Latest / AI for Founders with Ryan Estes / Built a $50M+ AI Support Empire by Owning the Edges
Transcript
- 0:00Your customer support team is a liability, and the founders who
- 0:03figure this out first are going to eat everyone else's lunch.
- 0:06Every founder I talked to is hemorrhaging money on a
- 0:08patchwork of tools. One for chat, one for tickets,
- 0:11one for voice, one for workflows.
- 0:13None of them talking to each other, and your customers feel
- 0:16every single seam. The play that most founders miss
- 0:19is that support is not a department, it's a data
- 0:21flywheel. When you integrate every touch
- 0:23point into one platform, something wild happens.
- 0:26The AI handling 94% of your inbound questions starts feeding
- 0:30every failure back into the system.
- 0:33Every escalation makes it smarter.
- 0:35Every bad interaction becomes training data, your support gets
- 0:38better while you sleep, and your human team stops drowning in the
- 0:42level 0 nonsense and starts doing work that actually
- 0:45matters. So don't build 1 product.
- 0:47Build the integration between products that nobody else wants
- 0:50to build. That's where the value lives.
- 0:52Not on the nodes on the edges connecting them.
- 0:55The founders who own the edges own the platform.
- 0:58So where in your business are you paying 5 vendors to do one
- 1:01job and what would it feel like to own that integration
- 1:03yourself? Welcome to AI for founders.
- 1:06I'm Ryan Estes. My guest is David Kurandish, CEO
- 1:10and founderofcapacity.com. This one's for founders who are
- 1:14done with the tool graveyard and ready to understand how compound
- 1:18startup strategy actually scales.
- 1:20You'll learn how David thinks about AI support as a growth
- 1:23lever, why integration is the product, and how we built a $50
- 1:27million plus business by solving the problem behind the problem.
- 1:31And the newsletter is at AI for founders.co.
- 1:34This is where the real stuff lives.
- 1:36Frameworks, case studies, and the AI moves founders are making
- 1:39right now that nobody's talking about publicly yet.
- 1:42Come get smarter every week at AI for founders.co.
- 1:45And if this hit go, leave us a five star review.
- 1:48One sentence from you is worth 1000 algorithm prayers for me.
- 1:52And if you're ready to get your story on the podcast that
- 1:54actually matter, go to kickcaster.com.
- 1:57Kick Caster is a premier podcast booking agency that places
- 2:01founders on top shows so you can stop pitching into the void and
- 2:04start showing up in the right rooms.
- 2:06They handle everything, so you just show up and be brilliant.
- 2:09Go to kickcaster.com right now. That's Kick Caster by MO Burst.
- 2:16All right, David, welcome to the show.
- 2:17Thank you so much for joining me.
- 2:19Thanks for having me here, Ryan. We betcha, man, let's dive right
- 2:23into it. Your company capacity looks
- 2:25extraordinary. Your history as an entrepreneur
- 2:28is, from what I can tell, nearly flawless.
- 2:31You know, maybe we could. I wanted to hear some crash and
- 2:36burns doing research on you. I'm like, God Dang, this guy
- 2:39does not lose. But before we get there, you
- 2:43know, let's let's kind of open with with some of the news
- 2:45that's kind of cutting right now, which is the world of claw.
- 2:49You know, it's it's what, March 11th.
- 2:52And so we're, we're kind of past the, the original open claw, I
- 2:57mean explosion and now at all the major models are all kind of
- 3:01grasping at different elements that they can incorporate into
- 3:04their platform. So I'd love to hear your kind of
- 3:06take on this whole kind of open claw agentic kind of explosion
- 3:10over the last couple of weeks. Yeah, I think in terms of Open
- 3:15Claw, the thing that they figured out pretty quickly was
- 3:19that being able to have access to the full computer as opposed
- 3:24to being relegated to an amp goes a long way.
- 3:29I I built my first Open Claw app a few weeks ago where I am very
- 3:36worried about my wife clicking on a phishing attack link.
- 3:40And so I built a fish fry app where it's a little Chrome plug
- 3:45in and anytime a link shows up that looks like it's a bad
- 3:49hombre it'll either filter it out or do a little pop up or
- 3:53some kind of way to keep that from happening.
- 3:56It's not a full-fledged antivirus, but it's just a very
- 3:59lightweight a lot way of keeping keeping link safe.
- 4:04And the best part was I texted with my open claw bot to go
- 4:10build the entire thing. I didn't write a single line of
- 4:13code, literally just said hey, here's what I want to build.
- 4:17And it did it. And so I think we are moving
- 4:21toward a phase where this technology was being used to
- 4:30effectively do a slightly better version of an autocomplete to
- 4:35now it's it's truly taking on autonomous tasks.
- 4:39And I think the thing that I saw the big jump from when Open Claw
- 4:44launched from what previous folks had had done was just the
- 4:49ability to keep grinding it out and not ask you every single
- 4:54prompt. Now there are people pushing
- 4:56back on Open Claw using up a gajillion tokens.
- 5:00So I don't know that it's the most efficient platform for
- 5:03building things, but it is very effective.
- 5:07Yeah, 100%. And that's actually a really
- 5:09cool use case because kind of in the classic McAfee security, a
- 5:13lot of times the malware protection is actually the
- 5:17malware building it, you know, for yourself.
- 5:22You're like, OK, I know I'm definitely not going to hold my
- 5:24own files for ransom, so. The thing I hated on these,
- 5:26these antivirus suites that just slow your computer down, they
- 5:31take forever and like 90% plus of the intrusions come from some
- 5:38bad e-mail that somebody clicks on.
- 5:40And then next thing you know, they got access to your
- 5:42computer. And so I'm like, OK, I could
- 5:46probably reduce the likelihood of getting hacked by 90% if I
- 5:50put this on my family's. Computers, yeah.
- 5:53And that's also kind of tapping into some of the, the fears
- 5:55maybe kind of what holds me back from really being so gung ho
- 5:58with open claw is that bad actors out there are using it,
- 6:02you know, in to, to do exactly that, you know, to, to basically
- 6:06send ransomware or just attacks in hacks across the board, you
- 6:11know, and, and the, the, the ability to spin up users by the
- 6:1510s of thousands, you know, assuming that like your, your
- 6:19token management doesn't go completely nuts.
- 6:22You know, if the balance sheet still works, that it, it, it
- 6:25makes me tiptoe into the arena a little bit, you know, however.
- 6:31The big thing I've been thinking about is how long till the best
- 6:38till the model that can run entirely locally on your device
- 6:43is good enough to build whatever you want.
- 6:46So platforms like Open claw do a good job of connecting to
- 6:51multiple models and kind of pick what you want.
- 6:53But if you want to build something today, most of that's
- 6:57still going to go with a larger foundation model.
- 7:00Pick, pick your favorite. But I do think we are going to
- 7:04enter an era at some point soon where there are models good
- 7:12enough that can run on a souped up MacBook that just as good at
- 7:19writing software. And then actually storing it
- 7:23locally too, which is interesting.
