Latest / AI for Founders with Ryan Estes / The Founder Is the Bottleneck. Here's How to Clone Your Judgment.

Transcript

The Founder Is the Bottleneck. Here's How to Clone Your Judgment. · AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

0:00
If you're like me, your company waste 22 hours every single week
0:03
on absolute nonsense. You're not building, you're not
0:05
selling, you're not creating, you're coordinating.
0:07
Microsoft studied it. 57% of your team's time is spent in
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meetings about meetings, Slack threads, chasing contacts and
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e-mail asking what was decided in the last e-mail.
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And AI isn't fixing this, it's making it worse.
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Every founder is racing to bolt AI into a broken system.
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More agents, more dashboards, more tools.
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Nobody opens. Now you're scaling your chaos.
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Ultimately, you are the bottleneck.
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The founder who can't be in every room, can't write every
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SOP, can't approve every e-mail. The expertise lives in your
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head, and the second you're not there, your company forgets who
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it is. But what if your company itself
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could think? Not generate, but it could
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think. A living system that captures
0:45
your judgement, your taste, your strategy and delivers it to
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every single person on your team in Slack.
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Right where the work already happens.
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So how are you going to get all that expertise?
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Out of your head. Welcome to AI for Founders.
0:57
I'm Ryan Estes. In this episode, you learn three
0:59
things that will completely change how you build 1 Why
1:02
alignment is the silent killer of fast moving companies and the
1:06
exact framework to fix it this Week. 2 the seven forms of waste
1:09
destroying your team's output, and the one thing that's
1:12
stealing more time than all the others combined.
1:15
And three, how to clone your founder?
1:16
Judgement into a system so your team stops waiting on you and
1:20
start shipping without you. Now if you want the sharpest AI
1:23
plays for founders, drop straight into your inbox, head
1:26
to AI for founders.co and join the newsletter.
1:28
It's an advantage 5 minutes a week, pure founder fuel.
1:31
And if this episode hit, leave a review like you're tipping your
1:34
favorite bartender if you like that kind of thing.
1:36
Hope you enjoy this one. Let's get into it.
1:44
Thank God would be the shortest podcast of all time.
1:47
Josh, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining
1:49
me. Thank you, Ron.
1:51
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you.
1:53
You know, we had a chance to to speak before about your company
1:56
Dobbin and it's Dobbin dot AI with 2B's and you know, this is
2:01
tackling alignment in organization.
2:04
Now alignment kind of is a buzzword.
2:07
You know, that people need to find synergies and alignments
2:09
and all these things. But it's more than that.
2:12
It's almost like the philosophic and spiritual core of a company
2:16
and a mission. And you know, we're all founders
2:19
here and this is one thing that's very hard to do, you
2:22
know, which is 1, make somebody care and two, point them,
2:26
everybody in the right direction.
2:28
So we're all working for a unified goal.
2:31
So I'm excited for this conversation.
2:32
Why don't you give us a quick introduction to Dobbin and kind
2:35
of technically the specifics and benefits of the platform?
2:39
Yeah. So the short version is Dobbin
2:44
is company AI to scale founder judgement, period, right.
2:48
So the idea is how do we create a system and a structure that
2:53
embeds culture, embeds strategy, embeds brand, embeds objectives
2:58
in the actual day-to-day work. So Dobbin itself is model
3:01
agnostic, you know, gazillion agents running around.
3:05
But fundamentally what we do is we very rapidly build what we
3:07
call a foundation for a company. That foundation is made-up of
3:11
about 15 different dimensions to describe a company, everything
3:14
from culture to values to brand to strategy objectives,
3:18
etcetera. And then that becomes an
3:20
iterative system that guides the day-to-day work in Slack.
3:25
So teams interact with their Dobbin in Slack.
3:27
You can invite Dobbin into as many Slack channels as you want.
3:30
And fundamentally you're basically having a conversation
3:32
then with the smartest guy in the room, right?
3:34
So you've got all of this confusion that runs around an
3:39
organization around like what's our strategy, What's our actual
3:42
brand guidelines? What, what are the objectives
3:44
for this? And Dobbin operates as a central
3:47
source of truth and then delivers that and embeds it in
3:50
the day-to-day work. Incredible.
3:52
And I want to unpack that a little bit and see kind of like
3:54
what's at the core of values and these kind of things.
3:56
But you know, an immediate use case could be like I need a JPG
4:01
or I need a PNG lock up of our white logo.
4:05
I could ask Dobbin. Dobbin's like bang, here you go
4:07
to everyone in the. Organization, actually great
4:09
question. Dobbin is not a creative
4:12
generator, so Dobbin is not a design tool.
4:15
Dobbin is a thinking partner. So what Dobbin would do is,
4:18
well, let's think about it from the lens of strategy.
4:22
What are you trying to make? Right.
4:23
So Dobbin meets everybody in the organization, kind of where they
4:26
are. So the way our designer uses
4:28
Dobbin is he's built a channel right in Slack.
4:31
When we spin up a new channel in Dobbin, we actually allocate a
4:36
new knowledge base to that Channel.
4:38
So our designer has loaded up this channel with everything
4:40
that inspires him about design. So when he drops the design in
4:43
there, because Dobbin is multimodal, Dobbin is reading
4:46
that design but actually critiquing it.
4:49
It's not generating new designs. It's more of a thinking partner
4:51
for him around like, oh, this is not conforming to the values
4:55
that you've articulated. You want the design principles
4:57
to adhere to, right? So Dobbin is a strategy partner
5:02
for people doing their work. So the lowest person in the
5:05
organization might use Dobbin just to get guidance on what
5:07
they should do. One of my favorite use cases, we
5:10
have an intern in one of the companies that we work with.
5:12
She literally goes into Dobbin everyday and she's like, hey,
5:14
what should I do today? Right?
