Julie Bort, Editor, Startups & Venture Capital, TechCrunch

Julie Bort has been in tech journalism long enough to have had not one, but two tenures of 13 plus years – first at Network World and then at Business Insider, now editor of VCs and startups at TechCrunch. You might be surprised to learn that one of the most prolific voices in B2B Tech reporting nearly became a teacher, and you'll definitely be surprised to hear that she and her husband gave it a go at being scuba bums (her term) on the island of Maui. 

Julie joined us to talk about tech culture, the year she spent diving off the coast of Hawaii, and where she thinks tech startups are headed for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B Tech's, top 200 media and influencers, including Julie. Here's our chat with Julie, enjoy.

Transcript

Dave Reddy (00:00):

Julie Bort has been in tech journalism long enough to have had not one, but two tenures of 13 plus years – first at Network World and then at Business Insider, now editor of VCs and startups at TechCrunch. You might be surprised to learn that one of the most prolific voices in B2B Tech reporting nearly became a teacher, and you'll definitely be surprised to hear that she and her husband gave it a go at being scuba bums, her term on the island of Maui. Julie joined us to talk about tech culture, the year she spent diving off the coast of Hawaii, and where she thinks tech startups are headed for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B Tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Julie. Here's our chat with Julie and Joy. Julie, thanks so much for being on the show today. We really appreciate having you.

Julie Bort (01:14):

Hi, Dave. My pleasure.

Dave Reddy (01:17):

So let's jump right in. So you were born in Chicago, but you didn't necessarily stay there. So, where in essence, did you grow up? Or maybe the question is, where didn't you grow up?

Julie Bort (01:27):

Well, I didn't move around that much, but yeah, I was born in Chicago. I've got extended family there, but high school and college. My family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, so I went to a SU and high school there. And so yeah, I am a child of the Midwest and mostly the west, though I would say the desert. My brother's still there, but I don't love the desert that much. It's beautiful in the spring, but it wasn't my jam and met my husband there. And then we moved around a bit before eventually settling where I am, which is Colorado, which is also unusual for a tech reporter. But yeah, I had this little bit of skipping around, scuba diving bump for a bit, and then I came back to corporate job in California and started writing in tech. And then my career just sort of followed me. I left, I left California and thought I was leaving tech journalism and it followed me. People kept wanting me to write for them. So here I am, decades later, still Colorado and writing for a premium publication.

Dave Reddy (02:35):

So what I heard was Hawaii and scuba bums. So tell me about that. That's like everybody's dream. What happened to UK? I understand you and your husband moved there for a year and just

Julie Bort (02:46):

We did. Yeah. So this was long ago actually, and this was not straight out of college. I had gotten out of college, I had a corporate job. It was stressful. And a friend of ours that we had known in college called Up out of the blue, turned out he quit his job and he moved to Maui and he was running a dive shop there. And my husband is a master scuba instructor and I'm a dive master, and that's how we met. We met when I was training to learn how to scuba dive, and we were like, well, if he could do it, we could do it. And we quit our corporate jobs and we went to Maui and we worked for a place called Maui Dye Shop for a year, scuba bums, and it was really, really fun and everything, but basically it's a low income job. It's what you would think. It's a beach bum job, and it was really, really, really fun. But we were basically running up our credit cards to live, so we looked at each other, we're like, we're not going to have kids do this. We need to go back to the real world. So we went back to California and got corporate jobs again. 

Dave Reddy (03:55):

Well, I give you credit for figuring that out every time I go back to Hawaii, and I've only been a handful of times, but it is one of my favorite places on earth, if not my favorite place on earth. You can always spot the person who's been there too long.

Julie Bort (04:09):

You can definitely spot that person. And we talk about going back, we almost had a chance to buy some property there, and I used to dream about it. Those kinds of things where you have vivid dreams, like the colors are super bright. I used to dream about it and moving back, but now we actually just vacation there regularly. I feel like that scratches the itch. Colorado is pretty awesome. I can't complain about the way my career in life shaked out. I'm in a rare circumstance where I have a pretty high level successful career and I'm still living in a place that I chose for myself though I love California as well. I loved the Bay Area.

