JT Lidell is the Founder of Promenade, which seamlessly matches and connects military veterans to the resources, people, and organizations that matter to them.
Chad talks with JT about being a mission-driven, bootstrapped organization, the problems that he's encountered and hopes that Promenade solves, and aggregating people, tools, resources, and funding to make it happen.
Promenade (https://www.promenade.ai/)
Follow JT on Twitter (https://twitter.com/promenadeactual) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-zimmerman-35152a22/).
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Transcript:
CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel and with me today is JT Liddell, the Founder of Promenade, which seamlessly matches and connects military veterans to the resources, people, and organizations that matter to them. JT, thank you so much for joining me.
JT: No, thank you for having me. Excited to talk to you about what we're building over here and having this conversation. So thank you so much for having me on today.
CHAD: I love mission-driven organizations, and Promenade falls right into that. How did it come about for you?
JT: Yeah, this has been...the inception of it really truly began many, many years ago when I first joined the military straight out of high school. So I went to The Naval Academy, actually, started there then went to the army. Fast forward 7, 8, 9, 10 years, and as I was getting out of the military and trying to join the civilian workforce, the civilian world, that's where a lot of the problems and challenges that I'm trying to solve through Promenade started.
And then, working in the technology space in corporate America really allowed me to identify some of the solutions and tools that I'm working with now. But to answer your original question, the beginning of Promenade or the inception of Promenade really began with my entry into the military.
CHAD: What were some of the problems that you encountered and that you hope that Promenade solves?
JT: Back in 2000...I left the military officially in 2010 but went straight into defense contracting work from there and worked there for a few years. And it was, as I was leaving, I went literally from Afghanistan, and 30 days later, I was sitting in an MBA classroom. And leaving Afghanistan, I thought there was literally no problem, no challenge...after going through three deployments to Afghanistan and being deployed to other parts of the world, I was like, there's nothing that I'm going to come against that I won't be able to tackle. That was the furthest from the truth.
So there are a number of issues when it came to relationships, when it came to navigating the workforce, when it came to just understanding how drastically different the civilian world was from being in the military and the defense industry. So those problems are umbrellas, and there are many, many things underneath those that I came up against.
CHAD: What are some of the ways that, you know, I speak as someone not having served in the military. What are some of the big ways in which civilian employment is different?
JT: It wasn't even necessarily...well, obviously, there are huge differences obviously from the military and civilian employment. But it was really even like, how do you get entry into the civilian workforce just from the very beginning? So, how do you craft a resume? It seems like a minor thing at this point in my life, but it's a huge one. When you leave the military, you have these 9, 10, 11-page resumes. And that's what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to put literally every single piece of experience that you have on this resume.
But when you come to the civilian world, you have to somehow condense all of tha