Latest / Exit Algorithms / AI Business Model Design and the Zero-Human Company | Alistair Hofert (#66)
Transcript
- Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Welcome to exit algorithms, the podcast where we decode what it really takes to unlock growth, streamline operations and prepare your business for a high value exit. I'm your host Pete Vera. And today I'm excited to bring on Alastair Hofer. He's the founder of Synapse Squared, an AI strategy and business model design firm. He's also a Senator at the world business angels investment forum. a member of the MIT Technology Review Global Panel and McKinsey Online Executive Panel, and one of the most globally connected voices at the intersection of AI adoption and enterprise value creation. Alistair, super excited to have you here today. Welcome to the show. Alistair Hofert: What a pleasure to sit with you, Pete. I'm excited to see what we're going to discuss, discover and share about Lessons Learned. Thank you. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Yes, Yeah, same here. Yeah, I know you've had quite an interesting career. Do you mind kind of giving a high level for our listeners, some of the ups and downs of your business journey here? Alistair Hofert: Absolutely. It was diverse. I'll move at a whistle stop speed. I grew up in a coastal town on the east coast of South Africa. The city was called East London. I enjoyed surfing and running. I was a very curious young guy. I went to university and I started working at a German manufacturer at the age of 18. I worked in the day and studied in the evening. ⁓ Germans are known for being absolutely precise ⁓ and this is where my attention to detail came from. I spent the first 10 years of my life started off as a costing clerk, moved all out as the group management accountant, 2,000 employees, three manufacturers. After that I was headhunted. One of the metropolitan's in South Africa saw me and asked me to join them to implement an activity based casting system for the city. did that. After that, planning, budgeting and forecasting for a metropolitan, performance management and then strategic initiatives to be reported on. I took that out to a couple of cities. Our National Treasury saw that. I wrote a guideline for them. And PricewaterhouseCoopers in Johannesburg saw me. They asked me to come and join them to build a business. I built a business there around enterprise performance management. There were three areas again. Profitability and cost management, performance management, the third one, planning, budgeting, and forecasting. After that I moved into financial consolidation and reporting. Did a lot of work around South Africa, across Africa, Latin America, the US. Spent some time in Boston at Liberty. Did some work for them around consolidation, financial reporting in Europe. ⁓ I put up my hand for one of the most exciting things that gets me on the call with you today. I put up my hand to build what I thought then was a robotic process automation business. It grew radically in 12 months from robotic process automation, machine learning. ⁓ Natural Language Processing Generation, Understanding Computer Vision. I moved on from there. I spent some time in Eastern Europe. Met a whole lot of venture capitalists. I opened up a labor firm during COVID, came back to South Africa. And the topic that gets me in front of you today is professional services around building firms from scratch, creating edge initiatives for corporates that have to disrupt themselves gently. and incubating and mentoring businesses. I love helping entrepreneurs or corporates with executives over the age of 45 that are scared of the power of AI and I say this with deep respect, I'm 51. I love spending time gently walking next to them and every now and then they might have a ⁓ jug of cold water poured over them by the power of technology and ⁓ elegant business design. I ride a skateboard, I eat too much baked cheesecake and I have a nine-year-old daughter living in Bogota, Colombia. That's it. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Love it. Yeah, I'll a staring the nutshell. ⁓ that's awesome. So yeah, global perspective, so many different diverse business perspectives as well. ⁓ Man, yeah, on the pre show, you talked about building the first ever zero human business. Do you mind talking a bit more about that? Alistair Hofert: Ha ha ha ha! That's it. Yes, it's a conveyancing firm. So the way I found out about this, I sold my own property in Johannesburg. There's a suburb called Fourways. I was sitting on the couch and the real estate owner sat in front of me and asked how to fill out a huge amount of forms. I'm no longer married. My ex-wife lives in Colombia. All the documents are in Spanish. They have to be translated, certified, verified. ⁓ And I found out that you can have, for example, four buyers and four sellers and each of them will have up to 10 documents each so