Nick Crabbs: One Paradigm Shift Away From Fulfillment
Nick is a partner and founding member of Vynyl, a product development firm that works with corporations, institutions, and investors to build unique mobile and web applications that are technically excellent, visually appealing, and create real & measurable business value.
Prior to his work with Vynyl, Nick spent nearly a decade working for some of the nation’s largest banking institutions, local municipalities, and large enterprise environments as an IT specialist and manager. Embracing his more entrepreneurial endeavors, community engagement, and tech evangelism, Nick has worked with several start-ups, local community organizations, and leadership with large-scale events to leverage his knowledge and expertise in technology, management, and recruiting to judge events, offer mentorship, speak on panels, and contribute to a growing tech and entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Transcript
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[Music]
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welcome to the one away show presented by bw missions i am brian wish and i am
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your host and thanks so much for being here on this show i sit down with compelling entrepreneurs authors and rising leaders
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to talk through their most transformative relationships experiences and epiphanies
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curated with entrepreneurial leaders in mind we’ll dig into these finite moments in people’s lives and understand how
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they helped set their path forward nick krabs is a partner and founding
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member of vinyl a product development firm that works for corporations institutions and investors to build
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unique mobile web applications that are technically excellent visually appealing and create real and measurable business
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value prior to his work with vinyl nick spent nearly a decade working for some of the nation’s largest banking
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institutions local municipalities and large enterprise environments as an i.t specialist and manager
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embracing his more entrepreneurial endeavors community engagement and tech evangelism nick has worked with several
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startups local community organizations and leadership with large-scale events to leverage his knowledge and expertise
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in technology management and recruiting to judge events offer mentorship speak on panels and contribute to a growing
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tech and entrepreneurial ecosystem [Music]
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nick welcome to the one away show brian thanks so much for having me yeah
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so excited to have you here been fun watching you uh stand tall in front of the boise
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innovation community the last couple years um so nick what is the 108 moment that you
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want to share with us today yeah well you know of course without giving the the
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full introduction and backstory of my whole life and where i was born and all that good stuff
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uh i think uh you know mine might be strange from your other guests in the sense that
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i kind of looked at a series of small moments that have culminated in something that’s that’s pretty important
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to me and i’ll generally quantify this as you know about
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six years ago seven years ago somewhere in that range um you know i made this
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unintentional transition from you know working on my business all the time you know knows the grinder
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doing doing that stuff uh to volunteering a whole bunch of my time in different community
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organizations and that includes you know what is now boise entrepreneur week which is the the
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state’s largest um kind of entrepreneurial community-led focused event um it’s a week-long thing that
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happens here in boise every year that’s been pretty crazy to you know being on a school
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board and what that experience has especially been like over the last two years with covid and
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and you know being advisors on companies and college programs and
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you know blah blah blah blah blah and i get so much fulfillment from
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you know spending my time really at the end of it trying to help other people being successful
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at their ambitions and the weird thing is i think in my business life i’ve always kind of taken
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that position as well like i’ve always had another founder that i was being brought in to be like the number two guy
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right evp c whatever right but there was always someone else who i was kind of being there to try and like help elevate and
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and you know run around behind them with a bucket trying to pick up the the water that was flying off of what they were
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doing and uh you know i found in community work and in ecosystem building like it’s
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a lot of the same kind of stuff it’s just uh you’re doing it on a more macro scale for your region than than just
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inside your company wow well that’s a lot to pick pull away from that answer and uh you know what i
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was thinking about as you were talking was you know the founder type you know
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they’re so heads down they’re still in that tunnel of let me build build build build build and
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come up for air you know when i’m 40 and uh yeah go to the beach and call it a day but you seems like
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you were looking at a little more forethought to okay i can still
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live some passions and build passions but i can also expand and evolve in layers and help in different
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areas in the community what made you maybe look outside your let’s just maybe
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call it your comfort zone uh of work and say you know maybe there’s more to the world than just business and i can help
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and serve in different ways yeah no that’s a great question um
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you know i think the catalyst was that you know as a business owner operator i
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you know you’re involved in a lot of this kind of stuff you maybe get asked to speak at a conference or you
