Latest / Exit Algorithms / AI Product Sourcing, Tariff Strategy & Selling a Startup at 23 with Ricky Ho (#34)
Transcript
- speaker-0: Welcome to exit algorithms, the podcast where we decode what it really takes to unlock growth, streamline operations and prepare your business for a high value exit. I'm your host, Pete Vera. And today I'm joined by Ricky Ho, co-founder and CEO of SourceReady, the AI powered sourcing platform called the chat GPT for product sourcing. Ricky's a serial entrepreneur has had already raised $22 million. and sold his first supply chain tech company by age 23, and is also a Forbes 30 under 30 honoring. His latest venture, Source Ready, is growing like a weed and is already trusted by major Fortune 500 brands after just two years. So Ricky, so excited to have you. Welcome to the podcast. speaker-1: Thank you, Pete. Excited to be on it. speaker-0: Yeah, I can't wait to dive in here. For listeners that haven't heard of you before, do you mind sharing your background, where you're from and how you got into this business? speaker-1: Yeah, so I've been kind of working in the cross section of supply chain and technology for the past nine years now. My family is also kind of in the manufacturing business. So I've always kind of grew up, I kind of grew up in this industry. I went to UC Berkeley for my undergrad. I dropped out my second year to start my first company. So was 19 when I started my first company, TreeLab. And at the time, basically, I just thought that kind of these legacy systems that a lot of these big companies use were like super hard to use. the kind of user satisfaction score was very low and the adoption rates were not very high. So we thought that there's a better way, a more modern way to kind of build ⁓ a procurement and supplier collaboration system. And I think supply chain is one of those things where you don't really think about from day to day, but it's a huge impact on everyone's lives. And ⁓ my company, we've basically created software to help retailers better collaborate with their suppliers and manufacturers globally. And, know, like even for very large companies that we worked with, you know, despite spending millions of dollars on these ERP systems, you know, most of the day-to-day supply chain data still lives in email and spreadsheets. So we sought to basically ⁓ that market by creating a more flexible collaborative kind of platform where not only can kind of your internal data be within the platform, but also your external vendors as well. I that for five years, ⁓ sold company a year and a half ago, almost two years actually now. And yeah, started source ready soon after. And yeah, now we're still kind of in the supply chain and sourcing space, except now we're more focused on kind of the supplier discovery space. So you can think of us as like a search engine for finding factories. And the pain point that we see is that a lot of brands and retailers are trying to find suppliers, especially outside of China, especially with the tariffs going on. ⁓ traditionally, that's just very difficult because a lot of suppliers and manufacturers have very little publicly available information online. ⁓ And it's just very hard. Like imagine you want to find a coffee supplier in Columbia. Like, you know, a lot of these suppliers, you're not going to find a website. You're not going to find them on Google. we are goal is to like index the world supply chain data by, you know, acquiring data from customs agencies, government agencies, trade shows, all these different data providers, and basically creating a better way for to find the right supplier. Yeah, ⁓ so kind of my background. speaker-0: Gotcha. Awesome. Yeah. Amazing story. I love that, you know, dropped out to college to pursue a, you know, opportunity. It sounds like a lot like Mark Zuckerberg and several other famous tech entrepreneurs. So, yeah, it's awesome. And the, the attraction to the supply chain, same, same kind of thing for me. It's, it's so vital to the economy. And it's like, it's often, you know, taken for granted. Huge opportunity. I love ⁓ you found the ⁓ point and dove into it. Yeah, I'd love to talk about your first venture a little more in depth. How was the process building that and eventually selling? speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah, so when I started the company, really drop out right away. ⁓ I was just taking a break and I wanted to see if we can build a project with some traction. And built more traction than we had ⁓ initially And venture capital came to us and said, ⁓ if you're to build this into a company, obviously they'll be willing to back us. And that gave me the confidence to drop out to do it for full time. But there's obviously like ups and downs of the business. You know, I was like 19 at the time. I didn't know how to manage a team. We pivoted a couple of times here and there, trying to find the right customer fit, the right product fit. But I think overall it was like a great experience. Like at our peak, we had close to a hundred, hundred people in the company. We worked with some of the largest brands and retailers in the world. And I learned a lot, you know, how to manage large teams, how to hire, how to kind of build a good enterprise product. ⁓ and kind of one of the things you learn is that, you know, I was, when I started the business, my initial thesis was like user experiences is like the thing that will be the differentiating factor. because like the traditional legacy systems were just so hard to use. but. reality kicked in in that, ⁓ to be honest, like the, the user at these big companies aren't really the makers or what tools or what systems to buy. so