Michael Zaro – building technology careers & online empires

NOTES

Recorded in the Cottonwood Conference Room at Kiln Lehi

Michael Zaro on LinkedIn

V School

Smash Creative

SUMMARY

Michael Zaro is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of V School, an online school, and Smash Creative, a digital agency.

Early Interests and Education

• Grew up in Seattle and originally thought he would be a dentist before getting into tech in college.
• Graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in Latin American Studies.

Early Entrepreneurial Efforts

• In college, Zaro started his first company, MealDrop, which was like an early version of UberEats for college students to order food ahead of time on campus. It was too early and didn’t gain traction.
• The company pivoted into a development agency doing work for local restaurants, which exposed Zaro to software development. This was the genesis of his later company Verisage.

Verisage and The Origins of V School

• After college, Zaro partnered with Guy Vincent to form Verisage, a development agency.
• One client acquired by another company asked Verisage to train developers for them. This first “class” of developers turned into the beginnings of V School.
• After getting interest from others, Zaro and Vincent started offering more coding classes and V School was officially born inside of Verisage. It eventually spun out as its own entity.

V School’s Unique Mastery-Based Model

• V School shifted from fixed-length coding bootcamp model to a self-paced mastery-based model.
• Students move at their own pace based on mastering skills, not on a set cohort schedule. This helps maximize job placement.
• V School focuses on getting students employed in a new career, not just completing curriculum. They partner with employers to shape curriculum.
• The online format, with on-demand lessons plus live instructor support, facilitates the mastery model.

Growth and Future of V School

• V School now has over 200 students across web development, UX design, and cybersecurity programs. Web development is the largest program.
• AI and generative tools like Copilot will be increasingly incorporated into V School curriculum rather than threatening it. Zaro sees AI as another tool humans can apply.
• An AI-focused program seems likely in the future as demand grows in the space.

Smash Creative’s Accidental Beginning

• Zaro built the website for his wife’s blog while she was pregnant. Her readers asked who built it, leading to work for other “mommy bloggers.”
• Realizing this was a big niche, Zaro created a landing page for influencer work within Verisage. It took off into its own agency, Smash Creative.

Balancing Two CEO Roles

• Spends more time at V School currently, but loves both companies.
• Applies lessons learned and processes from each business to improve the other.
• Zaro enjoys the variety of challenges and constant learning being a CEO founder requires.

Key Takeaways on Entrepreneurship

• Take initiative to build skills and ‘just start’ – don’t overplan. Get reps and feedback quickly.
• Vision, strategy, and continuous improvement matter more than detailed planning.
• Hire for strengths rather than just skills/roles. Values and chemistry also crucial.
• CEO’s job is to do what the business currently needs, requiring constant learning.

Kyle Knowles:
Hello there. Welcome to the Maker Manager Money podcast, a podcast about entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, founders, business owners, and business partnerships from startups to stay ups, to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going and future entrepreneurs to just start. My name is Kyle Knowles, and it’s a Wednesday night, a rainy Wednesday night, and this episode is being recorded at Kiln in Lehi. Kiln is totally killing it in the coworking space, and they’ve just opened another beautiful community in Provo, Utah. You can find all of their locations at kiln.com.
Today’s guest is Michael Zaro, a serial entrepreneur, founder, and current founder and CEO at V School and Smash Creative. V School is an online school where you can master the skills to land your dream career in web development, experience design or cybersecurity. V School offers scholarships and apprenticeships to help you break into tech. Their graduates work at some of the best companies in the world, including Apple and Adobe. Smash Creative has helped over 500 sexy companies build their brands, businesses, apps, and websites with the goal of helping them build online empires. Michael graduated from Brigham Young University with a Bachelor of Arts in Latin American Studies. He lives in Utah with his wife, three daughters, and a son. Michael Zaro, welcome to the Maker Manager Money podcast.

Michael Zaro:
Thank you for having me, Kyle. Great to be here.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s nice to meet you in person. So I just want to start with, these aren’t too existential of questions, but who are you? Why are you in business for yourself and what do you see your businesses doing in the next 10 years?

Michael Zaro:
Yeah, so I grew up in Seattle just a little bit north of there. Came down to Utah for school and originally thought I was going to be a dentist, so I was good at science and liked talking to people. So that was what they told me I should do out of high school. Once I got here though, I realized I like teeth that are already clean. My parents helped out with the smile and spent a fortune on braces to get me there. So dentistry, I realized, wasn’t for me after I tested it out a little bit. Got into tech and really enjoyed it. While I was in the middle of college, started a company, it went okay. I learned a whole lot and so that was probably the most valuable thing out of it, and ultimately I got hooked on software. I just realized that you could impact so many more people, you could reach so many more people and you could build something in a more scalable way. So I got hooked on it and yeah, I don’t think I’ll leave.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. So the reason you went into business for yourself though wasn’t just about dirty teeth, it was about something else. What was it that the real motivator to do your own thing?

Michael Zaro:
So really being a dentist is a great career, but you can only help people when you’re in the chair. Once you go home, the work stops, your business stops, there’s nothing else happening without you right there every hour. And I felt like that would limit the number of people I could help or serve or the amount of work I could do. So my parents, some folks thought I was crazy at the time. It’s a great career, you should just do it. But I felt like I wanted to do more. I wanted to help more people. I thought I had ideas and I thought that was too strict a path for me. So went into business for myself so I could chart my own path and come up with crazy ideas and see if they worked.

Kyle Knowles:
So let’s talk about the beginnings then. You graduate from Brigham Young University. Were you doing anything entrepreneurial before college or did you start doing stuff after college?

Michael Zaro:
I was always the kid who was reading books from the library about how do you make money, mowing lawns and selling lemonade and spinning up all kinds of other crazy ideas. So I was always hustling, trying to do something and make some money. My parents did a good job. They provided what they could and gave me tons of guidance and support. Didn’t always have the most financial resources, and so if I wanted certain things, then it was my job to earn the money to get those. So that drive was instilled in me early on. So when I got to BYU, I was going down the dentistry track, I shifted, got into software while I was there. I tried my first startup before I graduated and it went okay, but we were about 15 years early and ultimately it didn’t work out.

Kyle Knowles:
What was it? What was the…

Michael Zaro:
So think of it like Uber Eats. I was really busy, I was working full-time, I was consulting the side and I was still trying to get reasonable grades and I never had time to eat on campus. And so I thought, man, I never have time in between classes. There’s only like 10 minutes. I’m never going to get food. So I thought if only I could order my food in advance, and then all I have to do is just pick it up and go. I know what I’m going to get. It’s $5 footlong. I’m a cheap college student. If I could just get the order placed, I wouldn’t have to sit around and wait in line. It’s super inefficient.
So I pitched the university on that and said, “Look, if you could online order, you could have way more business, it’d be way more efficient, it’d be great for you guys.” So I tried to do that. I got a team together, we built a platform around it. There was food and order fulfillment, there was order tracking, the whole deal. I got full depth into startups and software and product development, but ultimately there’s just not enough money moving when broke college kids was buying $5 footlongs to justify that business model. So it works better if you’re buying $60 a takeout or something, but not $5 footlongs.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. You keep mentioning hot dogs. So did you know the J-Dog guy? I don’t know.

