Podcasts about companies

“By far, the greatest danger of AI is that people conclude too early that they understand it” —Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI researcher AI is everywhere today, and there are many exciting claims about what it can do to help us be more productive. But, is this just hype, or are there aspects of AI that can improve our productivity?  That's the question I am answering today.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Hybrid Productivity Course  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 407 Hello, and welcome to episode 407 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  You may have noticed AI is everywhere. Our favourite apps seem to be adding more and more AI capability with each new update. And then there's almost every video and article on productivity warning us that if we don't get on board with this, we'll be left behind on the scrap heap.  It's also an exciting time, and there's no doubt that things are changing, and people are finding new ways to use AI to help us do our work.  But beyond the hype, how are current AI models really helping with productivity, and what will this mean for us as we try to manage our time in the future?  That's what I am looking at this week, and to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Chris. Chris asks, Hi Carl, I haven't heard you talk much about AI in your videos or articles. How do you see AI helping us with our time management and productivity in the future?  Hi Chris, thank you for your question.  The reason I have not written or spoken much about AI is that I am waiting to see where it settles down.  Currently, it's hard to work out what is true and what is pure hype. I saw a lot of noise about OpenClaw—an AI-type personal assistant that, if you give it access to your computer, can do a lot of things, such as make appointments for you, book flights, sort and reply to your emails and much more.  That was certainly interesting, but once I discovered that I would need to hand over all my passwords and credit card numbers to OpenClaw, I lost interest.  Call me old-fashioned, but I'm not comfortable giving up my passwords, credit card and banking details to a third party. Certainly not one that could be hacked very easily.  Last year, I read Dominic Sandbrook's series of books on British history from 1956 to 1982. That period covered some very interesting developments in technology, from the dawn of the nuclear power age to the introduction of the personal computer. In the late 1950s, it was predicted that we would all be driving around in nuclear-powered cars and that our homes would have their own nuclear power generators that would only need recharging every 10 to 20 years by the end of the century. Hmm how did that work out?  To better answer your question, Chris, I stepped back and looked at how I am using AI today. My main use of AI is searching for specific information. In a way, AI has replaced how I search the internet. I use Google's Gemini, and it is fantastic at collecting the information I want.  No longer do I have to open multiple websites to try to find the information. This has significantly reduced the time I spend going down rabbit holes looking for something specific and being pulled down holes I never intended to go.  I also use AI to generate subtitles and timestamps for my YouTube videos. Without AI, these jobs would take hours. AI can do it in minutes.  I use Grammarly to spell-check my writing, and I believe it uses AI in the background to suggest how sentences are written.  I rarely accept Grammarly's sentence suggestions. It seems to destroy my voice and turn sentences into bland perfections that lack resonance or feeling.  Beyond that, I am not knowingly using AI for anything else. I asked my wife how she is using it. My wife's a full-time student, studying physical therapy, so she's learning a lot about human anatomy and medical terms.  She's using AI to simplify complex concepts. She also occasionally uses Google's Nano Banana to generate graphics for her presentations.  So, if I look at how AI might help us with time management and productivity in the future, it does look like there will be some aspects of our work that AI can significantly speed up. In my case, generating subtitles and time stamps for videos is a great example.  However, when it comes to managing our calendars and task lists, I'm not sure you would want AI getting involved.  One thing I've always been acutely aware of is that much of what makes us feel overwhelmed is the sense that we have no control over how we spend our time.  We have calendars full of meetings, and sometimes we find ourselves double and even triple-booked. And then we have long lists of to-dos in our task managers with no sense of when or even how we will ever get that work done.  At best, AI may be able to break down those tasks into what it thinks are manageable chunks, but that won't take into consideration how you are feeling physically, whether you slept well last night or had a rather heavy lunch with an important customer.  AI can certainly suggest ways to manage your tasks and calendar, but you will still need to show up to those meetings and do that work.  Yet that will inevitably leave you feeling less in control of your time. Particularly if you use one of those AI-enabled calendars that suggest when you should be doing something.  What happens if you disagree with the suggestion, or you cannot make it? You feel guilty, or you start to think something is wrong with you.  Yet, there's nothing wrong with you. You're human, and you are going to feel tired sometimes or not in the mood to do that type of work.  The one area I would say you want to avoid AI getting involved in is how you manage your time. That should always be your responsibility and choice.  The idea that a computer tells you what to do and where to be is scary. Deciding what you do right now is what makes you human. You've chosen to listen to this podcast at this time. AI would likely tell you that, rather than listening to this podcast, you should be finishing that report you've been trying to finish all week. I also read about the excitement over the idea that AI could reply to your emails for you. Hmm, for me, that is a red line I will not cross.  Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that if someone has taken the time to write to me, I have an obligation to reply personally. That is just basic integrity. Now, it is true I don't reply to all emails. I don't respond to spam emails; for example, I simply delete them if they get through. How hard is that?  I'm fortunate that I'm old enough to remember several technological advancements. It started with the Internet, then email, the smartphone and cloud computing.  I cannot remember a technology being forced upon us, but it feels like AI is being forced on us, whether we like it or not.  And then there are the frightening ads that claim if you are not on board with using AI, you will be left on the career scrap heap by the end of the year. Nobody needed to do that with smartphones or email.  Companies, focused on making the technology user-friendly in such a way that we all wanted to adopt it eventually. The fear-mongering I see around AI makes me deeply suspicious of it. Why do they need to do that?  Perhaps that question is for people better qualified than I am.  Anyway, AI is here, and it's not going to go away.  Where I think AI will be a huge help to us is in repetitive, mundane work. I mentioned that I use AI to create subtitles and timestamps for my YouTube videos. That's been a huge time saver for me.  But if you follow my email processing system, you will find that you are faster than AI. I can clear 80 emails in my inbox in less than 10 minutes. It's also important that I do this, as I want to get a heads-up on my day. To know if there are any emergencies, what I want to read later and what I can delete.  What AI would do is categorise your emails between what it thinks is important and what is not. Trust me, you will do a far better Job of that than AI will.  The problem here is that you will not trust AI 100%, so you will still go through the emails it thinks are not important, just to check that it got it right.  And that's a big problem with AI today, although I accept that in time this may change; people don't trust it, which is a good thing, as AI can hallucinate and give you incorrect information. This means you spend time coming up with the right prompt, get the answer, and then have to check that it's correct.  The question then is: did it really save you time?  I am monitoring AI carefully. I know that in time, it will bring us some productivity benefits, new technologies always do. But there are a few areas where I won't use AI personally.  Writing emails and answering user comments. That's a personal integrity thing to me. Your principles should tell you that.  Managing my calendar. That's another personal thing, and giving control to any outside influence would always be problematic at a human level.  Creating content. If you've read an AI-generated blog post or watched an AI-created YouTube video, you can tell. Large Language Models will always default to the average, not just in the content, but in the words used. It's horrible, and nothing unique will ever come from it.  And finally, deciding what I will do at a task level and when. That's another one that, as a human, I will retain control. I had scheduled to write this podcast script at 11:30 today, but I had a cancellation at 8:00 am, so I switched things around.  I could have gone back to bed, but I felt great, so I decided to get on with this podcast script. My choice, made in the moment.  Thank you, Chris, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

Get featured on the show by leaving us a Voice Mail: https://bit.ly/MIPVM  Sam Fankuchen shares how organisations can move beyond AI hype to build real capability. The discussion focuses on creating an AI-ready culture, using AI agents with human oversight, and adopting AI responsibly in regulated environments. Sam explains why transparency, ethics, and experimentation matter, and why delaying adoption carries its own risks. The conversation is grounded in practical experience, showing how AI can scale human impact while keeping people, trust, and quality of life at the centre. 

The Brands That Win Care More. In baseball, you can feel when a team cares. You walk into the clubhouse… You watch how players treat the equipment manager… You see the energy in batting practice. You know immediately. The same thing happens in business. Customers can feel when a company actually gives a damn. And when they do… they become your biggest promoters. In this episode of WINNERS FIND A WAY, Trent Clark sits down with Justin Ricklefs, founder of Guild Collective and author of Give a Damn, to talk about the real competitive advantage in business today: human connection. Justin shares how brands win when they stop shouting about their products… and start telling stories that connect with people. This conversation covers: • Why your brand story matters more than your marketing budget • The biggest mistake companies make when communicating with customers • Why Chick-fil-A, Nike, and Apple dominate through emotional connection • How great leaders build companies that people actually care about • The power of customer delight in a noisy marketplace As Justin says: "Your brand is the story people tell about you when you're not in the room." Winners Find a Way_ Guest-Justi… The question every leader should ask is simple: What story are people telling about your company? ABOUT THE GUEST Justin Ricklefs is the Founder and CEO of Guild Collective, a Human-First brand agency helping organizations grow through clarity, connection, and creativity. Before launching Guild Collective, Justin spent years working in sports organizations including the Kansas City Chiefs, helping build partnerships and revenue through strategic storytelling. Justin is also the author of Give a Damn: The Catalyst for Caring Companies, a book that challenges businesses to rediscover the power of caring about customers, employees, and community. He lives in Kansas City with his wife Brooke and their five children. RESOURCES MENTIONED Justin Ricklefs Website: https://guildcollective.com Book: Give a Damn Connect with Justin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinricklefs/ WATCH / LISTEN TO THE EPISODE

In this episode, I sit down with Mark Vincent Fansler, who went from carpenter to senior corporate executive, walked away from burnout, and built a vertically integrated commercial real estate empire operating across multiple states. We talk about the power of elite rooms, the vision he had at 17 that shaped his future, how one intentional conversation turned into a $120M opportunity, and why thinking bigger is the only way to win in business. This is a masterclass in community, commercial scale, and betting on yourself when no one else believes you deserve it. About Mark: Mark Vincent Fansler is a commercial mixed-use real estate developer and founder of the M Vincent Family of Companies, a vertically integrated real estate platform operating across multiple states. With over 40 years of experience, he specializes in large-scale mixed-use developments, creative capital structuring, and building real estate ecosystems that generate long-term wealth. Starting as a carpenter and rising to senior corporate leadership, Mark now leads multi-million-dollar commercial projects nationwide. Connect with Mark Vincent Fansler Website: https://mvincentassets.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markvincentfansler/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mark.fansler.1/ About Justin: Justin Colby is the host of The Entrepreneur DNA and The Science of Flipping podcasts and a best-selling author. He is a serial entrepreneur with over and a seasoned real estate investor with over 20 years of experience. Driven by a passion to help entrepreneurs thrive, Justin created the Entrepreneur DNA community to support business owners in building wealth, systems, and long-term freedom. Through his podcasts, books, education platforms, and hands-on mentorship, he continues to help entrepreneurs scale with clarity and confidence. Connect with Justin: Instagram: @thejustincolby YouTube: Justin Colby TikTok: @justincolbytsof LinkedIn: Justin Colby Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

President Trump dismissed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem from her position yesterday, but she will move into a new role. Markwayne Mullin will assume her former post. Mark interviews John Carney, editor at Breitbart Business News. The U.S. unexpectedly lost 92,000 jobs, and John explains the factors behind the numbers. Companies may increase productivity by assigning more tasks to current employees, resulting in less hiring. They also discuss the reasons for frequent revisions to job numbers. President Trump publicly criticized former Fox host Tucker Carlson's character yesterday. He also announced that Iran's military force continues to be dismantled day by day, with no plans to stop the attacks. Meanwhile, the Oscars are considering a performance by Barbra Streisand. Mark interviews comedian Jackie Martling. Jackie keeps Mark laughing with his quick one-liners and jokes. He also addresses being mentioned in the Epstein files.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The U.S. unexpectedly lost 92,000 jobs, and John explains the factors behind the numbers. Companies may increase productivity by assigning more tasks to current employees, resulting in less hiring. They also discuss the reasons for frequent revisions to job numbers.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

President Trump dismissed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem from her position yesterday, but she will move into a new role. Markwayne Mullin will assume her former post. Mark takes your calls!  Mark interviews John Carney, editor at Breitbart Business News. The U.S. unexpectedly lost 92,000 jobs, and John explains the factors behind the numbers. Companies may increase productivity by assigning more tasks to current employees, resulting in less hiring. They also discuss the reasons for frequent revisions to job numbers.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1983: Christine Comaford reveals the five critical leadership mistakes that quietly derail high-performance CEOs, drawing on Robert S. Hartman's research and decades of executive coaching. She breaks down how inconsistencies, weak execution, cultural misalignment, poor accountability, and stagnant innovation erode momentum, often before leaders realize it. Learn how to course-correct with disciplined strategy, embodied values, and systems that foster both ownership and innovation. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://smarttribesinstitute.com/five-fatal-mistakes-halt-high-performance-leaders/ Quotes to ponder: "Companies rise and fall on leadership. Period." "Clear Expectation + Owner Agreement + Rewards & Consequences = Ownership And High Accountability" "From a politically correct standpoint, every CEO will tell you that they encourage out of the box thinking, or innovative thinking." Episode references: Robert S. Hartman Institute: https://www.hartmaninstitute.org/

It was a wild week in artificial intelligence. Joe and Robert break down a surprising stumble from OpenAI and the aggressive counter-moves coming from Anthropic. The hosts unpack what these developments signal for the broader AI landscape and why the growing concentration of power among a small number of platforms should concern marketers and creators alike. If a handful of companies ultimately control how AI works and how it distributes information, that likely tells us exactly where marketing is headed as well. Along the way, Joe and Robert offer a few friendly suggestions to Sam Altman on how he might rethink his public communication strategy during moments of controversy and rapid change. Next, the show shifts to a supposed social media "problem" involving the CEO of McDonald's on Instagram. Except… it wasn't really a problem at all. Joe and Robert argue the episode was actually a major brand win. The bigger lesson? Companies should stop hiding their quirky, weird, and interesting employees. Celebrating authentic personalities inside organizations may be one of the most underused marketing advantages available today. The conversation then moves into the exploding trend of 90-second serialized dramas dominating short-form video platforms. What started as a niche format is quickly becoming a global phenomenon, reshaping storytelling and opening the door to entirely new forms of brand entertainment. Winners and Losers Joe highlights the creative marketing moves coming from Staples and why the brand may be onto something smart in a crowded retail environment. Robert, meanwhile, calls out what he believes was a strategic misstep from global advertising giant WPP. Rants and Raves Joe raves about a growing opportunity inspired by a recent article in The Wall Street Journal on the rise of subscription mail products and why creators should pay close attention to physical experiences in a digital world. And in a rare twist, Robert offers praise for the research and insights coming from Gartner… something listeners may not have expected. As always, Joe and Robert break down what it all means for marketers trying to build sustainable media brands in a world increasingly shaped by platforms, AI, and shifting audience behavior. Subscribe and Follow: Follow Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose on LinkedIn for insights, hot takes, and weekly updates from the world of content and marketing.  ------- This week's sponsor: Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out. Point is, you miss a lot. Unless you use HubSpot. Their customer platform gives you access to the data you need to grow your business. The insights trapped in emails, call logs, and transcripts.  All that unstructured data that makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. Visit https://www.hubspot.com/ to hear how HubSpot can help you grow better. ------- Get all the show notes: https://www.thisoldmarketing.com/ Get Joe's new book, Burn the Playbook, at http://www.joepulizzi.com/books/burn-the-playbook/ Subscribe to Joe's Newsletter at https://www.joepulizzi.com/signup/. Get Robert Rose's new book, Valuable Friction, at https://robertrose.net/valuable-friction/  Subscribe to Robert's Newsletter at https://seventhbearlens.substack.com/ ------- This Old Marketing is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network: https://www.hubspot.com/podcastnetwork

