January 11, 2023

Episode 156: Layne Nadeau, Founder & CEO of Nval.com

Layne Nadeau is the Founder and CEO of Nval.com, a B2B company producing mark-to-model NFT price and market analytics data for regulated (or any) companies and platforms.

Layne has led multi-million dollar initiatives in retail banking, investment banking, blockchain, and digital asset industries as well as US state governments, public sector, commercial and retail automotive services, public utilities, transportation, professional associations, and universities.

Layne has a bachelor’s degree in Math and Computer Science and is genuinely excited about digital asset markets, and ecosystems and is building to enable this new technology space.

Layne is a father to 3 girls, a husband, an avid cyclist, sailor, brewer, world traveler, and NFT/DeFi degen.

Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Layne Nadeau, founder and CEO of Nval, a B2B company producing fair market value, NFT price and market analytics data for regulated or any companies and platforms. Layne. I'm so excited to chat with you and get to know you a little bit more and talk about what you're building, especially in the space that you're building.

Coming from a very traditional financial background, I think offers a really cool perspective and and especially in, in, in a, kind of a wild west of an industry right now. And it's gonna be exciting to chat with you about not only, you know, the experience that you bring into it, but kind of how you view the market.

But before we get into all of that, what were you doing before you started Nval?  

Layne: Hey, great to be here, Julian. Really excited to dive in. I'm always excited to talk, frankly. So this is, I spent about 18 years delivering enterprise software primarily as a consultant. Most of that time running my own business.

I have a computer science degree, but I ended up on sort of the project management delivery side. So I was a business analyst first, which. Really was what problem are we solving and how does technology solve that problem? And then I just became this sort of expert in execution of projects. So yeah, that carried me all the way through up until a few years ago about the last five years of that have been working with institutional finance, so some pretty big banks and institutional players one of which was about 300 billion aum.

And ran all major asset classes. And so I ran projects from front office all the way back to the SWIFT Network and Public disclosures and a book of record system change out, which was, you know, one project alone is $76 million kind of thing. So pretty, yeah, pretty surprisable stuff, but, Got that front row seat to the financial industry.

And that really when I then saw the blockchain tech stack was just blown away. I was like, this is so obvious. Of course.  

Julian: I love that man. And it sounds like you, you were incorporating so many different, not only aspects of your financial institutions and what they have to do within the project basis, but how do you kind of manage or figure out what to focus.

And then gain the knowledge that you have. I mean, it sounds like, or I guess the question is when you're faced with the project, do you kind of know what you're getting into or when you break into it, are there new things that you need to learn and kind of adapt to along the way?  

Layne: Yeah, so projects, I mean, the ultimate deliverable part of it, that's about the only part that is sort of consistent and repeatable.

. And then what ends up happening. It's the same principles, the same concepts, but very different because your ecosystem has changed. So even if you're changing the same CRM software from one in one organization, and then you go to another organization, everything around that single poet point that's the same is so different that the project delivery is just vastly different.

Yeah. And so somebody who unders really recognizes. The concepts at play and the principles at play. So everything from, you know, stakeholder management to requirements to just the dev cycle itself, you really have to understand that at a really high level so that when you see it in a completely new context, it still makes sense.

Yeah. Because it's very different. It looks very different. You can't just sort of take a cookie cutter approach. And I had, yeah. Some clients I talked. And you know, they said, oh, well, over here from, you know, one of the big four consulting firms says they have a plan in place, they can tell us exactly how this is gonna go.

And I, I did tell one client who ultimately hired me, they said, anybody who tells you how they know how this is gonna go at the outset is lying to you. Yeah. . I'm like, what I know is how to get there. And the short version. You only know maybe this much at the outset, and then right when you finish the project, just when it's all done, that's when you know everything.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. So what are some of the key variables that you look at or I guess, what are some of the most important structures of a business that you look at to then identify what, you know, software or system that you need to implement. If, you know, once you dive into it, you don't know a lot, but what do you go to, I'm sure to, in terms of gathering information, to kind of start setting the pieces into what then, you know, eventually becomes the end result.

