‍[00:02] Jennifer Wu: Hi everyone, thanks for listening to The Founder Spirit podcast. I'm your host, Jennifer Wu. In this podcast series, I interview exceptional individuals from all over the world with the founder spirit, ranging from social entrepreneurs, tech founders, to philanthropists, elite athletes and more. Together, we'll uncover not only how they managed to succeed in facing multiple challenges, but also who they are as people and their human story.

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As always, you can find us on Apple, Amazon and Spotify, as well as social media and our website at TheFounderSpirit.com. 

“You have to think on your feet constantly, how just to problem-solve 24 hours a day.”

“The key thing I learned in Afghanistan is that you are forever a guest and only a guest in Afghanistan. They are one of the most hospitable people on the planet.” 

“We need to find a new source of funds and a new pathway of funds. And that's really where the No-End Philosophy started. There's no timelines to this business, there's no extraction and there's no exit. We think in centuries, not in quarters.”

Joining us today is the principled Jay Cziraky, a serial entrepreneur, impact investor, and humanitarian operator, with more than 25 years of experience in conflict zones and developing economies. 

Jay is a Founding Partner of Move One, the market leader in deployed government and aid logistics across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa. He is also the Founder and Chairman of North Degrees, specializing in energy technology solutions for developing countries. Most recently, he pioneered the No-End Philosophy for scaling a new socio-economic model for future generations.  

I was introduced to Jay earlier this year and his vision for the No-End Philosophy really piqued my interest as a long-term alternative to short-term capital cycles - one that addresses global challenges by strengthening local economic resilience in communities around the world.

Just how did Jay’s journey shape his conviction in creating a path for the benefit of global communities? Well, let’s talk to him & find out.

Hello Jay, welcome to the Founder Spirit Podcast. Thank you for joining us today and thank you for taking the time.

[02:43] Jay Cziraky: Thanks Jennifer, great to be her - I’m really looking forward to our time together today.

[02:47] Jennifer: Great. Jay, growing up in Canada, what were some of the formative experiences in your life?

[02:53] Jay: Well, I think growing up in Canada was a unique pleasure. 

My family, or my father's family came over effectively as poor immigrants from Europe after losing everything they had back in Hungary. So we grew up a very normal life in the 70s and 80s in Canada. I think Canada as a country is an amazing place to grow up from a multi-culturalism point of view. I lived on a farm - you grew up with a lot of privileges. 

I grew up in a bit of a strange family. My father was a police detective, so didn't wear uniforms. So we grew up in a bit of a different household. It was lovely. I think insulated is very much part of Canada. And I think I grew up very much understanding our immigrant roots and the connections to Europe, but an amazing country.

[03:36] Jennifer: You're also born to one of the oldest noble families of Hungary, dating back to the 13th century. How did this family lineage influence your journey?

[03:47] Jay: Well, it was a big part of the journey. I was lucky enough to know my grandparents and my great grandparents, or at least one set of them. And my father was the last one born in one of our castles and estates in Hungary, where the family fled. 

My grandmother with her siblings and my father as a baby and her parents fled by horse and buggy, because the Germans stole all our cars on their retreat and all the boys were away fighting. And my other great grandfather stayed to sit on the land.  

While losing everything, the foundations of community and leadership were installed in me from a young age by my grandparents and even more so by my great grandparents, Count and Countess Andrassy. 

And it was all around how our family, the Cziraky family to 1247 and the Andrassy family a little bit older, how managing communities and being part of the community was a core to how the family survived all those centuries. And that was (instilled in) us from an early age. 

The other thing that was (instilled in) us from an early age was a sense of duty to community, duty to country. These sorts of things become military history and a political history and a leadership history. So all of that was (instilled in) us even though we had nothing from it, those principles still existed. 

And it also was the inspiration for leaving Canada eventually and moving to Europe. So I was very privileged to grow up knowing some phenomenal leaders, especially my grandmother in many ways. So, yeah, that was a huge influence on our lives growing up.

[05:11] Jennifer: So just picking up (on) one of the points that you had mentioned - so going back to Europe, when you graduated from University in the mid-90s, you became a founding partner in a logistics company, Move One, as the Director of the Balkans. 

And the Bosnian war, which ended just two years before your arrival in the Balkans, was one of the most devastating conflicts in Europe since World War II. What made you decide to leave Canada and work in post-war reconstruction? And what were you hoping to accomplish there?

[05:46] Jay: It's a fantastic question. And like a lot of things, it's a little bit of luck, a little bit of timing, a little bit of everything. 

So as I said, the military side of things has always been a big aspect of our family. I actually ditched school on my 17th birthday in 1990, I guess it was to volunteer to go to the Gulf War, the first Gulf War. And while going through the first part, the war lasted two weeks and they gave me a choice. I could stay, I could continue to join the army, I could go to the military academy, or I could go to business school.

So I decided to go to business school because we weren't getting into another fight. So that was my reasoning behind that. So when I graduated university, the wall had come down. There were changes happening in Eastern Europe.

My brother went over a year before to Hungary to see about family estates and assets and different things, and nothing really materialized there. And he met an American gentleman who had just started what eventually became Move One - it was actually called AES back then as a transport company. 

My brother ran out of money. That's when he met Kurt Clements, who was the founder and started working with Kurt. And the next thing he knew, he wound up in Sarajevo. This was right after the reconstruction started. And I graduated university, was working a corporate job. I flew over and visited them and they were having way more fun than I was back in Toronto.

So I went home and thought about it for a little while and then quit and moved to Hungary towards the end of 1997. So part of it was a desire to get back to the home country. Part of it was a desire to experience what was going on in Sarajevo and for the adventure. And to a certain degree for the duty aspect of it as well. But duty played a lot more of a larger role, I think, in things I did later. 

And it was just an eye opening experience to what was happening in the Balkans, but also what was happening in Eastern Europe, because I split my time between Hungary and Sarajevo at the time. And that then actually later led on to living in most of the countries in the Balkans. I lived in Macedonia, and then in the lead up to the Kosovo War, Albania, during the Kosovo War, which was quite exciting. In the rear, that's not where actually the fighting was going on, but a lot of interesting things were going on in Albania at that time. And then I lived in Pristina after the reconstruction started. 

So I spent, what is that, the winter of 2000-2001, I think it was, in Kosovo, which was fun without heat for the winter. A lot of it was for adventure, but a lot of it then was learning a lot. What does good aid look like? What does inefficient aid look like? What does good post-war reconstruction look like? Obviously a lot on the military side as well. 

But from an intellectual point of view, the more interesting side was on the reconstruction. It really was situated around adventure more than anything else.

[08:16] Jennifer: So I guess what also struck me when we first met is that you mentioned that before the age of 30, you had worked and lived in four post-conflict and conflict zones. And that was one of the things that always piqued my interest in terms of exploring potentially doing a podcast with you. 