James A. Weiss, managing director of Big Drop Inc, demonstrates how discipline from competitive fencing translates into digital leadership excellence. Big Drop Inc. grew organically by solving real client problems rather than forcing service expansion, proving that agencies succeed by managing expectations effectively, not just delivering outputs. Companies that adopt new technologies early while maintaining proven practices achieve sustainable growth; those chasing every shiny object risk short-term gains that don't compound into lasting competitive advantage. James's leadership extends beyond business metrics into human values shaped by parenthood and community commitment. He champions inclusive design not as compliance but as business imperative, recognizing that twenty-five percent of the global population benefits from accessibility-first thinking. His integration of personal growth with professional decision-making creates cultures where long-term client partnerships flourish because they're built on genuine curiosity about what clients truly need, not just what can be sold to them. Ready to build sustainable digital growth? Big Drop Inc. specializes in strategic SEO audits, comprehensive marketing consultations, and AI-informed search optimization that positions your brand for years of success. Visit their website to connect with James and his team for a free consultation—transform your digital presence from reactive to strategically intentional today. For the accessible version of the podcast, go to our Ziotag gallery.We're happy you're here! Like the pod?Support the podcast and receive discounts from our sponsors: https://yourbrandamplified.codeadx.me/Leave a rating and review on your favorite platformFollow @yourbrandamplified on the socialsTalk to my digital avatar Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Companies are treating AI as an IT rollout rather than a fundamental business transformation. Stephen Wunker, Managing Director at New Markets Advisors, explains why this approach will become a costly strategic mistake within three years. He outlines the cross-functional framework required for successful AI integration, including HR involvement for workforce transition planning, and demonstrates how AI can fundamentally reshape value propositions and go-to-market channels beyond operational efficiency.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Send a textTune in for  the CRE Collaborative Inc. Roundtable as we talk through current market distraction and uncertainty amid regulation, consolidation, litigation, legislation, vendor bias in assessments, escalating cyber threats, and public/political resistance to AI/data centers.How To: Execute fundamentals; leverage predictive analytics and AI for independent grading; strengthen cyber hygiene and insurance; advocate on policy (1031, data centers, private property rights); experiment with AI ethically in targeted workflows.Why this is relevant: Deals flow to those who prepare and execute; unbiased evaluation improves decisions; cyber resilience protects wires and data; policy engagement and ethical AI use shape operating conditions and growth.“To me it's all about regulation and consolidation and litigation. And legislation.” Stated Saul Klein“Keep listing, keep selling… Do what you normally do and that you do well and it'll all work out.” Stated Saul Klein "Only people whose businesses are growing are interested in marketing… they're already self-selecting.” Stated Rebekah Carlson “This system represents… the closest thing to an independent evaluator that can look at things at such a broader scale.” stated Andreas Senie  “You are not crazy; all these things are in fact happening.” stated Darren Hayes =Practical Takeaways: Double down on foundations: announce conference attendance, book meetings in advance, and run networking cadences to convert appearances into deals.Integrate AI-driven, predictive asset grading to forecast CapEx, refine NOI, and prioritize capital deployment across resilient asset classes.Attach a cybersecurity policy to E&O; enforce MFA and dual wire verification; keep mobile OS updated and train teams on social engineering red flags.Tune in to the replay where the  CRE Collaborative Roundtable discuss all things Technology, Marketing, Brokerage, Government Policy, Capital, Construction & Cyber Security in Real Estate. How to it affects your real estate businesses, and what you can do for the next 30 days to outpace the competition.Your Roundtable Hosts:Andreas Senie, Host, Founder CRECollaborative (CRECo.ai), Technology Growth Strategist, CRETech Thought Leader, & Brokerage OwnerSaul Klein, Realtor Emeritus, Data Advocate & Futurist, Original Real Estate Internet Evangelist, Executive Editor Realty Times, IncRebekah Carlson, Founder & CEO Carlson Integrated, LLC, Past President NICAR Association, Brokerage OwnerProfessor Darren Hayes CEO Code Detectives, Professor Pace University, & Top 10 Forensic Cyber Security Specialist nationwide.Dan Wagner, Senior Vice President Government Relations at The The Inland Real Estate Group of Companies, Inc.ABOUT THE ROUNDTABLE:Your all in one comprehensive view of what is happening across the real estate industry -- straight from some of the industry's earliest technology adopters and foremost experts in Technology, Marketing, Capital, Construction & Cyber Security in Real EstateJoin us live at 6 PM EST on the 1st Thursday of each month, across all major social media channels and wherever you get your podcasts.This three-part show consists of:Part I: IntroduDon't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel where there is a host of additional great content and to visit CRECo.ai the Commercial Real Estate Industry's all-in-one dashboard to connect, research, execute, and collaborate online CRECo.ai. Please be sure to share, rate, and review us it really does help! Learn more at : https://welcome.creco.ai/reroundtable

Joe's Premium Subscription: www.standardgrain.comGrain Markets and Other Stuff Links —Apple PodcastsSpotifyTikTokYouTubeFutures and options trading involves risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone.

In today's market, AI valuations are expanding faster than fundamentals can justify. Companies with minimal free cash flow are being priced as if dominance is already secured.  Capital continues to circulate between venture portfolios, strategic partners, and ecosystem incumbents, reinforcing growth narratives that assume liquidity remains abundant. But markets don't reward narratives forever. When growth slows or capital tightens, the question shifts from projected upside to structural durability. Does the business generate real cash? Does it control proprietary data that compounds value? Is it positioned to be acquired or forced to sell? This is where discipline separates operators from spectators. Daniel Nikic has spent years operating inside early-stage capital markets, studying transaction patterns, portfolio structures, and acquisition behavior. From that vantage point, valuation is less about headlines and more about capital flows, strategic adjacency, and who holds liquidity when cycles turn. In this episode, we look beneath the surface of today's AI enthusiasm to examine what actually drives valuation, how smart founders reverse-engineer an exit, and why companies entering a slowdown with balance sheet strength don't just survive, they consolidate.   About the Guest  Daniel Nikic is an investment research professional and entrepreneur dedicated to delivering tailored insights and strategic solutions. With over two decades of experience, Daniel has built a career dedicated to empowering investors and businesses with actionable insights. Born and raised in Canada, He earned a Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration from Brock University, where his passion for market dynamics and financial analysis began to take shape. ​As the founder of Cohres, a boutique investment research firm, Daniel specializes in helping high-net-worth individuals, venture capitalists, and startups navigate complex markets and emerging industries such as AI, SaaS, and data. His career journey includes impactful roles at HB Reavis, where he managed €500M real estate projects, Zursh, where he led AI-focused initiatives, and Azafran Capital Partners, where he developed investment strategies and managed data teams. ​Through his dedication to innovation, Daniel combines a global perspective with a hands-on approach, helping clients uncover growth opportunities and achieve their goals. His leadership has positioned Cohres as a trusted name in investment research and strategic planning. To learn more, visit https://www.danielnikic.com/.    About Your Host From pro-snowboarder to money mogul, Chris Naugle has dedicated his life to being America's #1 Money Mentor. With a core belief that success is built not by the resources you have, but by how resourceful you can be. Chris has built and owned 19 companies, with his businesses being featured in Forbes, ABC, House Hunters, and his very own HGTV pilot in 2018. He is the founder of The Money School™ and Money Mentor for The Money Multiplier. His success also includes managing tens of millions of dollars in assets in the financial services and advisory industry and in real estate transactions. As an innovator and visionary in wealth-building and real estate, he empowers entrepreneurs, business owners, and real estate investors with the knowledge of how money works. Chris is also a nationally recognized speaker, author, and podcast host. He has spoken to and taught over ten thousand Americans, delivering the financial knowledge that fuels lasting freedom.   Resources Get Your FREE Copy Of 'The Private Money Guide'  and 'Mapping Out The Millionaire Mystery'.  Keep up with us every week on our FREE Live webinars for more conversations like this, and as a BONUS, get our newest mini-ebook instantly upon signing up! https://moneyschoolrei.com/wednesday-webinar (digital download). Dive into money, mindset, and motivation videos on my YouTube Channel, and be sure to subscribe so you can be notified of our weekly LIVE streams. Find out about our next weekend workshop, and see what others are saying: https://www.moneyschooltraining.com/registration.      

