of businesses,

There's a software component, there's an HR outsourcing component and an insurance component. You actually need to get a lot of information upfront because it's not responsible or legal to quote insurance without like underwriting it. And so there's this missing link. If you're a small business owner, you're like, Hey, this is a cool concept. Maybe you met them at a chamber of commerce event. Maybe they called you, maybe you did a Google search and then you get interested in the concept and then they ask you for this mountain of documents.

Kevin Mooney (33:26.497)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (33:44.02)
They usually send you like an Excel spreadsheet with like eight tabs asking you to fill out all this like personal information that you don't even like have access to because like your best customer won't stop complaining to you and something else is on fire and you don't have systems in place. And that's part of why you're a good prospect for them in the first place. And so I'm like, all right, so there's this problem of vendor selection. And then there's also this problem of like, I don't even, I can't even get them what I need to even get pricing in a reasonable amount of time.

The industry stat, depending on who you're talking to, is like somewhere between a quarter to half of a provider's entire sales pipeline, a PEO provider's sales pipeline, dies at document collection, which means they met a qualified prospect who said, want to get pricing and never did. And it's a $414 billion industry. And I'm sitting here and I'm like, okay, logically, I applied for a mortgage a year ago and Plaid pulled out most of what I needed from my

my financial institutions. so I was like, why is mortgage easier to shop for than this? That doesn't make sense. like, hypothetically, there's a lot of complexity there. There's a lot of complexity in mortgage. Our thesis is that we can use technology to change that. And then that's continued like maturing into, I'd say, like empowerment for a small business owner, which like

Kevin Mooney (34:53.635)
the end.

Kasey Devine (35:10.301)
There's healthcare costs on the rise, complexity is continuing to stay on the rise. So like, why is it that because of our own egos in the industry, we're going to continue masquerading this as unavoidable complexity. And that really just being honest, like pissed me off when I really like started sitting with it. Cause I'm like, you have small businesses that are going out of business because they can't solve these problems. And even if they solve the problems, half the time, they don't even know what's going on and they're getting screwed over.

And even if they're doing their best and they have a good provider that's helping them do their best, it's still not great outcomes. like lot of the, like the majority of our economy in the small business sector, the employees are low to middle income Americans. So I'm like, not only are the people who are like the backbone of our economy getting screwed, but like, so are these very vulnerable people based on somebody else's ego. So I'm like, you know what, let's run that down. And that's why Intravio was born.

Kevin Mooney (36:08.951)
Wow. First of all, I didn't know that. Well, I don't have a ton of experience with plot. there was a software that I recently started using as like my project management CRM invoicing sales software. and they use plot as a connector to,

Kasey Devine (36:35.997)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (36:38.679)
I think it was mainly for the ACH payments. So I was under the assumption it was more of a payment processor of sorts. But what you just said about mortgages and Plaid and how they were able to pull a lot of information from that, can you just help me wrap my head around not just how they pulled it, like,

more about what Plaid does because you had described Entravia, as I say it correctly, I'm sorry, Entravia as the Plaid of PEOs.

Kasey Devine (37:12.745)
You did. I don't care how you pronounce it. It doesn't matter, but that is how I say it.

Kasey Devine (37:20.423)
It is, yes. Okay, so in order to get a mortgage, they need to know everything about your financial life. And most of that data now lives on the internet. Fair thing, right? So what it does is you log into your bank, your 401k, any investments you have, and it pulls the information and relevant documents for you. You are granting permission to Plaid.

to access your information behind those vendors and those institutions systems. So there, instead of no individual has like a secretary for themselves usually. And so like, instead of having you figure it out or having somebody else figure it out, you're using your authorizing technology to go log into those systems on your behalf and pull out the relevant data and documents and then take the relevant data and documents.

Kevin Mooney (38:09.325)
You

Kasey Devine (38:17.114)
and do something that is currently meaningful with it.

Kevin Mooney (38:20.803)
That's pretty amazing. So rather than you getting all the paperwork.

Logging into your bank account, putting down the numbers, screenshotting, printing, all that shit. You just have to go through and enter your username and password and do the 2FA 18 times to make sure all your accounts are connected. And then at that point, bang, all these people, whether it's mortgages or something else, can essentially access that data when you apply.

Kasey Devine (38:41.383)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (38:54.268)
Yeah, yeah, it's it's I think it's a fundamental shift in perspective. Is it the vendors data or yours? And the assumption now, especially within tech circles, is it's yours. Now not everybody agrees with that, like because there's. Competition laws and all of that stuff and there's there's there's arguments to be had about that.

But the idea is if it is your data, if it wasn't existed in somebody else's system and it is only a record of what you do and what you have done, why is it complicated to access it?

Kevin Mooney (39:29.005)
Yeah, interesting.

Kasey Devine (39:30.684)
Yeah, so that's that's what we did within the PEO world and we are planning on doing on everything else. So if you talked about like if PEO was payroll outsourced HR employee benefits, workers compensation, insurance business retirement. Well, part of the idea here is like alright, most of that data for most companies lives online now and part of the complexity like I'll give the system.

A little bit of a break is like everybody has their own portal like the local salad restaurant now has their own like app that I can't order without getting the app. So like part of that's just the times I guess. But that was the idea was like alright hey we could replace the Excel documents that these vendors are mostly sending which are like HIPAA violations. So I I vibe coded that I basically what I built myself I looked on how to vibe code.

Kevin Mooney (40:05.527)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (40:16.217)
Sure. Sure.

Kasey Devine (40:24.976)
I did that. I built the portal that like the the digitized version of the dinosaur forms that were being sent and then went through the effort of making it HIPAA and SOC 2 compliant because I'm like we're going to start with transparency and data security because I think that's actually a major problem. And I don't care who this ends up being the end user for. They will care. You know what I mean? So like did that.

And then basically we've started building this, did get privately funded on a pre-seed round. We'll do an announcement here soon of that, but a little teaser, but we've, we've then started figuring out the underlying technology of companies that do similar things and integrating that in and it, training it in a way that's never been done like training AI in a way that's never been done to specifically do this thing.

Kevin Mooney (41:03.587)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (41:21.832)
And so that's kind of how this was all born. I thought the thesis was going to be, this is going to be like a business to business marketplace. We're going to give this to the small business owners for free. They can use this to shop for something they're already going to shop for faster. We get paid using the existing referral agreements with these vendors on a year over year basis, as long as they stay, just like kind of, kind of like commercial real estate. When we announced this publicly,

last Monday, the exact opposite turns out to be true so far where the vendors and everybody who's currently selling this brokers, vendors, salespeople, et cetera, are like, Hey, we've been experiencing this problem for years. didn't think it was solvable. If you actually can solve this, we'd be really interested in. Buying it as a software. And so overnight we have tried to re I wouldn't say like pivot because that's not, we're not actually doing anything different.

that reprioritize who the initial end user is, meaning that we are building this around it being deployed by another entity instead of keeping everything to ourselves. Part of why we said that is like, well, we might give up market share there, but like if the mission is to make this actually different, then let's make this as big of an attempt as reasonable. And that's how you actually solve the problem.

Kevin Mooney (42:39.78)
you

Kevin Mooney (42:44.162)
Yeah.

It's really interesting. do really appreciate how, well, this is how I'm hearing it right now, how you are, and this is, sorry, there's a lot of thoughts here. You should stay in that mindset where you're solving problems forever and make sure that you keep doing that. I think that is one of the big problems in SaaS. They don't,

Kasey Devine (43:01.02)
Love it.

Kevin Mooney (43:17.347)
They get caught up in their product.

They get caught up in maybe even brand sometimes debatable, but they get caught up in all this other shit that does not help you. They're like, look at this new feature that we launched. Look at the new product that we just shipped. It does this. Now you can click this extra button and you're like, I don't care. That's not what I'm after. I need these problems to go away forever. And if you're the person that's solving that whichever way, whichever

Kasey Devine (43:24.733)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (43:49.803)
business model you guys end up on, or even if it's multiple models there and different verticals possibly, stay in that problem solving mindset. I think that's gonna be huge for you. And that's not just like advice, it's something that I'm noticing based on what you're talking about.

Kasey Devine (44:06.406)
Thanks man, I thank you that.

Kasey Devine (44:12.05)
Yeah, like I think in some circles, capitalism has gotten a really bad rap over the past hundred years. We can go down that rabbit hole if you want, but to stay high level, an academic understanding of capitalism is that you get paid in proportion to the difficulty and severity of the problem you solve.

And I think to that point, we've gotten so wrapped up in branding, theory, economics, that we forget that like solving the problem is the point in the most efficient way possible. And if you solve the problem the best in the most efficient way, you win and you should. Because if you don't, like if you're going to do everything,

Like there isn't a world in any economic system where somebody does everything. Like I don't produce my own power. I don't produce the internet. I don't do my own trash. And so it's like, we have to at some point rely on somebody else to do it. And so I think your advice is really like hits to my heart. Cause it's like, well, if the day you stop solving problems is the day you should die. It's the day that somebody should come eat your lunch.