- 7:25So it's almost like a reversion back from the big, you know,
- 7:28cloud revolution of whatever 1520 years ago that now you
- 7:32might be able to just like completely self host, publish,
- 7:35distribute your app from your laptop.
- 7:39Yeah, it's getting, it's getting wild.
- 7:41You know, the death of on premise has been greatly
- 7:46exaggerated as more and more people are saying, Hey, we don't
- 7:49want to put stuff in the cloud for this or that.
- 7:51And at the same time, it's like, OK, I could use pick your
- 7:57favorite framework to go build up Microsoft Office or Google
- 8:02Drive competitor. But I, I think, I think I heard
- 8:06somebody mention this a few weeks ago.
- 8:07It's like, how many bug tickets do you think have been filed on
- 8:12an app like Microsoft Office historically or even a newer
- 8:16one, Google Drive or Salesforce? There's, there's probably
- 8:20millions of bugs that have been filed, addressed, tackled.
- 8:26And so yeah, is the juice worth the squeeze for something like
- 8:30that? Probably not.
- 8:34If you had a point solution for doing employee reviews, that
- 8:40might be something where you could you could cut up a 80% is
- 8:45good product in 20% of the time and a fraction of the cost.
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- 9:44That's the newsletter at AI for founders.co.
- 9:47Now back to the show. Yeah, I think this is the real
- 9:49front. You're here because, you know,
- 9:50for example, I spent a day kind of tinkering around trying to
- 9:53create a whisper flow for myself and it was all right.
- 9:57But then I was like, you know what, whisper flow is free, So
- 10:01what am I doing? But you know, the, the idea is,
- 10:04you know, of course, if you have your bot, you're texting with it
- 10:07and you know, you're offs kind of offloading some of the like
- 10:11creative responsibility where it can be watching you 24/7 and
- 10:14say, Hey, I notice you make these, you know, 5 tab opens and
- 10:18these entries into the spreadsheet.
- 10:20What if we did XYZ? Because a lot of times, you
- 10:23know, as much as I cherish my creative ideas, like the, the
- 10:26more I open up and say, like, Hey, here's what I'm struggling
- 10:29with. What are some options?
- 10:31It, it, it gives you some really good options or at least leads
- 10:34you to, to a solution you weren't looking at for, which is
- 10:38just I, I love the analogy of like being a sculptor, you know,
- 10:42if you're a painter, you start with a, you know, you start, you
- 10:44have to add everything. But sculpting is pulling stuff
- 10:46off and AI is really good about just feeding you ideas and
- 10:50iterations until you're like, no, but I like that plus this,
- 10:53and then you start to kind of get somewhere.
- 10:55So it seems like the next step with kind of some of these, this
- 10:58agentic support is it's recognizing your patterns.
- 11:01It's recognizing what's possible.
- 11:02That's probably outside of like what you've even considered.
- 11:07Yeah, I really like that analogy of the the painter verse, the
- 11:09sculptor. It's like that favorite quote of
- 11:12mine. It's like perfection is not when
- 11:15there's nothing left to add, it's when there's nothing left
- 11:16to remove. I think it's very, very similar.
- 11:21I also think most of the work people are doing today, 99% is
- 11:28still someone has an idea and they're going back to some
- 11:33language model of some sort and say hey, go build this for me,
- 11:37go do this, go fix this, go edit this, etcetera.
- 11:41I think where it's going to start to get really interesting
- 11:46is when the proactivity becomes a much bigger portion of the
- 11:52equation. So it's not I'm telling it what
- 11:55to do and then it goes and does it.
- 11:57It's coming back to me and say hey, I took care of this for
- 12:00you. Yeah.
- 12:01That's that's when this is going to enter the next inning.
- 12:06That's the fun part. You know where your your agent
- 12:09knows noticed that you have a bit of a temperature about 2:00
- 12:13AM and so it's going to it's going to push back your meetings
- 12:1545 minutes and give you a little extra time and some
- 12:17recommendations on some electrolytes.
- 12:20Exactly. You know, then we're getting
- 12:22into the Jetsons terrain and it's, it's so exciting and fun
- 12:25because, you know, it really feels like it's right around the
- 12:29corner if it's not here already. You know, that's the other part
- 12:32is there's always a reaching right.
- 12:33But when you start to sit down and see what we're doing now,
- 12:36you know, the IT, it's pretty extraordinary.
- 12:38I mean, whisper flow is a great one.
- 12:40I just, I kind of have a little note to like use it as much as
- 12:43possible. And the difference is really
- 12:45interesting. You know, one, I, I realized how
- 12:48much I was kind of dependent on typing for my thinking.
- 12:50It slows down your thinking a little bit.
- 12:52You can hold a thread. It's a little bit harder to
- 12:54speak to it. But also my mood during the day,
- 12:57if I'm really dictating and, and not using the keyboard, my
- 13:01posture is better. I feel more lucid.
- 13:04It's just, it's these subtle shifts that like really is is
- 13:07kind of extraordinary. You're saying we didn't evolve
- 13:09to hunch over at A at a laptop like a velociraptor all day,
- 13:13that that wasn't that wasn't part of part of our design plan
- 13:18here? Yeah, exactly.
- 13:20You know, I had an idea for a product I was kind of working on
- 13:23for a while that was a keyboard that was like a little ball that
- 13:27you would hold in your hands in your lap for, you know, 'cause
- 13:29it's like when you're doing Tai Chi, you're making the Tai chi
- 13:32energy ball. Like really, that's how we did
- 13:34evolve, right, Is to pick up a big rock and throw it over there
- 13:37on the on the rabbit or whatever.
- 13:39So like, if our interface was all like right here, I guess you
- 13:42can't see it in the, in the, I feel like it'd be way more
- 13:46ergonomic. So, you know, and we're getting
- 13:48to that point, you know, in the in the beginning it was like,
- 13:50oh, this has to be some kind of hardware component.
- 13:52But surely enough, I mean, as soon as like people accept
- 13:56wearing computers on our face, I mean, we're not there yet that
- 14:00you could easily, you know, have some kind of projection that's
- 14:02watching your hands in space in a much more ergonomic kind of
- 14:05place. So, you know, we are moving
- 14:08towards like a beautiful experience.
- 14:13I think with with technology, at least I for the sake of this
- 14:16conversation, I love talking about that because there's also
- 14:19the flip side. It's it's all too slippery to go
- 14:22down the scary stuff. But you know, really kind of
- 14:25envisioning the beauty and and kind of the elegance that can
- 14:29evolve from all of this is is pretty extraordinary.
- 14:32Yeah. I mean, I think about it in
- 14:34terms of, if you look at the history of computing, right?
- 14:39We started out with physical machines that then got
- 14:44represented in terms of zeros and ones.
- 14:47And then it was like, wow, we've got this digital representation
- 14:51of what used to be physical switches.