The reception to our recent post on Code Reviews has been strong. Catch up!Amid a maelstrom of discussion on whether or not AI is killing SaaS, one of the top publicly listed SaaS companies in the world has just reported record revenues, clearing well over $1.1B in ARR for the first time with a 28% margin. As we comment on the pod, Aaron Levie is the rare public company CEO equally at home in both worlds of Silicon Valley and Wall Street/Main Street, by day helping 70% of the Fortune 500 with their Enterprise Advanced Suite, and yet by night is often found in the basements of early startups and tweeting viral insights about the future of agents.Now that both Cursor, Cloudflare, Perplexity, Anthropic and more have made Filesystems and Sandboxes and various forms of “Just Give the Agent a Box” cool (not just cool; it is now one of the single hottest areas in AI infrastructure growing 100% MoM), we find it a delightfully appropriate time to do the episode with the OG CEO who has been giving humans and computers Boxes since he was a college dropout pitching VCs at a Michael Arrington house party.Enjoy our special pod, with fan favorite returning guest/guest cohost Jeff Huber!Note: We didn't directly discuss the AI vs SaaS debate - Aaron has done many, many, many other podcasts on that, and you should read his definitive essay on it. Most commentators do not understand SaaS businesses because they have never scaled one themselves, and deeply reflected on what the true value proposition of SaaS is.We also discuss Your Company is a Filesystem:We also shoutout CTO Ben Kus' and the AI team, who talked about the technical architecture and will return for AIE WF 2026.Full Video EpisodeTimestamps* 00:00 Adapting Work for Agents* 01:29 Why Every Agent Needs a Box* 04:38 Agent Governance and Identity* 11:28 Why Coding Agents Took Off First* 21:42 Context Engineering and Search Limits* 31:29 Inside Agent Evals* 33:23 Industries and Datasets* 35:22 Building the Agent Team* 38:50 Read Write Agent Workflows* 41:54 Docs Graphs and Founder Mode* 55:38 Token FOMO Culture* 56:31 Production Function Secrets* 01:01:08 Film Roots to Box* 01:03:38 AI Future of Movies* 01:06:47 Media DevRel and EngineeringTranscriptAdapting Work for AgentsAaron Levie: Like you don't write code, you talk to an agent and it goes and does it for you, and you may be at best review it. That's even probably like, like largely not even what you're doing. What's happening is we are changing our work to make the agents effective. In that model, the agent didn't really adapt to how we work.We basically adapted to how the agent works. All of the economy has to go through that exact same evolution. Right now, it's a huge asset and an advantage for the teams that do it early and that are kinda wired into doing this ‘cause you'll see compounding returns. But that's just gonna take a while for most companies to actually go and get this deployed.swyx: Welcome to the Lane Space Pod. We're back in the chroma studio with uh, chroma, CEO, Jeff Hoover. Welcome returning guest now guest host.Aaron Levie: It's a pleasure. Wow. How'd you get upgraded to, uh, to that?swyx: Because he's like the perfect guy to be guest those for you.Aaron Levie: That makes sense actually, for We love context. We, we both really love context le we really do.We really do.swyx: Uh, and we're here with, uh, Aaron Levy. Welcome.Aaron Levie: Thank you. Good to, uh, good to be [00:01:00] here.swyx: Uh, yeah. So we've all met offline and like chatted a little bit, but like, it's always nice to get these things in person and conversation. Yeah. You just started off with so much energy. You're, you're super excited about agents.I loveAaron Levie: agents.swyx: Yeah. Open claw. Just got by, got bought by OpenAI. No, not bought, but you know, you know what I mean?Aaron Levie: Some, some, you know, acquihire. Executiveswyx: hire.Aaron Levie: Executive hire. Okay. Executive hire. Say,swyx: hey, that's my term. Okay. Um, what are you pounding the table on on agents? You have so many insightful tweets.Why Every Agent Needs a BoxAaron Levie: Well, the thing that, that we get super excited by that I think is probably, you know, should be relatively obvious is we've, we've built a platform to help enterprises manage their files and their, their corporate files and the permissions of who has access to those files and the sharing collaboration of those files.All of those files contain really, really important information for the enterprise. It might have your contracts, it might have your research materials, it might have marketing information, it might have your memos. All that data obviously has, you know, predominantly been used by humans. [00:02:00] But there's been one really interesting problem, which is that, you know, humans only really work with their files during an active engagement with them, and they kind of go away and you don't really see them for a long time.And all of a sudden, uh, with the power of AI and AI agents, all of that data becomes extremely relevant as this ongoing source of, of answers to new questions of data that will transform into, into something else that, that produces value in your organization. It, it contains the answer to the new employee that's onboarding, that needs to ramp up on a project.Um, it contains the answer to the right thing to sell a customer when you're having a conversation to them, with them contains the roadmap information that's gonna produce the next feature. So all that data. That previously we've been just sort of storing and, and you know, occasionally forgetting about, ‘cause we're only working on the new active stuff.All of that information becomes valuable to the enterprise and it's gonna become extremely valuable to end users because now they can have agents go find what they're looking for and produce new, new [00:03:00] value and new data on that information. And it's gonna become incredibly valuable to agents because agents can roam around and do a bunch of work and they're gonna need access to that data as well.And um, and you know, sometimes that will be an agent that is sort of working on behalf of, of, of you and, and effectively as you as and, and they are kind of accessing all of the same information that you have access to and, and operating as you in the system. And then sometimes there's gonna be agents that are just.Effectively autonomous and kind of run on their own and, and you're gonna collaborate and work with them kind of like you did another person. Open Claw being the most recent and maybe first real sort of, you know, kind of, you know, up updating everybody's, you know, views of this landscape version of, of what that could look like, which is, okay, I have an agent.It's on its own system, it's on its own computer, it has access to its own tools. I probably don't give it access to my entire life. I probably communicate with it like I would an assistant or a colleague and then it, it sort of has this sandbox environment. So all of that has massive implications for a platform that manage that [00:04:00] enterprise data.We think it's gonna just transform how we work with all of the enterprise content that we work with, and we just have to make sure we're building the right platform to support that.swyx: The sort of shorthand I put it is as people build agents, everybody's just realizing that every agent needs a box. Yes.And it's nice to be called box and just give everyone a box.Aaron Levie: Hey, I if I, you know, if we can make that go viral, uh, like I, I think that that terminology, I, that's theswyx: tagline. Every agentAaron Levie: needs a box. Every agent needs a box. If we can make that the headline of this, I'm fine with this. And that's the billboard I wanna like Yeah, exactly.Every agent needs a box. Um, I like it. Can we ship this? Like,swyx: okay, let's do it. Yeah.Aaron Levie: Uh, my work here is done and I got the value I needed outta this podcast Drinks.swyx: Yeah.Agent Governance and IdentityAaron Levie: But, but, um, but, but, you know, so the thing that we, we kind of think about is, um, is, you know, whether you think the number 10 x or a hundred x or whatever the number is, we're gonna have some order of magnitude more agents than people.That's inevitable. It has to happen. So then the question is, what is the infrastructure that's needed to make all those agents effective in the enterprise? Make sure that they are well governed. Make sure they're only doing [00:05:00] safe things on your information. Make sure that they're not getting exposed. The data that they shouldn't have access to.There's gonna be just incredibly spectacularly crazy security incidents that will happen with agents because you'll prompt, inject an agent and sort of find your way through the CRM system and pull out data that you shouldn't have access to. Oh, weJeff Huber: have God,Aaron Levie: right? I mean, that's just gonna happen all over the place, right?So, so then the thing is, is how do you make sure you have the right security, the permissions, the access controls, the data governance. Um, we actually don't yet exactly know in many cases how we're gonna regulate some of these agents, right? If you think about an agent in financial services, does it have the exact same financial sort of, uh, requirements that a human did?Or is it, is the risk fully on the human that was interacting or created the agent? All open questions, but no matter what, there's gonna need to be a layer that manages the, the data they have access to, the workflows that they're involved in, pulling up data from multiple systems. This is the new infrastructure opportunity in the era of agents.swyx: You have a piece on agent identities, [00:06:00] which I think was today, um, which I think a lot of breaking news, the security, security people are talking about, right? Like you basically, I, I always think of this as like, well you need the human you and then there you need the agent. YouAaron Levie: Yes.swyx: And uh, well, I don't know if it's that simple, but is box going to have an opinion on that or you're just gonna be like, well we're just the sort of the, the source layer.Yeah. Let's Okta of zero handle that.Aaron Levie: I think we're gonna have an opinion and we will work with generally wherever the contours of the market end up. Um, and the reason that we're gonna have an opinion more than other topics probably is because one of the biggest use cases for why your agent might need it, an identity is for file system access.So thus we have to kind of think about this pretty deeply. And I think, uh, unless you're like in our world thinking about this particular problem all day long, it might be, you know, like, why is this such a big deal? And the reason why it's a really big deal is because sometimes sort of say, well just give the agent an, an account on the system and it just treats, treat it like every other type of user on the system.The [00:07:00] problem is, is that I as Aaron don't really have any responsibility over anybody else's box account in our organization. I can't see the box account of any other employee that I work with. I am not liable for anything that they do. And they have, I have, I have, you know, strict privacy requirements on everything that they're able to, you know, that, that, that they work on.Agents don't have that, you know, don't have those properties. The person who creates the agent probably is gonna, for the foreseeable future, take on a lot of the liability of what that agent does. That agent doesn't deserve any privacy because, because it's, you know, it can't fully be autonomously operated and it doesn't have any legal, you know, kind of, you know, responsibility.So thus you can't just be like, oh, well I'll just create a bunch of accounts and then I'll, I'll kind of work with that agent and I'll talk to it occasionally. Like you need oversight of that. And so then the question is, how do you have a world where the agent, sometimes you have oversight of, but what if that agent goes and works with other people?That person over there is collaborating with the agent on something you shouldn't have [00:08:00] access to what they're doing. So we have all of these new boundaries that we're gonna have to figure out of, of, you know, it's really, really easy. So far we've been in, in easy mode. We've hit the easy button with ai, which is the agent just is you.And when you're in quad code and you're in cursor, and you're in Codex, you're just, the agent is you. You're offing into your services. It can do everything you can do. That's the easy mode. The hard mode is agents are kind of running on their own. People check in with them occasionally, they're doing things autonomously.How do you give them access to resources in the enterprise and not dramatically increased the security risk and the risk that you might expose the wrong thing to somebody. These are all the new problems that we have to get solved. I like the identity layer and, and identity vendors as being a solution to that, but we'll, we'll need some opinions as well because so many of the use cases are these collaborative file system use cases, which is how do I give it an agent, a subset of my data?Give it its own workspace as well. ‘cause it's gonna need to store off its own information that would be relevant for it. And how do I have the right oversight into that? [00:09:00]Jeff Huber: One thing, which, um, I think is kind interesting, think about is that you know, how humans work, right? Like I may not also just like give you access to the whole file.I might like sit next to you and like scroll to this like one part of the file and just show you that like one part and like, you know,swyx: partial file access.Jeff Huber: I'm just saying I think like our, like RA does seem to be dead, right? Like you wanna say something is dead uhhuh probably RA is dead. And uh, like the auth story to me seems like incredibly unsolved and unaddressed by like the existing state of like AI vendors.ButAaron Levie: yeah, I think, um, we're, I mean you're taking obviously really to level limit that we probably need to solve for. Yeah. And we built an access control system that was, was kind of like, you know, its own little world for, for a long time. And um, and the idea was this, it's a many to many collaboration system where I can give you any part of the file system.And it's a waterfall model. So if I give you higher up in the, in the, in the system, you get everything below. And that, that kind of created immense flexibility because I can kind of point you to any layer in the, in the tree, but then you're gonna get access to everything kind of below it. And that [00:10:00] mostly is, is working in this, in this world.But you do have to manage this issue, which is how do I create an agent that has access to some of my stuff and somebody else's stuff as well. Mm-hmm. And which parts do I get to look at as the creator of the agent? And, and these are just brand new problems? Yeah. Crazy. And humans, when there was a human there that was really easy to do.Like, like if the three of us were all sharing, there'd be a Venn diagram where we'd have an overlapping set of things we've shared, but then we'd have our own ways that we shared with each other. In an agent world, somebody needs to take responsibility for what that agent has access to and what they're working on.These are like the, some of the most probably, you know, boring problems for 98% of people on, on the internet, but they will be the problems that are the difference between can you actually have autonomous agents in an enterprise contextswyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: That are not leaking your data constantly.swyx: No. Like, I mean, you know, I run a very, very small company for my conference and like we already have data sensitivity issues.Yes. And some of my team members cannot see Yes. Uh, the others and like, I can't imagine what it's like to run a Fortune 500 and like, you have to [00:11:00] worry about this. I'm just kinda curious, like you, you talked to a lot like, like 70, 80% of your cus uh, of the Fortune 500, your customers.Aaron Levie: Yep. 67%. Just so we're being verySEswyx: precise.So Yeah. I'm notAaron Levie: Okay. Okay.swyx: Something I'm rounding up. Yes. Round up. I'm projecting to, forAaron Levie: the government.swyx: I'm projecting to the end of the year.Aaron Levie: Okay.swyx: There you go.Aaron Levie: You do make it sound like, like we, we, well we've gotta be on this. Like we're, we're taking way too long to get to 80%. Well,swyx: no, I mean, so like. How are they approaching it?Right? Because you're, you don't have a, you don't have a final answer yet.Why Coding Agents Took Off FirstAaron Levie: Well, okay, so, so this is actually, this is the stark reality that like, unfortunately is the kinda like pouring the water on the party a little bit.swyx: Yes.Aaron Levie: We all in Silicon Valley are like, have the absolute best conditions possible for AI ever.And I think we all saw the dke, you know, kind of Dario podcast and this idea of AI coding. Why is that taken off? And, and we're not yet fully seeing it everywhere else. Well, look, if you just like enumerated the list of properties that AI coding has and then compared it to other [00:12:00] knowledge work, let's just, let's just go through a few of them.Generally speaking, you bring on a new engineer, they have access to a large swath of the code base. Like, there's like very, like you, just, like new engineer comes on, they can just go and find the, the, the stuff that they, they need to work with. It's a fully text in text out. Medium. It's only, it's just gonna be text at the end of the day.So it's like really great from a, from just a, uh, you know, kinda what the agent can work with. Obviously the models are super trained on that dataset. The labs themselves have a really strong, kind of self-reinforcing positive flywheel of why they need to do, you know, agent coding deeply. So then you get just better tooling, better services.The actual developers of the AI are daily users of the, of the thing that they're we're working on versus like the, you know, probably there's only like seven Claude Cowork legal plugin users at Anthropic any given day, but there's like a couple thousand Claude code and you know, users every single day.So just like, think about which one are they getting more feedback on. All day long. So you just go through this list. You have a, you know, everybody who's a [00:13:00] developer by definition is technical so they can go install the latest thing. We're all generally online, or at least, you know, kinda the weird ones are, and we're all talking to each other, sharing best practices, like that's like already eight differences.Versus the rest of the economy. Every other part of the economy has like, like six to seven headwinds relative to that list. You go into a company, you're a banker in financial services, you have access to like a, a tiny little subset of the total data that's gonna be relevant to do your job. And you're have to start to go and talk to a bunch of people to get the right data to do your job because Sally didn't add you to that deal room, you know, folder.And that that, you know, the information is actually in a completely different organization that you now have to go in and, and sort of run into. And it's like you have this endless list of access controls and security. As, as you talked about, you have a medium, which is not, it's not just text, right? You have, you have a zoom call that, that you're getting all of the requirements from the customer.You have a lot of in-person conversations and you're doing in-person sales and like how do you ever [00:14:00] digitize all of that information? Um, you know, I think a lot of people got upset with this idea that the code base has all the context, um, that I don't know if you follow, you know, did you follow some of that conversation that that went viral?Is like, you know, it's not that simple that, that the code base doesn't have all the knowledge, but like it's a lot, you're a lot better off than you are with other areas of knowledge work. Like you, we like, we like have documentation practices, you write specifications. Those things don't exist for like 80% of work that happens in the enterprise.That's the divide that we have, which is, which is AI coding has, has just fully, you know, where we've reached escape velocity of how powerful this stuff is, and then we're gonna have to find a way to bring that same energy and momentum, but to all these other areas of knowledge work. Where the tools aren't there, the data's not set up to be there.The access controls don't make it that easy. The context engineering is an incredibly hard problem because again, you have access control challenges, you have different data formats. You have end users that are gonna need to kind of be kind of trained through this as opposed to their adopting [00:15:00] these tools in their free time.That's where the Fortune 500 is. And so we, I think, you know, have to be prepared as an industry where we are gonna be on a multi-year march to, to be able to bring agents to the enterprise for these workflows. And I think probably the, the thing that we've learned most in coding that, that the rest of the world is not yet, I think ready for, I mean, we're, they'll, they'll have to be ready for it because it's just gonna inevitably happen is I think in coding.What, what's interesting is if you think about the practice of coding today versus two years ago. It's probably the most changed workflow in maybe the history of time from the amount of time it's changed, right? Yeah. Like, like has any, has any workflow in the entire economy changed that quickly in terms of the amount of change?I just, you know, at least in any knowledge worker workflow, there's like very rarely been an event where one piece of technology and work practice has so fundamentally, you know, changed, changed what you do. Like you don't write code, you talk to an agent and it goes and [00:16:00] does it for you, and you may be at best review it.And even that's even probably like, like largely not even what you're doing. What's happening is we are changing our work to make the agents effective. In that model, the agent didn't really adapt to how we work. We basically adapted to how the agent works. Mm-hmm. All of the economy has to go through that exact same evolution.The rest of the economy is gonna have to update its workflows to make agents effective. And to give agents the context that they need and to actually figure out what kind of prompting works and to figure out how do you ensure that the agent has the right access to information to be able to execute on its work.I, you know, this is not the panacea that people were hoping for, of the agent drops in, just automates your life. Like you have to basically re-engineer your workflow to get the most out of agents and, uh, and that, that's just gonna take, you know, multiple years across the economy. Right now it's a huge asset and an advantage for the teams that do it early and that are kinda wired into doing this.‘cause [00:17:00] you'll see compounding returns, but that's just gonna take a while for most companies to actually go and get this deployed.swyx: I love, I love pushing back. I think that. That is what a lot of technology consultants love to hear this sort of thing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. First to, to embrace the ai. Yes. To get to the promised land, you must pay me so much money to a hundred percent to adopt the prescribed way of, uh, conforming to the agents.Yes. And I worry that you will be eclipsed by someone else who says, no, come as you are.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And we'll meet you where you are.Aaron Levie: And, and, and and what was the thing that went viral a week ago? OpenAI probably, uh, is hiring F Dees. Yeah. Uh, to go into the enterprise. Yeah. Yeah. And then philanthropic is embedded at Goldman Sachs.Yeah. So if the labs are having to do this, if, if the labs have decided that they need to hire FDE and professional services, then I think that's a pretty clear indication that this, there's no easy mode of workflow transformation. Yeah. Yeah. So, so to your point, I think actually this is a market opportunity for, you know, new professional services and consulting [00:18:00] firms that are like Agent Build and they, and they kind of, you know, go into organizations and they figure out how to re-engineer your workflows to make them more agent ready and get your data into the right format and, you know, reconstruct your business process.So you're, you're not doing most of the work. You're telling agents how to do the work and then you're reviewing it. But I haven't seen the thing that can just drop in and, and kinda let you not go through those changes.swyx: I don't know how that kind of sales pitch goes over. Yeah. You know, you're, you're saying things like, well, in my sort of nice beautiful walled garden, here's, there's, uh, because here's this, here's this beautiful box account that has everything.Yes. And I'm like, well, most, most real life is extremely messy. Sure. And like, poorly named and there duplicate this outdated s**tAaron Levie: a hundred percent. And so No, no, a hundred percent. And so this is actually No. So, so this is, I mean, we agree that, that getting to the beautiful garden is gonna be tough.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: There's also the other end of the spectrum where I, I just like, it's a technical impossibility to solve. The agent is, is truly cannot get enough context to make the right decision in, in the, in the incredibly messy land. Like there's [00:19:00] no a GI that will solve that. So, so we're gonna have to kind of land in somewhere in between, which is like we all collectively get better at.Documentation practices and, and having authoritative relatively up-to-date information and putting it in the right place like agents will, will certainly cause us to be much better organized around how we work with our information, simply because the severity of the agent pulling the wrong data will be too high and the productivity gain of that you'll miss out on by not doing this will be too high as well, that you, that your competition will just do it and they'll just have higher velocity.So, uh, and, and we, we see this a lot firsthand. So we, we build a series of agents internally that they can kind of have access to your full box account and go off and you give it a task and it can go find whatever information you're looking for and work with. And, you know, thank God for the model progress, but like, if, if you gave that task to an agent.Nine months ago, you're just gonna get lots of bogus answers because it's gonna, it's gonna say, Hey, here's, here are fi [00:20:00] five, you know, documents that all kind of smell like the right thing. And I'm gonna, but I, but you're, you're putting me on the clock. ‘cause my assistant prompt says like, you know, be pretty smart, but also try and respond to the user and it's gonna respond.And it's like, ah, it got the wrong document. And then you do that once or twice as a knowledge worker and you're just neverswyx: again,Aaron Levie: never again. You're just like done with the system.swyx: Yeah. It doesn't work.Aaron Levie: It doesn't work. And so, you know, Opus four six and Gemini three one Pro and you know, whatever the latest five 3G BT will be, like, those things are getting better and better and it's using better judgment.And this sort of like the, all of these updates to the agentic tool and search systems are, are, we're seeing, we're seeing very real progress where the agent. Kind of can, can almost smell some things a little bit fishy when it's getting, you know, we, we have this process where we, we have it go fan out, do a bunch of searches, pull up a bunch of data, and then it has to sort of do its own ranking of, you know, what are the right documents that, that it should be working with.And again, like, you know, the intelligence level of a model six months ago, [00:21:00] it'd be just throwing a dart at like, I'm just, I'm gonna grab these seven files and I, I pray, I hope that that's the right answer. And something like an opus first four five, and now four six is like, oh, it's like, no, that one doesn't seem right relative to this question because I'm seeing some signal that is making that, you know, that's contradicting the document where it would normally be in the tree and who should have access.Like it's doing all of that kind of work for you. But like, it still doesn't work if you just have a total wasteland of data. Like, it's just not, it's just not possible. Partly ‘cause a human wouldn't even be able to do it. So basically if a, if a really, really smart human. Could not do that task in five or 10 minutes for a search retrieval type task.Look, you know, your agent's not gonna be able to do it any better. You see this all day long. SoContext Engineering and Search Limitsswyx: this touches on a thing that just passionate about it was just context engineering. I, I'm just gonna let you ramble or riff on, on context engineering. If, if, if there's anything like he, he did really good work on context fraud, which has really taken over as like the term that people use and the referenceAaron Levie: a hundred percent.We, we all we think about is, is the context rob problem. [00:22:00]Jeff Huber: Yeah, there's certainly a lot of like ranking considerations. Gentech surgery think is incredibly promising. Um, yeah, I was trying to generate a question though. I think I have a question right now. Swyx.Aaron Levie: Yeah, no, but like, like I think there was this moment, um, you know, like, I don't know, two years ago before, before we knew like where the, the gotchas were gonna be in ai and I think someone was like, was like, well, infinite context windows will just solve all of these problems and ‘cause you'll just, you'll just give the context window like all the data and.It's just like, okay, I mean, maybe in 2035, like this is a viable solution. First of all, it, it would just, it would just simply cost too much. Like we just can't give the model like the 5,000 documents that might be relevant and it's gonna read them all. And I've seen enough to, to start believing in crazy stuff.So like, I'm willing to just say, sure. Like in, in 10 years from now,swyx: never say, never, never.Aaron Levie: In, in 10 years from now, we'll have infinite context windows at, at a thousandth of the price of today. Like, let's just like believe that that's possible, but Right. We're in reality today. So today we have a context engineering [00:23:00] problem, which is, I got, I got, you know, 200,000 tokens that I can work with, or prob, I don't even know what the latest graph is before, like massive degradation.16. Okay. I have 60,000 tokens that I get to work with where I'm gonna get accurate information. That's not a lot of tokens for a corpus of 10 million documents that a knowledge worker might have across all of the teams and all the projects and all the people they work with. I have, I have 10 million documents.Which, you know, maybe is times five pages per document or something like that. I'm at 50 million pages of information and I have 60,000 tokens. Like, holy s**t. Yeah. This is like, how do I bridge the 50 million pages of information with, you know, the couple hundred that I get to work with in that, in that token window.Yeah. This is like, this is like such an interesting problem and that's why actually so much work is actually like, just like search systems and the databases and that layer has to just get so locked in, but models getting better and importantly [00:24:00] knowing when they've done a search, they found the wrong thing, they go back, they check their work, they, they find a way to balance sort of appeasing the user versus double checking.We have this one, we have this one test case where we ask the agent to go find. 10 pieces of information.swyx: Is this the complex work eval?Aaron Levie: Uh, this is actually not in the eval. This is, this is sort of just like we have a bunch of different, we have a bunch of internal benchmark kind of scenarios. Every time we, we update our agent, we have one, which is, I ask it to find all of our office addresses, and I give it the list of 10 offices that we have.And there's not one document that has this, maybe there should be, that would be a great example of the kind of thing that like maybe over time companies start to, you know, have these sort of like, what are the canonical, you know, kind of key areas of knowledge that we need to have. We don't seem to have this one document that says, here are all of our offices.We have a bunch of documents that have like, here's the New York office and whatever. So you task this agent and you, you get, you say, I need the addresses for these 10 offices. Okay. And by the way, if you do this on any, you know, [00:25:00] public chat model, the same outcome is gonna happen. But for a different kind of query, you give it, you say, I need these 10 addresses.How many times should the agent go and do its search before it decides whether or not, there's just no answer to this question. Often, and especially the, the, let's say lower tier models, it'll come back and it'll give you six of the 10 addresses. And it'll, and I'll just say I couldn't find the otherswyx: four.It, it doesn't know what It doesn't know. ItAaron Levie: doesn't know what It doesn't know. Yeah. So the model is just like, like when should it stop? When should it stop doing? Like should it, should it do that task for literally an hour and just keep cranking through? Maybe I actually made up an office location and it doesn't know that I made it up and I didn't even know that I made it up.Like, should it just keep, re should it read every single file in your entire box account until it, until it should exhaust every single piece of information.swyx: Expensive.Aaron Levie: These are the new problems that we have. So, you know, something like, let's say a new opus model is sort of like, okay, I'm gonna try these types of queries.I didn't get exactly what I wanted. I'm gonna try again. I'm gonna, at [00:26:00] some point I'm gonna stop searching. ‘cause I've determined that that no amount of searching is gonna solve this problem. I'm just not able to do it. And that judgment is like a really new thing that the model needs to be able to have.It's like, when should it give up on a task? ‘cause, ‘cause you just don't, it's a can't find the thing. That's the real world of knowledge, work problems. And this is the stuff that the coding agents don't have to deal with. Because they, it just doesn't like, like you're not usually asking it about, you're, you're always creating net new information coming right outta the model for the most part.Obviously it has to know about your code base and your specs and your documentation, but, but when you deploy an agent on all of your data that now you have all of these new problems that you're dealing withJeff Huber: our, uh, follow follow-up research to context ride is actually on a genetic search. Ah. Um, and we've like right, sort of stress tested like frontier models and their ability to search.Um, and they're not actually that good at searching. Right. Uh, so you're sort of highlighting this like explore, exploit.swyx: You're just say, Debbie, Donna say everything doesn't work. Like,Aaron Levie: well,Jeff Huber: somebody has to be,Aaron Levie: um, can I just throw out one more thing? Yeah. That is different from coding and, and the rest [00:27:00] of the knowledge work that I, I failed to mention.So one other kind of key point is, is that, you know, at the end of the day. Whether you believe we're in a slop apocalypse or, or whatever. At the end of the day, if you, if you build a working product at the end of, if you, if you've built a working solution that is ultimately what the customer is paying for, like whether I have a lot of slop, a little slop or whatever, I'm sure there's lots of code bases we could go into in enterprise software companies where it's like just crazy slop that humans did over a 20 year period, but the end customer just gets this little interface.They can, they can type into it, it does its thing. Knowledge work, uh, doesn't have that property. If I have an AI model, go generate a contract and I generate a contract 20 times and, you know, all 20 times it's just 3% different and like that I, that, that kind of lop introduces all new kinds of risk for my organization that the code version of that LOP didn't, didn't introduce.These are, and so like, so how do you constrain these models to just the part that you want [00:28:00] them to work on and just do the thing that you want them to do? And, and, you know, in engineering, we don't, you can't be disbarred as an engineer, but you could be disbarred as a lawyer. Like you can do the wrong medical thing In healthcare, you, there's no, there's no equivalent to that of engineering.Like, doswyx: you want there to be, because I've considered softwareJeff Huber: engineer. What's that? Civil engineering there is, right? NotAaron Levie: software civil engineer. Sure. Oh yeah, for sure. But like in any of our companies, you like, you know, you'll be forgiven if you took down the site and, and we, we will do a rollback and you'll, you'll be in a meeting, but you have not been disbarred as an engineer.We don't, we don't change your, you know, your computer science, uh, blameJeff Huber: degree, this postmortem.Aaron Levie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, so, uh, now maybe we collectively as an industry need to figure out like, what are you liable for? Not legally, but like in a, in a management sense, uh, of these agents. All sorts of interesting problems that, that, that, uh, that have to come out.But in knowledge work, that's the real hostile environments that we're operating in. Hmm.swyx: I do think like, uh, a lot of the last year's, 2025 story was the rise of coding agents and I think [00:29:00] 2026 story is definitely knowledge work agents. Yes. A hundredAaron Levie: percent.swyx: Right. Like that would, and I think open claw core work are just the beginning.Yes. Like it's, the next one's gonna just gonna be absolute craziness.Aaron Levie: It it is. And, and, uh, and it's gonna be, I mean, again, like this is gonna be this, this wave where we, we are gonna try and bring as many of the practices from coding because that, that will clearly be the forefront, which is tell an agent to go do something and has an access to a set of resources.You need to be responsible for reviewing it at the end of the process. That to me is the, is the kind of template that I just think goes across knowledge, work and odd. Cowork is a great example. Open Closet's a great example. You can kind of, sort of see what Codex could become over time. These are some, some really interesting kind of platforms that are emerging.swyx: Okay. Um, I wanted to, we touched on evals a little bit. You had, you had the report that you're gonna go bring up and then I was gonna go into like, uh, boxes, evals, but uh, go ahead. Talk about your genetic search thing.Jeff Huber: Yeah. Mostly I think kinda a few of the insights. It's like number one frontier model is not good at search.Humans have this [00:30:00] natural explore, exploit trade off where we kinda understand like when to stop doing something. Also, humans are pretty good at like forgetting actually, and like pruning their own context, whereas agents are not, and actually an agent in their kind of context history, if they knew something was bad and they even, you could see in the trace the reason you trace, Hey, that probably wasn't a good idea.If it's still in the trace, still in the context, they'll still do it again. Uhhuh. Uh, and so like, I think pruning is also gonna be like, really, it's already becoming a thing, right? But like, letting self prune the con windowsswyx: be a big deal. Yeah. So, so don't leave the mistake. Don't leave the mistake in there.Cut out the mistake but tell it that you made a mistake in the past and so it doesn't repeat it.Jeff Huber: Yeah. But like cut it out so it doesn't get like distracted by it again. ‘cause really, you know, what is so, so it will repeat its mistake just because it's been, it's inswyx: theJeff Huber: context. It'sAaron Levie: in the context so much.That's a few shot example. Even if it, yeah.Jeff Huber: It's like oh thisAaron Levie: is a great thing to go try even ifJeff Huber: it didn't work.Aaron Levie: Yeah,Jeff Huber: exactly.Aaron Levie: SoJeff Huber: there's like a bunch of stuff there. JustAaron Levie: Groundhogs Day inside these models. Yeah. I'm gonna go keep doing the same wrongJeff Huber: thing. Covering sense. I feel like, you know, some creator analogy you're trying like fit a manifold in latent space, which kind is doing break program synthesis, which is kinda one we think about we're doing right.Like, you know, certain [00:31:00] facts might be like sort of overly pitting it. There are certain, you know, sec sectors of latent space and so like plug clean space. Yeah. And, uh, andswyx: so we have a bell, our editor as a bell every time you say that. SoJeff Huber: you have, you have to like remove those, likeswyx: you shoulda a gong like TPN or something.IfJeff Huber: we gong, you either remove those links to like kinda give it the freedom, kind of do what you need to do. So, but yeah. We'll, we'll release more soon. That'sAaron Levie: awesome.Jeff Huber: That'll, that'll be cool.swyx: We're a cerebral podcast that people listen to us and, and sort of think really deep. So yeah, we try to keep it subtle.Okay. We try to keep it.Aaron Levie: Okay, fine.Inside Agent Evalsswyx: Um, you, you guys do, you guys do have EVs, you talked about your, your office thing, but, uh, you've been also promoting APEX agents and complex work. Uh, yeah, whatever you, wherever you wanna take this just Yeah. How youAaron Levie: Apex is, is obviously me, core's, uh, uh, kind of, um, agent eval.We, we supported that by sort of. Opening up some data for them around how we kind of see these, um, data workspaces in, in the, you know, kind of regular economy. So how do lawyers have a workspace? How do investment bankers have a workspace? What kind of data goes into those? And so we, [00:32:00] we partner with them on their, their apex eval.Our own, um, eval is, it's actually relatively straightforward. We have a, a set of, of documents in a, in a range of industries. We give the agent previously did this as a one shot test of just purely the model. And then we just realized we, we need to, based on where everything's going, it's just gotta be more agentic.So now it's a bit more of a test of both our harness and the model. And we have a rubric of a set of things that has to get right and we score it. Um, and you're just seeing, you know, these incredible jumps in almost every single model in its own family of, you know, opus four, um, you know, sonnet four six versus sonnet four five.swyx: Yeah. We have this up on screen.Aaron Levie: Okay, cool. So some, you're seeing it somewhere like. I, I forget the to, it was like 15 point jump, I think on the main, on the overall,swyx: yes.Aaron Levie: And it's just like, you know, these incredible leaps that, that are starting to happen. Um,swyx: and OP doesn't know any, like any, it's completely held out from op.Aaron Levie: This is not in any, there's no public data which has, you know, Ben benefits and this is just a private eval that we [00:33:00] do, and then we just happen to show it to, to the world. Hmm. So you can't, you can't train against it. And I think it's just as representative of. It's obviously reasoning capabilities, what it's doing at, at, you know, kind of test time, compute capabilities, thinking levels, all like the context rot issues.So many interesting, you know, kind of, uh, uh, capabilities that are, that are now improvingswyx: one sector that you have. That's interesting.Industries and Datasetsswyx: Uh, people are roughly familiar with healthcare and legal, but you have public sector in there.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: Uh, what's that? Like, what, what, what is that?Aaron Levie: Yeah, and, and we actually test against, I dunno, maybe 10 industries.We, we end up usually just cutting a few that we think have interesting gains. All extras, won a lot of like government type documents. Um,swyx: what is that? What is it? Government type documents?Aaron Levie: Government filings. Like a taxswyx: return, likeAaron Levie: a probably not tax returns. It would be more of what would go the government be using, uh, as data.So, okay. Um, so think about research that, that type of, of, of data sets. And then we have financial services for things like data rooms and what would be in an investment prospectus. Uhhuh,swyx: that one you can dog food.Aaron Levie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yes. Yes. [00:34:00] So, uh, so we, we run the models, um, in now, you know, more of an agent mode, but, but still with, with kinda limited capacity and just try and see like on a, like, for like basis, what are the improvements?And, and again, we just continue to be blown away by. How, how good these models are getting.swyx: Yeah, I mean, I think every serious AI company needs something like that where like, well, this is the work we do. Here's our company eval. Yeah. And if you don't have it, well, you're not a serious AI company.Aaron Levie: There's two dimensions, right?So there's, there's like, how are the models improving? And so which models should you either recommend a customer use, which one should you adopt? But then every single day, we're making changes to our agents. And you need to knowswyx: if you regressed,Aaron Levie: if you know. Yeah. You know, I've been fully convinced that the whole agent observability and eval space is gonna be a massive space.Um, super excited for what Braintrust is doing, excited for, you know, Lang Smith, all the things. And I think what you're going to, I mean, this is like every enter like literally every enterprise right now. It's like the AI companies are the customers of these tools. Every enterprise will have this. Yeah, you'll just [00:35:00] have to have an eval.Of all of your work and like, we'll, you'll have an eval of your RFP generation, you'll have an eval of your sales material creation. You'll have an eval of your, uh, invoice processing. And, and as you, you know, buy or use new agentic systems, you are gonna need to know like, what's the quality of your, of your pipeline.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: Um, so huge, huge market with agent evals.swyx: Yeah.Building the Agent Teamswyx: And, and you know, I'm gonna shout out your, your team a bit, uh, your CTO, Ben, uh, did a great talk with us last year. Awesome. And he's gonna come back again. Oh, cool. For World's Fair.Aaron Levie: Yep.swyx: Just talk about your team, like brag a little bit. I think I, I think people take these eval numbers in pretty charts for granted, but No, there, I mean, there's, there's lots of really smart people at work during all this.Aaron Levie: Biggest shout out, uh, is we have a, we have a couple folks at Dya, uh, Sidarth, uh, that, that kind of run this. They're like a, you know, kind of tag tag team duo on our evals, Ben, our CTO, heavily involved Yasha, head of ai, uh, you know, a bunch of folks. And, um, evals is one part of the story. And then just like the full, you know, kind of AI.An agent team [00:36:00] is, uh, is a, is a pretty, you know, is core to this whole effort. So there's probably, I don't know, like maybe a few dozen people that are like the epicenter. And then you just have like layers and layers of, of kind of concentric circles of okay, then there's a search team that supports them and an infrastructure team that supports them.And it's starting to ripple through the entire company. But there's that kind of core agent team, um, that's a pretty, pretty close, uh, close knit group.swyx: The search team is separate from the infra team.Aaron Levie: I mean, we have like every, every layer of the stack we have to kind of do, except for just pure public cloud.Um, but um, you know, we, we store, I don't even know what our public numbers are in, you know, but like, you can just think about it as like a lot of data is, is stored in box. And so we have, and you have every layer of the, of the stack of, you know, how do you manage the data, the file system, the metadata system, the search system, just all of those components.And then they all are having to understand that now you've got this new customer. Which is the agent, and they've been building for two types of customers in the past. They've been building for users and they've been building for like applications. [00:37:00] And now you've got this new agent user, and it comes in with a difference of it, of property sometimes, like, hey, maybe sometimes we should do embeddings, an embedding based, you know, kind of search versus, you know, your, your typical semantic search.Like, it's just like you have to build the, the capabilities to support all of this. And we're testing stuff, throwing things away, something doesn't work and, and not relevant. It's like just, you know, total chaos. But all of those teams are supporting the agent team that is kind of coming up with its requirements of what, what do we need?swyx: Yeah. No, uh, we just came from, uh, fireside chat where you did, and you, you talked about how you're doing this. It's, it's kind of like an internal startup. Yeah. Within the broader company. The broader company's like 3000 people. Yeah. But you know, there's, there's a, this is a core team of like, well, here's the innovation center.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And like that every company kind of is run this way.Aaron Levie: Yeah. I wanna be sensitive. I don't call it the innovation center. Yeah. Only because I think everybody has to do innovation. Um, there, there's a part of the, the, the company that is, is sort of do or die for the agent wave.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: And it only happens to be more of my focus simply because it's existential that [00:38:00] we get it right.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: All of the supporting systems are necessary. All of the surrounding adjacent capabilities are necessary. Like the only reason we get to be a platform where you'd run an agent is because we have a security feature or a compliance feature, or a governance feature that, that some team is working on.But that's not gonna be the make or break of, of whether we get agents right. Like that already exists and we need to keep innovating there. I don't know what the right, exact precise number is, but it's not a thousand people and it's not 10 people. There's a number of people that are like the, the kind of like, you know, startup within the company that are the make or break on everything related to AI agents, you know, leveraging our platform and letting you work with your data.And that's where I spend a lot of my time, and Ben and Yosh and Diego and Teri, you know, these are just, you know, people that, that, you know, kind of across the team. Are working.swyx: Yeah. Amazing.Read Write Agent WorkflowsJeff Huber: How do you, how do you think about, I mean, you talked a lot about like kinda read workflows over your box data. Yep.Right. You know, gen search questions, queries, et cetera. But like, what about like, write or like authoring workflows?Aaron Levie: Yes. I've [00:39:00] already probably revealed too much actually now that I think about it. So, um, I've talked about whatever,Jeff Huber: whatever you can.Aaron Levie: Okay. It's just us. It's just us. Yeah. Okay. Of course, of course.So I, I guess I would just, uh, I'll make it a little bit conceptual, uh, because again, I've already, I've already said things that are not even ga but, but we've, we've kinda like danced around it publicly, so I, yeah, yeah. Okay. Just like, hopefully nobody watches this, um, episode. No.swyx: It's tidbits for the Heidi engaged to go figure out like what exactly, um, you know, is, is your sort of line of thinking.Sure. They can connect the dots.Aaron Levie: Yeah. So, so I would say that, that, uh, we, you know, as a, as a place where you have your enterprise content, there's a use case where I want to, you know, have an agent read that data and answer questions for me. And then there's a use case where I want the agent to create something.And use the file system to create something or store off data that it's working on, or be able to have, you know, various files that it's writing to about the work it's doing. So we do see it as a total read write. The harder problem has so far been the read only because, because again, you have that kind of like 10 [00:40:00] million to one ratio problem, whereas rights are a lot of, that's just gonna come from the model and, and we just like, we'll just put it in the file system and kinda use it.So it's a little bit of a technically easier problem, but the only part that's like, not necessarily technically hard, it is just like it's not yet perfected in the state of the ecosystem is, you know, building a beautiful PowerPoint presentation. It's still a hard problem for these models. Like, like we still, you know, like, like these formats are just, we're not built for.They'reswyx: working on it.Aaron Levie: They're, they're working on it. Everybody's working on it.swyx: Every launch is like, well, we do PowerPoint now.Aaron Levie: We're getting, yeah, getting a lot, getting a lot of better each time. But then you'll do this thing where you'll ask the update one slide and all of a sudden, like the fonts will be just like a little bit different, you know, on two of the slides, or it moved, you know, some shape over to the left a little bit.And again, these are the kind of things that, like in code, obviously you could really care about if you really care about, you know, how beautiful is the code, but at the end, user doesn't notice all those problems and file creation, the end user instantly sees it. You're [00:41:00] like, ah, like paragraph three, like, you literally just changed the font on me.Like it's a totally different font and like midway through the document. Mm-hmm. Those are the kind of things that you run into a lot of in the, in the content creation side. So, mm-hmm. We are gonna have native agents. That do all of those things, they'll be powered by the leading kind of models and labs.But the thing that I think is, is probably gonna be a much bigger idea over time is any agent on any system, again, using Box as a file system for its work, and in that kind of scenario, we don't necessarily care what it's putting in the file system. It could put its memory files, it could put its, you know, specification, you know, documents.It could put, you know, whatever its markdown files are, or it could, you know, generate PDFs. It's just like, it's a workspace that is, is sort of sandboxed off for its work. People can collaborate into it, it can share with other people. And, and so we, we were thinking a lot about what's the right, you know, kind of way to, to deliver that at scale.Docs Graphs and Founder Modeswyx: I wanted to come into sort of the sort of AI transformation or AI sort of, uh, operations things. [00:42:00] Um, one of the tweets that you, that you wanted to talk about, this is just me going through your tweets, by the way. Oh, okay. I mean, like, this is, you readAaron Levie: one by one,swyx: you're the, you're the easiest guest to prep for because you, you already have like, this is the, this is what I'm interested in.I'm like, okay, well, areAaron Levie: we gonna get to like, like February, January or something? Where are we in the, in the timelines? How far back are we going?swyx: Can you, can you describe boxes? A set of skills? Right? Like that, that's like, that's like one of the extremes of like, well if you, you just turn everything into a markdown file.Yeah. Then your agent can run your company. Uh, like you just have to write, find the right sequence of words toAaron Levie: Yes.swyx: To do it.Aaron Levie: Sorry, isthatswyx: the question? So I think the question is like, what if we documented everything? Yes. The way that you exactly said like,Aaron Levie: yes.swyx: Um, let's get all the Fortune five hundreds, uh, prepared for agents.Yes. And like, you know, everything's in golden and, and nicely filed away and everything. Yes. What's missing? Like, what's left, right? LikeAaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: You've, you've run your company for a decade. LikeAaron Levie: Yeah. I think the challenge is that, that that information changes a week later. And because something happened in the market for that [00:43:00] customer, or us as a company that now has to go get updated, and so these systems are living and breathing and they have to experience reality and updates to reality, which right now is probably gonna be humans, you know, kinda giving those, giving them the updates.And, you know, there is this piece about context graphs as as, uh, that kinda went very viral. Yeah. And I, I, I was like a, i, I, I thought it was super provocative. I agreed with many parts of it. I disagree with a few parts around. You know, it's not gonna be as easy as as just if we just had the agent traces, then we can finally do that work because there's just like, there's so much more other stuff that that's happening that, that we haven't been able to capture and digitize.And I think they actually represented that in the piece to be clear. But like there's just a lot of work, you know, that that has to, you just can't have only skills files, you know, for your company because it's just gonna be like, there's gonna be a lot of other stuff that happens. Yeah. Change over time.Yeah. Most companies are practically apprenticeships.swyx: Most companies are practically apprenticeships. LikeJeff Huber: every new employee who joins the team, [00:44:00] like you span one to three months. Like ramping them up.Aaron Levie: Yes. AllJeff Huber: that tat knowledgeAaron Levie: isJeff Huber: not written down.Aaron Levie: Yes.Jeff Huber: But like, it would have to be if you wanted to like give it to an Asian.Right. And so like that seems to me like to beAaron Levie: one is I think you're gonna see again a premium on companies that can document this. Mm-hmm. Much. There'll be a huge premium on that because, because you know, can you shorten that three month ramp cycle to a two week ramp cycle? That's an instant productivity gain.Can you re dramatically reduce rework in the organization because you've documented where all the stuff is and where the answers are. Can you make your average employee as good as your 90th percentile employee because you've captured the knowledge that's sort of in the heads of, of those top employees and make that available.So like you can see some very clear productivity benefits. Mm-hmm. If you had a company culture of making sure you know your information was captured, digitized, put in a format that was agent ready and then made available to agents to work with, and then you just, again, have this reality of like add a 10,000 person [00:45:00] company.Mapping that to the, you know, access structure of the company is just a hard problem. Is like, is like, yeah, well, you just, not every piece of information that's digitized can be shared to everybody. And so now you have to organize that in a way that actually works. There was a pretty good piece, um, this, this, uh, this piece called your company as a file is a file system.I, did you see that one?swyx: Nope.Aaron Levie: Uh, yes. You saw it. Yeah. And, and, uh, I actually be curious your thoughts on it. Um, like, like an interesting kind of like, we, we agree with it because, because that's how we see the world and, uh,swyx: okay. We, we have it up on screen. Oh,Aaron Levie: okay. Yeah. But, but it's all about basically like, you know, we've already, we, we, we already organized in this kind of like, you know, permission structure way.Uh, and, and these are the kind of, you know, natural ways that, that agents can now work with data. So it's kind of like this, this, you know, kind of interesting metaphor, but I do think companies will have to start to think about how they start to digitize more, more of that data. What was your take?Jeff Huber: Yeah, I mean, like the company's probably like an acid compliant file system.Aaron Levie: Uh,Jeff Huber: yeah. Which I'm guessing boxes, right? So, yeah. Yes.swyx: Yeah. [00:46:00]Jeff Huber: Which you have a great piece on, but,swyx: uh, yeah. Well, uh, I, I, my, my, my direction is a little bit like, I wanna rewind a little bit to the graph word you said that there, that's a magic trigger word for us. I always ask what's your take on knowledge graphs?Yeah. Uh, ‘cause every, especially at every data database person, I just wanna see what they think. There's been knowledge graphs, hype cycles, and you've seen it all. So.Aaron Levie: Hmm. I actually am not the expert in knowledge graphs, so, so that you might need toswyx: research, you don't need to be an expert. Yeah. I think it's just like, well, how, how seriously do people take it?Yeah. Like, is is, is there a lot of potential in the, in the HOVI?Aaron Levie: Uh, well, can I, can I, uh, understand first if it's, um, is this a loaded question in the sense of are you super pro, super con, super anti medium? Iswyx: see pro, I see pros and cons. Okay. Uh, but I, I think your opinion should be independent of mine.Aaron Levie: Yeah. No, no, totally. Yeah. I just want to see what I'm stepping into.swyx: No, I know. It's a, and it's a huge trigger word for a lot of people out Yeah. In our audience. And they're, they're trying to figure out why is that? Because whyAaron Levie: is this such aswyx: hot item for them? Because a lot of people get graph religion.And they're like, everything's a graph. Of course you have to represent it as a graph. Well, [00:47:00] how do you solve your knowledge? Um, changing over time? Well, it's a graph.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And, and I think there, there's that line of work and then there's, there's a lot of people who are like, well, you don't need it. And both are right.Aaron Levie: Yeah. And what do the people who say you don't need it, what are theyswyx: arguing for Mark down files. Oh, sure, sure. Simplicity.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: Versus it's, it's structure versus less structure. Right. That's, that's all what it is. I do.Aaron Levie: I think the tricky thing is, um, is, is again, when this gets met with real humans, they're just going to their computer.They're just working with some people on Slack or teams. They're just sharing some data through a collaborative file system and Google Docs or Box or whatever. I certainly like the vision of most, most knowledge graph, you know, kind of futuristic kind of ways of thinking about it. Uh, it's just like, you know, it's 2026.We haven't seen it yet. Kind of play out as as, I mean, I remember. Do you remember the, um, in like, actually I don't, I don't even know how old you guys are, but I'll for, for to show my age. I remember 17 years ago, everybody thought enterprises would just run on [00:48:00] Wikis. Yeah. And, uh, confluence and, and not even, I mean, confluence actually took off for engineering for sure.Like unquestionably. But like, this was like everything would be in the w. And I think based on our, uh, our, uh, general style of, of, of what we were building, like we were just like, I don't know, people just like wanna workspace. They're gonna collaborate with other people.swyx: Exactly. Yeah. So you were, you were anti-knowledge graph.Aaron Levie: Not anti, not anti. Soswyx: not nonAaron Levie: I'm not, I'm not anti. ‘cause I think, I think your search system, I just think these are two systems that probably, but like, I'm, I'm not in any religious war. I don't want to be in anybody's YouTube comments on this. There's not a fight for me.swyx: We, we love YouTube comments. We're, we're, we're get into comments.Aaron Levie: Okay. Uh, but like, but I, I, it's mostly just a virtue of what we built. Yeah. And we just continued down that path. Yeah.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: And, um, and that, that was what we pursued. But I'm not, this is not a, you know, kind of, this is not a, uh, it'sswyx: not existential for you. Great.Aaron Levie: We're happy to plug into somebody else's graph.We're happy to feed data into it. We're happy for [00:49:00] agents to, to talk to multiple systems. Not, not our fight.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: But I need your answer. Yeah. Graphs or nerd Snipes is very effective nerd.swyx: See this is, this is one, one opinion and then I've,Jeff Huber: and I think that the actual graph structure is emergent in the mind of the agent.Ah, in the same way it is in the mind of the human. And that's a more powerful graph ‘cause it actually involved over time.swyx: So don't tell me how to graph. I'll, I'll figure it out myself. Exactly. Okay. All right. AndJeff Huber: what's yours?swyx: I like the, the Wiki approach. Uh, my, I'm actually