5:16
But the CEO is using Dobbin to actually do high value strategic
5:19
thinking around the direction of the company.
5:21
And then everybody below is like tagging in where they need
5:25
actually the information. Nice and a thinking partner.
5:28
You know, it's like almost you're having a conversation
5:30
with Dobbin. That's right, that's exactly
5:33
what you're doing. You, you know, 1 characteristic
5:35
of a good conversation is you got to have kind of vibe with
5:38
its personality. So how do you kind of structure
5:41
or build Dobbin's personality? Do you customize it for each
5:45
brand and for each person? Yeah.
5:48
So what we do is we build. We basically developed an
5:51
underlying taxonomy that maps attributes of a company to these
5:56
different buckets that I talked about, right?
5:58
And so we are, in some cases, our agents will go out and using
6:03
just the public facing presence of a brand, we can generate A
6:06
Dobbin, your Instagram, your LinkedIn, your website, you've
6:09
actually put a lot of energy and time into building your
6:12
presence, right? But it hasn't been codified in
6:15
something that you can then use as a delivery mechanism for the
6:17
rest of the company to be in conversation with it.
6:19
Dobbin does that in some instances.
6:22
We've built Dobbins from audio, right?
6:24
The founder might talk for four hours about, you know, their
6:27
craft, right? How they think about their work.
6:30
One of my favorite is a photographer named Mark Seliger.
6:32
We built him his DOB in using 4 1/2 hours of audio.
6:36
He talked about lighting competition, pre making, post
6:39
production, pre production, how he thinks about equip equipment,
6:43
how he thinks about being on set, you know all the like.
6:45
How the impact of theatre on his work.
6:47
His DOB in is incredible, right? The richness of his DOB in is
6:51
because he is describing a 45 year career in the way that only
6:58
an expert can talk about their work.
7:00
And then our system is there to basically be like, OK, this is
7:02
how we populate values, this is the brand essence of this
7:05
company, these are the core objectives of this company,
7:07
etcetera. So we're extractively creating
7:10
that bespoke for every company. But the inputs can be anything,
7:15
right? So we're really focused on the
7:18
reality, which is a lot of information isn't written down.
7:21
A lot of information actually either lives in somebody's head
7:24
or is in some random ephemera, right?
7:26
So Dobbin is built to take all of that and identify what
7:30
matters, right? What's relevant within the
7:32
structure that we've built and populate that.
7:35
So values, culture, etcetera, that is really expressed in all
7:39
these nuance Y ways within an organization, right?
7:43
Dobbin is keyed to look for that and then populate that system.
7:47
Cool. That's something I've actually
7:49
struggled with is kind of giving these agents personalities
7:53
because there's kind of a a line you walk where you know all of
7:57
the the agents at this point and they're still just babies were
8:00
just have the infancy of like these tools.
8:03
But they all have a very similar kind of like style and tone.
8:07
So you can kind of color it and flavor it, but then it almost
8:09
goes too far. So it's always kind of pushing
8:12
and pulling with the personality of the agents.
8:14
I mean, one hand I, I kind of expect like if I was working for
8:18
Disney and I got a Dobbin and I'd be like Dobbin, I'm a little
8:21
bit upset. I just want to run this e-mail
8:23
by you and I want to hear the voice come back and be like,
8:26
Ryan, you can't put square work in there.
8:29
Anyone else? We'll have anything.
8:32
I, I think the way we think about it is less from the
8:34
perspective of personality and more actually from this idea of
8:39
company perspective, right. And So what is the perspective
8:44
of the organization around XY and Z?
8:48
And that is really an expression of taste.
8:51
And I think that especially when you're dealing with founder LED
8:53
companies, you're really trying to capture how do you actually,
8:59
what is your judgement? What is the process by which you
9:02
personally are kind of triaging and thinking about information?
9:06
And then how does that actually what is that at the company
9:08
level, right. And so, you know, one of the
9:11
examples is just go back to that creative agency I mentioned that
9:15
photographer, the big win there was not that that we captured,
9:19
you know, this kind of like essence of the studio, it's some
9:21
kind of like ethereal level. But that his managing director
9:25
was then able to respond to RFPs in 30 minutes, right?
9:29
So instead of having three weeks, 17 meetings, 5 different
9:33
people involved, the whole thing got compressed to 30 minutes
9:36
because it was so tuned. And tuning, I think, is a good
9:40
way to kind of think about it, right?
9:41
Like when you think about the underlying structure that
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Dobbin's built, and Dobbin is both iterative, meaning like you
9:48
can just keep tweaking it forever.
9:49
You're not stuck with this foundation.
9:51
It's not like bedrock, right? It's a dynamic system.
9:54
So it is itself learning, observing, identifying gaps
9:58
where people are veering off from its core foundation,
10:03
proposing changes, right? So that the whole, the reality
10:06
is like nothing is static, right?
10:09
Like I can't write. There's a Greek philosophy.
10:11
You never, you never go into the same river twice, right?
10:14
You never go into the same river twice because the river itself
10:16
is flowing and you're changing, right?
10:18
Companies are changing, the market is changing.
10:21
Dobbin is built to be a dynamic thinking partner that starts
10:24
from this perspective that you give it, but then continues
10:28
evolving with the company as it continues to evolve.
10:31
And so I think that that's really also just one of the
10:34
great fallacies of kind of like this world that we came out of,
10:37
right? Which is like, you would have
10:39
these static things. Here's our guidelines, here's
10:43
our strategy, right? And you're like, well, OK,
10:46
that's a great plan. It looks great on paper.
10:50
But the minute you actually go into the world with this, you're
10:53
faced with real, right? And so you need to actually have
10:56
a flexible strategy. You need to have flexible
10:59
guidelines. You can't have a rigid anything.
11:01
Everything breaks if it's rigid, right?
