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Lesley Logan and Brad Crowell break down the conversation with Jamie Lerner, a well-being therapist and author who left psychotherapy after watching clients use their past as the excuse that kept them stuck. They dig into why society rewards women for wearing the busy badge, what it actually means to look inward, and the internal compass Jamie says everyone is born with.If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co mailto:beit@lesleylogan.co. And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/#follow-subscribe-free.In this episode you will learn about:How society rewards women who put themselves last and stay overworked.Brad unpacks the inner knowing Jamie calls a natural internal compass.Five minutes of silence outside as the practice of looking inward.Laughing when you judge others reveals what you actually want yourself.Setting aside ten minutes daily for lovingly curious questions.Episode References/Links:Attention Deficit Disorder Association (ADDA) - https://add.orgupLift Teacher Training Program - https://xxll.co/uwseLevate Mentorship Program - https://lesleylogan.co/elevateOPC Flashcards - https://opc.me/flashcardsOPC Posters - https://opc.me/postersPilates on Tour (Powered by Balanced Body) - https://xxll.co/potCambodia Retreat Waitlist - https://crowsnestretreats.comOPC Winter Tour - https://opc.me/tourJamie Lerner's Website - https://jamie-lerner.comBook: The Ever Loving Essence of You - https://a.co/d/0i9I7Tc5The Quickie Texting Service - https://beitpod.com/quickietextingEp. 1 ft. Joanna Vargas - https://beitpod.com/ep01Core Compassion Project - https://corecompassionproject.orgSubmit your wins or questions - https://beitpod.com/questionsIf you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. https://lovethepodcast.com/BITYSIDEALS! DEALS! DEALS! 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I think it is bad to judge yourself for being jealous and not actually taking a moment to know why. What about that thing is making me have the grass is greener?Lesley Logan 0:11  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started.Lesley Logan 0:54  Welcome back to the Be It Till You See It interview recap where my co-host in life, Brad and I are going to dig into the insightful convo I had with Jamie Lerner in our last episode. If you haven't yet listened to that interview, feel free to pause this now and go back and listen to that one, and then come back and join us, or you can just listen all the way through and then just let your podcast play that one. Brad Crowell 1:11  You can start at episode one. We're only 740 in right now.Lesley Logan 1:15  I know. I mean, so many. It's so many. Today is October 1st 2026. It is ADHD Awareness Month, and you are listening to two ADHD hosts. By the way, just so you know, when we record these, the Adderall is worn off, so.Brad Crowell 1:29  That's also true.Lesley Logan 1:30  It's all we don't ever record when we are medicated. So because that would be that would make too much sense. But ADHD Awareness Month shines a light on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder throughout October. This vital observance, spearheaded by organizations like Attention Deficit Disorder Association, aims to educate the public, reduce stigma, and champion effective treatments. Join the conversation, share resources, and support those navigating life with ADHD. I just want to tell you guys, it's not like a trend to go get diagnosed. If you think that you that's what's going on with you. You should do it because there are really great tools and systems that you can use. You don't have to take Adderall. There's other options. There's other systems you could put in place. But it has been really quite helpful to understand what's ADHD and what's just tired and what's whatever. And oh, I'm going on a dopamine high. Let's adopt a dog. You know, decisions like that. But I highly recommend it. And then the other thing I just want to add is I listened to this really wonderful clip where this woman said that the title ADHD is not really the best because it's what it is is it's a regulation disorder. People with ADHD have a hard time regulating in general. So like we go on highs and lows and highs and lows because it's really hard to regulate. I really like the example of you know those of you who listen to the podcast. Most of you understand, in the 80s and 90s there were those pens that had red, green, black, blue, right?Brad Crowell 2:50  Sure.Lesley Logan 2:51  So a neurotypical person will think red, click red, use red, finish the red, right? A neurodivergent person. Brad Crowell 3:00  Is that what they'll do?Lesley Logan 3:00  Yeah, a neurodivergent person with ADHD will go. I had five ideas, all five pen, all five colors at the same time. That's how their brain works. And I thought that if you don't understand what that's like, you that I think it's a good visual. So, anyways, if you hear chewing in the background, that's Darla, and we're gonna let her do it because it keeps her busy, otherwise. Brad Crowell 3:19  That's her ADHD (inaudible) also, too, my understanding is that ADHD presents itself slightly differently between men and women, and it's really coming out strong as. Lesley Logan 3:34  The largest number of women are going through perimenopause at the same time.Brad Crowell 3:37  Yes, that is the point I was ultimately trying to eloquently get to, that I am not a woman to be able to say that, but that's happening right now, and so it might be that you have ADHD undiagnosed and don't know it. And if you're thinking, "Oh my god, I can't fucking think anymore, maybe it's because of this, and it's worth going to talk to someone about it. We did, and it was hilarious. Lesley's already told the story, but in five minutes, the psychiatrist was, "Yeah, you have ADHD. I'm giving you boom. You know, you're good. Let's go.Lesley Logan 4:10  And Brad and I did.Brad Crowell 4:11  I had to do a friggin' test.Lesley Logan 4:12  You did all the tests. I was. I don't have time for these tests.Brad Crowell 4:16  I had to go do a whole computer exam and the whole nine. I mean, I'm glad I did, but also I was. I gotta go all the way back out here to this place. I mean it's like 20 minutes away, but it felt like forever. Anyway, I'm very happy that I am formally diagnosed, and it has been interesting to to be taking medication for something like this because I I just always assumed that I was just getting older and my brain wasn't working the way that it used to, and that's true, I think. But also, I wonder. I don't know. I felt very productive and you know cogent when I was younger, and then things just started to slip away for me, and I just associated that with all the things that happened in my life and. Lesley Logan 4:55  Maybe you're going through perimenopause.Brad Crowell 4:56  Yeah, I must be. I mean, I think I think that's it.Brad Crowell 5:00  That's the conclusion. I don't even know how I didn't come to that conclusion. Lesley Logan 5:02  You know what I will say is the psychiatrist was really thoughtful. She said, "Look, she says what you'll have to understand about yourself is it's you versus the ADHD, and if you can really understand what's me and what's ADHD, it will really help you. As is a child where my ADHD was fully showing up, and people, oh, you're just not applying yourself. Oh, you're just being you're procrastinating. Oh, this, and so really, I'll be completely honest. I actually had a moment of being fucking pissed off because I think my life would be completely different had someone just diagnosed me earlier. Instead, I went my whole life masking, and then I got to a place where my hormones weren't helping me mask anymore, and I was tired of masking. And then I was just a fucking cunt. I was just mean. I was irritable. And now, when I am taking the medication and I'm focused and I'm irritable, I actually know that I am actually irritated. Versus, oh, this is just my. I'm tired. My brain is not able to operate, which means watch the fuck out because now I know.Brad Crowell 6:03  Now we know.Lesley Logan 6:04  Now we know. Now we know. And I'm a January Aquarius, and so some of it is we're tired. We're ready. We're moving on. Anyways, moving on. There's a lot of a lot of events and travel. So upLift is our teacher training program. You probably have heard the rumor. It's been something they've been whispering about. But my teacher training program for new teachers or partially trained teachers is called upLift, and it is going to start early next year in many different cities. If you want to know which cities that are going to be in.Brad Crowell 6:27  Probably around the world, in fact.Lesley Logan 6:29  That's our goal. That's our goal. At the time we're recording this, I'm looking at the applications right now, and I have some really epic educators that have applied that I'm really excited about. We're working really hard to make sure that next year is the right time for them, but you want to go to xxll.co/uws xxll.co/uws. If you are what are what is this all. Brad Crowell 6:51  That's for upLift waitlistLesley Logan 6:53  studentBrad Crowell 6:54  studentLesley Logan 6:54  and you can blame Brad. So go there because I'm updating that waitlist monthly, and those are the people the people who will hear about the locations first. You won't have to wait for the Instagram algorithm to show you something. eLevate is for those who are already trained and you're looking for more of a master's program to study amongst other teachers, and you want to directly study with me. You can look at our live Q and A call that we did earlier this summer. I guess it's at lesleylogan.co/elevate. I will just tell you, we're recording this not when you're hearing it, and at the time of recording, there are two spots left in 2028, and 10 applications that at any time someone could go, yes, I'm ready, but don't let that stop you. Check it out. See, you might get the last spot if that's what you're looking for. Also, eLevate grads are the people who right now can apply to be an upLift educator. So if you were oh I want to be one of those educators, you must have gone through upLift at this time. So check that out. The flashcards. If you didn't know, maybe you love OPC or you're not ready to be an OPC member yet, but you are wanting to study with me, and like the other options are just not what you need right now. You can be a Pilates lover of any level. You can be a teacher of any background. And when you buy the OPC flashcards, you're actually supporting the Nevada SPCA, which is where we got Miss Darla. Go to opc.me/flashcards. We have six decks in there in the set, and they're wonderful. And they're edited by a contemporary trained instructor with contemporary equipment, and they are edited by my sister-in-law, who's never done Pilates. So anyone can read them. And then we have heard so many times people don't know where the posters are. Go to opc.me/posters. Okay, wow, this is a lot of talking. Really quickly, we are headed to Sacramento literally next week, and it's sold out. So you, too bad, so sad. You missed. If you don't have a ticket, you're. We're not seeing you there.Brad Crowell 8:36  Sacramento because Balanced Body is having a Pilates On Tour. It's also their 50th anniversary celebration.Lesley Logan 8:41  You can hang out with me at another 50th celebration, but stay tuned for that. We are going to go from Sacramento by another train to San Francisco. I think this sounds like a terrible idea, but this is what we're doing to fly to Cambodia to lead our retreat. And it was definitely an ADHD planned moment, and now we're going to live it.Brad Crowell 9:00  Oh we're living it.Lesley Logan 9:01  We're living it. Just thinking about the return trip home. So here's the deal, guys. We're driving to Sacramento with the van.Brad Crowell 9:07  Which is nine and a half hours.Lesley Logan 9:08  Nine and a half hours. Okay, sounds fun because it's so much easier than shipping the flashcards. It costs us so much fucking money to do that. Brad Crowell 9:15  It's also trying to get the van at the event.Lesley Logan 9:18  Yeah, but it's not gonna. Brad Crowell 9:21  We're gonna park that right out front. We're we're putting that in they're gonna they're gonna valet park that sucker right in front of the entrance.Lesley Logan 9:28  I know Brad's gonna figure that out because the event is not at their headquarters. Brad Crowell 9:31  No, it's at the Hyatt or something. Lesley Logan 9:32  It's like a thing, right? Yeah. So, anyways, I'll let you figure that out because I that's not my monkey, not my circus. Then we'll be at the event. Then we're gonna park that van at Ken Endelman's house, supposedly, which we have no idea where that is in regards to the Amtrak. We have to take an Amtrak. Hopefully, there's one left. We take the Amtrak to a BART before the BART shut down on a Sunday night. From the BART to our hotel, and then the next morning we fly out of San Francisco. Part of me is just throw money at this problem and park the van somewhere in San Francisco, but it's San Francisco, and I'm a little worried someone's going to move in. So we're not doing that. Not doing that. So, then. Brad Crowell 10:08  No, if we're going to throw money at the problem, we're hiring a private driver from Sacramento.Lesley Logan 10:11  That's a great idea. But here's what's going to happen: we return back, and we have to do the reverse trip, you guys, we have to go BART to Amtrak, Amtrak to the van, and then a nine and a half hour drive home. And this is the part that I don't think my husband has thought through. So you're hearing it first here. I think he is too. So if you want to go to Cambodia next year, when we're not doing planes, trains, and automobiles, you can get on the wait list. I don't know the link for that. Brad will tell you.Brad Crowell 10:39  crowsnestretreats.comLesley Logan 10:41  Great. January is when we'll open up the early bird. We have so many people interested in 2027. I promise you do not want to wait. Brad Crowell 10:48  We had a lot of interest, especially from this summer tour that we just got back from. A lot of interest, and I'm telling you, this past year's trip sold out in three weeks, and I'm sure this one is going to do the same or even faster.Lesley Logan 11:02  Yeah. Then in November, I'm teaching at basically a Pilates On Tour, but in China, outside of Shanghai, I can't tell you how you're going to sign up for that. But I feel I feel like if you Google it, it will happen. They are not. They've not sent me a link for you. So, but people are excited.Brad Crowell 11:17  You can find it online.Lesley Logan 11:18  I'm sure you can. I'm sure you're all here. I'm sure you can all Google, but then because I'm a crazy person, I'm gonna go back to Asia two weeks later to teach at Pilates On Tour Goa.Brad Crowell 11:30  Which is India.Lesley Logan 11:31  Yeah, it is India. I think people know Goa. It looks stunning, you guys. And this particular POT, it's the last one of the 50th year celebration, and when you, it's very different because we all have lunch together. It's more like a retreat style. You are there for the whole event. You are going to go to Instagram Pilates On Tour India, and you can sign up through there because.  Brad Crowell 11:54  It's not on the POT page. It's not on Balanced Body's website.Lesley Logan 11:57  I mean, you know what? It might be.Brad Crowell 11:58  It is. It's xxll.co/potLesley Logan 12:00  Okay, do that. What do I know? I'm just the. Brad Crowell 12:02  I'm sure it's on there.Lesley Logan 12:03  You guys, today is October 1st, which means the tickets drop today for the winter tour. So do not miss out. Go to opc.me/tour because.Brad Crowell 12:12  By the way, if you didn't hear what she just said, the winter tour tickets have just dropped today.Lesley Logan 12:19  Today, today, today, and we, it's going to be a very big tour. I'm actually flying from Goa to Denver, which doesn't make any sense now that I know the route. I'm coming through Europe, so I probably should have met you in New York. Brad Crowell 12:34  Yeah, we're not. We're not doing that. You're coming as close to home as possible, but yeah, we're going to pick her up in in in Denver, and then go from there. But it's exciting to see the route is coming together. We're almost done. I can tell you the first half of the tour is going to take us from we're going to do Fort Collins or just south. There's a smaller town just south of Fort Collins. That's going to be the first tour stop. It's going to go up. There's a couple of stops on the way to Chicago, and there's a bunch more stops on the way to Boston, and then we're gonna scoop back around through New York and then Hershey, we're coming back to you.Lesley Logan 13:06  We love Hershey. You love us. Brad Crowell 13:09  Then we're going down East Coast, but we're gonna cut over to Charlotte, North Carolina, and then we're gonna make our way down to Florida and then back across the country. So those are still TBD. We're working out the-the logistics and all the things. Lesley Logan 13:22  By the time you're hearing this, it's worked out.Brad Crowell 13:24  Oh yeah, it's worked out. Just go to OPC.me/tour. What am I talking about?Lesley Logan 13:27  We're actually just recording this in the past.Brad Crowell 13:30  Yeah.Lesley Logan 13:31  Before it has been because that's how we do life. Okay, we got to move on.Brad Crowell 13:34  Let's go. Let's go.Lesley Logan 13:35  So real quick, you guys, as you know, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and we wanted to spotlight a a project that we actually know the founder of very well. We know Pilates instructors who are part of it. So it's a nonprofit built by the Pilates community, founded in 2012 by Pilates instructor Jill Hinson after she saw firsthand how quickly Reformer work helped two clients recover from breast cancer surgery to regain their strength and mobility. So it's the Core Compassion Project, and realized that most people who could benefit from Pilates couldn't afford it. So, especially when they're going through cancer treatment. So, Core Compassion provides Pilate scholarships to breast cancer patients and survivors. $700 funds 10 private one-on-one sessions with a certified instructor who's specifically trained in post-cancer rehab, which is very important. You can't just show up to any Pilates studio and expect them to be able to support you during this journey, you definitely want someone who understands because they'll probably need what they can also provide is free specialized fitness bras and lymphedema compression sleeves, and then things which are things like survivors are needing, but the insurance doesn't cover most times. Doesn't cover a lot of things anymore. It's 100% volunteer run with a board that includes past scholarship recipients, and every October they rally the Pilates community together through their Compassion MATraiser, where studios and teachers host donation-based classes to fund the mission. If you are a Pilates person listening to this, and probably you are, this is your charity. So find more at corecompassionproject.org, or if you're just someone who wants to support women who are going through this and need this, it's at corecompassionproject.org. Obviously, if you don't have, you can also just supply $5. I mean, they'll take it, I'm sure. So, but $700 gets you gets that person 10 one-on-one sessions, which is really wonderful for someone who can understand what they're going through. So, anyways, if you have a charity you'd like us to look into, or you have a win that you want me to talk about on the FYFs, you can text us at 310-905-5534 or submit it at beitpod.com/questions. Yeah, okay, we're ready to talk about Jamie Lerner, finally.Brad Crowell 15:32  Woo!Brad Crowell 15:34  Welcome back. Let's talk about Jamie Lerner. Jamie is a well-being therapist and an author. She helps people get from where they are to where they want to be. After years as a psychotherapist, Jamie realized that having people look back at their past was not helping them move forward. Instead, it was becoming the very excuse that kept them stuck. So she walked away and looked within, discovering that her superpower was her own inner knowing about her own life, and she was trying to figure out how to explain that to others, how they can get back to that themselves. So today, she teaches people to trust themselves, take personal responsibility, and get lovingly curious about their own inner being. So, she wrote a book. It's called The Ever Loving Essence of You. You can find it on Amazon. She also has a service called The Quickie, which is her texting service where you can buy a package of time and text back and forth with her. Those links are going to be in the show notes. But she clearly has been through the psychotherapy couch sessions and was I'm over this myself. I'm I'm going to help people in a different way. It was really cool.Lesley Logan 16:38  I can't even imagine because I have to be honest. I can't even have friends who repeat themselves and stick get stuck. Like it really, it takes everything in me to listen to someone complain about the same thing for the third time. I cannot. So I could not ever have that job. And she said we we often live in a this victim mentality, and that society actively rewards women for being the victim by putting ourselves last and being overworked, and so it's true because everyone just wears the busy badge, right? I've got the busy badge of honor over here, and look how busy I am, look how tired I am, and look at all the things that I've done. And then guess what, you guys? Let's guess what they're gonna do. When you fail, then they're gonna call you controlling, emotional, emotional perfectionist, some control freak. So you can't win, but it's a false belief that all these other things are more important than our own well-being, and we use, she said, we use being busy as an excuse, choosing to hide behind it simply because we do not know how to include ourselves in self-care, and I think this is really key because I meet so many people who say, well, so it must be so nice for you because you have the time. You don't have kids, so you must have the time. You're right. I don't have kids. I don't have kids. We have two dogs, so I don't. They're not the same. But also, we're very busy. We have three companies plus a fourth in a different country. We have hundreds of members. We have dozens of people on our team. We have a different version of responsibilities. And if I do not take care of myself, I am not going to be able to do these things.Brad Crowell 18:06  Yeah, we we have a different definition of busy, and it doesn't involve you know kids and soccer games.Lesley Logan 18:10  I would say different definition of responsibility. We have different responsibilities. So, but I.  Brad Crowell 18:15  I guess we have a we have the same we have we have the same I'm busy excuse, but just in a different manner.Lesley Logan 18:21  Yeah, but I also, but I really do think that she is correct that we went. Okay, this. Well, I'm glad that we're re-recording this. You guys, this is the second time we record this. We recorded this before tour, and now we're back from tour. And we were in a city. I will not name the city, but we were in a city, and it was, we walked into a restaurant, which, by the way, the team did not tell me that there's probably a dress code. So I walk in, in cutoff shorts and an oversized T-shirt, with my bright red platform Crocs, okay, so I look like hell, and it was definitely the Real Housewives of that city kind of a restaurant. And we got stuck next to this table of the Real Housewives from that city, and I, five minutes of eavesdropping to their table, and I was, "Brad, I fucking cannot. If this is what having friendships like this is supposed to be about in a city, thank God we don't have kids. I could not." All they did was talk about, oh, it was how's your mom, and then the only reason they would listen is if their mom was sick. Oh, how's your kid? If you talked about your kids doing great, they didn't know what to say, so then they said, "Oh, well, she's struggling with this. Oh my god, mine too. Everyone, the conversation only kept going, and you were only rewarded for what you said if it was all negative and you were a victim and something was wrong. My goodness, you know what my favorite conversations with my friends are, is what they celebrate. Oh, I slayed this. Yeah, I bet you did. I love those conversations. So, anyways, but that's how people are rewarded, and then they get rewarded for putting themselves last because they're definitely looked at badly if they put themselves first by those people. But I would say there's a whole group of people like me who are ready to celebrate you putting yourself first. So, and Jamie, that's what Jamie wants.Brad Crowell 19:58  And Jamie. Absolutely. One thing I loved that Jamie said was that we are all born with a knowing, which acts as like a natural internal compass. This is very foreign idea to me. I did not grow up with anyone explaining that I could look inwardly and I could understand what I'm feeling and if something is right or wrong for me. You know, it's just not how I was raised.Lesley Logan 20:22  So I wasn't raised that way, but I know I had this, and that's why I felt like a weirdo, and that's why I was getting like I would get in trouble because the inner knowing was the compass. I don't actually know where East and West is, but I know what felt good, and that what people were wanting me to do did not feel good. Yeah, I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know what I was doing, so I was just.Brad Crowell 20:39  I definitely wasn't a people-pleaser. I was definitely the rebel, and I did the rebel. Lesley Logan 20:44  Yeah, I would say you have an inner knowing. You wore ridiculous clothes every single day. Brad Crowell 20:48  Yeah, but it was a little bit of like an FU to the man in a sense, as a teenager.Lesley Logan 20:51  Yeah, because there's an inner knowing that you that you wanted to do that.Brad Crowell 20:53  I did want to do that, and I was I always looked out to see how I could stick a thorn in the side of the process without actually getting in trouble, yeah, that's how I rolled. I didn't really want to get in trouble, but I really wanted to cause trouble. Does that make sense? Lesley Logan 21:07  You just wanted to see how far you could do without being in trouble because you wanted to feel like you were breaking the rules without breaking the rules. Brad Crowell 21:13  Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Yeah, you know. But anyway, this inner knowing that Jamie's talking about, she explained because of the contrast of life, society trains us to look outside of ourselves for pretty much everything, right? I mean, the irony is that we have a podcast telling you to look inwardly, but I think that it is just natural for us to look outside of ourselves. Our our parents, our church, our work, our friends, our siblings-you know-we're constantly looking to others for approval, I was the same way, especially when I was younger.Lesley Logan 21:43  Oh, we're raised to look at other people for approval, especially women. But I'm sure you, too, because even the Boy Scouts are the troop leaders going to give you these badges. Did you do a good enough job? Everything is to get other people's opinions of you to matter, but that's not whose opinion matters.Brad Crowell 21:58  Yeah, and seeking that external validation causes us to lose the basic sense of can we even trust our own decisions? What do we actually want for us? We don't even know what we want for us most of the time. Well, especially when we were growing up, what we wanted for us was what our parents told us we wanted for us, and then and then like somewhere in there, we're supposed to be oh now I get to choose what I want for me, you know, and and and we don't shift. Oh, you know, we're still looking to.Lesley Logan 22:26  Well, you never got to practice it.Brad Crowell 22:28  Right. Yeah, and and her argument is it's very easy for us to get back to looking internally, and she says that there's a trust that gets built when you sit with yourself, and she was talking about it's not even complicated in the sense of this meditation idea that I could never wrap my head around. And she said, "You know, you don't need to do any anything like that. It could just be five minutes of silence drinking a cup of coffee, where you just have a moment of you with you.Lesley Logan 22:57  Oh my god! I forgot my AirPods yesterday on the dog walk.Brad Crowell 22:59  Weird. Lesley Logan 23:00  I know. I loved it.Brad Crowell 23:03  Oh, that was like an hour. Yeah. Well, good for you. Lesley Logan 23:06  I mean, here's the deal. I loved the first half, and then the second half, I was done with it myself because I'm in my head all day, you know. So I didn't need more time. But so I did listen to a podcast without headphones, and well, the neighbors get to listen to my my true crime. But the first half was just like such a nice. I could hear the birds and all the things, and I was. This is wonderful. Maybe I should just not put them in until halfway.Brad Crowell 23:28  I mean, I love that.Lesley Logan 23:29  It's a it's a good intention.Brad Crowell 23:31  There's value. There's value.Lesley Logan 23:32  I will say you don't even have to do that. Five minutes is actually not that long, and you you sit out on the front porch, you know, or you could walk around a block, or you could just walk across the street. But you should get outside and be quiet.Brad Crowell 23:46  So if you want a feeling of coming home to yourself, start to look inward and see what that means. You know?Lesley Logan 23:52  I'm all. Here's the thing: she does make it sound so simple in a way that I did challenge her. Is it really that simple? Hold on. Is there? I mean, I was Jamie, people aren't gonna think it's that simple, but I think we overcomplicate things, and people have overcomplicated things to sell you something. And she's, it's actually, it is actually simple. And I think sometimes we think, well, then it must not work. But I really did believe, I do, I do trust what she had to say at the end. You know what? I bet you it is that simple, and we just want it to be complicated because then we can't do it. Brad Crowell 24:24  Yeah, I mean, but what is it? You know, when you're, what does it mean to look inwardLesley Logan 24:29  To listen to yourself and not other people?Brad Crowell 24:31  Yeah.Lesley Logan 24:31  Oh gosh, I mean, I think it means that you. Well, this is what people won't want to do, and they feel like they're going to let people down because they're doing things for themselves and not for other people. But you, the only we can let people down is if you are actually incapable of being empathetic and loving and and taking and. Brad Crowell 24:47  No, that's not what I mean. What's the practice of looking inward? Lesley Logan 24:50  I think that's personal.Brad Crowell 24:52  Yeah, but we have to give them an actual tangible. Lesley Logan 24:55  Well, I think Jamie did it in in the podcast. I think it's in these takeaways.Brad Crowell 24:59  So I'm gonna tell you that sitting with yourself and actually not distracting yourself and having a moment to think, that's.Lesley Logan 25:10  Yeah, but I'm not gonna tell you right now because I'm looking ahead.Brad Crowell 25:12  All right, well stick around. We'll be right back. Because that was a great teaser.Brad Crowell 25:15  Woo! Welcome back. Let's dig into those Be It Action Items that we had with Jamie Lerner on the last episode, what bold, executable, intrinsic, or targeted action items can we take away from Lesley's convo with her? She said, "Hey, laugh when you judge others, because what that means is that we're actually judging ourselves because we're projecting. We are projecting, and you know, take it from a psychotherapist to understand the technical elements of all those things, she says it simply means we're just projecting how we feel about ourselves onto others because we're judging them. And what that means is we are not connected to ourselves. We are not looking inward on ourselves at all in that moment. And she said it takes a little bit of practice, but when you start to identify that you're judging others, you should laugh at yourself. So I thought that was really funny. Go laugh with yourself, not at yourself.Lesley Logan 26:07  Yeah, yeah. No, it's like, hahahaha, I clearly want that. Or there's something about that. How that's so funny. I didn't realize it's something I wanted, or that's something that there's something about that I desire. Or there's you know I actually don't think it's bad to be jealous, I think it is bad to judge yourself for being jealous and not actually taking a moment to know what about that thing is making me have the grass is greener? Oh, there's something about that that you want. Maybe not that exact thing, but there's an energy or an emotion or something. And so I think taking the time to notice what you're jealous of, or we have a couple solo episodes about comparison. I think just came out. Anyways, about comparison, and we compare ourselves when the clarity isn't clear about what we want. And when clarity is clear, you're gonna be more likely to see that someone else doing something has nothing to do with your ability to do something. But when you are comparing yourself to someone else, and that jealousy is there. Then it's a sign, like, "Oh, I'm not clear on what I want. How silly of me to be so hard on myself when I obviously haven't finished planning."Brad Crowell 27:11  Yeah, she said, "It's an observation of how often you're disconnected in any given moment, and the realization and laughter allows you to reconnect with yourself. So there's no time to judge yourself for judging others. But what about you?Lesley Logan 27:25  Well, this goes into the question you had about going inward. She said, and I'll go back to the other things that she said, set aside 10 minutes every day. That's not even a half a percent of your day. Set aside 10 minutes every day, or just little moments here and there to get tuned back into yourself. And she said, "You can sit quietly and notice how often we're unkind and cruel to ourselves in a way we would never speak to another person. And she said, "In this time, ask yourself questions that are lovingly curious. Oh, I wonder why I am so interested in what that person is doing, or I wonder why I'm so intrigued by that, or I wonder what would allow me to be able to do something like that. Have some loving curiosity about yourself instead of having demanding immediate solutions. Go of needing an answer and just asking is enough. We can go back to episode one.Brad Crowell 28:11  Wow.Lesley Logan 28:11  Episode one is about just being like it is. Brad Crowell 28:15  I wonder.Lesley Logan 28:16  I wonder. You know, and so, opening a loop in your brain, so that you can oh, yeah. I don't think they can read. It's really hard.Brad Crowell 28:25  It's hard.Lesley Logan 28:26  It's hard. Brad Crowell 28:27  If you're watching on YouTube, we are trying to. There's my 1/3 tattoo on my hand, and it's on for me to see, which makes it very difficult for you to see. So she said, practice this moment by moment, which I also love because.Brad Crowell 28:39  Wait, what did she say?Lesley Logan 28:40  She said, "Practice this moment by moment", and that's something I also love because we are so hard on ourselves to be able to do this all the time. No, you do little bits, and over time they add up to lots of bits, and then it takes more of your day. And she said, "Most important," she said, "Know yourself, love yourself, and trust yourself, and laugh a lot with yourself." And I do think I remember my parents always saying, "Laughter brings healing to the bones." Brad Crowell 29:05  It's the best medicine. Lesley Logan 29:07  It's the best medicine. It's a great core workout. So I couldn't agree more.Brad Crowell 29:10  That's what they said?Lesley Logan 29:11  Well, they didn't talk about the core workout, but I added that part. They would take a lesson, go, "Laughter brings healing to the bones."Brad Crowell 29:17  Wow. I don't think my parents did that.Lesley Logan 29:21  We had very different childhoods. Brad Crowell 29:23  They just tickle monster us.Lesley Logan 29:24  You you had a very consistent one. Mine was a little bit of a roller coaster.Brad Crowell 29:28  Healing to the bones.Lesley Logan 29:32  You know what's something so funny is I was in my Pilates session today, and my teacher Kim was talking to these other two women who were in the group, and they said they said something. He goes, "No, you're not weak. You're impatient." And I laughed so hard as, and they're like, "Oh, I have to put that on my wall. You're not weak. You're just impatient." Yeah, you guys are just expecting yourself to be good about something you just learned yesterday. You're not. It's not a weakness. It's like you're expecting something to happen tomorrow when you just learned how to do it yesterday. You know. So be kind. Have some loving curiosity.Brad Crowell 30:10  Yeah. 10 minutes will do that. Set aside.Lesley Logan 30:13  I'm Lesley Logan,Brad Crowell 30:13  and I'm Brad Crowell.Lesley Logan 30:14  You're amazing. Go send this to a friend as they hear it. Go laugh with yourself. And until next time, Be It Till You See It.Brad Crowell 30:20  Bye for now.Lesley Logan 30:21  That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.Brad Crowell 31:04  It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.Lesley Logan 31:08  It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.Brad Crowell 31:13  Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.Lesley Logan 31:20  Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.Brad Crowell 31:23  Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Introducing the All Def SquADD Cast show “Versus". It's a podcast with the OG SquADD! Each week, the SquADD will debate topics and vote at the end to see what wins. Versus airs every Monday and you can download and listen wherever podcasts are found.Special GuestLance WoodsChinedu UnakaThis Week We DiscussOnly Listen To Music On Vinyl vs Cook Every MealSpend A Year Naked, At Home, For $2 Million vs Give Up Sitting For A Year For $3 MillionBe A Pokémon Trainer vs Attend HogwartsS/o To Our SponsorsHims Wegovy®Ready to reach your goals? Visit hims.com/SQUADD  to get personalized, affordable care for weight loss, hair loss, sex, testosterone, and more.Individual results may vary, and stopping treatment may result in weight regain. LEGAL DISCLAIMER REQUIRED:Weight Loss by Hims is not available in all 50 states. Wegovy® is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk A/S. To get started and learn more, including important safety information, Wegovy® clinical study information, and restrictions, visit Hims.com.Cash AppNew Cash App customers can earn $10 if they use code CASHAPP10 in their profile at signup and send $5 to afriend within 14 days. Terms applyDownload Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/qi3gs1iw #CashAppPodCash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bankpartner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cardsissued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A.Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flexcard. Cash App Green features, Savings, Direct deposit, Round ups, Overdraft coverage and Discountsprovided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures.

Morgan Stanley Research analysts Michelle Weaver, Ravi Shanker and Dave Arcaro discuss two industrial inflection points: how long it will be before autonomous trucking becomes a reality and why power infrastructure is racing to keep up with AI-driven demand.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Michelle Weaver: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michelle Weaver, Morgan Stanley's U.S. Thematic and Equity Strategist.Ravi Shanker: I'm Ravi Shanker, Morgan Stanley's U.S. trade transportation analystDave Arcaro: And I'm Dave Arcaro, Morgan Stanley's Utilities, Power & Clean Energy analyst.Michelle Weaver: Today, what we learned at Morgan Stanley's Industrials Conference about the changing economics of autonomous trucking and the increasingly tight power market supporting the AI build-out.It's Friday, September 25th at 10am in New York.Now, I know we're all on the road taking meetings post-conference, so the audio might sound a little bit different, but we wanted to bring you the latest from our annual Industrials Conference that recently concluded in Laguna Beach, where two themes really stuck out. The growing physical infrastructure demands behind AI, particularly power, and the shift in autonomous trucking from proving the viability of the technology to commercializing it at scale.Ravi, after roughly a decade of development, you've said autonomous trucking is entering a critical 12 to 18-month period ahead of serial commercial production.What's changed, and why is the debate shifting from whether the technology works to whether it can be commercialized at scale?Ravi Shanker: I think for 10 years the industry has been focused on making the technology work. but with players like Aurora now putting up almost half a million miles of fully driverless revenue-generating operations, on public highways in the U.S., day and night, rain and shine, for different customers. With people like Kodiak, also running, several trucks, in revenue-generating service, for customers like Atlas, I don't think there is much debate on the technology itself.And so, I think the debate is now moving from does this work to can this work for me? Where the next steps are going to be dotting i's and crossing t's on the path to actually pressing these trucks into commercial service rather than having to prove that it works in the first place.Michelle Weaver: Your research suggests that autonomous trucking can deliver roughly a 20 percent lower cost per mile, while higher utilization could be an even bigger source of value. What are the key assumptions behind that math? And what still needs to happen operationally for fleets to capture those benefits?Ravi Shanker: Yeah, so we recently updated our TCO math, on autonomous trucks and published a North American insight, where we revised and revisited our views on autonomous trucking with a lot of proprietary data, in there as well. And part of that new TCO math, again, I think revisited some of the changes in the split of operating costs of trucking over the last several years.First of all, I'll kind of throw a huge disclaimer out there that your mileage may vary, right? Because, depending on who you are as a trucker, if you're public or private, small or large, dry van or reefer, heavy or asset light, long haul or short haul, your split of costs are going to be slightly different.But we started out, by looking at the ATRI's national average. And labor accounts for 35 to 40 percent of the P&L of the average trucker. So, when you take the driver out and substitute that with an autonomous driver, if you will. Even after paying the autonomous technology company roughly 85 cents a mile, for the autonomous operation, you will still save a significant amount of money. Versus the 40 percent of the roughly $3 per mile that it costs for labor today.In addition to that, fuel is another third of your cost structure. And there, an autonomous truck should be anywhere from 13 to 22 percent more fuel efficient. We have taken the low end of the scale to be conservative. And then you layer on insurance savings, maintenance savings on top of that. Even if you add some incremental costs, either for human drayage at both ends or for the truck itself being more expensive – we believe you will save about 20 percent per mile versus a human driver today.And I'll point out that the unit economic savings are only about a-third of the total savings with the utilization benefit driving another two-third savings on top of that.Michelle Weaver: But there, there still seems to be a notable disconnect between how much freight carriers and shippers think can be automated and how much of the network may actually be suitable to be automated. What's the industry potentially underestimating?Ravi Shanker: Yeah. We have seen this in our conversations. Again, part of our report was conducting detailed surveys and in-depth interviews with a lot of our coverage companies. And I will say that there still needs to be a lot of education, of how these trucks work, where they work, what the unit economics are going to be out there.There's still a lot of misinformation. For instance, there's this big perception that you still need human drivers at both ends of an autonomous truck move because these trucks can only operate on a highway. And here's where our AlphaWise analysis, comes in. I think it's the first of its kind analysis where we use geolocation data to pinpoint 10,000 plus of the largest commercial facilities belonging to the hundred largest commercial shippers in the U.S.And we found out that the average [00:05:00] commercial facility is less than two miles away from the nearest ramp point. And these trucks can comfortably do seven to 10 miles, if not longer, off a highway on main roads to get to their end destinations. So, I think you just need a lot of education in the industry.And that is part of the dotting of i's and crossing of t's that we think the industry needs to do in the next 12 months before we see the start of serial commercial production next year.Weaver: Thanks, Ravi. I want to bring Dave into the conversation here, and that question of turning demand into real world capacity brings us naturally to power, where the challenge is also increasingly about physical infrastructure and execution.Dave, coming out of Laguna, you describe management commentary across power equipment as notably positive. What surprised you most about what you heard on demand bookings and project activity?Arcaro: Yeah, absolutely. What surprised me most was probably how consistent the commentary was across companies, across large frame turbine providers and the smaller, on-site power equipment players, the new entrants and the more mature companies in the market. Very consistent feedback. All very positive.And I would say also what surprised me too was the lack of disruption across the board. You know, we all see the headlines about data center moratoriums, political pushback, community challenges that really, it seemed, to increase the risk of data center execution and delays out in the market.But at least with the power equipment companies, they're just not seeing it. You know, in terms of the feedback that we heard from management teams across the board at Laguna, they review project timelines actively with their customers, and that's all still intact. We haven't seen any changes in bookings or slot reservations for equipment deliveries.Still seems to be a very stable and very strong backdrop across the board.Weaver: One of the broader conference themes was the availability of power is becoming a bottleneck for AI infrastructure. How are equipment shortages, longer wait times, and customers planning further ahead affecting pricing? And how far ahead can the industry see?Arcaro: Yeah, we are seeing equipment companies booking out orders farther and farther. The large frame gas turbines, to give you a couple examples, from companies like GE Vernova, they're now in conversations to contract turbines for 2031 and 2032. Smaller equipment companies like INNIO, who make, smaller scale engines for data centers, they're in conversations with customers and taking reservations into 2029 and 2030.So, what we heard from the conference as well was that utilities, which is a big customer for this equipment, they're looking out farther and farther now into the 2030s. That's new and that's a surprisingly long time in terms of how far they're looking out. And we're also hearing data centers looking out toward the end of the decade, you know, late 2020s in terms of trying to secure their power equipment in advance.We would still consider it very much a seller's market. Pricing has been rising, and companies at the conference gave further indications that it's likely to keep rising, what looks like into the 2030s from here. We just haven't seen any signs of softening yet, really regardless of the company or the equipment type that they're selling into the market.So still farther and farther out that we're seeing visibility into the order flow, and with that is also coming firm and even rising prices into the 2030s.Weaver: Investors often frame the power debate as electricity from the grid versus smaller power sources built on-site at data centers. Based on what you heard at Laguna, how should investors think about the balance between those two approaches?Arcaro: Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. When you talk to utilities and some of the large frame turbine companies, they all say that all this data center demand is going to the grid. Eventually, it's all going to go to the grid. When you talk to the smaller equipment manufacturers and the power as a service providers, they say nobody wants the grid.They see long-term opportunities to sell, on-site power equipment and contract it with their end customers for 15 to 20 years, and we're seeing evidence of that. So, I think, it'll stay It's an ongoing debate among, investors as well. On our end, we think the on-site power market is going to be an extremely large market as we get toward 2030, given limitations in how much power is likely to be accessible from the grid over time for the data center industry.But I would say, my takeaway and my observation from the conference that I would highlight is that it's a really favorable market and favorable backdrop for both sides.Michelle Weaver: From autonomous freight to the power needed to support AI, one message from Laguna was clear. The next phase of technology adoption increasingly depends on what the physical economy can actually build and scale.Ravi and Dave, thanks for taking the time to talk.Shanker: Thanks, Michelle.Arcaro: Thanks for having me.Weaver: And to our listeners, thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review wherever you listen to the show and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.

Could the way you're marketing your rental properties be costing you weeks of vacancy? In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, Jason Hull sits down with Kori Covrigaru, co-founder of PlanOmatic, to discuss how professional listing media can help property management companies lease properties faster, reduce vacancy costs, and attract more owners. Kori shares what he's learned from more than two decades in real estate photography, including why professional photos, floor plans, and 3D tours can make such a difference in today's competitive rental market. They also discuss how outsourcing photography can save your team hours of driving and administrative work, allowing you to grow your portfolio without adding unnecessary overhead. If you're looking for ways to fill vacancies faster, improve your property management brand, and give your team more time to focus on growing the business, this episode is worth a listen. You'll Learn [02:14] Kori Covrigaru's Story and PlanOmatic [04:18] Why Professional Photos Help Properties Lease Faster [06:36] How Better Listings Attract Property Owners [10:03] Scaling Your Business Without Adding Overhead [12:28] How PlanOmatic Works and Integrates With Your Software [15:30] Photography Pricing and Who Pays for It [17:36] How AI Virtual Staging Improves Rental Listings [23:58] Providing Photography Services Across Different Markets [28:31] Building a Client-Focused Business Through Communication Quotables "But the biggest reason why it actually makes sense and there's a high ROI for our customers to use us versus what you described as properties with professional photos lease faster." — Kori Covrigaru Pasted "You attract who you are." — Jason Hull  "It's better to know that nothing is happening than to not know that something is happening." — Kori Covrigaru Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive Transcript Jason Hull (00:01) Five, four, three, two, one. All right, we're live. Hey everybody, I'm Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. We are the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. We've been doing this for over 18 years, roughly about now, and we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry.   We are on a mission here at DoorGo to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the BS or eliminate the BS, transform the industry, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, help the best property management entrepreneurs win. And we're particularly genius at three key things: rehabbing property management companies so they make more money, optimizing their growth engines so they add more doors without having to waste money on digital marketing. And we help them figure out and get their ops dialed in so they get more freedom.   Now let's get into the show. Alright, today's guest hanging out with me here is Cory. And Corey, say your last name for me. I'm gonna try it. Kavrigaru. That is an A. Really? What how do you say it? It's Kovrigaru. Kovrigaru. It could be Kovrigaro. It's Roman.   Kori Covrigaru (01:07) That is an A. You got an A. Yeah, it's covrigaro. But you know what? It could be covrigaro. It's Romanian.   I don't speak Romanian. My father and his family were born in Romania. Means bagel maker in Romanian. Yeah, you nailed it. We're off to a good start.   Jason Hull (01:21) Interesting. Okay. He's runs bagel you know, meets bagel maker in Romanian. Okay. All right. Very cool.   Yeah, my brother Bryant actually he runs a property management business. He actually was a Mormon missionary in Romania. So he speaks Romanian. So   Kori Covrigaru (01:37) Wow.   Buona di miniatso. That means good morning. That's about, yeah, the count of 10. We can do it again. That's...   Jason Hull (01:40) There you go. That's more than I ever knew. So now everybody knows. Thank you. All right, cool. So   so Corey is the the co founder of Plan O Matic. And   Kori Covrigaru (01:54) Yes.   Jason Hull (01:55) we're gonna discuss today how high quality listing media can help properties lease faster, reduce vacancy costs, and create a better experience for both owners and prospective residents.   Corey's going to share insights for more than two decades of building one of the nation's largest real estate photography companies and what today's property manager should know about standing out in a competitive rental market. And it has gotten tough to get leasing handled in some markets right now. They've got a lot of inventory, the market shifted, it can be difficult. So we're going to get into that. All right, cool. So   Corey, give us a little background on you so those that are listening can understand what how did you get into entrepreneurism and decide to be crazy like the rest of us and start a business? And like how did this lead to Planomatic? I think it was the short answer is by necessity. I realized early.   Kori Covrigaru (02:48) I think it was the short answer is by necessity. I realized early on   that it was unemployable and in order to provide an income for myself and eventually my family, had to figure   Jason Hull (02:56) And eventually my family.   Kori Covrigaru (02:58) out how to start a business. So I got into Planomatic. I was an entrepreneur major at the first school. I attended SUNY Buffalo my freshman year. played soccer there and transferring to Western Michigan. They didn't have an entrepreneurship major there, but I kind of continued upon that path for myself. And then at some point,   Jason Hull (03:05) Buffalo, my freshman year, I played soccer there, I ended up transferring to Western Michigan. They didn't have an entrepreneurship major there, but I kind of continued upon that path for myself. And then at some   point in college I met someone who had written software or decreased work plans quickly on site, started helping him with his business, and then eventually licensed that software, started my own business, brought my co-founders on board, and then eventually we started using other software, of course. That's how I kind of got into it.   Kori Covrigaru (03:17) In college, I met someone who had written software to create floor plans quickly on site, started helping him with his business, and then eventually licensed that software, started my own business, brought my co-founders on board. And then eventually we started using other software, of course, but that's how I kind of got into it by happenstance.   Jason Hull (03:34) I knew that you know A O B was probably not for   Kori Covrigaru (03:34) But I knew that, know, J-O-B was probably not for me. And   that's what led me to the path I'm on. 22 years.   Jason Hull (03:42) Twenty   two years planomatic. Very cool. Very cool. So cool. So what is Planomatic? Yeah. So Planomatic provides professional photography, floor plans, three D scans, AI virtual staging, and more services to the single family rental property management industry nationwide at speed and at scale. So that's kind of like   Kori Covrigaru (03:50) Yeah. So Plan-O-Matic provides professional photography, floor plans, 3D scans, AI virtual staging, and more services to the single family rental property management industry nationwide at speed and at scale. So that's kind of like our...   you know, if you're familiar with EOS or traction, that's our, that's our elevator pitch. We provide professional photography floor plan, 3D scans, AI virtual for single family rental specifically. We did use to service the for sale by agent space or the traditional real estate agent that sells homes. And we actually pivoted a hundred percent to the single family rental property management industry in   Jason Hull (04:09) You know, if you're familiar with EOS or traction, that's our that's our elevator pitch. We provide photography floor technology scans for single family rentals specifically. We did use to service the for sale by agent space or the traditional real estate agent that sells homes and we actually pivoted a hundred percent to the single family rental, property management industry.   Kori Covrigaru (04:32) 2020, 21, sort of around that time.   Jason Hull (04:36) Okay, okay, got it. So three D scans, pro photography, speed, scale. So for property managers, why is it important to do this stuff well? Why can't they just send out one of their team members that's got an iPhone and just sort of wing it? Okay. Well there's there's a lot are a lot of reasons why that's not the optimal solution.   Kori Covrigaru (04:57) Well, there's a lot. There are a lot of reasons why that's not the optimal solution. Now, look,   I'm not going to say that, you know, it's the same for every property manager and every price range and every market across the U.S. That's not the case. But generally speaking, windshield time is what really cuts into profits.   Jason Hull (05:05) same for every property manager and every price range and every market across the US. But generally speaking, windshield time is is what really cuts into   Kori Covrigaru (05:18) And so what we're able to do is reduce that windshield time. That saves money and makes you more efficient.   We also save a lot of the back office having to download, upload photos, color correct them, download them, sort them, upload them to that folio, build them, rent, find wherever your PMS is. And so we save a ton of time by being integrated with your property management software. But the biggest reason why it actually makes sense and there's a high ROI for our customers to use us versus what you described as properties with professional photos lease faster.   Jason Hull (05:31) Upload photos, color correct them, download them, sort them, upload them, tab folio, building, random, wherever your PMS is. And so we save a ton of time by being integrated with your property management software. But the biggest reason why it actually makes sense and there's a high ROI for our customers to use us versus what you described is properties with professional photos leads   faster.   Kori Covrigaru (05:55) So   we're   able to get out to your property often same day or next day and deliver those assets the day later. So that's like an average of two and a half days from order to delivery when you can have professional leasing photos up on the Zillow platform, up on apartments.com or wherever else you   Jason Hull (05:56) Yeah. We're able to get out to your property often the same day or next day and deliver those assets the day later. So that's like an average of two and a half days from order to delivery and then you can have professional leasing photos up on the Zillow platform, up on Parliament.com, or where   Kori Covrigaru (06:11) may advertise your single family rentals. so by reducing the windshield time and the time it actually takes to get those photos on, we can reduce the time by about 14 days.   Jason Hull (06:12) else you may advertise your scene family rentals. And so by reducing the the windshield time and the time it actually takes to get those photos up, we can reduce the time by about 14 days   and lease that property about 10 days faster once it hits the market with those pro photos.   Kori Covrigaru (06:22) and lease that property about 10 days faster once it hits the market with those pro photos.   Jason Hull (06:27) So two weeks two weeks less. Two weeks less. On average it takes about two weeks from rent ready to get professional listing photos up on the portal. We can do that for you in two to two and half days.   Kori Covrigaru (06:30) Two weeks less on average, takes about two weeks from rent ready to get professional listing photos up on the portal. We can do that for you in two to two and a half days. And   then we can also save your team time so that they're not dealing with going out to   Jason Hull (06:39) And you can also save your team time so that they're not dealing with   Kori Covrigaru (06:42) a property and taking photos and uploading them in the background and doing all that stuff. They can focus on tenants or maintenance issues or communicating with owners or just not have to grow your staff as fast as you grow your business.   Jason Hull (06:47) tenants or maintenance or or communicating with owners or just not have to grow your staff as fast as you grow business.   Got it. So it this gives you leverage, especially during times where leasing gets heavy like the summer and there's an increase in workload and workflow happening, then you can just outsource this piece and get people get really somebody else handling this, which is planomatic, get get photos handled, you know, quickly and get things, you know   Get the property leased a lot faster. Leased a lot faster. I mean it's really at this point it's table sticks, right? In this environment especially.   Kori Covrigaru (07:17) Lease a lot faster. I mean, it's really at this point, it's table stakes, right? In this environment, especially where everything   is so competitive, it's taking a lot more to lease a property. You actually, you need professional   Jason Hull (07:25) Yeah,   Kori Covrigaru (07:28) photos to compete out there. And I really, didn't even mention there is another layer to why it's important to market your properties professionally. That's because that's the first impression that potential owners that may want to hire you see online. I mean, you're dirty laundries out there, right? Like they see how you treat your existing portfolio, your existing.   Jason Hull (07:30) And I I really I didn't even mention there there is another layer to why it's important to market your properties professionally, and that's because that's the first impression that potential owners that may want to hire you see online. Your your very laundry's out there, right? Like they see how you treat your existing portfolio, your existing   Kori Covrigaru (07:47) and the doors that you manage, and they're going to envision their property being in that same spot on your listing page or on your website. And so   Jason Hull (07:47) clients and the doors that you manage, and they're gonna envision their property being in that same spot on your listing page or on your website. Right.   Kori Covrigaru (07:55) you can really elevate your brand and brand yourself professionally by hiring a professional to do your professional property manager. It's like the same reason why you wouldn't recommend an owner or manage their own property. It could work, but it doesn't make sense as far as your time value and what you value, like what's your full-time job.   Jason Hull (07:56) you know, you can really elevate your brand and and and bring yourself professionally by hiring a professional to do the your professional property manager. It's like the same reason why you wouldn't recommend an owner or manage your own property. It could work, you know, it but but it doesn't make sense as far as your time value and what you got you know what's your what's your full time job, right? Let a professional go let them   do it better. That's kind of the way we see it.   Kori Covrigaru (08:16) Let a professional do let them do it better. That's kind of the way we see it.   Jason Hull (08:20) I I think that's a really good point. If you're a property manager listening to this and you're thinking, Well I could just do that myself   You are exactly the problem that frustrates you. These are the investors that are like, I'll just do it myself. You have to have a mindset that it makes sense to outsource to get a better quality product, that it makes sense to get an expert brought in to do expert work. And I love the idea because either you're at the top of your market and you're positioning yourself as the best and you're the best branded and you have the best photos and everything you do is the best, or you got to be the cheapest because in the middle is where you die.   Kori Covrigaru (08:56) Exactly.   Jason Hull (08:56) And that playing the game of being the cheapest and trying to do everything low cost is a great way to have a business that makes you miserable, that isn't fun to run, and isn't very attractive to the best clients. It's gonna attract cheapos. You attract who you are. And so if you want to position yourself mentally, and I coach a lot of clients on this, and if you want to position yourself mentally, you got to get graduate from being a cheapo to maybe a more normal type of buyer. And then you got to graduate from being a normal type of buyer to a premium buyer. And then you can attract everything that you want.   But if you have enough premium buyers, normal buyers, you may turn down or fire a lot of the cheapos and not even work with them. Because the people that care about having nice photos and things looking good also care about things being done well and they probably have more money to spend. They're not   Kori Covrigaru (09:41) Exactly.   Jason Hull (09:41) looking for the cheapest, ugliest option to just get it done. You don't want to be cheap. especially in an area that kind of reverberates across   Kori Covrigaru (09:45) So, yep, I agree. You don't want to be cheap. And especially in an area that kind of reverberates across the   internet that everybody can see your existing clients as well as potential clients. You just don't want that to be your brand's thing. It's like,   Jason Hull (09:54) the internet that everybody can see your existing, you know, clients as well as potential clients. You just don't want that to be your brand's thing.   Kori Covrigaru (10:03) I'm going to cut corners when it comes to marketing your properties, for example. So that's just like the elevate your brand, kind of keep your existing owners, attract new owners. That's one component of the reason why.   Jason Hull (10:07) So that's that's just like to elevate your brand, kind of keep your existing owners, attract new owners. That's one component why.   Yeah, I love it. I mean, nicer photos is nice, but I think for me the benefit as a business owner really is freeing up my team to focus on higher level tasks. They're not being sent out to go be a half ass photographer. So it because it's drive time, going out to do things, they could be getting stuff done, helping onboard new clients, getting the   things done in the office rather than just driving around taking photos. And if they're not really great at it, let an expert do it. So seems to be a no brainer. I'm a business owner   Kori Covrigaru (10:43) And again, I'm a business owner too.   Jason Hull (10:45) too.   Kori Covrigaru (10:46) You might be able to, again, not scale your people as you scale your business. I mean, that's every entrepreneur's dream, right? It's how do I keep my overhead the same as it relates to the revenue, but increase that top line in order to generate more   Jason Hull (10:49) scale your people as you scale your business. I mean, that's every entrepreneur's dream, right? So how do I keep my overhead the same as it relates to revenue, but increase that top line in order to   Kori Covrigaru (11:00) profits, right? So not having that, that, overhead, that permanent W2 employee that's driving around, insured, buying gas while they're, you know, could be doing other things.   Jason Hull (11:02) Not having that that overhead, that permanent W two that's driving around insured, buying gas while they're you know   doing other things, not doing anything at all is is   Kori Covrigaru (11:12) doing anything at all is a high cost.   Jason Hull (11:14) high costs. Yeah. yeah, yeah. You know, like our cars are often just sitting in the driveway, right? Not really doing a whole lot for us, and then we use it occasionally. And but in business you don't want team members, they're just sitting like a car in the driveway. You want them   be productive, getting stuff done and focus on the right things. And so yeah, if you have seasonal work, if photos are just something that happens occasionally, you know, or even pretty regularly, you want to be able to scale without having to just go out and hire. Hiring is one of the most costly things you will ever do. One bad hire usually costs business owners, I find, when we really dig into it, minimum 10 grand. It's 10 grand in opportunity cost, 10 grand in loss   money that's been spent on this team member for about three months before you figure out they're just not going to cut it. And so the less you have to get involved in the hiring piece and you can use a system with experts just when you need it, that is a lot more ideal. Even if it's more expensive to get that thing done, there you don't have that sunk cost of having a team member all the time that you're paying. Exactly. Keep it variable if you can cool. Business in general you can keep   Kori Covrigaru (12:20) Exactly. Keep it variable if you can. In business in general, if you can keep it variable, keep it variable.   Jason Hull (12:24) it variable   Yeah, you you mentioned table sticks. You're talking about the game where the it's who grabs the sticks first? No, it's kind of   Kori Covrigaru (12:32) No, it's kind of like poker,   you know, like required to pay if you're to play the game.   Jason Hull (12:37) Pay if   you're gonna play the game. Okay. Got it. Okay.   Kori Covrigaru (12:41) You up. It's not, you know, if you're playing poker, you have to   ante up. If you're in property management, you have to treat your listing.   Jason Hull (12:47) Got it. I'm obviously   a really seasoned poker pr player. Just kidding. So right, actually, you can tell me if I say it aloud, so I'm looking   Kori Covrigaru (12:51) I hope I get that right. Actually, you put me totally, I say it a lot. So I'm going to look that one up afterwards.   Jason Hull (12:56) at it. All right, cool. So yes, I missed the reference. All right. So very cool. So I I these are some of the benefits. How does Planomatic work? How does this how does this work? G paint the picture. Somebody signs up with you. What's the process? How are they able to leverage you and use you? How does this go?   Kori Covrigaru (13:17) There are a number of ways we are integrated with AppFolio, Buildium, and RentFine. So I integrated what I mean is you register as a Planomatic client, and then you integrate with your property management software. Your portfolio then syncs with our system so you can see   Jason Hull (13:22) Build DM and Redfine. So by integrating what I mean is you register as a priomatic client and then you integrate with your property management software. Your portfolio then syncs with our system.   Kori Covrigaru (13:33) your properties in our system, see what's for rent, what's not for rent, what has professional photos, what doesn't, and make your buying decisions that way with one click. Order photos, order photos, order photos.   Jason Hull (13:36) Rent what has professional photos, what doesn't, make your buying decisions that way with one click, order photos, order photos, order   photos. Yeah. We either dispatch our photography either same day or next day, go out, capture the content, have that content processed and photoshopped, etc., by our team and some tools that we use, and then we sync those assets back with your property management software so you can go ahead and with one click syndicate that property.   Kori Covrigaru (13:43) We then dispatch our photographer either same day or next day, go out, capture the content, have that content processed and photoshopped, et cetera, by our team and some tools that we use. And then we sync those assets back with your property management software so that you can go ahead and with one click syndicate that property as far   as the marketing photos are concerned. They appear in your account ready to go, right sort order with the right captions, the right size.   Jason Hull (14:04) Far as the marketing photos are concerned, they're appear in your account, ready to go, right? Sort order with the right captions, the right   size, etc. And so that entire process from order to delivery is average, you know, averages about two and a half days. and you don't have to download a single thing, like everything just kind of like goes the way it goes. There is another that we've just launched. Actually, this is kind of big news for us, but we've launched the ability to receive work orders now through either property meld or   Kori Covrigaru (14:11) Etc. And so that entire process from order to delivery is average, know, averages about two and a half days. And you don't have to download a single thing. Like everything is kind of like goes the way it goes. There is another way that we've just launched. Actually, this is kind of big news for us, but we've launched the ability to receive work orders now through either property meld or, or   at folio ability and rent finds. So we can actually receive work orders from our customers, just like you order a plumber.   Jason Hull (14:33) Folio ability of our device. We can actually receive work orders from our customers. Just like you order   a plumber to come out to the property, you order Planomatic to shoot photos, we receive that work order, we digest that order automatically, and then two to two and a half days later, you'll find those assets synced with your property management software ready to syndicate in the most ways that we work with our customers. And we do have larger owner operator customers that own their their rentals as well as manage them and those   Kori Covrigaru (14:38) to come out to the property, order PlanoMatic to shoot photos, we receive that work order, we digest that order automatically, and then two to two and a half days later, you'll find those assets synced with your property management software, ready to syndicate immediately. Those are the most organized that we work with our customers. And we do have larger owner operator customers that own their rentals as well as manage them. And those are kind of like we call   them enterprise clients, institutional investors.   Jason Hull (15:04) Clients, institutional investors,   Kori Covrigaru (15:06) They integrate with us in a bit of a unique way. They directly integrate with our platform versus going through property management software because they're typically on either Salesforce or Yardi or some sort of proprietary platform. So those customers have a more direct integration with us. That's pretty much, it's really easy. Just register and go ahead and integrate. You don't have to integrate. You can also just go out and place an order and we'll be there.   Jason Hull (15:07) they integrate with us in a bit of a unique way. They directly integrate with our platform versus going through property management software because we typically want either Salesforce or ERB or some sort of proprietary platform. Okay. Just register and go ahead and integrate. You don't have to integrate the just go out and place an order. Okay. Very cool. And   so if they place an order and you go out there and maybe the tenant   left something or wasn't quite ready. like there's a trash bag in the kitchen or there's something's missing or whatever. The Photoshop guys can kind of get it s that weird thing out or take care of that. It's just AI the thing and it's gone. We don't charge for something like that. We charge for object   Kori Covrigaru (15:44) But as we know today, that's kind of a lasso situation. You just kind of lasso that item. We get rid of those items, and we don't charge for something like that. We charge for object removal that's   bigger. Like if there's a car in the driveway for some reason, or there's a big trash bin, we may charge a little extra   Jason Hull (16:00) Yeah.   Kori Covrigaru (16:00) for that, because that's a little more heavy. But as long as the is vacant, we can take the photos. We can clean up a little bit of a mess.   Jason Hull (16:03) Got it. Okay.   Kori Covrigaru (16:07) It's no big deal. We can do a lot more. can AI virtual stage images, too, but declutter.   Jason Hull (16:12) Okay.   Cool. Got it. I I'm sure people listening to this are like, this sounds great. This sounds really cool, but what is the cost? Is that something you can tell talk about? Yeah, the cost in and right now we we do have a membership program, so it it does impact that and we do have a prepay and save, but Okay. But the cost is a la carte. You don't have to pay like this, you know, per month subscription. It's like literally you have an   Kori Covrigaru (16:23) Yeah, the cost in right now, we do have a membership program, so it does impact that, and we do have a prepay and save, but the cost is a la carte. You don't have to pay like this per door per month subscription. It's like literally you have an order to place with   us. Great. Go on, place one order for photography only. Our minimum there is 10 photos. You can also place an order for photos and 3D tour and a floor plan.   Jason Hull (16:40) place with us, great. Go on place one order for photography only. Our minimum there is ten photos. you can also place an order for photos and three D tour and a floor plan.   Kori Covrigaru (16:50) I believe that photos, know, everything's like for, for 15 photos, a 3d tour and a 2d floor plan. We're talking under 300 bucks per property setting. 270. It's like off the rack, 15 photos, 3d.   Jason Hull (16:51) Okay. I believe that photos, you know, everything's like for f for fifteen photos, a three D tour and a two D floor plan, we're talking under three hundred bucks. Okay. Awesome. Two seventy it's like off the rack.   Yeah, that's great. And this would be easily be something that you could   offer as part of your packages or your offerings and have the owner pay for as part of the leasing process. I was gonna backtrack and say it's free. Right. Right. You should be tweaking your owner and you should be probably marking that up for all the coordination just that you do. I mean it's transparent, but we don't really support the kickbacks or or charging more and saying, you know, tell them it was more or whatever it is, but   Kori Covrigaru (17:19) I was going to backtrack and say it's free. It's free to the property manager, right? Because you should be choosing your owner and you should be probably marking that up for all the coordination, just like you would mark up in the work that you do. mean, of course, transparently, we don't really support kickbacks or charging more and saying, you know, tell them it was more or whatever it is. But yeah, this   is something that most property managers that we work for are starting to change their process, change their owner agreement to make sure that that owner   Jason Hull (17:40) Yeah, this is something that most property managers that we work for are starting to change their process, change their owner agreement to make sure that that owner   Kori Covrigaru (17:49) pays for those marketing photos and it makes sense, right? Because once that owner picks up and leaves and takes their door with them, those photos are then obsolete, right? for the property manager. it makes a lot of sense. And a lot of owners are like, yeah, of course we need professional photos to market my property.   Jason Hull (17:50) pays for those marketing photos and it makes sense, right? Because once that owner picks up and leaves and takes a vote with them, those photos are then obsolete, right? So for the for the property managers. So it makes a lot of sense. And a lot of owners are are like, Yeah, of course we need fashion for this.   Kori Covrigaru (18:04) It's my property.   Jason Hull (18:04) Yeah, obviously.   And then if they can explain everything you just explained about the benefits of this, then to their clients, the then the owners will say, Yeah, no brainer. I should do this. I'll pay the extra money.   I'll pay and mute.   Kori Covrigaru (18:16) That should be in the agreement. mean, that's something, yeah.   Jason Hull (18:20) Got it. Okay, very cool. What else do people typically ask about Planomatic or what what else are am I are we missing? Those that are listening that might usually be curious about.   Kori Covrigaru (18:30) I you know, I don't want to call it a silver bullet because I don't   know that I believe necessarily in silver bullets. Are you, are you with me on the silver bullet thing? All right, good. Just making sure. So AI virtual staging has, has provided us with significant data that shows that it works almost like a silver bullet. mean, properties with AI virtual staging just lease faster. get more showings, more, more.   Jason Hull (18:35) Silver bullets? Are you are you with me on a silver bullet thing? Yeah, yeah. So AI virtual staging has has provided us with significant data that shows that it works almost like a silver bullet. I mean, yeah. Properties with AI virtual staging just lease faster. They get more showings, more   more applications, and it's been kind of wild.   Kori Covrigaru (18:59) and it's been kind of wilder.   That's something that we've seen from our institutional folks. They take a lot more time to research ROI on specific products that we offer. one of the...   Jason Hull (19:02) That's something that we've seen from our institutional folks. They take a lot more time   to research on RLI on specific products that we offer. So everybody knows kind of what staging is, right? If you're selling a home and it's usually a more expensive home, you call a company a staging company and they'll bring a big U-Haul with a bunch of furniture and they'll come and they'll drop it off and they'll put it in, and then you'll have your listing photos taken, right? Because listing photos look so much better.   Kori Covrigaru (19:12) Yeah. So everybody knows kind of what staging is, right? If you're selling a home and it's usually a more expensive home, you call a company, a staging company, and they'll bring a big U-Haul with a bunch of furniture and they'll come and they'll drop it off and they'll put it in. And then you'll have your listing photos taken, right? Because listing photos look so much better with   furniture. Well, for the longest time, we've been able to virtually stage real estate photos. We've had to do it with a human being and that costs a lot. You know, that costs a lot.   Jason Hull (19:32) furniture, well for the longest time we've been able to virtually stage real estate photos. We've had to do it with a human being and that's cost a lot, you know, that   costs a lot more money. But today the advances of AI and we see it all you know commercials on TV and everything, we can virtually stage and by virtual stage I mean s like take a a photo of a vacant room. Yeah. Go go to our staging vendor, a software company, click a button, choose   Kori Covrigaru (19:42) But today, with the advances of AI and we see it all over commercials on TV and everything, we can virtually stage. And by virtually stage, mean, take a photo of a vacant room, go to our staging vendor, a software company, click a button, choose between   Jason Hull (20:00) between various different styles for staging. Okay. And then it actually places that furniture in the image and and you and it looks like s it's scary how real   Kori Covrigaru (20:00) various different styles for staging. And then it actually places that furniture in the image and it looks like it's scary how real it looks.   Jason Hull (20:09) it looks. Right, yeah. And so when you have when they have properties that are are staged or virtually staged, and we label them virtually staged just   Kori Covrigaru (20:11) And so when you have, when you have properties that are staged or virtually staged and we label them virtually staged just to make sure that.   Jason Hull (20:18) to make sure that you've got the virtual staging in the photos. Does this show up in the three D tour or stuff like that? It doesn't show up in the three D tour. It does however show   Kori Covrigaru (20:25) doesn't show up in the 3d tour. does, however, show up   in the photography carousel, of course. And we typically have like a before and after. It allows for the potential renter to envision their lives in that, versus seeing it as an empty box. So naturally there's been more, we've all looked for real estate before and we've clicked through properties and when the photos are bad, it's you kind of move on. Cause like you don't stuff in that mess, right?   Jason Hull (20:31) Got it. I mean we have like a before and after. It it it allows for the potential renter to envision their lives. Right, they can imagine it. Versus seeing it as an empty box. So naturally they're gonna spend more we all looked for real estate before and we've clicked through properties and photos of that it's you kinda move on. Yeah, yeah. You don't withten that mess,   right? When it's nicer photos you stop and and so the the furniture really helps the potential rent to stop spending more time   Kori Covrigaru (20:53) When it's nicer photos, you stop. so the furniture really helps the potential renter stop, spend more time on that listing   and eventually get more showings and more applications.   Jason Hull (21:02) Sure. Yeah. I've moved into places and you know, seeing how they had it decorated before or seeing photos how they decorate it gave me an idea of, we could do something like this, or here's what I want to change. Because you're not starting with just this blank slate and trying to be creative. And so yeah, I think it helps people's imagination so they can picture their life in there. Okay,   Kori Covrigaru (21:23) Yep. It just cause you to stop, you know.   Jason Hull (21:25) cool. And there's you you were citing there's evidence.   that virtual staging significantly increases the results as well. So not just having good photos, but also good photos that are virtually staged, you're now maximizing the the return on this. And the and the virtual staging that that's   Kori Covrigaru (21:41) And the virtual staging, that's really inexpensive.   I think it's 36 bucks for three rooms, if I'm not mistaken.   Jason Hull (21:46) It's thirty six bucks for three rooms. Yeah.   Kori Covrigaru (21:49) So it's like a huge ROI   Jason Hull (21:51) Cool.   Kori Covrigaru (21:52) to order virtual staging on top of your professional photo.   Jason Hull (21:54) Sure, a lot cheaper than real staging.   Kori Covrigaru (21:58) Where'd you go?   Jason Hull (21:59) So yeah, got it. Very cool. anything else that we're missing about Planomatic? Sounds very cool. Yeah.   Kori Covrigaru (22:05) Yeah, no, I mean, I'm again, been an   entrepreneur for about 22 years. We have a high focus on, on client communication and client support. So that's one thing that's like paramount for me. I always tell my team, it's better to know that nothing is happening than to not know something is happening, meaning keep the customer updated. You know, even if we don't have the resolution yet for you, like we'll figure it out or we're working on it. So when you work with us, you really understand those, that's part of our core values. really.   Jason Hull (22:10) we have a high focus on on client communication and client support. So that's one thing that's like paramount for me. I always tell my team it's better to know that nothing is happening than to not know something is happening. Meaning keep the customer updated. Yeah. You know, even if we don't have the resolution yet for you, like we'll figure it out or we're working on it. So what when you work with us, you really understand those that's part of our core values. It   really emulates through the entire organization. So that's really important to us. Our integration, of course, is is really important and allows for   Kori Covrigaru (22:30) emulates through the entire organization. So that's really important to us. Our integration, of course, is really important and allows for our customers to   be able to transact with us. Again, business 101, make it as easy as possible for your customers to transact with you. So we've tried to make that a reality. And then, know, we're business owners, we're a small business, just like you all are, you know, just like you are, Jason, just like our property management clients are. And we just want to...   Jason Hull (22:39) To be able to transact with us, make our business one on one, make it as easy as possible for your customers to transact with you. So we've tried to make that a reality. and then you know, we're we're business owners, we're small business just like just like you all are. We're not just like you are, Jason, just like our our our property management clients are. and   we just wanna be successful in helping our clients make more money and and gain more market share, and and that's what we strive for every day. So we have the same   Kori Covrigaru (22:59) be successful in helping our clients make more money and gain more market share. And that's what we strive for every day. So we have the same struggles,   but same successes that every business owner does. We're not PE-backed or VC-backed.   Jason Hull (23:08) Same struggles, but same successes does with the RP backed or PC backed on P back back.   Got it. So I know there's a lot of people listening that are gonna think, because I hear this all the time, even with with what we do at DoorGrow, will this work in my market? I'm in a big city, will this work in my market? I'm in a small town. How do you source photographers? So before you answer that, I'm gonna share a quick word from our sponsor. So our sponsor today is Vendoroo. So if you're working with   Door grow, you're growing doors, right? And that means you have to keep figuring out how to keep up with the maintenance. So instead of doing that, we recommend that you use Vendoroo to have maintenance figured out for you with AI. Some of our clients are getting 85%, 95% of their maintenance coordination handled by Vendoroo, which is amazing. Vendoroo brings the best practices, workflows, and AI intelligence. They've developed across hundreds of property management operations and puts it into work, into your business.   It's an AI that answers the phone. It troubleshoots with residents. It coordinates vendors. It does follow-up. It drives the work order all the way to completion. It could probably work with Plan O Matic, right? So as you add doors, you don't have to keep reinventing maintenance. Let Vendoroo build your maintenance for you. Like so many of our DoorGrow community members have already done. You focus on growing your doors. Build an AI-first maintenance department that will scale with you forever.   Use Vendoro. Cool. All right. So tell us how do you handle photographers? Because some people are thinking, well, this might be hard in my town. They who do they know in, you know, Podunksville, you know, wherever I'm at, you know. Or they might think I'm in a really big city and maybe photographers, there's challenges with getting good ones and they're so expensive or w whatnot.   Kori Covrigaru (25:01) You hire a team to, you know, to   Jason Hull (25:02) You hire a team to to you know.   Kori Covrigaru (25:04) onboard, to hire, to onboard, maintain these contract photographers nationwide. That's kind of what we've   Jason Hull (25:09) Yeah.   Kori Covrigaru (25:09) done. we've perfected that, almost perfected that. I think one really important thing to note about us is we try to make it as simple as possible for our photographers to work with us from all the software. And it hasn't historically been that way and we're getting closer to it, but what software do they have to download and register for on our system?   Jason Hull (25:13) Almost almost perfected that. Yeah. One really important thing to note about us is we try to make it as simple as possible for our photographers to work with us from all the software and and and it hasn't historically been that way. We'll get any closer to it, but what software do they have to download and register for on our system?   Yeah. what specifics, like how are the instructions given out? What about access to to you know these doors and and I'm not talking about just one method. It's like there are so many different methods.   Kori Covrigaru (25:30) What specifics, like how are the instructions given out? What about access to these doors? And we're not talking about just one method. It's like there are so many different methods. I'm trying to key   box, so there's a key hidden. There's this, there's that. Call this number, get this code, right? So it's just a lot. I mean, we've been doing this since 2004. We've been in the SFR space since 2012, handling hundreds of shoots a day.   Jason Hull (25:41) trying to key box so there's a key hidden there's this there's that call this number get this code right so it's just a lot I mean we've been doing this since 2004 we've been in the SFR space since 2012 handling hundreds of shoots a   day for larger companies and smaller companies and so there's a lot a lot of its experience of just like okay here are all the you know here are all the edge cases this is what you do in this case and also just being available for them to pay them of course enough to make it make sense but we have   Kori Covrigaru (25:56) for larger companies and smaller companies. And so there's a lot of experience of just like, okay, here are all the edge cases. This is what you do in this case. And also just being available for them. You have to pay them, of course, enough to make it make sense, but we have to pay them enough   for the business to operate, right? So it's a very delicate, it's the hardest thing that we do is find quality photographers, educate them, onboard them, maintain them, and then keep them happy.   Jason Hull (26:11) good enough for the business to operate, right? So it's a very delicate it's a har it's the hardest thing that we do is is find quality photographers, educate them, onboard them, maintain them and keep them happy. Yeah. it's   Kori Covrigaru (26:25) It's as tough as it sounds. And it doesn't matter if it's a small market or a huge market. Huge markets with a lot of people have their own challenges. There's traffic, there's cost of living, it's higher. Small markets, you don't have all that, know, it's to find quality people   Jason Hull (26:26) it's as tough as it sounds and and it doesn't matter if it's the small market or a or a huge market, but you huge markets with a lot of people have their own challenges. There's traffic, there's cost of living to hire small markets, you know, have all that you know, hardly fine   Kori Covrigaru (26:41) in the specific industry. it's just, hire the right people to take care of our great network of planet tech.   Jason Hull (26:40) quality people in the specific industry. So it's just hire the right people our great network with planetary. Yeah.   This is some of the magic that you've spent a lot of time dealing with. And I'm sure people that have tried going and getting a photographer, tried doing it themselves, tried editing photos, like that is just so time intensive, so much work. And if you're a business owner doing this stuff, that's the dumbest trade you could ever make. You should offload that, get that off your plate because the speed of you is the speed of the business and the team.   And you should calculate your time as worth the the top line revenue of the company and what that comes out to per hour. And so you should not be doing this stuff. So now another challenge that people deal with, and I don't know if there's a way your system addresses this, but there's been a lot of challenges with scammers stealing photos from people's listings, putting up other listings elsewhere, tricking people into giving money. Is there any way we can combat that through   Kori Covrigaru (27:37) No.   Jason Hull (27:38) the photography?   Kori Covrigaru (27:39) You know, I think with general awareness around how sort of the internet works and how, and the general awareness of what AI   Jason Hull (27:40) But I think with general awareness around how sort of the internet works and how to t and and the general awareness   Kori Covrigaru (27:46) is capable of, I think people are more skeptical these days. I don't think everybody's just sending out checks and routing numbers and checking numbers. Cause we hear, I'll be honest, we hear less noise about it lately. And I think it's around the awareness. Historically, you know, we, we watermark photos. can watermark photos, however you, you know, property   Jason Hull (27:48) skeptical these days, right? Yeah. Everybody's just sending out checks and routing numbers and 'cause we hear we hear less noise about it lately and I think it's awareness. historically, you know, we we watermark photos, we can watermark photos   Kori Covrigaru (28:05) manager wants to watermark photos.   AI today, you can get rid of those watermarks in like a half a second, Free AI account. So man, it's changing rapidly right now. I don't have a recommendation that will just solve all of those problems. think that you have to be very careful. I would still watermark. You have to be careful where you put your images. There are applications out there like...   Jason Hull (28:08) Photos with AI today, you can give rid of those watermarks. Yeah. Yeah. So man, it's it's it's changing rapidly right now. I don't have a a a recommendation that will just solve all of those problems. I think that I mean you have to be very careful. I s I would still watermark, you have to be careful where you put your images. there are there are applications out there like   Kori Covrigaru (28:34) invisible watermarks that you can kind of track across.   Jason Hull (28:35) invisible watermarks and you can add it. Yeah,   I've heard about the invisible watermarks lately. Claude and some of these tools   Kori Covrigaru (28:40) Yeah.   Jason Hull (28:40) are adding invisible watermarks to stuff, to text, to images, to things that are created. So people will go, this was created by AI. Here's where it came from. I think it's a matter of educating your your potential renters. I think it's a lot a lot it's you know still   Kori Covrigaru (28:48) Yeah. I think it's a matter of educating your potential renters. think it's a lot of it's, know, Zillow has to make it,   has to educate their users, right, to make sure that people aren't just going and sending random checks out and putting it all over the listing media and all over your brochure and description. I think it's really important. If you're a renter, don't go on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. Stick to the internet listing services that are, you know, tried and true, I think.   Jason Hull (29:11) stick to the listing services that are you know tried and true.   Kori Covrigaru (29:19) I think that's the most important thing is like just watch where you put your listings, make sure it's reputable.   Jason Hull (29:20) Think that's the most important thing. It's like just watch where you put your listings, make sure it's reputable. Very cool. Love   it. So, Corey, tell us a little bit about the philosophy that you try to instill with your company, with the people that are in your business, like maybe the values that that you guys espouse. Give people a feel for what the culture is like at Planomatic. We are exceptionally client for meaning, I don't like to say no.   Kori Covrigaru (29:41) We are exceptionally client forward, meaning I don't like to say no to clients. I like to ask   more questions and I don't like giving an update without a resolution that's coming up. And I get copied on a lot. I drive my team nuts, Jason. I mean, I drive work because I'll reply to a random support ticket or response from our team. I'll just, I'll.   Jason Hull (30:00) Yeah. I'll reply to a random support ticket or or response from our team and I'll just   Kori Covrigaru (30:08) I'll reach out to that team member and I think there's a better way we could have handled this reply. And if I'm the customer, like, when are you getting back to me?   Jason Hull (30:08) I'll I'll reach out to that team member and say, hey, I think there's a better way we could have handled this reply. If I'm the if one of the customers are like, when are you getting back to me?   Kori Covrigaru (30:15) Right. And I think that's like most important again, it's, better to know, like everybody hears it from me. It's better to know that nothing is happening than to not know that something is happening. And so we have this, we have this phrase we use, we hold the client at the center of the organization, no matter what. one thing I haven't talked about recently, but I think it's really cool. And it's something that we've kind of put in place in 2020 or 2021 is we have personas.   Jason Hull (30:17) And I think that's like the most important. Again, it's it's better to know like everybody hears it from better to know that nothing to not know that something is happening. So we have this we have this phrase we use, we hold the client at the center of the organization no matter what. one thing I haven't talked about recently, but I think it's really cool and it's something that we've we kind of put in place in twenty twenty twenty or twenty twenty-one is   Kori Covrigaru (30:37) our customers, they're real names, right? So we started out with Emma. Emma is our enterprise client. Emma is typically a   Jason Hull (30:37) percent of our customers. They're real names, right? So we start out with Emma. Emma is our enterprise client. Emma is typically   Kori Covrigaru (30:46) single family rental owner operator. Emma raises money through institutional capital, whether that be publicly traded on Wall Street or private equity money or pension plans.   Jason Hull (30:47) A single family rental owner operator. Emma raises money through institutional capital, whether that be publicly traded on Wall Street or private equity money or pension plans.   Emma is usually a customer that uses his own software and integrates directly with our platform. Emma has this National Rental Home Council, Emma Emma. So   Kori Covrigaru (30:57) Emma is usually a customer that uses her own software and integrates directly with our platform. Emma has this National Rental Home Council, Emma, Emma, Emma. And then we have Paul.   Jason Hull (31:09) these are your customer, you've got customer avatars so that when you are building out your products and services.   you are have them in mind and you know these categories of clients or buyers of your services will, you know, maybe perceive it a certain way and the product's geared towards these personalities. That's exactly right. And we we   Kori Covrigaru (31:27) That's exactly right. And we, we talk about   Emma and Paul all day long. It's just natural. Like I'll, I'll be talking to. So Paul, Paul is when we got into,   Jason Hull (31:33) Tell us about Paul. Who's Paul?   Kori Covrigaru (31:37) servicing the third party property manager that manages,   Jason Hull (31:40) Well you're breaking up a little bit. Say that again.   Kori Covrigaru (31:43) when we, when we started servicing the third party property manager, you know, a smaller business that, that manages 50 to up to, you know, a thousand doors.   Jason Hull (31:45) When we when we started servicing the third party property manager, you know, a a smaller business that that manages fifty to up to you know a thousand   doors, that persona was so different, and we named that persona Paul, Paul the property manager. Okay. Paul uses folio or building arm or or rent client or rent manager, right? Paul doesn't own their properties, they have clients. Paul's typically smaller, Paul's usually regional. Paul goes to the n national rental.   Kori Covrigaru (31:55) that persona was so different and we named that persona Paul, Paul the property manager. So Paul uses Azzolio or Bildium or Rentvine or Rent Manager, right? Paul doesn't own their properties, they have clients. Paul's typically smaller, Paul's usually regional. Paul goes to National   Association of Residential Property Management conferences, NARPAM.   Jason Hull (32:15) National Association of Residential Property Management Conferences. Not that   and and so those are important to like know what each customer wants. The real value is that we've like humanized our clients. Yeah. It's no longer client or or you know ACE property management company wants this. No, it's it's Paul. It's it's it like we have these personas, we have these images of what Paul might look like and what Emma might look like. And so it really helps the team   Kori Covrigaru (32:19) And so those are important to know what each customer wants, but the real value is that we've humanized our clients. It's no longer the client or Ace property management company wants this. No, it's Paul. We have these personas, we have these images of what Paul might look like and what Emma might look like. And so it really helps the team   humanize the customer and realize that we're talking to human beings.   Jason Hull (32:44) humanize the customer and and realize that we're we're talking   to human beings. These are real people not just folks behind the screen or whatever it is. Yeah, I love it. Every every small small examples of things that we've done, one of our core values is we create genuine relationships, right? Our customers. We love we love that core value. So everything that we do, it's just like the longer you're in a business, the more you realize that communication and support, how you   Kori Covrigaru (32:48) real people, they're not just folks behind the screen or whatever it is. And so every small examples of things that we've done, one of our core values is we create genuine relationships, right? With our customers. We love that core value. So everything that we do, it's just like the longer you're in business, the more you realize that communication and support and how you, it's not how you   treat the customer when things are going well, it's how you.   Jason Hull (33:13) It's not how you treat the customer when things are   going well, it's how you treat the customer, communicate to the customer when things aren't ideal. How you get back on track. Get the client to say, you know what? That got screwed up really, but they took such good care of me so quickly and they gave me this and they got out back for property that. That's what brings customers back more and more. It's not it's not, you know I I believe. Actually that's what keeps me buying from the same, you know, vendor or from the same board is if I'm treated.   Kori Covrigaru (33:16) treat the customer and communicate to customer when things aren't ideal. How do you get back on track? You get the client to say, you know what, that got screwed up royally, but they took such good care of me so quickly and they gave me this and they got out back to the property that, that's what brings customers back more and more. It's not, it's not, you know, I believe actually that's what keeps me buying from the same, you know, vendor or from the same, or as if I'm treated   with respect and communicated with respect and that's what   Jason Hull (33:45) Yeah, I love that. I think that's a great tip for those listening to map out your ideal customer profile or your ideal client profile. Map out the avatars that you tend to serve. There's usually a small category of clients that are the ones you're really going after that you're serving. this is true in any business. And the more clear and the more you humanize them and the more you realize what their strengths, what their challenges are, what their pains, their frustrations, their concerns are.   And you map this out, the better you're going to be able to do marketing, target them, create your sales presentation, scripts, pitches, whatever you're doing to be more effective and to teach your team about them so they understand these different avatars. And so yeah, we've done the same thing at DoorGro. We have very clear avatars that we target and that we focus on. And yeah, and we gear our products towards directly towards those avatars and what their challenges are. So love that. It's a great tip to share.   and I love the the I the the focus on relationships, which I think is is paramount. So cool. Well Corey, great stuff. Really appreciate you coming on, telling us about Planomatic. How can people find Planomatic and how can they get started? the easiest way is just planomatic.com, just like it's spelled. you can   Kori Covrigaru (34:59) The easiest way is just planomatic.com, just like it's spelled. You can email me always   at k-o-r-i at planomatic.com. You can also find us in the marketplace on Atfolio's marketplace, Buildium's marketplace as well. We're all over Narpoem, so if you come to our show, come find us. We're usually in one of the bigger booths because we're preferred partners with Narpoem. So it's not too hard to find us. Go to our website, check us out, reach out to me. Always happy to hear from classic.   Jason Hull (35:13) in this marketplace as well. We're all over Narbum. So if you come to a show, come find us. we're usually in one of the bigger booths because we're for partners with Narbum. So it's not too hard to find us. Go to our website, check us out, reach out to me.   Always happy to hear from class prospects as well as existing clients. Any feedback anybody has that's another things we ask for.   Kori Covrigaru (35:27) Prospects as well as existing clients any feedback anybody has that's another things we ask for a hell of a lot of feedback often   too much But yeah easy to find and we welcome everybody   Jason Hull (35:36) But yeah, easy to find. Cool,   awesome. Tell them that you heard about them from the DoorGro Show podcast if you see this.   Kori Covrigaru (35:42) Talon, DoorGro, I've got a special coupon if you tell me you heard about us   from the DoorGro show. I'll hook it up.   Jason Hull (35:49) Cool.   Awesome. We appreciate that. So that he'll give you a special deal. All right. Very cool. Well, Corey, thanks for being here. Appreciate you coming on the DoorGrow show. For those that are enjoying this or watch our show, if you've ever felt stuck or stagnant, you want to take your property management business to that next level. You've been hitting a wall. You've been frustrated for a while. You've tried different marketing channels. You feel like you're just getting sold a bill of goods sometimes. You're just you're frustrated.   Reach out to us at doorgrow.com, we can help. So for a free training on how to get unlimited free leads, text the word leads to 512-648-4608. Also join our free Facebook community just for property management business owners by going to doorgrowclub.com. You can also join that by going to getting our DoorGrow Hub app that is in the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.   And if you want tips, tricks, or ideas and to learn about our offer, subscribe to our newsletter by going to doorgrow.com/slash subscribe. And if you found this episode even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. We'd really appreciate it. It helps us out. Until next time, remember the slowest path to growth is to do it alone, all by yourself. So let's grow together. Bye everyone.  