Dave Reddy (04:51):

What did mom and dad do jumping back a bit to earlier in your life?

Julie Bort (04:55):

Yeah, not terribly exciting or influential in what I'm doing. My dad was a businessman. He was a small businessman. He owned his own record shops. Now, this was back in the day when people would come in. There's still old fashioned record shops like that. But yeah, I grew up in a record shop where people browse through the records, organized alphabetically. There's going to be people that listening to this that have no idea what we're talking about, but that's the experience I do. You might you have to go to an old fashioned store to get that experience. And then my mom was basically a homemaker, a stay-at-home mom. But I say that though, she did work off and on all kinds of different jobs. She worked in offices and receptionist, and one thing she did while I was growing up is she ran the deli, friends of theirs owned a delicatessen, and for a number of years she was the manager of that deli. I remember we ate a lot of delicatessen food growing up. She worked for this. Yeah. But I would say mostly my whole formative years, she was,

Dave Reddy (06:02):

I got to ask, so record shop means he must have, you don't run a record shop if you don't love music. So what was playing in your house as you were growing up?

Julie Bort (06:11):

I mean, honestly, my parents were not real giant music really. I don't really know. My dad passed away when I was very young. Very suddenly. Yeah, I was 24 at the time. I'm a lot older than that now. And so I think these conversations that I might've had as an adult, I didn't get a chance to have. So it wasn't that. But I do remember one of his dear, dear friends was a record producer for a label. And I don't ask me what the name of the label is. I am not a big music trivia person, anything like that. But I do remember that one of their big stars that they signed was Foreigner. This is way back in the day. So I remember my older sister got to go to a foreigner concert backstage, and that was the highlight of her preteen years or whatever, the stuff that my dad was in. But it was in Chicago and it was in, yeah, so he had a record shop and he was, that's cool. Hot blood check. And see, they weren't super successful, but it was definitely scrappy, kind of a way to grow up. So just barely in the middle class, just barely.

Dave Reddy (07:26):

To your earlier point, a record shop owner and a housewife, was it a storytelling family? How did the journalism bug bite? Because you went to a great journalism school.

Julie Bort (07:36):

Well, I had grown up in Phoenix by that time, and so my dad wasn't running a record shop after we moved. He was doing a variety of other things, other businesses. And so I don't know, I was a creative writer, to be honest. Here's what happened. I loved to write as a kid. I was one of those kids that was writing stories. Other kids would draw or whatever. I would be writing stories. And then as I grew up, people were, I was like, oh, I'm, I'm going to get an English degree, I'm going to study. And then they were all like, well, are you going to teach? So I actually did get a degree in teaching. I never taught. I got an undergrad degree in journalism, and it turned out I was like, oh, well, here, hello world. I can actually make a living writing. I don't have to teach other people's writing. I can go do it myself. So yeah, that's sort of what happened. And I don't know, one thing led to another as these things do, one job led to another.

Dave Reddy (08:39):

And so you started out your career during the golden age of tech magazines and other thing, much like record shops that some people listening to this may not understand, but you'd go into a Barnes and Noble and there used to be a magazine rack and there were about a hundred different tech titles. You wrote for Land Times, you wrote for VAR Business, you wrote a couple of books. And at that point, were you a freelancer or were you staff?

Julie Bort (09:06):

Well, I had a really successful freelance career, but yeah, no, I started out as staff staffed, a tiny little tech publication that no longer exists. And then a friend of mine hired me to a tech publication in, it was part of a group of tech publications that also no longer exists. But yeah, it was the one and only time I got laid off, she hired me and a month later there was an all hands meeting and the publication shut down a month after they hired me, a month after they approached me from another job. Ouch. Kind of terrifying. It was terrifying, but that I put out a bunch of calls and then an editor at an IDG publication took pity on me and gave me a freelance job and introduced me to other people who also gave me freelance work. And yeah, I was quite a successful freelance writer. I mean, earning more money than I was as a full-time worker.