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get asked to hop on a podcast or like well like you’re certainly a resource that different um organizations might
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pull from to come kind of offer some perspective and and
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you know i always felt like that stuff and i’m using that very generally here could like go better
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right especially in my local community i was like man if i was in that position i would do it this that or whatever way
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right and of course entrepreneurs you’re like problem solvers so like in every interaction you can’t even help it like
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whether you want to or not when someone involves you in something there’s always this thing that happens in your brain
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you’re like man if i was gonna do this this way i’d have a totally different way of doing it right like we can’t help it uh maybe we’re a little broken
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because of that um and so i don’t know i just would always have that kind of feeling behind these
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interactions and um the municipality was actually the first ones that asked me to like run
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something right the city i had you know kind of sent them an email on some ideas on a program they
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were working on and and one of the points that i made was you really need to have an entrepreneur run this like entrepreneurs are built to
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like especially for an entrepreneurial program you need to have an entrepreneur that can give the correct advice like
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understand the problems that other entrepreneurs are having if you just have like a city official or a college
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professor or something you’re going to like miss the you’re going to miss the beat right it’s not going to be quite right because they don’t really live
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that life and understand those problems um and so the city i have to credit them they’re like great you should run it and
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my first gut reaction was like oh man i should have never opened my mouth what was i thinking like
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what have i done um but you know that was kind of the start of it was was just like trying to
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offer some advice to someone else’s program on how maybe they should go about doing it
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um yeah i mean i i think you’re right right when you’re born a certain way or you
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develop a certain muscle you’re always looking at how can something be a little bit better and so no matter what line of
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work you’re in community service or community work or work work uh you’re always going to maybe have that edge to
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finesse things in a way that you you have a vision to shape it well whether you’re an entrepreneur or not it’s the
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entrepreneurial mindset right that’s really what this is and you know some of us are more sick with it than others
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but that’s what it is right there’s like there’s some percentage of the population that just like has the entrepreneurial mindset whether they
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went to school for it or whether they didn’t it doesn’t really matter your background right like you have it or you don’t i think you can work on building
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it right it’s not to say that those are stationary places but um yeah that’s what it is and and uh you
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know i think that’s a big component of it totally so i couldn’t agree more with you i think
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you’re right just having that mindset is just in life is it’s such a tool toolkit that you can leverage in a
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way that can help others uh which you’ve done uh you know nick i’m curious you know you
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you going back to what you said at the beginning of wanting to get involved in the community
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and seeing your talents used in multiple ways was there something inside you that maybe felt a little unfulfilled or or
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shallow or you just wanted to expand the horizons and then the second part to
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that question is when you started to dip your feet in the water on
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the community side did any thing inside of you change like a sense
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of aliveness or a different kind of purpose i’m just trying to understand the feeling of the the two
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yeah i mean there’s a there’s probably a few different ways to answer that
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question and and some of it is like why why would you spend you know 450 hours a
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year and more um you know volunteering your time outside of just working on your business
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i still have a business to work on right i still have three partners and we run a you know a software company and and
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that’s like still a reality every day too but i think that for me
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um it was a really great opportunity to flex some muscles that i knew i had and
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i used them in my business life no doubt um but like
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it wasn’t quite the same of like going out and kind of being the master of your domain volunteering your time right you
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don’t have to like ask for permission very often when you’re just like showing up to help right
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and so that’s like i thought that was something that i was going to enjoy about doing these and like it’s
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specifically around like running boys the entrepreneur week for instance right like given a program like that you know
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it really was pretty evergreen there they hadn’t like they hadn’t built anything really yet and so i i kind of
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got the opportunity to just turn it into what it was um and and that was like a ton of fun to
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think through all those things and i think the other thing about doing this stuff is you learn yourself like
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this has been some fraction of business school for me right like the amount of learning that i got to do by interacting
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with all these other people their startups their problems their fundraising cycles that they’re
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trying to go through like i get a small piece of the benefit of
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every single one of those just in like understanding how the solution was arrived at and and like that’s awesome