- 14:53And then you had assembly language and it was like, wow,
- 14:56this is a major breakthrough because we're not doing zeros
- 14:59and ones. It's a higher order kind of
- 15:00thing. And then you went to programming
- 15:03languages like C and C++ and it was like, wow, I don't need to
- 15:06know like memory registers for most of this code is, you know,
- 15:10then you get in higher order, you're doing like HTML and
- 15:13JavaScript and we're building apps and these types of things.
- 15:17And now, I mean, it's getting to the point where people are using
- 15:21natural language to go build what they want and it's
- 15:25completely abstracted away from the underlying language even in
- 15:31many cases. And So what I've seen is that
- 15:35almost every jump in language interface has opened up an order
- 15:41of magnitude number of new people who can build software.
- 15:48And so now going toward a natural language interface,
- 15:52we're at the point where you don't have to know all the
- 15:54insurance and outs and intricacies, as long as you can
- 15:56explain your idea credibly and tell it to go build the test
- 16:00cases, which is very important, Anyone, anyone's going to be
- 16:04able to build software soon. Yeah, and it it democratizes
- 16:09like software in extraordinary way, which means we get to
- 16:12capitalize on the the billion people in India or take wherever
- 16:17that they've got cell phones. I mean, like once we can do
- 16:19everything locally on our Mac mini, it's only a couple of
- 16:23steps before we can do everything on our phone, you
- 16:25know, and now you have kids that never had access to, to
- 16:28opportunity that, that are brilliant, You know, that, that
- 16:32we can really all kind of capitalize on on, you know,
- 16:35their mental capacity. I mean, it's, it's pretty
- 16:38extraordinary. It's wild because you think
- 16:40about there is there's simultaneously more
- 16:47democratization of this technology than anything else
- 16:50we've ever seen. Wasn't like when the industrial
- 16:52revolution happened. It was easy to go start a
- 16:55factory if you were, if you, if you didn't have means right now,
- 17:00your point, You can pull up an iPhone open clause, some credits
- 17:04and you you can go build something.
- 17:06And there's also the potential for a lot of wealth
- 17:09concentration in the hands of some of the biggest corporations
- 17:13in the world. So it's so it's going to be
- 17:14really interesting to see what plays out economically.
- 17:17Does the democratization win? Do the large corporations win?
- 17:21Or is it a little bit of both? Yeah, that's, that's a big
- 17:26question, you know, because, you know, that we talked about the
- 17:28that Gilded Age and all those giants and those guys are
- 17:33nothing compared to the guys we got now.
- 17:36You know, the the amount of wealth that Elon and Bezos and
- 17:39these guys have accumulated is it is second to none
- 17:42historically, you know, so it does kind of beg the question of
- 17:46like, OK, well, how does that help everybody else?
- 17:50You know, what are we going to do if we're democratizing
- 17:53technology? But the foundation models,
- 17:55there's only four or five guys that really are, you know,
- 17:58getting the bottom line of all those tokens.
- 18:00How do we kind of effect that change?
- 18:02And it's I, I typically don't get into politics or current
- 18:05events, but it's, it's germane to the conversation, which is
- 18:07kind of the wealth tax that's going on in California where
- 18:10people are starting to propose kind of these one time wealth
- 18:13taxes. Now Elon's out there stoking
- 18:16this fire saying, hey, you're planning for the future.
- 18:20Don't you're investing in your retirement.
- 18:23You don't need to do that. You know, there's plenty for
- 18:25everybody with the assumption there's going to be some kind of
- 18:27Ubi or there's going to be some kind of wealth dis disbursement
- 18:31or, or something, which means somebody's got the money and
- 18:34someone's given the checks. And what I know about people is
- 18:37they're going to be looking over their shoulder at your check and
- 18:39be like, why is my check different than your check?
- 18:41You know, so when you think about the future of all this,
- 18:43particularly, you know, with software and I, I have a kind of
- 18:46way to dovetail the capacity because I want to ask you about
- 18:49that too. But what's your take?
- 18:51You know what, what's the, what's the end game here?
- 18:5310 years. OK, so in in no particular
- 18:58order, Elon is obviously welcome to his own opinions and every,
- 19:05every every can have their own opinion on these things.
- 19:08Personally, I wouldn't bank on Ubi producing the results that
- 19:14people are are talking about just yet.
- 19:18I think there's a lot societally that we have to work through
- 19:21before that becomes a reality. Number one.
- 19:24I will say though, you know, hold hold any political
- 19:32discussion of this aside, somebody like a Michael Dell put
- 19:36in the other billions of dollars of call it Ubi light programs.
- 19:43Let's see how let's see what happens there.
- 19:45Like that's it. That's an interesting test case
- 19:48test pancake to go study and see what happens to that cohort of
- 19:56folks. So I think that's a really
- 19:57interesting experiment. He put he put his, you know,
- 20:01again, I'm not like the biggest Michael Dell fan or anti Michael
- 20:04Dell. I don't I don't know him.
- 20:05I don't know him personally, but he put his money where his mouth
- 20:08is in terms of, Hey, you want to do Ubi?
- 20:10OK, let's let's go try. Let's go try it and see.
- 20:15So I'll put that aside. I would also say politically
- 20:23there are, I think we want to be a country that rewards people
- 20:28taking risks and building things.
- 20:33I think if we get rid of that, that is going to be a huge dent
- 20:39into one of the OR underlying principles of why the United
- 20:45States has over many, many years done done very well.
- 20:51So I think if you asked, you know, 10 people in the street,
- 20:55most of them don't think you should be punished for being
- 20:59successful. I I think the bigger flip side
- 21:02is I don't know how many kids Bezos has.
- 21:07I know Elon has a lot of them, right.
- 21:09But if you're at a Musk junior or a Bezos junior and you didn't
- 21:15build it, I'm not saying you can't leave an inheritance for
- 21:18your kids, but to me, that's what I would be going after is
- 21:23inherited wealth for people who didn't build it.
- 21:27You want to leave billions of dollars to A next generation who
- 21:29didn't, who didn't earn it, didn't build it.
- 21:32Personally, I think that should be taxed heavier.
- 21:35And then entrepreneurs who take risks and build companies and do
- 21:40things that require a lot of, a lot of stepping out of their
- 21:48comfort zone. I, I think they should be taxed
- 21:51lower. And I think unfortunately for
- 21:53our political climate, that policy or that, that that
- 21:57concept would not fit well in either party.
- 22:01My my friends on the left would be appalled at the idea that
- 22:05Bezos or Elon Musk's tax rate should be low.
- 22:11And then conversely, my friends on the right, who would be
- 22:14appalled at the idea that their kids should get a, a very large
- 22:19inheritance tax if they inherit, you know, 10s of millions,
- 22:23hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah.
- 22:25Oh, you could see the headlines be like, oh, there's going to be
- 22:28there's going to be tribe of people looking to assassinate
- 22:31the the billionaire guy so he can collect, you know.