Michael Zaro:
He was a couple years before me. Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Was he? Okay.

Michael Zaro:
But that was an inspiration too. He was floating around the business school and good stories told about him as well.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. And were you really going to zero in on hotdog or was it just anything?

Michael Zaro:
No. Subway was the popular thing on campus, and so it was those $5 footlong subs was really the deal. So yeah, there was literally like 50, 60 people in line and you’d look at it and be like, “Well, I guess I’m fasting today.”

Kyle Knowles:
Well, then, so how did you close it down? Did you have a postmortem? What did you have to do to close it down?

Michael Zaro:
So not really, and this is something that I think this is unique to us. You always hear about people with big startup ideas and they go and then one day they give up on it and they wind it down. I am more of the type that keeps pivoting until they find something that works. And so that wasn’t working on campus. And so we went off campus and tried to do business parks, but this is 15 years ago. Utah wasn’t this big tech hub that it is now. And so as we kept iterating, we ended up finding restaurants who needed some software built. They’re like, “Well, yeah, I’ll help on your silly platform, but also by the way, if you could build me an app that’d be really helpful,” or “Hey, my website sucks. Could you revamp that for me?” So we ended up shifting our software and doing software development.
Our first 20 clients were all restaurants that had needs, and then we realized we could pay the bills with that. And so it turned into just a dev shop. I partnered up with another guy, he had an existing dev shop, and so we pooled it all together. We had intended make some money doing that and then continue to fund the startup. And ultimately we had other opportunities that were more exciting and seemed like they had more potential. And so we just never wound back up the startup. The dev shop was the engine for several other businesses that we started and grew from there.

Kyle Knowles:
So let’s talk about going from the Uber Eats before it’s time. What was it called?

Michael Zaro:
MealDrop.

Kyle Knowles:
MealDrop, okay. That’s actually a cool name. And then from MealDrop, you morph into a dev shop. You partner up with Guy who’s been on the podcast and that’s Verisage.

Michael Zaro:
Yup

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. And walk me through the journey of Verisage and then starting V School and Smash Creative, how those two companies were birthed during the time you were at Verisage, I guess.

Michael Zaro:
There’s a little fun history on a small part of the Utah tech ecosystem. So at the time I was at BYU and there’s a lot of emphasis on entrepreneurship, a lot of teachers, professors, investors, just supporters, but not a lot had actually happened. There’s lots of people into entrepreneurship and not building anything yet. And so there was a group of maybe 10 or 15 of us that were BYU and were dabbling in startups. We were trying our hand and seeing what we could do. And at the time, most of them weren’t succeeding in any meaningful big way, but they’re generating revenue, we’re learning and growing. That turned into a really cool group.
Garrett Gee was in there, went off and did Scan, and now The Bucket List Family, Dallen and Austen Allred were in there. Brad Cahoon, Austin Craig, folks who’ve gone off and started very successful companies, raised money, generated revenue, had exits. It was just a breakfast club at the time, so we were all getting together and supporting each other. That was about the time I met Guy and a couple of things happened concurrently. So one, a few of us needed office space, so me and Dallen Allred rented a really old space that his, I think an uncle had available, painted it blue and green and let all the startups rent it for like a hundred bucks a month way back in the… I think it was technically the first coworking space in Utah.
Nowhere near as cool as the Kilns and [inaudible 00:10:12] of today, but it was a cool spot. So I ran that and had this startup, Guy was helping me with MealDrop and he had already started Verisage and as we got working more and more together, I would send him projects for the dev shop. He would send me stuff like consulting or marketing gigs, and we just got closer and closer and eventually decided let’s do this together. So yeah, between the coworking space, the dev shop, the startup that was not going anywhere at the time, that was how we got our start.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. And so I’m not familiar with Dallen Allred, but Austen Allred, does he have a coding school?

Michael Zaro:
Yeah, he’s doing something called BloomTech. Dallen launched… Oh, what’s the first one he sold? He sold the company. He did a ticket site and then he did… Why am I spacing it? He does Artemis now. Artemis Health or no, Tava Health, and I think he sold Artemis.

Kyle Knowles:
And are they brothers or what’s the relationship?

Michael Zaro:
Yeah, they’re brothers. I was friends with Dallen. Austen’s his little brother.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Michael Zaro:
Austin Craig was the guy who did Orabrush and then has gone on and been involved in the crypto scene. He did the big Bitcoin movie that got famous out of Utah, so he lived for a year on only Bitcoin with his fiance. Anyway, lots of cool folks in that group.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. Okay, and then so tell me what’s unique about V School then. You got with Guy, you’re doing Verisage, you’re doing some other stuff, then how did you give birth, I guess, to V School?

Michael Zaro:
So Verisage had a bunch of opportunities, honestly, a great way, if you’re not sure what business you want to start, get into a marketing agency, a dev shop, something where people are paying you to solve their problems for them. That’s a bunch of customers with needs right there and they’re willing to spend money to solve them. So you’re going to see a ton of opportunities and ideas. So that’s what we did. We ran Verisage for maybe five years or so, and a client that we had built a lot of software for ultimately came to us and said, “Hey, we’re getting acquired. Thanks for everything you’ve done. It was really successful for us, but we need our own dev team now.” So we said, “Okay, why are you calling me? No more shop, right?”
He said, “Actually, I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to hire my own team or what that takes. Can I pay you to train a team of developers for me?” We thought, yeah, it’d be a fun thing to do. We already had a unique training process for finding and getting folks ready to work on production. And so we thought, yeah, we could probably do that for him. That’d be a cool parting of ways. And so that ended up being our first V School class because we trained this team on his software stack and they went off and were successful. We had some other folks in the community that saw us at that coworking space and said, “Hey, I didn’t know you guys did classes. I’ve been trying to polish up on my coding skills,” or “I’ve been wanting to get into tech.” And we had three or four people that said, “If you do another class, let me know. I’d love to enroll.”
So that was the second. And same thing happened for the third, fourth and fifth class. And by the 10th, it was a whole line of business inside the dev shop and eventually it spun out as its own thing and outgrew the dev shop entirely. So what makes us special is a couple things. The history of V School is fun. So the first few years we existed inside of Verisage and it was a traditional coding bootcamp. People come, they spend 60 hours a week coding all day every day and learning as fast as they possibly can. We were marginally better than other bootcamps because frankly, I just think we cared more and the founders were really involved, but we hated the fact that not everyone succeeded and there were people that should have succeeded and were taking a risk on us as a new company and they wouldn’t make it across the finish line.
And it’s silly things, just life stuff. Your brother’s getting married and you want to go to the wedding. If this is your opportunity to learn to code and you miss two, three days because you’re off at an event like that, that’s like missing a month of university because we’re moving so fast and so you just get left behind. It’s hard to tell someone don’t go to your brother’s wedding, but at the same time, if they end up struggling through the rest of the program and not getting a job, that sucks. I don’t want to tell you to skip a wedding. I also don’t want you to not get a job and then not make the transition you’re looking for. If you get sick, your car breaks down, you can’t get into campus, it snows really hard, all kinds of silly things that just life happens. So we made a change.
We said we want to optimize not for just running students through a fixed length program. We want to get people into careers. That’s the ultimate win. Honestly, if a student gets a certificate or a grade from you but they’re not employed, it doesn’t really matter. No one’s happy with that outcome. The school, they got the tuition money, but hopefully they feel bad because they didn’t really deliver on the promise. The student’s pissed because they didn’t get a job and that’s what they were trying to do. So we decided to optimize for outcomes. So how can we help people get through the program, get the skills they need and obtain gainful employment?
It’s really hard. It’s hard to get the right pace for everybody. So take any skill, say you’re going to learn to play soccer or you’re going to learn a language or learn to play a musical instrument. If you take 20 people, they’re going to learn those things at different speeds. I mean take you and me. Do you speak another language?