Kevin Mooney (45:26.531)
Yeah.

Yeah. And you know, it's funny because I've, I've been in the brand space for 10 years now. And for most of that time, I was the biggest proponent of brand and I thought brand solves, solves everything. And to be fair, it does solve a lot. And I think it's very much needed. And I think it's very, very misunderstood by

most businesses, most marketing people, most brand people, it's just completely misunderstood. But to your point, solving problems is the number one thing that you should be doing. And somebody smarter than me once said, if you really just want to get rich,

then go find a rich person, figure out what problems they have and solve those problems. Because then you're to have people who have a lot of money pay you a lot of money to solve their problems. But that doesn't necessarily align with everybody.

Ethically or morally right? You know, we don't always just want to do that in your case It's like no. No, how can we help? these people that are in the middle that are the backbone of our society of our

Kevin Mooney (46:47.563)
economic superpower that are struggling day in and day out. And I personally just really enjoy that and align with that. I try to do the same. I don't work with $50 million plus companies. They're just kind of a pain in the ass for me. I like working with small business because they're going to listen to what I have to say. They're going to take the advice. They're going to go through the hard stuff because they know that it's not easy. The big guys are just like, I don't want to do this.

Kasey Devine (47:03.591)
Haha!

Kevin Mooney (47:17.457)
or I have too much money, I'll pay somebody else to do it, whatever that thing is. So I know we're kind of dipping out of your storyline and into morality, but I think when you start looking at tech companies and you look at what has happened and how many have popped up and how many have failed and gotten funding, most of those companies are just pieces of shit. They're just nothing, they're just there and the investors look at them like,

Kasey Devine (47:25.383)
That's okay.

Haha!

Kevin Mooney (47:46.677)
Okay, how much money can I give them and how much money will I get back out of this thing? And let's just do the least amount of work effort.

insert your, your term into it. And it's all about the money. And I hate, I hate seeing people end up there. part of my questions, and maybe they're down here a little bit more. I, I certainly want to know like how you're building this company, what your business model is, but I want to know like, how are you going to put leadership structure in place? And then how are you going to kind of combat some of these investors and

Kasey Devine (48:06.844)
Yes.

Kasey Devine (48:11.131)
No.

Kevin Mooney (48:24.259)
That is a whole line of questioning that I've got sort of in my head. I don't know if now's the time, but maybe it is.

Kasey Devine (48:30.215)
I think it is. Yeah. Well, and I want to let you off the hook, too, real quick. Brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. So it's not something you should completely ignore. But I came up with Entravia by talking, by debating something with ChatGPT for 30 minutes on voice mode. then I had it. Yeah. And then I had an idea for a.

Kevin Mooney (48:52.643)
That's it? Only 30 minutes?

Kasey Devine (48:59.725)
logo, and I had it do the logo. And I like the color green. And so that like, resonated with me. But so it's like you can, I think where people get off kilter is they think that that is like that solely by establishing a brand, are solving the problem based on future potential. And that's not necessarily wrong, because you do want to communicate what you're doing in the vision. You also though actually want to solve the problem.

I think that's something where people get there. Then you start talking about investors. And I think one of the things people don't understand about venture math, I'm to go all the way to the beginning of it, which is like angel investing, because it has less zeros and you can understand the concepts of it better. Because anything further than that is just adding more complexity and more zeros. But the more simple you can understand it, the better. If I'm an angel investor,

and I want to give a company $5,000 because I think that, and I'm going to take a little bit of their company in exchange. I think that they're solving a cool problem or that they might be onto something. Why that actually is an interesting way of changing the world is if I buy something in public companies or in commodities or something like that,

It does get a little bit into the Wolf of Wall Street model where it's like, it's a fugazi, it's fugazi, it doesn't exist, right? Like, whereas this thing doesn't exist, but you're, you're trying to direct value money toward a better future that you want to see ideally. And so the why the model actually makes a ton of sense if you don't like get into like a bro code positive feedback loop is

I'm going to give you $5,000 or put zeros here. The maximum I can lose is $5,000 and there is no limit to how much I could gain. So like, I think that's where people like miss the point. So then it's up to the entrepreneur to only work, to have a compelling enough story and product to warrant the investment.

Kevin Mooney (51:00.377)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (51:05.379)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (51:18.874)
And I think a lot of people whine because they have a cool pitch deck and an idea, but they can't prove that it actually would happen or that people want it. Just because you dropped out of Stanford doesn't mean you have a good business. then it's like, all right, well, now it's on the entrepreneur to only accept financing investment from investors that actually align with you. So that's what we've done so far.

And that's where it's like, yes, it's getting more and more complex. we continue to solve the problems in this industry at the rate with which we are currently solving the problems, we're going to be talking about the more zeros and the more complexity. I think that's where you nip it is like it starts. Attitude reflects leadership. Remember the Titans? If you keep that clear, it's not necessarily about not selling out or an us versus them kind of thing.

Kevin Mooney (52:08.687)
Mm-hmm.

Kasey Devine (52:17.895)
If you get there, it's because you let it get there. You decided to sell yourself out and you ended up in a place where you shouldn't be. You decided to do business with somebody that you shouldn't have done business with. And now you're gonna whine from your yacht. And I don't have patience for that.

Hopefully I was getting into the answers to some other questions.

Kevin Mooney (52:38.009)
doing great. How do you personally ensure that when those zeros come that you don't do business with the wrong person or wrong people?

Kasey Devine (52:51.206)
prayer. I'm not kidding. I like going back. That's why I want to tell the story about why I started this. I don't claim to have come up with the idea. I don't claim to even be the person who had the guts to start it. And I don't claim to be the reason it's going well. And if I continue and this is my own opinion, like if I continue to stay in that mindset and pray and say like

All right, what do want me to do next every day, every hour, whatever it is, I think I'm going to be okay. Because this I don't have this. It's so funny. The one thing that like, when I when I have talked to investors, when I've talked to potential big clients, they asked, like, why are you doing this? What's your end goal? And my answer is I don't know. You know what mean? Like

Kevin Mooney (53:25.999)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (53:41.827)
Yeah.

It's so good. That's an awesome answer.

Kasey Devine (53:46.094)
I don't know. And that's, think, like an honest answer, but saying like, believe I'm called to do this. And I think the answer to your question will make itself manifest when it's appropriate. So I don't know, like, I think the way that you start, the way that you avoid that is like, I'm not setting out to earn X millions of dollars. I'm not setting out to, I don't have a vision board behind me. have like a 1980s

beige wall in my basement in Bloomington, Minnesota. You know what I mean? Like, and sure that might not always be the case if we're successful, but the point is to solve the problem. And we got investors who also agree with solving the problem. And you can also set up accountability by continuing to communicate that. You'll attract employees, you'll attract customers, and you'll attract investors who are also aligned with that in some way.

And you will build guardrails around you because you won't be able to take a hard left or hard right turn eventually because you've continued building with that as the infrastructure. And if you end up pulling out the support beam in your basement, the house crumbles anyway. So you'll be forced to continue going on least that kind of trajectory.

Kevin Mooney (54:56.975)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (55:00.759)
Yeah, you know, in the brand world, we call those core values or we call them principles, one of the two. And, you know, a lot of times clients, when I'm going through the exercises to try to pull those values out of them, you know, a lot of times they think, we're just kind of assigning words so that we can fill a bucket.

But I would say that the real businesses out there who have those values defined and then they stick to them, meaning every decision that they make, they go back and they look at that and they say, does that align with these values that we have? Yes, great. Move forward. No, sorry, but I'm not going to take you on as an investor. Those companies tend to win.

hands down the most. And to me, that's really what brand is. There's a great guy. His name is Caleb Ralston. He talks about brand in this way that brand is, I'm going to butcher this. Sorry. Sorry, guy. brand is

is essentially your partnerships, who you decide to align yourself with. Because those partnerships are the ones that help you get known out there in the world, not just as a company, but as a problem solver, whatever, so on and so forth. And let's say you align with a drug addict because you just thought that would be a fun thing to do, or you align with a

Kasey Devine (56:16.432)
Yes.

Kasey Devine (56:23.961)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (56:41.035)
a bad guy, a villain or something like that, because you think it's personally fun. Well, if those don't align with the brand, you're going to be a now associated with that person. And I see that happen all the time in the investor space. And I see companies really struggle with it because they need the money. They need that thing to keep growing, to keep hitting the 100 X over and over and over and over again.

So with that being said, I mean, it's very clear that your beliefs and religion to you is the guiding light. I can very much respect that. How many people do you have on your team right now? And then I have a follow-up question to that. So.

Kasey Devine (57:18.97)
Yes.

Kasey Devine (57:27.365)
There is an employee and two contractors.

Kevin Mooney (57:32.981)
As you grow and you look to build this team, because like you said, you're going to need help. You're going to need engineers. You're going to need salespeople. don't know, marketers, advertisers, whatever, all this stuff. How do you intend to build your leadership team?

