Jacob Quint 26:58
Yeah, and especially for the kickoff of projects, you almost need, like, once you have an intimate knowledge of the building, and you’re on site, new, you’ve been through everything, it’s much easier to talk about remote viewing, but talking about a construction project conceptually without actually seeing it is extremely difficult.
Greg Owens 27:15
Right, right. Yeah, I mean, it just even sometimes just even finding like the room inside a building that we’re gonna be working in is and navigating your way through security from where to park to where you’re going to get through security to, you know, each step, each step through the whole building. Right. Your job, interesting, logistic challenges, right?
Jacob Quint 27:34
It is, yeah, San Francisco is a beautiful city. But it comes with a lot of challenges to be here.
Greg Owens 27:40
Right? Is the building, you’re remodeling an old one too?
Jacob Quint 27:44
Is it? It’s it’s pretty old. I think it was built in maybe the 1970s. It’s been through a couple iterations. But it’s pretty unique in the fact that it’s a standalone building in San Francisco. Yeah. And so it’s, it’s, we feel pretty fortunate to have found it, I think it’s going to suit our needs really, really well and give us the r&d space to lay the groundwork to make be very successful in the future with this company.
Greg Owens 28:07
Yeah. And I would guess that the company is, is deciding to build in San Francisco. It’s just not it’s not an expensive, they must have thought about it a lot. Yeah, me, but it’s also where a tremendous amount of the talent is, and talent that you want to have showing up.
Jacob Quint 28:23
Yeah, I mean, when they offered me my job, I was ready to go just about anywhere in the country and ready to move anywhere. And for the right job. And I ended up moving, you know, an hour and 20 minutes out the one on one. You know, I when I was weighing it, I was talking, you know, to my girlfriend and thinking about it. And ultimately, I cannot I will never regret taking time to go live in San Francisco to try and build the company later on in my life when I look back on it. Right. And a lot of other people with all the colleges all pack everything. It’s it’s a high cost of living, but it’s also it’s a pretty effective place.
Greg Owens 28:57
Yeah, yeah. And it’s getting better right now. I mean, over the last couple years, it really went through some major changes that made it sort of like a ghost town and a lot of ways when we do a lot of work in the city. And so it was kind of just eerie, right? Like, it just didn’t feel right anymore. And you know, it’s unbelievable amount of theft and that kind of stuff was happening where we had to like, you know, nothing in our car like trucks or vans that could be broken in and stolen it would be it would just be taken during the daytime, right? And that kind of stuff and it’s getting better again, right now it feels better feels feels like things have picked up a lot more.
Jacob Quint 29:34
It does the middle of COVID I spent some time down here and San Francisco was getting pretty rough. But you know, I look back to it. And my superheroes Batman and you know, his whole ethos is about protecting Gotham City and it’s like cities by nature of humanity. You get all these people compress in an area bad stuffs gonna happen but it takes a lot of good people to try and make the place just a little bit better everyday too. And I do feel like Sam be especially in San Francisco have the appetite for that type of challenge.
Greg Owens 30:04
Right. Right. The rain also helped back in October, November. I mean, it’s sad that it hasn’t rained that much since then. But then major rainstorm, clean things up. Yes. Well, you know, during the drought, they stopped powerwashing sidewalks and things right. You know, though, I mean, we’re still in a drought. But at least we got a lot of rain clinic clean stuff up, right? Yeah, yeah, that goes a long way. Yeah, we have a build. There’s a building, we do work for one of the autonomous car companies in San Francisco, and they have a building in San Francisco. And what blows me away is like, every, they get tremendous amounts of graffiti. And granted, they haven’t white, they painted their building white with a black strip on it, right. It’s a perfect canvas for graffiti. And it’s, it’s mind boggling to me. And I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t think anybody does, because we go paint it. And then that night, it’s tagged again, like massively not even just a little bit like the whole building.
Jacob Quint 31:02
It’s pretty impressive how quickly they get it up.
Greg Owens 31:04
It’s mind boggling how impressive it is. Because that’s not cheap, either, right? Like the rattle rattle cans or not, it’s like $8 they can or something like that. And somehow they’re, you know, I keep telling the client like, hey, you know, maybe we maybe we just host what you guys could just host a like graffiti, you know, contest, and who can do the best graffiti artwork on your building?
Jacob Quint 31:27
Yeah. And so we’re kind of looking at that right now, you know, our building is down on Bryan Street, right across from Costco in San Francisco. So it’s an area that gets a lot of spray paint. That’s where this wall here in the building, like there’s parts of it that are tagged up some of its really, really good, but you know, I live in the mission now. And walking around. Now, there’s a lot of graffiti around the mission. But there’s also especially on 24th Street, just these beautiful murals that people that street artists, and they don’t get tagged, the plain buildings are the ones that get tagged. Right. And so I do think there’s something to be said, for just having civic art projects and making something. It’s a lot you think a lot more about destroying something beautiful than destroying an ugly building?
