Steve Gordon: Inside the California DMV’s Transformation

Guy Kawasaki:
Hello everybody. It's Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast. And today I have a guest that if you had told me when I first started getting driver's licenses in California, that someday I would have a podcast about remarkable people and I would bring on the show the person who ran the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, I would tell you, you are crazy because I spent half my life waiting at that freaking office in Redwood City. I am very proud that this is the Remarkable People podcast.
We're trying to make you remarkable. And I have the remarkable Steve Gordon who runs the California DMV, and I can tell you from personal experience, I love the DMV. Not many people might say that, but if you really think about it and you've had recent experience at the California DMV, you would be happy. I'm telling you. I want to give a special shout out to my favorite office, which is the Capitola of California DMV. They are so great there. Welcome to the show, Steve Gordon.

Steve Gordon:
Thank you, Guy. Glad to be here.

Guy Kawasaki:
I am sincere in my praise for the California DMV, I'm telling you. I look forward to registration time. I'm going to go buy more cars, so I have to register more often.

Steve Gordon:
We look forward to helping you with that. Thanks.

Guy Kawasaki:
Now that I'm getting older, I have to go get my license renewed more often. It's all good.

Steve Gordon:
But still it should only be every five years and we've simplified. You still have to have an eye exam, but no longer do you need a written knowledge test. It's simple.

Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, when did that happen? Because I know I took the test and an eye exam.

Steve Gordon:
Just recently, this was probably about six, five months ago where we actually removed the requirement for a knowledge test. This was popular when we left COVID because we had waived it during COVID. And then we brought it back and there was this outrage.
And then we actually went back and looked at the data and saw that very little correlation between passing a knowledge test and safe driving. We convinced our administration that it's the right thing to do and we had good controls and other ways to take care of driver safety and we got rid of the exam. Yeah, it's fantastic.

Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, so when you say you convinced your administration, what does that mean? You just call up Gavin and say, "Hey Gavin, it doesn't matter if people take a knowledge test." And Gavin says to Steve, "Yeah, okay. Fine, take it off." How does that work?

Steve Gordon:
No, I think the governors have many, many bigger things to do than worry about that. We work as part of the administration and we try to make sure that as we make changes, and that's very public and we want to make sure that we work with the folks that are in our agency.
And so want to make sure they're aware of what we're trying to do, why we're trying to do it, and why we believe it's the right thing to do. Government is one of those things that they want no surprises. We want to make sure we socialize it the right way, share the data, share the facts, talk about the opportunity, and making sure that of course the skids are greased so we could roll it out and be successful.

Guy Kawasaki:
And the state attorney general doesn't call you up and say, "Listen, we cannot lower the standards because somebody who didn't have the eye exam and is going to run over a little old lady and they're going to sue the state because we removed the eye exam from the licensing process."

Steve Gordon:
Yeah. We didn't actually remove the eye exam. What we took away is the knowledge test.

Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, the knowledge test, okay.

Steve Gordon:
That's something that people struggle with, but these people who've written to me and I've met with, these are people that have been driving for fifty, sixty years. It's nothing they're going to learn about driving from a knowledge test. Even though we simplified it, we actually made it more of a video so you can see how to drive safely.
But so that's the part that we removed, and we've been studying this for many, many years. I have a bunch of R&D folks, PhDs that study driver behavior. And they go back and show you the correlation between passing an exam and safe driving and there is no correlation. There's no sensitivity to if you don't pass the exam, you're going to be a worse driver. Think about it, when we were sixteen-year-old boys, we passed the knowledge exam, and we were not the best drivers out of the shoot.
Now the eye exam you mentioned is still required actually in statute. There are different ways to do the eye exam. People that are perhaps more fortunate, they can go to some cases LensCrafters at the mall, not to promote a product or go to Kaiser, which I'm a Kaiser customer or somebody else. You can actually have that physician send in the results of the eye exam and satisfy that requirement.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. It's good to know.

Steve Gordon:
Yeah, don't get me in trouble here, Guy. We're just starting this discussion.

Guy Kawasaki:
I'll put it in a good word with Gavin for you. Don't worry.

Steve Gordon:
Great, thanks.

Guy Kawasaki:
Just take me back in history. How did this come about? Did the state of California retain a headhunter or did Gavin personally recruit you? I don't even understand how you become in charge of the DMV.

Steve Gordon:
I didn't either, but I was in a semi-retired state, my wife would probably say that. And we were living in San Jose at the time and local newspaper San Jose Mercury News, and Erin Baldassari wrote an article, I'm sure it was like the editor said, Hey, write something. She put an article that I believe the headline was “Hate the DMV? You Could Run It.” And my wife was reading the Mercury News. She saw that and she read what was in the post.
She says, "Honey, that sounds like you." And the implicit thing in there was well, and you don't seem very busy. Anyway, so I read the article, I looked at the governor's appointment page and I'd read a little bit about the DMV and said, let's see what happens. And I did not expect anything to happen. You put it in this hopper.
It was very much a government form. There's a lot of places to fill things in. You're like, this is never going to fly. And sure enough, about six weeks later, I get a phone call from area code 916, I'm thinking, who do I know in Sacramento? And sure enough, it was part of the recruiting process, and I went to my first interview in Sacramento a few days later.
It was completely out of the blue. This job found me. And it just so happens that given my past experience, it was not a bad fit with my background. My wife was absolutely right. And so when she complains about it's hot in Sacramento in the summer, and it can be very hot here, I remind her that she got us here. And so she should enjoy and make the best out of, and we have. Sacramento and the Midtown area for dining, it is fantastic. We really enjoy our time at Sacramento.

Guy Kawasaki:
And to get a job like this, is it like working at Google where you have twelve rounds of interviews and they say, "So Steve, how would you count the number of manhole covers in the state of California?" How does it work in this process?