Kasey Devine (57:39.642)
Yes.

Kasey Devine (57:52.313)
Ooh, OK. I'll give you a little bit of a longer answer. So it starts with what I care about. Then it goes to what I expect. So Jason Pfeiffer, I saw him speak at a conference once. He's editor in chief. I've been pulled up on LinkedIn. Tag him in this. He's a good dude of Entrepreneur Magazine. And he led an exercise, which was like a personal mission statement. And his whole point there was like, OK.

If you like life is going to throw you a bunch of curve balls. If you don't understand what you're about, then when, when you do get those curve balls, you will crumble. You see, aren't kind of where I'm going with there. And so I wrote one in the conference room that day and I stuck to it. I'm grounded in faith. I coach connect to disparate ideas.

Kevin Mooney (58:36.099)
Mm-hmm.

Kasey Devine (58:49.337)
form unlikely teams and lead with an inspiring strategic vision to promote innovation, a growth mindset and continuous improvement. And I have, I think that allowed me to get into that like sales role I just did, then like leave ego behind. Cause I'm like, you know what, like it's not about the title of what I'm doing or anything, but if I'm doing things that align with that, I'm happy. So there's like, this is what it's going to take to keep me interested.

and not burning out is I have to, whatever I'm doing has to align with that. And it's intentionally wide in some ways. I didn't say I needed to be a VP of sales. didn't say I needed to be a founder. It just said like what I do. I could be a janitor and do that. Like, and that's not disparaging sanitation. It's just like, doesn't, doesn't actually matter what I'm doing. Dog groomer, mailman, doesn't matter. Going into then what I expect, how do you, how do you hire the team? Especially in this day and age.

Kevin Mooney (59:34.137)
course.

Kasey Devine (59:47.329)
I, there's a HR tech company, Rippling. they hire, I listened to a podcast on them once they hire based on need. And so they spin up the engine that are going to have problems that you need to solve. let's say inbound sales demos. I'm going to build an engine that creates a bunch of these problems inbound sales demos. And I'm going to hire salespeople to run the demos when.

There's enough for one person to do it. And then as the next, as they start getting stretched too thin, we'll hire another one. You know what I mean? So, so only hiring to solve the problems that are actually existing and making it so that the problems actually happen. So then that's how you know when to hire. Um, in the world of AI, I, again, I don't think that I think human in the loop AI as of today's recording, January 14th, 2026 is the way to go.

Um, and I don't think we're quite to like Skynet Terminator, you know what I mean? Like yet or not yet. Um, and so with that though, it's like, you're gonna, you're gonna 10 X, you're gonna a hundred X, whatever you put into that. And I think that AI in the hands of values aligned, uh, experts in what you do gives you an unfair advantage. Um, so for example, uh, I think it's being really clear when we're talking about the leadership team of what problem are we trying to solve by hiring this person?

Kevin Mooney (01:00:50.733)
Not quite.

Kasey Devine (01:01:16.931)
Let's even before we decide to hire that person, make sure that we can look them in the eye and say that they have 40 hours of dignified problems to solve that we are not going to have to go back to them in six months and think, Hey, the thing we're going to hire you to do wasn't actually a problem. Let's validate that it is. Then I get to the three things that I learned this actually back from one of my leaders at ADP adapted it slightly. I asked for, there's like an employment contract I enter into and my attorney Galen is going to be like, it's not a contract. like, I know this is just.

Kevin Mooney (01:01:44.937)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:01:46.445)
a wording. The thing is, I ask for, if you're potentially a fit and you have the qualifications for which I'm looking to solve the problem, hopefully that means I can't solve the problem on hiring somebody who's fundamentally different, then it's attitude, effort, and execution are the three things I usually expect. And I give a spiel, it's corny, but it makes sense. If you give me those three things and you fail at the job I'm hiring you to do, it's my fault.

I will own it publicly and I will fix it. If you give me those three things and you fail, it's my fault, not yours. Why I say that is attitude is like, it's not saying I need you to like barf rainbows all day, but like, I want you to go back to the whole thing we just talked about maybe a half hour ago, which is we're paid to solve problems. So I'm hoping you come across problems that are hard and that you can't solve. And I'm hoping that you have a lot of them.

Kevin Mooney (01:02:42.104)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:02:42.506)
I, I, I'm not asking you to be like overly optimistic and overly positive, but I am asking that like, you come with an attitude of problem solving effort is that like, I, don't want it to ever be a question why that you, that you are giving a hundred percent of your effort into what we're doing. That doesn't mean working 70 hours a week. That means like when we're working, we are working and we are trying with all of our faculties to solve the problem. And then execution is like, all right, if we have a plan, whether it's your plan.

It's the plan we've developed together or it's my plan or whatever it is that you actually try to go do it the way that we drew it up. And so then if you fail at those things, if you fail at what I'm asking you to do and you gave me those three things, I didn't put you in the right position to win. I didn't have a good enough plan. I didn't, know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which is something that can be fixed and it it's liberating because it's order and it's not chaos. That's what I'm looking to develop.

Kevin Mooney (01:03:40.419)
Ahem.

Kasey Devine (01:03:41.456)
And outside of that, I'm looking for people who light up when I tell them the idea. If you don't get it within five minutes, I think I'm halfway decent communicator, but it's probably like not the initial hires to a startup.

Kevin Mooney (01:03:45.453)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:03:53.429)
Sure. Sure. Have you read Patrick Lencioni's book, the advantage?

Kasey Devine (01:04:03.715)
No.

Kevin Mooney (01:04:08.683)
I should send you this book because it's fantastic and it is all about organizational health.

Kasey Devine (01:04:12.772)
Please.

Kevin Mooney (01:04:19.437)
And I have to reference it. I pulled it right here off my desk. It's very, very in depth, but there are four stages to organizational health. And if I can find it really quick, there's four disciplines. It is build a cohesive leadership team, create clarity, over communicate clarity.

Kasey Devine (01:04:34.616)
Ooh.

Kevin Mooney (01:04:48.877)
and then reinforce clarity.

When I read this book, it resonated with me so much. I could build an entire brand strategy workshop just off of this book. And in fact, some of the things that I do in my business is directly from this book. And I never even know, never even read it. But.

The way that they talk about building a cohesive leadership team is really, really interesting. And it's based on this pyramid that I had bookmarked. It's based on trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and then lastly, results.

And it goes into deep on how, how you kind of facilitate building trust within the team and so on and so forth. It is, it's a fantastic read and super useful for anyone in business, but certainly in a tech startup, because I believe you're solving these problems. And I believe that it's going to probably spin up pretty quickly because that's a large industry to be in 414

billion is a big industry and if there's only a handful of providers and then now you're doing something that nobody else has done I expect to see some pretty good growth in there which means

Kevin Mooney (01:06:24.599)
Especially when it comes to investors, there's going to be pressure to build teams and it's going to, you know, they have certain requirements that they, they want to see for you to be investible. And you may be able to get out of some of that with certain investors, but other, especially like VC groups, they're going to make you have certain things in place. And I think this book is going to be super helpful for you. in that department, I'm not claiming to be an expert on it or know it. I'm on my third time through the book.

but it is it's really really good. One of the things that they talk about in here and it's something I've been doing for a very long time is paying attention to personality types. Specifically through the Myers-Briggs platform if you're familiar with that at all. There are just certain things that certain personality types are incapable of doing and through the last

Kasey Devine (01:07:12.344)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:07:21.163)
I'd say 10 or 12 years of studying it and learning about the different personality types, it's helped me tremendously. Whether it is somebody that wants to be a guest, whether it's a lead or a client, I'm able to kind of pick up on what personality type they are, help deliver information in the way that they understand it.

the most and then most of the time the outcome may maybe it's not exactly what I wanted, but it is their best effort on it because they understood it a certain way. And so it talks about that here in in building a cohesive leadership team about the Myers-Briggs and there's there's certain things you can do. Another mentor of mine, his name is Jose Caballer

He built a platform called FEDO and it is flaky, evil, dorky and obnoxious. And you kind of fall into one of these categories, but what he does when he goes out and does these workshops is he'll type them and then group them by type. And then he'll assign a task to them. And inevitably all of the people who have the same personality type

they cannot complete the task because they're kind of wired a certain way. So they sit there and they argue about, you know, who's going to do what, how are they going to do this? And then the time expires and they can't do their project. He pulls the group back together and then he splits them back up into F E D and O and magically they're able to complete their task 15 minutes ahead of time.

And it's this really interesting exercise to get people to understand that they are wired a little bit differently than someone else and how they work together. I'm on a complete rant here, but.

Kevin Mooney (01:09:28.929)
I think it's really interesting when you look at hiring leadership level people. Because my wife is in SAAS and she has made some wrong hires before. And she's handled it very similar to how you just talked about, where it's like, that's on me.