Kyle Knowles:
I don’t.

Michael Zaro:
Okay. What sports do you play?

Kyle Knowles:
Soccer, basketball.

Michael Zaro:
Okay, so say we’re going to play basketball, we don’t know it yet. We’re going to play. If you and I are going to pick up basketball, who’s going to learn it faster? Me being six foot five and having a 30-inch vertical.

Kyle Knowles:
Maybe you.

Michael Zaro:
I would probably have an advantage. That’s not that I’m better, it’s just I have some advantages that make that more likely, right? Say we’re going to play soccer. I’m uncoordinated though. You might be way more nimble and faster than I am, maybe you’re better at soccer than I am. If we are going to learn that at a different pace, if you put us both through a 12-week basketball program or 12-week soccer program, we’re going to be different skill levels at the end. That’s true with almost every skill and almost nowhere in our lives do we measure skills by time spent on it. We measure it by competency. So if you learn a language, you’re not a three-year Spanish speaker, you’re a conversational Spanish speaker or a professional or a fluent level speaker. If you play sports, you’re JV or varsity or you’re a semi-pro or you’re college or you play at the D1 level or D3 level, there’s all these competency scores or metrics.
It’s not just I played for seven years, that doesn’t mean anything inherently. But in school we just measure it by years. You’ve been to school 10 years, cool, you’re now a sophomore. You went 12 years, you’re a senior, you should theoretically be as good as every other senior, but we know that’s not the case. You can take the end of every semester and there’s a distribution of how students perform. Getting back to that coding school, we saw that as well.
After every week of content, you see this distribution, some people have nailed it and they were bored on Wednesday because they already get it. Other people got it, but it took them until Saturday and other people ran out of time, didn’t really master the skills, and Monday we were hitting new content and so they started to get left behind. So we started to see if we measure progress in the program and we allow you to move forward based on how fast you master the skills, that’s going to be the successful, that’s going to be what’s going to get people the skills they need by the end of the program.

Kyle Knowles:
So then what happens? I guess explain to me first of all how you get paid and do you just get paid later if someone’s going to take two weeks to learn a skill versus someone that takes two days to learn a skill?

Michael Zaro:
So there’s one price. So it’s up to us to get you through the program at the right… If we accept you in the program, it’s because we believe we can get you through the program in a reasonable amount of time. We can get you into industry. It’s up to you how good a deal it is. It’s to the student’s benefit to get through the program as quickly as possible and because every week you’re at V School costs you money. The average outcome of V School is about $70,000.
Let’s round down to 60,000, so that divided by 12 months means it’s about 5K a month. Every month you stay at V School longer than necessary is $5,000 of opportunity cost. So you don’t want to linger, you don’t want to spend a year or 13 or 14 months. You want to blitz it, get your butt in the industry and making money because you will continue to learn for the rest of your career. You might as well be getting paid to do so instead of sitting around at V School, and we’re the same way. We want you to get done and get on with your life.

Kyle Knowles:
So if you did take longer than a year, it’s not that you had to pay more, it’s just you’re still there. You’re not making money, you’re not out in industry.

Michael Zaro:
Yeah, it’s a waste of your time. The opportunity cost is huge. In fact, that’s what happens at university. It’s supposed to take four years. Average student takes five and a half, six years. There are students that even take six or seven years if they’re working or if they had to retake classes or if they’re just not really pushing hard. The fact is if you spend five years at university and you could have done a school like V School and got through it in one year, you’ve got four years of opportunity costs, four years of missed earnings.
Even if that’s a $60,000 job, that’s a quarter million dollars that you are missing out on. That dwarfs what would’ve you paid in tuition, right? People talk about student debt and racking up expensive tuition costs. That’s a fraction of the expense of college. The real expense is wasting years of your life in potentially prime earning years, getting drunk and hanging out. Just get on with your life, go be productive. So there is a top limit on how long you can be at V School and it’s well beyond what it should take you if you’re putting any meaningful amount of time.

Kyle Knowles:
What’s the fastest someone’s completed V School?

Michael Zaro:
So we measure full completion as start to employment. So there’s the milestone of finishing the skills portion and then there’s an apprenticeship and work experience part, which is unique about us, but full journey. We had someone finish it in just under three months. It was like two days less than three months. Cool story, actually. She was blind, legally blind. it was incredible. I had her show me three different times how she did it because it was incredible to me. So she had headphones, she would hear it auditorily. She was exceptionally good with her keyboard and navigating because the mouse was not very productive. And yeah, I think a couple reasons. Super smart, super hardworking, just really disciplined. I also just think she wasn’t as distracted. She put in the work and really wanted it to happen. She did terrific. Fantastic example and still has the record for fastest time to industry.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. What’s the oldest student that you’ve put through V School, do you think?

Michael Zaro:
I don’t know the exact age, but someone probably in their fifties. There’s a couple that might’ve been in their sixties, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. So they’ll say they were in their fifties.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. And what was the reason that they went to V School?

Michael Zaro:
There’s a couple of broad groups. There’s folks that know what they want to do. They know it’s something in tech and they just want to get there as fast as they can or they just know college is not for them. It’s one of those two things. They’re the young folks. Then there’s folks that are somewhere around 30, 25 to maybe 40. They’re mid-career changer. They did something, they don’t love it or they’ve reached a peak. They’ve done everything they can in that industry.
The folks that are beyond 40, a bunch of different reasons. We’ve had some folks that are coming back after a successful career and just wanted to become more technical. Never had the chance to learn and it was more exploring it. Some want to do it for a startup, they want to be able to build it themselves. They don’t need to rely on other people, it’s just they want to run their own show. We’ve had other people who just were still working and were tired of working with their bodies. They were in construction or they’re driving or doing something that was just harder as they got older. And so being able to sit at a desk, be in an office environment was more conducive to them.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay, and so do you have cohorts or is it just one person going through the curriculum by themselves?

Michael Zaro:
Yeah, great question. So that was one of the key things that changed when we shifted from a time-based model to a mastery-based model. In mastery-based, we don’t have cohorts. So there are start dates once a week just to facilitate onboarding and all the kickoff things, but you move through it as fast as you prove competency. And so as fast as you can demonstrate the skills through technical interviews and other assessment means we have, you move forward in content. So two people that start on the same day could end on the same day, they could end months apart from each other. It just depends on how fast they’re able to acquire the skills.

