Latest / AI for Founders with Ryan Estes / I already know you hate taxes

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I already know you hate taxes · AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

• 0:00
  Business owners, I already know you hate taxes.
• 0:02
  Like not oh paperwork kind of hate.
• 0:04
  I mean the kind of hate where you'd rather get dental work at
• 0:06
  a gas station then explain your PNL.
• 0:09
  And here's the part that should scare you a little.
• 0:11
  Taxes aren't just expensive, they're sneaky because most
• 0:14
  founders don't overpay on purpose.
• 0:16
  They overpay because they're too busy.
• 0:18
  And even worse, half of you are sitting there like.
• 0:21
  I hope my tax. Person is doing it right.
• 0:23
  Hope is not a strategy when the IRS is involved.
• 0:26
  Believe me, I know. I've been audited twice.
• 0:28
  So listen, there's finally a tool that makes this easy.
• 0:31
  It's called deduction.com. And yes, I'm shilling for it
• 0:34
  because it's awesome. And the founder, Sy, is a buddy
• 0:37
  of mine. He's a Denver guy.
• 0:39
  Well, he's British, but he's. Here now, so we're claiming him
• 0:42
  for 500 bucks. Deduction.com's agent will
• 0:45
  complete and file your return and there's a human reviewing it
• 0:48
  and signing it. And right now PSI is onboarding
• 0:51
  every single customer himself. You can say you knew him when at
• 0:55
  that price. And I'm being dead serious.
• 0:57
  I would have them run it just to double check my tax preparer.
• 1:00
  Because if you catch one mistake, one missed deduction 1,
• 1:03
  oops, it pays for itself instantly.
• 1:06
  Here's the real question though. If taxes are the biggest bill
• 1:09
  you pay every year, why are you treating them like an
• 1:11
  afterthought? So go check out deduction.com
• 1:14
  and stop donating extra money to the government like it's a
• 1:16
  charity. It ain't until PSI, I said.
• 1:19
  What's up? So you're in New York, you're
• 1:38
  like, let's try Denver. Was there anything particularly
• 1:40
  that rooted you here or you just kind of?
• 1:41
  Want to explore the practical? You know, you always need
• 1:43
  something to push you to go somewhere.
• 1:46
  Yeah, I always wanted to first of all, I always wanted to hear
• 1:50
  the US. And I was lucky enough that my
• 1:51
  friend started a company in New York and he sponsored me and I,
• 1:54
  I came to the US and I, you need, you need some kind of
• 1:57
  poll, basically. Sure.
• 1:58
  And then with Denver, there was an amazing job opportunity.
• 2:01
  I was helping and advising a company out here called True
• 2:03
  Anomaly. OK.
• 2:04
  Which is I think it's a little bit of a Denver darling.
• 2:08
  You know, they, they Evan is the CEO of true normally and, and
• 2:13
  they're doing incredible things on the aerospace and defence
• 2:16
  start side. So I got a chance to come out.
• 2:19
  That was that was a sort of excuse to to go otherwise, you
• 2:23
  know, why why Denver versus anywhere else, right.
• 2:26
  And actually my, my wife was a little hesitant.
• 2:29
  And now she's she's a real New York like city rat, you know,
• 2:33
  like loves it, loves it. And honestly, she is like in
• 2:38
  love with Denver. She just, yeah.
• 2:41
  So actually if we, if I ever want to move back, it's going to
• 2:43
  be tough. She's now like true, True Blood.
• 2:47
  She even says Colorado now. Nice.
• 2:49
  Not Colorado. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:51
  Definitely not Colorado. Yeah.
• 2:53
  Because we love. We realized the other day that
• 2:55
  the locals say Colorado, Colorado.
• 2:57
  So she now says that so. Yeah, Arvada Co yeah.
• 3:01
  What are some other ones? Buena Vista.
• 3:03
  Yeah, yeah, there's, there's the Colorado accent is very subtle.
• 3:08
  Yeah, yeah. You know you don't pronounce the
• 3:10
  TS in the middle of words. Yeah.
• 3:12
  Oh, OK. It's not mountain, OK, It's
• 3:14
  mountain. Interesting.
• 3:15
  It's not fountain. Fountain.
• 3:17
  Oh yeah, you're right. It's like a, it's like a a
• 3:19
  little stutter. See, I wouldn't know this unless
• 3:21
  I spoke to a true native Coloradan, which is impossible
• 3:25
  to find now. Yeah, exactly, everyone.
• 3:26
  'S from New York or LA or Chicago.
• 3:29
  Totally. That's crazy.
• 3:30
  Everybody's from everywhere else, which is also awesome.
• 3:32
  But yeah, it is. You know, if you talk to my
• 3:34
  sister Raquel, like, she has the quintessential Colorado accent
• 3:39
  and it's, it's great. I'm just like, yeah.
• 3:42
  It's awesome. OK, I need I need work on my
• 3:44
  accent clearly, so just put me in touch with her maybe to.
• 3:48
  Clean that up. Yeah, so how dare.
• 3:50
  You know, I'm just like, you know, walking around so
• 3:53
  conspicuously. So yeah, that's great.
• 3:56
  Man, cool. And then?
• 3:59
  What? I don't know if it's rude but
• 4:01
  like the visa to get into the state.
• 4:03
  Yeah, no, it's not rude at all. It's like a touch.
• 4:05
  It's kind of a touch point right now, particularly in technology.
• 4:08
  Like what did you do to actually get the opportunity to be here?
• 4:11
  Yeah, I actually have a really, I feel pretty passionately about
• 4:15
  this, actually. But I was lucky that an employer
• 4:20
  was willing to sponsor me #1 sure.
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  And #2 I was eligible for an O1 visa, OK, Which has a very
• 4:28
  slightly obnoxious title, which is extraordinary ability.
• 4:32
  It was originally started as a visa for people like Nobel Prize
• 4:36
  winners and people like that to attract them to the US Over
• 4:39
  time, they broadened it to basically accept entrepreneurs,
• 4:44
  athletes, basically people that have some source to them, if you
• 4:49
  will. Sure, I won't like big myself
• 4:52
  up, but I was really fortunate to be eligible for it.
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  And you know, that's how I, I, I came in.
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  I was very, very lucky. It's a lot of work.
• 5:00
  Did you star in a play or something or like?
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  What? So I actually, I started my
• 5:04
  first company in the UK called Caribou.
• 5:06
  Amazing. And that company was acquired by
• 5:08
  Mattel and we had enough. This was in 2013.
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  We had enough publicity success. We were featured by Apple during
• 5:17
  the iPad Air 2 keynote. That was.
• 5:19
  Yeah, that was a long time ago now that when I submitted my
• 5:23
  application for the O1 visa, I was recognized for that those
• 5:29
  accolades. And and actually the irony of
• 5:31
  all of this is before I started that company, I was rejected
• 5:34
  from every like first job that I applied for.
• 5:39
  We call them grad schemes in the US, in the UK, but basically
• 5:43
  they're like starter jobs like consulting, investment banking.
• 5:47
  I tried, I tried the regular like I'd, I'd say this to
• 5:51
  everyone, like I really tried not to go down this path of
• 5:54
  being an entrepreneur and start a company like.
• 5:57
  For good reason. It's it's kind of hellish, I.
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  Really just wanted to like, I don't know, just be have a
• 6:02
  normal job as a consultant investment banker and I just got
• 6:05
  rejected completely by every job in the UK.
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  And the irony of all of that is if I had gone down that path, I
• 6:13
  would not have been eligible for an O1 visa to America.
• 6:16
  Cool. So life just has that weird
• 6:19
  serendipity. Yeah.
• 6:20
  I, one of my mentors called. It says it's good luck, bad
• 6:23
  luck. Who knows, You know, So I look
• 6:25
  back and I'm like, sort of bad. Was it bad luck or good luck
• 6:28
  that I got rejected from literally every single graduate
• 6:31
  job? So.
• 6:32
  God. Man, that's so important because
• 6:36
  because, you know, the career path is difficult.
• 6:39
  Entrepreneurship is very difficult, you know, to, like,
• 6:42
  realize that like when you broaden the view, you don't
• 6:44
  really know how it's going to shake out.
• 6:46
  Yeah, you know, totally. And you were in the keynote for
• 6:49
  Apple Air, iPad Air 2, correct? Was that Jobs?
• 6:54
  It was not Jobs. That was Phil Schiller cool and
• 6:57
  under the That's a great question.
• 7:00
  I think that was Tim Cook's leadership Cook.
• 7:02
  What was the lift like after that?
• 7:04
  Crazy. It was like 200,000 downloads
• 7:06
  like that day, yeah. So cool.
• 7:09
  Do you remember that those days that was like the app economy
• 7:12
  days? Yes, you know where like
• 7:14
  everything and and it's funny now I was you know, we can get
• 7:18
  into it at some point, but like what?
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  What was the last app you downloaded?
• 7:23
  Exactly. It's it's just that, you know.
• 7:26
  Now I have to download apps for like, you know, tools at my
• 7:29
  house and whatever, like the security.
• 7:31
  Only if you have to. Yeah, and then you're pissed.
• 7:32
  You're like Oh my God, another. App, yeah.
• 7:34
  It's like, only if you have to. Yeah, yeah, no one's downloading
• 7:36
  it. So that was those glory days
• 7:39
  where if you want a distribution, you would just
• 7:41
  download an app and oh, sorry, make an app and put it in the
• 7:44
  App Store. And then and then what you would
• 7:46
  do is you would, this is another secret.
• 7:48
  Back then as you would, you would find the contact
• 7:50
  information for the local App Store manager.
• 7:54
  Yeah, so there was auk App Store manager.
• 7:57
  You find his contact and then you would try and establish a
• 8:00
  relationship and get featured. Yes.
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  And getting featured was like the big way to like make it big
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  totally. You know, again, now I think a
• 8:08
  lot of that's kind of irrelevant.
• 8:10
  Oh man, that was a, that was a fun time too.
• 8:12
  It was cool. You know, that's, that's
• 8:14
  actually what is, has me most excited right now about AI in
• 8:17
  general is it's bringing back this enthusiasm and fun to
• 8:21
  technology where it's new, you know, like the, the, the whole
• 8:24
  app revolution was incredible. It was, it was just so fun
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  because it's like, oh, what can you do?
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  What can you do? And then it started, everything
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  kind of became centralized and like you're like, OK, it's all a
• 8:34
  part of this, the machine And Web 2 was like whatever.
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  And you have the the tech giant luminaries and it seems like
• 8:40
  they got big moats around what they have for distribution and
• 8:44
  you're just kind of like. There's a lull.
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  You know, so like really shout out to open AI for just blowing
• 8:50
  a wide open, you know, and getting like Google to react,
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  getting everybody else to jump in the game because now it's
• 8:56
  it's wide open again. I haven't had a similar story.
• 8:59
  I was doing a podcast. It was it was the Denver
• 9:02
  business podcast when we were, you know, in the park on the
• 9:06
  blanket with the candle and same thing.
• 9:08
  I I knew somebody at Spreaker and Spreaker I think is the
• 9:11
  since dissolved. But it was a really cool
• 9:13
  podcasting app because you could go live.
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  So you would record a Spreaker, you could go live.
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  I would tweet it out and we'd get this big kind of radio
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  audience that would ask questions and stuff.
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  Yeah, So it was really cool. And so I was talking to one of
• 9:26
  the, the product managers there are just giving feedback and
• 9:30
  kind of what I wanted. And I was like, Hey, you know,
• 9:32
  in your onboarding, you guys always do a, a recommendation on
• 9:37
  for four podcasts on the bottom. I was like, will you put me
• 9:40
  there? And he's like, sure.
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  And I shot to number one in like 2 weeks.
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  And it was just, it was just from like literally just asking
• 9:47
  somebody to do something cool, you know, which I, you know, a
• 9:51
  tip for founders. I think that that's something
• 9:53
  that's also goes a lot of times unsaid is that like, open your
• 9:58
  mouth and solve your problems, You know what I mean?