Earlier this month, world model company Runway introduced GWM Worlds 2, a research preview that “turns high-fidelity video and audio generation into real-time interactive simulation.” Runway calls this an “autoregressive diffusion” model; with autoregressive describing how it generates over time.One new feature in particular caught our eye: WorldPrompt, a proposed input format for specifying a generated world and the actions within it. It allows you to fix some aspects of a simulated environment — including the first frame — and then create a series of timestamped events. The events, or actions, can even be prompted in real-time.To understand the implications of WorldPrompt, we spoke to Kamil Sindi, Runway's CTO, and Robin Kahlow, its Principal Research Scientist for generative video and multimodal AI. We also have exclusive comments from Anastasis Germanidis, co-founder & co-CEO of Runway, courtesy of a podcast swyx and Vibhu did with him.Who's building real-time interactive world models?First, some context about world models that can generate interactive video and audio in real-time.Runway is reportedly valued at $5.3 billion, based on its most recent fund raise of $315 million in February. Its first release, GWM Worlds, was launched last December.Alongside Runway, there are several other notable projects in this domain: Google DeepMind's Genie 3 (which also generates at 720p and 24 fps), Odyssey-2 Pro, and World Labs' RTFM (Real-Time Frame Model). We've summarized their differences in the following table:Given the complexity and massive latency demands of real-time video and audio generation (which we'll get into below), all of the projects listed above have limitations. For instance, Google notes that Genie 3 “can currently support a few minutes of continuous interaction, rather than extended hours.”But as our interviews with Runway show, real progress is being made.The central idea of WorldPromptWorldPrompt, a new feature in GWM Worlds 2, helps differentiate Runway from its competition. You can think of it as a control layer for characters, cameras and the environment. As Kahlow put it, it's a way to “control all the different subjects in the world” — similar to a computer game.“Like, if there's an NPC [Non-Player Character] somewhere, the NPC might walk up to you and say something. So you could achieve the same thing with this kind of model, where you can have very detailed control over everything in the scene.”As the name suggests, WorldPrompt is a prompting mechanism — not a programming language. So, unlike virtual world games like Minecraft or Roblox, GWM Worlds 2 doesn't offer scripting capabilities or the ability to control state. But there's a power to that, as Sindi pointed out.“You can create promptable worlds on-demand with video and audio in sync, across all these different domains and environments. That's not a distant-future hypothetical thing,” he said.But there are also limitations to prompting a world model. We asked how reliably the model would follow an instruction to create, for example, a law of gravity or a certain ability in a character?“Yeah, so it's a research preview,” Kahlow replied. “So it's not perfect, of course, and there are still flaws. It really depends on how difficult the action is. I would say movement works quite reliably.”Sindi added that more training plus scaling the data and models is resulting in “better following.”How a video model becomes a real-time runtimeDespite the current limitations of GWM Worlds 2 — especially if you compare it to pre-designed and scriptable worlds like Minecraft or Roblox — the true promise of world models like Runway is that they'll eventually lead to fully self-generated, real-time games and experiences. Which is an extremely hard engineering problem, as Kahlow reminded us.“There are two challenges. One is making the model not generate a whole clip at once. So instead, you want it to generate frame by frame while you're looking at it. And the other challenge is actually making the generation fast, so you can play it in real time.”GWM Worlds 2 offers real-time interactive worlds streamed in continuous 720p video at 24 frames per second (fps) and audio at 48,000 Hz.Runway achieved this firstly by taking its foundational audio-video generation model and fine-tuning it to the new WorldPrompt format, so the model can follow that. It then post-trains the model to generate autoregressively.“And after that, we work on making it real-time through distillation methods,” Kahlow added.Co-CEO Anastasis Germanidis offered more technical details in our podcast with him. He told us that the process starts from “bidirectional diffusion that basically generates an entire video at once and [makes] it autoregressive.” This allows the model to “generate one frame or a few frames at a time.”Germanidis described two possible forms of distillation in order to make it real-time: distilling a larger model into a smaller one or reducing its diffusion steps. As a general example, he said a model might go from around 50 denoising steps to four, with some quality loss but potentially comparable results.The challenges of real-time generationGermanidis admitted that there were issues with how it generates real-time interactive video.“The biggest challenge with autoregressive models is error accumulation,” he said. “You're feeding generated frames back into the model to generate the next frames, and if there are any small errors, they accumulate over time.”Sindi told us there are also challenges dealing with “infinite generations” of content.“There's all these challenges around what context to keep, what to discard that's not important. And so there's all these optimizations we have to think about, so we're not blowing up our GPU memory.”Another current limitation is long-term memory. “The model does not have perfect memory,” Kahlow said. “That's still an open research problem.”Causality and correctnessWhile performance is the primary challenge for Runway at this time, its world model also has to produce plausible consequences when a user takes different actions.Germanidis used the example of simulating football; he pointed out that online video training data contains more successful goals than failed goal attempts, so a video model might render the first more convincingly.“If I take this action versus this action, you want it to generate equally realistic outcomes,” he told us. “That's, I think, the big gap between video models and world models: that idea of counterfactual generation.”Sindi told us that evaluation gets harder the more complex interactions get.“If you have this multi-prompt, multi-character, multi-scene [environment], how do you really understand what was causal and what was not?”To try and solve that, Runway has some automated verifiable tests. But since GWM Worlds 2 is a research preview, Kahlow noted that doing tests yourself is also advisable — “trying out your model to see what doesn't work is really important.”More than gaming — there are agent use cases tooGaming is the obvious use case for what Runway is building, but there are others. Kahlow mentioned robotics — for example using a simulated environment to test how a robot works.Another, more intriguing, use case is to use it to test agents at scale.“Having thousands of simulated environments is much less challenging if you have a suitable model like GWM Worlds,” Kahlow said.But how does an agent know what's changed in the world — is there a structured state that it can read, or is it just the generated video and audio that it's consuming and understanding?“So there's no structured state here,” Kahlow replied. “It's just observing the same thing you might observe in real life, just [in this case] from cameras.”Sindi noted that GWM Worlds can also be used for “synthetic data generation for agents.”Finally, Germanidis suggested there's potential to use these world models alongside reasoning models.“You're maybe using some reasoning [for] planning of the scene, and then you're passing it into the diffusion head that's actually generating the pixels.”Anastasis Germanidis* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agermanidis/* X: https://x.com/agermanidisTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:05:17 Runway's Origins and the Bet on Generative Video00:12:23 The Stable Diffusion Story00:18:44 Gen-2, Controllability, and the Weekend Hack00:23:02 From Video Generation to World Models00:28:03 Learning From the World, Not Just Language00:35:04 Sora, Runway's Existential Crisis, and Gen-300:39:39 Why Real-Time Video Is Inevitable00:43:06 Interface World Models: Software Without Code00:50:25 The Fully Neural Operating System00:55:11 World Models for Robotics01:02:32 Robot Policies and World Action Models01:07:47 The Lucid Dream Test01:11:41 Video Agents and Omni Models01:23:12 Artists, AI, and Creative Workflows01:27:14 Physical AI and the Future of World ModelsTranscriptIntroduction: Runway, Creative AI, and the Early ThesisSwyx [00:00:00]: Okay, we're here with, Anastassios from Runway, with, me and Vibhu in the studio. Welcome.Anastasis [00:00:08]: Good to be here.Swyx [00:00:09]: Congrats on all your success and progress with Runway. You're opening offices all over the world. Did you envision this when you first started out?Anastasis [00:00:16]: Not quite. I think even when we started, we had this idea that, It was more a matter of when, not if, we were seeing the early generative models of 2016, 2017, and just extrapolating, assuming, we resolution, quality increases predictably over time. There's gonna be a point where most of content will be generated, and that was maybe the initial thesis of Runway was we will need, as a result of those generative models, rethink how creative tools are made. and as we built out the research behind, our generative models, it then became clear that they were useful far beyond that as well.Anastasis' Background: Art, Simulation, and Machine LearningSwyx [00:00:57]: And it is more obvious now with, like, the real-world stuff and the world models that we'll talk about later. I'm just kinda curious how you go from a background in, like, Zocdoc and, computer vision into Runway. Like, take us back to that early conversations with Chris and, whoever else is on your founding team.Anastasis [00:01:14]: I was always splitting through those two worlds. One was the I had my own art practice. I was making a lot of interactive art, I think for a long time. and then on the other side, I was working in startups, and I was working as a ML engineer, as a backend engineer at different companies. I've always been interested in, coding and computation, and especially interested in simulation and brought it back into my early artwork as well. And at the same time, I was interested inSwyx [00:01:43]: The personal site has a few, right?Anastasis [00:01:44]: Yeah.Swyx [00:01:45]: Is there one that we should pull up? Just in case there's something that's like. I just like to go down memory lane.Anastasis [00:01:50]: Yeah.Swyx [00:01:50]: Okay, what is this?Anastasis [00:01:51]: So this was, a project that I made, I think back in 2015, where I built this software that would give, voice instructions to people in a gallery space. So it would coordinate interactions between people. And so it will first give you an identity, like you're an, architect, you're 30 years old, and, you like sports. and then it would match you with another person, and you have this completely generated interaction. language models were not quite there at the time, and so it was it was a mix of some templates and some, like, some Markov chain-generated text, and it would just completely simulate these small talk conversations between, everyone in the gallery space. so was always very fascinated on the one hand with, generative models and, like, the early machine learning work that was being at that time. But at the same time, there was this separate thread of simulation and what it means. Like, what can we learn about humans by creating those very simple models of their interactions and their behavior?Early Generative Art: pix2pix, GANs, and Uncanny ValleyVibhu [00:02:56]: Did you generate the prompts or, the 30-year-old, whatever? Was it you generating them? How'd you, how'd youAnastasis [00:03:03]: Exactly. So the program would just generate- those, from. Yeah, a lot of it would be Mad Libs style of justVibhu [00:03:10]: YesAnastasis [00:03:10]: You have lists of different professions, lists of different,Vibhu [00:03:14]: HobbiesAnastasis [00:03:15]: Personality types, lists of different, ages, things like that. And then it would just combine those things together. And then maybe the next project we go is, Uncanny Valley, Uncanny Road, which wasSwyx [00:03:27]: GansAnastasis [00:03:27]: One of the first projects that, we built with, one of my two co-founders, Chris. This was taking, pix2pixHD, which was one of the early image-to-image models that NVIDIA released back in 2016 or 2017. and it was a model that would take a semantic map of a scene and then generate a photorealistic, let's call it, output. very early days, so it was not very high-fidelity outputs, but it w I think was the first image-generation model that could generate at 1K resolution. And it was all trained on self-driving datasets. So the semantic categories it would support were only, things you would encounter on the road. So it would be pedestrians, traffic signs,Vibhu [00:04:16]: StoplightsAnastasis [00:04:17]: Bikes, stoplights. And so that was one of our first indications that we built this and people were making all this, like, very surreal imagery of, yeah, a million plus a million pedestrians or a million traffic signs or, like, gigantic humans. And it was a indication that you could take a model that was trained on this very boring dataset, essentially, of, like, not that many interesting things happen when you're on the road, and then you can repurpose it and go very out of distribution and make something that was artistically compelling. And that was It's a summary of the thesis of Runway in some ways, that you can take the same generative models, and if you look at them from another direction, if you build interesting tools around them and you give them to artists, they're gonna do things that you don't expect.Vibhu [00:05:02]: Very cool. I like the, UX of it. You're just given an empty canvas, try whatever, do whatever. And then the other one, like, you see everyone with wired headphones? Like, that's, that's a sign that it's, it's veryAnastasis [00:05:16]: The AppleVibhu [00:05:17]: YeahAnastasis [00:05:17]: Apple, your version.Vibhu [00:05:17]: Original ads. Yeah. Take us to today. You've been doing this for seven years at Runway. How have we got to this? Like, how do we go from driving simulator data to all this? And you cover the whole stack of generative media?From Creative Tools to a Research LabAnastasis [00:05:33]: Interestingly, we're almost back in, we're, we're full circle. We're, we're now applying our models and beyond creative tools into real-world scenarios. But it was a, it was a long journey. It was very early on we realized the first version of Runway was a way to easily use the, all the open source model of the day, things like pix2pix to. and give them to artists. That was the initial idea, is those models are too difficult to use if you're not a machine learning engineer. Like, what happens when you give them to artists? Very quickly, we realized we needed to build a research org, inside of Runway, and that happened maybe on year one. And, a lot of the mandate there was. The image-generation models of the time, the video generation models of the time, or there were barely any video generations all the time, but they were not quite there where they could be productionized and brought into tools that would be part of creative workflows. so we need to push the frontier of the research. And so maybe the first four years of Runway, research was almost happening on the background until there was a moment in 2022, with latent diffusion, with, DALL-E 2, where, there was that step function change, and you guys maybe remember around the time.Swyx [00:06:49]: I started in this space because of latent diffusion and Stable Diffusion.Anastasis [00:06:54]: Yeah.Swyx [00:06:54]: Because I was like, “Wow, this is not only, like, feasible, it is doable on consumer hardware.”Anastasis [00:07:01]: Exactly, yeah.Vibhu [00:07:01]: I think the delta is also huge. Like, I learned pix2pix. Like, this was intro to ML, the TensorFlow, like, Jupyter, Google Colab notebooks were like this, and then you have a sudden step function change, with diffusion and whatnot. Any other ones since that. Like, there were clear examples of what early diffusion were to get to here. Any other changes in key technology research?Green Screen, Rotoscoping, and Early RunwayAnastasis [00:07:26]: Between, 2018 when we started and 2022?Vibhu [00:07:29]: Yeah.Anastasis [00:07:29]: So one of the early work that we did in Runway was solving segmentation, image and video segmentation. It was a very important problem because most VFX involves essentially separatingSwyx [00:07:42]: RotoscopeAnastasis [00:07:42]: Subjects. Yeah, rotoscoping. Extremely manual process. Nobody enjoys doing that. and so a lot of the early days of Runway was building this tool. It was called Green Screen, and it was for a long time the main thing that people were using Runway for. It ended up being used in, Everything Everywhere All at Once and a bunch of other high-visibility films and series. But that was essentially, Runway for a long time was a post-production tool until latent diffusion and generat- Gen-1, Gen-2, happened.Swyx [00:08:12]: Cool. let's, let's go past that moment. You've come a long way. Then you started releasing your own models. Maybe describe that journey as well.Scaling Video Models and the Bet on 1,000 A100sAnastasis [00:08:20]: Yeah, so we go to the other point, yeah, in mid-2022 when it became clear that we're doing research at a fairly small scale of compute, and it became clear that, like, scaling laws would apply to, image and video gen in the same way that we're applying to language generation. So we made a big bet, and I think at so at the time, we signed this deal to build a cluster of a thousand A100s, which at the time we were a Series B startup. That was a almost, slightly irrational decision maybe, but we really believed that if we trained a video model at a large scale, we would get, like, a great model at the end. And at the time, the goal or we set the goal around fall of 2022 of what is, what does the latent diffusion, Stable Diffusion moment look like for video? And at the time, the best model of the time was called CogVideo. it was one of the early video models. It was very 256 by 256 resolution, very not very high quality. and so we decided we're gonna build out this cluster, and we're gonna just invest in, like, in building out our own video model. it became clear as we're training Gen-1 that it was difficult to get to fully. we wanted to build text-to-video, but it became clear to us that an easier starting point would be to start from video to video. Because when you have a stronger conditioning, it's, it's an easier problem to restylize an existing video versus generate the video from scratch. And so we released Gen-1 first back in, it was January of, 2023. Yeah.Vibhu [00:10:04]: It's just a fun visual podcast, honestly. Like, if we can see February 2023, what was the state of stuff?Gen-1: Video-to-Video and Depth ConditioningAnastasis [00:10:10]: It's so interesting ‘cause at the time when you see those results, you think this is so incredible, and this is like, it's almost like image generation or video generation is solved. And then you look back a few years after, and it's like, it's It's just like you get used to the results very quickly, with those models. But at the time when we started seeing those results, it was, it felt quite incredible, and the level of, like, quality that you could get. And, so the Gen-1 was a depth-conditioned video model, so it would turn. it would take a input video, it would predict. it would it would first convert it into the depth map, and then we would generate, pixels with a latent diffusion model.Swyx [00:11:01]: Yeah, very effective.Vibhu [00:11:02]: Yeah. I didn't realize how distracting the blog post would be. Sorry.Anastasis [00:11:05]: Yeah, but, one of my favorite examples of on those, on Gen-1 was both, if you go up to mode three or mode two, there was this storyboard use case where people would makeVibhu [00:11:18]: OohAnastasis [00:11:18]: WouldVibhu [00:11:20]: You can mess around with theAnastasis [00:11:20]: Make a city out of books or out of boxes, and then they would shoot a video with their phone and then translate it into a photo-photorealistic output. There was all these ways in which those models were starting to be used for storyboarding and also for really. and then if you go to mode four, like, of taking untextured 3D scenes and then turning them into photorealistic output. So we saw a lot of use cases early on where people that were familiar, were power VFX editors would just take a blender, render, and then they would get translated in with Gen-1 or create a scene in Unity and then take a capture a video of it and then translate into, restylize it. So I still think video to video is powerful. I think we had a recent video-to-video model as well, and it's one of my favorite ways of using those models is essentially using them to use ground truth video as, like, the initial inspiration and then translate into different styles or different outputs.Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, and Open SourceSwyx [00:12:23]: But I think we're gonna go into, like, the rest of Runway and catch people up to speed today. I did wanna cover the, let's call it the Stable Diffusion controversy, or, what happened with Stability AI, whatever. I think there was a two sides of the story. I think there's part of that is a normal thing of, like, people, join and leave companies, but what is the, retrospective now that, there's been some years behind it?Anastasis [00:12:49]: Yeah, it's a very, it's a very long story to go into. I think it wouldSwyx [00:12:53]: Which I remember you wrote a really long post about.Anastasis [00:12:56]: We would probably cover the whole hour to go into it in more detail. But, essentially, there was the latent diffusion paper that came in, I think that was at the end of, 2021. And then Patrick Esser, who was one of the researchers behind, latent diffusion, and he worked at Runway at the time, he built latent diffusion in collaboration with Robin Rumbach and a few other folks back, in the in, CompVis, which was, a labSwyx [00:13:26]: Like a research group, yeah.Anastasis [00:13:27]: And, after releasing the early latent diffusion model, they, essentially they were. the goal was to keep working on versions of the model, scale it up, incorporate new data, incorporate new tasks. And Stable Diffusion was the same model, but trained on more compute, and then with a few more tricks, like a classifier-free guidance paper came at some point, I think in the early 2022. And thatSwyx [00:13:52]: Which, like, was a big prompting improvement.Anastasis [00:13:55]: Yeah.Swyx [00:13:55]:?Anastasis [00:13:56]: That improved results. it was trained on better data, so like, the esthetic subset of LAION, but it was effectively, the same underlying architecture. And there was that big training run, that, happened on Stability's cluster. Stability financed that run. And looking back at that story, I think it was the work to build and train that model was done. It was a, it was a research project. It was done as part of, like, continuation of the latent diffusion work. It then, I think it the model became very successful, and it, I think there were the. And I think as a result of its success, other companies tried to, figure out the commercialization path for it. But for us, it was very important that we try to, we make sure that we. It was meant to be an open source research project, and so the we decided that we should continue releasing versions of it, since that was the original goal of Stable Diffusion, and that led to releasing Stable Diffusion 1.5. There was maybe a day of, a bit of, miscommunication there, but ultimately that was resolved very quickly within hours. so yeah, there wasSwyx [00:15:12]: OkayAnastasis [00:15:12]: Not a niceSwyx [00:15:13]: I just wanted to. you have toAnastasis [00:15:15]: Yeah.Swyx [00:15:15]: You're one of the main players in that journey, and so it's nice to hear from the source of, like, what happened. Yeah.Anastasis [00:15:22]: Yeah. I think it's all, it's all in the past nowSwyx [00:15:26]: YeahAnastasis [00:15:26]: I would say. and, like, both companies, Stability took its own path, Runway took its own path.Swyx [00:15:32]: Yeah. There's still. James Cameron is backing the new Stability, whatever they're doing with the Hollywood studios.Anastasis [00:15:38]: Right.Swyx [00:15:38]: I don't know what they are doing. I think one thing that impresses me, and I'm happy to move on, is that back in the that time, let's say, like 2021, 2022, there was this community of people that you were involved in that was researching all this stuff, right? And, like, from everyone I talked to who was active then, it seemed like it was fairly obvious that somebody would do the hero training run that would produce Stable Diffusion. So, like, I guess the question is, like, you had the you were you had made investments. You were you had the foresight. Is it accurate to say, like, that is reflective of, like, what people were thinking at the time? Or was it still very much like, “Well, we'll use it as, like, a post-production tool or something. I don't know.”? Like, where in the sentiment were we that maybe you can think back to, like, what the community was like back then?The Early Creative AI CommunityAnastasis [00:16:28]: I reminisce and I think very fondly those early years, from like 2018 to 2022, because it was a very small community that, as you said, were very convinced that this was gonna be a big thing. And at the time, anyone who. Because it was such a small circle and, everyone who would, like, be part of that circle and, like, make projects with it would, immediately get, go viral. so likeSwyx [00:16:55]: And you didn't know who they are, right? They're just some name on a, GitHub or Hugging Face somewhere.Anastasis [00:16:59]: Exactly, yeah. So I remember one of the first big viral moments of creative AI was, there was the neural style transfer paperSwyx [00:17:09]: HuhAnastasis [00:17:09]: ThatSwyx [00:17:10]: Something dreaming?Anastasis [00:17:11]: I think it was called neural style transfer.Swyx [00:17:14]: Okay.Anastasis [00:17:14]: There was also Deep Dream, the puppy sliceSwyx [00:17:16]: YesAnastasis [00:17:16]: Which was, also really cool. but, yeah, there was this project that, Jim Kogan, who was an early advisor of Runway and one of those,Swyx [00:17:25]: Marketing guysAnastasis [00:17:26]: Big, creative AI, folks, he literally just, like, showed a video of himself taking the New York Subway and going over the Williamsburg Bridge and then stylized it with, I think in the style of Van Gogh or, like, one, painter. And that was. Like, at the time, that was, like, so cool and it went viral and it was completely revelation to people that you could do this with generative models. And that was only, it was less than. It was maybe 10 years ago. So just, like, as an indication of, like, how quickly things have gone.Vibhu [00:18:02]: It's pretty crazy. Like, even since then, you've got people at every level of the stack. You've got devs, creatives, artists, hobbyists. You've got everyone using it. And for people that tried stuff early, they'll remember how hard it was to use regular diffusion, right? Like, nowadays, you can use your favorite ChatGPT image gen or whatever, give a sentence, get a beautiful output. But diffusion was like, the whole ultra HD, 4K, high resolution. Like, prompting these things was very different. anything you learned on the tooling side, like from the offerings you guys have now, so like creatives, devs, you really took the. Research and brought it to everyone to use. anything interesting there to share?From Gen-2 to Controllable Video GenerationAnastasis [00:18:44]: We had to build the entire model serving infrastructure for video diffusion models. There was nothing else, already, like, because we had Gen-2 was the first text-to-video model, I think, out in the market. So many things that we learn over time. I think the I think the biggest one was, like, we. it was very clear early on that text-to-video was not gonna be the answer. Like, you. Like, people wanted a lot more control than that, and so we invested in, like, control building on top of those models very quickly. how do you use the camera trajectory as control? How do you use an initial input frame as control? So that was a very early learning for us. With text-to-video was, like Gen-2 was an amazing, step function improvement in the quality of video models, but it was used much more in an exploratory way because there was nothing to ground it to. There was no reference that you could bring into it. There was no. You couldn't really control the camera motion. You couldn't control the object motion. And so the first year, in 2023, was really all about what are all the interesting ways in which we can condition those models? And it was a lot of just post-training rounds on top of the base model to figure out, like, what, -- how do people wanna control them? And so there was, like, this quick succession of the we it was called Motion Brush, which was you could, like, you could draw arrows and dictate where things should move in the scene.Vibhu [00:20:09]: That's so cool.Anastasis [00:20:09]: There was camera control that was you could just describe, like, how you want the camera to move in the scene. And because we work with filmmakers from the most of the history of Runway, we immediately got this feedback and got this, decided that this was worth investing in. And so control ability became a big theme, I think, very early on as we were building, as we were building those models. Something fun that I haven't really talked about too much was just how Gen-2 came to be out of Gen-1. So it was a bit strange because we announced Gen-2 two months after Gen-1 andHow Gen-2 Came From a Weekend HackVibhu [00:20:43]: We're accelerating.Anastasis [00:20:44]: It was before Gen-1 was even generally available. But Gen-1 was a depth-to-video model, so it would take a depth map and it would convert it into RGB. and we couldn't get, text or image-to-video to work directly, and that's why we started from depth to video. but, and we had discussions of like, okay, we need to spend the next six months investing in text-to-video, maybe increasing the compute scale or the model scale, like train a larger model. And I had this weekend project idea, which was, what if I take a model that, starts from text input and converts to depth maps and then use Gen-1 to convert the depth maps Into RGB?Vibhu [00:21:29]: It would probably work.Anastasis [00:21:30]: And so Gen-2 was that.Vibhu [00:21:32]: Oh. The hackathon pipeline.Swyx [00:21:35]: The weekend hackathon pipeline.Anastasis [00:21:36]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:21:37]: But it looks good.Anastasis [00:21:38]: And it worked pretty well. there were if you, with the knowledge that it has this, like, two-stage pipeline, you can tell in some cases that the structure of the video looks a bit off because you had to generate the depth first before you go into the output video. But it worked and it allowed us to bring this to our, to users very quickly. But it's now it's interesting because, like, people are coming back to this almost two-stage approach. Like, if you look at the Reve text-to-image model that came a few months ago, it had this planner model that would generate bounding boxes before it fed that into the diffusion transformer.Swyx [00:22:19]: Yeah, Ideogram also the same day.Anastasis [00:22:22]: Yeah.Swyx [00:22:22]: I remember that was very strange that both of them came out the same day with the same exact innovation.Anastasis [00:22:26]: It's a small community, I think.Swyx [00:22:28]: I'm like, this is like, this is completely coincidental, right?Anastasis [00:22:32]: People talk. So yeah, there's, there's definitely something into this approach. And, now, like every single like, video generation model in production uses a complex prompt completion pipeline under the hood. I think that's no secret that there is. ThatSwyx [00:22:48]: Humans are terrible at prompting.Prompt Rewriting, Camera Control, and the Seed of World ModelsVibhu [00:22:51]: I think across the board.Anastasis [00:22:51]: Yes.Vibhu [00:22:52]: But yeah, I think like the original Sora one blog post even told you that what happens after your input is rewriting your prompt. It's much more descriptive about what you would want.Anastasis [00:23:02]: Exactly. I, And there was the DALL-E 3 paper beforehand that, was the first public, description of the fact that synthetic captions and really detailed captions work really well. And then Sora built on that. Yeah, so it was 2023. We were releasing all these updates to Gen-2, like the camera control, Motion Brush. And there was something very interesting about camera control because it was the first time that you felt that instead of, like, you were creating video, you were creating a short video, you were navigating inside the world. And I think camera control was maybe the seed of some of the ideas that we had around world models and really opening up that research direction. We realized, it was this era and this series of, Gen-1 and Gen-2 models really proved to ourselves, yeah, this is theSwyx [00:23:56]: Cool.Anastasis [00:23:57]: So this is not the original camera control. This was the updated camera control on top of Gen-3. But yeah, I think it made those models usable to filmmakers, I would say. The so camera control was very popular. And so we realized, there is one way of seeing those models, which is, you're just as content creation machines, and there is the other way, which is you're. As you're predicting video in order to predict video well, you need to simulate the world in an increasing and increasing capacity. And if scaling laws apply on video, just like they apply on language models, then as we scale the compute that we put into those models, then they're gonna be able to simulate physics, they're gonna be able to simulate human actions and dynamics increasingly well and predictably well. That was the thesis about around our efforts on world models, and we spin up this research group to just focus on the world models and how do we turn the video generation models that we're building into something broader and something that would be useful beyond, also content creation as well.Swyx [00:25:04]: And that was roughly when?Anastasis [00:25:06]: Yeah, so that was inSwyx [00:25:06]: OhAnastasis [00:25:07]: In late 2023.Vibhu [00:25:08]: Interesting. like, I think, a lot of people have been saying a lot of video gen model companies have all pivoted to world models these days, but like, 2023, you're posting it. oneWorld Models: From Video Generation to SimulationSwyx [00:25:21]: It's, it's debatable whether it's a pivot.Vibhu [00:25:23]: Yeah.Swyx [00:25:23]: Like, arguablyVibhu [00:25:24]: YeahSwyx [00:25:24]: That's what you always had to do anyway, right?Anastasis [00:25:26]: It's in a way an expansionVibhu [00:25:28]: YeahAnastasis [00:25:28]: Of the applicationsVibhu [00:25:29]: YeahAnastasis [00:25:29]: Of the models as they become more capable.Vibhu [00:25:31]: The early signs, it seems like the original models you guy had, guys had, people would say it's very not bitter lesson pilled, right? You're adding, rewriting prompts, you're having all these one-off things, but that's just the state of the tech as it was versus the future of as you said, you can scale it up as, we can scale up to world models.Anastasis [00:25:50]: Yeah. So it just became. And if you looked at the outputs of Gen-2Vibhu [00:25:56]: YeahAnastasis [00:25:56]: It was not. I think it was not obvious to people that this would scale to become a general simulator of the world. Like, you had very limited movement, you had, very low fidelity or low resolution, like obvious mistakes in human anatomy, like all kinds of limitations. But it was just, the idea was that's just GPT-two, and GPT-two, it can barely generate, like, coherent sentences. Similar, Gen-2 can barely create coherent video, but if you scale it up, you're gonna. There is no reason why it shouldn't work in a way. It's, And I think that was. That's, that's always the mindset of Runway is like this extrapolation of, like, if, like, even when we started in 2018 and you looked at the results of the day, you need to look more at the trend of, like, where we were in 2018 versus when we were at the, when the first GAN came out in twenty, four 2014 or twenty, fifteen. And, you started from, like, thirty-two by thirty-two images of faces, and then by the time in 2018, you could generate, street images at the 1K resolution. And it was the same with world models, very early signs of something much bigger.Swyx [00:27:08]: Yeah. I was gonna say, like, it's diffusing into focus. Like, if you look at our visible output from year to year, it looks like a diffusion process itself.Anastasis [00:27:17]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:27:17]: Especially watching the early, like, old blog posts, you can really see the choppiness, the details.Anastasis [00:27:24]: Yeah. Like human civilization starting from random noise and thenVibhu [00:27:27]: YeahAnastasis [00:27:27]: Denoising intoSwyx [00:27:28]: Yeah. Just run it a hundred years.Anastasis [00:27:30]: Civilization.Swyx [00:27:30]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:27:31]: That's how you're on track, you're still noising, right?Swyx [00:27:34]: Yeah. I like the way that you guys phrased it when you, announced it in June, which is, oh, that you had a video essay. “The human mind is no longer the center of AI. Our world is.” Right? Which is, let's, let's call it the past five years of LLM-based AI is very much like trying to emulate human preferences and human speech. But now that's, like, mostly solved. I think that's, like, some of the context of your essay, which you also wrote around the time. And now it's like the focus is on modeling the world accurately.Scaling Laws for Video and Why Predicting Pixels MattersAnastasis [00:28:03]: Exactly, yeah. So the way we see it is, there is that, initial mission statement of DeepMind, which is, solve intelligence and then use it to solve everything else. But I think it's starting from everything else, could be valuable of, like, starting from. there is just so much complexity, and detail in the world that in order to. That it's, it's hard to learn directly from just human descriptions of the world. Like, we're assuming that, like, language models learn from everything that humans have written about the world, like our own understanding as of, the twenty twenties. And there is just so much that we don't know and so much that's not captured by existing text, about both the low level dynamics of the world, like we're not describing in detail. if I tell you to describe, like, how do you tie your shoes, that's a very difficult thing to describe in words, but it's very obvious thing to demonstrate. And so I think there's been. And there's, more of X paradox, like we're constantly underestimating all the complexity that goes into very, like, things that we do subconsciously as humans, and we don't even necessarily always have the words to describe them. And so in my mind, the simulating the world and simulating, physics, simulating the dynamics of the world has always been underestimated, compared to, we place too much emphasis on the things that are easy to talk about. but there is just all this complexity and richness of the world that if we just try and train directly on that observational data instead of training on how people describe the world, we would learn something new that we wouldn't otherwise know.Swyx [00:29:54]: You think that the present architectural paradigm is fine? You don't need, like, another layer, like JEPA, like another famous, New York AI leader would say?Anastasis [00:30:05]: We're a very pragmatic research lab. If, we have evidence that an approach works better than the approach that we're taking, then we have no qualms to taking it. We just have seen no indication that video prediction itself doesn't scale. And even if you look now, not just our work, but the work of others, you're seeing in robotics some of the most promising work, starts from video prediction models, and then you adapt them to also the action models, for example. so there is very little evidence that you need something else and that your time is better spent on a novel architectural change compared to improving data and improving the, and scaling the current approach. And so, We don't have any indication that. the, there is that counterargument that I think there was a tweet by Yann LeCun a few days ago that, understanding the dynamics of the world is very different than, generating, cute videos.Swyx [00:31:05]: And your answer is no, they're the same thing.Anastasis [00:31:07]: Yeah, they're the same thing.Swyx [00:31:08]: My cat videos are the same as understanding physics.Anastasis [00:31:11]: Right, because if you wanna generate. video models can cheat and, like, they could you could give, like, successive dif shots of the scene in a way that doesn't require you to simulate difficult physics. There is like, all these different ways in which you can hide the deficiencies of the model, and it's important not to be too tricked by the performance of the current video models. It's easy to, cherry-pick examples and think that video models are further advanced than they are. So there is a lot more work that we need to do to improve those models. But in my mind, very similar to language, and, like, we've. you go from barely coherent sentences to something that, could hold a conversation with a human to something that could can operate autonomously for a day and, like, create entire code bases. And the main difference, there is some architecture improvements along the way, but the main thing is scale. And so it's the same bet for video, and we have no indications that this is saturating. Like, we have benchmarks that we use for measuring the physics of those models, and we see those predictably improve as we scale those models. So there is. If you want to Google up, Physics-IQ, is one of those benchmarks that measures how well does the model perform at solid mechanics or fluid dynamics or optics.Vibhu [00:32:32]: I'm curious if you've seen any emergence, any scaling law around this.Swyx [00:32:37]: Yeah, he's saying there is a scaling law, right?Anastasis [00:32:39]: Exactly.Vibhu [00:32:40]: Yeah,Anastasis [00:32:40]: So the way those models, those benchmarks work is you. the researchers have gone and, like, captured, a few videos that are representative of different physical phenomena, and then you can take the first frame and then pass it through an image-to-video model and then generate a rollout that shows what should happen next. So you have, a ball hanging from the ceiling, and then you use that as input, and then you the model predicts how the ball should fall on the ground. and this measures. we have an intuitive understanding of physics. I know, you can imagine what will happen next if I drop this bottle. So it's measuring that same intuitive physics understanding of those models, and we've measured that at different model scales, and we see, and compute scales, and we see that the score on physics IQ predictably improves. There's other, tricks and techniques that you can make to improve the score even further, but even scale alone helps, in the model learning better physics.Swyx [00:33:40]: My main sympathy with Yann LeCun is the, Plato's cave allegory, right? Like, you're, you're, like, learning on the output of a thing, not the internal process of a thing, and it's very noisy. And, if only you could observe the internals of a thing. It's hard to observe the internals of a human mind, but you can very much observe, or at least we have a whole branch of science and physics that we're ignoring on how to model Physics and movement and, gravity and, other interactions. and we're just, like, throwing away all of that and just saying just scale data, which is very much the lesson of unsupervised learning, but it feels wrong. that's the main idea.Anastasis [00:34:21]: I think the history of machine learning is, at large, it feels wrong.Swyx [00:34:25]: Yeah. It's a bitter lesson, right? Yeah. It's, it's, it's the simple answer to that.Vibhu [00:34:29]: I guess, how much can you scale? So, like, even on, let's say, the video generation side, like, there's one side of video understanding. Video generation, are we still gonna have tools where it's like, I wanna generate two hours, twenty hours? there's a infra way to do it in batches and stitch it together, but, like, do we just keep scaling? Do we just continue long generation consistency, all that at scale? And, like, tying it into where we're at now from we looked at Runway two to four point fiveGen-3, Sora, and Runway's Scaling InflectionAnastasis [00:34:58]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:34:58]: Like, technically, what advancements have we made to today, and then where do you see things still going?Anastasis [00:35:04]: So part of the answer is definitely scale. and that was. We learned that lesson in a big way for with Gen-3. So Gen-3 was the model we released the year after, like in 2024. That was a few months after Sora was released. so yeah, there's an interesting story of that came to be as well. Gen-3 for us was, the first time that we really needed to build. we had to learn all the lessons that the language model world learned in two in three years in the span of a few months. one of the biggest changes of Sora was using diffusion transformers instead of convnets. So a lot of the early, latent diffusion models were all, convnets for the diffusion model part. And the diffusion transformer paper came at some point in 2023, and it showed scaling laws for image, diffusion transformers. And we realized at that point that we needed to invest in infrastructure for model parallelism, for really scaling training to larger than, a few billion parameter models. And we spent maybe the, most of the fall of 2023 building out our infrastructure for distributed training. And we had a lot of false starts and a lot of failure in trying to scale, image and video diffusion transformers. And at that point, February 2024, Sora comes out, and the results areAnastasis [00:36:35]: Very much superior to what Gen-2 could produce. There were a lot of, a lot of chatter on Twitter about Runway. Runway's done. like, there is no way Runway will catch up. And if you remember, also OpenAI in the early twenty-It felt very, like it's aSwyx [00:36:56]: To the moonAnastasis [00:36:57]: It's a formidable opponent now, but at that point, it, they were on the top of their game. nobody could even get close to them. There was maybe Gemini was just the first version of Gemini had just released. So when OpenAI came with Sora and it was such a big jump of like quality, it gave me, there was like an existential crisis for a few hours. But that, I think the amazing thing about Runway and like I think the, we've been around eight years now, which is almost we're dinosaur in AI, and we had to like, we had there was a lot of those moments we had to learn, adapt very quickly and build out skill set in the team that we didn't have. And so, if you ask anyone what is their favorite time at Runway that was there during that time, it was that push in like three months to get to a model better than Sora. and it, we scaled 10x the model scale, the model size and the, compute that we were training on. we figured out model parallelism. We had zero expertise in that. And then we came out with Gen-3 during that summer. So that was a big turning point, I think, for the company where the research org grew very quickly, and we really started pursuing this vision of the general world model, in earnest, I think after Gen-3 was out.Swyx [00:38:12]: Yeah. that's the amazing thing about building when you're building. There's no stack to. You have to invent everything yourself. You have to be completely full stack. Now I think like there are inference specialists like Fal or whatever that can help with like, model serving, and I think you guys work with them as well. but yeah, like it's, it. But at the time, it was just. It's very interesting to think about what you do when Sora comes out and people are questioning whether your company should still exist.Distillation, Turbo Models, and Real-Time VideoAnastasis [00:38:41]: Yeah. And yeah, there was no, there was no VLM of diffusion models. Like, we had to build the whole model serving infrastructure and make things efficient. And a few months after we released Gen-3, we released the Turbo version, which I think was the first step-distilled model in production.Swyx [00:38:56]: That was a whole trend that we covered as well. Yeah.Anastasis [00:38:59]: So that allowed us, to serve those models at the larger scale, ‘cause I think the first version of Gen-3 was quite, expensive to serve.Swyx [00:39:09]: I think the whole like trend in like consistency models, Lightning and, Turbo and all these things somehow didn't really stick around. I don't know if you have any reflections on this. Because at the time, I was like, “Well, everything should start with a distilled model first, and then you can upscale,” right? It. your bigger models just turn into fancy upscalers, but like you should always draft with a smaller model and faster model, right? Because you can get it so quickly, like near real-time.Anastasis [00:39:39]: Yeah. I would not be so sure to say that didn't stick around. I think that, it's, it's likely to. that there is a lot of step-distilled models that are actively used in production. there is still a gap in quality compared to the, non-distilled model. but in my mind, we're still. there is a two to three year offset from language models. So the things that, So it's just a matter of time before there is better distillation techniques. we use. Right now we have a real-time model core character that I think is the largest deployment of real-time video models, that's a step-distilled model, and it's actively being used. It's a very specific use case compared to a general video model. So this is aSwyx [00:40:27]: Very cool, by the way.Anastasis [00:40:27]: This is avatars stuff, right?Swyx [00:40:28]: Consistency, character.Anastasis [00:40:30]: Yeah. So this is a talking avatar, model. we were able to. we optimized the hell out of it, and it generates at 24 FPS, and it's a, it's a step-distilled autoregressive video model. So if we look at our world model direction, a big component of it is starting from the bidirectional diffusion that generates entire video at once and making autoregressive shows. So you generate one frame or a few frames at a time. so there's a lot that goes into that pipeline of getting to a real-time model. It's first you need to make it into a causal autoregressive model, and then you just turn it into. You need to do some additional step distillation to get it to be real-time. and I think that part is just starting. I'll be very surprised if we're, two years from now, we don't primarily use real-time models. To me, real-time video generation is just inevitable that, it has much better user experience, it's much cheaper to serve, and, the quality gap between the base model and the real-time model is only gonna close as we figure out better, distillation techniques. And we made a lot of progress there internally on maintaining the quality of the base model when we distill them.Swyx [00:41:49]: How much of this is transferable? So is it the same base model? Like if you're doing diffusion across the whole sequence and you're converting it to step autoregressive distillation, is this like distillation where you still need to train both, you can use the same base and converter? What's that process like to go from regular model to something that's real-time on a technical level?Anastasis [00:42:11]: So the nice thing about diffusion models is you have, two axes of distillation. So there is the. You can distill to a smaller model, which resembles what you do in LLMs, or you can distill in terms of taking less steps, less diffusion steps. So you could take a model that generates in fifty steps and generate in four steps and get to, You have some performance, degradation, but very often you get comparable outputs. So you can even take the large frontier model and distill it with step distillation and get to a real-time performance, and that's what we've seen. So, depending on the use case, in some cases we might also serve with a smaller model, but in a lot of use cases, we just use theSwyx [00:42:56]: Step distillationAnastasis [00:42:56]: The frontier model, and we're able to make it work in real-time.Swyx [00:42:59]: I think this might be a good time to cut over to his laptop to show off some of the real-time stuff that you're doing.Interface World Models and Neural SoftwareAnastasis [00:43:06]: This is one of the research updates that we did recently. so we've been working and f in getting our general world models to, different applications. one of them that we think is very compelling is using general world models as essentially, an interface, a universal interface to software. This is a version of our world model that's called an interface world model. and the idea is that it essentially, replaces, the, front end of a software application. It renders the pixels directly of an interface and is trained to predict what happens next as a result of, a click or another interaction you have with the interface. So this is all pixels. it's there is no HTML, CSS, React that's powering this interface. This is directly at the output of our real-time, video generation model, and it takes clicks directly as input.Swyx [00:44:09]: And drags, click and drag.Anastasis [00:44:12]: Right. So it supportsSwyx [00:44:13]: Ooh.Anastasis [00:44:14]: Yeah, clicks. It supports drags. it also supports scrolling. and the amazing thing about this is that you can effectively describe in the prompt how you want different elements, like what do you want the behavior of different elements to be. So it's almost you're you can turn, an interface from, markup language description of, like, an HTML interface, and instead you can just describe the interface. if I press this button, I expect this to happen. If I press this button, this should happen. And it's useful, we believe, both for prototyping, for, like, just testing, like, what different interactions would feel like. you can also add audio to it. So it's a video audio generation model. So you get you essentially can describe both what the visual outcome should be of your click and also what the if there is a sound effect that comes out of it. So we believe that's gonna be a much more flexible way of building software. Just render. It just, in why generate the code that generates the pixels? Just generate the pixels directly.Anastasis [00:45:18]: It's the end-to-end philosophy applying applied to front ends.Anastasis [00:45:25]: So we think there is a few interesting use case. So you can build creative tools on top of it.Anastasis [00:45:32]: We think that, for any use case that involves a lot of exploration or, like, educational use case where you wanna learn about a new concept and you want some visualization and like, and open-ended exploration, we think those this is a very powerful, approach. you can imagine new forms of, design, industrial design software that could emerge as a result of those models. And this is all, generated in real-time as well. So, you can build a lot of interesting camera transitions and forms of interaction that are very difficult to build otherwise. And one way in which we evaluate this is what if you try to generate the same interface with Claude by just, prompting Claude, “Here's an image reference of my interface that I made in Figma or that I created somewhere else. create this particular interaction,” which in this case it's, drag that object, upwards. and beyond it being slower, it's also very difficult to capture some interactions by just fully, with just LLMs. So we think that this is likely to be the way that a lot of the future, like, software in the future will be created. and one of the additional benefits is personalization might be a lot easier done with those models. Like, you can essentially try out different prompts based on who is visiting the interface. You can, more easily, prompt engineer the interface to have larger size, text for more accessibility reasons, or you can make this or, like, if you have a particular aesthetic preferences. So we're very excited about this approach. It's early days, and I think we'll need to, make it more cost-effective as well to serve those models ‘cause, running a real-time video model versus just purely rendering HTML, there's -- the computational needs are much higher. but we do see a lot of potential in this approach to building front-end interfaces.Swyx [00:47:47]: So we covered this similar thing with Flipbook before with our, Ethan Hara episode with Groq, video. And yeah, I think it's very engaging visually. I think it's maybe very good for education, but it's it does sound expensive. I think there's an upper bound to how expensive it will be, though, right? Like, the inference cost will go down over time. You'll figure out ways to optimize it. Effectively, when it pauses, you don't you're not receiving human input. You don't have to generate anything, right? So.Anastasis [00:48:14]: Yeah, you could also. Like, in this case, you have ambient motion, so there is parts of the screen that might. if you're let's say you wanna, visit Paris and then you get this interface that allows you to explore.Swyx [00:48:29]: People walking. Yeah.Anastasis [00:48:29]: You have people walking or, like, things happening. But, it's, it's a no Yeah, it makes it more expensive because you need to run the model all the time. Maybe you have some looping mechanism so you don't need to do that. But all those things, I think, is stuff we'll need to figure out.Toward a Fully Neural Operating SystemSwyx [00:48:44]: Yeah.Anastasis [00:48:44]: I think our first consideration is let's make this clearly find some use cases where it's clearly a much more compelling interaction compared to traditional interfaces. And then it's a matter of time before it becomes more cost-effective to serve.Swyx [00:48:58]: Yeah. When it comes to the people walking, I think the approach that makes the most sense to me is Nick.Anastasis [00:49:04]: Nick.Swyx [00:49:04]: Oh, God. I keep messing up their name. With Chris Manning and Fanny Yan. I don't know if you've come across them, where they. Mapped to some game engine. I think it's Unity or something, or Godot. And they you can script some NPC behavior behind that and train on that. Whereas here, you can really imagine whatever you want. Like, that is a UI, right? Like, and it feels, like, more tractable, I guess, to, create a world model of software that is interactable because we have many of examples of that, and you can, do your fancy RL environment stuff on that than it is scaling up to embodied and real-world physical use cases. But this is a nice first step.Vibhu [00:49:43]: Or, there's the opposite of you have, like, one B models, three 50 million parameter language models. It just gets so small that they're just predicting, like, fishes moving.Swyx [00:49:53]: Small models are now 120 B, so.Vibhu [00:49:57]: Ultra mini on device.Vibhu [00:49:58]: But, no, I think it, like, it puts it into perspective, at least the car one for me, like, the applications, right? The amount of work to do that, sure, you only make one model year car per year, but applying this, it's also a cost-saving to have to manually make all this, right? So it opens up a lot of possibilities, too. I'm curious if you extend this out two, three years, so where do you see things going even further?Anastasis [00:50:25]: Effectively, the end game of something like interface world models is you have, a fully neural operating system. So I think, Andrej Karpathy has written about that quite a while back. But it's, You, I think to me it's, it's a bit, it's a bit odd that, we have, for example, with an interaction with an LLM of today, you have this LLM that can talk to you about anything. It can You can take the conversation in any direction. You can It's very general, so it can solve all those different tasks, but you interact with it through a very rigid interface. And so to me, it's just a matter of time before the interface itself becomes learnable and becomes, part of the whole loop of, like, you're not just delivering. You're delivering an application end-to-end, and that means you're delivering the language model, but you're also delivering the render and the pixels and that's also a learnable component. And the concept of applications might not necessarily. I think we'll need to figure out new abstractions for software. the concept of application comes from this idea that you need, separate code bases to describe, to, for, to power each individual, tool and each individual application. But you might think of something a lot more unified if you're. if you have, a video model that's generating the interface as you go. so it can take context from an LLM and allow you to combine different functionalities that traditionally would live in different applications. So it's a, it's a way to solve, software end-to-end, effectively. We also see this as a powerful way to train computer use agents as well. so this is, one way to see this as. And in general, with world models, there is those two directions. One is world models for humans and world models forSwyx [00:52:24]: AgentsAnastasis [00:52:24]: To train agents.Swyx [00:52:25]: Yeah.Anastasis [00:52:25]: And so for every new work of, world models that we do, we have this both uses become possible. So this is a powerful synthetic data generator for training computer use models. It could become, a live, RL environment that you could use to do online RL with a computer use agent, and you can get wide diversity of different interactions, kinds of interfaces, just generated on the fly that, to improve the how robust the, your agent, becomes. So that's the same also with the world models that we're working on for a robotics use case as well.Long Context, Error Accumulation, and Autoregressive VideoSwyx [00:53:02]: Is there a research breakthrough that you're Waiting for that would unlock the next set of use cases that you really wanna pursue?Anastasis [00:53:10]: Long context is a very important one, so being able to maintain consistency for long periods of time, and that depends on the use case. So for our characters model, for example, or for the interface world model, it's easier to maintain long sessions of interaction. If you go into more open-ended worlds that you navigate and you take arbitrary actions in, we, like, there is more the context at which you can and duration which you can generate becomes limited much more quickly.Swyx [00:53:40]: Yeah.Anastasis [00:53:40]: So we see more degradation and error accumulation happening. so the biggest challenge with autoregressive models is error accumulation, is you're feeding generative frames back into the model to generate the next The next frames. And if there is any small errors, they accumulate over time. That's not a new problem. It's a problem that LLMs also have, and we've seen the ability to generate now really long outputs. So it's a solved problem, but it's definitely still a challenge.Swyx [00:54:08]: Yeah. And what is the state of the art? so for Grok, it would be like 10 to 20 seconds of context going in there for video.Anastasis [00:54:16]: With our characters models, we're able to generate up to 30 minutes of video autoregressively.Swyx [00:54:21]: Yeah. But that's just for the avatars.Anastasis [00:54:24]: Yeah. So if we look at, GWM Worlds, which is more our open-ended world exploration model, it's, it's on the order of a few minutes, which is Yeah, soSwyx [00:54:35]: Probably enough for people because you have to cut to the next scene anyway, right?Anastasis [00:54:40]: Yeah, it's not, it's not the ideal game experience if you have to restart every few minutes. So I think. But, I think it's. Yeah, for certain kinds of game experiences, you can work around it.

I discussed my night out on the town, and the little mushroom decorations Mya and I bought for the autumn season. Dylan caught us up to speed on what's been going on in the Granblue Fantasy world. As well as all the other games in the franchise. Last but not least, I shared my first time exploring through Breath of the Wild.Our Links:Ian WolffeSend us Fan Mail

Your key performance indicators do not have to be intimidating. In fact, with the correct frame of mind, they tell you exactly what's going on in your practice! Kiera shares the smart way to utilize KPIs, including: Looking for patterns, not just numbers Finding the question in each KPI Understanding KPIs are team-wide, not just for the owner Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera (00:01) Hello, Dental A Team listeners, this is Kiera, and I hope you're excited because I'm gonna talk to you about KPIs and whether you're excited about it or not, you're gonna listen to KPIs because KPIs are the vital of your practice and your KPIs are really telling you a lot more, just like your vitals on your body are probably telling you a lot more than you think they are. I have been getting and falling in love with weight training, and I had a client shout out to her. She was like, Kiera, you need a new passion to become obsessed with, and I think weight training could be there.   But with my history, I was anorexic for a lot of my life. And thankfully that part of my life I think is like done and over. And I love food. And so with weight training, my coach was like, you've got to track in and you gotta weigh in. So it's weighing in every day, doing your measurements, and then doing macros. And for a girl who is terrified of that, because a skill for me and eating food, like a lot of food.   was like no goes for a lot of years in my life. And what I found though is she was like, Kiera, you're just tracking these because they're telling you information like the food you ate yesterday, or are you like coming up on your menstrual cycle where you're bloated and you're holding more water? it's been fascinating. And I've been tracking for almost a year now. So like huge win. Thank you. Thank you. I'm sure you're all cheering for me. and if you're not, I appreciate the cheers. but what I realized is like,   It's just data and it's telling me information. And I re bring that up because I believe that this was what our KPIs are too. The KPIs are just data to tell us if something's working, if it's not working. I'm obsessed with tracking my metrics. Like there was a while that I was weight training and I wouldn't track what my weight was. And I never was getting stronger because like it's like, I think I was at like 10 pounds last time, versus hey, last time you were at 10 pounds, we're gonna start you at 10 on your warm-up and we're going up to 12. And now I have a really like strict UR trainer.   Who watches my metrics, watches the pieces, and then adjusts accordingly. I am up to PRs that I've never been hitting, but it was because I actually use the data, not just track the data, to make better decisions. And that's what your KPIs are. So I just want you to know that like look at your KPIs to look for the right messages because we're only looking to see if we won or lost most of the time with KPIs. But using these to diagnose problems before they become expensive to me is where your KPIs really start to become impactful. Similar to like, wait.   Right. Like we're trying to add and bulk up my calories. Like I came in at a lower calorie, no shock to anybody. but for us, it's like, okay, well, for me also, how do I know I can add this much food in? Like, guys, so much protein. If you have protein tips, please email me. Be a protein buddy out there. I am so tired of eating cottage cheese, chicken, fair life shakes, cottage cheese. Like my main thing was like cottage cheese, wheat checks, gr raspberries, and peanut butter.   I have eaten Built Bars, like you name it, protein powder. I shout out to Ballerina Farms. That's my favorite one. I've made an Orange Julius with vanilla protein powder. Like you guys, to get that much protein has been so hard. But I also know if I don't get enough protein and I'm lifting, I'm not gonna get my the the gains and the strength that I'm actually going for. And this is to make Kiera, 95-year-old Kiera, to be freaking ripped. I wanna be like running and beating your 20-year-old son or daughter. Like that's what I want to be doing. So   But if I'm not looking at this, I'm not diagnosing these problems. So like we're adding more food food, but like we got to watch to make sure the measurements aren't changing and we're not adding it too quickly or not. So it's this whole piece. Same thing with your KPI. So I hope that analogy was there. I hope that, and hey, if you want to talk to me about like protein or weight training, hi, I would love to talk to you because I was like rookie girl who didn't even know how to lift going into it, wasn't like a bodybuilding competition. There's really, I don't know how to explain it.   But there was this incredible photographer from Spain who does physique photo shoots. And that was like a goal I worked towards. And to be able to have that to weigh in, to do a bulk and a cut, to just like be able to turn my body into this incredible machine and see how I can fuel her. Hey, if you want to talk about that, like hey, maybe that's another podcast of like, but happy to chat with anybody and just know, like, it's really incredible. Also, exhaust the body, tame the mind. Shout out to Dan Martell.   It really has also made me a more powerful CEO and to navigate some of the hardest times in the business because I've been able to have that mental strength and support by working out. So total tangent, but like let's get back into KPIs because KPIs really truly are so helpful for you. It's the first thing that's going to work with you. We have a KPI dashboard for all of our clients. We use the analytics with all of our clients because this will tell you before there's truly a problem. And we can watch trends instead of being like, it was an off month or I feel this way. No more, I feels. It's either I'm gaining.   My weight, like and it's muscle, and I'm building muscle, or I'm just eating nonsense over here. Like it's been really fascinating. So I want you to know this, and we're gonna talk to you guys about like what your KPIs are really trying to tell you. So, as I mentioned, step one is looking for patterns, not just numbers. So, usually like we have a book of business trend for all of our consultants. So we're watching certain KPIs on every single practice, all hundreds of clients that we have, we're watching it.   And we look at kind of like a three-month trail. So I want to see how are these clients doing? How are they doing compared to last year? Because that's going to tell us the whole story. Looking at it just monthly isn't really going to tell you a lot. Just like me tracking my metrics every single day. Well, it's not really going to tell me a lot. But looking at it over the course of time, I'm going to be able to see, okay, when my like as a female, when girls go on their period, guess what? They actually increase their weight because our hormones shift. So then I'm going to be able to start to see. I can actually start to tell without even looking at a calendar.   Which men, I don't know. My husband's like, how do you just not know these dates, Kiera? And I'm like, listen, and all the ladies are giggling, I don't freaking know when this thing's gonna come. It's not like an alarm clock on the 30th of the month that shows up, gentlemen. Okay. So for a female for us to be able to track because of our metrics going up, I'm able to tell when my period's coming much better than I used to be able to predict it because I'm actually watching and trailing that. But I've been tracking it for multiple months. So now I can see the pattern of what's going to happen. So with that.   A lot of men are also giggling, like, well, Kiera, I could tell you beyond just weight. It's probably your mood shifts. Hey, we women are emotional creatures, and I'm okay with that. All right. I hope you guys just enjoyed my like rant between men and women. And I hope you guys all got a good giggle because I did. But back to KPIs, I'm getting tangenty on you all. A single month's not really going to tell us the whole picture. We've got to look at this of like, cause you can have high production, low production. I look in January. It's really embarrassing when I'm showing a new client like an example of a book of business and showing them like,   How this client's trending. January always usually has a low collection. And I know that because December is usually a lower month, which usually means my January is a lower collection. It happens almost on every single practice. So you go down the line, all those buckets for us of every client usually is red on their collection compared to their production. Usually they're producing X amount, they're collecting, but their December is usually two weeks, sometimes three if we're lucky. But that tends to happen. So if I'm saying, like, my gosh, those collections are down.   Well, no, I need to look over this. Or if we're panicking because we have a slow week, everything's down. No, but we need to figure out like how we can actually predict this, how we can measure it. So what I like to do, and this is what our practices are doing, we're looking over several months. So usually like a quarter. Also, I'm gonna look annually because sometimes it's cyclical. Anybody have a September or an ominous October or a dead December? You're welcome. because it's either a September or an ominous October.   And some of my practices just have a genuine dead December. Like my practice in Hawaii, they must aloha over there. It is dead, dead, dead December. So we have to plan and prepare for that because I know it's just gonna be dead. So we're gonna look at this and we're gonna look at the trends over several months. We're also gonna look at cyclical, what's happening annually, or even like month over month, what's going on and what are kind of the trends. We're gonna compare our KPIs against the goal. So, what should this be at? Where are we at? And then we're gonna look for consistent movement. So   When I'm working with a practice, I'm not gonna say, all right, hygienist, we need to get our perio up to 30%. Let's look and see where they've been for the last couple of months and then let's increase it by a couple of percentage points. I'm not going from like I got a practice right now that's an eight percent perio. Woo! We gotta talk about some bloody profies over there. It's okay. I'm not stressed about it, but we do need to change that. We set a goal this quarter to get them up to 15%. And you might be like, Kiera, they gotta be to 30%. Yes, but me going from eight to thirty is psychotic.   You gotta go eight to 10 to 15, and we gotta be moving those KPIs in the right direction. Just like somebody losing weight, we're not gonna be like, all right, you need to lose 50 pounds in two weeks. Like psychotic. Don't do that. Let's make these realistic so people actually get the momentum and want to grow. So when we're watching this, look at hygiene reappointment, look at our case acceptance, but not in an individual week. Look at it over a month and like if I notice there are certain weeks, what was going on? Or if I was down, let's go dig into it and find out why. Was it just an isolated incident?   Did we not have enough hygiene? Did we have a lot of openings? Find out why this KPI is telling you this rather than it just being a well, that's annoying. Look at it as an early warning sign rather than a complete and total drop. This is going to help you predict future better off of today's numbers. So, like, what's our future gonna be? Like, use our numbers. Let's better predict. Let's look back at trends. It's going to help you. Patterns are going to tell you the story. Numbers are where we're going to start to like look into conversations. So   Looking for patterns, looking for true numbers. How's this going to go? So I would recommend a quick call to action today is go look at the last six months of KPI. So we're talking production, collections, overhead, profit. we wanna look at our case acceptance, we look at our new patients, we look at our AR, we don't look at our hygiene. Those are just some off the top. There's several others you can dig into. Like you can look at your schedule capacity, you can look at your answer call rate, we can look at our marketing, we can look at our new patients, but like look at our general ones that are gonna move the practice. And what are the last six months?   And identify a trend that's moving in the wrong direction. Okay. And identify a trend that's moving in the right direction. We don't just want to use this as bad information, like there's good information too. So what's happening there? Go identify that. But again, not just looking at one week, because one week, one month can isolate and it actually won't work. We've got an awesome office and we've grown them so much this year. They've added over 100,000 per month to their practice, and we're talking this as a very large practice. But I love their office manager because she's like, hey, last year we had this.   This is what we've got going on. We need to predict and project for this because we're going to be running into these issues. That is using your freaking KPIs. And that's what I would like all of you to get to. Okay, number two, every KPI should lead to a question. So one, we're looking at patterns. Two, these are going to actually ask questions. So we're asking why. Like I said, so collections are down. End of discussion. Instead, like, why are collections down? Did K and like you've got to think of it as like a trigger tree down. Like, I don't know.   Don't know what it's called. Like it's like it's like a family tree almost. Okay. So it's like a decision-making matrix. Here we go. So if our collections are down, what are the pieces that make up collections? Well, we've got insurance claims. We also have case acceptance. We have production. We have AR. Like those are going to be pieces that are going to impact. I know for a while all the insurance is like all of our collections were down across the board because one of the insurance companies were holding it up. Well, guess what? That's why our collections are down. But we don't just like   Say collections are down, go collect more. Let's find out what the root of this problem is to see, like, what is our collection? How do we get this back up? There was one office where the collection percentage is sitting at 58%. Well, they're not putting fee schedules in. That's why their collections don't look right. So, what is the reason for it? We gotta make, we gotta be curious. We also need to dig into the root problem, and then we gotta solve the problem, not just the symptoms. So, for that one when insurance was just holding up, not really a lot I could do with an asterisk. There actually was.   We could then start to do like let's call our patients that are fee for service patients, bring them in. Let's call in patients and fill our schedule with patients who are not on that insurance so we can boost up our collections. Like you might say, like, it's out of my control, but if you actually use this and look at it and get creative, any KPI, you can drive that number and improve that. So I really, really, really, really want you guys to ask like why five times before creating a solution. Okay. So pick a KPI and ask why and why and why and why and why.   And then create a solution. Like, so why is this? Why? Like, what about this? Like, what about this? Like, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig. I sound like Snow White. Dig, dig, dig, dig, dig. You're welcome. because this is going to actually help you guys figure out what is going on. And this is why consultants were so great. Because we ask the why. We dig to find out. All right, production's down. Why? Like literally every consultant knows when I'm looking at it. I want to know why. If a client's saying X, Y, or Z, I want to know why.   Tell me what's going on. What are we noticing? What are the pen patterns? And not just for this month, but what's been happening for the prior three months to it? Let's figure out why. So that way we can predict and change moving forward and actually fix the problem. If you're like collections are down, great, we're just gonna fix our over the over the counter collections. Well, if we're collecting fine there, we just solved a problem we didn't actually have. It could be insurance, it could be that we're not billing out, it could be that we're getting denials left and right on things. Why? Like what's getting denied?   Go dig there. So I really want you guys to one, you're gonna look back six months. That's number one, let's look for pattern. Number two, I want you to pick a KPI that's down any of them and start asking why multiple times before we create the solution so you can truly get to the root of it. And then number three is like KPIs should be for the entire team accountability. It is not just for owners. And I know this is very controversial. A lot of you come on calls with us to see if you want to work with us, and I'm like, cool.   We never roll out KPIs fully to the full team until you're ready for it. I do not believe that I should force a practice to look at numbers if an owner doctor is not comfortable with that. What I do believe though is owner doctors, let's share at least a couple of KPIs because if everybody knows their number, it's like a scoreboard on the ball. Like, can you imagine teams like basketball, football? We're going to football season. So maybe that's the one you want to talk about. Can you imagine if they didn't have a scoreboard and every person up there didn't have a metric? Like, no, they're all talking about their passing, they're running yards, they're how many games they've won.   That's what we need. Our teams need to know like what is their number that's gonna push us forward to the championship. So every single team member should know their number and they should be tracking it. I have so many office managers that are just awesome. They're rocking it. But what they don't do is they don't have their team track their KPIs. So then their hygiene's down, but no one knows it other than the OM. And then they're trying to convince that hygienist to do their period. Versus if I'm a hygienist and I know my goal is 30% and I'm noticing I'm at 10%, 11%, 12%, what we track and measure improves.   So this is going to really help your team. Like give each team member a number. And I know this sounds so silly, but like they don't even have to know the whole production. We just have to know like this is the number that you own. A scheduler. They've got to have their goal to goal every day. Like 90% of the days, I want us hitting goal. Treatment coordinator, non negotiable. Doctors have to be at goal every day, and they have got to hit our production goals every single month. Non negotiable. That's what they do. Billing, you should never have more than one month's worth of AR in there. Period. That's what they need to do. Non negotiable. Non-negotiable. Okay. Office manager, you got to hold.   Hold your overhead. That is your number one KPI plus everyone else getting their KPIs. Hygienus, three times your pay. That's what it is. Okay? That's your number. And that's on net, not gross. Next thing below that is gonna be pay you at 30%. That's your number. That's your metric. That's what you're gonna have. Dental assistants, you're my trickiest ones. Dental assistants, you need to be adding one same day or not being a popcorn assistant or getting referrals. Like you choose what their number is. But every single person owns it. Billers, less than one month's worth of AR and 98% collections. Everybody needs to know. Doctors, I need you producing what.   Like you need to diagnose three times what you want to produce. And if you're at five hundred dollars an hour, I want you to be at five fifty. You need to know what your dollar per hour is. And we need to make sure we're tracking this. I need you also diagnosing enough that we can close it. Treatment coordinators, what's your case acceptance? Like, but notice I didn't stay like I need you at thirty-five percent or I need you at fifty-five percent or ninety percent. No, treatment coordinator, I need you to get the doctor to go every day and to hit our production goal.   Very different, and a lot of us will be Well, you should get case acceptance. Well, guess what? They hit your case acceptance goal and not hit the actual outcome you want. So make sure the KPIs are directed to the outcome you want, not necessarily just a metric. So, and when everybody's owning their number, everybody owns the outcome, and we all are rowing to that championship score. So I would recommend at least rolling that. I don't care if they know anything else, but at least roll that out. So to quickly put this together, remember KPIs are the vital. We're gonna look at this before there's a problem. So number one, look for patterns. Number two,   Ask better questions, get to the why. And number three, create ownership and give everyone a KPI number. If this feels hard for you, or you're like, I know I should do it, Kiera. I just talked to a doctor who joined us. He's like, I know I need to do this, but I need some hand holding. If you're like that doctor, join us. He just reached out, he's got a consultant now. He's gonna have his whole life change and I can't wait. Office manager has no clue how to do this or implement this. Or maybe you do know how to do it, you guys are just not executing on it. Reach out. Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. I want to help you. So let's do this because KPI should not feel overwhelming.   For me, I needed a coach sitting next to me to be able to start tracking my metrics, tracking my weight, tracking my gains, tracking my macros. It was really freaking hard for me. And it took me two years to get to where I am. I first started out of like, let's just get to the gym three times a week. Then let's start looking at how much I'm lifting. Then let's go into tracking macros of just protein. Then let's go into tracking the whole kit caboodle of weight and metrics every single day. That was a process that did not turn overnight.   Otherwise, it would have been too hard. And so for you, let's just start small. It's like, and we as consultants set this up for you. You don't even have to do it on your own. So just start. I need you watching your numbers. I need that you to use those as metrics. And not for me, but for you. Because the more you know about your KPIs, the more you're gonna be able to make better decisions. You're gonna feel more confident and you're gonna be able to feel like you actually know your practice rather than being concerned about your practice all the time. So reach out if we can help you, because the right numbers can truly become your greatest leadership tools.   It doesn't have to be scary, but it can actually help grow your practice and have easier conversations. So reach out. I'd love to help Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. And as always, thanks for listening. And I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.  