I put you in the wrong role. You're not a bad person. You're actually probably better fit over here in this role. I know that that may not be the role that you want, but I can tell that's where you belong. And those types of decisions are really hard. I see it weigh on my wife pretty often. So it's interesting that you're, saying those same types of things as opposed to, no, you suck. Get out of here. You're fired.

Kasey Devine (01:10:15.246)
Yeah, well, I think having not read the book that you suggested and wanting to, it reminds me of like the I try to oversimplify everything because it draws understanding. The children's game of like telephone, I think we just inherently are way worse at communicating than we think we are, all of us. And like that's proven by a game of telephone or.

You know, if you, if you wanted to use that in like a corporate environment and brainstorming here, you could say it like you could tell somebody something and say like you have to tell somebody else, without using the same words, something like that. You know what I mean? And see if you communicated the essence or what's important there. Jaco Willink does a really good job of like making sure that you understand how you're communicating, what the expectations are. One of the things it's like, I like the idea of

personality types and I think there are ways that we tend to but some of like Dr. Carol Dweck's work with like mindset and like growth mindset I think is stuff that I come to because I don't know man like going back all the way to the beginning of our pod I know a bunch about PEO right now and 10 years ago I didn't you know what I mean and I was in sport management and whatever else and before that I didn't know how to tie my shoes and before that whatever and so like I think that there are gonna be like

Kevin Mooney (01:11:29.817)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:11:39.019)
If you now, if you asked me to go be a mathematician or a scientist, it's not likely because I don't, I'm not interested in it. I'm not naturally gifted at it. And I, and I don't want to put the time and effort in to go do that thing. But in general, when somebody's not doing something that you expect them to do, if it's, it's one of three things, they didn't understand what you wanted them to do. They don't know how to do what you want them to do.

or they don't want to. Those are the only possibilities. You know what I mean? And I think we overdiagnose they don't want to more than is necessary because I think a lot of the time it's they don't understand or they don't know how. And we think that they don't understand and we think they know how. Then we just label them as idiots or lazy.

Kevin Mooney (01:12:12.121)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (01:12:35.215)
Sure. Yeah, I think that's one of the things, and I understand that a lot of people have, they're very up in the air about things like Myers-Briggs. I think that the patterns that I have recognized in those personality types make perfect sense to me. But it does go back to, and I think that this is a very layered approach, right? My wife just turned me on to this happiness test.

by Arthur C. Brooks and I immediately after taking it was like, this ties really, really well into my personality type. So if I had a different happiness type.

then my personality type would, it wouldn't change. I would be a different flavor of this thing. So it is very layered in there. But one of the things about Myers-Briggs that stands out to me is the pretty, pretty severe difference between an intuitive and a sensor. And those are the second letters in, in the type sensors are type, they're the type of people who they need factual data.

data, they need instructions, they need orders. And intuitives are more like read between the lines, kind of figure it out on their own type of people, so on and so forth.

That doesn't mean that you can't have a very lazy intuitive who doesn't want to do anything, doesn't want to learn, doesn't want to grow. And it doesn't mean that you can't have somebody who's super interested in your industry as a sensor and then have them go figure it out for themselves. Like they can absolutely do that. I just happened to lean to one side where if I'm interested in it,

Kevin Mooney (01:14:33.185)
I'm just going to go as far as I possibly can. And you sound like the exact same person. But if you, if you had your investor now ask you 10 years ago, you'd be like, I don't know what a PP or a PEO is. And if that, if that investor didn't sort of look at you and think through who you are as a person, that could have been a missed opportunity. So all I'm saying is like,

Kasey Devine (01:14:38.999)
But if you have...

Kasey Devine (01:14:58.239)
huh.

Kevin Mooney (01:15:00.565)
It's really, it's kind of amazing how we've gotten along as society for as long as we have, because there's so many things just kind of battling against us, views and beliefs and opinions and colors and all this weird stuff. But, I think I lost my train of thought, but I guess where I was going with it is, is probably somewhere in that, like,

Kasey Devine (01:15:07.341)
Ha ha ha ha.

Kevin Mooney (01:15:22.575)
paying attention to the human is so much better than what the credentials are, even when it comes to the problem that you're trying to solve. Because you're the person that can go and figure out that problem and figure out how to solve it. It's your way of doing it. It may not be other way, other people's way of doing it, just like you experienced in your job. They're like,

I don't know what you did. I didn't even think about the things that you were working on, but you did them just so happens. Those aren't the problems that we want to be solving right now.

Kasey Devine (01:15:54.467)
Totally, man.

Kevin Mooney (01:15:55.789)
It's a wild, wild thing. And hiring for me has always been a struggle. That's why I bought this book and I've been just reading it over and over again for when that time comes to step up and put some leadership underneath of me, I've got some sort of framework that I can lean on.

Kasey Devine (01:16:15.491)
It's it's hard it is part art part science you're dealing with people if people were predictable There'd be a lot more stock market millionaires and you know like you can do the best you can and you got to understand that you're gonna do you're gonna mess up and you need to handle it with humanity and humbleness and Honesty as much as you can There's an old graduation speech from the 90s sunscreen. It was put to music if you remember that one

Kevin Mooney (01:16:44.271)
I don't.

Kasey Devine (01:16:45.62)
Look it up. It's full of one liners. You know, it's like, and it's book ended by, know, here's a bunch of advice, but like you should put put on sunscreen. And there's a quote in there that that goes a couple of them, maybe. Don't worry about the future or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are out to be the kinds that never cross your worried mind, the kind of blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.

Kevin Mooney (01:17:07.438)
Hahaha

Kasey Devine (01:17:14.786)
And then there's another one that kind of goes into the theme of what we were just saying, what you were just saying of, um, uh, your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's. And I think both can be really true. You can get analysis paralysis. think you got to do, the point is to like pick a system. And I think the system you're talking about is perfectly valid. Pick a system that you believe in, that you can articulate, that you understand, do the best you can with the data you can get and treat them like a person.

and know that no matter how good your system is, you will fail at some point because nobody's done it perfectly. You know what mean?

Kevin Mooney (01:17:47.854)
Yeah.

Never ever. No, I've always been. I've always said that like we don't have it figured out. We're not going to have it figured out. And by the time we think we have it figured out, we're almost dead. You know, that's just the way it's going to be.

Kasey Devine (01:18:02.518)
Yeah, well said,

It is, it'd be like that. I'd absolutely do. But I think, I think the focus that you have on hiring and going, going into like, how do you think about expanding your leadership team, which is how do you, how do you have a full force multiplier on the organization and on the mission? It also means how do you, how do you choose who, who you trust to delegate stuff like this to? But I think that's important, right? Going back to like one of those two triangles I said earlier, like I've seen.

Kevin Mooney (01:18:07.634)
Kasey Devine (01:18:34.496)
really well capitalized companies fail. I've seen companies with fantastic ideas and products and services fail. You really don't see companies that have alignment and good people top to bottom fail. You just don't like those are the ones that stick around.

Kevin Mooney (01:18:44.878)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:18:48.335)
100%. So I don't want to release any information out there in the world, but you've got a pre-seed round that just happened, which is really cool. What are you going to do with it? As much as you can say, or as little.

Kasey Devine (01:19:00.726)
Yes. Yes. Thank you.

Kasey Devine (01:19:08.891)
Kasey Devine (01:19:12.226)
Probably go to the south of France Yachting and then no kidding Thank you for laughing First of all Make sure that I'm not homeless at least at a minimum level. That's that's something that's really important to me is to not be homeless If I can avoid it and then that's where the folks that have been

Kevin Mooney (01:19:23.563)
Yes.

Kasey Devine (01:19:40.862)
recruited that I told you about came, you know, were able to come from. The employee is a software engineer. If you're going to have scale a tech based company, there's only so far currently today in January of 2026, that vibe coding can take you. And I thought it was responsible to stop. And so I hired somebody who's professional at that. And then the contractors are both folks to help grow the company.

And that is such that like, yes, that's my specialty. You might be like, why did you invest money in folks that can grow the company? If that's like what you do. And it's because I don't have relationships with everybody. And if I'm a self arguing echo chamber or not getting different perspectives to challenge me, I'm going to run off a cliff and not see it. And so I wanted to help there.

Kevin Mooney (01:20:36.846)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:20:40.042)
The idea though, if you think about like somebody is going to get smart on like LinkedIn and argue with this, but it's just like a perspective. Pre-seed in tech to me is you seem like you have a good idea and there's early validation. Like let's go see that if you put a minimum amount of money into it, that there is market validation at some point. Then seed is about like starting

to attempt to find product market fit and establish some sort of sales motion and like zooming out a little bit. I picture all of this as playing like Battleship. You remember that? Where you're kind of like guessing or like an RPG, like video game or something like that, where you don't have the entire map. You're kind of just shooting arrows.

Kevin Mooney (01:21:26.617)
do.