Layne: Yeah, so, so primarily it becomes the problem that needs to be solved and like the pain point or the problem and the motivation. So motivation and these two things. If you go into the enterprise world, this stuff appears in a business case. So we have a pain point. We can't do something, something we do costs too much.

Our technology's outta date and therefore it's risky or costs too much. So we have this pain point, and then the opportunity or the motivation is, are we gonna save money? Are we gonna be able to keep doing our jobs? , or are we gonna reduce risk? Those sort of. And then you take it sort of one step further down into the detail and you really start to look at what are the real pain points?

Is it that our infrastructure doesn't work? Is it that our users aren't getting the tool they need anymore because our business has improved or shifted or changed? And then on the motivation side, it's like, which organizational, which people, which users, which customers. Ultimately, if you're in sort of startup land, who has this pain point?

And who doesn't and who's impacted and maybe doesn't stand to benefit, but they have a big impact. If you're the sales team and you are just punting things over the fence, and then somebody else has to do something. If they change how they receive stuff and you have to do a bunch of changes, but it doesn't actually benefit you, you know, you have to sort of speak their language, if you will, or at least find a common ground as to like, why is this in your interests?

And yeah, and that's not for everyone. That's, you know, not everybody is excited to have to do work that ultimately doesn't make their day any better. And so finding that motivation and figuring out how to wrangle people. Yeah. That is honestly the very first few steps, months, even in some of these big projects, is figure out who's at play and what is their  

Julian: interest in this.

Yeah. Are there a couple of uh, go-to questions or principles that, or structure that you use that, that has been reliable in terms of gathering that information that, that motivation clients that you've work with?  

Layne: It is. I mean, I start, if I started, so I used to start back up for a second. It used to start engagement.

Sometimes actually writing the business case. And if I'm starting that far that early, I really start with who called me in, who has a pain point, and then just keep asking these probing questions. and it all boils down to like, tell me more about this . They'll just keep going and going and telling you sort of why this pain point exists, how it manifests.

You ask, who does this affect? And so you really uncover what is it that doesn't work right now that we need to make better or fix? And then you just start asking, you know, those peripheral questions of who does this affect? Who does this? And then you go to sort of upstream and downstream and you say, well, where did that data or record or process initiate?

Like how did it come to you? And then you look upstream and you're like, oh, well the private equity floor started this, and now it comes down to back office. Who's dealing with, oh, the other side. Oh. And then eventually the book of record is the one that receives this. And so you get these, you end up building lists of, yeah.

Stakeholders and. High level requirements or pain points. And then, you know, you take all of that if you're doing a business case and you say, okay, well what's the cost to do this? And also what is the cost of not doing this? Yeah. And. That's really it. That's an entire business case right there.

Yeah. Who's affected, what involving and what is the cost and benefit.  

Julian: Yeah. How would you say this is kind of influenced and also we'd love to, to kind of hear a little bit more about the inspiration behind nal, but how has that experience kind of translated over into an industry that's a little bit nuanced and a little bit more challenging in terms of not having as.

uh, Historical evidence in why financial institutions or individuals or companies should go with a new kind of disruptive technology, like in NFTs and blockchain and everything around that.  

Layne: Yeah. The terminology we used in crypto seems to be first principles, right? Boiling it down to what is the first principle here, and that's really about.

Getting to the root of the problem and the problem, you know, technology proliferates because it solves a problem. Okay? Whether that's communication, whether that's uh, financial settlement, or whether that's proof of ownership, you know, it solves a problem. And so not losing sight of getting to the root of the problem, so to.

A good friend of mine once coined the term, and I don't think he was trying to be sort of clever when he did it, but he said, all in love with problems, not with solutions. Because in all of the enterprise world, you first start with the problem and you write up this business case and a loose project plan of, in order to do this is about what it's gonna take.

And then you go out and find software or technology that's going to solve that problem. So you very much separate the two. You start with the problem. and then you find out a way to solve that problem. Yeah. As opposed to finding a hammer and running around looking for a nail. Right. Which everybody gets caught up doing to some degree because there's this amazing new toy called blockchains and they're fantastic and they do all these cool things, but that doesn't mean they should do a lot of things.