Welcome to the daily304 – your window into Wonderful, Almost Heaven, West Virginia. Today is Thursday, March 5, 2026. #1 – From WV ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT - West Virginia's automotive industry continues to expand West Virginia is strengthening its automotive sector through growing manufacturing, assembly, and supply chain activity. The West Virginia Department of Economic Development highlights the state's strategic location, workforce development initiatives, and industry partnerships that are attracting new investment and creating jobs. From component production to final assembly, the Mountain State is positioning itself as a competitive force in the automotive industry. Read more: https://westvirginia.gov/industries/automotive/ #2 – From YAHOO! TRAVEL - West Virginia's Appalachian Mountains: A hidden travel gem The Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia offer scenic ridgelines, waterfalls, hiking trails, and charming small towns that make the region a standout destination for outdoor enthusiasts. Visitors can experience four-season adventure, cultural heritage, and peaceful escapes — all set against the breathtaking backdrop of Almost Heaven. Read more: https://travel.yahoo.com/articles/nestled-west-virginias-appalachian-mountains-150000185.html #3 – From WV EDA - Direct Lending Program supports local businesses The West Virginia Economic Development Authority offers flexible, competitive financing through its Direct Lending Program. Designed to foster expansion, job creation, and capital investment, the program provides below-market loans and customized financing solutions to help West Virginia businesses grow and compete. Companies across a range of sectors can leverage these incentives to support strategic development and long-term success. Read more: https://eda.wv.gov/wvedas-direct-lending-program-offers-incentives-for-west-virginia-based-businesses/ Find these stories and more at wv.gov/daily304. The daily304 curated news and information is brought to you by the West Virginia Department of Commerce: Sharing the wealth, beauty, and opportunity in West Virginia with the world. Follow the daily304 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @daily304. Or find us online at wv.gov and just click the daily304 logo. That's all for now. Take care. Be safe. Get outside and enjoy all the opportunity West Virginia has to offer.