• 10:01
  Like if you know somebody, ask for a favor.
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  It's like my grandfather used to tell me.
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  He's like, hey, when you move in a place and you want to make a
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  good impression on your neighbors, knock on the door the
• 10:10
  first day and be like, hey, we're baking some cookies.
• 10:12
  You got an extra egg. Even if you got eggs, you know
• 10:15
  what I mean? But then they're like, oh, hi,
• 10:17
  welcome to the neighborhood. You know, sure, here you could
• 10:19
  have an egg. And so like, basically you're
• 10:22
  making yourself vulnerable. They're helping you.
• 10:24
  You're giving them kind of a position of trust and authority.
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  And then the next day you go repay the egg immediately.
• 10:29
  And so they're like, oh, this person is also trustworthy.
• 10:32
  Yeah. You know, so you create this,
• 10:34
  like, immediate bond by doing that.
• 10:37
  So, you know, a lot of times with distribution and it's like
• 10:39
  you just really need something. It's like you don't need to bang
• 10:41
  your head against the wall about like, how do I customize this
• 10:45
  cold e-mail? It's like dude, just call them.
• 10:47
  Yeah, it's like asking you shall receive, right?
• 10:49
  Yeah. Actually, you know, there's a
• 10:52
  lot that we did early on with deduction that, you know, we
• 11:00
  just asked and we ended up, you know, whether it was an advisor
• 11:05
  or an investor or ACPA that we, you know, we'll get into all of
• 11:09
  that. But yeah, totally.
• 11:11
  You just, you just, most people don't ask, right?
• 11:14
  And the irony is like a lot of the most, the people that you
• 11:19
  think are never going to respond are actually the people that get
• 11:23
  hit up the least because everyone thinks they're not
• 11:25
  going to respond totally. So it's kind of interesting.
• 11:28
  Yeah. And I want to get to
• 11:29
  deduction.com, but let's close the loop on your last company.
• 11:33
  So you exited the company from Mattel.
• 11:35
  This was, was it a, it was an app, was it for kids?
• 11:38
  Was it? Yeah, it was a Skype for kids
• 11:40
  back when Skype was a thing, RIP.
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  And we started that out of Graduate School.
• 11:47
  It was kind of just one of those like, you know, just throughout
• 11:49
  the idea it was part of a business plan competition.
• 11:52
  Could we build an interactive video calling application?
• 11:54
  Again, this is like before, really, FaceTime had all that
• 11:57
  interactivity. And so, yeah, you know, it
• 12:00
  allowed, it allowed parents to read stories, play games
• 12:04
  remotely. And yeah, that was a company.
• 12:08
  Killer. What was any details of the exit
• 12:11
  you can divulge? It was.
• 12:12
  Definitely a soft landing, but it was an amazing, you know, I
• 12:17
  sort of almost knew it was never going to make a lot of money
• 12:19
  because at that time publishing was having this like, you know,
• 12:22
  we were selling books in the in the app.
• 12:25
  That was kind of that was a hook.
• 12:27
  And at the time publishing was just having a it.
• 12:31
  It was at a time when they were like publishing is dead and
• 12:33
  right. But it's an amazing, you know,
• 12:34
  that taught me the full life cycle of a company.
• 12:37
  And as I say, I think one of the most incredible achievements for
• 12:41
  me was that O1 visa as as strange as it sounds like, I
• 12:45
  think if if I had the opportunity to make 200,000 lbs
• 12:51
  from that, let's say company or even 500,000 lbs, I would take
• 12:55
  the O1 visa. Yeah, you must really not like
• 12:59
  those Grace guys. Or I just love America.
• 13:03
  You know, It's funny, though, like, especially now in the
• 13:06
  current climate, you know, that it's obviously quite polarized.
• 13:10
  But I had my citizenship interview.
• 13:13
  Sorry, no citizenship oath ceremony recently.
• 13:16
  Yeah, and there's like people from 100 different countries or
• 13:19
  like less about 100. I will tell you those are the
• 13:22
  most patriotic people you're ever going to meet.
• 13:24
  I mean when they said do take the oath you they couldn't have
• 13:28
  stood up quicker. Yeah.
• 13:29
  You know, so, you know, because this, it takes so much work,
• 13:33
  these these visas that you end up really valuing being here.
• 13:40
  Yeah. So anyway, yeah, it's cool.
• 13:43
  Yeah, it's fun. It's cool.
• 13:44
  Yeah. It is a weird time.
• 13:46
  I don't think it's as polarized as like the media makes it.
• 13:49
  Yeah, I think you're right. I think most people are like,
• 13:51
  yeah. I mean, we want good people.
• 13:52
  We don't need to put boots on the necks of grandmas.
• 13:55
  Like, what? Is there a happy medium?
• 13:57
  Totally, Totally. You know what I mean?
• 13:58
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 13:59
  But it is, it is cool. It's kind of like what you're
• 14:01
  talking about, like immigrants to Colorado, you know, from
• 14:05
  other states, you know, if you're coming here from
• 14:07
  California, these people are the ones that are enthusiastic about
• 14:10
  like, hey, where's the good fishing spots and blah, blah,
• 14:12
  blah. Meanwhile, all my chromogeny
• 14:14
  friends that have been here forever, they don't do anything,
• 14:17
  you know what I mean? So you got to have like the
• 14:19
  people that are really stoked on the new place.
• 14:21
  And so it works. You know, I, I was always told
• 14:25
  that I was Italian. Like my, my, my uncle, rest in
• 14:31
  peace, Uncle Don, he did our genealogy back to like, he found
• 14:36
  a guy named Azo Este and named my son after this guy from like
• 14:41
  16th century Italy. And, you know, he was like, you
• 14:46
  know, a well to do kind of a aristocrat in Italy, but yeah,
• 14:51
  about 3 generations back. My, my uncle made a terrible
• 14:54
  mistake and the, the tree didn't branch that way.
• 14:56
  So I actually did like one of the, I think 23andMe and it's
• 15:00
  like I'm 99.8% English. And so I was like, all right,
• 15:05
  well, God save the queen or king or whatever, give me some soccer
• 15:09
  and I'm, I'm ready to go, you know, Yeah, although.
• 15:10
  You say football, if you're that, that's right, that high
• 15:13
  percentage English. You know, exactly, exactly.
• 15:18
  So so at some point I got to make it back over to England and
• 15:21
  and trace my roots totally, you know, even though I don't know,
• 15:25
  I'm probably like you, I'll be like, oh man, I'm feeling
• 15:27
  depressed. I'm re evaluating all my life
• 15:29
  decisions with this like dark sky.
• 15:31
  Although some Colorado people I talk to really, really like
• 15:35
  cloudy days because they're like, it's too much.
• 15:37
  You know, I met 1 Colorado lovely lady.
• 15:40
  She's actually my hairdresser. And she said, she said that when
• 15:48
  it's like too much sun for too long, she actually gets
• 15:50
  depressed. Like inverse sad.
• 15:53
  You know, I was like, I've never heard of this.
• 15:55
  There has to be Colorado. Itis only the only Coloradans
• 15:58
  could develop something like that.
• 15:59
  I was like, this is the height of weather privilege, you know,
• 16:02
  coming from the UK. If you said, if you said that to
• 16:05
  an English person, I think they would actually be offended.
• 16:08
  Yeah, totally. They'd like strangle.
• 16:10
  You I was like, I've never heard of this.
• 16:12
  I don't think there's medical backing for this.
• 16:14
  She's like, yeah, I have the I have the she says like inverse
• 16:17
  of seasonal, you know, just the depressive disorder, whatever
• 16:22
  it's called. And I was like, this doesn't
• 16:24
  you've made so sorry. Yeah, that the, that, that's
• 16:27
  hilarious. It's like, you sure like a
• 16:29
  beautiful sunset. And she's like, it's really
• 16:31
  bringing me down, right? I've seen too many of these.
• 16:33
  Yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah, I don't know.
• 16:38
  That's great. Yeah.
• 16:39
  Cool man. So soft landing.
• 16:41
  You get the hit the jackpot with the awesome visa.
• 16:44
  Make it to New York, make it to Colorado.
• 16:46
  You're sitting here twiddling your thumbs.
• 16:49
  I'm assuming you can't get a job anywhere either.
• 16:50
  So you're like, what's the next project?
• 16:53
  So talk us through like before we get to really an introduction
• 16:57
  of deduction. Like I, I'm always fascinated
• 17:00
  with the validation process and the idea process because one
• 17:04
  thing that founders have is they have shiny object syndrome,
• 17:08
  especially when they exit a company.
• 17:10
  This is often times kind of a dark place for founders because
• 17:14
  you're like a little bit untethered.
• 17:15
  Your, your identity is kind of shook and you also are
• 17:18
  accustomed to a lot of work all the time.
• 17:22
  And so when you kind of are separated from that, the
• 17:24
  tendency is to dive right into something right away.
• 17:27
  So how did you kind of manage that transition to decide on a
• 17:30
  project to take forward? I was actually quite fortunate
• 17:33
  that when I so I came to New York, I was sponsored by by my
• 17:38
  friend Luke who started a company called Latch in New
• 17:41
  York. And so I joined as head of
• 17:44
  product. We were like 20 people and I
• 17:47
  actually helped Luke and, and the team for seven years build
• 17:51
  that company. And that company was an amazing
• 17:54
  company building basically delivering keyless entry
• 17:57
  solutions for apartment dwellers.
• 18:01
  And I, I was the Chief Product officer there over the seven
• 18:04
  years and then we took that company public in 2021 via SPAC
• 18:08
  during the crazy kind of SPAC boom.
• 18:11
  And so I left that in 2023. And I was fortunate enough that
• 18:15
  I'd seen basically how you build a company from, you know, let's
• 18:20
  call it zero to zero to 1 and then one to N 500 people, $1.5
• 18:25
  billion valuation. What number of employee were you
• 18:28
  at that at that company? I was like, I was like 20 ish,
• 18:31
  yeah. And he got grew it to 505
• 18:33
  hundred and went public. Yeah, and like you know, Chamath
• 18:36
  Palapitia led the SPAC and. He led them all, didn't he?
• 18:39
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 18:39
  The SPAC king, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 18:41
  So and that was like AB to B to C company.
• 18:46
  Yeah. So it had a flavor of like B to
• 18:48
  B, It had consumer, it had hardware, it had software, it
• 18:53
  had kind of everything network effect.
• 18:55
  Yeah. And because I was so early, I, I
• 18:56
  saw everything. I saw how do how do you build
• 18:58
  product? How do you fundraise?
• 18:59
  How do you do legal? How do you do IP?
• 19:02
  How do you do marketing everything.
• 19:04
  So it was basically like the crash course in in, in really
• 19:07
  how to like build a a serious business.
• 19:10
  So when I left in 2023, I was fortunate that AI had that
• 19:14
  experience. B, my now Co founder, who was
• 19:17
  the VP of software engineering at Latch left at the same time.
• 19:21
  So we teamed up. We're like we're going to take a
• 19:23
  big swing. And at the time, obviously Chad
• 19:26
  GP, well, some of the GPTI think two or three was coming out at
• 19:29
  that time. So there's clearly like there's
• 19:31
  some excitement. Yeah.
• 19:33
  And so, you know, I did what everyone did.
• 19:34
  I think at the time started ideating and I really started
• 19:37
  with B to B. Yeah.
• 19:39
  I was like, it's because I'd learnt the B to B motion at
• 19:42
  latch, B to B to CI was like, I'm going to start AB to B
• 19:44
  company. And actually one of the first
• 19:45
  ideas was I have a list of ideas, but one of them was AI
• 19:50
  compliance company for businesses, right?
• 19:52
  Try to deal with a lot of compliance at Latch.
• 19:56
  And I went through loads of different ideas.
• 19:58
  I got so much, so much advice from other founders.