(10:15):

It would even be considered a lot of money today. What I did back then, the issue, and I wrote a book, but the issue was I had little kids and I was coming back to work after putting them to bed, nine till midnight, and they went to daycare. But still, just the way those things work out. Anyway, I was working myself into the ground freelancing, and so then I had a job to go permanently into an IDG publication, which I took, and I stayed there 13 years. It was not the most exciting journalism I did at Network World, but it was fun. It was fun enough. I traveled a bit. I did all special issues. I did a lot of research based journalism. It really taught me a lot. We did this national salary survey. We did a lot of foundational stuff there, and it was a great job. It was a great stable job for raising kids. And then I got poached by Business Insider when they were tiny and no one had ever heard of them.

Dave Reddy (11:19):

Let's go back to network world. You were there, as you said, 13 years and Yes, and I hope my networking clients, forgive me for saying this, networking is not the most exciting thing in the world, but it does make the world go round, at least from a tech perspective, and I think we often take it for granted. Over the course of 13 years, how much innovation did you see? Because things change and I'm sure since then that was 2011 when you left, things have changed even more crazily.

Julie Bort (11:47):

Well, I would say enterprise computing, knowing the enterprise IT landscape really helped me in my career a lot. Obviously the pace of innovation is always, it was crazy in tech then. It's crazy in tech now. It's always been crazy. It will continue to be crazy. And the cool thing about being a tech journalist, I had dabbled, I have done a few other bits of writing, like political journalism, just a tiny bit in some of these other worlds and even sports journalism, those worlds are kind of ugly. They're really just painful

Dave Reddy (12:26):

Former sports writer. I know

Julie Bort (12:28):

The people you're writing about, I think they're so highly, it's just very orchestrated or it's ugly political journalism, the stuff that happens behind the scenes just nasty. Anyway, in tech journalism, I can literally call up the brightest minds in the world. I call up the brightest minds in the world, they get on the phone with me and they talk to me. And so you're always learning something. There's always a lot to learn, and the innovation is very, very fast everywhere. It still is, and it will continue to be. So it's just a fun job.

Dave Reddy (13:04):

So that was quite the Ship. Business Insider was a new title. Title, I don't know how new in 2011, but it was relatively new. How did you end up, I mean, 13 years, and I understand that. Was it just that you wanted to try something new or

Julie Bort (13:18):

Yeah, I liked it again that they have slang words for tri magazines. We all worked really hard, so I don't use slang words for anyone. I don't use slang words for the PR professional. I don't do any of that. I feel like everyone works really hard and I feel like people genuinely are trying their best. Mostly I have stories. I have war stories, of course stories, but which people are not trying their best. But in any case, so it was a big move back then. But yes, I was bored to tears. My kids were older and I could then jump into more of the type of business. Insider was tiny and had a terrible reputation. I talked to all my friends, I was like, should I even do this? They're known for just a bunch of key slideshows or whatever, but they were trying to hire, well, they needed to hire an enterprise tech reporter.

(14:23):

They had a giant, it was ad driven. They had a giant contract and they needed the material and they needed someone who actually knew what they were talking about. So that's why they were offering me the job. But it turned out they also did want to go more into more serious journalism. They really did want to write about the personalities and about the upside and about the downside and about the startups and about all those kinds of things. So yeah, I was part of that transition at Business Insider. I'm glad I did it, but it was hard. I went from a stodgy company to a startup that was in its infancy, so it was like dictum of the day, you know what I mean? We're going to do things this way. They'd come in on Tuesday, we're going to do things this way. So yeah, it was hard, but it was fun.

Dave Reddy (15:17):

And also given that they were a startup, one of the things Business Insider is known for is well covering startups. And so you ended up joining or running a team, not sure which, at some point in 2020 on startups, correct.

Julie Bort (15:30):

Well, between joining, I was at Business Insider for two or 14 years too,

(15:37):

But so I was their first serious tech reporter, their first serious tech reporter of any kind. Their first, well, we had gadget tech reporters that were very, very good, but of covering the industry in the business and their enterprise coverage. And then I was their first investigative reporter, so I did giant investigations, Uber Investigations in Google, you can look it up. So years of that, which was really great learning experience and really, really fun, but also difficult. Those were difficult. I wrote a story. There were a lot of stories about workplace culture issues, people who really abused by their workplaces, and they can be, you're almost a therapist when you're talking to these workers about what's going on. And then you also have to make sure that you have the documents and you have the facts. And anyway, companies are not happy about these kinds of stories, so it's difficult on both sides.

