Introduction and Background Discussion
Ryan Davies: Welcome everyone to the Tech Business Roundtable podcast show. This is a podcast show dedicated to shining a spotlight on tech innovators, entrepreneurs, founders, and the compelling narratives behind the movements they’ve established. I’m your host, Ryan Davies, and I’m hosting today’s discussion on Building Tomorrow’s Tech Today: Insights from Jeremy Blackburn with Jeremy Blackburn. Thanks so much for being here.
Jeremy: I appreciate you having me. Nice to be here. Ryan
Ryan Davies: Really excited to dive into this and go through your founder’s journey. Do you know what’s made you successful in tech? I know you cover so many different areas you have such a diverse background. For those who are listening here, Jeremy is the founder and CEO of Black Ink Technology, which he founded in 2019 to develop hardware and software applications that utilize the Blockchain for commercial applications to connect physical products and services and make them verifiable and validate a digital token that can be utilized in digital worlds as a functional equivalent. Since its inception, Black Ink Tech. has incubated 15 subsidiaries that fall within Black Ink Tech. So I’ll get to know more about that. It’s a software and hardware platform that’s built on the creation of, you know, hardware oracles and a software platform for physical world data hardening. And there’s a whole bunch of amazing elements to that, and maybe that’s a great place for us to jump in because anything I say would do a disservice to what you’ve built here. So I’d love you to kind of shine a little bit light of light kind of on that for us.
Jeremy: Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. It is a mouthful, as you say. And so, to try and be as simplistic as possible. We’ve developed the chained ecosystem, which is literally what our vision was. We own and operate businesses in the physical world, right? Some people say the real world and the digital world are real as well. So I don’t really like using that term, but, you know, the physical world, there are transactions every day, whether it’s product services, events, and, you know, recognizing that there’s this tokenization or this digitization movement, We wanted to build an ecosystem that had the same attributes or properties that exist in the physical world, but in the digital world, the days of where we would all go down to the market and I would buy, you know, sheep from you and apples from somebody else and sell wool. You know, those days are long gone. But the traditional method of commerce was I knew you; you knew me often for generations. I would see you, you’d see me. The product, we’d see the service, you know, everything was visible with our eyes. And so, as the move to digital commerce has been well in a couple of decades now, even more than ever, there’s everything is becoming digital. Now, we have the advent of AI and machine learning, which are going to make it even more difficult to know who you’re dealing with. And so, you know, we develop Black Ink Technologies to solve problems in our current businesses that are trying to move into the digital world, but we lack the capabilities to do so. And so we did it with our business view of what exists in the real business world today to meet those challenges and requirements and standards but to do it in the digital realm. And so, you know, Black ink tech, we say everything should be empowered by chain it. And, it literally is the creation of fully functional digital equivalent data records or tokens. They’re called tokens because they’re minted on a Blockchain. And so, you know, we create those fully functional digital equivalent tokens for utilization in the digital world as a true representative of the physical objective or service. And they are very industry-agnostic. They work, and the use cases are broad and wide.
Ryan Davies: Maybe drill down on that for us because I know we’ve got a wide audience as well in terms of, you know, industries and backgrounds and what they do. I know you’ve been able to continue to expand out to be able to touch more and more spaces.
Jeremy: Yeah. Data is at the core of almost any business now. I don’t know of hardly any business that doesn’t use computers or data. And so if you think about literally any business product or service, there’s usually a digital aspect to it, even if it’s just, you know, you could exist completely off the grid. Still, you aren’t able to build a scalable or enterprise-level business in that way. You’re going to need to use computers, and that’s going to mean, you know, digital, you know, data. And so, if you look at the core of any transaction, there are attributes in the physical world, and what we did early on is we identified those attributes and kind of simplified them down into four key things. Like where, when, who, and what. And if you think about whether you’re buying a product or a service or attending an event, those attributes exist in the physical world at all times, you know, Where did it occur? When did it occur? Who was there? And then what exactly was the product or the event or the service that happened? And so if you look at those four attribute components and then apply them to pretty much any business product, service, or event, we collect and validate those attributes, and then we record them on a Blockchain. So they’re permanent or immutable, or they’re tamper-proof, or you can tell if somebody tries to alter the data. So we have a permanent data record of those attributes, and then we’ve built out features that allow things like touch on it. So, we’ve literally trademarked, trust no one, and trust nothing. Everybody’s about reimagining trust, reinventing it, or a new form of trust. We said trust no one. And so, that means us, too, right? And that’s why our platform has some of these very unique, you know, and patented features like touch audit that allow you to literally validate yourself on the attributes of where, when, who, and what. So, in one of our data records, if you wanted to validate where that occurred, you would literally click or touch on your mobile device, and it would display the GPS address, and if you touched it again, it would take you there. And if you think about the relevancy of that for things like organic produce, right? We’re trusting so much in our daily lives, from the food we eat to the clothes we wear, where they are produced, and where they are sourced. Trust is a huge part of our lives. And so what we’re trying to do is eliminate a lot of that need for trust because trust is broken and it’s taken advantage of. And so when I buy organic, you know, vegetables, and I look at the price of the organic versus the regular or non-organic vegetables, there’s a huge delta or difference in those prices. And so what I love to be able to simply pull out my phone, scan a QR code, see a where attribute, touch it and see, you know, Ryan’s organic produce farm and then further, you know, touch the organic certification and see where when who and what that occurred and actually see the who on that and be able to touch that and see a government register of employees. I would love that, and that’s one of our products, right? So, we’re providing the transparency of provenance or origin for these data records. These data records exist now; we’re just providing the platform or the ecosystem. So they can be recorded in an easy-to-use fashion.