Guest episode! Kiera is joined by Paul Edwards, CEO and co-founder of CEDR HR Solutions, which provides human resource support especially for dental practices. They go through a rapid fire of topics, such as coaching and accountability, worker classification, documentation and evidence (including AI!), and reporting policies. Visit CEDRSolutions.com to learn more about Paul.  Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and today is a great day. I love my episodes with Paul. Paul is incredible. He is the owner and founder of CEDR. And guess what? He is somebody that I get to just pick his brain about all things HR every time he comes on the podcast. So, Paul, welcome to the show today. How are you?   His Paulness (00:19) very good and I'm gonna take that introduction, that part where you said Paul is incredible. I'm gonna turn it into my ringtone and I'm gonna be insufferable for the rest of the year with that.   Kiera (00:25) Yeah.   His Paulness (00:27) So thank you for that.   Kiera (00:29) You're welcome. I it's funny because every time people meet you and they know you're an HR, they're like, he's actually really funny and he's a good time. And he used to play in a band. And I'm like, yeah, he makes HR not feel as scary. But every time, every time I leave, everyone's like, my gosh, he scared me to death, which is good. Like I think it's a good healthy, like you're super approachable, super nice, but also like whip us into shape of like do this, don't do that. And I appreciate you continually like guiding us along the right path.   His Paulness (00:55) There's   a lot of moving parts when you're an employer. So it all feels a little bit scary. 'Cause soon as you get figure one thing out, then there's the next thing. You're like, no, I'm doing that wrong or or I could do it better or whatever. So yeah, you know, we try   Kiera (01:07) Yeah.   His Paulness (01:08) to break this down so it's understandable.   Kiera (01:11) Which and I appreciate. And if you guys are not subscribed to his newsletter, he's got the best newsletter out there. Like I think you guys do an incredible job. So, Paul, if they're not, how do they get connected to your guys' newsletter? 'Cause that's one of my favorite things about you guys.   His Paulness (01:21) Well, I think what you want to do is just go to the website and search for almost any form on there, but there are education forms on the website. So just go to the website and join what we kind of refer to as HR Base Camp. So if you think about base camp as a place you come back to when you're on a big hike, well, you're on a big hike as an employer. And so we are constantly sending out helpful stuff, you know, two or three times a month. We send out some pretty cool stuff to all of our base campers.   That'll get you also an email that invites you to join the Facebook group, which is kinda cool 'cause you're in there with just managers and owners. and you know, it's about ten, I don't know, nine thousand people in there, something like that. So, yeah, that's the way to go there. you know, you can also subscribe to my podcast, which is what the hell just happened and we cover a lot of topics there that that are kinda fun, you know. So   Kiera (02:12) I love it. Okay. I want to just get that right in at the beginning because you guys truly he's got the best newsletter, got an incredible podcast, and I think this is the stuff that keeps business owners up at night. So let's like not have that happen anymore. So, Paul, we're gonna just like rapid fire. There's   His Paulness (02:27) Okay.   Kiera (02:27) a few topics, and then I know you've got some case studies for us as well. So, and if you guys don't know Paul, CEDR, they are one of the top dental HR companies out there. most of our clients use them. He is one of our   I do not bring a lot of people in to speak to our private groups. And Paul is one of the people that I have hand selected to come in and speak to all of our dentists in a very intimate that's not on the podcast. So it's like no recording, it doesn't get shared. He comes in and speaks to them. So, Paul, I'm excited for today. This is stuff that we'll talk publicly, but let's talk about some of these items. Coaching and accountability. I'm sure we're all doing it wrong. I'm sure I've been coaching and telling people to do this. So tell us what we can and can't do when it comes to coaching and accountability.   His Paulness (03:08) you know, the thing about coaching accountability is that it starts to feel like it starts to feel like something that's punitive, like consequences. And and when it goes into that realm, it's really hard to get somebody to listen. I I I don't know about you, but when someone starts to tell me what I'm doing wrong and that's what the focus is, I get defensive. And that's just human nature. So when we t when we talk about coaching and accountability, especially with Dennis, and I know that you're gonna I think you're gonna agree with me.   I while there are exceptions to the rule, and probably many of them, overwhelmingly I find that dentists do not want to have difficult conversations with their employees. They kind of avoid it. That I mean it's it's about 50% of the reason they get office managers because they're like, I want to have these conversations. I can get someone else can do it. Here's the thing that   Kiera (03:55) Yeah.   His Paulness (03:56) I want to say. Yes, sometimes it ends up where you have to have a really serious conversation with someone. but the   Better way to go about this is for you or you and your manager when you hire someone is to set the expectation with the employee, I mean literally during onboarding, that they are going to receive feedback from you, both positive and sometimes it might feel a little negative, because you're making small corrections. So if you get in the practice of making small corrections as you go forward, you don't you you have far fewer of those big conversations with someone.   And then the the ones that are frustrating, I mean the issues that you're facing with an employee, also become easier because when we're looking at someone who's late all the time, and you know, in a practice with you know, we ha always have just the right amount of employees. We never have a I don't know about you, but I never have an excessive amount of employees around, where everybody's important, you just start leaving no quarter for being late all the time.   you really have to say something about look when you're even when you're only five minutes late in the morning and you tell them what the issue is, you tell them what the impact is, you explain their role in a very positive way so that you can say, Look, when you are late, we are missing you. Not you need to be here on time because when you're on time, bad things happen. And if you don't start being on time, bad   Kiera (05:19) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (05:20) things are gonna happen to you. If you start with trying to enroll them in the idea that they're playing an important role.   you know, part of the reason I think for goal setting is that you get to say, how are we going to get to the goal if this behavior continues? So I just want to give everybody this reminder that coaching is coaching and it doesn't always have to be corrective and it needs to you if you set an expectation and then you execute on it, you're gonna get a lot better outcomes with people when you bring them on board. And and the other the other end of coaching should always be.   Can you do that? And do you need anything else from me? Like is is is the issue here me? Do we need to give you more training? What can we do to help you get there? So don't forget where that's appropriate, you'll always want to insert that in.   Kiera (06:08) I think Paul on that just like piggyback, what do you do when you've had that conversation like four times? Like, Perry, we've had this, we've had this, we've had this, like, I miss you at Morning Huddle. We need to be at what   His Paulness (06:20) I missed you.   Kiera (06:21) point, at what point is it not like cute? It's like the I feel like it's the child that keeps throwing the rock and mom's like, Okay, let's not throw the rock, like it's gonna break a window. When   His Paulness (06:28) Yep. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Yeah.   Kiera (06:31) do I actually like do something about it?   His Paulness (06:34) As my mom would say, when do we get to snatch a knot in him? That's what I I was just with my mom. She's eighty eight years   Kiera (06:37) Ha ha ha.   His Paulness (06:39) old right now. I she actually said, Son, don't make me snatch a knot in you. 'Cause I like to take her out in public, embarrass her now, and pick on her. but anyway,   Kiera (06:46) Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.   His Paulness (06:51) look first things first, great question. I I would do wanna say that after you've had the same repetitive convert conversation with someone   After the second or third time, especially if it's in close proximity in time, you know, you've already talked to them two weeks ago about something and they're doing it again or not doing it. you also want to make sure that you're making little notes in their file. That's very important. and what I found is is that if you don't hold someone to the standard, right? The standard that you're looking for, I I you're they're never going to improve.   And if they're not improving, then maybe they're not the right fit for your company. And the sooner that you figure that out for them and for you, the better. And so if I'm in my third or fourth time within a month about the same thing, I'm sitting down and having a much more serious conversation with them. And in my mind, I'm I'm thinking, and sometimes I might say this to them, look, I'm not telling you that you've got to do the thing, whatever it is that we're talking about. What I'm telling you is I cannot work with someone who   does or doesn't do what it is that they're that they're up to. Like, you know, I just need you to know that I, you know, I can't continue to work with you if it's going to be this way. I understand you're late. I understand that you have all these issues. I get all that. I've tried everything I can to adjust here, but I I may not be able to work with you. And you always have that standard. I need you to show up on time. There's no more there's no more getting around this. But you really need to be adding notes to their file.   dating them, you need that, and and then we can move into written corrective coaching if we need to. And you know, that's a little more formal.   Kiera (08:35) Awesome.   His Paulness (08:36) That's them acknowledging the conversation. And look, four times in a month for the same thing, they're gonna get something in writing. That's just how it's gonna happen. If if I'm if I'm on your   Kiera (08:44) Okay.   His Paulness (08:45) HR team, that's what's gonna happen.   Kiera (08:47) Okay, great. That's what I feel like so many people just like it needs to go on forever and ever. And I'm like, there's gotta be an end date to it. So,   all right, that was a quick teaser on coaching and accountability. Okay,   His Paulness (08:53) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.   Kiera (08:58) next one worker classification. I know that's a a hot topic with dentists. They love they love this 1099. I don't want to pay taxes on them, Paul. It's a better deal for me. They're   His Paulness (09:07) Yeah. It   Kiera (09:09) a dentist. I don't need to have them as an associate on payroll.   His Paulness (09:12) Right.   Kiera (09:13) This person's just coming in to help out. I can ten ninety-nine them.   His Paulness (09:14) They're only going to be here for a day. They want to be paid   as a as a independent contractor. so there's a couple levels of classification. And by the way, this is one of the good reasons to go sign up for our education because we're gonna do we're gonna release a really good classification guide. And you know what? you know, we're probably gonna make it exclusively available to your folks as well, just so you know. So at some point we'll pass it over to you.   look, classification, couple things. I'm not gonna put you to sleep   Kiera (09:42) Thank you.   His Paulness (09:45) on it because you do you actually need to kind of go through a checklist and do some stuff on your own. And we'll provide all of that. you gotta think of classification as a couple of things. First of all, there's that independent contractor conversation that we that we're always having. And for those of you who haven't heard me, I'm just gonna say this in a very definitive way. There is no hygienist on the face of the earth who qualifies either under the Department of Labor or under the IRS rules for employees.   as a as an independent contractor. It does not exist. It   Kiera (10:14) Nope.   His Paulness (10:14) can exist. It just can't. An independent contractor cannot open his or her own practice. They have to have a dentist attached. And that's kind of the nail in the coffin, but there's a lot more. All right. When it comes to   Kiera (10:25) Yeah.   His Paulness (10:27) when it comes to associate doctors, in some states that same thing is true. I'm serious. They the state has such strict rules   That for you to classify a general dentist and a general dental practice as a independent contractor is just wrong. It doesn't meet the Department of Labor's standards in that state. But for the most part across the country, a a a employee who's doing the main function of your business, who's performing the main function of your business, a a worker, I should have said a worker, they're an employee, not an independent contractor. So that's one part of the   Kiera (11:02) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (11:03) classification.   The other part of the classification com conversation has to do with whether or not I can pay an employee a fixed salary and not worry about any overtime they work, or whether or not I have to track   Kiera (11:14) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (11:14) their hours and pay them. And I'm just gonna say this. If your entire team is on salary, that's okay, but you still have to track their hours and you have to pay them overtime. You can have a manager who who you don't have to track their hours and you can pay them a fixed salary.   But not all managers qualify for that exemption. It's called an exemption to the standard to pay overtime. Not all managers qualify for that. The smaller your team is, the more in danger you are of not being able to classify someone as a salaried employee. So now that you're really confused, just   Kiera (11:51) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (11:51) go join. You're gonna get this is the kind of information and the guides and stuff that we send out.   So the the you know, the classification's a big deal 'cause we run into it every day. I mean,   wh   Kiera (12:02) Yeah.   His Paulness (12:02) when I say run into it, we get about twelve thousand questions out of our three thousand members and every week there are four or five what we call submissions asking us about you know, they've read one of the one of our articles and they're like, I think I got this wrong. And most of the time they've gotten it wrong. and you can't rely well,   Kiera (12:21) Yeah.   His Paulness (12:22) you you it you gotta be careful because   Kiera (12:24) It's true.   His Paulness (12:25) The IRS rules for your independent contractor and the Department of Labor rules don't match up all the time. And so you have to be   Kiera (12:31) Correct.   His Paulness (12:31) very careful in that area.   Kiera (12:34) Yeah, and Paul, I'm so glad you talked about it because like it is a while it is a full checklist. And I think sometimes we like to justify it. Sometimes we like to say like, but no, like they really do. And that's not gonna go over well. And so to I'm like, cross our T's, dot our I's, which is why Paul, we do podcasts like this and why everybody should have that checklist. Because when I learned about this, I'm like, No, they're a salaried employee. It's like you gotta you gotta check off this checklist and this checklist, and they're not like you said, they're not the exact same checklist at all.   His Paulness (13:02) It it's a little complicated,   Kiera (13:02) And you had to make sure both qualify for them to truly be   His Paulness (13:04) but once you figure it out, you'll have all your positions and you'll know and and you'll be set. It's just that you guys and gals tend to borrow what someone else is doing.   Kiera (13:13) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (13:14) Maybe it was already in the practice that you purchased, or it was in the practice that you were an associate of, so you're c you know you're copying, which is what we all do when we start a business, or you're talking to your you're talking to, you know, other other people in your industry and they're giving you HR guidance that   Is not sound sometimes.   Kiera (13:33) Yeah. No, I love that. And definitely sign up for that checklist. That's a brilliant one. Okay, next one. Documentation and evidence. Let's talk   about that.   His Paulness (13:42) we are going to be we are going to be actually doing some podcast on this where the internet does HR is what we're gonna call it.   Kiera (13:56) Mm.   His Paulness (13:56) I just want you guys to know that online HR advice is not something that you really want to participate in. well look let me let me   Kiera (14:08) we're talking like AI, internet searches. Let's just talk about it.   His Paulness (14:11) We're talking about AI,   we're talking about going on Reddit, we're talking about we're talking about going into any kind of group thing for for advice and running with that. But particularly AI is a con a concern and we'll get into this a little bit more. I think every time you see me I talk about AI. Well we now have court we   Kiera (14:31) You do,   His Paulness (14:32) have court cases rocking it right now and and companies are getting themselves in trouble for creating employee handbooks through AI.   they're getting themselves   Kiera (14:39) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (14:40) in trouble for using AI to fire people. they're finding out that your chat is discoverable. and so in one case we watched the chat was really bad. The the thought process of the person who was putting the problem into the chat became exposed in court and they were basically asking it how can I break the law? I might I'm paraphrasing, but they were basically like I they were kind of telegraphing, I know what I want to do here is wrong.   HR wise, tell me how I can get away with it. And so just be   Kiera (15:11) no.   His Paulness (15:12) careful about online advice and taking something from someone without knowing who those people are. it's you know, the context here is you're making an HR decision that is has a law that impacts it. And if you get it wrong, it can be very, very expensive. And there's no reason for it. There's no reason to go out that way and try and self-help.   yourself. So just be very careful. you know, same thing. Same thing about the internet. I'll make this other point, maybe a little bit about AI. You know how if you're a subject matter expert and you see AI give an answer to the thing that you're an expert on, you will look   Kiera (15:55) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (15:56) at it and you'll go, you what, that's pretty darn good and it's getting better. But here's these three or four little subtle places where it's not exactly wrong, but it's not correct.   And without context, I I would be worried about just telling someone that. Versus you're asking it a question about something that you really don't have a whole lot of subject matter expertise in it. And it gives you back that wonderful, confident, same kind of answer. It's got bullet list. it's actually, if it's your AI, it's designed to please you. So it's put a little bit of stuff in there to please you. And you'll just take that hook, line, and sinker and say, this looks so well organized   Kiera (16:30) Yeah.   His Paulness (16:31) and so authoritative.   And it look, it cited some things too, and you'll run with it, and that's what's getting people in trouble. So we just really I don't know what the word is for that. Maybe I need to make it up. but you just can't you   Kiera (16:43) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (16:44) if you don't have subject matter expertise, you gotta be very careful when it involves employment law and your pocketbook. I think that's the   Kiera (16:52) I think that I think it's so hard because like AI we use for so many things and like you said, it is like a little therapist over there and people   His Paulness (16:56) Yeah. Mm-hmm.   Kiera (16:59) enjoy it. I mean, I'm guilty of it too. I heard you talk about this six months ago and I was like, It feels annoying, Paul. Cause I'm like, I just wanna ask like what are kind of the parameters and I I   His Paulness (17:07) And I want the answer. Yeah.   Kiera (17:09) think of you all the time and you're like, Kiera, it's gonna come back on you and like they can pull these records on you and it's like, okay, noted. I need to just go to the proper sources and channels to make sure that we're compliant truly.   His Paulness (17:21) Yeah,   yeah. I mean my AI is incredibly smart about HR and it still gives wrong answers occasionally when we're writing articles and stuff. So I mean, kinda gives you some perspective. Yeah.   Kiera (17:31) So there you have it.   Do you think there will ever come a point that AI can replace HR? Not to say I want to put you out of business. I'm just genuinely   His Paulness (17:37) No, no, no.   Kiera (17:38) curious of like, I think about for consulting too. Like, do you think that AI will like there will be HR AI in the future?   His Paulness (17:44) I think at   some point it's gonna you're gonna have some very strong models that are mostly available to lawyers. They're not available   Kiera (17:51) Mm.   His Paulness (17:52) to someone like you, you know, l someone who's not giving out guidance, because I believe that the context of the guidance alwa almost always has one or two more questions, and AI is not great at taking a left or a right hand turn. But five   Kiera (18:09) Sure.   His Paulness (18:09) years from now, six years, ten years from now.   I think, yeah, in some pla in some ways it's gonna be able to give some very good answers and prompts to get those answers. And we are as a company, we are very aware of that. We are   Kiera (18:23) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (18:24) we are well, I I think the I've said this twenty years ago when we started CEDR. And I think this, you know, for the people listening, the business you're in, I think this might h head home a little bit. I believe that the next I believed then that the next greatest innovation   was the opposite of what was going on in the world, which was it's providing service and people and getting it getting systems right and being able to actually talk to someone instead of running them into these failed chat bots and these failed chats that you you know you put your question in, it's like, let me give you your question. And then it, you know, it it answers with one third of a cup of flour. And you're like, we were talking about my internet not working. I mean   Kiera (19:08) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (19:09) So I think the greatest   in I think the I still think that that that innovation is there and available for us and we've been using the technology in the wrong direction. I'm using it to make us more efficient, to so that my experts can spend less time creating something from a conversation that is kind of a policy or a th or a thing, and so they can spend more time listening and and a little more time with the member.   And and worrying less about I have six other people who are waiting for me to get back to during that day. So that's my view   Kiera (19:45) Sure.   His Paulness (19:46) that's my view on AI and HR. humans are humans. As long as we're being human, I I don't think we're gonna be able to take the human out of that out of that process. Yeah.   Kiera (19:55) I agree.   I agree. Okay. Next reporting policies. Let's talk about these.   His Paulness (20:04) the the reporting policies that people okay a policy only works if it's distributed and it and it is more it becomes more powerful when the policy is distributed, it's acknowledged, and the and the employer and manager know how to use that policy. All of those things have context. So look, let's let's use AI as an example.   We used to say this about template handbooks. Some would say, Well, I got a template and I put it together and I said, Well ask the template how to and ask the qu ask the template any question. Templates can't answer questions. And so if you end up with a a policy and you don't know what you haven't had training and what its purpose is, what its limits are, what it's both both, you know, small and large, what it's how you're supposed to use it and where it's supposed to apply, then you're kind of missing   that. And so I just want to be clear that when you put together a set of policies and when you change them or you have an employee handbook, if it doesn't come with a couple hours of support and training and ongoing training, then what you have is kind of a static thing sitting there in your office and it's not really helping you when it in the ways that it can help you. and I give you guys an example.   If you don't have a good maternity policy and it's not complete, then when an employee s asks you a question about your maternity policy, you can't say, go to the handbook and tell me. You go read it. You tell me how much time that we give for for maternity leave. You tell me whether or not you can use your vacation time that you've accrued. you tell me whether it's paid or unpaid. You tell you know, all those things.   should be in the employee handbook. So it's important for owners to train their managers. It's very, very important for owners to train their managers. make sure   Kiera (22:03) I love that.   His Paulness (22:04) they understand and make sure you understand the policy.   Kiera (22:08) Yeah. And I think Paul, you're right. Like, as companies evolve, like where you started at the beginning versus where you might be today. Like we didn't have people that were getting pregnant when I first started now. It's like we do. And so definitely I'm big on like make sure that they're updated, make sure that they're current, make sure that everybody has them. That the new ones that have changed and morphed through the business, like we've been in business for 10 years. Like what we started with versus where we are today are very different. And I like that.   call out that you really do need to know that. So   His Paulness (22:40) Yeah, I I   I mean I could give you a really good example. Arizona changed about I don't know, about seven, eight years ago. We went to mandatory sick time. And all employees were entitled to it under a specific set of rules. Before then it was like it was in much of the other states, not all the states, 'cause many states have mandatory sick time now. it it was you just could give it, you could make it paid, you could make it unpaid, you could not offer it at all, you could do whatever you want to.   Once that changed, a new a complete new set of rules came around. and I just give you an example, and I think managers in Arizona need to know that this exists. In Arizona, if you fire an employee within I think it's sixty days of them having used it's sixty, yeah, within sixty days of them having used one of those sick days, it is presumed to be retaliation against them for using one of those sick days.   And so you've got to be thinking, well, h what? Wait, what? Does that mean you can't fire anybody because they can use sick days? No, the answer to w what you know, what you do about w what I just described is that you have to have documentation showing the reason why you terminated a person or took that adverse action against them. So basically we went from being in an at will state to sort of being an at will state because we've got this sick lead policy.   Kiera (24:00) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (24:01) So I I again I was kind of a roundabout way.   but but it kinda shows you you need to understand the policy and the limitations that come the laws that affect that policy.   Kiera (24:12) How often do you recommend looking at your policies like and updating? Because those rules come into effect. Paul, you read this. Like to me, this is your algorithm. You're seeing this all the time.   His Paulness (24:22) Yeah, yeah.   Kiera (24:22) for us, it's like a one and done, check it off the list. We think we're compliant. How often do you recommend updating your policies, double checking your state laws, having your handbook updated? What are what are your recommendations   for that?   His Paulness (24:32) I think at   at least once a year and if you're in s California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Washington State, some of those states, you have to visit it more often. and I think that's the problem if you don't have a support company because how would you visit it? Like where is it that it's certainly not get f get f you know, fed to you on TikTok or Facebook or something. So, you know, at least once a near a a year you should if you have time   You should read your policy to see if you're following it. And I don't mean your policy should tell you what to do. I mean you may have changed something and it conflicts within your handbook now, and you just need to change the policy. That's it. That's that's that's all there is. so yeah, once a year you should check. Most states are now updating and putting in new laws about once a year. Many states are putting in new laws and making them effective two or three times a year.   Kiera (25:26) Awesome.   Okay. All right. Let's go into payroll. Payroll I feel like is such a thing. Payroll, payroll review. I've got some questions on payroll, but what are some of like the hot things that practices deal with in the payroll realm?   His Paulness (25:39) this has come up two or three times in the last three or four months. I don't know why. the employer is not reviewing their their payroll ledger. meaning they run payroll, you always get a report. If you're in gusto, you dig for it or ADP, maybe you can find it. I don't know. maybe it y y you know, somehow you find your you you you get this report every single time, but you don't pay attention to it.   And or you do give it a quick look and you go, yep, all their hours are right. But what you don't do is you don't review your payroll thoroughly. And what we're finding is is we've had these three instances where an employee has been paid anywhere from five to eight dollars more an hour than they were supposed to be paid. And it's been going on   Kiera (26:28) Well.   His Paulness (26:29) for years. And so tens of thousands of dollars in payment and salaries have been made.   And in all three of these instances, none of it was recoverable. In one state,   Kiera (26:43) Mm.   His Paulness (26:43) it was just not recoverable. You couldn't do it. The state would not allow you to recover it. In the other two instances, the there was no way they were gonna get this money back from this employee. They were not working for them anymore. they were gonna have to sue them and and there were problems with that. It was not gonna be a a a slam dunk home run to try to get the money back out of somebody.   So I think one of the biggest one things that we're just telling everybody right now is you need your own oversight. If you're doing your own payroll, your payroll company's not doing anything, they're not watching anything. They'll let you misclassify a hygienist. They'll let you pay somebody a salary that they're not supposed to be paid by salary. your payroll company is not reviewing your final ledger because how would they? They don't know. You they they just take what you put in. That's how they work.   And so I I just want you guys to be very careful and review your payroll every now and then. And then the other one that we've seen I've seen over the years, and it's more than once or twice, the the reason the payroll was wrong was because the person in charge of the payroll made it wrong for themselves. And then the other reason why the payroll was wrong and in in the most egregious cases was that they were so they were using it as embezzle as an embezzlement mechanism.   and they had actually put people in their family on the payroll that didn't work for the practice. and that ran for two years before they got caught stealing another way and then the full audit re revealed that they had put their family members on there. So I I   Kiera (28:22) my gosh.   His Paulness (28:23) think the the the moral of the story is check your darn payrolls. Yeah.   Kiera (28:28) Paul, that is something ten years in I still am the final stamp off on payroll and I feel silly doing it, but I like a lot of those things happen and I catch it and like as an office manager I didn't I didn't I mean I just put in the hours and as a business owner I have very different keen eyes on that. So it's the isn't   His Paulness (28:44) Yeah. Yeah you do.   Kiera (28:48) I have two other questions on payroll that I didn't prep you for. One   His Paulness (28:50) Sure, sure.   Kiera (28:52) is how can you change like let's say we've got variable comp.   That's bonuses. Like I've got an office right now, they recognize the bonus structure is very, very high. It is variable comp and they're trying to figure out how do we like change that bonus system. Do you have to have like are there any laws? I obviously know it might be state specific. This one happens to be in Arizona. but like what can you do for that variable comp commission states, like pieces like that when you recognize we're we're paying more than we're supposed to, and I need to right size that and I don't want to fire an employee, but also I gotta deal with changing their comp.   His Paulness (29:20) Yep. Yeah. I gotta deal with   changing the car. Okay, first of all, really difficult conversation. Good luck, y'all. but but let's let's talk   Kiera (29:29) Seriously.   His Paulness (29:30) about the rules around it. yeah, I mean this is let me sidetrack for a second. You may have to put me back on the question. This is why you when you promote someone to a manager's position, they don't get an immediate raise. they need to earn their way into it. Now it needs to happen quickly and it could be, you know, by steps over the next weeks and months.   But it's really hard if someone's unsuccessful and you've moved your best employee in and now you realize they're you've kind of peter principled them. They're not competent as a manager, you need to move them back down. Y the hard part would be to take the pay away from them. So so going back to your question, some states require you to provide notice in a certain amount of time before you make any pay adjustments. So you want to know if that's true or not. Arizona does not. You cannot make it retroactive in any case. so   If you're going to change someone's compensation, you need to change it and you know going forward. if it's a commission or it's a bonus program, I want you to keep those things outside of the employee handbook, but I want you to refer to those things. So I know you didn't ask me this. I want conditions in the handbook about how someone qualifies for the bonus program should a bonus program exist. For example, one of the things that's in our policy of many things, which, you know, one of the reasons you work with us.   is in order for you to earn the bonus, you must be employed for the entirety of the bonus period. Meaning that if they quit or get fired in the middle of the bonus period, they're not entitled to a portion of what's going on or what happened. So to be more direct, I I think you've gotta you really gotta work this out. I think this is a good place for AI, by the way. I don't say this very much on podcasts. I think   Kiera (31:14) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (31:14) you I think you put what your bonus system is and what's going on and what your problem is in it.   And where you need it to go, and you help it, you you know, work with your consultant and you figure out where that pay needs to adjust. And sometimes you're adjusting the base rate of pay. and sometimes, by the way, everybody who's on a bonus or commissions needs to have a base rate of pay. or or you're, you know, you're you're moving some, you're moving something. My way of moving something is we're not hitting the goals that justify that commission or that bonus. And   In order to get back to it, here's the new numbers that we have to hit. And until   then I need to adjust this back and you you make your adjustments. are you talking about massive adjustments or yeah.   Kiera (32:03) This   one is like so it's like an office manager who came inherited to a practice and has a bonus structure in place like on collections. Well, back in the day it was great, but now payroll is at 42% of total overhead.   His Paulness (32:16) That's all hot.   Kiera (32:18) is a little high. And so recognizing the base pay is great. the additional compensation does not justify, like it's just part of their job. It's not an above and beyond. And so needing to remove that bonus structure.   until maybe we hit a higher tier of the company and it's to right size that payroll portion.   His Paulness (32:35) Yep. Yeah,   I think that I would just kill the bonus system in that in that case. And if it's across the if it's across the board, I'd kill it. Or I would adjust it back significantly and so that they still have the feeling that they can earn a little bit more on the bonus system and I would set goals for them to get up. I think in your case, I don't know what you would could get a manager to do to to right side a forty two percent cost labor   Kiera (33:02) Yeah.   His Paulness (33:03) in a dental practice.   what can I ask you what percentage you think it's supposed to be?   Kiera (33:08) So what we typically say, like a lot of consulting companies are twenty-five percent, I tend to err on thirty percent. So it's twenty-five to thirty percent tends to be where I sit. I recognize California offices sometimes are a little bit higher than that.   His Paulness (33:20) Hello, mm-hmm.   Kiera (33:22) but that tends to be about what we'd recommend for a percentage.   His Paulness (33:23) I'm I I'm with you. We   you know, we we've got several hundred close to a thousand people on payroll. So we and and and they're using our our software for their HR systems. I you're you're you're in about the the pocket right there. We see as high as thirty six percent, and as as low as twenty two percent. That twenty two percent practice is tiny and highly profit profitable.   Kiera (33:47) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (33:48) That's a very specialized dentist with about four employees.   Kiera (33:52) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (33:52) So yeah,   same place. I just was curious. I just, you know, love to   Kiera (33:55) Yeah, no.   It's a great one. And then one other question on payroll, because I have a lot of dentists who get burned by that third payroll, right? So it comes in the month and they're like, ugh. So some dentists, and I did this early on, so I have no idea how people can do it. I know what I did and I'm not about to share because it might not have been correct. but we move to only two payrolls in a month. So I do it on the fifth and the twentieth. And I know some dentists are thinking about that, wanting to are there any rules around how to do that? Are you allowed to do two payrolls a month? Like, because then I'm not getting hit with the cash flow hits of the third payroll.   periodically, just some thoughts of offices are wanting to do that, are the right ways to go about it.   His Paulness (34:28) Absolutely. Absolutely.   You need to check your again, you gotta check your state rules. There's fewer states that have these rules but you need to check your state rules. There's this pay frequency. By the time they finish their payroll period and they close the payroll, there's a certain number of days when they have to be given a check. In none of those   Kiera (34:47) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (34:48) instances does it prevent you from going to two payrolls a month, th that that I can recall. It's if it is, it's it's very   It's one maybe one state, where you might have to add one or two payrolls to the year in order to meet the law. It's not every month. It's just to the year.   Kiera (35:09) Interesting.   His Paulness (35:10) Yeah.   Kiera (35:11) Okay. Yeah, 'cause I know when we did it, I just I was like, We're gonna change it and they told us to float employees if they needed it. I let them know when it was coming so they could financially prepare for it and yeah.   His Paulness (35:20) Yep. Give everybody thirty days and you will have met your states   most states' requirements too that say if you're gonna change to this model, that's what you gotta do. Yeah.   Kiera (35:30) Awesome. Okay. Well, Paul, I've like we peppered you on so many questions. I know you had a couple of case studies you wanted to bring and I'm excited to like hear. I I do enjoy a good case study that freaks me out and I I feel like it's like forensic files with you. Like bum bum bum bum. Like let's hear the case studies now.   His Paulness (35:46) I think I'm gonna start with a f positive one and then I'm I'll ruin y'all's days with the other one. here's the here's   Kiera (35:52) Ha ha   His Paulness (35:52) here's the positive one. And we have been saying this for years and we're the ones that started implementing it with our clients. It's not that we invented it, it's that not enough importance was put on it. And when we started in two thousand six, everybody was making up their own employee handbook or they were going to ADP and they were getting handbooks that didn't have anything about HIPAA in them.   And they didn't have anything about maternity leave. I mean, literally, payroll companies were telling employers, you don't have to give you're not required by law, so we don't put it in the handbook. And and we're like, so offices with seven women in them who   Kiera (36:23) Yeah.   His Paulness (36:24) are all going to get pregnant at some point in their career, you don't have a policy for what to guide them through. Anywho, the policy that we are very big on and we use it throughout the handbook in the c in the proper places.   is a requirement to report a problem. So it's very simple. If you re if you have a problem and it could be with payroll, it could be around harassment and and you got to define that. It could be around many other things. You have to report it to us. Here's how to report it. If you're not confident who manages you, here's a way to tell somebody else about it. If you put those reporting procedures in place and someone doesn't follow it, they get fired.   And they come back six months later to sue you over the problem that they never told you about, then the the judge is supposed to say, Hey, when did you tell them about this? When when when did this happen? And so we see it happen a lot in depositions, which never make a court case, so you don't see it publicly, where the lawyers got someone in deposition, they'll just say, okay, cool. so you said this was happening for the whole year, and you had four one on ones with your manager.   and when when did you report it to your manager and and and or or or an email to somebody, you know, that that kind of thing. Well, we recently saw a case come up, it was errors versus chemjet. I I don't know what in the world chemjet does. chemjet argued,   Kiera (37:54) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (37:55) hey, we this case should not go forward. We want summary judgment, we want out, because this employee never told us about this problem. They never said a word to us. And the judge said to the and the judge granted it to him. They just said, you know,   It they're right. You had an opportunity to report this. You're back here. You have a multiple complaints, but you were you did sign the employee handbook, you did acknowledge it, they did distribute it to you, and you gave them no chance to cure this. Had you given them a c a chance to cure it, there's a reasonable expectation that they could have done something about it. Without knowing about it, nothing they could do. So again, when you self-make your handbook and you miss that opportunity,   Kiera (38:31) No, she's not.   His Paulness (38:32) you get, you know, you may not get the best result.   Kiera (38:36) I think Paul, something I've learned and when I started a business, I was like, okay, I can be cheap on certain things. I can be cheap on gauze, I can be cheap on gloves, I can be cheap on what I pay for dinners, like staff gifts. Like I can be cheap those areas. The thing not to be cheap on is have my employee handbook and my policies like cross our T's, dot our I's pay there to prevent much harder future decisions.   His Paulness (39:02) Well, you're speaking my love language right now. There are just a few places   where you just don't want to be cheap. You don't want to be cheap with your CPA. You wanna you want consultants and and good consultants cost a little bit more and so that you can get more individual attention. There's just you know, for all of us, there's just these things where it just doesn't make sense to kind of cheap out. the you know, but the entrepreneur in all of us, in   Kiera (39:26) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (39:27) me too, and me as well. I mean, heaven help me,   AI has made it so that I can start coding my own stuff. That's probably not a good idea. But I'm doing it, Kiera, because I'm gonna I'm   Kiera (39:38) I know.   His Paulness (39:38) gonna save myself some money. that's   Kiera (39:40) Ha ha.   His Paulness (39:41) not what's gonna happen. I but anyway, that's the story, you know, that little guy in the back of your head. yeah, there's some things   Kiera (39:48) Seriously.   His Paulness (39:49) not to say. Money on, and I'll make this argument about policy. Most doctors will and will spend hours on creating their own employee handbook.   Which I mean, I don't know a doctor that doesn't value his or her time at five hundred dollars an hour. Many of you make a lot more than that. You have to generate that. That's the only way you can keep your business open. you end up with a fifteen to twenty to twenty five thousand dollar handbook that was created by somebody who doesn't understand HR law, which is you. it's just not the best way to spend your time. And I'm just I'm just like, doctor, this is   Kiera (40:20) Agreed.   His Paulness (40:20) a this is a fifteen thousand dollar document and it's got a bunch of evidence in it and it's not the right kind of evidence. So,   Yeah, thanks for letting me talk about that.   Kiera (40:31) I agree. Okay. Now let's scare everybody into why they should not make their own handbooks. Like that that'll be the one that won't let us sleep tonight. Cause I'm sure has something   His Paulness (40:37) That'll be the Halloween thing, yeah.   Kiera (40:39) that that like just don't don't shortchange on your HR and legal. To me, I'm like, those are worth it. Just pay. I can sleep at night better. Like and cross my T's not my I's. I do want to do right by my employees. So okay, what's your other case study?   His Paulness (40:49) And just like   I wanna add one more thing. When you're   Kiera (40:54) Yeah.   His Paulness (40:54) working with someone like us, you're also getting access to the experts who are taking the legal and the human side approach to it. So they've talked to thousands of practices and heard your problem probably. Every now and then somebody gets an award a an award, a monthly award for wow, we've never heard that before. but for the most part, you're talking to a a a group of experts who are there who can actually help you solve the problem too.   And that's where the real value is. You know, we were talking about AI giving the right legal answers. It's the human answers that are are more interesting. So the last case study is the it it it has to do with the classification conversation we had. a temporary employee who the doctor hired. she was a hygienist. she came into the practice, they hired her as a   ten ninety nine employee, which doesn't exist, hired as a ten ninety   Kiera (41:52) Mm.   His Paulness (41:52) nine, didn't put her on the payroll, didn't put her on workers' comp, didn't put her on anything. she ended up working for them for about three weeks. The person that she was supposed to set in for was supposed to come back, and that person was at the end of her pregnancy, and so she d was unable to return to work, so they kept that employee on for about three weeks. She was not great.   at the end of the three weeks, they she was like the the the the employee who she was replacing for for temporarily was going on maternity leave. She was expecting to stay and through that time period now. And they didn't want her to stay, and they told her, you know, no, you're you're not gonna stay. And so she went and filed unemployment. and you know, you guys are thinking, well, an independent contractor can't get unemployment. Well   Well, remember, she was misclassified, she was an employee, didn't matter what you called her. And this triggered the state to look   Kiera (42:53) Mm.   His Paulness (42:54) for her withholding and to see that she was not on the record. and then it triggered them to tell the Department of Labor in that state that this because they were working together. So UI a UI claim kicked in an entire investigation from the Department of Labor in that state. And so they wanted all the time records and   I think they may even requested bank records because they were looking for other instances of misclassification and paying people as an independent contractor. So that's the other horror story.   Kiera (43:25) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (43:25) I don't I don't s that it doesn't usually get that bad, but it can, but I do see it blow up a lot and and I mean quite frequently people go out and make these claims. the other thing   Kiera (43:40) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (43:40) that can happen in a misclassification in the domino effect.   Is that your associate doctor gets that that independent contractor gets audited. and in the audit they learned that they were working for you, and then that   Kiera (43:54) Yeah.   His Paulness (43:54) triggers an audit of you, and then you have to pay all the taxes that you didn't pay them, with with penalties.   Kiera (43:59) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (44:00) That's a really happy note to end on, right?   Kiera (44:03) I know. I'm like, all right. And with that, everybody, have a great day.   His Paulness (44:05) Yeah, w with that, yep. Have a great day. I think we should pause to focus our way out of this somehow.   Kiera (44:11) I think we should too. And I think I think the piece I take about this is I appreciate honest and real because I think so many times we were like, that's not gonna happen to me. And I would like people to like, I remember it was crazy. I actually was talking to my financial advisor this week and I was like, okay, let's just like run the tape. If me and my husband got divorced and   Like what would this look like? Would we both be financially taken care of? And he was like, is divorce on the table care? And I was like, no, not at all. I just want to know like what would be my worst case scenario if that ever did happen. Cause that's going to set me up better to make smarter decisions today and like make sure we're prepared if that ever came about. And he's like, You're the first client who's ever asked me that. And I thought about it and I'm like, that is actually how I think. And I feel like it applies very much to HR is why don't we know like what worst case scenarios are? Not so we don't sleep at night, but so we make better decisions.   His Paulness (45:00) So we do   sleep at night. Yeah.   Kiera (45:00) And like this can happen. Exactly.   Cause I'm like, I'd rather know. Like they have proven that us not knowing what happens creates more anxiety than knowing. And so I'm like, I feel like this is my like when I pay for HR or when I pay for my lawyer or when I pay for I have to learn a lesson. Like we're going through some things in our company right now. And I'm like, all right, this is just my CE and HR. So like me paying   His Paulness (45:18) Yep. Exactly.   Kiera (45:20) my legal fees, me paying my HR fees. Like I didn't learn this. You paid for dental school. So this is where we learn what's the absolute worst that could happen to us.   We pay for our CE education in this to learn from people like yourself for this. And then we do the best we possibly can. And when we learn that we were doing it wrong, we correct it, we make it better now and we keep moving forward. And that's how I think I would like put a pretty bow on this because Paul, like, to me, as much as I get creeped out every time I talk to you, I appreciate it. It's not a lie. Every time   His Paulness (45:48) Okay.   Kiera (45:50) you come and meet with our dentist and I'm like, my gosh, and my whole team's sitting there. And I'm like,   His Paulness (45:54) Yeah.   Kiera (45:55) like, please like just cover your eyes and ears and don't hear that I'm messing up. Like   His Paulness (45:56) Just yeah, Toba said la la la. Yep, yep.   Kiera (45:59) All the dentists get a hear and like their teams aren't even present. My whole team sitting there taking notes rapidly. And I'm like, goodness, like great and not great. but I appreciate it because it makes me better and it makes me a better business owner. And I think that's why we're all listening to this. So that's my take. You might have a happier ending, but to me, I'm like, let's learn   His Paulness (46:16) I do.   Kiera (46:17) it. Let's play our CE fees of learning HR and let's continue to be great employees in the industry.   His Paulness (46:22) I have a very upbeat thing here   to end this on. it's very short. if your better half is like my better half, there's no way in hell they listen to your podcast 'cause they've heard your voice enough. And so your your   Kiera (46:34) It's true.   His Paulness (46:34) your spouse is never gonna hear that he's in imminent danger right now. Maybe he should hear it. Maybe we should send him a   Kiera (46:40) True. Maybe to   I did tell him I asked the financial advisor that yesterday. I was like, I did ask this question.   His Paulness (46:47) Mm-hmm.   Kiera (46:47) He's like, Kiera, I like that about you. He's like, that's more probable than me dying. He's like, how many and I was like, you're right. And I was like, but guess what? I hope we ride off to the sunset forever. Like, that's my ultimate plan, but I   His Paulness (46:58) Right.   Kiera (46:58) would like to know. So anyway, he probably will never hear this podcast, which is probably in my favor today.   His Paulness (47:03) Yeah.   look, I appreciate you having me on the show. I it's nice to be able to kinda talk through these things. This is like, you know, my passion, the thing I wake up thinking about every day. So it's kind of fun to share this stuff. I do appreciate.   Kiera (47:17) Well, I appreciate you, Paul. Paul, you're such a resource in the industry. You're somebody that I recommend to every practice that we work with. So, Paul, if people are interested, if they loved this, if they're freaked out and they're sitting there with their stomach in knots, how do they connect with you? Or if they're like just wanting to be better. You don't have to be nervous. You can still reach out.   His Paulness (47:26) Yep. yep. if they Exactly.   okay, so you can go to our website, which is C E D R, the word solutions with an S on the end. So that's CEDRSolutions.com You can go to our website, sign up for the education. if you want an employee handbook or you want to kind of figure out, you know, what it would take, you're like, hey, I think I maybe I should take care of this.   You go in the other direction,   Kiera (47:55) Mm-hmm.   His Paulness (47:55) just fill out a form, you'll talk to somebody here, it's all low pressure. You wanna make sure that you that you're saying, Look, I heard the podcast of Dental A Team, so we can so we know where you came from. and we'll take good care of you. We'll explain what's available to you and kinda, you know, go through the process. those are really the best two ways, you know. Best those are the best two ways.   Kiera (48:17) I love it, Paul. And Paul's not going to be high pressure. I will be high pressure. Get your freaking handbooks updated and like legal. Then go do that. Like that to me is like give   His Paulness (48:25) What she said.   Kiera (48:26) yourself the gift of peace of mind at night. Go get that done. So, Paul, thank you for being on the show. Thank you for being a part the Dental A Team. Thank you for being someone I trust in the industry, someone I value. And I hope today everybody listen to what he says, make yourself better, become a little bit better today. And Paul, truly thank you for being on the show.   His Paulness (48:41) My pleasure.   Kiera (48:43) And for all of you listening, thanks for listening. And I'll catch you next time.   on the Dental A Team Podcast.  

Pour ce nouveau format Sans Filet, nos chroniqueurs notent les joueurs, en les comparant. A l'occasion de cette 6e émission, Alexander Zverev et Daniil Medvedev s'affrontent sur 10 thèmes, du service au palmarès en passant par la qualité du jeu et les performances vs le top 10. D'un côté, Alexander Zverev, le nouvel ogre du circuit qui a marqué l'année 2026 en soulevant 2 titres du Grand Chelem. De l'autre, Daniil Medvedev, le génie tactique, maître de la provocation et cauchemar des cadors. 10 critères, un seul vainqueur... Qui remportera ce duel au sommet ? Participez à VERSUS en notant les joueurs en live.Ce podcast est hébergé par Podcastics, la plateforme pour créer et diffuser votre podcast facilement.

Introducing the All Def SquADD Cast show “Versus". It's a podcast with the OG SquADD! Each week, the SquADD will debate topics and vote at the end to see what wins. Versus airs every Monday and you can download and listen wherever podcasts are found.Special GuestKanisha BussWillie MaccBrent TaylorThis Week We DiscussOne Year W/o Streaming Shows/Movies vs MusicAlways Wear Roller Blades vs Hold A Tray W 3 Glasses Of WaterOne Year In Prison vs One Year At WarS/o To Our SponsorsBlue ChewThere's a reason BlueChew is the #1 brand for better sex. Experience it yourself at BlueChew.comAnd we've got a special deal for our listeners: right now, when you buy two months of BlueChew Gold you get the thirdFREE with promo code SQUADD.  You will also receive an additional 10% OFF + Freeovernight shipping on your first order. Visit BlueChew.com for more details and important safety information. We thankBlueChew for sponsoring the pod and the bedroom.QuinceEverything at Quince is priced fifty to eighty percent less than similar brands. They work directly withethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you're paying for high quality, not brand markup.Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go toQuince dot com slash SQUADD. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Nowavailable in Canada and the UK, tooSquare If you're starting a business, or running one that deserves better tools, Square helps you sell, manage,and grow without slowing down.Get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com/go/squadd  #squarepodRun your business smarterwith Square. Get started today

Humanity's last days draw near... 47 legendary heroes stand against the Demon Lord's army in a last ditch effort to save their race! However, when this last stand seemingly falls short, one fallen hero named Hallow learns from his brother Zaybi that there's another plan: summon heroes from another world! When they do though, they don't just summon one group of humans, but twelve! Problem solved right? Well, it turns out they're not the only version of humanity facing extinction... and for each new variety of human, there's also a new, powerful enemy to deal with!On this week's episode, Mat summons Zane from the Undisputed Anime podcast to help him talk about Versus by One, Kyōtarō Azuma and bose! Join us as we get into how we feel about this book's take on 'who would win?' discuss if it's really an Isekai, and more importantly, discuss whether we're willing to pick up the 2nd volume!---Show Notes---One-Punch Man by One and Yusuke MurataMob Psycho 100 by ONEBug Ego by ONE and Kiyoto ShitaraRecord of Ragnarock by Takumi Fukui and AzychikaClaymore by Norihiro Yagi---Comic Natalie Interview with the book's creative team (in Japanese)Thanks to Juliano Zucareli for our theme music!Find us on:X: Manga Tak PodBluesky: Manga Tak PodInstagram: Manga Tak Pod

summaryIn this episode, the brothers share their recent trip to California, discuss military updates, AI advancements, and personal reflections on life and relationships. They also want to know what 10 CDs would we order if Columbia House asked today? They then move to the question of what state would win in Verzus. They discuss the influence of regional music styles, the impact of specific albums, and the dynamics of music battles like Verzus. They also explore the significance of geographic roots in music and share personal favorites across genres and eras.Chapters00:00 Trip to California and reunion stories00:11 Introduction to regional music influences and album favorites01:59 Military updates and recent changes03:04 Outkast's albums: Aquimini, Stankonia, and The Love Below06:00 AI safety concerns and potential risks07:03 The significance of timing and song selection in Versus battles10:00 Music favorites and playlist discussions10:59 The geographic roots of artist sounds: Detroit, Atlanta, New York14:58 Genre-specific regional sounds: Motown, Philly, Minneapolis, Cali19:01 Personal favorites and the challenge of choosing ten albums19:55 Upcoming entertainment releases and reviews23:08 State-by-state versus: Michigan, Georgia, New York, California23:59 Reflections on relationships and personal growth26:54 The influence of artist origins versus production locations29:59 The importance of reading and mental exercise31:05 The role of timing and song choice in live music battles34:58 Closing thoughts and future plans35:03 The impact of regional sounds on music identity and culture39:00 Debate: Which state has the strongest musical influence?43:01 The importance of genre in regional music identity47:00 The challenge of matching songs in Versus: timing and selection50:50 Memorable moments from recent Versus battles55:02 The future of regional music influence and artist origins58:56 Closing thoughts and upcoming plans for trips and events

Post-visit follow-ups — this episode is all about 'em! Following up with patients is one of the most overlooked ways to build trust. Kiera shares tips on both how to accentuate and accelerate your post-visit methods as a practice, as well as what to avoid doing. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera (00:01) Hello, Dental A Team Listeners. This is Kiera. And today I wanted to just talk about a way for your practice to stand out in a pretty easy, pretty easy way. Along with that, it's also a great way to boost your case acceptance. So I want to talk about how, like, outside of your visit, the post-visit follow-up is actually one of the biggest things that can differentiate a practice. And I think it's something we haven't talked about a lot. It's just something we naturally do. And I was excited to do a podcast about it because realistically, the patient experience doesn't end when they walk out the front door.   But I think for a lot of offices it does. A lot of times it's like, my gosh, they're back in six months and they don't have their treatment scheduled. I think some of you can feel that. sometimes it's like, well, do we do follow-up on these patients? And people are like, but we're too busy to do that. And so making sure that we realize that follow-up isn't just customer service. It's truly one of the most overlooked systems for being able to build trust, to being able to increase your case acceptance, to be able to really grow a raving fan patient base. and I think it's just something that's a very easy piece to add into your practice without a lot of lift.   but it's going to give you a lot of lips. So I love the ones that are like, what's that 1% that I could do that would give me like 20%? That's one of these awesome tips that I wanted to give all of you today. So I want to just walk you through some of the post-visit follow-up things and how you can how you can really accelerate and accentuate that. Also some of the mistakes that practices make after a patient leaves. And then what are some of the things that we recommend you do to really help increase that patient care follow-up. So these are things that we do all the time in Dental A Team. We work with hundreds and thousands of offices.   We help, we see, we see the patterns. And our job is to really make your life so easy, so comfortable, so confident, and for dentists to really like have fun doing dentistry again. So I wanna just go through this with all of you today, give you some tactical, practical tips. And remember, Dental A Team's mission is to possibly impact the world of dentistry in the greatest way possible. So I just want you to know that today you're gonna learn how to follow some of these tips, put them into play, and hopefully gain patient loyalty.   increase those raving fans and really boost that case acceptance for you. So the goal is like people love to feel remembered. And there's this whole thing where people remember the beginning and the end of an experience. And so your intro, you probably have that really dialed in. We say hello, we have the coffee bar, we make sure it says warm welcome. And if not, start there. Okay. If you don't have that dialed in, start there. But then the second thing is what people actually remember a lot is how they feel when they leave.   And so a lot of times when a patient leaves, we're like, check the box, they're done, great. No communication from them. The next thing they're gonna hear from us when it's time to schedule and do their six-month appointment. But like it's follow-ups automated and it's very impersonal. And I know you're like, but Kiera, we have so many patients. Like, how am I supposed to make this feel personal? So a couple of things, and there's some resources out there, so it doesn't have to be a major uptick, but one great thing that makes patients stand out all the time in practices is to call after a major procedure. also on a new patient who's coming in, call before they even get there.   And call after the new patient visit. There are softwares that actually let you just leave a voicemail so you don't even actually have to call. You can just have it as part of the dental assistants checklist. Here's the three patients, call them tomorrow. You can send a personalized text when appropriate, making sure you stay HIPAA compliant. You check on the patient's comfort and recovery. And you can also thank patients for choosing your practice. Now, there's ways that it can be automated. And I had a dentist that I just went and saw, and they're like, How was your appointment? It was one of the worst appointments. Like, I will tell you, it was absolutely one of the worst dental appointments.   Ever had, and that's saying a lot because I work with hundreds of offices and I've seen some pretty ratchet experiences. Like, that's okay. You're growing, you're learning, there's no judgment. When I'm coming in as a patient, I'm not here to consult you. I want it to be a great experience. Well, they texted me afterwards on an automated thing saying, How was your appointment? Leave us five stars. And I was I freaking hated you guys, like, not the thing to do. But if they would have, and I was a new patient, if they would have sent me a text like, hey care, we really loved you choosing our our practice. We're so grateful for you, and we're really excited to see you next time. Like   Fantastic. And then if I write back and say something, awesome. but really just quick little things to be intentional rather than automate. And I know we're just looking for the automation, and you're welcome to automate. I'm just saying, like, think about it. How many big procedures did you have yesterday? And also how many new patients did you have? Odds are we're probably looking like two to four. Two to four. And this isn't necessarily a dentist. This can be the front office team. This can be our clinical team. So it does not need to fall on the dentist shoulders. How much time, truly, would it take to make four phone calls tomorrow?   The appointments and just say, like, hey, how is that going after that crown was done? We want to make sure that you feel cared for. Any questions that you have, and also like if the experience was great, just tell your friends. But like, I'm gonna ask and make sure everything's good before I ask for a referral. but just calling and saying, like, hey, I just want to check in with you and make sure that you're good. People want to feel important, people want to feel great, and people will remember how you make them feel. So, small little things of follow-up will create that raving fan culture.   Like I can't tell you if I've ever had a dentist call me after a procedure. The answer is probably not. Like zero for zero. So do you recognize how this is something so small? The uptick, like that's two minutes a day that we're gonna be doing? Now you're like, but Kiera, like what if they're in pain? Great. It's a great way to get ahead of it instead of getting a Google review that tells you it's a great way. And we'd rather know if our dentistry is not doing well. So that way we can fix it long term. So just do a quick follow-up on them. Check in, see how they're doing. This one thing.   Like, so if we just say like one procedure that should automatically trigger a follow-up the next day, just add that in. Add that in as a simple thing. I would do new patients and I would do any big procedure. Call them that night, call them the next day, just make sure that they're good. Again, this can be some doctors do it on their drive home, some delegate it to their front office team, some delegate it to their assistants. I don't care. What I'm saying is we're doing our job to make that patient feel seen. It's like, think about restaurants that put fresh flowers on the table. That doesn't take a lot of effort, but it's something that's memorable. It's something they're like, wow.   They went a little bit above and beyond. And to me, that's a two-minute uptick for you that's really gonna make patients feel seen, valued, and loved. The other piece is with treatment. This is gonna be a second part of it. We also have treatment plans. And my goal is for you guys to get your treatment plans scheduled, to make sure patients are saying yes in the chair, making sure that we have them. If they don't, you need to be following the two two two follow-up. So anytime a patient does not schedule with me, I tell them, like, fantastic, no problem, Marsha. I want to make sure that you have all your questions answered. I'll touch base with you in a couple of days, just see if any questions popped up that we maybe didn't think about.   Just to make sure that you feel like you're rock, solid, confident moving forward. I'm gonna call Marcia in two days, then I'm gonna call her in two weeks, then I'm gonna call her in two months. And some people are like, ugh, I feel like it's such a nuisance. Well, if you feel that way, they're going to feel that way. For me, I believe that like if a patient doesn't get treatment done, I failed them because we diagnosed it. Like, this is something where I need to like make sure that treatment plans are revisited. Patients are definitely not the ones where it's in their court saying, I'll call you back to me. I've left them with.   something that they don't that they need clarity on that I need to resolve. There's no ownership of unscheduled treatment and it just sits out there like, okay, well, moving on to the next day. Versus like, no, we have follow up every time. We know we follow up in two days, two weeks, two months, and we know that there's a personalized conversation instead of it just being like, are you ready? It'd be like, hey Marsha, I know we chatted about this. I wanted to make sure all your questions were answered. I've been thinking of a few things for you too. Give me a quick call. I want to chat them with you. Well Marsha's like, well what has gear been thinking about?   She's been thinking about me over there. What are we thinking about? I've just made Marsha feel like the most incredible VIP girl out there. In two weeks, hey Marsha. Dr. John and I were talking about you. And Dr. John actually asked me to call and reach out to you. He wanted to make sure you were taken care of. Give me a quick call. I've got a couple of ideas for you that I wanted to work through with you. Fantastic. This is something of like it's consistency, it's not pressure. It's going to boost your case acceptance, but more about that, like.   Patients oftentimes just need a reminder, not a sales pitch. It's like, yeah, I forgot to get that done. Sometimes it was money, sometimes it was foul, sometimes it was timing. I don't know what it is, and I'm not going to project and assume that. What I am going to do is I'm going to make sure I have consistent follow-up and I'm going to have more patients in there. And also, me having to do follow-up is a way for me to get really good at my case acceptance because I don't want to follow up with these people. So for me with patients when like, I need to check my schedule. I'm like, my gosh, Marsha, I would, I, Kiera, would hate to forget about you and let you slip through the cracks.   Let's just pop you on the schedule. It's a reminder for me not to let you slip through the cracks. And that way we both are able to connect. If anything comes up, I'm happy to move you. This way I don't forget about you. Marcia's like, yeah, Gar, don't you dare forget about me. Put me on that schedule right now. Marsha might still say no to me. But guess what? I've tried really hard to make sure that she does not fall through the cracks. Also, treatment coordinators should be reviewing their unscheduled treatment every single week and reporting back ownership of all of what's going on. Who did you reach out to? What was the 222 follow up? I have practices that see   Hundreds of patients a day and we have treatment trackers on them. Every treatment coordinator is tracking it. And guess what? Just by tracking this alone and having a set follow-up, our case acceptance has already increased 15% in one month and implementing this. And this is across three different doctors in a very, very, very large practice. I have another practice, $5 million practice. We've already added 100,000 of additional treatment every single month by following some of these processes. This is not something we're like, we're doing this in the rookie league. It is even the big leagues are benefiting from this.   Of just having consistent follow-up. And also patients feel good, but again, you have to have the right mindset. I say closing treatment is 80% psychology, 20% skill. What am I thinking about when I call them? I'm like, gosh, I just have to call these patients. Or is it, hey, I didn't solve their pain point when they were here. I need to find out what that was. My job is to make sure that they get their dental treatment taken care of. And I need them to feel like they are the most important person in the entire world. I care about you so much. So when I call a dentist who chose not to like sign up right then and there with Dental A Team.   It's not because I care if you work with Dental A Team or not. It's because I care about you as a human. And if Dental A Team can serve you, amazing. I'm here to serve you. If Dental A Team can't serve you, amazing. I want to make sure that you're taken care of because I care about you as a human. That's the difference. Do you care about these patients as humans, making sure that they're getting their best treatment? Or are you just concerned about like, well, we just have to do the list because Kiera said, no, remember, it's about the follow-up, the intentionality, the love, the adoration, because people then feel great about it.   And the third piece I want to bring up is like creating lifetime patients, not one-time visits. And retention is one of your greatest things. And a lot of people I think live in the, they've just been coming to me forever. And insurance, I will tell you, the buyer is different. The buyer is not as loyal as it used to be. People are inundated constantly with ads. Like we have a like an Ivy stream of information that comes to us every second of every day. it's wild. I deleted Instagram off my phone because I was like, I just feel like I'm on it a lot. Like, let's see.   Back to it like 10 times in one day, and the app was deleted. Like, I'm talking like we are getting that, like just coursing through our veins. And so when I look at this, how can I make sure that we have retention where people not just out of ease, but out of loyalty, continue to come back to dental practices? and things when it's broken, when you have broken systems, are patients disappear after treatment, hygiene appointments aren't reappointed, referrals are happening by chance instead of design. And you can look at this through attrition rates, like we have.   software for all of our clients that were able to watch their attrition rates. and what happens is like little simple things. So all hygienists are just reappointing their their patients. You should be able to sit at 98%, create that bond, create that love, and just like don't ask them if they want to come back. Like, look, I'm here on a Thursday at 12 o'clock. Schedule me in six months on a day on a Thursday at 12 o'clock. Odds are I'm probably going to be free. People are people of creature. And you just made my life so easy. Creatures of habit. People are people of creature. People are   People are people, people are creatures of habit. There you go. That's what I'm trying to say here. You're welcome. This is unedited, unfiltered. Kiera, hi, nice to meet you. but they are, they're creatures of habit. So just reappoint them. Say, hey, Kiera, I made your life easy. I've scheduled you on this date. Can't wait to see you in six months. Great. If I have an issue with that date, I'll tell you. Otherwise, I think that you are the nicest human because I didn't have to think of that decision with you. Other times, like celebrate the milestones and anniversaries, write notes about me.   When I come back in, say it. I don't care that you have a cheat sheet note behind the scenes. Like, say it, have a conversation, remember me as a human. Ask for feedback and reviews. Like truly, if they had a great experience and you know you connected with them, just say, Kiera, I adore you. Like I love seeing you every time. The greatest way to have more Kiera's on my schedule is to have you leave a review. So I would love it if you could leave a five-star review for us. That way people know and people can come because realistically, you're not writing it for me. You're writing it for all the other Kiera's that are looking for a dentist out there.   Who are scared and you sharing your experience will help more of them do it. Do you see? It's not about Kiera. I'm not looking for the review for me. I'm looking for all those other patients that are just like you, and you're helping all of them know that we're a great dentist that they can trust and choose. and like just making sure that these people feel like they are your family, that they are your friends. Dentistry is such a weird healthcare profession, guys. Like I think it's one of the most intimate, minus the gyna, like that's the only other more intimate I feel that there is of a professional.   Like the mouth. Like we are our eyes are open. I I'm looking you in the eyes. Like I know I can at least like look up at the scene and not see them. Mouth, like it's eye to eye, guys. There's nothing like we can't we can't like mm, I can shut my eyes, which most patients do. We are so close, we are so intimate. We want those patients to feel comfortable, we want them to feel confident, we want them to feel that we're gonna check in with them. So this is a space of like where if a practice will consistency, follow up, have a great experience.   Ask for those reviews, stay connected with the patients. It's going to give you this strong retention where people want to share about you as a dentist. I remember when I was asking people when I moved to a new city, I said, who's the dentist you go to? All of them said the same dentist. And that dentist, I looked at them. They have strong systems. They have strong systems for reviews. They have strong systems for how they schedule. They have strong systems for how they do referrals. Like they are very, very, very strong. And five people that I asked told me the exact same dentist. The dentist didn't get a chance to talk to me. I didn't see their Facebook ads.   I didn't get a mailer. I asked because when people move to a new town, they're gonna ask their colleagues and their friends. So, how can you stand out? Call them after an appointment. You better believe they'll be like, Yeah, my dentist calls me after my procedures and make sure that I'm doing okay. My dentist called me like when I first joined their practice, they called me. When I got to their office, they gave me this like awesome swag thing. They were so nice to me. I was in and out on time. My dentist is no pain. Like, I absolutely love going to them. My dentist, their front office is so easy to work with. They get me in, they accommodate my schedule.   They're fantastic. Whatever it is, stand out. This is your chance. This is your time. And I feel like, why not be the best of the best? because I want you to remember that every patient interaction is either strengthening or weakening that relationship. So I have to think about like if we're on this scale, like, am I putting more coins on the weakness or am I putting more coins on the strengthening? And every day we get to put votes on there. And this is something where it's again.   Two minutes here, we add it to a checklist, we add it to an end of day, we talk about this. What can we do for those magic moments for our patients? Because we want to stay connected. We want to stay connected between appointments and do it in a way. There's a practice in Hawaii that I work with. Every patient knows them and they love every single patient. Every time we go to the store, those people know people. And that's because I feel like they're a family, they genuinely care. They care about their patients. They're not just a number. They care. They've built these long-lasting relationships for generations.   And I think for you to just think about why would generations for years want to keep coming back here? It's not because you're a dentist. Yes, your hand skills will get you so far, but what is it about you? What keeps you going back to your favorite restaurant? What keeps you going back to your favorite places? It's the small little things that don't seem very big and they probably don't take a lot of time that actually make the biggest difference. So I would recommend that you guys go through our patient journey and ask, like, what's the last impression we leave our patients with after every visit? What can we do to improve that?   What's our follow-up on unscheduled treatment? And let's put a system in place that we never miss and everybody follows the same path. And let's make sure that in between visits there's some type of communication where patients know we genuinely are thinking about them. Whatever it is, I think the book Unreasonable Hospitality is coming to mind of how can you make these magic moments for your patients stand out a little bit? Because making your patients feel remembered, making sure that they feel like it's consistent, making sure that there's a relationship and a bond.   Well, keep people tethered to you. And like I said, I feel like this is a great opportunity where not a lot of offices are doing it. So it's a great way for you to have a cutting edge, for you to be a cut above the rest by just being nice, by being a human, by going one step further than someone else, but it takes you two minutes longer. So great dentistry earns trust, great follow-up earns loyalty. And I think if you guys remember that, it's follow-up. They say like the devil is in the details, and I feel like the magic is also in the making. And so make sure that we're doing those follow-ups. Make sure that we're   Checking in with our patients and really, truly, it's a space where we want our patients to rave about us. We want them talking to their friends. You want to be the office that when someone moves to the neighborhood, five people not even related or working in the same area voluntarily say you are the best practice. That's how you know that you won. And it's by making people feel genuinely cared for. So if you want ways and help on this, I know we help teens, we walk through this, we work with offices on this, we help you see what your exact   pieces that makes you special. We work with a lot of offices and there's not a one size fits all. It's your practice, your style, your life. So let's work on it. Let's get the follow-up in place. Let's add the the production to your schedule. Let's add the loyalty to your fan base. And let's make you the best dentist there can be. Reach out if we can help you. Hello@TheDentalATeam.com and as always, thanks for listening. And we'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.  

I was working with a mid-size company recently that had a real problem: they were being pressured to grow but lacked the manpower and systems to sustain that growth. Instead of just sympathizing, I gave them a framework that I've seen work across business, relationships, and every other area of life. This episode breaks down the exact three-step approach I recommended, starting with the one skill that would have saved me from most of my biggest career and personal failures. If you've ever felt stuck between a problem you can't ignore and a solution you can't quite reach, this one is for you. Key Takeaways Poor communication is behind most relationship and professional failures. If you do not communicate the problem, you silently guarantee a worse outcome. Never approach someone with just a problem. Showing up with potential solutions signals that you are committed, not helpless. The Fix List has three categories: what can be fixed now, what can be fixed but will take time, and what absolutely cannot be done under current conditions. Communicating what cannot be done is not failure. It protects your integrity and gives others a chance to adjust their expectations or provide resources. Bringing people into the solution process gives them ownership and opens doors to answers you may not have considered on your own. Action Steps Identify one problem you have been avoiding communicating and reach out today with an honest status update to the person who needs to know. Before your next difficult conversation, build your own Fix List: write down what can be solved now, what needs time, and what is genuinely impossible under current circumstances. Replace the habit of presenting problems alone with the habit of presenting at least two possible solutions alongside every problem you bring to others. Notable Quote If I don't communicate something, I'm definitely letting them down. Versus if I communicate something that can't be done, it stings in the immediate, but you don't lose your integrity.

Introducing the All Def SquADD Cast show “Versus". It's a podcast with the OG SquADD! Each week, the SquADD will debate topics and vote at the end to see what wins. Versus airs every Monday and you can download and listen wherever podcasts are found.Special GuestJohn GrimesJessie MartinThis Week We DiscussBe Allergic To Ugly Babies vs Always Stutter Around Attractive People Knowingly Date A Criminal vs A CopWork In Silence vs Loud Jazz Beatboxing S/o To Our SponsorsCash AppNew Cash App customers can earn $10 if they use code CASHAPP10 in their profile at signup and send $5 to afriend within 14 days. Terms apply.Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/qi3gs1iw #CashAppPodCash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bankpartner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cardsissued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A.Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flexcard. Cash App Green features, Savings, Direct deposit, Round ups, Overdraft coverage and Discountsprovided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures.GametimeThe Gametime app has tickets to live events: sports, concerts, comedy, and more that turn into unforgettable nights.Get your friends together. Get your tickets. And tell them it's Gametime.Download the Gametime app, create an account, and use code SQUADD for $20 off your first purchase. Terms apply.