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that’s super awesome and so you’re asking about change like how have i changed through this well yeah i have a
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lot different perspectives a lot of different perspectives on how you build community how you fundraise how you run
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a startup what a good idea what a bad idea is i mean like fundamentally different than what i
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would have thought five or six years ago okay so let’s take that and build on
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that one step further you you you come into boise startup week i love
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what you said a lot about you don’t ask for permission when you’re just showing up to serve and help i mean
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that is so true and so pure for you you said there are a lot of things that you would have done
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differently um that or you’re thinking about things a lot
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differently than when you started especially let’s say in relation to building community so
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five years ago how how were you thinking about building community and how has that changed since you’ve gotten your feet in the
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trenches yeah i mean wow like i could we could we could do a whole talk and a whiteboard
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about just that no doubt but um you know i think one of the biggest one
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is is understanding how important relationships and relationship building
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truly is in helping others access their opportunities or their best lives and so
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what i mean by that is i think when i first started i was like looking for mic drop moments right i was like looking
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for these opportunities to like walk in a room and like say a really smart thing and like
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figuratively drop the mic and be like thanks folks i’m here all week right like i think i was looking for moments
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like that at times um and i thought that was a way to to get something right i thought that just
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being like invited to being on the stage or in the news article or like whatever
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it was like i thought that was some pathway to get something and i realized like that’s actually the
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the least beneficial part of doing this stuff actually the more beneficial part
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is the person who invited you to come like how can you help them what can you do for them because that’s like a
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lasting lifelong you know useful relationship that you both can get like
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great interaction from have fine fulfillment like that that’s the better part than whether or not you
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did some other activity and then the mic drop moments are really irrelevant right like then you don’t have to
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it doesn’t matter you just show up and like all right well i see it this way like you know maybe people don’t agree with me maybe it’s the wrong way like
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you can be a lot more you know maybe egalitarian with the way that you talk about things you certainly don’t have to be as definitive in how
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you talk about things and i think it’s a big difference uh what do they say this only the sith speak in absolutes right
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so now it’s like a weird thing that like sets me off is when i hear people talking these really crazy absolutes i’m
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like ah you know they’re evil because they’re because they like haven’t they haven’t gone through the cycle to be a
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little bit more egalitarian and how they think about this stuff well to your point i mean i think a lot of people will pay a lot of money for
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just the mic drop moments or their they work too they might drop moments yet i think what you’re saying what i’m
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hearing you say is you know the mic the mic drop moments are the byproducts so when you get to them
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you can just show up and be yourself and it’s just like keep going on with your day and say yeah that was good but you
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know you’re not doing it for the mic drop moments you’re doing it because of all these small moments that maybe created a bigger moment yeah i i i mean
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i’ve gotten to a point where i don’t even know that that like that’s not the value at all right the value the value
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in having any of these kind of interactions is the fact that you get to meet interesting people and you get to spend
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your time trying to figure out how to either be a community builder together or to bring resources to what they’re
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trying to do you know sometimes i’ll be they’ll be like oh it’d be really great if you could come be on this panel and
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that will like you know bring some audience or whatever and i’m like sure like it you know again it doesn’t really matter
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what i’m saying there it’s mattering that they’re getting something for me showing up or me bringing a resource to them
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that’s the better part that’s the part that makes a difference in anyone’s trajectory including yourself it’s not
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that you said something smart yeah no i i love your humble uh mentality about you know the way you go
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about things and relationships so let’s let’s so let’s keep diving into your experience with boys who start up again
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if you have other service opportunities by all means slip them in here that you want to share um you know
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what i’ve noticed is you you know this these moments was very formative for you and
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you were able to open areas and help usually though you know to make something formative there’s there’s
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certain people who make that experience super formative or specific experiences that you can look
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back on and say within the just should say the nucleus of serving um i’m sure
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there have been people or specific moments slash experiences where you look back and you say that that really shaped how i feel about
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this are there does anything maybe come to your mind when i was saying that that would be worthwhile to highlight or