- 22:35Yeah. I mean, it is an interesting
- 22:37idea because then you could also borrow against that.
- 22:39But of course you're like looking at valuation over time.
- 22:41It's hard to consider, you know, and maybe the, the, the tough
- 22:45thing is, is that there's not a lot of conversation around this,
- 22:48largely because everything is so politicized and so polarize that
- 22:52everyone if, if somebody has an initiative, they're, they don't
- 22:54like it because it's blue or they don't like it because it's
- 22:56red. And there, there's, there's so
- 22:58much nuance here. You know it's it's.
- 23:01Ryan it's like taking a pros like I'm saying here, if I I
- 23:05said if I pulled 100 people on the street and said, hey, let's
- 23:08we can figure out what the numbers are.
- 23:10But conceptually, people who take risks should have lower tax
- 23:14rates. People inherit, inherit most of
- 23:18their wealth should have high, pretty high tax rates.
- 23:21What do you say about that? I think it's pretty good. 70% of
- 23:26people agree to that, 75% of people who agree to that.
- 23:29And you'd have the the rest of your 15 on hard left would say
- 23:33this and 15 hard right would say no to that.
- 23:36But this isn't, this is like one of those middle of the ground,
- 23:39middle of the road proposals that I think most people would
- 23:43be like, yeah, that that kind of makes sense.
- 23:46But we're we're in a climate where that's difficult too, to
- 23:50push something like that for it. Yeah, or even to even talk about
- 23:53it. You know, no one's really
- 23:54talking about it. If the end game is, you know,
- 23:56you ask all the guys, you know what, what is it?
- 23:58Well, we'll probably have to have some Ubi, but it's like,
- 24:00it's like, boy, that's that event Horizon is quickly
- 24:04approaching, you know, and that creates a lot of problems.
- 24:07But there's a lot of nuance within that, you know.
- 24:09So like, to your point, you know, you can't de incentivize
- 24:13people because some of us, we don't want lopped ears.
- 24:16You know, we want the the ears that stick up.
- 24:18We want to stay wild, you know what I mean?
- 24:21But but but also, you know, maybe that that's not the first
- 24:25layer of the conversation that OK, we're replacing income and
- 24:28jobs with some kind of Ubi check.
- 24:32You know, that that's probably not the first one.
- 24:33But to your point, like I love those two examples, People that
- 24:36take risk pay lower, people that inherit pay higher.
- 24:39And then, you know, what are some other things that we can
- 24:41agree on? Well, there, there shouldn't be
- 24:43children that are suffering for lack of healthcare or there
- 24:45shouldn't be people that lose their entire life savings
- 24:48because they have to pay it on health expenses.
- 24:51Where we do have, you know, Medicare and Medicaid for, you
- 24:54know, it's downside being so big, it's pretty darn good
- 24:57considering how big it is. You know, So there's ways that
- 25:01like they could recapitalize some of this wealth in existing
- 25:05systems. It's not perfect, of course,
- 25:07Doge didn't clean all the houses.
- 25:11But you know, even approaching that feels like divided in like
- 25:15in contentious, you know? Yeah.
- 25:17I mean, you look at Social Security as another example.
- 25:20I mean, we can argue about what the benefits should be, what age
- 25:26is it should be, but the math is the math like it's, it's not
- 25:31going to last forever with the current population demographic,
- 25:35you know, timeline. So you got to either lower
- 25:38benefits, raise revenue, raise taxes, or raise the age in which
- 25:45the payouts can have. Like, it's just a math.
- 25:48We can argue about what the solution should be, but there
- 25:50are people that don't even want to accept the fact that there's
- 25:56a problem. Yeah, 100%.
- 26:00It'll be interesting. You know, I, I, I think that
- 26:03there's, there, it's a little bit slower when you're getting
- 26:06to the Senate floor, particularly because the folks
- 26:09in the Senate just probably aren't on X everyday pulling
- 26:13their hair out about what they can do with open claw.
- 26:16It'll get there. This is unsubstantiated, so
- 26:19don't vote me on this, but I had someone tell me that one third
- 26:25of our senators today don't use e-mail there either.
- 26:31Staffers will print out the emails for them and hand them to
- 26:35them. And again, not substantiated
- 26:38that. Don't, don't put that as the
- 26:40headline here. But do you want those people
- 26:44making AI policy? Really.
- 26:47Like just thinking about that for a minute.
- 26:48That just seems, I'm not saying we don't need guard rails and we
- 26:52don't need AI policies. I'm not saying that at all, but
- 26:57the, the gerontocracy has to go either side.
- 27:01I, I don't care. This is the non, non partisan
- 27:03issue. Like if you're a pilot, you have
- 27:06to retire at a certain age. We should, we shouldn't have
- 27:09people in their 80s staying on and being senators for 50 years.
- 27:14I think that's either party. There's not this, you know, I'm
- 27:17not ageist like great elder statesman, awesome stateswoman.
- 27:22But there are many things in our system that need to change.
- 27:26Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. It's it's funny too to see like
- 27:29the European Parliament's when they're convening, it looks like
- 27:32a frat party and they're all in their nice suits.
- 27:35Everyone's like 20-30, you know, they're, they're younger so that
- 27:39you know, you can probably the vitality is, is there.
- 27:43Not that they don't have their own problems, but I, I totally
- 27:45agree there. It is quite a morass of a
- 27:48situation we have legislatively, particularly when we really need
- 27:51some like pretty sophisticated folks.
- 27:54You know, I I think, you know, Trump has Trump is Trump, but
- 27:59you know, he did bring in the second the second term, a lot of
- 28:02like field experts into his cabinet that I thought was like
- 28:05really cool. You know, it seems like kind of
- 28:07the spirit of like the the original constitution that you
- 28:12have people that have found success or a found network and
- 28:16and found influence. And then they dedicate some of
- 28:19their time for public service. And you know that they're in
- 28:22there four years, six years, eight years maybe.
- 28:24But then they're back into the the private sector and there
- 28:28it's not kind of like this, you know, career politician
- 28:32situation. We've got now on both sides
- 28:34where they really do benefit by having on being either, you
- 28:37know, the incumbent or, you know, the opposition and it just
- 28:41switches roles. But they're always the same
- 28:43people there. You know, it can get a little
- 28:45frustrating, but you know, you who knows, man?
- 28:47The, the, the, everything's changing so fast.
- 28:51You know how midterms will go and and everything else we'll
- 28:54kind of see. Yeah, I think, I think I've hit
- 29:00my my political limit for one one friendly podcast here, but.
- 29:05Amen. I do think what what's been
- 29:10interesting is, you know, my wife is a physician by by
- 29:16background. She's now a practicing
- 29:18therapist. And the the vaccine skepticism I
- 29:22I think is really dangerous in many ways.