(16:40):

So after doing that, being an investigative reporter, their first one, but now they have many really great ones, some of whom I helped train, many whom I trained, and then went to other publications. I decided I wanted to run a team. And so they were thinking about, actually, they were think they were trying to create a TechCrunch competitor team there. And so I launched that team and hired a bunch of great people, hired a lot of people, trained a lot of people, get them training in scoops, and they were getting poached left. There's so many of them out there now working for major publications that I'm happy that I had a small hand in their careers.

Dave Reddy (17:24):

Business Insider has been a bit of a revolving door for years, and that's a good thing in some ways because that means you've got good people.

Julie Bort (17:31):

Well, it's a poaching ground. It might look like a revolving door, but it's sort of like the reverse that happens is that people come there and they really have a reputation for taking, there's a lot of interns and if they show promise, they hire them and then they get trained up and then they get poached. So it's more like a poaching ground than anything else. Yeah, it happens all the time.

Dave Reddy (17:58):

Let's talk a moment about workplace culture. Since you did so many investigations into that, it feels like there was maybe just before and then during the pandemic, there was sort of a golden age for workers, and that seems to be going away. Do you agree? And why do you think that is? What is it about the Valley? When I say the Valley, I mean tech.

Julie Bort (18:17):

Well, there was a period of rapid hiring. It was the whole ERP era, the whole low interest rate, and it hit a frenzy in 2020 and 2021. And so there was a period of just rapid hiring during that time in which the tech employees had the upper hand. But I don't know that it's ever been a golden h for tech employees. I do feel like the people that don't have a voice in the tech industry, they're tech employees, most of these work contracts are pretty draconian. I mean, you have to sign India, you can't talk about your job at all. And then it also breeds a culture of the tech bros culture. There were a lot of years where startups, they probably still do this to some extent, but I mean the AI industry, cerebral valley on some of that's happening there, but there was a lot of years where startups were building their cultures. It was your home life. So it was beer and it was nap pods and it was your playroom, but really it was, you don't have a life.

Dave Reddy (19:37):

Stay here.

Julie Bort (19:38):

Yes,

Dave Reddy (19:39):

24/7, we'll feed you. We'll even put a bed up for you, but don't leave,

Julie Bort (19:43):

But it's work and you don't have a voice and there's ins and outs. And if someone asked you out and you didn't want to date them, there were ugly things that happen in startups that way. And so it didn't really create a culture, created a culture where lots of bad behavior could occur, and I think goes through ups and downs with that. I think there's still plenty of plenty of stories. I do feel like it's the startup employee. It's the startup employees that lose out when bad behaviors happening at the top, in my opinion. But I'm a journalist, so I want to put my parents.

Dave Reddy (20:33):

You're allowed to have opinions on this show. I'm not. You are. Do you see a time, are you hopeful when tech culture finally sort of wakes up and is like, oh, maybe this isn't the best way to run businesses.

Julie Bort (20:48):

I am seeing zero evidence of it so far. I do think that it's not all anybody. It's not all anything. There are certainly amazing places to work, amazing examples of it. I just think the incentives get misaligned pretty regularly when it comes to tech, and that can breed bad behavior.

Dave Reddy (21:13):

So I presume you and the folks you're working with at TechCrunch are doing some of that. Let's talk first about the shift to tech crunch. Again, long run, 13 to 14 years, and then you yourself were poached out of business decider. How'd you end up at TechCrunch?

Julie Bort (21:28):

Well, I knew Connie, our editor in chief, and I had tried to poach her, and then she got promoted and we connected and she had a job opening. So it took a while. The coach became the coachee. And I also do, I want to emphasize though too, what I love about tech, I mentioned this earlier, so I think that it does breed bad behavior and there's, it's important to shine a light on it, but it also breeds amazing. Cool. I've been writing about startups for decades now, and you think I'm the most jaded person in the world, but I am constantly reading pitches or talking to founders and being like, that's an amazing idea. That's really cool. That's really great. That's really going to help people. This is really great. It's this seesaw effect where, yeah, okay, I do feel like there's cultural issues, but I also feel like it's amazing. The tech is amazing. People are working hard. They're bringing their ushering, change it dominant in everybody's lives. So I am excited about tech. I like writing about it. I love startups.