Kasey Devine (01:21:38.676)
and hoping you hit the target with some sort of educated guesses. But there isn't really a playbook in startups because if there was, you wouldn't have a company. So nobody's done it the way you've done it with your perspective at that time. And so I think that's where there isn't like a comment for my playbook of how to scale to 100 million because nobody else will be able to do it. So like that's kind of the idea is without getting too over the skis is

Kevin Mooney (01:21:48.473)
Right.

Kasey Devine (01:22:08.566)
I'm pretty sure this is a good idea. And let's do just enough to validate it and do that with dollars and cents, because again, we're capitalists. And go find additional investors that would say, those results do indicate that people don't hate you. And what would happen if we did more of what you did? Would more come out or would less or the same come out?

So our idea is to get to that next stage, ideally at least $300,000 to $500,000 of annualized recurring revenue ARR.

Kevin Mooney (01:22:37.977)
Sure.

Kevin Mooney (01:22:46.787)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:22:52.825)
There's just one, there's a topic in here that I want to talk about because I'm so interested and I failed at it so many times. It's on topic, but off. Talk to me about vibe coding.

Kasey Devine (01:23:04.417)
Cool. All right, I'll talk to you about VibeCoding. Love VibeCoding.

Kevin Mooney (01:23:08.567)
because I have just barely dabbled in it and I don't know. can't get the, I also come from, I taught myself web design and development many, many years ago. And so I'm, I'm super intrigued on how the code works, how clean it works. And then I'm very into the design cause I'm in brand and all that, all of that shit. Talk to me about vibe coding cause I have failed at it many times.

Kasey Devine (01:23:38.133)
Yes, sounds good. From when I started to now even, it's changed. And I think that's like the thing to note. Unless you listen to this podcast within a week of it being released, what I'm about to say is semi-irrelevant. That's how fast it's going though. Like that is truly how fast it's going right now. Even such that the systems I've used are, if you started a new project, different. Right now,

Kevin Mooney (01:23:52.787)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:24:07.585)
Anyway, think so like.

Going back to like the assumption I have about AI is it makes things go faster or with more volume. If you have, if you don't know what you're doing or you have a terrible idea, all you're going to do is produce more of it. So where vibe coding is today is I think it.

Kasey Devine (01:24:35.477)
gears toward founders or entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs, doesn't matter, that have a very clear vision of a problem they need to solve. If you are just like building like a toddler with Legos and you don't know that you wanna build a castle, it's just gonna end up like a jumbled mush of Legos. You know what I mean? Like it won't do anything, it'll kind of suck. But like for me,

And again, not saying I'm like the second coming of insert tech person here. I'm not. I have a very clear idea of what needed to happen first. And I see it in my mind of like, all of these things are possible, but the underlying infrastructure needs to do this. And, I don't need to really go interview people as much in my role as others might because I've lived the problem myself.

for 10 years and every single conversation I've had with small businesses and those who serve them dance around those set of problems. Like it is an underlying thing. And so you can kind of start daydreaming of what it needs to do. Vibe coding, think does work, I think to an extent. I don't think it's going to, like we're not yet today at the place where you could not have a background in software engineering and coding.

And Vi code your way as a one person startup all the way to a unicorn status. I don't think that's possible yet. Like alone without having anybody else help you at all. Even if, even if you're a software engineer that's using vibe coding technology, that's significantly better. Like Wayne Gretzky using a hockey stick, same hockey stick I use way different results. You know what I mean? Like same hockey stick. So I think like it depends on who you are. all I, what.

Kevin Mooney (01:26:23.523)
Yeah, yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:26:30.506)
What Vibe Coding has done in my opinion is for tech companies has removed, it has taken the goal posts significantly farther out to get investment quickly because you either are getting into like deep tech or hard tech or if you have anything to do with SaaS and you can't demonstrate like a demo, you don't care.

Kevin Mooney (01:26:58.607)
Right. Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:26:59.297)
Like you haven't tried, even if it's wire-framed, like there is no excuse to, if you have a vision to not have a visual of how it works. And now there's no excuse to not have a very, very minimum viable product, something like literally just something to show time and effort. I think what Vibe Coding goes well is you know who you're building for and also that you might have folks who would be willing to try it, who understand the problem.

because then they can give you different perspectives of things you haven't considered.

Kevin Mooney (01:27:30.797)
Yeah. So you vibe coded your way to this precede round. And who did?

Kasey Devine (01:27:37.141)
Yes.

I was upfront about that too. think that's like an important thing is don't lie.

Kevin Mooney (01:27:44.043)
Yeah. So who did you have kind of test and help you through some of that stuff? Or was it just you being like, no, this is how it should go based on my experience.

Kasey Devine (01:27:57.225)
Most of it was just me based on my experience, given like the timing, because it can't like counteract with my prior employment. Some of it was like, have industry people that also, like I said, like one of the groomsmen in my weddings in my industry. So validating the idea was something that like I didn't have to do alone. I was able to like FaceTime some friends in the industry.

and show them what I have and say like, am I missing? Or like, what would be like if you're if you're going to show this to somebody, where would you be embarrassed? You know what I mean? Or like what what minimally has to happen? Like if you if you could only prioritize three things, what would you prioritize? That's like that's kind how that happened. I didn't I didn't really have anybody else like diving into it. I crashed it entirely and couldn't get the code back at one point.

Kevin Mooney (01:28:42.031)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:28:54.302)
and did have to pay a software developer company to re-rescue it, like 1099 real quick, over the course of a weekend or something like that. So you do pay an idiot tax.

Kevin Mooney (01:29:08.587)
Yeah, yeah, I would assume there is. I, you know, I haven't even paid for any of the software is lovable or, Replet. I haven't paid for them. I use their free version just to kind of see what I can do and, know, see what a prompt would essentially cost me in credits. Cause I'm, I was still wrapping my head around, you know, well, what is a credit? How much does it cost? You know? and I mean, I got some like real

janky things out of it, but you had said something in our pre-meeting that was interesting. It was the order of prompts and and like what you prompt it. Can you talk to me a little bit about that and how you did it?

Kasey Devine (01:29:48.704)
Mm-hmm.

Kasey Devine (01:29:55.434)
Yeah, I think AI right now, and especially as it relates to the AI bots that are vibe coding, like talented interns that don't understand context currently. And I think with that, that's why subject matter experts are doing better with vibe coding, because they have the context.

Whereas if you're just like if you just go on to Reddit or like a message board and you're just trying to find something to build and You'll assume you understand the problem if you're doing it though it would whether it's figma whether it's a piece of paper like What I would do if you're gonna dive in I'll pick on lovable. I think lovable is a pretty good example of it. It's a good company I would like

take the journey of the customer and write it out of what, at a very minimum level, what needs to happen, what are they doing? And that way, and I would like understand that how AI is even made, I kind of think, is obviously everything boils down to zeros and ones, but it's on pattern recognition. All AI is is a really, really sophisticated calculator. It's pattern recognition.

we are humans are training AI and the stuff that we produce is training AI. How do humans understand and how do they learn stories? So if you can, if you can do that, I think you're going to have better success. If you can, if you can understand as clearly as possible what the MVP's user journey is, and prompt it minimally on

bite-sized chunks, you have a better chance of success. I need you to create, before you do anything, a login page. You know what I mean? Like, start there. And then what happens after you've successfully, well, and then like, you could say, all right, this needs to have username and password, and we need to make sure that there's like an email that goes out, or we're gonna go look up some YouTube videos like I did of how to connect to Google's OAuth. That's all possible.

Kevin Mooney (01:31:59.15)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:32:14.329)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:32:15.87)
And then what happens from there, what happens from there, what happens from there. If you try to prompt too much, it'll break.

Kevin Mooney (01:32:23.267)
So it's not like, hey, build me a SaaS company. It's like, blah. It freaks out.

Kasey Devine (01:32:23.466)
Every time.

Kasey Devine (01:32:27.061)
No. Yeah, of course. Like, and because so would your intern. Like picture it that way. Like your interns not going to build you a multi-billion dollar infrastructure company overnight. Like, but what they might do is like build a wire frame of a login page and then you could like, maybe you go look up a YouTube video or I have often, I got out of I've coding personally because.

Kevin Mooney (01:32:32.729)
Sure.

Kasey Devine (01:32:55.912)
It's irresponsible now for me. But there were times when I would ask Lovable something on chat mode. I don't know what they even said. I'd put it into chat GPT to help me translate it and then like go find a YouTube video to help explain it to me. You know what mean? And then go do that. So you have to be like a little bit resourceful as well.

Kevin Mooney (01:33:15.393)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:33:21.389)
Yeah, I mean, I currently do that between Notion and chat and maybe a image generator, you know, just for mock-up purposes. You know, I'll take something from here and I'll put it into there and then prompt me over here. And you just bounce between all of them. Just try to get to that one thing. But prompt engineering is a whole skill in and of itself. And I like the way that you broke that down.