Yeah. So really then you know, you look for the best tech or solution to a problem, and in some cases it's not a blockchain. And so really focusing. That step is something that I guess was drilled into me for, you know, 20 years in uh, in the enterprise space because no enterprise is gonna spend money on something just because it's cool.

Yeah. It all has to add up to their bottom line, right. It has to work better, faster, cheaper. There has to be a return on that  

Julian: effort and money. So.

Yeah. And what is the problem that Nval now is solving within the market of NFTs in, in particular?  

Layne: Yeah, sure. So, so anywhere, and I'll use the most generic term market in any market uh, the value of the assets in that market is just a fundamental data point in real estate.

You know, you can't, excuse me, you don't buy something unless you know what it should be worth, and then you decide what to pay for it and you buy it. Yeah. The bank doesn't lend you money against it. Collateralized lending without knowing what is this thing worth in the market. You don't insure it without having an insured value.

And so it all is all predicated on recognizing what is this asset worth in the market? And for NFTs, this is a very new market. A lot of its new assets uh, new asset types, and we have this unique ability to see most of the transactions and also uh, in real time. And so really what we're solving at Nval is this transparency of the market.

What is this asset worth today? What was it worth yesterday, last month, last year? So that at the end of a year, for example, you can do balance sheet accounting. You can do a year end and say, this was our asset, these were our assets at December 31st. Or if I'm considering buying or selling, you know, managing your portfolio understanding what the market value is of something is just fundamental to everything.

and then it gets, you know, more fancy when you get into insurance or derivatives and that sort of thing. But they're all still predicated on, you know, this is a fairly foundational data point. So the problem space became, that wasn't solved. Yeah. I went out there and spent 10 months going full degen in, in DeFi on every blockchain I could, every smart contractor I could read in white paper and used my own assets.

and the NFT space and really ran into this problem of there was no way to understand how these markets valued themselves efficiently, right? Yeah. Like you could become an expert in one space, but you couldn't really do that in real time and you couldn't do that to the efficiency that machines can do it.

And so what I recognized, or at least my thesis is that the space can't progress to the efficiency or the scale of sort of modern markets Yeah. That we're familiar with in other areas without these tools in existence. And so again, coming from the financial industry, I've seen them at play. and it was just obvious that, well, we have to build those. So yeah, let's go  

Julian: get through .  

So, so it sounds like you, the incumbent issue was the efficiency of gathering the data and then using that data to thNvalue the NFTs. And what, where was the deficit? Was it in the reporting of the value? Is it in the gathering of the information and where do you gather that information to then know and aggregate the overall value of, you know, set?

Layne: Sure. So I like to use analogies for this because it's not as obvious in the crypto space, but the gap is really that no two NFTs are the same, right? Yeah. By definition. Yeah. But also in that it's very difficult to compare them to each other. So unlike fungible tokens or liquid assets, securities and whatnot, where there's a spot price, there's no spot price.

In traditional world, what we would call illiquid um, there's also no spot price for what's probably more common or more closely aligned, which would be bonds or fixed income, but there are very close comparables. Yeah. And so this is what we do in real estate, right? We look at every house that was sold recently.

We look at everything we know about those houses, and we compare it to this one over here that we're now trying to. And so this is, it's called Mark to model. You create a model of how the market behaves, and then you apply it to this asset over here and you get data point back out. And so the challenge is while there are challenges on amassing the market data it's really about coming up with that model that says, this is how the market behaves and therefore here's what we would assign a value to.

And it gets even murkier because, or I guess stratified because. , every collection behaves differently. So if you go to open Sea, you know, you'll find thousands of collections out there. And it's, it's not possible to compare board apes to sandbox land. I mean, you can, but it's comparing apples to orange, right?

It's comparing real estate to cars. And you're like, well, why would the price of a car have a direct impact on the price? Or be an indicator of the price of real estate? And so you get. The scale problem of you need to compare like assets to, to do a decent job of determining market value and this, these are all very traditional concepts.