Kyle Knowles:
So it is online, but how much human, actual live either in person or over Teams or Zoom or whatever? How much of that happens?

Michael Zaro:
Yeah, there’s a really good mix. So the core content is asynchronous or recorded, so that’s what allows people to move through it at various speeds. If you needed a live instructor to get new content, we wouldn’t be able to have hundreds of students moving at different speeds and watching things over and over again. So the core content is asynchronous and recorded, but there are daily check-ins with small groups. There are one-on-ones. Each student has an instructor and a career support person assigned to them. So they have a dedicated resource for any questions they have. There’s large group meetings, there’s workshops, there are things that are done during the business day, nights and weekends. Really we have as many different ways of learning as possible so that you have a buffet of resources in front of you and the student has as many barriers removed as possible and they can focus on learning as fast as they can.
A metric that we track actually on this is how fast a student gets a response to a question. So in a community of hundreds of students at a time, if somebody raises their hand in a classroom, a teacher sees and walks over and helps someone as soon as they can, we wanted to replicate that same experience. One of the things that sucks about online programs is having to wait to get unblocked. So I’m working, I’m learning, I’m trying something. Oh, I got to question. I guess I got to wait until Thursday when they have office hours or I’ll post it to a forum and someone’s going to see it in the next week or so.
But your progress essentially gets stopped at that point and so you’re not able to keep moving through the program because you have some question or clarification you need. That’s one of the biggest limiters of online programs. At V School, the average question gets answered in less than five minutes. And so as soon as somebody says, “Hey, I got a question,” or “I’m struggling on this,” or “I’m working on that,” or “I’m confused, help,” on average is three minutes. Our limiter is under five and that’s true about 16 hours a day. So it extends even into evening and on the weekends.

Kyle Knowles:
So is that through live chat or Slack or something like that?

Michael Zaro:
So it’s primarily through Zoom. So they’ll request help through our Slack community. It’s dedicated for our students, but usually if it’s not a really quick and easy thing, they’ll hop on a Zoom call immediately with an instructor, a TA, a staff member, a career support person and get live one-on-one help within minutes.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. So how many students are enrolled right now?

Michael Zaro:
About over 200.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So you’ve got experience design, cybersecurity and web development, is that right?

Michael Zaro:
Yep.

Kyle Knowles:
And so how did those three categories, the 200, what’s the rough percentages of those three different programs?

Michael Zaro:
We started with the JavaScript web development program and so that was our big program for a long time. We recently launched cybersecurity in June, I believe, and it is on pace to pass the user experience design program already. Experience design is a great program. I feel like it’s still misunderstood. Some people think it’s just graphic design and they’re like, “I don’t know if I’m artistic enough for that.” They don’t realize that it borders on product and there’s business and analysis in it and you’re testing conversion rates. There’s so many different parts of it. I feel like it’s still not really well understood. People know what coding looks like and they know what cybersecurity looks like from a bunch of, or they think it looks like from movies and TV shows. UX design is still something that’s a fledgling space that has a lot of opportunity.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. And then so how many of those students do you think, what’s a rough percentage are full-time? What they’re doing full-time?

Michael Zaro:
That’s a good question. So I don’t know off the top of my head. So it used to be more students were part-time and through COVID that shifted. So when we went online at first, we had lots of students that were full-time plus, 30 to 60 hours a week. And then as COVID went on, people started taking gig work and working from home and their relationship with work changed a lot. And so as a result, we have a lot of people that in the last year or two have come to us that are going through the program more part-time, but it’s because of the way our program is structured. There’s not just a part-time or full-time track. We have people anywhere between 15 or 20 hours a week all the way up to 60 plus. And so there’s a nice spread between there, but I’d say probably a third or full-time and probably two-thirds are part-time.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. And then as far as the web development, the JavaScript, are there other languages that they learn as well or is it just mostly focused on JavaScript?

Michael Zaro:
JavaScript, yeah. When we started, we were Python and then we switched to Django. In fact, this is one of the things I think was really helpful. So our dev shop primarily did Python. So when we did our first program, our first class was Python because that’s what we needed to teach them for the client, and then the subsequent classes, that’s what we were good at. And so we just continued to teach that. What we found was a couple of things. When someone is breaking into industry and doesn’t have a lot of prior experience, the employer’s taking something of a risk on that person. So they want to have as much confidence as possible that they’re going to be able to add value. They don’t necessarily want them to touch the data on the backend, they update the website, add features, fix bugs. Those kinds of things are safer.
And so we wanted students to be able to demonstrate those skills. So we taught a framework called Django. So that’s built on top of Python. It helps students demonstrate their skills more effectively. Little while later, JavaScript was getting more popular and a framework called Angular was a really big deal. And so we adopted that into the curriculum. Learning two languages though, we ultimately decided was more learning curve than was necessary. Our job is to maximize employment. It’s not just running students through some curriculum or whatever we felt like we were good at. We should be teaching what is most effectively going to get that student a job. And so as minimum learning curve as possible, maximum value and product that they can develop is going to be the ticket. So JavaScript front-end and back-end is really, really helpful because the same approximate syntax allows them to build more and be productive faster.

Kyle Knowles:
And they can learn other languages from JavaScript.

Michael Zaro:
A hundred percent. In fact, in the job search. So we have what we call stage one, which is where they learn all of the necessary skills for the career path they’re in, whether it’s web dev, UX design or cybersecurity. And as soon as they’ve proven competency of all those things, they move to what we call stage two. So that’s where essentially we found if you were teaching English before this or a truck driver or coming out of the military, you might have all of the skills to get a job now, but you don’t look the part on your resume, right? You’ve got 15 years of English teacher and nothing as web developer. And so it’s hard to look at that resume and say, “Yep, I’m going to give this person a shot.” So we realized there’s going to be a gap of perception even if they have all the skills.
And so we developed what we call a stage two to really build that out and make a more robust process so that the journey from wherever you were before into a career was a continuous journey, almost like a conveyor belt where every step is accounted for. So in stage two where you’re building experience, you’re going to be working on projects, you’re going to be doing internships and apprenticeships, you’d be doing contract work and you’ll get exposure to other languages, other tools, resources. We had a student who really wanted to learn .NET. His dream job was a company that required .NET. We did not teach him any of it.
He learned everything he was supposed to in our curriculum for JavaScript and it taught him how to learn. Then in stage two, he studied his butt off and learned .NET and two months later had a job with that company. So was he an expert .NET developer? No, but he learned everything needed and showed them, if anything I don’t know, I can learn, just give me a minute and I’ll handle it. And that was super appealing and they hired him.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really cool. So a couple more questions on V School and then I want to talk about Smash Creative and some other things. But so what in your background helped you have the confidence to start basically a programming school? I mean to begin with, it was a programming school, teaching developers, and I know you started that with MealDrop, I guess, but were you coding at MealDrop and you got into this and you thought, well, I can start a school and start teaching people how to be a programmer?