Steve Gordon:
I've been critical of the interviewing process because it is a bit abstract and in government we're trying to be super fair, very even. Sometimes the questions are just a bit goofy. My wife traveled up with me when we did these interviews, so we were just commuting up from the Bay Area and I left the first interview and I was just shaking my head and said, okay, this is done. Because it was just such an odd interview, I assumed that they were not serious.
They were just checking the boxes and okay, yeah, we interviewed some guy from the Bay Area. And sure enough, a couple weeks later I got another call and it's now progressing up the leadership chain. And eventually I get to meet with the governor's chief of staff, Anne O'Leary. If you Google her, she's a very serious woman, has worked in the highest levels of government at the federal level. And you're meeting with Anne O'Leary and you're thinking, okay, this is getting serious.
And as I left the interview that day with my wife again, I said, "You're going to have to really consider right now that, do you want to move to Sacramento? Because our next interview is going to be with the governor." And sure enough, five minutes later, Anne's calling me on the phone and saying, "Hey, can you come back tomorrow? The governor wants to meet with you." We had to decide. I said, "Are we going to move to Sacramento? Because it's getting serious."
And I met with governor, super curious guy, very interested in trying to improve government, and I was impressed. I shared with him what he should expect getting from me because I have things that I'm focused on, things that I want to do a certain way. And I was impressed and apparently I impressed him enough. And next thing you know, they're trotting me out in a press conference. And as you know, you never want to follow a better speaker.
Here's the governor doing his thing as he does, is an amazing speaker. Then they trot me out and I'm like, deer in the headlights. And that was it. And then next thing you know, I'm meeting with the staff and getting to know what's really going on inside the department.

Guy Kawasaki:
Back up a second. Just give me an example of a question or two in the first interview that was goofy.

Steve Gordon:
It's probably unfair, but they were of the type, what's your favorite color? And again, not being critical, but I think people are trying to be fair so they ask these very generic questions. And from that, I'm not sure what you're supposed to take from it, but when I've talked to my friends, I say it's the equivalent of that. And it's like, what were they trying to learn from that? And I know people that of course were in that interview are going to listen to this discussion.
They're going to say, what do you mean? But it was very odd. And I've shared with folks that are in the various offices and say, we ought to up the game on making sure, especially at an executive level, you should be talking about what do you really want to know from that person? You can ask tough questions or reasonably tough questions to a number of people and then still be consistent.
Anyway, like I said, we were driving home from that. It's like, okay, that's done. We're going to go back and going to do something else, but it turned out that it wasn't done.

Guy Kawasaki:
My God. And tell me, so now you're meeting with the governor, you get an offer and all that, and then what do your buddies at Cisco say? They say, "Have you lost your mind, Steve? Why would you do this?" What was their reaction?

Steve Gordon:
I thought their reaction was fantastic. They're like, thank God someone's going to go in there and do something. And for the people that work closely with me at Cisco, they knew that I'm an operations guy, I'm no nonsense. I'm a ton of energy to apply on things. And they were like, yeah, great. If you need anything, give me a call. Of course, it got posted in the press.
Some people were posting on my LinkedIn page, and the funniest comment was, this guy was at Microsoft because you want to see if the governor will reduce your salary by six dollars because if he does reduce your salary by six dollars, it'll be equal to the speed of light in miles per second or whatever. And I looked at that and said, okay, first the guy was pulling for me for success, and he was having a little fun with the speed of light.
It was a math question. And I thought, okay, I love that. But I think people truly were pulling for me. And I tell you, when I got into the job, there were a number of opportunities for bringing or at least needing some context. I reached out into my network and people were extremely generous and are still extremely generous when I need to understand something or how to think about this, people are very generous with their time, which is fantastic.
And they want to be involved, they want to see things improved. And they're just glad that they can give the ball to somebody like me. I'm very fortunate to have those friends and acquaintances and that network to call upon.

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, Steve, let me go on the record right now that if you ever want my advice on how to evangelize the DMV, I'm there for you, bro. I would love to help you guys.

Steve Gordon:
That's great. We'll see about what edits we can put into this podcast and see if we take it. No, I'm kidding. No. I mean people are extremely generous and it's really fantastic that people want to be that invested and they see that there's an opportunity to make change. We can't fix everything, but we've got our Pareto charts, we're attacking this one silo at a time. We've had a lot of success, but there's still a lot more work to do.

Guy Kawasaki:
All right. Just to back up a step, because people outside of California, outside of America may not be familiar with what a DMV does. Can you just explain what it is you do and what you don't do? Who does the freeways or is it just licensing or where's the dividing lines?

Steve Gordon:
All the DMVs across the nation are slightly different. California has vehicles and drivers in it, and we're also responsible for the automobile dealer network. We have oversight over what's called an occupational license that are all these things that touch businesses that are selling cars, motorcycles, anything that is considered a vehicle. But by and large, the thing we do the most are vehicles.
You buy a vehicle, title a vehicle, register a vehicle, there's thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight million depending on which number you look at of those that are in the system. We have drivers, of course, that's you and me that are somewhere twenty-seven, twenty-eight million unique driver's license. That's the rite of passage for many people.
That's another important thing that we do. And then everything else past that is really administering those two things. There are, like I said, dribs and drabs, and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but we have oversight of the automotive industry.
That's an occupational license and there are lots of dealers. We want to take that very seriously. There are the things that happen to vehicles, lien sales. I have an investigations unit, I didn't know when I got hired that I have a small law enforcement team and they're very focused on enforcing the laws that are our narrow lane in the vehicle code. It's been a great learning curve for me.
When I showed up, I thought it was just vehicles and driver's license and it turns out that it's a whole bunch more and these are very serious matters, and we want to take them seriously and want to do as much good as humanly possible for the consumer.
We want to make sure businesses can do their thing and be efficient and effective. And that means we have to sit in a lot of different chairs and understand what's the most important thing we can do and what's the best solution, best path to a solution for this problem or that problem.

Guy Kawasaki:
And does your data interface anything with voter registration or jury duty or anything like that?

Steve Gordon:
No jury duty. I have jury duty I need to call in for on Monday, so thanks for the reminder. But California is a motor voter state and all that merely means is that when you come in to do something for the motor side, DMV stuff, we pop up a form as part of the application process from the Secretary of State.
And the Secretary of State's form will ask you if you want to register to vote or if you want to change your voter registration criteria. When I arrived, that motor voter system was in a bit of disarray, so there was a few crises when I showed up.
I got to meet the Secretary of State now, Senator Padilla, very imposing man, and we had a good chance to chat about the motor voter process, what we're going to do, how we're going to govern it, and we worked closely with the Secretary of State's office to get it so that that process worked and was improved and now I think is highly functional and that's where you want it to be. And got it off the radar of everyone as a problematic system. Got it to stable and now we just maintain.

Guy Kawasaki:
And do you have any interaction with the Federal Department of Transportation or NHTSA or anything like that?