- 29:25Yeah, but the food pyramid, yeah, telling people to eat real
- 29:29food that you like, forget your healthy food versus unhealthy
- 29:34food. Like, even before we get to
- 29:35that, let's start with real Food First, not real food.
- 29:39Like, like that's a huge win. And so I just, you could go
- 29:43through all these and you got some policies that have done
- 29:46well, some that haven't. There's a lot of character
- 29:48issues, I think, in the current administration, but I do think
- 29:52there are some wins there as well.
- 29:53Yeah, 100% the food pyramid. Remember those commercials for
- 29:57like, Frosted Flakes would be like a healthy part of a
- 29:59balanced breakfast. And it shows the biggest feast
- 30:02you've ever seen. It's incredibly like, what am I
- 30:06drinking at? The low fat craze, the Alestra
- 30:11or whatever it was. Cool man, I want to I want to I
- 30:16love that rabbit hole or that was really fun to go down.
- 30:20But I want to talk a little bit about capacity and, and
- 30:22particularly I think it plays into what we were talking about,
- 30:25how we're starting to figure out what the new UI of technology in
- 30:29humans is, You know, as it becomes smaller and kind of it
- 30:32gets littler. I was watching Zoolander the
- 30:35other day and just the favorite joke on there is like how small
- 30:38their phones are. But we're kind of like shrinking
- 30:40again. We got really big and now it's
- 30:42kind of coming back and we're trying to rediscover like how
- 30:44we're going to communicate each other with each other with these
- 30:46tools. So I'd love a a brief
- 30:48introduction to capacity and kind of what you guys are
- 30:51working on over there. Yeah.
- 30:53So let me start out a little bit of background.
- 30:54So serial entrepreneur, been in the tech space my whole career
- 30:59and prior to this, I had started a company called announced media
- 31:02vertical search portfolio websites.
- 31:05And we began by adding Q&A to the individual sites, which led
- 31:10us to go acquire a company called answers.com.
- 31:13We took that private, merged it with the company I started, grew
- 31:16that, got it to a great exit. And then I had this existential
- 31:20crisis of what in the world I'm going to do next.
- 31:23So I was reflecting back on my, that was, but most of my 20s
- 31:27basically we're putting that company.
- 31:29So reflecting back on my time at answers.com and I thought about
- 31:32how there was a small segment of questions that were very, very
- 31:40commercial in nature. They were very like
- 31:43transactional at high value. And there was a whole long tail
- 31:47of like, should I break up with my girlfriend?
- 31:50What's the best animal at the zoo and stuff and stuff like
- 31:54that. And so I, I, I liked this idea
- 31:57of whatever I was going to do next.
- 31:59I wonder if I could focus on some of these most commercial,
- 32:03most important high dollar value questions that people have.
- 32:08I also like the software as a service business model toward
- 32:11the tail end of my time. But at that company, we had
- 32:13gotten to about almost 5050 between advertising revenue and
- 32:17SAS revenue. So I like, I like subscription
- 32:19revenue models. And then I also have this
- 32:21passion to see people do their best work.
- 32:24Like there's a reason people pay you to work like it.
- 32:30It's you're going to have bad days.
- 32:32You're going to have everybody's got days they don't like.
- 32:35But when you see people that are working out of their gifts, out
- 32:37of their talents, out of their longings, out of the things they
- 32:40desire and the things they love, it doesn't feel like work or it
- 32:44doesn't feel as much like work. And it feels like you're in a
- 32:46flow state or you're in a, you're in a good place.
- 32:49And so I had all this kind of bobbing around deck of my head.
- 32:52And then that Christmas time of 2016, the top selling on Amazon,
- 32:57top selling item on Amazon, it wasn't a book, it wasn't a video
- 33:01game, wasn't a toy. It was Amazon's Alexa.
- 33:06And so that was kind of a watershed moment for me where I
- 33:08was like, OK, the top selling product in the world right now,
- 33:13consumer product is an AI that's, albeit a very
- 33:17rudimentary one at that time. I think this technology is going
- 33:21to have an even bigger impact on the world of work.
- 33:25So we started capacity in the beginning of 2017 and it kind of
- 33:28pulled, it's like a like that movie Slumdog Millionaire, where
- 33:30the whole game show is the sum of all of his life experiences
- 33:34into one place. When I started it, I pulled from
- 33:37my experience at answers.com, the SAS background, his desire
- 33:41to see people do their best work, this rise of AI, all of
- 33:46that coming together. And we, we started the, the
- 33:49company initially with the idea that you could have an AI
- 33:53internally to help support your team.
- 33:55So think HRIT, password resets, onboarding questions, all that
- 34:01sort of stuff. And when we got into it, it was
- 34:05one of those things where right idea, but we didn't have the
- 34:09right product market fit initially.
- 34:12And the big thing that we had to pivot on was that mid market to
- 34:17small companies had this problem, but they didn't have
- 34:20much of a budget. And then mid market to
- 34:23enterprise companies had the budget, but needed a bunch of
- 34:26enterprise Y things that we didn't have at the time as a
- 34:29small start up. I didn't have SoC 2, I didn't
- 34:31have HIPAA compliance, I didn't have role based access controls
- 34:35and all the all the goodies. And so we got those now and we
- 34:38built that now and got a big portion of that.
- 34:40But the just getting in the game in AI, enterprise AI allowed us
- 34:48to see that there was a huge need not only to support your
- 34:50team, but also to support your customers.
- 34:52And that started digitally first with chat bots and virtual
- 34:56agents. It's since gone Omni channel.
- 34:59And so if I Fast forward to today, capacity is about 20,000
- 35:03customers, roughly 450 enterprise, big names for folks
- 35:08like that you'd recognize like a T-Mobile or a Verizon or a Nike
- 35:13or American Express. And then at the same time, we
- 35:16worked with a lot of mom and pops, life coaches and spas and
- 35:20salons and car dealers and folks who might want to automate, you
- 35:23know, one part portion of their flip.
- 35:26We're building this company with the idea that automating support
- 35:30is one of the best things you can do, both for the customer
- 35:33experience, but also to free people up where you can either
- 35:37get people working on higher order tasks or companies can
- 35:40pocket the savings. And that's what we provide back
- 35:43to these companies to go decide. Incredible.
- 35:46And when you're talking about Omni channel, is this like video
- 35:48chat, voice chat, regular chat, text messaging, like audio
- 35:54calls? What?
- 35:55What is Omni? Yeah.
- 35:57So you could be on a website chatting with our virtual agent,
- 36:00You could be texting. We've got plug insurance with
- 36:03WhatsApp. You could be on a call.
- 36:06We can sit in front of your contact center software.
- 36:09We can be plugged into your contact center software like
- 36:11RingCentral or Nice and Contact that we can be on your intranet
- 36:16internally, we can plug into Slack and teams for your
- 36:20internal side, really anywhere where you get an e-mail, a
- 36:24ticket, a phone call, an inquiry, we can be there.