Michael Zaro:
That’s a great question. So I hadn’t actually thought about it until you said that actually. So at MealDrop, no, I wasn’t doing any of the coding. At various age, I did this much.

Kyle Knowles:
Like HTML, CSS, stuff like that.

Michael Zaro:
Yeah, basic front-end stuff. But what really happened is Guy and I have a really cool relationship. When we worked together, so I was still in college, he’s maybe 10, 15 years older than me. So he had a lot more career experience. He’s extremely smart and technical, I had been building software for big companies, very, very impressive. And I was marketing and sales. So there was a tendency for the business folks to look at the technical people and be like, “Ah, that’s my code monkey. He did the nerdy stuff.”
There’s also a tendency for the technical talent to look at the business folks and be like, “Ah, this is just that sales guy or whatever.” He doesn’t actually have skills. He just schmooze his people or talks. So there’s sometimes angst between those two groups and Guy and I really wanted our business to work and we really respected each other. And so I walked him through some of the business things that I had learned and was good at, and he walked me through some of the technical things. And so am I competent developer? Still no, I am not productive, but I can have technical conversations with my team to this day. And that’s largely because Guy showed me the ropes and walked me through that and I was able to run a tech startup. I was able to launch companies, generate revenue and build real businesses as a Latin American studies major. University did not prepare me for this career track because that’s not what I was going there for.
I was going because I liked the topic and I thought I was going to go to dental school, and so it didn’t really matter what I did for undergrad. So the confidence came from I feel like you can do almost anything you want if you are driven enough for it. And I was able to start a business. I was able to learn to code. You can learn almost any skill. You can start a business, you can change your life and change the trajectory that you’re on if you put the effort into it. You got to put it in the right ways. That’s what V School’s job is, help point you in the right direction. Of the millions of hours of content on the internet, we’re going to give you the most important things to learn in the right order that’s going to get you into industry, but it’s your job to put in the effort. And I was able to learn skills on my own as well. I knew it was possible. And so I think that was a big part of it.

Kyle Knowles:
And don’t discount your humanities degree because as a fellow humanities degree earner, I think it taught you probably a lot of things, communication and other things that you used probably as a sales and marketing guy.

Michael Zaro:
I did learn a ton from it. I did. And in fact, this is a very side note, but my capstone class was actually one… There’s several classes that I took along the way that were really impactful for me. My capstone was exceptional. What was so interesting, I can’t remember the exact numbers. So this isn’t to the digit correct, but we were supposed to read something like 20 or 30 books in the semester for our capstone. It’s like, I don’t got time for this, I’m in my senior year. I got stuff. I’m trying to figure out what job I’m going to have, what I’m going to do. And what he taught us was you don’t need to read every word on the page. You need to understand what the book is about, the point they’re trying to make and extract the authors, the case they’re trying to build, right?
They have some opinion and they’re trying to support it through this book, extract that out and you’ve got 90% of the value from the book. And so one of the last classes I took at university was teaching me to do that. I wish that was the first class I took. It would’ve helped with the thousands of pages of textbooks I actually did read. But understanding the purpose or the target condition that I was supposed to accomplish was really, really, really helpful. So that is just one example of a skill that I learned that has translated into business tremendously is how do I get to the nuts and bolts? How do I figure out what the real purpose, the real goal is here? It helps not sitting through really long meetings. It helps not getting tied up in all the context and details. How do I get to points of inflection or areas where we have leverage and we can actually create some kind of impact. I learned that principally out of that capstone class. So shout out humanities majors. You can learn things there too.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. So here’s a question I just thought of. How many entrepreneurs do you know that have an MBA?

Michael Zaro:
Off the top of my head, not a ton. Yeah, I know there are some, but not a ton.

Kyle Knowles:
For sure. I know very few. I know there are some for sure, and I’ve had them on the podcast, but they are few and far between entrepreneurs that start businesses. And I feel like one of the entrepreneur skills that I’m finding by doing this podcast is being able to, like you just said, zero into what they need to know right now. Right? There’s one thing about knowing this wide, I don’t know, deep understanding of business and strategy and everything, but an entrepreneur is learning every day what they need to know that day. That’s my understanding. Do you agree with that?

Michael Zaro:
Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. That’s one of the things that’s most exciting and probably difficult about being an entrepreneur is that the job description varies. What you need to be doing is what your company needs that day to succeed. That’s all it is. At the beginning, it’s probably going to be a lot of sales. You need to find customers, then it’s going to be customer feedback. You got a few customers, how bad did you perform? And then go and fix those things. Then you’re going to be getting better at product development and fixing what you’re offering them. Once you get the hang of it and you’ve got a little model that works, you got to get really good at hiring. You got to build the brands that people want to work for you. There’s a million different skills and it changes, and that’s one of the things some people start businesses just for the money.
And it’s exciting if it works, you might make some money. But there’s a lot of better, more efficient ways of making money that entrepreneurship or at least more sure. I would be an entrepreneur anyway, even if the money always sucked because I’ve never grown as fast as I have as an entrepreneur. You have to learn new things and people are relying on you, all of your team and your employees and their families, your customers and the people that rely on them. They need you to succeed and to continue to be excellent and you have to learn and grow at every stage of your business, and that is addicting. I want to learn and grow and be the best person I can be, and entrepreneurship’s been a terrific method for driving that in me.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really awesome. So how do you stay on top of things and how do you learn things? Are there websites you go to? Blogs? People you follow? What’s your learning process?

Michael Zaro:
Yeah, all of the above. It’s changed over the years. I do try to learn from all kinds of different places. There’s folks I follow online or I read about, but I think one of the biggest things that has helped me is realizing you don’t have to be a master of something. I think Alex Hormozi said something about this where it takes maybe 20 hours to be competent at something, but people are so nervous about what it’s going to take or how long it’s going to be or if they’re cut out for it, that they’ll delay that 20 hours for weeks and months and sometimes years. You’ll just put off starting. Starting makes all the difference. If you just get into it, you’ll figure out what you then need to do differently to learn.
You can read about any skill, but until you actually try to do it, it’s never going to be the same. I can read about shooting a basketball, elbows in, bent knees, follow through, but until someone puts a ball in your hand and you just chuck it and it clanks terribly off the backboard, you don’t learn as much. You got to throw it one time. Even if it goes terribly, yeah, air ball it or it looks ridiculous, you’ll immediately get feedback on it and know what you can do better the next time. That’s been my jam. Just get into it, give it a shot. Don’t be afraid of failing miserably a few times. That’s part of the process. Just get those losses out of the way early and then you’ll be able to iterate and get better.

Kyle Knowles:
To learn by doing.

Michael Zaro:
A hundred percent. Frankly, most people are afraid to do that anyway, so just getting that first rep in, you’re going to beat like 80% of people anyway just because you showed up. Most people are just scared to try, and so just that alone is going to put you in the top 20%. At that point, you’re already above average, so it doesn’t take much longer to get competent and get into that top five or 10%.

Kyle Knowles:
So you’ve mentioned basketball a couple of times. Did you play basketball?