like the. The sales process is actually a lot more complex than you would think. It's not like where you can just say, hey, trial this thing. If you like it, buy it. Because the user that uses it is not the guy that decides what software to buy. So there's a lot of learnings ⁓ how to build a sales organization, how to position the product from the perspective of how the key decision maker will think about it, ⁓ not at the end user level. ⁓ And actually one of the motivations why I ended up selling the company was because ⁓ With enterprise ⁓ ⁓ hard to build a product-led motion for growth. What mean by that is if you ⁓ use product like Zoom or Google Docs or Notion or these kind of collaborative tools, most of time, the end user is the decision maker. ⁓ The user the person that decides whether they want to buy it. But for B2B enterprise, the end user and the decision maker are oftentimes very far away from each other. And because of that, the product really is not that important. product is like maybe 30 % of the decision-making. Like 70 % is like, how do you build trust with the customer? Is your company reputable? Are other logos or customers that they know using it? It's more about building that trust and validation, which I think is like great. But I personally, I'm a big fan of like building great user experiences. So ultimately like that was why I decided to sell the company because I wanted to go into ⁓ a line of business where I can actually serve the end user. And yeah, so that was my motivation for selling and starting SourceReady. speaker-0: that sense. And you you use all those lessons to further your in other ventures later on. Yeah, ⁓ I'd love talk about the, you know, were there any difficulties in the sale process or things that you may have wish you'd done differently? speaker-1: Yeah, I think as I mentioned, like we initially, when we were trying to sell our kind of, so what our system did was we basically helped onboard all of their global vendors. And then we basically created this like tool where they can collaborate in our platform. So you can imagine like before a lot of these large retailers, most of the day-to-day supply chain is not in their ERP. It's like in different emails and spreadsheets. And it's just very hard to understand where a particular order is, or if there's any like, for example, delays, like what, whether that delay is being like handled. So we basically created systems to help better create visibility in the supply chain. And our initial thesis or proposition to customers was like, hey, ⁓ can replace your current way of doing things. You ⁓ can your to ⁓ use our to collaborate. But ultimately, that hit some roadblocks because for a lot of companies, they actually couldn't even convince their suppliers to to join the platform to collaborate with them, then there was like an adoption issue. then we actually had to think about like, okay, how do we like not change the way they're doing things, but still make an improvement? And ultimately we came across the idea of like integrating with their email. So they can still do what they currently do. They still communicate over email and the suppliers don't have to log into any system, but we will like pull data directly from their email to create insights and automate that workflow. So that's like one example of like, I guess a product insight that we had. And then I think from a sales perspective, be honest with you, like supply chain software, especially if you're selling to kind these larger enterprises, it's a very complex decision making process. And it's not something that a company ⁓ will like, the sales process for us took like seven, eight months per customer. It just takes a long time because you have to get a lot of people on board. You have to get the IT person on board, the chief supply chain officer. ⁓ oftentimes a CFO. because of that, you kind of have to navigate your way through the different organizations and who reports to who, who is the decision-maker here, who's the champion, who is kind of the guy that's kind of against it, how do you convince him to not be against it. So there's a lot of ⁓ relationship and kind of sales pitching that you have to do across these different stakeholders. speaker-0: Gotcha, yeah, change management, right? speaker-1: Yep, exactly. speaker-0: And yeah, when you built the company, did you have someone that was running the day to day or because you said it built it up to 100 people. How did you go about ⁓ the right people ⁓ carry the business forward when you exited? speaker-1: So I had a chief of staff, she did like all the ops of the company, but I don't think like for a tech company, pretty flat in terms of like ⁓ reporting line. Like I knew everyone, everyone knew me. we're not, we weren't at the size where I think operations management was our biggest problem. And actually you know, our culture, like I think, you know, the term like culture eats strategy for breakfast. Like if you have a good company culture and you hire the right people. there's actually not that much management overhead, least when the company is small. So if were like a thousand people, that'd be a different story. But I think one of our challenges was actually finding the right customer fit and the right product strategy. That took us a while. That took us almost two and a half, three years. We changed directions multiple We were always doing this, the big direction changed, but We, we, we initially said, okay, let's target like mid-sized companies. And then we pivoted, we're like, ⁓ let's only have to go after the large companies. And then the large companies, the sales cycles were taking so long. And then we