Like, no, this is the thing that I need. A login page should be pretty simple. Name, email, enter, submit, whatever the thing is. Yeah, I really like that. It's kind of crazy though that that's how you started this thing. That's how you built your MVP and you're at pre-seed round. It's pretty impressive, I gotta say.

Kasey Devine (01:34:15.52)
Thanks. Well, OK, thank you. I appreciate that. Part of why I think is because I spent now 11 years. In doing various parts of the same thing, admitting when I'm wrong when I can trying to be better than I was yesterday and there like. You can cut this out as a clip. There's like a hack that I learned early early on.

Can I go back and like tell the story because I think it actually plays Back to the the field sales role at ADP I'm in a city I didn't grow up in and like outskirts of town and everything's like a good old boys club and like I'm struggling even though I care won the change the training class and One day I was like, you know what? They're gonna fire me if I don't do better and like none of this is working I'm going to go out and I'm just gonna try to like

Kevin Mooney (01:34:46.553)
Please do. Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:35:12.595)
go meet people and ask what they do and like help them, whatever. You know what I mean? Like, and I went to a chamber of commerce meeting. I specifically didn't bring business cards and I just talked to people and I deflected every single time somebody asked me what I did. Just like, I'm not going to talk about it because every time I talk about it, mess it up. I suck at this. I tried to understand what they're doing. Why are they there? Who are they trying to meet? Like, what's good look like for them? What problems are they trying to solve? And then there's some people I clicked with.

And like, remember I met one person who said like, well, you can't help me. I'm like, probably not. Like what, is it that you're looking to do? He's like, well, I'm unskilled trades and I'm looking to get a better website. And I don't know, this was 2015. Obviously now you could just like, if I'd code that, but, looking to get a better website. And then, so what I did the next day is I took his business card and I Googled web designers in the area and I cold called them.

And I didn't cold call them to sell them what I sold. said, Hey, my name's Casey. sell payroll and HR in the area. I'm not trying to sell you something. have a question. Like what? I was like, I was at a chamber of commerce event and I met this person who was looking for a website and I told them I would try to help them. Do you work with those industries? Are you accepting clients? How much does it cost? Etc. And the people who were kind of nice, I met for coffee. And then I asked them.

How can I help you? And then I would go do that. And the question, the corny style of the question is, if I could do any, regardless of what we just talked about, if I could do anything to solve a problem for you or introduce you to somebody, whether you think I can do it or not in the next two weeks, who or what would it be? And then go try your ass off to go do it. And if you don't do it, but you show effort,

They show like a you show that you're like a good person who actually cares about their well-being is in a complete selfish prick. B sometimes you'll get to do it. You know what mean? And like that's actually how you grow a network. So I did that for 10 years in an industry that I know a lot about and I've invested a lot of time outside of the eight to five studying this. Like when I going backwards, I remember I told you I got certified in everything.

Kevin Mooney (01:37:17.239)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:37:33.279)
is because I'm like, I'm not an HR practitioner or a payroll practitioner or a benefits practitioner. I sell this thing and I've read the feature benefit statements, but I don't know why not having this sucks. Like I have never lived it and I never will. So I want to go like kind to understand or at least show that like this sales dude took the time to understand me a little bit. So when you combine those things together, now you're talking about like, how did you raise pre-seed? Well, ingenuity.

And also having like a lot of people in that realm who aligned and also have, I've tried to help without asking for anything in return for a long time. And then you come to them with an idea and some passion and then you ask for their help.

Kevin Mooney (01:38:18.467)
That's amazing. That's amazing, man. I love that story. That's it's so good. It's such a good way of doing it. I've never done that. I mean, I, I helped small businesses, but I helped small businesses for money and sure, sure. But

Kasey Devine (01:38:37.908)
Yeah. Me too. I do get paid. Don't worry.

Kevin Mooney (01:38:44.505)
There's a fundamental switch that happens in one's brain to go and do the things that you did. And that is huge. And it's clearly paying off, right? Maybe you're not, you're not a millionaire and you're, you're not hundreds of millions of dollars in your tech company, but look at where you're at now. Like that.

Kasey Devine (01:38:53.001)
Mm-hmm.

Kasey Devine (01:39:06.355)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:39:07.107)
that method clearly has paid off. It's made you a better person, it's made you a more curious person, it's made you more, it's made you, it's made you smarter. Let's just say that. It's made you smarter for doing that and going through that effort. So overall, good person. That's incredible.

Kasey Devine (01:39:19.113)
Thanks, man.

Kasey Devine (01:39:23.743)
Thank you.

Thank you. Well, it's kind of funny. None of the cold outreach for investment worked. None of it. Zero. Not one said yes. My two time ex-employee turned friend, his new boss, he introduced me to his new boss because he stayed in the industry and this guy dealt with tech stuff, he said. And I tried getting to meet him twice.

didn't work, finally got ahold of him. Turns out he kind of likes the idea, pulled the string further after again, having those kinds of conversations and being open and honest. He ends up introducing us, me to our lead investor. The lead investor introduced me to the firm that did the rest of the round. And then the original person put together a group of industry professionals to invest privately in a special purpose vehicle.

And now as we are gaining traction, which is happening rather quickly again, because remember, I'm not responsible. I did not do this. You know what I mean? Like I'm just listening. What's funny is it's continuing to happen that way. We're like just showing up and saying why we're doing like I'm not selling anybody. I'm showing up and saying this is what we have built. This is what we are trying to build. This is who I'm looking to meet. How can I help you?

And all of the, it's become an overwhelming positive feedback loop, such that I think we'll get to seed at least by the end of the first half of the year.

Kevin Mooney (01:41:04.847)
Wow, that's good pace right there. I mean, when you have a really...

Kasey Devine (01:41:08.34)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:41:14.935)
I don't want to just say niche industry. You're solving a problem in that niche industry that hasn't been solved. And it is the right problem to solve. know, it's not just like, my UI looks cleaner. You know, it's easier to click around or something like that. You're solving this problem of time for people.

Kasey Devine (01:41:29.801)
Mm-hmm.

Kasey Devine (01:41:43.647)
Yes, it's one thing you can't get more of.

Kevin Mooney (01:41:44.673)
It's a huge, it's a huge thing for people, whether they're in business or in life. If he, and if you can solve a time problem, you've got something that's probably going to take off. Now, how do you protect your

Company in that zone. Is there someone that's going to come in and make that time even faster? Maybe I don't know Sure when they put chips in our heads and you know, you just think about the problem and it's solved Yeah, but until then like you're doing something that's that's really solid there So no wonder you're you're meeting the right people at the right time at the right pace to get these these rounds in it just seems very clear to me that that

Kasey Devine (01:42:05.661)
I hope so.

Kevin Mooney (01:42:27.437)
Like, why wouldn't that be there?

Kasey Devine (01:42:29.705)
So I wanna like hit on a couple of things before I forget it. Number one, I forgot what podcast I was listening to. Actually, no, I didn't. I was scrolling through social media on the floor at 2 a.m. while my wife was feeding our newborn, trying to stay awake. And I found this hour long video from a while ago of Peter Thiel talking about startups. And I listened to it the next day. And one of the things he said really stuck out to me.

So this is one point of two different points. He said, you have kind of two different businesses or two different folks in business. You have the monopoly that is trying very hard to convince everyone they're not a monopoly or the company that is not a monopoly trying to convince everybody that they're a monopoly.

Kevin Mooney (01:43:19.203)
Ha ha

Kasey Devine (01:43:22.227)
And I laughed so hard and I was like, yes. Like, and he was, he was talking up like, duh, of course, Peter Thiel had a good idea. But he like, okay. But like that makes sense. Cause it's like in my space, you have these professional service providers. I'm not going to name any of them specifically that like have their industry experience and their, specificity and all this stuff. And they're claiming that there's nobody like them. They are one of one. And then you have like, what we're trying to accomplish is like.

Kevin Mooney (01:43:30.211)
to thought.

Kasey Devine (01:43:51.113)
Dude, we wanna have this be huge. And like, if you wanna come try to do it for faster and cheaper, you should, go ahead. You know what I mean? Like, I don't think you can, but like you should. And like, I think that's the difference is like we're being inclusive, not exclusive. The other thing though is like listening to your conscience. And so I'm gonna communicate this point in the way that I have been formed.

Kevin Mooney (01:43:57.327)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:44:21.021)
That doesn't necessarily like I hope I can get the point out so that if you disagree with my worldview of Catholicism, you can still get the point. In, I believe, the Old Testament, there's a point where I even forget who it is. There's a man waiting to hear God's voice and there is a earthquake. It wasn't in there. There's pillars of fire. It wasn't in there. And it turned out to be the still small voice is where he heard God.

So even if you're in a secular perspective or in a different faith tradition, to bring this out, it's that you find truth at the highest level when you find quiet and it's the still small voice. The quote in Catholicism is, the conscience is the aboriginal vicar of Christ. So it means it's like, that's where you should listen to. It's the still small voice when you're out for a walk.