Steve Gordon:
Yeah. We work with NHTSA on many things and we also work with the Federal Highway Administration. Those two have different jurisdictional roles and I'm still new enough, five and a half years into this thing. I'm still not sure exactly what each one does, but I know that they play a role and one is responsible for funding and keeping the highway system going. The other one is responsible for the vehicle side of it.
If there's a vehicle recall, you'll see through the Department of Transportation, the NHTSA arm, will be coordinating those efforts and then we'll have responsibility to make sure that those, let's say it's an emissions recall, which really, maybe not from NHTSA, but we have responsibility of working with them and making sure that regulations that they promulgate as they're applicable to us are applied in the state. We do work with federal agencies.

Guy Kawasaki:
All right. When you first got there, describe the situation you inherited.

Steve Gordon:
I had spent eighteen, nineteen years at Cisco Systems and my last five, ten years there, I did a lot of acquisition integration. If there was a services business, I would be responsible to get it to tuck in and so on. When I showed up at the department, it was very similar. There were these different groups, we call them divisions, initially you might call them tribes, where they were these vertically integrated things, and they were independent and driving the ship.
I had a chance to work with all of the deputies, try to understand what we were trying to do, but understanding that we were on the clock, right? In my days at Cisco, you had some time to figure out what we just bought and where it might fit and how to get the best out of it, but we were on the clock in the government because the first REAL ID deadline was looming and we had to get our act together very, very quickly.
I gathered deputies around, we figured out what the initiatives were, we tried to figure out who's who in the zoo so to speak, and try to make sure that we were focused on the right things with the right people, with the right resources, with the right metrics. And we just started to attack as you would do in any particular business, making sure that the first thing's first, next thing, next thing, next thing. And there was some really good people.
There still are some really good people here. Many of those people that I met on day one, they're still here. They want to win. Sometimes they just didn't know how to prioritize or how to settle disputes between the tribes. And we set up a different governance structure and made sure that in fact we could resolve those issues so we can actually do the most important thing for our constituents.

Guy Kawasaki:
But do you have some statistics for us that when you started, the average waiting time was two hours or whatever, what were service levels like when you came into this?

Steve Gordon:
Yeah. Government and measurements are not as strong a partners as you'd like to think. But one simple measure we had before I started, the governor had asked, I think this was Governor Brown had asked McKinsey to come in and work with the government operations group. They did some really nice work. And one of the things that I often joke with the McKinsey partner, we still have a relationship. The one really great thing they left us is this value stream map.
And it showed for a REAL ID the number of steps. Many of these were just self-imposed policy steps that we added to the REAL ID process. And a value stream map, the way you use it, you start looking at each step, you challenge each step and you're looking for things that are called waste. And those wastes are things you don't really need to do, but you're doing, they're in the way.
And that process at the time was somewhere around twenty-eight minutes, and that's just based on the value stream map and that's being generous. It was actually probably a little longer than that. We attacked that with vigor. We took it from twenty-eight minutes to ten minutes and it now runs around routinely around eight minutes. Still four minutes longer than what it needs to do, but with our current systems, that's how it works. That's one measure, it was twenty-eight to ten.
We had wait times that were in the press there, four hours, sometimes two and a half hours, sometimes longer. I don't know if any of that was really well measured. And then on top of that, just one last thing, there was also an internal audit that was ongoing before I arrived. It was called the OSE Audit, Office of something. Anyway, it's some state auditor looking at performance measures. They were in there helping to try to figure out what else was going on in the department.
All that stuff when I arrived was just coming to fruition so I can actually immediately take a look at that, figure out which of those things I need to incorporate into my plan and be able to attack base on that because you do need baselines. And we had a couple, but they were really not as robust as you'd see in private industry.

Guy Kawasaki:
Some people may be wondering what exactly are they talking about with REAL ID. Can you explain REAL ID for the listener?

Steve Gordon:
Sure. REAL ID is actually a spin out, if you will, of a federal requirement from Nine/Eleven. This was back in the day where we were concerned about people accessing an airport, getting on a flight, and we really didn't know who they were because each state's requirements for identification were different.
And they still are different to some degree, but if you want to access this federal entity, an airport, there was a law passed, the REAL ID Act, and that tried to standardize what the requirements were to make sure that identity documents were the same across the nation.
Residency documents were the same across the nation. That when you have a REAL ID and you show up at an airport, show up at a TSA stop as you're trying to get into the airport, they'll have a high degree of confidence that you will actually be who you say you are.
And that's something we've been implementing now for many, many years, as are many other states. And there are states like California where the REAL ID is not a required credential, so you're not a must-have state. There are some states that you can only have a REAL ID, but California allows a federally non-compliant card as do many other states. We have a REAL ID option.
We have eighteen, nineteen million people that have the REAL ID. Almost majority of people that want to travel, access federal facilities have a REAL ID. And that's going to be a requirement come up later this summer to make sure that people get into the airport with the right credentials. TSA, Department of Homeland Security is making sure that window of time gets narrowed so we can actually get everybody who needs to access an airport, or a federal facility has the right credential.
Of course, you can still use a passport, a military ID. There's a bunch of other ways to do this, but a REAL ID is certainly something that is easier because we almost always travel not only with our phone, but also with our driver's license.

Guy Kawasaki:
If people in California are listening to this and they don't know if they have a REAL ID, don't you just look at your license and see if there's a golden bear on it or something?

Steve Gordon:
That's exactly right. Very good. Very good. There's a star for you there. The bear and a star in the upper right of the driver's license, it's pretty evident when you just look at the card.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, I know that now. Okay. Now you walk in this, you see service levels twenty-eight minutes to get REAL ID and you have these internal audits. Now what are the phases of what you went through to improve the situation? How did you do this?