You had touched upon the Kosovo War, which started shortly after your arrival in Sarajevo and lasted a bit over a year, followed by peacekeeping troops in the region. And I know you had witnessed firsthand both the conflict in Kosovo and also the rebuilding of Bosnia. 

And I was wondering, looking back, what stands out to you the most during this period?

[08:58] Jay: Okay, so during the Balkans period, by the time I got to Bosnia, as you rightfully said, it was in the (post-war) reconstruction. It was actually in what they call the SFOR stage. Kosovo was from beginning, during, after, etc. And then I can talk a little bit about Afghanistan and Iraq later. 

For me, the biggest thing was just an entire learning experience in all of this. I think that was the fascination and it was seeing how the international community works together with the local communities. Sometimes extremely well, sometimes not so well. 

I think that's a major takeaway of what does successful reconstruction look like, what does non- successful reconstruction look like, the behavior of militaries. And just seeing the whole former Yugoslavia literally come apart and in some ways very bloody and very sad. In other ways, it seemed to work a little bit better. 

So it was a very interesting place to be young and in your 20s when you're really learning everything for the first time and doing a lot of things for the first time. I mean, you're going into countries that don't exist or hadn't existed previously. And we're advising customs of new countries on how to import things into the country. And we're not exactly the most experienced people either, right? So there's a lot of making this up as you go along. 

And I think that was one of the interesting takeaways. And you realize that this stuff's not all previously planned out. It's a lot of smart people working in a good way. But there's no sheet, it all has to be made up as you go along. And I think that was one of the larger takeaways.

[10:28] Jennifer: And what was it like working in the Balkans during that period as a young adult?

[10:33] Jay: Again, it was interesting. I mean, the sadder side of it was you saw a lot. I was not involved in things in the Balkans that were particularly scary, but I saw the aftermath of things that were very scary. And that was a big eye opener.

I remember my first drive to Sarajevo with my brother, with Paul, and going through the village of Devente, and it's gone, right? And they're spray painting on the houses to show who lived where and military units and everything else. 

And no matter how many books you read, no matter how many movies you watch, seeing the aftermath in reality was shocking. And something that you can't explain to someone until you see it. And as I said, what I saw was aftermath. I don't even want to think about obviously (what) the people had to go through, (what) was actually happening there. So that was very interesting. 

I also thought the resilience of the people was amazing, especially the people in Sarajevo who stayed. Every person in Bosnia has a story around what happened. I mean, it affected everybody. And harrowing tales of people, what they did to protect family members, to go rescue girlfriends, I mean, you name it and it's all there.

That and also a whole lot of misconceptions, you know, about how scary places can be. They're not as scary as the news makes them out to be. These are normal people living normal lives.  And I think that's also one of the big takeaways is everywhere in the Balkans, every family member wanted the same thing, which is just a better education for the children, more security, better food, better… all of these different things. 

But I also witnessed a lot of people not trusting each other, the wedges that have been put in between different societies and what have you, I was living in one country, going to another. They're like, how can you go there? It's dangerous. I'd get to the other country, they'd say, how'd you come from there? It's too dangerous. And it's all just the same people - I think that was one of the biggest takeaways.

And the biggest pleasure was it was just an amazing time to be in Europe. It was opening up and really changing. It was transforming from a version of communism to free market economies to democracies. There was a lot of hope and a lot of that's been realized, some of it hasn't. 

So I think it was that state of change was a really interesting place to be in your 20s,

[12:41] Jennifer: As mentioned, you also experienced war in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan war started shortly after 9/11 in October 2001. And Move One, your company, was contracted by the US military to bring shipments from Uzbekistan into Afghanistan. 

I have several questions about this, but let's start with the first one. How did you guys convince the US military that Move One was right for the job? I mean, imagining you joined them as the founding partner just four years before in Eastern Europe, I don't know what the size of the company was at the time. 

Just curious, how did you convince the US military that Move One was the right company for the job?

[13:23] Jay: It's a great question, because I think it really had to do with being one of the only people available. 

When 9/11 happened, very shortly afterwards, our customers from the war in Kosovo, from the war in Bosnia, so whether that is military, direct contractors of the military, that whole sort of industrial establishment was calling us very quickly saying, guys, it's Afghanistan, get ready. 

And our customers started telling us immediately, like, do you have ways to move equipment into Uzbekistan? And literally, once flights were working to the US, I flew over for some meetings, and then I got my Uzbek visa in New York, and I went to Uzbekistan. 

And we started arranging cargo coming in from Europe largely, but also from the United States into Uzbekistan, delivering it to the military base there, which at the time was supposedly being used for search and rescue, but it was being used for much more than that. I think that's a known fact now. And that was our job. 

So we were kind of the only people there. And what happened about arranging the very first convoy into Afghanistan for the American forces in December 2001, me and Randy were the two guys from Move One on the ground there. 

And the operations colonel came to us and said, we need to get more equipment into Afghanistan - the helicopters aren't enough, can you arrange a convoy? And we said, sure, but there's a few challenges. And he's like, what are those? 

Because we are one of the only people operating outside the wire. And we're like, well, we're in a very controlled country. There's checkpoints across 300 km of road to a city in Uzbekistan that requires a visa even to get into the city, to cross a bridge that hasn't been crossed in seven years. And there's a lot of obstacles in the way, so we need some time to think about this. He's got, well, you got 48 hours to get it done. 

So we used a lot of leverage through people, through the military, to open up paths for us. We had to find Uzbek truck drivers willing to go, we had to work closely with the border to get the border open - a lot of different things. History will show - two Red Cross trucks went over on a day in December, the next three trucks that went over covertly were ours the next day. So there's things you just have to do sometimes. 

So again, this was a case of were the only people there. I did ask the colonel, I'm like, don't you have something better than a 28-year old civilian Canadian to go do this? He said, no, you're the only one there. So we went and got it done. So again, there's an adventure side of this. 

Afghanistan was a little bit different in many ways in the post 9/11 world - there was also a duty aspect. I mean, we weren't doing this for the money, and Randy and I were going down there to do it because it's what the soldiers needed. They were our customers, but there's a duty, and they're our allies. So we decided that it was the right thing to go do. 

But it was a very interesting time, to say the least. And I learned something very important about localization as well that day. So in the 48 hours leading up to this, Demeralt, our head of local Uzbek operations kept saying to me, saying, Jay, the drivers need visas, the drivers need visas. 

And I kept saying, Demeralt, don't worry about the Afghans on the other side - they're not going to care, we have it arranged, everything will be escorted. And he kept saying, no, no. And I didn't understand what he's talking about. Literally, when we're loading up the trucks in the morning to go, he starts yelling at me. 

And I said, Demeralt, what's going on? He goes, Jay, Uzbek truck drivers need a visa to leave Uzbekistan. And I said, what do you mean? I mean, coming from Canada, you don't need a visa to leave your own country. And he's like, they need a visa, they can't leave the country. I'm like, oh. (chuckles)

And I kind of went hands on knees to the necessary people inside the Uzbek authorities to say, I didn't realize this. So they made an exception for us, which they said they wouldn't do again. But that could have held up the whole thing. And this is a testament to listening to your local advisors. But I just made an assumption. So that was our panic the day we loaded the convoy.