In this episode of After the Crash, David Craig sits down with Sam Littrell, COO of Stratejic Relationships, to discuss how investigators uncover critical evidence by finding people who previously worked inside the company being investigated.✔️ Why former employees can be key witnesses in serious injury and wrongful death cases✔️ How investigators locate people who worked inside trucking companies and other corporations✔️ What former workers sometimes reveal about safety practices, training, and company culture✔️ Real examples of cases where inside information helped uncover what was actually happening behind the scenesWhen catastrophic crashes occur, families are often left with one question: Why did this happen? Meanwhile, the companies involved may already be working to protect themselves.This episode explains how attorneys and investigators search for the truth by speaking with people who witnessed how a company actually operated day to day. In many situations, former employees may have reported safety concerns or dangerous practices long before a crash occurred.David and Sam discuss real examples involving trucking companies, product liability cases, nursing homes, and other industries where insider knowledge helped reveal information that otherwise may never have surfaced.The goal is simple: find the truth and understand what really happened.If you or someone you love has been involved in a serious truck crash, understanding how investigations work can help you better understand the process of uncovering accountability.–01:17 Meet Sam Littrell and Stratejic Relationships02:09 How Investigators Find Former Employees05:05 Why These Investigations Matter in Serious Cases07:29 Why Former Employees Often Speak Up09:04 How Attorneys Start an Investigation12:10 Example: Trucking Company Safety Practices Revealed14:39 What Happens When Investigations Don't Find Evidence18:59 Other Types of Cases Where Insider Information Matters21:53 Why Attorneys Must Search for the Truth25:17 How to Contact Stratejic Relationships—If you or someone you know has been involved in a truck crash, don't wait.Visit https://ckflaw.com or call 1-800-ASK-DAVID for experienced legal help.—Why Listen to After the Crash?Navigating the aftermath of a trucking accident can feel overwhelming, but you don't have to face it alone. This podcast is designed to educate and empower victims and their families, helping you make informed decisions about your future.—Learn About the Firm:At Craig, Kelley & Faultless, LLC, we've dedicated over 30 years to fighting for trucking accident victims. From preserving evidence to holding negligent trucking companies accountable, our mission is to protect your rights and secure the justice you deserve.—Download Semitruck Wreck for FREE:https://www.ckflaw.com/truck-accident-ebook/Follow Us on Socials:Website: https://www.ckflaw.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ckflawLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/craig-kelley-&-faultless-attorneys-at-lawContact Us:Email: info@ckflaw.comPhone: 1-800-ASK-DAVID#TruckWreckLawyer #TruckingAccidents #BoardCertified #AfterTheCrash #TruckAccidentLawyer #PublicSafety #WrongfulDeath #CraigKelleyFaultless

