as always a big thank you for being here if you do like this episode make sure to hit the like button down below and subscribe if you're on youtube and also leave feedback if you're listening on your podcast player a big thank you as well to chase bliss for sponsoring this episode and here is my conversation with steve steve i'd love to hear a bit about your your empress founder journey

sure yeah as much as i remember of it it's uh i get probably every time i tell it you know i add something new to it but um i guess people can always go back and and pick it apart yeah in high school i used to do a lot of electronics my friends and i um we tried building a robot and i was also into music too i was just playing in a band so my friends and i we built some guitar effects and you know i could never really get them working that well but uh it was one of my main hobbies and so i decided to go into electrical engineering uh my friends went away to school i stayed in ottawa lived at home didn't really like it kind of got um enchanted with this guy there's this guy paul graham he uh well he's a vc guy which you know most people will say is kind of lame but he writes um these really interesting essays about like how to provide i guess some of them are like how to provide value you know what you should be doing he has a really good one on um how pretty much most news articles are basically kind of PR behind the scenes.

And so that kind of got me thinking, like, I want to start a business.

And, you know, I told my parents I'm going to quit school and just get right into it, you know, because you have all these, I guess you're a young kid, you're kind of dumb and you're like, oh, you know, Bill Gates and These other guys, yeah, they just quit school and they do things.

You don't realize that they're probably like 100 times smarter than you and their work ethics probably a lot higher too.

So they convinced me like, well, why don't you just move out, move in with your friends? So I moved from Ottawa to Kingston, went to Queens, finished my degree.

And then after that, tried to run a web design company.

So I mean, taking the more recent drive pedal that you released, if you're going to articulate the milestones of what a typical product development process looks like, you know, if you have five or six stages, you know, what are those stages in that process?