[17:15] Jennifer: I would have had the same reaction as you, actually. Because coming from a different cultural and political context, you just... you don't even understand what that means.

[17:25] Jay: Yeah, and they don't teach you that in business school?

[17:27] Jennifer: No, they don't, certainly not how things function at the Uzbek and Afghani border. 

And as you mentioned, while the first shipment went well, the second shipment, I understand, hit a snag where your trucks were stuck at the border for five days. And I was told that the logistics business is all about finding solutions. And I was wondering, how did you find the solution there?

[17:54] Jay: That's more relationship building with the local Uzbek nationals. And actually, my colleague Randy had to do a few other things that we probably can't mention together with the US military, in a good way, so it wasn’t just trucks stuck at the border. 

And, yes, you have to find creative solutions. It’s again, that's all around building local relationships. And by the way, people are thinking about nefarious behavior - that's not actually what it is. It is relationship building at its very most. And there's a little bit of vodka drinking involved, but that's also part of negotiating in these environments. But we did manage to get it over, it's always about finding these new ways and building relationships. 

I think, as I mentioned, even in Uzbekistan, often they were saying, well, this requires a document that's never existed before. So we would just go home and type up the document and bring it back and say, yep, this is it, and it's okay. It's a lot of creative thinking on your feet. 

Because, again, this was all happening in real time, right? There were soldiers in the field that needed stuff, and it was our job to get it there.

[18:49] Jennifer: Right. So people say amateurs talk strategy and professionals talk logistics. What do you think is the most underappreciated part of logistics?

[19:00] Jay: It's probably the complicated aspect of it. It's very easy to draw a picture on the map and say, well, just move stuff there. But there's a whole bunch of different things in between.

You know, even we would have situations where even in Bosnia, cargo would come into the Netherlands and be trucked down to Sarajevo. I think it's 1,600 kilometers on a map, and people are like, well, why can’t I get there in two days?

You have explained about all the borders. This is before a lot of the EU was open and protocols and rules and regulations. So there's a whole lot of timing involved in all of this stuff. I think that's a big aspect of it. 

And today, whether it's reconstruction with aid, whether it's a military operation, I mean, these don't move light. No military in the world, including the United States, has enough airlift capability with their own planes to go actively conduct a war effort in a foreign place. You have to contract planes, ships, different things from the civilian world. 

And when you think about Afghanistan, I mean, look at the countries around it. You can't go through Iran. Going through Pakistan is tricky. You can't go through Turkmenistan. You have to go through Uzbekistan, which means you have to go through Kazakhstan, in many cases, Russia. 

These are all very sensitive areas. And then you throw things like weather on top of this, and trucks are using the light fires underneath to stop diesel from freezing. In Afghanistan, truck drivers don't use maps or GPS, or at least they didn't at the time. 

The first time I brought a map out, people started laughing at me. You have to literally be like, okay, well, you know where this part of your family's from? Okay, up in that - we need to go up into that village next to it. And this is how you conduct logistics. 

So it always goes wrong. There's always something going wrong all the time. We had a plane coming in for an operation for the British military, a Russian cargo plane, and it showed up without ramps. And obviously the customer is quite mad at us. And they're like, why didn't you check if the plane had ramps before it left? 

I said, they forgot them in Lahore - I didn't ask them to fill up the gas tank - I didn't ask them to check if the plane had tires. You don't think to ask for these things. But of course, it shows up. And what do you do? You build a dirt ramp and back a plane up to it. It's. 

You have to think on your feet constantly. And I would say, that's the number one aspect to it is how just to problem solve 24 hours a day.

[21:18] Jennifer: And when you left Uzbekistan a few months later to set up operations in Kabul, this was, I think, spring 2002, what was it like operating a logistics business in Kabul in the early Days? 

I mean, many of us, like me, you know, live through this period just by watching CNN, just by watching the news and seeing what's happening. But being on the ground, what was it like?

[21:40] Jay: It was really interesting. So when I drove to Kabul, I delivered a shipment of medical supplies to the military, and that took me three days from Tashkent to Kabul, through mountains, through the Salang Pass, which had an avalanche on the inside of it at the time. And it was quite a hairy drive from a driver safety point of view - it actually wasn't dangerous from a war point of view, thankfully. 

But again, everything was virgin. And that's the most interesting thing. Again, you are literally doing everything for the first time from dealing with airport operations, dealing with local trucking companies, understanding a different culture. The Afghan culture is very much different than the Balkan culture. 

The key thing I learned in Afghanistan is that you are forever a guest and only a guest in Afghanistan. They are one of the most hospitable people on the planet. They are very tough people. I mean, they kicked out Genghis Khan and everybody else who's ever stayed longer in Afghanistan than they're welcome. 

But if you ask an Afghan for help, you approach it from a friendly point of view, they will do everything in the world for you, way beyond risking their own self-interest. Amazing people. So that was a whole idea around learning it and learning just, again, these are very different cultural environments. 

And lucky again, we lived in the town of Kabul. We didn't live at Bagram Air Base or inside the US Embassy compound or at the airport. And we lived and worked with the Afghans every day, and that's had a huge lasting effect on me. 

Again, learning how to work in their system, with their system, everything being first, so nothing had been done before the way we had to do things. And that was an incredible learning experience.

[23:19] Jennifer: So now, jumping ahead, I know you were the lead investor in one of the impact private equity funds that invests exclusively in Afghanistan called In Frontier Limited. I believe it still operates businesses inside Afghanistan. 

And looking at what's happening today 20 years later, how do you contrast what is happening on the ground today in Afghanistan to those days 20 years ago where it was perhaps full of hope? I'm just curious how you view what is happening today in that country.

[23:57] Jay: Yeah, it's interesting. 

So Afghanistan's been through a lot of changes, good and bad, as well as the international community, good and bad. There was a lot of hope. I think Afghanistan went in some different directions, as we all know, historically with the large portion of the international community leaving. 

But some of the international community stayed, especially in terms of aid organizations. We stayed operationally in our businesses. So with In Frontier, founded by two amazing entrepreneurs, Ben and Felix. Myself, Austin and I, as a family, we invested in the TopCo - we were the first seed investor into the TopCo, that company, to help get it started. 

And I wanted to do that because I was very busy with Move One at the time that I couldn't find a way to give back and reinvest back in the country. So when Ben and Felix approached us about starting In Frontier, I was like, great, this is a way we can give back into the general community, not the community that's attached to all the foreign investment. But actually we did stuff in farming, with an airline, with a school in pharmaceuticals was the very first thing that we did. And that was very interesting. It was a way to give back.