for one property 80 documents it's insane ⁓ and when i filled out all those forms it took about seven or eight months to process the property and i thought this is insane i need to build a business it's not a real estate business it's a conveyancing firm its only job ever is to have a zero human touch for the administration of the conveyancing function. ⁓ Conveyancing can be complicated, Unfortunately, if lawyers listen to this or attorneys, ⁓ the only thing I need from those guys, when they're free of studying, they can sign the documents. But it ⁓ used to take about between five weeks and 10 months, depending on who lives where and buying properties. Today, it takes five days. That's it. End of story. So. It is wild. ⁓ It's a monster to get there because the most difficult hurdle is people that want to buy and sell real estate that are super excited that they never have to fill out forms and you can do it on your mobile phone or screen or tablet and then get some guy who studied to sign with his finger. ⁓ All the people buying and selling love it. The guy with the finger who has to sign it, he's not so happy because that is ⁓ ⁓ It's straight out disruptive innovation. So that's one of the things that keeps me busy right now. I hope it's answered your question. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Yeah, no, fascinating. think, you know, listeners, not all of them are used to hearing, you know, that that's even really possible. I guess it's a one person business just due to legal reasons, right? They have to sign. Alistair Hofert: Yeah. Last year in November I had to replicate my mind. I used to have a team of 17 people which were software developers and designers but I wanted to own this business and I wanted to have the first business in South Africa with zero humans as a landmark and this is it. So I used four platforms on purpose so that people can't copy the design. I've been in this movie with ⁓ intellectual property before. I have a trademark on that and ⁓ I used a 415 page script that is created by versions of myself. The one's a developer, another one's a designer, another one is a QA and things like this. So that's the highlight of what that method is. Why this is important is when I meet corporates and other entrepreneurs, the lessons are learned and the methods. ⁓ My answer is straightforward. Log on. That's it. You can go to convyeye.ca, etc. and you can read what this is about. Synapse Capital is another one. It's a trading platform. It is not the fly by night scam. Hackshow Backyard Trading Makeup Story. It's a regulated entity and it discloses absolutely everything there. That is it. It behaves like an investment bank with zero humans as well. I've put that out in the public and that's my cold water on executives and entrepreneurs. It's a nice wake up call to say guys, if I could replicate my mind and in five or six months launch two firms, they can compete against large corporates. Number one, don't be scared. Chat to people like Alistair and Pete. ⁓ Number two, ⁓ If you're not deploying AI and cognitive science in a new model, you'll be out of business in the next decade. I'm fairly comfortable to say this because I've tested this thinking with Singularity, some of the guys in the US, Europe, and the things that they're seeing in different economies. It's shocking, but I would rather hear that there's a fast moving car coming down the road than find out by mistake. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Yeah, for sure. Man, yeah, let's talk a little bit about implementing AI ⁓ for businesses that are trying to adapt. ⁓ Maybe it's useful to give kind of an example of businesses you consult with. Where do you start when you take on a new client to find where's the lowest hanging fruit, the most effective way to implement AI? Alistair Hofert: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. I hear that very often when I meet folks, either online or in Johannesburg. The first thing I ask, and it's normally either an ex-co member or an owner, is what do you hate in your business? What do you hate? Start by automating that and learn how a technology behaves in your business. Don't spend a lot of money on software upfront go for a subscription This is important in design because when you scale ⁓ You need revenue to cover the cost as the technology and the business scales So what do you hate is what I ask and the second thing what are you scared of? What are you scared of about your competitors? Whatever you are scared of start building that now give it five weeks I work with a team and ⁓ there are absolutely no computers or screens in the room. I go to a golf course down the road, it's called Randbark Ridge. You are not allowed to have a phone, you leave that. The only thing we do is we play terrible golf. and we practice driving. It's not about the golf. The point is we're out in sunshine. We're not looking at a screen. We're