• 20:02
  You know, you should do B to B for XYZ reason.
• 20:06
  You should. You've got to love your
• 20:09
  customer. You've you should, you should
• 20:11
  not do this industry. You should do that industry.
• 20:13
  And it was just so much, you know, you know, in a good way.
• 20:18
  There was a lot of noise. Were they, were they recruiting
• 20:20
  you? They're like or look at what
• 20:21
  we're doing over here. Not even.
• 20:23
  Yeah, I mean, I sort of wish not even, you know, they were all
• 20:27
  starting companies and they were like, you should start a
• 20:28
  company. And so honestly, I, I create a
• 20:31
  list of like 20 companies. Cool.
• 20:34
  And my advice? Did you write it down or where
• 20:36
  did you put the list? In Apple notes OK, and I, I
• 20:40
  actually like tweeted once I started deduction, which is the
• 20:43
  company I ended up starting. I, I tweeted out the list of
• 20:45
  companies hoping that like maybe some people will be inspired and
• 20:49
  take some of those ideas or like, you know, change the morph
• 20:52
  them or whatever. So I had this like long list of
• 20:56
  ideas. I will say one of the best tips
• 20:59
  I got from a, from a mutual acquaintance was just, if you
• 21:04
  have an idea like create the deck, I just create the deck and
• 21:07
  send it to friends and just see what they say.
• 21:09
  And so I, I did that. I had probably 10-15 decks.
• 21:13
  One of those decks, a couple of my friends got really inspired
• 21:17
  by. I didn't come up the idea.
• 21:19
  One of my friends from the UK actually came up with this idea
• 21:22
  for a hard, a Wellness hardware product that I'm not going to,
• 21:25
  I'm not going to ruin their announcement, But he came up
• 21:29
  with this idea and I, I sort of helped him create a deck for it.
• 21:32
  And and they actually ended up starting that company and and I
• 21:35
  sort of help advise. So basically I just did a lot of
• 21:37
  that. And but but I think two things
• 21:40
  happen. 1 is I, I, I realized that the simplest solution.
• 21:43
  The simplest solution is is the most obvious and I wanted to
• 21:47
  solve a problem for myself I just realized that that's going
• 21:50
  to that's going to hold me for 10 years not at the
• 21:54
  intellectual. Intellectually correct.
• 21:57
  Idea because there's a lot of intellectually correct ideas you
• 22:00
  know oh you should start a compliance AI company because
• 22:04
  you know the ACV is X and. The Tam is.
• 22:07
  The Tam is this, and you know, you can get some design partners
• 22:11
  like all of that, but what's going to last you for 10 years?
• 22:13
  You know what, I think Naval said this, which is you need an
• 22:20
  idea that you can like wake up in the early hours and just like
• 22:23
  thinking about it and all. Like on the drive here, you're
• 22:26
  thinking about it totally. So that was #1 and then #2 we
• 22:31
  can get into this is I suddenly felt a really strong conviction
• 22:34
  that B to B was saturated. And you know, there's amazing B
• 22:40
  to BAI companies, but Brian Chesky said this literally last
• 22:43
  week that he's on the board of Y Combinator, and he said more
• 22:49
  than 80% of Y Combinator companies right now are B to B.
• 22:54
  It doesn't make any sense because if you actually look at
• 22:57
  the S&P, 560% of the SP500 are consumer or consumer adjacent
• 23:02
  companies. In other words, like the biggest
• 23:04
  outcomes in history of basically being consumer generally,
• 23:07
  generally speaking, but forget the financial side of it.
• 23:12
  Just philosophically, I felt that AI today, most of the time
• 23:18
  is being used to create efficiencies for businesses,
• 23:22
  right? Which is driving higher profits.
• 23:25
  But you know, I felt strongly that AI shouldn't just be used
• 23:30
  to make businesses more efficient.
• 23:31
  It should really benefit consumers.
• 23:35
  And the number one way I think it should benefit consumers is
• 23:39
  to be deflationary, meaning bring the price down of things
• 23:44
  and make them better. And I just felt like there was
• 23:47
  not enough of that. There was a lot of wow, like we
• 23:50
  can cut customer support staff by 50%, which is fine, like
• 23:56
  whatever, you know, I'm sure people feel strongly about that.
• 23:58
  They should, but there wasn't enough wow.
• 24:01
  We can actually make AI bring the price down for people or we
• 24:05
  can make AI make their lives better or etcetera.
• 24:08
  So that was the two things. The bull case for going B to B
• 24:13
  as an entrepreneur is you know you have a more sophisticated
• 24:16
  buyer, you can do a higher ticketed item, you can have
• 24:19
  design partners that will bring you in.
• 24:22
  You have enterprise opportunities.
• 24:25
  What's the bull case then for B to C?
• 24:27
  Yeah, here's what I say about B to B And again, all of that I
• 24:30
  think is totally true. I think shout out to my B to B
• 24:33
  founders out there. I think B to B is easy to start,
• 24:38
  hard to finish. Yeah, consumer is hard to start,
• 24:42
  easier to finish. Yeah, meaning, yeah, you can get
• 24:44
  some design partners no problem, way faster than getting 1000
• 24:49
  consumers. Sure, yes, you can get up to
• 24:52
  probably 2-3 million in revenue pretty quick.
• 24:55
  Sure. But selling to thousands of
• 24:58
  businesses, that's really hard. That's really hard.
• 25:00
  And especially when everyone's doing that and the reality is
• 25:04
  like everyone's like, I want to start a unsexy B to B company.
• 25:09
  That's like, sexy now. Totally.
• 25:11
  You know, it's that absolutely. That's what everybody's doing.
• 25:13
  Yeah, 80% of Y combinator is B to B.
• 25:16
  Like it's not that is sexy. So if you're going to start AB
• 25:18
  to B company again, there's, there's terrific B to B
• 25:22
  companies like, and I latch was AB to B to C company.
• 25:25
  So like we, I start, I helped start AB to B company, but
• 25:29
  you've got to start it not because it's the intellectually
• 25:32
  correct thing to do. You should start it because you
• 25:36
  passionately believe in helping this business.
• 25:39
  You know, and I think just the most people, a lot of people are
• 25:43
  starting B to B companies because it's intellectually
• 25:45
  correct. Totally.
• 25:47
  OK, so you started deduction.com.
• 25:50
  Now I want to come back. Remind me if we don't get to it.
• 25:53
  I want to hear about your decks because this this sounds like
• 25:56
  you're an expert about deck making.
• 25:58
  Yes, but let's get into deduction.com.
• 26:01
  What does What does deduction.com do?
• 26:02
  Yeah, deduction.com is an is the next generation H&R Block.
• 26:06
  So we've developed an AI accountant, Taylor CPAI, and we
• 26:12
  deliver to consumers tax advice within 24 hours for a fraction
• 26:17
  of the price of an accountant and we also file for you.
• 26:20
  Amazing. Amazing.
• 26:22
  OK, as you're validating this, you're putting all these decks
• 26:26
  together. Yeah.
• 26:26
  Why did this one stand out? You said.
• 26:28
  You said because you felt a personal attachment to it.
• 26:30
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 26:31
  So three things happened. One was we just talked about
• 26:36
  apps, right? I just, I'm a product guy.
• 26:39
  I think about the world through the product experience and I
• 26:43
  became obsessed with this idea that people are not going to
• 26:45
  download apps or use websites in five years.
• 26:49
  They're going to communicate with these agents via e-mail,
• 26:53
  text, call, the same way they talk to humans today.
• 26:57
  And so I started thinking about what were the use cases for
• 26:59
  that? And, you know, I actually was
• 27:02
  like, an AI nutritionist would be great.
• 27:04
  You know, my friend actually like has a nutritionist that he
• 27:07
  texts and they charged him 200 bucks a month for.
• 27:10
  And I was like, that's amazing. You just text your nutritionist
• 27:13
  and they, they, you text a photo of your meal.
• 27:15
  And and I was like this, these sort of got my wheels turning.
• 27:20
  But what really hit home was I emailed my accountant, this was
• 27:24
  a few weeks ago. And well, sorry, this was last
• 27:28
  year when we think about starting a company and they took
• 27:32
  like 4 weeks to respond. Yeah.
• 27:34
  And I was like, OK, this is interesting.
• 27:38
  And then the third thing is I looked at the market because I
• 27:41
  was like, OK, if I'm going to be crazy enough to start a consumer
• 27:43
  company, let's just like make sure economically it makes
• 27:46
  sense. So I, I know I talked a big game
• 27:48
  about consumer versus B to BI will say like, if you're going
• 27:52
  to do consumer, try and find a sector that has B to B
• 27:54
  characteristics. And the craziest thing happened.
• 27:59
  I looked at this market, and this is the market that everyone
• 28:03
  forgets about because everyone just thinks about TurboTax when
• 28:06
  they think about taxes. And actually, 55% of Americans
• 28:10
  choose a personal accountant over TurboTax.
• 28:13
  Because they're so scared. Scared they don't want to deal
• 28:16
  with it. Yeah, it's the worst.
• 28:18
  And they spend $16 billion on personal accountants.
• 28:23
  And if when I went and read it and everyone said the same thing
• 28:27
  I wait weeks for a response I'm getting charged 1000 bucks or
• 28:30
  more. And I realized this industry is
• 28:32
  not just pre AI, it's pre digital.
• 28:36
  Yeah. And so that was it.
• 28:38
  I was like, this has the right market dynamics.
• 28:41
  It's not as crowded as TurboTax DIY stuff.
• 28:45
  And that was the that was the birth of deduction.
• 28:49
  Brilliant. I love it and it's such a big
• 28:51
  Tam. It's everybody.
• 28:52
  Literally the only thing that you're sure of in life is death.
• 28:56
  In Texas, you know. What I mean, and so you you, you
• 29:00
  look right over it because you're like somebody's doing
• 29:03
  that, but nobody's doing that in kind of to that point.
• 29:07
  You have H&R Block, then you have you have TurboTax and, and
• 29:10
  their big new revolution is like, we're doing like in person
• 29:13
  shops now, like they're opening brick and mortars, you know, and
• 29:17
  all of that is just to ease, I think, like how uncomfortable it
• 29:21
  makes people for taxes. And for good reason, because,
• 29:24
  you know, the tax code is written in incredibly
• 29:28
  undecipherable intentionally, you know, because they're like,
• 29:32
  hey, well, I think Bill Burr had a joke or something.
• 29:36
  They're like, do you know exactly what I owe?
• 29:37
  And yet they're like, yeah, like, well, will you tell me?
• 29:40
  They're like, no, yeah, They're like, but what if I overpay?
• 29:43
  They're like, oh, well, you can figure that out later.
• 29:45
  Like, but what if I underpay? Oh, you're going to jail?
• 29:47
  Yeah. You know, So it's like it's an
• 29:50
  area that everybody is super intimidated by, you know, and I
• 29:55
  think particularly for founders, because generally speaking,
• 29:58
  like, you know, the people that listen to this podcast are
• 30:01
  similar to you where we're idea guys, we're product guys, we're
• 30:03
  programmers, we're developers, we're creatives, we're
• 30:06
  marketers, All these things exist in a different quadrant of
• 30:09
  the brain than like paying taxes.
• 30:12
  So for us to to leave some a customer like unattended to for
• 30:16
  four weeks is we. We can't even think about.
• 30:20
  There's no way that would ever happen.
• 30:21
  But like for an accountant, they're just like, oh, that's
• 30:24
  just, you know, we're busy, you know what I mean?
• 30:26
  And so they have this luxury largely because they're almost
• 30:30
  like the dragon in The Cave, sitting on a pile of gold coins
• 30:34
  that everyone tip toes around because you're like, dude,
• 30:36
  you're signing off my taxes. So what?
• 30:38
  Exactly. Yeah, you're kind of.
• 30:40
  And, and by the way, it's, it's not their fault.
• 30:43
  Yeah, they're completely overworked.