When nobody's around and you're not blasting yourself with podcasts, like the thing, the gut is usually right, is the other way of saying that. You see I'm saying? And like, that's what I'm listening to, is like, now you can have a poorly trained guy, quote unquote. Like if you're a complete idiot, if you've no time becoming at all skilled in something, that's probably like, not gonna work.

Kevin Mooney (01:45:25.291)
Mm-hmm. I do.

Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:45:46.888)
But I think it actually makes a ton of sense because even if you don't believe in my faith, think about it this way. If that's where you think you should go and if your choices are half chance and so are everybody else's, at least this is the one that feels the best. And half of it's gonna be that you don't have a better idea and that you're not like playing with one arm tied behind your back. You're not self-sabotaging yourself. You know what I mean?

Kevin Mooney (01:46:02.329)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:46:14.984)
And that's how I think a lot of this has happened too. It's like, what do I do next? Sit, listen to the small, quiet voice, do that. Even if it doesn't make sense.

Kevin Mooney (01:46:25.005)
Yeah. I try to listen to that voice as often as I can. And I also contemplate if that's the right voice to be listening to, but that's still what I do. So I totally understand. I think so. My personal belief is that it is, and maybe it's because it's my voice, but it is very interesting to me.

Kasey Devine (01:46:31.25)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:46:36.926)
It's the most interesting voice to listen to, Kevin.

Kevin Mooney (01:46:54.069)
You had said something closer to the beginning that I wanted to circle back before I ask you maybe the final question. And it was in terms of the business model. And it was something that you realized after launch. And I wanted to get some clarity on it because I was a little bit confused. You were essentially talking about how

Kasey Devine (01:47:11.742)
yes, I could talk to that.

Kevin Mooney (01:47:22.851)
when you launched, you were thinking that you were gonna be the hub, correct? And what you realized shortly thereafter was that people would essentially license the technology from you? Is that how you're looking at it or? Just in this early phase, yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:47:37.09)
Yeah, at least I kind of think so. Currently. Yeah, like that is the best guess I have today, which will be funny if we ever talk again, you'll be like, was that right? It'll be like, kinda.

Kevin Mooney (01:47:49.071)
Yeah, well, I hope we do. would like to stay in touch. I'd like to have you on multiple times because I want to see the journey of this thing as it goes. Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:47:54.142)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:47:57.95)
Thanks man. Yeah, that makes sense. like, yes, I thought so. So this is an industry specific thing, but the vendors, if you think about a marketplace or supply and there's demand, the supply side, the vendor in our industry frequently pays for closed business and a recurring basis because they don't really have CAC, customer acquisition costs for those who don't understand that term. And it's like, sure, I'll pay you.

for bringing me business that I didn't have to go find and I'll pay you to help me retain it. So like, that's like a common thing. I think that's actually more common if you ask in other industries too, but most people don't ask. That's a very common thing in our industry. I thought, let's take this tech, like here's the mission. We should make this easier. How do we make it easier? We find small businesses who are in the process of shopping for this and we give them an easier tool.

We make it so unbelievably easy and we make it free and secure. We make it so good that they would be so silly not to click this button and to be done. I still think that's kind of right, but like I thought I was wrong. I think, I think, I thought that that was going to be the way that we were going to get more user feedback. We were going to be able to develop cash and then go be able to license this software back to the vendors.

back to the supply side of the marketplace because they have the same problem. If I'm representing the industry as like a avatar, technically, I'm just solving the problem directly. But what I realized was like, no, you are solving the problem as an avatar of the industry, but there's also actually an industry who actually fuels that problem right now. And you could either go compete with all of them.

Kevin Mooney (01:49:41.657)
right.

Kasey Devine (01:49:50.385)
in some sense, even though you're not competing with them because you're giving them business, you're competing with them in some sense because like, there's only one ad that can be first in Google. There's only, you know, like, et cetera. or you could just sell it to them. And then I was like, wait, that actually really aligns of helping other people, like, and other people winning partnerships and stuff like that. a, they already have distribution models B they feel the problem every day. See, they have money and they'd be willing to pay money to solve the problem.

D, they didn't think the problem could be solved in the first place. So that's where I've realized I think we're onto something with the go-to-market motion. Same technology, we haven't pivoted two weeks in. It's when I started telling my industry buddies and then the buddies they would introduce me to what we did and what we can do with the underlying technology, most of them think I'm lying. And that's where I'm like, that's where it hurts. You know what I mean?

Kevin Mooney (01:50:45.967)
Mm-hmm, gotcha. Yeah, yep.

Kasey Devine (01:50:49.573)
Not lying, and if you think that if you're that skeptical, that means you care a lot.

Kevin Mooney (01:50:54.015)
Yeah, for sure. You know it's a problem. You realize you recognize it exists and no one's come along and done it. And so they're like, nah, that can't be solved. No way. That's not done. Here you are.

Kasey Devine (01:51:04.007)
We've all been to the same happy hour where someone's envisioning that and like, yeah, we have. And nobody actually went out after the happy hour, drink a Gatorade and built it.

Kevin Mooney (01:51:12.856)
Right.

Kevin Mooney (01:51:16.717)
That's yeah, that's interesting. So when you, when you talk about selling it to them, what does that look like? What does the model look like to you? And maybe that's a vague question, but that's kind of intentional.

Kasey Devine (01:51:27.809)
Kasey Devine (01:51:33.821)
It looks like however it needs to look like. That's part of what we're figuring out. I'm not trying to be like a smart ass, but like at pre-seed, we have a bunch of assumptions. And I think where we're validating is trying to even quantify how much this problem is worth. that answer changes based on users. So go back to the battleship example. We have a

Kevin Mooney (01:51:41.261)
No, I understand.

Kasey Devine (01:52:03.247)
Again, going back to actually same example, going back to Jordan Peterson maps of meaning. We all have a map of how everything works at all. It's just, it's really blurry or more sharp. And so we have this like blurry map that got a little bit sharper of how this is supposed to work, but we're still like needing glasses, like Velma from Scooby-Doo. and we can't find them. So we're playing battleship, trying to figure out where they are. And so like,

What we'll start finding as you get data points is some of them are completely irrelevant, but some of them start to cluster. And where they cluster, that's like an archetype or a customer type that you can now hone in your product and your pricing from like a marketing perspective to be able to serve them efficiently. That's what we're trying to figure out right now, is talking to enough people who don't believe that we can solve the problem and figuring out what the problem means to them, what we're missing.

Kevin Mooney (01:52:50.319)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:53:00.519)
from our solution that we would need to build to make this useful for them. Again, not to make custom software, but to prioritize features in the most capitalistic way. You know what I mean? Like if I thought the most important thing was making the site red instead of green, and you thought the most important thing was connecting it to HubSpot, and you're the one who's gonna give me the money, it's gonna stay green and we're gonna connect to HubSpot. You know I mean? That's kind of where we're at right now.

Kevin Mooney (01:53:24.735)
Yes, 100%.

Yeah, I mean, you're in that prospecting phase and you're learning about your customers, even though you were on that side of the table at one point in time and you've spent years over there. You're like, yeah, but there's all these other people that are probably interested in it in a different way. And how can the same technology be applied to it? I think that's super smart. Don't ever stop listening to your customers. If you do the ship sinking.

Kasey Devine (01:53:58.013)
Yeah, man, it really is. I don't disagree. And a lot of people have a lot of good ideas. Like I didn't ever download like the app for those like mobile electronic scooters until I was hung over after a wedding marathon training and like needed to go home. You know what mean? So it's like continue to talk to the people who having problems. And some of the problems aren't actually technical. You know what mean? It's like, hey,

Kevin Mooney (01:54:17.484)
Yes.

Kasey Devine (01:54:25.265)
because we do this thing at this scale. We ran into this problem at this time. And then you, the other thing is like, don't be the smartest person in the room. Like try to be the fool. If you can't be, if you can't find an opportunity to be the fool in something, you'll never be the expert. And so like, assuming that you're the idiot and assuming that you don't understand is the safest place to like operate life from, but especially customer discovery because,

Kevin Mooney (01:54:30.478)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (01:54:55.451)
I don't think like, think to a certain extent, folks know what they want, but I think a lot of the times they don't know what they want. The whole like faster horses and Ford example. but on that, I think you'll understand what it means to them. And I think that's like the common thread that we're finding is it doesn't really matter what feature, like what problems set or a subset we solve with what feature that we decided to roll out or prioritize.

the meaning behind solving the problem will never go away. And if we understand that deeply, like, is it the seven habits or what book is it, where it's like you're hoping to get to the person where point where they say that's exactly right. You need to have them understand you.

Kevin Mooney (01:55:37.312)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:55:42.327)
Is that this book? Is that this book? Exactly what to say?

Kasey Devine (01:55:42.557)
Is it the seven habits? Is it annoying me? Nice. I don't know. It's kind of blurry. I can't, don't, haven't read that one, but I'm sure that's what it says.