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speak to oh yeah absolutely so there’s this statistic i started like
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talking about um as like entrepreneur week and some of the activities that we do there come up
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and it’s that in in seven years we’ve awarded
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uh something on the order of about 340 000 of like non-diluted funds to
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early stage companies some of them may not like really be qualified as startups but like that’s not what the way they’re
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there to judge right like we’re there to judge how they pitch and and we award money the
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the thing that i think we’re the most proud of is every single one of those companies is
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still in business today that’s like shocking i mean that is bucking the
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trend beyond belief and these aren’t like huge checks right this is ten twenty five
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thousand dollars but these are really really early stage companies really you know if you’re from looking at it from
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an investor perspective really high risk and so the fact they’d still be around and thriving in most cases i mean
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they’re growing and hiring employees and getting their products on store shelves or acquiring new users
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and why do i like say that’s the the part that’s most interesting there’s a ton of other stuff we do beyond that but
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it’s just stuff like this didn’t exist before there was no
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place you go pitch and get non-diluted funds in boise idaho it didn’t exist
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and so you know founders would leave or they would kind of die on the vine before they got that first like check
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it’s also very validating when they go out and try and raise real money they get a lot of news articles written about them blah blah there’s all this good
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stuff that surrounds them as they go off in the world and
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every year when we run entrepreneur week the lead up to it is just kind of like it’s crazy right trying to put on an event with a hundred and some odd
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sessions and all the stuff and it’s hard and every year i’m like god i don’t know if i have another one in me like this is rough and then we
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award these like checks and we see all the previous winners because they all come back and i’m like oh that’s why we do it
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that’s it right there like it’s all worth it again and i ride that high for like three or four months and totally forget all the pain of how hard it was
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to organize the event and so it’s like euphoric recall i get like stuck and to do it again because
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all i remember is the good stuff well i mean you’re making me go back to my college
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entrepreneur days and think about all the events and the people who made them possible right and and i think what’s so
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special about the position you’re in is you know the people who show up or the students who are awarding checks they
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may not truly notice or uh let’s just say always appreciate it
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uh just because they’re in their own mind but you’re able to have this holistic view of
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you know the what the event you’re put on the opportunity you’ve created and you get to like really see and feel
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uh that impact i mean you really get to serve uh in such a beautiful way
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well and it’s it has parlayed to an interesting place in my life too you know i mean i now
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my partners and i last year well i guess 18 months you know we’ve deployed like 1.8
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million in really early stage venture investment mostly in boise but kind of all over the place
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um you know i wouldn’t have seen four or five years ago that that would have been the direction of of
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you know what i’d be spending my time on but you know i mean when you’re involved in that ecosystem and you’re building
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something like that you’re you’re gonna see all the great founders that are worthy to be invested in and so you know it’s
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who who better who better to you know in some regards and so um
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yeah i mean all that stuff just builds on it on top of it and there’s always people in
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ecosystems who like ultimately are connectors right they’re people who will help bring resources to it and i think i
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now get to credit myself being that but it’s it’s i guess it’s weird when you’re like self-crediting yourself or something like that
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but you know like it seems like that’s kind of where things have have gotten to and and it’s um
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it’s a fun place to be yeah well i appreciate you um staying and you like you again i
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think you should be proud and grateful and you’ve created these opportunities for yourselves but you know by you
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putting yourself uh in a leadership role within the community like you get to get to see the
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direct impact maybe in a different way from customer experience and clients that you’re working with in the day job
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so to speak so um it’s neat it’s also maybe what i’m hearing is you know you’re a partner of vinyl
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the software company but you’re noticing i guess let me ask this morning a question how are you noticing right your
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community experience uh impacting the the business and vice versa
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so we have this philosophy at our company generally which is why i get a
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lot of permission to like go and run off and be a board member for a school board or
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something right which is that one way for us to sharpen our own tool
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as engineers as entrepreneurs as you know creative thinkers is to go and
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spend our time solving problems for others at the end of the day like especially a business
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like ours that’s that’s what we’re paid to do right like we are a services company paid to build and