11:03
So I think we're living now in this world where the rate of
11:09
change is so great, the needs of companies are so dynamic, that
11:14
not having a company AI that understands your company and
11:18
really sees the world to the lens of your company seems
11:21
completely insane to me today, right?
11:23
Like I'm like, what? It's not 1987 people.
11:27
We need to like, you need to actually be thinking about how
11:31
do you capture the way in which you do your work and systematize
11:36
it, right? Because that is how you stop.
11:39
What is the like recreating the Einstein thing of like making
11:43
the same mistake over and over again, right?
11:45
Like how do we build systems that are themselves learning
11:48
systems? And the trick with Dobbin is
11:51
then how do we deploy it to everybody at the same time,
11:54
right? So everybody being able to
11:56
interact with it in Slack means you're naturally having a
11:59
collaborative conversation now with a shared sense of truth
12:02
that is itself evolving, getting smarter, learning, etcetera.
12:06
So the company is naturally aligned.
12:08
So back to your question about alignment, we don't, yes, the
12:12
alignment is now this whole, you know, AI buzzword.
12:15
We actually mean it from the standpoint of like rowing in the
12:17
same direction, right, Period, right.
12:19
So, so much time in companies is wasted with people trying to
12:23
track things down and not understand what the strategy
12:26
was, not understanding what the brand is, etcetera.
12:28
Dobbin is just built to kind of like eviscerate those
12:31
bottlenecks. Quick side note for founders who
12:35
are using AI to write content, you've probably noticed this.
12:38
It's incredibly fast, but it doesn't really Dr. meaningful
12:41
traffic. And honestly, that's because
12:43
most AI generated content is just average.
12:46
There's no real insight, no depth, no structure, missing
12:50
things like internal linking, and Google's getting very good
12:53
at filtering that out. So instead of trying to just
12:55
prompt better, I actually came across something interesting
12:58
called Neenah. It's a system that combines
13:01
human strategy and review with AI writing to create high
13:04
quality SEO optimized blog content that's actually designed
13:09
to rank and keep ranking. What I like about it is that
13:11
it's done for me. Their team handles the topic
13:14
strategy in the content review and data markups for Google and
13:18
turns blog posts into actual long term from traffic assets.
13:22
So if you're a founder thinking seriously about organic growth,
13:25
this is one of those things worth paying attention to.
13:27
You can check it out at Try nina.co.
13:30
That's TRYNIN a.co. Try nina.co.
13:37
Every week I sit down and ask myself one question.
13:40
What do founders actually need to know about AI right now?
13:43
Not the think pieces or the stuff that sounds impressive,
13:45
the real useful, put it to work today stuff.
13:48
Then I write it up, send it to you in your inbox, free.
13:51
That newsletter is called AI for Founders and I built it because
13:54
I was tired of. Waiting through hit pieces and
13:56
people. That are afraid of the future.
13:58
Each issue I breakdown the tools worth your time, the strategies
14:01
that are working, and the ways you can use AI to grow your
14:04
company without burning out or getting left behind.
14:06
Thousands of founders read it every week and I'd love for you
14:09
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14:11
founders.co. 3 seconds to sign up and I promise it's worth it.
14:16
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, for people
14:18
that have a attention to to brand, which for me is very
14:23
important, you know, I everything I do, I want it to
14:26
have energy, I want it to have enthusiasm, I want it to have
14:30
novelty. I want to have a sense of whimsy
14:33
and fun, you know, because like, if, if I can't, if I'm not doing
14:37
something that's fun, I'm just generally not going to be
14:39
attracted to doing it. So I want to promote that.
14:42
And that's very difficult, particularly as you start
14:44
getting a, a larger organization.
14:46
It's like, you know, just some very simple principles.
14:49
Like we never are sarcastic, you know, we are never sharp or
14:54
short with emails. There's like a lot of like just
14:56
kind of procedural things that as the organization gets bigger,
15:00
you don't have a way to really babysit everybody and make sure
15:03
that everything's in line with each other.
15:05
That's right. There's a there's a great saying
15:09
that I realized I pulled from casino of all places.
15:13
I watched it last weekend for some reason, which boy, that
15:16
third act is kind of hard to watch.
15:18
But anyway, you know, De Niro's at standing in the casino and
15:21
he's like, hey, there's a right way, there's a wrong way and
15:23
then there's my way. And that's how we're going to do
15:25
it. Whenever I'm feeling
15:28
particularly spicy, I'll pull that one out just because it
15:30
kind of like levels the playing field that in my opinion, the
15:34
the fastest moving, most competent teams are kind of a
15:38
benevolent dictatorship. And you know, people have to
15:41
trust the guy at the top's going to make the good reasons for for
15:44
good reasons. And when you know you have
15:46
expertise and you have experience, you don't
15:49
necessarily have time to explain why all the time.
15:53
That's. Right, so.
15:54
I think, I think you're, I think sorry.
15:55
Go on, face your thought. I was just going to say, so like
15:58
it really right now it's about pulling the expertise and
16:01
experience out so that it can be utilized by everybody a little
16:05
bit more democratically. Yeah.
16:06
And I and I think two things there.
16:08
One, your company isn't, it is an expression of you period,
16:12
right. That's the company you built,
16:13
right. So what you are trying to do is
16:15
embed the way that you want to be in the company, right.
16:19
So what is the structure and system for doing that?
16:21
Well, historically that's been top down management, right or a
16:25
whole bunch of kind of like management, you jitsu etcetera.
16:29
We have, we have a new opportunity ahead of us, right.
16:31
And the opportunity is for that culture, those rules, those ways
16:36
of thinking, ways of operating, ways of being to actually be
16:39
system operating instructions. That just hasn't been possible
16:43
and that is the reality that we're operating in today.
16:46
And I think the kind of second thing is you're talking about
16:48
expertise, you're talking about pattern recognition, right?
16:51
You're talking about the the depth of time and experience
16:55
that you've put into something where you have formed very
16:58
specific ways of thinking, operating, etcetera.