• 30:46
  And if you go again to Reddit, it's it's all on there.
• 30:50
  They just have too many clients. 43% of them turn away work and
• 30:55
  then they just don't have the time to be technology enabled.
• 30:58
  Yeah. And so it's just sort of a a
• 31:01
  lose lose, honestly. It's it's and so yeah.
• 31:04
  Well, I mean to that point, like, you know, Sam Parr.
• 31:08
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sam, he's got this group called
• 31:11
  Hampton. I joined Hampton Cool, and it's
• 31:13
  a great group. And he's like the CEO of that
• 31:15
  company. He's the founder of that
• 31:16
  company. It's a big company, but it was
• 31:19
  such a problem that he spun off like another tool that was like
• 31:22
  literally like a bookkeeper Finder that like he would get
• 31:25
  all these different people and had all these different
• 31:27
  attributes. So you went in and you're like,
• 31:29
  OK, I have two laundry mats and, you know, a liquor store.
• 31:33
  And it would match you with appropriate bookkeeper or not
• 31:36
  bookkeeper, but tax preparer because people are at such a
• 31:40
  deficit. And so he was basically created
• 31:42
  a side business, you know? Matchmaking.
• 31:46
  Just matchmaking because people are.
• 31:48
  It's such a high to me, you know, so man, kudos to you, man.
• 31:53
  This is this is really. Cool.
• 31:54
  Do you have an? Do you use an account or do you
• 31:56
  do TurboTax? I have an account for business
• 32:00
  tax, but I did TurboTax last year and I, I think I told you
• 32:03
  that as my last personal accountant, I've made some
• 32:07
  mistakes and you know, I was audited 2 years in a row.
• 32:12
  So I'm very sensitive to to taxes and what I want to do is
• 32:16
  actually walk through my personal use case because I'm
• 32:19
  signing up for deduction and I want to.
• 32:22
  We'd be honored to serve you. I can't wait, but before we do,
• 32:26
  is there a story around the URL? Because deduction.com is
• 32:30
  gangster. It's beautiful.
• 32:33
  Yeah, you know, actually I started the company with a
• 32:38
  terrible name. I won't say it, but it had a way
• 32:42
  worse name. And kudos to one of my investors
• 32:46
  actually, who is British and he's in he's in New York, but
• 32:50
  he's English as well. And in a very diplomatic way, he
• 32:53
  was like, so sorry that the name, let's talk about the name.
• 32:57
  And you know, I, I, I worked on it for a little bit, maybe a
• 33:02
  week or two, and yeah, it sort of came up with this name
• 33:06
  deduction, just the double meaning number one, sort of like
• 33:09
  figuring things out inference. And then also the bottom line.
• 33:13
  And then of course, they're like very obvious.
• 33:14
  Yeah. And then, you know, it was like
• 33:19
  some conversation I had with one of my investors, like, should we
• 33:21
  just seeiftheir.com is available?
• 33:24
  And sort of my perspective was if you're going to start a
• 33:28
  consumer tax company, trust is going to be the number one
• 33:30
  thing. And I didn't want to get
• 33:33
  deduction dot AI. Sure, I didn't want to sound
• 33:36
  like just another AI company. Sure.
• 33:39
  I really wanted to project that this company has been around for
• 33:43
  10 years. Prestige.
• 33:44
  Sure. Yeah, and slightly vain, but you
• 33:48
  know, everyone aspires to sit with the greats.
• 33:51
  And I felt that deduction.com would sit with the ramps and the
• 33:57
  Coinbase if we have the Fort, if we are fortunate enough to have
• 34:02
  that success even close to that. And so I just was like, let's
• 34:06
  just prep now, you know, you know, manifest.
• 34:10
  And here's a secret to getting a great domain number one start
• 34:16
  before anyone knows you. Yeah, you don't want to be
• 34:19
  trying to get a.com when you raise your Series A and everyone
• 34:22
  can see how much you. Got a $50 million evaluation.
• 34:24
  They're like, yeah, yeah, I've been waiting for you.
• 34:26
  Be a nobody, like a literal nobody.
• 34:29
  Nothing on your LinkedIn and #2 is you need a great broker.
• 34:33
  Yeah, And I did not know this, but the key is to have a broker
• 34:37
  because here's what's interesting.
• 34:40
  Most dot AI and dot coms are owned by two to three companies.
• 34:44
  Yeah, In fact, like I think there's a country where most of
• 34:48
  them, the AIS are registered. So I found a great broker.
• 34:52
  I'm happy to say it's it's Rob at snaggedsnagged.com.
• 34:56
  Rob is in is a killer. Shout out to Rob.
• 34:59
  Shout out to Rob, he would be him and I were texting at like
• 35:01
  1:00 in the morning. He's like and so through Rob and
• 35:05
  snagged we got a crazy deal. I'm talking we did not spend
• 35:11
  $100,000 or $1,000,000. I won't say the exact number.
• 35:15
  What? What is it, a ballpark?
• 35:17
  Ballpark under 50 grand? Really.
• 35:19
  Yeah. Wow, yeah.
• 35:22
  For deduction.com, yes. So did you like, did you wear
• 35:26
  like a costume? And you're like, hey man, I was
• 35:31
  just thinking about this domain. And yeah, I mean, obviously if
• 35:34
  you have a broker. And he just handled it all.
• 35:36
  And you know, I think the seller was very, you know, I think I
• 35:40
  actually think that was the value of it.
• 35:41
  Like, I think that's the real value of it.
• 35:43
  The value now is higher because we built a brand around it.
• 35:48
  Sure, of course. And, and like deduction.com
• 35:50
  could be a really silly brand if it, if, if it's not handled
• 35:54
  carefully, you know, so everything, everything sounds
• 35:57
  inevitable, but I think that was the right price.
• 35:59
  The seller was, was a, was very agreeable.
• 36:01
  Rob did a great job. And, and so those are my 2 tips
• 36:04
  to get a great.com andithink.com.
• 36:06
  Is is is important for a consumer business?
• 36:08
  I agree 100%. I, I think that it, it builds in
• 36:11
  prestige if it's dot AI that everything that has you know, is
• 36:17
  with AI now in two years we'll all be pulling out that because
• 36:21
  it won't be beneficial for the market.
• 36:22
  Get this, the dot AI was more expensive.
• 36:24
  No kidding. Makes no sense.
• 36:27
  Makes no sense because everyone wants dot AI.
• 36:29
  But I I personally think dot AI sounds like a sandbox, like a
• 36:33
  totally. Product Exactly.
• 36:35
  I agree. And I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but
• 36:37
  like it's definitely like AI so ubiquitous now that in two years
• 36:41
  it's like obviously everything has AI.
• 36:43
  You don't have to mention it. Like nobody cares, they're just
• 36:45
  going to want to. That's a great point.
• 36:46
  Walk into it and it just works like magic and you're ready to
• 36:49
  go. You know, it's kind of like it's
• 36:51
  like when everyone started putting I behind a product when
• 36:54
  after iMac and iPhone, it's kind of like it's like because
• 36:58
  because that was originally Internet Macintosh and and so
• 37:03
  that was what I stand stood for. And I think kind of what you're
• 37:06
  saying, which is if you do it dot AI, you're kind of
• 37:09
  everything's going to have AI. Yeah, what?
• 37:12
  The same thing happens in food. Like, and maybe we talked about
• 37:14
  this, but it's like, you know, omega-3 fatty acids had a moment
• 37:18
  where it's like you had to put in everything.
• 37:20
  So it's like your bread is like now enriched with fish oil.
• 37:23
  I'm like, I don't want fishy bread.
• 37:26
  Like that's disgusting. But they put in everything now
• 37:28
  it's protein, you know, now it's like, oh, everything's got more
• 37:31
  protein, protein. It's like, OK, so there's like
• 37:33
  these fads and trends that happen and AI obviously is and
• 37:37
  everyone's happy about their shiny new tool.
• 37:39
  But like now it's starting to be so ingrained in people's live,
• 37:43
  especially this is what I think is a a great timing for a
• 37:46
  consumer product because a lot of these reports are coming out
• 37:49
  like how people are using ChatGPT in particular, you know,
• 37:53
  like Gemini's making massive inroads.
• 37:55
  Claude obviously is absolutely killing it in all kinds of
• 37:58
  domains. But like the way that people are
• 38:01
  using ChatGPT at first, they're like, oh, maybe they're going to
• 38:04
  like create, you know, bots for X or they're going to, you know,
• 38:08
  help it do their taxes or something.
• 38:10
  But really it's, it's like their new best friend.
• 38:12
  They're like, it's their confidante, They're talking to
• 38:14
  it. So where that I think effects
• 38:16
  kind of what we're doing is like people are getting more and more
• 38:19
  accustomed to actually talking and conversing with speech into
• 38:24
  these tools, which will affect us all in a profound way because
• 38:28
  I hate typing into chat bots, you know what I'm saying?
• 38:30
  And so we're there is a path now where we are going to get to
• 38:34
  this point where like you're like, hey, I just want to talk
• 38:37
  about taxes and deduction, your deduction agents like, hey,
• 38:40
  Ryan, what's up exactly? And you're like, OK, cool, now
• 38:43
  you're having a conversation. And the and the magical thing is
• 38:47
  that you can just e-mail, text or call the agent.
• 38:51
  You don't need to download an app.
• 38:52
  I don't want you to learn another user experience because
• 38:56
  you don't want to think about taxes, let alone learn some new
• 38:59
  interface, right? And so you know what I said to
• 39:03
  everyoneistaylor@deduction.com e-mail That's the agent Taylor.
• 39:09
  And actually one of the magical things that kind of what made me
• 39:13
  really feel like starting a company was my Co founder
• 39:16
  prototyped really simple thing where you could e-mail intro the
• 39:20
  agent and the agent would BCC the sender and say it would say
• 39:25
  like, thanks I to BCC Ryan, great to meet you, blah, blah,
• 39:29
  blah, blah, blah, let's get started on your taxes.
• 39:32
  I just isn't so simple, right. But I just saw that interaction.
• 39:35
  I was like, this is this must be the future.
• 39:37
  This is it. And you know, today people
• 39:40
  e-mail intro our agent, you know, to eat to their friends or
• 39:43
  their family because again, the important thing is to meet
• 39:46
  consumers where they are. Yeah, like how did you, how did
• 39:49
  you communicate with your accountant when you had one?
• 39:52
  E-mail. 80% of Americans do that and so why app you know, just
• 39:58
  e-mail, e-mail based agent and and because we've met consumers
• 40:02
  where they are, you know, also like how did you hear about your
• 40:06
  accountant? Probably a friend of.
• 40:08
  Yeah, family member. Family member, yeah, there you
• 40:11
  go. That's how people find out about
• 40:12
  accountants. So it's like if, if that's how
• 40:15
  people find out about accountants and then they do an
• 40:18
  intro, right? E-mail intro is how I have done
• 40:21
  it. Why can't you e-mail intro the
• 40:24
  agent? And so, so much of what we spend
• 40:27
  time on is just meeting people where they are, because that's a
• 40:30
  beautiful thing about AI is that it's kind of this invisible
• 40:34
  fabric that you can kind of immerse into just the general,
• 40:41
  general life without trying to like change the interaction or
• 40:43
  the interface and stuff like that.
• 40:45
  Totally, it's amazing and I mean I, I don't mean to disparage
• 40:49
  chat bots because I use it and it's fine, but it is just like,
• 40:52
  OK, it's, it's going to change, you know, and you're already on
• 40:56
  the cutting edge of that of like, where am I already?
• 40:58
  Why do I need to like go to an extra place, you know?
• 41:02
  So it's really cool. So OK, let's do this.
• 41:05
  Let's take my personal tax liabilities as a YEAH and see
• 41:09
  how deduction can help. Me.