They just don't, they just haven't been implemented in this space to date. So that's essentially what we do. The hard part is finding comparables and then being able to produce kind of fair market value in real time or historically. , all the marketing actors that need  

Julian: these data points. And, And what's the result if we're, if you're able to do this so accurately for those who hold NFTs or those who are looking to hold NFTs what is gonna be I guess the positive impact of, of, or just overall impact of, of understanding the value of your asset?

Is it more frequency in trading them? Is it the increase in the values of the assets? Is it just overall maybe knowledge of the space in general and that knowledge kind of has some cascading. What in particular are the benefits of knowing this information and knowing the value of the nft?

Layne: Yeah, so the most obvious one is utility. We hear about DeFi and NFTs and that can only really happen if you have some kind of value assigned or associated to that nft. And so that unlocks everything that DeFi does today. And you know, it's a recreation of collateralized lending of insurance.

All of the certain derivatives and whatnot that we get in any asset class. And so for that to be possible and especially for it to run efficiently this needs to be available. Yeah. So we've seen peer-to-peer lending marketplaces, in which case they work, but they're not efficient. I wouldn't expect everybody to be able to show up and immediately assign a value to something, whereas if you do have that sort of market insight those can operate at a, at a different scale.

So, so that's one big one. And then sort of more, not nuanced, but more philosophically what you get is more efficient markets. Yeah. So if you look at NFT markets today, there's a few collections that trade very, constantly and get high volume. And so they actually have reasonable sort of bid ask spreads, and then you get a whole bunch of other collections that don't really trade it enough to be able to be really efficient.

And if you get to the real the, the old world, comparison of uh, commodities or real estate, you know, real estate is something. , you can tell pretty close how, what fair market value is on real estate. Because we have so much history, we have so much knowledge and there's so much transaction volume. We're really good at modeling that industry.

Yeah. And we really need that ability. And so what that becomes is an efficient market because all the lenders can figure out how much something's worth. All the insurers can figure out how some much something's worth. We have this common agreement within a margin of. Um, Of what an asset is worth. And when you have that, now the market's become very efficient because all of these peripheral things are possible and we have this agreement on, on market value, and that's, what's coming to the NFT space or NFT backed assets, but it's not there yet. And that's what we're here to help solve.

Julian: it's, it is incredible to think about the NFT space and there's becoming so many different use cases for, you know, having smart contracts and you know, one person was telling me that they were developing a method of having almost a diploma as pretty much a smart contract and, you know, non fungible and how will.

I guess those types of, of pieces of personal information rather than assets that, that we purchased, but personal information kind of influenced overall, you know, market that you are keeping track of or is it something that's out of touch? What can you incorporate and what can't you incorporate just as a general curiosity?

Layne: Yeah, so, so anything that you can sell has a quote market and so something like identity or credential. Those aren't something that we sell. I mean, unless you're Facebook legally , is that a dig? Sorry. But like, you know, we don't, we don't have a, there's no market for identity. There's no market for credentials.

Those are facts and sort of ownership assets that are important, but we don't buy and sell them. Right? And so anything that we buy and. Now we have market data about, as opposed to just history or verification. Authentication and verification kind of stuff. Yeah. So there's fascinating use cases out there.

One of the ones I think I'm, I'm the most excited about is authenticity. Yeah. Uh, Using NFTs. So you look at the deep fakes out there and you're like, how would you verify that a deep. Was not President Biden launching nukes at Russia and, and , you know, how do you do that globally? Immediately? And the answer is something like a blockchain where anybody can verify it immediately and say, this is actually a fake, there's no way um, that this is real or that you can verify that it is real.

And so, but there's no sale for that. There's no like, market for that. Right. Like there's demand for it, but you don't sell authenticity Yeah. In that regard. So, so that's kind of the way I see the space is we have all of these features that NFTs will get used for but they're not part of a market per se.

Yeah. And then you get all these other assets where they are something that you buy, sell, trade, and have a monetary value of some sort. Yeah. And so anything in that fair game. We, We work with much of it as it can.  

Julian: Yeah. It's incredible to think about the space and its evolution, but tell us a little bit more about Nval, where is the product currently at?