17:00
You probably haven't taken the time to write down extensive SO
17:05
PS for every single thing that you do or how you would like the
17:09
team to operate, but they're in your head, right?
17:12
And they're how you guys operate on the day-to-day.
17:15
So the magic of this is just recognizing, OK, you have a
17:20
process, you have a system, it's whatever you're doing today,
17:23
right? Dobbin codifies that and says,
17:25
and then gives it to you as a mirror, right?
17:28
It's like, hey, here's what it is.
17:30
And then you can look at it and be like, well, that's not that's
17:32
I want to tweak this or whatever.
17:34
But you're now operating with an instruction set that then guides
17:38
behaviour as opposed to, you know, a wish and a kind of like
17:43
management where you're like, I have to be in every room, right?
17:47
So one of the things that we talk about Dobbin is like, what
17:52
if you had a chief alignment officer, right?
17:54
What if there was a role in a company and that person's job
17:58
was like, hey, here's your job. You got to stay up 24 hours a
18:01
day. You got to be in every meeting,
18:05
You got to be on every call. You got to make sure that
18:08
everything that comes out of the company is correct.
18:13
Don't sleep and also you can't eat because you got to be
18:15
available when they want, when people need to talk to you and
18:17
you got to be responsive and you always got to be friendly,
18:19
right? That's like nobody, nobody would
18:21
do that. Let's like that job.
18:23
And that is the job that founders are doing all day,
18:26
right? Founders are running around
18:28
trying to make sure that the expression of the company is
18:32
true to this thing that is in some ways ineffable, right?
18:37
And that is very, very challenging.
18:39
And so, you know, we come from a place where, you know, my 2 Co
18:44
founders and I are all kind of hybrid operators advisors,
18:49
right? We've worked with tons of
18:50
different companies. We've got extensive experience
18:53
working with founders and you know, we've all started
18:57
companies like this is an expression of something that we
19:03
have experienced. This is not some magic problem.
19:05
We went to go, you know, fine, this is like this is the number
19:10
one thing that is a choke point in a founder LED organization is
19:14
the founder, right? The founder is the bottleneck
19:17
and the bottleneck is very simple because you cannot be
19:20
everywhere once nor can you just write everything down and hand
19:23
it to people and be like, hey, do it this way, right?
19:26
You need a system level implementation.
19:29
Dobbin is a step towards capturing and delivering that
19:37
into an organization in a way that just was never possible.
19:41
Yeah, which is incredible, but it has some potential banana
19:46
peels in there. And, you know, because it's so
19:49
new, it's never existed before. You know, we know how much
19:52
people love change and in particular, you know, I like to
19:55
build teams like a pirate ship. I just love that analogy because
19:58
I I'm always looking for the outcast.
20:01
You know, if I'm, if I'm getting a crew together for my pirate
20:03
ship, I, you got to have the guy that, you know, makes the run.
20:07
You got to have the guy that plays fiddle.
20:09
You got to have the one legged guy that if you go to battle,
20:12
like this guy's got your back. So you get kind of this ragtag
20:15
group of people that all combine to like have like a really kind
20:19
of interesting cohesion. But these are also kind of the
20:23
people, generally speaking, that too much rigor, too much
20:26
rigidity will kind of tamper their spirit and diminish their
20:30
creative output. So have you seen any tension
20:33
there between people that are like, oh man, this is kind of,
20:36
this is putting handcuffs on me? Yeah.
20:38
I mean, I would say that I think probably the reason you and I
20:41
get along is like I'm a piratic human being.
20:44
So, you know, we have a certain like we are democratizing
20:50
something, right, in a way that is historically very
20:55
gatekeeping. And a big part of what we are
20:58
thinking about is how do you give people maximum flexibility
21:02
and freedom to run on their own while still having the support
21:08
of, let's say the company actually being itself like a, a
21:12
thing, right? Like the company's not just an
21:14
idea, it's it's like actually information and ethos, etcetera.
21:18
And so as people go explore new territories or, you know, bring
21:24
themselves to the work, Dobbin is not a, you know, a
21:28
schoolmaster, right? Dobbin is a thinking partner,
21:31
right? So what Dobbin might do is be
21:33
like, oh, this is actually an interesting idea, right?
21:36
This doesn't actually this is not this doesn't necessarily
21:41
align with XY and Z, but there's something kind of interesting
21:45
here. How do I work with this person
21:47
and kind of like steer this towards, OK, this is this is in
21:51
the guard rails and this is outside the guard rails.
21:54
But what it will do on the back end, because it's paying
21:58
attention, is it will note where you have these gaps and
22:02
misalignments, and it will propose those amendments that I
22:05
was talking about earlier. And so for you, as you're
22:08
managing your pirate ship, you get to actually go through that
22:11
and be like, oh, you know what? The first mate has an
22:12
interesting idea over here, right?
22:14
Like this new SOP that emerged through a conversation between
22:19
the first mate and, you know, the, I don't know, the scullery,
22:22
whatever the heck the the analogy is of the pirate ship.
22:25
Like, this is something powerful like this.
22:28
You know, I actually do think this is something that would be
22:30
additive to the way that we operate.
22:33
So Dobbins generated a proposal for this section of my
22:35
foundation based on the observations that my team is
22:38
making around Brandon Tone. Yeah, I think I'm going to add
22:41
these, right. And so that that's what I mean
22:44
by the flexibility. And I think like, you know, my
22:48
partner Jonas is absolutely ruthless about the idea that
22:55
people should be allowed to have enormous independence and run
23:00
with their work within the parameters set by the company,
23:05
right. But you know, I think it is
23:11
about the idea of empowering people, but providing structure
23:16
for that empowerment to be accelerative and not just a free
23:21
for all. Yeah, I totally agree.
23:24
And I like what you're saying about like if it's too rigid,
23:27
it'll break. It needs to bend.