• 41:10
  Yeah, Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it because it's it's
• 41:14
  it's convoluted, OK, you know, but no more so than anybody
• 41:17
  else. I mean, you know, that's, that's
• 41:18
  The thing is that like for me, you know, I talked about, you
• 41:21
  know, being audited, which makes me on pins and needles.
• 41:23
  You know, I, you know, I'm very precise with like all my
• 41:27
  bookkeeping and everything. So that like when I'm going to
• 41:29
  like submit my taxes, like it's just bulletproof.
• 41:32
  But that being said, you know, in 2025, I had a software
• 41:37
  company that's basically paying me as an independent contractor.
• 41:40
  I have a holding company that is kind of an LLC that is for
• 41:45
  various projects. I have the company I sold, I
• 41:51
  have a job I have another vested interest in of ownership in the
• 41:58
  company that actually purchased my company.
• 42:01
  I also closed positions on Fidelity app and closed
• 42:06
  positions on Coinbase. So I have like that's probably
• 42:11
  amalgam of like all the revenue sources I have for different
• 42:15
  companies that I have variable ownership in.
• 42:17
  And then also just like income that's coming to me as a person.
• 42:20
  So when I can, I e-mail deduction.com and then it will
• 42:26
  give me instructions of all the forms and everything I need to
• 42:29
  submit. Yes.
• 42:32
  And do you want to know the secret that no CPA wants you to
• 42:36
  know? Please?
• 42:37
  2 words. Perceived complexity.
• 42:40
  OK. So your perception of your
• 42:45
  complexity is likely much lower than the actual complexity of
• 42:50
  your taxes. Interesting.
• 42:51
  And that is the arbitrage that Cpas and accountants use to get
• 42:58
  great returns on customers. And it's it's not, that's just
• 43:03
  how business works, right? Sure.
• 43:04
  And so most Americans, you included, perceive your
• 43:10
  complexity to be much higher than it is.
• 43:12
  And so with deduction our what our basic messages is that we
• 43:18
  are not doing that arbitrage because we don't need to.
• 43:21
  Sure. We use AI to basically level the
• 43:24
  playing field. And so for you, you would
• 43:27
  email.taylor@deduction.com, you'd say, hey, I have all these
• 43:30
  income sources. Here are all my documents.
• 43:33
  Can I just say like log into my bank and figure it out?
• 43:35
  Yeah, you can do that. You can upload all the
• 43:38
  documents. You can send all the documents,
• 43:40
  the agents then going to look at everything.
• 43:42
  It's also going to look at your last year's return and it's
• 43:45
  going to start comparing and it's going to come back to you
• 43:48
  with some questions. Yeah.
• 43:50
  The other thing is that you are going to get human touch points.
• 43:55
  For example, all clients get a 15 minute onboarding personally
• 43:59
  with me. Nice.
• 44:00
  You're doing all the onboarding. Right now, yes.
• 44:02
  Amazing. Because I think this is also
• 44:05
  like a maybe a philosophical tangent, but the more AI that
• 44:10
  people interact with my, my bet is that the more people will
• 44:15
  value a somewhat arbitrary human touch point.
• 44:21
  No, absolutely. You may not talk to me.
• 44:23
  You're not going to talk to me about taxes on our 15 minute
• 44:25
  onboarding call because I'm going to say e-mail Taylor.
• 44:28
  Taylor is way better in taxes than I am.
• 44:30
  And you're. Going to be like, you want to
• 44:32
  see a pitch deck of this new idea I've got.
• 44:34
  Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I'm going to tell you that
• 44:36
  hey, look, I I made this and This is why I made it.
• 44:39
  And you by meeting me, you should trust the company just a
• 44:44
  little bit more. The second thing, and this is
• 44:46
  super important, is we have real Cpas and tax professionals that
• 44:49
  will review high impact decisions and your final return.
• 44:53
  This is another really important thing about accounting and tax.
• 44:56
  Anyone who's telling you AI is going to do your taxes maybe for
• 45:00
  something very simple, but you know, would you want to know
• 45:05
  that there was just a human rubber stamp or would you be
• 45:06
  fine with just an AI doing the whole?
• 45:07
  Thing no, definitely, I think it's a major component of like,
• 45:10
  yeah, somebody at the end of the day like if their signature is
• 45:14
  going to need to be on that return, yeah, you know, so it's
• 45:16
  like OK, yeah, you know AI that signature is going to come right
• 45:19
  back to me. Right, exactly.
• 45:20
  Yeah, Yeah. So someone the IRS requires a
• 45:22
  human to sign and our CPA is you know Matthew Medono, Casey
• 45:27
  Epson, etcetera. They have over 20 years
• 45:29
  experience and so yeah, but my message to you is we can
• 45:33
  absolutely do it. And you know, you e-mail back
• 45:36
  and forth with Taylor. We do have a secure upload on
• 45:40
  the web. I did want to ask you about that
• 45:42
  too. And compliance, you know, I'm
• 45:44
  talking about like, yeah, just give you my bank.
• 45:46
  Now. Maybe I'm getting a little
• 45:48
  carried away. You're charming me with this
• 45:50
  British accent. And like Colorado, Colorado,
• 45:53
  Colorado. But but yeah, like how, how
• 45:57
  concerned should I be for like privacy and those kind of
• 45:59
  things? Here's what I say.
• 46:00
  We don't even need access to your bank.
• 46:02
  Yeah, like you know, we just need your PNL and you know, your
• 46:08
  W2 and your 1090 nines and your K ones.
• 46:13
  We are going to be introducing the ability for the agent to
• 46:16
  automatically pull some of that stuff.
• 46:19
  But there's no need to read your entire bank account.
• 46:22
  That there is a case to be made that for self-employed
• 46:24
  individuals that miss expenses, that, you know, we could go read
• 46:29
  every expense and deduct. To be totally frank with you, I
• 46:34
  think it's a really small, you know, a lot of companies make
• 46:38
  this kind of like, we'll, we'll go find every deduction in your
• 46:41
  bank account. You don't want a $15 deduction
• 46:46
  for like paper, right? I think what you want is make
• 46:51
  sure the big stuff you, you get done.
• 46:53
  But the strategy is good. And so that's why I, you know,
• 46:57
  yes, we can, we can go read your bank account, but I don't even
• 47:01
  need access to it. All I need is just you to answer
• 47:03
  some questions and and ultimately let let the magic of
• 47:08
  AI and and human Cpas kind of take it from that.
• 47:12
  OK, That's a great way to start a relationship.
• 47:14
  You're like your first year, You're like, you're not getting
• 47:15
  access to my bank account. Yeah, yeah, totally.
• 47:17
  By year 2, you're like, all right.
• 47:19
  Right, Yeah, yeah. And, and I think, you know, we,
• 47:22
  we would even say in, in our, in the age or you would say like,
• 47:25
  you know, you don't need to do this again because an
• 47:29
  accountant, this is what an, so one of the things that we
• 47:32
  believe is that the AI must act like an accountant, not like an
• 47:35
  LLM, right? So an LLM, obviously it's based
• 47:38
  on LLMS, but an LLM is very chatty.
• 47:41
  BT is very deferential to you, right?
• 47:43
  So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's trained to please you.
• 47:48
  An accountant, a good accountant is trained to be practical,
• 47:53
  pragmatic and not just be like, yeah, sure, let's you know,
• 47:59
  let's let's go write every single expense on this thing.
• 48:02
  It's like Ryan, you're going to write off $60,000 worth of
• 48:05
  liquor. Like what are you doing?
• 48:06
  Yeah, I mean, and you're saying it was delivered on a picnic
• 48:11
  blanket of get like come on, That was clearly leisure.
• 48:14
  That was clearly leisure. That was your wife there.
• 48:18
  So, you know, again, if you, if you do categorize all these
• 48:25
  little expenses, the agent will take a bit.
• 48:26
  What I was sort of trying to say is that the, there's a
• 48:29
  pragmatism involved in doing taxes where a good accountant
• 48:32
  will say, look, we can go hunt down $5 pens and pencils.
• 48:37
  Why don't we talk about the bigger things?
• 48:39
  And so that's what the agent, that's what our AI agent is
• 48:42
  going to be prioritizing. Can we find good credits?
• 48:46
  Can we find big deductions? Sure.
• 48:48
  We can go find the tiny ones, but I don't even think that that
• 48:51
  requires reading your whole bank history. 100%, I love that.
• 48:55
  That's so cool. And I want to make sure that I'm
• 48:57
  getting this correctly because this is tax preparation, it's
• 49:00
  not necessarily bookkeeping, right?
• 49:01
  Correct. OK, OK, great.
• 49:03
  Is there is there opportunity to go into that in the future?
• 49:07
  I think potentially in the future.
• 49:11
  Because I got to tell you, like QuickBooks.
• 49:15
  I hate QuickBooks with a burning passion.
• 49:17
  Yeah, totally. It's.
• 49:18
  Awful. You know, it's the whole Intuit
• 49:20
  suite. I'm just like, you guys are just
• 49:22
  like, they lock you into it and they're always up selling you
• 49:26
  weird things. They use fear tactics and sucks
• 49:29
  and it, you know, it's awful. Yeah, yeah.
• 49:31
  I feel like that's another place that's like, man, yeah, if that
• 49:34
  could be done better. Totally.
• 49:36
  I think there's a little bit, let's call it the, you know,
• 49:40
  the, the bit of bookkeeping where you have the actual book
• 49:45
  and you just need to make sure it's ready for tax preparation.
• 49:48
  I think that sort of hand off we could do well, we're going to
• 49:52
  see about bookkeeping. I think honestly, I think
• 49:56
  there's actually a lot of great bookkeeping tools that are
• 50:00
  coming out now. There's also a lot of like
• 50:02
  really consult, like there's a, there's tools specifically for
• 50:04
  solopreneurs or solar proprietors, solar proprietors
• 50:06
  where it's a bank and bookkeeping kind of combined and
• 50:09
  then out it just exports your schedule C And that's amazing
• 50:13
  because you just forward that to taylordeduction.com.
• 50:16
  It's like everything's categorized on yadda, yadda.
• 50:19
  So, you know, we'll see. OK, the other great thing is, I
• 50:23
  mean talking about right now, it's January, everybody's
• 50:26
  getting their W nines W twos together.
• 50:28
  Is that covered within deduction?
• 50:30
  OK, fantastic. And then of course, you know,
• 50:33
  the great thing about Taylor at deduction is that like, she can
• 50:37
  work 24 hours a day for 1000 different people because you
• 50:40
  know that when you're in crunch time and you need your taxes to
• 50:43
  get done, that your tax preparer is probably on meth or like.
• 50:49
  Seriously, they do like create 100 plus hours.
• 50:52
  Dude, big time. It's unbelievable.
• 50:53
  It's crazy, yeah. It seems inhumane, honestly.
• 50:57
  It's like, dude, this system is broken just because what we're
• 50:59
  doing are these people. But like Taylor is like, no.
• 51:02
  Problem and there's been a 33% drop in graduates or like
• 51:07
  younger people entering this profession.
• 51:10
  So the, the Cpas and, and you know, not just Cpas, just tax
• 51:14
  preparers because you, you actually don't need to be ACPA
• 51:16
  to prepare taxes, which is a whole, there's a whole other
• 51:18
  story. But they just, they can't even
• 51:22
  hire people to help them. So no wonder that, that they're
• 51:25
  retiring, right? And the funniest thing is when I
• 51:28
  started the company, I went to go talk to Cpas just be like, is
• 51:31
  this a stupid idea? I also thought that they would
• 51:33
  tell me to to, you know, politely F off.
• 51:36
  Yeah, I see what you're doing. And I have not met met a single
• 51:40
  I could get another single CPA who hasn't either said this is
• 51:44
  incredible or B, can I white label it totally.
• 51:50
  So that was also another conviction was like the, the,
• 51:54
  the, the labor market that I quote, UN quote, potentially
• 51:57
  could be displacing is like welcoming me, which is kind of
• 52:02
  the opposite of the narrative you hear where, you know,
• 52:04
  everyone's worried that it's going to displace their job,
• 52:06
  which is which is real. But in this specific profession,
• 52:11
  they are not worried about AI taking their jobs.