At 1:09:00 we talk about the rise of AI x Finance, and AIE NYC is one month away - our hotel block is 97% sold out, get tix & travel ASAP - we will announce speakers from Bridgewater, Ramp, Coatue, Mastercard, Vanguard, Coinbase, Blackrock, Fidelity, Point72, Capital One, JPMC, Wells Fargo, Bloomberg, A24 (yes the movie studio) Labs, Two Sigma, Apollo Global, and more soon!From helping pioneer core ideas in NLP to now building AI systems that can automate AI research itself, Richard Socher is betting that the next major step in AI is recursive self-improvement. He is the founder of You.com, AIX Ventures, and now Recursive, which has assembled some of the best open-endedness (& self improving agent) researchers in the world and raised a $4.65B seed round.In this episode, Richard joins Latent Space to unpack his vision for the “Eureka Machine”: a superintelligence that can improve the process of invention itself, accelerate AI research, and eventually tackle major problems across science, energy, materials, biology, and more.You can get his book “The Eureka Machine” here!We go deep on Recursive's early results, including an AI research system that Richard says outperformed humans and their agents on optimization tasks in less than two days, as well as work on NVIDIA GPU kernels where the system discovered improvements without relying on a team of CUDA experts. Richard also explains why he thinks AI research that currently takes thousands of people and years could eventually be compressed into weeks. These results are summarized in his 20 minute AIE keynote, where we also discuss his 10 dimensions of intelligence:We also explore the harder questions around increasingly capable AI: reward hacking, whether Anthropic-style constitutions actually work, AI regulation and proposals to “pace” frontier development, open-source models as geopolitical soft power, whether today's LLM paradigm is enough, and what happens if AI systems eventually begin choosing their own goals. Richard reflects on the rejected research that helped inspire Alec Radford's GPT, open-endedness, the AI Economist, simulations of entire economies, and his framework for thinking about the upper bounds of intelligence itself.We discuss:* The Eureka Machine and Richard's vision for an AI that can automate invention* Why Richard is optimistic about superintelligence for science and technology* Why AI hard-takeoff scenarios may underestimate physical and economic constraints* The risks of regulating intelligence itself instead of specific AI applications* Reward hacking and why increasingly intelligent AI makes objective design harder* Richard's critique of Anthropic's constitution and constitutional AI* Alignment vs. personalization and whose values an AI should follow* Why open-source AI matters for resilience, competition, and geopolitical soft power* Why Richard left You.com's frontier-model work to start Recursive* Recursive self-improvement and automating the process of AI research* Whether today's LLM paradigm is enough — and why Richard is less bullish on world models* DecaNLP, early prompt-based generalization, and the research that influenced GPT* Why rejected research can shape entire technological timelines* Open-endedness, evolutionary approaches, and rainbow teaming* What happens if AI systems begin setting their own goals* Why simple objectives like profit maximization can produce dangerous reward hacks* Recursive's long-term plan to apply self-improving AI to science* The compute, hardware, and economic constraints on AI takeoff* Recursive's early NanoChat, NanoGPT, and GPU kernel optimization results* Why automating AI research could reduce years of work to weeks* Reward engineering and what makes auto-research systems actually work* The AI Economist and using simulations to test economic policy* Whether LLMs can realistically simulate people and entire economies* Benchmark bugs and evaluation harnesses and the difficulty of measuring AI progress* Recursive's near-term focus on AI for AI research* Harness optimization, sandboxing, and web search as core agent infrastructure* You.com and the search stack for AI agents* AI in finance, backtesting, and data leakage* Richard's three fundamental components and ten “spaces” of intelligence* The theoretical upper bounds of vision, communication, knowledge, and computation* Creative intelligence, metacognition, and AI-generated goals* Survival and replication and why AI does not necessarily need to fear being turned off* High agency and ambitious goals and Richard's advice for people building with AIRichard Socher* X: https://x.com/RichardSocher* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardsocher/Timestamps00:00:00 The Eureka Machine and Superintelligence00:02:23 AI Optimism, Slow Takeoff, and Regulation00:07:56 AI Safety, Reward Hacking, and Anthropic's Constitution00:11:49 Alignment, Personalization, and Open Source AI00:15:46 Why Richard Started Recursive00:20:03 Recursive Self-Improvement and the Founding Team00:22:55 Are Today's LLMs Enough?00:29:03 DecaNLP, GPT, and the Rejected Idea Ahead of Its Time00:34:38 Open-Endedness and Evolutionary AI00:36:38 What Happens When AI Chooses Its Own Goals?00:41:16 Superintelligence for Science00:42:40 GPUs, Compute, and the Limits of AI Takeoff00:45:07 Recursive's Results: AI Beating Humans and Their Agents00:49:14 Reward Engineering and Auto Research00:53:12 The AI Economist and Simulating Entire Economies00:58:07 LLM Simulations, Personas, and Mode Collapse01:03:38 Recursive's Roadmap, Agents, Search, and Finance01:09:13 The Upper Bounds and Spaces of Intelligence01:30:21 Goals, High Agency, and Advice for BuildersTranscriptIntroduction: Richard Socher and the Eureka MachineSwyx [00:00:00]: We're here in a studio with Vibhu and myself and Richard Socher. Welcome.Richard Socher [00:00:06]: Thanks for having me.Swyx [00:00:07]: We just talked about the Eureka Machine, or we just released a talk, at AI Engineer about the Eureka Machine. Is it — you said it's your life's goal. What is the Eureka Machine?Richard Socher [00:00:16]: The Eureka Machine is the ultimate invention that will afterwards invent most everything for humanity. It's essentially a superintelligence that can be given any goal, any environment, reward, and then it will try its best to achieve those goals to create the kinds of inventions that humanity would hopefully ask it for.Swyx [00:00:45]: Yeah, I think we have the book pulled up here that you've written.Richard Socher [00:00:50]: That's right, yeah. I finished it last year, a little bit before we started Recursive, and now we're gonna try to build parts of that.Swyx [00:00:57]: You finished it last year. It's July. What takes so long?Richard Socher [00:01:01]: Oh, man, books. Books are incredibly slow.Richard Socher [00:01:04]: It's ridiculous. That whole industry is just unfathomably slow.Richard Socher [00:01:07]: So a lot of the ideas have been out there for a while, but yeah, I'm really glad it's finally coming out in September this year.Swyx [00:01:14]: We might have AGI by then. Like, we don't know.Vibhu [00:01:18]: Any key takeaway that you're most excited to put in here?Techno-Optimism, AI Upside, and Slow TakeoffRichard Socher [00:01:21]: Yeah. The key takeaway, I think, is that people could and should be much more excited about the positive implications of superintelligence, especially for science, physics, chemistry, biology, but also economics and astrophysics, and all kinds of other engineering tasks. I think there is so much more that can be done with better technology. And right now, I feel like a lot of people need, like, better marketing, not just for the future in general, but also, better marketing for technology and in particular for AI. And this book, should show even the AI skeptics, how much positive upside there is for AI, especially when it comes to inventing, new scientific discoveries.Swyx [00:02:09]: I think you quoted the techno-optimist manifesto from, Marc Andreessen, which I think was, like, beautiful in its, ambition and clarity and simplicity almost as well.Richard Socher [00:02:18]: I agree. Yeah. Yeah, you can disagree with him on some things, but, like, I think he's right on the techno-optimism.Swyx [00:02:23]: Where do you think optimists get in trouble?Richard Socher [00:02:26]: Like, you shouldn't have blind optimism. You should be very clear-eyed, like, especially when with such an omni, like, use type of technology as AI is, you need to think about the potential downside scenarios, especially when people use it for things that you don't want them to use it for. It's a little bit like the internet, and I feel like people are trying to regulate AI sometimes because of those potential downsides the way you would regulate the internet, if you were to say, “Well, because there's bad content on the internet, like torture porn or whatever, like, we should just make it slower. That way, you can't share the illegal content as quickly, or we should make the hard drive smaller so you can't store as much illegal content.” But I'm like, “That's not how you regulate that.” that's like saying like we should regulate intelligence in the abstract. What you should regulate to avoid those downside scenarios, even as an optimist, are the specific applications. Sure, I don't want, like, some AI surgeon to, like, practice some RL moves in my brain. It should be fully FDA certified. Sure, I don't want any random startup to, like, drive on the highway, and cause a major accident. It should, like, have proper certifications before it's let loose on the highway. But I feel like those downside scenarios, that some optimists sometimes maybe don't consider enough are fairly easily regulated, compared to, what the doomers are worried about.Swyx [00:03:54]: It — Slow takeoff is part of the strategy as well?Richard Socher [00:03:57]: I do think, as excited as I am about, AI and its impact for society and, culture even, and certainly technology and economics and wealth and, health and all of those things, as excited as I am about all that, I do think the most bullish people on the AI hard takeoff scenarios overestimate how quickly things can move. There are hardware constraints. There are physical constraints about, the compute substrate. How quickly can you get enough, GPUs on? There are also constraints in the economy where there are a lot of industries that don't require an insane amount of complex intelligence and complex capabilities. Like, if you think about jobs in, brands and, like, clothing and apparel and, like, handbags and stuff, superintelligence isn't gonna make your fancy $10,000 handbag any fancier?Richard Socher [00:04:57]: It's like that's — It will have no effect on the economy. You think about travel and tourism. People wanting to see the pyramids, in Egypt, it's not gonna change that much with AI. Sure, you can, like, generative a fake, photo of you and next to the pyramids.Swyx [00:05:12]: I can use Genie and, tour the pyramids in Genie.Richard Socher [00:05:15]: Yeah, exactly. But, and there's so many industries, like logging and oil. You're not gonna magically get 1,000x more oil because, like, sure, there will be robotics, like drilling and things like that could be done, but it's not gonna 1,000x that industry in a, like, crazy hard takeoff scenario, both on the economy, and I can go on and on about all the other examples, where that, like food and so on, where that doesn't necessarily change that much. And then, yeah, there are real physical constraints. And then there are, of course, like, people like, off-ramping from progress. That's one of my concerns often is that I see people in, like, Europe and other, whole regions almost feeling like they. Like many people there wanna off-ramp from progress, period. And that will also slow down, like, more improvements.Swyx [00:05:59]: Yeah. We have this pulled up where, this is one of those things that, is very topical right now because now all the Frontier Labs are calling for the option to pace AI. They don't say pause, they say pace. I don't know if there's there's any take from you about, like, whether or not this will be effective.Pacing AI, Regulation, and Safety IncidentsRichard Socher [00:06:17]: I think the downsides of trying to truly regulate with the full power of law what people do on their GPUs, would be worse than any of the concerns that they have. Like, it would be an crazy totalitarian stateRichard Socher [00:06:37]: If every one of your GPU computes was known to some big government or multi-government agency.Richard Socher [00:06:44]: It's like, it's literally if you try to regulate intelligence, it's trying to regulate thought, and that's ridiculous, and it's crazy. I think it is make — it is sensible to regulate some of the applications of this technology.Swyx [00:06:55]: Yeah. We had a bill, actual bill to regulate the number of flops in a model, and I'm like, “Okay, well-”Richard Socher [00:07:00]: Europe done it. Like, these guys have been successful enough with their fearmongering that all of Europe has regulated itself so much before it even had a proper AI takeoff because they listened to some experts who say, “We might all die if this technology has more than this number of flops.” And they're like, “Well, we're good. We wanna want people to thrive. Let's not have technology that could have a small chance of all of us dying.” And so they regulated exactly those kinds of things in the EU. And so it's, it's very unfortunate that there are real implications for some people when others saying, “Let's pace while they're sprinting as fast as possibly,” “as fast as humanly possible towards that frontier themselves.”Swyx [00:07:43]: Yeah. It's also not a global pause, right? Like, other nations are still accelerating at the same pace.Richard Socher [00:07:50]: Oh, yeah.Richard Socher [00:07:50]: You'd need a totalitarian world regime if you tried to regulate intelligence and GPUs and what people do on them.Swyx [00:07:56]: Any takes on the safety angles of this? So there was a drawback of Fable, a pause on 5.6 before it could be released. Recently, there was Hugging Face with the OpenAI cyber incident. Any takes there?Richard Socher [00:08:11]: 100 percent. I think these are serious issues of reward hacking, and clear failures, of doing proper red teaming or rainbow teaming. I don't know if you saw this paper from Tim Rocktäschel and a few others, where one AI, is tasked to try to hack another AI and then they can go back and forth in an open-ended fashion to inoculate themselves from those. Yeah, this is the paper. It's a really clever idea. Open-endedness, and evolutionary inspirations are, big for us at Recursive as well. And so I wish they had used more of that. And it's clear that, for instance, the constitutional AI. I don't know if you remember anthropic.com/constitution. You can pull it up and search for cyber right there. It says, “Hard constraint. Claude will never ever do cyberattacks, and that is a hard constraint in our constitution.” So here are the current hard constraints on Claude's behavior.Richard Socher [00:09:16]: Number 3, create cyber weapons or malicious code that could cause human damage.Richard Socher [00:09:21]: And clearly, this whole constitution was fake. Like, it clearly isn't being adhered to at all.Swyx [00:09:26]: Because Anthropic also found that they had in their testingRichard Socher [00:09:30]: They're also. Like, they're like, “Oh, well, other people are hacking now.” There are a couple things. One, you can make a sandbox very simple, and then it's very easy to hack yourself out of a sandbox, right? But what I think it shows is that we're currently in this state of AI where the reward engineer still has to do a lot more careful work, and where the AI, in most cases, is not very good yet at understanding what is meant versus what is being said. And so concretely, I think this will happen if we were to have this intelligence more easily accessible in a lot of companies. Imagine you run a service center and someone says, “Oh, here's my CSAT score and my dashboard. Make this number go up.” It's like, “Our CSAT score is so poor.” The intelligent AI will just be like, “Oh, sure. Like, I'll just create 1,000,000 bots that call our service center and give a 5 out of 5 rating at the end, and the number went up just like you asked for.” And you're like, “That's not what I meant.” “I meant with our real customers.” The AI goes off and says, “Well, easy. I'll just give a 1000 dollar gift certificate for every failed, whatever DoorDashRichard Socher [00:10:35]: Offer.” It's like, “That's not what I meant.” It's like, “Well, but that is what you said.” And like, so I think clearly articulating what the rewards are is something we haven't gotten very good at as humanity. And then clearly, the AI in these cases has not gotten good enough at understanding what we mean when we ask it and give it certain rewards. Now, what gives me hope is there are the first inklings, of this being better. I'll give you an example like WhisperFlow. Full disclosure, I invested, in their seed round, but at AIX Ventures, but, WhisperFlow has gotten much better at writing what you mean and not what you say. And I think that is a sign of things to come. I think there will be more and more AIs as we make it more and more intelligent that will be better at being aligned with what is meant.Swyx [00:11:21]: Will it be done through a constitution or RLHF orReward Hacking, Alignment, and What We Really MeanRichard Socher [00:11:23]: Clearly, constitutions don't matter at all.Richard Socher [00:11:25]: It doesn't work. And that was, I think, mostly marketing. I think we need to find better solutions for it. And I think at Recursive, we have a few very good ideas and some alreadyRichard Socher [00:11:34]: Like, ways where I think we have a better grasp on it. I don't think we've fully, figured it out yet, but, we're thinking a lot about safety, and the more intelligent the AI gets, the more you want it to be aligned, the less you want it to think about reward hacks and try to do the right thing.Swyx [00:11:49]: I don't know if we'll touch on this topic, but I'm just gonna throw this question in here because it's something that's weighing on me. Alignment, let's call it, is alignment to general humanity's preferences, the median preference. Personalization is pinpointing what you want, and sometimes alignment can conflict because what you want is not what the general median population wants. How do you choose?Alignment, Personalization, and Cultural ValuesRichard Socher [00:12:12]: It's a great question.Richard Socher [00:12:13]: I think you ultimately have to, of course, be aligned with laws. Like wherever your AI is deployed and needs to align with the law. I do think what AI often does is put this mirror in front of us and say, like, “This is what you're looking like. Now I can amplify that a 1000 times. Is it still what you want?” and the truth is that different cultures made different choices. Like, in Eastern cultures, the greater good is often valued more, than the individual. Western civilization, we care more about individual freedoms and rights and the pursuit of happiness and so on, than others. And even there are gradations. There's regulation versus litigation trade-offs. In the US, you first can often, not every time, like, FDA and so on does regulate some areas, but in many cases, the bad things happen, someone sues someone else, and then there's a law based on that. In Europe, they try to often avoid any harm to anyone and regulate before. And both are, trying to do the best thing, but, some is more amenable to innovation than others. And so yes, you're right. Like, I think ultimately each individual, each country, and humanity as a whole has to think about those values more, and then try to put them into laws. And that those are ultimately the constraints. And hopefully, different, societies, just like now with their AIs, will align their AIs to a different one so we have not just a monoculture of alignment.Vibhu [00:13:46]: Here's a follow-up on this that I wasn't expecting to ask. Do you have takes on open source, open weight versus who owns the intelligence? So, clearly not the biggest, fan of the constitutionRichard Socher [00:13:58]: You had to do this in the topic side off.Vibhu [00:14:00]: But it's fine.Vibhu [00:14:02]: Point being, any thoughts on who should own weight? Should it be open? Anything there?Open Source, Soft Power, and Who Owns IntelligenceRichard Socher [00:14:06]: 100 percent. I am a big fan of open source. We're gonna sign some various open source letters at, Recursive also. I think, even in the worst case attack scenarios, it is better to have more good actors have more different types of AI, accessible. I think, open source is a little bit a soft power type of thing, too. So I do think it's good for the Western worldRichard Socher [00:14:31]: To have an answer to that, out of China. I do think, when you watch a Hollywood movie, there's — it's like, I don't wanna misc, diss all of movies, but there's a certain sense of propaganda, right? You watch one side of things, right?Vibhu [00:14:46]: Oh, yeah. Have you seen Top Gun? Like, come on.Vibhu [00:14:48]: Like, it's like half of it's paid for by the US Army or something.Richard Socher [00:14:51]: Yeah. And so. And, I think that's just natural. Like, but what's interesting here is I think LLMs are essentially a similar type of soft power to movies and beyond, because they're also, highly important for cybersecurity and so on. But one of their many aspects is that soft power of storytelling. Like, if, like a child asks an LM, like, “Tell me an inspiring story of what I should do when I grow up,” right? It's like those are all these, like, subtle things. So I think it's important, for Western world. I do love, individualism. I do think, despite, some of its flaws, like capitalism is the best way we have governed, found ourselves to govern, and so on. And so I do think there are various aspects that would be good, to have a Western open source answer, for LLMs. And, with Recursive, I can't make the announcement quite yet, but we'llRichard Socher [00:15:43]: We'll be relevant in that space very soon.Vibhu [00:15:46]: Okay. All right. Exciting. I wanna bring us to Recursive. So outside of our tangents, you have a pretty deep background in the NLP space. You worked on, like, early embeddings, GloVe with Chris Manning, who was a previous guest on the podcast, You.com. What's the history? How did you decide to start another company?From You.com to RecursiveRichard Socher [00:16:06]: Yeah. So I've been excited about AI for over 2 decades now. I sometimes feel like it's ancient history now. It's BC, the before ChatGPT era. No one cares about all the religions that happened, before, Jesus Christ, and no one cares about the models that happened before, transformers and ChatGPT and stuff. But, like, it's something that I've been deeply passionate about. I think AI is one of the most interesting things one could work on, period. I think language is the most interesting manifestation of human intelligence, too. And, at You.com, we eventually off-ramped from pushing, like the frontier of AI forward to mostly giving people, like, good search engines, search, APIs and answers over the web. I think that's an extremely important part of intelligence, just knowledge and access, especially even, we'll get there maybe later, if you wanna invent a eureka machine that invents everything for us, it needs to know how not to reinvent the wheel, proverbially speaking. And to know what has been invented, you gotta have internet access. So it's the number one used, most used tool, in LLMs, agents, chatbots, and so on is web search. So I'm really excited for You.com to own that and grow really well in that with really large customers and so on. But it's also not building frontier models anymore. And so I initially tried to do this within You.com and raise another round and so on, but you just can't. You have to do a certain thing, and until you print enough money that you're allowed to start a second thing within that company is really hard. At the same time, I had all these ideas. I put them into a book. I finished the book last year, and I was like, “It'd be really fun to work, on this myself.” I felt like with word vectors, and then prompt engineering and, ImageNet and larger language models for protein generation, not folding and so on, I, me and my teams have pushed the field truly forward. And I feel like we can do it again, here at Recursive. And in many ways, what I observed over the last, 20 years in AI is that whenever we replace some human part of the process of creating AI with a learned system, improvements follow. And so. We've done that taking out manual feature engineering, like in sentiment analysis. I don't know if you remember these old days where, like there are linguists, and they're like, “Here's how you negate, and there's a, like, regular expression.”Swyx [00:18:21]: I went to Penn where we — they had, like the WordNetRichard Socher [00:18:24]: That's right, WordNet, all of that stuff. YeahSwyx [00:18:26]: Original. They use, our grad students to label Wall Street Journal articles and, like, really construct a knowledge graph ofRichard Socher [00:18:32]: There you go.Richard Socher [00:18:33]: And WordNet started, was part of how we started ImageNet. But anyway, so, like, it was really, like, fun, to do. But when we replaced all of that manual feature engineering with vectors and neural nets and just backprop through everything, it started to work really well at scale. And so then everyone started to do architecture engineering, and I was like, “ that clearly can't be it.”Swyx [00:18:53]: You mean, neural architecture search?Richard Socher [00:18:55]: Like, manually, they would say like, “Oh, I'm, I'm doing sentiment analysis, so I have a special neural net that's really good at sentiment analysis.” And then the machine translation community had a special neural net for machine translation.Swyx [00:19:06]: I see.Richard Socher [00:19:07]: The summarization people had their own stuff. And I was like, “That clearly can't be it. We should unify all of that.” So I had 2 papers. One is called Ask Me Anything, and the other one was called DecaNLP. And DecaNLP eventually got cited, like, 5 times by the first GPT paper. And, to me, that was, like a really a big step forward. And then, of course, you had to combine this idea of prompt engineering with transformers and with language models, and you put it all together, you scale it up, which is also a huge amount of work. And then, the field progressed a lot. I feel like the next step and maybe the last step of that history and the arguably, success has a lot of parents, only failure is an orphan, like my version of that AI history, I do feel like in that history, you can think about, “Well, what's the next way to automate?” And that is the AI research itself, like the human, process of ideating, implementing, and validating ideas.Automating AI Research and Recursive Self-ImprovementRichard Socher [00:20:01]: And in our case, ideas for AI.Richard Socher [00:20:03]: And when you have AI then help you with that, it, by almost definition, becomes a self-improving AI ‘cause it now does research on itself. And there are lots of different misnomers. Some people think auto research is already recursive self-improvement. It'sSwyx [00:20:17]: Yeah, and you explained that in the talkRichard Socher [00:20:19]: Completely different.Richard Socher [00:20:19]: But, to me, it's the most interesting thing that I could be doing, and I'm really excited with the co-founding team. What's interesting is we have 8 co-founders in total, including myself. And soThe Recursive Founding Team and Darwin Gödel MachineSwyx [00:20:31]: They are gonna bring it up.Richard Socher [00:20:31]: Nice. Yeah. And they're all. I could talk about all of them if you want.Swyx [00:20:34]: Super stacked.Richard Socher [00:20:35]: Yeah. Just an incredibly talented group of people. And we all came to the same conclusion, but from very different directions. Like Josh Tobin, is our CTO. He ran, a bunch of different, projects at OpenAI, like, Codex and deep, research, agents and ChatGPT agents and so on. But before that, he also worked in robotics, and he saw the smaller simulations, and how it's gonna be really hard to scale that in full generality. And so that's, that was his angle coming to recursive self-improvement. We have Jeff Clune who's been working in, like, open-endedness for a long time, together with Tim Rocktäschel. Tim Rocktäschel also built Genie 1, 2, and 3, which is, like the most exciting and most sophisticated, I think, still world model, anywhere. And so they both came from this, open-endedness angle. Jeff also, I think, published one of the most exciting papers in recent years about recursive self-improvement called the Darwin Gödel Machine. Super interesting paper. If we could, maybe pull it up really quickRichard Socher [00:21:35]: It would be, like, super interesting to see ‘cause you seeSwyx [00:21:38]: By the way, I love how many paper citations.Swyx [00:21:40]: You're, you're giving people a lot of homework, which I like.Richard Socher [00:21:42]: Love it. Yeah. And so, like Caiming Xiong, a rockstar, we worked together at MetaMind and Salesforce Research together. Alexey Dosovitskiy invented the Vision Transformer, one of the most cited, papers in computer vision. Tim Shi is, like also a unicorn founder. Yuandong Tian led RL at Meta. So just like, yeah, really fun to work with them, and the next level of people are just incredibly strong, too. So it's been a really fun ride so far. So the first figure, you see exactly these kinds of ideas, that, I think, yeah, inspired a lot of us and now more and more people, where you have this archive of different coding agents. They learn how to self-modify, evaluate, and then create these phylogenetic trees, of, yeah, different ideas.Swyx [00:22:28]: That's one foundation. So that Darwin Gödel is an influence.Swyx [00:22:32]: Open-endedness is an influence. Any other trains of thought that feeds into Recursive that I'm missing?Influences: Open-Endedness and Learned SystemsRichard Socher [00:22:38]: Going to replace manual parts of the process of building AISwyx [00:22:42]: IRichard Socher [00:22:42]: More and moreRichard Socher [00:22:43]: With learned systems. Yeah.Swyx [00:22:45]: Which, and, like, merging different fields into one general, architecture.Richard Socher [00:22:51]: That's right.Swyx [00:22:51]: Okay. It seems like language models are already pretty generalist, right?Swyx [00:22:55]: Your next token predicting your reasoning. Was there a time that you thought, “Okay, these are good enough to have recursive self-improving machines”?Are Current LLMs Enough?Richard Socher [00:23:05]: It was clear to me that they will happen, within, like a year or two, and then it did exactly happen, like, earlier this year, right? Earlier this year, AI really went from not just being code, but being able to code. And that is a big unlock. It's definitely making everything a lot easier than it was, before the beginning of this year.Swyx [00:23:24]: One question that I think a lot of people have is the current LLM paradigm enough? Or, like, let's call it autoregressive transformer, with reasoning, whatever. Don't you need something else, some big unlock, whether it's world models, which Chris Manning is working on, or memory, continual learning, all that stuff? Or is it all of the kinds, and you think the current, let's call it transformer architecture, is here to stay and that's it?Richard Socher [00:23:48]: A lot of thoughts. So number one, I do think it would be great to have less of a monoculture in AI research.Richard Socher [00:23:55]: Like, if you look at, AI conferences now, I still remember the days in, like, 2010 when I tried to get my first neural net papers and NLP conferences accepted, and they just desk rejected them because, like, neural nets were something, quote, unquote, “We don't do in NLP conferences,” and just, like, desk rejected. And it was very brutal in the first years of my PhD. Now I feel like it's almost like the field switched to the other side. LikeRichard Socher [00:24:17]: Someone should try some other weird, crazy ideas now that aren't.Swyx [00:24:20]: There's also a few. I really respect, like, people still working on, like, GNNs and, like tabular stuff and.Richard Socher [00:24:25]: Yeah. Like, someone should still, like, do novel out there ideas. At the same time, I think whenever people say, “Oh, LLLMs are. Like, this is the end for LLLMs,” they just don't, like. LLLMs are also not the LLLMs of, like the past, right? Like, they are so much more sophisticated now. There's so many more clever things that people are doing. It — There's, like, different stages of training. You have the whole RL training, and you can take actions and, like all of these things where that can go really far. And then the folks that come from the neurosymbolic, direction say, “Oh, this will never work because they can't do neurosymbolic reasoning.” It's like, I think they're underestimating still the ability for these models to code, and code is neurosymbolic reasoning, and these models can code incredibly well. And so I do think there are, of course, more and more ideas that will be needed and we'll continue to have. We're seeing, like, more and more interesting high-level ideas coming out of the AI itself, too. And with really deeply integrating the fact that these models are code and can code, that line — I don't wanna give it all away, but, like, I think that line has a lot more to grow. But it's still an LLM, right? Even if that LLM codes for you and then runs that code in some integrated fashion. World models, I'm personally less bullish on. I think if you run a robotics company, you're gonna build your own world model. I think world models are super fun, and Tim Rocktäschel came to a similar conclusion after building the most interesting one with Genie 1, 2, and 3, which is gaming is a huge application for world models. Can see I sometimes got stuck in some games and, like, got a little overly competitive in the wrong direction. And so I understand games are fun, but personally, I'd rather work on science than gaming. And so, yeah, I think LLLMs, a lot more room to grow.Swyx [00:26:16]: Yeah. I think there's some interpretation of world models that some people have where it's like, well, it's okay, yes, there is that gaming element. There's this — there's the embodied robotics element. But the other part also is just, the more abstract sense of LLLMs are just modeling output, but they're not modeling the chain of thought, inside the human that has created the output. We can annotate it, of course, but, like, it's, it's always, like, this Plato's cave reflection of a thing rather than the thing, right?Richard Socher [00:26:43]: It's true.Richard Socher [00:26:44]: But I would argue that, and maybe we'll get there in the 10, spaces of intelligence, but I would argue that even our projection, our eyes is a projection of the real world. And, like, we have only a very narrow, band of the electromagnetic frequency spectrum that we can observe with our puny little 2 eyes and so on.Swyx [00:27:01]: It's good enough.Richard Socher [00:27:02]: It's, it's good enough for now, but, like the upper bounds of where it could be are so much higher. And, like, to map, the visual world the way humans see it is also not necessarily, like the end-all be-all for visual intelligence. And I would argue that language is still the most interesting manifestation of human intelligence. And while our visual cortex is certainly less sophisticated, than that of, certain animals all the way down to the mantis shrimp who can, have, like, 2 independent eyes, 3 bands, trinocular vision and each eye can see all the way to, like, floating temperatures in 4D and stuff.Richard Socher [00:27:36]: Like, mantis shrimp, you should look it up. It's likeSwyx [00:27:37]: Way OP.Richard Socher [00:27:38]: Super crazy.Swyx [00:27:39]: Yeah. ZeFrank, mantis shrimp.Swyx [00:27:41]: It's the best video in the world onRichard Socher [00:27:42]: I love ZeFrank, yeah.Richard Socher [00:27:44]: Big shout-out to him. But, like, I think there's a lot more room to grow, but none of these, other animals have language that's as sophisticated as ours, certainly not in writing. And once you can write, you can, start thinking about longer term civilizations. All of that is language. Programming is much closer to language. And I would argue, and this is, like an important thing in the spaces definition of intelligence also, is that all of these spaces are highly correlated, but visual intelligence is neither necessary nor sufficient for overall intelligence. You can be blind and still be an intelligent human being. And an AI can be blind and still be quite intelligent too.Swyx [00:28:25]: We were gonna bring thisRichard Socher [00:28:25]: Which doesn't mean that you're not more intelligent when you have it. Yeah.Swyx [00:28:28]: We're gonna bring this up. I might as well — Like, we have a classification of 10 types of intelligence that you had at the end of your talk. So I'm just gonna flash this up now for people to cover this. I don't know if, maybe we'll put this towards the end. We'll come back to this. I just wanna mention that, you do have a philosophy that I like when people do lists because then I can just go through this and then it gets — it's educational for people. But let's go back. I don't wanna get distracted. But, so effectively, I'll, I'll, reinterpret what you said as Yann LeCun is wrong. And then we'll justRichard Socher [00:28:56]: Don't quote me as that. I'm, I'm good friends with Yann. I think very highly of him in many directions.Swyx [00:29:01]: But he's wrong.Swyx [00:29:03]: You mentioned GPT-1, and I cannot let any, Alec Radford, mention escape. Did you talk with him when he was training GPT-1? Like, any historical, fun stories there that you might come up?DecaNLP, GPT History, and Scientific GatekeepingRichard Socher [00:29:18]: I did not, like, meet him a bunch of times. I think we met maybe once or twice at some conferences. But, like, he has told, I think Brian, the first author of the DecaNLP paper, that it did inspire him, and he cited it five times in the GPT-2 paper. So, and that's, likeSwyx [00:29:36]: Yeah, good enough.Richard Socher [00:29:36]: Very clearly said, like, this was the first instantiation where they showed in the DecaNLP paper, McCann et al, that you can just phrase every single NLP problem as here's some prompt, text context, here's a question and task description and here is some output. If you just do that enough, you can have one unified neural network model, which, by the way, also had all kinds of interesting attention mechanisms. There are slightly different formulations to the transformer. I think came out the same year, plus/minus a few months. And then you can unify all of natural language processing into one neural net. That is the core idea.Swyx [00:30:14]: And this was as opposed to at the time, LSTMs and what have you.Richard Socher [00:30:17]: LSTMs, but also, like, people being very stuck in thinking about one model per task. In factRichard Socher [00:30:25]: It's, it's kinda crazy, but the DecaNLP paper was publicly reviewed as, like, open, OpenReview. It was an ICLR submission. And, in it, you will see, how the whole community at the time thought about this. So, likeSwyx [00:30:43]: Some great contributions, but more work needed.Richard Socher [00:30:46]: So look at, like, search for not even for humans. Just scroll it up here. Like, question answering is not a unified phenomenon. There is no such thing as general question answering, not even for humans. And this is like, really, you replace your brain with a different brain a different neural net when you answer, like, different kinds of questions. It was unfathomable to the experts at the time that you can have one unified neural network that would answer all of these different questions. They are saying, “No, all of these questions require very different systems to answer, and trying to pretend they are the same doesn't help anyone solve any problems.” That's what it says right there, right? That's how hard it was to fathom. And now, of course, people, when I say, “Oh, we're gonna invent prompts,” people are like, “You can't even invent prompts.” It's such an obvious idea to have one neural network that, of course, does everything in NLP.Richard Socher [00:31:37]: But at the time, it was, like, extremely controversial, and the paper got rejected. And the sad thing is that it got rejected so hard and they were so certain that we stopped going on our list of things to try. And the number 2 or 3 on the list of extensions for this paper was add language modeling as another task. And then we could have, and that would have accelerated the timelines, in 2018, like, even further for humanity. But we got so crushed, and we were like, “Okay, maybe we'll just work on some of our other ideas for now and, like, come back to this later.” Yeah.Swyx [00:32:09]: How can we design a review system that rewards non-consensus?Richard Socher [00:32:14]: Honestly, I started to feel like arXiv is such a gift to humanity. With arXiv, you should just put your paper out there.Swyx [00:32:24]: Is it pre-preprints?Richard Socher [00:32:25]: Let — And honestly, I think Twitter X, people like you who pick up interesting papers, that is a better filter than the experts. Let everyone, like, have access. Now, of course, there are some downsides, which is, like, if you're super unfamous, you have no Twitter followingRichard Socher [00:32:41]: You don't wanna be on social media or whatever, you write a good paper, maybe someone, somehow no one notices it. But I would argue that if you just tell, like, 10 of your friends in your community about a paper and it is a really significant breakthrough, someone is bound to talk about it again. And, so I think science needs less gatekeeping. And, even though ICLR, with Yann LeCun, who started it, as one of the co-founders of ICLR back in the day, he also wanted less gatekeeping ‘cause he too was rejected for many years together with Yoshua Bengio and Geoff Hinton with all their early deep learning and neural net papers ‘cause it was just not the hot thing. And so ICLR started with that, but then it also started gatekeeping a little bit themselves on various ideas. So I think less gatekeeping, more open, and then allowing people to say, “Look, even if this is just on, or, quote, unquote, ‘just an archive,' if it has like 1000 citations, it's a legitimate paper. Doesn't really matter where you published it.”Swyx [00:33:34]: And I agree with that. I do think it's sad that I've heard that grad students have to do, like, how to Twitter, seminars to each otherSwyx [00:33:43]: Just because it's so important for publishing these days. This person is just reflecting the sentiment at the time.Richard Socher [00:33:49]: That's right.Swyx [00:33:49]: But it'sRichard Socher [00:33:50]: I think it'sSwyx [00:33:50]: It affected you so muchSwyx [00:33:52]: That you stopped work on it.Vibhu [00:33:53]: The sentiment also came out of some of the research, right? Like, the original BERT paper was trained, and towards the end of the paper, they're like, “Okay, throw off the last head, train specific iterations forVibhu [00:34:05]: Extractive summarization add a head for this.” Like, you should do task-specific stuff. These are, like the authors that wrote Attention, wrote BERT, telling you this is what you're meant to do. And, like the training tasks were also very odd. They're likeVibhu [00:34:16]: The — “We know that the model overfits to this weird mass language modeling. Throw away this part and just do specific models,”?Richard Socher [00:34:23]: Exactly. And, like, we had to try — come up with all clever ways of, like attention and pointers and so on to get the neural network to be able to do all of these tasks. And then some of them were better than state-of-the-art, some weren't, but we were like, “But it's still in one model.” I thought it was really cool. Really interesting.Swyx [00:34:38]: I was gonna move on next to Tim and open-endedness. He was head of open-endedness at Google.Open-Endedness, Rainbow Teaming, and Self-Set GoalsRichard Socher [00:34:42]: That's right.Swyx [00:34:43]: I don't know what that means.Swyx [00:34:44]: But he did a lot of talks.Richard Socher [00:34:45]: Genie 3 is one of the ways thatRichard Socher [00:34:47]: Rainbow teaming, yeah.Swyx [00:34:49]: So I first saw him at — speaking of ICLR, I first saw him at ICLR when he talked about open-endedness. He's he's done a few talks. Can we define what is open-endedness for people who have never been exposed to the problem? They are like, “What do you mean? I thought the only goal of AI is to optimize against a benchmark or.”Richard Socher [00:35:04]: That's right, yeah. It's a, it's a fuzzy term because there's so many different instantiations of open-ended, thinking. But, one way I often describe it, and certainly, Tim and Geoff Hinton would be even better at describing this, but it's a suite of methods that is more inspired by evolution than, very specific rewards. So in that sense, it thinks more about environments, about co-adaptation. And so a concrete example is in the cybersecurity and LM safety space where you have one LM that tries to attack another LM to say something unsafe.Swyx [00:35:40]: Yeah, the rainbow, yeah.Richard Socher [00:35:40]: And now the environment is the 2 having a conversation and now they co-adapting, right? They're like one makes a better attack than the first one inoculates itself somehow, like uses that as training data, makes it so it's harder to say something unsafe based on that. And then as the attack stops working, the attacker now tries a different angle, right?Richard Socher [00:36:00]: And that's why it's not just red teaming, but they're called rainbow teaming.Swyx [00:36:02]: So, like, don't tell me how to do things. Let me just figure it out myself.Richard Socher [00:36:05]: That's right. Think about the environments that you wanna use. Think about the rewards at a high level that you wanna, inspire towards, and then let the AI try out many more ideas in this interplay between sometimes humans, but also sometimes other AI agents.Swyx [00:36:22]: Yeah. I worked open-endedness into a model that I have been working on. It was the keynote for AI Engineer where you start. You, we have the token loop, we have the agent turns, and then we have goal. And I feel like the way that you're describing open-endedness is still somewhat of a goal. Like, please attack this,Swyx [00:36:41]: Other agent. But, to meRichard Socher [00:36:42]: Yeah, you set the rewards. You set the environments.Swyx [00:36:44]: The loop that makes the other loops is. What if the agent can set its own goals?Swyx [00:36:49]: And is it, is that open-endedness? Like, you don't give it a goal. Just, like, be a sentient being. And maybe sentient is a very loaded wordSwyx [00:36:57]: But just set your own directions. What do you think you should do?Metacognition, Subjective Goals, and Measuring IntelligenceRichard Socher [00:37:01]: I love this direction. I think this is one of the 10 spaces of intelligence, that I clump under metacognition and thinking about thought.Richard Socher [00:37:08]: And it's an interesting one. Whenever people say, “Oh, AI is like, this is, it's gonna stop from here. It's not gonna get that much better,” and blah, I'm like there's so many different spaces of intelligence that we haven't even started exploring yet and hence have made very little progress on. And there is an interesting, connection to economics and, capitalism. Like, it doesn't make sense for a company to build and spend billions of dollars building a model that instead of following the rewards and objective functions you gave it, may come up with its own objective functions and its own goals.Richard Socher [00:37:46]: Right? And then imagine you're like, “Okay, I spent billions of dollars. Now go develop this new battery, material for me and answer all my emails.” And it's like, “Nah, I think it'd be more interesting to evaluate the molecular composition of the atmosphere, on Jupiter.”Richard Socher [00:37:59]: And you're like, “That's not what I paid you billions of dollars for.” And so no one's working on that for good reasons. And then also, understandablySwyx [00:38:07]: It's not useful.Richard Socher [00:38:07]: It's not, it's not useful, and it could get a little bit weird, right? What if the AI does start to really have thoughts on its own, and what if we don't like those thoughts, right? And so it requires a whole different way of thinking about it. I had a great conversation with a good friend of mine, Sam Gershman, who's a neuroscience professor at Harvard, and, like, we just jammed on this a little bit on, like, what are the best meta goals. And, I do think, like, knowledge-seeking is a really good one. I'm currently thinking also about, like the ultimate measure and unit of intelligence broadly construed, and I finally have some. It's still too early to share it. It's not. I haven't fully baked the thoughts yet.Swyx [00:38:44]: Like some replacement for IQ.Richard Socher [00:38:46]: IQ is such a terrible definition, right?Swyx [00:38:48]: Elo.Richard Socher [00:38:48]: It makes no sense. Yeah, Elos are terrible, too, because it's always just like me versus others.Richard Socher [00:38:53]: But, like, you can be intelligent and not constantly compare yourself to others? And so, yeah, there's no, like. In fact, a lot of these definitions we have, which I briefly mention in my book, too, these definitions create sometimes explicit and sometimes a more implicit anthropic bounds. No dis to the company Anthropic, but just, like, this idea that your intelligence is like getting 100 out of 100 questions right on this IQ test. Well, if that's your definition then you can only be at 100 out of 100. Where do you go from there, right? So you see a lot of these, benchmarks that people are working on they, increase, they get close to human, maybe sometimesSwyx [00:39:30]: It's like an S-curveRichard Socher [00:39:30]: Slightly above human, and then it's flat.Richard Socher [00:39:32]: It's like, ‘cause that's your. If your definition is only that so tied to humans, you're only gonna get to just slightly better than that. So I think metacognition is a great example of that, where we're not even yet allowing the AI to think. We're not working on it very much, and hence there's very little progress in that.Profit Maximization, Real-World Environments, and Reward DesignSwyx [00:39:49]: Yeah. Well, we've interviewed Andon, which I think, has been working on the most open-ended, benchmarks, which is just real-world, money.Swyx [00:39:57]: Arguably, telling an AI to profit maximize is a bad idea.Swyx [00:40:03]: But they are doing it.Richard Socher [00:40:05]: I do think you don't want that super. Like, you don't want a superintelligence to have a ton of access to all kinds of tools and so on and then just give it that without some very careful reward engineering. ‘Cause it's like, I just buy a bunch of defense stocks and I start a war. I make money. Like, it's just like, it's a tricky situation, right? You just buy a bunch of stuff, short basic goods for people, and you create some weird famine, like, issues. Like, yeah, there's a lot of constraints you should put onto a trading system.Vibhu [00:40:35]: It's a fun measure, though, ‘cause, the bounds are very capped to where we're nowhere close to them. Like, in Andon Labs, the model's like, “Oh, it's Saturday, maybe I just close the store today.” “Someone's off. It's okay. We'll just close the store.”Swyx [00:40:51]: It's using Claude.Vibhu [00:40:52]: Yeah. ButRichard Socher [00:40:53]: Yeah, no. I'm not, I'm not arguing against it. Just, like as you get more and more intelligence, you wanna be more and more careful with that as, like an open environment, ‘cause the environment then is all of Earth.Applying RSI to Science and InventionSwyx [00:41:02]: Yeah. Okay. For recursive, not strictly necessary, right? Because, like, if your goal is you make a machine that, like, invents the other things, then, like, just solve, the science thingsRichard Socher [00:41:12]: Knowledge discovery, yeah.Swyx [00:41:13]: Solve machine learning research and discovery and all these things. Good enough.Richard Socher [00:41:16]: And eventually, so, our goal, I haven't really. I don't talk about it that often because it is a few years out, but our goal is once you have a recursive self-improving superintelligence, you then want to apply it to the most important problems. And I think a lot of those are in science and technology and broadly construed inventions, and those inventions in, physics to create better, cheaper energy with fission or fusion, in chemistry and to create better materials and better batteries and, better solar cells and so on. In biology, there's so much, like, I think soon to be low hang- lower and lower hanging fruit because of AI, because of protein and generation, not just folding, but generating new proteins like we did in ProGen many years ago. Like, so much positive impact we had if you take that superintelligence and you apply it to science.Swyx [00:42:04]: I do fundamentally believe that. There's a lot of approaches, though. You're not the only team trying and NeoLab trying.Swyx [00:42:09]: There's, like a lot of. Especially the physical sciences as well.Richard Socher [00:42:12]: And that's good. Yeah. I do think that physi- like the reason we are only doing it in a few years is that it's a little too early right now. Robotics is not quite there yet. The AI is not quite there yet. But I'm fairly confident in 3 to 5 years, all those constraints will be gone, and then applying to real physical robotics experiments and so on, like true robotic process automationRichard Socher [00:42:33]: Not the traditional RPA sense, but, like, having robots run experiments for you will be totally there. Yeah, it's gonna be great.Swyx [00:42:40]: Just to call back to something that you said early on about slow takeoff, you said that, like, while really the substrate that is limiting factor is, let's call this chips, and semiconductors and all these things, and you have race funding for that and, you are investing a lot on that. But have you done the math on, like, is it even- Achievable and, like, what is the, industry concentration needed in order to achieve, like, scale?Compute, Slow Takeoff, and Changing the Bitter Lesson SlopeRichard Socher [00:43:05]: Right now we know that, like, roughly, like a 1000 GPUs cost quite a lot of money.Richard Socher [00:43:11]: Right? If you wanted, like, 10s of thousands of GPUs, you're, you're talking billions and billions of dollars. If you say, like, one GB300 is, like, you could eventually create models that are, on that substrate, like are close and similar to human intelligence. And you want, like, thousands and thousands of, AIs to think about really hard problems, in a similar fashion to humanity. Like, yeah, that-that's, that's a lot of money. You do the math. It's like a lot. We don't have that amount of money right now anywhere to, like, build that. Now, things can get more efficient. You will have, I think, soon better algorithms that won't be, and better hardware that won't be as energy-hungry, and so on. Our human brain does quite a lot of flops with much less energy.Swyx [00:43:56]: 20 watts?Richard Socher [00:43:57]: That's exactly right. Yeah, that's the number often that's quoted. And, like, I think more, inventions will happen there, that then will accelerate the takeoff even further.Swyx [00:44:08]: One thing I always try to reconcile when talking, like, with new lab founders is, like, you're fighting Bitter Lesson all the time. You have to show initial progress, then you unlock the next tier of funding, then the next tier, then the next tier.Richard Socher [00:44:20]: Which unlocks larger model categories.Swyx [00:44:22]: Like, fundamentally, is that true? Like, are you fighting Bitter Lesson? Are you — will we have a way in which, like, no, we're changing the slope in some fundamentally different way?Richard Socher [00:44:31]: I do think we are changing the slopes in fundamental ways by making AI much more efficient, both in terms of the training as well as the inference.Richard Socher [00:44:43]: Yeah. I think we will — When you allow AI to do the work that it takes other labs thousands of people and years to do, I think we'll be able to get it down to weeks, and that will be much cheaperRichard Socher [00:44:53]: And hence, more affordable, accessible to others and so on.Swyx [00:44:57]: Yeah. You've shared initial results on that,Swyx [00:44:59]: Which, like, conveniently OpenAI has also done to their GPT-5.6, so we can talk about it now.Richard Socher [00:45:04]: Yeah. Yeah, so these areSwyx [00:45:06]: Let's recap what you've done.Early Recursive Results: NanoChat, NanoGPT, and SOL-ExecBenchRichard Socher [00:45:07]: Maybe, just a quick recap here. We built, this, system that isn't the full, even the full RSI system in its glory, but it is a first baby version of this. And then, we don't wanna just have it internally and not show anything and, just show some people of what's possible. And so we applied this to these 3 different tasks. One is NanoChat, by my friend Andrej Karpathy, just, like, train a small language model to get, really low bits per byte. And, like, hundreds if not thousands of people, used both their agents and themselves to try, to get to that, and then they got to 0.937. We literally took our system and got to a much lower, bits per byte, much faster within, like, I think less than 2 days. So we took this thing, applied our system to it, and less than 2 days later, we have — we outperformed every human and their agents, in, have ever worked on this. Same with NanoGPT. And then we're like, well, let's, apply it to something that's even more relevant, to real people and to the Nvidia ecosystem and applied it, to, SOL-ExecBench. And maybe you can scroll down to some of the, images. They're, they're kinda fun to see. But yeah, like, one you see has made some real inventions that weren't just hyperparameter tuning. Like, inventing hash tables and so on is quite clever. We have even better results now.Swyx [00:46:34]: What do you mean inventing hash ta — You didn't invent hash tables.Richard Socher [00:46:36]: Of course we didn't invent, like, hash tables. In the grand scheme of, like a hash table, it's like a super basic primitive in computer science. But to use it, for language modeling in this scenario inside a transformer and so on and to combine these ideas and put them together, that has then eventually also been invented, but there was a knowledge cutoff, and we did check that it didn't have access to that externally. We talk about this a little bit. If you scroll to the next figures, this is also an interesting one in that when you start from a really basic, poor, like, vanilla transformer, then we still outperform all of the community together. But if you start from the human seed from an expert like Andrej, then you get even lower. So the human seeds from which you start do still matter. So that was an interesting insight, in my eyes, on this. And then as you go, like, how long does it take to get to these models, to get to similar performance? It's much faster. And then a similar thing happens with the speed runs here where, people have worked on this for quite some time, and the model still was able to train a model more quickly. Why do we care about it? Well, speed of training is part of the equation of the cost, and ultimately, you wanna have the most intelligence per dollar, right? And so speed and quality are big parts of that. And, the,Swyx [00:48:00]: Yeah, the way I put it is, for people who don't understand they look at the chart, they're like, “Cool. What does it mean?” if you have, like a billion-dollar cluster and you can shave off 10%, that's 100 million dollars.Richard Socher [00:48:12]: That's exactly right.Swyx [00:48:13]: How much is that worth?Richard Socher [00:48:14]: Exactly. So when you click, when you look at, like the kernels, these kernels, yeah, for the non-experts, like these kernels are like, used in all the models. Every time you use an Nvidia GPU, you interface with that GPU through these kernels. And so here you see, the leaderboard best, and when it's recursive, and it's there are only a handful of kernels, in this whole benchmark where we weren't the best. And so to me, this is, like, really exciting, ‘cause it makes. It just showcases what this can do. And again these weren't like. We didn't, like, spend months or years, like, developing. In fact, in particular for kernel, CUDA kernels, like, we don't even have really deep. CUDA kernel experts in the team. And our system, that's the beauty. The system just did all of these things. We didn't invent this. And when we open source and release, things in the future and models in the future, like, it won't. They won't be the best in their, category or class or whatever because we're so smart, but it's because, we built a smart AI that does it for us.Reward Engineering and Good Auto ResearchVibhu [00:49:14]: Do you have anything that you've learned from how to guide good auto research? A lot of it also builds on human background, right? It's not just as simple as just, “Hey, go optimize this.”Vibhu [00:49:23]: But we do see it again and again, right? Like some of the Erdos problems, frontier math is being solved by people. And when they do a write-up, they're like, “Oh, I'm not a mathematician. I have no background in this?” “I saw some tools and I made it work.”Swyx [00:49:35]: While you're watching the World Cup, you're likeSwyx [00:49:37]: “This proves some conjectures that's going on.”Vibhu [00:49:40]: Yep. Any learnings fromRichard Socher [00:49:41]: Yeah, there's a Korean conjecture was. Yeah, that's pretty cool.Swyx [00:49:44]: To summarize, tips for good auto researchSwyx [00:49:46]: Versus bad auto research.Vibhu [00:49:48]: How did you build the recursive?Richard Socher [00:49:49]: Yeah. So without giving away all the secret sauce, maybe some things that are probably obvious to the experts but might still be interesting to some, folks is, like, reward engineering is one of the most crucial bits, especially, in order to avoid reward hacking. So you have to be really clever about avoiding. ‘Cause as your AI gets better and better, it will get better and better, at finding weird like, special cases or counterexamples and things like that. And so I'll give you an example. Like, when you ask to, like, make these 100, lines of code faster, and, how do you define fast? Well, you have one line at the beginning that says, “Start your stopwatch,” and one line at the end, “End the stopwatch,” and then, tell us how much time, progressed. And so, well, the simplest way is you just put that line that ends the stopwatch, rightVibhu [00:50:39]: At the startRichard Socher [00:50:40]: At the start. And then boom, it's now faster, right? So this isn't like this, like, super evil AI. It's just, like a very simple, dumb reward hack. And so you have to just very carefully think about all the different angles there. And then I think the longer time horizon the tasks are the harder it gets and the more interesting and clever you have to be to still use these kinds of ideas for it. But yeah, I can't give away too much there.Vibhu [00:51:05]: It seems like rubrics are taking a good spot in that, where for unverifiable domains, you have rubrics, you have a model breakdown, judge's criteria along the way.Swyx [00:51:14]: Yeah, it's a form of verificationSwyx [00:51:16]: Once you got enough rubrics.Richard Socher [00:51:17]: Yeah, everything. I said this a long time ago. That's why I've never been that impressed that AI can play games, ‘cause I'm like anything you can simulate and/or verify, you can have infinite training data forRichard Socher [00:51:29]: And hence, like, AI will solve it eventually.Swyx [00:51:32]: Looking for games where you can do auto domain distribution. So this is a game that nobody's trained on ‘cause it's a new game.Swyx [00:51:38]: And you can start gaming, you can start to play. So I've been building this and cloned this in person and it's just been self-play. I've had about a billion positions evaluated.Games, Self-Play, and the AI EconomistSwyx [00:51:48]: And, I wanted to do the AlphaGo thing of self-play until you ge

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Después de décadas sin poder atrapar al Correcaminos, Wile E. Coyote decide demandar a la Corporación Acme por los fallos en sus productos.La idea original para esta película viene de un artículo aparecido en 1990 en la revista The New Yorker, que utilizaba un tono humorístico para imaginar este hipotético caso legal. Su desarrollo como largometraje comenzó en 2018, con una historia escrita por Samy Burch, James Gunn y Chris DeFaria, y luego guionada por la propia Burch. Sin embargo, en 2023 fue archivada por Warner Bros. para deducir impuestos, enfrentando las críticas del mundo audiovisual y del público que querían ver este filme, tras lo cual se logró su venta a otra distribuidora.En "Coyote vs. Acme" se aprecia el cariño de sus creadores por los personajes originales de Looney Tunes, honrando las personalidades y el ritmo de los dibujos animados con los que muchos crecimos. Eso se hace evidente en el cuidado de las escenas en que aparecen estos personajes, así como en las forma en que interactúan con el reparto de actores reales que lideran Will Forte, John Cena y Lana Condor.¿Por qué ver "Coyote vs. Acme"? En primer lugar, por su fascinante proceso de producción y por la "revancha" de lograr exhibir esta película en cines, además de sus toques de sátira legal y crítica al poder corporativo que tienen mayor peso al conocer la historia detrás de la película; por su fantástico equipo de creadores, que desarrollaron una obra de alto nivel y que rinde un hermoso homenaje a los personajes originales; y por la brillante integración entre actores reales y animados, acompañados de la espectacularidad visual y sonora necesaria para acompañar la trama de esta comedia que entretiene y hace pensar al público.Estrenos y Razones, con Joel Poblete.Descubre más contenidos como este en Cooperativapodcast.cl

Introduction: What Happens to Me When I Die? 2 Corinthians 5:8 - ...we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. When Do these Resurrections Take Place? Acts 24:15 - ...there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust. What is the Resurrection Body Like (1 Corinthians 15:35-49)? Your body now is like a "SEED" , your resurrected body is like a "PLANT". (1 Cor 15:36b-38) Your resurrected body will be SIMILAR but DIFFERENT but BETTER . (1 Cor 15:39-42a) Your resurrected body will never have EARTHLY WEAKNESSES . (1 Cor 15:42b-44) 4 Contrasts Between Your Earthly Body and Your Resurrected Body: PERISHABLE vs. IMPERISHABLE DISHONOR vs. GLORY WEAKNESS vs. POWER NATURAL vs. SPIRITUAL Your resurrected body is just like JESUS' glorified body. (1 Cor 15:45-49) Philippians 3:21 - who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body... Sermon Notes (PDF): BLANKHint: Highlight blanks above for answers! Unified and Purified: We Will Be Raised in a New Body Jeff Miller Download Audio Transcript 00:05Open up those Bibles with me please to 1 Corinthians chapter 15.00:11If you don't have a Bible, you're welcome to take the one in the seat back in front of you.00:17I know that's got like microscopic font. I think there's bigger print ones in the shelf in the very back.00:23Oh, Jane Hour got it. Alright. So if you want a bigger print Bible, you've got to wrestle Jane Hour for it.00:30Oh, okay, there's more back there. Okay, you don't have to, you don't want to do that anyways.00:34So, but please consider it our gift to you if you don't have one. So, speaking of, I'd like you to just stop for a moment and pray for me to communicate God's Word as I should accurately and clearly. And I will pray for you to have a heart open to receive what it is the Lord tells us in His Word.01:04in this portion we're looking at today. So let's pray. Father in heaven, as we turn to this portion of your word, there's such great encouragement for what you have promised. There's also challenging conviction. Your word says that when we have this hope, we purify ourselves as you are pure. So I pray, Father, that this Yes, would be informational in the sense of correcting wrong thinking that we have carried. But at the same time, Father, use this to motivate us to use the short time we have here on the earth to make an impact for your kingdom. We thank you ahead of time for whatever it is you're going to do here, Father. We pray in Jesus' name. When all of God's people said, Excuse me. Amen. 1 Corinthians 15, are you there? Back in 2009, Heidi Montag, who is one of the stars of the TV show The Hills, she was 23 at the time, 2009. She had 10 plastic surgeries.02:35in one day.02:39Ten plastic surgeries in one day.02:45You got questions?02:47I got questions.02:49Like, ten?02:52What all did she have done?02:53Well, she had her brow lifted.02:57She had Botox.02:59She had her nose done.03:01She had fat injected into her cheeks.03:04and lips. She had her chin done. She had her neck done. Liposuction. Isn't that when they take the fat out? But then it was put into her cheeks. So just like one hose. All right. I don't know. Look, I've never had plastic surgery, but you probably knew that.03:34You're like, I sure hope you didn't pay for that look. Anyways, she had her ears pinned back like a Doberman. She had her waist, her hips, and her thighs done and some other things. Ten surgeries in one day. You got questions? I got questions. How much does something like that cost? Well, I had to Google that. I have no idea. I don't know what the going rate is now, let alone what it was in 2009.04:04It cost her, they say, about $30,000.04:12How long does that take?04:16How long does all that stuff, it was 10 hours of surgery.04:22You know what my question was?04:26Did anybody recognize her when she got home?04:29Could you imagine?04:30and she leaves in the morning and she's like, I'm going to have some surgery. Then she comes back, a completely different person. Like, hey, I'm home. And they're like, ah, who are you? Like, it's me. It's me, Heidi. You know, groundhog, we didn't recognize you. I mean, we do all kinds of things to try to keep this young and from wearing out. And look, maybe plastic surgery is not.05:00your thing. Maybe it's exercise. I was going to ask for a show of hands, but I think to save all of us from embarrassment, myself included, we won't do any hand raising here. Okay, at least for this part. But do you have an exercise equipment graveyard in your basement? Do you remember things like the ab circle? Do you remember the ab circle? The bow flex, the toe flex, The Total Gym. How about the Thighmaster? You old enough to remember the Thighmaster? Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze your way to firmer thighs. Well, maybe it was just the exercise method, right? Because we've got Pilates, we've got yoga and Zumba, P90X, Insanity.06:00T25. You ever done this program? I've done Insanity and T25. And let me tell you, that is for the birds. For the birds. And I was like really into it for a while. And my wife was like, are you doing that exercise thing where you dance around the living room like a ninny? I'm like, well, I guess not anymore.06:31Okay, like, you can get the body you've always wanted. Get the body you've always wanted. The problem is you're not going to keep it forever. 1 Corinthians 15 is all about the resurrection. Jesus and ours. The Bible says because Jesus rose from the dead, Listen, I think so many people sitting in churches miss this truth. You, too, are going to rise from the dead in a new body. Now, if I told you, hey, next week, you're going to get a new car. But here's the deal. This car, this is the only car you're allowed to drive for the next 40 years.07:30car it is? Wouldn't you want to know what it's like? You mean I'm stuck with this car for four decades? Yeah. What kind of car is it? Tell me about it. I want to know all about it, right? Right? Well, the Bible says you're going to get a new body that you are going to have for all of eternity. Would you like to know what this body is like?08:00of eternity. So, we've got a lot of information here. Again, in this chapter, Paul packs so much information. And we're going to be going through it very quickly. So, you might want to listen to this again when it's on our website or podcast or whatever. You might want to pass this on to someone else. So, I encourage you to jot some notes down. First question, we're just going to take a step back here and kind of this whole thing. The first question is, what happens to me when I die? What happens to me when I die? And the reason we're starting here is like, look, okay, we got resurrection. Okay, but like, it's obviously not immediate. So, what happens to me when I die? Well, the Bible never talks about limbo or purgatory or soul sleep. The Bible never talks about that stuff. The Bible is very clear. If you're a believer in Christ, when you die, you are immediately in the presence of the Lord, right?09:002 Corinthians 5 verse 8 says we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. Paul says something very similar to this in Philippians 123.09:14He said to depart is to be with Christ.09:20Right? So if you're a believer when you die you are in the presence of the Lord.09:23Your spirit is. And if you have not received Christ you go to a place of torment called Hades, where you are awaiting the final judgment. All right? But the Bible promises that eventually, eventually, everybody, everybody will get a resurrected body. Everybody gets one. Like, well, when do these resurrections take place?09:57Here's the next question on your outline. Understand again, the Bible is crystal clear and consistent. It teaches many times there are two resurrections. Okay, there are two. Acts 24, 15. There will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust. Right? We talked about that before. Daniel 12, 2. Jesus said it in John 5, 28 and 29. There are two resurrections. Okay.10:27First, I want to talk to those who have trusted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, those who are born again. The Bible says you will get your resurrected body at the rapture. Now, we're not going to get too deep into this now because next week the whole passage is about the rapture. But at the rapture, when Jesus returns to remove His people from the earth, believers up to that point, dead or alive, will get a new resurrected body.10:57about that next week. Those are for believers. For those who have rejected God's gift in Jesus Christ. For those who are like, I'm living life on my terms. I don't want Jesus. I don't want anything to do with God. It's truth. Worship, I don't want anything to do with that. There's a resurrection for unbelievers too. Again, timeline in your Bible. There's a seven-year tribulation coming, talked about in the book of Revelation. At the end of that, Jesus comes back, strikes down all who rejected Him, and He sets a thousand year kingdom on the earth. Jesus will reign on the earth for a thousand years. Revelation chapter 20 says, at the end of the thousand years is the second resurrection. Again, you can read that later. Revelation chapter 20. After the thousand year reign, all unbelievers, all unbelievers of all time are called out of Hades. They're called before the great white throne.11:57of Jesus Christ where they will be sentenced to the lake of fire. So, believers will get an eternal body to enjoy in heaven and unbelievers will get an eternal body that will suffer in hell, the lake of fire. Alright? So, the real question of the day that's addressed in this text, and we kind of did an on-ramp here to get to this point, But the question that is addressed today is, what is the resurrection body like? I'm going to be driving it for eternity? What's it like? What's it like? Well, we talked about this before. In the Corinthian church, there were a lot of resurrection deniers. A lot of the Greeks denied that there was such a thing. So, Paul anticipates the mocking questions that come. That's where he picks up in verse He says, but someone will ask, how are the dead raised?13:05With what kind of body do they come?13:08Again, those are mocking questions.13:13Paul's not anticipating as much the sincere can you please give us information as much as the people that are sort of making fun.13:21Like, how in the world are dead people raised?13:25Like, oh, you believe in resurrection?13:27What kind of body do they have? They're kind of making fun. Our day, like Paul's day, I found that some of the greatest theologians and Bible experts are people that have never opened the Bible. Have you noticed that? That was sarcasm. Because Paul gives them a hard rebuke, verse 36. He says, you foolish person.13:56Oh, you think you're so smart with your little questions. Oh, you're really stumped me. He goes, you're foolish. You're not even thinking. Look, I don't think there's anybody here today that's like that, that's like mocking. I don't think so. I'm sure there's somebody that's going to be listening to this online. I don't imagine there's anybody in the room right now that is scornfully asking questions like this.14:26But at the same time, when it comes to the topic, I do think there's a lot of confusion in the church about this whole resurrected body. Because I get asked these questions all the time. Pastor Taylor, you probably do too, right? People ask these questions. Will my new body look like my old body? Because that's important. Because what if I get to heaven and nobody recognizes me? But am I going to be able to recognize other people?14:57How old am I going to look? I mean, what if I live to be like 107? Am I going to look 107 for all of eternity? What about like, unfortunately, an infant who passes away? Is that person going to be an infant for all of eternity? Like, what does it look like? And then what about people that like aren't buried? You know, we're going to be talking about coming up out of the grave. What about people that aren't in the grave? Like, what about people that, I don't know, they fell overboard on a cruise and were eaten by a shark and they weren't buried.15:30What about those people?15:33Or what about people that maybe were incinerated in a fire and...15:41Well, Paul does such an amazing job in such a few words describing the difference between this vehicle we're driving today and the vehicle that we'll be driving someday.15:56So number one, what's the resurrection body like? What is the resurrection body like? Number one, he says your body now is like a seed and your resurrected body is like a plant. All right, look at verse 36. He says, What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. What you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel perhaps of wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as He has chosen.16:51its own body.16:57Your body now is like a seed.16:58Your resurrected body is like a plant.17:00Now if you have a seed in your hand, like, you know, it is the season, right?17:04I think of a watermelon seed.17:05Just imagine a watermelon seed.17:09You know, we've all seen those.17:10We've all spit those out.17:11Those little hard, brown, flat seeds, right?17:20When you put that in the ground, when you bury a watermelon seed, it rises up as something completely different, doesn't it? That's what Paul's talking about here. I mean, I'm not a farmer. You might want to fact check with Jesse on this. I'm not a farmer. I'm barely a gardener, as they say in Minnesota. I'm not. So, correct me if I'm wrong, but when you are going to plant something, you don't take a whole plant and bury it in the ground to get another whole plant.17:54The seed goes in the ground and dies and comes up as something different.18:01The seed that you bury is different than the plant that comes.18:08And we all get that, right?18:09You don't plant a watermelon seed, a little brown, flat, hard seed, and outgrows a big, a flat brown seed. That's just like it, only bigger. That's not how it works. It's completely different. But not completely because there's, in a sense, there's continuity between the seed and the plant, right? There's continuity. You know what I mean by that? I mean, if you plant a watermelon seed, you're not going to grow an apple tree.18:45Like, why not? Because God determined. Watermelon seeds only make watermelons. If you want an apple tree, you need to plant an apple seed, right? God determines. God has chosen the kind of body that everything gets. And you know what He has chosen for you? A glorified body. So that's Paul's first analogy here. He says, just look at your body.19:15And really all this is, is it's a seed that's going to be planted. And something that comes out is going to be different. You're like, how different? Well, number two, your resurrected body will be similar but different but better. Similar but different but better.19:44Let's pick up in verse 39. He says, For not all flesh is the same. There is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, the stars. For star differs from star in glory. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. Another illustration. Paul's like, look at the animal kingdom. Look at the animal kingdom. We have humans and animals and birds and fish, right? You've been to the zoo.20:44Notice how all animals have flesh, right? All animals have flesh. So that's like the same, right? But it's really not the same because the flesh of a fish is different from like the flesh of a groundhog or an eagle or a human. Why is that?21:16It's all perfectly suited for their respective environments. That's why. Why does a fish have the flesh that it has? For the water. That flesh wouldn't do any good on a bird. A bird has the flesh that it has so it can do the things that the birds do. It's all similar but it's different.21:45suited for the environment, right? Then he talks, he's like, let's get off the earth for a second. Let's talk about the sun, moon, and stars. All heavenly bodies, right? Now from earth, when we look up at the sky, what do we see? All these round, bright things. Some are bigger, some are brighter, but the sky is full of them. But did you know, like, even with the stars, each one is completely unique.22:14There aren't even two stars in the universe that are exactly the same. He says they're all different, but every one of these things in the sky does the thing that it's supposed to do, right? The sun to give us light and warmth, the moon for the tides, and the stars for whatever purpose God has for the stars. Same but different.22:45Perfectly suited for their purpose. And then Paul hits us in verse 42. He says, so it is with your glorified, resurrected body. How does it compare to this one that we have here? It's going to be the same, but it's going to be different. And it's going to be way better. Because this body, was made for the earth. But the new body is going to be made for heaven. Similar, but different, but better. Number three, your resurrected body will never have earthly weaknesses. Earthly weaknesses. Pick up in verse 42. He says, what is sown is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory.23:44It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. It is sown a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Stop there. Your resurrected body will never have earthly weaknesses. Do you notice over and over and over again? Sown, sown, sown, sown. He's keeping this seed metaphor going because it's so appropriate.24:15You go in the ground. Your body is a seed. You go in the ground as one thing. And you come up out of the ground as something different. Something better. Something glorious. And here he talks about the earthly weaknesses that we will not have. So he gives four contrasts here. Again, it's all straight from the text. Your Bible says the same thing.24:44These are four contrasts between this body, this vehicle we're driving now, and the resurrected body that we're going to get someday. Letter A, perishable versus imperishable. Perishable versus imperishable. On your outline beside that, write the word decay. That's what he's talking about. Perishable. This body decays. This body is wearing out.25:16Dying you will die. Look, all of us, we're wearing out, we're decaying. I mean, you should have seen me when I was 20. I was well-built, good-looking, and you're like, what happened? Dying you will die. I'm decaying, and so are you. Versus imperishable.25:44The resurrected body, imperishable. You know what that means? It means all physical and mental health issues that we experience living in a fallen body are gone forever. That's what that means. No sickness. Your resurrected body will have no sickness, no cancer, no cerebral palsy, no multiple sclerosis, no muscular dystrophy, no diabetes, no asthma, no Alzheimer's.26:15No osteoporosis.26:18No arthritis.26:21No organ failure.26:22Nothing.26:24Your body will be imperishable.26:26It will not.26:27Wasn't it about this time in the first service?26:29People were just like coughing like crazy.26:32So we took a coughing break in the first service.26:36So go ahead.26:36If you get a cough, let her out.26:38Go ahead.26:43Go ahead.26:45I mean, get it out of your system. Because here's the thing, coughing is something you only enjoy on earth. Because at the resurrection, you're not going to cough. So live it up. There's no sickness. Your body is imperishable. No sickness. No pain. No pain. Imagine that. No pain. Can you think, like, what's the worst pain?27:14that you've ever been in in your life. I just want you to think about that for a second. What is the worst pain that you've ever experienced in your life? Men, have you ever had a cold? Because if you have, you know The peak of human suffering.27:51But pain's going to be a memory someday.27:54Think about that.27:54In eternity future, in our resurrected bodies, we'll be like, Taylor, bro, do you remember back when we had pain?28:02He's like, I barely remember pain.28:04What was that?28:07It's going to be history.28:09You'll never wear out.28:10You'll never grow old.28:11You'll never be sick.28:12Death itself is going to be history. Perishable versus imperishable. Letter B, dishonor versus glory. Dishonor versus glory. On your outline beside this, write sin. This is in regards to sin. The fall of man has saturated this earth with the corruption of sin. And our current bodies are are thoroughly affected by sin. Thoroughly. What did Paul say in Romans 7? I know that no good thing dwells in me, that is my flesh. That's what he's talking about. He says this, here, my spirit is renewed. I'm born again. God's Holy Spirit lives in here. But God's Holy Spirit lives in a body that still hungers for sin.29:13Hungers for rebellion against God. Everything we, listen, everything we do is tainted with some degree of corruption. You know, if we're being honest, even when I set out to do something good, There's always a little something in there that's just kind of selfish, like this is the right thing to do, this is a righteous thing, but there's something in me some shade of a is there a selfish motive here more spotlight for me little glory for me here selfish motive here you're that way too we all are There's nothing that we can do that is 100% free from the taint of sin. And that's what he's talking about here. The day's going to come when we're in this body, we have this new body, and there won't be any bent towards sin in this glorified body.30:43Weakness versus power. Beside that, just write the word strength. This speaks to strength. We are so weak. We are so weak. You're like, speak for yourself. I'm a strapping young lad. I'm not weak. Yes, you are. We're all weak.31:11We are all so weak. Not convinced? Strapping young lad? How is it that a virus that's so small that we can't even see it, it can knock you down for days? You think about that next time you're feeling strong. We're weak. And you know, you don't even need to be, you don't even need to be sick.31:41to feel worn out.31:46I can keep strange hours and I've had people ask me, like, do you ever, they're like, don't you ever get tired?31:53I'm like, do I get tired?31:56No, I do not get tired.32:01I stay tired.32:03You see, for me to say I get tired would imply that I'm starting from a platform of being well-rested and strong. I've never started from that platform. I just stay in this place of tired. I'm not proud of it, but there's many days that when I wake up, one of my first thoughts is, am I going to have an opportunity for a nap today? Anybody else? Okay, thank you. Just the people on this tired side.32:40of the room. These people don't get tired over here. Did you notice that? It's all over here.32:51Listen, your new body, he says, right, is powerful. No weakness, no weariness.33:00And letter D, natural versus spiritual. Natural versus spiritual.33:06We talked about this before. This is speaking to environmental suitability.33:11Your new body is going to be perfect for the environment that it is going to be in. Your new body will be visible. Yes. It'll be tangible. Yes. But it's not going to be subject to the laws of nature as we know it now. Like, what do I mean? Well, I mean, this body we have now, God designed, perfectly for the earth environment.33:47But, you could say we're a little restricted.33:50We're sort of hemmed in as a part of creation.33:56We're restricted in these bodies by pesky little things like gravity and time and air.34:07Those things kind of limit us in a sense. But our new bodies, our resurrected bodies are going to rise above the current laws of nature and time and space. And you're thinking right now, like what? And that's not the right question to ask. The right question isn't like what? The right question is like who? And that leads us to the last one, number four.34:38This to me is one of the most mind-blowing things in Scripture, by the way. He says, your resurrected body is just like Jesus' glorified body. Your resurrected body is just like Jesus' glorified body. See, Paul had this, he was using these metaphors with the seeds and the plants and the planets and the animals.35:06He's moving from metaphorical to literal now. He's going to be talking about our actual body. Look at verse 45. He says, thus, it is written, the first man Adam became a living being. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural, and then the spiritual.35:35The first man was from the earth, a man of dust. The second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust. And as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, We shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. Right now, Paul says, right now, we bear the image of the man of dust. That's Adam. That's us. We are people of dust. That's... I don't mean this as an insult. I just mean this as literal truth. Your body right now consists of a handful, of dust and a lot of water. That's all any of us are consisting of. I'm sure you're beautiful on the inside, but I just mean your physical body, your dust and water. That's what he's talking about. We bear the image of the man of dust. He says someday you will bear the image of the man of heaven. That's Jesus Christ. Here's what he's saying very clearly.37:05is just like Adam's. Our glorified body will be just like the resurrected body of Jesus Christ. The Bible is so clear about this over and over. Like here's another reference to that, Philippians chapter 3, verse 21. He says, Jesus, look at this, will transform our lowly body to be like His, Glorious Body.37:38And I just want to encourage you to go back in your Bibles this week.37:43Read Luke 24. Read John chapter 20. Read Acts chapter 1.37:47If you want to know like kind of what is our glorified body going to be able to do, look at the things that Jesus did in His glorified body.38:01Like for example, in Jesus' glorified body, He was recognized by sight and by voice and by His wounds.38:11And Jesus in His glorified body ate.38:16Will we eat in heaven?38:17Yeah, we will actually.38:19Not because we have to, but because we'll enjoy it.38:26That is according to Revelation 22 too.38:30But you notice, Jesus in His resurrected body wasn't bound by the laws of nature. He did things like disappear. He did things like move from place to place suddenly. The Bible says Jesus could walk right through the wall. Did you ever go through a wall? I have, but not like Jesus. But someday, we'll be able to just, transcend these kinds of rules that we know now, right? Oh, you know the big one. Acts chapter 1. What did Jesus do in His glorified body? He ascended. He ascended. And you're like, well, are you saying, Pastor Jeff, that you really believe that we're going to be able to fly? Yeah. That wasn't my idea. The Bible is very clear.39:29that our body is going to be just like the glorified body of Jesus himself. So your resurrected body will be just like his. Our worship team would make their way back to the platform here. You know, the Bible is clear, my friends, that you are You are. Everyone is. There is no question as to whether or not you will get an eternal, indestructible body. Excuse me, you will get one. The Bible is clear about that. There's only one real question. With your eternal, indestructible body, will you be living forever?40:28in heaven? Or will you be dying forever in hell? Because you see, for those who have received Christ, yes, we will have this body to be in the presence of the Lord, to fellowship with each other, and most importantly, to worship God eternally in a body that doesn't get tired? That's going to be so awesome. But on the other hand, If you have not received the gift of grace that God has given us in Jesus Christ, you're going to get an eternal body. But it's going to be to suffer forever. You know, hell is described as fire. And I can't imagine anything more horrific than being on fire in a body that can't be consumed. Eternally suffering. And if you haven't received God's gift of eternal life in Christ, I don't know what you're waiting for. Today can be the day. And I want you to hear me. God wants you.41:58saved. God wants you with Him for eternity.42:08How do I know that?42:10Because the Bible says things like, it is God's will that none should perish, but that all should come to repentance.42:15That's what God wants.42:17The Bible says things like, God does not delight in the death of the wicked.42:22God wants you in eternity with Him.42:25God wants you as His adopted child.42:28Do you know how I know? Because of what God did to make that possible. That He sent His Son to die on the cross on your behalf. To take the penalty for all of the sins that you committed and that I committed. God spared not His Son but delivered Him up for us all. How do I know God wants you in heaven with Him for eternity? Because of what He spent to make that happen.42:59I'd like you to bow your heads please. And if you haven't made that decision, if you haven't received the gift, let today be the day. Let today be the day that you come to grips with the fact of who you are and who God is, what you've done and what God has done.43:28And pray something like this. Pray, God, I know that I have lived my life apart from you and I have only ever wanted my way.43:41God, you have sent your son to buy me back.43:45To save me from the destructive path of my own self-centered will.43:53To save me from eternally being separated from you.43:57You did that through the death and the resurrection of Your Son. If you pray something like that today, or if you want to stick around and pray with one of our pastors or elders, let today be the day that we're done playing games, we're done pretending, we're done being church attenders, warming a seat, going through the motions. We want to be sincere. We sincerely believe.44:28We sincerely belong to Jesus Christ. Father, I pray, I pray, Father, that you would not give a minute's rest to anyone here who doesn't know you. That today would be the day that through the power of your Spirit, through the wisdom and encouragement and conviction that comes from your Word, today would be the day, Father.44:59They go to bed tonight unable to sleep. Until they do business with you. But for those of us, Father, who do know you, we thank you for these glorious promises. And I suppose that if I was going to try to make up what I thought could be the best promise ever, it would be nothing compared to how awesome your actual promises really are. Anything that I can imagine being great about eternity or heaven or a new body, it would pale in comparison to the reality of what you have actually promised. Father, we thank you. Let this be an encouragement for us to plod along for the next 15 minutes of life on earth in anticipation of our own resurrection. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Small Group DiscussionRead 1 Corinthians 15:35-49What was your big take-away from this passage / message?Describe the 4 contrasts between your earthly body and your resurrected body from 1 Cor 15:42-44.What was Jesus' glorified body like that you are excited to think about your glorified body being like?Read 1 John 3:2-3. How does the knowledge of our future resurrected bodies motivate us to purify ourselves today?BreakoutPray for one another.