23:29
It will bend and breathe in different places.
23:32
And over time, because Dobbin is using all these interactions as
23:36
training data, it can kind of also be that mirror to say,
23:39
like, you know what you, you said these four things are
23:41
really your, your, your values. But it seems like it's kind of
23:47
these four things, yes, you know, and then they you can
23:50
rally around that be like, yeah, actually we have kind of seen
23:53
that this is more effective for us.
23:55
And so you there's kind of like a a self-awareness that comes
23:58
over time. You know, you start with like we
24:01
have a knowledge base and we have brand standards and we have
24:03
a mission. We have all these things, but it
24:05
is breathing. And so like, if it's Dobbins
24:08
continuously using it as training data, it starts to
24:10
emerge like where the successes really lie, you know, And I, I,
24:14
it would be, I would think that it was kind of like on the
24:17
fringe of certain things, there'll be certain guiding
24:19
lights that are tried and true that you'll, you'll run with,
24:22
but then you start to kind of pressure test everything else.
24:25
Yeah, it's it's, it also moves things a little bit from the
24:29
subjective to the objective, right?
24:32
Because you leave the space of just human reactivity and you
24:37
start having a structure that is actually reflecting back to you
24:43
what is happening, right? So not you're like, you can
24:46
literally see it. You're like, Oh yeah, this repo
24:48
sucked, right? And this was the conversation.
24:50
And this is the output of that conversation.
24:52
Oh, that's interesting. That's not the way that I
24:55
necessarily would have thought about this.
24:57
But now I see it documented and now I can reflect upon it and I
25:01
don't have to accept it. You know, we're, we are
25:04
passionate about, you know, human in the loop, whatever you
25:08
want to call it. But as I was saying to you
25:10
before, the idea is that Dobbin is there to really support
25:13
everybody in the organization, right?
25:14
It's not there to it. We don't believe that, you know,
25:19
the future of work should be humans who are not engaged
25:24
actually in what they're doing, pushing buttons, right?
25:28
Like we are very passionate about human creativity.
25:32
We are very passionate about the idea of the dialectic.
25:37
And I think there is real enormous value, though, in
25:41
having a system that suddenly can capture all that and not be
25:45
a black box, right? Actually, like, here it is,
25:48
right? And you'd be like, oh, OK, I'm
25:50
going to tune this. I'm going to tune that.
25:51
I'm going to tune this. But be, you know, completely in
25:55
partnership with it. Not, you know, in some kind of
25:59
like, oh, mysterious like, what's happening here.
26:02
Yeah, well, let's talk about everyone too, because the thing,
26:06
the fun thing about putting a pirate ship together is being a
26:08
pirate's awesome, you know? So, you know, it's giving the
26:13
the members an opportunity to be their most creative because they
26:17
have the proper confinements. You know, I'm a I'm a fan of
26:20
jazz, you know, so jazz notoriously, you have the head,
26:23
you plan standards. It's like these are the chord
26:26
changes. This is the opening riff.
26:29
And then you know, so within structure, it's comforting to
26:33
then know the the containment of your creativity.
26:37
But where you have to have absolute adhesion within the
26:41
team is, you know, if you got 10 pirates, each pirate is spinning
26:45
up five AI agents themself. The alignment with an agents
26:51
between the the company and then other agents is also huge.
26:55
And this really hasn't been seen ever before either where you can
26:59
have markdown files that say like every agent you're spinning
27:02
up have to have these attributes.
27:04
And some of those have like legal ramifications and
27:08
compliance ramifications. And then also just kind of
27:11
generalized brand standards. You know, as more and more
27:15
we're, we're creating Dobbins for like every aspect of our
27:18
work that will be in our inbox, They'll be in our in our Slack
27:22
chats, they'll be in our cell phones.
27:24
Like like to have that kind of controls in place seems like
27:28
it's absolutely necessary right now.
27:31
Critical. I mean, I think the, yeah, the
27:34
jazz is a good analogy, right? It's like, yeah, you're
27:36
freestyling, but you're freestyling with these
27:38
instruments in this theatre with these rules, right?
27:43
And so I think the improvisation of work is a kind of like one of
27:49
those realities that people like to pretend, you know, they can
27:52
just apply some kind of like project management framework and
27:55
it makes the, you know, reality of work go away, right?
27:58
Which is that, like, you cannot plan what is actually going to
28:05
happen. You can plan what you would like
28:07
to do if everything goes according to the plan, right?
28:10
And so having that flexibility in the system, I think is really
28:14
critical. And I was thinking, you know, we
28:15
were talking about our kids earlier, you know, resiliency,
28:21
resiliency, right? Systems need to be resilient.
28:23
What is resilient? A system that is flexible,
28:26
right? And so that again, back to the
28:29
idea that like, yeah, you create these rules, but the rules are
28:32
not, it's not bedrock. The rules are there to be
28:36
guardrails for the organization, but also to be points of
28:41
observation for where things are deviating from that because
28:44
reality kicks in, right? Suddenly something happens that
28:48
you weren't planning on, right? The price of oil goes to
28:52
$130.00. Well, that wasn't part of my
28:54
plan, right? That wasn't in my strategy when
28:57
I was doing my financial planning three months ago or
29:00
whatever it might be, right? Like things change and when
29:04
those things change, it is not helpful to tell people to refer
29:09
to the strategy deck that you've drafted and emailed them six
29:13
months ago, right? So I think that that's the, the
29:17
nimbleness of work. I like your pirate analogy.
29:20
I think it is just a reality, right?
29:22
Which is like, even if you think you're not hiring a pirate ship,
29:25
you're hiring a pirate ship, right?
29:27
So how how do you give the pirate ship the structure to
29:32
operate without, you know, going bananas?
29:36
And I think that that's all going to be about a future where
29:41
we're building this structure into how we work.
29:44
We're going to create what structures we want.
