Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:02
Do most people and I want to get to the resources piece for a second Alexander. Which is so you know, we’ll get to the you know apps, technology, everything like that. But are there any interesting resources from like a parent perspective? There’s emotional stuff like I remember I’ll pull this up. I had as an example, Doctor Eli Lebowitz on who developed the SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Children Emotions) program. And so that was an interesting one. And we talked, you know, parent, you know, a guide to helping your anxious child. What are some or maybe, you know, just rattle off some of your favorite resources, whether it’s books in this realm for support for parents. And then we can talk about the kind of the business front.
Alexander Landa: 15:49
Right? Absolutely. They are. There are multiple frameworks. Let’s say like most research one, like when people get, when parents first get diagnosis, they go, well, what kind of therapy will work?
So everyone goes ABA, right? It’s called applied behavioral analytics. The problem with that is the neurodivergent community, the autistic individuals who, you know, become adults. They are revolting against ABA. And the reason is back in the days, like, you know, not every ABA is bad and not every ABA is good. Right? But they had a bad experience when they were growing up, and they feel very compassionately and that they were treated like Pavlov’s dogs. So, you know, ABA therapy is the one that’s being, you know, paid for by insurance companies. Right.
And then there is another. It’s interesting that you pulled Mr. Lebowitz. So the SPACE actually is an acronym for another methodology that we used in Akiva. And you can pull it on our website. Yes, it’s a SPACE model. So the SPACE model that we use is the, it stands for Sensory Predictability, Acceptance, Communication and Empathy. And this is a much more appropriate and proven model and highly researched model by therapists around the world.
There are many different papers. So we’ve gone through a lot of it and we’re like, well, you know, there is this ABA that everyone approves and it’s, you know, paying money for like we should do that. And then we started listening to, you know, to, to our community, to our, to people like my son. And they said very clearly, we don’t like that. We didn’t like it. They forced us to do things that we, you know, are not wired to do. And there should be other things. So when we build Akiva, we build it on a SPACE principle. And that’s what I would recommend.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:01
So talk about from, just from a business perspective. We’ll get into some of your favorite books, resources. But technology, what are some of the apps software tools that you like to use personally? Professionally?
Alexander Landa: 18:15
Yeah. You know, in the past few years, there’s been just explosion of different tools. And I’m sure, you know, there probably isn’t a person in the world who hasn’t heard about ChatGPT. And, you know, we use different tools in our technology stack, for example, you know, we use Canva and we use Figma.
Figama, we use for prototyping, technology prototyping. It’s great, great, great tool that allows us to collaborate together. Canva we use for a lot of things, like sometimes they even, you know, put together a presentation, an investor presentation or and and so on. And I’m traveling and I can do it on my mobile phone and this is great. Right. So this is sort of a frontline tools, you know. Again, in terms of the more hardcore development tools. So our team is using C#. And in that net framework to compile for meta quest environment. We also use analytical tools in Azure which is Microsoft Cloud solution. And we use native tools for building iOS companion app and Android A companion app. And so this is sort of our overall platform and how we developed it. But then there are lots of other things that goes around.
So we decided to use Telegram for communication because it has amazing ways to communicate as a team. And, you know, a lot of teams are using Slack and other other things and so on. But we found Telegram to be incredibly, incredibly beautifully designed tool.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:19
This one. Yeah.
Alexander Landa: 20:20
Yeah that yeah that delivers constantly. And you know we use it as you know as a storage as the collaboration of ideas. It just has a lot of things we’re planning to have another smaller projects. We’ve been toying with doing an NFT project, but not in terms of, you know, creating something that, you know, would, would necessarily go heavily into the blockchain area. We just want to be exposed to crypto community.
And, and we want to make sure that our community has an opportunity to collect digital items, and we want to use it as a vehicle to, you know, to give back to our community. So the charitable organizations that are working with autistic and neurodivergent individuals, we want to give them, you know, adequate amount of software, as much as we can donate. So, you know, in case any of individuals who are running those organizations are listening, please reach out to me directly. You know, we’ll leave my information at the end and we’d love to talk to you. We’d love to see how we can help, and would love to donate some of our software to the cause.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:50
So we’ll talk about books. I know you’re really into sales, marketing, business books before you mentioned those, because I’m going to pull up you mentioned NFTs and crypto stuff. So I did an interview with Dmitry Buterin. He’s actually the father of Vitalik Buterin, who started Ethereum. And he broke down because this is above my pay grade here. So he broke down NFTs and blockchain for me. And there’s another one Chris Madden really talked about NFTs and the metaverse and how it worked. And so that helped me.