The current political landscape now is sensitive, but we're reinvesting in Afghanistan because again, I try to think apolitically as much as possible in everything we do, and then that will lead to some of the things we talk about, maybe with No-End later, is that I believe in localization and working with local communities. 

In any country, you need to work with them, regardless of who's in power. I don't have the ability to change that. We're not a political organization. We're not political people. We're here about investing in local communities and making it work no matter what the situation is. 

And I'm very proud of the organization for continuing even during the transition, because our loyalty is to our employees and their families, and as well as our investors, etc, but most importantly, to the communities. And you have to support that regardless.

[25:57] Jennifer: So a year later, the Iraq war broke out, and then you found yourself in the Middle East setting up operations yet again. But it's a much bigger operation compared to the one in Afghanistan. What were some of your biggest challenges in your daily work?

[26:12] Jay: Well, again, that was a different cultural situation. It was a different warfare situation. And we'd gotten used to the Middle east because we always use the UAE as our main air hub into Afghanistan. So when we set up to go into Iraq in spring of ‘03, we did the same. And then we set up operations in Kuwait. 

And then sometime in the spring, I drove to Baghdad on my own. And that was a bit of a challenge and fun in its own right. The very first thing we did into Iraq was delivering mail to the front for the British military, so it was an interesting experience and an interesting first convoy.

And then I needed to get to Baghdad, shortly after the Americans largely took control of Baghdad. And to get up there I needed to drive and I had some connections in Iraq, so I went up with the British military as far as Basra. And the next day I was being met by a group of Iraqis to take me up to Baghdad. 

And I had my (Mitsubishi) Pajero (a large SUV), and loaded up with food and fuel and all these different things. And I went out the next morning and I'm waiting at the British checkpoint and it was three or four vehicles of Iraqis to come to get me. And we're talking and I get on the sat phone to Baghdad and I'm talking to Omar, who is my contact in Baghdad. 

And he said, is Saad there? So I found Saad and I handed over the satellite phone. They talked for a minute or two. Omar gave me the phone back, said, okay, Saad will go with you in your vehicle, I'll see you in Baghdad in a few hours. 

I said, okay, great - I hung up the phone. And in Arabic, Saad said a whole bunch of things to everybody else and everybody left. And it's just me, Saad and my (SUV) Pajero and he goes, Baghdad? I'm like, I guess so. 

So we drove to Baghdad, we are not entirely safe. And Baghdad was very much not under control at the time when we arrived. So that was a bit of an interesting experience going up there. But again it was recreating everything from scratch. 

We had opened up airport operations, we had to set up convoy operations going out of Kuwait, also out of Jordan. Finding employees, finding access, finding a place to live, understanding where you're going on. Finding fuel was a constant challenge at that time. In fact, there was black market for fuel and regular fuel lines. It was a lot of chaos. 

But what I will say is all the organizations, whether that is inside the US government or inside the UN or different things, they always send really their best people at the beginning of these conflicts. They really are people that are open-minded, geared on problem solving. It's before all the red tape of bureaucracy sets in. So that's always fun. 

And then when I tried to leave Baghdad a few months later and actually drive out through Kuwait, there was a whole problem at the border because I left without telling anybody over a berm. 

There was a special document you were supposed to have if you left the way I did. But that document was only issued after I left. And they said, well, you still need it anyways. I'm like, how am I supposed to have a document that only existed after I left? And they said, that's your problem. 

So they kicked me out and then I had to go back in. And I missed my parents who were visiting me in Hungary, so I was all late to see them. Whole chaos, but I made it out. But again, Iraq was much different and the conflict was all over the place in Iraq at the time.

Afghanistan in the early days was much more up to the mountains. Kabul was a much safer place than Baghdad. So again, it's doing everything from scratch - you have to write the rule book all over again.

[29:32] Jennifer: Right. So out of that experience, out of your experience in Iraq, you helped to found North Degrees to set up the non-logistics related businesses in these emerging economies. And I believe one of the early companies that you founded was a food company in Iraq. 

And was this out of duty? Did it feel like out of duty for you to branch out of logistics and into the local communities to start things from scratch?

[30:01] Jay: It's a great question and I really wish I could say yes and claim that, but actually it was a little bit about diversification and it was a little bit about boredom. But at that stage with Move One, we were investing in local communities and economies. 

And the one thing that I'm very proud of (is) Move One, which I did leave about 10 years ago, as a company, they never left Bosnia, never left Albania. I mean, there was a time when Albania, a very very small part of our group P&L, but we had people that helped us there when it was an important part of our group P&L, so we never closed down. And that I've always been very proud of. 

So actually when we started North Degrees was just to expand more in local investment, really inside of these countries and see how we could invest and not just be to do with the government. And our customers were asking us to do it.

And so that's when we actually, we built a food factory in northern Iraq in a place called Erbil. And we opened it right at the beginning of the ISIS crisis. So after two years of permits and building and everything else, and while we were very, very lucky not to lose the factory to ISIS, it became very close one night. 

That was actually when the air campaign from America against ISIS started - they were actually quite close to our factory. The business died, so our customers disappeared. So that's when we decided to scrap that. But North Degrees carried on as a distribution company. 

It wasn't the reason for me leaving Move One necessarily, but it had something to do with it. It’s after the failure of our factory, we said, okay, as a board, they said let's stay only in logistics. And by then I wanted to do more. I felt that we were very, very good at doing hard things in hard places as a company.

The widget didn't really matter. The company we built was a great logistics company, still is today, phenomenal working in places like Ukraine and Gaza and all over Africa. But we could have been in telecoms, we could have been in food supply. It didn't really matter what the widget was. The whole team was really about doing these hard things in hard places. So I got bored and I just wanted to do more hard things in hard places. 

And that's where I think the joint learnings from what we did with In Frontier, which was operating at the time and starting North Degrees and then leaving Move One was really around we can do more inside of local economies. 

We can do more utilizing our local knowledge and our ability to operate inside these countries, whether that is from how the laws work, how banking works, how working with local nationals works, etc. And then that's when we decided to look at, okay, how do we invest into these fragile populations and economies? 

And it kind of restarted from there. And that would have been in 2015, the first venture being in the energy sector, largely because my wife being from Norway, from Stavanger, there's family connections up there. And the North Degrees was born to go in and bring in technology into these countries to really enhance their energy production. 

So that's what happened during the changeover. And I think it grew over time, this real need to sit and reflect about how do we give back to fragile communities, how do we give back to these countries that we've been very successful in. And it grew from there.

[33:20] Jennifer: So speaking of doing hard things or harder things in hard places, of the four different conflicts and post conflicts that you've been involved with, what was the hardest for you?

[33:33] Jay: That's a great question. Because all of them were different in different ways. 

Afghanistan had the most impression on me for sure. You know what I mean? It's the part that touched me the most over all the different places. I think it had to do with the timing, the ruralness of it. So from a nature point of view, Afghanistan beyond anything. I mean the roads, the infrastructure, the lack of communication, everything was definitely the most challenging.