29:47
Dobbin's solution for that is like, hey, you don't have to
29:49
sweat it. We've already created the
29:51
structure. We'll build it for you in an
29:52
hour and it'll be in Slack tomorrow.
29:54
You don't have to learn how to build anything.
29:56
You don't have to imagine, you know, how do I craft my markdown
30:00
files? It's like you don't have to
30:01
worry about any of that. The system does it.
30:03
You're good to go. You just put information in the
30:05
knowledge base. You can, you know, connect a
30:07
bunch of different stuff, but you're fundamentally it is a
30:10
solution for taking something which has been historically a
30:14
very analogue problem and just, you know, making it available to
30:18
everybody. Yeah, let's talk about alignment
30:21
2 and kind of broader context because it does seem like a a
30:24
very relevant challenge right now.
30:26
You know, like where I see Dobbin is great because
30:30
especially for the FNG, you know what I mean?
30:32
It's like they're trying to get like up to speed and have all
30:34
the jargon and like know all the shorthand and all.
30:37
That's really hard. So knowing that you have a
30:39
single source of truth, if you have questions, it's AI.
30:42
So they don't make you feel dumb, They don't, They're not
30:45
irritated, they're not impatient.
30:47
You can just really have that conversation and learn, which is
30:50
amazing and which brings up people up to speed fast.
30:53
But like now we have very interesting work culture, if you
30:57
can even call it that. I mean, post COVID, you know,
30:59
most organizations sent people home.
31:01
Now there's some kind of in in the office, out of office
31:05
hybrid, but a lot of teams are still remote.
31:09
You know, you might never meet your Co workers.
31:11
You kind of exist on blowing rectangles and and slack
31:14
channels. So, you know, for some folks
31:17
that can be like incredibly isolating and lonely.
31:20
You know, for some folks, they just check out and don't tell
31:24
anybody and just stop working and you figure out the hard way,
31:27
you know, what are some of the larger kind of challenges with
31:30
alignment right now? Yeah, I mean, I think the remote
31:33
work, I mean, that was bad to go, right?
31:35
I started working where there was a guy who would go down the
31:37
aisles with a shopping cart and he had papers in the shopping
31:40
cart. And he would take the papers off
31:42
your desk and he would put them in someone else's desk.
31:44
And they would take the papers from that person's desk and put
31:46
in someone else's desk. And that was an inbox.
31:48
And that was an outbox, right? And the nature of an inbox in an
31:52
outbox was, was limited. There was a rate limiter on the
31:55
amount of in and out based on the amount of printing that you
31:59
would do at the Xerox copier with your code that would tell
32:03
you like, hey, you can't make 200 copies, dude, right.
32:07
So there wasn't this proliferation of endless
32:10
information. So one of the biggest challenges
32:13
that we have, I think as a culture is we've just made a
32:17
mess of the last 30 years of digital crap that we've created,
32:22
right? Everybody writes an e-mail and
32:23
they're like CCO, right? And you're like, what, why?
32:27
Like why do I have 500 emails? And, and I think this is really
32:31
a tyranny when you are in a remote organization where you
32:34
haven't even met people, right? And you're being just like, you
32:37
know, kind of tagged on things all the time, right?
32:40
So our idea and I don't think it's winky dink that Dobbin
32:45
itself, we're a fully remote company, right?
32:47
Jonas is in Majorca, our head of design is in Amsterdam, our
32:50
engineering team is in Finland, our head of customer success is
32:54
in Los Angeles and our number twos is in upstate New York.
32:56
My Co founder, another Co founder is upstate New York.
32:59
Our you know, Optus system is in Florida and our head of finances
33:03
in LA, right? It's like we're all over the
33:05
place. That is not coincident for what
33:08
we actually built, right? Dobbin effectively becomes like
33:12
a town square where you are able to gather together, right, see
33:17
what the other people are doing, build on what the other people
33:21
are doing and actually be connected to the work.
33:23
You can see the work literally getting built out.
33:26
And I think that that's, you know, we have one company that
33:28
uses DOB and that talks about how it they don't need, they
33:33
don't need as many meetings and they don't have as many layers.
33:36
And I think that that is kind of a magic thing, right?
33:42
Like if you could pull that off, that's kind of incredible.
33:46
And I think that the alignment problem, it's really just, you
33:51
know, that's a fancy word. What?
33:53
What's another way of putting it?
33:54
People are confused, right? People are just confused.
33:57
They don't know what the strategy is, they don't know
34:00
what the guidelines are. They're not exactly sure what
34:03
was decided in the last meeting because the information from
34:06
what was decided in the last meeting was delivered in an
34:08
e-mail that had 700 words, right?
34:12
And it was 4 weeks ago, right? And so this is about moving to a
34:16
different way of taking information and making it
34:22
systematized, right? Not just having it be ephemera
34:26
or just in somebody's head, but actually like, how do we put
34:29
this knowledge back into the system and make it available to
34:31
everybody? But so I think of it even, you
34:34
know, we talk about the chief alignment officer, but really
34:36
it's like the chief confusion and frustration removal officer,
34:40
right? It's like people are literally
34:42
happier when they're working with Dobbin because they're not
34:45
just sitting around waiting. You know, I, I, I did.
34:49
Have you ever studied many years ago, many, many years ago, I
34:52
worked with a guy named Mike Schwartz.
34:54
Mike Schwartz was head of operational efficiency at
34:56
Amazon. Amazing human.
34:58
He taught me about lean manufacturing when I was at 1
35:00
Kings Lane. There are 7 forms of waste in
35:04
lean manufacturing. Transportation, inventory,
35:08
motion, waiting, overproduction, over processing, and defects.
35:13
The number one killer is waiting.
35:16
Yeah. Waiting, waiting, waiting,
35:21
waiting, waiting. And when you're the founder and
35:24
it's your company, when people are waiting for your waiting, it
35:29
drives you bonkers. Yeah.