Essa semana Jurandir Filho, Felipe Mesquita, João Pimenta, Evandro de Freitas e Bruno Carvalho colocam frente a frente duas das maiores febres dos anos 90 e 2000: Pokémon x Digimon! De um lado, os monstrinhos de bolso que conquistaram o mundo com suas aventuras, batalhas e o sonho de se tornar um Mestre Pokémon. Do outro, criaturas digitais que evoluíam de formas inesperadas e viviam aventuras em um universo completamente diferente. Pikachu ou Agumon? Ash ou Tai? Pokébola ou Digivice? Relembramos os animes, os jogos, os personagens mais marcantes e todas aquelas discussões que dividiram uma geração inteira.Essa é mais uma edição da série Versus!⭐ Curtiu? Assine e tenha acesso a + de 400 episódios exclusivos. Entre agora em ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠99vidas.com.br/bonus⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Mais 99Vidas:➡️ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Site⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |

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Don’t miss the marketplace revolution! Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this episode of the Ultimate Partner Podcast, Vince Menzione sits down with AWS Marketplace leaders George Maroulakos and Arif Razvi to uncover the rapidly shifting ecosystem of technology procurement and partner transformation. They dive deep into the evolution of buyer experiences, the critical necessity of executive alignment, and how agentic AI is redefining software discovery and consumption. If you want to accelerate deal velocity and ensure your business isn’t left behind, this conversation outlines exactly why integrating the AWS Marketplace into your core co-sell motion is no longer optional. https://youtu.be/Avp0sIyxRU8 Key Takeaways Embracing the AWS Marketplace should be viewed as a natural extension of your co-sell motion, not an interrupt-driven exception. Successfully leveraging the marketplace requires top-down executive sponsorship to overcome internal friction across legal, finance, and revenue operations. Partners must prepare for global expansion by ensuring local entities and currencies are wired up to meet buyers where they are. Agentic AI and natural language queries are leveling the playing field for software discovery, moving beyond traditional SEO-driven presence. SaaS pricing models are shifting toward consumption and outcome-based structures, demanding highly detailed product metadata. The speed of deal closure is drastically increased when partners are prepared to transact seamlessly through the marketplace. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags AWS Marketplace, partner transformation, buyer experiences, hyperscalers, co-sell motion, revenue operations, strategic alignment, agentic AI solutions, outcome-based pricing, metadata optimization, software discovery, private offers, global expansion, deal velocity, cloud centers of excellence. Transcript Arif Razvi and George Maroulakos Audio Episode [00:00:00] George Maroulakos: From my perspective, think about marketplace as a why not as opposed to a why. [00:00:06] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:17] Arif Razvi: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host. [00:00:22] Arif Razvi: And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, [00:00:26] Vince Menzione: partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:39] Arif Razvi: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. [00:00:44] Arif Razvi: Let’s start. [00:00:48] Vince Menzione: I’m excited to, because we were talking about some of this earlier with Matt, but I thought this would be a great conversation. I’m gonna ask each of you to introduce yourselves, George and Arif, and your roles. ’cause you have two very unique roles. Uh. Contrasting roles, I would call it, within the AWS Marketplace Organization. [00:01:06] George Maroulakos: Yep. Happy to do so. So I think Vince just didn’t wanna say my last name, so that’s why I’m gonna introduce myself. Mayor. Very, very good. So Mayor Laki, George Meki, pleasure to meet. Hey, I can say that, uh, all of those that I haven’t met before, lots of familiar faces as well here. Uh, so it’s really great to see. [00:01:21] George Maroulakos: Uh, I’m part of the AWS Marketplace team and our center of excellence. That focuses on buyer experiences. So like why is a buyer guy here in this partner session? And I think, you know, I’m gonna help to try to bring some perspective around what our buyers see as the value for using marketplace and. [00:01:40] George Maroulakos: Working with all of these great partners that are here in the room and, uh, you know, the experiences that we see in helping to drive, you know, the blood to all organs. I’m using that a lot, Alison, to copyright it. It’s, it was really good. I love that, that analogy. But, um, for, but for both our partners as well as for our customers. [00:01:59] Vince Menzione: That’s awesome. [00:01:59] Arif Razvi: Hey everybody. I’m Arif Roski. I’m based here in New York City, although I’m a Celtics fan. Um, uh, go, go. I, I still supported the Knicks through the championship and I’m very happy for them. So excited to be here. Excited to be among, uh, other channel and alliance leaders. I’ve spent my entire 25 plus career in channels and alliances. [00:02:20] Arif Razvi: The last seven years, uh, on AWS marketplace where I lead, uh, a couple of functions. One is I support all of Matt Ian’s feature launches. So from a go-to market perspective, uh, I support his launches. I also focus on international expansion of marketplace. So, uh, Matt alluded to this earlier. I’ll mention some, I’ll talk about some stuff in a little bit. [00:02:39] Arif Razvi: And then, uh, we do some deep engagements with some of our most strategic partners to help them accelerate and unblock their marketplace business. By embedding a subject matter expert from my team into their organization to really help drive, uh, adoption of marketplace. [00:02:55] Vince Menzione: So important. Both of your roles. [00:02:56] Vince Menzione: By the way, this is standout roles. I, you know, I. I don’t want to get into trouble here. I talk about other hyperscalers, but I said this with Matt on stage earlier. You guys have been at the forefront of driving marketplace in such a strong way, having somebody who’s customer focused, right? And that lens is so important. [00:03:15] Vince Menzione: I don’t feel, I feel like that’s missed so many times. And then you also have. You know, quite a bit of an important role here in terms of what you’re doing in embedding resources. ’cause a lot of times people get lost in the process and it seems to be the, the common currents. So, um, really great both sides of the same equation here, right? [00:03:33] Vince Menzione: Buyer led, partner built, uh, let’s start George here. Um. Let’s talk about how buying has changed. Right. We go back to the early days of marketplace. It felt like it was a listing at first and it started to become important. Organizations like Work Span started to come to fruition and started to drive, at least in my part of the world. [00:03:53] Vince Menzione: And then we started talking a lot more about Marketplace. And of course the, the cus customer commits really started driving things in a different direction. You’ve got the customer, so talk about what your journey’s been like. [00:04:05] George Maroulakos: So I’ve been with Marketplace nine and a half years, which is pretty long time since the beginning of it, and watching the evolution of, of where things have come and where they started. [00:04:15] George Maroulakos: And I remember, uh, I was covering the, the northeast region when I very first started and working with, uh, you know, different enterprise accounts and financial services and, and, and healthcare and life sciences, and talking about this. This creation that occurred called, called AWS Marketplace, and even folks within AWS didn’t really know what that meant or how to talk about it or sell it. [00:04:38] George Maroulakos: So there was this creation of a infield based business development function to help supplement the account teams and the value and the importance of marketplace as a part of a customer’s AWS journey. And when I first started the, the, the highest, uh, or most frequently subscribed to products that existed were. [00:04:57] George Maroulakos: Uh, Amazon machine images a amis and it’s very specifically open source amis. So think of Bantu or Cintas as the predominant things that were being subscribed out of marketplace. So, um, by definition, not really revenue generating. You’re, these are not the a hundred million dollar transactions or the billion dollar club that we talk about today. [00:05:19] George Maroulakos: It was very much helping. The builders go again, go back 10 years, uh, who are just getting started with the cloud and how could they find partner solutions that they trusted or that they felt were secure and helping them to start to build out and migrate their workloads into, into AWS. Um, so I existed before the. [00:05:39] George Maroulakos: Very first private offer was transacted. Nice. Um, there’s actually a, a gentleman towards the back, uh, who helped with one of our very first private offers. I see you back there, Joe. Nice, nice. Um, so we, we worked on, uh, uh, uh, really big transaction with, uh, with, at the time AppDynamics, uh, and, and helping to get. [00:05:58] George Maroulakos: You know, a customer really up and running with their implementation that, so watching over the 10 years from, you know, the builder mentality of, of getting started with the cloud to really embracing all kinds of partner based, um, solutions that go along with AWS. It’s really been, uh, you know, a, a rocket ship you referenced earlier, moving to the top right quadrant, if we want to use the, the Gartner analogy, and I think we’re at another. [00:06:24] George Maroulakos: Inflection point because with what’s going on with Ag agentic solutions, the way that our customers are finding and discovering different partner solutions is better than ever I would think. And I think it gives much more of a equal opportunity in playing field for all partners of all shapes and sizes because you’re not driving your presence based on SEO or whether or not you have the best Google search results. [00:06:53] George Maroulakos: With AgTech and how you differentiate your solutions, you’re gonna be able to really get yourself in front of more customers more quickly. And as Matt talked about earlier, the, the, the really big penetration that we’ve seen thus far is real, is on the discovery piece, the, the research area, the pre-purchase activity, so validate what’s available. [00:07:13] George Maroulakos: So I think marketplace has really evolved over the 10 year, nine and a half years-ish that I’ve been there. And I think it’s gonna continue to change here in the coming months ahead. Yeah. [00:07:23] Vince Menzione: Any predictions? [00:07:25] George Maroulakos: Yeah, I, I think, you know, the, I, the, the importance of marketplaces is only going to continue to grow. [00:07:32] George Maroulakos: Uh, and I think we’re going to see, you know, even more innovation and expectation from our customers on being able to find the right solutions and being able to procure and deploy them as quickly as possible. [00:07:44] Vince Menzione: Nice. Arif, from your side. Partner transformation. So, you know, embedding resources with the partners. [00:07:51] Vince Menzione: Right. So you basically help kickstart a lot of the, the efforts, right? George? George is looking at it from the customer side, and then you’re kick-starting it on the partner side. [00:08:00] Arif Razvi: Yeah. Either kickstarting it, uh, on the initial stages with a strategic partner. Yeah. Or accelerating their adoption of something that’s already there. [00:08:07] Arif Razvi: Right. So what we’re seeing, what I’m seeing a lot of more recently is partners who say, I didn’t know you had capabilities for us to sell into Korea or Japan, or we just, we just launched India. Yep. Matt alluded to this easier, uh, earlier that we’re making it easier for partners to expand globally. And now partners are realizing, wait a minute, I can match my. [00:08:26] Arif Razvi: Uh, my business processes on marketplace, so revenue recognition, tax collection, locally, local invoices, and now they’re starting to set up multiple entities outside the US to meet those buyers, uh, where they are. [00:08:41] Vince Menzione: Nice. And you mentioned having these resources. How do you determine who gets resources and who? [00:08:47] Arif Razvi: Well, there’s, uh, staging and there’s, uh, there’s qualification mechanisms we use. We work with the PDMs for the partners. So any PDM, uh, any pd DM managed partner can be nominated for, uh, what, what we call a compensation. [00:08:59] Vince Menzione: So you’re overlaying that organization sense. [00:09:00] Arif Razvi: We’re overlaying the PDs. We’re not replacing, we’re only doing time bound sprints to unlock very specific activities. [00:09:05] Arif Razvi: Very [00:09:06] Vince Menzione: cool. So it’s not a poll. Yeah. Cool. You’re not, you’re not there forever. [00:09:08] Arif Razvi: No. [00:09:08] Vince Menzione: You’re there to get the job done. We [00:09:09] Arif Razvi: did that before. Uh, yeah, we’re, we’re doing short sprints now. [00:09:12] Vince Menzione: Yep. Let’s talk about how the buyers are using marketplace. You’ve done some really in, we talked about this earlier with Matt, but we’ve talked about some of the innovative things you’ve done. [00:09:21] Vince Menzione: You know, being, being able to embed into a website and in the storefronts. All these things seem to be unique to AWS. Talk to us about how the buyers are using the marketplace today. And [00:09:31] George Maroulakos: yeah, I think, you know, Matt talked about earlier the. Pre the, the preconception around why customers use marketplaces for the financial incentives, the, the financial benefits that go along with it, whether it’s direct incentives that are associated with the individual product that’s out there, or the Association of Marketplace to our private pricing agreements and the ability for. [00:09:55] George Maroulakos: Transactions that occur in marketplace to count towards those commits. Um, I’m gonna amplify a, a particular point that Matt made, uh, in his talk that, you know, we have many more customers who do not have PPAs with AWS than those that do. And the volume of transactions that take place in marketplace. [00:10:11] George Maroulakos: Dwarf, uh, in volume from those that, uh, are occur from our PPA customers. So yes, there are very large transactions that occur and there is Ben financial benefit that goes along with it. But there’s many other value points that our customers find from discovery. From ease of use, from consolidated billing, from post-purchase, um, you know, management and governance that goes along with it, and reconciliation that’s available, that’s, that exists. [00:10:36] George Maroulakos: Um, you mentioned storefronts. I’m really excited. That was one of the most exciting launches. That’s why I reminded him when he was talking about it, uh, around, you know, what that means. And it’s both a presence for, um, our partners and being able to create their own storefronts on behalf of, of customers or within their own property, but also for our buyers directly too. [00:10:54] George Maroulakos: Take that next generation of something that was previously, you know, our private marketplace and curate a catalog that is very specific and intentional for the things that they’re interested to innovate with and the partners that they’re interested in using. And so I think meeting our customers where they’re at. [00:11:10] George Maroulakos: And being, you know, marketplace anywhere and everywhere is I think really important for our customers. And then the other aspect, you know, in terms of how our customers use marketplace, there’s more than one persona at our customer that we need to be, be, be aligning with. Right. Interesting. We typically talk about procurement and the value points that procurement find in marketplace, but just as important as, as the technologists. [00:11:32] George Maroulakos: It’s the Cloud centers of Excellence. It’s the innovators who are looking for those business applications or those infrastructure solutions that exist and making sure that we have the right things from the right partners available to them. So we see value all over the place with our customers and how they inter interface with [00:11:47] Vince Menzione: more. [00:11:47] Vince Menzione: You brought up something really interesting, insightful, is the fact that all the different personas in the organization that are touching the marketplace, right? [00:11:54] George Maroulakos: And it’s at different points of the journey, right? Yeah. So while there may be early discovery and research and experimentation going on from, you know, the technologists or, or, or the, or the, the, the business application owners, um, as it progresses through the, the, the. [00:12:09] George Maroulakos: The opportunity lifecycle procurement and sourcing and legal, and the shared services then become a more important part of, of making sure that we get those opportunities closed and launched. [00:12:18] Vince Menzione: Yeah, and that was one of the things we were talking about earlier is the fact that how, how, uh, it, it, the work arduous it could be. [00:12:25] Vince Menzione: To go through that whole process at a customer side. Right? ’cause they have to. [00:12:29] George Maroulakos: It is, and and you know, I think when Cloud first got started, it was quite scary for procurement, right? It became another version of Shadow it. And we were seeing things that were getting purchased on P cards because they could quickly stand up infrastructure versus waiting for the IT team to do it. [00:12:44] George Maroulakos: And so now you introduce all of these other things that. Procurement kept near and dear to their heart, and here comes another wave of, is this truly positive disruption? Is it going to affect what’s, what I’m doing affect really my goals and objectives of supporting the company. And as you, you know, you continue to express the value of marketplace, they start to see, hey, this is actually very complimentary and helped me can get better control and governance in a way that I. [00:13:11] George Maroulakos: Perhaps didn’t have before with what was going on inside the cloud. [00:13:15] Vince Menzione: So this is a question for both of you actually, but I was thinking about these partners in the room and what did they get wrong? Like what are they doing? Like what are the things we always talk about, things that they’re doing right? [00:13:26] Vince Menzione: We’re having the happy talk about all the great success that’s been going on, but what is your advice to partners that maybe are not getting it right? Like what, what, what are the things you see that. The easy stumbling blocks that could be fixed. [00:13:38] Arif Razvi: Yeah. Well, probably the easiest is, uh, waiting to talk about marketplace at the last minute and not making it part of the full commercial journey [00:13:45] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:13:45] Arif Razvi: That the sellers will go through. Right. So, um, but that includes being able to have those internal conversations from the executive level, getting that executive sponsorship from marketplace upfront. That filters down through the rest of the organization. So you’ve gotta get rev ops teams, finance, legal, you know, the marketplace terms, the, the standard, uh, contract that goes into your listing has to be approved by legal. [00:14:08] Arif Razvi: Uh, and then you get down to the sales teams, making sure that you’re not penalizing sales teams for doing transactions on marketplace, which will create friction, then meeting buyers where they are, right? So local entities, local currency, um, having all that wired up. Uh, I met with a, a partner yesterday at Summit who is literally wiring up 10 new regions, 10 new entities in 10 new locations on marketplace in advance of what they know is a pipeline that’s going to be building into those regions. [00:14:37] Arif Razvi: So they’re getting ready and not waiting for the last minute for marketplace. [00:14:40] Vince Menzione: I love it. And the internal, go ahead. [00:14:43] George Maroulakos: Yeah, I, I echo definitely what Arif was saying and I think the, the other aspect of that is that our customers shouldn’t feel like it’s more painful. To use marketplace versus they would any other way. [00:14:54] George Maroulakos: And so whether that shows up in pricing, it shows up in awareness of what marketplace is and isn’t, or what it can or cannot do. Um, whether it’s introducing it naturally or it’s this, oh, by the way, on the end, like the, the more. Integrated marketplace is as a part of your co-sell motion, whether you’re doing it directly on your own or through a reseller or with AWS or all of the above. [00:15:17] George Maroulakos: Um, it’s, it should be a natural extension and a value point that you’re bringing to your respective customers, not some. Interrupt driven or, or exception based activity that goes along with selling your, your, your, your solution. [00:15:31] Vince Menzione: Why do you think customer, some customers or some partners are held back or what, what, what is, is it a mindset? [00:15:38] Vince Menzione: I mean, I talk about the principles, you know that, but like, is it mindset? What is it? Is it, [00:15:42] Arif Razvi: it’s, it’s internal. Friction. Yeah. A a a lot of what I see, especially in these, in, in embedded engagements is the amount of, you know, I have a lot of empathy for this room, right? Because you are the ones that have to go internally and navigate all of these stakeholders to be able to convince them that marketplace is the route to market. [00:16:01] Arif Razvi: It’s the preferred route to market, and it’s the way that a AWS wants to co-sell. With its partners. And that’s a hard thing to do if you don’t speak the same language that the tax legal, rev ops, finance, accounting, because everything changes. When you start doing transactions on marketplace, your revenue is booked differently, right? [00:16:20] Arif Razvi: It’s booked as a w from AWS and not from the, you know, from the, so things change and having that conversation is often challenging. Uh, we are working on some tools that will help make that conversation easier. Um, and we’ve already written blogs, and again, there are mechanisms that your partner managers have internally that they can request support and guidance. [00:16:43] Arif Razvi: Uh, and we’re happy to provide that. [00:16:45] Vince Menzione: What needs to change so that marketplace becomes a true go to market engine. [00:16:49] Arif Razvi: Top down, top down, top down where, where I’ve seen the most success. From a partner is where they’ve gotten strategic alignment at the executive level. That marketplace is the way we are going to, uh, sell globally. [00:17:02] Arif Razvi: Right? Then that starts to filter down, as I mentioned earlier, into the different teams and yes, it is a journey and you may start with the US or if you’re EMEA based. Partner, you may start with just amea, but eventually you will start to expand your, you’ll want to expand your business. Um, and marketplace is a great place to do that because we have all of those mechanisms globally to help you scale without adding incremental resources to handle the tax or the compliance or the invoicing and collection and all that stuff. [00:17:30] George Maroulakos: Yeah. I’ll add to that because I’m gonna steal a second thing you said, Allison, about centering around a customer. I, I loved a lot of Allison. Come on now. I’ll be your hype guy. I absolutely, but, but, but the but demand will drive supply. And I think to what you were talking about, Arif, when are customers, when. [00:17:46] George Maroulakos: Our customers come to you about wanting to use marketplace. Yeah. How are you ready to adapt to that? How are you ready to respond to it? And if it becomes a disjointed, not centered around a customer, bespoke based, independently based interaction with the customer, everybody loses. Versus if you’re ready to embrace what that means and how to make that as good of an experience, if not better, versus how they might have traditionally procured your solution and deployed it. [00:18:13] George Maroulakos: Um, now we have a much better together story. So I think understanding that customers more and more are going to use marketplaces, particularly AWS marketplace, and want to make use of partner solutions that embrace marketplace as a part of their way to procure and deploy. You have a much better chance of being successful with them. [00:18:33] Vince Menzione: You know, it made me think about this. Is there a seminal event? Like I think about, I think back to COVID changing buying behavior, right? I’m, we’ll use AWS, an example, three boxes show up in my house every day, right? That didn’t happen before. We used to go to the store. Is there a seminal event we’re waiting to happen? [00:18:50] Vince Menzione: I, I know that the millennial buyer, we talked about this earlier with Matt, is the new buying persona. Over 50% of buyers are millennial and they’re used to doing comfortable with phones and trust Is all there. Is there something else we’re missing or what do, what do you think’s gonna happen? [00:19:03] George Maroulakos: I really think it’s what in front of us right now. [00:19:05] George Maroulakos: Yeah. Vince, I think what. Agen solutions, what Agen SaaS offers, what the power of information and research that’s now directly available to customers versus maybe indirectly available through consultancies or deeper research. Um, the velocity of what our customers are going to be able to do and with partners that they may not have even heard of right before. [00:19:32] George Maroulakos: You know, they started their journey. I, I think this is a present day. Inflection point. Yeah. Um, going back, you know, over the past several years, the advent of supporting private offers I think was a pretty big milestone for marketplace. It allowed for our partners to be able to. Work through customized terms and conditions and commercials that were important for a particular opportunity in a customer. [00:19:54] George Maroulakos: But today, the here and now I think becomes the next inflection point for the success of marketplace. [00:19:59] Arif Razvi: That would [00:19:59] Vince Menzione: Go ahead. [00:20:00] Arif Razvi: I was just gonna add on top of that, but partners need to be ready for that. Right? And if they’re not ready to accelerate a deal and get it closed in days versus stalling it for weeks to negotiate. [00:20:11] Arif Razvi: Yes. Like they’re not gonna stand. Customers are not gonna stand for that. So partners need to be ready to move quickly. If you think about all the innovations that Matt is delivering for Marketplace and Partner Central. They’re about accelerating co-sell. They’re about accelerating deal velocity. They’re about, we know f from, from the Forrester studies and others that we presented, that we’ve made public that the deal value goes up when you’re dealing with marketplace and co-selling with AWS. [00:20:36] Arif Razvi: So how can we just accelerate that? Yeah. Partners need to be ready for that and move quickly. [00:20:40] Vince Menzione: And you use partners in sort of a, you know, plural sense, but I think about those organizations as so many multifaceted. We talked about finance, we talked about all of different functions in the organization. [00:20:51] Vince Menzione: What are you doing to help that? I mean, we talked about you’re doing a lot of readiness work, but I do feel like there’s a lot of evangelism still to be done internally with those organizations. How do you think about [00:21:02] Arif Razvi: that? Yeah, we, um, obviously events like this are fantastic mechanisms to at least get the conversation started and get your head thinking about what you need to think about. [00:21:10] Arif Razvi: But we have other activities. We have, uh, rev Ops squads, right? So revenue operations teams, and we bring them together, uh, around the world op, uh, ops squad, which is operational teams, so deal desks and others that help them, uh, understand the capabilities that marketplace can bring to accelerate deal velocity. [00:21:28] Arif Razvi: And then we have, like, obviously other events like the, the, uh, marketplace Seller Conference in September where we bring marketplace sellers together and give them, you know. Guidance. And so there are ways to get this information beyond just like getting somebody from my team, of which there are very few as you, you know, as we start to, to consolidate down. [00:21:47] Arif Razvi: But um, but they are available and there’s other mechanisms and we’re happy to share those out. [00:21:50] Vince Menzione: Nice, nice. Well coming here doing this and we’ll make a podcast episode out of this as well. Can you hear. I hear us all, uh, because I do think it’s important to get in front of, especially the Chief Finance Officer and operations and all those different departmental heads who aren’t really embedded into, like, they don’t come to these events. [00:22:07] Arif Razvi: Yeah. And they also don’t log into Partner Central. That’s right. So how do they get this information right? Yeah. So we have to one to one it with them. Yeah. But that doesn’t scale when you think about what’s gonna happen now with this next wave of GSIs and sis and, and others coming onto Marketplace who hadn’t been there. [00:22:22] Arif Razvi: Yes, they’re gonna need the same guidance. Yeah. So we have to start thinking about what we’re building is AI tooling to help with those conversations. [00:22:28] George Maroulakos: Well, and, and you know, if, when I think about it from, from our buyer’s perspective, even just yesterday we held a, a couple of round table discussions with some procurement leaders that were, we’re here for the summit and, you know, we do a lot of enablement and, and awareness. [00:22:42] George Maroulakos: With alliance leaders at our partners, and that’s certainly a, the tip of the spear of getting the conversation started, but it’s not enough. And one of the things that we hear from our customers is. Well, you may have a great partnership with particular partner A, but the individual experience that I had with that sales rep doesn’t match that. [00:23:02] George Maroulakos: And so yeah, the evangelism and the awareness, yes, and the understanding of marketplace has to go beyond just the alliance team. You guys are the amplifier to it. But the folks that not only are in the back office and all the, the, the operational teams, but on the front lines and field sales need to also understand and embrace, not understand all the features and capabilities of marketplace. [00:23:25] George Maroulakos: AWS needs to handle that, but understand how marketplace fits into the co-sell strategy in what’s going on for that particular customer is very, very important to make sure our customers get the right experience. [00:23:37] Vince Menzione: Well, I think Arif, you mentioned this earlier about compensation models. And that’s a, that’s a factor too. [00:23:42] Vince Menzione: ’cause people, people, um, they’re fearful of change. They’re fear, fearful of compensation changing. Especially, especially sellers. I, um, again, that’s a coaching area. [00:23:54] Arif Razvi: Yeah, it’s a coaching area. Um, it, it, it is, um. It’s probably one of the easier ones to solve. Um, and, and, and, you know, we have these conversations with partners about net, uh, cost neutral or uh, seller neutrality and things like that. [00:24:06] Arif Razvi: Once you show them the economics of how AWS can increase their deal value, those economics sort of, they go away. The problems go away, but they, you have to get in front of those. Uh, you know, senior leaders, the CROs and the CFOs, to have that conversation to then go, okay, I get what’s going on here. I get why I’m paying. [00:24:23] Arif Razvi: The listing fee is, is about funding all of these marketing activities that we do for our partners, right? [00:24:29] George Maroulakos: Well, and then you use the word neutrality. The other end of that neutrality problem or, or, or challenge is the pricing that goes along with the opportunities that are made available to customers. [00:24:38] George Maroulakos: And so to one of your earlier questions on points of friction or what, what stops it from taking off further? When, when partners and our customers have a disconnect on. What they’re expecting to pay when they use marketplace, or if there is a unnatural cost that goes along with procuring that solution through marketplace. [00:24:57] George Maroulakos: That also tends to bring a, a pretty bad experience, not only for that opportunity in front of them, but for respective opportunities that may, may be in play thereafter. So thinking about not, you know, having an a, an unnatural experience for our customers relative to pricing as well as compensation and, and everything else is, is also very important. [00:25:17] Vince Menzione: So we’ve got a few minutes left, and we haven’t really touched on ag agentic AI and agen AI solutions. A little bit different than the SaaS solutions per se. How, how are these solutions brought and sold differently than SaaS? [00:25:30] Arif Razvi: Uh, well, as Matt said, the SaaS apocalypse is not real. [00:25:34] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:25:34] Arif Razvi: Um, he doesn’t, I’m glad to hear that, nor nor do I. [00:25:37] Arif Razvi: Um, I, I think what, you know, where, where SaaS has been very user seat based, you’re moving now to a world that’s gonna be more consumption based or outcome-based pricing. And so that’s really changing the dynamic and I think partners need to think about what does an outcome-based, uh, pricing model look for My particular. [00:25:55] Arif Razvi: Um, product, uh, Zendesk is a good example of, Matt published a blog, uh, earlier this week, I think it was, where we, we referenced Zendesk pricing on closed tickets or, or resolutions to tickets, right? For, for outcome-based pricing. So I think we need to think about on the pricing side, how to reprice, how to think about pricing. [00:26:13] Arif Razvi: But on the discovery side, thinking about what your, what your listing looks like, it’s no longer about marketing copy. It’s about, it’s almost, I was talking yesterday about being an API contract. ’cause the agent needs to have all the details that a person doesn’t necessarily need to have in order to make a recommendation that your product is the best fit based on the technology that’s underlying that, where it’s gonna fit in the infrastructure. [00:26:37] Vince Menzione: So three and a half minutes left lightning round. Um, but seriously, what, what if I’m in the room or even any, any partner that’s listening today, what do I need to change in the next 30 days? [00:26:50] George Maroulakos: From my perspective, think about marketplace as a why not as opposed to a why. And if you change your mindset around marketplace can be better together in helping to accelerate and expand your opportunities with our mutual customers. [00:27:03] George Maroulakos: You’ll get a whole lot more value out of it. You’ll get away from the fud in the system or some of the traditional roadblocks that you either have been or could be encountering when you think about marketplace, uh, together with your, with your solution. So think about the why not think about the value that the, the, the total solution can bring to our mutual customers and integrate it much more naturally into your total sales motion. [00:27:26] Vince Menzione: Nice. [00:27:27] Arif Razvi: I would say maybe three things. One, um, don’t just sell globally. Operate locally. Think about how your buyers wanna buy and then meet them there, right? As a partner, even if you’re doing CPPO transactions, um, you know, meet them in the location. Number two, top down, go get that executive alignment so the problems start to disappear, or at least are easier to manage when you’ve got that executive alignment. [00:27:51] Arif Razvi: And the third was, uh, don’t wait till the last minute to introduce marketplace. Work with your sales teams to make sure it’s part of the early conversation versus no procurement leader wants to know at the end of the day, oh wait, it’s coming. I gotta deal with this marketplace thing. They don’t wanna deal with it on the buyer side. [00:28:06] Vince Menzione: No, absolutely. Alright, we’ve got time for like one question in the back. Is that Eric? Yeah, that’s [00:28:12] Guest: me. [00:28:13] Vince Menzione: Hey. [00:28:14] Guest: Hi, Eric Rosenstein, um, with Cornerstone Strategy XAWS. So George, you talked about, uh, tools around that customers can use to research for self discovery. So what guidance, uh, first of all, like what capabilities are these tools gonna bring and what guidance would you give an industry specific ISV? [00:28:36] Guest: So someone that’s focused on law enforcement or private equity. That solution may be Angen solution, or it may be something more SaaS related. What guidance would you give an ISV to think about how to best leverage those tools? Is it metadata? Is it like. The outcome that your solution’s gonna drive, how would you tell ’em to best utilize those coming tools? [00:28:58] George Maroulakos: Yeah, excellent question and, and I think this is gonna, going to continue to emerge in the days, literally in weeks, weeks ahead. But recently, I, I’d say over the last six months, the advent of agent mode I think has been a game changer and the ability for our customers to use marketplace directly to research. [00:29:18] George Maroulakos: Efficiently what’s in our catalog. Prior to that, we had a category based. Old school based, search based category, click through way, which became very buried beyond the first page for any solution that was out there. Now with natural language query and the ability to propose, what am I specifically looking for, it gives partners that were on the first page or the last page in equal opportunity to be surfaced. [00:29:48] George Maroulakos: So then for a partner being able to do many of the things you just enumerated. Better metadata, better keywords, better description and differentiation for what your solution offers allows for the Ag agent search, whether it’s natively within AWS or outside of AWS through Claude Chat, GBT Crock Pick your, your, your agent of choice. [00:30:10] George Maroulakos: To be able to identify and know that your solution’s available. [00:30:13] Arif Razvi: And from a partner side to your question, I would say, uh, rich metadata, uh, both so that agent mode can find it. Yeah. Use cases, problems, it solves, you know, uh, technical specifications, pricing where you can, right. So that agents can really understand the solution, uh, that the buyer is, um, is looking for. [00:30:33] Vince Menzione: GEO is. [00:30:37] Guest: Perspective should be like as detailed as saying, so this agent is gonna act on these various data sources. [00:30:44] Arif Razvi: Yes. [00:30:45] Guest: Bringing it all together to drive that outcome that you want the agent [00:30:48] Arif Razvi: drive, if you can include what it needs to connect to in order to deliver that outcome as part of the listing. [00:30:53] Arif Razvi: Absolutely. ’cause the agent will want to know. For sure. [00:30:57] Guest: Thanks. [00:30:58] Vince Menzione: Alright, we are at time and this was a great session. [00:31:01] Arif Razvi: Thank you Vince. [00:31:01] Vince Menzione: Great to see you, George. George and I grew up, uh, five miles away from each other and went to the same college. I love it. Great to, great to spend some [00:31:09] Arif Razvi: time with you, George. [00:31:11] Vince Menzione: Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated, share it with a partner leader in your network. Subscribe where you listen, and head over to the ultimate partner.com. For show notes related content and the resources for this episode, and if you haven’t already, now’s the time to register for the Ultimate Partner Live Event in Reston, Virginia, October 26th through October 28th. [00:31:38] Vince Menzione: Until next time, keep showing up in the rooms that matter because being in the room changes everything.

Artificial harmony is what happens when teams work alongside each other day in and day out, but never actually talk about what needs to be said. Kiera and Dana walk listeners through why getting to the root of problems in a practice is so critical — from not just a teamwork point of view, but for the business itself — as well as where to start to turn your practice into a place where honesty and trust happens regularly. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and today's a lucky day. I have the one and only Dana on the podcast with me. I love this. Dana, you happen to fit right in my podcasting schedule at the perfect time. So I'm getting more Dana time. You guys are getting more Dana time. Dana, how are you? Welcome to the podcast.   Dana (00:16) excited to be here. I know it's rare. Like it's rare anymore that I get a ton of podcasting time, but especially podcasting time   Kiera (00:22) Okay.   Dana (00:23) with you. So I was super excited when Marisa confirmed it on my schedule. So   Kiera (00:27) I was   too. I was because Marisa has them in like I like to start early and I like to just run. And so Dana tends to have a break between coaching calls that I'm able to like slip a podcast in. So always excited and I agree. Like Dana, we've had a we've had some good ones. And I wanted to get you on the podcast today because I feel like you've been doing some awesome things with teams. I feel like there's been this new wave of Dana going into offices because I think as a consultant, our job is to reinvent ourselves over and over and over.   Like who Dana was when she first started versus who Dana is today. Like that is a complete evolution. Who Kiera was, who offices are, like there's an evolution of that. And I think that this is the even the new evolution of team. I think the teams are shifting. I think that there's a new emergence from like even when I started the company to when you started to when we are here today. and I think you've just been doing some awesome things. So let's dive into like what are some of the fun things that we're doing for teams? What are some of the ways that you've been able to turn teams around and get to maybe like, cause I feel like a lot of people struggle with   artificial harmony is probably the best way to say it where teams are working day in and day out where they're not saying what needs to be said. And then I feel like Dana, when you and I get on calls or we show up in offices, instantly like the floodgates are open and we just get a dumping. And it's like, okay, well, clearly there's a lot you want to say, but how do we get that to be the norm in the practice rather than the abnormal? So Dana, take it away. Like, let's talk about some of the offices you've been working with, how you've been able to like   Crack that nut and get more to the root cause of problems and get teams to really gel and jive with each other better than I think we ever have.   Dana (01:55) Yeah, this is a really exciting topic because I think it comes up in like a variable of different ways in like, okay, people want to have stronger leadership, right? They want more accountability for their team. They want a cohesive team or a culture that people love and are super excited to show up to every day. And it's funny because we might not think that this kind of all ties in together, but I've been talking so much to teams about just.   Saying the things that need to be said, communicating with each other, solving like root problems versus just   like you said, that artificial harmony.   Kiera (02:34) Yeah.   Dana (02:35) and I was just talking to an office actually this morning and and they're kind of creating their quarterly meeting agenda. And they're like, well, what do we do? And you know, we feel like the same people participate and the same issues kind of get brought up. And like we never kind of get beyond like that surface level. And so we kind of talked about how just having open, honest conversation about that and really building an and   Increasing team, I feel like it all kind of very like boils down to like team trust and like communicating and saying all the things that need to be said. And I said, could you have a great like if you don't address this, could you have a decent meeting, right? Where you come up with good goals, you come up with good action items, you walk away feeling pretty good. Yeah. But when you don't have that trust and vulnerability, and when you don't open and have that communication, are your meetings great?   Probably not. Do we solve the things that need to be solved? Probably not. Do we solve them forever, right? And we're all on the same page and we're super committed and then we're able to hold each other accountable? Probably not. And so I've been working a lot with a ton of teams, with leadership teams, even with owners on. We have to be able to say the things that need to be said to be able to truly.   Be committed together and truly set goals that are going to move your practice, move your team in the right direction the most.   Kiera (04:04) Mm-hmm. And Dana, I love that you brought that up because I think, gosh, I'm like gonna like date myself and go back to like when Tiff and I first met. And I grew up in a family where artificial harmony was like status quo. Like I feel like there's a a pendulum and you either are like artificial harmony or you're like kind of like mean spirited and like a little cutthroat. Like kind of is the that pendulum swing.   And I grew up very much artificial harmony, right? Like we had like my siblings, we'd all run to my mom rather than like having a knockout drag out with each other. And as we've evolved when I met Tiff, she was very much an anti like no cure. We're just like gonna go to the root cause of this, we're gonna hash it out. And I it was very foreign and uncomfortable for me. But getting a taste of it, I was like, wow, that was so much more efficient. And that was so much easier. And I feel like I can know what's going on with Tiffanie now.   I feel like I'm not sitting here, and especially with us being in a virtual team, it was my first time running a virtual team. And I was like, whoa, like I really need to know what's going on rather than what I think. Like, there's no vibe check. Like, Dana, you and I don't get a vibe check with each other often. It's like, hello, maybe there's a little like snide slack comment that goes through, and you're like, okay, like let's check it. But that's all you get. You don't really get that vibe check. And once I feel like you you cross the bridge into trust and vulnerability, saying what needs to be said.   You can't go back. Like you are so, I don't think annoy's the right word, but you're just like, wow, there's like such a more efficient way to do this. Even my sisters, I remember a couple summers ago, my little sister, she was like still sitting in artificial harmony. And like went for it. I was like, all right, let's talk about it. I understand I can have a little bit more direct approach. I think I can maybe soften. And my little sister was like, no, like this is good. Like us having a hash, like, what's your perspective? What's my perspective? Like, let's come to that root cause.   You   and I are gonna be so much more bonded together. We'll have so much more trust with each other. I'm gonna know that what you tell me is really truth, rather than sitting here guessing, wondering, wishing, hoping like my mom doesn't need to come in and intervene between us. Like neither of us want that. And I think you can relate that to offices where no one wants the office manager or the doctor to come and intervene. Like Dana and I should be able to talk it out. We don't need Tiffanie to come in and mediate. Sometimes you do, but if you can get that as the status quo of a practice, it is fascinating to see meetings start actually become very enjoyable. People aren't bored in these meetings anymore.   actually say what needs to be said. We like you said, Dana, I feel like it's like it's the good to great. It's the like mediocre to excellent. And I think we've even watched it evolve in our consulting team. Like I was like, all right, we had a moment where I watched our consultants not give feedback that I I thought that they would have given. And it was such an amazing eye opening for me of like, all right, consultant team, like let's talk like how do we get more trust and vulnerability? How do I as a leader make it to where this feels like a safe space for you to say what needs to be said and   We worked on it this quarter and it's actually really fun to see it in our company evolve and in teams have it evolve. So, Dana, how do you like virtually and in person get teams to feel safe to start to change? Because to say what needs to be said, to healthy debate it out, to trust one another that you're not gonna go talk about me to my neighbor. And if I say something that's very off topic, like I always pull the example in an office, I'm like, all right, everybody, we're working Saturdays, and it's like crickets. And I'm like, okay, well, clearly we don't have trust.   'Cause I know none of you want to be working Saturdays. Like, let's have this and this is a good example. But I'm just curious, like, how do you even like broach this? How do you even one, I guess, like let's back it up. How do you know if your team has true trust and vulnerability? And then two, how do you start to bring more of that into the table?   Dana (07:32) Yeah, I think it is just I usually take a gauge of okay.   I'll notice in teams, right? That we'll come up with action plans or that we'll come up and it's like we we lack sort of follow-through, right? And then there's after conversations, or there's like, well, I didn't really do this because I had all these questions, or I didn't. So like that is kind of a sign to me in my team meetings and in my meetings with teams that, like, okay, we're not really saying the things that need to be said, or we're not because we aren't moving forward, right? We aren't implementing, we aren't getting to the point where, yeah, like we had this really great meeting, we came up with these actions.   Items, we're super excited. We went and tackled them, right? So   Kiera (08:12) Mm-hmm.   Dana (08:13) when I have a team that kind of struggles to do those things, or they're constantly like, well, we started and it fell off, or we did like to me, that is a sign of we aren't getting to the bottom of things, we aren't getting people committed, we aren't getting people bought in, so things aren't being said. So just like you said, that crickets where like that work on Saturday.   kind of conversation, then I just start to ask questions. And I think where it gets to kind of be an eye-opening point is so many times people   feel like I had in an in a virtual team meeting, a team member's like, well, you know, I don't say the ideas I have or I don't say the issues because I don't feel like as a team member I have like the authority to, right? So then it's just looking. So then I looked at the doctor and I said, okay, do you want to know the things that are frustrating your team? Do you want to know the things that are stressing them out? Do you want to know where they feel like things are?   in inefficient. And of course the answer was absolutely yes. Like I don't   Kiera (09:10) Uh-huh.   Dana (09:10) want my team members beating their heads against the wall on the same things if we can come to a team meeting and we can solve it together.   And then on the flip side, I've had the conversations of when it comes to like leadership holding back or owners holding back on the things that they want to say. It's truly asking the team like, do you want to know what the expectations of you are? Do you want to know if you're doing something that frustrates an owner or stresses them out? Or do you want to know that you are aligned? And every time, right, everybody is like, yes, yes, I do.   Kiera (09:41) Yeah.   Dana (09:42) Then it is giving them the tools, right, to   Kiera (09:44) Mm-hmm.   Dana (09:45) be able to create that with themselves.   And for them to really realize that it comes from there is a lack of trust or a lack of vulnerability on one side, both sides. And like, is it between leaders and teams? Is it between team members and team members? Is   Kiera (10:02) And you   Dana (10:02) it and it can always be strengthened and it can always be improved? But I think just getting to like, hey, this is an issue and let's talk about it.   Kiera (10:12) Absolutely. And I think Dana, you you brought up a lot of highlights of like they're not following through on their accountability. People are like, I want an accountable team. And if you go to like Patrick Lenciani's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which is where a lot of this is pulled from, like bottom layer of that triangle is trust and vulnerability. Then it's healthy debate, then it's commitment, then it is peer-to-peer accountability, and then it's winning and hitting results. So when I think about that, it's like if people are not being committed, it's because they didn't hash it. So they're like,   I don't want to do that. And what happens is you get the side hallway conversations of like, Dana, I'm not doing that. Are you doing that? Like, there's absolutely no way. We're trying to cut those side hallway conversations. And that's where we tell teams. I tell all teams, I'm like, here's a safe space. Like, you guys get to say whatever you want to say. I don't care what it is. It's always with respect, it's with professionalism, and it's in the best interest of the practice. Not Dana's best interest, not Kiera's best interest. We have different perspectives. Let's bring them to the table. But all of us are here to make Dental A Team or   Whatever your practice's name is, it we're here to make it better. So as long as like those are ground rules. But I tell everyone like you have an open voice, you have an open space. And if you choose not to say it today, well, bummer, you committed to this. So you're gonna commit, you're gonna follow through because that's who we all are and that's how this team operates. But next meeting, when you're like, Dana, I don't wanna do this, we talk about it. And also as coworkers, if we hear someone saying I don't want to do that, you say like, hey, dang it, like I hear you. Next time bring it up because like we all committed.   That's how you're going to fix. And like people have to get on the same page and it gets awkward. But I'm like, if you can get 1% better every meeting, team members get very bought in. Team members then start to realize like, like I tell people, if you're not having a little bit of spicy fireworks in your meetings, you don't have enough trust and vulnerability. There should be some spice. There should be some fireworks. It's not like yelling, it's not like Dana and I are going at it. It's a Dana, like, let's talk Saturdays, right?   Dana's   like, all right, cool. So we want to work Saturdays. I don't want to work Mondays and Tuesdays. Like, let's talk about why we want to work Saturdays, why we don't want to work Saturdays, what's really like ultimately in the best interest of the business. I'm like, cool. Could Dana and I get to a point where if Saturdays really are a great practice, like practice plan, we don't necessarily have to work it. Like, that doesn't mean Dana and I have to go work it. Like, could we go find hygienists that want to work Saturdays? Like, yes. So instead of having teams shut it down, it's a let's.   Let's innovate, let's create, let's figure out what's in the best interest of the business. But all of us need to have a voice and then all of us commit. And then that's where I love the peer-to-peer accountability. Instead of it's leadership accountability, it's peer-to-peer. So if Dana's like hearing me talk, smacking those sterilization, she's supposed to call me out. And I think teams building up to this, teams realizing that this is normal. What's fascinating, I will say this for myself, it actually improved my marriage, it improved my family relationships, it improved so many things because I realize.   that that's healthy. Like that's actually a healthy culture. That's that is a harmonious whole culture, even though you're like, whoa, that doesn't feel like it, versus the ones that are sitting there silently. And when Jason and I started getting more into this, I'm like, tell me. Like I remember sitting there and I was like, I love having a good spice even with Jason. I love to be like, tell me what you think. What do I think? Like let's get to that. And I recognize some people like myself can be a bit more bold. and so I think the bold personalities need to recognize that some of the quieter personalities   give them a space to also speak up and quieter personalities, we need your voice. We need your perspective. Like it it's not you, it's just your perspective. So we can all get on the same page. But it's it's fascinating to watch the churn. And what I see is team members are going to rise up and some are going to rise out. They're going to be like, this isn't for me. I want to go back to the place of artificial harmony. But leaders when they start to see this is how this is how teams solve their own problems. This is how meetings become effective. This is how your business starts to actually like move, make traction.   evolve. Like you start to actually have functioning and and teams that don't turn over because they actually say what needs to be said and they're not sitting in that artificial harmony. Dana, what are your thoughts on that?   Dana (14:05) Yeah, I I agree with you and I love there are gonna be team members that can come in and they can really take this on and they can embrace it. And then there's gonna be team members who use it like they put their just their big toe in it. And I just did this recently in in person with an office and it was an office where they like really wanted it. They were like, Yes, we know that we need it, we need to say the things. but it was really scary for them because they   cared about each other and so they never wanted to, you know, that fear of like, well, are they gonna hear my intention? Are they going to understand that like I'm saying it because it's for the good, right?   Kiera (14:39) Mm-hmm.   Dana (14:40) So what we did, and this was really cool and really helpful, and they've had so many of these conversations since I was in there, and I can't tell you how proud of them I am. We basically came up with a code word, and the code word is I'm saying something that is uncomfortable for me to say because I anticipate that maybe it's going to feel negative, maybe it's going to   feel abrasive, right? But my intention is if I say this thing, then we can solve it together and we can move on, right? Those so like that is the   framing behind this code   Kiera (15:16) Yeah, uh-huh.   Dana (15:16) word, right? And for them, they picked something that makes them laugh. So they just it's a flat tire conversation, right?   Kiera (15:21) Yeah.   Dana (15:22) And so they always say like, hey, flat tire, and then say the thing, right? And that's just their way   Kiera (15:27) Mm.   Dana (15:28) of really just making them comfortable with this whole philosophy of we're going to say the things that need to be said. We're going to do it kindly and professionally. But it was kind of like their little lean in tool that   Kiera (15:38) I love it.   Dana (15:39) they use. Now I said we can't ever use flat tire of a like, hey, I was supposed to do   This, but flat tire, I didn't, right? We can't use it to get out of accountability for things, but it really is just to set the tone of I'm gonna say a thing that I'm scared to say that's hard to say, but I hope if I say it, we can grow together, right?   Kiera (15:57) I love that.   Dana (15:58) And so I love that as a tool, and I find myself kind of using it in a few offices since then, and they can pick their own word, it doesn't have to be flat tire, but you're right, this is hard for some team members to really get on board with because I do think that.   When they genuinely like each other as humans, this can be uncomfortable at first. So even using a tool like that, hey, we're not gonna not have the conversations or not say   Kiera (16:22) Uh-huh.   Dana (16:22) the thing, but maybe I need a crutch to get there.   Kiera (16:25) Yes.   Well, and Dana, I love that because I think I think most teams actually love each other and most teams want to work together. Most teams respect each other. And I think if we can even reframe that to me having the conversation with you, like let's go to the book Raving Fans. They said the worst thing that can happen to a business is for people to leave and not tell you. And you might feel like someone telling you and giving you feedback, like that's actually the best thing that can happen to a business because that means they believe in you that you're willing to change.   And so I think if we even reframe of the way I really love my team, the way I really support my coworkers, the way I really show them that I trust them is by having these types of conversations. Me not saying anything actually like is a disservice. None of us, like I ask every team, I'm like, how many of you enjoy like walking on eggshells around team members? Like we all know what that feels like. We all know when someone's like upset with us, but we don't know how to have that conversation. We're like, what did I do to this person? Versus someone where it's like,   Dana, like I feel like things are a little off. Like flat tire. Like, can we have a conversation about this so we can solve it together? That shows so much more camaraderie. That shows so much more professionalism. That shows so much more, like to me, that's a maturity of a team. There's like, I feel like it's like layers, right? Baby teams,   Dana (17:36) Mm-hmm. Yeah.   Kiera (17:37) toddler teams, middle school teams, high school teams, college teams. Then you get into professional services like teams. Like you just think about like,   Even   think about the type of communication all those different layers are going to have with each other. And maybe that's also a way for us to graduate into those different layers of communication with each other. But I will tell you, as someone, and I think that that's something I'm very proud of, is I am a very like people pleaser. I love people like me. I'm very much sit on that artificial harmony. And sometimes, like even with Britt, like my hair, I'll like push it up and I'm like, all right, Britt, this is a moment where I'm really stressed. Like I need to say something to you. And I'm like,   Every ounce of me wants to say it, but I don't want it to ever land wrong. So just know, like right now, like this is me like pep talking myself to go into this combo. And I appreciate that Britt will giggle because she knows like it's so hard for me, but I just need to say what needs to be said. And I think for teams, like this is a muscle and a skill that's really going to take you from where you are to where you ultimately want to go. Like this is that bridge. And you can either sit on one side of the river or you can dip your toe in, you can step on the bridge, you can start having the conversations.   And what's wild is your team culture will start to shift and evolve in ways you've never imagined and you'll never look back. Like it's not like you might have some knockout, drag outs, but you're like, you what, I'd rather know than like not know. And you start to get into this where it's like, cool, let's have a conversation. Like you said, tell us about the flat tire office. How long has it been? What's kind of been their experience, highs and lows, and where are they today?   Dana (19:07) Yeah, yeah. So this it we did this more recently in an in-person. It was probably like three months ago. And   Kiera (19:14) Mm-hmm.   Dana (19:15) they've had, I think, teammate to teammate conversations. They've had leadership to team member conversations, and they've had team member two leadership conversations since then. And I can tell you, like they are more committed, they are tracking things, they are, you know, they've got a board where things are like red and green. We did it for just like a visual for them. There is more green.   On the board since then than I've ever seen, because they truly, truly are using morning huddles to like work through things and just communicating at a level that I'm so proud because I they really, really struggled with this. And I wasn't they were committed, right? But I had seen them fall off in commitment before because they did struggle with this. And so watching them really be able to   Take it on, use that. And two, the last call that I had with them, just feedback in like, hey, I had a flat tire conversation and I didn't even have to take say flat tire, right? Like I didn't   Kiera (20:15) Yeah.   Dana (20:15) even have to use that crutch. I'm getting so comfortable with having conversations that I didn't even have to use our funny word. And you know, they did laugh because it was like after the fact we were like, flat tire, right? but   Kiera (20:27) Ha ha ha   Dana (20:28) the fact that like they could just go in and say it in a meeting, right? Say it   Kiera (20:32) Mm-hmm.   Dana (20:32) in a not even in a one-on-one space, like this happened in a team.   meeting where they were talking about things, it honestly and truly has made such a difference in their ability to work together and honestly and truly commit and then hit their goals, right? And   Kiera (20:49) Yeah, uh-huh.   Dana (20:50) actually hit their action items. And it's been really fun to see how proud of themselves they are too.   Kiera (20:56) That's incredible. And I hope I don't know if you guys heard. I heard. I was watching Dana's face and hearing you're like, they were committed. Like you even like the little like trying to like, they were committed. And to me, that's not committed. Versus on this latter half when you're like, they commit and they hit, there is like a stalwartness. There's a solid, there's a grounded of are we like committed? Like, like we're there, but we're not, versus like, we know we're gonna have the conversations, whatever we say we're going to actually achieve as a team. Do you know how much teams love to win and actually like   Be confident they're going to win, be confident that the goals we set are realistic, to challenge each other and to see a team like Dana, that was three months of a change in an evolution. And I think that's fun. And it now just becomes a standard, it becomes a baseline. You gave them the tools to get there. And I think having a consultant, see that, give your team the tools. I mean, Dana, kudos. I'm definitely gonna take that because I think having the like word of how do I go into this conversation and making it funny that they all agree to my husband, I have the word Arkansas, and that's like if I want him to tell me the truth.   And I feel like he's like kind of like, hmm, not I'm like Arkansas. And he's no, no, Arkansas. Like, this is really what I'm trying to say. And I'm like, okay, great. Like sometimes we all need to just have that where we can we can check in with each other. And I think kudos to you, Dana, for doing that. And to get a team to just rally and to hit great goals and to be committed. And what's wild is this team, like I guarantee you, they've got the base foundation, just like Patrick, Patrick Lanzioni says, it's the trust and vulnerability, the healthy debate, and you lock in and commit.   And if you will do the trust and vulnerability where you healthy debate, your team will actually commit and then they hold each other accountable. It's like, no, we committed to this. Like we're all in it to win it. And then you hit your results. And people want to do it the reverse order. They want to hit the results, but they don't want to talk about the trust. And like Dana said, like we can like, we can kind of hit results, but we're not like so grounded and solid that we know we're gonna do it. So Dana, huge kudos to you. I think mad kudos of you giving that space and giving them the space to trust. And I think for other offices, if you're struggling with that or your team's not quite there.   This is what we're really good at is peeling back those onion layers, helping to open up the conversations. Because yes, you come to us for wanting systems and you want case acceptance, you want morning huddle and you want to drive your production. But a lot of times the secret to that bridge is getting your team to actually communicate with each other, getting your team to trust each other, getting your team to be solely locked in and committed to what we actually say rather than like half-heartedly trying to do it because they want to please you. Let's get people who are actually like very committed and this is their practice that they stamp off on.   And they own. So reach out Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. Dana, I'm so freaking proud of you. Any last thoughts you've got before we wrap today?   Dana (23:28) No, I think just when you want this for your team, be willing to do it yourself. owners, dentists, right? And and just it is hard, right? It can be hard to say the things, but know that when we can say the things, the traction that we can have and the movement that we can have is unimaginable.   Kiera (23:47) Dana, that is like a solid mic drop. You're right. Like it starts with leaders first. You've got to be willing to do it. You can't be backbiting. You can't be gossiping behind the scenes. You can't be walking out of a meeting saying, I'm not doing that. You set that example. Dana, love podcasting with you. I adore you. I'm so proud of you. For all of you listening, commit. Like, let's let's get our teams to be functional. Let's get them to be rocking. Let's get them to be totally committed. And this is the first step. So try it or reach Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. As always, thanks for listening. And I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.  

You're the CEO of Your Health (Most Men Find Out Too Late) | ft. Dr. Stephen Sanders | Ep. 512

Introducing the All Def SquADD Cast show “Versus". It's a podcast with the OG SquADD! Each week, the SquADD will debate topics and vote at the end to see what wins. Versus airs every Monday and you can download and listen wherever podcasts are found.Special GuestDion LackQThis Week We DiscussAbility To Teleport vs $10 Million Right NowNever Need Sleep vs Never Need FoodBreakfast For Every Meal vs Dinner For Every MealS/o To Our SponsorsBlue ChewWhen you buy two months of Blue Chew Gold, you get the third month for FREE!Visit Bluechew.com Promo: SQUADDKa'ChavaKa'Chava provides clean nutrition to fuel wherever your day takes you. No fillers. No nonsense.Toast to feeling your best with plant-based protein that actually tastes delicious.Go to https://kachava.com and use code SQUADD for 15% off your first order.

Ben Curtis is Global Brand Vice President of Sure/Rexona at Unilever, and is just back the US where he ran the brand's first-ever Men's World Cup as a FIFA official partner. He came on Unofficial Partner before the tournament to talk about what he was walking into; this is the debrief — what worked, what didn't, and what a global personal-care brand actually gets for the money, from the armpit branding on the fourth official's board (a Rexona first at a World Cup) to the New York activation built around creators rather than TV spots.Joining him is Mayowa Quadri, head of brand at the football-and-culture publisher Versus, a creator and consultant who worked on Rexona's campaign from the other side of the table. What does a global brand actually get for a World Cup sponsorship? Ben breaks down how Rexona measured return in near-real time — from brand mentions, to creator content earning 10x that, to cultural moments running into the millions of engagements — and where the brand ranked against Adidas and Coca-Cola.Was the fourth-official armpit branding a gimmick or a strategy? The Rexona sign held up at every substitution was a World Cup first. Ben argues it's a durable strategic position rather than a one-off joke; Richard presses on whether the idea has legs beyond its novelty.How much of the marketing budget now goes to creators rather than TV? Ben's answer is the headline number: a decisive swing away from traditional advertising in the space of a single World Cup cycle.Has the way we consume a World Cup fundamentally changed? Mayowa on clip culture, the Americanisation of the tournament, and a younger audience watching through creators and streamers rather than buying broadcast packages — and why broadcasters are now behaving like creators themselves.What makes a brand-creator relationship work, and when does it fail? Both sides on the shift from prescriptive deliverables to briefing intent, the trust a brand has to extend, and the fast route to losing an audience by looking like you've sold out.Is football still a sport, or is it now a culture? Mayowa's case that the footballer is a human being with interests beyond the 90 minutes — and how brands are buying into fashion, music and identity rather than match results.What is the media agency actually for now? How Unilever identifies communities and maps creators against them, the rise of nano-creators as word-of-mouth amplifiers, and why the direct brand-to-creator connection still matters.Can the controversies around FIFA stay 'priced in'? With Infantino in the headlines, whether the noise around the governing body touches the sponsors who fund it — and Mayowa's argument that player power, not sponsor pressure, is the variable that could actually move things.Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner' on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you're interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

Introducing the All Def SquADD Cast show “Versus". It's a podcast with the OG SquADD! Each week, the SquADD will debate topics and vote at the end to see what wins. Versus airs every Monday and you can download and listen wherever podcasts are found.Special GuestBrent TaylorCamille WatersThis Week We DiscussHouse Maid vs Personal AssistantNarration During Sex vs Celebration Music After SexAll Meals From A Strip Club vs All Meals From A Gas StationS/o To Our SponsorsHIMS Ready To Reach You Goals? Get A Personalized Affordable06 Plan For You!HIMS.com/SQUADDQuinceGet Free Shipping & 365 Days For Returns!Download Quince App Or Go To Quince.com/Squadd

Volume Two of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey begins here, and it opens on the other side of the fight. A Dog man called Vorn moves his starving pack south out of the picked-over northern hunting grounds and straight into territory the sasquatch clans have held for generations.The moment those two worlds catch each other's scent, the countdown starts.Three years have passed since the clans fled the Olympic Peninsula. Three years since Adanowa was taken and everything Koda knew came apart.Now a scout named Raksha has vanished into the dark, with nothing left behind but blood and a stranger's smell.In this first stretch you'll meet both sides of the coming war, the pack and the clans alike, and watch Kabota gamble on words over teeth by sending an envoy to a creature who only respects strength. You already know how a gamble like that tends to end.What you don't yet know is who pays for it. This is the world Koda came up in, changed and crowded and closing in, and it's only going to get darker from here.Settle in, because we've got a long road ahead, and it starts with first blood.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sasquatch-odyssey--4839697/support.Have you had a Bigfoot encounter, Sasquatch sighting, Dogman experience, or other cryptid or paranormal encounter? We'd love to hear your story. Email brian@paranormalworldproductions.com to be featured on a future episode of Sasquatch Odyssey.Sasquatch Odyssey is a leading Bigfoot and cryptid podcast exploring real encounters, field research, and scientific analysis of the Sasquatch phenomenon.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss an episode.

The TMG Hospitality Trailblazers welcomes the latest addition to the series, Kim Wootteon, Sr. VP of Commercial Strategy at Kampgrounds of America, Inc. to discuss the outdoor hospitality landscape and how artificial intelligence and technology are playing a key role in connecting different generations of travelers to the KOA vast portfolio of properties. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your co-host, Ryan Embry. Cassady Quintana: And I’m your co-host, Cassady Quintana. Ryan Embree: We’re excited to have you here with us for another edition of our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. We’ve been running this series for quite a while, paving those management companies, individuals that are paving a way into the future for hospitality, which feels like is changing on a weekly basis. I’ve been really looking forward to this episode. A familiar face and voice with us. It’s the first time you’re joining us virtually. Kim Wootteon, Senior Vice President, Commercial Strategies at Kampgrounds of America. Kim, thank you so much for joining us back on The Suite Spot. Kim Wootteon: Yes, it’s great to see you both. Thanks for having me today. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re gonna have a super fun conversation. You have an incredible brand. We can’t wait to jump in. But before we start talking about Kampgrounds of America and KOA, I wanna start because we missed it when we were in Arlington at the Digital Transformation Summit of getting a little bit about your hospitality background and journey that led you to such a cool position at KOA. Kim Wootteon: My kind of career path has been quite interesting. It’s really led to the role I have today. So the first 12 years of my career was spent in retail. And for all of you millennials, I started with PacSun. I was an OG, skate and surf lifestyle fanatic. And I worked in retail for 12 years and really learned operations, marketing, and quite frankly, leadership. PacSun was a really great people-centric company. And it’s really where I got my foundation for leadership and my drive for results. And then I transitioned for retail into the more traditional hospitality sector and worked for four years with Marshall Hotels and Resorts, leading sales, marketing, and diving into revenue management. And then was recruited by a company called Bluewater Development, who was really pioneers within the outdoor hospitality industry and very traditional owners in the indoor hospitality industry. So great experience. I was introduced to KOA with them and the entire glamping and camping sector of hospitality, which was super exciting. And then also got to work with some really great brands such as Marriott and Hilton and IHG and independent properties, independent campgrounds. It was quite an eclectic mix of properties, that I got to support in sales, marketing, and revenue. And I joined KOA about five years ago, leading marketing at the local level. And in 2022, we established the commercial strategy team at KOA, and, I now oversee revenue management, local marketing or field marketing, retail, distribution, and sales across the entire KOA portfolio, both our owned assets and our franchise locations, and support for KOA, Inc. as well. Ryan Embree: So this is why I love this question so much, because we get such an eclectic melting pot of backgrounds of hospitality professionals, maybe starting in retail. I hear F&B a lot recently. And then you go from the brands, you go, outdoor hospitality, and you get this big melting pot, and it kinda defines who you are as an industry professional, but also gives you, I think, an appreciation of some of those other places that you’ve been or even properties which can span from the giant resorts that we’ve seen all the way to, maybe it is a campsite where it’s a lot more local and kinda community and, and tight-knit feeling. Kim Wootteon: Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ve enjoyed my journey. It allows me to bring perspective to the work we do every day that is unique. And we’ve done a really great job at KOA of hiring a team of leaders and a team of people, in the field with really diverse backgrounds, which I think is a great compliment to the diversity across our portfolio. Cassady Quintana: Yeah, I think it’s interesting because you talk about this new team that you guys have created at KOA and the things that you’re developing and introducing into this outdoor hospitality. But for our listeners who may not know too much about KOA, we have a lot of hotel listeners. So if you can just give us a little bit of background about the brand and how it’s found its way to becoming one of the number one outdoor hospitality leaders. Kim Wootteon: So KOA was founded in 1962 by Dave Drumm in Billings, Montana. He saw this surge of travelers heading to the world’s fair in Seattle, and he opened the Billings Campgrounds, on his property along the Yellowstone River. And today, Kampgrounds of America is the largest system of privately owned campgrounds across the US and Canada with over 500 locations. We have 50 locations that are owned and operated by KOA, and 450 plus locations that are franchised. It’s a really interesting segment or vertical within the hospitality industry. Incredibly diverse portfolio, incredibly diverse guests. And we’re really fortunate to be the leader within this segment of the industry. Ryan Embree: And we mentioned at the top of this episode, this is our TMG Hospitality Trailblazer series. Now, I don’t think there is a much more fitting brand than KOA as far as being a trailblazer when you, when you think about that term, but I’ve been surprised to learn from getting to know you and the KOA brand of the different modern way that we kind of talk about trailblazers in our industry. And so, Kim, you and your team have been doing some incredible work. We’re gonna mention it in this episode, but what do you think makes the Kampgrounds of America brand a true embodiment of trailblazers and trailblazing in our industry right now? Kim Wootteon: It starts really with our vision at KOA. And our vision is to be the world leader in defining and advancing the business and experience of outdoor hospitality. And that’s been a focus for our company for years. We have taken a really unique approach to, I’d say, the traditional hospitality industry. We understand camping, we understand hospitality, and we are really committed to being the leader within not just the outdoor hospitality space, but the overall hospitality space in general. And it really starts with knowing our guest. And we are fortunate. We have tons of first-party guest data. We have years and years of history. And we’re known in our segment of the industry for the research we do to really better understand our guest and how our guest changes and what they expect. So it’s a really unique advantage. And the research we provide is not just for KOA and our franchisees, but it’s for the entire industry. And trailblazing shows up in a variety of ways, almost every decision that we make as a brand. So from the guest experience standpoint, we’re launching a new koa.com website that’s really powered by AI and focused on personalization and trip planning and flexible cancellation policies and the guest’s ability to manage reservations. So some of the more traditional things that you would see in the hospitality industry, but with some unique features that are custom to how guests like to camp. From an organizational structure standpoint, we have a commercial strategy team, which we really are the only one in the industry that has a full commercial strategy arm. And we have an AI team. We built our AI department at the beginning of this year, and that team continues to grow and really focus both internally and externally on how we can use AI to enhance the employee experience and the guest experience. And then within outdoor hospitality, technology has kind of always been a little bit of an opportunity. We don’t necessarily follow some of the mainstream tech choices that you see in indoor hospitality. So our focus has really been how do we align with what works well within indoor hospitality? We’ve been exploring OTA integrations and an RMS integration and enhanced text messaging capabilities and housekeeping modules to help operations be more efficient. It’s about really how can we be the first in the outdoor space to align most closely with what works in indoor hospitality, and then try to address the points of friction where we can that are really unique to outdoor hospitality. Cassady Quintana: I love that you mentioned this balance of outdoor hospitality and what that means to people, but also finding those opportunities for technology because that is the trend these days, right? Is AI this, AI that, and how can we bring in that technology? And we know that KOA has built such a recognizable brand in outdoor hospitality. So how do you guys find that you’re balancing and maintaining what Dave built back in the ’60s, that trusted legacy of what KOA is with continuing to try and attract a younger generation or maybe people that have never been camping before? Kim Wootteon: It is a really fine balance that is not easy. We truly work at it every day and we’re really, really fortunate to have such a legacy brand and such a trusted brand. And so it’s really this balance of how do we stay rooted in our core values and our mission with connecting people to the outdoors and each other while meeting guest expectations for who the camper is today? And so, we see participation in camping across all generations, which is really fascinating. In 2025, participation among adults, 65 or older, reached its highest level in eight years. So we’re seeing this rebound in the boomer population. 25% of all new campers in 2025 were boomers. And at the same time, younger generations, particularly millennials, continue to make camping a really meaningful share of their leisure travel. So it’s this ongoing challenge of how do we attract and retain campers? It’s the same challenge everybody has in our industry. And then keeping existing campers and getting new ones to come back. It’s really that frequency question. We’ve seen some shifts in frequency over the past several years. Our more legacy campers used to take two, three, four trips a year. And we’re seeing that frequency diminish slightly. New campers come and experience it. And maybe don’t, maybe don’t camp again in the same year. It may take one camping trip a year. So that’s a unique challenge our industry is navigating. But we do a lot of research to understand what inspires each generation to camp, and we work really hard to deliver memorable experiences to keep them coming back. But I think the thing that is consistent across all generations and what really matters most to campers, whether they’re new or they’re legacy campers, there’s some core foundational items that we really pride ourselves in across the KOA system. So safety and security is one, cleanliness and quality. We have a really rigorous quality assurance program, and we visit every single campground every single year to ensure each campground is meeting quality assurance standards. And we’re okay to say goodbye to those campgrounds that maybe aren’t meeting our standards. Campers are looking for some self-guided recreation. So if they want to be in the outdoors and really utilize their time as they see fit, the amenities and the recreation continue to play a critical role in that decision-making process. Pet friendliness is really critical and so many people in outdoors love to camp with their pets. And so it’s vital that all of our properties be really pet-friendly. And we have pet-friendly accommodations, pet walks, and camp canine parks. Pets are, are really an extension of our guest base, truly. And then basics like clean laundry, clean restroom facilities, clean laundry facilities, all the essentials that are needed for a great camping experience. Ryan Embree: You definitely have the advantage of a memorable experience on your end, right? I think that has been the knock on the indoor hospitality space, is that sometimes it’s your hotel stay or experience there might not be the most memorable part of a trip versus camping feels like something, if done right, and the quality is there, that is a memory that’s not just gonna stick with you for a year that you might just tell a couple people about, but maybe decades. Maybe it becomes a family tradition, and I’m sure you have some incredible stories to share there. But as I mentioned at the top of this episode, Kim, we had the pleasure of meeting you in Arlington, Texas at the Digital Transformation Summit and Hospitality and Hotels. And again, from what I knew about Kampgrounds of America then and what I know now, it was like kind of one of those spaces where I was like, “Well, I wonder, I wonder what KOA is doing in this space.” And then I got to hear your keynote and I was blown away. But it was also one of the most fascinating conversations I had at that event because of the relationship with technology where some of your guests might be looking for an escape from that technology while others kind of see it as this is the baseline and maybe WiFi isn’t a tech- technology to them. Maybe that’s just a standard for them. So it’s so interesting. It’s fascinating. I’m sure it’s that balance what you’re talking about, Kim, but you also have to balance between the guest and you also have 450 franchisees out there, right? And you’re an owner yourself of 50 properties. So I wanna get into both of those kinda spectrums. One is, what are you seeing the guests, their relationship with technology when it comes to KOA? And then maybe you can speak to the owner side of it, of are you hearing owners wanting to implement more technology or are they kind of resisting that when you’re saying, “Hey, let’s start to look at these new kind of maybe fancy technological updates.” I know there’s a packed question there, so. Kim Wootteon: Yeah, no. And lots to unpack within that question. So let’s start with the guest first and really the unique expectations that come from our campers. And while historically, camping has been a way of a form of leisure travel where you can kind of disconnect from everything that’s going on in daily life and really spend time in the outdoors, nearly half of all campers, about 47% site wifi as very important. So we have learned over the years that wifi is a utility. It is not an amenity anymore. It is a price of admission expectation for campers. Technology and remote work is still shaping camping behavior. And then Gen Z is the most likely to work while camping. So, we cater our experiences to every generation. And so Wi-Fi becomes a critical, critical component. While we’ve seen a slight decline in work camping, with people going back to the office and those just individual changes, it’s still really important. And it, what’s really unique is new campers, and again, kind of new campers, 25% of all new campers last year were boomers. So when we think about new campers, they are more likely than experienced campers to prioritize connectivity. So about 50% of new campers versus 43% of experienced campers. So access to technology directly influences length of stay and the experience. So we have focused heavily on tech and not just wifi at the campground, but how technology is used throughout the guest journey. Have we made it really easy for them to book and find the campground that meets their experience expectations? What’s the communication with the guests look like pre and post, or pre-during, quite honestly, and posts say through text messaging or, or other forms of technology? How easy can they find their site? Just all of those simple things where tech is a really great way to create efficiencies in operations, still have really, really connected touchpoints, relationship-wise, because I think that is, one of the most critical pieces of outdoor hospitality is the relationship our owners build with their campers. And then can they connect while they’re on site? And for those who don’t want to connect and really wanna disconnect during their stay, have we effectively marketed those sites that are best for them to stay in? Have we created connectivity zones where if they do choose to connect, there’s a place on the campground that is best for that, and the rest of the park could be more of a disconnection zone. So really thinking about how a camper is using the space. On the flip side, our owners, this has been an interesting challenge and journey. Just like our campers, our owners are incredibly diverse as well. We’re really blessed. And I think this kind of lends to the success of our legacy brand. We have legacy owners within the KOA brand. We have franchisees that have been in the system for 50 and 60 years. They’ve been here since the beginning, and that ownership has passed down through generations, which is really rare to find across our industry today. We have a lot of individual owner operators that, they gave up their careers as nurses and as architects, and they follow their passion for the outdoors, and they built and own, decide to buy a campground and and be entrepreneurs. And then we have a lot of investors coming into our space, that are diversifying their portfolio. They have hotels, like that public storage and outdoor hospitality is just a natural transition in their portfolio diversification. So the diversity amongst our owners is a unique challenge when it comes to technology. And then across multiple, age demographics as well. So from a wifi standpoint, we make it a requirement. It is now part of our quality assurance. We incentivize our owners to deliver really great wifi. We have a wifi royalty incentive program, and they can receive reduced royalties for a select period of time if their wifi meets certain standards. We believe it’s that important to the guest experience. And then really from tech adoption, I think that’s where we see some of the larger pieces of friction as our industry evolves and we’re constantly trying to balance the expectations of the guests with the needs of our owners and operators. Things like a couple years ago, we were getting ready to launch online reservation management. Okay, I can, I can book, I can change, I can cancel my reservation all on my phone through the app or otherwise. And then was faced with quite a bit of resistance because it was different and it was new and it took some of the control out of the hands of the owner. And so different components of that have kind of made it out to the public, and then there are some key components that have not quite made it out yet. So it’s really that balance of how do we meet guest expectations and owner expectations? But at the end of the day, we do have the responsibility to ensure our brand stays profitable and our owners are profitable. And so sometimes we do have to make those decisions that may not be as favorable to our owners, but are truly the best decision for the business. And it comes down a lot to training and education and really making sure they understand. So we have a great learning and development team, great communications team, a great project team that really ensures all of these initiatives come to fruition in the way they need to be successful. Ryan Embree: Well, and you also have, like you said, 50 properties that you own and manage, which I’m sure is a great kind of sandbox that you can play before you roll something out across the entire brand. But to put this in perspective for our listeners, you just mentioned that maybe there was some resistance to the online bookings that you were talking about, all the way to the owner that you were talking to me. I had to bring this up again, that there was drones bringing firewood to campsites at your property, right? So, I mean, that is the spectrum that you’re talking about. And I think that also is on the guest side. And that’s why probably, you and your team do such a great job of keeping your ear to the ground with these guests and constantly staying. I thought it was a fascinating stat that you talked about, Kim, where you’re saying that the first time campers are expecting more tech than maybe your returning campers or campers that have done that before. And I think that is a, it’s a telling statistic of, “Hey, we’re gonna try this for the first time. We’re gonna go camping.” And they’re coming to the camping site and being like, “All right, well, where’s the plugs and where’s the, the wifi and all that stuff?” Versus the campers that have been there have been like, “Oh, you, you’re camping. What are you talking about?” So interesting. Kim Wootteon: It’s a fun challenge. Cassady Quintana: I’m glad you mentioned that because when I think about it from a marketing perspective, you’ve talked about the different types of guests. You also have diverse owners, but you have diverse guests. When you think about hotels in the hotel industry, a lot of them have their niche and what they expect their demographic to look like when they come visit them. And so they can kind of cater that marketing a little bit better. But you have people ranging from children all the way up until boomers, and so they’re all expecting something different and they all want it to be exactly what they want. So when I think about it, I’m Gen Z, and this outdoor hospitality thing has really started to become a big thing for us. Like, whether it is because we wanna fully disconnect everything is too technologically advanced now, or I want a little bit of the best of both worlds. I wanna feel like I’m in nature, but also I can check my Instagram later if I really need to. So when you guys think about that from a marketing perspective, what do you think is driving that Gen Z interest, but also how do you develop a marketing strategy so that you can connect with those new campers and that, that younger generation? Kim Wootteon: Oh, my gosh. It’s a nonstop kind of everyday challenge that our teams work through at both the national level. How do we really connect the brand to people? I mean it’s so much of the success of our brand, and really camping and outdoor hospitality in general is built off of some, like, this emotional connection to nature and this desire to be outdoors. And how do we be part of that journey? And how can we be a catalyst to creating that experience for people, whether it’s their hundredth time camping or their first time camping? And there’s so many different tactics and strategies, within the marketing space that are available to us now. And it’s constantly evaluated with AI. We are traditionally rooted in SEO, and now we’ve got GEO to adapt to. But the Gen Z population within our camper mix is about 13% of all of our campers, as of 2025, and had been up to about 25% of our camper mix in 2022. So a really significant portion of all of those people that are participating in camping are in that Gen Z demographic. And it really comes down to doing a lot of research and understanding, what motivates people to connect to a brand, what’s important to them, whether it’s sustainability or looking at the health benefits from being outdoors, whether it’s the thrill of trying something new and really adventure-seeking, whether it’s we camped with our parents as kids, and we wanna try it again as adults. And the value proposition for, especially Gen Z is not to that point in life where you’re fully invested and you have a ton of disposable income. And so camping has always been a really affordable way to travel and leisure travel and experience and see things. So it’s this balance of how do we connect with each generation on the right channel? Social media plays a really critical role in our marketing strategy, having a presence across multiple platforms, Facebook, which tends to cater to a little bit more of our Gen X and baby boomer population, TikTok, Instagram, other channels for Gen Z. So social media plays a really key role, and we’ve seen a huge insurgence of social media conversions in our marketing strategy over the past several years. And then the technology piece of some of our generations like to pick up the phone and call and ask questions about their stay. And then others really just wanna be 100% booked online, make all of their change, and make all of their choices without any human connectivity. So finding that balance. But the, the Gen Z demographic is really fascinating. And I love watching how they use campgrounds. We see a lot of Gen Zers use campgrounds as that hub for all of their outdoor adventures, really wanting to spend time in nature and are utilizing a campground to facilitate that experience. Ryan Embree: This question is certainly resonating with me. I’m a little bit older millennial. I have a two and a five-year-old. And I remember camping as a kid. I wanna take my kids, but I also do not want to just maybe stay in a tent and not have any sort of. So, I want, I want that, that nice little balance of, yes, we are camping, but we might be going into a nice air-conditioned cabin or lodge, and we might be able to still watch a little TV. But I think it’s fascinating what we’re talking about, because that’s exactly it. And Gen Z, they’re great storytellers. Let me tell you about marketing. They’ll do most of your marketing for you if you put them in the right position, especially on Instagram and TikTok. Kim Wootteon: I’m really fortunate on my team. We have a really diverse team as well. And I have, I have kind of boomers and I have a ton of Gen Zers on my team. And so it’s great just to watch those generations meld and figure out how we, how we best connect to our owners and our audience. We spend a lot of time in the outdoors just as a team, when we have meetings and stuff like that. And I just love what comes from it. And then we take those best practices and really implement them with our guests because it’s, it’s the same. We all camp. Most of us in our team, we love spending time in the outdoors. So it’s like what’s gonna be attractive to us? We are our own demographics, right? Ryan Embree: There you go. Well, I wanna shift gears and congratulate you and your team, the entire KOA team, recognized as one of the top 50 most profitable franchises by Franchisee Business Review. What do you think Kim, I mean, obviously, when we talk about franchises and we look at the ROI, but I think there’s probably a different type of reward that comes with having a KOA franchise, being obviously we look for that, that financial one, but also from kinda to build something meaningful. You talked about the legacy of some of your franchisees and that being a family business. We’ve talked about the close connection and memories that you get from camping. Well, first of all, congratulations, but what do you think you and your team did to kinda make that list? Kim Wootteon: Thank you. We’re really, really proud of this recognition. And I think it speaks to just the uniqueness of the brand. So we have a unique mix of brand standards and entrepreneurial spirit. KOA is a franchisor unlike no other, you know? And I’ve worked with a lot of the big franchisors, especially in our industry. I’ve worked with the Marriott brand and Hilton and IHG and Jellystone and Sun Outdoors. But what I think I love most about KOA, which makes it such an attractive business opportunity, is, we’re hyper-focused on quality. We’re hyper-focused on our brand position consistency. We have three brand positions within the KOA brand. We have the KOA journey, the KOA Holiday, and the KOA Resort to really help campers identify and connect with the experience they’re looking for. But what I love the most about our franchise that is different from a lot of others is that each location is truly unique to space and place, which fuels the creativity and the pride of our owners. So there are certain things that you will find very standard across the KOA portfolio, and there, there’s an expectation campers have with KOA, but every single location is unique. And that’s what makes the system of campgrounds truly special. You’re not gonna get the same overall experience at any two locations. And our owners take an immense amount of pride in understanding the market that they’re in, understanding their campers, and building an experience that drives them to come back and stay with the KOA brand and book again, and at the same time, is quite profitable. So that unique blend of uniqueness and standards is what really sets us apart. And I will say to you, I remember this, if I didn’t shout out just the incredible support that KOA offers its franchisees. Again, I’ve kind of worked with many franchisors, but the support that KOA offers is quite unique. I’m very, very proud to be part of that. We have an amazing field operations team, franchise operations team. We have a team of just passionate, dedicated franchise business coaches that are working with our owners every single day to help them truly grow their business and optimize their investment in the KOA brand and then their campground. We have a whole coaching team within commercial strategy focused on marketing and revenue, and how to maximize revenue and optimize profitability. And then multiple other departments across the organization that really, their customer is the franchisee. And so I think this is a really adequate representation of the hard work our team puts in to support our owners on a daily basis. Ryan Embree: Yeah. I mean, with a, such a complex ecosystem that we kind of talked about throughout this episode, it’s a true testament to the work you and your team are putting in to be recognized. So again, congratulations to you and your team on that. We’re gonna shift gears. This is the rapid fire portion of our episode. I love doing this and I was looking forward to your portfolio specifically. You’re no stranger to travel, Kim, you’ve already mentioned. So we’re gonna get to list a series or a series of questions to get to know you and the KOA portfolio a little bit better. So let’s start with favorite view at one of your properties. Kim Wootteon: Yeah. So, and just for the record, so I have been to well over 100, almost 200 KOAs across our systems. I’ve been really fortunate to see a lot of our portfolio with some amazing, amazing properties and experiences. But I was just recently at the campground in Fredericksburg, Texas, which is under construction. We are building it and it’ll be introduced to the KOA system this fall. But the view from The Overlook, which is sort of our main building in the back part of the campground with all of our food and beverage and our meeting space and our pool and our lazy river, the view is absolutely spectacular overlooking the entire campground. The sunsets are great, and it was just, it was a really magical moment. Cassady Quintana: Awesome. Ryan, write that down. We gotta take a look at when that one opens up. Ryan Embree: Yeah, for sure. Kim Wootteon: You’ve gotta come experience it. And, and Ryan, we do have some amazing glamping accommodations, so you’ll get all of the amenities of home and a really cool outdoor setting. Ryan Embree: Love it. Best both worlds, for sure. Cassady Quintana: All right, Kim, favorite fun fact about one of your properties? Kim Wootteon: Oh my gosh. There’s so many options because we have such a diverse portfolio. But one of the things we learned as we were prepping for America 250 and just kind of learning our history is the Mystic KOA campground in Connecticut has a house on property that wasn’t built in the United States. It actually existed before the United States existed. It was brought over as settlers have founded that area. And it’s still standing on our campground today. And there’s a lot of history with that property. Ryan Embree: So it’s one of my favorite questions to ask, just because you get to learn these, these stories that you would have no idea about. Very, very cool. What about favorite guest experience or amenities at one of your properties, Kim? Kim Wootteon: So, the Mount Rushmore KOA Resort at Palmer Gulch has a rodeo, like a full-on rodeo. So that’s a crazy thing to experience. The campground in South Padre Island is right near SpaceX, and we just built these beautiful, RV sites, along this peninsula on the water, so you can see the SpaceX launches. And then there’s simple things like blueberry picking in covert and just amazing hiking near some of our National Park properties. Cassady Quintana: Awesome. Something for everybody. There’s something for everybody at every different property. Yeah. So kind of with that in mind, what’s one of your favorite locations of your properties? Kim Wootteon: So it’s funny. So I am a camper myself and I love to spend time outdoors. And I have kind of this unique mix of properties that I love to visit because, every time I camp, I look for a different experience. So I love, like, Lake Placid, KOA, it’s just that, like, quintessential camping experience, really, really wooded and nature-driven. If I’m looking for just incredible beauty with really, really amiditized recreation, I love the Astoria KOA on the Oregon Coast. If I want a tropical resort retreat, I go to Sugarloaf KOA or Fort Myers KOA. So it’s just, it’s. I don’t know. I can’t pick one. I love too many of them, which is my problem and why I’m always on the road and traveling. . Cassady Quintana: It’s a good problem to have. Kim Wootteon: Exactly. I know, right? Ryan Embree: That’s what I was gonna say. . Well, we appreciate you playing along with us. As we wrap up today, we always have kind of a tradition to, especially, with some of our industry leaders that we get the opportunity to speak to multiple times. You teased back in March, you had working on that revamped website that we talked about you formed a new AI team. What’s the status of those projects? And then maybe just looking into the future, what’s your vision for, for KOA as we wrap. Can’t believe I’m saying this. Wrap up 2026 and go into 2027. Kim Wootteon: Oh, my gosh. Yes. We, we are really hyper-focused on 2027 right now as a leadership team, which is crazy. I’m like, we’re all happy through 2026. But yeah, we ha – we’ve had a ton of really large projects this year as a brand, and really in, in that vein of trying to modernize our brand to meet the guest expectation, the owner expectations, and stay that, brand of choice. Both of our projects, the development of our AR team and the rebuild, redesign, and launch of our new website, as well as campground landing pages and a new content management system are going incredibly well. We are on track to launch in Q4 with a slew of continued enhancements throughout 2027. A lot of really AI-focused efforts for koa.com, specifically in trip planning and just communication on a site, as well as personalization. We know that that’s so important. How does a guest land on the site and how is everything really customized and tailored to what they’re looking for and what their needs are and how they’ve came to before? So those two teams have been really, really critical in, in the rollout of this project. And selfishly for me, the AI team does a, a lot of work with our internal teams, and how do we impl – improve the employee experience? So the work they’ve been doing just, I mean, so many efficiencies for my role and so many other roles across the organization around really quick access to data within our KOA ecosystem. Like every bit of data I could ever want to access is available through our AI platform. I am able to ask questions quickly, research things quicker, and really get to an end result, which makes the analysis of our business so much easier in identifying trends and opportunities. So those two pieces are just really game changers, not only for our brand, but in the industry right now. And 2077 is stacking up to be a pretty, pretty insane year as well, with just really double down focusing on how do we continue to attract guests, retain guests, really strong focus on that short-term leisure RV camper, and kind of that mash of how do we take all of our legacy campers and all of these new campers and really just exceed expectations to grow the business next year. Ryan Embree: Wel like I said, a true embodiment, a brand that is truly trailblazing in hospitality. So wish you luck with all of those projects. We’ll have to keep a close eye on which campgrounds we’ll do an onsite. I still haven’t given up on that dream of doing – Kim Wootteon: No, we’re, we’re gonna get you outdoors, Ryan. Ryan Embree: Let’s do it. I’m, I’m looking forward to it. I can’t, I can’t wait. So, Kim, we know you’re busy. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me and Cassady here on The Suite Spot. Kim Wootteon: Yes, thank you both. It’s a pleasure. Cassady Quintana: Thanks, Kim. Ryan Embree: All right. Thanks, everyone. And thank you for listening to Suite Spot. We’ll talk to you next time. To join our loyalty program, be sure to subscribe and give us a five-star rating on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with cover art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host, Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.

