Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / The Reality of Going All-In: How Cary Sparrow Built Wagescape Against The Odds

Transcript

The Reality of Going All-In: How Cary Sparrow Built Wagescape Against The Odds · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  It touches every community, every life in the world, every organization, every government, every country in terms of what's going on with jobs and pay.
• 0:12
  All right, Carrie Sparrow, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 0:16
  Dave, it's a pleasure to be here.
• 0:18
  Absolutely.
• 0:19
  We appreciate you taking the time.
• 0:21
  So, Carrie, you've got a very diverse background from being a US Navy submarine officer to several high level executive roles.
• 0:32
  All of this before you founded your company wagescape 10 years ago.
• 0:37
  Can you just talk about what led you to start the company and how it got started?
• 0:44
  You know, my career you kind of hinted at, this is what a friend of mine calls a purple squirrel.
• 0:49
  It's not something that you would see every day.
• 0:51
  And it really is just kind of following whatever I, I thought looked like it would be interesting and challenging and, and fun all at the same time.
• 1:00
  So, you know, the last job I had, I've been working, I've been working with the labor market and with corporate HR functions for about 30 years now.
• 1:09
  I started when I was in management consulting and then on the corporate side, that was my job, was to build, you know, HR capabilities globally.
• 1:20
  And I'm fundamentally a geek at heart.
• 1:23
  And when I was looking at what was going on, what was causing us the biggest challenges, I realized that there was a real big issue with quality of data as it relates to what's going on in the labor
• 1:35
  market.
• 1:36
  And that sounds like a really kind of niche thing.
• 1:38
  And it is to a degree.
• 1:39
  But everybody in the world depends on understanding what's going on with jobs and with pay and what their career opportunities are.
• 1:47
  And if you're hiring, where the skills are and where you can find the talent, and if you're talent, where you can find the jobs and the information around all of that.
• 1:56
  When I was looking at starting Wagescape just is really awful.
• 1:59
  Historically, it's just been awful.
• 2:02
  And we can go on for, for a long time about why it's so bad, but I guarantee you whatever you think you know about what's going on with jobs and paying things is mostly wrong.
• 2:12
  And so I also got to understand what was the root cause for that.
• 2:16
  Why was data so hard to come by?
• 2:17
  Why was it, you know, know, so unreliable?
• 2:20
  And saw that there was an opportunity to address that and that became wage skate.
• 2:24
  You know, I started asking around and, you know, I'd always had an entrepreneurial approach to my jobs, was always taking kind of a what if we did this?
• 2:34
  What kind of, you know, is there a market opportunity around X, Y and Z?
• 2:38
  And this was an opportunity to kind of, you know, Hang my shingle out there myself.
• 2:42
  Which was, you know, in hindsight, pretty naive, I think.
• 2:48
  You know, I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there that, you know, unless you're a serial entrepreneur and you, you know exactly what you're getting into.
• 2:55
  A lot of entrepreneurs, you know, are like, what?
• 2:58
  Boy, I wasn't expecting that.
• 3:00
  That was, there was a lot of that going on for the first year or so when I, when I founded Wadescape.
• 3:05
  But yeah, I'm fundamentally a geek.
• 3:06
  And I said, you know, we got, you know, we got the biggest market in the world.
• 3:11
  It touches every community, every life in the world, every organization, every government country in terms of what's going on with jobs and pay.
• 3:19
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• 4:05
  A difference on the information available to it, that'll open up lots of opportunities for innovation and efficiency measured in very, very large dollars.
• 4:13
  And so that the, the genesis of, of Wagescape, and it's been 10 years and it's been kind of interesting because had to reinvent what Wagescape is several times because market conditions have evolved pretty, pretty quickly since when I
• 4:28
  started it.
• 4:29
  So, okay, yeah, no, appreciate the backstory there and a lot to unpack.
• 4:35
  And yeah, I can certainly speak to that too, even from my previous executive career in terms of trying to hire key positions and understanding where the market was and all that sort of thing.