Have you, do you have user data and, and what is getting you excited about the building and the evolution of, of the product that, that you're that you're building now?  

Layne: Sure. So, so we started August last year. We're just over a year and a half old, I guess, or almost a year and a half old. And we have an MVP live.

We are a b2b. So we don't intend to produce anything in any one vertical. We're not gonna get into lending, we're not gonna get into insurance or a marketplace or that sort of thing. And if you go to, again, traditional markets, there's principles built into regulated markets, which say if you are the entity that provides market data, you can't also be the entity that's selling everything.

And so this is why Bloomberg doesn't run the New York stock. And they both have to exist for them to both be efficient, right? And so we really see ourselves as the third party neutral uh, market neutral fact provider as a yeah, that enables all of these markets. So we're working with platforms that, in some cases our, our marketplaces that want to provide data to their customers to just improve the customer experie.

And then we're also working with accounting platforms. Again, that if you need to do a balance of your assets there's only a few sort of gap approved methods. Yeah. And right now it seems kind of like most people have to default to cost basis, which is what you bought it for, right?

You can imagine. I mean, these things move, right? They move up and down. So in some cases you may look really good and in some cases it's not the most accurate representation. So we are working with some accounting platforms. We are fairly early stage as far as that goes. We are just pre-revenue. We do expect our first customers to be live and paying kind of in Q2 of 2023.

And so, you know, I'm really excited To, To build in parallel with these customers because it isn't really a, a known space yet. It's not a, it's not a commodity where, oh, I know how to get this data point and I know exactly what it does and therefore everybody has products for it already or that need it already.

And so all of our customers are really building products with us. Yeah. Um, That, that weren't possible until they've had this data point. And so again, that's accounting platforms. Um, we're all also working with a broker dealer platform, or wealth manager platform, and they're scheduled to go live with one of their major partners to the tune of, you know, a few hundred thousand wealth managers that they need regulated data, they need regulated reporting for their customers and that's, you know, it's just not available out there.

So we're getting to the point. things are heating up fast. It's a fun market to be in right now. Yeah. Given everything has burned to the ground recently, . But what we have found is that because we work with the regulated actors in the space they really shine through. Yeah. One of our partners, when FTX was the headline news and everybody thought that things were such a scam or that there was so much problem, so many problems in the.

they said, we've been getting inbound investment calls because they recognize that well regulated, well established credible actors. Holy smokes. They really stand out now. Yeah. And lucky for us, that was our space anyway. And that was our customer base anyway, so here's hoping, but things have slowed for sure.

Julian: What are some of the biggest challenges outside of this the, the global market that, that Nval faces today?

Layne: I think the composition of these markets mm-hmm. and what they're going to look like as more not even traditional asset classes, but existing asset classes start to move in. So, you know, music is a, is a trillion dollar industry globally.

How they're going to leverage this technology is unclear and what it's going to do to the, composition of the space. From a business perspective, you know, that's a risk for us because we just need, we, it's unknown, I guess. It's less of a risk and more of an unknown. Yeah. That how will we fit into that to support that space?

Same would go with gaming. As regulated industries or assets start to come into the space, the same kind of things pop up, right? It's, there are incumbents. They don't necessarily work with this stuff. How will this get built? Just a lot of unknowns would be our biggest risks. Yeah. And outside of kind of our cortex, more about just the evolution of the space itself.

Julian: Yeah. And if everything goes up, what's the long-term vision for Nval?  

Layne: My long-term vision is that NFTs are the future of ownership. Um, Yeah. How we're going to, how that's going to manifest is anybody's guess. Which kind of leads me back to the , the unknowns in the. . But what that means for us is that every market, every asset space needs transparency.

We need to be able to see in every actor in that space needs to be able to see how the market's behaving and how it's doing. And we really have the goal uh, the expectation to be part of that solution, to be a platform that doesn't really care what asset class it is. As long as we can provide that transparency.

So, yeah, we expect to support regulated side account accountants. You know, they're not technically regulated per se, but they have expectations of data and transparency and their sources of data, and that's a high bar. And that's really our vision is to be able to support that space. And I'll just add one piece to that.