Dave Reddy (22:46):

Lots of change of TechCrunch also. How's it going?

Julie Bort (22:50):

Yeah, TechCrunch is, TechCrunch has a core being about itself. It has a core solid play. Its feet are firmly on the ground. We know what we're doing and we know what we're about. And the media industry, people forget. The media industry is a for-profit industry. It's created more than shared billionaires. We're a for-profit industry, and so publications are subject to the for-profit winds that blow. So yes, we got sold from one corporate entity to another corporate entity. Yeah, so how I tell people what the experience of that is, is that, you know how when you start a new job your first week, and it sounds like your first three months, you're like, how do I do this thing? What button do I hit? Or what's the software for this? Or who do I ask about a benefits

Speaker 3 (23:53):

Question? Imagine your whole company. It's your whole company. We're all just like, what button do we push? And so that has been the last couple

Julie Bort (24:03):

Of weeks, but it's just, it's fine. We're all writing about startups and we're breaking scoops and we're enjoying the tech industry same as we were before the sale happened.

Dave Reddy (24:15):

Yeah, I went through a couple of mergers at old firms, and it's like you said, it's, it's a whole new ball game. All of a sudden you have to prove yourself again, or at least that's how you feel.

Julie Bort (24:25):

I felt like it's more just the details. It's more like because someone that establishes digs in, gets roots, figures out how the system works, then improves it. That's why I've been at my companies for so long, but you just don't know who those people are. Your roots are picked up and moved kind of a thing. It's not so much proving yourself. I feel like TechCrunch is quite proven in the tech industry. We know what we're about, and that's all the same. It's more just like, what's the backend system that we're using to do this thing now? How do I embed a photo like little piddly things that you wind up having to rework out?

Dave Reddy (25:09):

It's an interesting time for tech and the VC space. It always is, but there's some added color right around now. What are you and your reporters seeing? I mean, obviously, AI is driving most, but there are other things. What else is hot? And of course, if you want to talk about AI, you're more than welcome to, which tends to improve my listenership. But what else is hot besides AI?

Julie Bort (25:32):

Well, biotech seems hot. We don't cover biotech too seriously. A tech wrenching is–it really requires specialized knowledge, but you are seeing some more crossover on the more classic VCs investing in biotech. So, help tech is fairly hot and biotech is hot. Interestingly enough, FinTech is making a comeback, and we're starting to see, I mean, Klarna is weight in the wings to IPO, or having other just about ready to IPO. So fintech's making a comeback. Yeah, it's all about AI. AI is getting all the attention lately, but it's AI in a lot of different ways. So obviously there's the foundational model makers that is already narrowing as fast as that's moving, that's narrowing down. But then, the rest of it is people just implementing AI into the other ways they're serving consumers and businesses. So yeah, right now AI is the rage, but I would say it's not all the same flavors of AI. And every industry has its AI flavor. It's AI usage, but that doesn't necessarily make it an AI. So yeah, we're seeing activity all over the place.

Dave Reddy (26:51):

Sure,

Julie Bort (26:51):

Yeah.

Dave Reddy (26:53):

What do you make of the market? It's funny, I wrote this question a month ago, and is the chaotic economy going to upset the venture market again? And the chaos today is different than when I wrote it a month ago, but it's still here. So what do you make of that? You mentioned that Klar is considering an IPO. Are we going to get to a place where it's smooth sailing and you're going to see more investment or more consistent investment, more IPOs, or are we just going to,

Julie Bort (27:23):

I mean, the IPO market is going to have to open eventually, and I think these investors in funds cannot wait forever to get their returns out. But they also, because the IPO market has been so closed down, they are now creating all these other ways to get their funds out if they need to, including tender offers and all that private sales stuff. So eventually that it will heat up. Oh, here's the best way to describe it. I have a VC acquaintance who describe it as it's a seesaw between fear and greed, A fear and greed cycle. We're in a heavy greed cycle when it comes to all things ai, and we're in a heavy fear cycle when it comes to everything else. And eventually, as soon as the fear lifts, it will become greed again, and everything will get hot and overheated. It'll crash. And so I think that's a function of human nature. I don't think it's an economic condition function. So I foresee more of that happening, A healthy slate of companies going public and making lots of money and encouraging more to come out. No one knows exactly when that is, but it does feel like a tidal wave behind a gate. So as soon as a couple of companies open that gate, we will get the tidal wave and then we'll see.