• 4:46
  Like you said, the data is just not there.
• 4:49
  So, okay, you've got this very diverse background, several executive roles.
• 4:56
  You have this problem that you see that you want to solve with your company.
• 5:00
  I mean, how did you go about when, like you said, the data is just so bad.
• 5:06
  So how did you go about starting this company and solving that problem?
• 5:10
  Yeah, so there's two fundamental problems that had to be solved that I thought I had a pretty good beat on.
• 5:15
  One is where do you get the, where do you get the data from in terms of who's Hiring whom and how much are they paying for?
• 5:22
  And, and at the time, there was a growing number of companies that were tracking that information for their clients.
• 5:30
  And the percentage of all the jobs in the world that were being tracked by a relatively small number of companies, these were like payroll companies and recruiting companies and things like that was growing.
• 5:42
  And so I thought, well, I can just go to those companies and work out an arrangement where I get their data and then I consolidate it and I give it back to them in form of intelligence, and then
• 5:55
  I sell to other audiences and, you know, the intelligence and the other problem that had to be solved is how do you get the data from one organization to line up, you know, from, from multiple organizations to all
• 6:05
  line up together?
• 6:06
  Because what, you know, what one company might call an application developer is a software developer in another company is a Java programmer in another company.
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  And, you know, intuitively we know that those are likely to be the same things, but how do you really consolidate them together?
• 6:24
  And that was something in my last job that we spent a lot of time on.
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  And so I knew that that was a solvable problem and those were the two fundamental technical problems that had had to be addressed.
• 6:35
  And, and that was, and I mentioned that I kind of had a naive view because I thought, well, if we can solve those problems, then we're off to the races.
• 6:41
  Well, it turns out there's all kinds of other problems that have nothing to do with the technology that had to be solved as well.
• 6:48
  And, but we got us started on the, on the technology and, you know, in order to address, you know, show people what the possibilities were, we built a proof of concept.
• 6:59
  And that proof of concept had kind of a graphical front end, which was a typical, pretty slick business intelligence, you know, lots of cool graphs and drill downs and things like that.
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  But the data that we built it off of was job ad data.
• 7:12
  So I was thinking that we would go out and get live data about people that actually had jobs.
• 7:16
  And, but in order to build it, build out the proof of concept, we use job ad data because that was available, and all we had to do was build some scrapers to go get it.
• 7:24
  And we built these scrapers that went and got a massive amount of job ad data.
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  And then I ran into a brick wall.
• 7:30
  I ran into a total brick wall because I started talking to people in companies that could be potential, you know, providers of, of this data and, you know, like recruiting firms, payroll firms, like I was saying.
• 7:43
  And their response to me was, that sounds like a cool idea, but I could Never give you that data.
• 7:50
  Well, like, why not?
• 7:51
  Like, well, contractually we're required by our clients not to share that information with anyone outside of our system.
• 7:57
  And I heard that enough to know.
• 7:59
  Well, that's, that's a pretty big problem.
• 8:01
  That's.
• 8:01
  That sounds like it's a.
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  Probably a showstopper.
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  The other thing is I started going around and talking to people who could use the data.
• 8:08
  And you know, like, one group that could use the data are the folks that figure out compensation policies and manage the whole like annual incentives and, and, you know, annual raise and annual comp budgeting.
• 8:25
  That's the compensation team in organizations.
• 8:28
  And I was like, hey, if you had this data and you had real time information, very reliable about what's going on with pay, you know, could you just stop using your existing providers?
• 8:40
  And, and you know, I could give it to you at a fraction of the price.
• 8:43
  And they're like, we'd never do that.
• 8:45
  I'm like, why not?
• 8:46
  And like, why not?
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  You know, I could give you something better for a tenth of the price.
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  And they're like, well, because, you know, we depend on the credibility of the other data sources.
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  These are economics houses, these are salary survey providers.
• 8:59
  The folks that, you know, are the big consulting firms and the people that we work for want to know that we've got the best firms in the world behind our data.