Steve Gordon:
I hate to minimize it, but it was pretty much back to fundamentals, right? We had to figure out what are our staff doing, which tasks are they completing, are those tasks we care about? And we just worked our way down. You can imagine, created these large Pareto charts of things that have high volume and we looked to figure out how we were attacking those. The old Boston Consultant two by two grids.
We looked at the volume, we looked at the ability to execute, and then we attacked things that were impediments to success. For example, having attestations signatures on paper and printing those copies. At the window you used to walk into the DMV, would print your application for you, we'd slide the application, it'd be six pages on what's called now a half sheet, and we would slide it across the counter. The customer would review them, they would sign it with a pen, wet signature.
They'd slide it back across the counter. We would then take those at the end of the day, we put those all in an envelope. We would send them on a journey to Sacramento where we would scan them and then we would dispose them. It was nuts, but it was one step in the process. And we had these tablets that were at the window that somebody a few years before that had thought, we're going to use these for something, but they never got used.
My chief digital transformation officer guy that is just an amazing talent, Ajay Gupta, said, "Why don't we actually have the attestation on the tablet?" And people are like, we can't do that, can't do that. We looked at the statute, looked at regulations, looked at our policy and found out we actually could do that. And we did. We lit those up.
All of a sudden, that paper, those six sheets we just slide across the counter and bring back, send to Sacramento, scan, dispose of, that went to zero. Because we could. We have people that attest online, and there's really a thing of beauty. I don't know if you've seen this, Guy. You have people that have never used a touchscreen before and you see them, they're just slowly drag, but they get it.
They get it, and it's a joy. I don't want to malign people, but if people get a little older, haven't used as much technology perhaps as you and I have, it's the first time they've used a touchscreen. They're saying, oh, that's what that's about. And they sign and completely paperless.
And so we've gone from tons of paper a week to zero, no more trips across California to get to headquarters to be scanned and so on. We've reduced our footprint, we've speeded up the process. We've actually made the process better because it's digital from day one. It's things like that. And there's a thousand of those, and that's just one that you saw at every window on every driver's license transaction.

Guy Kawasaki:
But I read a report, I think it was in the Harvard Business Review, about management by driving around. I want to hear about that.

Steve Gordon:
Yeah. In my days working at Cisco, our CEO at the time was a guy named John Chambers. And John Chambers, I mean at that level, you've got to be a master storyteller. He would go off and he'd be visiting a customer, he'd come back with a story, I'd be doing this, and I saw this, this is what they're working on. And he put things in context. You're always taking notes, right, as you're rising through your career.
What things do I need to bring into my portfolio if I ever get to that level so that I will be able to communicate effectively. And one of the things I pulled from John Chambers is that he was really good about getting out, and he was really good about bringing back what he saw when he was out.
I made that one of the things I wanted to do, a deliverable I wanted to do, because the number of changes we were doing at the time when I first joined, your staff needs a break from you and sometimes you need a break from your staff.
I would go out on the road. I would just say, okay, this week I'm going here and I would just start driving. And we have 220 plus offices, 180 field offices and a bunch of other offices. And I would just go hit a region. And I did a lot of driving. My wife came with me and I was doing for two things. One is I wanted to make sure that I had firsthand knowledge of what was going on. I mean, look, you're not going to have representative view by spending fifteen minutes or thirty minutes in a field office.
But you started building simple relationships. You started showing that you care. Many times, this was the first time the staff had ever seen the DMV director ever. And then in some cases when I started visiting them twice, three times, four times, they're like, wow, we've never seen the director twice.
You start building these little small relationships, and when you do that, you start seeing things that you wouldn't normally see and the staff sees you in a different light. I recall it was down in one of the offices in the LA area, and this woman brought to me this lien release. She financed her cars, many people do, JP Morgan, they're going through their process, and she was trying to sell her car to her neighbor but couldn't get the lien release.
It's just a mess. Those things take time. But I gave her my card, I took copies of her material. I said, "Look, I'll be happy to help you and send me an email. Let's work on this together so I can actually learn more about the lien process." And the staff got to see that, oh, he's not afraid to talk with the customer.
He's not afraid to reach across the counter. He's not afraid to take on work. And it also encouraged them to say, you can lean in a little bit more. We can't solve all of the problems, but we can actually help the customer if we lean in and try to understand stuff. And I've subsequently had discussions with the large financials, including JPMC, to understand what is the lien release process? What can we do to improve it so we can simplify?
Because cars, it used to be homes were the number one asset people had. Nowadays, cars are the number one asset people have. And so when you make that illiquid because a lien release takes too long or we're administratively slow, whatever it might be, those are opportunities for us to learn and grow and improve. And the only way you do that is you start seeing and feeling the pain that people have when they're stuck between immovable forces, government, large bank.
And we want to make sure that in fact, we can improve things. And the only way you get to see those things is you just happen to be in the field office when somebody brings in that issue. That's what it did. I went out and drove around, COVID interrupted it. You don't want to go out and start driving around during COVID when people are afraid, but it was great. It was great to get out, and it's just a beautiful state, just as a side note.
I love to travel, I've had some good fortune traveling the globe, and now all of a sudden I get to be in all fifty-eight counties. First, I didn't know there were fifty-eight counties when I started this job, but I do now. And I've been to all of our offices, I've been to all these places, and there are some remarkable people all across the state and some wonderful people. The people we hire in these communities are from those communities.
You get a sense for what the ethic is there, what the local customs are, cultures, and they're just some wonderful people. It's a win, win, win, win, win for me to be able to be out in these communities. It's fun to have a road trip. My wife loves to travel with me. It's fun stuff.

Guy Kawasaki:
There should be a reality TV show about your life. Just see, this is like Ken Kissinger. Oh my God.

Steve Gordon:
I'm a serious guy. I like to get out, have fun. But look, these are people trying to do their jobs and I want to show that I respect what they're doing, but I want to show that I also care about improving the process, care about them. And there's no reality show. When I first started, the team was like, okay, we want to get this entourage. I was like, no, I travel light. I travel either by myself, I travel with my wife.
That's the extent. I don't need any coordination. I don't need anybody traveling with me. I don't need any advanced staff. I just show up. And when I first started, I was polite. I asked for permission from my field staff. Hey, I'd like to go over here. Oh yeah, okay, that'd be a good time to show up. Now I just tell people, I'm going out.
I'm going to be in the high desert next week, or I'm going to be around the Salton Sea the week after that, or I'm going to be an altruist after that. I just tell them generally where I'm going to go. Not that I want to surprise anyone, but I don't want people to over-engineer what is really going to be a fifteen, twenty minute meet and greet and move on to the next site because it shouldn't be any more difficult, just like your neighbor stopping by and that's how it should be.

Guy Kawasaki:
Just to make this perfectly clear to people, this wasn't like a TV series where the CEO goes in as a customer and disguises as hell, mystery DMV user. You went in as a director.