35:32
Right. And so 100% right.
35:35
So here's the beautiful thing about lean manufacturing.
35:39
I wish to hell somebody had taught me this when I was a kid.
35:42
Lean manufacturing says whatever you do today is your process.
35:48
Doesn't mean it's a good process, but it's the process.
35:51
If you just go through that process and pay attention to
35:53
what you do today and note that anything that's one of those
35:57
seven things that I just called out is waste and remove it,
36:02
you'll have a better process. If you just focus on waiting in
36:05
your organization, you free up an enormous amount of time.
36:10
One of the things we found out when we were building Goblin,
36:13
that blew my mind. Microsoft did a study, they
36:17
estimate that 57% of our time is spent coordinating 57% of our
36:23
time, right? It's 22 hours a week on a 40
36:25
hour week, right? So you're like, what?
36:29
Right. I'm paying people.
36:30
It's like, and by the way, it's nobody's KPI, nobody's like, hey
36:34
guys, our key objectives for this quarter are to coordinate a
36:37
lot. I want to see at least 57% of
36:41
our time doing coordinating. That's our new goal, right,
36:45
Right. So we're really trying to
36:46
squeeze into the 43 percent the work, right?
36:50
And so the reason everybody's bonkers, right, and frustrated
36:54
and overworked, etcetera, is because I don't have any time to
36:56
do the work because 22 hours a week is just spent trying to
36:59
figure out what the work is. It's so basically Dobbin's
37:02
solution. And I, and you know, I, I don't
37:04
think this is every company on earth is going to have a company
37:08
AI. Dobbin is a flavour of that,
37:10
right? But our solution is stop
37:12
waiting, get what you need in the system, try to get further
37:17
on your own, get some help from Dobbin, share it with your Co
37:20
workers, show them what you're working on, get further, right.
37:24
And if everybody was just able to get a little further without
37:28
needing to have 17 emails, five of the meetings, etcetera, you
37:31
just remove that layer of waste that it's not that alignment is
37:36
like forced, it's that the alignment is ambient, right?
37:41
And that I think he's a really powerful way of understanding
37:48
what is now possible with these systems, right?
37:51
This is something that my friend Howard pointed out.
37:53
He's like, it's about ambient alignment.
37:56
That's the new architecture, right?
37:59
That's the infrastructure you want.
38:01
You don't want a schoolmarm running around being like, no,
38:04
no, no, that is not the way to do that.
38:05
You want it just being there when you're trying to do your
38:08
work, right? And so I think that that's, I
38:12
don't know, I think it's like kind of an amazing that makes me
38:15
excited, right? Like that makes me excited
38:17
because I spent so much time in my life in meetings where I
38:20
wanted to shoot myself right where I was just like, I can't
38:23
believe we're having this meeting again.
38:24
Yeah, I think it's just the fifth time we're having this
38:26
meeting. And the the bigger the company,
38:28
the more you have that experience of, I don't know,
38:34
whatever a negative Deja vu is, right?
38:36
It's like a miserable vu, right? You're like God.
38:39
Groundhog Day looking. Right.
38:41
Dog Day, right? Yeah.
38:44
Well, and then ultimately it it metastasize until you're one of
38:47
these companies that fires 20,000 people with an e-mail.
38:51
Exactly and. You're like, boy, that the
38:54
people that are leftover hate you, you know?
38:57
Yeah. Good.
38:58
Luck and and I think the other thing, you know, we've been so
39:04
obsessed with the idea that the problem with our companies was
39:08
we didn't have enough project management, right?
39:11
It's like every it's like, oh, do we need more project
39:13
management? No, you know what you need?
39:15
You need a better Kanban board and you're like, no, I think
39:17
it's a problem. If that was the problem, we've
39:19
got so much project management software, we'd be, you know,
39:22
productivity in the country, each of the roof.
39:24
It doesn't matter. That stuff doesn't really work.
39:27
It's not that it isn't important.
39:29
It is important to know what the schedule is and when things are
39:32
due, but the problem is that people are lousy and adhering to
39:35
that right you. Again, it needs to be ambient.
39:39
It needs to just be part of what the work is.
39:44
Yeah, I agree. OK.
39:45
We're at that time. We're ready to go to the quantum
39:47
round. Are you ready?
39:49
Let's do it. One thing I love about Dobbin is
39:52
it exists in Slack. I feel like if I'm making
39:54
somebody log in and sign up to a new dashboard, I'm already going
39:58
to lose. Why did you decide on Slack and
40:01
not say in e-mail? Yeah, 'cause my my partner Jonas
40:05
is a genius, basically. Short version, he's like, the
40:09
problem with companies is lack of coordination and
40:11
collaboration. The solution for that is
40:13
dropping the system and the structure right into where
40:16
people are trying to collaborate and coordinate, period.
40:18
Full stop. Where they are already.
40:21
Where they are already right like like that, you know, we say
40:24
right perspective, right information, right channel.
40:28
Love it. Aside from Dobbin, what
40:32
experiments are you doing with AI right now?
40:33
Or side projects or little things.
40:36
Well, I mean, I'm all Dobbin, so everything we're doing is
40:39
Dobbin, right. So the thing we just launched is
40:42
a what we're calling an outside in report.
40:45
So now you can go to our site and actually just put in your
40:48
LinkedIn company profile in your e-mail and we'll generate a,
40:52
what we're describing as really a look at your business from the
40:55
outside. That is itself this multi agent
40:59
like Wonderland and generates a really nice clean report that
41:03
gives you a really kind of interesting insight into like,
41:06
oh, how should I be thinking about this?
41:08
And So what we're really trying to do with Domin is start like,
41:10
how can we make it more portable?
41:11
How can we start pushing it out in the world in these different
41:14
ways? And that's really, you know, I
41:16
don't have time for anything else other than Domin.
41:18
All I'm doing is domin. Love it.