In the rapidly evolving landscape of technology, the search for high-caliber talent is a constant challenge for U.S. businesses. Yet just a short flight away, a vibrant and largely untapped reservoir of skilled professionals is driving innovation across Latin America. Plugg Technologies was founded on the recognition of this immense potential, creating a dedicated pathway for U.S. companies to access the exceptional tech expertise found in countries like Argentina, Mexico, and beyond. This is the story of how a bold vision turned into a company that is redefining staff augmentation and forging powerful, cross-border partnerships.In 2015, Brian Samson, made a bold move. He left San Francisco for Buenos Aires, taking on the challenge of growing a FinTech startup. What started as a small team quickly evolved into a thriving workforce of 85 talented professionals in Argentina. This eye-opening experience revealed a powerful truth: Latin America is home to a wealth of untapped tech talent ready to drive global innovation. This insight led to the creation of Plugg Technologies, a company dedicated to connecting U.S. businesses with the best and brightest minds in LATAM. With the addition of Ruben Santana a 30-year staffing veteran with extensive experience leading nearshoring operations in Mexico our team grew stronger. Ruben's knowledge of the region's talent landscape has been instrumental in our success.Today, Plugg Technologies has become a trusted partner for U.S. companies, placing hundreds of top Latin American tech professionals from Argentina, Mexico, and beyond. We have the infrastructure, leadership, and expertise to make nearshore staff augmentation a seamless experience, empowering companies to scale quickly and efficiently. At Plugg, we're driven by a mission: to provide personalized, hands-on service for every client we work with. Our deep roots in the region, combined with a commitment to excellence, mean we don't just fill positions we build lasting partnerships.CONTACT DETAILS:Email: brian@plugg.tech Business: Plugg TechnologiesWebsite: www.plugg.tech Social Media:Podcast: nearshorecafepodcast.com LinkedIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/briansamson/ Remember to SUBSCRIBE so you don't miss "Information That You Can Use." Share Just Minding My Business with your family, friends, and colleagues. Engage with us by leaving a review or comment on my Google Business Page. https://g.page/r/CVKSq-IsFaY9EBM/review Your support keeps this podcast going and growing.Visit Just Minding My Business Media™ LLC at https://jmmbmediallc.com/ to learn how we can help you get more visibility on your products and services.

Partnership ecosystems are evolving quickly as native AI companies scale at unprecedented speed. In this Belly2Belly episode, Bill Kenney talks with Chris Samila from Partnership Leaders about how AI companies are building partner programs, why distribution matters more than ever, and how service and technology partners are beginning to blend together in the AI economy.Chris Samila, Partnership Leadershttps://www.partnershipleaders.com/https://www.joincatalyst.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrissamila/..Feel free to contact us with any questionsBill Kenney, bill@meetroi.comMEET, https://meetroi.com/ 

From Navy SEAL to Venture Builder:Nuri Golan on Turning Elite Operators into Elite EntrepreneursIn this week's Team Never Quit Podcast, Marcus and Melanie are joined by Nuri Golan, a man who proves that elite performance doesn't end when the uniform comes off — it evolves.A Veteran and Officer in the Israeli Navy SEALs, Nuri transitioned from high-stakes maritime operations to high-impact venture creation. Today, he is a serial entrepreneur, startup advisor, investor, and Managing Partner of Vetted — a powerful platform helping combat veterans build world-class companies.In this episode, Nuri shares how the mindset forged in special operations becomes a competitive advantage in the startup arena.Building & Exiting Multiple CompaniesNuri's entrepreneurial track record is nothing short of remarkable:·         Co-Founder & CEO of EXO Technologies (acquired by Lear Corporation)·         Co-Founder of Navmatic (acquired by Superpedestrian)·         Co-Founder of SosivioAfter EXO's acquisition, Nuri went on to lead Lear's corporate venture arm — investing in startups and venture funds, gaining firsthand insight into what separates promising founders from scalable operators.He brings a rare perspective: he's been the founder, the acquirer, and the investor.Vetted: Unlocking the Entrepreneurial Power of Combat VeteransToday, Nuri serves as Managing Partner of Vetted — an education, acceleration, and investment platform designed specifically for combat veterans from the U.S. and Israel.Through:·         The Vetted Startup Accelerator·         The Alpha-Bet Entrepreneurship ProgramVetted equips veterans with:·         Hands-on mentorship·         Early-stage funding·         Tactical business education·         A powerful cross-border founder & investor networkThe mission is clear: transform operational excellence into entrepreneurial success.Bridging Two Innovation PowerhousesAs an Israeli-American, Nuri is passionate about strengthening collaboration between U.S. and Israeli veteran communities — two ecosystems known for innovation, resilience, and leadership.He believes elite combat veterans represent one of the most untapped entrepreneurial resources in the world — disciplined, decisive, mission-driven leaders ready to build companies that matter.This conversation with Nuri Golan delivers powerful insight from someone who has operated — and succeeded — at the highest levels. In this episode you will hear:• By the time he was 19 or 20 [my grandfather] had already graduated from college and was in the U.S. Army. (8:31)• You don't have to precheck in Israel because it's mandatory service for Israeli's. (9:25)• We saw our family with tattoos on their arms from death camps and concentration camps they were sent to. (19:19)• In Israel, all of our officers are “Mustangs.” (Prior enlisted and then cross over to become officers) (26:51)• In Israel, you don't really have a lot of senior enlisted guys, especially operators. The most senior guys – the ones with the most experience – are officers. (30:11)Israeli Arabs, who are Israeli citizens, don't have to serve. Ulta orthodox Jews are also exempt from service. (31:44)• [Marcus] Do something for your people. (37:01)• I really wanted to help create a program to help show them [combat veterans] how to utilize the skills they got from their military training and service in the business world, because I realized that a lot of the skills that I got from the military is what helped me become a successful entrepreneur.0 (40:46)• Our program is open to all combat veterans from U.S and Israel. We also started an entrepreneurship school.0 (43:53)• Hamas operators don't walk around with rifles. (57:51)• Their command centers are all under Mosques and hospitals by design. (58:37)• There's always conflict so you'll go to Tel-Aviv in the middle of the war and you'll still see people on the beach playing volleyball, and out at restaurants. We have to continue to go on. That's how you fight terrorism. (61:36)• Israel is one of the most important partners that the United States has in the global landscape. (66:36)Support Nuri:- https://accelerator.thevetted.vc/ Support TNQ  - IG: team_neverquit , marcusluttrell , melanieluttrell , huntero13  -  https://www.patreon.com/teamneverquitSponsors:  - Navyfederal.org       - bubsnaturals.com [Promo code TNQ]  - davidprotein.com/TNQ  - mizzenandmain.com   [Promo code: TNQ20]   - masterclass.com/TNQ  - Dripdrop.com/TNQ  - ShopMando.com [Promo code: TNQ]  - Tractorsupply.com/hometownheroes  - meetfabiric.com/TNQ  - Prizepicks (TNQ)   - armslist.com/TNQ   -  PXGapparel.com/TNQ  - bruntworkwear.com/TNQ   - shipsticks.com/TNQ   - stopboxusa.com {TNQ}   - Tonal.com [TNQ]  - greenlight.com/TNQ  - drinkAG1.com/TNQ  - Hims.com/TNQ

Companies are making moves to monetize AI and intimacy. Bridget Todd joins us to unpack some of the issues around this, and her upcoming audio book tackling the topic 'Love at First Prompt'. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Apple has introduced a number of new products this week, including a new phone and displays. But the Macbook Neo is a low-cost Mac that could make the company's PCs more popular for kids and families. Whether it moves the needle for the stock will take time to tell. Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Rachel Warren discuss: - Apple's new products - Does AI need new hardware - Are airline stocks in trouble? Companies discussed: Apple (AAPL), Delta (DAL), American Airlines (AAL), United (UAL). Host: Travis Hoium Guests: Lou Whiteman, Rachel Warren Engineer: Dan Boyd Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We're committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joe Lonsdale reveals how Palantir recruited its first hundred employees, why the best candidates always chose equity over salary, and how the war for top tech talent has exploded in the AI era.

March Market Cap Madness tips off its Final Four this week on Rule Breaker Investing, and you're not just watching—you're playing. Past world champion Andy Cross (6–1 lifetime) squares off against Cinderella contender Loren Horst (1–0) in our first semifinal matchup, with a spot in the World Championship at stake. Grab a pencil, set your ranges, and see whether your market-cap intuition can outscore Andy, Loren… or both. The Madness is on, and the bracket is tightening. Companies mentioned: ACN, AMD, BA, CSU, GLOB, IDXX, INTU, SERV, TCEHY, WIX Sign up for The Motley Fool's Breakfast News here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.fool.com/breakfastnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Order David's Rule Breaker Investing book here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1804091219/⁠⁠ Host: David GardnerContestants: Andy Cross, Loren HorstProducer: Bart Shannon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if the reason you keep coming in second place in your CSM interviews has nothing to do with your experience and everything to do with what you're missing in the presentation?In this episode, I'm breaking down the three exact categories hiring teams are grading you on… and yes, I used to be the person creating the scorecards. I'll show you how to use the prompt like a literal checklist, the basic mistakes that instantly cost you points, and how to prove you actually think like a strategic, consultative CSM (not just someone who can build a decent slide deck).I'll also discuss executive presence and the subtle signals that make a team feel confident putting you in front of their biggest customers. If you want to stop guessing what they're looking for and start positioning yourself as the obvious hire, this is your blueprint. And there's one simple shift at the end that could put you ahead of 98% of candidates. Hit play and let's dive in.00:43 – Why Presentations Are “Make or Break” in Customer Success Interviews04:07 – The Game-Changing Tip That Instantly Puts You Ahead of 80% of Candidates06:27 – The Three Big Categories Hiring Teams Use to Grade Candidates (And Where Most Applicants Slip Up)09:24 – Common Pitfalls: Why Generic Tactics and Lack of Engagement Hurt Your Chances15:09 – What Makes Executive Presence So Crucial During an Interview Presentation20:23 – Don't Overwhelm Yourself: Pick 2–3 Areas to Improve Each TimeOTHER EPISODES YOU'LL LOVE:

Here is a FAQ Video on the Courses: https://youtu.be/0F7imrzjXWs Here is a deep dive into which course is best for you: https://youtu.be/JM_jgS8M-iU https://www.b2bRevenue.com - Get Your Free E-Book on How Companies make Decisions. FAQ: 1 YEAR ACCESS, PAY MONTHLY OR ANNUALLY NOT A SUBSCRIPTION OFFICE HOURS EVERY  OTHER WEEK VIA ZOOM. 1 HOUR GROUP Q&A. UNLIMITED 1-ON-1'S  ARE FREE AS LONG AS THEY CAN BE SHARED IN THE COURSE. 1-ON-1 ARE FULL ACCESS ON DAY ONE - NOTHING IS GATED OR TIME RELEASED. ALL CONTENT IS VIDEO BASED AND SELF PACED I RECOMMEND TAKE COURSE ONCE WITHOUT NOTES OR APPLYING IT SO YOU UNDERSTAND THE BIG PICTURE FIRST. THEN TAKE AND APPLY IT STEP BY STEP. YOU START WHEN YOU WANT AND GO AS FAST OR SLOW AS NEEDED.   Email me additional questions: briangburns@me.com     — SAMPLE EMAIL TO EXPENSE THE COURSE MGR,   I have been listening to the brutal truth about sales podcast for X months and it speaks to the issues we face.   They currently offer a course that includes video instruction, group Q&A and One-on-One coaching. I'm committed to my own personal development and would like your help in expensing the course.   It would pay for itself if I closed only one new deal of $X value.   Please let me know by Friday if I can move forward with this 1 year course.   Thanks, ME Here are some student interviews from the courses:      ———————————————————————————————————— Audible 30 day Free Trial: http://www.audibletrial.com/BrutalTruth  

Protein is having its moment in the spotlight. Companies are adding more protein-enhanced products to their lineups as demand grows. The new federal dietary guidelines unveiled earlier this year also put the nutrient front and center. Harvest Public Media's Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval reports on whether Americans actually need more protein.

Most entrepreneurs build their companies without thinking about the day someone might buy them.That's a huge mistake.Mark Sims joins Neil to break down the 5 Cs framework used by buyers and private equity firms to evaluate businesses. From competitive positioning to clean financials, from cash conversion cycles to operational capability, this conversation explains what actually drives valuation when a buyer looks at your company. If you want to build a business that sells, not just a job that pays you, this episode shows what serious buyers look for and why so many companies fail during due diligence.In This Episode, We Cover✅ The 5 Cs Framework for Business Value Mark breaks down the five factors buyers evaluate when looking at a company: competitive positioning, capability, cash conversion cycle, clean financials, and concentration risk. These elements determine how attractive a business is to investors and acquirers.✅ Competitive Positioning and Pricing Power Where your company sits in the market matters. Businesses with clear differentiation gain pricing power, stronger margins, and protection from commoditization.✅ Why Owner-Operator Businesses Struggle to Sell If the entire business depends on the founder, buyers see risk. Companies with documented systems, capable teams, and operational structure become far more attractive acquisition targets.

Get 90 days of Fellow free at Fellow.ai/coo In this episode, Michael Koenig speaks with Greg Keller, co-founder and CTO of JumpCloud, about identity access management and why it's becoming one of the most important operational systems in the age of AI. Greg explains how traditional identity systems were designed for office-based companies running Microsoft infrastructure and why that model broke as companies moved to SaaS, cloud infrastructure, and remote work. The discussion then turns to the next big shift: the rise of AI agents and synthetic identities inside organizations. As companies deploy more AI tools, the number of machine identities may soon outnumber human employees. Managing what those systems can access will become a critical security and operational challenge.   Topics Covered What a CTO actually does Greg explains the different types of CTO roles and how technology leaders help companies anticipate where the market is headed. Identity Access Management explained simply IAM answers three core questions inside every company: Who are you? What can you access? How is that access managed?   Why the old IT model broke Traditional identity systems were built for on-premise offices and Microsoft infrastructure. Modern companies now operate across: SaaS applications cloud infrastructure remote work environments multiple operating systems How JumpCloud approaches identity JumpCloud was built to manage identity across devices, applications, and infrastructure regardless of platform. Where Okta fits in the ecosystem Okta helped modernize browser-based authentication through Single Sign-On, while JumpCloud focuses on broader identity infrastructure.   AI, Security, and Synthetic Identities Why COOs should push AI adoption Greg argues AI adoption is no longer optional. Companies must encourage teams to improve productivity and efficiency using AI.   The rise of synthetic identities AI agents, bots, APIs, and service accounts are becoming new actors inside companies that require identity governance.   Bots may soon outnumber employees Organizations will soon manage more machine identities than human ones.   AI as a potential insider threat AI systems can become security risks if they are granted excessive permissions or misinterpret policies.   The API key governance problem Many AI integrations rely on API keys, which are often poorly managed and can create hidden security risks.   Key Takeaway As companies adopt AI, identity access management becomes the control layer that determines what both humans and machines are allowed to do inside the organization. The companies that manage identity well will move faster and operate more securely.   Links: Michael on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/michael-koenig514 Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorykeller/ JumpCloud: https://jumpcloud.com/ Between Two COO's: https://betweentwocoos.com Episode Link: https://betweentwocoos.com/ai-agents-identity-access-greg-keller

Meryl Richards, program director of Food & Forests at Ceres, explains why she is excited about the rapid evolution of new technology in agriculture.    To stay connected with USFRA, join our newsletter and become involved in our efforts, here. 