Greg Owens 32:11
Yeah, yeah. I think there’s a I think some of the artists will respect the art, right? Yeah,
Jacob Quint 32:17
they do. And it’s, you know, ultimately, it’s, it’s pretty cool. Sometimes, you know, there’s, there’s places where you don’t like to see graffiti, but some of the some of it, it’s cool to see the expression of the great, especially the mission at night, it’s so colorful, and so beautiful. And so and so much so much of it is so well done some really, really fun place to walk around. So you can do that everywhere. Yeah, it starts.
Greg Owens 32:40
And, you know, it speaks to so many different cultures, too, right? There’s such cultural variety in San Francisco that gives it its I mean, that’s why I think a lot of people love it. There’s such a cultural variety of food and art and experiences and that kind of thing. Yeah. Especially in our mission. Yeah.
Jacob Quint 32:59
Yeah. It’s a small city, as far as its scope, but there is so much variety everywhere you go.
Greg Owens 33:05
Right, right. And it’s a destination for people all over the world. Whenever I told them. I live next to San Francisco, you know, just all you hear is people gloating about their time they came to San Francisco and visited right.
Jacob Quint 33:18
Yeah, yeah. And I grew up as a young kid around the Seattle area. And I love Seattle. Yeah, San Francisco is pretty close. I would argue it is. Yeah, yeah. I’m sure the people here would argue that San Francisco is better. But I could never leave my own city.
Greg Owens 33:33
Right. Right. Right. Um, I wanted to touch on something else. But before we end here in a little bit, but um, I love that you find a lot of freedom in startups. Yeah, that that right. And I started thinking about it. I was like, You’re right. Like, like, there’s you because you’re having to create so much more. I mean, you have a job. That’s a facilities manager job. But because it’s a startup, there’s so much creativity, I think, that you’re having to do on a day to day is, and then you’re surviving that chaos, speak more to that.
Jacob Quint 34:05
Okay. So imagine, probably like with you with painting, you’ve been painting for a long time, you probably got started to get really good at painting, when you started teaching other people how to do it. In the startup world I come from, you know, I used to work for pro build construction a long time ago, very corporate company, and I got to see the inside of their system. Then after that, I went and ran a small Auto Glass business in Southern Oregon, and got to learn to run a small business and mark it on a small scale like holistic level. And combining all of those for every successive job. From there. I’ve just picked up new skills and I get to use my entire toolbox at the startup because if somebody goes who knows how to write an SOP about this machine, I can do that. And then I can take people and train them how to do that. And then who can do it’s just, there’s just so many different examples. Basically, I’m not, I’m not a chemical engineer, but I was still able to put together and run a beauty extraction system that does phase transitions from gas to liquid to extract THC oil, because I was at a startup, right. So ultimately running those butane extraction systems requires generally engineering degrees and things like that nice steady science, I study engineering, I study all that stuff, but I don’t have the beef paper that says that I did. And so being there, it allows me to work in those environments, and I get a being at a startup, you don’t have the capital to hire everybody you need. So I get to work with a lot of contractors that are very specialized, and I get to learn so much from working with them. And, you know, it’s just, it’s a really, really good way to stay competitive, to keep yourself growing, to keep to just keep your skills growing. So you don’t start to stagnate. And you know, there’s so much that once you once you settle down, once you get comfortable once you stop growing, to me, it’s a very scary thing. And I don’t want to do that for a long time. And so being in these environments where we have, you know, an aligned goal that we’re working towards, intensely is a very, very exciting place to be.
Greg Owens 36:05
Yeah, that’s, that’s amazing. It reminds me of the entrepreneurial world, like being just an owner of a company too, right? There’s just so many hats, you have to wear on a regular basis. Right? And some you enjoy. You enjoy more. And then some, you just have to kind of suffer through and get it done. Because it needs to be done.
Jacob Quint 36:22
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then as you grow, and you know, it’s, it’s not everybody can have the type of life that they look back. And I had this huge impact on the world, but especially if the opportunity we have here with Mission Barnes, there’s a very real chance that if it’s not us, I hope it’s us. If it’s not somebody in the sphere, very, very, or multiple people that sphere, there’s plenty of real estate out there for people to go after. And this could very, in a very real way impact food security for the human race moving into the future.