Ryan Davies: Incredible. I was watching something the other night. It’s incredible about that, the journey of chocolate, and they had all of this stuff about how it was, and there’s child labor proof, and they’re like, so we sent somebody out there, and it took us four minutes to find somebody who had children under 11 working on a farm. But they had these certifications on their thing saying guaranteed; it’s not. It’s sourced this way. And it was like, oh, well, and then, of course, here comes the PR team going, we were stunned by these allegations, and we apologize for breaking trust, right? Like, I mean, what an amazing, you know, what a fit that this kind of brings together here was saying like, hey, look, we can, now trace it and follow, through with all of this with the groups that the organizations, the companies that you’re working with here, this seems like it could be a significant challenge for them to, pick up. But at the same time, I know you’ve made it that successful for so many people to be able to take this journey and do that. So what challenges do you see some of these organizations out there, and how have you been able to help them overcome them?
Jeremy: Well, you know, it’s interesting because I remember a year ago talking to you, you were commenting about, I’m a Yankees fan, you’re a Cubs fan. You know, we’re not embarrassed either of us about that. But we were dealing with some individuals in the sports memorabilia world, and one of the interesting parts of our journey is that you know, it does have to be easy. You know, I understand it; our teams understand it. But when you’re producing a product or a service or a platform like this, I remember that we were creating these data records, we were minting tokens off of sports memorabilia, and I was sending the QR codes via email to someone so that they could, could validate them, right? I say, Hey, here’s the QR code, and so he called me, and he’s like, so I’m clicking on it and nothing happens. I’m like, well, you use the QR code with your phone. He’s like, so I have to take my own cell phone, and I’m going, oh, right. Yeah, you do. So, you know, and so if you think about it from a business viewpoint, we’re sending QR codes, and we were very proud that they, you know, you can text them, you can email them, you know, you can just like any image, you can send it any number of ways. But then when they received it then they were having to figure out, ok, if I get it on my phone, now, how do I scan it with my phone? And so some of these problems didn’t become evident until, like, you actually put your product in an end user’s hands, right? So we immediately recognized that we needed to make our QR codes clickable, or you could touch them, and then they would open up the data. So again, you’re going back, you know, and look, that’s a mistake on our part, right? We recognized after the fact that as great as it is to have embedded, you know, QR code generation, or it’s called unique object identification, QR code is one of many ways that we do that, but when a business receives that. If you can imagine you’re inside of a large organization, I don’t think I can see somebody sitting at their desk getting an email, pulling out their cell phones, getting a QR code, getting that information on their phone. Now it’s on their phone. How do they get it back to their desktop? And so when you’re designing products, it’s really important to keep in mind who your ultimate end users are. And in our platform, it’s both individuals and organizations, and so being able to plan those user journeys or those onboarding sessions and those consumer user stories were very important, and, look, we missed several. Still, that’s not uncommon. You’ve got to develop products in an agile format. Everybody in software development knows what I’m talking about. You know, you’ve got to be very flexible about being able to change it because I’m not going to change corporate America or even individuals sitting at their desks; there are mannerisms where they’re going to go through this cumbersome process of pulling out their cell phones, scanning a QR code. Now they’ve got the information on their phone, and if you’re talking about that, we attribute, you know, imagine that you’re a lender or a bank, and you just got a QR code for my loan closing. And it’s like, ok, now I’ve got exactly the confirmed digital identities of who closed, where it closed, when it closed, and even the provenance of our closing documents. But now that information is on my phone, I have to get it back to the computer. Now we’re introducing different stops of the data, which actually means the integrity of the data is now passing through several hands, which is a trust that no one is going to become a problem. We definitely learned a lot through our progress, and until you actually get it in third-party users’ hands, we were using a lot of our own companies and our own employees to test it. One thing I learned is that they don’t want to tell you what’s difficult or hard very quickly unless you push them because, you know, they’re telling me to use this. I have to use it because we’re an affiliated company, but you really need it from third parties that have no affiliation with you. They’ll give you honest feedback, and then you might even have to push them and ask, you know, what could be better, about 1000 times ask them and then, you know, 999 they finally tell you, yeah, it would really be great if I didn’t have to use my phone and I could just stay on my desktop. So, yeah, lesson learned, and there’ll be more, I’m sure.