• 52:13
  They get this, they want AI to take their jobs because they
• 52:16
  were all retiring. Totally.
• 52:18
  And they're they're the the part that's driving them crazy is the
• 52:21
  part that AI is really good at. And now I mean for sometimes now
• 52:25
  I talk to a lot of AI companies in the medical system because
• 52:30
  this is another place that's. Like, oh, cool, yeah.
• 52:32
  That's just like, I mean, it's so ripe for so many different
• 52:36
  products, but it's so deeply ingrained in these terrible
• 52:39
  processes that it's really hard and really slow.
• 52:41
  Yeah. But the the thing that I keep
• 52:42
  coming back to, I'm kind of embarrassed to say it.
• 52:44
  It's like, well, these doctors, we need them more.
• 52:46
  Not necessarily as like clinicians, but more like
• 52:49
  shaman. Yeah.
• 52:50
  You know, so like what you're talking about, like the 15
• 52:53
  minute onboarding call you get with Sai, which is incredible by
• 52:56
  the way, I hope you can keep. That my action.
• 52:58
  That's really the Colorado. Colorado.
• 53:01
  That's right. No, but like you, it's like, oh,
• 53:03
  we're not talking about that. I'm gonna talk about you and
• 53:05
  yeah, your hopes, dreams, ambitions, what's going on with
• 53:07
  your business? Like, cool, man.
• 53:08
  I just want to make sure I'm touching all the bases.
• 53:11
  That's really what we want from the doctors in a similar way is
• 53:13
  that like, you know, we can have AI scan your X-rays to see how
• 53:17
  fractured you are and it'll be much better with that.
• 53:20
  So the time you get, the 13 minutes you get with a doctor is
• 53:23
  them understanding you and your life.
• 53:25
  Yeah. Because it that influences so
• 53:27
  much things. So if you're using AI products
• 53:30
  to like, make sure like everything is bulletproof as far
• 53:33
  as with whatever new tax liability you may have incurred.
• 53:37
  And but you have a text preparer when you need them to just be
• 53:40
  like, hey, man, it's cool. Here's the things you need to
• 53:42
  keep an eye out for. Here's what we're looking for
• 53:44
  for next year. Just like the very like the the
• 53:47
  shaman to be basically soothing you, your feelings and like and
• 53:51
  like ease some of your anxiety. So I could see like as a tax
• 53:54
  preparer, you're like, yeah, dude, I could use these tools
• 53:56
  immediately. Like if you could white label
• 53:58
  that. I still want to have be the
• 53:59
  point of entry. But but then it puts them in a
• 54:02
  position where they're more of a trusted friend as opposed to,
• 54:05
  like, you know, the mother with the ruler getting caught with
• 54:08
  the hand in the cookie jar, you know?
• 54:10
  I had a so I also in our in our, you know, all our
• 54:14
  communications. I actually put my cell, it's my
• 54:18
  business cell, but it's my cell and it's a bit of an experiment
• 54:23
  actually. I haven't seen any company that
• 54:27
  just puts the CEO cell number. And I was like, I would love
• 54:33
  that, you know, and it is a business cell and, you know,
• 54:37
  it's, it's managed. And if I can't get to it, you
• 54:41
  know, as a member of the, my staff world.
• 54:43
  But I put the cell number on there and I said, let's see what
• 54:46
  happens. And today I got a text message
• 54:50
  from a lovely lady in Santa Fe, NM.
• 54:55
  Not sure exactly like how old she is and things like that, but
• 54:59
  it seemed like she was maybe on the, maybe on the older side,
• 55:01
  like not, not, not your classic, not your classic, like
• 55:05
  millennial tech person, right? And she texted saying, Hey, I, I
• 55:11
  I want to join, but I just want to like learn more.
• 55:15
  So I just sent her my booking link.
• 55:16
  We hopped on a 15 minute call and I, we didn't really talk
• 55:19
  about taxes. We spent.
• 55:21
  And again, it was 15 minutes like time box.
• 55:23
  Yeah, I can't do, it's not scalable, right?
• 55:25
  But as I'm starting the company, this is totally fine.
• 55:28
  And we talked about how she, she's actually, she said she's,
• 55:34
  she's a disc jockey, DJ and a painter.
• 55:38
  Radio or. I don't know, but you know,
• 55:40
  she's does these things and she's looking for an accountant,
• 55:42
  etcetera, etcetera. You have to be a painter if
• 55:44
  you're living in Santa Fe. It's a prereq.
• 55:46
  Exactly. Yeah.
• 55:47
  And, you know, really lovely person and looking for an
• 55:51
  accountant. I explained how deduction works,
• 55:53
  how we're a little different, why I have an English accent.
• 55:57
  And, you know, we got off the phone.
• 56:01
  I texted her at the sign up link and she was like, amazing.
• 56:04
  Thank you. Can't wait to join.
• 56:06
  So there's something to customer service that will always remain
• 56:12
  despite everything being agentic, agentic.
• 56:15
  And, and I, I think people will be more comfortable using AI if
• 56:20
  they know that like behind the scenes there's, you know, they
• 56:23
  got that human that they met sail, they met Ryan or they met
• 56:26
  whoever. It's big.
• 56:28
  It's big. They just met them and again,
• 56:30
  like, you don't need to spend that much time, I take it, you
• 56:32
  know, I was inspired by Superhuman.
• 56:34
  Yeah, totally. With the 15 minute onboarding
• 56:37
  and I was like, this is this is totally contrarian.
• 56:40
  So I'm not trying to say what I'm doing is contrarian by any
• 56:43
  means, but I think this is the this is the unlock for, for, for
• 56:48
  for a gentic professional services. 100% and I think
• 56:51
  especially, you know, AB to C company, like you have to know
• 56:55
  what the customer experience is first and foremost tip of the
• 56:58
  tongue because otherwise you're going to start.
• 57:00
  I mean, obviously numbers and projection and you're going to
• 57:03
  be 10 years in the future, but like really to talk to every
• 57:06
  single person that's coming on board is amazing.
• 57:09
  I think that's so smart. And at some point, you know,
• 57:11
  we'll, we'll probably have a hire an amazing customer success
• 57:14
  manager who can do it with superhuman, I believe.
• 57:16
  I, I think it was like some member of staff that on board.
• 57:19
  It was still great. You know, we're going to, it's
• 57:22
  going to be interesting to see how, you know, my, I have a four
• 57:24
  month old how he grows up with AI.
• 57:29
  He may actually trust AI more than humans for something like
• 57:32
  tax prep. 100%. Which is a crazy, which is a
• 57:35
  whole different thing. But I think at least for now, we
• 57:40
  need to bridge the gap. The question then becomes in, in
• 57:43
  eight, in 20 years, do you need the human touch point at all?
• 57:48
  And I know. I just don't know.
• 57:50
  We just don't know. Yeah, hopefully, you know
• 57:54
  whoever's running deduction.com in 20 years.
• 57:57
  Well, if you we'll have to figure that one out.
• 57:59
  Four months old. So yeah, by the time maybe
• 58:02
  they're, they have like a device or something that like maybe you
• 58:05
  start introducing AI, maybe they're four or five.
• 58:07
  So like didn't then that that AI partner essentially grows up
• 58:12
  with them. Like it's I'm sure it will, it
• 58:14
  will speak to them at their level and like as and help them
• 58:17
  progress. And yeah, it's so interesting.
• 58:20
  Yeah, it's going to be very anthropomorphic, you know.
• 58:22
  So, you know, these predictions are like our, our opinion on
• 58:30
  this sort of human AI is very much grounded in today.
• 58:34
  I think it's going to be interesting to see how that
• 58:37
  evolves. And at what point do you not
• 58:40
  even need that onboarding call or at what point do you think
• 58:43
  the onboard, you know, talking to the human makes you trust it
• 58:45
  less? Yeah.
• 58:46
  Yeah, exactly. But for now, we're not there
• 58:49
  yet. Yeah, it's going to get slippery
• 58:52
  and weird. OK.
• 58:53
  We are at the time in the podcast to go into the quantum
• 58:56
  round. Are you ready?
• 58:57
  Yes. OK.
• 58:58
  Is that like quantum? Is that like quantum computing?
• 59:01
  Yeah, well, it used to be the lightning round, but it's 2026.
• 59:03
  OK, OK. We're not playing around
• 59:05
  anymore. It's a quantum round.
• 59:06
  OK. But before we do, it's just
• 59:10
  founders, it is mid January, I'm going to get this out at the end
• 59:13
  of the week. So like literally go get on
• 59:15
  deduction right now and get this going.
• 59:18
  It's what's the price point? $499. 500 bucks for a year.
• 59:23
  Unbelievable. So 500 bucks.
• 59:25
  I mean even if at that price point, just cross check what
• 59:29
  your your CPA is already doing and get a second opinion for 500
• 59:34
  bucks. You know what I mean?
• 59:36
  You get the, you get the, you don't.
• 59:38
  Need to pay until filing. So you can.
• 59:41
  Get all the advice which is checked by a human CPA.
• 59:44
  Yeah, you can totally get that for free.
• 59:46
  And if you just take that advice and go to your CPA today and
• 59:49
  they'll pay us, so be it. My point is, if you get the
• 59:53
  advice from us, why not just file with us as too as well?
• 59:56
  Dude do it I mean you guys are already preparing everything you
• 59:59
  have it right there just bring it to deduction.
• 1:00:02
  You know double check and then file through there right right.
• 1:00:05
  I'm really excited to use the tool side.
• 1:00:06
  This is really cool. It's like the.
• 1:00:08
  Perfect timing because I've been putting this off because I have
• 1:00:11
  two accounts that I've been talking to and it's the same
• 1:00:14
  thing. It's like here's your login
• 1:00:16
  portal to put upload all this stuff and I'm just like.
• 1:00:19
  What do you and what's the UX like on that portal?
• 1:00:23
  Death. Spear death is like designed in
• 1:00:25
  the 90s and like, you know, look around, have to find things.
• 1:00:29
  I'm like, oh man, I don't want to learn this.
• 1:00:30
  How they over complicated that? Because our our.
• 1:00:34
  I don't even call it a portal, I call it a vault.
• 1:00:36
  Yeah. Because what do you do with the
• 1:00:38
  vault? You.
• 1:00:38
  You. Just.
• 1:00:40
  Like stuff it with stuff, right? Hopefully gold Nuggets, but
• 1:00:45
  documents in this case. And that's how we designed our
• 1:00:47
  vault. Cool.
• 1:00:48
  It's it's an upload button. Amazing, you know, and that's
• 1:00:51
  what I love about AI is like 1 button should solve all my
• 1:00:54
  problems. But you know, I mean this is
• 1:00:56
  this seems like just absolute amazing products.
• 1:01:00
  I So let's let's take this into the quantum.
• 1:01:04
  Yeah, let's do it. OK, you're entering college
• 1:01:08
  today. What would you study?
• 1:01:11
  Great question, I'm not sure I'd go to college.
• 1:01:14
  How so? I would either I would do one of
• 1:01:18
  two things. I'd either go into the arts.
• 1:01:20
  OK. Go become an incredible film
• 1:01:22
  maker, Do something that, you know, it's just distinctly
• 1:01:26
  human. Sure.
• 1:01:28
  I don't think AI is going to take over all film making.
• 1:01:32
  Yeah. Or something like that.
• 1:01:33
  I'd go into the arts, or I would just go start a company.
• 1:01:36
  Yeah. Yeah, because there's no real
• 1:01:39
  do. Do you feel like college now is
• 1:01:40
  just more of like an extended adolescence where you you get a
• 1:01:44
  little bit of like grace period? Because the world is so
• 1:01:47
  complicated now, it seems like if you can just like breathe a
• 1:01:51
  little bit until your mid 20s, maybe like studying arts and
• 1:01:54
  like is the way to go. Like an aesthetic.