Alexander Landa: 22:25
That’s great.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:25
Understand it because to me it’s kind of a foreign concept. But what are some of your favorite books on the, you know, sales, marketing business realm?
Alexander Landa: 22:37
Right. So lately I’ve been really focusing on the books by Alex Hormozi, and he has three brilliant books. He recently had his latest book that broke all the records by sales. So he has the first book I believe is on offers, and he teaches in the book how to create the best marketing offers. The second book is on how to. Yes, exactly.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:09
The second book is $100M Offers we have here. If you’re watching the video and we have $100M Leads also. Correct?
Alexander Landa: 23:15
Correct, correct. The second one is$100M Leads. And then the third one that he released was about I believe that that’s about just how to make money.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:29
Here it is.
Alexander Landa: 23:30
Yeah, that’s the latest one. I haven’t. I’ve started reading it but I haven’t finished it yet. And the reason I haven’t finished it yet is, as I mentioned to you, Jeremy, I am a voracious reader, but not always I read business books, and since I was a child, I was really into science fiction. And so what I’m going through right now is the book series called Red Rising, and this is just incredible. I think the only other book that I love so much, the Red Rising, has six books in series.
The only other series that comes close is the, it’s kind of oldie but really good one is by Roger Zelazny and it’s called The Chronicles of Amber. So they’re both on Amazon, but they’re brilliant books. They don’t have to do a lot with business, but they actually do because they inspire your imagination.
And neither one of those books has a movie about that, which I think is actually great, because you can imagine those characters and and you can dream about the worlds that the authors so eloquently describe.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:51
Yeah. Any other sales and marketing books? I know you’re a voracious reader that you’ve liked throughout the years.
Alexander Landa: 25:00
Yes. So I believe the book that Ben Horowitz had written, The Hard Thing About the Hard Things. I also believe the book that Peter Thiel had written, Zero to One, that I would highly recommend for anyone who is interested or considering going into entrepreneurship. I mean, lately it’s been sort of, yes, sort of. You know, the interesting thing about this book, the hard thing about the hard things. So I used to work for Ben many years ago, and he writes about, you know, what we did during the four years, and he writes specifically about one of my managers, and he doesn’t mention me by name, but he mentions our project in there and like how heroism sometimes doesn’t scale.
And this was the famous thing that he said. He said, like in terms of scalability, because we had a small team compared to the giants that we competed with, but everyone was a hero on a team, right? And so at some point, he said, heroism doesn’t scale, which was pretty interesting. But you know, Zero to One by Peter Thiel is incredible. He talks about the importance of understanding the niche market and finding a way to establish your dominance instead of just going into highly competitive place and compete against, you know, there are other brilliant books, you know, on specifically on sales and marketing. But I think, you know, if we just have time for the viewers to go through these five books, that’s going to be great.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:56
What did you learn working with Ben? Are there any lessons that you remember?
Alexander Landa: 27:02
You know, this was the most amazing team that I was part of, Bar None. And, you know, I went through a very rigorous interviewing process. I think, like they had, they had me flown to four different cities. I’ve talked to several different people over four months, period before they made the decision to make me an offer. And, you know, at that time I was a successful product manager at Universal Pictures. And I’ve done, you know, I’ve built digital asset management system that is still alive in the same reincarnation and it’s called Solar at Universal Pictures, and it’s a mission critical system for them. And they haven’t touched it because it was built to last.
You know, and I thought that they would never, you know, give me an offer. But once they were ready, they, they, they, they went very quick and they like, you know, we want you, you know, you come in. And so one of the things that I mean, the three things that I learned is that, you know, if you want to succeed in anything, you just have to not only show up on time, but you have to be your best 100%.
Right. You can’t leave things for tomorrow because tomorrow is not guaranteed. Right.
And then the other, the other thing is that, you know, the world is not perfect. The software will break sometimes. You know, the customer will be upset sometimes. But at the end of the day, if you give 150% of yourself to solve a business and technology problem for your customers, for your team, then more likely than not, you’re going to win.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:57
First of all, this has been fantastic. Alexander, I want to point everyone to Akiva.ai. And so, you know, just share it, right. There’s a lot of people that could really use this. So there’s families, clinics, schools, nonprofits, you know, send it their way. So Alexander, I just want to thank you, everyone. Check out more episodes. Check out Akiva.ai.
Alexander Landa: 29:20
Jeremy, thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate you. Have a wonderful day.