• 9:08
  And so there's no way I'd ever get rid of those.
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  I was like, huh, well, there's showstopper number two, and that has nothing to do with the technology.
• 9:18
  And so how do we get around that?
• 9:19
  And, and I was commiserating with another CEO and I was showing.
• 9:23
  I was like, hey, this is, you know, I thought this was really cool, but I don't know if we're going to be able to take it anywhere he goes.
• 9:28
  And on the first problem he's like, well, why do you need like, data from real employees?
• 9:34
  The data from job ads is just as good, if not better, because it shows you kind of what's in the market right now.
• 9:39
  And I was like, I never thought of it like that.
• 9:41
  And so I tested that idea out with a few folks and they were like, yeah, that's actually we could, you know, really use that in addition to what we're having.
• 9:49
  And then I went back to the other audiences and I was like, hey, if you wanted to supplement what you're doing, you know, for a little bit of money, but it would be a little bit more money, but
• 9:58
  it would show you kind of what's happening right now.
• 10:01
  Is that something you'd be interested in?
• 10:02
  There were enough people who said yes that I was like, okay, we're back to the races, you know, and now I got a product concept and now I just got to go line up some clients to do that.
• 10:10
  And you know, so, you know, I could have shut the whole thing down when I got my first, you know, when, when the first barrier came up.
• 10:20
  But I just felt like there was something there that I just had to find the right place where people could see it and, and keep coming back to it.
• 10:27
  And so there was a lot of, you know, a lot of iteration on that.
• 10:30
  We, we were able to get some really brand names to come on board right away and signed up as a data as a service company.
• 10:38
  So in other words.
• 10:39
  But when I say that, I mean that all we did was provide data.
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  So you think about a tech company and you think, well, they've got, you know, this super cool software app.
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  We didn't have any of that.
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  All we did was provide data to people.
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  We consolidated data from literally millions of different places and brought it into one environment, you know, made it all look this, you know, look like the same vocabulary, all the same things, you know, meant the same from.
• 11:08
  Regardless of what companies were we were tracking, we figured it out pretty quickly.
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  We were tracking, you know, within the first year we grew to about 90% of all, all new jobs in the US were tracking in, in our systems.
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  And then we expanded, we've since expanded to track data at about the same level from over 240 countries and major territories around the world.
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  So we're, you know, we're, we're as comprehensive as you can get in that respect.
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  And when we realized that we had a pretty good story to tell people.
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  But, but it was a data as a service company and those are long lead time sales.
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  But they were, you know, they were big enough that we could cover our costs with them and, and grow a little bit as we, as we were going.
• 11:51
  All right, so now when you started the company, right, did you go all in, quit your job and you were like full time with this company?
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  Is that.
• 11:58
  Oh yeah.
• 11:58
  Okay.
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  I wouldn't recommend that to anyone, by the way.
• 12:03
  Well, you talk about some of the, the common entrepreneurial habits, the ready, fire, aim, like you started it, you got this great idea and then you run into these two massive roadblocks.
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  And because you kind of, you'd already basically burned the boats like you, you were forced to figure it out and you did and pretty quick within the first year you landed some.
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  Some major clients that were.
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  Right.
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  Helping you cover costs.
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  Yeah.
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  So it took us about a year to land the clients.
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  It took us about another six months to go cash flow positive.
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  So.
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  Okay, yeah, for a while.
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  That lasted for a while.
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  It didn't stay that way.
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  Growth eats cash, as a.
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  As a good friend of mine likes to point out.
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  And that's certainly the case.
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  But.
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  But no, I, you know, I went all in on this.
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  I could have, you know, at some point bailed and looked at getting a different kind of job, but I didn't do that.
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  And, you know, I.
• 13:00
  I definitely appreciate the wisdom of, if you have one job and you've got a great idea, you know, to start a business, start doing that as your night job, right.
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  As your side gig, and really test it out.
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  Because the one thing that became pretty quickly apparent to me was regardless of how confident I was about where there was an opportunity or how something needed to be done, single idea that I had, every single one, to
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  some degree, is wrong.