Kevin Mooney (01:55:51.779)
This is an interesting sales book. geared to, it's sort of geared to just sales in general, but it's popularized in the creative industry. And it's like exactly what to say, but I'm pretty sure, Phil Jones talks about that where you say, no, maybe this is, I think you, what you're referring to might be, Chris Voss, the FBI negotiator.

Kasey Devine (01:56:19.355)
Yes, never split the difference.

Kevin Mooney (01:56:21.397)
Never split the difference where if you get to say somebody say that's right. Yes.

Kasey Devine (01:56:27.629)
That is the, that's the, that's the goal. So that's what we're trying to do. I only listened to it because he's very good at speaking. He also got his start in my home state, Kansas city as a beat cop. He talks about that. So I like him. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:56:30.991)
I have that book here too. Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:56:40.589)
Really? Yeah, he's really good. I watched his master class first, and then I got his book, and then I watched another master class, and now I'm back on the book. I can never stop absorbing the nuances in not only him, but the way that he delivers that information. It's super interesting.

Kasey Devine (01:57:03.066)
Yeah, and intent matters. you go like stop listening to this podcast and you go pick up that book or listen to the audio book, which you should, as a way to learn how to manipulate people, that is only thing you'll do. If you use that and you put it in your tool belt to learn how to communicate with somebody effectively, clearly, and understand how people tick so that you can serve better, that's what you'll do. You know what I mean?

Kevin Mooney (01:57:15.215)
you

Kevin Mooney (01:57:27.287)
Yeah, 100%. yeah, every time I read that book, I'm like, someone bad could use this in the wrong way.

Kasey Devine (01:57:36.22)
I'm looking at my set of books, like the laws of power, that book, I can't find it, whatever that is. Same thing, you're like, that's incredibly Machiavellian. And at the same time, if you understood how that works, then you A, can identify when it's happening and B, use it for good.

Kevin Mooney (01:57:45.314)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:57:50.913)
Yes, exactly. I love it. Okay. Tell me while we have a little bit of time left, tell me, something about work or business that you believe now that is different than let's say 10 years ago.

Kasey Devine (01:58:13.948)
That's different than what it was 10 years ago. What I believe now. I believe now that the world is incredibly small. That is something where like beginning of career, I thought it was a big complex place and hard to understand. And I think one of the unique things, I continue coming back to this because it's how I think of how I

rationalize myself into faith was that it is incredibly unlikely that there are patterns everywhere. If you understand the suffix of biology, sociology, logos, logos is like logic, is the word. it's like, it's the fact that no matter how far into sciences and technology we get that there are

that they aren't random is highly unlikely. Like it should be kind of more random than it is. And I think that's something that I didn't believe when I started. I saw the world as infinitely complex and big, and now I see it as understandable and small.

Kevin Mooney (01:59:27.011)
very interesting that is does that come from

Kevin Mooney (01:59:37.167)
Does that come from just the networking part of this? Like, is that the core of it? I'm not trying to reduce it to that, but is that where it comes from? you're like, oh, I've talked to all of these people, they've led me to all these other places, which has gotten me to this place in life, which now all of a sudden I realize that this place is just a tiny place.

Kasey Devine (02:00:03.676)
I don't think it didn't come from there. I think it also came from like trying to do hard shit and then succeeding or failing, but not failing either way as bad as I thought and being like, yeah.

Kevin Mooney (02:00:09.679)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (02:00:17.143)
or dying, right? You don't die. You don't just disappear because you failed. Yeah, yeah.

Kasey Devine (02:00:21.244)
Well, that's an interesting concept too that's worth actually hitting on in relation to what you're saying, because it's like one of the beautiful things that makes humans humans is that we can kill off our dumb ideas without killing ourselves. You know what I mean? And with that, it's like, OK, I assumed that HR at the time or that payroll wasn't something I could understand. And I learned how to do it by hand.

Kevin Mooney (02:00:34.831)
Yeah.

Kasey Devine (02:00:50.639)
And then I was like, I'll never be able to connect with a business owner without them seeing me as a salesperson. And then I learned how to do it. And then it's like, okay, I never will be able to afford to do this thing. I will never be able to run a marathon. I went from couch to marathon in a year. Hurt myself, but I did it. Never gonna run a marathon again. like, start learning, like, I don't know. If you don't push yourself,

You never learn that things are figure outable. And I'm not saying that you can do everything. Like I want to go back and say, like, I will never be a physicist. Like I could do everything I could to become a physicist and I won't be a pretty good one, but I'll be better than I was today. I think that's the point is like, yes, it's the networking effect, but it's also just of like setting out. Um, Andy Frisella is a, is a popular entrepreneur. One of the things I did his 75 hard program three times. One of the things he is a proponent of is.

Kevin Mooney (02:01:21.081)
bread.

Yeah.

Kasey Devine (02:01:44.587)
his thing called the power list, you write down five things and you go do them every day. What do you need to do to make sure this is a good day in your book and you go do those five things and they have to be something you weren't planning on doing? If you actually do that every day and you don't compromise on those five things and they're not going to be something you were planning on doing, you have it stacked like crazy and you start pushing yourself and you grow, that's where I think it came from.

Kevin Mooney (02:02:10.486)
Yeah, that's huge. I wish I did more of that. I do have core things that I do. They're non-negotiables. Working out in jujitsu and you know, things like that, right? That I'm just like, I have to do it. Right now I'm not in jujitsu because I've been injured. I've had some health issues that I've been working through. But to your point, when you do those things,

Kasey Devine (02:02:21.377)
Oooooh

Kevin Mooney (02:02:39.119)
And you might not even like doing those things, but you do them anyways. The state of your mind completely changes. have a good friend who does nothing. He's never done anything. He wants to do it. He talks about it, but he never does anything. And his mindset is just shit. It's just down in the mud. And I'm like, it's cause you don't do anything. Yeah. You might go to the gym every once in a while, but it's not,

you know, a non-negotiable regular every day at 8 a.m. you go and you do it or something like that. And I wish for him that he could break through that ceiling. And I don't know, there's probably baby steps to getting there. I'm sure Andy says the same stuff. I don't know, I haven't taken those, but there's, all I'm getting at is there is straight magic that happens when you set...

achievable goal and you just knock those things out and you do them. It's a pretty wonderful thing. So kudos to you for doing that and it's definitely gotten you where you're at right now and I wish that you keep crushing it.

Kasey Devine (02:03:44.283)
Thank you.

Kasey Devine (02:03:51.583)
I appreciate that. And unsolicited advice to anybody, get married. And if you can, if you're able to, have kids. Yeah, you'll figure it out. Man, I think that that's a huge, it doesn't matter what you want to do in life. You could be a professional dancer. could just, it doesn't matter. I'm trying, I'll spare you the brainstorming.

Kevin Mooney (02:04:02.083)
That'll force you to do something.

Kasey Devine (02:04:21.148)
The more you learn, and I think this is one of the underlying threads, the more you learn to do it for somebody else as a servant leader, the better. And that's where you end up being successful. If you cave in on yourself, and it's a lot like trying to clutch an ice cube. And I think that's part of it. Do that.

And also like if you're going to build any habits, if you're going to build any skills, be start seeing yourself as the person who keeps promises you make to yourself. and those can be really small, make your bed. That can be really small. I'm to go for a 10 minute walk every day. I can't commit to that. I'm to be the person who at least gets up and puts on their gym shoes every day, but I'm never going to miss a day where I don't put on my gym shoes and then build. Like you don't go from zero to marathon. You know, you don't go from.

Not knowing to speak as a baby to being William Shakespeare overnight. Figure out what that next achievable thing is and go do it and get really good at trusting yourself that when you say you're going to do something, you'll do it. That's where a lot of the self worth is. That's why that's how you start seeing that you can actually potentially go chase something down. And I think that this is the best day and age to do it. Like go people saying like I wish I was alive back when because man, there's.

There's so much that you can do just by showing up being respectful and being a decent human now. And there isn't a bit of factual knowledge that isn't available to most people in their pocket. It's now.

Kevin Mooney (02:05:51.787)
Mm-hmm. Right. It's amazing. Words of wisdom right there, Casey. Thank you so much. With that, don't think I can top that last part. So let's get out of here. Thanks, Casey. Can you tell everybody where they can find you, your company, if there's any listeners out there that are in need of PEO? This is your guy.

Kasey Devine (02:06:00.283)
You got it, man.

Kasey Devine (02:06:08.505)
Alrighty, good to see you. Thanks for having me.

Kasey Devine (02:06:20.507)
Thank you, I appreciate that. Entravia, E-N-T-R-A-V-I-A, Google that. I'm on no social media except for LinkedIn. K-A-S-E-Y D-E-V-I-N-E, I'm the dude with the mustache smiling. And if you say that you found me here, I'll try to ask you the same question of how I can help you.

Kevin Mooney (02:06:40.281)
That's amazing. Thanks, Casey. I appreciate it. All right.

Kasey Devine (02:06:43.483)
You too, Kevin.

‍