Ryan Davies: I think it’s incredible. It’s exactly that right. You have to have some principles that guide your approach towards product development and fostering innovation within your team because, as you said, if you don’t push them, it’s not going to, you know, it’s not necessarily going to take place. So it’s fantastic that you’ve really been able to embrace that from outside your team. You know, a lot of what you do as well. Again, you have to build some really strategic partnerships in both the tech industry and, of course, across the industries that you’re working in. Do you have some advice for our founders who are looking to establish, kind of, meeting meaningful collaborations and building strong partnerships?
Jeremy: Yeah. They are absolutely vital, and we were fortunate that we had some existing relationships that were easy for us to go to for, you know, PoCs and MVP testing. And when you’re trying to get those, and you’re literally developing, especially a software product for an industry that you don’t have those contacts in. I would Make sure you establish those relationships as early as possible because they’re going to guide your journey. One thing that I see, and it’s almost cliche, is the mistakes that are made when you have very brilliant software developers and programmers, developers, product owners, and project managers. But if they don’t have industry experience, if they’re trying to build a product for an industry that they do not have actual experience for, and to make mistakes, there’s just; it’s impossible not to, there are nuances, there’s even the vernacular of the words that are used in an industry differ that you might not be used to, you know, acronyms that you might put into your app or your product or your program might mean an entirely different thing in that industry. And so, as we’ve expanded our ecosystem into new industries, we’ve always tried to make sure that we had a subject matter, yeah, an SME subject matter expert for that industry that had actually been in that industry, not just knew about it. I know a lot about baseball; you might know a lot about baseball. We were talking about baseball managers, and we thought that either one of us could manage a baseball team, even if we’ve been watching it or even playing it for decades. There’s a lot to learn. And so, which is why most professional sports or even companies, you see people that have been, you know, you don’t see somebody that starts at a company, the CEO, the next day there’s an experience level. And so I think that that’s a very important part of software development is that when you’re developing a product, your users, your customers, you need to have that subject matter expertise, either yourself or in your development teams, or you will absolutely have mistakes. And so, you go to them as early and often as possible; you hear about this all the time. You know, people are trying to establish those first customers that revenue. There’s a lot of emphasis from the investment community on getting that first dollar of revenue in the door. But, you know, I would say more important than that first dollar is the first satisfied customer because if you’ve got one satisfied customer, even if that customer is using your system for free, at least now you’ve got a product that they want as opposed to a, a dollar in the door. And so I often see that emphasis on that dollar in the door, as they say, is highly emphasized when I think that from our side, we have waited years literally to actually start charging for our product because, you know, I would, I look at it from the other side, if I was bringing these products into my business, what would I want them to do before I would be willing to pay for them? And so we want to have a product that’s not just about, hey, we’re generating revenue, but hey, we’re providing significant value, measurable ROI to our customers so that they want to pay for our product, not just use it that they want to pay for it. That’s a big difference in a lot of the ways that companies approach their markets and their customers; it’s great to have revenue. It’s better to have satisfied customers that want to pay. And that’s a completely different journey as opposed to getting us some sales and getting me some customers who are satisfied with your product. That’s a better story.
Adaptability in Technology and Market Dynamics
Rayan Davies: I completely agree, and that’s, again, a blurred line, a little bit of a loss of focus. Sometimes. It’s incredible advice to our listeners to keep that in mind in their journey You kind of touched on a little bit too about this, you know, having subject matter experts and staying ahead of the curve in this ever-evolving tech landscape and how fast it’s, you know, and changing from that standpoint here; how are you able to do that? How are you and your team able to stay adaptable and ready for shifts in technology and market dynamics so well?