Steve Gordon:
Yeah. One thing I found early on is my photo is in every DMV. I did not know that. One of my cousins that lived in the Redding area, so I was like three weeks, four weeks, five weeks on, whatever it was, whatever it takes to get photos out there. She sends me a photo of my photo on the wall. She goes, essentially, WTF. And I was like, what is that? She goes, that's your photo on the field office out in Redding. I was like, I had no idea.
Yeah, no, I go in the front door, and I talk with the staff, I talk with the customers. I go behind the counter, of course. They know who I am. I show them my badge. It should authenticate everyone. And yeah, I go in and try to see what's happening and I meet everyone. I try to say hello to everyone who's there. And yeah, no surprise customer, no mystery shopping.
Now looking at that a different way, I do use all of the different channels for our services. And so I renew my registration. We have this feature in our IVR. I'll give that a try and some cases I'll record the session because I want to give feedback back to my staff about here's how it sounds. Here's where it's maybe too fast. Here's where it's too slow. Here's where I got in this loop.
It's all process improvement stuff, but I try to use every channel we have, and I try to encourage my senior staff and even our line staff, use these services, feel how they feel, give us feedback so we can actually improve them and so on. But the only way you do that is you get out and you use them. And the only way you get to see what's happening, if you will, in the wild with our customers is you stand in a field office, you talk with people.

Guy Kawasaki:
The next time you go to Watsonville or Capitola, I want you to tell me, I want to go in with you. I want to see you do this. That'll be so fun.

Steve Gordon:
Yeah, no, I'm happy to do it, but it's less exciting than you think. I'm there and I'm in and out.

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, it's only twenty minutes.

Steve Gordon:
Right? I'm in and out, fifteen, twenty minutes. I make sure I make a point of saying hello to everyone, including there are examiners that are doing drive tests. I try to catch them in between drive tests because they're on the road. They rarely get a chance to see anyone, and I just want to make sure I don't make a big deal out of it. But at the same time, I want to make sure I have a chance to meet everyone, and that way encourage them.
If they see something, and there are a few that take me up on this offer, they'll send me an email and they'll say, hey, I saw this or I saw that. And then we'll go through a discussion about how do you collect data. There was one in Reedley, which is this town outside of Fresno. She was this manager, wonderful, very curious, was writing me about, oh, we see a lot of this and I'm in it, I hear a lot. I say, well, quantify a lot.
And so I said, here's how you might quantify it. I taught her how to quantify. I grabbed some data on the back end that maybe she wouldn't have access to. I shared with her, here's what I think's happening across the state. And sure enough, she validated that her a lot was maybe two items a week. I said, so instead of us focusing on those, important, but let's focus on something that's bigger. I gave her some examples, but it's how you teach people.
First taught her to reach out to me, taught her to engage, taught her about how we're thinking about data, caused me to think about something I wasn't thinking about. And now she's better at doing analysis, and that's up and down. There's a data entry clerk here, her name is Katherine. Took me up on this offer months ago, and she is in this repetitive job where she sees all these same form over and over again.
Her job is to do error correction and finish the data entry. And so she wrote me and she had this long story about this address and not populating correctly, and I said, I'll come right down. I thought, okay, there's no way she's going to have any data. I show up and she's like this serious woman, and she's seeing thousands of these things. She pulls up her examples. She saved one of them for me. She walked me through, this is where the problem is when you do this. And sure enough, she was spot on.
And she says, the management team would not fix this. I said, I'll get that fixed. But she had evidence she was waiting for this moment. It doesn't get any better than that because she was prepared, she had data and she had a real problem and she was stuck. That was fantastic. When Katherine writes me now, I pop right down, I say, show me that again, and we get it fixed. And matter of fact, her team is now much more responsive because Katherine brings facts. Doesn't get any better than that.

Guy Kawasaki:
What office is this?

Steve Gordon:
This is headquarters. This is a person who does data entry at headquarters. We process a lot of mail and she's the choke point for certain forms. And she is the expert because she sees thousands of them, and she's attentive.

Guy Kawasaki:
Coming from Cisco, now, I wouldn't put Cisco in that same class of companies as Facebook and Meta and PayPal Mafia, et cetera, et cetera. But what's the similarities and differences in management in this Silicon Valley tech company and then going to a public service company, state of California? What's the differences, what's the transition like for you?

Steve Gordon:
First, I was on the services side of Cisco. Even though I'm trained as an accountant, I was in technology support. I learned TCP/IP protocol, I learned how all that stuff works. I was surrounded by a bunch of people who are MSEEs and BSEEs. RC, a guy who's our chief deputy, Ed Swenson has got a couple degrees, graduate degree in electrical engineering from Stanford. These are people that actually know what electricity does.
I know electricity does something, I can't tell you why it does it, but I understood protocols and so on. Anyway, most of my experience from Cisco was on the services side, and then I had this acquisition tuck-in role later on in my career. It was business driven, and in those roles you became very focused on operations and you had to figure out what's the right order of things.
I developed some great relations with a guy named Mike Zill, who's still a good friend of mine. He's a big thinker, but he's also a manufacturing process guy. He taught me about the whole basics of how do we make sure we get cost quality cycle time and get things into the hopper and through the system first pass yields and first time, that sort of stuff.
And so I had a number of people that were helping me understand the impact that a product could have on a customer. A guy who wrote to me last week, he was in one of our DMVs down in San Jose, Malachy Moynihan, who was our chief of engineering at Linksys when Cisco acquired Linksys, was stuck trying to register a car at one of our field offices. Our systems are having a glitch. He was texting me like, what's going on?
Should I wait, should I go? But he's another guy who taught me how to think about when a product had a defect, the downstream impact, the impact on a customer, the impact on the channel it was in. And so all of those things played a role in helping you think about the business you're in, thinking about the quality of the product you're producing, making sure people can get through that process in the first pass.
Regardless of whether you're at Facebook, you're at Cisco, wherever you are in that technology life cycle, there's a lot of that that's the same. And you're just using best practices. I was fortunate to be surrounded by people with advanced degrees, good universities, good colleges, good thinkers, good experience, and I pulled from all of those people, and they've been very generous with their time to help us improve my skills and help us now apply those to the state of California.

Guy Kawasaki:
Now, it seems to me that, yeah, you can say there's a lot of similarity, but correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like your ability to motivate people with raises and RSOs or stock options, that's not on the table at the California DMV, right? What do you do to motivate people?

Steve Gordon:
Yeah.