Until these products exist, until these tools. , the real valuable assets can't really leverage this technology or move into these public blockchains. You know, you're not gonna see uh, you're not gonna see music show up if they don't have confidence that their royalties will be respected, for example.

Yeah. Because they're like, well, why would we don't need to do this. And so part of that is to provide tools that they recognize in markets that we've had for years. We really see ourselves as that stepping stone for them and that enabler to the. Yeah, that was a long-winded answer.  

Julian: No, no. It's, no, it's incredible to see about the impact that just the information and knowing where the value is of an asset at a given time just has compounding effects towards it's even it's value over time.

Um, Cuz without that assurance then it, it's just kind of, you know, for show and it's not anything that can necessarily have a positive effect if, if you hold it, you know, it's kind of just like, oh. Fun token that I might have, but it doesn't really offer me anything versus, you know, I think things that have a lot of validity over time or, or things that have value that increase or, or that you can at least measure.

So you know, where it, where it lands or where it stands at, at, at any point in time. What a particular, yeah, what in particular is difficult about your job now? I. You've ran a consulting businesses, you've worked with these institutions and these companies, but now this new product in particular is a new challenge that you face and yeah.

What is particularly hard about your job?  

Layne: I mean, it's dubbed as product market fit. But at the same time, when I go back to my previous life, I guess it was a whole life, it was a whole lifetime work.  

Julian: Yes. Yeah. 20 years.  

Layne: You know, it's, it's coming out to, it's coming up with requirements. It is. That is product market fit, and so yeah, it's just a, a, a difference on the same theme.

And so, you know, my biggest challenges or, or unknowns again, are really about the shifting landscape or the shifting part of the ecosystem. If I was building an enterprise product that, yeah, was in something that was, you know, maybe it was 10 times better, but it was in the CRM space. , that's a fairly well known less shifting, less changing space.

Also way less exciting, frankly, . And so, you know, it's just that things move very quickly. Obviously the capital landscape is pretty challenging right now. That's thanks to, you know, some pretty major collapses last year. . But it does let those of us that have sound business models and business practices and, and tech. Hopefully survive and really carry through where the real value is created and not the height. One of the ways I look at this space is, uh, you'll see I can, I like analogies cuz these are sometimes hard concepts to work through. But yeah, we have all this infrastructure uh, in block. . And for all of these existing asset classes to move in, we have to build more infrastructure that they recognize and they use.

And so the analogy I like to use is, you know, we didn't build the autobon when we had the Model T forward, and we also didn't build the Ferrari before we had, you know, interstates, right? Like they had to move in parallel. They had, we had to just keep building better, better. And the next thing you know, oh wow, we have the Ferrari on the Audubon and.

We're really one half to that equation. And we like to, I expect that the size of this space seems big to those of us in it sometimes. And it is, so minuscule. the, The amount of value that was created in NFTs in just a few years from scratch is staggering. it is impressive. It is amazing.

and it's a drop in the bucket compared to all these assets that already exist that can use this technology. Yeah, and I use music as. All that music already exists. It has trillions of dollars of value and they can just snap their fingers and, oh look, now we're using NFTs in blockchain, even if a tiny fraction of that.

But yeah, that will look so much faster than anything we've felt in the space so far. And that stand a lot.  

Julian: it, it's so fascinating. And I guess one thing I was curious cuz you know, my company we don't build in, in, in blockchain technology, but what is particularly difficult about, for those who don't know or don't have, have products in blockchain, what's hard about building?

Is it finding people who have the technology skillset set the technological skillset to build? or, or is it the tools or the updates of different languages that can be used to build certain assets? what in particular is hard about building in blockchain right now?  

Layne: I think the, the, the Achilles heel really is the number of developers that know how to work directly with blockchains.

Yeah. And the, the solidity languages, the rust languages and, and those native base layers. What we are getting to very quickly is that gets abstracted one level out, and so. , you know, any really good developer now can just tie onto an api Yeah. And use interface with the blockchain itself.