not behaving the same as what we normally do when we make decisions in an office or in the role we used to do. So I pull them out of that. And when folks are relaxed, what do you love? What do you hate? What are you scared about? There's only paper. There are no computers. We sit outside, we have orange juice and we chat and we draw. It is exactly the opposite of what you would expect with cognitive science. But the whole point is ⁓ communicating with people at their most relaxed state allows a comfortable environment to lift out what they love, what they hate, what they're scared about. Those three things we turn into one five-week sprint. And then we go back into the office and talk it through. Who are the people? What are the technologies that you use right now? ⁓ When they're finished answer, depending on how new their platforms are. If it's older than 10 years old, I typically say to them, think about data integration and data migration. What they have, they may want to switch that off. So I put that on the radar immediately. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Hmm. Alistair Hofert: Startups and scale-ups have a huge advantage because they're creating stuff that's Legacy businesses that are either massive or 10 years older or you have 50 employees for example, I'll put that on the radar immediately. Data migration into a new affordable platform on a subscription, it's going to keep you safe rather than investing in the legacy of 2035. There's a lot to think about there. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Mm. Yeah, well, but... Alistair Hofert: Alright, it's a mouthful I know, but I'll pause there for your next question Pete. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Yeah, a lot to digest, a lot of good insights there. I love that perspective and that approach as well. think it's really unique, valuable too. Yeah, what do you see as some of the, yeah, sorry, what were you saying? ⁓ What do you see as some of the biggest mistakes that companies make right now in trying to implement AI? Alistair Hofert: being over ambitious is number one. The other one, I see this so often, it's horrendous. It's easy, fast and cheap. Just use CHATGPT and you'll get an answer. I generally say build a business disrupt yourself and phone me in five weeks It is not easy. It is not fast. It is not cheap Later on you'll have a sliding scale of fixed costs that drop radically if you get the design right ⁓ So being over ambitious and thinking you can if you have a quite a successful business now and People look and they see wow. There's a lot of a harp around AI. This sounds amazing I need to get this stuff into my business. I'm hearing so many stories people There's like media there's stuff on the news people are replicating their minds. There's some guy in Joburg now on a podcast That's crazy. It sounds exciting, but I'm not sure where to go Slow down, five week sprint, learn to kill your darlings and pick a small area that you disrupt of your own business before you be over ambitious. Starting to shoot the lights out, the success rate of businesses I've worked with in startups, there's a 77 % failure rate across the 130 startups, it's expected. and that's because of HUB and picking a simple problem to solve in your own business start with that and then do it again in a different area and you'll see the pattern of behavior ⁓ logging on to a massive platform and seeing with I won't name the software and forums but FarmGo the big five if you go into like Amazon, Google, of those, Analytica, Anthropic, there's many many, DeepSea, Contrana, there's many of them. There's such a massive bouquet inside there, people get lost in the modules of software rather than, I want to do this now, I'll go and look what can I rent. Automate first, repeat, repeat, repeat, and then think about scaling. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Yeah. really, really good advice there. was going to ask you too, how do you, there's with so many tools out there, how do you separate, you know, the hype from strategy, the wheat from the chaff and decide which are the tools that are, you know, actually going to drive value in your business. Alistair Hofert: ⁓ So out of the 130 platforms worldwide I've personally tested, paid for, tried, used and broken about 22 of them are paid. I can't sit on a podcast and guess and read a paper and give you an opinion from somebody else unless I've logged on, tried it, built script, broken things, had successes. I've narrowed it down to about 22 out of the 110 approximately worldwide. The typical names that you hear would be Anthropic and Chachi, BT, Claude, Deep Seek and there's a bunch of others, the 110. Depending on the client that I meet, I know that I'll draw upon five or six out of the 22 that I've narrowed it down to. Excuse me. And for a sprint, I just pick one on a rental and a subscription. And it's for a use case and the cost is not radical. When we see stability and the most important thing is ⁓ fit for the problem and the client must understand it and like it. ⁓ If I give you a Ferrari, but you actually like Lamborghinis, you're going to be, this is awesome, but like I have to climb in this thing every day. So that's the learning discovery thing that I do with folks. And the theme is clear. Whatever you used to do with anything legacy, you will be able to do with five or six rental tools. ⁓ It's not easy, it's not cheap, it's not fast. but it scales like mad later. Probably month nine to 12 in my experiences. I can't speak for everybody else's projects, but this is what I've seen in the initiatives I've worked with. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: No, that's great. I think that's a great blueprint ⁓ system to follow for anyone. Choose one and start small and have a direct outcome that you're trying to achieve. think it's really solid advice. and you being on the front end of the disruption in the space, I'm curious your perspective. business models... Alistair Hofert: Yeah, absolutely. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: become obsolete the fastest as AI matures. Alistair Hofert: Traditional high rock in corporates dead No question number one The best example of that is McKinsey worldwide ⁓ If you ever look at quantum black what they've done with Formula One racing they've taken that and put it back into McKinsey and They have it looks like a highly modular business So I think your corporates are going to have problems. Five to seven years from now, ⁓ you're to have guys like yourself and myself. If you have seven or eight potent entrepreneurs that come together with a small workforce of 50 to 100 people, it's not fun. It's not fun because clients will look and say, I don't know, do I need to go to this massive corporate that's charging me a few hundred dollars per hour or a few thousand dollars per hour for a team? Or do I get the same product to answer from here? ⁓ It starts to get wild when you see the stuff that I look at now. 3D printing of limbs in Africa. We have different problems here. There's lots of crocodiles and sharks and hippopotamuses and we have 1.4 billion people across 57 countries. A business waiting to happen in Africa. Don't build hospitals. 3D print limbs for people that get bitten by sharks and hippopotamuses and crocodiles. People think I'm mad. In the meantime, there are 8 million limbs. you're selling dignity, you're not selling limbs. For me this is how entrepreneurs should be thinking. A lot of people don't know that a part of AI is computer vision and you use computer vision to have a look at Pete with his arm that was amputated or cut off so that I could create a blueprint to 3D print your arm without a factory and a truck and you going to a hospital and five doctors and turn appointments. It happens there. So that is classic disruptive innovation. and again lots of words but very very real businesses that don't sound like AI but one part is computer vision and a business model. I don't know if I need a traditional corporate manufacturer for prosthetics and limbs. I don't think we need this on this continent. I don't think we need this in any country in the world. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Hmm. Alistair Hofert: If you find a entrepreneur that's willing to put up his hand and start with computer vision and AI and scale into a massive business. Welcome to 2026. That's crazy. It sounds crazy. There's more, but that's it for now. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: FES- Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. Wow. And thank you for some of those examples. I think it's very, it's mind opening for some folks, ⁓ you know, especially they're not necessarily researching it and in it day to day like you are. Yeah. I know you're deeply connected to the, you know, the global angel and venture community as well. I'm curious, what are investors looking for? Alistair Hofert: Yeah. Yeah. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: know, an AI native companies right now versus even just 12 months ago. Alistair Hofert: ⁓ So the number one, there is a heavy focus on ⁓ I'm using these words so carefully, robust AI business models, solving the right problem or harnessing an opportunity. you'll see that kind of language in different words coming out of Business Angels. Venture Capitalists are much more hardcore. That's like Shark Tank that you watch on TV. A Business Angel has the word angel is there on purpose because it incubates and promotes entrepreneurs at the same time. So we invest quite a bit of time. A Business Angel and a Venture Capitalist will look at the entrepreneur first. Number one thing. before a technology. If that is a born innovator, ⁓ he might 3D print ice creams next to ⁓ Florida Beach for surfers, you see. So you have to look at the entrepreneur