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write software in interesting ways for clients and be engrossed in their problems to make them better and so what
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better way to sharpen your sword than to do that in your backyard for the place you live work and play and the people
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who are your neighbors right it’s a way to sharpen your own sword and being better at your craft and so we encourage
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our employees to get involved in all kinds of stuff i mean they serve on boards of this that or whatever we sponsor those events as well like i mean
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and we encourage them to do so because we think it’s a way to to keep your spirit of service alive uh in everything
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you do in your life yeah it’s neat that you know you have that trust built in um but you’re looking at
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from a problem-solving angle you’re looking at it from an angle of i mean the application of experience is
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too you know while you’re you’re on a school board you know i’m sure you’re learning things and you’re meeting people though that
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you can apply different perspectives to solving different problems uh so i i find that fascinating something i’m
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curious about uh nick is you’ve talked a lot about how uh
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from an element of change and uh you changing as a person through you know
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you said your your views on community have changed not just you know my job moments but now i’m gonna make maybe
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steeper deeper divots with individuals on the relational level but
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beyond maybe the interpersonal side or perspectives that have shifted
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how do you think you as a person as nick grabs changed the most by serving
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without expectation but serving out of just pure love for what you’re doing how have you changed as a person
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yeah um this is this might sound really silly but i think i found a sense of calm that
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i didn’t have now that could also be the transition from being in like your late 20s to your early 30s
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like i’m not sure if i just got older and therefore i am also wiser or if some of this stuff led to that um you know i
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uh i think that’s been something that’s been a little different i think when you’re younger and you’re scrappier you
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spend a lot of time really trying to like fight it out right sit down at a table and put your elbows out
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make sure your points are heard make sure that the things you’re driving on are successful and and you know you might be a little bit
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scrappy or a little bit of a fighter about it and i think as as all this work when you’re spending so
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much time in community stuff where that like behavior doesn’t really like accomplish the goals in the same way that it does
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maybe as you know a ceo of a young hot startup um
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like i i find myself having a lot more kind of like all right like i don’t know if i like love the
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opinion that you have but like i also don’t need to like fight with it either like i don’t need to like i can be pretty lazy fair be like oh
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cool man that’s great like a high five good luck right like and so i find myself having like more and more of that just applied generally
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across my life is that i you know you don’t really need to stick your elbows out in every situation
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totally so it’s kind of weird i wrote something down before you just said that answer i was going to ask you about um
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i’ll tell you what it was but i’m going to keep you on the edge of your seat for a second to build on that before i kind of
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lean into what i was going to ask you were you more of a fighter or more of it i got to have my point heard oh yeah oh
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yeah tell me more tell me more and maybe where you think it might have come from
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i mean i have no idea where i learned this but i i think for the longest time i thought the way that you arrived at
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good solutions for things was that you had to fight about it right so like
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maybe i was like okay i need your thesis and regardless of what you say i need to
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provide some antithesis and we have to like battle that out and we will arrive at the correct decision through the
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other end and so i think i spent a lot of my early entrepreneurial days like assuming
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that is how it was done um and i don’t know where i learned that i couldn’t tell you i couldn’t i you
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know i’m sure a therapist could figure that one out for somebody else but like i thought that’s how you did it and um
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you know i mean in some cases you still have to know where to where to put your foot down i mean certainly that’s true in any case in business you
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have to know how to negotiate things in a correct way but when you lead from a place of having healthy relationships
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um you approach those problems a little differently right when you lead from a place of like
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i don’t need to win the argument i need to make sure that you and i can work together on some common ground when
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that’s like the actual goal almost regardless of what the outcome is i think that really changes how you
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operate in all of the situations and so i don’t you know i don’t find myself having to do that a whole lot uh anymore
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and maybe again that could just be getting older thing that could be a community thing i don’t really know but
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like that has changed and and i think it’s a good lesson that i had to learn i think a lot of people have to learn
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that lesson i wrote down before you talked about getting comfortable you know maybe in your early 30s i wrote down something i
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wanted to ask you before the interview i wrote comfortable with yourself and i noticed when we were having dinner on boise a few weeks ago i just noticed a
25:47
sense of extreme comfort with who you were it’s just i mean i’m not telling you this to just boost an ego or like