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  Right.
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  There's something that is wrong about it, and in some cases, it's a really big miss, like the two examples I gave.
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  In other cases, it's just a little miss.
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  Like what.
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  It's, you know, like a certain technical spec or, you know, what a client needs or where to get talent for certain things.
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  And.
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  And something that may have been right last year might no longer be right now.
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  So.
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  So that presents a very different kind of business leadership challenge than.
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  And I'm speaking to anyone who's thinking about coming out of a corporate career.
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  You know, you're a little bit older, you figured out how to do it on the corporate side.
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  You think, you see that there's a.
• 14:09
  There's something that you would love to just, you know, get out there and start your own business and prove it from.
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  And I'll tell you that one of the biggest things you got to let go of is the whole philosophy about being right.
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  You know, just give that whole thing up.
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  It's way more important to be fast than it is to be right.
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  And in the corporate world, it's perfectly acceptable to be slow to get it right rather than to be fast and get it wrong.
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  And in a.
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  In a startup environment that, you know, not being fast will kill you, you'll run out of money, the world changes really fast.
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  So whatever you think you're building for will suddenly no longer be the target.
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  So you got to move fast and you got to get traction and you got to learn, because everything there's everything is wrong in some way or another.
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  So the only way you're going to figure out how to do it right is to get the first iteration done and build off of that.
• 15:00
  So that's such a great point, Such a great point, especially for people like you see so many entrepreneurs these days come out of a corporate career, right.
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  And then that's.
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  And they have a great idea, like you said, right.
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  And that mindset is so different than corporate, where, like you said, right, it's perfectly okay to be slow to get it right versus on the flip side, in a startup environment, you really have to fail fast, find out
• 15:26
  what's going to work, what's not, iterate, and then continue to take action until you get it right.
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  Right, right.
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  And if you need to make a major redirect or a pivot, people like to talk about pivots, then you do it right.
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  You got to.
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  And don't look back from that.
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  Whereas, you know, pivot in the corporate world means somebody really screwed up bad.
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  And, you know, that's something you want to avoid at all costs.
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  And so it's, it's a fundamentally different mindset.
• 15:52
  I talked to a lot of my, you know, contemporaries, a lot of my friends that thought about getting out, you know, and, and, you know, as their, as their, their next act, starting a business, I'm like, don't.
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  You really don't want to do that.
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  And, you know, if, if you still think, you know, in, you know, if you think about it and you talk to some other people, you still think you want to do it, come back to talk to me and,
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  and I'll tell you, you don't want to do it.
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  By the third time they come back and say, I said, okay, well, here's what you're getting yourself into by doing that.
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  There's no safety net.
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  So you got to create your own safety net on this.
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  You're going to be wrong all the time.
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  You're going to be alone all the time.
• 16:30
  You're gonna actually, people say, what keep you.
• 16:32
  What keeps you up at night?
• 16:33
  When I, you know, before I started Wavescape, after I got out of the Navy, right, when I was in the Navy, stuff kept me up at night.
• 16:40
  But any, any kind of corporate job or consulting job I had, nothing really kept me up at night.
• 16:46
  What made me nervous or was I uncertain about that was a different question.
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  But nothing literally kept me up at night.
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  Even though people would always ask that.
• 16:53
  Running my own business.
• 16:55
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 16:56
  I've lost a lot of sleep.
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  I mean, A lot of sleep over things that could go wrong or things that were going wrong and not going right fast enough.
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  I mean, that was.
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  The other thing is that sometimes things, it's not that things are going wrong, they're just not going right fast enough because, you know, traction is out of your control in, in some cases.
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  So.
• 17:15
  But yeah, if you're thinking about kind of a late career move to start your own business, it's a totally different ball game.
• 17:23
  And I will tell you that the things that you bring to the table are wisdom, efficiency, the ability to be, to have more success with your imagination and creativity because you got a much broader base of, to draw
• 17:39
  from.