Michael Zaro:
I did. I really enjoyed basketball. I haven’t played as much recently, but yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Did you play in high school?

Michael Zaro:
Yeah. Played growing up in high school, I learned about mastery based in high school because as good as I thought I was at basketball, a friend of mine, John Brockman, was much better, and though he was a year younger, he was bigger and stronger and faster and more talented. So my dreams of going to the NBA were somewhat squashed by a more talented player taking my spot.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. So at V School, how are you gathering and collecting voice of customer and then how often do you meet to iterate? Is this a yearly thing? I mean from talking to you, it sounds like you’re on V3 or something of, because you’ve gone through this evolution, at least for the web development program. Just talk about a little bit about the process, getting customer feedback and turning that into new strategies or new courses or what.

Michael Zaro:
Definitely. So web dev program is probably version 50, so we iterate very quickly and there’s a couple of primary sources of feedback. So what’s going to get us to create a program in the first place is going to be us seeing an imbalance in the market between demand for talent and available talent. The bigger that discrepancy is, the bigger the opportunity we see. And so if it gets large enough, we think if we can effectively solve that, there are plenty of customers, there’s lots of demand, and if we think we can get people skills to fill those jobs, then yeah, that’s going to be a great opportunity. How we decide what curriculum to teach or how to do it’s a pretty cool process. So first thing is you got to start with the end in mind. The point is not just deliver some curriculum and help people pay us tuition, that’s a crappy school.
What we do is go and say you are at V School to get a job, so who’s going to give you the job? Go out and identify hiring partners. We’ll go and talk to a bunch of hiring partners, 10, 20, 50, a hundred. Over time, it ends up being a lot of folks. So you take them and you interview, you survey, you send emails, you do polls, all kinds of different stuff to gather as much insights as you can. What you’re really trying to glean is what skills do you need to see to employ somebody in these roles? And eventually we want to know which of those are most important and what’s going to give our students a competitive advantage or an unfair advantage against a university grad or a bootcamp grad or somebody else. We take all that information and it’s a lot, and ultimately we have to do is say, what’s the 80% that is shared among almost all of them?
That’s the core content that is needed for that skill or for that career or that job title. Now there’s always going to be a 20% that’s we do things a unique way. We use a weird language, we use a weird tool set, we have some special product development method. There’s always that 20% that’s custom and that’s okay. We’re trying to make students maximally employable, and so we’re going to focus on the 80% and then for hiring partners that help us provide feedback and iterate on that process, we’re going to dial in that 20% for them so that they get an advantage. So creates a cool relationship with hiring partners so that we get the guts so that our students can go off and get jobs anywhere. But for the hiring partners that helped us build that and guided us through that development of the programs, we often will build extra curriculum for them so that we can serve students up to them on a silver platter.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really awesome. So why V School? What does the V stand for?

Michael Zaro:
V stands for a bunch of things. So initially, it was a nod to Verisage. That was the dev shop that Guy and I ran together and where V School eventually grew out of. It was also this idea that you go to B-School, it’s a specific skill set you’re learning as business and how to get in there. The d.school out of Stanford was very cool for the design program. They had an awesome brand. We thought it was a cool idea. So that informed a lot of it. Over time, we’ve adopted this idea of it being vocational.
I think the future of education will look significantly different than it does today. Right now we’ve indoctrinated students for decades, for a couple generations at least on go to college to get a job. But college isn’t meant for getting a job. There are so many interesting and amazing things you can learn at college or university, but they aren’t skills to gain employment necessarily. So V School is focused on getting you employed, and so that nod to it being vocational is I think really, really important. I think students in the future, youth in the future will grow up and gain a skill first so that they can start a career and have a nice foundation and then things like university will become things that you’ll do continually over your life. You won’t just go for four years and then be done, but you will continue to learn and continue to study as your interests and your passions, as your hobbies, and potentially later as your career might guide you.
There’s no reason you should be done at university when you’re 22. I have things I want to learn now. I love economics. I love math. I’ll take more of those classes just because they’re fun, but they didn’t get me a job. Latin American studies, as insightful and valuable as it was, didn’t get me where I am in my career. So get people into a job, get them stable, get them able to provide for themselves and their families, and then they will have the ability to go on and learn more of the soft skills or the liberal arts things that are still valuable, just not directly tied to a career.

Kyle Knowles:
What’s the future of V School with generative AI, then and Copilot, those kinds of things?

Michael Zaro:
So it’s super, super interesting and it’s not just about our coding programs, but that affects every program we offer. So generative AI is like many new technologies. It will look scary and it will look like it will displace people, but ultimately I believe it will be one more powerful tool that humans can use and apply for affecting good and increasing productivity. Think of it this way, I can have a learning model or I can leverage generative AI to learn things essentially infinitely faster than I could. And so there are things that I would like to be able to do that I can’t justify taking a week or a year or a decade to learn really, really well, but I can train a model on that and so I can glean much of the value from it. It’s as if you can extend your brain and can train it on an infinite number of things.
And so being able to harness that skill or harness that technology in a way that you can point towards whatever your career is or whatever skill that you are drained in, I think is going to be really, really powerful. So we’re dabbling with some things like that right now in our class for the learning experience just early on and just barely experimenting there. We are definitely working on ways that students will learn to prompt engineer and use these tools, and I think that will just continue, that will get more and more deeply ingrained into our programs and we’ll inform future things that we offer as well.

Kyle Knowles:
Do you see a separate program based around AI?

Michael Zaro:
It does seem like that right now, that seems to be the trajectory. So when we decide what programs we’re going to offer, they’re not going to be the very bleeding edge of things because markets change really quickly. And like I said, we look for a huge imbalance between talent available and talent that’s being demanded. And so for really new things, there are killer jobs that pay a lot of money for AI specialists, prompt engineers, that kind of thing, but there’s not the volume of them yet and what the skills needed look like is not always clear. It’s really variable and how you demonstrate that is not a known pathway yet.
One of the values of V School is that we’re demystifying the path to a career in the tech industry, and so that’s not clear yet on AI. There’s new tools all the time. There aren’t clear winners. There’s not one platform to rule them all, and so we can teach you something that may get replaced in a week or a month. And so as it becomes more clear and as industry learns how to use AI more effectively and the demand for that goes up, it’s not just a handful of jobs making 300,000, but as there are tens and hundreds of thousands of jobs, we will definitely move into that space.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. You’re a CEO at two different companies.

Michael Zaro:
Yes.

Kyle Knowles:
And how much time are you spending at each?

Michael Zaro:
Yeah, so more at V School, but Smash is terrific. I love what I do there. We’ve got an awesome team there as well.

Kyle Knowles:
Smash Creative, let’s talk about that. How did you come up with the idea of Smash Creative?

