Bring your ideas to life.

Hey, everybody. My name is Dave Oldham. I am a serial entrepreneur. I've started several companies and now have become an investor. I've invested in a bunch of companies, both through some venture funds and some direct angel investments that I've done.

At the start of my career I worked in B2B SaaS software technology. I enjoyed that, but as I built several different companies, one of the companies I built was some ad tech for consumer brands.  The more I got involved with consumer brands and got connected with and met creators that were bringing really cool consumer products to life, I got excited about and really interested in the direct to consumer model - building products, designing products, creating products that individuals would use in their daily lives to make their lives better, to bring happiness to them, to their pets, to brighten their home, whatever, to improve their lives in various ways.

I really love the creator process and taking an idea that you have and going through the effort to bring it to life and to get it into somebody's hands and let them use it and let them fall in love with it. It's a pure creative artistic process that I really love. Recently I've wanted to get more involved with supporting consumer product creators in helping their brands grow.

I love the creative process. Taking something from an idea in your head to an actual product people can use is art and science and is a beautiful thing.

I like introducing consumer, to new products that are coming out and why they're cool, but also understanding the backstory. What is it like to be a creator, to bring a product to life? How hard is that to do? So the Brand, Sweat, and Tears podcast from a thematic standpoint is focused on these three aspects: Brand, which is why did somebody want to create this product in the first place? What motivated them? Why were they passionate about it? Why did they care about this specific category or this particular thing? What motivated them and what is the mission or the purpose of their brand? What does it stand for? What does it mean?

Secondly, the sweat. How hard is it really to take something from an idea in your head to an actual product? A lot of the podcasts I've listened to over the years have focused on the highlights or the success stories. Not a lot of them really get into the nitty gritty details about how difficult, how challenging it is to bring a product to life, to get something from an idea in your head to an actual product. So I want to talk about how hard that is.

And then finally, the Tears: I want to talk about the mental, emotional, psychological journey, the roller coaster of that whole process of building a brand, creating a product and a brand and scaling it across the whole entrepreneurial journey. On the podcast I'll have guests that are early in that process that have just started creating something, ranging all the way up to seasoned veterans who have multiple products or built a global brand and with some retrospect can look back on their journey, their experiences and talk about the highs and the lows and how they overcame challenges and difficulties and how they were able to build what they built.

The goals of the podcast are to help consumers connect on a deeper level with these founders and their brands, and to inspire more Creators to bring their amazing ideas to life.

Ultimately the objective, or the goal, is to let listeners be able to hear the real stories from real creators and founders and connect with them on an emotional level. Personally, I'm a lot more loyal and a lot more interested in the brands where I understand the backstory, I understand the creator, the origin story, the creation story, and that I believe in their purpose and align with their mission. I'll pay more for those types of products and I'll stay more loyal over time to those products.

I also want to inspire more people to create. I want to inspire more people to take those ideas that they are talking about at their family barbecue, with their friends over lunch, the things that they say like, oh, you know, it'd be cool if this thing existed or, oh man, I've been thinking about this thing for a long time. I want people to try to bring those great ideas to life. I want to inspire creators, want to support more creators, want to invest in more creators and help people bring their cool ideas to life.

So with that, I hope you enjoy the podcast. I'd love whatever feedback you want to give me. If you want to be on the podcast because you are a creator and you've built something or are starting to build something, you can contact me at dave@oco.co. You can check out the podcast pretty much anywhere podcasts are published. I hope you enjoy it.