were like, okay, should we actually target that? And then there were like a lot of back and forth. And, and, and I think the, that's part of the challenge of doing enterprise, software. It's like your validation cycle is actually quite long because if you can imagine, like, it takes like nine, six to nine months to close a deal. Right. So. Yeah. If you make. the wrong decision on the direction, don't realize that until like six to nine months later, which is like a long time for a startup. So ⁓ think one of the lessons there is like, you don't want to be too rushed on ⁓ the scaling the company. Like I think that's also one of the negatives of raising too much money too early on. It's because you have you have the pressure to deliver revenue, you have the pressure to like show traction. you kind of have to hastily move things along, even though you didn't think things through or didn't have the full understanding of the market yet. So I think this time around, I think it's like ⁓ you to be slow and then really, really fast. And when I mean slow, I don't mean intentionally slow, but deliberate ⁓ in strategy and understanding the market very well before scaling your team, before ⁓ hiring bunch of people. And I think like a lot of startups make that mistake. First time founders make that mistake. A lot of it is also ego. It's like, oh, look, I have so many employees. Oh, look, you know, the company is growing, but like these are all vanity metrics. Like what ultimately matters is like, your revenue growing fast? Is your customer growing fast? and I think, yeah, like I think we scaled a little too early before we were ready and that caused some amount of like time wasted on the wrong direction. And it's like, once the ship gets big, Burning directions is hard. It's like, imagine you have like 20 salespeople and then like two months ago you told them go after these customers. And then now maybe you're reflecting, you're like, ⁓ crap, like maybe we should go after them. Like it's really uncomfortable telling all these salespeople, be like, ⁓ no, I'm sorry. Like we actually want to go after this instead. So it's like the big, but if you only had like two people, right? I can literally have a meeting and say, okay, let's just, let's just try this instead. Right. It's like, so that, that, is why like lot of times startups when you're small, you could actually move faster ironically, because when your organization gets big, pivoting and changing directions just becomes more complicated. So yeah, so that's something I would say is definitely a learning for me. speaker-0: Yeah, wow, great insight. I love that analogy. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and then so with Source Ready, I was reading a bit about it and really love the business. Can you explain a little bit, ⁓ maybe advice you'd give business owners on approaching supplier selection? speaker-1: Yeah, that's a good question. I think, so Alibaba is kind of the website or platform that a lot of small businesses use to find suppliers, which I think is fine. But I think the challenge with kind of the existing way people find suppliers is that number one, it's very hard to tell what's real and what's not. So a lot of these supplier directories, they make the majority of their revenue from supplier advertising. So when you search on Alibaba, like I want to find a t-shirt factory. Right. The list of suppliers that show up on the first page are not necessarily the suppliers that are the most reputable or the best suppliers. the, they're the suppliers that paid the most money to rank on the first page. ⁓ and this is why for a lot of first time people sourcing for the first time, they'll, they'll like, you know, get ripped off or get bad quality products or, know, this is a very common situation with people. I think one of the things that I would say is vet them and the way you would vet them, there's two ways. One. The expensive and the hard way is like hire an agent in China or somewhere at the location and like make sure they visit the factory. They're the real, make sure that, you you see the factory floor and make samples before. That's one way. And then the other way is like part of the thing that we do is that we use customs data to basically validate, validate what customers the supplier currently works with. that's a great way to just understand the customer profile. So if you look at a supplier and you say, okay, what are the majority of customers are working with? If you know that a supplier works with a reputable brand, then most likely the supplier are going to have the right quality and compliance requirements in place, right? So if you know the supplier already works with, let's say, Lululemon or some reputable brand, that tells you a lot about the supplier. So I think that's one thing. And then the second thing is diversification of the supply chain building resilience. So China obviously is kind of like the place that most people just go to for everything. I think ⁓ cost effective and China is just a powerhouse in making everything. But do think that for brands that are scaling, like obviously if you're really small, think China is great, but once you get to a certain size, you do want to build some amount of resilience in your supply chain by diversifying your supplier base to multiple countries. Because, you know, like either it's tariffs or geopolitical situations or even COVID. speaker-0: cost effective. speaker-1: It showed us that like, you don't want one disruption in the supply chain to cause your entire inventory or your cost economics to break down. So it's important to say, okay, the same category, I'm going to have a vendor in Vietnam, I'm