Jeremy: So well, there’s an old saying that you know: Success is preparation and meeting opportunity, right? And so, one of the best things about our platform is the ability to identify, frankly, humans, right? You know, we have something called ID that does liveness tests and does geospatial analysis and things like that to determine you are, in fact, human. And we did that for validation and verification purposes. But remember, we started our company in 2019, and some of our earliest patents are literally regarding, you know, what now is known as an NFT, but they weren’t even really called NFTs back then. And, you know, when we were talking about being ID and the prevention of, you know, we didn’t say AI; we said computer-generated models, which would, you know, fake a human presence, right? Or a human identity. And so we did that years ago, and so the fact that AI has now become so prevalent, there’s no other way to say it, it was luck. I mean, we didn’t see this. If we saw this, we’d have invested in several of these AI stocks that have gone tens of thousands of percent. So there is a factor of being prepared for the opportunity. I remember when I was younger, computers were just coming out, and the source of knowledge, believe it or not, was encyclopedias, right? I mean, you went to the library, and if you had encyclopedias in your home, oh, my goodness. How amazing was that? You know, and now it’s that information and more is so readily available on the internet. If you worry about the technology that might surpass you or replace you, you’re just going to be worrying. Is there something better than you out there? Yes. You know, there are nine plus billion people on the planet, there’s a lot of smart people, there’s a lot of great ideas and great projects going on, and I think that when you say to stay ahead of everybody, I think you just have to focus and do the best you can and be aware of what’s going on. You don’t want to be ignorant of developments like AI right now, you know. If you were in certain software application developments and you’re not using AI, then you’re falling behind, right? So you want to be aware of what’s going on, but you don’t want to be so conscious of it that the bleeding edge is called the bleeding edge for a reason because there’s a lot of blood out there. And so, you know, you want to stick to your idea, you know, you obviously want to do analysis and make sure that you’re addressing competition. But, the things that you don’t know, just like even this week, I had a meeting with someone, and he literally had just sold his company, and he’s like he said, like, thank God the people we sold our company didn’t know about you guys. He’s like, you’re three years ahead of where we’re trying to go. And he says we just sold our company. He said, you know, and I’m like, well, do you have a non-compete? And he’s like, no, because he’s literally applying for a job. And I said, well, that’s very comforting to hear. But we didn’t come out and start doing a lot of marketing or publicity until we had a firm foundation. And, in our case, we had the fortunate opportunity to take some time to develop an entire ecosystem that we didn’t have to go to the market to get that first dollar in the door because we could take the time to develop a product that would be, you know, that people would want to use. Then, we also filed a lot of patents around our products to protect a lot of these things that we thought were innovative and that we were coming up with, and those offer some protections. Just because you have a patent doesn’t mean you’re going to be a successful company. we have double-digit awarded and even double-digit, you know, undergoing prosecution right now. They’re pending, but that alone doesn’t make your company. I see that become an issue sometimes; you see people who are like, oh, we’ve got, this is patented. Congratulations. That’s great. You know, that sincerely is an accomplishment to have patents awarded. But, they also, you know, you can walk into the bank, so SVB is gone now they used to do patent loans. I don’t know anything else that does. And so you’ve got to have customers, you’ve got to have revenue, and they’re a great deterrent to competition, but they’re not going to make you successful. So, while there’s a lot of great advice out there, you know, get the patents, but get those happy customers as fast as you can.
Lessons Learned and Advice for Tech Founders
Rayan Davies: That’s just, that’s unbelievably well said. You’ve given us so much incredible advice here already, and I love to close off with the past and the future kind of outlook. So, for a learned lesson or things like that, looking back, is there a piece of advice that you wish you had received when you were just starting out as a tech founder? I’m sure there are 100 of them looking back, but maybe something that sticks with you from that perspective.