• 17:41
  Your ability to navigate, you know, uncertainty with kind of fortitude and initiative, I think are better the older that you get, which is why I think there's, you know, studies have shown that older entrepreneurs tend to do better,
• 18:01
  but it is not, it's not Pollyanna, otherwise everybody would be doing it.
• 18:05
  And there's a reason why so many fail when they start.
• 18:08
  The other thing that I did was I got involved in a, a coaching group after about, after about six years of doing it.
• 18:16
  I got, I realized that, you know, I, I wasn't growing the company as fast as I wanted to and I was at risk of becoming irrelevant because the market changes.
• 18:28
  Right.
• 18:28
  And so I joined a coaching group, you know, one of these entrepreneurs groups where we, I had a cohort of peers.
• 18:36
  And that was amazingly beneficial when I did that because even though the people that I was, was talking with on a, on a very regular basis didn't do anything, you know, their business was not like mine at all.
• 18:50
  We all were facing.
• 18:51
  95% of the struggles we faced were the same.
• 18:54
  And so could really learn, learn from each other and have a, a pretty safe environment to, you know, work through the challenges we were facing in real time.
• 19:04
  And so I got off on a tangent there.
• 19:06
  But yeah, no, it's so, so many great points there too, because you talk about and that that's a common entrepreneurial challenge, at least that I hear talking to so many.
• 19:18
  And I, I've never heard it phrased that way, but it's, it's so, I'm sure it's so relatable to the audience where you say things aren't necessarily going wrong, they're just not going right fast enough to where you see
• 19:31
  the progress, you see the growth, you see things going right, but yet like not fast enough to make a meaningful difference or the type of difference that you want or your vision.
• 19:42
  Right.
• 19:42
  And so Often it takes longer, it's harder, it's more expensive than you initially thought or you planned on.
• 19:51
  And like you said, it gets very lonely too.
• 19:53
  So like, how did you deal with all those elements given that like you said, right, you went all in, you had to pivot right away, you lost a lot of sleep.
• 20:04
  You wouldn't recommend this to anyone that's asking you, oh, should I do like, how did you deal with all those issues?
• 20:12
  Well, there is, I mean there is a part which is really energizing.
• 20:15
  I mean, starting your own business and running it and building a team around yourself and then building credibility among others that you look up to and becoming a part of that kind of grid is extraordinarily rewarding.
• 20:27
  Rewarding.
• 20:28
  Right.
• 20:28
  So on the one hand, it's like the hardest job I've ever had.
• 20:31
  On the other hand, it's the most rewarding job I've ever had.
• 20:34
  On the one hand, it is without a doubt the most sustained, stressful job I've ever had.
• 20:38
  There's been other jobs where I've had like periods of really intense stress, but nothing is like this base level of stress for such a long period of time as what you'll find when you're, you're running your own business.
• 20:49
  So how, how do you do that?
• 20:50
  One is you got to take care of yourself.
• 20:52
  Obviously you're not really going to find too many people that you know are going to be able to relate to what you're doing.
• 20:58
  Other entreprene can.
• 21:01
  So finding, you know, a group of other entrepreneurs might be something that you know can help.
• 21:06
  I'd recommend exploring that pretty tremendously.
• 21:09
  But for the most part the loneliness is something that you just got to be able to deal with is my, my view.
• 21:18
  If you're really uncomfortable kind of being out there where your decisions, you know, there's, there's nobody necessarily backing you up on your decisions and it's a pretty lonely spot and you're not comfortable being that spot or you're not
• 21:33
  able to get comfortable at it.
• 21:34
  It's probably not a good fit, frankly, in terms of the stress.
• 21:41
  You know, I, I have a really supportive family, but I can't share with them like what goes on on a day to day basis because their eyes glaze over, you know, and they don't, you know, it's not, it's
• 21:52
  not something that's truly relatable, I think.
• 21:55
  And so, you know, having a, you know, a great family environment is I think essential for your kind of mental well being.
• 22:03
  But at the Same time can be a source of stress in its own right, especially if you're starting later.