• 1:01:56
  I think it's great for vocations like medicine or yeah, but and
• 1:02:05
  the the other really good thing about it is like the social
• 1:02:07
  development and network that you develop.
• 1:02:09
  But I just think me personally, if I I just, I would go to
• 1:02:13
  college for the arts like filmmaking or whatever, or I
• 1:02:17
  would just start a company and I wouldn't bother.
• 1:02:20
  Totally, yeah. Do you feel like there's a
• 1:02:22
  secret weapon you have being from London?
• 1:02:26
  Yeah, I sound much smarter than I am.
• 1:02:32
  Can people in London call you out?
• 1:02:34
  They're like, man, you got that? He's.
• 1:02:36
  So average. Yeah.
• 1:02:37
  God, I can't believe he. Yeah, I can't believe he made it
• 1:02:39
  in America. Yeah.
• 1:02:41
  That's amazing. Yeah.
• 1:02:43
  There was like an obsession with the English accent.
• 1:02:45
  There's a lot of anglophiles right here yeah, it's I would
• 1:02:48
  honestly like I that's that's kind of the nice thing is I
• 1:02:51
  slightly stand out and there's something to talk about sure,
• 1:02:54
  but yeah, they. Think you're a spy or something?
• 1:02:56
  Yeah. Or they.
• 1:02:56
  Yeah, they either think I was smart or, you know, because if
• 1:03:00
  you think about every movie you watch, right?
• 1:03:03
  Like I, we were just watching Frankenstein on Netflix.
• 1:03:05
  Cool English accents. Yeah, like everyone just sounds.
• 1:03:09
  Well, if it's like a historical. Villains Master.
• 1:03:11
  Africa. They like speaking English.
• 1:03:13
  All the villains in every movie have an English accent.
• 1:03:15
  Like, you know, the the masterful, ingenious villain.
• 1:03:19
  English accent. Yeah, all like the sophisticated
• 1:03:23
  crown, you know, English accent. The key the reality is most
• 1:03:28
  English people don't talk like that, but Americans like do you
• 1:03:32
  think that they. Taking the Thrones, it's some
• 1:03:34
  fantasy, Yeah, that's another place.
• 1:03:36
  It's like they're all, they're all English actions.
• 1:03:38
  Yeah. English actions just makes them
• 1:03:40
  sound more. Now my voice is particularly
• 1:03:43
  thrashed today because on the way over here I'm learning like
• 1:03:46
  these new Blue songs. So I was trying to sing the
• 1:03:49
  harmonies as I was coming over here.
• 1:03:50
  So my I can just tell my voice is completely torched.
• 1:03:54
  But if I was on a good day and I was in London, would that would
• 1:03:58
  I have a similar draw by with my Coloradan accent?
• 1:04:02
  I, I, yes, I was saying this to an American person literally the
• 1:04:07
  other day who, who wants to go to London or move to London?
• 1:04:10
  I said like British people love Americans.
• 1:04:14
  Yeah, especially Londoners. Londoners love Americans.
• 1:04:16
  They love. They're the last people in the
• 1:04:17
  world that. Do your voice stands out?
• 1:04:20
  Your voice stands out. The charisma, the friendliness,
• 1:04:26
  the directness. Actually, English people love
• 1:04:28
  that. Yeah.
• 1:04:29
  Because like, English people are quite.
• 1:04:31
  That's what people, English people want to be.
• 1:04:33
  They're just reserved. Yeah.
• 1:04:35
  No more stoic. Yeah, Yeah, I appreciate that.
• 1:04:38
  OK, cool. You're making a deck.
• 1:04:40
  It seems like you're really good at it.
• 1:04:42
  Not only did you you launch this, the success of deduction,
• 1:04:47
  but also another deck was so good that a friend of yours
• 1:04:50
  picked it up and took and launched that.
• 1:04:52
  What goes into a deck? What are some parameters and
• 1:04:55
  some attributes of a deck when you're building a deck?
• 1:04:57
  Do you know, do you know? Do you want to know my motto
• 1:04:59
  with decks? Yes, decks get checks.
• 1:05:01
  Decks get checks. I like it and it rhymes.
• 1:05:04
  It rhymes, so it must be true. It must be true, but it's I'm
• 1:05:08
  serious about this and I learnt this at Latch.
• 1:05:11
  Kudos to the CEO and founder of Latch who he would always like
• 1:05:16
  painstakingly create these decks, fundraising for
• 1:05:20
  customers, for employees, for all hands.
• 1:05:24
  And these decks were beautiful. And I remember him telling me
• 1:05:28
  that he had this thing of like render to reality.
• 1:05:32
  Like if you can render something and make it feel real, it it or,
• 1:05:36
  you know, one day it's sort of like it manifests itself.
• 1:05:39
  So, yeah, you know, the decks that I create, it's not that
• 1:05:42
  they're like some masterful pieces of, of art or anything,
• 1:05:46
  but creating a good deck, getting a designer, pay them,
• 1:05:52
  you know, don't go cheap and go on fiver.com or Upwork, Like get
• 1:05:55
  a real designer and and just invest in it and you'll be
• 1:06:01
  surprised like how far it goes. What are the components of the
• 1:06:04
  design? It's like, are we talking about
• 1:06:06
  the logo fleshed out? Do you need the hockey stick
• 1:06:09
  projection for the Tam you need? You need minimal words?
• 1:06:13
  Any kind of like requirements around that?
• 1:06:15
  That's three things. One is follow the structure that
• 1:06:18
  everyone recommends. I read a book.
• 1:06:23
  I think it's the I'll include it in the show notes.
• 1:06:28
  Cool, I'll send it to you. There's a great book and it's by
• 1:06:30
  an amazing multi exited founder. And he was like, this is the
• 1:06:34
  structure for a precede. This is the structure for a
• 1:06:36
  seed. This is the structure for a
• 1:06:37
  Series A. And I tell everyone just follow
• 1:06:39
  that structure, you know, so #1 like it's all basic, right?
• 1:06:43
  Team slide, market slide, problem slide.
• 1:06:45
  Just follow the structure. It's amazing how many people
• 1:06:47
  just go off the, you know, go off piste with this, but it's
• 1:06:51
  like just don't. So no one structure #2 yes, to
• 1:06:56
  logo and stuff. But the other thing I say is I
• 1:06:58
  don't overthink logo and branding on your deck.
• 1:07:04
  With our first deck, we, we, I did the logo in like a few hours
• 1:07:10
  and the designer did one revision of the deck, just made
• 1:07:13
  it look good, nice graphics, etcetera.
• 1:07:15
  Took like a couple days. Sure.
• 1:07:18
  And then, you know, so that, that's really it.
• 1:07:22
  And then, you know, I think the third thing is just, you know,
• 1:07:24
  iterate from there as you're meeting people, you're pitching,
• 1:07:27
  you make some changes, corrections.
• 1:07:29
  And that, to me, is a great deck.
• 1:07:31
  Cool. Some of the advice I've heard
• 1:07:33
  over the years on a great deck is, you know, don't ask for
• 1:07:36
  money, ask for advice, you know, only 6 or 7 pages like sell the
• 1:07:40
  sizzle, you know, really create the market opportunities.
• 1:07:44
  Maybe kind of what you're saying too is like, make sure that they
• 1:07:47
  understand very clearly in their mind and they can see the next
• 1:07:50
  step so that it's like this is something that needs to be to
• 1:07:53
  come to the world. That's right.
• 1:07:55
  You know, the secret with fundraising and pitching is that
• 1:07:58
  you're not fundraising, right? You're just meeting.
• 1:08:02
  Yeah, like, you know, I'm working.
• 1:08:04
  I'm not really fundraising right now.
• 1:08:05
  What are you? Working on really.
• 1:08:06
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not fun. I'm just showing you this, but
• 1:08:09
  I'm not fundraising. Yeah.
• 1:08:10
  It's kind of like the, you know, it's the dance, right?
• 1:08:14
  And, and it, I think one of the most interesting things about
• 1:08:17
  starting a company is that whole dance that's like, you want to
• 1:08:20
  be the bell of the ball and you're not asking, you know,
• 1:08:23
  you're being asked, you know. I know, you know, it's funny
• 1:08:28
  because like women are so naturally accustomed to that,
• 1:08:31
  you know, that they're they're the OG demand Gen.
• 1:08:36
  You know, dudes are out here like, hey man, what's up?
• 1:08:38
  I don't know though, with my English accent in America, I'm
• 1:08:40
  joking, I'm joking, I'm joking. All right, English guy.
• 1:08:45
  Let's go with this then. Yeah, every Superman has his
• 1:08:47
  kryptonite. Is there a way that being from
• 1:08:49
  London is actually a hindrance? Yeah, that's a, that's a good
• 1:08:52
  one, totally. I mean, I think, you know, I, I
• 1:08:57
  actually thought about this really deeply when starting a
• 1:08:59
  company. Yeah, which was, you know, B to
• 1:09:04
  B especially would would I, I, I'd actually, it applies not
• 1:09:10
  just to if you're like not American, it applies even if
• 1:09:14
  you're American, which is will your customer segment resonate
• 1:09:18
  with you, your brand? Yeah.
• 1:09:20
  And so just example, like an investor that I really respect
• 1:09:24
  was trying to sell me on starting a kind of company that
• 1:09:29
  sells robots to landscapers, right.
• 1:09:32
  And I was like, are these local mom and pop landscapers going?
• 1:09:37
  How they going to resonate with this English guy rocking up to
• 1:09:43
  Missouri or wherever, LA with wherever and with his English
• 1:09:48
  accent dressed in all black saying, you know, here's a
• 1:09:52
  robot. I don't think so, you know, I, I
• 1:09:56
  think, you know, I think and, and it's not, it's not like a,
• 1:10:00
  it's not like a xenophobic thing or anything.
• 1:10:02
  It's just people, people will resonate with people that, you
• 1:10:07
  know, they're used to in that sector.
• 1:10:09
  Well, and probably that's why TurboTax is opening up brick and
• 1:10:12
  mortars. Yeah, it's because you're the
• 1:10:13
  landscaper guy. You want to shake the hand and
• 1:10:16
  look them in the eye and you know.
• 1:10:17
  What I mean, Yeah, yeah. There is a certain amount amount
• 1:10:19
  of that ethos in in America. For sure.
• 1:10:22
  And and and the thing about so, so that would be a kryptonite.
• 1:10:25
  I think there's certain markets where I would not be good
• 1:10:27
  because I think founders have to sell right.
• 1:10:29
  They're they're the first sales people in any in their company.
• 1:10:32
  I don't think there's certain segments that I, I wouldn't be
• 1:10:35
  good at selling, whereas like make me sell SAS to founders.
• 1:10:40
  Great. We can talk about Netflix and
• 1:10:43
  whatever, but with deduction, you know, with our price point,
• 1:10:47
  we are going for people that need an accountant who have, you
• 1:10:50
  know, that professionals etcetera.
• 1:10:52
  And like this lady today, she was not at all turned off by my
• 1:10:55
  accent and who I was. And so but but it was a question
• 1:11:01
  to me. It was it was a question to me.
• 1:11:02
  I was like. It could totally not exist.
• 1:11:04
  It's just a weird assumption. It's like some insecurity that I
• 1:11:07
  would have to be like, oh man thing.
• 1:11:09
  I think I'm some country you know I'm getting from.
• 1:11:10
  Yeah, maybe I'm totally wrong and landscapers would love me.
• 1:11:13
  Yeah, they'd be like, Oh yeah, you're great because yeah, your.
• 1:11:16
  Name is just like that guy in Game of Thrones.
• 1:11:20
  Your name sounds cool and all that.
• 1:11:22
  It'd be funny if you could like run a test like AAB test, like
• 1:11:25
  you got prospects coming in, you see where they're at, part of
• 1:11:28
  the world, just like adjust your name to be like something very
• 1:11:31
  familial for the folks in like Louisiana or Missouri, you know?