From a complexity and at times violence point of view. Iraq for sure. Iraq was an extremely difficult place for a very long time. So they were definitely the most challenging. And again, projects into Africa as well have been challenging. But a lot of those challenges from a logistics point of view really actually come down to bureaucracy to a large degree, complexities of multimodal logistics and security.

[34:29] Jennifer: All right, so now we can talk about your new project, the No-End Philosophy. 

And five years ago you came up with the concept of the No-End Philosophy, and Denesfa, which is a company now based in Budapest, it's named after your ancestral village to put the No-End Philosophy into practice. 

No-End stands for no extractions, no timelines, no exits.

So I was wondering if you could explain to our listeners the No-End Philosophy? What inspired you to come up with this concept and how it would work?

[35:07] Jay: Thank you. It's a great question. 

It's a long-term hybrid learning process. From the different things that I've seen, there's a portion of it that comes from the family background and this idea of community leadership, investing in your communities and also thinking ultra-long-term. 

Our family ran its operations for 700 years in Hungary. So having that kind of mindset, then blending that with what I learned after at that point, 20ish years in conflict zones, post-conflict zones, developing economies, what goes right, what goes wrong, how do you do things better? And finally, well, where can we make a difference? 

So really what happened is five years ago I was doing what I was normally doing when I was bored. I was complaining to Åsta (my wife) about is there a better way to do humanitarian aid? Is there a better way to do post-conflict reconstruction? When I'm finished with the commercial things I was doing, I'm going to spend my time trying to see if we can make a difference there. 

And Åsta said, well, two things. One, you're in Covid, you're not traveling like you used to, so you have some free time, and if you really want to take on a big challenge, that maybe you should start now and not wait. And like most things in my life, she's right. 

So we said, okay, well let's do something. And we decided to call the entity Denefa and name it after the family - (I) was looking for a family legacy project that can incorporate some of our family values. But what I sat around and thought about was, well, what is the one thing that I've really learned in all these different places that I can maybe do something about? 

(I) learned lots of things I can't do anything about, but what can I do something about? And really what it is that there's one common thread, whether that was in the Balkans or whether that is just in Eastern Europe coming out of the Cold War, rural Central Asia, Africa, post-conflict zones, is that in any what I would call fragile population, the local communities and their leaders... And by local communities I mean charities, co-ops, small businesses, NGOs, municipal sort of level leadership, village kind of leadership. 

They're all very aware of where they are. They have a good awareness of where they want to go to make their situation better. And they also generally are pretty sure of what they need to get there. What I've seen time and time again is they don't receive that support in a scalable, notable way from the international communities around the world. 

So I said that if you listen to local, national, they know what they need and you listen to them, then you need to provide that. But do we do that accurately? And I think that's one of the great takeaways that I had. 

And then the other part when I looked at it, I was like, okay, well can we fix this? And I'm generalizing here, by the way, how to do those three things do you need? You need a way to fund what these local communities want to do, some technology transfer involved and then there's some tools and habits and structures that can be put in place as well. 

But the technology transfer and tools and structures don't come without money. So at the end of the day, the real thing is can you create patient investment and capital into these local communities? Which is exactly what In Frontier does, by the way. A lot of this inspiration came from what In Frontier did together with my local experience. And can we solve that? 

So we looked at, well, why does this patient capital, why does this long-term investment needed in fragile populations not happen? And we looked at, okay, what are the current sources? And they really break those down into three sources.

One source is the international community, which as we know generally has a tendency to follow CNN. So whatever is front page on the news is getting funded. And then when another crisis unfortunately happens, when it always does somewhere else, money moves there and it leaves the other places. We're always leaving too soon and not funding long-term enough - that's aspect one.

The second aspect of money is really what is very in trend today, which is impact investing. The unfortunate part about a lot of impact investing, not all. Again, there's always good organizations in here as well. But I'm just pointing out where we can look at improving is a lot of impact investing is really just investing.

It's still trying to maximize return, mitigate risk, 6-8 year exits - traditional sort of private equity investing. It needs to be done differently in these fragile economies. They require longer investment time periods, they require more patient capital, more patient time on returns, etc. So it doesn’t super work. 

And the other main source is what I would refer to as private capital, whether that's coming out of private foundations, private individuals, corporate CSR programs, individuals that want to even donate a little bit of money per month, etc. It's having a hard time finding its way to those local communities - the pathway is difficult. And as soon as you make that pathway difficult for money, it generally stops.

So what we realized is we need to find a new source of funds and a new pathway of funds. And that's really where the No-End Philosophy started. We said, okay, well if we can't rely on traditional forms of funding, what can we rely on? What can we create? 

So we had a look around and we said, okay, looking at the world, economically speaking, in terms of economic populations, how is it broken up and where is it interesting? So approximately 4 billion people on the planet, 50%, live in what I would call fragile populations, which means income is not steady, it's not very high. What's earned on a daily basis is spent on the very basics of food, shelter, security, etc. And it's live day to day. 

And then the other end of the spectrum is what I would call really the capital population. And that's the people who have access, either directly themselves or through their organizations, etc, to excess capital. And that's really about 80 million people, the global 1%, if you will, because it's about excess capital that can be invested into these fragile areas. 

It's not capital that's tied up in people's houses, their pension plans, their cars, their families. And those families need that, right? It's what can be used beyond. And not enough of it, in my opinion, gets released. And again, there are great families doing great things in these areas. But when you look at compared to all the capital in the world and what gets actually to the end user, it's too small, frankly, what's available today. 

But then there's 4 billion people in between there. And I think that's a really interesting population. It's often referred to as the working class population or middle class population. I like to think of it as a consumer population. So what's interesting about these 4 billion people is they spend way more money than everybody else combined on daily consumer goods and services. So not capital assets like cars and houses, but literally clothing and food and insurance and banking and mobile phones and going for dinner, etc.

In fact, they spend $44 trillion a year, which is two times the US GDP or bigger than the GDP of US, China, Japan, Germany combined. Where does that money go? You know, where do the profits from what everyday working people spend go?  And does it move through the entire economy? And what we've seen is it really doesn't. It moves through part of the economy that has a tendency to get stuck. 

And this is what I mean by excess capital. It gets stuck in other forms of investments - it doesn't move around. And we realize that in order to really improve the lives of the 4 billion people in the fragile populations, to strengthen the lives of the 4 billion people in the working class population, profits must circulate. We need to move that all around. 

And that's really where the No-End Philosophy was born. We said, okay, can we create perpetual entities that focus on consumer spending and consumer services and then reinvest all of those profits in communities forever, globally, and communities being back in the company, back its employees, back in its societies, into fragile populations, etc. 

Can we do all of that? And I believe we can. But then we said, well, we better prove our concept before we go tell the rest of the world about it. So that's kind of where the whole birth started with No-End. And we came up to that conclusion in 2020, 2022, 2023. But then we thought we better go prove what we're doing before we start talking about it.