going to have a vendor in China, I might have a vendor in Mexico or wherever, ⁓ ⁓ resilience ⁓ pay back in the long term. speaker-0: Yeah, wow, that's great advice. ⁓ I was actually going to ask you about that, to build resilience in the supply chain. That makes sense, diversify. Just ⁓ when in your investments, you wouldn't want to have all your eggs in one basket. You want to have a few different baskets that you can fall ⁓ upon ⁓ one ⁓ speaker-1: Yep. Exactly. speaker-0: Yeah. And does that mindset on, you know, on sourcing change as a business grows, say from, know, from a very young startup to, you know, as they grow, grow in scale, you know, beyond 10 million revenue and hit those benchmarks. speaker-1: Yeah, of course, of course it changes. like you have more leverage. What I mean by leverage is like a lot of the really good manufacturers, they have very high minimums. Like if you, if you approach a Lululemon factory and you tell them I'm going to order 50 pieces, like they're not even going to reply you, you're just too small. But if, if you're doing like 10 million revenue, then you have scale and you can negotiate with these suppliers and you can actually start going up the, the supply, ⁓ going to the more of reputable suppliers because you can say I'm going order 100,000 yoga leggings and you know they're definitely going be interested. So I think that's one of the benefits of being able to scale up your operations. Yeah so that's I guess one difference that you would have. speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. It makes sense. Do you see businesses kind of try to take, are there common mistakes ⁓ see businesses make as they grow? speaker-1: on the supply chain. speaker-0: Yeah, and the supply chain. speaker-1: Yeah, I think there's a couple of ones. As I mentioned, getting too comfortable with existing suppliers and not exploring the broader market to look for alternatives doing it too late. It's like, yes, maybe the supplier was great when you were doing half a million revenue, but are they still the best supplier when you're at three million? Are there better alternatives out there? Are there better price points out there? Are there better quality? So I think always be on the lookout for new opportunities, that's number one. And then number two is, ⁓ looking at supply chain as an end-to-end cost optimization and not just the final production costs. I think people get too caught up on FOB costs or the cost ⁓ out of the door, but you look at supply chain, there's a lot of hidden costs. You the cost of time. What I mean by that is if you're ⁓ ordering from like China or Vietnam, it's going to take 12 days on a ship to get over here. But if you source out of, let's say Mexico, despite on average, having a higher production cost because it's just less efficient there, your to a US might be like two days by truck or three days by truck, ⁓ depending on you are. And that 12 to three day change could actually reduce your costs because now you're able to do kind of these fast turnarounds. So instead of ordering a huge amount of product beforehand and holding that inventory, I can order a smaller amount of product and quickly replenish as my sales validate the product. So there's a lot of kind of nuances with the supply chain optimization, right? It's like, yes, you that this product has really like consistent demand, yeah, you can order this bulk load ahead of time from Asia and ship it over a ship. But if there's like new parts that you're launching or products where you require a certain amount of agility, then you should think about supply chain as like, even if find a US manufacturer, for example, for certain products. Yes, they're going to be more expensive, but hey, you're able to do this quick replenishment and you're able to get this agility from it. So I think that's the one thing. And then also obviously the tariffs and stuff, it's understanding what are ways you can game the system legally. So I'll give an example. If you look at ⁓ product like this, depending on the composition, ⁓ tariff that you pay could be very, very different. if majority cotton-based versus polyester, Polyester is like synthetic material. Typically, if you look at like a country like Vietnam or China, US are going to have on average a higher tariff rate for synthetic material simply because the US wants to protect its like chemical industry. So if your product is made of like nylon, 70 % nylon or like polyester, you're going to be paying upwards of like 30 % tariffs. But if you make that composition like 30 % nylon, 70 % cotton, where it's like majority cotton, then you can classify that as under a different HS code and kind of avoid tariffs that way. So there's a lot of things that you can do with the product without making huge changes to navigate this like tariff situation. And I think that's like also something that AI can really help with. It's like have AI analyze all the current tariff rates and say, okay, what changes can I make to my product to lower my tariff rate? Or what countries should I be sourcing out of? if I were to try to find a lower tariff rate country or something like that. speaker-0: Got it. Yeah, I gotcha. Yeah, it's a brilliant use case. I love that. AI is a big theme of this podcast also. I was curious how, you know, obviously source ready is very, it seems it had AI in mind from the ⁓ get go. that right? ⁓ speaker-1: All speaker-0: Yeah, how did you that? you have yourself, software background or do you have a, you have a team that, that helped you with that? speaker-1: Yeah, my co-founder, you he worked at, he worked on AI before AI was cool, like 12, 10 years ago. So he's been kind