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yeah i’m telling you this because like when we were in conversation you were just so comfortable in your own
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skin and i like it really uh i reflected on that
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and uh it was very neat i had literally all my journals about it like i was like very comfortable with yours like you
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know and i i just thought i admired it and you said it came from service i mean
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or maybe a part of it but when you so my question is to build on that when you said you were in such a fighting like i
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gotta prove a point and that’s how i you know i’m gonna win and get my point across
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i’ve noticed that when we’re in such conflict with maybe who we are other people it’s like we’re adding weight like a lot of baggage and like things
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to ourselves i mean do you have any kind of like breaking point at all like in this process where it’s
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just like i gotta strip all this down because the weight of this burden of fighting is just too much
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wow there’s a lot to unpack in that question i mean it’s a big question right so like
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there’s a lot of little things that add up in people’s lives to make them comfortable in their own skin and the truth is we all know that
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some people go through their whole life never really finding their their own personal zen whatever that may be right
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and not to say that i’m some like guru who’s figured out because like i i figured something out kind of
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maybe that works for me right um but i think that
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it stems from a lot of things like what are the what are the important parts of anyone’s life that bring fulfillment i
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think there’s some like truth universal truths about it right like let’s cut out the normal stuff like okay am i fed am i
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housed can i like provide for the basic necessities to exist right like that’s pretty that’s a very base level one but
27:44
then it comes into what are my relationships like right what is what is my relationship like around me
27:49
and you know i think when i was in my like late 20s and and you know being a
27:55
young founder and really early in that i mean it wasn’t this wasn’t my first venture um
28:00
you know i think most my relationships were okay but i also found that i would like be in these strange
28:06
situations from time to time and i don’t know if there was some like light bulb aha moment that went off in my head i
28:13
don’t think that happened but i think that like people want you to be authentic with them
28:19
and the expectation is that they can then be authentic back to you and you can build like healthy relationships
28:26
with those people and this transcends business relationships but it’s certainly applicable too but i mean you
28:32
can talk about with your siblings your parents your significant another your like whatever i
28:38
mean i have people who like come and help me work on a farm i will live on a farm right and so like it’s true there
28:44
too right like honesty authenticity and like making sure that you’re going
28:50
into each one of those interactions where you’re prepared to give that authentic self
28:56
um i mean we’ve all run into people who are like man i just don’t feel like they told me the truth right i feel like they’re being sneaky or whatever like
29:02
there’s some like hair raised on the back your feel your neck like your goal should always be not to be that person
29:07
right like what can you do in your interactions i think once i made that change in my
29:12
life where i stopped having to worry about always being right i stopped to have to worry about always having the
29:18
best idea i stopped having to worry about trying to prove myself in a way that um
29:24
you know maybe people who are in their early 20s feel like they need to do um it made a
29:30
substantial difference in my ability to maintain positive relationships with other people uh and i think it certainly
29:36
for business certainly for volunteering certainly for all these places in my life it made a big difference um and and again
29:42
no one’s perfect i fall down too but like that’s uh that’s a that’s a thing that i think
29:48
helped a lot yeah one more i appreciate the transparency i mean that’s what i know that’s what i felt is just
29:55
authenticity and honesty and and i try and do that most of the time
30:01
but i also find it very rare especially in other men younger men
30:06
um and it’s just it was so apparent and like that’s why i was i just i walked away
30:13
from that conversation and i was just like that’s really neat um and so i
30:19
you know when we have those formative life experiences that precede us and shape us like you said it sounds
30:24
like you built the awareness to say you know what i don’t really want to look like this anymore and
30:30
serving in the communal sense give you an outlet uh maybe to show up a little differently
30:36
and i mean let me ask you another question around like self value or worth once you started
30:42
um volunteering in the community you know boys startup week and uh
30:47
did you did you like who you were better you know do you do you like the person that you were becoming more did you
30:53
notice any shifts there well and that’s it right i think that’s the key which is that i don’t know if i
30:58
would have come to this realization again i’m talking about it like i sat down one night and i had like a cognac in one
31:05
hand and was like aha eureka we figured out the secret right like
31:11
no like what happened was i started spending a lot of time trying to help other people and through that
31:17
process over years you just like you realize that like you have to show up in a very different way to do that
31:25
and and so you’re almost like subconsciously training yourself to value the way that you interact with
31:31
other people and it is really different when you’re trying to lend your talents in a volunteering capacity um and do
31:38
that for a sustained amount of time um i think i think doing it once here or there you know like showing up a soup
31:44
kitchen on on thanksgiving that’s great if you do that awesome i’m not trying to put it down it’s a good thing to do but like it’s
31:51
not sustained right so you kind of get your moment to like pat yourself on the back but did you like reprogram some
31:58
core part of you was that even a goal i don’t know but for me that definitely happened it happened without me trying
32:04
to make it happen it just happened organically because you have to act different and um and i think it’s been awesome i
32:10
mean i think it’s been a wonderful thing in my life i think it’s unlocked a whole bunch of other stuff that i would have never even considered right again the
32:17
farm is a great example for your listeners i had no plans of being a farmer i am not a
32:22
farmer i know i’m from idaho but like that is not i grew up in apartment
32:28
um but you know it was like it was a cool thing that just like has always intrigued me and i just happened to have
32:34
like met the right people in the right moments and we like had built lasting friendships and i was like screw it
32:40
let’s have a farm that sounds awesome like yeah i mean you’re you’re so present to
32:45
the signals i i just i want to do him on one one last point let’s shift to the farms because it’s fascinating what i
32:51
think is so neat about certain what you’ve done to serve and give is you’ve done it and i i think you said it’s not