• 22:08
  I mean, I had, when I started this business, I had a daughter going through college, I had another son in school paying for all the bills still had to be paid and the business wasn't making enough money to
• 22:27
  cover all of that.
• 22:28
  So savings was, you know, ticking down every month just to cover, cover those kinds of things.
• 22:34
  And to the point earlier about are we, you know, doing well enough, fast enough, that was a pretty major concern.
• 22:40
  And so you've got other concerns that you gotta deal with.
• 22:43
  And you just, I mean the more that you can go in eyes wide open and the more that you can have some guardrails built around you so that if you're not, not, you're not making it fast enough, you've
• 22:52
  got the ability to pull up and say we're done or we need to change, change tack because this isn't sustainable, the better it's going to be.
• 23:01
  Some of the things that, I mean one of the things we did, which is also something that was just a choice other, a lot of other people do it a very different way is I completely bootstrapped the company.
• 23:13
  So meaning the company was entirely funded by me and then very quickly had to get funded by its own revenue.
• 23:22
  And so, you know, having other investors involved or other, and I was the only founder by the way, so having other investors or other founders involved complicates your decision processes a little bit and can create some incentive alignment
• 23:41
  challenges in the case of investors.
• 23:44
  But what it does for you is it gives you resources and it gives you perspective that you're, you know, you're not just in it just for yourself or just by yourself rather.
• 23:58
  So there's some ways that you can kind of mitigate some of the, the things that we're talking about around kind of being out there by yourself, the risk and so forth, the stress that comes with that.
• 24:07
  But there's trade offs.
• 24:08
  I mean, there's a reason why I, I chose to have the company just be self funded is because I didn't feel like I was ready to commit to other investors that I would, you know, we had enough of
• 24:24
  a solid direction in terms of where the market was to be good stewards of their money.
• 24:29
  And, and I'd rather not deal with that and I'd rather focus instead.
• 24:35
  I would tell people the minute that I think that getting a dollar from an investor is going to make this company more successful than going and getting the next dollar from a new client, I'LL go get an investor.
• 24:48
  And I hadn't reached that point yet.
• 24:50
  I did reach that point a couple years ago, but the, the market fell out of funding for where we are.
• 24:57
  And so, you know, I think relatively soon we'll be out in the, you know, in the market for funding.
• 25:04
  But yeah, initially it was, it was all like we gotta, you know, we gotta eat what we kill.
• 25:11
  And, and by the way, if you're not delivering value, you don't have something pretty compelling, people aren't going to pay you for it.
• 25:20
  So we always gotta be in front of where the market is and always got to be building, you know, relations and we gotta be thinking of the now and the near term and the little bit further term and
• 25:30
  the longer term all simultaneously.
• 25:33
  So looking back at it now, especially with 10 years in and how far you've come, I mean, do, do you think that made you better in terms of.
• 25:43
  Because I'm sure you see the common story where companies raise money, run out of money, raise money again, run out of money.
• 25:49
  I mean, do you think the fact that you, number one, were the sole founder and you bootstrapped so you had to always eat what you killed from the start and you face those real challenges early.
• 26:01
  Do you think that made the company stronger versus had you gone and get, got funding right away for, to a.
• 26:10
  Degree, I mean, up to a certain point.
• 26:11
  And I would put that point at, you know, about three years ago.
• 26:15
  And then, and then you get a choice, right?
• 26:18
  You can grow increment when you're self funded, you can grow unless you got something amazing, which, you know, we hear about them, but there are an extraordinarily small number of folks that get product market fit to a degree
• 26:34
  that just blows it out of the park without outside funding.
• 26:37
  You know, when you're funded by yourself, you can expect if you're doing okay.
• 26:41
  What we were seeing was we were seeing 30 to 50% revenue growth a year.
• 26:45
  But we became constrained because in order to keep growing revenue, I had to, I had to add, had, you know, sales capacity and marketing capacity and that's expensive and there's a ramp up associated with it.