of working on machine learning and AI for a long time. I would say that it's very obvious to me that like the tasks in which humans are good at are ironically things that AI are not, which are like very nuanced, experience driven, ⁓ high-stake So like, ⁓ I think AI today can actually negotiate with suppliers effectively. Like I think that's a very human thing, but What AI is good at, ironically, is where humans are actually very bad at. So looking at large volumes of data and finding patterns, that is something that AI is just like a superhuman. Like it's way better than a human. Even if you had a empire state building worth of people doing the same job, AI would probably do it better and faster. So I'll give you an example. let's say I gave you a question of, find me a supplier with a particular certification. And I want the supplier to have worked with this type of customer. And I want the supplier to have a revenue range between this and this. And I also want the supplier to have experience doing this specific like construction. you have to look at millions of suppliers to find the best supplier in the world that matches your four requirements. As a human, you're only to have the mental capacity to maybe like look at a small sample set of all ⁓ the suppliers the world. And maybe out of luck, you happen to come across some supplier that matches your four requirements. But AI is not like that. AI, could literally throw the world supplier database into AI and say, hey, look at all this supplier and find me the best supplier that matches my specific four requirements. So it's kind of like a search problem, Like, you know, Google search is basically an AI product. It's a machine learning search engine, right? So like when I type in a keyword in a matter of milliseconds, it can service the best websites or links. The same as for like finding suppliers, right? I have a list of requirements that I have and I need to find the best factories in the world, considering tariffs, considering my personal requirements, considering all these factors and ranking the best suppliers from top to down. Even if I gave you a thousand people working 24 seven, you probably, can't even look at all the suppliers if I gave you a year. but AI can do that in 20 seconds. So I think this is where the co-pilot idea comes where it's like, Yeah, the AI is never going to replace the professional sourcing person because you have a lot of experience that the AI does not have. However, it can supercharge and make you a superhuman. It can let you do things that you otherwise would not have the ability to do. So I think that's the relationship ⁓ that AI can really help with. speaker-0: Absolutely. Yeah. So it amplifies your abilities rather than, you know, completely replace. Yeah. Do you use so, and makes a lot of sense, you know, compressing data, analyzing data. Are there any other use cases that you find yourself using AI on a or weekly basis? speaker-1: Exactly. personally, I I use AI every day. Like, I don't think I could work with that AI, you know, everything from like today, our podcast today is being recorded and being summarized with the AI note taker, right? I AI for, you know, our internal meetings. ⁓ I use AI to draft blogs. So our engineering I think the statistic is like 70 % of all our code now ⁓ is written AI. So yeah, I think it's incredible. Like, I think we should be grateful that we still have a job. I actually don't know what will happen in five years. I think if the state of growth continues at this path, I do believe that a lot of Y-collar jobs, entry-level jobs, will be automated. But that's a different problem for the speaker-0: Yeah, that was going to be my next question is, where do see it all going, affecting business from your perspective supply chain especially? speaker-1: Yeah, I do think that like supply chains are getting more complicated because of tariffs, because of all these situations and the amount of people entering the supply chain as a, a, and a career is actually not increasing. So, so I think that's a great thing where AI can come in. It's like, you have a lot of additional work that people have to do, but not enough people to do it. So I think every organization needs to adopt AI to make your existing workforce more productive. However, I do think humans need to go up the value chain. on the types of tasks they're doing. like, instead of spending weeks trying to find supply information at trade shows or going to Alibaba looking for these information, like I think that type of work will never be done by humans ever again. Like that is just work that AI will do. And then, but what will the human do? Well, the human, you're going to focus on building supply relationships. You're to focus on negotiation. You're going to focus on supply chain strategy, understanding what are the pros and cons with different regions. I think That is where the human is still going to be in a loop in the short run. So I think you could think about AI as just a crazy automation engine. The type of work that will be automated in the supply chain are data heavy, relatively repetitive pattern recognition work. And I think that type of work, humans would never do again. However, The work that AI cannot do that will still require experienced sourcing and supply to people are things like ⁓ the nuances of ⁓ pros and cons of different decisions ⁓ strategic level things. So I that's what I ⁓ believe. speaker-0: Yeah, I think that that has a lot of, there's a lot of data back to what you just said. Great insights, Ricky. Thank you. Yeah, I love to learn about how you structure your day. You get so much done and built some incredible companies. Do