41:21
As a designer, often times there's so many, I suppose, like
41:26
aspects of design, whether that could be flower arrangements or
41:31
it could be calligraphy or graphic design, it could be
41:35
product design, it could a lot of different things.
41:38
Do you have a favor, or perhaps do you have a certain style of
41:41
design that is the lens that you can interpret the world with?
41:45
Yeah. I mean, the design that I like
41:46
is system design, and that's really the lens that we have
41:50
here, right? Which is like, it's not an
41:52
aesthetic, it is a system. And designing systems requires
41:57
you to pay attention to the way people work and the way people
41:59
behave and the things that people need and where you need
42:02
to provide support. And so that you know what, I got
42:05
my start designing editorial system.
42:07
I was a magazine designer and I got good at building design
42:09
systems for magazines. I always thought it was
42:11
interesting. And by the way, what that means
42:13
is when you go out to make the magazine you're already
42:16
operating with like this is the grid, this is the structure,
42:19
these are the typefaces, these are, you know, etcetera,
42:21
etcetera, etcetera. What you're doing is thinking of
42:23
like what photograph do I want to put there and what kind of
42:25
story? You're not inventing the
42:27
magazine from scratch every time, right?
42:29
I always thought it was interesting that businesses
42:32
didn't have underlying systems for how they operated, right?
42:36
It just was like a free for all. It's like, hey, now we're going
42:38
to have more meetings right now we're going to have like, and I
42:41
and I think that that's really been a kind of interesting gap
42:46
as knowledge work kind of grew out of the assembly line
42:51
thinking, which is basically why did we sit next to each other in
42:55
the office? Because we were an assembly line
42:57
for paper moving through our system, right?
42:59
And then everything became digital.
43:00
We kept doing it and then suddenly COVID came and we were
43:03
like, oh wait, we don't have to be Co located.
43:06
But wait, when we're not Co located, we don't have to water
43:09
fountain anymore. We don't have to pass the flow
43:11
of information anymore. We don't have this like
43:13
beautiful ebb and flow of how real information is passed
43:17
within an organization. And so designing a system for
43:21
capturing the natural currency of people's conversations as
43:28
well as like what actually matters and then creating that
43:31
structure, but keeping it flexible, that's the kind of
43:33
design that went into Dobbin. And that's kind of like, you
43:36
know, also my, our head of design creates very beautiful
43:39
things, but we're very focused on really the system
43:42
architecture of it. Incredible.
43:46
Couple more questions. It's been so fun.
43:47
We're going to do the founder Challenge question.
43:50
This is brought to you by inbox alchemy.co.
43:54
Now all founders need distribution.
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And if you're going to invest time and money in distribution,
44:00
why not build a list? Because with
44:01
email.youhavethatrelationshipforalifetimeifyoucanlearnmore@inboxalchemy.co. Here's the question.
44:09
What is something that you believe about the future that
44:12
most people think is crazy? OK, what do I think about the
44:17
future that most people think it's crazy?
44:19
I mean, I think a lot of people think I'm crazy about a lot of
44:22
things, but let's just focus on one thing.
44:23
I think it is completely inevitable that we are going to
44:29
be in conversation with synthetic versions of ourselves
44:34
that are going to be affected. I mean, that's basically what
44:37
we're doing, right? We are building some version of
44:39
a digital twin of a company. Without getting into the
44:41
technicality of that, but just the idea of that.
44:43
That's going to be true for everything.
44:45
Anything that can be described at a methodological level is
44:50
going to be able to be captured. And you're going to be in
44:52
conversation in some version of that.
44:54
And that conversation is going to be ubiquitous, right?
44:57
It's going to be in your car, it's going to be in your
45:00
headphones. It's going to be when you walk
45:02
down the street. And now the trick is, how does
45:04
that not become a disaster, right?
45:07
Like how does that future that I'm describing of like we're
45:11
obviously going to be in this conversation with the synthetic
45:15
intelligence, which is going to be ubiquitous, How does that not
45:19
become like advertising in our mobile phones?
45:22
And I think honestly, I think the biggest thing we got to
45:25
figure out is that, right, like how does it become an organic
45:29
experience? Because what feels like it's
45:31
possible right now is for us, we've built the first digital
45:34
digital thing that actually can operate in a kind of organic
45:38
medium, right? So how do we continue building
45:41
on that? And how do we make that
45:42
experience amazing as opposed to extractive, demoralizing, you
45:47
know, and oppressive? And so I think like probably the
45:50
thing that people don't believe, that I believe it's totally
45:53
possible. It's totally possible to make
45:56
that future that I just described not dystopian, but
45:59
actually incredible. I love it.
46:03
I'm with you. I share that optimism.
46:05
I love it. Were you were you able to get
46:08
the name of that nonprofit from your wife?
46:11
Oh, crap. I do not have the name of that
46:13
nonprofit from my wife, but I she's in a board meeting,
46:17
unfortunately. But I will say, I will say my
46:20
wife is in an incredible, it is a nonprofit.
46:22
She's in an organization called the Resistance Revival Chorus
46:25
and it's incredible. And if anybody's curious that
46:28
she go look that up, they're trying to make their next
46:30
record. You can donate money.
46:32
Amazing. And I'll put show notes to that
46:34
in wherever people are listening to this, they can check out
46:37
that. They can obviously check out
46:39
Dobbin, which I'll put links to that.
46:42
Josh, where's the best place for people to connect with you
46:44
online? You can just hit me up in
46:47
LinkedIn, I respond to DMS there, or you can just e-mail
46:52
me. I'm Joshua dot Liverson at
46:53
Dobbin dot AI. Incredible.
46:55
We'll link all that up to the show notes as well.
46:57
Josh, this has been amazing. Thank you so much.
47:00
Ryan, thank you man, I enjoyed it.
47:02
Talk to you soon. Founders, you know better than
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