Tuesday was more of a rotation day than a "flight to safety" trade, says Jed Ellerbroek, saying he's surprised to see investors buying the dip earlier than expected. Looking ahead, he talks about how investors are turning the page on the AI story from risk to value. Companies with sustainable profits are ones Jed sees surviving while riskier stocks need to prove themselves. For more defensive trades, Jed urges investors to look into industrials and materials. ======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.Subscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – / schwabnetwork Follow us on Facebook – / schwabnetwork Follow us on LinkedIn - / schwab-network About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about

In this episode of Develop This!, Dennis Fraise sits down with "America's factory whisperer," Didi Caldwell, President & CEO of Global Location Strategies, for a candid and strategic conversation about the realities of site selection in today's turbulent environment. Site Selectors Guild With more than two decades guiding large manufacturing and heavy industrial projects, Didi shares insider insight into how companies actually make location decisions — and where communities often fall short. From compressed project timelines to the reshoring debate, from data centers reshaping energy markets to the growing importance of investment-ready sites, this episode is a masterclass in modern economic development strategy. If your community wants to compete — and win — this conversation is essential listening. What You'll Learn The New Reality of Site Selection The world of site selection is more volatile than ever. "Slow is fast — and fast is fraught with mistakes." Companies often fail by not aligning internal stakeholders before launching a search. Falling in love with a location before the data supports it can derail projects. Didi emphasizes a critical principle: "We evaluate proof, not potential." Incentives: Myths vs. Reality Incentives can enhance a strong location — but they cannot fix fatal flaws. Communities have a responsibility to evaluate ROI. The best incentive? A truly investment-ready site. Discipline in underwriting incentives protects long-term community prosperity. "Communities have a responsibility too." Data Centers & the Energy Disruption Data centers are fundamentally reshaping: Energy markets Power pricing Infrastructure planning Community land use As Didi notes: "The power price just went up too high." Communities must proactively manage land planning and infrastructure capacity to avoid crowding out other investment opportunities. U.S Reshoring: Reality or Rhetoric? Reshoring isn't a full return of manufacturing — it's a rebalancing. The U.S. holds competitive advantages in energy costs for capital-intensive industries. High interest rates and tariffs complicate investment decisions. Smaller projects are often easier to site than megaprojects. The key? Understanding where your community truly competes. The Evolution of Virtual Site Visits Virtual tours are now a legitimate step in site selection. Communities must have accurate, organized, and accessible data. Speed matters — but speed without preparation increases risk. "You need to have the right information." Preparing Communities for Investment Successful communities: Know their strengths and weaknesses. Maintain updated site data and infrastructure assessments. Align utilities, workforce, and leadership. Act as problem solvers — not just marketers. "We have to demonstrate we can deliver." Key Takeaways for Economic Developers Investment readiness beats incentive generosity. Discipline beats optimism every time. Long-term thinking outperforms short-term wins. Preparation reduces risk. Speed without diligence leads to costly mistakes. Communities must prove viability — not just promise it. About Didi Didi Caldwell is President and CEO of Global Location Strategies, a world leader in site selection and incentive negotiation services and a two-time honoree on the Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Companies list. She is a member — and former chairperson — of the prestigious Site Selectors Guild and currently serves as Chair of the REDI Sites initiative. Didi holds a bachelor's degree in architecture from Clemson University and an international MBA from the Darla Moore School of Business. With expertise in large-scale manufacturing and heavy industrial projects, she has guided some of the world's most complex location decisions.  

80% of management strategies create addiction and fear. Your best employees aren't burning out because they're weak. They're burning out because you're running their nervous system on the wrong chemical. You keep giving them dopamine: bonuses, titles, corner offices. And every single hit requires a bigger one tomorrow just to feel the same. Meanwhile, their cortisol climbs higher with every promotion, every new responsibility, every quarter where the targets get bigger and the recognition gets emptier. This is the episode where Adam Lane Smith and Andrey Korikov break down the Secure Loyalty Formula: the biochemical equation that separates companies people would fight for from companies people quietly escape from. Adam's recent TEDx talk introduced Bio Loyalty: the concept that real human loyalty isn't built through manipulation or incentive structures. It's built the same way a healthy family is built: through deep need fulfillment that makes people genuinely want to stay. Most companies have never even considered this. They're running the same addiction cycle they use in bad relationships: give a hit, withdraw the hit, punish for not performing, repeat. The equation is simple: Attraction + Commitment ÷ Cortisol. Most companies only target attraction. That's the dopamine. That's the “we are all family here” lie. That's the pizza party nobody asked for. What's missing is the commitment piece: vasopressin bonding through shared achievement, serotonin through genuine belonging, and cortisol managed at the right level so people actually care without being crushed. In this episode, you'll learn why two thirds of dopamine is just anticipation (and why the reward never feels as good as you imagined), why avoidant leaders scoff at loyalty and only understand manipulation, why Gen Z isn't lazy but has been dopamine burned out since birth, the difference between the Secure Love Formula and the Secure Loyalty Formula, how Japanese work culture got the bonding right but destroyed their people in the process, why anxious and disorganized employees are actually more likely to become deeply loyal, the mentorship model that builds tribal belonging instead of learned helplessness, and the three steps any leader can deploy today to start building the Secure Work Home Balance. This conversation breaks down the nervous system science applied to how humans actually bond in professional environments: the same biochemistry that builds lasting marriages, applied to building teams that stay, perform, and recruit your next best hire for you. The research shows teams built on this formula are up to 30% more productive and 30% more profitable.

In this second part of our series on engineering organizations, Jeff and Luca explore how companies that build products should focus their efforts differently depending on their stage and scope. We start with startups and early-stage companies desperately searching for product-market fit, where the brutal truth is: quality doesn't matter yet. Your MVP should embarrass you—if it doesn't, you waited too long. We discuss the critical mental shift from throwaway prototypes to proper engineering once validation arrives, and why technical founders often fail by solving the wrong problem brilliantly. Moving up the ladder, we examine narrow-focus companies that have found their niche—like the German firm that does nothing but maintain a 100-year-old anchor chain machine, or specialists in medium-power electrical switches. These companies win through efficiency and deep expertise, but face existential risk if the market shifts. Finally, we tackle wide-focus companies introducing multiple product lines, where the challenge becomes running internal startups while managing established products, each requiring radically different approaches. The key insight: your focus must match your product's lifecycle stage, whether that's ruthless speed, cost optimization, or high-level process learning. Key Topics [02:30] Startups and early-stage companies: the existential search for product-market fit [06:45] The MVP philosophy: if you're not embarrassed, you waited too long [11:20] Quality vs. speed vs. scope: why quality doesn't matter in early stages [15:40] The Potemkin village approach: building facades to validate demand [19:15] Embedded products and MVPs: when physical products need creative shortcuts [23:50] The critical switch: from prototypes to proper engineering after validation [28:30] Narrow-focus companies: German hidden champions and deep specialization [34:10] Wide-focus companies: running internal startups within established organizations [40:25] Product teams and parallel focuses: managing different lifecycle stages simultaneously [45:00] Large established companies: high-level process learning and avoiding organizational weight Notable Quotes "If you read the Lean Startup, they will explicitly say: if you weren't embarrassed by your MVP, you waited too long. It really has to be painfully flimsy because you cannot afford to do it well." — Luca "Quality doesn't even factor because you're very explicitly building mock-ups from chewing gum and paper mache. They are fully intended to be thrown away." — Luca "Getting that product-market fit is existential. You will die if you do not get it and get it relatively quickly." — Jeff Resources Mentioned The Lean Startup - Eric Ries' book discussing MVP philosophy and the importance of being embarrassed by your first product The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick's book about getting real customer feedback and validation through financial commitment The Art of Innovation - Tom Kelley's book on IDEO's design process, including the clothespin switch story Luca's Website - Trainings on embedded agile, AI in embedded systems, and more Jeff's Website - Consulting services for medical device software development You can find Jeff at https://jeffgable.com.You can find Luca at https://luca.engineer.Want to join the agile Embedded Slack? Click hereAre you looking for embedded-focused trainings? Head to https://agileembedded.academy/Ryan Torvik and Luca have started the Embedded AI podcast, check it out at https://embeddedaipodcast.com/

Uniswap Case Win Exposes Why Suing Crypto Companies Is Tough #Crypto #Cryptocurrency #podcast #BasicCryptonomics #Bitcoin #Gold #Silver #Platinum #Palladium #CryptoCrash Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://CryptoTalk.FM Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠@ThisIsCTR⁠⁠⁠⁠ Discord:⁠⁠⁠⁠ @CryptoTalkRadio⁠⁠⁠⁠ Chapters (00:00:01) - Crypto Talk Radio(00:01:43) - Bitcoin vs. Ethereum: When Will It Stop?(00:03:31) - Bitcoin's Intrinsic Value During War(00:08:26) - Uniswap vs The Scammer(00:14:24) - Lie of Absence vs Conviction(00:17:56) - Can You Bring a Scammer to Justice?(00:20:58) - 7 Things You Can't Sue in Court(00:23:41) - Don't Put More Money Than You Can Afford in Cryptoc(00:28:48) - Be Smart in Crypto

Silicon Valley loves billion-dollar moonshots and AI darlings. Sam Gerstenzang and Dan Friedman are doing something different—they're starting medical spas and funeral homes.On this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper sat down with Gerstenzang and Friedman, partners at Boulton and Watt, which they call the "world's slowest startup incubator." Their model: Come up with an idea, achieve five or 10 million dollars in revenue themselves, then hand it off to a CEO who can take it to the next stage. They've used this playbook to build Moxie, a Series C company that helps nurses open their own medical spas, now with 600-plus customers and a 200-person team globally. Their second company, Meadow Memorials, is a contemporary funeral home with no physical real estate. It has become the largest provider of funeral services in California.Both businesses launched right around the arrival of ChatGPT—and neither was built with AI in mind. So how are they thinking about AI inside companies where the core work isn't going to change? In this conversation, Gerstenzang and Friedman share how they built an AI agent called Matthew Bolton to power their customer discovery process, why synthetic customer calls completely failed for them, and why they believe you shouldn't give anyone credit for using AI.If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!Want even more?Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It's usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.To hear more from Dan Shipper:Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribeFollow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipperIntent is what comes after your IDE. Try it yourself: augmentcode.com/intentHead to granola.ai/every to get 3 months free.Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at www.Framer.com, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house.Timestamps00:00:00 — Introduction and how Sam and Dan's paths first crossed00:01:40 — What it means to be “the world's slowest incubator”00:04:50 — Why Bolton and Watt runs companies to several million in revenue before handing off to a CEO00:07:30 — How specialization across the founding journey creates advantages00:10:40 — Building AI-durable businesses versus AI-native ones00:16:10 — How an AI agent transformed their customer discovery process00:19:30 — Where synthetic customer calls completely fail00:29:30 — Deploying AI inside established companies00:32:30 — Why newer projects see huge gains from AI while mature companies see 10 percent00:37:00 — A preview of what's next for Bolton and Watt

What does it really take to sell an AI-native product into the Fortune 500? In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain sits down with two founders deep in the trenches of enterprise AI adoption, Esha Joshi (Co-founder, Yoodli⁩) and Anup Chamrajnagar (Co-founder, Gradial.) Their companies are selling into some of the world's most complex organizations, like Google, SAP, Snowflake, Databricks, and more. And they break down what founders often underestimate about enterprise AI sales. They dive into: Why most AI pilots fail and how to prevent it The "three-legged stool" of enterprise sales How AI review boards are reshaping buying cycles Securing long-term contracts Pricing AI: seats vs. usage vs. outcomes Navigating non-deterministic AI failures with customers Building champions who accelerate their careers with AI If you're building an AI-native company and selling into enterprises, this is for you. Full Transcript: https://www.madrona.com/this-is-how-fortune-500-companies-are-buying-ai-today Chapters: (00:00) – Introduction (03:37) – Early AI Pilots: What Worked (and What Didn't) (05:01) – Sell Pain, Not Features (06:25) – Why Enterprise Expectations Are Higher Now (07:48) – Moving From "Wow" Factor to Durable Outcomes (09:17) – How to Structure a Pilot That Converts (10:35) – Expanding Beyond the Initial Wedge (13:41) – Turning Pilots Into 12-Month Contracts (14:47) – Navigating Procurement & AI Governance Boards (16:02) – What's Changed (and What Hasn't) in Enterprise Sales (16:45) – How to Increase Deal Velocity (19:39) – Using AI to Improve Your Own Sales Ops (20:20) – Are You Replacing Jobs with AI? (23:14) – Building Career-Accelerating Champions (23:46) – When AI Outputs Go Wrong (Real Stories) (25:23) – Why the Pilot Never Stops (29:04) – Pricing AI: Seats vs. Usage vs. Outcomes (34:48) – Go-To-Market Partnerships That Unlock Enterprise (37:25) – The Role of Forward-Deployed Engineers (38:44) – Final Advice for AI Founders Selling to Enterprise

Nolan Lewin, director of the Rutgers Food Innovation Center and vice president of the New Jersey Food Processors Association, joins the podcast to discuss a wide variety of topics hounding the food and beverage industry. First, Lewin discusses the impact that the new Dietary Guidelines and other regulatory machinations are having on processors, and then highlights what some companies are doing to combat GLP-1s and the impacts of the ultraprocessed foods debate. Lewin also gives his insights into some of the recalls in food products that we've seen in recent years, how technology is helping predict outcomes and find more issues particularly in the labeling arena, and how processors should continue to look for solutions to keep people safe.

The market is dropping and oil is up today as the Middle East continues to be on investors' minds. But is this a panic the market will get over or the kind of action that will push the economy into recession? Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Matt Frankel discuss: - Rising oil prices and today's market - Target's ho hum business - Do insider buys really matter? Companies discussed: Target (TGT), SoFi (SOFI), Shift4 (FOUR), ServiceNow (NOW). Host: Travis Hoium Guests: Lou Whiteman, Matt Frankel Engineer: Dan Boyd Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We're committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Phong Le is CEO of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), and David Bailey is CEO & Chairman of KindlyMD. This conversation was recorded live at Bitcoin Investor Week in New York. In this conversation, we discuss Strategy's evolution from a bitcoin holding company to a leveraged treasury and now a digital credit platform, including the launch of its perpetual preferred product designed to offer bitcoin exposure with lower volatility and yield. We also cover capital markets strategy, competition among bitcoin treasury companies, macro impacts, and bitcoin's continued integration into Wall Street and global finance.======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 80+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $1,000 in rewards.======================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.======================0:00 - Intro0:25 - Strategy's three phases of buying bitcoin7:04 - Bitcoin's graduation into Wall Street & traditional finance10:11 - Macro economy & Fed policy12:01 - Would they ever sell their bitcoin holdings?15:26 - Bitcoin, government policy, & political adoption19:52 - The responsibility of running a public bitcoin company26:35 - The future of bitcoin treasury models & consolidation

What if the reason your marketing "isn't working" these days isn't your team — but your strategy? In today's environment, buyers are changing faster than most companies can keep up. Sales teams are frustrated. Leads are down. And what used to work suddenly doesn't. The real issue? Most organizations are still operating with outdated assumptions about how to turn their prospects into customers. In this episode, Rachel sits down with Karen Hayward, Managing Partner & CMO at Chief Outsiders and author of Stop Random Acts of Marketing, to unpack what modern growth really requires — and why CEOs must reclaim ownership of it. Karen brings more than 20 years of experience advising Fortune 1,000 and mid-market companies. At Chief Outsiders, she leads a team of 40-plus CMOs and CSOs, helping organizations align sales and marketing around the voice of the customer to accelerate revenue. She's a Vistage and TEC-certified speaker, guest lecturer, and trusted advisor to CEOs and private equity leaders ready to build growth engines in today's marketplace. In this episode, Karen breaks down how to replace marketing chaos with a disciplined strategy. The Modern Buyer Has Changed — Has Your Strategy? Today's landscape paints a generationally different picture of consumer behavior than the one many of us grew up with. Nearly 65% of B2B buyers are now Millennials or Gen Z. They research independently. They distrust early sales engagement. They want rep-free or digital-first buying experiences. And increasingly, they're discovering companies through AI platforms. If your growth engine still relies on cold outreach and traditional sales funnels, you're misaligned with how today's customers actually want to buy. Karen explains that marketing now owns the majority of the funnel. Her advice? Start with the voice of the customer. Interview recent wins and losses. Identify what customers truly value — not what you assume they value. Then align positioning, messaging, and sales enablement around that insight. From Random Acts to Real Results One of the most common mistakes Karen sees? Companies executing disconnected tactics without a cohesive strategy. Instead, she urges leaders to focus on three foundational pillars: Deep customer insight Clear competitive positioning Honest understanding of company strengths Only then should you invest in acquisition. Karen also shares tactical wins leaders can implement immediately: Record discovery calls and use AI to tighten proposal alignment Run an AEO grader report to evaluate how AI platforms see your business Build robust FAQ content based on real buyer questions The throughline? Discipline over randomness. Marketing remains full of engagement metrics and busy dashboards, but true success relies on measurable growth. Enjoy this episode with Karen Hayward… Soundbytes 09:21 – 09:32 "About 65%-plus of B2B buyers today are millennial or Gen Z. And they buy drastically differently than baby boomers do." 37:46 – 38:30 "By the time the salesperson gets engaged, you have very little time to build trust. So how do you coach yourself to get better on the at-bats that you have given how little time you have? So the one thing I would do with the sales team, or with BD people, or with founders, or with you — if you're talking to clients — is I would record the initial conversation with the client and understand what their needs are. I would record that. And then I would send a follow-up email to them with a summary of what they said, and I'd ask them to correct me." Quotes "Marketing now owns most of the sales and marketing funnel." "Stop doing random acts of marketing and hoping something works." "You can't rely on your sales force to tell you why you're winning and losing." "Open the door and ask about them first." "Engagement doesn't pay payroll." Links mentioned in this episode: From Our Guest Website: https://www.chiefoutsiders.com/profile/karen-hayward Phone: 650-823-4292 Connect with Karen Hayward on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenhaywardcmo/ Connect with brandiD Find out how top leaders are increasing their authority, impact, and income online. Listen to our private podcast, The Professional Presence Podcast: https://thebrandid.com/professional-presence-podcast Ready to elevate your digital presence with a powerful brand or website? Contact us here: https://thebrandid.com/contact-form/

Wisconsin National Guardsmen stationed in Middle East, Online gambling companies oppose Wisconsin bill.  why some of the biggest companies in online gambling oppose a bill that would legalize the industry in Wisconsin.And nearly half of Wisconsin's lowest-performing schools are all located in one part of the state. What's being done to change that?