[43:44] Jennifer: So just following up on that, can you give us a concrete example of what you're doing now with Denesfa as a concrete example?

[43:51] Jay: Yeah, so Denesfa was born and we said, okay, let's go find a consumer product. And we looked around. I really wanted to do insurance, but we didn't know anyone that would give us enough money to start an insurance company. 

So we said, okay, what's a great consumer product that is globally used, growing, used on a regular basis and also impacts a lot of people, both at the production level, at the distribution level and at the consumption level? So we settled on coffee.

We said, could we create cafes to rival traditional chain of commercial cafes, but reinvest everything that we make in communities around us? And that was in 2023. And we said, okay, that sounds like a really good idea. But then we realized we don't know anything about coffee.

So we had to go find someone who does. And we found this small social enterprise coffee company in Hungary, in Budapest, called Daisuke. It has an amazing founder Sabi, who really understands the coffee business, he's committed to community. 

And I talked to Sabi about what we wanted to do. At that time, it was just called Denesfa - we hadn't gotten the No-End name yet. And he said, great. So we actually arranged to buy a slight majority stake in Daisuke and said, okay, can we start building it? Can we build our model, which was (to) raise startup capital through philanthropic seed funding? Which we did.

We brought in a bunch of investors into our nonprofit wholesale trading company in Hungary. We used that money to purchase the stake in Daisuke, as well as expand it to three fully-owned cafes. And then we went out and looked at raising debt financing to expand that further. 

We now have five owned cafes, our first franchise - we have a roastery all in Budapest and growing. And now we're just on the cusp of taking it to the rest of the world. Not sure where yet - that'll depend on where our investors want to take it and how they'll help us take it there. 

And we learned some amazing things about that. We learned about how can we work with farmers in the field, how can we work with our baristas, how can we look at post-company profit programs, which are actually, we're doing one currently in India. And how can we make a lot of mistakes along the way? You know, this is very much a work in progress. I would like to think it's the perfect setup. It's not yet, but it will be. 

We've got some great people working with us and we're improving how do we communicate the impact that we do? How do we make sure it's KPI'd correctly? How do we make sure we deliver what our employees really want? Some of our ideas were great, but actually not functional. And so we're working through all those things. 

And then from an investor point of view, even from a consumer point of view or general public point of view, we learned a very valuable lesson. And that's that in general, people don't understand what the word nonprofit means. It's not a charity. Nonprofits work like regular businesses, especially ones that turn revenue. Not all nonprofits are revenue generating, but a lot are. 

And we're a revenue-generating nonprofit in our sense. Nonprofit means no access to dividends. It really just means you can't extract gross profits or net profits out of the business. And they all need to be reinvested, and they need to be either reinvested in the business or supporting charities or communities or different things.

So everything has to circulate, going back to the whole idea of profits must circulate. So if we're like, well, if it doesn't translate well, the word nonprofit, then what should we call what we're doing? 

And we went back to what you said earlier is, well, our core ethos where there's no timelines to this business, there's no extraction and there's no exit. We're not going to sell it to private equity, we're not going to IPO it, we're not going to give it to somebody. So really what it means is No-End - these are perpetual entities.  

And that's when we actually rebranded Denesfa to Denesfa No-End Company. And we came up with the idea of the No-End Philosophy.  And what I'm really excited about is this spring we actually registered the No-End Philosophy company also in Budapest. And we did that for one really important reason. 

We also learned that even if we built the best coffee company in the world, if we built the biggest coffee company in the world, how much profit could we really make to invest in fragile populations around the world? Several hundred million. Maybe a billion if we're really lucky. That still doesn't move the needle. It could do a lot of good, but it can't transform 4 billion people. 

But what can transform 4 billion people is creating hundreds or thousands of No-End companies. If there's an alternative for every consumer, product and service, where all of the money recirculates in the populations, that can be a generational shift. There's no way we can do that on our own. So the only way to do it was actually to create a new socioeconomic philosophy and then advocate that out to the world to see how we can support all of our constituents.  

And those constituents being the general public, first and foremost, our consumers, our entrepreneurs and our investors. And if we do it really well, eventually everybody becomes all of those things. You get capital for all, even if it's small capital.

Everybody has (the) capability of being the type of consumer they want to be or working for the type of organization that provides those goods and services. So can we create an entirely all consuming group of entities? And that's really what we're doing with the No-End Philosophy. It's a big goal, but we think in centuries, not in quarters. 

So that's what we're up to these days - early stages, but really exciting and really fun.

[49:46] Jennifer: Great, Jay, a couple of things that come to my mind. This may work well in the specialty coffee chain sector because there's a high profit margin and you can afford to make some mistakes along the way. 

What other sectors do you see where the No-End Philosophy could flourish?

[50:11] Jay: It's a great question. I think it comes back to the bell curve a little bit. So we're right at the front of the bell. 

So with coffee it's in the learning process. And in the specialty coffee business, the types of customers are early adopter customers to begin with. The type of people who want to invest in that they're front end of the curve kind of mindsets. So that's a great place to start. As we work through the structures of these companies and more importantly, we build brand recognition to the concept of No-End, we can move into more price sensitive marketplaces. 

I do firmly believe that with the right form of OpEx (operating expense) backing, any consumer goods industry or consumer service industry is eligible for this, whether that is insurance or in t-shirts or in a rental car agency or you name it, because there's no magic wand to those businesses. Where the challenge comes is if you're in deep IP businesses where owning and controlling IP really changes the environment or deep-stage tech, that's going to take seven years of investment and it may or may not pop out the other end and make money.

The thing about regular consumer products is you're very short from idea to revenue. And even more so, No-End is very well set up to convert existing consumer businesses over into a different model. 

What I've learned is a lot of entrepreneurs are really there just to build. They're interested in building their companies, their brands, working with their people. For them, the income they make is a byproduct, of course, important for having a life, but that's not why they do it. 

So when you set this up and you can form other forms of capital financing to expand and working with like-minded entrepreneurs and tools to expand and you're simply taking salaries and pensions out of it as a leader, because you need to get paid still. That's enough for most entrepreneurs, earning reasonable salaries. 

So you can apply it into any industry. And I believe as we grow this, we'll be able to operate in those more competitive industries. There is a whole aspect to it in B2B here as well. There's lots of businesses that would sell products to consumer companies that can also operate under a No-End structure, where their audience is really the companies that are buying their products as opposed to the end consumer. But again, that trickles down and it moves through the economic supply chain.

So it really is agnostic. And during 2026 we'll be adding a few of these companies into the matrix and really start growing the No-End family.

[52:28] Jennifer: So you had talked about entrepreneurs, but what about investors? I mean I'm just trying to put my investor hat on. No timelines, no exits, how am I going to get my money out?