- 36:27But I'll, I'll say Ryan, one of the things that we, well, OK, so
- 36:32I've been, I started this in 2017.
- 36:35It's been a great run, had a ton of fun.
- 36:39And I can say we, we definitely predicted that AI was going to
- 36:45be big. And you got to remember, it's
- 36:46hard, it's hard to remember now. But in 2016 when we were coming
- 36:49up with the idea, people were like, blockchain is going to
- 36:52dominate and AR is going to dominate and VR is going to
- 36:55dominate. AI was, was maybe 4th on the
- 36:57list of what people were talking about.
- 37:00And I had a strongly held conviction that this technology
- 37:05would be the defining thing probably until quantum really
- 37:12goes full, you know, full deployment of quantum right
- 37:18between Internet and quantum AI will be the will be the next,
- 37:21next big thing. The other thing though, that I
- 37:25think people get, people get a little tripped up on is that I
- 37:29think about AI and for the practitioners on this call, I
- 37:33think about AI in terms of two different types of problems you
- 37:35can solve. You've got what I would call
- 37:39salad problems. So I make a great Caesar.
- 37:45I call it a Cyrus salad because my dad's from Iran, but it's a
- 37:48Caesar style salad. It's got anchovies and it's got
- 37:53fresh kale and I make my own croutons.
- 37:56It's got garlic, all the things. It's so good.
- 37:59So it's an amazing, if you ever come to Saint Louis, Ryan, come
- 38:02to my house. I will make you my Cyrus salad,
- 38:04right? So change your life, right?
- 38:07It's so good. You could be out of one of the
- 38:11ingredients and it's still going to be pretty good.
- 38:13Maybe with the exception of the, you can't miss the lettuce,
- 38:16right? But with the exception of the
- 38:18lettuce, you could remove any one ingredient.
- 38:20It's still going to be a really good salad, right?
- 38:2280 or 90% of the benefit. But then there are other
- 38:26problems that are more like what I would call brownie problems.
- 38:28So I've got 4 kids at home and if they make brownies and they
- 38:34miss one ingredient just slightly, they're not like 80%
- 38:39is good or 90% is good. That entire batch of brownies is
- 38:43in the trash. And so the thing I liked about
- 38:46using AI to automate support is when we were starting out, I
- 38:50felt like this is very much going to be a salad problem
- 38:53where even if we can't automate all of support, if you can take
- 38:57out half of the calls or 60% of the tickets or 80% of the live
- 39:04jets, you can still deliver a lot of value in the interim as
- 39:09you're working through those last stages first.
- 39:11Other problems are more brownie problems, or if you don't solve
- 39:16the entire problem, that batch is going to be the trash.
- 39:21Love that analogy too, largely because if you don't a salad
- 39:27without croutons it's not as delicious but you still you
- 39:31still have the salad. But like to your point, like if
- 39:34you don't have all the greens for a brownie, not only is it
- 39:37not as good but like it's almost not even a brownie anymore.
- 39:40It would like pudding or something, you know, it like
- 39:43becomes something else so that there's maybe a, a, a point
- 39:47where the AI products are also like that because you know
- 39:50what's beginning as support, you know, online support, which is a
- 39:55little text thing or it's got video or it's, it's basically
- 39:58meeting where people where they are like, is it really support
- 40:02or is it something new? You know, and, and to me, the,
- 40:06the, the more sophisticated that these, you know, chat support
- 40:10has gotten. It's fantastic, you know,
- 40:12because in 2017 it must have been talk about like support
- 40:15tickets. People get really upset because
- 40:17you get in phone trees and you're like, talk to the
- 40:19manager, talk to the manager. But but now, you know, and
- 40:23that's credit to you of seeing where the puck was going
- 40:25because, you know, back then it was like, man, Alex can't do
- 40:30anything for me or, you know, but but now they really can.
- 40:34So when I'm experimenting and I find like a good one, you know,
- 40:38you can test the parameters and it's amazing.
- 40:40You find yourself actually more engaged with with chat support.
- 40:44You, you have all the patience you want.
- 40:46You don't have to have all of the the politeness that we have
- 40:51in in conversation. You know, like if I'm drolling
- 40:54on for too long and be like, I better shut up and let this guy
- 40:56get get on with this day. But you don't have that.
- 40:59So it it almost, it becomes a new thing where it's like, OK,
- 41:02this is like a portal into the entire knowledge base of the
- 41:05company. Like, how complicated can I get
- 41:08the questions? And you know, my favorite
- 41:10question is like, hey, what should I be asking you right
- 41:12now? You know, you know what my
- 41:14intentions are. Like what else?
- 41:16Tell me what I should know. Well, right, to jump back into
- 41:212017, we were just getting this idea off the ground.
- 41:24You know, the technology wasn't there yet.
- 41:27It was urging and it was improving and there was a lot of
- 41:32good stuff going on, but we recognized pretty early.
- 41:36So like some stats today, when we started in 2017, if you asked
- 41:43our AIA 100 questions, we would respond to 55 of them and ten of
- 41:48those would get thumbed down in the feedback loop.
- 41:51And so my joke was 45% of the time it works every time sort of
- 41:54thing. But Fast forward to now, I mean
- 41:58REI is answering between 92 to 94% the questions you throw at
- 42:01it, less than 1% get thumbed down in feedback if it's
- 42:05improving every single day. And So what I what I would say
- 42:08is we recognized early on that the linkage between the virtual
- 42:17agent and the human escalation. This shouldn't be two separate
- 42:23systems. The tight coupling of the
- 42:27virtual agent handling the level 0 support what used to be level
- 42:301. Now it's automated.
- 42:32But a clear escalation path and an escalation path to the right
- 42:37human agent at the right time with the right expertise.
- 42:40And critically being able to use AI to help that agent spend less
- 42:44time. And then critically, making sure
- 42:46that that human agent, what they do isn't in a silo that works
- 42:51its way all the way back into the virtual agent.
- 42:55If you can make that happen and close that loop and this thing's
- 42:59going to thing's going to learn really quickly, even beyond
- 43:05improving the underlying model or adding more training data,
- 43:07etcetera. Incredible.
- 43:10And you know, starting in 2017, flash forward what, we're 7-8
- 43:15years into the company and you have 20,000 customers.
- 43:19So talk about your approach to go to market and what kind of
- 43:22what you know accounted for like that rapid growth?
- 43:26Yeah. So a couple years ago I kept
- 43:32hearing some version of the same thing over and over again, which
- 43:36is David, we are so tired of trying to duct tape together
- 43:42these different solutions. We don't want to go to 1 vendor
- 43:45for a help desk and a different one for our work flows and one
- 43:48for a virtual agents and totally different one for a call QA and
- 43:50one for our outbound campaigns and completely different one for
- 43:54our translation and support. Like could, could you just put
- 43:57all these things together into one integrated play?
- 44:03Because we as a customer, I don't, we don't have a team of
- 44:05integration specialists go make this happen.