Guy Kawasaki:
Because the Silicon Valley way is always about stock options.

Steve Gordon:
Yeah, it's tricky. I'm sure some of your other guests might be better skilled here academically about which buttons to push. I've never been a strictly a financially motivated guy. Some of my peers, they were focused on the RSO or they're focused on when their options were going to invest, never was my particular focus. Obviously want to be well compensated. At the same time you want to make sure you're on a mission.
That's the highest level thing, right? You're on this mission, you feel you can make an impact. And by and large, I think the people that are on my staff at the frontline to the top line, they think they're making a difference and they are making a difference. I was out in Palm Springs last week and there was a woman in Palm Springs named Tamika, I forgot Tamika's last name, sorry Tamika, but she had been a recent recipient at this agency that were part of the transportation agency within the state.
We recognized her across the state as someone who really was making a difference in people's lives. You meet her, she just lights up the room and she's doing the intake at the field office in Palm Springs. She's your first point of contact and she's on that mission and she's making people's lives better one customer at a time.
Getting them the right feedback, a smile on her face, a can-do attitude. And that office performs better than its adjacent office. And I attribute some of that to Tamika because that one person can make a difference.
Anyway, you talked about stock options and compensation. We do not have those levers here in government, but we are mission driven and I think having people like a Tamika or even people like some of my senior staff who are on this mission are trying to remove roadblocks, things that we've all been taught to do in Silicon Valley, taking obstacles out of the way. I think people see that in fact, we understand that and we're willing to do that.
We're willing to invest political capital behind that, and we're making their job simpler. We're making the customer's journey easier, and that's good for everyone, even if you're not doing it because of that direct financial motivation.

Guy Kawasaki:
And if I were to see Tamika or call Tamika and say, "Tamika, what is your mission at the DMV?" What would she say? What's the mission?

Steve Gordon:
That's a great question. I don't know what Tamika would say, but I certainly suspect she would say that she's there because she loves helping people. And when we think about the mission of the DMV, yeah, that gets a little muddy. We are a tax collecting organization, but we should be the best. And I try to remind my staff that when we're buying an online service or even a retail service, we should be thinking about the best of the best.
We should not be benchmarked within what they call it, the tallest pygmy. We should not segment ourselves into a small little group and be the best government agency with a left-handed leader. No, that's crazy. We should be looking at what does an Amazon do, JPMC, right? When you have the highest credit card, when you're about to lose that credit business, you should be thinking about what do they do to lean in to make sure they don't lose you as customers.
We have to aspire to that level. That means our services have to work, they have to be easy, they have to be intuitive. When people want to pay us money, we should help them pay us money. We should not make it hard for them, and sometimes we do. We have a lot of room to grow there, but I think that's the mission we're on is just making sure that participating in society in California, getting your driver's license, registering your vehicle, trying to be compliant, that should be easy.
We should assume that people are trying to help themselves and trying to help us, and we did to make it easy, and we should just realize that the comparator in the marketplace is Amazon. I talked to my staff, and I asked them, anybody order anything from Amazon over the holidays?
And every hand goes up and so when you're thinking that the DMV or government should be different, I said, no, we should be good as what we're trying to do as they are. We should make the products are on the shelf. We should know what they want to buy. We should make it easy to put it in the car. We should make it easy to pay. And again, we have some room to go there, but that's the direction we're heading.

Guy Kawasaki:
I got to say, I am just having the time of my life in this interview, and I don't say that quite often. Madisun can attest to that. The innovation that I discovered with the DMV that when I first saw it, I said, man, what made them do this? This is so interesting, is this thing that you can get your number for your appointment before you get to the DMV so you can get that number in advance.
When you get to the DMV, there's already been progress in the queue. I want to know how did that idea come to be? It's like calling up Baskin Robbins and say, all right, give me your ticket now and I'm going to drive down there in fifteen minutes, and I'll be served thirty seconds later.

Steve Gordon:
I think some of us came from just our experiences outside of the office. Yelp allows you to do that. One of the local restaurants, there was a Thai place by my place in San Jose and they would allow you to put yourself in line. Part of that lived experience that I had, but it wasn't my idea. We went to our vendors, a company called Qmatic, and I said, "Hey, so how does this work?" They said, "Oh yeah, we have this feature. You guys didn't want to use it."
I said, so how does it work? They told me, yeah, just give your email address, put your phone in there, get your name and we'll drop you online. Many of these companies have these features. We just didn't understand exactly how to use them and the role they would play. And that's actually an underutilized feature today, the get in line feature.
I love it too. The first time I used it, by the time I got there, I was late and I was just doing it from the office and our nearest office is a mile up the road, but it's a really great way to allow customers to remove the long wait in the parking lot and just know that they've got a place, they could see their number being called as it tells you where you are in line. I think it's a great feature, and it was already in the product, but the idea I saw it being used was at Yelp.
We actually contacted Yelp and the advantage of being the director of the DMV, when you contact people, they think, oh my God, I did something wrong with my driver's license. People call you back, you go through the investor relations door, that door, people are responsive when you come in through the investor relations and you get a lot of feedback from these other industries about what they're doing, how they're doing it.
We incorporated that. It was in the product already, so I don't get any credit for inventing it, but I just recognized I've been using that product via Yelp for this local Thai place because it was just easier to get in line as I walked over there from my house in San Jose.

Guy Kawasaki:
Right. And wait, I'm just curious. Not that I've never done this, but what happens if you get there, and your number's been called?

Steve Gordon:
The team will then put you at the top of the list.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. There's no downside.

Steve Gordon:
There's very little downside.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. That's good to know. I got a lot of questions. I'm fascinated by your business. Okay, I'm sorry.

Steve Gordon:
You got to come volunteer some time here. We could use some Guy in the business.

Guy Kawasaki:
Sign me up. I'll go get training from Tamika and Madisun and I will staff the Capitola office.

Steve Gordon:
We would probably just be happy if you help us think about some of our bigger problems, but if you want to work at retail, we're happy to put you at a window.

Guy Kawasaki:
I want to know why does the DMV register every car every year? I know there are ten states that do every two years. I know Delaware is a permanent registration. I have six people in my family. That means at some point I own four cars or something and I'm always filling out forms. I'm always worried that I missed a deadline, that I get the penalty. Can't I register for a longer time?