Dave Reddy (29:05):

Over the past four months, it's been interesting out of Washington, Trump Musk, although Musk seems to have moved back into the background, at least for the time being. So that has forced tech media to take a long look at that, to cover that a lot, cover the executive orders, what's going on with Musk himself. How are you guys handling that, and how long do you expect this to last?

Julie Bort (29:32):

Well, how long is this presidency? We have a roadmap. We had a previous Trump presidency, and then there was just lots of news from that presidency the whole time. So I personally expect it's going to last the whole time, but I don't know how TechCrunch handles it. The interesting thing about it is that it's not really in the startup world. So our bread and butter focus, it's like waves that is shifting us. It impacts us, and we do have to cover it, but it's not our primary focus. We're not political, so it's not our primary focus. I do think that things shift so quickly that if you take a breath, you may discover that the story we're about to post is already out of date. It's been two hours. So stuff like that is happening. It's fun, though.

Dave Reddy (30:36):

Little patience is helpful these days.

Julie Bort (30:38):

Yeah, I mean, news is fun.

Dave Reddy (30:41):

So we do have to talk about AI, and I want to talk about AI in journalism. Good, bad, both. And how specifically are you and your folks using it at TechCrunch?

Julie Bort (30:53):

Well, we don't have a dictum to use it. My former employer apparently has, which did not occur while I was there. So I don't have any direct inside skinny about any of that. But I mean, so many of our reporters are covering AI and the ones that are recovering AI very closely, they have subscriptions and they are using ai, and sometimes they're messing with models before they write, and so they're using it like a curious observer would use it, that kind of thing. At one point we had a subscription for some AI images. Every story has to have an image. I don't know what's up with that. The subscription that we had for that has gone away, and I think they're thinking through all of that. It's still a bit of a legal landmine for publications because we don't know what they're training on, and we don't want to be party to if models are training on data that they shouldn't have.

(31:58):

So that's kind of up in the air. I personally just use it. What did Sam Altman say? He said older people are using OpenAI like a Google replacement, and younger people are running their lives with it. I'm not running my lives with AI yet. I use it daily as research Google and also testing. If I'm writing about something, I might go take a look, that kind of thing. So as far as AI in the newsroom right now, AI is a terrible writer. I mean, it's just a terrible writer. It just doesn't, thank God for that. Telling stories, and I don't know whether that'll change or not, but we have this little node embedded in our CMS. And lots of publications have this, right? Because these little nodes, they do things like, they help you view your SEO before you publish something. You can just see how it's going to show up on Google and it tells you, oh, you don't have enough keywords or whatever.

(33:04):

The little things, the SEO of the day folks instruct us to do as journalists to put in our post, and we have this little note in there. And one of the things that likes to do is rate your writing. It's kind of nasty about it, this little ai, and it's like, this story is terrible, but if it was up to ai, we'd all be writing third graders. It can't compose a compelling narrative. So at the point that that changes, at the point that that changes and AI really can do the job of a journalist, it's going to come in and be a journalist.

(33:38):

I don't have any strong opinions. It should never do that. The thing about it though is that most of my job is talking to people and finding out what's going on and in what the most interesting thing is Right now, AI can't do that part. As far as I could tell, they can't. And even if they could replicate talking to people, they can summarize, they can't find the most interesting part. So for now, I would say AI isn't coming into the newsroom like a junior reporter. I think that some publications I think of has experimented with it for doing things like sports reporting, where mostly people just want to know what the stats are. There's not a lot of narrative in that or even some earnings reporting, that kind of thing. But the thing is, right now, ai, AI still lies. I mean, it still makes stuff up. It just makes it up. And in fact, there was a recent news articles about people picking up syndicated things that turned out to be an AI made up fabricated thing. So it has to fix that. And I mean, that's an inherent problem with the way models work. Eventually, they will figure out ways to make that more reliable, whether or not then that actually comes into more newsrooms to take up junior reporting tasks. I don't know. We are not doing that at TechCrunch. We're all writing our own stories.