• 1:11:36
  Yeah, I'm going to say this as well.
• 1:11:38
  And again, it's, it's I, I don't think there's a single place in
• 1:11:41
  America I haven't been welcomed. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:45
  You know it's. Just it's just, can I sell?
• 1:11:47
  Can I sell you? Can I authentically sell you a
• 1:11:50
  product when I'm so clearly not from that industry?
• 1:11:55
  Totally. You know, Yeah, yeah,
• 1:11:56
  absolutely. It'll be interesting to see how
• 1:11:58
  that pans out. Yeah, totally.
• 1:11:59
  I would assume that like when people are thinking about their
• 1:12:02
  money, they want somebody who sounds smart and for whatever
• 1:12:04
  reason, we. Oh, there we go.
• 1:12:06
  We think English people. Yeah, I know.
• 1:12:08
  Numbers. Yeah.
• 1:12:10
  Yeah. Amazing.
• 1:12:11
  OK. We love business ideas and
• 1:12:15
  sauce. You're full of them.
• 1:12:16
  You're brimming can. I pull out my list.
• 1:12:18
  Please, actually I would love a a business idea you've got that
• 1:12:23
  you're willing to share that you feel could reach 1,000,000 in
• 1:12:28
  annual run rate the fastest. OK, now, but then now I have to
• 1:12:34
  actually look at these. Get this the top of my list
• 1:12:40
  Human in the loop, Consumer AI tax agent.
• 1:12:43
  There it is, started that one. That was a good one.
• 1:12:47
  The working name for that was Taxi TAXI.
• 1:12:49
  That's pretty darn good. Yeah, OK.
• 1:12:53
  I'm just going to actually wrap a fire through the list.
• 1:12:55
  I think all of these could reach, you said a million in.
• 1:12:57
  Yeah, A. Million AR I think all of these
• 1:12:59
  good so I'm just going to wrap a fire from least crazy to
• 1:13:04
  craziest. So human in the loop consumer AI
• 1:13:06
  tax agent. Sorry, already done
• 1:13:07
  production.com SEC reporting automation for large
• 1:13:14
  enterprises. I was almost going to start that
• 1:13:15
  company. You need like what, 1?
• 1:13:18
  You need one design partner and you probably hit a million.
• 1:13:22
  Totally, really, really undeserved market #3 regulatory
• 1:13:25
  AI agent, lots in that space. Oh, it's the AI sales and
• 1:13:30
  support for laborers. So this is kind of like the
• 1:13:32
  landscaping thing. AI sales.
• 1:13:35
  Sales and support. Yeah.
• 1:13:36
  Interesting. Text.
• 1:13:36
  Text message based. Love it.
• 1:13:38
  Yeah, love it. Did you want a crazy one?
• 1:13:41
  Yeah, Orbital Data centers. There's a couple of companies
• 1:13:43
  that have started doing that. Are we talking about like,
• 1:13:45
  orbiting the planet? Yeah, because, yeah, I was doing
• 1:13:48
  aeros, I was doing aerospace at True Anomaly, and I was like,
• 1:13:51
  why aren't data centers in space?
• 1:13:53
  Totally. How would you do it?
• 1:13:54
  Free cooling. Like, just like a big spaceship.
• 1:13:59
  You'd basically do like satellites with GPU's strapped
• 1:14:03
  to them, launch them off Starship and there's a couple of
• 1:14:07
  companies that are doing that now.
• 1:14:08
  There's one called Star I can't remember now.
• 1:14:11
  How far did you take that? What's the what's the capital?
• 1:14:14
  I just realized I couldn't, I, I just felt like I did not have
• 1:14:20
  the story to go raise the amount of capital you need to do it.
• 1:14:24
  Like if I was X SpaceX, you know?
• 1:14:29
  So those are a bunch and then I'm going to tell you some more.
• 1:14:32
  You pitch that to Elon if you met him.
• 1:14:34
  I don't think so, because he'd probably tell me I'm stupid.
• 1:14:38
  He probably like your English accent, makes you sound smart,
• 1:14:41
  but you're not. He's like, what does my South
• 1:14:43
  African accent make you feel like you're like?
• 1:14:45
  OK, another 100%. So these are like a little less,
• 1:14:49
  OK, These are all kinds of crazy ideas, OK, And house party
• 1:14:54
  CrossFit meets DJ like a DJ CrossFit like.
• 1:14:58
  CrossFit with the DJ? Yep.
• 1:14:59
  Yeah. AI family tree investigator.
• 1:15:02
  So the quick insight there was that my grandfather has what's
• 1:15:07
  called ancestry.com. Yeah.
• 1:15:09
  And he has to like go and like talk to family members to like
• 1:15:11
  trace, like who is your kid and who's your dad to build out the
• 1:15:16
  family tree, right? Yeah.
• 1:15:17
  So I was like, why isn't there an AI e-mail based agent that
• 1:15:20
  goes and investigates for you totally and builds out your
• 1:15:23
  tree? Cool AI trademark and
• 1:15:25
  comprehensive search agent. I spent 5 grand to do my
• 1:15:27
  trademarks. I was.
• 1:15:29
  Like I know a guy who does that. With AI, yes.
• 1:15:31
  OK, sick. You should put down the show
• 1:15:32
  notes. Yeah, SEO, website content bulk
• 1:15:35
  generator. So like there is a company
• 1:15:38
  that's trying to do this. It's not that good.
• 1:15:40
  Is there a definitive like because they don't even have the
• 1:15:43
  acronym yet. It's AEO or it's GEOGEO I've.
• 1:15:47
  Heard Yeah, yeah, yeah. But basically it's, it's like
• 1:15:51
  SEO best case and our best use case principles are still
• 1:15:55
  playing in the same way. Plus Reddit in or something.
• 1:15:58
  I mean it, I don't know if it's definitive yet.
• 1:16:00
  How you can see the LMS is it? There's a bunch of companies
• 1:16:04
  saying they can. Yeah, I've seen it too.
• 1:16:06
  OK, I'll finish it because it's probably getting boring now.
• 1:16:08
  It's great Plant Air, which is a plant moving company because you
• 1:16:11
  know you can't move plant like most moving companies won't move
• 1:16:14
  your plants. Because why?
• 1:16:17
  Because of the liability of like, the plants will die, yeah.
• 1:16:19
  You break the cactus in half, you're in trouble.
• 1:16:22
  So. Plant, air plant moving.
• 1:16:24
  I don't know. I didn't validate all of these.
• 1:16:27
  I like it, but I thought your listeners may find some of these
• 1:16:29
  funny and bad. I think my my philosophical
• 1:16:33
  serious point about this is these are all a mixture of good
• 1:16:37
  and terrible ideas, but you need to go through all the terrible
• 1:16:41
  ideas to get to the good ones. I don't, I don't know, I think
• 1:16:44
  it's like a brain cleansing thing.
• 1:16:46
  You know why I think it is, is because good ideas and bad ideas
• 1:16:50
  come from the same place, and you show respect to ideas in
• 1:16:53
  general by giving them a home somewhere.
• 1:16:55
  And if it's in your Apple Notes app, you're like, cool man.
• 1:16:58
  No, I respect that idea. It's out, yeah.
• 1:17:00
  Like I just keep it coming. People think, you know, for
• 1:17:03
  example, Elon, you know, he's obviously comes up with
• 1:17:05
  incredible ideas. Do people know?
• 1:17:07
  I don't know if people know this.
• 1:17:08
  He had he on a daily basis has terrible ideas.
• 1:17:12
  And the reason I know this is, you know, I worked with a bunch
• 1:17:16
  of X Space XX Tesla people and every day he comes up with like
• 1:17:21
  10s of ideas and he wanted to start like a candy company, like
• 1:17:26
  candy, like gummies because he was like, there's no good
• 1:17:29
  gummies in America. He wanted to start like a sofa.
• 1:17:33
  One of the engineers told me from SpaceX that he once rocked
• 1:17:36
  up and said to this engineer, this my sofa in my lit, my small
• 1:17:42
  house at OnStar base, something about the sofa and he wanted
• 1:17:46
  like the sofa to be like in some way robotic.
• 1:17:49
  Amazing. I had this engineer like work on
• 1:17:51
  a. Robotic sofa.
• 1:17:52
  Something like that. Too.
• 1:17:53
  That's a great idea. And then obviously like, and
• 1:17:56
  then he and then he like. So the point is like everyone
• 1:17:59
  has bad ideas. And even Johnny, I've said this
• 1:18:02
  about Steve Jobs, which, you know, I think now it's OK to
• 1:18:06
  talk about Steve. You know, it was like it was
• 1:18:07
  kind of trite and cheesy to talk about Steve Jobs for a while.
• 1:18:10
  Sure. I think now it's like, OK, we.
• 1:18:11
  Can bring him back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:18:13
  It's not too soon that sometimes, like Steve Jobs
• 1:18:17
  would, like, say something in a room, an idea, and it would, and
• 1:18:20
  everyone, it would be like, everyone's like, this is
• 1:18:22
  terrible. Yeah.
• 1:18:24
  And then Johnny, I've said that, but sometimes he'd walk into a
• 1:18:27
  room and he would say some say an idea and it would suck the
• 1:18:30
  air out of the room. Yeah.
• 1:18:32
  So I think like the point is, everyone has bad ideas.
• 1:18:33
  I'm going to finish this off with a few last words, please.
• 1:18:38
  This is more of a high level business model thing, but I
• 1:18:42
  think more people should pay per transaction, pay per use than
• 1:18:47
  subscription. Cool.
• 1:18:48
  I would. There's so many AI tools I would
• 1:18:50
  use right now if I could just do a one off like 5 bucks just give
• 1:18:55
  me this image or $1.00 give me this whatever.
• 1:18:58
  Totally agree, largely because I want to switch everything to
• 1:19:01
  Claude now because it's just yielding such better results.
• 1:19:03
  So it's like I've got Nano Banana and I've got Chachi BT
• 1:19:06
  and all these $20 subscriptions everywhere.
• 1:19:08
  I'm like, dude, I don't want to pay lovable 50 bucks a month
• 1:19:11
  anymore. It's just like, dude, let it,
• 1:19:13
  let it be until I need and I'll just, you know, chip in.
• 1:19:16
  Yeah, it's not a great story for investors, but it's a great
• 1:19:19
  story if you're going to bootstrap or whatever.
• 1:19:21
  And then I'll leave you with one which is kind of full cycle on
• 1:19:24
  on talking about accents is verbosity AI boost your vocal
• 1:19:28
  with daily words from your Kindle highlights.
• 1:19:30
  Cool. Make people have better
• 1:19:32
  vocabulary. Amazing Kindle highlights.
• 1:19:35
  It then takes the words that like stick out.
• 1:19:37
  That are more like complicated and interesting.
• 1:19:40
  And then it tells you, like, this is the word that you know,
• 1:19:43
  It's kind of like word of the day, but it's tied to something
• 1:19:45
  you've actually read. Cool, amazing and shout out.
• 1:19:47
  That that's the one that won't go to a million the fastest.
• 1:19:51
  Totally amazing. Sigh.
• 1:19:54
  This has been awesome, man. I really appreciate it.
• 1:19:58
  Thanks for having me. Yeah, it was great to have you
• 1:19:59
  down here. deduction.com again. Jump on this, you guys.
• 1:20:03
  You've got a couple of months till taxes are due, but we
• 1:20:06
  there's all this shuffle that we have to do in January obviously.
• 1:20:09
  So make it happen, Sai. What's the best place for people
• 1:20:12
  to connect with you online? Go to deduction.com sign up and
• 1:20:17
  my number's right in the top right hand corner.
• 1:20:19
  There it is. Yeah.
• 1:20:20
  Cool. This has been awesome, man.
• 1:20:21
  Thank you so much. Thanks.
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