[53:09] Jay: It's a great question. So we have a theory inside of No-End and it's really about the separation of financiers and shareholders. And we really think about shareholders as shepherds of the business, about thinking about the long-term security of the business, not about immediate or even mid-term or long-term financial returns, but building an economically stable long-term business. 

Financiers have a duty to return and that's part of it. So the way we set up the whole model is that you seed finance and startup capital with philanthropic equity. So philanthropic money that has no expectation of return, this is money that would normally go into other forms of donations, etc. 

But by investing into a No-End company, you get to watch your donation if you will grow forever because you put seed capital into a business and you get to see its revenues, its gross profit and its net profits fund communities in perpetuity. So you don't lose sight of where your investment goes. 

And then on the other side of it you have OpEx (operating expense) expansion funds and operating capital coming from debt. And we choose debt because then you fix the return. The investors got reasonable expectations to returns, and there's less short term pressure providing you can pay your coupons, which is important. You need to set up a debt mechanism that's functional for your business. 

And both parties get what they want. So the philanthropic investment is really what I call active capital. So these are people that want to sit on the boards of these No-End companies, be actively involved in what they're doing.

And then the debt financing is passive capital. So you're involved in the business from a passive point of view. You've invested in it, but as a debt holder only, you don't have control over the operation of the business. That's left to the shareholders and the stewards. 

And when you're thinking long-term and ultra long-term, those two interests align because people want recurring income and passive income long-term, you're not looking for a short, fast exit. This is how I see those two parties working together.

[55:20] Jennifer: So the active capital would be more the philanthropic capital. So it's more like making grants to the businesses to operate the No-End companies?

[55:30] Jay: Correct. So the exact money that we raised for the very first No-End company came from our greater network. And again, it was people that say, okay, I give X amount of money a year away in donations, in charity, supporting social enterprises, different things where there's no real aspect of any kind of financial return, but you want impact return or you want community coverage, etc. 

And we went to them and said, look, why don't you look at using a portion of what you would normally contribute in a year to us. And then we'll show you how we turn that dollar or that thousand dollars or that million dollars into investing in communities by first, all the benefits that come from the operating company, which in our case happens to be a coffee business. You know, how does that benefit farmers, how does that benefit our employees, how does that benefit the general public? And then what do we do with our greater corporate profits? And your philanthropic capital helps all of that. 

And by giving philanthropic capital you take a seat at the board. So that means you do have fiduciary responsibilities, you have impact on how we operate, how we behave, how you develop our values. And most importantly, you have responsibility for succession. And that's a huge aspect in building perpetual companies. How do you have succession that's going to continue your views and values and the company's views and values ultra long-term?

There are trusts and different setups like that. But the world evolves. And by having an active board you can evolve with the world. You can be very stuck sometimes in trust, in foundation setups. Whereas with our shareholders and in case of Denefsa, it’s 15, they have to find their successor. And it can be through family, it can be through a different individual that wants to pick up the baton from them and continue to lead. 

And by having 15 people doing this, not two, you should have a gradual turnover inside of your boards in a well-thought (manner), because our new Board members, our new shareholders need to be approved by the others and follow our governance and build along. And so that's where I think it's a bit of a unique structure for the active philanthropic investor that speaks to a certain amount of people.

And then on the other side, in the passive side, there's a great amount of people out there that want to do good with their money, they want to see it work, but they don't have the time to be involved in its work and people are busy, that's okay. And this is another element. 

And these are not huge returns, but it replaces nice static returns like you would get from investing in a rental property or in bonds or different things. And this works transparently in an impact environment, where you know that the returns that the company makes off your debt 100% re-circulates in the company and in the communities.

So it allows you to have a passive side to it, which also speaks to a different kind of investor and some people both. What we don't do is again, ultra short-term, high risk, high reward is not how we work.

[58:45] Jennifer: So I'm just thinking in the case of Daisuke, so if I'm an active capital holder, instead of giving money each year to the communities on the ground, in this case where the coffee beans comes from, I would be granting money to Daisuke and then the profit from Daisuke would circulate down to those communities.

But I would give the money to Daisuke just once. Is that the way to think about it?

[59:13] Jay: Sort of, yeah. The intellectual side of it's correct, the application is a little bit different, but yes. 

If your interest was helping farmers in Latin America, you can give to a charity in Latin America, you'd look to find a co-op to invest or whatever in Latin America. But in the Denefsa side, you're actually investing in multiple communities. 

One of the main ways we support our communities in Latin America is how we buy coffee, how we pay for the coffee that we buy, the relationships that we make in the field, which is really all managed by Sabi, our founder on the coffee business. It touches points there.

And then it's also touch points with our employees, stable jobs and then what do we do with the form of profit? So it's more for investors that want to look at things holistically across a broader range, but also it's a one-time investment. 

So if they're happy with the Denefsa and Daisuke investment 2-3 years down the road, again if they want to look at part of their philanthropic contributions and say I would like to do this again, well the next one's not going to be in us, it's going to be in No-End company #17. We're looking at different social enterprises in Africa but also this just could be, a set of laundromats or a digital sales platform or whatever that other No-End company might be. 

So if you want to invest again, the next opportunity will be a new company because Denesfa and Daisuke have already seeded, we will grow with that. It allows for diversity and this is how we build with scale.

[60:04] Jennifer: Speaking of scale, you talked about wanting to build 2,000-3,000 or tens of thousands of No-End companies and you want to build that into a global movement. So just how do you plan to make that happen?

[60:57] Jay: Calling in a lot of favors is what I've been doing at the moment, but it's about advocating what we're doing. 

So again in order to do this is why we decided to put things into a philosophy. We looked at putting it into. Yeah, is it a movement?  Maybe, but it's really about adopting a set of values and visions.  And what I've been so very lucky with over the years is I have a great network of really smart leaders being much smarter than me all over the world with different levels of connections. 

And we've put together what we call the Group of 53, which is our non-fiduciary advisory to the philosophy. So we have an ownership stake in our philosophy, then we have a separate group whose job is really to help us build our values and help us build awareness and help us find these other companies and these other great entrepreneurs. 

And I'm proud to say we have members in our Group of 53 across every continent, every walk of life, and pretty much every age group, from 20s to 60s and that's how we're starting to get the word out. 

And really going into 2026 is when we start marketing it. But this is a long-term process. It's just a constant grind of just building, adding, talking, getting it out, etc. But this is based on building community bridges, building leadership, building networks, working with other existing networks.  

I think a really core aspect that we haven't really talked about is we're not trying to reinvent any wheels here. What we're actually trying to do is build an application for wheels that already exist.  

Sometimes I get asked, well, how are you going to improve education on the coffee farms in Latin America? I'm like, we're not going to. We're a money-in organization. So we're about how do we take money from the general market economy and get it to where we're reconnecting.

And how do we get that money to the organizations, the local communities? And I talked originally that they know what they're doing - that's a key aspect. And when you look at the structures of Denefsa, it's not entirely unique. 