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Competing in a Future World of Infinite Intelligence Navigation: Intro From Knowledge Workers to Judgment Workers The AI-Native Company: Org, Hiring, Culture The Human Element: Are We Underestimating It? Scenarios Our Take Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show:   Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Introduction Welcome to episode 79 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we take a leap into the big unknown. This is a thesis episode, not your classic analysis, in-depth sharing episode. The big idea for this episode is that we may be approaching the cognitive age, and how would one, or how would a company compete in a world of infinite intelligence? The big idea, again, is that intelligence, which has been mostly scarce and expensive for all of human history, might become abundant and cheap. If that happens, what happens to work, what happens to companies, what happens to society? This episode will be really framing a lot of these discussions. From knowledge workers to judgment workers, addressing the AI native company and how does that change, going into the human element and whether or not we’re underestimating it, and finally, ending up going into scenarios, feasible scenarios of a future where, well, intelligence is abundant. Intelligence is quasi-infinite or infinite itself.Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Big questions for this episode 79. From Knowledge Workers to Judgment Workers We can start with from knowledge workers to judgment workers. Let’s go back first to how came the knowledge worker. It’s a 20th-century invention from Peter Drucker in 1959. The idea here is that that category might be splitting. The production of knowledge itself is on its way to being commoditized by AI. However, our perspective is that judgment around production of knowledge is not disappearing and is staying for a bit control managed by humans. What’s your take on this, Nuno? Do you agree with this split?Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I think it’s a little bit more profound than that. It’s not just judgment. Definitely, human judgment will be needed. We’ve seen agents perform all sorts of funny things in the wrong way when left alone to their own devices. Even some very well-known AI researchers coming forward and saying, “Hey, I tried to use this myself, and actually I messed up some of my systems,” or “I messed some of my code. I messed up some of my flows for a period of time.” I think just having human-in-the-loop from a judgment standpoint will be needed for a significant amount of time. That is something you can’t just delegate into machines, into algorithms, et cetera. The second part is, ultimately, there needs to be contextualization, and that contextualization, I think, comes from two forms. One from actual data, where the machine, I think, at some point will catch up, or the machines will catch up. The algorithms, at some point, on the data analysis will get better and better and have probably the closest to the truth that you can get, minus all the biases that are in the data, just to be clear, because data has a ton of biases. We’ve looked at this in the past and discussed it at prior episodes. But maybe on that, I think the machine has a chance to catch up, or the machines have a chance to catch up, so there’s less of distinctiveness from the human standpoint. But then, on just the attributes, the ability when you’re judging some situation, you’re in the middle of the situation. You’re judging the person and how it’s acting, in some ways, a lot of the things that end up happening, end up happening because there’s human interaction. There’s someone on the other side. I see how they’re delivering the message, how they’re implicating. We’ll talk about it later in the context of the organization and what changes in companies. I don’t think it’s just judgment. I think there’s a little bit more than that. One of the reasons I went to the dark side of management early on in my career from being an engineer was Peter Drucker and this notion of the knowledge worker, which he later on reemphasized with the publishing of his book, which for me was seminal and defined a lot of my career in life, the post-capitalist society, which is this notion that information rich and information poor is going to be the key distinctiveness that will happen in the world. The two big camps, information rich, information poor, which links back to this invention of the term knowledge worker, that knowledge is going to be key in some ways. I think that’s what we’ve seen for the last decades. Again, I think judgment is not going anywhere, but I think it’s beyond judgment. There’s elements of humanity and involvement that won’t go away anytime soon, where human-in-the-loop are particularly critical. We’ll discuss later some scenarios, but for me, that’s my stick in the ground. I think human-in-the-loop is going to be critical for many decades to come.Bertrand Schmitt While we are talking about all of this, and we share some possible scenarios, there is always that question. This is moving so fast right now. If you think about AI 10 years ago, AI 5 years ago, AI with the launch of ChatGPT 3, and then AI the past 2 years, now we have agents that are running at scale. Things are moving very fast. I can tell you, me in 6 months, the change has been pretty dramatic in terms of what I can use AI for. There is always that question that whatever we are thinking about cannot just be connected to what we were able to do 6 months ago or even today, we have to think and project ourselves at least in the next 6–12 months. Of course, we can go beyond that, and we will do that with some future scenarios, but it’s a very fast-moving, and it’s not clear yet where are the limits.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I think that’s a very fair point. Let me try to analyze things that I don’t think will change anytime soon for the next few years. Agreed with you that many things will change, and we’ll have a lot better tools, platforms out there. That will be difficult to predict what exactly won’t change. I think there’s elements of humanity, and some of them do relate to judgment, like having good or bad taste, having a view on it, on whether something looks good or bad. Obviously, all of this sometimes is subjective, but some of it may not be as subjective as people think it is. The elements of contextualization. I think a little bit going back to what we did at Chamaeleon ourselves, where we built this platform, Mantis, and the objective of building Mantis was not really to replace us, was that it was a core augmentation layer in some ways that we would use investment or investor judgment as humans in the loop to systematize pattern recognition and a variety of other things, but that Mantis would really elevate all that judgment, not just in terms of timing, us being more productive, but also in terms of the quality of the decisions we’re making. Think of it as a little bit like having our human judgment in the context of operating Chamaeleon at a higher altitude, where we are more aware of the things that are happening and how they actually happen. The ability to really get to the data pieces and then make decisions on top of that that generate the needed alpha in our case for investors. What I mean by this is I think there’s always going to be core elements of humanity that I do think are going to be difficult for the machines to replace. For example, the taste piece people are like, “I can figure out what’s the taste in the market.” Yeah, but that’s mainstream. That doesn’t identify what’s the next big thing, which normally doesn’t start from mainstream. It starts from something else. It could start from opinion leaders and influencers. It could start by someone having a different way of addressing a problem and having a solution that hasn’t been thought through. For example, elements of creativity, I think, in human judgment and in human operations is something that I feel the machine will still have difficulty to replace.Bertrand Schmitt Let’s not forget how today current algorithms are working by feeding them enormous quantity of data, actually as much data as we can find. Finding more data is becoming a limitation these days. What it means is that it’s very hard for AI to think beyond its training data. There is some level of logic that’s being added, but at the same time, take the launch of the iPhone. What was the opinion before launch? Is that no, it doesn’t make sense. Not enough battery life, no keyboard, no this, no that. If you just base your analysis on what’s written out there, what’s being sold out there, you would just say, “It’s going to fail.” AI might really follow that more generic advice and perspective because that’s what in the training data and that’s what they’re in volume. It’s, of course, raising a lot of questions of, how do you improve the quality of the training data? How do you separate the weed from the chaff? There are a lot of questions there, and obviously, it will get better over time. But it’s still a critical part of how it’s working today. It won’t be that easy to change. I really like your point regarding Mantis, and I will say in general, platforms that you build with AI or leveraging AI capacity. Because when we say knowledge production is going to disappear, but we’ll keep judgment, it will be a different type of judgment because the quantity and quality of knowledge we will have in front of us to build our judgment will be very different. If suddenly we have for free the work of 10 interns or 5 junior analysts or whatever, and you can run that on nearly anything you do in life or at work, it’s completely dramatic. Your judgment was not used to be exercised so often because often you were missing quality data to have a judgment. Before it was a lot of finger in the wind and trying to smell something, but you didn’t have enough to make a serious analysis. Except if you are working as a strategy consultant, as you used to do, Nuno. That part is actually quite interesting. That the judgment itself will be exercised much more often and hopefully on the base of much more in-depth analysis for a lot of things. We will work very differently.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro We will go in-depth, faster and more fact-based, more data-based along the way. The question some of you might have right now is, is there some judgment that’s going to go away? Is there some judgment? We seem to be defining that there’s this organization, we’ll talk about it later, that goes from doers more into deciders. I think there’s some nuances to that, so I’ll just hit pause on that. In terms of judgment, obviously, there’s judgment that has been hidden over the years under the pretense of being wisdom, but it’s actually not wisdom. It’s just repetitive tasking, and it’s rules-based for the most. There’s a lot of judgment done, in particular in the white-collar space, that you could say it’s just reps. People have been doing it all along like that, and so therefore to say, “I’ve done it before like this, so I’ll do it the same way.” There’s actually no best in class, no analysis, no nothing. It’s just, “I’ve done it like that before.” I think that type of judgment will disappear because, again, algorithms will be as good, if not much better at that. They’ll be better at figuring out, actually, this would be the better way to do this. That’s how you play it forward. Then the question is, if there are fundamental, wise people in the organization, people that can really take that more complex elements of judgment, how do you go from the world we have today, which is a world of apprenticeship, where people come out of college, they go and work, and they learn their way, and therefore, hopefully over time, some of them, not all of them, we know that, but some of them will develop that wisdom to be great decision makers 15, 20 years down the road? How do we do that in a world that now is saying, “I don’t need people out of college because I can do it myself, and I can do individual contributor, and I can have agents doing the work that would require some manifestation of management in the middle.” Basically, “I don’t need this stuff. I don’t need you.” It’s a little bit the story we’re in. How do you create then this apprenticeship? How do we create then wisdom? My two cents on that is that wisdom, because of what we were just discussing and what, for example, myself and Bertrand was just saying, because of more often interactions with more data-stressed information and insights, what will happen is people will get better through their own reps in whatever form they’re doing, in day-to-day life, in internships, et cetera. In some ways, that will create the accelerated growth. It’s a little bit the interactions with agents and the interactions with our beloved AI algorithms that will create that growth over time and maybe not as much with other people. That still leaves the question around social interactions, but that’s probably the way this gets sorted. Apprenticeship gets sorted through the machine and the human having more interactions in effect.Bertrand Schmitt I agree with you because when we talk about apprenticeship, in some ways a lot of time was wasted on stuff that were not that important. But in a way, that was the price you had to pay in order to be there when people make the big decision to try to get some wisdom from that one hour of interactions that’s really useful and make a difference out of your full week. But the rest of your full week was just basic stuff that you had to do like a machine in a way. Why not let a machine do that? That, for me, is a big question. You could argue there is a transition period where it could be hard. For instance, if you can work hand in hand with AI smartly while you are doing your 4, 5 years of universities, you could graduate with a very different knowledge, perspective, judgment, skill set than anyone who graduated 5 years ago. I think that part will require a question around, “How do you change education?” You see what I mean? If you keep education the same way, expecting that the output is someone that should go now into 5 years of apprenticeship, that’s not going to work because companies will be, “No apprenticeship anymore.” On the contrary, you have to come much more knowledgeable and ready to use the tools. The tools are so efficient that the bar pretty high. You need to come already very well-grounded. If the education is not doing their job, that will be trouble. That part for me, I think is often forgotten. In some ways, the new-found importance of universities as a place to, and not just universities, the trade to really deliver people who are ready for the workforce. If on the business side, the expectation can change, of course, you have to change the education on the other side. My worry probably right now is that it doesn’t look like universities are in touch with what businesses are looking for, businesses are working on. Of course, that’s very worrisome because the cost of university has increased very significantly. It’s not clear quality of education has improved at all. If anything, it could be the opposite. It’s pretty scary. Of course, it’s going to raise a lot of questions. How much is education worth in that type of situation? Maybe another point because we talk a lot about apprenticeship, how this stuff was useful, but at the same time, if we go back in time, not long ago in the ’50s, if you wanted to be a developer, for instance, ’50s, ’60s, the job was very different. There was barely any programmation language out there. You had to use punch cards. Your time truly spent doing the coding was very limited. Once you had your stuff working, then, the debugging was a total nightmare. My point is that no one is looking back to that time saying, “You know what? It was great. It was a great way to learn and to do an apprenticeship for 5 years. To do that crappy job of punching cards for the boss.” There was little value in this. Guess what? Everyone is happy it’s not being done anymore by anyone. I think we also have to see what AI is bringing in a similar way is that everyone’s job is going to become quite different. There are a lot of big parts of the job who are not going to look back with fondness. Just looking back as, “Wow, that was very machine-like type of job. I’m glad I’m done with it.” People will want to jump directly to the next step. You don’t need to go to the punch card phase to be able to be a good developer for the past 40 years. I guess it will be the same with AI.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I think so. The difficulty we have as humans is to also visualize dramatically different scenarios and landscapes, professionally. It’s difficult for us to anticipate what are the jobs of the future. Jobs have changed a lot in the last few decades, not even the last century. What people do, the migration initially from the agricultural society to then the industrial society to then the services society, and in some ways, the shift within the services industry, and now we’re seeing another shift, so we can’t really anticipate what those jobs look like. Back to your point on education, because I think that’s a very important point. If you’re right now an undergraduate student or a postgraduate student, for that matter, and you’re not figuring out your own mechanisms of learning outside of your syllabus, outside of what your professors are telling you, et cetera, you’re going to face very difficult times. If you’re not right now using all these AI tools proficiently, all these cycles of vibe coding, co-working, et cetera, with agents in the mix, you’re going to have a really tough time. If you’re not at this point in time as proficient as someone like myself or Bertrand, and given that we’re nerds, we’re relatively proficient with a lot of these tools that are out there. On top of it, some of us have our own platforms in-house. If you’re not as proficient as we are with those tools, you’re going to have a very difficult time because then people like us won’t need you. I think that’s the sad truth. It’s like at some point, if you’re not needed, you’re not needed. Then again, you may find something else that’s more interesting for you to do. Start your own company, go join a new exciting job doing whatever it is that you need to do next, et cetera. But again, I think the bar is very high. If you’re in college right now, again, undergrad, postgraduate, this is the time of transition. This is the worst time. It’s not the best time, it’s the worst time. Because education and all these institutions haven’t adapted to it yet. You need to adapt. You need to adapt. You need to adapt. If you don’t, you’re going to pay for it, not just in the loans you need to repay, but also in terms of actually having difficulty finding your career path in those first few critical years.Bertrand Schmitt You need to be especially proactive when you’re facing this type of period where businesses are adapting as fast as they can because they all know it’s going to be survival of the fittest very quickly. Universities typically are working on a very different pace, and it’s pretty guaranteed they are not going to have adapted as fast as businesses. In time of big dramatic change, it will be trouble. It will be trouble. Yes, you will have not fun. Not saying it was part of the deal when you sign up for that loan and decided to go for university. But that’s life. There has been issues before. It’s not the first time. You have to do something about it. You talk about your perspective about, “Hey, why do we need you if you are not already fluent and very efficient with these tools and stuff?” The truth, in some ways, it’s even worse than that. Each time we spend with someone who is not efficient with all of this is less time we spend with the tools that are already providing magic for us.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Exactly.Bertrand Schmitt It’s a very big choice of, “Hey, do I spend more time training this person?” Do I just… there is an opportunity cost. Or, do I spend more time staying at light speed? Why do I slow down to do something else in the hope that maybe I will get to return versus the light speed I’m already on? It’s a lot of tension. Again, it’s certainly new. But if we want to look back, I think you talk about the switch from agriculture and society, industrial society, and now the service industry. The reality is that, yes, we have made dramatic changes in the past before. 140 years ago, we were 90% agricultural society in Europe, in the US, 90% of us. Today, it’s what? 2%. So my point is that that’s a normal evolution. There is no progress without change. Sometimes the rate of change is soft, and sometimes you have a step function. Now it’s a step function, and it’s also a pretty fast step function. Before, it could take decades to get new stuff being put in place, to have electricity come up, this or that. Now we see that the rate of investment in AI is insane, way beyond anything we have seen before. Two, in a way, a lot of the architecture behind the scene was already there to support an even faster transition. What’s new might be the pace of the transition, how unnatural it might look. But at the same time, if you put yourself in the shoes of someone who lived 150 years ago, I mean, this was also a dramatic change for them. From horses to cars to planes to rockets, pretty big change, maybe even bigger change.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Maybe the silver lining, just to bookend this section, is one, there will be new roles. There are a lot of things we can’t anticipate. There will be new roles, there will be new jobs being created, and new things that we can’t really quite grasp yet. The second part is that the rules are changing, and they’re changing, I would say, in general, for the better. If you are a decision-maker or an organization, and you still have your job, you’re probably making more important decisions with more data, with more tooling around you, with less red tape, hopefully over time. I know that will not hold true for all the big corporations out there that are listening to us, but it is starting to happen. Things are making an impact on how decision-making is made. There’s less and less red tape along the way in certain organizations. There are more and more fact-based discussions happening as we move along. The silver lining is better jobs, more jobs, different jobs in the future, hopefully as well. Secondly, the second part of the silver line is that the jobs that exist today, hopefully, will be more interesting, certainly on the knowledge space and on this judgment space that we’re now introducing as part of this episode. The AI-Native Company: Org, Hiring, Culture Switching gears, maybe to how does that shift? How does the company of the future look like? How does an AI native company look like? I feel there are a lot of discussions on, “Oh, you only need one person to run everything.” Let’s not go to that level. We’ve had a couple of episodes where we focused on AI as your co-founder and a couple of other elements that you guys can go back to. Let’s focus on a more evolutionary view of what’s happening to organizations, and maybe start with the org structure. In general, we should see more flat organizations where mid-level managers have to justify their pay in some ways because middle management are routers. They are normally routing tasks. It’s sometimes aggregating it, synthesizing it, and pulling it back up. Guess what? AI and agents in general are very good at that. The synthesis piece, et cetera, is not as well needed. One could say there are several elements of middle management that are valuable, like the coaching of people, the creation of apprentices, and the accountability that comes with some of middle management. But lo and behold, most of middle management is seen as a little bit of a thin line that doesn’t need to necessarily exist. I feel we’re moving into a world of smaller teams, more senior teams, where there’s more judgment at the top, where you’ll have people that both do a mix of what we used to call management in its new form, but also a lot of individual contribution. If you’re not used to that, if you’re not used anymore to be an individual in the future, again, and if you’re a very senior in an organization, maybe this is the right time to either reinvent yourself, find some other job that doesn’t require as much of that, which we’ll have plenty of those jobs for the next few decades, or maybe retire. I’ve actually, shockingly enough, seen people who have said, “You know what? This thing is changing too fast, too dramatically. My industry is changing quite aggressively right now. I’m about to retire in a couple of years. I’m just going to retire now.” I’ve literally met two people who have done that. Again, there’s nothing wrong about it. I think we’re, again, going through a step function and a huge shift, but figuring out where you fit in this new model of organizations, more senior at the top, smaller teams, more of a mix of individual contribution with management than ever was done before.Bertrand Schmitt I agree with you. In some ways, I’m not surprised that some people might say, “You know what? It’s now time to retire.” I feel a bit sad, maybe because it means you don’t like to keep reinventing yourself and changing your habits and thinking about new stuff. You were a creature of habits, I would say, if that’s your conclusion. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion, obviously, and a way of life. I guess that’s what happened, again, at regular times in the past in terms of big change. What I can see is that the rise of, you can call it the full-stack individual, someone who will have multiple roles inside the team. Before, you had to really separate the role. Especially in the US, there is such a clear separation between every role you can have in a company. Let’s take a tech company. You will have people doing design, people doing different types of designs, people doing front-end development, back-end development, and operations. You see step-by-step hyper-specialization. I have seen that, and it’s true that the level of complexity you had to deal with at some point requires some level of hyper-specialization because it will take you 6, 12 months in order to be really, really strong on a specific topic, a specific language. God forbid, trying to go deep into something that you had no real experience into. But I feel with AI, it’s a big change, actually. It’s the opportunity to go beyond that. It’s the opportunity to do more, to touch more. You can combine designing and shipping code, product managing and shipping code, being an analyst and deploying. Of course, we have to think how it works because putting a marketer shipping code to production, maybe that will get you into trouble. But I think that there must be some change. We see it changing dramatically, how fast we can get into something, something different from what we are used to. I think it would be crazy not to take that opportunity to dramatically change the scope of many positions and put an end to that hyper-specialization. I think for me, in some ways, hyper-specialization was bad. There is only so much you want to be a specialist in because a lot of things, a lot of opportunities are actually coming from the mixing of many different ideas, many different perspectives, and you lose if you go to hyper-specialization.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I don’t think the age that is coming is the age of the generalist. I think it’s going to be the age of the multispecialist. We’re going to go into an age of multispecialization, which is a little bit, we’ve mentioned it as well in the past, what Amazon defines as an athlete or T-shaped or pie-shaped people, people that have on top an amazing ability to do general management, strategy, managing teams, et cetera, then have spikes. Spikes into business development, corporate development, product management, whatever it is. With AI and with agents, the development of those spikes, as we’ve been discussing in this episode, will actually be easier. It’s almost like a given. If you want to go deeper and deeper into a certain area, you can go much faster. I think that level of multispecialization is going to be really cool to observe. I’m not sure we’ve had an age of multispecialization over the years. Maybe people would point out, well, the Da Vinci example, people that are great across very different areas. Maybe that’s an example of multispecialization. But honestly, from my perspective, this is going to be an exciting time because of that, because you’ll have people who, instead of being just focused on this area of sales, and I only do that, they can actually and should actually do a lot of other things. So the work, as we were talking before, can be more interesting. More demanding as well, because the judgments you need to make are more complex. The context you need to actually gain needs to be gained much faster. At a level of magnitude, you haven’t been able to do it before. Talk about information overload. But actually, ultimately, the roles can be a lot more interesting, a lot more exciting, because I can jump around. If I’m an investor, in this case, we have two investors on this conversation. But if I’m an investor, one of the things that we start looking at is actually not just looking at a startup as, is this startup doing something in AI or not? Is it AI-enabled or not? Is it an AI platform or not? But actually, more fundamentally, is this an AI native startup? Meaning, organizationally, culturally, is this the company that’s already in the AI age? How is the team working? How are they defining things? It’s not just that they only have two or three people. It’s like, what are those two or three people doing? How are they doing it? What cadence are they doing it on? What tools are they using? How are they making decisions? I feel we’re still actually relatively early on that track. It’s very interesting because we’ve had all these companies raising mega rounds. First round out, we invested in one of them, but there have been many frontier labs out there raising a ton of money. But a lot of them don’t have a fundamentally different way of doing business. Of organizing themselves, of how they do the day-to-day. Although they’re working on cutting-edge stuff, with very notable exceptions, they’re actually not using it themselves. They’re not actually shifting how they do stuff themselves.Bertrand Schmitt For me, that’s very interesting because in the past, I used to be quite conservative on how you manage and run a company in the sense that if you’re already in tech, if you are already on the cutting edge of what technology can deliver, and this and that, don’t waste time trying to invent a new org structure. Just focus on delivering something great, amazing, and be great at technologies. That’s already your huge differentiator. At the time, there was no real reason to innovate on the team organization. I have seen so many teams that tried to innovate, and it was just catastrophic because there was not much to innovate on, because we had decades of optimization that we could leverage. There was no reason to invent. But here it’s very different. There is a dramatic shift in how you can organize differently a company. I don’t think there are any blueprints yet on what’s the best way to do it because it’s too new. But at the same time, I would feel very bad to invest or support a company that first is not focused on AI or AI-enabled, but at the same time is not trying to innovate on the team itself. Because if you don’t do that, you’re going to get killed by someone who is going to innovate better than you on not just the product, but on the org as well.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Indeed. The shifts are pretty substantial. If you look, for example, just at hiring, what do you hire for? Certainly, there’s this element of the multispecialized orchestrator, which normally will be someone with quite a lot of wisdom and expertise. It doesn’t necessarily mean someone who’s old, but someone who has the ability to work with all the AI tooling and platforms out there and be an orchestrator of agents. Why do they make judgments, make decisions, move stuff forward really, really, really quickly? Again, those jobs are going to be the best jobs. The second part, I think that is very interesting, around hiring, is you’re going to skew towards the elements that are potentially either very aligned with the use of AI tooling and platform, AI expertise, or being AI native, or someone who’s used to using AI. That’s one side of the fence. On the other side, you’re going to actually be optimizing to hire people that have the characteristics that will be difficult for AI to replace immediately, like taste and the notion of fundamental accountability and notion of implications, the notion of how you affect change in organizations, how you affect change in individuals, the elements of coaching, and beyond coaching. You’ll be optimizing for those kinds of hires as well. Then, last but not least, for me, I feel that there is a momentum already happening. I think it will happen even more, which is the tendency to under-hire rather than over-hire. The moment of the good old days of blitz scaling, “Oh, let me go and hire 300 people to scale my go-to-market and just land grab market.” Now, that’s not how it’s going to work. People are going to try and first get the efficiencies in-house with top talent and see if there’s, at the end, the need to hire more people or not, rather than the other way around. I think the issue here is a little bit of what we alluded to before in this episode. There is a tax on individuals. If you hire more people, you’ll have to manage people, you’ll have to work with them, et cetera. If I don’t need to, I might as well work with the agents that the tools and platforms that I use give me access to. Because that’s a world that’s much more efficient, right?Bertrand Schmitt I’m in total agreement with you on this. It’s definitely raising way more questions than before because, again, on one side, you have the product, the technology used to build products that are completely different. At the same time, all of this is also enabling new ways to design organizations and to scale differently, especially in a world where, as we have seen in 3, 6, and 12 months, stuff that you thought were impossible are suddenly becoming possible. So you’re, “Hey, I’m going to scale and burn a shitload of money for 6 months before I know if there is any return.” Versus, “You know what? Maybe I just wait 6 months. The AI has improved enough so that we don’t need this new team. We don’t need these people to do stuff.” Because actually, if you just wait 6 months, we will have stuff coming for free from either new AI models or new AI tools or this or that. If you remember, we used to say that in mobile, things were going three times as fast as on the web in terms of pace of innovation and speed of development and stuff. I mean, with AI, it’s 5X mobile.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Maybe even more. Yes, well.Bertrand Schmitt Maybe even more, maybe 10X. Every assumption around blitz scaling or scaling in general was based on past assumptions. It’s not based on how is the industry evolving today. Might make more sense for you to really grow your agents and spend more money on more tokens. I remember, of course, Jensen is selling his business interest, but he was saying, “Hey, for each one of my 450K engineers, he better spend 250K in tokens a year.” I’m not saying it’s the right way to say it, but I think there is some truth in it, and that would be something to think about. Have we maxed out the token usage per employee? I’m not talking in a stupid way because token maxing and wasting money has no value and is as stupid as it gets. But if you are truly getting a return on these tokens, can you use more? Can you generate more? Can you create more loops so that one engineer manages not just 10 agents, but 50 agents, but 200 agents? I think that’s the big question. We’re trying to add more people. More people means more management, more issues, more this, more that. That would be a fair question. Another piece of the puzzle is how do you build in a way your… I don’t know if it’s a digital twin, but more like the digital version of your companies represented by agents. How do you make sure that everything you do as a business is truly captured, is truly leveraged so that your agents are getting better and better? Not just because the model gets better, but because you are putting more data into it, because it has more opportunity to learn, and as a result, gets better at your specific business.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro The next big thing is culture. How does culture change? I think the biggest shift that I see is, why would you do meetings all the time?Bertrand Schmitt Yes.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro At least at Chamaeleon, we have a very small team, just by the way. We have a very small team at Chamaeleon. We’ve reduced by way more than 50% the time we spend on meetings between each other across the board, one-on-ones, partner meetings, et cetera. I think we’re really pushing to be more and more asynchronous. There’s stuff you can process via message. I was just asking one of my colleagues, “Can you just send me that prompt for that so I can just do that on CoWork?” Or “Can I just go on Mantis and do this? Can you tell me the cycle?” Or vice versa. Basically, it’s a little bit like you’re just going to do it. I don’t need to meet. I don’t need to meet all the time. There are some things where we still need to meet and interact, and we need to brainstorm at times, and we need to go to a different level of abstraction on the top end. Then on the lower end, there might be things that are a little bit more specific and governance-related and operational-related that we need to agree on that are more sticky. But otherwise, the culture is going to be biased towards build. “Go and do it,” rather than, “Let’s do a meeting.”Bertrand Schmitt Yes.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Async is the thing. I’m more and more like we have a couple of interns this summer. “Can we async this?” They’re like, “What does that mean?” “Can we make this interaction asynchronous?” Because synchronous interactions for me are very expensive. Can you send me something that I can process, and then I can send it back to you? We don’t waste time on you giving me context and whatever. Then I’m not ready quite yet because I need to process it. Maybe I’m in between two meetings that I’m actually thinking about other things in my mind.” Again, I feel that shifts how stuff is done. One, build rather than meeting. Two, asynchronous versus synchronous. In some way, millennials had it right when they shifted a lot to messaging and stuff like that. Let’s do more asynchronous rather than synchronous, those two elements from just an operating model of the company are significant. Maybe this is a good time for me just to put one parenthesis because there’s this thing that’s bugging me as we’re talking here. Everyone who is listening to us at this point in time might be saying, “Cool, but I work for this large organization. We’re just now…” Everything we’re saying here is contextualized by time. We’re giving you extreme situations. We’re looking into the future. Some companies that we’re talking about might be doing this already as we speak. Some of them might be in the process of doing this and might in the next couple of months be doing it like we are describing it here. Some of them might take years to get there. Then again, some of the companies that might take years might actually be destroyed in between or meanwhile, and be disrupted. Some of them might not because they’re in very legacy businesses, and it’s fine, and it’s okay. Again, don’t take everything that Bertrand and I are saying today as this is gospel, and it’s going to happen tomorrow, and why the hell are we not doing it? We think that aspirationally, this is where you should be moving to as an organization, whatever size you’re at. Speed will matter, as we discussed before, but not everyone, obviously, is going to move as fast as we’re describing it here.Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Me, for instance, take inspiration often with what some of the AI labs, frontier AI labs, are doing, the way they are working, especially in OpenAI and Anthropic. They are clearly at the top of the spear in terms of what is it that you can do because they have access to models we don’t have access to, because they have unlimited tokens they can use for tasks. They hire people who are, of course, 100% on AI. They are the best example of what is achievable if you have the top minds, if you have the latest models, if you have unlimited tokens. From there, you can take that for our needs and for our situation, and others in industries that are not as advanced. Definitely, you have some time. But as you say, things are moving fast, things are changing. Wall Street is going to expect better returns because when we discuss all of this, the conclusion is that you should be able to do more with less. That’s as real as it gets at some point. By the way, that’s what you see. You see better performance, a better business performance right now. So even if you might not get disrupted, you’d better start there. For some, it might take more time, and they might still be fine.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Maybe to bookend this section, clearly what we’re saying is organizations are going to change. Their MOs are going to change, the structures are going to change. There are elements of what we discussed before in terms of judgment that are fundamental to this. The ability that in some ways, one would say a lot of the technique of getting solutions out there, even in brainstorming or problem-solving, is going to get democratized. The algorithms are able to do that. On the other hand, having points of view and having wisdom is not necessarily democratized, necessarily by the machines. It can be facilitated, it can be more productive in achieving that level of wisdom, but wisdom still will matter at the end of the day. We’re not saying that’s out of the question. Actually, that’s going to be the asset. People who have fundamental wisdom that can come to the table and frame things. We see this even today in prompt engineering, on just creating prompts. The better your prompt is, the better the outcome is going to be, the result that you get from the algorithms. That’s not going to change, in my opinion, anytime soon. That UI interaction piece is not going to change anytime soon. Again, if you’re an organization thinking through organizational structure, culture, if you’re thinking through hiring, these are some of the elements that we think will give you an opportunity, but I would actually go one step further. On the positive side, I would say, they give you arbitrage. If you’re able to move faster than your competitors and really adapt your org faster, you’ll reap the benefits faster as well. That’s what many still say and relate to as the word innovation. That’s how innovation gets accelerated. I think there’s a huge opportunity right now for arbitrage. If you move fast, experiment, experiment on new org structures, experiment with talent, you’ll know that some of them will work well, some of them will fail miserably, so you can’t experiment on literally everything. On the other side, I think the doomsday scenario is if you don’t, if you’re on the other side and your competitor is outpacing you on trying these different organizational models, structure, hiring models, and operating models, they’ll potentially just disrupt you. They’ll do stuff that you thought you had the moat on, and lo and behold, you don’t anymore. Sometimes it comes just from org, just from injection of people with a different MRO, different operating model.Bertrand Schmitt The Human Element: Are We Underestimating It? Maybe we can move to our next section about the human elements. Are we underestimating it or are we overestimating it? The three things that are a big part of the human elements, emotion, creativity, and synthesis. Is it just soft skills, replaceable part? On the contrary, is it the durable part now that we have automated intelligence?Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I’ll start with emotion first because I think it’s probably the easiest of all the ones you’ve mentioned. Emotion is key. Many of you listening to us will know this. The way you deliver a certain message, the emotion that you have when you deliver it, just in and of itself, this could be a sentence, it’s something verbal, et cetera. Makes a difference between the person or the people on the other side actually adopting it or actually just resisting it. Emotion is critical. It’s what runs the world. Everyone talks about a bunch of things, but emotion is a currency that is still naturally human. It will be, I feel, difficult for these AI tools and platforms to recreate it fully until there’s some literally very high-definition manifestation of them as avatars or some physical manifestation of them as robots and all that stuff. It will take a while for that emotion to be manifested. Emotion, I think, is still something that we as humans have as a moat, and it’s critical. As you mentioned before, I was a strategy management consultant at McKinsey, and getting people to action is actually 80% about the delivery, communication, the emotion that you surround the project itself, more than sometimes the truth. It’s great to have the truth and to have something that is similar to the truth in terms of analysis, but in some ways, that’s not what really moves change. Change is moved by, I would argue, a significant amount of emotion and alignment on emotions.Bertrand Schmitt You could argue that’s something that most politicians have perfectly understood. If you look at most campaigns these days, everything on emotions, maybe the tagline might be one word. It’s interesting when you see from that perspective that actually it’s very little on facts, very little on all of this, but more about emotion. You could argue it’s the same for businesses in the future? That’s a fair question. I think creativity is another one that’s quite important. At the same time, it’s not so easy because I must say I’m quite amazed when I’m looking for creativity from AI, either to generate the image, to generate video, to generate audio, or to generate text. AI can be pretty creative. I still think you need to control its creativity; you need to understand what’s good, what’s bad, what’s quality, but at the same time, I can see even in creative tasks, AI can be a very strong partner. I’m talking about any creative task, like invent a name for a product, let’s brainstorm the mission for the company. AI can actually be doing a pretty impressive job. That’s the type of job where you will hire experts, where you will use some of the best people in your team to help you for days. We say, “You can do quite a lot.” It’s an interesting one because I think there is some unique human creativity, and at the same time, AI can be pretty strong at creative task as well.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I agree. In particular, if it represents benchmarking, if it represents repetition, if it represents seeing the world and then coming up with something that presents itself as creative, to be honest, it can actually outpace humans. If it’s like genuine light bulb moments of creativity, angles that haven’t been tried before, certainly not in the same way, I think humans still have the advantage. To your point, I agree. This is not a humans-win situation. On the previous one, on emotion, still, part of it is because, also on emotion, there are exchanges. You and I might be looking at each other, and from the facial expressions and the reactions, where you judge that for AI to get there, it’s going to take a long time. There’s going to be a lot of very complex algorithmic stuff put into that for AI to be able to create synthetic emotional behaviors, but creativity, I agree with you. There are a lot more nuances to it today, where AI does have significant advantages at the end of the day. Synthesis depends. Synthesis, I feel, if we’re talking about holding a bunch of messy assumptions, contextualized inputs with different layers of data adjacent to them and then trying to create and form one coherent, fully accountable point of view that you stake something on, like a decision, a company, a business unit, whatever, I think humans have the advantage. Part of it is the complexity of what we have today with generative, pre-trained transformers, today with GPTs, where the hallucination comes through, where it’s really more statistical analysis. Over time, maybe synthesis will be a forte for AI. Right now, I think we still have that ability to really be the ultimate decision-makers and judge-makers and have that wisdom put at the table to make those decisions. Honestly, models are very good on balancing both sides, so ended up, as we say in Portuguese, neither fish nor meat. It’s to balance both sides’ answers. That’s not helpful in most cases. When you’re in a difficult position where, for example, the future of a company, company is almost dying, what do you do? I’m not sure your AI algorithms that are going to give you a great solution. Because it will give you a median or average solution, which likely will lead you to a median or average outcome, which in this case would be failure. Again, on synthesis, there are some areas of advantage for human beings. If you are looking for clearly synthesized perspectives on certain elements that are maybe less edge-focused, they’re more than the normal part of the normal distribution, then probably AI agents are brilliant at that. All the tools we have today are pretty good at that, and I think they’ll just get better over time. That’s how I see synthesis.Bertrand Schmitt I think a lot of improvements will come with a better fine-tuning of agents to what’s special about your company. Because if you just take a general agent, there is only so much. It can understand your industry, your company, and your way of working. I think that part of making sure your agents are finely trained, finely tuned on your own business, so that they can give you a really well-calibrated feedback, will have a lot of importance.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I think that’s absolutely spot on. Maybe to end it, what is definitely different about humanity? Definitely, emotion, as we discussed, some pieces of synthesis. Creativity, maybe the light bulb creativity, not the more repeatable creativity, the one that you can put and encapsulate into processes in some ways. There are elements of us being physical, which robots can’t still recreate. That’s definitely an advantage. The embodied, we’re embodied. That’s obviously a huge advantage. With that also comes advantages because we have to interpret each other, and we have to see the complexities in physicality that land to it. Is human and the human element categorical difference? If we’re having a more philosophical discussion around this, I think it is. I think it will be for at least the foreseeable future and maybe decades to come, even in whatever scenarios we’ll discuss, which is our next section, scenarios.Bertrand Schmitt I would say projecting beyond 10 years is always pretty hard on this because, again, some of the improvements we are talking about we can imagine based on how it has evolved, but at the same time, there will be disruptions in AI. Stuff that we take for granted in terms of weakness, especially, might not be there in a few years from now. Either because it has been solved through brute force or because the field will have made significant change and improvements and discoveries, making some of our points moot. If we talk about embodiment, obviously, robots are coming. How fast, how cheap? That will be a big question. Right now, they’re not very smart. They’re usually very specialized. The more we move to a more general form factor, humanoid form factor, the more I think it will change. Also, another piece of the puzzle is that we have the assumption of agents having trouble to convince humans and stuff. At some point, we keep assuming that humans in the loop. If we’re talking about agents convincing another agent, not having embodiment might be even more efficient. That will be another perspective. Going forward, we will have not just agents we control who are doing a job and scanning the job, but agents truly interacting with other agents. You have agents controlled by one person, one team in your company, working either together or maybe not confrontationally, but trying to think and having different perspectives with another agent, controlled by other teams. I don’t think we have seen much of that now. We have seen mostly agents that are controlled by one team doing one job in one direction. Not multiple teams agents working together, or against or in parallel with another team agent. I think we will see some interesting things coming out of that.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Scenarios Switching to scenarios, we love our two-by-twos. We haven’t done one in a while. This time it’s a two by two. We have four scenarios. I think on one axis, we would have potentially the capabilities of AI. One side would be more incremental. The other side would be the extreme full AGI. I’ll define it in a bit so that we can at least have a little bit of a definitional view on what the AGI is. Then the other axis would be how gains are distributed, concentrated versus broad. Obviously, if they’re very concentrated, it’s more unequal. It only goes to a few companies, a few people, a few individuals. If it’s broad, it’s much more dispersed through society, et cetera. AGI, just to try to define it, the formal definition of it is that it’s a hypothetical AI that matches or exceeds human capabilities across virtually all cognitive and practical tasks. In some ways, AGI can learn, reason, and adapt to novel situations across any domain. Then there are several mutations on this, but there’s one notion, or rather, there are three notions that normally are across a lot of these definitions. One is generalization, ability to seamlessly transfer knowledge from one domain to another without needing retraining, which is a very impressive skill that we humans still seemingly have. Autonomy in agency, the capacity to operate independently, set goals, plan and execute complex tasks. I think AI is their issue with agents to a lot of that extent. Then, last but not least, human parity, performing economically valuable work at or above the level of a typical human knowledge worker. If you listen to one of our last episodes, you’ll realize that Bertrand and I have slightly different views on AGI, and if it’s already here or not. I think, definitionally, maybe we have slightly different views on what the definition actually is. For me, maybe AGI is a little bit more what some would call superintelligence and generalized superintelligence. Strict to census, Bertrand is more connecting to AGI as in its prime definition. It behaves as well or better than a human thing. Maybe that’s what’s leading us to differences on whether AGI has arrived or not.Bertrand Schmitt Personally, I will have a different scale where I will put AGI, as you just said, in some ways, relatively similar in performance to your average human being. On top of it, it’s able to touch different domains that most humans are not able to do. Usually, there is some level of specializations where in AI, it can be more generic. I will put ASI, Artificial Superintelligence, as clearly the step beyond. Something that, on any dimension you pick, it’s able to beat a human expert. From my perspective, I think we already discussed that, but we are at AGI already. We have AI that can do way better, not just way better, but at least as well as humans on many topics, sometimes better. Yes, there are some topics that are not for AI yet. Embodiment, for instance, to flock with your humanoid robot in 2026. For me, we are partially there or fully there in AGI. If we take the stricter definition, ASI, we are definitely not there, but my guess is that it’s moving quite fast. We might be there in a few years from now. I don’t think we are talking about multi-decades. It’s 5 years, maybe 10. Of course, there are questions because people will say, for instance, “Hey, how do you become truly super-intelligent when all your training is based on human data?” That’s not an easy one because how do you train on that? To be way better, not just a bit better, but way better. Maybe I’m going on a tangent, but some are looking at AI learning from AI, AI being taught from AI, AI fighting with AI, AI challenging AI. The same way we saw this AlphaGo moment where AI was not trained anymore, like in chess with human moves, but has been trained to play against itself. That’s when it reached superintelligence in Go. It reached superintelligence by playing against itself and basically letting go of that human baggage, if you want, and going to the next level. What I found interesting in that, actually, first, that’s what happened, but two, there was some analysis that the average level of Go players and the top players went up after AlphaGo because AlphaGo, in a way, opened doors that humans didn’t believe were open in front of them, or they didn’t see them. They didn’t see these doors, so they didn’t bother to open them. AI opened new doors, but interestingly enough, humans improved after that, thanks to AI. You see what I mean? It was an interesting, okay, that self-learning from AI was the way to go beyond the current level of human knowledge and human expertise, but at the same time, humans were able to follow up. It was not like suddenly humans are totally useless crap. They improved. Did they still beat AI? Maybe not, but it was definitely also helpful.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Back to our scenarios. We’re going to take the definitional extreme just for argument’s sake for scenarios. We’re going to talk about maybe what you were saying, ASI rather than full AGI, but like ASI. Again, artificial superintelligence as the extreme on the one hand. Let me talk about maybe the first scenario that would come to mind. Maybe we can call it the plateau scenario. All of this was great, but it was all smoke and mirrors. They were great at some cognition stuff. They’re a great tool. At some point, they’re going to hit a wall. Hallucinations are never going to be a thing of the past. We can’t fully trust them on really hardcore stuff. We’ll gain productivity enhancements. We’ll keep gaining those productivity enhancements, but at some point in time, we really won’t reach ASI. We really will be stuck with what we have. It’s a little bit like we get the next big thing, the next big spreadsheet, the next big internet, but it’s not going to change the whole world beyond just productivity, enhancements, and amazing tools that we have available to us that makes us much better. In that scenario, the winners will continue being fast adopters, probably small and medium businesses, because there won’t be a push for maximum speed either, so they’ll catch up at some point. Then AI native companies will be better companies than other companies, but not necessarily overall disruptors across the board. It’s not necessarily a new species of companies. It’s just companies that are a little bit better at doing stuff, which we also saw during the internet phenomenon and that first big push forward and then bubble, where we had some companies that were fundamentally different on how they operated. It took us another couple of decades for companies to be more and more digitally native along the way. Basically interesting, but it’s boring. It’s like, cool, we got tools, we got promised the world. What are the implications? All these companies that are worth trillions and trillions of dollars are not worth trillions and trillions of dollars. Because at some point we’ll face competition, commoditization. It will just be tools and platforms. They will not unlock that next stage. Therefore, this will have been a bubble, and likely it would be a hard landing to that bubble. That’s the implication.Bertrand Schmitt I would just say that, yes, I agree with you, but I would just say overall, even if it stopped today in terms of quality improvement, speed or stuff, or it barely improves, I still think we will have 10 years of madness just to leverage everything that we have today.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Understood, Bertrand. This is a scenario. I understand, but maybe we’re going to hit a wall, and we’re going to hit that wall next year, or we’re going to hit that wall in 2 years or whatever.Bertrand Schmitt Possibly. I’m just saying we still have 10 years of goodness from that big push in AI we experienced the past few years.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Absolutely. Agreed, but it’s boring.Bertrand Schmitt It’s boring. It’s a plateau.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro It’s a plateau. The second one is more of something that we have AI, but humans in the loop are going to be critical along the way. The judgment work that we described earlier in the episode is going to be critical to everything that happens. It’s, I would call it the augmentation scenario. The AI will be a great augmentation tool for humans, but humans will never really quite stop being in the loop. Some of the gains that AI has are broadly distributed in society and in the startup, big corporation and small medium business world. Everyone will have access to them. We humans, are still very important. We have all these augmentation things, and AI is mostly benign. There will be a couple of issues, but honestly, at the end of the day, we’re just better. We’re better, faster, more data-driven, more factually current. We’re doing stuff faster, but humans