Dave Reddy (35:14):

Big left turn here. So in addition to being a master diver, you're a member of a bike patrol. What does that entail?

Julie Bort (35:21):

Oh, I haven't done any of that in a really long time. I didn't really like it. I am a big mountain biker. I like to ride my mountain bike. And so I measure myself by Colorado standards. So the women I ride with stuff, they ride just terrifying. They can go down terrifying things. They can go up things. You're like, how are you riding up that cliff? I don't ride that well. I would say that if the average person rode with me, they would call me an expert rider. But by Colorado standards, I'm intermediate advanced on a good day, and I don't come anywhere near expert experts. I literally know people that jump off cliffs and are videotaped. I'm not of that elk, but I really like to ride my bike a lot and I'm not bad at it. And I did some racing for a few years, and I'm part of some international, I pay my days and I'm part of some international groups, and I go out and trail build. So when I volunteer my time, people want me to volunteer my time to write press releases or help them with media stuff. But when I volunteer my time, I go out and do trail work and stuff. It's not a good match.

Speaker 3 (36:38):

My husband is in construction and he knows everything about it. I can barely dig a ditch. I really don't like it. Tell me where you want me to move the rocks. I write for a living. I don't know. I can move rocks. I can put a rock from here to there. Tell me I

Julie Bort (36:50):

Can't design a trail anyway, that's what I do. Anyway, and so I joined. I had joined and I did go get backcountry certification, and I was in a group that did bike patrol so that if you came across someone who was injured or whatever, but my family laughs about things like that. So my husband, he's in construction, that's what he does for a living, but he also was an EMT and he was a paramedic and he was on the volunteer fire patrol. He loves all things to do with the human body. I am very squeamish. I'm very squeamish. I

Speaker 3 (37:27):

Don't want anything to do with the human body. I could never be a doctor. I don't like icky things going in out, anything like that.

Julie Bort (37:39):

So anyway, I took this back patrolling bike thing, and if I do ever come across someone in need, no doubt, I will step up and do something on my cell phone, of course. But I was just like, I'm never going to

Speaker 3 (37:55):

Learn how to split someone and drag them on my bag out of the back country. I'm going to stand here and wait for the helicopter to come in and not look is what I would do. So wasn't a good fit for my particular personality, but

Julie Bort (38:09):

Yeah. Anyway, that's what that's about.

Dave Reddy (38:11):

There's a lot of choices here. This is always the last question I ask, and you've got a lot of choices here. So Chicago, Arizona, California, Hawaii, or Colorado.

Julie Bort (38:24):

Well, I've lived in Colorado. Colorado is the best lifestyle for cost of living of any place I've ever lived. But it isn't inexpensive and we live in a house now that we couldn't afford to buy as these things go. So yeah, I really love living here, but I love them all. I mean, I love the ocean. I love being outside. I love the mountains. Yeah, all of it's great. I feel like wherever you are, I don't know, go outside, look at the stars, breathe the fresh air, count, your blessings, all those kinds of things. You can't go wrong if you stay focused on what you have instead of what you don't have.

Dave Reddy (39:07):

On that note, Julie, thank you so much for being on the show. We really appreciate. That was a lot of fun.

Julie Bort (39:12):

Great. Thank you for having me.

Dave Reddy (39:13):

I'd like to thank you all for listening today, and once again, a big thank you to our guest, Julie Bort of TechCrunch. Join us again next month when we interview yet another member of the B2B Tech Top 200. In the meantime, if you've got feedback on today's podcast or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valley Marketing and how we identified the B2B tech top 200, be sure to drop me an email at d ready@bigvalley.co. That's DRE double DY at Big Valley, all one word.co. No M. You can also email the whole team at pressing matters@bigvalley.co. Once again, thanks for listening and as always, think big.