There's great companies out there. Newman Salad Dressing is amazing. I'm not 100% sure if I understand correctly, they've given $500 million away to children's charities in the US by building a consumer product company which makes amazing salad dressing and they sell it. They've done that as a company.  

And if you look across the world, there are companies that have done what they've done small scale, larger scale.  You look at things of what Patagonia has done, etc. But they were a for profit company for a long time and then switched it over, which is also amazing.

What we're doing with No-End is trying to really put a common philosophy and idea around that and build that into a structure that entrepreneurs and business leaders and community leaders can work around. And it creates some kind of commonality in all of this. 

That's really what No-End is doing - we wouldn't want to dare claim that we're entirely original. We've put together a lot of good ideas for a lot of great people that have come before us and put that into what we think is an actionable, scalable, long-term outcome for society.

[64:15] Jennifer: Right. You had mentioned assembling a Group of 53, I'm proud to be a member. And I never understood the significance of the number 53.

[64:26] Jay: Yeah, it's a great question and they don't answer it. 

So 53 is a numerological number for No-End. There's a couple reasons behind it. There's a mathematical reason behind it and I promise anybody who guesses it, I will tell them and just swear them in secrecy and we'll just leave that as a forever thing. 

But the other aspect of it is a prime number, which is always nice to have. This is a global program, right? And if we're going to think about a global program in perpetuity, it needs safeguards, it needs people that can make sure our philosophy is relatable, that is culturally aware. 

As we talked even back into the war things, different cultures, different communities act differently all over the world.  And if we don't have advisors from different age groups, different parts of the world, different backgrounds, etc, how do we create something that is relevant? 

Very often what we talk about is relevance - how can we be globally relevant? And you need a set of advisors that do that when you start breaking up the world. I mean, you need a fair bit of people to do that. 

And thank you for being part of the Group of 53. And I think, as you know, we're at 21 members right now, just being careful as we add, so we have room to grow both in age and across the world. 

And it's the same responsibility as our shareholders of succession. Each member of the Group of 53 is obligated to find their successor when they don't want to do this anymore, or don't have time, etc. And that really becomes the safeguard for the philosophy. 

And then I have a whole other way of bringing in greater people into the philosophy. I need to figure out how to structure that from, honestly, from a legal structure point of view. That's a lot of what we're working on right now is how do you take this new concept, scale it globally under one applicable legal structure worldwide. 

And I think that really speaks to the most brave or aspirational of all of our goals, or audacious, is that can we create a new legal entity? And that's where this is all going eventually - we're not there yet. But can we create something that encompasses corporate structures, trust or foundation structures and NGO structures, all under one form of legal entity? 

Because in order to really build a perpetual entity that serves communities, serves customers, and serves all 8 point whatever billion people on the planet as their constituents, no current structure actually does all of those things.

There's great aspects to all three of those entities and there's limitations to all three. So can we take the good parts or the workable parts that we want and leave the ones that don't work behind? And that's also one of our goals over the next near-term, 1-2 years to see if we can get that out the door.

[67:17]  Jennifer: And what is your vision for the No-End Philosophy in five years?

[67:21] Jay: That's great. So if we're really, really successful, we start to be a noun and a verb. I think that would be fantastic.  

I see us as having multiple companies under adoption. I don't really have a set number. I think geographic spread would be most important.  I would love to see Daisuke and our coffee business across multiple continents, if not all.  But more importantly, it is growing that, empowering the mass, empowering consumers. Can we get consumers to really buy what we're doing?  And I think that onus is on us.  

I think the greatest challenge has been, we speak about inside of the Group of 53, is how do we communicate this?  How do we communicate it relevantly?  How do we make sure values are aligned across stakeholders, across global constituents?  So all of that is our big challenge. So the success or failure lies on us. 

I have absolute faith in the consumer. I have absolute faith in regular people, you know, the people that are living on our planet. I really do. And I think if you put the right opportunities in front of people, they'll absolutely support it. I think if you ask too much of people, they can't support it. Right, because people are busy, people have lives, people have other things they need to worry about every day. 

But if you put products and services in front of them that have a responsible good cause behind it that can't be changed, which is a key aspect, they will support buying these products and we will see that impact happen in the communities, at consumption, at production, and then at the fragile populations down the line. 

Actually, all the wars and conflict zones have given me more faith in society, not less.

[69:06] Jennifer: That's great to know. And for those people who want to support the No-End Philosophy, where can they find you online?

[69:12] Jay: Well, you can find me on LinkedIn. Of course, the other way is actually just through the No-End website, which is no-end.com. 

And we're looking for people that want to get involved And I really see that from, again, all aspects of our constituents. It comes from entrepreneurs and companies that want to look at supporting No-End, becoming like No-End. It has to do with investors. It has to do with people who want to advocate it and help us find new companies or people that want to help us interact with consumers and make sure our message is correct.  

And also community organizations. This actually does play at the community organization level as well. And how to find what products can communities develop and use that revenue to benefit themselves? That's a whole other aspect of what we're doing.

[70:01]  Jennifer: I have one last question - it doesn't have anything to do with No-End or the previous logistics business. I was wondering, having lived and worked across all these different cultural contexts in from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to Central Asia and Africa, if you have a favorite travel destination.

[70:27] Jay: It's a great question. And I've been so lucky to have been on every continent, including Antarctica and all over the different places. It's a fantastic question.

My favorite area of the world that's off the beaten path a little bit would definitely be Central Asia. The big sky, the high deserts, the people. It's a very old and historic part of the world. I think it's got an amazing history, amazing people, amazing food. I have a romantic thing about Central Asia for sure. It's the old Silk Road, it’s an old track of explorers.  

But I've had an amazing time on every single continent. I think that the best travel destinations are the small communities and small villages and interacting at a local level. And I think that's rewarding in every single country in the world.

[71:12] Jennifer: I also love what you said about Afghanistan.

[71:15] Jay: Yeah, I mean, amazing. And I hope tourism comes back there. I believe it is, to some degree. Again, just an amazingly historic part of the world, an unmapped part of the world, and I'm very glad I got to spend so much time there.

[71:28] Jennifer: Wonderful, Jay. 

We're now coming to the end of our interview, and as you know, we end every episode with a quote. And for this episode, we have a quote from Lao Tzu, an ancient Chinese philosopher and author of the book Tao Te Ching, one of the foundational texts of Taoism,

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Thank you, Jay, for taking the time to join us on the podcast today. And with that quote, I wish you all the very best in your journey of transforming this No-End Philosophy into a global movement. Thank you for joining us.

[72:03] Jay: No, thank you Jennifer. It was a great time. I really appreciate it.

[72:07] Jennifer: If this podcast has been beneficial or valuable to you, feel free to become a patron and support us on Patreon.com, that is P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/TheFounderSpirit. 

As always, you can find us on Apple, Amazon and Spotify, as well as social media and our website at TheFounderSpirit.com. 

[72:26] END OF AUDIO