you mind sharing some of your secrets to your work week? speaker-1: I mean, to be honest with you, it differs week to week. But I do think that one thing that's important is understanding every week, would put down, what is the P0 priority of this week? What do I have to get done? Because the problem with running a company is that every problem is your problem. You're going to have all types of tasks that come your way. You're going to have product problems, sales problems, strategy problems, fundraising problems. you kind of want to stay focused and solve one critical issue at a time. think that like tunnel vision almost is very important. That's how you become productive. Or like if you look at great CEOs, know, everyone only has the same amount of hours in a day, but like, why can Elon Musk run these companies? It's because he has a great way of delegating certain tasks to other people. And then for the tasks that he needs to focus on, he's like locked in and he just like gets those tasks done. Right. So I think you don't want to get into a scenario where like you feel very busy, but you're not actually that productive. I think I see that with a lot of like founders where like there are calendars like fully booked, but like is the company actually improving and moving along week to week? Uh, because you could just be doing a lot of busy work that actually should you shouldn't even be doing it. Like this should, this should not be the work for the CEO. Like you should be delegating this and you should be focusing on what is the work that only you can do. No one else in the company can do. If this type of work is something that someone else can do, not saying you delegate everything, but like you eventually want to get to a point where you build a system where your job is to solve the hardest problems of the company that only you can solve. And then for the tasks that are, I wouldn't say not hard, but the tasks that ⁓ can be repeated or can be executed, you want to find the best person to kind of execute on that. So I think that's one of things that I learned is like, For me right now, for example, activation is my number one priority. How do we get users from sign up to activation? ⁓ is where I spend the majority of my time. And then also enterprise sales, closing these big logos. every week, I about what are the top three things that I need to get done this week to help move those two things along. And you're to have other things come your way. I'm not saying I don't do anything else, but it's kind of like an 80-20 split. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love that. Yeah figuring out what signal what's noise and doing the most important thing Yeah, measuring, you know, maybe not necessarily having a calendar but focusing on the output. What are you getting done in the day? speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, just don't get hung up in busy work. yeah, ⁓ part of it honestly is also like, at for me, ⁓ when was running my first company, you almost want to feel busy because you feel productive. You feel like, wow, I did a lot. But productivity is measured by time spent. Productivity is measured by number of valuable actions that you've taken that move the company along. So great CEOs make very few, very high quality, very good high quality decisions. And then bad CEOs make a lot of fast paced, not like a lot of small decisions that are bad. So I think like that is an inside that I basically take in. speaker-0: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, we're coming up on time here, ⁓ but I always ask at the end of the show, what's one practical tip business owners could implement this week? speaker-1: I think use AI. I think if you're not using AI in every function of your business, you are missing out. Think about AI as a way to run your company at a scale with less people. If there's a marketing function that today takes you 10 hours, can AI make that into either two hours or five extra output with the same amount of time? And same with supply chain and sourcing, right? Like if you can use AI to help you find the best supplier, why are you doing this manually? I mean, that's my, mean, from us, like, you know, we're a company of eight people. If we didn't have AI to do what we are currently doing, I think we would probably need three to four X amount of people, maybe even more. So yeah, I think, I think people are too skeptical on AI. I think people kind of, I know a lot of people that are like, ⁓ AI is not reliable. The answers are not good. You know, hallucinates. But guess what, like humans hallucinate too, you hallucinate. If you hire someone, they can hallucinate. I think think of AI as a tool. But it's like the change of the century. And if not ⁓ fully on on it, I think you're missing out. speaker-0: Yeah, 100%. I think AI or die at this point, you know, you got to be using it at least at some level or else you risk being left behind. Great tips. Ricky, it's been a great conversation today. Really appreciate your insights. I just wanted to give you the floor also to plug source ready and also where can listeners find you easiest. speaker-1: Yeah, they can go to my LinkedIn, search Ricky Ho, source ready, happy to connect with anyone. I post a lot of supply chain insights and interesting kind of facts. And then ⁓ if anyone is trying to source products, find suppliers, especially ones outside of China, you can go to our website, sourceready.com. It's completely free to use. So for any businesses that are like trying to find new suppliers, I think this could be a great resource. speaker-0: Yeah, I'll leave that in the show notes. speaker-1: Awesome. Thank you so much.