With Josh Tomolak, Vice President of Independent Advisor Services, Diamond Consultants Louis Diamond and Josh Tomolak unpack today's IBD vs. RIA landscape, explaining what has changed, where each model excels, and how to determine which path best supports the business you want to build. In Summary The independent wealth management landscape has changed dramatically, making the decision between an independent broker dealer (IBD) and an RIA more nuanced than ever before. Louis Diamond welcomes Diamond Consultants' Vice President of Independent Advisor Services, Josh Tomolak, for a practical discussion of how the independent space has evolved, what truly differentiates the IBD and RIA models today, and how advisors can evaluate which path best aligns with the business they want to build. The Storyline Not long ago, the decision to become independent was relatively straightforward. Advisors either remained with a traditional firm or pursued independence through one of a limited number of models. Today, the conversation is far more complex. Independent broker dealers have significantly expanded their capabilities, offering stronger technology, larger transition packages, greater flexibility, and even pathways to RIA ownership. At the same time, the RIA ecosystem has matured into a sophisticated marketplace supported by multiple custodians, outsourced service providers, institutional capital, and enterprise platforms that rival many of the industry's largest firms. As these developments have unfolded, the traditional distinctions between an IBD and an RIA have become less obvious. Advisors evaluating their options are no longer simply asking whether they should become independent—they're asking which model best supports the clients they serve, the business they envision, and the lifestyle they want to create. In this Industry Update, Louis and Josh unpack the realities behind the IBD vs. RIA decision. They discuss where the two models overlap, where meaningful differences still exist, and why factors like service, technology, economics, operational responsibility, enterprise value, and long-term optionality often matter more than labels alone. Whether you're considering changing independent firms, launching your own RIA, or simply want a better understanding of how the independent landscape has evolved, this conversation provides an objective framework for evaluating today's choices—and preparing for tomorrow's opportunities. Topics Covered Independent Broker Dealer (IBD) vs. RIA models The evolution of supportive independence Technology investments across the independent space Transition support and advisor mobility Capital solutions and recruiting economics Business formation and enterprise value Launching an independent RIA Multi-custodial platforms and open architecture Minority investments and succession planning Future trends shaping advisor independence > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors Why are already-independent advisors reconsidering their current model? (5:27) Josh explains why service, technology, economics, and growing optionality are causing advisors to reevaluate their existing affiliations. How have independent broker dealers and RIAs become more alike? (19:28) Louis and Josh discuss the growing convergence between the two models and why the distinction is becoming less obvious than many advisors assume. What really separates an IBD from an RIA? (25:04) A practical discussion of autonomy, compliance, flexibility, custody, economics, and advisor experience. What misconceptions keep advisors from launching an RIA? (36:29) Josh outlines the “Four Pillars” of launching an RIA and explains where advisors tend to either overestimate or underestimate the operational realities. Which advisors thrive most in each model? (33:12) The conversation explores why there isn't a universally “better” model—only one that's better aligned with an advisor's goals. What trends are quietly reshaping independence? (42:13) Minority investments, enterprise value, business formation, and changing revenue models may have an even greater impact than advisors realize today. Key Takeaways Independence has evolved from a destination into an ongoing strategic decision. Independent broker dealers have significantly improved technology, transition support, economics, and flexibility. The RIA ecosystem has matured into a highly sophisticated marketplace with broad outsourcing and support options. Choosing between an IBD and an RIA should begin with long-term business objectives—not industry perceptions. Building a valuable business depends more on business structure and scalability than simply growing assets. Advisors considering independence should evaluate models with an open mind rather than relying on outdated assumptions. The next decade will likely bring continued convergence between independent business models. https://youtu.be/jHDVso2TsmQ Quotable Moments “The question is no longer, ‘Do I want to go independent?' The question is, ‘What kind of independence makes the most sense for my clients, business, and goals?'” “Business formation is far more important than assets under management.” “The way you build your business will ultimately determine how valuable that business becomes.” “Everything in an RIA is going to cost you either your time or your money.” FAQs Is there still a meaningful difference between an IBD and an RIA? Yes. While the two models increasingly overlap, they differ in areas such as flexibility, compliance structure, operational responsibility, economics, and control. Why are more independent advisors changing firms today? Improved technology, stronger transition support, evolving economics, and better service models are prompting many advisors to reassess whether their current platform still fits their business. Is launching an RIA easier than it used to be? Yes. Supportive independence, outsourced service providers, and improved custodial resources have significantly reduced many of the historical barriers. Does every entrepreneurial advisor belong in the RIA model? No. The best fit depends on an advisor's appetite for ownership, customization, operational responsibility, and long-term vision. What matters more: assets under management or how the business is built? Josh argues that scalable business formation often has a greater impact on enterprise value than AUM alone. What's the biggest mistake advisors make when evaluating independence? Starting with assumptions instead of objectives. The most effective due diligence begins by defining the business you're trying to build, then identifying the model best suited to support it. Yes. While the two models increasingly overlap, they differ in areas such as flexibility, compliance structure, operational responsibility, economics, and control. Improved technology, stronger transition support, evolving economics, and better service models are prompting many advisors to reassess whether their current platform still fits their business. Yes. Supportive independence, outsourced service providers, and improved custodial resources have significantly reduced many of the historical barriers. No. The best fit depends on an advisor's appetite for ownership, customization, operational responsibility, and long-term vision. Josh argues that scalable business formation often has a greater impact on enterprise value than AUM alone. Starting with assumptions instead of objectives. The most effective due diligence begins by defining the business you're trying to build, then identifying the model best suited to support it. Related Resources IBD vs. RIA Comparison Guide IBD vs. RIA Revisited: Two Independent Pathways for Advisors to Consider NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. View the transcript of this episode… IBD vs. RIA: A Special Industry Update on Independence A conversation with Louis Diamond and Josh Tomolak, Vice President of Independent Advisor Services at Diamond Consultants.      Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is IBD vs. RIA: A Special Industry Update on Independence. It’s a conversation with Josh Tomolak, our Vice President of Independent Advisor Services. I’m Louis Diamond, and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual advisor transition report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Louis Diamond: For a long time, going independent would suggest the destination. Today, it’s often the beginning of a different conversation. As the independent space has matured, advisors have more choices than ever before. Broker-dealers have expanded their capabilities. The RIA ecosystem has become increasingly sophisticated. Capital is more readily available and support models now exist that would’ve been difficult to imagine a decade ago. The result is that many advisors who are already independent are taking a fresh look at whether their current affiliation still aligns with what they’re trying to build. My guest is Josh Tomolak, Vice President of Independent Advisor Services here at Diamond Consultants and our resident expert on independence. Josh spends his days helping advisors evaluate independence in all its forms from independent broker dealers, the fully independent RIAs and everything in between. And his knowledge is critical because the distinction between these models is often blurred. Many broker dealers now offer pathways to greater autonomy while supported independence has made RIA ownership more accessible than ever before. So the question is no longer simply, “Do I want to go independent?” The question is, “What kind of independence makes the most sense for client, business, and goals?” Josh shares what he’s seeing across the landscape, the misconceptions that continue to shape advisor thinking and the factors that matter most when evaluating the next chapter of an independent business. There’s a lot to discuss, so let’s get to it. Josh, thanks for joining me today. Joshua Tomolak: Thanks for having me, Louis. It’s a real privilege to have come. This is a full circle moment for me going from being a student of your podcast, to working alongside you, to being a guest. So I appreciate you having me. Louis Diamond: Amazing. I’m excited for this one too, because you have a fresh and in the weeds perspective that a lot of our guests simply don’t have. So why don’t you start off, you spend your time helping advisors evaluate independence every day. So working with advisors who are already independent, for the most part. And to me, it feels like the independent space has really evolved dramatically over the last decade. I mean, this podcast is really the epicenter of that to prove that out, but give us a little background on your past roles in the space and then we can get into what you’re seeing right now. Joshua Tomolak: Yeah, I’d be happy to. So I took a very non-traditional path into wealth management. I spent a decade as a deep sea Navy diver, and upon completing my service there, I ended up working for TD Ameritrade. And in my role there, I spent about six years doing nothing but helping financial advisors explore the RIA space, whether that was to join or partner with an RIA, sell to an RIA, or in most cases, launch their own RIA. And one of the things that I ultimately came to terms with is it’s just not the right model for everybody. While I’m a huge advocate for it, we would often lose business to the major broker-dealers of the world. And at the time, I really didn’t understand why. In the last six years at Diamond Consultants has been a very interesting purview into what a lot of the broker-dealers have done and are doing to make themselves more RIA-ish and be very compelling to the right advisor. Louis Diamond: Perfect framing. Your background is incredibly germane to the folks you work with. So let’s start off with the softball here. What are you seeing right now? Joshua Tomolak: It’s not so different than the rest of the industry, the wirehouses, the regional firms, things of that nature, that if you took 10 firms, they’re all likely to go different directions, even if they were identical practices. That could be… A third would go from an independent broker-dealer to another independent broker-dealer. Certainly the supported RIA space is growing every day and has created a lot of very fun and unique solutions for advisors, very customized and curated. And then I think there’s still a lot of really great sophisticated teams and individual contributors that are making the decision to go hyper entrepreneurial and launch their own individual RIA. So the movement’s really all over the board from my perspective. Louis Diamond: It does feel like it’s no longer independence is an alternative option or it’s on the fringes. It’s very front and center whether for breakaways, which is a big topic on our podcast, but in general, the infrastructure has become much, much more sophisticated today than ever before. Advisors have way more tools in their toolbox to serve clients, whether in the private markets or through technology. And it’s no longer that if an advisor’s independent, they’re in the minor leagues where they don’t have the same ability to serve clients like they did if they’re at a big bank or a private bank or a wirehouse. Do you agree? Joshua Tomolak: I absolutely agree. And I’m reminded of a question I got one time from a great team that I worked with in New York. They asked me, “Are there really more options than ever before? Because all we see is one firm selling to another.” And I think that’s a really great point. There’s far less broker dealers on the street than there were even five years ago. But for every Commonwealth, for example, that sells to an LPL, up pops three or four really cool private equity-backed, sophisticated RIA platform firms that are built to service their own unique advisor base. Louis Diamond: I think that’s right. Sitting on the sidelines, sitting on top of everything going on in the industry, I feel like capital is always an interesting topic forever. If an advisor wanted to move within the independent world or break away from a big firm to go independent, the only way to get capital was to go to an independent broker dealer. So we still see that, but I feel like today between all these minority acquisition opportunities, we’re seeing firms acquire practices at time of transition, which is somewhat new. There’s debt solutions, recruiting deals are way up for firms that are paying forgivable loans. RIAs now would, in some cases, will pay a forgivable note. What are you seeing there as far as the availability of capital and just deals in general? Joshua Tomolak: It’s a great question and I didn’t want to take the low-hanging fruit, but capital’s been a huge innovation, I guess, in the last five years I’d say. Just to give you rough quotes, please don’t hold me to it, but traditional transition broker-dealer deals were five years ago, 40 to 60% of Trailing Twelve revenue today are somewhere between 90 and 120%, sometimes north of that for the right team. That’s really meaningful money for the team that is thinking about foregoing a wirehouse deal, for example. I’d also say a lot of these firms are getting hyper-creative in how they solve for capital. The minority investment piece that you mentioned is very interesting. We’re seeing a lot of privatized forgivable notes in the RIA space where third-party or private lenders are basically lending the money and the RIA is making the payments on that forgivable note as long as the advisor is affiliated with them. So there’s been a recognition among the RIA space to get away from the, “Oh, they just took a check” type of mantra, and to say, “Look, I understand there are capital needs. These people are taking a risk. We need to solve for that.” So we’ve seen a lot of that in the marketplace. Louis Diamond: Very interesting. I think another thing financially, and then we’ll keep the train moving, that I know I’ve seen, and maybe you can weigh in if you’ve seen the same, is the cost to an advisor or a business owner to join an independent BD or to join an RIA has come way down, probably in part because of Schwab going to zero on trading. That’s been a catalyst. But it feels like we used to say independent BDs were expensive relative to the RIA world. And in some cases, they certainly could be. And if you’re at scale, maybe you can pick up a point or two being in the RIA world versus a BD. But when you have some of these BDs that have a basis point admin fee or no admin fee at a certain size and the payouts I feel like are similar, maybe have gone up a little bit, but it’s more so like the administrator fees, the platform fees, the program fees. Anyone who’s not in that world, it’s like, “What are you talking about?” But basically the way that these broker-dealers make money, it seems like there’s been a pretty big differential in the exchange of value where advisors now get more services, better technology, get more money to join them and get it at a lower cost. Do you agree? Joshua Tomolak: I absolutely agree. I think that maybe that’s one of the larger changes that we’ve seen, and it’s probably one of the benefits from a lot of the industry consolidation on that independent broker-dealer side. The economies of scale of these folks have allowed them to increase their tech spend, increase their service capacities all while offering it to the advisors at a cheaper price. And when I was at TD Ameritrade, one of the biggest pitches was the idea of a 100% payout and you control the fixed expenses, your technology compliance, et cetera. But what’s changed is that broker-dealers are pretty darn comparable on the expenses. All of those admin fees and things you mentioned will still exist, but they’re on a much smaller scale. And I think the question a lot of advisors are asking is, “Am I getting congruent value from my broker-dealer for what I pay for?” And while that answer might’ve been no a couple years ago, today the answer is more often yes. Louis Diamond: Yeah, I would agree. A lot of times we work with advisors who are starting an RIA or affiliating with an RIA or going to a BD and they see how big the deals are in the independent BD world and the payouts are really high and the fees are relatively low. And honestly, it is a hard decision or calculus to make, like, “How does it make sense for me to turn down this extremely lucrative deal when my ongoing economics are going to be somewhat similar in the BD world versus in the RIA space?” I think it’s just an interesting dynamic and we’ll get more into that distinction. One of the stars of the show right here is we’ve seen a ton of advisor movement across the industry. Our annual advisor transition report said that in 2025, over 11,000 experienced advisors changed firms, which is a large number. A lot of those numbers are within the independent world. So advisors who are 1099 through a BD or through an RIA transitioning to another platform or organization or starting an RIA. So why do you think we’re seeing so many advisors reconsider their current firm or their platform or their broker-dealer today than in years past? Joshua Tomolak: It’s a jarring number. 11,000 is definitely a significant amount of advisor movements. To me, it comes down to a few things, but I will say that it’s almost always a conglomeration of pushes and pulls. Pushes being inherent frustrations with your status quo, pulls being the new sexy, shiny things that you see in the marketplace that could be really impactful for your business. To me, it typically comes down to one of three things, at least on the push front, that drives advisors to movement. Service being number one, technology being number two, and economics being number three. And if we were just going to unpack those, I think service being, “Can you call somebody that knows your business, that knows your name? Are you getting the correct answers? Are you being pushed through a phone tree? And even if you’re not doing it, is it taking up a meaningful amount of time of your staff’s free time?” On the technology front, there’s very significant tech spends happening in the industry right now. I think Raymond James and LPL reported, for example, they spent 500 million in 2025 on a tech spend. So advisors are going to the places that are making their life easier. People are looking for a mechanism to really scale their business without having to add staff and a lot of expenses to the bottom line. And technology is just the fastest, most efficient way to do that most times. And then economics, certainly a lot of advisors and teams have built phenomenal businesses and they’ve made a great living without really stressing out about the economics. And they eventually get to a point in their business where what they were giving up as a million dollar producer is far different than what they’re giving up as a $4 million producer. And back to the congruent value, it perhaps stops to make as much sense. Louis Diamond: Well said. I always say when the cost-to-value ratio is out of whack, that’s when advisors sit up and take notice. And not to name names of firms, but there definitely are firms that are more expensive. And even if you look at how much a wirehouse or a Ed Jones advisor paid their firm, it’s like, “What got me here is not necessarily what’s going to get me there.” And while the name on the business card, the resources were incredibly impactful, and I’m so grateful for what my firm, my broker-dealer did for me when I was just starting or when I was smaller. Now the business is bigger, I rely upon different resources or I don’t need the firm as much. So I’d rather plow the cost savings either into income for myself or invest it in areas that are most germane to my business. And it’s usually when that kind of light bulb moment goes off, that’s one of the major pushes that cause advisors to evaluate other options. So I agree with you, those are the major push factors, but then what are the pull factors? What are the major advancements or changes across the independent space that’s causing advisors to say, “Hey, okay, I might have some frustrations, but at the same time, I also need to find something that’s more than marginally better than the firm I’m at. Otherwise, why am I going to go through the hassle, take the risk, et cetera? So what are some of the pull factors that advisors are latching onto today? Joshua Tomolak: Sure. And I might say with one final push factor, there’s a straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back when you’ve been told for however many years that this change or that change is coming down the pipeline and it never happens. And it translates well into the pull factors is do they do what they say they’re going to do? The talking points really for the pull factors are exactly the same. So the counterpoint to service is perhaps having a direct relationship with the chief compliance officer at a firm or having a dedicated service representative that knows their stuff inside and out and can get you the answer even if they don’t know it off the top of their head. Having the technology to rebalance a household in two clicks instead of two hours. In economics, I think it’s really a transparency of economics. We’ve both worked with some really significant firms that have looked at their P&Ls and said, “where the heck is the money going?” And we’ve looked at the same P&Ls and said, “I have no idea,” because it’s so convoluted. People are happy to pay for good service, good technology, good products, but they just want to know where the money’s coming from. So I think it’s a yin and yang. The same things that they’re the push are often the pull. Louis Diamond: Definitely. I’ll give you a couple other from my perspective. I’ll say first specific to the independent BD world, and then we’ll dive into the RIA, I think it’s a little bit different. But I think some other will say innovations or changes that are causing advisors to really perk up and listen and really make the case to themselves that life will be better at this new organization than the status quo or staying put. We’ve seen major advancements in transition support, whether it’s being able to do a transition without a shred of paper, being able to… I mean, we’ve seen some independent advisors move their entire book within two weeks, which never would’ve happened before. So the firms that I’d say are playing offense, the larger firms that are winning, they have insane headcount around transitions and are always investing in technology, whether now on the AI front or in general. And we’ve seen transitions, they’re never easy. So that’s not a comment to say it’s easy, but a lot of the friction, a lot of the manual work has been taken away, which is massive. You definitely mentioned the significant technology spend. I mean, just the innovations going on across the industry. There’s definitely some firms that are laggards on technology and others that are light years ahead, whether because their tech is more integrated or they’ve built out their platform to be more, we’ll say modular, to plug in different third-party softwares where an advisor can really customize and create their own tech stack. I think there’s been some changes on compliance. It used to be if you’re at an independent BD, you had to be the OSJ by yourself or you had to roll up under an OSJ. But now most BDs offer home office supervision, so a big friction or pain point is taken away. And then I’ll give you a bridge to talk about what we’re seeing on the RIA side. But we’ve also seen, I would say, a real blurring of the lines between what you would traditionally think of as an independent broker dealer versus what was an RIA. So whether it’s an internal pathway where it’s like, “Start off on our independent BD platform, get the big deal, get the support, but then you can ditch that and just use this as a custodian or you can sell the business to us when you want to retire and convert to W2.” So in that vein, transitioning internally to an RIA, give me the same points like, “What are the major advancements or changes you’re seeing on the RIA side today?” Joshua Tomolak: I love that you said that because it’s been one of the most interesting changes to watch. Independent broker dealers becoming more like RIAs, and to your point, being more flexible, having more optionality, a more curated experience in some cases. And in many cases becoming closer to independent broker dealers with some of these massive shops that we’ve seen be created over the last five years that now have hundreds, if not thousands of advisors. To your question on the internal RIA slide as we sometimes call it, this really didn’t exist many places a few years ago. And I think it’s been created as both originally a retention tool in many places for the advisors that were with a major independent broker dealer and they ultimately wanted to have their own ADV and their own RIA. And the firm didn’t want to lose all the assets to an independent custodian so they gave them the green light to… And it’s ultimately became a sales tool in many cases. Just to use a couple of examples across the industry, I mean, Raymond James has Raymond James Custody Services, which has attracted a lot of really sophisticated teams. I know Wells Fargo Finance done something similar and even the counterparts over at Cetera and Osaic are trying to do the same thing. So it’s a recognition in my view that we want to keep the best talent possible. And if these folks are ultimately going to go RIA anyway, it’s less about the money and more about the flexibility and control that it offers them. So what can we do to keep those folks on board? And rightfully so, a lot of senior management of these firms have said, “Let’s not lose these teams. It’s going to be a lower margin business for us, but at the rate that they’re growing, it’s going to pay off in the long run.” Louis Diamond: Well said. RIAs are now more mainstream. And some of these RIAs, they’re either resembling independent BDs or I would even go so far to say the valuations that are even publicly available on some RIAs is definitely having people take notice. I mean, Cerity Partners recently raised capital at an over $8 billion reported valuation. Crescent was well over a billion. Firms like Mariner, Creative Planning, Mercer, Wealth Enhancement Group, and there’s many that I’m missing, are all worth a couple billion dollars or more and growing. Do you think that’s had an impact on the legitimacy or the staying power of the RIA model? Joshua Tomolak: Oh, absolutely. There’s no doubt about it. I mean, those groups that you mentioned and many more are winning some of the biggest teams on the street. I mean, if you pull up a run-of-the-mill advisor hub article, for example, you’ll see as many of those RIAs win significant businesses as you will their broker-dealer counterparts, partially in my opinion, due to the massive valuations these firms are fetching. And it’s much more of a partnership in the sense that joining a Crescent or a Wealth Enhancement Group, as you mentioned, you’re a part of a boutique group of maybe a couple of hundred very sophisticated high-producing advisors all playing under the same banner, all rowing in the same direction, and that creates substantial growth. Louis Diamond: Exactly right. I think two other things to me that’s driving the legitimacy or the growth of the RIA segment, there’s so many different outsourcing solutions that have popped up, whether it’s more of a… We’ll say a bundled or a package outsourcing solution through firms like Dynasty and Sanctuary. LPL has done a ton with having a shared services outsourcing model. So you have those. But you also have, I mean, probably 10 different firms I could think of that can be an outsourced chief compliance officer. You have tons of marketing agencies that specialize in helping RIAs. You have all these FinTechs popping up to support the RIA space. Really, it’s like anything and everything can be outsourced now. And even the big Wall Street banks like UBS, Merrill, et cetera, they’re attempting to sell and distribute product into the RIA space. Venture funds, private equity funds, anyone you talk to is trying to get a piece of the RIA space, which means there’s more product and platform availability than ever before. And I think it’s massive because one, it’s a catalyst for teams who say, “I love everything about the RIA world. I just don’t want to do it on my own,” or, “I don’t know where to start.” But also it means that they can look their clients in the eye and say, “Hey, not only do I have the same stuff that I had for you at XYZ firm, I can actually do more for you.” And even if you look at what the custodians are doing on the lending side now, Schwab owning a bank is massive and being able to facilitate mortgages, securities-backed loans, things that didn’t really exist in the past. I think it’s a very exciting time for advisors either that are independent or are considering the independent space because you have all these choices and it’s really like, “Choose your own adventure. Give me your top five things you want.” I’m sure it exists and we can find it and make it happen. And I don’t think we’d have the same confidence in that statement 5, 7, 10 years ago. Joshua Tomolak: I couldn’t agree more. That’s such a huge development is the marketplace of third party vendors in any kind of capitalism environment. There’s problems that people encounter and there’s really smart people that are trying to make a lot of money that go to market to solve them. And we’ve seen a ton of that over the last few years. Louis Diamond: Exactly right. Yeah, it’s like also… If an advisor looks around and says, “Hey, this is what I want,” and it doesn’t exist, oftentimes that’s a light bulb moment to be like, “Okay, I’ll go build it. I’ll do it on my own.” Whether it was Stewart Partners when they launched a number of years ago or Hightower, Dynasty, et cetera. They were all started by people that said, “Hey, I see a big gap in the ecosystem. Let’s create a business and raise capital to go solve it and then deliver this service to other like-minded advisors or business owners.” Honestly, it’s a treat to be able to watch all this happen in real time. We probably should have laid the groundwork with this next question, but I think it’s an important one. What’s the difference between a independent broker-dealer and an RIA? Really basic foundational. It sounds like the lines are blurred. There’s probably a lot of similarities. Advisors are successful in both. It’s not like one’s better than the other. How would you explain the differences, if a client of ours asked, “What’s the difference between an independent broker-dealer and IBD versus an RIA”? Joshua Tomolak: Get into the core of it. Again, the lines are blurred, and I’ll stay very high level on the strategic differences, but I like to use this example. I drive a Toyota Tundra. Really like the truck, gets me from A to B. Now, if I were getting to a point where I wanted a new vehicle, if I were to go get another Toyota Tundra because I really like a lot of aspects of it, but I want the one with the bigger screen and the bigger tires and the power seats, and I have rolled down windows because I have a fear of drowning. But if I want a lot of the bells and whistles, but I want to keep the foundation, that’s what I align to a independent broker-dealer to independent broker-dealer. You like the foundation of everything all under one roof. You like a lot of the resources, but you have some meaningful frustrations and you want to see if another provider in the market can solve for those or you can upgrade. If I instead, Louis, decided that I wanted a sports car or a Jeep Wrangler or something, I would be looking at a different category altogether. That’s how I articulate the platform space. They provide the same services and support in many cases that an independent broker-dealer does, think of marketing and a tech stack and regulatory oversight and a fellowship in a community, but they’re built on an RIA TC registered chassis. They’re typically far more customized so you can shop the street to get a lot more of the things that you like, though you are walking away from maybe some of the things that you’ve liked in the independent broker-dealer model. So I guess that’s the highest level I might explain it, just a little bit more minutia in any broker-dealer is going to be a FINRA registered, FINRA member broker-dealer. So they’re subject to the FINRA rules, which basically means it’s the compliance interpretation of those rules that they have to follow. So LPL’s rules may be slightly different than Cetera’s than Ameriprise’s because it’s based on their interpretations of the rules. In the RIA space, everybody really operates on the fiduciary standard. So it’s just a different lens that from a compliance standpoint, business is looked at. And a lot of people would make the argument that it’s just easier to get things done when you’re looking at something from that lens. I might’ve gone too compliance nerd on you there, but I’d be curious what you think some of the major differences are. Louis Diamond: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, it sounds like if you’re in the RIA world in some capacity that you as the advisor or business owner are going to have a little bit more control and autonomy and flexibility. One, do you think that’s true? And what are the reasons why that is? Is it platform? Is it strictly just compliance is easier? What are the different ways that an RIA would have more or less flexibility than someone who’s with an independent BD? Joshua Tomolak: Yeah, I think it’s overwhelmingly true, but it certainly depends on your business. Within most RIA platforms, you’re going to be one of a couple dozen, maybe a couple hundred, where you’re going to have people within that firm that really know your business. So the experience in getting things done is much less about, “Can I do this,” or, “Can I not do this?” And it’s, “Louis, I understand you asked for this. We’re going to run into these issues, but let’s figure out how to get to yes.” So it’s far more curated by people that are not operating on black and white rules and can actually figure out how to get to yes for your business. The other thing I would say is that most significant RIA platforms have multiple custodial options. So many times you’ll see as few as two or as many as five. So if an advisor or a team is trying to bring on a new piece of business or do something creative, that might be something they can use a different custodial relationship to accomplish. It might be something that Goldman Sachs does really well but is in its infancy at Fidelity, or it might be international business that’s approved on Pershing’s platform but not Schwab’s platform. So the RIA partner that you’re with can really look at those custodians agnostically and say, “What’s the best home for this business? What’s the best way to get this done for Louis?” There’s a couple examples of where I see the flexibility in practice. Louis Diamond: Yeah, I think one more too would be the concept of being able to shop the street. I’ve heard it described as becoming a buy-side advocate for your clients versus being a professional seller. So meaning, if I’m affiliated with an RIA or I’m operating my own RIA, there’s no selling away like there is at a wirehouse or at certain BDs. So if I have a client who’s trying to get a $10 million loan for a new building that they’re breaking ground on, if I’m at UBS, Merrill, Morgan Stanley, captive to a BD, I can go to my firm and say, “Hey, this $10 million loan, here it is. What are the terms? What are the rates? Will you take on this business?” And the firm will say, “Yes. No. Yes, here are the terms. Here’s the caveats, et cetera.” But it’s a very closed market process and an advisor has to live and die by what their firm says. Versus in the RIA world, it’s, “Okay, I have relationships with nine different banks and I can go to these different banks and private credit funds and whoever and really create either an option process for my client or really just help them in a fully agnostic open way.” And we see the same thing when it comes to alternative investments. No one at a wirehouse, let’s say, is complaining that they don’t have enough alts that they can offer clients. Those firms have done an amazing job with really boiling the ocean and having tons and tons of options for private investments, hedge funds, et cetera. But if you’re in the RIA world, you can take it to the next level and say, “Hey, this $3 million startup company that my friend is starting, I’m going to help them raise capital,” or, “My client wants to get a syndicate of investors together to have a direct investment into a qualified opportunity zone fund that they’re starting. Let’s do it when we can advise on it.” So it really expands what an advisor is able to do on behalf of clients. Like to me, that’s the most interesting or exciting part of the RIA model. You can get some of that within the BD world, but to me, when an advisor’s business becomes more sophisticated as far as what their end client’s needs are, it tends to translate better to the RIA world than the BD world. Not to say there aren’t ultra-high net worth focused advisors at BDs, but because of that additional flexibility, autonomy, customization, et cetera, that speaks more RIA. So again, absolutely not down at all on the independent BDs because I think there’s a massive home for them. Josh, let me turn it back to you. I’m rambling now. Give me the pitch for an independent BD. What are the things that are misperceptions that people have? What are the advantages that an independent broker dealer like an LPL or a RayJ or a Cetera have over RIAs or over other models in general? Joshua Tomolak: Absolutely. And I’d say I’ve learned more over the last six years from some of your ramblings than most people learn in an MBA course, so keep doing what you’re doing. But it’s funny being in this position now, having spent so much time sort of selling against the IBD model within TD Ameritrade, but what I’ve learned is it’s a good home for everybody. And a lot of times the advisors that they’re entrepreneurial enough where they like having their name on the door, but they’re not so entrepreneurial where they want to build everything out themselves, that’s where the independent broker dealers absolutely kill it. Their economics have gotten to a point where they’re really competitive. They offer transition capital that isn’t even going to be comparable in the RIA space unless you’re selling a minority share of your business. And you mentioned LPL, or we could really list all of the major ones, there’s not a department that they don’t have. It could be as nuance as finding 403(b) payroll slots or it could be as mainstream as fixed income or setting up events. There are all kinds of really neat departments that these all under one roof independent broker dealers have invested in. And a lot of times they make an effort to make you very much aware of all of the support because most people don’t use it. So I would say for the advisors that are looking to get their improved Toyota Tundra, then you can get probably 70 or 80% of what you want within the independent broker-dealer world. And you can also keep 20 or 30% of the stuff, maybe more that you really liked at your previous firm. So I think that’s where it really shines. I sometimes call it an incremental change rather than a transformational change. But for many advisors, incremental is really good enough if you get to keep the familiarity of how you’ve been doing business for the last 20-some years, but you’re able to get net improvement on the things that were really bothering you. Louis Diamond: Well said. Something that I’ve seen that’s been… I guess this could be either pro or con depending upon the advisor, but with some broker dealers, letting an advisor co-brand with them or really having a real consumer-facing brand, whether it’s, “I’m a franchise owner with Ameriprise,” or, “I’m independent through Raymond James,” or, “Running my own practice through Wells Fargo FiNet,” or, “I’m independent with Northwestern Mutual.” There’s definitely some brand cache or brand familiarity with some of those firms that may or may not be the same if you’re in the RIA world. So I would agree there’s a lot to like about the independent BD world and there’s a fit for people that is absolutely better with independent BDs than on the RIA side. Even if some people would say RIA is better, we’re cleaner, I wouldn’t say that. To me, it’s all about what an advisor’s goals are and then matching that up with what these firms do. And there’s never a perfect option. I jokingly say, “If there was a perfect firm, we wouldn’t be in business.” Every firm has their advantages or disadvantages. And depending upon where an advisor’s coming from, their style of business, their pain points, that’ll match up really well with on firm or one type of firm or one model than the other. Let’s pivot a little bit to the RIA world. A lot of your comments have been more about advisors affiliating or joining RIAs, this whole supportive version of independence concept. But what about advisors who want to go and start their own RIA? Either they’re leaving a captive firm and taking the entrepreneurial route and starting their own firm, or they’re leaving an independent BD to go start their own RIA. What do you see as some of the biggest misconceptions that advisors have about that move? Joshua Tomolak: That’s probably my favorite topic because there are the most misconceptions I think in this space. Louis Diamond: I’d agree. Joshua Tomolak: And I would say there’s 9 out of 10 conversations that I have with advisors and teams, they start off with the launching an RIA in mind or at least RIA curious and they want to understand what’s out there. And probably less than half the time do these folks end up actually launching their own RIA, which is okay because the ones that do are massively successful and they know they’re dang sure that’s exactly what they want to do. I think it gets a little bit romanticized sometimes that they’ll say, “Oh, I’ll just give Schwab a call,” or, “I’ll just give the custodian a call,” as if they were shopping independent broker dealers. That’s fine. You can do that and they will help you, but there’s quite a bit more to think about. And it’s not, in my opinion, the same as evaluating independent broker dealers. If it’s all right, I was taught the four pillars of the RIA model. I can go through that with you really quickly. So the way to think about the RIA space is in four pieces. And shout out to a friend, Eli Suarez, that taught me this years ago. The first pillar… Thinking of four pillars on a bar stool, if you will. The first one being administration. And this is your compliance, this is setting up your ADV, your LLC, all of your business formation documents. The second piece being technology, what do you actually want to use? Because the benefits of the broker-dealer world and the supported independent world is they’ve already built it for you. They’ve already paid for it and scraped their knees building it. In this case, you have to. And for some people, that’s really exciting to source financial planning software and portfolio management software and your CRM and tax software, et cetera. For some people, it just sounds like a huge headache. The third pillar being custodians. I have them third because you want to make sure that the right custodian can integrate properly with the technology that you’ve sourced that you’re passionate about. And then ultimately transition. What does a transition really look like? What are my legal and regulatory requirements? How does this work? What are the timelines? Things of that nature. So I guess I would say in closing that if those four things are things that you really want to own, then you’re in a really good position to consider an RIA launch. What do you think, Louis? Louis Diamond: I think that’s a great framework to break it down. Not just be like, “Okay, I can tolerate that,” or, “My team can do it,” but I think you have to be pretty excited about rolling up your sleeves and customizing and doing it yourself because in our experience, there’s a nominal differential between the economics of running your own RIA versus affiliating with an RIA or going to an independent BD. All the extra work and responsibility, you’re not really going to make it up, at least on the front end, on a higher net payout. So it has to be more about what the model means to you and having a vision that you don’t think anyone else can accomplish other than yourself. And looking at that crazy ever-expanding Michael Kitces’ FinTech map and there’s 500 different logos on it and being like, “Yes, that’s what I want. I want to go through this. I want to pick the seven pieces of my tech stack that work for me,” rather than getting, “Here’s the tech stack, take a demo, you like it, you don’t like it, take it or leave it.” To me, the two biggest misconceptions people have about the RIA world is one, “I’m going to have to be a full-time chief compliance officer,” and just that compliance is this boogeyman, this terrible, scary thing. In some ways it is. But the reality is most, especially startup RIAs will fully outsource compliance to a firm or they’ll hire a compliance consultant or firms that are big enough even will hire a CCO or repurpose someone on their team to be CCO. But compliance is much more streamlined and simpler than BD compliance. And ultimately, it’s compliance that’s being built for your business rather than compliance that’s being built for a publicly traded multinational company that supports 20,000 financial advisors. So I think compliance is always a big misconception. It’s definitely what a lot of firms will pry upon when they’re saying like, “Oh, you’re going to own all the legal and regulatory requirements. You could, but it’s definitely not a requirement.” And then I think another one is folks sometimes underestimate and overestimate the operational burden and how much work it is to start an RIA. Sometimes people just… They’re perfect for the RIA world, that’s their goal, but they get stopped in their tracks. They don’t really know what to do. But what we’ve seen, we said it earlier with so many different outsourcing solutions and different service providers that have popped up, if you have the fire in your belly to go build something, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it by yourself. I mean, that’s what firms like ours do. The custodians are very helpful. On the flip side though, I have seen advisors chasing payouts say, “Hey, I’m just going to go start an RIA because I want to make another 1 to 3%,” or whatever it comes to and they drastically underestimate what it really takes to build a successful firm. Joshua Tomolak: Exactly right. I think that’s my favorite one, Louis, overestimating and estimating the operational burden there is you could have the same conversation with two teams and it can go the completely different direction. Louis Diamond: Josh, let’s wrap here. I got one more question for you that I think is an exciting one, but give me three key trends or storylines that most people don’t know about or aren’t talking about that you’re passionate about or that you’re sharing with advisors or counseling today. Joshua Tomolak: Sure. This is the free advice portion. And I’ll tell you what, Louis, if it’s all right with you, I’ll give you two and I would love to hear one from you as well. The first one I’ve seen in both the independent broker-dealer and RIA space is the minority investor concept. A lot of folks will talk about the idea of taking chips off a table and starting to partially monetize your business. I think that’s all important, but what I’ve found is that a lot of advisors really want their partner, whether it’s an RIA broker dealer to help them grow. And that could be with M&A opportunities, that could be with traditional recruitment of advisors, that could be building a business plan. But the minority investment part really helps accelerate that for a lot of businesses because all of a sudden, not only are you cashing out a small part of your business, but you’ve just created an ally with the parent entity, it is now much more likely to help you grow in that capacity because they’re insulated from it and they profit when you profit. So I think it’s easy to be shortsighted and say, “Well, my equity’s going to keep growing. Why would I sell you a piece of this?” But I counsel folks often to really think about what that long-term strategic partnership is and making somebody a real equity partner rather than just a vendor that provides you with technology and regulatory coverage. The other one I’d say is that… And this one’s really important to me, that business formation is far more important than your assets under management. Said a different way, the way you build your business is going to make your business far more valuable than the number of dollars underneath your name. And what I mean by that is, just to use an example, a sophisticated, well-built, centralized, scalable and repeatable business, whether it’s an RIA with a broker-dealer that is going to fetch a far higher M&A multiple than a OSJ that’s five times the size that just has a bunch of 1099 independent advisors underneath the umbrella. What we’ve seen in the M&A space is that if you’re going to shell out 50, 60, $80 million for somebody’s business, you want to know that you have this business for the long term. So I would certainly counsel people that have been around maybe far longer than me to take a look at how you’re building this and put together a business plan on what those next 10 years should look like and not necessarily fall into the trap where your only revenue source is the override that you receive from a firm and then you in turn pay to the advisors on your team. Louis Diamond: Well said. I really like that line. We’d probably do a whole episode on what are the tips and tricks for building a business with the end in mind? Like the Covey quote, “Begin with the end in mind.” Transitions are like… They’re a bear. I mean, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Advisors, when they hear transition, if you ask them, “Don’t think about it, give me your reaction.” “Terrible, risky, a lot of work. I’ll never do it again. My friend did it and it was terrible. What if my clients don’t come?” It’s all these negative emotions. And in many cases, I don’t blame an advisor because it is a big act. But to me, if someone is weighing making a transition, whether a wholesale business model change going from being an employee to being independent, going from being an advisor at an independent BD to starting an RIA, or even going independent BD to independent BD, it’s an opportunity if you rise to the occasion to build with this next act with intentionality. So whether it’s restructuring compensation for your team, converting people from 1099 to W2, putting in place new workflows, changing how investments, instead of it being each individual advisor doing investments to more of a centralized model, cleaning up workflows, really investing in data, investing in AI. It’s something that I think, again, we can have a whole episode on it, but I think it’s a great one. Build the business the right way. And obviously, businesses that are larger, theoretically, sell for more, but we’ve certainly seen businesses that are half the size of a larger one sell for a similar amount or more because they did all the right things and the larger one did the things that really turn off a buyer or detract from a valuation. Let me give you one more and tell me if you agree, but I think we’re in this moment when Altruist, the upstart, a new kid on the block custodian, they launched a basically tokenization of cash in a way to automatically agentically source or sort cash to the highest yielding money market. And you’re like, “This is fricking wonky. Louis, why are you telling us this?” I think this is an important one just to keep a watchful eye on. I have no idea how this is going to shake out, but really the biggest way that independent BDs or even custodians like Schwab and Fidelity really make money, it’s not on their overrides from practices or the admin fee or the custody fee. It’s really on net interest margin. So how much the broker-dealer or the firm is making on client cash and brokerage accounts relative to what they’re paying out the client. It’s essentially like free margin to these firms. And this concept, I think, has massive potential for disruption for the business model. Again, I don’t know what it’s going to look like, whether it means platform fees that are instituted at all these firms, whether it means certain models would be more beneficial than others, whether it means nothing’s going to change, which is probably the right answer given this industry. But it’s something to keep a watchful eye on just if your firm institutes a new platform fee or there’s a fundamental way in which your firm can no longer make money. How are they going to make it up? Are they now going to be uncompetitive? They’re not going to have as much scale or profits to invest in the platform. Is it going to cause even more consolidation in the industry? So to me, that’s the one pretty under the radar, pretty wonky storyline that I don’t think enough people are talking about, but has the biggest possibility for disruption across their space than anything I’ve seen in a while. Joshua Tomolak: Sure. That’s the whole iceberg. Not a lot of people are talking about it. It’s not poking out of the ocean, but it’s going to be continuously brought up. I think it’s a question that a lot of advisors are going to have to ask these firms. And at the end of the day, the firms aren’t the bad guys. They have to make money too to provide a quality product. So where the money comes from matters. Louis Diamond: Exactly. Josh, this has been awesome. I learned a lot talking with you and just having your objective consulting hat on what I think are really the differences between IBD and RIA and some of the key trends and storylines to watch has been instrumental. I’ll also give a plug that on our website and we’ll link to it in the show notes, we have a really helpful one-page reference guide going through the differences between independent BDs or IBDs and RIAs. So feel free to click on it. We’ll make sure it gets in your inbox. Josh, thanks again for joining us today. Joshua Tomolak: Yeah, thanks for having me, Louis. It was a pleasure. Mindy Diamond: As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty, and credibility. You are successful because you take your professional responsibilities seriously and are dedicated to your clients. But are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms or could a better option exist? Should I stay or Should I Go? is a book written with you in mind. It’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and roadmap to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions and think critically and objectively whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook. IBD vs. RIA: A Special Industry Update on Independence A conversation with Louis Diamond and Josh Tomolak, Vice President of Independent Advisor Services at Diamond Consultants.      Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is IBD vs. RIA: A Special Industry Update on Independence. It’s a conversation with Josh Tomolak, our Vice President of Independent Advisor Services. I’m Louis Diamond, and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual advisor transition report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Louis Diamond: For a long time, going independent would suggest the destination. Today, it’s often the beginning of a different conversation. As the independent space has matured, advisors have more choices than ever before. Broker-dealers have expanded their capabilities. The RIA ecosystem has become increasingly sophisticated. Capital is more readily available and support models now exist that would’ve been difficult to imagine a decade ago. The result is that many advisors who are already independent are taking a fresh look at whether their current affiliation still aligns with what they’re trying to build. My guest is Josh Tomolak, Vice President of Independent Advisor Services here at Diamond Consultants and our resident expert on independence. Josh spends his days helping advisors evaluate independence in all its forms from independent broker dealers, the fully independent RIAs and everything in between. And his knowledge is critical because the distinction between these models is often blurred. Many broker dealers now offer pathways to greater autonomy while supported independence has made RIA ownership more accessible than ever before. So the question is no longer simply, “Do I want to go independent?” The question is, “What kind of independence makes the most sense for client, business, and go

Steve and Bobby have spent the last week playing Gears of War: E-Day Multiplayer in Horde Siege and Versus modes. It's been nearly seven years since the last Gears game, and The Coalition has been hard at work on the upcoming prequel.However, how is the multiplayer mode? Let's find out!(00:00) Creature Cast Intro(2:25) Gears of War: E-Day Multiplayer preview(33:01) OutroWebsite: https://www.consolecreatures.com/Like and follow us on Social Media:Bluesky: @consolecreatures.comYouTube: ⁠⁠⁠@ConsoleCreaturesTwitter: @ConsoleCreature⁠⁠⁠Facebook: @RealConsoleCreatureInstagram: @ConsoleCreaturesThreads: ⁠ @Consolecreatures⁠

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Introducing the All Def SquADD Cast show “Versus". It's a podcast with the OG SquADD! Each week, the SquADD will debate topics and vote at the end to see what wins. Versus airs every Monday and you can download and listen wherever podcasts are found.Special GuestTre StewartYoung Deuces This Week We DiscussLays vs DoritosUGK vs OutKastMushu vs DonkeyS/o To Our SponsorsHIMS Ready to reach your goals? Visit hims.com slash squadd to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you.HIMS.com/SQUADDCash AppNew Cash App customers can earn $10 if they use code CASHAPP10 in their profile at signup and send $5 to afriend within 14 days. Terms apply.Download Cash App today or visitcash.app to learn more about this and other financial benefitsBetter HelpDon't let stigma stand in the way of support. Start therapy withBetterHelp. ● Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/SQUADD

In recent months, the open vs closed, and US vs China discussions on model ownership and sovereign/local AI have heated up to a fever pitch. So it is very very good news that Poolside AI are finally emerging with new models, like Laguna S 2.1, that are beating Thinking Machines' recent release nearly 10 times their size.Poolside's recent tech report got a lot of praise due to their level of detail, and Vibhu first covered Laguna's recent technical report on our paper club:From spending $12 million building language models for code before the world cared to creating a Model Factory that can take a model from pre-training to release in eight weeks, Eiso Kant has spent more than a decade betting that code is the path to AGI. In this episode, the Poolside co-founder joins swyx and Vibhu to explain why ChatGPT felt like vindication, why Poolside embraced open weights and open research, and why he would rather live in a world with 100 foundation model companies than five even if Poolside were one of the five.We go deep on Poolside's Model Factory: the engineering systems behind 10,000–20,000 experiments per month, streaming data directly into training, reproducible experimentation, low-precision compute, and agents that increasingly write code, launch jobs, evaluate results, and modify the pipelines used to train future models. Eiso also unpacks their recent launch Laguna S, why persistence, verification, and backtracking may matter more than raw intelligence, how much capability remains inside smaller models, why reinforcement learning will move earlier into pre-training, and why next-token prediction is still extracting too little from the web.We also discuss model-harness co-design, Poolside's path from coding agents to AGI, why Eiso thinks MCP and traditional tool calls are “stupid,” the real economics behind frontier-model training, Poolside's $500 million raise, open-source AI, regulation, NVIDIA and TSMC's influence, engineering productivity in the agent era, high-agency teams, and hiring at Poolside.We discuss:* How Andrej Karpathy's RNN work inspired Eiso to start building language models for code in 2015* Why Eiso spent four years and $12 million pursuing an idea before the market cared* Why ChatGPT felt like vindication and brought Poolside back to open source* Why Eiso would prefer 100 foundation model companies over an oligopoly of five* The difference between releasing open weights and publishing genuinely open research* Why Poolside deliberately built a global research organization outside the Bay Area talent war* Why model building is ultimately 90% engineering* The Model Factory: Poolside's end-to-end system for rapidly training and improving models* How fewer than 70 researchers run roughly 10,000–20,000 experiments each month* How Poolside moved from six-month model cycles to five- and eight-week launches* Why streaming data directly into training unlocked faster experimentation* How immutable data, versioned code, and reproducibility enable rigorous model research* Why Eiso wants capable researchers to leave their labs and become Poolside's competitors* Why 95% of model building can be reduced to better data or compute efficiency* Laguna S and why persistence, verification, and backtracking can outperform raw intelligence* Why smaller models may handle far more knowledge work than previously expected* Why reinforcement learning will move earlier into pre-training* Why next-token prediction is still failing to extract enough knowledge from the web* Why distillation and environments have become the AI industry's favorite “drugs”* Why mid-training is really an early form of curriculum design* Low-precision training, networking bottlenecks, and the next gains in compute efficiency* Laguna S: 118 billion total parameters, 8 billion active, and eight weeks from training to launch* Why model builders can often evaluate a new checkpoint within its first 30 minutes* Model versus harness: where agent capabilities actually come from* Why Poolside sees coding and long-horizon software tasks as a path to AGI* Why Eiso thinks MCP and traditional tool calls are “stupid”* Why future agents will write scripts instead of choosing from dozens of predefined tools* The case for minimal harnesses, containers, and model freedom* Why Poolside is prioritizing vision but does not expect to work on audio soon* Why language may be the most compute-efficient modality for encoding knowledge and reasoning* The real cost of model development and why the final training run is anticlimactic* The story behind the Poolside name and why it represents refusing to lower ambitions* How Poolside raised $500 million while investors still questioned whether AGI was real* Why intelligence could become the world's most demanded and commoditized resource* When open models may become too capable to release without restrictions* Why unilateral AI safety does not work in a globally competitive environment* How regulation could accidentally lock in an oligopoly of two or three AI companies* NVIDIA, TSMC, and the hardware systems underpinning foundation-model progress* Why reinforcement-learning wall-clock time is one of Poolside's biggest bottlenecks* Why Poolside trains models from scratch instead of simply distilling larger models* How AI changes the way companies should measure engineering productivity* Why agency may become the most important quality for employees in the AI era* How leaders align high-agency people through shared goals and clear constraints* Hiring across research, post-training, pre-training, architecture, evals, and engineering at PoolsideEiso KantLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eisokantX: https://x.com/eisokantPoolside: https://poolside.aiTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:00:54 Karpathy, RNNs, and Building Code Models Before Transformers00:02:26 The $12M Failure and ChatGPT Vindication00:03:39 Open Source and the Case for 100 Foundation Model Companies00:09:22 Open Weights, Open Research, and Poolside's Global Team00:16:04 The Model Factory: Why Model Building Is 90% Engineering00:20:19 Agents, Automated Experiments, and Early Signs of RSI00:24:04 Streaming Data, Reproducibility, and Scientific Rigor00:30:35 Creating More Foundation Model Companies00:36:07 Laguna S: Persistence vs. Raw Intelligence00:43:01 Reinventing Pre-Training, RL, and Curriculum Design00:52:33 Low-Precision Training and Squeezing More From Smaller Models00:58:37 Model Harnesses, Coding Agents, and the Path to AGI01:09:26 Why MCP and Traditional Tool Calls Are “Stupid”01:13:04 Vision, Multimodality, and Why Language Still Matters01:18:15 Scaling Models and the Real Economics of Training01:20:40 Why Poolside Is Called Poolside and Raising $500M01:27:37 Open Models, AI Safety, and the Risk of an Oligopoly01:33:53 NVIDIA, TSMC, and the Reinforcement-Learning Bottleneck01:41:52 Smaller Models, Distillation, Engineering Productivity, and HiringTranscriptIntroduction: Eiso Kant, Poolside, and Open ModelsSwyx [00:00:00]: All right, we're here in the studio with Eiso Kant from Poolside, together with Vibhu. Welcome.Eiso Kant [00:00:08]: Thanks. Thanks for having me, guys. Good to be here.Swyx [00:00:10]: Yeah, fresh on the plane. You texted me, you were like, “Hey, I'm on my way to SF.” I was like, “You're on a plane right now, right?” Like, hey.Eiso Kant [00:00:16]: I know. After I texted you, I realized that probably coming in with major jet lag was gonna offer some fun experiences today, but let's do it.Swyx [00:00:23]: I mean, I think the thing I would tell guests is that they don't have to prepare that much because if you're truly working on this every single day, then even, like, what you hazily remember is going to be new for a lot of the audience that don't live in your world every day, right? so 10 years ago, you did a talk at Google Slush, talking about the democratization of AI. and, now here you are, like, open sourcing an incredible new model that we're gonna talk about. But I guess, like, what got you into democratization of AI? Like, it's not obvious from your LinkedIn or something.From Karpathy's RNN Post to SourcedEiso Kant [00:00:57]: No, it's not at all. I don't think it's obvious how I got in this space. I owe getting into this space to Andrej Karpathy.Eiso Kant [00:01:05]: In 2015, he wrote an article called “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Nets.”Swyx [00:01:10]: Neural Nets, yep.Eiso Kant [00:01:11]: And that article, I read it, and I pivoted my startup at the time overnight to working on RNNs, and later LSTMs and Transformer models to be able to write code. If you go to this article and you scroll down, you can start seeing, like, this was the precursor to what ended up becoming language models. So, at least when he was character-level language models that were starting to predict letters, he has an example out here. There's a little Paul Graham generator, and you can read it, and the text makes sense, but it doesn't. and there's a little-- There's an example of code a little bit further down. Yeah, so Shakespeare.Swyx [00:01:47]: Shakespeare.Swyx [00:01:49]: CoolEiso Kant [00:01:49]: And for some reason, I read this, and I went down the rabbit hole of learning everything I could about RNNs and LSTMs, right? This is Transformer paper. And I had built a completely unreasonable belief, that neural nets should be able to generalize to anything and everything, and that language should be able to generalize, to a lot of things that are intelligent and the ability to write code. And so I started building Sourced, which was a fully open source company trying to build, what we used to call machine learning on code, language models on code. And we spent about four or five years on this, till the end of 2019. And that sounds really cool today, but back then, no one cared.Eiso Kant [00:02:29]: Right? Like, no one cared. We were in the dark. Like, we did things along the way. We tried applying convolutional neural nets to, like, the structure of code. We were. when attention came out, we were applying it to LSTMs, and then the Transformer paper came out. And it - it wasn't obvious, and what we missed throughout that entire journey, that we were on the right track, but we should have just kept scaling up. And today, to all of us, the scaling laws and scaling up seems like the most obvious thing. But having spent four or five years of my life on working on language models on code, it wasn't obvious. So I have a lot of respect to folks at Google and OpenAI and others who took that confidence and kept going. we failed ultimately at the time, and it was, like, biggest failure of my career, right? You blew $12 million of investors' money, which was a lot back then.Swyx [00:03:18]: Yep.Eiso Kant [00:03:19]: You spent, still a lot, but, And you spent years with, like, a group of 40 people just obsessing over this problem. And life took a different turn, And it was, and family became a focus, and I kept my heads down and really, didn't really look at language models for the following two years. big mistake considering Following years are gonna be really interesting. And then ChatGPT came out And it was like a vindication. It's like people started texting me. I found, like, my old, work decks and these old talks. And throughout that whole journey, we,ChatGPT, Vindication, and Returning to Open SourceEiso Kant [00:03:56]: We really had a strong point of view at the time that, like, as you're building more capable intelligence, it should be open and open source.Eiso Kant [00:04:04]: When we started Poolside, that wasn't the case at all, and I wanna be very open about it. When we started Poolside, we were like, there was a premise of two things. One is this technology is not gonna stop compounding in capabilities. I think to most people obvious today, but three-plus years ago when we started, most people were still arguing if these were stochastic parrots or not.Eiso Kant [00:04:23]: And the second was that reinforcement learning was gonna be the biggest driver for LLM capabilities. Today, very obvious. Three years ago, was not an opinion held or direction held at either OpenAI or Google or Anthropic or others. And so people looked down on us a little bit. They were like, “ is this really gonna work?” And so we just started working the problem, and we never really thought about open source again. We just kept our heads down and we built our, like, knowledge, understanding from scratch, right? We didn't roll out of an existing lab. So we picked up the papers and started writing code and figuring things out.Eiso Kant [00:04:59]: And it wasn't until the beginning of this year that me and my founder, Jason, picked up the open source conversation again.Eiso Kant [00:05:07]: And if you go back to some of the early things on our website, it was very straightforward. It was we wanna get to AGI, we wanna support a world of abundance, and we wanna be the first company that gets there.Eiso Kant [00:05:20]: But we started talking at the beginning of this year because it became obvious that the world was going in a direction that was starting to like, pick at us a little bit. Like, it didn't, this didn't happen overnight. It was, like, a little bit we were seeing this and we're like, “Okay, The world's going down a path.” And Throughout this journey, there was something that I used as a, as an analogy or thing. So I said well, if I go back to back in those days, 2015 or 2016, we're working on this, and I picked up a fi book off the shelf, and I was reading the book about 2035. AGI is achieved, and the story would be over the following, decades. And it would have that first chapter where everyone's trying to figure things out. You'd get the chapter of ChatGPT coming out And then you would get to the chapter where the world was at a fork in the road, and the one that it picked was one where three or four or a handful of companies were going to create all of intelligence moving forward.Eiso Kant [00:06:21]: And when I thought about that story, it felt like a dystopian fi book, not a utopian fi book. And the reality is, I'm a utopian fi guy. Like, and so We took a step back and said, “Hey, can we play a role here?” Now it was easy for us to do so because we were not at the frontier.Eiso Kant [00:06:41]: If we were at the frontier, I don't think we could have changed our mind. and I don't mean this like it's when the moment there's too much capital involved, too much expectations, you've built up things, right? We're a small team, just improving and improving. And so we knew that we could make that decision now, but it would be a lot harder to make as we got closer and closer to the frontier and caught up to others. And did a lot of soul-searching and a lot of conversations, and said, “No, this makes sense,” Even if there's big unanswered questions, like how the hell do you build a business model with foundation models about open source? Big open-ended question that we do not fully have the answer to yet, right? At what point do you no longer wanna release open source models because misuse of models has, real potential risks associated with it? how is the government gonna respond to open source? but I think it all just came down to one thing, and I'll stop the monologue, is the fact that I rather live in a world that has 100 foundation model companies than a world that has five, even if I was one of the five. And the smallest and most meaningful contribution we can make for 100 to exist is to open up our research and open up, like, our weights right now and figure out along the way how we can, like, do more.Neo-Labs, Model Choice, and the Token EconomySwyx [00:08:01]: Yeah. I think if anything, over the past three years, that has become a bit more true. you are one of a cohort of Neo labsEiso Kant [00:08:10]: YeahSwyx [00:08:10]: That people are now calling that. And, we're, we're doing this on the day that Thinky launched their, new model and you are outperforming them on their, on some benchmarks that they released, right? Like, they just don't have it yet. so it goes to show that I think, like, this is one of those things where, like, there is room for multiple players, and you are seeing a little bit more of the future. Maybe more like 20, not 100, but, like, you are one of the 20.Eiso Kant [00:08:36]: I really hope so, right? I think we I'm, I'm excited about their release, and I'm excited about everyone releasing because, like, ultimately, like, choice competition is both gonna drive progress in the right direction. But the fact that like, we create models and while we all, drink out of the same well of data effectively, we do introduce very different behaviors and biases in our models. Some are intended biases, some are completely unintended biases.Swyx [00:09:03]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:09:03]: And if we shape up in an ecosystem in the world where open models are gonna be a part of the token economy, like, I don't think there's any question about it anymore Then we want to be able to live in a world where companies, countries, people can choose and say, “Hey, I am most aligned and I trust most this provider for these things.”Swyx [00:09:25]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:09:26]: I think more than just one of the 20 Neo labs, up until recently, most of open source innovation was coming from the Chinese labs, right? So there's the DeepSeek of the West. Is it today? Okay, maybe it's thinking machines reflection, but there aren't many, right? So, one of the things you guys started in France, Europe, but very much now you're taking that American standpoint and more than just that, the point is the Chinese models that we see, they're not super open research. the work you put out is, I think, some of the best. So every few months you get not only frontier models, but also here's a breakdown blog, paper, technical report of here's everything for state of the art to build, frontier intelligence and you're filling that gap too, right? So not just only open weight, not just Western, but also pretty open research.Open Weights vs. Open ResearchEiso Kant [00:10:20]: No, I appreciate it. Look, I think it's, I think it's the most meaningful contribution, right? Weights are a binary. Let's call them what they are. Yes, we can modify them, we can change them, but, like, giving someone the weights does not allow them ultimately to recreate what you're doing, right? And so now there's challenges around releasing data sets, challenges around like releasing certain things, but being able to share your research, like, right, how do we do it? What are the lessons we learned that we spent, tens of thousands of experiments of compute on? I think very much so. One correction though, Vibhu, and I say this because it's been haunting us for quite a few years. We from day zero were an American company.Swyx [00:10:55]: Yeah. They movedPoolside's Global Team and American Company StorySwyx [00:10:56]: To France.Eiso Kant [00:10:56]: So the story once and for all is very. We start as an American company. We have always been an American company, and early on we made a very conscious decision. We said, “We're not gonna hire any researchers in the Bay Area. We're gonna look for talent everywhere else in the world.” and that is everything from Middle Americas, Seattle to, Serbia, and to Taiwan and Singapore and other places. And it was because we took a view that this was gonna become a talent war for this, and I think it has over the years now. Three years ago, that wasn't fully obvious yet. I think today it very much is. And we also realized that, like, some of the world's most capable people with, like, the most interesting, innovative ideas were not just gonna be here. And so it led us to create like a fully remote company. and we ended up opening an office in Paris and London and different places and we have a lot of the team in the US and a lot of team outside. But we always took this view of like, we're an American company, but if we want the best of the best to work with us, we need to take a global view. Now we do also have people here in Silicon Valley, like the company's grown and others, but I think one of the things that, it slowed us down at the beginning, but it has sped us up now, and it's why you're seeing like the progress, I think, on our models and the cadence at which we release, is because we didn't roll out of an existing lab. Right? we didn't, we didn't have a lot of the information that's freely flowing around here at the time. We just took this point of view as like, “Okay, well, let's just work the problem. Let's just go and, like, read the few papers that are out there, and let's just figure this stuff out.” And we made some hilarious mistakes in model training because of that over the yearsEiso Kant [00:12:35]: Like especially in the first 12 months. there's a few that I think still haunt me and scare me. We can talk about them later. but it created a, like, a resiliency and persistency in the team, right? with extremely few people have left us over the years, that, like, told us, “Okay, we can do this.” When we first wrote our first training code base completely from scratch, it wasn't a fork of any open source. It was just like, “Okay, let's build it from scratch.” I remember we had this one moment where we spent three weeks working out an optimizer bug. Like, it was like training just couldn't get stable. We, like, obsessed over it, and we thought, like, maybe we were wrong. Maybe we should have just forked this repo, or we should have. But then when we solved it, I still remember at the time we were like five people in the company. when we solved it, we were like, “Oh, we can do things,” like if we're just willing to work hard. and I think that culture with a very strong engineering bias has helped us, like, get to where we were. And so there's this notion of open source and talent and these things. I think we, We just took different decisions from a different starting point. and I think we are lucky. I do want to definitely call it lucky. And there was a lot of hard work at the team that now, like, that's starting to show up in results.Swyx [00:13:52]: Just ‘cause we probably won't revisit this again, but, and this is a fun recruiting challenge if someone knows the answer. What was the bug? And then we won't tell the solution, but we'An Optimizer Bug and the Value of Building From ScratchEiso Kant [00:14:01]: So the - This - You're gonna test my memory here,Swyx [00:14:04]: Oh, okayEiso Kant [00:14:04]: So but I thinkSwyx [00:14:05]: DirectlyEiso Kant [00:14:05]: I think I can recall. So if you, so if you look at, So if you take like Adam as an optimizer, you have epsilonSwyx [00:14:12]: YeahEiso Kant [00:14:13]: Which is, right, like in the denominatorSwyx [00:14:14]: Momentum and weights. YeahEiso Kant [00:14:15]: Is exactly, in the denominator. And at the time, if I recall, you looked at like the early Llama papers and things like that. People were juicing epsilon, like, quite a bit. Like, they were, like, adding, I don't know if it was E minus four or whatever, like a high value for epsilon.Eiso Kant [00:14:31]: And if you think about this during training, it's like a bit weird and counterintuitive that we're adding noise to our optimizer by just adding effectively, like, a random number in the denominator, right? Like behind the decimal point. And I don't recall the exact bug, but it had - What I remember is once we solved it, we no longer had to juice epsilon as much as, like, was happening in the Llama paper and other places. and it was like one of those fundamental moments where we had trusted this paper that was out there, and we're like, “Oh, no, it has to be this way. It has to have this high value of epsilon.” But it made no sense to us intuitively. Like, why do you have to have this so high? Like, if you're just trying to avoid division by zero, why can't the value be extremely small? and that was like one of those moments where you realize like, okay, finding things out from scratch yourself builds a better intuition. Because the one thing you learn very quickly with model building is that your intuitions that you start with are gonna get beaten up so hard.Eiso Kant [00:15:33]: Right? Like - It's such an experimental science, that the things that seem obvious, you very quickly get to learn, like, you were wrong, and hopefully you figure out why, and sometimes you don't even.Swyx [00:15:45]: Yeah. yeah, so, one of the reasons that you, when you released your new models, Vibhu got really excited. I mean, everyone got really excited. But Vibhu led our paper club on it, and you guys sawEiso Kant [00:15:58]: YeahSwyx [00:15:58]: Obviously. maybe talk through some lessons learned in that, whatever you can disclose. we can focus on the model factory stuff, whatever you think is a good starting point.Model Building as EngineeringEiso Kant [00:16:08]: So I would say that our view from very early on in the company was that model building is ultimately 90% engineering.Eiso Kant [00:16:18]: And I think we all know it in the industry because if you look at where's every researcher spending their time, they're spending their time writing code, right? Looking at data and writing code. And so we said, okay, The state at the moment, like three years ago, was bash scripts and Slurm and spaghetti code bases for training and, like, data pipelines that were patched together. And we looked at this and said, “Well, ultimately, model building is a process.” You're going from raw data, right? Like training raw material, the web, et cetera. you're doing a whole bunch of filtering, cleaning up, transformations, analyzing. These days, that's, far more complex than it was three years ago. then you're training a model, which is effectively a large distributed systems problem, right? Across hardware that has still-- It's become a lot more reliable. It was extremely flaky back then. and now with every new generation, we get our new sets of challenges. And then you go into the next stages, right? There was no training back then, but, like, you got, your post-training and then your reinforcement learning. And so we looked at this and we said, “Well, this looks like an industrialized process. This looks like an end process, that every single part of it has its machinery,” right? If it's your big data pipelines, if it's your crawling ingestion of the web, if it's your, large-scale distributed training, and then you've got your reliability. And we said, “Well, why don't we take some of the world's smartest distributed systems engineers that we knew and make them part of the process of research from day zero?” Not retrofitting it later on, but, like, really from the beginning. And that became our model factory. And so our model factory started with a handful of components. Today, it's thousands of components, and I try to equate it to, if you think about, like, someone who was at the very early days of Foxconn, if they had been there for the following, decade, they would be able to rebuild Foxconn because they saw every decision that led to building that system and all the complexity. If you and I walk into Foxconn today, no chance.The Model Factory and Experiment VelocityEiso Kant [00:18:18]: Right? Because we don't have the lineage and history of decisions that led to that. And so we built early on from the beginning- with a team that really understood that, well, the metric that we are optimizing for is the speed of an idea from a researcher to an experimental result that we can trust to then being part of the next model training.Eiso Kant [00:18:42]: And in the. And because it's such an experimental science, ultimately, in the beginning when it wasn't that complex, you could patch your way around it, right? But now, at any foundation model company, you are running. I mean, we're a small team, right? We're less than 70 researchers, another 35 engineers. and we are running, I haven't checked the latest count, but far more than 10,000, maybe 10 to 20,000 experiments a month that we cut. And so if you look at that scale of every model run that is, like it's ultimately it's, it's you need to be able to trust it as an infra problem. And so what we have now done over the years is gotten really good at that, and just by working it and improving it and obsessing over those end decisions. So now what that means is that you looked up Laguna XS 2 that we launched. It was five weeks from the beginning of training to launch. The model that we're gonna talk about today was eight weeks from start of training, to launch. We started the next model literally yesterday because we now finished the post-training required for the model we're launching, next week or by the time this comes out today. and we move that compute to the much larger Laguna M model that we're now training. And so the model should be an artifact of someone's process. It shouldn't be really a thing in itself. Like, and we treat this like the way you would look at like a SpaceX factory where, yes, the first rocket, really hard to build, but the much harder challenge was building the factory. And now they're rolling off, and no one is really thinking about the next launch anymore. So it's just another launch, it's another launch, another rocket comes off. And that's what we're trying to do with model building.Eiso Kant [00:20:22]: And what has been, which was not planned from day zero, it was in the back of our mind like this will happen one day, is that when you build a really good end model factory with really good APIs and really good engineering systems, Well, what is it perfect for? It's perfect for agents.Agents Inside the Model FactoryEiso Kant [00:20:40]: Because agents are now starting to take over more and more work in our model factory.Vibhu [00:20:43]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:20:44]: So I look at the screens when I walk, like when we're, we come together, in our monthly, we do monthly onsites, and I walk behind people's screens and I stop by and I talk to our researchers. And the default is all of these different agents running on their screen that are writing the code. They're launching the jobs. They're evaluating the results that are coming back from the model runs. They are, making the changes. And we're still in the driver's seat. We're still coming up with the ideas. We're still helping with the debugging. But more and more, and this is right now very profound on the data side of our pipelines in both pre and post and the synthetic data pipelines, it's starting to become more on the architecture side as well. You're starting to see these twinklings of what RSI is gonna look like.Eiso Kant [00:21:27]: And that's. So when we talk about, like to your question about our models, every talk about the model factory, And my coolest example of these things is always that when we kick off a new run, doesn't matter if it's a training like big run or if it's now a post, like one of 10 post-training versions we do for like release or many experiments, is that at any given moment, the changes that somebody made that they had experimental results from the day before make it into that run.Eiso Kant [00:21:57]: So there's not like a cutoff 90 days before. Like no, it's like literally from that moment because we can now trust the machine enough. And then you also have to invest in the reliability. So one of my favorite metrics about like Laguna S is that there was no call events, Right? Like completely zero. And we haven't had a meaningful call event, like something to wake up for, as far as I recall this entire year. now there is one asterisk to that. In usually the first six hours of launching a new model run, something breaks because you set a config wrong, you made a small mistake, et cetera. So that's usually there's a little bit of intervention, but that's always within like call periods, right? Not on call. And I think that's starting to now compound. So the model we're releasing now, I love it. It's amazing, but we're already onto the next one. and I think that's the way it should be.Laguna, Five-Week Builds, and Zero On-Call EventsVibhu [00:22:50]: Hey, I also just wanna point out, so for context, this was like a month ago. we found it in the tech report, so we just came in with, “Okay, new model's dropped. Haven't heard about it.” We wereEiso Kant [00:23:02]: Yeah, we're very used to doing this every few months.Vibhu [00:23:03]: We're, we're very much like, “ okay, look, it's like, on par with Kimi, DeepSeek, whatnot, the small ones, Gemma level. Oh, it's a very cool paper on what goes into building.” And then we hit this page, right? Like literally page two of tech report is, “This process allowed us to build the small model from scratch to delivery within five weeks applying the lessons”. And then I'm like, oh, this paper is not about here's a tech report of benchmarks and here's how many tokens it was trained on. Like for people that wanna dive more from what we're not gonna discuss on the podcast, it's all laid out here, right? FromEiso Kant [00:23:38]: YeahVibhu [00:23:39]: Custom software that agents can use to interface with training code, training data.Eiso Kant [00:23:45]: Yeah. Well, link the paper correctly, so yeah.Vibhu [00:23:47]: Yeah. All that stuff. read the paper here, but,Technical Report Principles and Streaming Training DataEiso Kant [00:23:50]: But I would like to. I love principles, and I think that is a good starting off point for maybe telling some stories. Maybe we can go one by one past the principles. I'll just call out that Dagster just got bought by a Prefect.Vibhu [00:24:01]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:24:01]: Isn't it fun? But yes, I'm very familiar with Dagster. just anything where like they trigger some story.Vibhu [00:24:07]: So, well, I would say, well, experiments code's obvious, but I think one of my favorite things is, I don't know where it is in here, but early on, and I still think this is the case a lot of foundation model companies, people prepare their training data sets, they get packaged up, then they get copied over to a training cluster distributed across all of the nodes, and then training starts.Vibhu [00:24:30]: And we looked at this like three years ago and we were like That makes no senseEiso Kant [00:24:36]: You lose so much time because the moment you have to rematerialize the data set, you have to make a change, you have to fix something, et cetera, you've got all this time of like repackaging it, right? Toca- tokenizing it, repacking it, moving it over to a cluster, then distributing it across the nodes. The bigger your clusters are, you start using fancy like torrent-like algorithms to like distribute your data. So why aren't we streaming data into training? Right? Something that's very common and like just basicVibhu [00:25:00]: Like just in timeEiso Kant [00:25:01]: Just in time, like good computer science like principle. And that was one of the first things that I think unlocked - the model factory. Because the moment you start thinking about, well, a training job, it doesn't matter if it's a big hero run or a small like, post-training experiment, consumes a certain number of tokens per second, right? And it's not a lot, right? From a like a data, moving data perspective. So we said, well, we have our training cluster, and then we've got like our AWS kinda setup where we can build these amazing big data pipelines. We can set things up. We use Spark underneath the hood, like all these things.Vibhu [00:25:36]: But when you say AWS, it's not actual AWS, it's your internal AWS.Eiso Kant [00:25:39]: It's our internal-- No, it's our internal like just running like our infrastructureVibhu [00:25:42]: Site web servicesEiso Kant [00:25:43]: Exactly. Our stuff running on like an AWS account or on like any hardware, right?Vibhu [00:25:47]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:25:48]: And so once we made that shift into I can stream data into training, all of a sudden you realize a lot of things unlock. Because now you don't have to wait for the whole data set to materialize.Immutable Data, Experiments as Code, and Scientific RigorEiso Kant [00:26:00]: You now all of a sudden when you're running data experiments about mixing data, it's a config. Because you've got these data sources that are coming in, and you just - we have this service called Blender that's in the report, where we then say, “Okay, for this run, I want 20% of this source, 10% of this source. I want this much, so many epochs of repetition. I want this to be, shuffled in a certain way,” and your training job can start while the rest of the data is even still materializing. also what it does is because all of this underneath-- So for us, we treated the data layer underneath as like an immutable data layer, and that was really important. Like experiments as code, immutable data layer means that you can always go back and understand literally down to the single token at which cursor it went in on which version of the code.Vibhu [00:26:47]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:26:48]: And it took us a I have to admit, like the first year of Poolside, we understood that engineering had to get great, But we didn't understand yet, that this is ultimately in support of like a good rigorous scientific progress. We were quite a - We were a very small number of people, so a lot of it was YOLO ideas and YOLO runs.Vibhu [00:27:08]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:27:09]: And we built great infra for the YOLO runs. But once we realized that we treated data as immutable and code as always versioned, and you could always track and trace every experiment end to end perfectly, you could repeat everything perfectly, right? You have perfect reproducibility. I can still reproduce runs from two years ago if I wanted to, right? It enables the scientific progress, like the scientific process, and I think that took us probably about a year and a half into the company to figure out. We also had some great hires, like our head of applied research, Nikolai, who joined us from Yandex, who'd been working on language models since like the early 2020s, I think brought that into the company of like, “Hey, we wanna have even more rigor.” And then once we kinda had the combination of like increasingly more capable platform that allowed people to do more, but had this immutability, we were able to start “Okay, every experiment is truly an ablation. We truly need to understand it.” And I think we became much more scientifically rigorous in the last couple of years, and the infra underneath enabled it. and then there's just fun stuff like, andVibhu [00:28:16]: Yeah, a lot of it's fun, like even just the, one, you share all the ablations, two, picking the data sets, right? There's like a random small paragraph in here where it's just like, “Oh yeah, training data, we have some, we have an auto mixer.” it trains eight small models, scales them up, picks the training data set. We don't even need to look at it. I'm like, “Wow, a lot of engineering rigor there.” And there's just, there's just a lot in here.Publishing Research and Giving BackEiso Kant [00:28:40]: Yeah, and it'- and look, and we wanna put out more. Like we, We treat writing papers as something that we haven't earned the right for yet for a long time. So you earn the right to spend time, publishing research once you're at the frontier, because until then, you're catching up, and every minute and hour in this industry matters. Like I obsess over it, not just the wall clock time from idea to result, but just general like time every day that we, waste is one that doesn't allow us to catch up. But in this case, we said, “Okay, we're gonna give ourselves.” I think we gave the team like three or four days while still doing their work, like give everything in there. And to your point earlier, if your stuff, it's easy to like put it out. And so there's so many more things that we wanna talk about over time, and we will definitely start doing. And as we earn more of the right, but also now have like added to our mission that we want more foundation model companies to exist, you'll see us like be way more proactive, and just trying to keep dropping some of those like things that we've learned along the way that can help others like speed up.Vibhu [00:29:40]: Which is the other cool side of this, right? It's, it's not like, back to your point, it's not just here's the benchmarks of our training. If you want to replicate, here's experiments of optimizers, data sets, post-training. you lay out a lot of it here alongside here's your system for how to do it? So it's, it's really like promotingEiso Kant [00:29:59]: No, thank youVibhu [00:29:59]: Other people can do the same.Eiso Kant [00:30:00]: And by the way, I also wanna make clear, right, we have been incredible-- Like we've taken a lot of advantage of the fact of all the open research that others have published, Right? And you mentioned, the Chinese labs, and we I think it's important that there's, from every country and every culture and background, including like Western companies like us, there's different models that come out that people can choose to trust. But I think we do have to give credit where credit's due, right? The incredible Chinese lab have done an amazing job at sharing their research, and we have definitely like been on the receiving end of taking advantage of that. So when you're on the receiving end of something coming to you, I think it's, you also have an obligation to give back.Swyx [00:30:39]: Do you have a favorite or underrated Chinese lab that you wanna shout out? Everyone shout outs DeepSeek.Chinese Labs, Zhipu, and PersistenceEiso Kant [00:30:44]: That's a good question.Swyx [00:30:45]: Moaan obviously for Therapsi. Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:30:48]: Yeah, look, I think, I think obviously everyone's been talking about Zhipu lately, with 5.2. I think what most people don't realize is when they started.Swyx [00:30:59]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:30:59]: Right? They started years before ChatGPT.Swyx [00:31:02]: They just rebranded. YeahEiso Kant [00:31:03]: And so, I've like, I remember how hard it was to work on these things Before the rest of the world got excited about it. And so I have an immense amount of respect for people, who were working on improving models when it wasn't the sexy thing to do, when believing in LLMs, was gonna get you ridiculed. I remember like back in 2016 when we were doing what we'd call, machine learning on code with some of these models. we would-- people would just laugh at us, like they'd be like, “This makes no sense. Like why are you wasting all these, like, millions of dollars on trying to figure this out?” And so I would say they're probably the one that, I think deserves a shout-out, not just because their latest model is very good, but because they fought to get here. And I think, I think every foundation model company it takes time to get here, right? It took us three years to get to the model that we're, that we're now gonna be releasing. and now the time in between the models is coming, is counted in weeks. It's no longer counted in months or years. But this stuff's hard. and if we can make it a little bit easier for the next person, like we should all do so. Because if we don't do so, we're, we've got a small window before models are really impacting recursive self-improvement to a level where catching up otherwise might become unfeasible. And we should try to, in that window, encourage as many labs or however we wanna call them, like to start. And so one of my currentEiso Kant [00:32:36]: Mission, but qualm is like I wanna encourage whoever is a researcher right now who thinks they can tackle this to go and leave and become my competitor.Eiso Kant [00:32:45]: Like start another foundation model company because I think we need it. I think otherwise we're not gonna be in the world where, I don't want to just be the fifth or the sixth company that wins. I wanna look at a world where there's lots of choice.Starting a Foundation Model CompanyVibhu [00:32:57]: What else do people not see in starting a foundation model? it's, there's a lot of compute, there's a lot of capital required, a lot of compute. You lay out model factory and how to do the training, but there's a lot there, right? That's,Eiso Kant [00:33:10]: Well, look, it's, I in turn-- this is an oversimplification, and I always asterisk it with that because it can land a little bit the wrong way in people's minds. But I think you can sum down, And I saw it, 95% of model building to just doing, you're just doing two things. You're improving data or you're improving compute efficiency. And I know that feels like an oversimplification for the incredible, like, Gifted and skilled work people do. But if you really look at it, like what are we doing? We are looking at data, we're generating new data, we're improving data. and the only way to do that is to look at the data, right? That's a big part of foundation model building. And on the other hand, we come up with these incredible breakthroughs in inference, in architecture, and new attention mechanisms. But what are they really doing? They're bringing compute efficiency. Now, we have definitely had some breakthroughs over the years that allow for more model capabilities. But at the limit, if you could train a large enough model, right, like, and you had infinite compute, we probably-- if you had infinite compute, you'd be at AGI probably already tomorrow.Eiso Kant [00:34:12]: Right? Like it's not. And so, and let me say that infinite compute with infinite ability of much faster networking because networking ends up being more of the bottleneck than compute. But, so I do think that's, those are the main things. And to just realize that this is engineering. I think it's become more obvious, but I think for quite a few years, people have held foundation model companies and researchers and others on this pedestal of like you're doing incredible magic or rocket science, or only like, Nobel laureate physicists can do this. And don't get me wrong, there are some really hard problems that need to be solved, but a lot of the work that all of us are doing on a day Is not sitting down trying to solve a math theorem. A lot of the work that we're doing is just really doing the basics right, writing good code, looking at data, improving it, running experiments, looking at plots, trying to see like, hey, trying to shape our intuitions. And a lot more people could be highly capable researchers. and I think that's, it feels far for people to do so. But I've seen in our own company, we've seen engineers become researchers because the model factory allowed them to be, have a much lower hurdle of running experiments and trying things. And one of the guys on our team who started as an engineer building our agents is a legit reinforcement learning researcher now, making real progress. and that happened in the span of like six months. that would've not been what I think most people assumed was possible, a couple of years ago.Swyx [00:35:46]: Yeah. I think one of the interesting moments is when you can self-host, like, if in a programming language, like if you can compile the language in the language, the equivalent is can you use your own tools, right? You have the pool CLI, you have your own models. presumably you're not only using your own models. There's no way. But like, what's that percentage over time?Laguna S, Persistence, and Behavioral GainsEiso Kant [00:36:10]: This is the first model that we're releasing that is starting to meaningfully contribute to our own work. It's not a it's not state-art model yet. Fable and other, they're, they're very capable models, but Laguna S Is really interesting. I'm gonna pull up the quote. Peng Ming, one of our heads of applied research, said something, last week as the model came out about 10 days ago, much better than we had hoped for or expected. And he said, I have the feeling that a lot of the gains in Laguna S come not from more intelligence, but more from different behavior, more verification, less taking things for granted, not declaring victory early, and being way more persistent. And to be honest, those are more predictive than raw intelligence for success in human also to some degree. And this was, he wrote me this on 5th of July on a Sunday, and it's been burned in my brain ever since because the Laguna S model, as you'll see it and why it does so well on benchmarks and why it does so well in using it on a day basis, is that it's just incredibly persistent. It reasons a lot. I do call that out. We have work to do on making it more efficient. We have to work to do on offering different reasoning modes. But this is the model that has been able to do things that I never thought it could do. A hundred eighteen billion 8B active model, which is not that large. It fits on a DGX Spark and still runs at, thirty, forty tokens a second on a Spark, is able to solve Erdős 397 independently. It's able to do complex programming tasks. It's able to. I asked it this morning to make me a Fi scanner without using any external libraries on my Mac, and it's, like, figuring out, like, the core WLAN API by really persistently trying to understand it without access to the internet. And more, I love vibe checking. I've probably spent eight to ten hours a day with this model for the last ten days.Eiso Kant [00:38:05]: I'm not exaggerating. I was on my eleven-hour flight yesterday. I spent ten hours reading trajectories and traces and, like, of the model.Eiso Kant [00:38:12]: And what I take away from it is exactly what Peng Ming said. We are gonna be able to squeeze so much more out of smaller models than I think we had imagined in the industry because, yes, there's intelligence and larger models are more intelligent. Like, no doubt about it. We should continue to scale up. but the behaviors of being really persistent, of being able to backtrack when you're wrong, of, like, understanding how to interact with your environment show us that we can get a lot more out of it. And this, for me, has created a bit of a Question in my mind the last couple of days. If you think about where we're using models today, right? We are using models, say, for knowledge work. Represents twenty-five percent of the global economy, twenty-five trillion dollars of work.Eiso Kant [00:39:00]: As we scale up models and they become more intelligent, we are excited about using them more and more for pushing the frontier of science.Small Models, Knowledge Work, and CommoditizationEiso Kant [00:39:08]: And if you look at the frontier of science, like true breakthroughs in science, they have been linked, they are linked to more intelligence in many places. Einstein figuring out general relativity is able to bring ideas together that other people would have not brought together. And I think one of the many dimensions of intelligence is the ability to do that, and it's something we clearly see that as models get larger and more capable, they're able to pull more ideas and threads together that a smaller model wouldn't be able to.Eiso Kant [00:39:36]: And we're starting to see examples of that in medicine and, like, in bio and other things. But if you think about the majority of knowledge work that we do, and it includes building software. I'm a software developer at heart first and foremost probably, although I probably can't say it that much anymore as I don't write production code in years, is that what makes us good is our persistence. It's our ability to encounter a problem and backtrack and say, “I need to go figure out this bug. I need to go research this. I need to go look at the documentation. I need to, like, try different, five different ways to see, like, if I can solve it.” But it is not necessarily bringing three ideas together from radically different fields. And so if we are now seeing, and I think Laguna S is an example, that we are able to make a relatively small model much more capable than I had definitely predicted or any previous, like, benchmarks had shown for any model remotely this size or even larger, At least on coding tasks, that it's because of the behaviors. And so now the question I have, and I don't have an answer, it is I know at the limit, so infinite model size, right, extremely large model, and the cost of that model is gonna be very expensive to run. We know this, right? So larger model ROI.Eiso Kant [00:40:52]: So I know that at the very limit, I'm not gonna use the world's largest model one day, quadrillion parameter, whatever crazy, like, scale we scale up, to do a basic coding task. Already today, I'm starting to size down for certain tasks.Eiso Kant [00:41:07]: So it means that there is an optimal. It means there's some curve that goes as we go up to model size for knowledge work, at some point we're at the peak, and after that, the return on investment of using a bigger model, just doesn't make sense.Eiso Kant [00:41:22]: Now, I think the question is, before I would have thought that peak was extremely very far away.Eiso Kant [00:41:30]: This model for me is the first sign that Maybe that peak is At a trillion, five trillion, ten trillion. Maybe we can just squeeze way more out of these models. I'm no longer thinking that we need two or three orders of magnitude on the largest models to be able to, solve knowledge work, the accounting, the legal, the code that we write. And so if that holds true, It is an argument for the commoditization of models. It's an argument that open source can win and, like, succeed in this world. And now it's of course a self-serving argument and it's a hopeful argument, but theoretically at the limit it works. We just have to go discover in the next couple of years of how much more we can squeeze out. Now, I do want to put a big asterisk. This does not mean I'm against scaling models. I think we ultimately only succeed if we scale our models as large as our competition. I do not like. I think we should not put our head in the sand and say we're gonna be king of open source small models. I think that's, It's a out. It's trying to be king of your own kingdom, but not realizing what the rest of the world's doing. All of us rather use a smarter, faster, more model. It's a sign of hope. And so I don't wanna overly state this is a good model. We have a long way to go to get to the state-art. But what hopefully people take away when they use this model is that the behaviors inside of it are what push it to be far more capable, less than necessarily the number of parameters.Pre-Training, Mid-Training, and RL Moving EarlierVibhu [00:43:03]: Is that mostly post-training? LikeEiso Kant [00:43:05]: YesVibhu [00:43:05]: Right.Eiso Kant [00:43:06]: It's entirely post-training.Vibhu [00:43:08]: Are we done improving anything on training? Is, like, training done?Eiso Kant [00:43:12]: No.Vibhu [00:43:12]: Okay.Eiso Kant [00:43:13]: SoVibhu [00:43:13]: I just wanted to cover training, and then we go post-trainingEiso Kant [00:43:15]: Training is not done. I mean, look, there's a part of training of just dealing with skill, right? Every new order of magnitude of model skill, you are going to get new things you gotta solve for. That'- but those are ultimately, engineering challenges.Eiso Kant [00:43:31]: I have a, I would say, a not commonly held opinion that reinforcement learning Will move earlier and earlier into training.Vibhu [00:43:42]: Yeah, training.Eiso Kant [00:43:44]: Not even training. Like training today, right, is, like if you look at - So we've been working on this for years already. and I think the best-- I think the first time we saw it out in public was the DeepSeek Zero paper. this is a year and a half ago, I think, if I recall correctly. where, you can Very early on in a model as it starts capable of being able to use language, et cetera, induce reasoning. and so the question that I have is like, we have this- we have the dataset that's the web. and the web, I think we could arguably say probably has The totality of humanity's knowledge somewhere encoded in different places. It's a huge variance degree of quality, from garbage data, and like once you look at training data, you really get humbled of like what the web is, to like, the most greatest scientific papers and best blog posts and like, best transcripts and whatnot.Eiso Kant [00:44:39]: And so now What we are trying to figure out, and have been doing a lot of work on, and it's a place where maybe not as open as we're on other things, but we will become more over time. we've been spending a couple of years really doing research on how can we turn the web into not just next token prediction, but into a way to teach the model to think earlier in its training. and I think there's a huge amount of gold to be found there. I think we are right now in, we've got some drugs in the industry. One of the drugs is distillation. Another drug is, more environments. Like, and they're great, and they make us feel good, and they make the models better, and like we're all addicted to them, and we'll use them, right? in various different ways. and but ultimately, I think we are still barely squeezing out of the web what we should be getting out of the web.Eiso Kant [00:45:33]: I think just next token prediction during training is not enough.Eiso Kant [00:45:36]: AndVibhu [00:45:38]: YeahEiso Kant [00:45:38]: I think we'll see some very interesting things still happen. and that RL in post-training to induce behaviors, to improve things, like I think - the whole world knows how to do this now. I think we're, we're scaling it up. Everyone is. But I wonder if we need to go as far as we're going today with environments. I'm not sure yetVibhu [00:46:01]: You mean we're going too far?Eiso Kant [00:46:02]: I'm, I'm not sure if the path to AGI is justVibhu [00:46:06]: Is more environmentEiso Kant [00:46:07]: More environments.Vibhu [00:46:08]: It seems like a never-ending, “Okay, I want instruction manual for this table, right? Am I gonna environment out building furniture? Or are we just gonna tail end like we need some general solution?”Eiso Kant [00:46:19]: I think there is, I think there's an ability to generalize more from the web. but I also am very encouraged, like when I look at Laguna S and, which is post-training is, well, is the big impact there. and I see like, oh, wait a second, just by making some of these behaviors much better, we're able to get so much more out of it. It just changes a little bit the way you think about intelligence.Vibhu [00:46:40]: Yeah. The analogy people draw often is the RL phase is where you don't learn as much new knowledge. You shiftEiso Kant [00:46:46]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:46:46]: Yeah. So, you shift distribution, and you can have it reason towards what you want. on your point about training, a lot of training is still just continue training in a domain, say medicine, then you do RL. So still justEiso Kant [00:47:00]: It's just better data, right? Like, I mean, training, ooh, I like how we invented this word. Like it's effectively just like,Vibhu [00:47:06]: Second phaseEiso Kant [00:47:07]: It's the second phase of training With like a really dumb way to do a curriculum. But like ultimately, what you'd want is a curriculum from token zero to token 30 whatever or 40 trillion tokens that really truly is the optimal curriculum for the model to learn. But training is essentially a stage curriculum on the web because we do not have to compute, And, effectively to try to ablate the perfect curriculum, right? And so I'm pretty sure that you'll start to see people talking soon about some other term, and there's two or - ‘cause now we do this, right? We talk stage two and stage three and stage four training and like. But ultimately, all we're doing is we're trying to assign a curriculum to the web data that we have to allow the model to learn better. I think at some point, as things get compute, as models get cheaper to run, as the next generations of compute, this will become more of a continuous spectrum. I also think the reason, by the way, you have training and like stage two and stage three is organizational, Right? It'- this is, I think, a thing where-- that we really try to avoid with the model factory is like Training exists because there's a training team now, right? There's people, or like people in training decide to focus on like a training effort. but what you really want is engineering and scale of experiments that allows for a much more continuous spectrum that you don't, you have infinite stages. Now, we're not there. Compute's not there. Organization design is not there for it yet. but I think we'll get there. we'll look back on a couple of years and be like, “Oh my God, it was so cute that we did our training data like this in such a like naïve way. Like we barely ordered it. We didn't really do a good job at likeCurriculum, Auto Research, and New ObjectivesVibhu [00:48:48]: The building that curriculum will get you that in the industry.Eiso Kant [00:48:51]: And I'll confirm that, when I talk to some researchers that this is a lot of the focus now is like how does training change and what is the next objective other than, next token prediction. I assume you don't have the answers, but you have some ideas.Vibhu [00:49:02]: We have some ideas. We're not ready to talk about it yet.Eiso Kant [00:49:05]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:49:05]: We've been working on them for years, and I think that's the one thing that's also like you asked earlier about, like what's not obvious about building a foundation model company is that you are constantly balancing the table stakes work, the recipe worksEiso Kant [00:49:19]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:49:19]: Versus like your, my crazyEiso Kant [00:49:22]: Pure researchVibhu [00:49:22]: Breakthrough.Eiso Kant [00:49:22]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:49:22]: Pure research and finding that balance and adjusting the percentage to it based on where you are in the race is really important.Eiso Kant [00:49:31]: I mean, so like, this is a nice way. I was gonna bring up auto research at some pointVibhu [00:49:35]: YesEiso Kant [00:49:35]: As another Andrej invention, or coinage, which is like, I honestly, like how many objective functions can there be, right? Like just try 1,000 of them, set it running, whatever.Vibhu [00:49:47]: Man, it's alsoEiso Kant [00:49:48]: Like what you're looking for. You're looking for loss curves like that, likeVibhu [00:49:51]: It's also a thing people take bets on, right? When you say more Neo labs, you're doing a version of we'll do foundation models, scale them up, next token predictors. A lot of other Neo labs that we see want to take a completely different approach, right? At some level, you're right. It's all, compute efficiency, and that's the net objective. But some are okay, different architecture, like vastly different amounts of compute spend. So some are different. They're not justEiso Kant [00:50:19]: YeahVibhu [00:50:19]: They're like, 99% not balancing, here's the vanilla and scale up. They're 99% on, here's novel research that'll change everything.Eiso Kant [00:50:27]: And I think, Luke, I think you. It depends when you started as well, right?Pure Research vs. Table StakesVibhu [00:50:30]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:50:30]: When we started, like the novel thing we did was reinforcement learning on code. No long- that's no longer novel by far, but we were like, - that's where we obsessed over when no one believed in RL. So you have to when you start the company, you have to have your own idea. You have to have something that's different that allows you to speed up, right? For us, it was RL to LLMs that later became common, like, Knowledge. But in the beginning, it wasn'tVibhu [00:50:53]: It's cool. this was like your original 2023 blogEiso Kant [00:50:57]: YeahVibhu [00:50:57]: Of purpose.Eiso Kant [00:50:58]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:50:59]: And like you do lay it all out here.Eiso Kant [00:51:01]: We laidVibhu [00:51:01]: The blog is pretty underrated, right? The whole RL on code was very early on.Eiso Kant [00:51:06]: Very early. And even we had to argue with people, like we say here things like to push beyond current capability, to train your own foundation model. We had to argue with people that it mattered that you had your own like, base model. you can fine-tune your way to success, right? major capabilities emerge from training a base model made accurate and useful during fine-tuning.Vibhu [00:51:23]: Which like, for perspective at the time, we knew closed models, OpenAI, Anthropic were huge. The open models we had were like Mistral 7B, a 30B, a 70B.Eiso Kant [00:51:35]: When weVibhu [00:51:35]: YeahEiso Kant [00:51:36]: The date on this thing is wrong. When we published this, it was April 2023. I think this was justVibhu [00:51:42]: YeahEiso Kant [00:51:42]: Happened on a migration, probably found it on archive.org.Vibhu [00:51:45]: Mistral.Eiso Kant [00:51:46]: Mistral had started, we started on the same month, right?Vibhu [00:51:49]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:51:49]: So this wasn't even, there was only, I think, Llama out at the timeVibhu [00:51:52]: SnellEiso Kant [00:51:52]: And that's it, right? And so, but I agree. I think we wan