• 26:57
  So you're limited in terms of how fast you can grow and after a while you're at a point where it's either like, either it works in the market, in which case if you're not, if you're not set up
• 27:08
  to scale as fast as you can, someone else is going to do it.
• 27:10
  And that's what happened to us.
• 27:11
  I mean, you know, I had predicted a number of years ago that once people see the, the value in our kind of data, there's going to be more competitors.
• 27:18
  And sure enough, there were.
• 27:19
  And then the market changed around, you know, like what the economics of our data were and so forth.
• 27:24
  And so you, you kind of, you can take that approach for a while, but at some point you got to decide, is this going to be a lifestyle business?
• 27:32
  In which case I'm just going to keep doing what we're doing and we'll just, you know, live off the cash that we spin off and not expect to grow very much.
• 27:39
  Or if you want to grow, you know, and ultimately have a really nice exit, you got to bring in outside money.
• 27:45
  As far as I'm concerned, at some point you got to do it.
• 27:47
  But if you bring it in too early, then there's a, I think a higher chance that you won't have figured out what the market is, you won't have figured out the product market fit, which means that you're going
• 27:59
  to get, you know, you're committed to deliver on something that you don't fully understand yet.
• 28:06
  And you know, so you've got a, a higher risk of failure because your investors will pull out if, if you don't, if you don't, don't deliver.
• 28:17
  Okay, all right.
• 28:18
  And appreciate that.
• 28:20
  Another question too.
• 28:21
  So how is the, you know, especially in a data data, as a service company like yours, how is the advent of AI affected your company?
• 28:36
  I talk about AI every single day, multiple times now.
• 28:40
  It is the, the biggest thing that we're talking about most of.
• 28:48
  So there's big opportunities that we've been able to take advantage of with AI.
• 28:51
  There are things that we can do with data using AI that before would have been cost prohibitive, like the ability to integrate data from all over the world, all industries, you know, tens and tens and tens of millions
• 29:08
  of companies into one place depends a bit on AI.
• 29:12
  And unless we wanted to just throw thousands of staff at it and so like translations and interpretations and all kinds of other things.
• 29:22
  So we were, we started about a year and a half really leaning into AI capabilities to do data consolidation and enrichment.
• 29:30
  A lot of back office stuff that, you know, on the surface isn't really sexy.
• 29:34
  We tried, we tried when Chat GPT first came out to put our own LLM front, front end on top of our data.
• 29:44
  And what we found, and this was like a year and a half ago, we found that the underlying models were getting revised so fast that whatever we built we would have to start from scratch every Month to six
• 29:57
  weeks.
• 29:57
  And so we just stopped that and said, you know, at some point the models are going to be good enough that we can just get one that does everything we wanted to do without having to, to build a
• 30:06
  lot of custom custom modeling and custom coding.
• 30:09
  And that's where we are now.
• 30:10
  And so, so now again, we're looking at, you know, what can AI do in terms of, you know, creating a seamless spectrum of delivery approaches for us.
• 30:21
  Because right now we've got, there's lots of different ways we can deliver the data.
• 30:24
  We're not just a data as a service company anymore.
• 30:26
  That's what we started off as.
• 30:27
  But we, we evolved.
• 30:28
  We have some business intelligence products, we have some reporting products, we have the data as a service product.
• 30:35
  We have custom products where custom analyses for folks.
• 30:40
  And with AI, prior to even thinking about AI, all of those delivery approaches and product concepts had to be developed separately and they had to be marketed separately, which is a really inefficient way to do things.
• 30:55
  With AI, we can create a technology that allows the client to decide what form do I need my data in, in what questions do I need it to answer.
• 31:06
  So we're not trying to guess the answers and then building a product around that.
• 31:10
  So AI opens up a really big opportunity for us from that standpoint.
• 31:15
  But there's another, another challenge with AI, which when you're in the data business, which is AI models now are defining what truth is.
• 31:24
  So if you go out and ask, you know, what, what is a marketing manager in Austin, Texas, make go to any one of the major, major LLMs and they will, with authority, tell you.