And so again, these are those compounding technologies that are solving these problems for us. But there's certainly there's not enough in the entire world people who know how to write stable, secure, scalable, smart contracts. Yeah. And, And part of that is because blockchains in general, Settlement layers.

That's not something that we have a lot of in this world. Yeah. Settlement layers are very, backend technology. Just like the SWIFT network. Nobody interacts with the SWIFT network. Banks interact with the Swift network and all of a sudden we now have what anybody can interact with the blockchain.

You're like, wow. But should they Right ? Yeah. I think that should get abstracted away just a little bit more and as soon as we. A lot of these challenges that these early companies and, you know, where no exception have is mitigated. It, it decreases very quickly.  

Julian: Yeah. I, I, I think we could talk about the future of NFTs and blockchain for hours on end.

And it's so exciting to hear your kind of um, experience currently because you know, from now until when, you know, a couple years down the line I'm sure the landscape will be so different. So it's really cool to hear in a drop of time where things are currently at and and how the impact of.

You know, experience within the traditional finance markets has kind of created, I think and, and it sounds like we'll create a really regulated and mature technology, which is gonna be exciting to see how it can impact other industries as well. I always like to ask this next question for not only my audience, but for selfish research purposes.

What books or people have influenced you the most uh, whether it was early in your career or now?  

Layne: This is, This is interesting and it's probably not gonna be what you were expecting, but two of the books that are still stick with me after years and years and years, one is South by Robert Shackled or by Shackleton.

So this is the the Expedition to try to get to the South Pole by the British, and he never made landfall. It took him over a year. Died for years on end or for months on end. It's just this harrowing story and account because they survived it of survival. And the reason that it's so impactful and it's still for, still applies in, in business, I think, is to really put in perspective to give you some humility.

Be like nature doesn't mess around the market. The world doesn't mess around, no matter. Right. You think you are. Yeah. You will be proven one way or the other. And the second book it's an account of. , about finding the Northwest passage and it's called the Man Who Ate His Boots. So the Franklin Expedition is something we in Canada know very much about cuz it happened through, you know, the Northwest passage.

And it's the same type of tale except it didn't end well. He did die , so did his whole crew. Uh, he was terrible. But the lesson of humility in that, at least what I took from it, you know, there's people who have lived up there for centuries with no modern technology and they were. Yeah, and they couldn't, and the British showed up and said, no, we know.

and they all died . It was like, you feel better, like yeah. Maybe have look around. Yeah. Learn something. And so, you know, those two they always come back to you for some reason. Those lessons just are so universal. Yeah. That and they're entertaining books to read. I mean, at least I found them entertaining.

Julian: Yeah. I mean, I, it sounds it's very much in line with what you're doing now, right? It's a new expedition, but based. You know, principles that have been around for forever at least within, you know, the financial institution. So, let's hope you don't eat your boots at the end of the day.

And um, and you can still continue growing and scaling. But I know we're at the end of the episode and I always like to give my guests a chance to give us your plugs. Uh, Where can we find you? Where can we be a part of nal not only the journey, but if I'm a prospective customer uh, where can I, where can I get, in touch with you or in touch with the product?

Layne: Sure. So I'm, anybody can find me on Twitter. It's first name, last name, Layne Nadeau convenience of having a, a more unique name that's harder to spell. uh, Hope, hopefully they can pick that up. Nval.com. You can reach out to us directly there. You can see everything we're doing. Anything. You can send me an email directly, layne@nval.com.

The experience with new customers and exploring this space particularly in B2B and infrastructure is not a click and buy kind of experience. And so I really relish speaking to projects in the space, speaking to people, building that understand the need or the gap or the pain point. Yeah.

Or don't understand it, but just have that pain point. You know, reach out anytime. Love to talk about any of this stuff, as you've probably noticed.

Julian: Well, Layne I so much appreciate, you know, you being on the show and giving not only your traditional kind of experience, but also how it translates to, Nval and also the current market and where it's gonna go.

So, I hope you enjoyed yourself and thanks again for, you know, being on the Behind Company Lines podcast.  

Layne: This is a pleasure. Thanks for having me.  

Julian: Of course.

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