- 44:08So I heard that once, I heard it twice, I heard it about a dozen
- 44:11times. And I'm like, OK, I think we
- 44:13need to go double click on this and kind of map this out.
- 44:17So what we did is we mapped out 24 steps to the customer
- 44:21experience journey, starting with the inbound agent
- 44:24deflection, going to the agent assist escalation and cutting
- 44:29down handle time, going to post interaction work flows and then
- 44:33finally outbound campaigns. So those are the kind of the
- 44:35four product lines or groupings. And I think at the time we were
- 44:41I'm going to see maybe in two or three of those areas.
- 44:45And so I went back to my executive team and I'm like,
- 44:47guys, this is the map. I'm so excited.
- 44:51This is what we need to go do. Here's our strategy.
- 44:55And they looked at me like I had three heads.
- 44:56They're like, David, how the are we going to pull this off?
- 45:01And then number one, and then #2 is anybody else doing this?
- 45:04Is there anywhere else we can draft off of?
- 45:06So on the second part, I came across some of the work from
- 45:12Parker Conrad Parker's the CEO and Co founder of Zenithets, now
- 45:16CEO and Co founder of Riplin. We're a Riplin customer, happy
- 45:20Rippling customer on. He's got this concept he calls
- 45:24compound startup. And the basic idea of a compound
- 45:27startup is that you take what used to be a bunch of disparate
- 45:31point solutions. You put them together, you lower
- 45:37the cost of the skew, but you maximize the price and the take
- 45:41rate of the bundle. And then crucially with AI, you
- 45:47become integration as the product and that becomes the
- 45:50core of what you do. And so he's doing that in the HR
- 45:54space. We looked at that and said, OK,
- 45:56I think we can go do that in the customer support space.
- 45:58I think we can do that in CX space.
- 46:01And so we, yeah, go over that again.
- 46:04Let me see if I can follow you again.
- 46:05So basically just explain that to me I guess.
- 46:08Yeah, so super high level, there are all these point solutions.
- 46:11So 2026 there's a point solution for for everything.
- 46:15Companies are tired of putting them all together themselves.
- 46:18They want to go to fewer vendors that are more integrated, that
- 46:22can do more things. And so this compound start up
- 46:25strategy, you take discreet point solutions, you put them
- 46:27together, the individual skew, the individual product cost
- 46:31actually goes down the take rate of the bundle, you have people
- 46:35using more of your products overall.
- 46:37So your margins should actually go up over time.
- 46:40And then crucially, you be integration as the core thing
- 46:46that you do and what I mean by that.
- 46:48All the other points together into one unified place.
- 46:52Yeah. So think of it like this, the
- 46:55difference between a product suite and a platform.
- 46:59In a product suite, you have multiple products, but they're
- 47:02very loosely coupled, like using that we were talking about
- 47:05Microsoft Office earlier. If I use Office or I use Google
- 47:09Drive, yeah, I might copy a spreadsheet from Excel into
- 47:15PowerPoint or from G Slides into or sorry, Google Sheets into
- 47:22Google Slides. But they're pretty they're,
- 47:25they're, I would not consider that to be a platform.
- 47:27That's it. They're, it's a product suite
- 47:29where there's some light integration, but in a, in a
- 47:33platform. So in a in a product suite, the
- 47:37value primarily lives on the node of what the individual
- 47:42products do. In a platform, the value
- 47:46primarily lives on the edge that connects these different pieces
- 47:50together. So in our world, if we have a
- 47:53virtual agent that can go handle 90% of your calls, but then it
- 47:56needs to be able to escalate to a support person, that support
- 48:00person should be able to have AI to help them.
- 48:03That might kick off a downstream workflow that happens
- 48:05asynchronously. That workflow might send an
- 48:08outbound message back out to the customer who may come in and
- 48:11leave a survey or are reading the review or, or some kind of
- 48:14feedback that then triggers some additional loyalty point like in
- 48:19that case, the the solution or the, the, the, the, the, the
- 48:25customer facing interface. It's not about the note, It's
- 48:28about the, the intersection of how all these things tie
- 48:30together into one customer experience.
- 48:32Got it. And so I know there's a very
- 48:34long way to answer your question, but we have been
- 48:36running this compound start up strategy for the customer
- 48:39experience that has allowed us to grow dramatically.
- 48:43Some of that we've built directly and we've got great
- 48:46engineers and we use AI for that.
- 48:49Some of it we've partnered. So like take payments for
- 48:52example, we have a payments portion of what we do.
- 48:53We didn't have to build a payment processor in 2026.
- 48:56I've got a partnership with Stripe for that.
- 48:59And then some of this we've we've gone out and acquired
- 49:01companies that are really good in their respective area.
- 49:05We'll take on all the work of doing the integrating and the
- 49:07duct taping and the Elmer's gluing so our customers don't
- 49:10have to do that. And then we go cross sell up,
- 49:13sell like crazy, back out to our respective markets.
- 49:15So that's been the, the strategy we're running From a organic
- 49:20growth perspective, we're roughly 5050 between 5050 sixty
- 49:2640 between direct outbound sales and then partner LED growth.
- 49:31But the the core at the end of the day, the problem behind the
- 49:34problem, why haven't more companies automated their
- 49:37support? It's because stitching all these
- 49:40things together, even in 2026, if you don't eat and breathe and
- 49:44sleep that it's very painful. And that's what we solve.
- 49:47That's the problem behind the problem that we solve and allow
- 49:50our customers to do awesome things.
- 49:52Incredible. Cool.
- 49:54Totally get it. Yeah, and it makes sense
- 49:55because, you know, there there is more and more platforms that
- 49:59everyone's kind of native to, you know, if you know, the
- 50:03Senate isn't comfortable on, on emails.
- 50:06So it's like they'll be able to opt easily into text messages if
- 50:10you prefer that, you know. So the, the there is always
- 50:13going to be need to be like a, a downstream e-mail confirming
- 50:17everything that went out. It's, you're going to need to
- 50:19have certain things in place, but you know, something like
- 50:22capacity as you know, if it's my kids, I'm sure they would rather
- 50:26have everything in Snapchat, you know, 'cause that's where they
- 50:30are. And so like eventually you'll be
- 50:31able to have service agents everywhere, you know, where
- 50:34you're most comfortable and most native to those platforms. 100%.
- 50:39Yeah, all right. It's time in the show to go to
- 50:42the Quantum round. Are you ready?
- 50:44Let's do it. This is the next horizon of
- 50:46interviews. OK, First things first, when
- 50:50you're talking about the acquisition, when you sold
- 50:53answers.com and you were looking towards the next project, that
- 50:59exit was $900 million. So how long did you take off and
- 51:06why did you decide to jump back into a start up?
- 51:08Why not just boat drinks into the sunset?
- 51:12A couple things. One I took five months off, I
- 51:18realized I can't just go drink Mai Tais on a beach for very
- 51:21long. It's great for a couple days.