32:58
sustainable to the soup kitchen because perhaps it’s not as aligned to an experience but you’ve been able to serve
33:04
in a way that’s so aligned to your strengths and skill sets without expecting a payday at the end of it and
33:09
then you get that merger and kind of shared nucleus of you know it can help in both areas so i think
33:16
that’s a really interesting when you think about serving okay how do you do it in a way that’s connected where you can bring your
33:22
skills right relationships into it opposed to doing something so different
33:28
even though that might be really nice may not be as useful over the long haul doing it so just
33:33
wanted to hammer that point well and the feedback you get to gives you kind of this unintended upside which is that you
33:41
get a place to practice and learn yourself right and so when you’re using
33:46
and you’re applying like your craft your skills to that volunteering it really is a different experience
33:52
because again you don’t have to ask for a mission you can try different things you can be more brave maybe like i
33:58
certainly felt that i got to be more brave about stuff i wanted to try so anyways i mean it certainly uh it
34:04
certainly is has a lot of impact in wherever you are and whoever is around you yeah uh so cool i mean you just see
34:10
how your face lights up when you uh talk about it i mean i can send you the video after but you can just tell like it’s
34:16
coming from a place of internal joy i was in boise a couple weeks ago and uh nick had me over for dinner
34:23
bomb bomb indian meal chicken curry rice it was incredible but
34:30
he beyond beating him in pool on the first game that he wore a glove because he was so good um
34:36
he also showed me his tour a tour of his farm uh lucha was amazing you literally
34:42
are living on like a self-sustaining comedy like that you’ve built and it’s fascinating so again like i think this
34:48
goes with being comfortable with yourself you’re like screw it i’m gonna go build a farm and why not like how did this happen unravel i find it such an
34:55
interesting part of who you are yeah well so first i’ll say something that may or may not be true which is i think
35:01
all of us have this fantasy in some form right all of us like have this dream of some kind of
35:08
like self-sustainability whether that’s a farm or just like growing a garden or whatever like there’s very different ways that it
35:14
manifests but all of us have some kind of agrarian desire in us somewhere
35:20
and i’ve been thinking about this for a long time and
35:25
i didn’t really know what the end forum was going to take but i’d always been like ah we should be more connected to our food like you know that’s like out
35:32
of whack out of balance in our culture like all this stuff comes from a factory and it’s probably killing us in fact we know it’s killing us yeah we still eat
35:38
it and so like that was one component of it the second component of it is there’s such an
35:44
opportunity for community building in that kind of activity right people who have shared purpose goals visions
35:51
around something so like core to who we are as humans which is our food um
35:57
and so like through kind of those things i just been having lots of conversations with my friends and people i would meet
36:02
and you know i’d find someone who ran like a small urban farm or uh you know a
36:08
co-op farm or something along those lines i was just fascinated by these people i’d like talk to them for hours
36:14
about like why how what did you do um coupled with this i i had this idea
36:20
that like land use in this country is one very privileged and my whole farm
36:27
is very privileged place so like i understand where i’m coming from here but like land use in this country is
36:33
very privileged right the concept of a home is that i will like buy a piece of land and i will like live in it with my
36:39
significant other and we will have 2.5 kids and like i will pass this home to those
36:45
2.5 kids when i die and it will be like a source of wealth and and like that’s our land use
36:52
and by the way the most cultivated crop in the united states is grass which is silly
36:58
like what a waste of water and so i just couldn’t see myself doing
37:04
that i just couldn’t like believe that that was gonna be my life and i was so excited and energized by something very
37:11
different um and so then i had to figure it out what what does that actually look like and the goal was let me start here this
37:18
was the goal of the farm how do i use a piece of land
37:24
for a community purpose to make it a free house there we go how do i use a piece of land
37:31
for a community purpose to make it a free house and there’s a whole bunch of ways in
37:37
which i do that but largely it’s true so i live in you know on a couple acres here in boise in a you know
37:43
3 800 square foot house with a guest house and the house is free because of a combination of selling veggies the
37:51
combination of having artists and musicians paying for you know rent and all the things that would come with them
37:56
coming and going um a combination of of course tax incentives that come from producing food and caring for animals um
38:03
a lot of people know this but my goats are a tax write-off like who wouldn’t i didn’t know that until i talked to a tax guy right
38:10
and so when you add all that stuff together it’s largely very close um of a free house
38:16
and i think that we should be thinking about land use as a way to help other people live
38:24
happier better lives um as a community project and i think there’s a financial incentive for the
38:30
per the people who put that together in order to have a home like that um again my rants are way below market rate
38:37
and yet i’m fine right and so i think that’s that was the goal the the output of that
38:43
is we spent two years um i mean completely redoing this property we ran
38:48
30 000 feet of drip line irrigation we produce truckloads worth of veggies
38:55
we sell it at a farm stand every saturday i have never had so much fun working on something
39:00
and you know i mean there’s nothing more pure than like grabbing a shovel and walking outside and digging a ditch so
39:07
that like the water can flow across your cornfield correctly like that’s as pure as it gets like and when
39:14
you come in and you’re like muddy and sweaty and everything hurts because you’re not
39:20
in shape enough to dig the trench right like like that is one of the best feelings that
39:26
i’ve experienced like it’s so fulfilling to have the place that you live
39:31
be that yeah totally for those that can’t visualize nick’s farm i mean it is
39:38
big i mean you got the goats in the back you the little front line you have all the different you know the fruit trees
39:43
yeah i mean it’s a it’s a big place it’s it’s amazing how much effort you got that wall by by the road
39:50
i mean it’s i mean i what you’ve done in just two years right is pretty cool the the the other thing i
39:57
was thinking about as you were talking and maybe not when i first um was there was
40:02
um you were talking about the farmers market that you do
40:08
in a way though right connecting back to the first part of our conversation the farmer you’re serving a community
40:14
you’re you know you’re you’re serving you’re creating a place for people to come to organize meet connect a really
40:20
shared beautiful shared experience um you know in a way that’s probably fairly
40:26
affordable for the community i mean have you do you see the farm as a vehicle to serve as well i mean what how
40:33
do you think about it well i mean certainly as a as a community builder absolutely i mean that
40:38
was intentional right we wanted people to come here and be here and experience being here and i mean it’s really like
40:45
just an example of this so we’ll have people who come to the farm stand and we like have pre-picked the veggies right
40:50