Podcast Trailer — Start Here The Uncommon Way is a leadership and business podcast for women entrepreneurs and founders who want to scale with more authority, power, and sustainable growth. Companies don't just scale through strategy. They scale at the speed the founder can access authority, capacity, and clean decision-making. This trailer explains the next evolution of The Uncommon Way — and why the conversation is shifting toward power, leadership expansion, and sustainable scaling for women building significant companies. You'll hear: • Why growth eventually makes leadership capacity the limiting factor • The shift that allows founders to access dramatically more power — without years of inner work • How businesses reorganize when authority becomes clear and decisions become clean This isn't about hustle, performance, or optimization for the sake of doing more. It's about upgrading how you lead, how your business supports you, and how power moves through the company you're building. If you're a woman entrepreneur, founder, CEO, or emerging leader navigating growth, higher-stakes decisions, and bigger impact — this is where to begin. Hosted by business and leadership coach Jenna Harrison. Follow the show to start operating at the level your company now requires. ***** The Uncommon Way is a leadership and business podcast for ambitious women entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders who are scaling companies and expanding their influence. Hosted by business and leadership coach Jenna Harrison, the show explores how power, authority, and leadership capacity shape business growth. Episodes focus on decision-making, founder leadership evolution, team stability, and the structural shifts that allow companies to scale without overwhelming the person leading them. This podcast is especially relevant for women navigating: • Business growth and scaling challenges • Increasing leadership responsibility • Team expansion and higher-stakes decisions • Founder authority and executive presence • Identity and leadership evolution during scaling The Uncommon Way approaches growth differently. Not through hustle, constant self-optimization, or endless inner work — but by upgrading leadership, strengthening decision structures, and expanding the capacity required to run the company you're building. Topics include: • Founder leadership capacity expansion • Decision-making at higher levels of responsibility • Authority and power dynamics inside scaling businesses • Structural business leadership • Founder psychology and identity shifts during growth • Sustainable scaling and operational clarity Whether you're an experienced founder, a rising leader, or building something that's starting to matter at a bigger level, this podcast helps you access more power and lead accordingly.  

Podcast Show Notes – Episode 270 | 03.03.2025 Episode Title: Jeremy Jensen & Sean Barnes     Episode summary introduction: Sean Barnes sits down with Jeremy Jensen, founder of Encore Search Partners, to talk about what it really takes to build a high-performing business and a high-performing life. They get into culture and why one toxic top performer can quietly poison an entire organization, the brutal 2015 oil crash that nearly shut Jeremy's doors, and the mindset shift that comes from living below your means. The conversation turns personal as Jeremy shares how he rebuilt himself after divorce and a health wake-up call, and why real confidence comes from integrity, not optics. Then they zoom out to the executive hiring market in 2026, where AI, systems integration, and cost pressure are changing what companies hire for, and why senior leaders can't rely on yesterday's resume to win tomorrow's seat.   Key Moments 00:01:13 - Jeremy's business scale and why culture became non-negotiable 00:02:42 - “If you're a pain in my ass… hit the road”: removing toxic talent 00:07:48 - Family vs sports team: how Jeremy thinks about performance and standards 00:10:17 - 2015 crisis: revenue drops to $0 and the decision to double down 00:15:36 - Scrambling for revenue, survival creativity, and the value of a safety net 00:20:10 - Sean on financial discipline creating personal freedom and backbone 00:26:05 - Jeremy: divorce, rebuild, and the 2022 wake-up call at 284 lbs 00:31:23 - “I worked on myself for three years”: what actually changed 00:37:14 - What Jeremy wanted changed every 5 years: rich, power, fame… then respect 00:45:24 - Why people don't invest in coaching: cost vs investment mindset 00:51:06 - Sean: the leap into entrepreneurship, rebrand to Wolf Executives, restarting lean 01:07:18 - Executive hiring now: longer processes, interview fatigue, and “free consulting” fear 01:11:57 - 2026 trend: systems integration, AI, outsourcing, and profitability pressure 01:18:29 - The hiring trap: hiring “big company” execs who can't scale the next phase 01:21:11 - Sean's framework: clarity, visibility, value for career transitions 01:22:33 - Jeremy's next chapter: growth plan and May 16, 2026 wedding in Warsaw   Key Takeaways Culture beats “star power.” One toxic high performer can cap the entire team's output. When they're gone, the rest of the organization often accelerates.   Your safety net buys you options and integrity. Living below your means doesn't just protect you in downturns, it gives you the freedom to stand your ground when it matters.   In 2026, executive value is shifting toward integration and productivity. Companies want leaders who can implement systems, leverage AI, and improve profitability. If you're not evolving, someone younger and more current is already in the lane.   Guest: Jeremy Jensen LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyjenson/ Website: https://encoresearch.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyjenson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@encoresearchpartners   Host: Sean Barnes Website: https://www.wolfexecutives.com   https://www.seanbarnes.com   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanbarnes/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/wolfexecutives https://www.linkedin.com/company/thewayofthewolf/ LinkedIn Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7284600567593684993/   Twitter: https://x.com/seanbarnes https://x.com/wolfexecutives   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_seanbarnes https://www.instagram.com/wolfexecutives   TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_seanbarnes   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theseanbarnes

Yours Truly Media has (seemingly) bitten the dust and Jared and Jason break down why this always seems to happen, why it's hurting us all, and why it's our fault. 

What happens when the cost of intelligence drops to zero? The only thing that matters is knowing how to give the right instructions.In this episode, Andreas Bachmann – co-founder of Adacor, a managed cloud and critical infrastructure provider serving banks, automotive, healthcare, and energy clients across Germany – shares what 22 years of deliberate, founder-led growth actually looks like. We explore the real tension between innovation and zero-tolerance uptime, the co-founder crisis that almost broke the company, and why Andreas believes the primary job of every knowledge worker in five years won't be doing the work – it'll be managing the agents doing it for them.What You'll Discover:[00:01:19] Innovating When Failure Is Not an Option → How Adacor runs experiments for critical infrastructure clients who can't afford a single hiccup – and the mental model that makes it work[00:05:30] The Sustainable Growth Playbook → Why Andreas chose deliberate, step-by-step growth over hypergrowth – and how that decision made Adacor more competitive, not less[00:13:49] The Co-Founder Crisis Nobody Talks About → At 40–50 people, Adacor fractured into silos and the founding team needed “marriage counseling” – what they decided, and who stepped back[00:17:34] Self-Organization Without Chaos → How Adacor implemented OKRs, dailies, and retrospectives in a high-stakes environment – and the one thing that makes retros actually stick[00:23:37] Building a Human-Centered Tech Company → From family compatibility programs to volunteer firefighter support – why Andreas treats the company as the strong one, not the individual[00:27:26] The AI Question: Bullshit or Real? → Why Andreas went all-in on AI in 2022, how Adacor hacked EU innovation grants to build an AI team years early, and why he skipped the GPU commodity race entirely[00:34:16] The Future of Work Is Managing Agents → Andreas's thesis on what happens when intelligence is automated and essentially free – and what human value actually looks like on the other sideKey Takeaways:Sustainable growth is a competitive advantage in high-trust industries – adding people too fast breaks the thing clients pay you for“Fast fashion software”: non-developers are already using AI to write and discard code; this is a glimpse of where all knowledge work is headedThe best retros are useless without a committed “what do we do about it now?” – every retrospective at ATCO must produce 1–3 actionable initiativesThe co-founder transition from parallel silos to one clear direction is one of the most underreported breaking points in company buildingThe new leadership superpower isn't having all the answers – it's knowing when to step back and trust the people who doAbout Andreas Bachmann:Andreas is co-founder and CEO of Adacor, a German managed cloud and critical infrastructure company he's been building for over 22 years with a deliberate focus on stability, human-centered culture, and innovation that doesn't break things. He's also a founding force behind Media Monster, an initiative supporting mental health and work-family compatibility in tech.

To watch a video version of this podcast, click here: https://youtu.be/4LmP_3WOezgIn this episode, Reuben Saltzman and Tessa Murry welcome Noah Gavik from Brothers Underground to discuss the impact of private equity on the home service industry. They explore the benefits, challenges, and ethical considerations of private equity ownership, as well as how it influences business operations, customer relationships, and overall market dynamics.Here's the link to Inspector Empire Builder: https://www.iebcoaching.com/eventsTakeawaysPrivate equity (PE) buys service companies to generate higher, faster returns than traditional investments.PE ownership typically brings major operational changes—software, compensation, insurance, branding, and company culture.Large PE-backed companies can outspend small businesses on marketing (especially Google ads), pushing independents down in search visibility.Consolidation can create near‑monopolies in some markets, reducing consumer choice and increasing prices.Strong profit pressure often leads to aggressive or ethically questionable upselling, shifting focus away from true customer needs.Big roll‑ups can erode the personal relationships customers value, causing long‑time employees and clients to leave.PE-owned firms heavily emphasize metrics—conversion rates, revenue per call, average ticket—sometimes at the expense of service quality.Smaller companies win through trust, direct communication, craftsmanship, and community‑based referrals rather than high‑pressure sales.Huge review counts can hide negative experiences; fewer but consistent 5‑star reviews from smaller companies often reflect better service.Consumers should rely on referrals (inspectors, tradespeople, neighbors, realtors) instead of only choosing the top sponsored Google results.Selling to PE isn't inherently bad, but owners must understand PE's goals and be prepared for major cultural and operational changes.When interest rates rise and profits tighten, PE buying slows—but consolidation continues long-term.Chapters00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome02:15 Understanding Private Equity05:01 The Mechanics of Private Equity07:33 The Impact of Private Equity on the Market11:03 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Private Equity17:58 Navigating Changes Post-Acquisition22:09 Personal Perspectives on Selling to Private Equity26:11 The Power of Referrals in Service Industries28:32 Private Equity's Impact on Business Operations31:13 Sales Techniques and Customer Education33:02 Ethics vs. Profit in Business36:01 The Future of Small Businesses in a PE-Dominated Market37:43 Balancing Profitability with Customer Relationships41:16 Ethics in Sales and Customer Service44:01 Navigating the PE Landscape for Business Owners48:26 Building a Reliable Network for Service Providers

The guys sit down with Jack Lutzel and Meghan Geer of Coastal Companies in Rhode Island, and Mike Santolucito of Outdoor Pride of Massachusetts and New Hampshire to hear how they fared during the largest winter storm to hit in years!

Here is a FAQ Video on the Courses: https://youtu.be/0F7imrzjXWs Here is a deep dive into which course is best for you: https://youtu.be/JM_jgS8M-iU https://www.b2bRevenue.com - Get Your Free E-Book on How Companies make Decisions. FAQ: 1 YEAR ACCESS, PAY MONTHLY OR ANNUALLY NOT A SUBSCRIPTION OFFICE HOURS EVERY  OTHER WEEK VIA ZOOM. 1 HOUR GROUP Q&A. UNLIMITED 1-ON-1'S  ARE FREE AS LONG AS THEY CAN BE SHARED IN THE COURSE. 1-ON-1 ARE FULL ACCESS ON DAY ONE - NOTHING IS GATED OR TIME RELEASED. ALL CONTENT IS VIDEO BASED AND SELF PACED I RECOMMEND TAKE COURSE ONCE WITHOUT NOTES OR APPLYING IT SO YOU UNDERSTAND THE BIG PICTURE FIRST. THEN TAKE AND APPLY IT STEP BY STEP. YOU START WHEN YOU WANT AND GO AS FAST OR SLOW AS NEEDED.   Email me additional questions: briangburns@me.com     — SAMPLE EMAIL TO EXPENSE THE COURSE MGR,   I have been listening to the brutal truth about sales podcast for X months and it speaks to the issues we face.   They currently offer a course that includes video instruction, group Q&A and One-on-One coaching. I'm committed to my own personal development and would like your help in expensing the course.   It would pay for itself if I closed only one new deal of $X value.   Please let me know by Friday if I can move forward with this 1 year course.   Thanks, ME Here are some student interviews from the courses:      ———————————————————————————————————— Audible 30 day Free Trial: http://www.audibletrial.com/BrutalTruth  

In this episode of the Game Deflators podcast, hosts John and Ryan recap their latest gaming sessions before diving into the major leadership shake‑ups happening at Microsoft's gaming division. With longtime Xbox chief Phil Spencer stepping down and former CoreAI executive Asha Sharma taking over as the new CEO of Microsoft Gaming, the hosts explore what this transition could mean for Xbox's long‑term direction. They also touch on the departure of Sarah Bond and the broader restructuring that has reshaped the upper ranks of the Xbox organization, a shift that has drawn significant attention across the industry.  The conversation connects these changes to ongoing challenges in the fighting‑game genre and how shifting leadership priorities might influence future platform strategy, content pipelines, and studio support. The episode wraps with a review of the Rambo NES game and a preview of their upcoming food‑themed gaming month.   Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Gaming Pickups 06:21 Current Games and Anime Recommendations 12:08 Discussion on Marathon and Gaming Trends 17:59 Fighting Game Strategies and Progress 22:19 AI in Gaming Reviews and Industry Changes 28:05 Microsoft's Leadership Changes and Future Directions 35:47 The Future of Xbox and AI Integration 42:41 Fighting Games: Challenges and Opportunities 50:45 Rambo: The NES Game Review 58:29 Food Month: Upcoming Game Themes   Find us on TheGameDeflators.com Twitter - www.twitter.com/GameDeflators Facebook - www.facebook.com/TheGameDeflators Instagram - www.instagram.com/thegamedeflators   The views and opinions expressed on this channel are solely those of the author. The content within these recordings are property of their respective Designers, Writers, Creators, Owners, Organizations, Companies and Producers. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted. Permission for intro and outro music provided by Matthew Huffaker http://www.youtube.com/user/teknoaxe 2_25_18