- 51:22Not a great lifestyle. I played sports in high school.
- 51:26I wasn't a good athlete, but I realized now in retrospect, I I
- 51:32need to be on a team competing for something.
- 51:36We have a black lab mix and we had a trainer come in to try to
- 51:39help us because she was a little bit of a mess.
- 51:41We got her and they're like Labradors need a job, They need
- 51:46a they need a purpose, they need a a reason for they don't they
- 51:50don't just hang around the house dogs right.
- 51:52They they need to be doing something.
- 51:54I'm chasing blush. Exactly.
- 51:56I'm I'm the Labrador of of this analogy here.
- 52:00And then I also looked at, I made my long laundry list like
- 52:03here's 50 different things I could do.
- 52:05And there were some probably 3 or 4 good ideas in there.
- 52:12Another, I don't know, 6 or so OK ideas and then 40 terrible
- 52:20ones. But this was the one where I
- 52:22looked at and I said, if I don't start this company, I'm going to
- 52:26regret it the rest of my life. And I don't want to look back
- 52:30with regret. I, I, there's another Bezos
- 52:34interview where he talked about, you know, why he started Amazon?
- 52:37He went through a very similar type of framework.
- 52:38He's like, if e-commerce took off and he didn't start Amazon,
- 52:42he'd regret it the rest of his life because he knew or he
- 52:45thought we had this just internal belief that this was
- 52:53going to take off. And so very similarly, I mean,
- 52:58I'm not Jeff Bezos, but I looked at this and said, hey, this AI
- 53:01thing takes off like I think it will.
- 53:02And I didn't start this company, man, I'm going to regret not
- 53:06doing that. Yeah, so it was in five months.
- 53:11That's that's a good amount of time.
- 53:13You know, that's enough time to really do some soul searching
- 53:15and and decide like what what what do I want to do next?
- 53:19So, you know, like almost everybody I talked to, I kind of
- 53:22asked them that question after an acquisition and it's just cut
- 53:25boils down to you love the game. You know what I mean?
- 53:28It's like some people get into this.
- 53:30I do love. Yeah.
- 53:32And it's interesting because I just enjoy talking to you so
- 53:35much. You have a really like pleasant
- 53:37affectation. You see them, you seem rested
- 53:40and like healthy. It's not true of everybody, but
- 53:46also like just incredible success.
- 53:48You know, like the, it looks like your, your first year, you
- 53:50did 5 million in, in annual revenue and like you're up
- 53:53soaring past 50 million now. You know what, what keeps you
- 53:58kind of base and, and calm? You know, I, I definitely talked
- 54:02to a lot of founders that don't have your Labrador energy.
- 54:08Yeah, I mean that the Labrador energy is definitely a
- 54:10superpower for sure. Yeah, I'm a practicing
- 54:14Christian. So I try to take a 24 hour
- 54:17Sabbath from Saturday afternoon to Sunday afternoon and like
- 54:20unplug. You can call me if there's a
- 54:23major fire. But yeah, I I try, I try to have
- 54:27rhythms of, of rest throughout the week and I work my tail off.
- 54:31One thing I learned, this is something we've some of your
- 54:33founders who are listening here. My last company I worked crazy
- 54:37hours, but it was very erratic. In this company, I have a very,
- 54:43very fixed schedule. So I work late every Monday
- 54:45night, every Wednesday night, most Thursday nights, often
- 54:49Saturday mornings. But I do a Tuesday night date
- 54:52night every night with my every week with my wife.
- 54:54And it might not be some big thing.
- 54:55It might be we're watching some show and grabbing take out or
- 54:59something. But we I try to have like fixed
- 55:03time, sacred time where I'm not fully plugged in the rest of the
- 55:08matrix. And what I found is my I do a
- 55:11Thursday morning breakfast. I have 4 kids.
- 55:13I do a rotating Thursday morning breakfast, one-on-one with each
- 55:16of my kids. And that was a pretty easy way
- 55:21of adding one-on-one time into a crazy busy schedule when they
- 55:26know dad's worked a lot. And so one thing I would
- 55:30recommend to any of the founders on this call as don't give up on
- 55:34having to work hard. Like anything with everything
- 55:37going on today, you're probably going to have to work harder.
- 55:39But if you can order your your time where you have kind of an
- 55:46ideal calendar that you're plugging everything into as
- 55:49opposed to just reacting to what gets thrown at you, yeah, you
- 55:52can have a lot more consistency, which allows you to run fast and
- 55:56harder, faster and harder for a longer period of time.
- 55:59Love it. And that's been instrumental for
- 56:02me as well, you know, like having time blocks for certain
- 56:06tasks so you can kind of prioritize and and do deep work.
- 56:10What's what's hard work for you right now?
- 56:12What's what's the stuff that's really challenging?
- 56:16The most challenging part of my world is that running this
- 56:19compound startup strategy, I could go spend the entire next
- 56:23year, I'll take all of our developers and all the, all of
- 56:26our clod code and everything we're doing and say just go work
- 56:30on helpdesk or just go work on voice virtual agents or just go
- 56:34work on identifying our survey like I could, I could point at
- 56:41any one area and it would be well spent.
- 56:45The hard part if you're running this strategy is you have to be
- 56:48in constant prioritization mode and you're not prioritizing good
- 56:53versus bad or good versus OK. You're you're constantly
- 56:57prioritizing good versus great. And that's the that's the
- 57:01hardest thing to do because inherent to the model is you get
- 57:06value with having everything integrated and shared
- 57:09components. But how often do you work on the
- 57:12integration piece versus the individual nodes?
- 57:15That's where I spent a lot of time thinking.
- 57:20Love it. David, this has been awesome.
- 57:22I kept you a little extra and I don't want to go overtime, but
- 57:25if I have two minutes, I would love for you to talk about
- 57:29Create a Loop, which is a really cool nonprofit organization that
- 57:32you're on the board of, I believe.
- 57:34Yeah. So a few years back we helped
- 57:38start this organization called Create a Loop.
- 57:41We helped teach computer science and AI to kids who don't have
- 57:46access to to that sort of thing. 90% of our kids are on the
- 57:49school lunch program. That about 1700 kids go through
- 57:52the program we started out doing after school.
- 57:57We've also done some summer program work.
- 58:00We're now starting to teach teachers how to teach C, basic
- 58:04CS, and basic AI usage into these schools.
- 58:06It's one of the most impactful things I've I've been a part of.
- 58:12For people that want to check that out, it looks really,
- 58:14really cool. It's createaloop.org.
- 58:17The website iscapacity.com. Definitely check it out.
- 58:21Bunch of great information there.
- 58:22And David, where's the best place for people to connect with
- 58:25you personally? Just e-mail me
- 58:27david@capacity.com. David@capacity.com Thank you so
- 58:30much. I really appreciate this
- 58:31conversation. Hey, thanks, Ryan.
- 58:33Take care, man. You are about to spend anywhere
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