mindset, number one. And when you interview and listen to a pitch, just like Shark Tank, the pitch might be terrible because the business case, it's not happening. But the thinking you might want to say, This person needs to come into a team and build a business. Let's go. I think you would be good at this. You find an artist or a hairdresser that can solve a problem for accountants just because of the way of their thinking, but they chose the wrong problem or opportunity to harness. So that's the kind of lens that you'll pick up from. business angels. VCs are term sheets and hardcore metrics and hurdle rates, run rates, revenue, annual, monthly recurring revenue, turnover, traction, total addressable market, hard metrics in those first few months. So I'm playing back some of the thinking of someone that had sit in the chair and look and say yeah is this worth investing in or it's going to be a trick and a half. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Wow, yeah, thank you for sharing. I love that perspective. Yeah, you know, as a lot of our audience is business owners ⁓ trying to, you know, train for AI ⁓ and get better at it, ⁓ what would, you what would you prescribe as a, you know, maybe a regimen for getting comfortable using AI training ⁓ for a business to maybe not be very technical? Alistair Hofert: not very technical. ⁓ It's not promoting myself but if you start by looking at some of the things that I post on LinkedIn, ⁓ it is not heavily technical. This is entrepreneurs up to executives that are not coders. If I can be as black as white as that. There's quite a few people that, I mean I have about a million views every three, four months. and the contributions of what I normally do is I set an anchor on LinkedIn which is a tried and tested point of view and then thousands of comments come in most of them are good lots of them are wild I come and I tidy up the wild stuff tidying it up is showing lessons learnt with humans learning from each other and the wild stuff gets cleaned up there in public on purpose And there's quite a community that comments on AI design and business model design. I use LinkedIn on purpose because it's a business focused platform. ⁓ There's no fluff happening there. Some of the answers are not fun. They're not, it's not impolite. It's just, I don't think this is going to work and here are five reasons why. And the collective intelligence of communities, ⁓ So Realmetric has 1.2 million views over the past three months on LinkedIn. There's only 18,000 followers, but I'm very, very specific with my audience. The reason I like that is it's because it's not Alistair saying, go to my website, pay me dollars now for this thing. I like the power of collective intelligence, which is open humanity communicating with a lot of rock solid trusted opinions coming in. And I want to see the wild stuff because then we clean it up and every now and then there's an entrepreneur that makes you say, let's jump on a call. You see some of that playing out in public. And it's good because there's nothing to hide. Alistair learns, Pete learns. It just so happens we have 20 years on our back of scars on our back. Lots and lots of things that we saw break and quite a few things that really worked well. So that's a good place to point. I hope. I don't know your audience well enough, but this is typically what I'll share with folks. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Yeah. ⁓ I love it. What is some of that wild stuff that you see? Maybe some common misconceptions. engaging on LinkedIn. Alistair Hofert: ⁓ Filter, filter, filter. I've had ⁓ men in their 50s falling in love with AI avatars in China, for example, and become emotionally dependent, which is actually quite serious. There's a co-dependency psychological issue. I deal with cognitive science specifically before going into AI. The other one is having AI as religion. That's another one. There's a church, ⁓ there's actually an outfit in, I think it's in Arizona. People walk in a church and you worship an AI and everybody talks and asks questions to an AI God. So that's pretty wild. ⁓ A good example, which is wild but good. in Japan for elderly folks in old age homes where their partners have passed away and died. They have a conversation with an AI that has been trained on the deceased partners emails, notes, voicemails and telephone calls. It doesn't create an emotional dependency. if Pete is my brother and you pass away five years from now, the conversation today, I can listen to and have warm memories about Pete, who is my brother who passed away. It's pretty hectic, but we're moving into a society which is completely different. And I've seen quite a bit of this in Japan with old age homes and family memories that are rekindled digitally. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Yeah, incredible examples. I hadn't heard of those. Man. Alistair Hofert: Welcome to 2026 where there's a lot of stuff out there. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Yeah, wow. Yeah, I know we're talking a lot about business. I'm curious, how are you leveraging AI personally today? How do you use it ⁓ every day? what's a ⁓ positive use for people, ⁓ in your opinion? Alistair Hofert: Yeah. Every day. ⁓ I argue with myself. I created a digital version of myself, a digital twin. ⁓ And I saw I have something which pulls out my character defects. Every one of us ⁓ anger, hatred, jealousy, pride, a whole lot of things like that. ⁓ Anger, hatred, jealousy and pride are very, very strong. and I've created a script where you... ⁓ it's like a psychometric interface and I argue with myself like I don't know what you're thinking about this what's wrong with you what happens is that I get a visual of my own character defects and I work on them every single week so Pete insults me now and says, I think your face is too red and why are you hearing earphones and you're not using that? Normally I would get offended by that. But what I've done is I've learned my own character defects and I work on them after arguing with myself, after replicating my personality. And I think that's a very, I'm going to be putting that out in about three months time. It's not as silly as it sounds because people can do it in the privacy of their home. And you can argue, argue, argue and then you realize, ⁓ arrogance, I didn't know that. Or stubbornness or jealousy. I didn't even know what jealousy, how? They're pretty hectic topics, but with AI comes the ability to have better humans over the next decade. And ⁓ that is a very, very, it's a beautiful use for AI. ⁓ because you end up being a more mature, balanced, capable human being and I learn, ⁓ Alistair, you might be arrogant about your education and the fact that you've studied a lot. Don't do that. Rather sit and listen and the answer is, how can I help this guy today? How do I make his day better? The opposite of that. So an argument engine is unbelievably useful. for building a better society in small communities. And I've tested this with some guys in business. And I said, I think you're going to see some hatred and ⁓ pride. They didn't like it. But the whole point is you can try it in the privacy of your home, and you learn, and you grow and mature. And this is an amazing use for AI. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Fascinating. Yeah. And, you know, there's some products out there from, you know, top minds and in different industries that have attempted to, you know, make an AI product version of themselves. ⁓ I'm curious, how do you, how do you do that? Like for yourself, you know, for someone that may, maybe doesn't have, you know, tons of stuff online content that you could train a model on. Yeah. How do you go about making a digital twin of yourself? Alistair Hofert: Yeah. ⁓ I won't give the recipe away or the structure but I used 200 structured questions ⁓ and I answer it brutally honestly as Alistair and I train a machine learning engine, a specific platform. ⁓ It's not a US product. I'm carefully choosing my words here because there's intellectual property around that. but I've used an engine. The whole point is you never argue once or you never train at once. So once you've created something using 200 questions, you go back and argue one week later and it will tell you if you are better or worse. So that is how I did it with structured questions. Other people around the world that are listening to this, so Pete today, you may have your own unique set of questions that you'll put into a platform and you'll answer it. I'll recommend just one which is useful. So Pete, today or tomorrow on the weekend, have a look at Anthropic and think about 20 questions and say, my name is Pete. I like wearing turquoise shirts. I sit in an office with a map. I enjoy playing tennis. ⁓ I like reading and this is my persona. I live here, I don't like sunshine, I enjoy surfing, I like trains, I never fly. When you do that with Anthropic, as an upfront statement, you're telling it what you are. Then, formulate your own questions. What do you love? What do you hate? Just start with two simple questions. You've told it who you are, and then it asks you, what do you love and what do you hate? It takes that persona, and it starts to learn about Pete because you told that persona who doesn't like airplanes, who catches that, I don't like ice cream, I think I'm angry quite often, all your characteristics and you've just told it what you love and what you hate. Those are the first two steps. Add your own questions on there for now. There is science behind having 200 questions. It is very very structured around left brain and right brain and the different cognitive functions. So if you look at the top of your brain from the top, the left hemisphere and the right, they do different things. Think about the questions you want to ask yourself and answer them in one platform and you'll start to be able to train or view your own mind and personality. It gets like scary and exciting at the same time. But that's practical advice for today. 