Greg Owens 36:54
And especially if we become like, Elon Musk wants us to be an interplanetary species. Yeah, absolutely. It’s gonna be a more and more of a necessity to be able to grow food on Mars, right?
Jacob Quint 37:06
Well, yeah. And you know, to give you a little bit of an idea, we did a biopsy on a pig, I can’t five years ago, maybe. And we’ve been using the same cells from that one pig that is still alive the entire time to grow all the products we’ve ever made, you know, we have partnerships with food manufacturers, and we’re actually making like, store ready sausages now that, you know, I tried it the other day for the first time, I would be happy with them. And I love me. So I would be happy, pretty happy with them getting them at a restaurant.
Greg Owens 37:36
And then what is what does your mom think of you being in this industry is she’s probably excited for you because you’re excited about it all?
Jacob Quint 37:43
Yeah, you so Yeah, exactly. She doesn’t love it. You know, it competes with her industries, farmers tend to have a very set viewpoint based on just the nature of their work, which you know, that’s fair. That’s, that’s what affects them. That’s what they care about. But she sees how excited I am for the change. And she’s happy for me to be able to go do it for me, though. And it’s not going what we’re doing is not a threat to meet the meat industry at all. Not only and it’s certainly not a threat to something at her size, there’s always going to be a market for steak and beef. What I worry about is where you go to these farms, say in China in the US do where they have 100,000 cattle. And they are they are pretty bad conditions.
Greg Owens 38:27
I once watched the CEO of Neiman Neyman ranch there was in MYRIN here, and he was speaking he’s like, look, what cow Do you really want to eat? Right? And he showed a picture of like, a bunch of one of those massive ranches with 100,000 Cows all stuck together in the hot sun and desert feed coming in, or his cows like on the Murrin coastline, you know, looking at the ocean with the sea breeze and eating green grass. Yes. And I was like, huh, I’ve never thought of it that way. I’m gonna pay a little more to eat some of these cows.
Jacob Quint 39:04
And I can tell you with no agenda, a taste much better.
Greg Owens 39:09
Yeah. And I realized that too, right? I mean, like an In and Out Burger is amazing, though. But their sauce and it’s their process, and I didn’t have to cook it. But when I’m making a steak, it’s so much better to have like that. It really is. It really is it makes a big difference. So and then to sort of wrap things up here a little bit. What I like to point towards or help people with on this podcast is your thoughts on like, if somebody wanted to get into a startup business to get into this industry, like how what would you recommend at this point in time, how they go about doing something like that? If they’re if they find interest in it.
Jacob Quint 39:50
So I would say it depends, you know, it depends on your resume where you went to school, that kind of stuff. If you have technical degrees in science or engineering, it’s you can go just go target what you want. If you don’t You just want to get into it. When I left the wine industry, I was gonna take six months off or so I got kind of bored. And I just got a phone call and basically started the cannabis company as an entry level and boy, knowing taking a bet on myself knowing that they had a high need for skilled people, and knowing that I would be doing what I like to do, which is managing things very quickly. And there was, so if you have those skills, take the bet on yourself, go in there. And, you know, when you get hired and tell them and be like, Yeah, I’ll come in and work for you for 20-25 bucks an hour. Now, we’re gonna talk about this again, in 60 days, we’re gonna talk about it again in six months, and we’re gonna get up to, you know, take, take the risk on yourself, and absolutely the best the what I think the best advice I can give to anybody, go to jobs, where you can learn skills, go get paid to learn, if you’re not going to go to college, get paid to learn. If you’re not going to be learning, don’t be there. Like it’s otherwise you’re basically wasting your time and wasting their time. Obviously, those conditions can change if you have a family to support and all that stuff. But if you don’t have all those other pressures, if you’re not learning, find somewhere else you can.
Greg Owens 41:05
No man, that’s great advice if I dropped out at the age of 16, out of high school, but I I had always been like knocking on doors and finding jobs. So I wasn’t my parents were super worried and like, how are you going to survive? And what are you going to do and how you’re going to make a living without an education. But in my mind, I was like, Well, I know how to work. I know how to do labor, labor, like construction work, like I learned enough. And I knew that I could knock on doors and talk to people and and start super low. And I even I learned early on to the to just like when they’d say how much to like rake their yard, I would say look, I’ll rake the yard and then you pay me what you think it’s worth. Because I because I would underbid myself all the time. And they would pay way more. And I was like, This is great. And then I learned also that if I rake the lawn all day long outside in New York, and it’s super hot, you know, like, just a really hard labor. And then, but then like they had me watch their dog for the weekend. And they pay me like 100 bucks for the whole weekend watching the dog, which was super just fun. I was like, Huh. There’s there’s differences in how people perceive money, right? There really is. Yeah, but then just getting gaining that knowledge, like learning learning different trades along the way, was super, super helpful. And I mean, I’m, I take it for granted a lot and how much knowledge because I’ve been exposed to so many things right. And it sounds like you had the same thing in your childhood, working on a ranch right to have all that knowledge of different aspects of work
Jacob Quint 42:40
very much. So yeah, hone your skills. Practice talking to people, you know, that was I went took a public speaking class back in Manhattan one time, I could have taken it anywhere. But I want to go to Manhattan. So I did it.