so they’ll be like a creative potatoes and they’ll be like a crate of you know radishes or whatever and like people be
40:56
like can you give me a tour and show me where the radishes came from and can i pick them myself right like we’re like
41:03
yeah sure let’s do it right and so like there’s this this whole component of people being
41:10
really excited about what we’ve been built here especially the people around us and you know a couple square miles
41:16
right um and similar to like entrepreneur week where i was talking about the payoff there where we see like these founders
41:22
going off and like doing something great like to see someone’s joy coming on a place and being like i’ve
41:28
been watching you for a year and like seeing you guys with out here with shovels every day right digging in the
41:34
field and now i get to pick a radish and like take it home and eat it
41:39
um we were we were doing this thing for a while where we would give everyone 15 off if they sent us pictures
41:46
of what they cooked with the food um and so our like instagram which is getting flooded with all these pictures
41:53
of like the dishes that people made and it was sick we found out one guy’s like a professional chef we had no idea
41:59
he came every saturday we had no idea this dude was a professional chef he like works at one of the restaurants in downtown and these were the veggies he
42:06
was buying for his family right so this is what he would cook at home and dude his dishes were sick they were
42:11
so good looking so no 100 right it was intentional to be a place of community uh we also kind of
42:17
stumbled into it right because we bought the farm and then cove it happened and like a whole bunch of people i knew who were bartenders musicians
42:24
artists whatever they all lost their jobs and i was like hey like come grab a shovel i can’t pay like a ton but like
42:30
you know i’ll give you some money to like dig a bed and plant some onions like whatever let’s and you can eat it too
42:36
like it’s cool [Laughter] yeah no nick i mean it’s a dimension i mean i
42:42
struggled with this a lot in my early 20s and you know growing out of it in my mid to late 20s but
42:48
work becomes so much of an individual and what’s so neat is you’re branching out and building layers
42:55
and i know you’re a musician and are you you’re very talented with music but uh
43:00
you have all these components to you beyond the maybe one thing that pays
43:05
your bills uh and you can serve a community to the farmer’s market you can serve the
43:11
community through uh boise entrepreneurship week uh you can
43:17
be a part of people’s lives and give the gifts that you’ve created for built in with internally now you can start giving
43:23
those and serving in different ways and and you know become more multi-dimensional um
43:29
in a way that you know you can create large impact on on your own terms and i think that’s
43:35
what’s so neat for someone so young right i think people get old they get the kids in the
43:40
nutritional lifestyle and get married and all the things but i like how you’ve done it different and you haven’t maybe
43:46
fell into society’s expectations so to speak well i think that like we tell children
43:52
that we want them to follow their passions right like be passionate go follow your passions but you know what i
43:57
don’t think we really mean it like when our kids are like great i want to be an artist we’re like no no no no
44:03
whoa whoa whoa whoa you need to go get a college degree preferably in something that’s like paying a lot of money and
44:09
that should be your passion right like we don’t really mean it when we tell this to kids and so you know really what
44:15
you’re poking at is that like i i try to work on things that inspire my own passion right and if
44:22
it’s not that then i probably won’t do it right like so it has to be something that stirs that thing in me
44:29
um and then i’m all in like i’m two feet in i you know i can run fast and i’ll run as fast as i can in it because
44:36
it like brings some sense of joy to and purpose to my life yeah i i love
44:43
everything you just said and i think it’s so true and it’s just great to see so
44:48
uh nick i’ve been thinking take me like you may have no idea 20 you made no idea
44:54
10 but maybe 5. who’s net crap in five or 10 years what what what do you
45:00
see for your life the impact you’re you’re serving i mean what maybe give me the the core tenets of
45:06
the craps yeah i mean this is this is going to be the most boring answer ever but man i have
45:14
no idea you know i have no idea right i think that
45:19
you have to live today on today’s terms you live today on how you’re going to
45:25
help the next person in front of you you spend your time by working on the next right thing in front of you
45:31
and it’s amazing how many good things that will shape your life happen and i’m a very like
45:38
try to get narrow and compartmentalized kind of person i think it’s the only way that i can like do all the stuff right
45:44
a lot of people ask me like when do you sleep and they’re like well you have to understand like i don’t have kids and i like you know like there’s all this
45:49
other stuff i chose not to do so i could do these things instead but it also is having some discipline to just like okay
45:55
this is the next person i need to help this is the next email i need to craft this is the next you know report i need
46:02
to send it like this is the next trench i need to dig and this is where the corn is planted right like
46:08
i mean i’m injecting a few different things from my life here but like i try to think about it that way if i spend a bunch of time thinking about
46:14
what five years brings you know i have a hard time doing it because it never works out the way and the root of
46:21
all pain is expectation so why put expectations on yourself that you’re maybe gonna be disappointed about later
46:27
right sure well the there’s pain either way is what i’m learning in life it’s just
46:32
you choose your pain so well if if you’re if you’re good with any outcome to some extent like if you know how to
46:37
roll with the punches it’s hard to be disappointed yeah well i’m so i’m reading a book
46:44
right now on that it’s called emotional agility yeah but anyways it’s a hard skill to learn
46:49
um but you know it’s it’s a i think a great skill to have because you’re right like
46:54
learning to take a punch and that spiral is a useful skill and
47:00
you can navigate life much easier so nick this has been uh
47:06
just as good if not better than i expected uh always a treat um
47:11
where can people get involved with boise startup week where can they contact you at vinyl where can they reach out to you on linkedin what what’s what’s the best
47:18
places for you yeah i mean if any of this resonates with anybody and meet up i’m always happy to chat um so linkedin
47:25
is definitely the the best place just kind of blanket reach out to me you can literally just search my name nick krabs
47:30
n-i-c-k c-r-a-b-b-s um and i should come up there are not that many nick crabs in the world
47:36
believe it or not and in terms of boise entrepreneur week you can get that at boise entrepreneur
47:42
week dot org and vinyl if you want to see what i do for my day job is vinyl
47:47
b-y-n-y-l dot com awesome well thanks for being here i really appreciate your time awesome
47:53
thanks so much brian if you enjoyed this episode as much as i
47:58
did i hope you leave a review on the platform of your choice and share it with a friend who you think would find
48:04
it valuable if you’d like to receive a written newsletter and thought leadership head on over to
48:10
bwmisions.combackslashnewsletter and subscribe
48:15
see you on the next show [Music]
48:25
you
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This post was previously published on Arcbound.
***
You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
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The post Nick Crabbs: One Paradigm Shift Away From Fulfillment appeared first on The Good Men Project.