Jeremy: Well, I found it in my first tech company in the nineties, and so, it’s been a minute, as they say in this part of the world, so there’s, what you don’t know is what you don’t know. Even the best plan, you’re going to have to be adaptable; you’re going to have to be malleable. You’re going to have to be able to adjust to what happens; you can put the best development team in place, the best business plan in place, have all your funding in place, and you’re still going to have challenges. Early on, I was given great advice related to the business trust but brand your cows. That one’s going to stick with me forever. And, there’s, the best advice, I think, is to understand there will be something go wrong, and when it does go wrong, you’ve just got to adapt to it and be ready to address those challenges. And so the successful companies, before we were starting, people often ask, you hey, what do you think made you successful and look, I’ve had challenges, I’ve had failures you’d be if you’re in business long enough we do a lot of real estate development. Literally thousands of projects. Did we make money on every single one? No, nobody does. You’re going to have failures over time. But the ability to have grit and conscientiousness is the actual word they use, which is just that determination to keep going. That is the thing that served me the best. It would be hard as long as I believe in what our products and our company are doing. you just have to keep going and there are going to be challenges; people are going to quit Black Ink tech. We hired a development team internally in the first three months. We hired a CTO, paying him very well, mid-six figures, had a contract, and hired the team ready to go. He walked in and said, I’m sorry, but I’m quitting. I’m like, what? And he had gotten an offer for seven figures, and he was very talented, obviously, right? He’s like, I know we got a contract, but, you know, I’m going to find somebody, I’m going to help you out and don’t worry about it. And I’m like, you know, I mean, that right there probably when he killed a lot of companies, I mean to bear down kind of and say, oh my gosh, I have to do this again. We’ve had other things happen similar to that where we’ve had setbacks with either development teams or, you know, hardware, as you mentioned, at the onset, we do both hardware and software. There’s a reason for that; there’s a technical reason for that the data that can be trusted by a trusted computing network is the data that comes off, that is, much more reliable. We actually grade our data, which is something that I think. Well, we patented that. And so, you can grade data off of a trusted computing network that’s better than a cell phone or a VPN computer, right? But, you know, when you’re doing something new, you’re going to have challenges, setbacks, both financial and team members and even customers I mean, we’ve had some customers early on that, seemed like they were very, energetic. I’m not going to drop names, but even a year ago, we had spent a lot of time integrating with some of the well-known NFT platforms. Everybody knows they are on this page, right? And along came the FTX issue and then the SVB issue. There was a new player in that arena that was stripping out the royalties and the smart contracts, and it decimated the market share of the guys that we were dealing with. I remember literally week over week the people that we have been talking to, you know, emails are bouncing back; they’re just not there anymore, right? Those companies or customers were completely shifting their focus to retaining customers instead of developing new products. And so when you talked about choosing your partners to work with, there’s no way they could have seen that coming. I can’t fault them for that. I would have done the same thing. You’ve got to recognize those things are going to happen. So even with the best plan, you should expect things to go wrong, and then you should have the conscientiousness to keep going and to stay in there and overcome it right now. That doesn’t mean that if I’m manufacturing horse-drawn carts and everybody’s driving a car around, I should stick to my guns and keep doing horse-drawn carriages. You have to be aware that you might have been passed. And so I do see that some guys just will not give up and you’re looking at them like, man, I don’t see ever being successful. So you need to be willing to have that balance of being able to say, yes, I’m here. I understand it’s going to be hard. Still, at the same time, being able to listen to others and say, OK, maybe I should listen, everybody’s telling me this isn’t going to work, we all focus on the story where the founder says, you know, 10,000 people told me I was going to fail. I kept in there and kept going; depending upon who those 10,000 people were, you probably should have stopped. I mean, if I had, whoever of the tech world telling me, yeah, your products outdated, it’s never going to work me having, all the grit in the world isn’t going to make it successful. So, being able to listen to people is also important.
Future Outlook and Technological Trends
Ryan Davies: This has been one of the best podcasts in terms of just being able for people to listen and absorb and get exactly that insight and maybe where those challenges and barriers have hit and to see. Again, it’s more than just written. Determination is being able to be adaptable and listen and adjust to both the markets and who you’re with and who you’re partnered with. Everything. Unbelievable. I can’t. Thank you enough. Before we switch off here, where do you see the future heading? A little bit about the past there and a vision where Black Ink Tech is evolving to meet those challenges and opportunities.