Michael Zaro:
Yeah, it’s another example of a customer finding me instead of me having a brilliant idea in the shower. So while I was running Verisage with Guy, my wife had our first baby, which was super exciting. We were a broke college students, and so while she was pregnant, I guess it started with some people saying, “You’re the cutest pregnant lady. How do you do that?” You don’t always feel the prettiest when you’re pregnant and your body’s changing, things are difficult. You can be sick. My wife is a very, very cute pregnant lady, and so she had some friends asking her for tips and she’s like, “Yeah, maybe I’ll blog about this. Give women tips on how to feel beautiful when you’re pregnant.” Anyway, that blog she asked for some help with, she ran it, but I would play a support role, and I designed and built her website.
So a couple of friends that followed her said, “Hey, I love your blog. It’s so cute. Who built it?” She’s like, “Actually, my husband did.” So I did a few more and we ended up having a dozen or so mommy blogs, fashion blogs, different blogs in that space from influencers that we had built at Verisage. And so eventually we had enough of them that I noticed one day on our web traffic that it started to tick up unnaturally. I was like, “Whoa, what happened? Did we have a press release go out? Did we got some award?” And I realized they were links back from these blogs that we had built. So Verisage was focused on big software for medium and large companies. We worked for Logitech and MasterCard and North American Bancard and state governments, all kinds of big stuff. We’re really proud of that.
And also there’s this growing line of business for influencers and fashion bloggers and mommy bloggers. So we recognized that in the analytics and thought, what if we put a page up just for them so that they didn’t land on the Verisage page and you get completely confused? And so built a page said, hey, yes, we actually do work for influencers, mommy bloggers, that kind of thing. And yeah, all of a sudden we started getting these calls. We realized, holy cow, there’s a whole line of business here.
So that grew inside of Verisage as well. So we had the main dev shop, we had V School that was growing. We had Smash Creative, we ran several other things. We acquired a group called Reef3. That was a interesting play in the finance industry. Anyway, lots of interesting businesses we started and sold and grew along the ways. Smash grew because we had a really repeatable acquisition model. We built beautiful sites, and as people saw those, these blogs had high traffic, they pointed back to our site. And so it became this really virtuous cycle where the more good work we did, the more people saw our work, the more people call us and ask for good work. And it grew into its own business and eventually we split it out of Verisage.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. How many employees at Smash Creative?

Michael Zaro:
About 15 right now. We’ve always been remote. V School was in person and very in person. We had housing and buildings and stuff like that and then switched. Smash has always been remote, and so we’ve got people all over the place across the United States. We’ve got a number of digital nomad types. We’ve got a few in Spain, one in Costa Rica, one in Peru. Yeah, we’ve got an awesome crew.

Kyle Knowles:
And is it just specializing in website development and design?

Michael Zaro:
So initially we built blogs and then a lot of our clients were starting to dabble in other businesses. They were doing affiliate links for shopping things. Then they do collaborations with brands. But they got to the point where they had this audience and they wanted to launch other businesses, but they weren’t always sure how. And so often they would come to us and we realized that was a really good opportunity. We had all the skills necessary to help them, and we were unique in that we really deeply understood the influencer space. And so yeah, we started working with tons of them. So they would use their audience and their following usually on Instagram, and they would launch a line of athletic clothing. They would launch a line of hats, of makeup, of purses, of anything they wanted to do. So it went from blogs to websites to shops to now we do apps and custom software development, flash sale platforms. I mean, we’ve done all kinds of awesome stuff now.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really cool. So do you host these apps and sites and things like that?

Michael Zaro:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Michael Zaro:
Yeah, yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Is the model more like they’re paying you a monthly fee, that kind of situation, or how does that work?

Michael Zaro:
Sort of. Hosting isn’t where we make much money. It’s more of a favor we do for clients to make sure that their sites are secure and safe and well-managed. And frankly, most of our clients are not terribly technical, and so they don’t want to be managing that. They want us to just handle that so that they can focus on content creation and branding and their side of the business. So there’s two ways that people work with Smash right now. There’s projects that they can be small or big. It can be a blog website, Shopify site, anything like that. It may also be big. If you’ve got custom software, an app or platform, those are all projects. If you’ve got a need, it could just be branding, happy to work with you, that’d be awesome. What we’re doing a lot more of now is we found as these companies have grown, they realize they’re in this really interesting spot for a company.
They don’t need 20 people, but it doesn’t always make sense to hire a full-time person. And so they’re usually small organizations. They’re not great at hiring and training and staffing and all those things. And so they started turning to us. So a lot of our work now is supporting these clients that we’ve helped them launch businesses. So now we’re the team behind the scenes. They’re the face and the brand, and they build the audience and we handle the tech, the design, the building, often the site or shop management, inventory management. Sometimes we’ll even run their emails or create graphics or content for them behind the scenes.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So CEO at V School, CEO Smash Creative, are you doing similar things at both companies or is there a superpower or fun things you like to do at V School or at Smash Creative?

Michael Zaro:
So the businesses are really different. And so I think with the overlap is there are so many interesting things that I will learn at each business that I’m like, oh, I can see how it applied to the other one. So for example, over the last six months or so, the way we run product at V School has changed. We’re adopting Product Kata as more of our method for product development, and that’s been really impactful. And so as I’ve seen how that’s impacted and elevated what we do at V School, I’ve stalked to the Smash team now and say, “Hey, this is something I’ve been learning. I think it’s really effective. Here’s how I think it could work for us.”
Similarly, on the Smash side, we had so much success driving leads through channel partners. These clients that we had worked with in the past who links in their footers or on their sites would drive back to us and produce all kinds of new revenue. We thought, that’s awesome. How do we get some kind of recurring cycle like that in V School? And so we have been exploring different ways of scholarships where we partner with nonprofits. They’ll promote a scholarship opportunity at V School out to their communities. It could be youth interested in tech, women in tech, career changers in Milwaukee, whatever the group is. We found that by partnering with them, they’re able to promote our message out further. A lesson learned at Smash was able to be applied at V School and help the company in a different way.

Kyle Knowles:
Just a two-second description of Product Kata. Is that what you said? I’ve never heard of it before.

Michael Zaro:
So I’m not the expert. This is something that I’m learning on as well. But really there’s two things that strike me that are valuable about it. And this is probably not the correct pitch for it, but there’s two things. There’s a big difference between strategy and planning. Often we think of them as we accidentally conflate them or we just call it strategic planning and we’re just going to plan important stuff. But really planning is just deciding a list of tasks that you’re going to accomplish. Strategy is deciding which tasks you should even bother doing. So having a really clear strategy is understanding with which customers and with what services are you going to have the advantage. There are students who are a perfect fit for V School, someone who is driven, who is focused, who wants to change careers quickly. That’s a perfect student for us.
Somebody who wants the university experience and whose parents are paying for it and doesn’t know what they want in life is not a great student for us. They should just go to college and screw around for five years. That’s not what we do. And so a clear strategy is how do we identify students who are driven and focused and want to change careers? Because that’s where we will win. If I pitch V School to somebody who wants to go and make friends for five years and explore life and their options, we’re not appealing. So Kata says, what is the key objective you’re trying to accomplish? And so you have to know your strategy to be able to pick that. You got to be really honest about what’s the target condition, what’s the goal, and where are we today? How far away are we from the target condition?
And the Kata part is you’re going to iterate through you’ll have a list of things that you might want to work on. You say, “Hey, I think this is the best thing,” or “I think this is the biggest blocker,” and your team will come up with this stuff. People on the ground at the business will have insights and ideas. Instead of the boss just coming in and saying, “Hey, here’s the list of 17 things we’ve got to get done this quarter,” your team is really empowered to say, “Hey, we know what the goal is and we know if we’re short of that, here are the three things that we need to be doing to close that gap.” And so it’s much more about closing the gap between where you are today and where you want to be and iterating through that in a real process instead of, “Hey, these are all the things on our backlog. We finally have some time. Let’s do them.” It’s not a very effective way of solving problems. That’s just an effective way of doing work. But I don’t want to do work. I want to solve problems.