Steve Gordon:
Yeah. I think there's two issues there. One is that we've just launched a few months ago the concept of a garage. You can put your vehicles in the garage. Now we've launched, you can cash your credit card. Again, these are just commercial services that all of us see, Amazon or wherever we might shop online. And then the next thing we'll do is to set them up for auto payment so you will never be late again.
But California's law is that we do it on an annual basis. I'm not sure if that's a budgetary thing, a cashflow thing, but I agree with you that if you did them two years at a time or whatever, I think the concern I hear, and this is anecdotal, that well, if you register for two years, you sell your car, now you have to deal with the, I've got to unwind that transaction.
They didn't drive it for the second year. I've got to give refunds and giving money back, refunds, it's just a convoluted process. There's a lot of controls around that. It's fixed at one year, but we want to make that one year so that it's easy so you can just put it on autopay and like everything else in life, got to remember to take things off autopay when you don't want them anymore, but that's where we're going.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. I tried.

Steve Gordon:
Sorry.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Now another question I'm curious about is, because I can't remember, donating your organs, is it opt in or opt out?

Steve Gordon:
It is opt in.

Guy Kawasaki:
Why can't you make it opt out?

Steve Gordon:
Good question. That's a statutory issue. I'm on the administration side of that. If the legislature wants it to be opt out, they can certainly write a bill and we will then adhere to that bill. We don't make the rules, we just operate within them.

Guy Kawasaki:
But I think social psychology has proven that if it's opt out, you'll get 90 percent opting or not opting in because you can't opt in, but 90 percent of people would donate their organs if it was opt out, right?

Steve Gordon:
I'm sure Donate Life in California would be happy to have that. I'm sure they're probably working on some legislation in that area, but it's not there today.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. What's the relationship with business partners like AAA? And I understood the AAA business partner, but then I saw that there's this insurance brokers and stuff. Did AAA come to you and say, please let us do some of this, or did you go to AAA and say, take some of the load off of us?

Steve Gordon:
No, it predates me, but what I've heard, and I believe this is true, that AAA, back in the day a hundred and some years ago, used to be the DMV. Then the state said, actually, we want to take over that responsibility, but AAA is then, because of that past relationship, and again, you'd have to Google this, but we've been in business for 115, 117 years. And so before that, AAA, the Automobile Association was the place you had vehicles registered.
Now, we should check this. I'm sure your audience is going to fact check this, but I believe that to be true. And so they have a special relationship with us, and so we extend our systems into AAA. They have a special relationship that they are part of us, and they can do transactions in a unique way, and there's no uplift on what they charge.
At some point over the past number of years, there's this business partner program that has grown inside of California, and there's a couple of levels, but at the retail level, which you're talking about insurance companies, smog shops, you see them around every corner and there's 6,000 plus retail sites.
There's a belief that having those services in the community is a good thing. People are more likely to consume a service if it's within their community. And there's some evidence to say that's true. By and large know that the people that are probably doing the most with this are some of the online retailers. And that's a bit tricky because they charge an uplift for the service in this business partner program.
And if you're not careful, for the same service you can get at retail price, no uplift from us vehicle registration, you're paying that same fee and then you're paying a thirty-nine dollar uplift. And that infuriates some folks because they're listed as a partner that people missed the point that they didn't need to go down that road to get that done. But anyway, there's 6,000 plus of those across the state. There's a few large online retailers.
And then on top of that, there's this first line service providers. Think about it as a two tier distribution model. The first line partners, there are five of them, and those people actually then license all the people that are underneath them. And California is unique in a sense that the people that are actually in that channel, dealers are part of that channel.
If you're a franchise new car dealer in California, you are required to do an e-report of sale, electronic report of sale, and you're required to use one of those first line service providers to do it. Because we want to make sure the forms come into us, they come in right and so on. And so you see those fees listed out when you buy a car. And at the next level if you're a used car dealer, you're also required to participate in those systems, but in a different way.
We want all those documents coming to us electronically. That distribution model works and it's a lot of different facets to it, but at the retail level, the insurance shop, the smog shops and so on, yeah, that's just brick and mortar additional services that have been enabled across the state and are used in local communities because sometimes that's where you can speak a certain language, although we support thirty-six languages. It's a complicated world, Guy.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, Steve. Now if you thought I was being technical before, I'm going to get a really technical because I am very curious.

Steve Gordon:
Look at the time. No, I'm kidding.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. These are going to be quick and easy questions, okay? But stuff I'm wondering about, and I bet a lot of people are, okay? I want to know if you understand how the HOV Fast Pass pricing on Highway 101 in San Mateo County works?
Because I have been in that lane and that lane says HOV two or more Fast Pass required, Fast Pass is from three in the afternoon to six in the evening. except if you have an HOV or something like that. I am driving along and of course I'm going speed limit, but I am driving along in my plug-in hybrid car and for the life of me, I cannot figure if I'm going to be pulled over or not.

Steve Gordon:
Yeah.

Guy Kawasaki:
Do you know how that works?

Steve Gordon:
No. I read those signs too and say, I have no idea. I look for the next signpost and see if I can figure it out piece by piece. But I'm like you, it's unclear what's categorized in the three or plus, two plus spin of where you are in the state as well. unfortunately, I'll kick that over to our friends that Caltrans and to the State Transportation Commission.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, fair enough. All right.

Steve Gordon:
All right. I can't figure that out. Sorry.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. See, you are honest. All right. Now, I have a plug-in hybrid and I found out to my surprise that I can get an HOV sticker, but it expires in September. Why are there short-term HOV stickers for some models?

Steve Gordon:
Well, they're not short-term. They mirror the federal fiscal year. That's why they end at September Thirtieth. And it's a federal law. These are federal roads that they allow California and other states to give certain privileges to HOVs. We have to go and have the federal administration, I'm not sure if it's Federal Highways or I think it's Federal Highways. This is their program that they allow California to allow people into the HOV lane.
We give a sticker as a result of that so we can identify those vehicles and make sure they qualify for emissions and so on. The reason that it only is good till September, that is the end of the federal fiscal year. We're waiting right now to find out if the federal government is going to continue to extend that for the next year or the years past that. But at this point, September Thirtieth of this calendar year is the last time you'll be able to use an HOV sticker in California at all.

Guy Kawasaki:
Any car?

Steve Gordon:
Without a change in federal rules, yes.

Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. I'm sure there's some nineteen-year-old undergraduate who's looking into that for us. Next question is, I have the app Wallet MDL and I don't quite understand. If I get pulled over by the CHP and I don't have my physical license, can I just show my phone? Is it good enough for that?

Steve Gordon:
Yeah, law enforcement has not updated processes to consume the MDL and a lot of places haven't. I've been working with my counterpart, the commissioner of the CHP, and I think he's looking to figure out how do we make vehicle stops more efficient, more effective, safer for the officer and for the passengers and the vehicle. But this change takes time. We're just getting TSA to be able to take the MDL at the airport. I was just at Sacramento Airport just last week.
They're announcing the next tranche of airports that will take a mobile driver's license. California is the only state that also uses a different technology. We have the ISO standard, which is what you'll see in the MDL at the airports. And there's a verifiable credential W3C standard that allows us to be able to have something that could be used not only websites for web purchases, but also in retail.
And so we're working with a company called TruAge, which represents these convenience stores and to be able to consume the mobile driver's license at convenience stores. It's an emerging technology, Guy, and law enforcement is going to get there. And we're working with law enforcement.
I have a chance, I get to know the commissioner of the California Highway Patrol, Sean Duryee, marvelous guy, and he wants to modernize this thing and we're working with him to do that so you can actually have the engagement, they can have a safe transaction, could pre-fill some forms if you're going to get a citation. That day's coming, but it's not coming today.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. The bottom line is carry your physical license.

Steve Gordon:
You need to carry your physical license, yes.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Now this question, I only have two more, okay? This question I'm asking for a friend. All right. I know that if you flunk the driving test twice and if you flunk it again, you got to start all over with the permit process. At least I think that's still true, right?
What happens if my friend takes his kid and they go to the DMV and they watch the route that the test goes on, they follow a test driver and they say, okay, so now we know exactly which route that person is taking. When you go for your driver's test, we're going to practice on that route. Is that legal?

Steve Gordon:
I'm sure this friend has been to one of the driving schools because that's one of the requirements for first-time drivers, those driving schools know the routes the DMV takes, but that doesn't mean you're going to pass the test. I think, yeah, it's certainly legal to do that. I would encourage you to do that, drive safely at the right distance. But the net of it is you still have to drive.
My son, we were living in San Jose at the time, he took his at the Los Gatos office and he pulls out of the parking lot and there's a truck that is unloading in the middle of the street. Even if he knew the route, which he did not, you have to be able to handle this obstacle that was in the middle of the road that do I go to the right, do I go to the left, do I wait?
There are those things and that's why people, I think, they're challenging. You have to be able to know how to stop, how to navigate. Even if you know the route, it doesn't really matter. You still have to know how to get around the block and down the street.

Guy Kawasaki:
All right. Because this friend used this story in a book to illustrate the concept that there's always a way to prepare for tests. And if you can figure out a way to prepare for tests, you can do better on the test. And when this friend wrote this story in his book, some people read that and said, "In New York, it's illegal to follow an exam to learn the routes." I'm just asking for this friend who lives in California if it's illegal here.

Steve Gordon:
Yeah, I don't think it's illegal. I don't know if it's wise to do that. Focus on the fundamentals. That's what I did with my son. Make sure he had enough reps and enough things. That's where you should spend your time.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. This is my last question. My last question is, I applied for a personalized plate three months ago. Can you check if it's done yet?

Steve Gordon:
Sure. Can't do it on here.

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm going to call up Tamika and say, "Tamika, can you please help me?"

Steve Gordon:
She would love that phone call. By the way, personalized plates is a couple things, right? We've changed the way we do personalized play to where we have an AI agent now that helps us validate if the plate's going to be offensive and there's no shortage of things that are offensive, that are clear edge cases.
And then from there, there's a manufacturing process because each one of these things requires a special stamping and that takes some time, but it shouldn't take any longer than that ninety days. Off the air, or you could outsource to Madisun and shoot me the VIN and then I'll take a look, figure out where it is.

Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, are you telling me that it's not somebody in Soledad who's making my plates? It's not a prison thing. That's a myth?

Steve Gordon:
No. It's not Soledad, but it's in Folsom and it is not a myth. There are stamping machines.

Guy Kawasaki:
In Folsom Prison?

Steve Gordon:
Yeah, I've been there. Prison, by the way, if you've never been inside of a prison, they're pretty depressing. Let's start there. But there's a team of folks that are part of the production line that actually stamp plates and they do a great job and it just still takes a little while. Plates are stamped in California and it's a very sophisticated process, but it's also done inside the prison. If there's a problem, your supply chain could be disrupted.

Guy Kawasaki:
I have visited San Quentin twice, and I got to tell you, I've been scared a few times in my life, but man, just walking through the prison, truly it's just like The Wire, man. I was scared shitless the whole time.

Steve Gordon:
Yeah. Yeah. I would encourage you to stay out of prison, but again, off the air, shoot me the vehicle identification number, the VIN and we'll take a look, tell you where it is. Ninety days is probably right in the window because it just takes time to get that into queue.
It's a special one-off process. We got our sequential plates that are cranking through, so they got to stop that line to do, oh, this is Guy Kawasaki's plate, with reverence. And there's probably some incense or whatever we do. No, I'm kidding. There's no incense.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Well, Steve Gordon, this has been a most enjoyable episode and thank you. Besides all the humor, there's some very important lessons about the professionalism of your organization, how you manage by driving around. These people have a mission, they are proud of what they do. And for the fifteenth time, just let me tell you, I really love the California DMV.

Steve Gordon:
Great. Guy, thanks for having me on and thanks for helping promote our services. I really appreciate it.

Guy Kawasaki:
All right. And I'm serious, if you ever want evangelism advice, I'm here for you.

Steve Gordon:
I'm going to take you up on it. Next time I'm down in the Capitola area, I'm going to call you up as well. Going to see if you'll show up. We'll see, we'll see.

Guy Kawasaki:
I will greet you at the DMV.

Steve Gordon:
That would be great. I look forward to that.

Guy Kawasaki:
This was Steve Gordon, California DMV and I hope you enjoyed this episode, listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it and doing it. This is Guy Kawasaki. It's Remarkable People. I hope we made you a little bit more remarkable today. Thanks to Madisun Nuismer, producer, co-author. Tessa Nuismer, researcher and Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez. We are the Remarkable People team, and we're trying to make you remarkable and get a remarkable car registration experience. Thank you, everybody.