Jeremy: Yeah. Well, this is actually the most speak and not equal to every feature and functionality that I would want from a business perspective. It’s scalable, and it’s got all the ability for existing business enterprises to ingest data from our platform. So you’re not having to replace their existing software system. So, we’re literally right now we’re hopefully the fund starts, right? Lots of work and effort can also be rewarded in the development of the product. But now we start seeing consumers and customers start to use it, see the advantages and the benefits. And so, where is that going to take us? There are lots of opportunities that we’re evaluating now, in different industries different. It’s exciting, right? Technology is ever-evolving, and I see the biggest challenge for us is that AI is now well-known. Blockchain was a new concept a decade ago. The businesses that don’t adopt Blockchain, which is different than Cryptocurrency, which is a part of the Blockchain world. But Blockchain is about immutable or permanent data. That’s the value to me. I think to most businesses, the data on a Blockchain is permanent, and there are a lot of ways to utilize that because you don’t have to trust it. You know that this is what happened; it can’t be altered, it can’t be changed without detection. And so I think that is becoming mainstream very quickly, in all business, and that will, you know, actually, come into all of our lives, even to our personal life, everything I think will be recorded on a Blockchain or an immutable ledger, which could be quantum as well. But at the same time, AI has just exploded in the last year. I expect that it will continue to evolve and explode and be adapted to almost all I don’t want to say every aspect of our lives. Still, it will be decisions that we make that take us a tremendous amount of time and evaluation to make. If those databases have that information, they can make that decision very quickly. I’m not in any way saying they’re going to replace humans. They can get to the point where we have to be very careful with what controls we allow computers, and especially AI, to control business processes and parts of our infrastructure systems. so that there needs to be caution and regulation in government, and that’s what it’s there for. But, it is beyond that, the thing I’m the most excited about, which is going to be an even larger change than even AI, which will be quantum, the speed that quantum can call there are so many more things that are possible, growing up when I did dating myself. Still, you know, things that on Star Trek in the seventies and eighties where they’re talking on their wrists, it happens today, right? I mean, and it’s just common, and it’s normal, and with quantum teleportation, things even beyond that are possible. And so the ability to create individual pharmaceutical treatments the ability for the speed at which quantum can compute and complete calculations powered with AI that really could bring about just a tremendous amount of change. And so, how do we protect ourselves against it? We’re not in quantum computing; we’re there to harden data. So our platform works whether it’s Blockchain or Quantum. But, going back to what I said earlier, the ability to be agile and to adapt to challenges is literally all you can do. You have to have the knowledge and stay up on world events. I don’t know anybody successful for a long period of time who wasn’t continually educating themselves; education or knowledge is a lifelong pursuit of mine, and it should be of everybody. And so things do change; they change quicker now than ever. So, being aware of what’s going on and being ready to address those challenges when they occur is all you can do. You can’t plan for it more than that.
Ryan Davies: It’s just wonderful again. That’s incredible advice. Other episodes we’ve done so encourage, of course, our listeners not to go back and listen. But we’ve talked about again that exact idea of the Blockchain being it’s not crypto, right? It’s so much more in terms of what you can protect and what you can do. And, you know, we’ve talked about that for even things like art and collectibles and podcasts and things like that to be able to protect IP protect things that aren’t traditionally, again, in a digital sense that still have some physical element and aspect too and how to do that. So this is incredible. I can’t thank you enough for this chat here, Jeremy. what I’d love to do is just sort of give you a chance here as well to let people know how we can get in touch with you and learn more, pick your brain a little more, and, certainly, for your services and everything you do be able to connect with the Black Ink Tech.
Jeremy: Yeah. No, you know, https://blackinktech.com/ or our ecosystem is called chain or chain it, our emails, phone numbers, everything’s on there. I’m on LinkedIn, you know; I respond readily to that. So, that’s monitored, you know, pretty, constant. So, happy to interact with anyone, and one of the positive things that come out of experiences like this is you are able to reach people that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to connect with. And so I’m always, you know, looking forward to who reaches out. I can’t see who’s watching this, but you can see me. So you reach out to me, then that’s how that interaction starts, and it’s led it to amazing, you know, opportunities, not just with, you know, Black Ink Tech, but other businesses. You know, like I mentioned at the onset, we own and operate other businesses. And so a lot of our best relationships and connections have come from, you know, whether it was speaking events or, you know, podcasting like this where somebody saw it reached out and, we’ve got customers now that are in different continents, different countries, different parts of even the US or North America that I don’t know how we’d have ever connected otherwise. So, I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you, and I have had some success. I’ve had failures as well, and that’s the story of any founder or entrepreneur who keeps up and keeps going. So, I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today.
Ryan Davies: Thank you so much. We appreciate you so much. I want to take a minute again to thank Jeremy Blackburn for this incredible podcast, Building Tomorrow’s Tech Today: Insights from Jeremy Blackburn. And I want to thank our listeners as well. We can’t do what we do without you. Until we meet again with another amazing TBR episode, it may be hard to live up to this one. But Jeremy, thank you again. I’m your host, Ryan Davies. Take care everybody.