Kyle Knowles:
Where does the word Kata come from?

Michael Zaro:
I believe it’s Japanese. I think it’s a variant of Kanban product development or project management approach.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. So your wife helped, I guess, influence or almost launch a business, right?

Michael Zaro:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
How much did she pay you for her website?

Michael Zaro:
She paid four children and many hugs and kisses. My wife is amazing.

Kyle Knowles:
How important is your life partner, your wife, to your success as an entrepreneur?

Michael Zaro:
My wife is incredible. And over the years, it has become even more clear to me how wonderful she is. So we have four wonderful kids and a big furry dog, and I can’t imagine how I could manage all of the things in our life and try to run a business in a similar way to so how me and Guy worked together where we didn’t just completely separate and we each had our own jobs. I learned to be more technical. He learned about some of the sales process. It’s been very similar with my wife. We do have our roles. She’s at home largely and with her family and raising our children and managing the home.
But I support her in that. I cook most of the dinners. I help with cooking. We split our roles up because it’s our family, we share those roles. And for managing the business things, she’s an incredible support to me. So I’ll think through things with her. I’ll ask her questions. Sometimes we’re just a sounding board, so I’ll talk through something that I’m stressed about and she can help me see it from a different point of view because she’s not buried in it every day and she doesn’t have all the overwhelm that comes with just being so busy during the week.

Kyle Knowles:
I noticed in Smash Creative, I went through the website a little bit. I didn’t see any males on the website, at least the few pages that I went around. So is your wife influencing some of that too? Meaning are you getting a female perspective in some of the things that you do, whether it’s for V School, if they’re female enrollees to V School or Smash Creative with these influencers, and I don’t know if they’re mommy bloggers, but it seems like it’s predominantly female-focused.

Michael Zaro:
So two things. So early on, I think my wife was really involved in shaping that because it was her and her friends or people that had seen her blog. And so it was all one degree of separation from my wife. And so that set us on a path that happened to be very female-focused. We’ve worked with guys along the way and we’ve worked with just businesses that employ men and women, but it’s not as common to see a company like ours who works with almost exclusively women and just has so many successful female clients that they’ve worked with and helped and supported over the years.
I mean, for those listeners in Utah that are aware of the influencer space, I mean Cara Loren, Rachel Purcell, Emily Jackson are some of the Utah folks, Emily Gemma. We’ve worked with women all over the country, several bachelorettes, folks that have been on TV, TV personalities, actresses, directors, coaches, authors, all kinds of personalities and people with an audience or a following. And while my wife isn’t super involved in Smash these days, I think the path that we were set on because of her influence and because of her impact on the business early on continues to be felt today.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s great. And so if someone doesn’t have a following yet, do you help anyone like that build a following?

Michael Zaro:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. We definitely still work with folks that are smaller or don’t have a large following. Fact is one of the things they need to focus on first is the building of an audience. They need to find their voice, what resonates with their audience, what’s their unique style or vision or approach? And so yes, we can help with that, we will get them started, help them find their voice, and then as they do, and as the audience grows, it unlocks lots of other opportunities for them. And that’s one of the things that we’ve been really effective at is helping influencers become brands and launch businesses outside of blogging.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. Thank you for being so generous with your time. I know we’ve gone a little bit over. I have a lightning round of questions for you. Favorite candy bar.

Michael Zaro:
Butterfinger.

Kyle Knowles:
Favorite musical artist.

Michael Zaro:
Frou Frou.

Kyle Knowles:
I don’t-

Michael Zaro:
Imogen Heap. She had a side band.

Kyle Knowles:
Favorite cereal.

Michael Zaro:
Oh, there’s this premium protein cereal you can get at Costco. It’s not the best cereal ever, but I’ve been in a fitness challenge with some friends for a while and that’s a cheat code for getting your protein in the day.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. Mac or PC?

Michael Zaro:
Mac.

Kyle Knowles:
Google or Microsoft?

Michael Zaro:
Google.

Kyle Knowles:
Dogs or cats?

Michael Zaro:
Neither. Just kidding. I love my dog.

Kyle Knowles:
Phantom or Les Mis.

Michael Zaro:
Phantom.

Kyle Knowles:
What’s the book that you recommend the most to people?

Michael Zaro:
The Rise of Superman. It is about extreme athletes, but really it’s about finding flow state. There’s a scientist who uses his study of extreme athletes to demonstrate how they’ve been able to advance their sports much quicker than traditional sports because there are so many characteristics of extreme sports like risk of death, living on the edge of your capabilities versus what your capacity is, extreme focus. There’s 19 variables that many are present there that it teaches you how you can access flow state and get into a more creative flow quicker. It’s a fun read because it really appealed to me and struck a lot of chords and really helped me.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s going in my queue. It sounds awesome. What’s one thing that most people don’t know about you?

Michael Zaro:
I trained jujitsu for a while and I’m reasonably good. I haven’t trained with official belts, but I trained for small tangent. I served a LDS mission in Las Vegas and in high school I was fairly big and strong. I played sports and then I just walked for two years, all day long talking to people about Jesus and families. And so I lost a lot of weight. I went from 220 down to 170 or 180.
For the first time in my life, I felt a little nervous or unsafe when I was in weird neighborhoods. And I met a missionary one day who wasn’t playing basketball or soccer like most of them, and got to talking to him. He did some prize fighting to earn money for his mission and was a talented boxer and jujitsu practitioner. So he taught me. Once a week, we have a little bit of time off a couple hours a week. And so he taught me for a few months there and then I looped it into my training. And then after I got back I did a few years at college. And yeah, not a normal thing I think tall, gangly people do.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really cool. What other sports did you play?

Michael Zaro:
So lots of soccer growing up. I got really tall and so they said you should probably do basketball. I played football for a little bit. I like it a lot more now than I did in high school. I’m a new skier. I snowboarded before. I don’t know if I can call myself a scuba diver, but I am certified and I’ve gone half a dozen times and really enjoy it. Outdoors hiking. Just did a big 25-mile hike with my uncle last weekend, so that was fun.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really cool. So thank you again, Michael, for being so generous with your time.

Michael Zaro:
Thanks for having me.

Kyle Knowles:
Being on the podcast and I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors. I really enjoyed the conversation tonight, and thank you for being here.

Michael Zaro:
This is a blast, man. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it, Kyle. I think this is my first official podcast.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, now you’re going to get booked.

Michael Zaro:
Oh, boy.

Kyle Knowles:
The pressure’s on me to make you sound good, I guess. That’s what it really is.