• 31:40
  Now when you look under the covers of what they're telling you, it's coming from places that the data is not up to date or it's not reflecting what you're really looking at and so forth.
• 31:50
  So the, the underlying data is not that good.
• 31:53
  But how good does it have to be when you've got, you know, models that are pretty pervasive, that are really being used like search engines in a lot of cases that are able to give you an answer on
• 32:06
  something.
• 32:06
  And so that means for us, we've got a couple of opportunities.
• 32:11
  One is we have to really lean into kind of the quality side of what we're doing.
• 32:15
  And we're lucky that we've already got a brand that supports that and we're able to talk about, you know, why that's important.
• 32:21
  And there are folks that really depend on that.
• 32:23
  And there's another piece which is there's Lots of folks that are building AI models the way that they provide other services.
• 32:30
  And so now we're being the, you know, the data provider for those.
• 32:34
  Those AI models.
• 32:35
  So there's a.
• 32:36
  A new market available for us.
• 32:38
  But I think, you know, there's a couple things about AI, lots.
• 32:44
  Everybody has their own perception about what it can and can't do.
• 32:49
  But I come back to every single day, AI is as bad as it's ever going to be.
• 32:57
  It's only going to get better from what it is right now.
• 33:01
  So.
• 33:02
  And, and by the way, the product life cycle is not measured in two to three years anymore.
• 33:06
  It's measured in.
• 33:07
  In one to three months.
• 33:10
  So it's super fast accelerating it.
• 33:14
  And that means that there's all kinds of disruption that's coming from that.
• 33:20
  We have to kind of hunker down and get really focused on what are the opportunities and what are the risks for our business.
• 33:26
  But broader than just our business.
• 33:29
  I think the whole world's getting turned upside down from, you know, because of AI, And I think that we're going to be having very different conversations, you know, within a year about what AI is doing and not doing.
• 33:43
  Okay.
• 33:44
  All right.
• 33:44
  And car.
• 33:48
  It's a big topic.
• 33:49
  We could talk for a while about AI.
• 33:51
  Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.
• 33:53
  And like you said, it's accelerating so fast and make it, you know, like.
• 33:57
  Like you said, product life cycle is about one to three months and.
• 34:00
  Yeah.
• 34:01
  Incredible.
• 34:03
  Well.
• 34:03
  So, Carrie, 10 years in this incredible journey you have and being where you're at now with the company and how it's evolved, looking back on it, what would you say has been the best part, part of being an
• 34:14
  entrepreneur?
• 34:16
  Oh, I think, you know, without a doubt, the ability to kind of take an idea and really bring it to life and then create a whole team around that we have, you know, so it started off just me,
• 34:27
  but now I got a whole team, and we got a constellation of, you know, an ecosystem of partners who depend on what we do and bringing that to life and being able to shape the, you know, how other
• 34:37
  people see possibilities in the future.
• 34:41
  Without a doubt, the best part of it.
• 34:42
  I mean, the ability to take just a glimmer of an idea and really make it something meaningful in real life is hugely, hugely gratifying.
• 34:51
  I think I get to work for myself, you know, I work for my team, I work for my clients and partners, but at the end of the day, they're my bosses instead of someone else being my boss.
• 35:04
  And I like that a lot, too.
• 35:05
  This is usually rewarding, but it's gotta.
• 35:08
  It's gotta fit with your personality, I think.
• 35:12
  Well said.
• 35:13
  All right.
• 35:13
  And Carrie, if people are seeing this and they want to learn more about your company or get in touch with you for, for any other reason, what's the best, best way people can find you online?
• 35:22
  Yeah, it's easy.
• 35:23
  You can learn more about wagescape@wadescape.com and our website.
• 35:27
  And you can reach out to me or learn more about me on LinkedIn.
• 35:33
  Okay, we'll link all that in the show.
• 35:35
  Notes for everyone.
• 35:36
  All right, Kerry, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today and sharing all this valuable wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 35:42
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 35:43
  It's my pleasure.
• 35:44
  It's great talking with you, David.