200 questions. Pick a platform. ⁓ I'm very careful about naming them because of this gets recorded and put out in the public. I never slander or promote any platform. I just name them for you to consume. I've been through this before, if I could put it that way. So Claude Anthropic are useful starts. Very, very good place to look. Yeah. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Yeah, fascinating. Wow. You know, it... Alistair Hofert: What a decade we are in for, Pete. What a decade. Wow. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: So cool. Yeah, you know, I do like tennis and reading. That's pretty funny. Alistair Hofert: So ⁓ do I! That's why I mentioned it. Very good. Excellent. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: ⁓ I think that that's kind of is that that term reverse prompting is that basically what that is is getting it to Ask you questions and then it learns from you Yeah, I see. Okay Alistair Hofert: Yes, yes, yes, basically. Yes, yes, yeah, exactly. It's a huge thing to practice. The more you practice and you see the answers, I just practice that a lot. After this call, I'll send you maybe 10 or 15 questions I've personally used without my answers and I'll recommend one platform to try out. You'll be surprised. And then... Next week, Pete have an argument with Pete. You'll be surprised at what you can do with those answers and how you can apply that to clients and people around you. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Please do. I'd love to see that. Yeah, I'll make a little space. Yeah. Awesome. Great. Yeah, we're coming up here on time. I know we could probably keep talking forever. I love this conversation. ⁓ But I always at the end, at the end of the show, I always ask guests if they could leave one practical tip. I'll stare for you in your case. One practical tip for business owners want to start Alistair Hofert: Beautiful, I'll share it. Perfect. Alright. For sure, for sure. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: building a real AI strategy right now. What would that be? Alistair Hofert: Start a file, name a problem, do it on a platform for five weeks on a low-cost rental. Learn to kill your darlings. Those are the five things. Done. Clear. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: love it. Awesome. Well, I think you might have to explain the Learn to Kill Your Darlings real quick for listeners. I know I had to ask you at beginning. Alistair Hofert: if you love the idea, don't spend money on that forever. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: keep evolving, right, and don't stay too attached. Alistair Hofert: Don't stay attached. You think this business is going to make money and month number seven you've burned cash? No way. Five weeks, learn to kill your darlings. Have someone experienced who's had to do it with you? Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Yes, sir. Yeah, awesome. And I do love what you said at the beginning too, balance and focus. I wrote that down. I think those are really good, really good tenets. Alistair Hofert: Yeah, it's important. It's important. ⁓ I personally do this. I work lots. But I frequently go and I walk around the golf course on purpose. There are no computers, no phones, zero. ⁓ I take that in on purpose. I connect with nature. It's less than a mile from my home. ⁓ That is unplugging. You have to do that because in 2035 I'm going to have like 3D printed burgers and my golf clubs will be printed and there are no caddies and there's no grass and it just gets mad. So I do that on purpose to disconnect and I recommend that for anybody in this domain. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Love it. Wow. So many good takeaways today, Alistair. Thank you so much for pouring into this episode. Where can listeners find out and learn more about you and your work and the great information you put out? Alistair Hofert: ⁓ Pleasure. ⁓ LinkedIn as I mentioned, Alistair Hoefert, the same spelling that we have on the screen now, it's as simple as that. ⁓ There's many many places to find me. That's the kind of anchor. They could find me there, connect, write. ⁓ They could swap notes between yourself and myself online on my profile. It's good for both of us in terms of the discussion today being repeated in public again. So they could find me there, refer to you. That's a good thing to do today because we'll pull them into a conversation for their business on my profile with yourself and myself. Super practical. Pete, Exit Algorithms Host: Great. Awesome. I'll leave that in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on today, Alistair. It was a pleasure. Alistair Hofert: It is a pleasure. Have an amazing day.