Greg Owens 42:52
Was it a Dale Carnegie course? Yes, it was nice. Those hands.
Jacob Quint 42:55
If you get the chance to do that stuff. practice those skills that you need to talk to people and you develop all that stuff. Everything else you need, your toolbox becomes more full. And then you have the confidence to go do it.
Greg Owens 43:08
Yeah, I still I do. I do a lot of public speaking. And I still go to Toastmasters. Right? Yeah, constantly Hone mine try to hone my skills. Because I find that the like you just said in so many aspects of managing people to get my own thoughts clear in my own head. It helps me to speak,
Jacob Quint 43:28
right, I had to do that I used to do BNI. And I did that for years. And every once a week, every week, I had to stand up and talk for 30 seconds, 90 seconds, that every couple months, I had to go give a 10 minute presentation. And outside of school, you don’t get environments do that. And then I was careers, it is extremely important to be able to talk to people and represent yourself well and market yourself.
Greg Owens 43:52
Yeah. And to manage people are like you were saying, like, a store to explain how to use a piece of equipment or that kind of thing and hone those skills. Right? That’s absolutely. And then how about getting into a startup business? Because you you went after startups?
Jacob Quint 44:08
I have. Yes. They. So if you’re interested in a particular field, research what’s happening in that field, and you can look for startups, especially around the Bay Area, they’re everywhere. They’re there. They’re not that difficult to find. I’ve been fortunate and the ones that I’ve gotten to I’ve been called by recruiters, and I’ve talked to some some I’ve said no to and a couple I’ve said yes to, but you can definitely go find them and target them. And you know, most people don’t get rich working at startups. And a lot of people think that’s the reason to do it. I say the more the reason to do it is because you get to do stuff that you’re not qualified for. And then you become qualified for it.
Greg Owens 44:44
And it also sounded like you believed in the mission. Absolutely. Right. So that that was a big piece of that you looked at. We looked like that how they were going to try to change the world. You’re like, Hey, I could be a part of that.
Jacob Quint 44:55
Absolutely. Right. And you know, I work with a lot of scientists who are very, very, very smart. but they don’t know how to build buildings.
Greg Owens 45:00
Right, right. Yeah, that’s good. That’s great. Well, thank you. How can people find out more about you and Mission Barns?
Jacob Quint 45:10
I kind of like operate from the background. So there’s not much out there. But Mission Barns in particular, there’s quite a few articles about Mission Barns, look them up. The stuff we’re doing is very fascinating. And yeah, is truly could really be one of the next great innovations and for the human race. So yeah.
Greg Owens 45:28
Well, we’ll put we’ll put a link to their website, on this podcast and that kind of stuff. Is it okay to put a link to your LinkedIn or?
Jacob Quint 45:36
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Out there. I’ll talk to people. I just don’t like to put myself in the forefront unless I have to.
Greg Owens 45:41
Right. Right. Right. Well, thank you so much for being on our podcast today. Jacob. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you here.
Jacob Quint 45:49
Yeah, it’s been a pleasure talking to you, too. It’s been cool listening to a couple of podcasts. I’ll check out more about my, like people you talk to him talk about?
Greg Owens 45:55
Yeah, it’s been interesting because I, I started this right before the pandemic. And a friend convinced me I should, I should do it and get into it. And, and then it turned out to be great during the pandemic, because, you know, the, there was an opportunity, I had more time on my hands. And then I joined continue, because I just keep learning all kinds of new things. Every time I have a podcast, I mean, we’ve had, you know, just learning about Mission Barns was just phenomenal, right, and hearing about what you’re up to, and that kind of thing. And then all the other different types of like, the the amount of AI that’s coming into facilities management, right. And like, I think we’ve had two or three podcasts now on that subject from different companies. Right, and just been fascinating to see what’s coming up. And it really are about the world world through this through this media, right. Yeah, it really is. Alright, thanks again for being on the Watching Paint Dry podcast.
Jacob Quint 46:50
You’re welcome. I appreciate you having me.
Outro 47:02
Thanks for listening to the Watching Paint Dry podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.