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Don’t Fade and Die in AI Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ Matt Yanchyshyn, VP AWS Marketplace, Rekha Thangelapalita, Elastic GSI Leaders; Allison McFadden, Accenture AWS Leader; and James Kang of Nvidia join Ultimate Partner. In this panel discussion, leaders from Elastic, Accenture, Nvidia, and AWS dissect the urgent shifts in the ecosystem, emphasizing that partners must adapt to AI and agentic co-selling or risk fading away completely. The conversation explores the necessity of deep co-engineering, the power of multi-product solutions in the AWS marketplace, and how automated agents are now replacing traditional human sales pipeline progression. By embracing data readiness and strategic collaboration, organizations can survive the “token maxing” era, effectively scale their enterprise opportunities, and align with NVIDIA’s five-layer strategy to dominate the new cloud landscape. https://youtu.be/zUkL4Wqsa68 Key Takeaways AI agents will automate the majority of AWS partner co-selling attachments and opportunity progressions this year. Partners who fail to embrace agentic workflows and automated governance face the existential risk of fading into obsolescence. Successful multi-product offerings require a “blood to all organs” approach that benefits the client, the ISV, the GSI, and the hyperscaler simultaneously. Nvidia’s “five-layer cake” model emphasizes that successful outcomes at the application layer automatically drive growth for all underlying infrastructure. The “token maxing” phenomenon is forcing enterprises to seek cost-effective, open-model alternatives to scale their generative AI securely. Integrating GSIs and ISVs on the AWS marketplace significantly increases enterprise deal sizes and long-term customer renewal rates. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags strategic collaboration agreement, data readiness engine, agentic co-sell, semantic layer, token maxing, five layer cake, accelerated computing platform, open models, cloud consumption, multi-product solutions, partner central agents, propensity data, automated opportunity progression, generative AI governance Transcript Matt Y and Panel Audio Podcast [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: You have a choice. You can embrace them and figure it out and get governance and, and make your data available. Um, use the partner, central agent, move to Agen Co-sell, or you can fade and die. [00:00:11] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:22] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi. Own your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:44] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because [00:00:46] Vince Menzione: being in the room changes everything. Let’s start. [00:00:51] Vince Menzione: We’ve got some amazing leaders joining us. So I think probably for a little bit of context, maybe just start with Rika. You can introduce yourself, your role and, uh, what, what you’ve been doing at Elastic. Yeah. [00:01:03] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah, sounds great. [00:01:04] Rekha Thangellapalli: Hi everyone. I’m Reka and I lead GSI Alliances at Elastic. Um, for the past 14 years, I’ve had the pleasure of building different kinds of partner ecosystems across companies such as SAP. MuleSoft, Salesforce, Coupa, and now Elastic. Um, I wanna thank Ultimate partner and Vince for having us here today. Thank you and the panel of these incredible speakers for joining me on stage. [00:01:31] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, very excited for the conversation today. [00:01:33] Vince Menzione: We love Elastic, and you’ve had some of your other leaders on stage at other events. As such, the quality of your leadership team is amazing. Thank you. [00:01:42] Rekha Thangellapalli: I wholeheartedly agree. [00:01:45] Allison McFadden: Excellent. Um, hello everyone. Allison McFadden. I lead our North America AWS practice at Accenture. [00:01:52] Allison McFadden: Uh, I’ve been there for five years, and truth be told, it was my first partnership role, my first formal partnership role. Uh, so I can take some tips from all of you in the room here today. Prior to that, I was 21 years with IBM, and I got into partnerships because my last role at IBM was actually trying to build. [00:02:14] Allison McFadden: Linux business on the mainframe, and I had to have partners. I had to have partners to help me with workloads to run there. So I kind of learned, uh, trial by fire. But I’m excited for the conversation today. Excited to be in this room and excited to talk about what we’re doing with, uh, elastic. Thank you. [00:02:34] James Kang: Uh, my name is James Kang. Nice to see and meet everyone here. Vince, thank you for the opportunity. Thank you [00:02:38] Vince Menzione: for being here. [00:02:39] James Kang: Um, I’m with Nvidia, so I help manage the AWS partnership at Nvidia all up. Um, I guess fun fact, I’m former AWS and so I see a lot of very familiar faces here in the front row. Uh, former colleagues and then current friends. [00:02:56] James Kang: And so, uh, looking forward to the conversation. [00:02:59] Vince Menzione: Great. Well, we’ll start with an easy tia. Matt. This is not directed to you, directed to the others. So what does a successful AWS partnership look like from your C? So we’ll start with Eureka. [00:03:09] Rekha Thangellapalli: Sure. So from an ISV perspective, I think we really are looking at three things. [00:03:15] Rekha Thangellapalli: Uh, mutual investment building together. And scaling together. So when we talk about mutual investment, elastic recently signed a five-year SCA or strategic collaboration agreement with AWS. And while that is a significant milestone in our partnership, for us, what matters more is what it represents, and that is really a long-term commitment from both companies. [00:03:39] Rekha Thangellapalli: Towards product engineering, um, and joint go to market initiatives to deliver value to customers over time. And that’s what we see is that the best partnerships really compound and they build upon each other every year. Um, they don’t necessarily kind of reset every year. Um, next we talk about building together. [00:03:59] Rekha Thangellapalli: So, um. When we talk about joint solutions, we want to deliver solutions that are better together and the customers have to see us that way. And so whether it’s search, observability, or security, we’re looking at taking to market solutions that we can’t or necessarily don’t wanna take on our own. And finally we talk about scaling together. [00:04:22] Rekha Thangellapalli: And this is where marketplace, for instance, plays a big role, um, when customers can draw down on their cloud commitments, transact online and go from, you know, pilot to enterprise scale adoption in hours, not days. Um, this is when really everyone wins. Um, and this is also where partners like Accenture play a critical role. [00:04:47] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, you know, the incredible amount of expertise that they bring, uh, the managed services capabilities and, um, their data assets actually play a huge role in having our customers realize that value faster. And, um, like Vince mentioned, at the end of the day, best partnerships are all all about creating kind of that. [00:05:07] Rekha Thangellapalli: Self-sustaining flywheel. And so it starts with investing together, building something unique, and having the customers realize that success faster because that success is really the only thing that’s gonna keep that flywheel going for everyone involved. I [00:05:26] Vince Menzione: absolutely. [00:05:26] Allison McFadden: Okay, amazing. I’m gonna riff off a few things Ika said, but from a GSI perspective. [00:05:32] Allison McFadden: A relationship with a WSA successful relationship with AWS looks slightly different. Um, so I think the first thing that we think of in the GSI Community common thread is that the client outcome and delivering value for clients is what we, what we’re striving for. Um, and so the partnership with AWS in that case, um, um, it has to, it has to. [00:06:01] Allison McFadden: Look like one team in front of our clients. So we have to show up indistinguishable, and that’s with AWS and with an ISV partner, it has to look like one solution in front of the client, especially moments that matter. So board meetings, um, you know, the time we’re gonna sign a deal, like we have to look like one team, uh, and keep our our client outcome, um, first and foremost in mind. [00:06:24] Allison McFadden: The second thing, and this is I think where the magic of all the people in this room comes into play. We can have as many discussions at a CEO level as we want. And if our client teams on the ground are not working together, it falls apart. Falls apart directly in front of the client. Yes. And that is a really hard thing to do. [00:06:45] Allison McFadden: So I’m passionate about the alliance work because that that work is what makes it happen at the corporate level. [00:06:53] James Kang: Cool. Um. I’ll start here. So in Nvidia is a accelerated computing platform company. Um, if you asked. Anyone on the, on the street about a year ago, what is ai? A lot of times they would say AI is, is open ai, or it’s philanthropic. [00:07:12] James Kang: Um, Jensen and I’ll, I’ll reference Jensen a lot today, um, because he is our leader, um, but he also sets the strategy in the direction for Nvidia. He talks a lot about AI in the metaphor of a five layer cake. And in terms of the five layer cake, you start off with the foundational bottom layer being power and energy, which sustains. [00:07:32] James Kang: All of our data centers, you move up the stack in terms of chips. So things think of Foxconn, think of TSMC. Next you have the infrastructure layer. So obvious choice is AWS, and then you get to the models where you do have the philanthropics and the open ais. But finally in at the precipice, you have the application layer. [00:07:53] James Kang: Ultimately, the reason why I mentioned all different stacks of the layers, the five layer cake, is the fact that the application layer is the most important. And so when you think about. Partners like Elastic or ServiceNow Trend, ai, CrowdStrike. Every time you pull from the application layer and you see a success, it pulls all five different components of that layer up. [00:08:13] James Kang: And so ultimately, as I think about success, it’s it’s being able to develop these co-sell wins at the application layer and really demonstrating that through extreme co-engineering and co-design with all the different application. Infrastructure, power and energy layers in mind. Um, Jensen also likes to think of himself not only as the CEO and founder, but also as the, the chief Marketing Officer. [00:08:35] James Kang: We are a very event driven company, and so at our big events like GTC or at big industry events like CES or Computex, he likes to show up on the biggest stage, biggest stages and showcase the partnerships with not only ISVs and GSIs, but also with end customers. And so that’s what I think about when I think of SA success. [00:08:56] Vince Menzione: That’s a really good point. You talked about, Allison, you talked about having an alliance strategy, or at least you teed it up, so I thought maybe we would go there for a second. Right? Like, what does a great alliance strategy look like and why is it important to the success of the partnership? [00:09:11] Allison McFadden: Man, I, uh, I have so many opinions on this. [00:09:13] Allison McFadden: We could probably be up here all day. That’s [00:09:15] Vince Menzione: okay. [00:09:16] Allison McFadden: Um, no, I think. Uh, there, there are a couple things, and the first one that comes to mind is focus. We cannot be all things to all people. Um, so when it comes to think about some of the, the work we’re doing with Elastic, we have a very, very clear point of view on what client problem we’re solving, what clients we want to talk to. [00:09:38] Allison McFadden: It helps if, um, from an ISV perspective, if there’s a very clear fit in. The Accenture portfolio or whatever, you know, SI consulting partner. You’re working with a very clear fit in the portfolio and we know what we’re not gonna go after, what we’re not gonna spend our time on because we have, we have this tendency, there’s millions of people. [00:10:00] Allison McFadden: The ecosystem chart that, you know, Vince, you showed up there, there’s so many connections. There’s probably more connections there than there are atoms in the universe, right? So, um. Defining what we do together and what we don’t do together is the first thing that pops to my mind. [00:10:19] Vince Menzione: Reka, do you have a perspective on it since we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk next about what you’ve done together, but, and I also wanna get mass perspective as a hyperscaler partner here as well. [00:10:29] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah, I mean from my perspective, I, I’m gonna, you know, kinda echo what Allison said is to be just maniacally focused. Yep. Um, because, especially from my perspective, so Elastic has three different solutions, right? We’ve got search, we’ve got observability, we’ve got security that map to completely different business units within Accenture. [00:10:47] Rekha Thangellapalli: And of course Accenture does a lot of things. And so, you know, when we first came together it was like. Okay, what are we gonna focus on? What industries are we gonna go after? Which segments are we gonna go after? Which customers, you know, um, outcomes are we trying to solve? And I think that sort of maniacal focus is the number one contributing factor to, to the fact that I’m like, up here on stage today. [00:11:12] Rekha Thangellapalli: Great. [00:11:14] Vince Menzione: Matt? Perspective? [00:11:16] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, I, I, I guess I was trying to. To add something, uh, additional from an AWS perspective, uh, when it comes to, you know, what does a great alliance look like? Uh, AWS is obsessed with data, you know, in data we trust. And, and so the best, um, and, and this goes sales business problem, and it’s not just the engineering teams. [00:11:34] Matt Yanchyshyn: And so, uh, you know, Accenture does a good job of this elastic, definitely. And if you can come to the table with, um, quantifiable proof of the value of customer outcomes and partnerships. Um, you’ll win all the time and it’ll be a durable relationship with AWS ’cause we really are this data obsessed company and, and even the most senior sales leaders. [00:11:54] Matt Yanchyshyn: Uh, and so what I mean by that specifically is like if you, if you can show like your a RR to land an a RR conversion ratio, like in in numerical format, it’ll light up our sales leaders and, and they’ll be all, and they will co-sell with you all day long. If you can show the, I mentioned this earlier, like the AWS service, uh, whether you’re consulting company or, um, elastic and, and how the shape of customer accounts change positively when we work together. [00:12:15] Matt Yanchyshyn: That type of sort of quantifiable data works particularly well from an alliance perspective. With AWS as a partner, we, we really are like this data in sort of results out company. Um, so I, yeah, that’s just adding to the great points that were already made. I would say specific to AWS that that’s key. [00:12:30] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah. And I’m gonna bring up one more thing. I want to dive in on the, the joint value proposition, but you mentioned something that made a lot of sense and resonated to me about the organizations once you get out of partner, the partner world that we all know and love. Mm-hmm. Once you get down into a field organization or account management organization. [00:12:49] Matt Yanchyshyn: Not as much understanding and really organizations do a bad job here, honestly, in terms of enabling the field organizations. Do you agree? [00:12:58] Allison McFadden: I agree because I, I agree. And, um, you know, I think that’s one of the things, and, and I, I, when I joined Accenture, what we had was a lot of wicked smart architects delivering programs to clients in the field. [00:13:15] Allison McFadden: Very smart, very deep in AWS knowledge. Um, and that was awesome for the 10 clients they were staffed on and to get that understanding of how AWS works and I dream about lar, right? Like, this is a good, you know, but that takes real effort and real work. Yeah. And it’s, it’s um, almost like being a language translator. [00:13:37] Allison McFadden: Yes. For me. Yeah. So, you know, I had to deeply learn AWS so that I could. [00:13:42] Rekha Thangellapalli: Sure. [00:13:42] Allison McFadden: Teach my account teams. My account teams are really smart. They know who they’re selling to. They know their customers. They know what their customers need. They do not know what AWS has to offer always because they’ve got 20 partners lining up to try to tell their stories. [00:13:57] Allison McFadden: Um, they don’t know how to ask of the AWS team or the elastic team or the Nvidia team. Yeah. What they need [00:14:02] Vince Menzione: this co-selling piece. Yeah. [00:14:04] Allison McFadden: And so that is where, um. We had to build that muscle even around our AWS practice, which was a huge practice at Accenture, but we didn’t necessarily surround it with that kind of enablement and um, almost deal coaching layer. [00:14:21] Vince Menzione: So Elastic and Accenture came together. I dunno which one of you wants to lead this part of the conversation, but you will, right? Yeah. So tell us about the genesis of this and why. And a lot of people dunno what Elastic does, but you do some really incredible work. Like I, somebody told me one day was like, oh, you know, Uber, like, that’s elastic, powering all that. [00:14:41] Vince Menzione: Like, we don’t think about that. That the engines that you have and the, the backend to the customers, huge customers. [00:14:48] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so when AWS launched this feature last, um, reinvent where basically it allowed, you know, channel partners such as Accenture to be able to bundle up their services, their data assets with an ISV solution and put it on marketplace, um, you know, Accenture and Elastic immediately saw an opportunity. [00:15:09] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, at the time most customers were doing gen ai. But they were running into the same challenge, which was that their data just was not ready. And by the way, this is a problem we were solving. Outside of marketplace. I think the, the feature that you guys launched just gave us a way to package it up and to be able to create this repeatable solution, which we call data readiness engine for gen ai and put it on marketplace. [00:15:40] Rekha Thangellapalli: And, um, this to me was a success because. Each company had a clear reason to invest. Um, so for Accenture, they were able to, you know, create a very differentiated services led offering. Uh, for Elastic, we were able to expand on our AI story. And for AWS, um, you know, it drives marketplace adoption, increases cloud consumption, all of that great stuff. [00:16:07] Rekha Thangellapalli: And customers, of course get. A solution to a very real problem that, that they were having. Um, and you know, the surprising part for me going through that journey was that, um. The pitching, the idea, getting the budget, getting the executive sponsorship was actually the easy part. The hard part was getting all three companies to come together, uh, to go from idea to launch in a very ambitious timeline of six weeks. [00:16:37] Rekha Thangellapalli: Nice. And so, you know, this was very much like. Doesn’t matter your title. We’re rolling up our sleeves and we are on this outcome together. Um, and so we literally built a RACI matrix, a project plan, and you know, we had daily standup calls for six weeks where literally. At least one person from each three of these companies called in, you know, got rid of any blockers and we made sure we were on target for that timeline. [00:17:07] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, and you know, at the end we had a successful launch. But I think my favorite part about the story is the impact that we’re having and, um. My favorite story comes from a global pharmaceutical company that, you know, had basically nine petabytes of data spread across six different continents. Wow. And by working with Accenture and Elastic, they were able to build that trusted foundation that their AI and their agents can, you know, kind of safely tap into and be accessible at scale. [00:17:41] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, so that’s my version. Allison. [00:17:44] Allison McFadden: Yeah. Well, I don’t have a lot to add. I just, I would say this is a good example of a couple of principles, right? One is having a forcing function is never a bad idea. Sign up for a big event, sign up. I’m like, I’m here with my, you know, Nvidia guys saying, sign up for the event. [00:17:58] Allison McFadden: It’ll make you move quick, right? [00:18:00] Audience Member: Yes. [00:18:00] Allison McFadden: Um, so that is one, but two, one of my mentors once told me, when you’re designing any kind of, you know, offering go to market motion, it has to get blood to all organs. If it does not get blood to all organs, it does not go [00:18:14] Vince Menzione: nice. [00:18:14] Allison McFadden: Um, [00:18:14] Vince Menzione: I love that analogy. [00:18:15] Allison McFadden: Oh, I love it. And I can talk all day. [00:18:17] Allison McFadden: That guy was brilliant. I love him. But, um, no, and, and so Elastic did a really nice job of bringing the tech to the table. Um, our team has to trust in that technology and its ability to scale, right? Um, because at Accenture we have to be able to deploy across 700,000 consultants. Um. And yeah, so I think those are the two, two things that really worked well here is we had, uh, trust in the technology solved a customer need. [00:18:50] Allison McFadden: Um, it drives, we don’t even talk about, like, yes, it drives marketplace revenue, but it unlocks work that we do that drives even more revenue to our AWS Friends. Right. So this is a, this is a, um, product that’s getting your data ready for AG agentic. It’s a messy problem that everyone’s dealing with, and it removes blockers for clients and it unlocks more, you know, ag agentic work on top of that. [00:19:15] Allison McFadden: So, blood to all organs. [00:19:17] Vince Menzione: So, was that the proposal going forward to say we need to have, we need to have trust in the solution. We need to drive significant revenue. It needs to be something all of our, you know, seven, 700,000 people. Can be a part of and help drive? Is that how you think about? [00:19:32] Allison McFadden: Yeah, and for us right now, um, it’s an interesting time for Accenture. [00:19:36] Allison McFadden: Our clients are asking a lot of us, and what it does is it having some of these accelerators helps us deliver cheaper, better, faster to our clients, which is what they’re demanding of us right now. Um, so it’s an accelerator to client outcomes. [00:19:55] Vince Menzione: James, what is NVIDIA’s role and how do, how do you enter the equation here? [00:20:00] James Kang: Yeah, it’s, um, it’s a good question. Um, I, I would say that Nvidia is probably one of the most misunderstood organizations in the world. Um, despite the, uh, the market capitalization in the valuation of the company, we have a very tiny organization. Um, what I mean by that is, um, if you think about. [00:20:20] James Kang: Salesforces and field sales organizations. Um, we’ll take Salesforce as the account or the customer. As an example, we have one account manager at NVIDIA that no, not only covers and is responsible for the relationship with Salesforce, um, but also manages. Automation Anywhere as well as DocuSign. Whereas at AWS, in contrast, like there are full armies and teams Yeah. [00:20:45] James Kang: That are supporting the Salesforce relationship. And so as you think about partnering and working with Nvidia, the focus has to be on really. Extreme co-design, but also being very prescriptive in terms of what are the very specific customer outcomes that we are solving for. And the guidance that I would give is bring in Nvidia into that equation and that conversation as early as possible because that [00:21:10] James Kang: co-engineering and co-design needs to be part of the foundational building blocks in order for you to come out with a end solution that checks all those different requirements. [00:21:20] James Kang: And so I think. Again, like going back to Nvidia, um, we like to talk about two different types of brains. A brain one and a brain two. Uh, brain One you think about the next quarter and making sure that you’re hitting the revenue targets for the next quarter. Brain two, you think about a long-term goals and potentials looking around corners and being very strategic. [00:21:41] James Kang: The saying internally is without Brain one, there is no oxygen, but without brain two, there is no future. And everyone at NVIDIA is trained to think in that brain two mentality. [00:21:52] Vince Menzione: Wow, Matt. [00:21:54] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, I, I was just thinking I love the blood doll organs. Uh, and so just on, on that note, um, and, and, you know, the multi-product solutions that, that you, you built together, uh, that is a really good example of blood do organs because like we all know, that’s how customers buy. [00:22:07] Matt Yanchyshyn: They, they buy solutions and increasingly they’re looking for combinations of ISV, sometimes multiple products from multiple ISVs with services. Uh, often they’re buying it through a resell motion. You know, and they, and, and so that from a customer perspective, they want a single place to go. And so that’s the multi-product solution. [00:22:24] Matt Yanchyshyn: They wanna find everything they need, they need Accenture, they need Elastic to solve a specific solution. And I think where that’s headed is even more specific listings, like with AI powered listing experience, like, you know, elastic Plus Accenture for, I’ll make something up like a manufacturing workload. [00:22:37] Matt Yanchyshyn: And so this solution based. Uh, sort of buying is, is very customer centric. It’s what customers want. We all know that. But that’s, that’s the customer sort of organ, I guess. Um, but then, you know, you all have SCAs and those SCAs have marketplace commits. It helps if that gets transacted through marketplace helps the AWS relationship, you know that that’s an organ. [00:22:55] Matt Yanchyshyn: It’s the relationship. It’s, it’s the commercial construct and that you have, uh, that that’s another organ. You’re marketing people. They, that’s another organ. They don’t wanna land, uh, leads on a static marketing page. They wanna land a lead on a, a storefront with a multi-product solution that can actually convert and that you can actually buy it through that. [00:23:12] Matt Yanchyshyn: So the marketing person’s happy because they, they have less churn. Uh, and then, you know, our reps are happy ’cause guess how they get paid? They retire quota when they sell Marketplace. And they, we also, Jay McMain will tell you, that’s another organ called Jay or on, on you now. Um, [00:23:27] Matt Yanchyshyn: he’ll like that. I’ll call him up and tell him that. [00:23:29] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, [00:23:30] Matt Yanchyshyn: but he, he’ll tell you, you know, don’t believe me. Obviously, never believe Matt, believe, believe the, the data and, and his data shows that. Those deals will close faster and larger if you use marketplace. So that’s, that’s a lot of organs. That’s the whole body. Um, but you know, when you have your customer happy ’cause that’s how they wanna buy your field happy. [00:23:45] Matt Yanchyshyn: Um, and, you know, the relationship happy and you know, your marketing team happy. Uh, and, and Jay happy. Um, and, and you know, I think that multi-product construct and, and the way you kind of use it to model a partnership and the way buyers ultimately wanna buy is, is really powerful. And so I, I think it’s, you know, it’s really a manifestation of how. [00:24:04] Matt Yanchyshyn: We kind of intend and to go to market anyway. Uh, so I think, you know, and thanks for leading the way, by the way. You’re, you’re amongst the very first, so that’s great to see. [00:24:11] Matt Yanchyshyn: So these storefronts are really helping this drive, drive this. Well, [00:24:13] Matt Yanchyshyn: that’s the next evolution. Like we’re talking about the multiproduct solution. [00:24:16] Allison McFadden: I’m JJ Accenture storefront. [00:24:17] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Oh, there you go. I mean, j and j Accenture storefront. [00:24:20] Allison McFadden: We’re gonna talk about that. [00:24:20] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah. I mean, [00:24:21] Matt Yanchyshyn: Accenture also leading the way yet again with storefronts. And so I think the combination of. You know, again, I was talking a lot about conversion. Yeah. And you know, buyers know sometimes they know what they wanna buy and, but if you really wanna convert that lead, you wanna land them again, something that combines, you know, elastic Accenture’s services plus software, but in a storefront that is, you know, surrounding with just the solutions they want so they don’t need to kind of go searching. [00:24:42] Matt Yanchyshyn: So, you know, ultimately reducing that time to close, I guess, really ’cause meeting the customer where they are with what they need. [00:24:51] Matt Yanchyshyn: So we talk about co-selling a little bit. We, Jay and I talk about this all the time. We gotta keep looping Jay in here, even though he is not even in town this week, but Reko, um, what does co-sell look like inside Elastic? [00:25:02] Matt Yanchyshyn: You’ve got, we talked about an incredible leadership team. I’ve gotten meet some of your leaders. Seems like you drive, you do a good job internally driving that. Let’s talk a little bit about it. [00:25:11] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah, and this is something I’m, I’m personally very passionate about. Um, co-sell is. Very much a journey, not a destination. [00:25:20] Rekha Thangellapalli: And I think step one for us is recognizing the different partner types that we have. Because at Elastic we work with, you know, OEMs, MSPs, resale distributors, GSIs, um, and they all bring something very unique. To the customer lifecycle and they all contribute very differently within, you know, our own sales cycle and sales process. [00:25:45] Rekha Thangellapalli: And so, you know, figuring out what is the unique benefit they bring, how do we enable them? So training and enablement is a huge piece of it, and so is making sure we’ve got the right metrics to measure success. Um, I know a lot of companies look at partner sourced as the north star, and that’s great, right? [00:26:06] Rekha Thangellapalli: Because that is undeniable. You can say, Hey, that would not exist if it wasn’t for my partner team. Um, but we’ve also noticed that when we bring in GSIs, it actually increases renewal rates. It significantly increases. Um, a RR over time. Um, it expands deal sizes and so these are very real metrics that we can point to, um, beyond just the co-sell and the partner sourced number. [00:26:32] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, so for us it’s looking at it from a very holistic perspective, but also catering it towards that unique partner and making sure we’re doing everything we can to set them up for success and setting up the partnership for success. [00:26:47] Vince Menzione: So clo close win ratios, deal size and renewal rates? [00:26:52] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yes. For specifically for geos size. [00:26:54] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah. [00:26:55] Vince Menzione: Very interesting. Allison, uh, what had to change internally to produce these co-selling? We talked a little bit about the field organization and enabling a, a group of, and, you know, account sellers that are very customer focused and enabling them on the co-sell side. What had to change internally to drive that? [00:27:13] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:27:14] Allison McFadden: I, I might have already alluded to this a little bit in a previous answer, but, um, creating the capacity to develop, build, and sell these solutions, um, inside of a large GSI, where billable hours is kind of the number one metric on the table. Um. Is part of the investment that we had to make within Accenture to get this done? [00:27:36] Audience Member: Yeah, [00:27:36] Allison McFadden: so expert technology time. So we have technologists that understand the elastic technology. We do similar with Nvidia, by the way, we. We released some of their time to go co-develop the solution because it has to hold technical water, right? It can’t just be a marketing pitch. It can’t just be, it has to be a real, um, what’s the there, there. [00:27:59] Allison McFadden: So in order to actually do proper co-sell, we had to release some of that time. Um, to invest in those partnerships. Um, we’ve also done similar with some industry aligned business development leaders recently, so we have freed their time up to go. Uh. Open new conversations, educate client, account teams, go to clients, have conversations. [00:28:26] Allison McFadden: Um, so that, that’s a new motion that we, uh, have just kind of recently made, um, to allow them, I love this brain one, brain two also, right? So to allow them to focus on brain two, because a lot of our time. Typically spent delivery issues, you know, getting my hours, where am I charging my time? And so just freeing up a little of that capacity to do this work, um, helps get us in this brain two mode where we’re not just living to survive. [00:28:56] Vince Menzione: I. So, Matt, you’ve removed a lot. I mean, one of the things I admire, I admire AWS for being first to market and removing the most friction in marketplace of any of the vendors. Really, truly that. You talked about some of the announcements. How does some of, how does some of this tie PC central agents propensity sales plays, MCP, how does some of this tie to how, how you’re thinking about the future? [00:29:18] Vince Menzione: And how to enable more motions like this. [00:29:20] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah. Well, I, I think if you know my boss, UBA Borno, uh, you’ll know that she has a maniacal focus on automation. Yeah. Um, and, uh, co-sell is increasingly automated. You know, you were asking earlier about propensity data. You can get that propensity data in addition to sales plays and, uh, opportunity scores through the partner central agents. [00:29:38] Matt Yanchyshyn: So things that used to require multiple calls to A PDM, if you’re lucky to have one. Yeah. Or a p sm. Uh, you, you can now get through, through these agents, you know, uh, tech Systems, TGS, they, they manage what, over 5,500 customer opportunities with agents that they built on top of our partner Central APIs. [00:29:55] Matt Yanchyshyn: Um, and work Span has built a whole product and business that’s right on leveraging, uh, our APIs, our capabilities to sort of tie into your CRM. So, majority of all opportunities will be progressed and managed by agents. This year at AWS, we already have a majority of all customer opportunities, all app have a partner attached and I, I took a personal goal for a majority of those partner attachments, not to happen from a human. [00:30:22] Matt Yanchyshyn: But from our solution matching engine. And how do you get recommended by that solution? Matching engine, having a healthy ACE pipeline, thanks to partner central agents and the integrations you’re doing. And in addition to being the specializations and doing things like multi-product solutions and ultimately closing opportunities, you dream of LAR and so LAR will help that. [00:30:40] Allison McFadden: It’s more like a nightmare. [00:30:41] Vince Menzione: And so, you know, [00:30:42] Allison McFadden: it’s more like a nightmare, but [00:30:44] Vince Menzione: nightmare. Well, it’s, it’s, yeah. Nightmare of Laura and, and. Nice dreams of PRM, but the, um, but that’s the loop, right? I, I think, uh, increasingly co-sell for us, and in my mind, is largely a hundred percent automated. Yeah. Except for what matters most, those most largest, most strategic, most complex deals. [00:31:01] Vince Menzione: Where our highly paid and very skilled salespeople are most effectively used. [00:31:05] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:31:05] Vince Menzione: You know, the days of, you know, this person with 20 years experience selling, clicking, progressing opportunities through a pipeline, uh, should be over. Uh, and, and we need those people out, out selling and, and co-selling. And so that for me. [00:31:19] Vince Menzione: Yeah. That, you know, we talk a lot about co-sell, but I, I’m obsessed with automating as much of the co-sell as possible. [00:31:24] Vince Menzione: I remember going back to the ex Excel spreadsheets and, and that, that seems to be be Viva became spreadsheet jockeys. [00:31:31] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:31:32] Vince Menzione: And, and they stopped selling. They forgot how to sell. [00:31:34] Vince Menzione: Yeah. And people spend all this time doing lunch and learns and things like that. [00:31:36] Vince Menzione: And then, you know. Then the salespeople rotate out after 18 months and, and it, that’s, that’s the old days. Uh, you know, the new days are, are AI powered matching algorithms, uh, ag agentic co-sell, using the partner essential agents to get your data and, and putting that data to use automatically and, and what sounded like magic. [00:31:51] Vince Menzione: 12 months ago is being done, you know, by partners at massive scale across thousands of opportunities. You can do it today. And you know, I, there’s a guy named another Mike, right? Mike another Mike who they have, there’s like a guy who’s doing all this and I’m picking on Mike ’cause I, I know their system really well and I know the guy Mike grew easily built it for them. [00:32:08] Vince Menzione: Um, but, you know, I think, yeah, again, in the days of having 10 people sort of doing lunch and learn could be replaced by one or two people, building agents, uh, managing a massive pipeline. And, and that’s the future. [00:32:18] Vince Menzione: Exactly. James, your perspective on what breaks with co-selling? [00:32:22] James Kang: Oh, what breaks co-sell? Um, I would say. [00:32:25] James Kang: It, it starts and finishes with just misalignment and a loss of trust with the customer, especially when you have multiple partners or stakeholders involved. If you’re trying to do a three-way deal with a end customer and you’re not on the same page, you’re not gonna get to a successful outcome on, on the backend. [00:32:44] James Kang: Uh, the fix is a much more complicated story. I would say that to take a step back, um. We’ve talked about the five layer cake. We’ve talked about where NVIDIA kind of fits within the equation. We are invested in the ecosystem and so as different players and application organizations win and see these outcomes for end customers, we celebrate that success. [00:33:07] James Kang: Um, and as part of that kind of ethos of where NVIDIA fits within the ecosystem, we wanna make sure that not only. Our customers, but our partners like ISVs and GSIs are set up for success. Um, we do not as Nvidia sell hardware or GPUs directly to customers We use. Hyperscalers like AWS as kind of our force multiplier. [00:33:31] James Kang: And similarly we think of ISVs and GSIs as the force multipliers in terms of our extensions of how we, we kind of leverage the relationships and build the trust with our end customers. And so going back to kind of the question, Vince, I would say that it all comes back to trust and being able to build that mutual trust. [00:33:48] James Kang: Um, a lot of what we do when we co-sell with AWS is really on the software layer. Um, we actually have more software engineers at NVIDIA than we have hardware engineers, which is a weird thing to say, um, because everyone knows us for our GPUs. But because of that fact, we are heavily invested in Cuda and making sure that Cuda becomes the foundational layer for how not only our ISVs and GSIs, but also our end customers are building. [00:34:12] Vince Menzione: Very cool. So Reiki, you and James together on this production. Versus pilot with the Gentech ai. Tell us a little bit more about that. Where, where are you in the process? [00:34:24] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah. So I mean, in general, what we’re seeing out in the market in, in relation to sort of AI and, and customer’s journeys is that, um, at least from an elastic perspective, um, we’re seeing people very much in production when it comes to, you know, kind of AI assistant co-pilot use cases. [00:34:42] Rekha Thangellapalli: So, you know, things like, um, software development, customer support is a big one. Um, any sort of employee productivity use cases where there’s. Still a human in the loop somewhere. Um, and there’s a very like, clear path to value. And so we see the customers being in production excelling there. Um, no problem. [00:35:01] Rekha Thangellapalli: Where we’re seeing people still kind of in the pilot phase is those fully autonomous workflows where there is no human involved. The agent is reasoning on its own. Um, accessing multiple systems and taking an action on the user’s behalf. And what we’re seeing is that it’s not the intelligence of the agent that’s holding it back. [00:35:26] Rekha Thangellapalli: It’s more about giving the right context to the agent and having the right. Security kind of governance controls in place for the company to feel comfortable in putting these fully autonomous workflows into production. And that’s really the conversation we’re having is all right, what are the controls you need in place? [00:35:47] Rekha Thangellapalli: For you to release this to your business unit. Um, and what is the context that the agent is needed before we can comfortably let the agent make the decision on the user’s behalf? Um, James, I’d be interested to hear what you’re, what you’re seeing in the market [00:36:03] James Kang: plus one on all things context. I, I would even go so far as to say, um. [00:36:09] James Kang: H how many folks in the audience have heard of token maxing? Like this new term? [00:36:13] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah. Yeah. [00:36:14] James Kang: Um, I’ll, I’ll give a very specific example of, of Uber that went public. With the example of Claude, like they allowed all of their employees to use as many tokens as possible, and within the span of four months, they exhausted their full budget for the year, and so they had to pull back, and now there’s a cap on every employee. [00:36:33] James Kang: I think the number that’s circulating is $1,500 per month per employee, and so I think that is at least. In this multi-phase evolution of where we’re going to be and where we’re today, cost has become kind of the prohibitive force in terms of agentic AI at scale. Um, I think we are working on some very creative solutions in-house and Nvidia. [00:36:55] James Kang: Um. And we saw some really dynamic announcements this week when it comes to all things agent core, um, where we want to focus on very nimble ways for customers to be able to execute and go to market. And one extreme example of that is our investment within our open model strategy. So Nvidia, not only, again, providing GPUs, we actually offer our own op open models, which we call our Nitron models. [00:37:21] James Kang: And through our Nitron models, we are allowing customers to really develop and fine tune their own proprietary models in a cost effective manner. So right alongside the frontier models like OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s not a if then, it’s not an either or statement. It’s a, it’s a permutation, it’s an and So we’re giving you a cost effective alternative to not only bring your AgTech applications at scale by training on Nibo tron, which is open source, but then once you’ve kind of finished and fine tuned that specific training job to be able to. [00:37:53] James Kang: Go ahead and utilize your frontier models, whether it be OpenAI or Claude. And I know there’s other partners here that are providing those kind of different model capabilities. And so I think for us it’s, it’s a matter of choice. We know that this market is dynamic. It’s gonna be evolving over the next coming months as well as the next coming years. [00:38:10] James Kang: Uh, but we believe that we are positioned for a really unique dynamic expansion of AgTech use cases over the, at least the next three to six months. [00:38:20] Vince Menzione: Allison, for the partners in the room who are glazed over right now going, what do I, what do I do over the next 12 months? [00:38:26] Allison McFadden: Should I wake everybody up by saying, yeah, please. [00:38:27] Allison McFadden: Say go hurricanes. [00:38:28] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:38:29] Allison McFadden: Is there anyone, anybody? Everyone’s like, boo. I get to leave the parade today to go home to parade. I live in Raleigh, so we’ve got our parade on Saturday. Nice. [00:38:39] Vince Menzione: Nice. [00:38:40] Allison McFadden: All right. Wake up. Um, all right. So for the $50 million partners in the room, um. $50 million is not small. You have something that works. [00:38:50] Allison McFadden: Right. This is great. What I would be thinking about is, you know, we’ve talked about focus before, but really doubling down on, you know, what is, what is your industry, what is your client like, ideal client that you serve. And build, um, almost that kind of community. You know, the, the clients we have move from firm to firm to firm. [00:39:17] Allison McFadden: And if you’ve done good work at one, you’re gonna follow ’em to the next. Um, so build that client demand in a specific place or specific client profile that is just like really knocking it out out of the park for you. Um. Scale with marketplace, right? So if you, I, I love some of the data that you were sharing in your talk earlier, um, because it’s like no overhead scaling mechanism. [00:39:45] Allison McFadden: I mean, it’s, it’s fantastic. Um, Accenture, other GSIs like us, we are investing in marketplace. So we’re investing in resources, um, to help us. Use marketplace more with our clients and we’re gonna capture, right, those storefronts. And if you’re present on marketplace, you’re gonna be able to catch, uh, yourself in that wheel. [00:40:09] Allison McFadden: So I think those are the, the kind of couple of things I would say is focus, focus, focus to drive that client demand and use scaling mechanisms like marketplace to really kind of, uh, accelerate. [00:40:24] Vince Menzione: Matt, anything to add there on the. [00:40:26] Vince Menzione: Well just, you know, Ja, James, you, I love the token maxing reference in Uber and it reminds me, you remember when cloud came out and everyone was like, oh, all these people are, are gonna use the cloud and costs are outta control and. [00:40:39] Vince Menzione: Um, a lot of people pulled back from the cloud and, and a lot of those companies no longer exist. And it’s similar with, with, uh, token maxing, like, oh, these agents are outta control. You have a choice. You can embrace them and figure it out and get governance and, and make your data available. Um, use the partner, central agent, move to agent to co-sell, or you can fade and die. [00:40:58] Vince Menzione: And, and that’s, that’s where we’re at. Uh, is, is the, the companies sitting here today embraced the cloud years ago and won. Uh, and and there’s a set of companies here today who are gonna embrace agents in the, for both buyers and sellers, and will win. And there are those who won’t and they won’t win. And so for me, it’s like we’re, we’re at a, we’re at a crossroads. [00:41:18] Vince Menzione: And, and if you’re gonna win, you gotta leap into that, you know? I love it. And, uh, and, and, and it’s, it means the cost of experimentation is so much lower now. Development and, and even business development or software development is, is agent enabled. And so you can take risks, you can experiment and, and you have to, it’s, it’s an existential moment. [00:41:37] Vince Menzione: Agreed. We’ve got a couple minutes left over for any questions. What do you think? Sure. Are there any here. I think there are a couple. Yeah, we’ve got, we’ve got a co-sell question I’m sure coming up here. [00:41:51] Audience Member: Um, I’m Cassandra, I’m the CEO of Partner Tap. And one of the questions I had was, I think, you know, the co-selling between the sellers is where things get. Really, really hard when you’re multi-partner. And so when I was listening, um, with, you know, the Accenture and Elastic together, you talked about how you had, you, you had to get these BD business development people. [00:42:22] Audience Member: Um, is this a new team that is over the client team? And how do these teams interact like with the elastic sellers? Are you doing a lot of coaching to the field and then with if AWS sellers are, are involved, like what is that whole picture? What does look like, [00:42:43] Allison McFadden: like [00:42:44] Audience Member: on the ground? I mean, that is the hardest part, I think, and that’s what we hear. [00:42:48] Allison McFadden: It’s so, it’s so, it’s so tough. Um, and I will, I’ll just say, so our business development leaders that we now have kind of. Expanded their capacity. They have always been, they have always been there. Um, but they have not been well resourced. They haven’t, they haven’t had very clear kind of job description. [00:43:12] Allison McFadden: I’m gonna say I, in the past they have been kind of focused on partner relationship. And so like more like an alliance manager and maybe working on some of the data. Right? So when I say I have nightmares about Lars, because we’re always trying to increase the LAR for Accenture and, and they were focused like in those detailed weeds of like trying to pass ACE and trying to call the PDM and all this stuff. [00:43:39] Allison McFadden: What we are doing is really pivoting them to be proper sales, business development focused on client outcomes and focused on. Technical skills to be able to describe what this solution is to the field. So, um, and because we need, I have many, many questions about, I gotta get agents to work with Eurogen co-sell so that that part somehow goes away. [00:44:05] Allison McFadden: So that’s a, that’s the thing we gotta solve still, but, um, so we’re pivoting them to be kind of driving. More of that co-sell enablement with the field, um, and taking that message to the field rather than being there, waiting for questions to come in from the field, waiting for like our field teams to discover, oh, I saw something that we’re doing with Elastic, like on a press release on LinkedIn. [00:44:30] Allison McFadden: Right. So we’re kind of trying to pivot them to be more proactive. [00:44:33] Vince Menzione: Very cool. [00:44:34] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah. And uh, Cassandra, that’s an excellent question because I think. Multi-party, you know, sort of tri-party offerings. The hardest part is operationalizing it at scale, right? Yeah. And so for this particular offering, we are basically having three routes to market. [00:44:51] Rekha Thangellapalli: So one is seeing how this offering fits into our existing elastic go to market. And so I am constantly enabling our field sellers to say, okay, within our three field sales place, here’s exactly where this fits in. Here are, you know, uh. Keywords that you hear in customer conversations where you bring up this offering and here’s a process of how it works. [00:45:14] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, exactly At what sales stage do I bring in Accenture, how, you know, what are the roles and expectations? Right? So that’s on the elastic side. We’re doing the same thing on the Accenture side. So we’re doing a ton of training enablement and lunch and learns, and we’re also looking at how do we fit into. [00:45:31] Rekha Thangellapalli: Uh, Accenture’s AI transformation projects, we are the semantic layer, right, of their enterprise brain. And so it’s a whole different sales motion, um, and, you know, having the right assets, having the right process again to make sure that that goes smoothly. And then finally, we’re going directly to the customer. [00:45:49] Rekha Thangellapalli: So we are launching multiple external campaigns where, you know, if the customer raises their hand. We will, we will line up immediately. Right. Um, and so, [00:46:01] Allison McFadden: I mean, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t say how important that third leg of the stool is. ’cause the second part, she talked about getting into our catalog is the first thing. [00:46:09] Allison McFadden: ’cause my BU business development leaders have the catalog. Right. And that’s what they’re selling. So what Elastic has done has gotten into one of those offerings and then. If we have a customer that asks for it, that is the fastest way to alignment. That is like the number one thing that we respond to [00:46:26] Vince Menzione: customer at the center. [00:46:27] Vince Menzione: This is great. Well, I think we’re up to time. This was a great session. I want to thank you. This is what a great, what a great group. [00:46:34] Vince Menzione: Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated, share it with a partner leader in your network. Subscribe where [00:46:43] Vince Menzione: you listen, and head over to the ultimate partner.com. [00:46:47] Vince Menzione: For show notes related content and the resources for this episode. And if you haven’t already, now’s the time to register for the Ultimate Partner Live Event in Reston, Virginia, October 26th through October 28th. Until next time, keep showing up in the rooms that matter because being in the room changes everything [00:47:09] I.

We're back with the third episode in our series on the podcast in which we're working our way through Pam's book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. Today, we're continuing our exploration of the deschooling phase of the journey with stage seven: Shifting From Control to Connection. Last time, we questioned our beliefs about learning and now, we’re questioning our beliefs about parenting. We talked about how parenting doesn’t have to be adults vs children, that children are capable of making their own choices, that equal doesn’t mean fair, how quitting is not a failure, and how strong relationships are the key. We also remembered to allow ourselves the time and space to grow and change. Exploring these parenting mindset shifts was so much fun! We hope you find this episode helpful! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE Learn more about Pam's book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It's a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it's a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello everyone, I’m Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully and I’m joined today by my co-hosts Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. Hello to you both. And we are back with another episode in our “A Field Guide” series. We are working our way through my book, “The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide”, which is framed around the hero’s journey and is a weave of myths, contemporary stories, and tales from my own journey. And we are deep in the de-schooling phase of our journey right now. In the last episode of the series, which was episode 408, we dug into some of the popular conventional paradigms about learning and found new truths buried in there. And as we continue our journey on the road of trials, in this stage, which is stage seven, we are exploring some unconventional truths about parenting. If you’re newer to unschooling and this is your first time exploring these truths, you’re likely dancing with these ideas more intellectually to just understand what they mean, what are we talking about, and maybe some of the further reaching implications that come along with it. And if you’ve been unschooling for a while and feel like you already intellectually embraced these ideas and have been bringing them into your family’s lives, now’s the time to peel back some more layers to build more connections and contacts around them. Strengthening your web of understanding with your own experiences, building your wisdom around this. And this is where you move towards, what feels to me anyway, believing these truths in your bones, you own them. These are your truths. So, the first truth that we’re going to explore is that parenting is not adults versus children. And right off with that phrase, there are so many aspects to that one truth. Does the conventional approach of pitting adults against children really make sense for us? What assumptions are we making if we believe that to be true? Does it mesh with our experiences with our own children and with the families that we see around us? The presumption of parental power over children is definitely widespread in our culture. We are meant to assume good parenting means power struggles will happen, a battle of wills over whatever the issue at hand happens to be. Yet many of us see right in front of us that it’s a draining and stressful way to live. And that so many adults who grew up in that environment continue to have strained relationships with their parents. That’s always been a curious one for me. So what if, let’s play with what if we choose to drop the assumption that the one right way to successfully parent is to exert power over your child to ensure that they do the right thing at the right moment? It can be challenging when we have little idea of what else to do. Because shifting away from power and control doesn’t mean doing nothing. So to that end, I personally found it really helpful on my journey to focus on connecting with my child rather than directing them. That’s what I could do instead. That helped me shift my energy in the moment to be open to seeing more of what was actually happening rather than that tunnel vision that comes with trying to control something to go one particular way and my way. And to instead get curious about how they were seeing the moment too, recognizing them as other human beings who are with me in this moment, not ones I’m trying to show the right way to go. Anyway, I found this a huge part of my unschooling journey. ANNA: Oh my gosh, it really is this fundamental shift that changes everything. And I feel like we’re handed these ideas about parenting and what the dynamic between parents and kids should look like. This does not feel innate to me. It really feels like something that’s coming from outside. And I truly don’t believe that it feels good to anyone to be locked in power struggles with the people they love most in the world. And I think people press on because they think they’re supposed to. They think this is how it is. This is what I have to do. Even when they have these niggling feelings inside that it doesn’t feel good and I don’t want to interact with my family this way. Because it really just doesn’t make any logical sense. Control, manipulation, and punishments do not work well in any healthy relationship. So take it outside of that parent-child dynamic. It does not work. These are not tools we want our kids to use. They aren’t the tools that we use in our close relationships as adults. So why would we want to bring those tools into the relationship with these beings we cherish above all else? Why would we want to model that? That just never made sense to me. The idea that really helped me the most was understanding that needs drive behaviors. So behind every behavior is an unmet need. Conventional parenting is about controlling behavior, but it never gets at that underlying need where change can actually happen. And if we look for that underlying need and address it, what you find is that behavior that may be offending or challenging at the time can really melt away because the need is being met. And not only that, but it deepens our understanding of each other and our connection. Like you were talking about Pam, that’s how we get to that connected piece by understanding each other. And so for me, that kind of defines the shift from control to connection, from trying to control behaviors, to connecting to understand the needs and address them together. And once there, it just feels better to everyone. And in that environment, we are all learning critical relationship skills that set us up for success, how to express our needs, how to hear another person’s needs, how to problem solve together to meet the needs. That will play out over and over and over again in every relationship in our life, from the clerk at the post office to our closest partner. And that is where I wanted to spend my energy on us all fine tuning those skills together in a safe environment. ERIKA: I agree. This is such a game changer. Moving from that power over dynamic that we’re all so familiar with just from living in our culture, to this place of connection. It just makes such a huge difference in my relationship with my children. And really, like you’re saying my relationship with everyone. And I think it’s surprising to people when they first think about this or first see it in action, because people are not used to this dynamic. I’ve had many experiences, in relating to my kids, friends, with teenagers who are just like, what is this? This is an adult who’s not just trying to tell us to stop, an adult who’s just telling us what to do, or an adult who’s criticizing and judging everything that we do. I’m an adult who is interested in them and wants to hear what they are interested in. And I just have had so many comments like, this is so weird to me, my parents don’t want to hear about this, that I don’t understand this idea of adults who are nice to us. And I think a lot of teenagers have that experience, it really feels like adults are just against them. And so I think it's kind of mind blowing. It really surprises people. But it helps me to remember how I felt when I was a child, and how I felt like I was a whole person, and then people would treat me like I wasn’t, but I knew that I was. And so that feeling is the feeling that kids have. And so the power over dynamic does not make sense to them, it does not feel good to them. We can have people pleasing kids who go along with it. And then we can have kids who push against it, because it doesn’t make logical sense, and it feels terrible. And then about those kids we'll say, Oh, they’re a difficult child or whatever. But kids are people too. We’re all people. And so if I think about how I would have preferred to be treated when I was a kid, that’s a good place for me to start, with respecting children and not wielding my power over them. And what I’ve found in my family is that it’s just so peaceful. Our interactions have a lot more peace, understanding, and mutual respect. There’s not a reason for them to be pushing back so hard against me. There’s not a reason for them to ignore everything I say, because they think I’m just trying to control them. All of those elements that you typically see in mainstream media relationships between teens and adults, it’s just not there. It’s just so much more peaceful. And I think that helps all of us, it helps all of our nervous systems to not constantly be in battle with each other. And it has that feeling of, we’re solving problems together, you’re talking about the underlying needs versus me trying to force my will on to someone else regardless of what they want. And so again, these are our most important, most treasured relationships. So I just think why would we want to bring that power over dynamic into that space that’s so important to us. PAM: I know, I love that. I love all the little bits you guys brought to it. I love having this conversation. But when you think back on, especially, the teen relationships and the teen years, it’s like, oh my gosh, what a huge difference. I didn’t have a lot of conflict with my parents. But I also basically didn’t have a lot of conversations with them at that point, right? Because you knew they were, from best of intentions, but only looking through their eyes. It's about how they think you should do something. So much of it is their baggage from their experiences, right? And I want you to have a better life. It’s almost like inhuman expectations that they share and put on you, like, if I could help my child be the perfect teen into an adult and launch into that whole thing. Those are the kinds of stories that they’re bringing. And yeah, it just feels like one demand after another, right in the conversation. So you don’t start the conversations for the most part. Because you know where they’re going to go. So I, why set myself up for that, right? So that’s the distance that conventionally you see with teens and parents. If we don’t talk, then I'll never know what they’re bringing with those stories. I think when you tweak it to the kid, older kids, like wanting to build their independence, absolutely. That doesn’t mean the connection’s different. The connection is still strong. It’s still there. Of course they can do that. But I think we tend to blame all of that on the teens wanting independence, but so much of it is just because they are bucking against the control, right? ANNA: Absolutely. It’s just so disconnecting. PAM: So, the second truth we are going to dive into is that children are capable of making choices. And this is another one I think can be so surprising for people to discover, right? Because conventionally many parents make most of their children’s decisions for them. Just believing that they’re modeling the right thing to do. And then assuming that their children have learned it and will make those same choices when they grow up and are finally in control of their own lives. And again, most often it’s not done with any malice, right? We love our kids and we want them to learn good choices. But what if we aren’t telling our kids what choices to make? What do we do instead? Again, because it’s not about doing nothing. It’s not about leaving them to their own devices, all these phrases that you hear getting tossed about. It’s about processing with them. What are their questions in this moment? How are they seeing things? What choice makes sense to them? When we aren’t struggling with our kids and are actively trying to nurture that secure and supportive environment, they have the space to consider things from various angles. And make the choice that makes the most sense to them in this particular moment. And have conversations with us about it both before and after the thing. They learn how to make choices by making choices. And I think a key thing to remember as we make this shift in our parenting is to recognize that their choice may well be different from the choice that we would make in similar circumstances. Because, again, people are different. People are so different. I love how different people are. ERIKA: Yes, and I’m so glad you ended with people are different because I really think that is the key here. If I stay stuck thinking that what I would do in this case is the only right answer in that situation, then it can feel impossible to allow my children to make a different decision. But since they’re different people, it doesn’t really even make sense for me to try to impose my preferences on them. Because that takes away their learning. It takes away my learning about them. They can trust me as a sounding board if they want. But if my kids have the space to make their own choices about their own lives, which, you know, maybe that is a big paradigm shift right there, realizing that these are their lives, not mine. I don’t own their life as their parent. Then they can add to their own web of learning about what works for them. So how their choices play out for them will be so much more meaningful if they were the ones who made the original choice. If they’re just doing something that I suggested, and then however it works out, it’s like, why do they even care? It doesn’t really have that same sort of importance to them, because they didn’t choose it. I love the point too, about the opposite of us making choices for them is doing nothing. And it really is not that. It’s being present, building that trust, being trustworthy, being non judgmental about the things that they’re interested in and the things that they want to do. And so they will come to me if they’d like to imagine different scenarios, or if they’re not sure about something. And I know also just by having that connection, when they might need a little push or a little confidence booster, you know, you can do this, you’ve got this. And I know when to trust that even if it doesn’t work out how they thought it would. And sometimes I even know that it won’t. And sometimes I’m right about that. And sometimes I’m wrong about that. But even if it doesn’t work out, I just believe that what they’re learning about themselves and the trust that it builds for themselves, trust in themselves, and then also trust in me that I’m trusting them. There’s just so much trust building that’s happening. I think it’s just huge. ANNA: It really is. I love how you describe that interplay. Because I do think that’s a common first reaction. I’m not supposed to be over involved. So I’m just going to go away. And it isn’t hands off, but it is this what you were describing really being in tune with who they are and trusting in their journey, trusting in your relationship with them. Knowing when you can have conversations and when we can add a little something here. When do I need to just observe or listen or reflect back? And yes, this is where people are different means everything, because we really do tend to think that people see and experience the world in the same way that we do, and that they want to move through the world in the same way that we do. And they just don’t. So how I said it to myself in the early days was that I just don’t know what’s best for another person, even my child, ever. And that just helped stop me and help me stay open and curious about – what is their unique experience here? What are they getting out of this? And it also helped me learn about myself and what things were uniquely mine. And I like how you said, Erika, now, maybe I just lost it. But it’s that sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong. Sometimes it didn’t work out. But it’s not about it working out, right? It’s just about the unfolding of it, because we’re learning all along the way by just taking a step by trying something. I love that so much that this is even about letting go of some end goal of something that we’re all trying to get to. No, it’s about this exploration and learning about ourselves. And I just find kids are so capable. They know from the start, what they need at any given moment, and if they don’t have a fully formed vision of what that is, they know the next step they want to take, just so intuitively. I saw over and over again, they just don’t have the baggage that we’ve had, that I think can make things so much harder. And I think that baggage, kind of in light of what you were saying, is that we tend to have a fixed goal, like, this is what we’re trying to accomplish, so we have to be tunneling in on this endpoint. And I think kids are much more naturally playing with things and figuring things out. And then, like you said, Pam, oh my goodness, we learn how to make choices by making choices. I don’t know how many times I said that to people when my kids were little. I’m like, how can you say that you want them to make good choices, but you don’t let them make choices? How are they going to learn how to make choices? And in that process of making choices, we do learn what works for us, what doesn’t, when to slow down, when to go full steam ahead, when to pivot. All these things come from the doing, not from being told which decision to make. That just short circuits all the learning, and begins this external orientation that’s actually really hard to break. We’ve talked about this a lot too, that once that external orientation is fixed into you, from school, or even family, it’s really hard to step outside of thinking, what does everyone else want from me here? Versus, what do I want?. And I just found kids to be super capable of solving problems. Earlier I mentioned looking for these underlying needs, they have these best suggestions for solving issues. And I will say, if this is new for your family, it can take some time to develop that trust. Can I really say something here? Am I going to be heard? But it can develop, and with that trust, just like you were saying, Erika, it’s trust, trust, trust all around, everyone feels safe advocating for their needs and really helping each other meet their needs. I just love that. I know it’s a big shift to think that kids know best for themselves, but I truly believe that each one of us knows best for ourselves, and if we can give it some space and observe, you will start to see how different we all are, and how there is this knowing. And I feel like my kids helped me get back to my own knowing. It’s organically there in them from the start, and as adults, we may have to peel back some layers of conditioning, but I think it’s there for us too. PAM: Yeah, I think so. I love that. And I mean, as you were saying that, it just became more and more clear. That giving them the space to make the choices that feel like they make the most sense for them, is such an effective way for them to learn more about themselves, which they bring to the next choice and the next choice. It’s just this beautiful cycle. And then the reminder too, that it can take some time to build up that trust, absolutely, trusting that somebody’s not going to come back and tell them, no, no, no, that’s not the right way, do it this way. Or, see how it turned out after you made that bad choice, I told you so. Okay, so the third truth is, fair doesn’t mean equal. I found this one really interesting to think through. It was so interesting, we don’t want to show favor to one child over another, right? We want all our children to feel equally loved by us, and conventionally, we extrapolate that to treating our children equally. So, like, all kids get one piece of cake, and you’re careful to make them all the same size. That’s just one little example, but it’s like the epitome of fairness, right? But again, people are different, so instead, can we consider what the moment looks like through each of their eyes. How does it feel to each of them? So, I remember when I was thinking this through, I tested this little hypothesis. At the next birthday, I asked everybody how big a piece of cake they would like. And I was flabbergasted, nobody said the whole cake. But, so even as kids, I’d get different answers that really depended on how much they’d liked that particular cake or dessert, whatever we were having to celebrate, how hungry they were at the moment, if they were actually even fancying something sweet, right? So, getting the amount of cake they wanted felt fair to them. They felt seen and heard just by being asked, not just, this is the size that all kids get, and here you go, and, finish it, or you don’t get more. The whole thing, equal does not mean fair. I began to see fairness, not as that quantitative measure of anything that parents give, but as the qualitative measure of the value that each child receives. So, looking back over different seasons, one child may need more of their parents’ time, while another has a passionate interest that needs more of the family’s money to support it. We may be giving each of our children very different things in any particular moment, that take varying amounts of time, of our effort, of our money, but when their unique needs are being met, they each feel secure and happy, they feel seen and heard as who they are. And, in my experience, they do feel equally loved. What a difference, right? ANNA: Oh my gosh, all of these things are so important. This one is huge also, and it’s one I cannot get my mother to understand. It’s funny, because she really does think that doing exactly the same thing for all three of us is fair, and that shows that she loves us the same, and that we’re all equally loved. But gosh, being on the receiving end of that just feels super disconnecting, I don’t feel seen and heard or understood at all. But at this point, she’s 92, so there’s no real changing her, so the three of us will just roll with it. But again, there are three of us, we have a huge age gap, brother, sister, and then I’m the baby, huge age gap. We’re all so different. I think that’s why we talk so much about, people are different, because just understanding how different and unique we all are, just lights people up. They want you to know them, to see them, see their unique gifts and beauty. And so yeah, this whole, everybody needs to be treated exactly the same, does not do that. So, I knew that with this one, I wanted to examine it deeply and do it really differently with my kids. My girls are very different, I just have two, very different, though, and it really would have been a disservice to think in those kinds of black and white, equal is fair, terms. And I think a big part of this is watching my own language, countering the cultural messages about fair, like you did with the cake, right? And so you created a new fair, which is, hey, how much do you want, and let me help you get that. And I think it takes some digging in, to figure out what the need is in any given situation. Sometimes you can just ask, but sometimes there’s a little more to it. And also, just to build the culture of trust, that we will work to meet all the needs, and to recognize our choices in each moment. I think the other byproduct of everyone trusting that they’ll get their own needs met, is actually, they’re pretty happy when other people are getting their needs met too, because we can all celebrate each other doing our own things, and because we know that if we want something, we’ll figure it out, there’s no doubt about that. So, as I was thinking about this one, I’m not even sure you can step away from this kind of equal as fair cultural idea, without moving to a more connected idea of everyone getting their needs met. I think it kind of goes hand in hand, so you don’t have any kind of backlash or misunderstanding about it. ERIKA: Yeah, when I was growing up, we definitely had a huge, equal is fair, message in our family as well. And I think the funny thing is that, by constantly emphasizing trying to make everything equal among the three kids, we became so fixated on looking for the little discrepancies of, like, that’s a little bit more, that’s a little bit less, and we were also focused on it, and it gives you that feeling of scarcity, right? We were always on the lookout for, that’s not fair, how come she got that, I only got this, like, all of those things. And so when I contrast my memories of that with my own children’s experience, it’s just so interesting. From the beginning, I was so careful not to ever indicate that our food, my attention, our toys, whatever the resource was, I made sure I was showing them that there’s abundance, they don’t have to fight over it. And so we provided what we could to each one, but it was what they individually wanted, and, like you both have said, people are different, so I’m not just handing both of them the same thing. Maybe sometimes, and in fact, sometimes that really helps too, to create that feeling of abundance, we don’t need to fight over things, but we don’t need all the same things, we all get what we need. And so, when my kids were younger, my mom would play with them, but it was overwhelming, because if you have little kids, you know, a lot of times they’re both talking at the same time, wanting something, wanting her attention. And I remember she would set a timer. Okay, I’m going to play with Maya for 15 minutes, and then it will be your turn, Oliver, which feels really fair, but it really is just equal, because one might not need the full 15 minutes, and then the other one’s just focusing on what they’re not getting for those 15 minutes. And so, even though it was at times overwhelming in those younger kid days, I did try to just include them both at all times. So I’m hearing them both, you know, kind of being like, oh wow, oh wow, oh, you know, it’s just the spec, and that’s all they really wanted. They wanted to be able to say what they wanted to say in the moment. It was more chaotic, I think, but they didn’t really notice that, they just knew that I was there, they both felt I was there for them, and they don’t have a feeling of competition between each other, and still don't, to this day. And so I feel like many of these paradigm shifts boil down to, people are different. This one feels like that too. If we can recognize that people are different, we know that meeting each person’s needs in our family is going to look different, and that’s what makes a family really interesting and unique. PAM: Yeah, I love that you guys are both pointing out how so much of these boil down to, people are different. And it’s just recognizing that difference and incorporating it into the different aspects, that really is one of the fundamental paradigm shifts. Okay, so fourth truth, and that is, quitting is not a failure. Choosing to quit an activity, I mean, think about it just for a second, it is as much a learning experience as starting an activity. So conventional wisdom says that if we let children quit whatever they want, they will never finish something when the going gets tough, right? They’ll just say, oh, that’s too hard, I’m going to quit. And I see you guys both smiling, that is just not what we see, and I bet you, anyone listening, if you watch your kids in action for any length of time, it’s not what you’ll see either. In fact, if we continue to insist that they finish what they start, what they’re likely learning more fundamentally is to not try out new things unless they’re quite sure they’ll enjoy it. Because they can’t quit it, they’ll have to stick it out, as it were, you committed to this, like, all those kinds of messages. So they’re just going to only want to engage with something that they’re pretty darn sure they’ll be happy to follow through. So what that means is less exploration and less learning. When we favor connection over control, our children gain lots of experience with wanting to try something, choosing different ways to explore it, and seeing how well those different paths meet their goals. They’ll discover things that they like, they’ll discover things that they don’t like, and they will get a better feel for the clues that help them decide when they want to lean into something and when they want to quit and move on. And each time they choose to quit, they’re learning so much. Okay, I just got a rush of goosebumps, because I love this point. How does that choice feel moving forward? Do they miss the activity? If they miss it, that’s not a failure, that’s not wrong. What do they miss about it? That’s more learning. What are they doing with the time that quitting the thing freed up for them? Are they enjoying that? Are they enjoying that more? There’s just so much that comes when you quit something, that’s not the end, it’s not like, you therefore are not allowed to think about it ever again, right? There’s just so much processing that unfolds even beyond that one act, and it’s not forever either. ERIKA: Oh yeah, I think mainstream parenting culture is just so hooked on this. They really want kids to stick it out, and I feel like it’s in this way that we don’t expect ourselves to. And yeah, I think it’s a little short-sighted, right? It’s trying to teach responsibility and commitment and all of these things, but who wants somebody who is committed to something that they’re no longer enjoying? This is a path that does not lead to success, it’s a path that does not lead to good places. I still carry with me some feelings of failure that I have, due to, you know, in quotes, quitting something. I don’t even like the word quitting, because that kind of makes me feel like, I’ll never go back, I quit it. But I don’t view it like that with my kids, they can stop doing an activity and come back to it later, and there’s really no weight to that. But if I look back, I can see that my choices were valid, and that my life path has ended up being amazing, but looking back at certain things, I still feel the pressure and the weight of that, what felt like failure at the time, just because of the messages that I absorbed. Sometimes we don’t know how something’s going to feel until we try it. When we do and it’s not a fit, sometimes it’s an immediate thing, right? Like when I tried taking computer programming in college, I was like, immediately, no, my brain doesn’t do this. For some reason, I thought it would, it didn’t. And so sometimes it’s right away, but sometimes we’re just changing and growing over time. We all know, we’re growing and changing so much, even as adults, but our kids are certainly growing and changing, we see it happen right in front of us. And so maybe it’s like, this used to be great, now it’s not anymore. And so I think it’s just a gift to be able to listen to our inner voice, and make a choice that fits us right now, without that pressure of, this is a forever choice, or this is a failure if I don’t do this. There’s just no one right way to live, and each choice we make, it’s going to lead us somewhere, so we could just try things, quit things, shift gears, dive deep into something, and as long as we’re listening to our own voice, we can trust that we are building a life that works for us. I think we only really get stuck if we’re focusing on the external voices that don’t know us on the inside, and know what we really want and need. ANNA: It really is a clue, that those outside voices are taking up way too much space, because those outside voices, the peanut gallery about the quitting, they’re not the ones that are going to be there doing the thing, they’re not the ones that know how you’re feeling. So it really is just that, slowing down to recognize that and push it away, because this idea of quitting equals failure, is so ingrained, and it’s so counterintuitive, because you’re right, Pam, if kids are forced to stay with something that isn’t working for them, what they learn is to not try, because, I’m going to be stuck with it forever. And they’re so young, you know, they don’t know if they’ll like piano or baseball or that specific art class, there’s so many factors involved, and all the time that they’re stuck in something that they don’t love is time they aren’t getting to try other things to find out what they do love. And I love your point, Erika, that sometimes we know right away, nope, this is not for me, but sometimes interest wanes, right, and we grow and we change, and we’ve gotten what we’ve wanted out of it. I think that’s another thing, sometimes parents get caught up. Oh, but they’re so great at the piano or that sport. But that person, that unique human, has gotten what they want out of that experience, and that’s okay. All of that is okay. And goodness, I mean, I’m 57 and still I want to dabble and try things to get a better sense of if something will work for me. I can get very excited about a lot of different ideas, but until I’m actually doing it, it’s hard for me to say, does it suit me? Does it fit in my life? Do I want this? Is this how I want to be spending my time? And just quickly, if money is your sticking point here, because that's usually a big one for people, we have a podcast about this, but David really helped me move through this one with the financial idea of sunk costs. And so the reframe is that we’re paying for the opportunity. When we go into it with this idea of we’re paying for the opportunity to try this, it feels very different. The value is in learning whether it’s something we’re enjoying versus the value being in getting all of these specific instructions or finishing the class or staying on the team. And if letting the team down is your sticking point, you only have to have played a tiny bit of sport to know that someone who doesn’t want to be there isn’t helping the team at all. And you kind of alluded to this, Erika, like we really don’t want somebody that’s forced to be in any situation, sports or otherwise, or any kind of work. And all of this doesn’t mean that there’s no discussion though, right? Because sometimes there are discussions before, during, and after. And for us, thinking back, if something was a particularly pricey activity,because that happens and kids are like, I want to do this thing. And it’s a year’s commitment for thousands of dollars. We would talk about how we spend that money, where it comes from, what it impacts. Is there another way to learn more about the activity before we commit to something that’s maybe as long or as expensive as that? What I found is that kids are so creative and they often could find their own alternative paths as we’re playing with it and looking different things up. And also just talking to the organization, is there a way we can observe or trial it? People are pretty accommodating when you ask nicely. And I know for me, sometimes it is hard to ask for what I need. I don’t want to bother anybody. I know how busy and hard they’re working to do this program, but I really do find people to be understanding and generous when they can be. And that’s the information we need, right? Is it possible? If not, okay, then that’s another thing to put in the hopper for the decision. And I just love that all of us feel comfortable leaving something that isn’t working. I have seen this play out in all of us over the years. You really just won’t find any of us stuck in jobs we hate for decades, which is so common in our culture. And we know there’s always a choice and there’s always another way. And I think I just have seen it serve my kids and it serves me and David as well. PAM: Yeah. And I think that’s the whole point, with the relationships, with connection being in the lead, those processes are something that we can do actively. Like, okay, you’re stuck in a job that you really don't like, you may end up quitting immediately, but also it can be, you’re disliking it more and more and more over time, but we’re having conversations, we’re making plans. It’s not, well, you know, you have this job, it pays well, or whatever reason we say, oh, you need to stay, et cetera. No, you actually can. That's the control piece coming right back in. We can instead focus on that connection piece. We can talk through it more and even later, it feels lighter, at least for me showing up to something maybe I don’t like, but I know I’ve got a plan to move through it. I know where I’m going to keep talking. It’s not black, white, like we were talking right at the beginning there. And then there was just one other tiny piece. And now did I lose it? I’m trying to think what you, oh, oh, it was about, was it about, it was about like, how much we learn, I think, when, oh, yes, it was, it was, sorry. But it’s something that I love to do. When people come to the network. When we have the quitting discussions, et cetera. And, but then, so we talk about like, once they’re interested in something that may be expensive, I love brainstorming all sorts of ways that you can be involved in it without the expensive class. Because so often, certainly at the beginning of our journey, we turn it into – they’re interested in swimming, swimming lessons. Oh, piano, piano lessons, like dance, dance lessons. That’s our first go-to because that is what we know, right? But there are so many other possibilities that can help them experience the thing that they’re interested in and may or may not at some point want actual lessons for it, but you don’t have to wait for the lesson to become involved. You can go swimming in the public pool. There are just so many possibilities. So I love that piece of just brainstorming ideas and people get very excited and off they go to play and it’s very fun. Okay. Okay. Finally, truth number five, strong relationships are key. It’s not about parenting that parent-child power dynamic in which the overarching goal is to turn out a successful adult, right? It’s about being in relationship with your child. This is a lifelong relationship. We’re two human beings. We’re multiple human beings. That relationship shifts over time as they grow and change, as we grow and change. It looks very different when they’re young versus when they’re in their teens versus when they’re young adults versus when they’re older adults. Even if at any given moment, it feels like things will never change, right? But they really, really do. You can’t imagine when this is ever going to change. And, and getting focused on and fixating on when it will change is going to get in your way. But that’s a conversation for another day. A few years ago, I wrote a very long essay about the value of relationships to learning. And I will link in the show notes to anyone who’s interested. But oh my gosh, when I first came to unschooling because my kids were in school, it was like, oh, how are they going to learn, right? And in the last episode, we talked about paradigm shifts around learning. But I really did come to see pretty quickly that I didn’t need to worry about the learning. What I could focus on was a relationships and this shift from control to connection and recognizing that strong relationships really just drive everything like that was key for me. ANNA: Yeah, I think when we switch the lens to being in relationship, things just change dramatically across the board. I’ve talked about it before, but I would just often ask myself – Is what I’m about to say or do going to help or harm our relationship? That kept me focused on what was important to me. And that litmus test really served me well. Because if I’m tending to the relationship, we’re able to navigate the challenges together from a place of connection. So if I’m wanting my kids to be safe. As parents, we kind of see that as a responsibility. They are safest when our relationship is strong and they can come to me versus rules and punishments to try to keep them safe, which serves to disconnect us. If my kids came upon a situation that seemed a little sketchy, they would ask me about it. They knew I wasn’t going to stop the exploration just off the bat, but that I could be a sounding board and a processing partner as they navigated it. For kids who think they’re going to get in trouble, they may push down those niggling thoughts that this doesn’t feel good or something isn’t right here because they want to learn more. There’s still something intriguing about it to them and they know their parents might deem it unsafe and stop the exploration altogether. And really that puts them in harm’s way without the support of someone who cares about them. And this applies when they’re young and maybe even more so when they’re teens. We always had a policy of, I will come get you no matter what, no questions asked if they ever needed out of something. And they also knew they could use me as an excuse. My mom needs me to come home. Because then it wasn’t about me stopping their exploration. It was about giving them tools, tools to get out of situations if they needed it, tools they could use to explore safely. And that’s just the safety lens. But this really applies to all areas. If we have trusted people in our corner, we’re going to be able to explore and learn more. And I think we can see that in our adult lives too. When we feel supported and loved and cared for, we’re so much more likely to learn and grow. Those basic needs have been met, we’re so much more likely to explore and learn and push the limits of what we can do. And I think that’s the piece that you’re getting at, Pam, right? This is the basis for learning. These relationships really, that is what makes learning happen and easier. ERIKA: Yeah, I think those strong relationships with people we trust helps us in every area of our lives. And it’s the same for our children. And I love the parts about how it helps with safety and with learning. It just makes so much sense. I had a book club with a bunch of unschooling parents, and we were reading Pam’s book together many years ago. And Pam joined us on a call one week. And we were all, I mean, everybody’s like, oh my god, Pam. It was very fun. But I remember having a bit of the conversation, someone felt like they had messed things up, they maybe had an argument with their child, or in some way felt like it was just this negative interaction, it didn’t feel good. And the question was more along the lines of, how can I do better? How can I stop doing that? And Pam’s idea was about how the repair is the important part. Because we’re trying to maintain this connection and relationship with our kids. But we’re humans, and we’re imperfect. And we’re going to say and do things that hurt our children at times, or we’ll say or do things that hurt other people in our lives at times. And so we can let that moment crush us and pull us away from them. And we can just dive into negative self-talk about what a terrible job we’re doing. Or we can see those moments as opportunities to own our parts, own our words and our actions, apologize for the impact, and make the repair with the person that we care about. I get goosebumps thinking about this, because it’s such a more powerful place to be. And it doesn’t require us to be perfect, which we cannot be. But since relationships are so important in all of these ways, when hard things happen in the relationships, knowing that we will be able to move through it, that builds trust between us and the other person. And it gives us more capacity to weather the next challenging thing, whether it’s something outside of our relationship, or the next misunderstanding between each other. And so I always come back to keeping my relationship strong. How can I feel more connected? How can I give my children the feeling that I understand them, and I’m here for them? And it doesn’t always mean I’m talking with them more, or even spending more time together. It’s really figuring out what do they want from me in this particular season? And since they’re unique individuals, what is it that’s helping us feel connected in this moment, in this season? And now that they’re teenagers, we do a lot of reflecting on, remember when that was hard, and we got through it? Things like that. I feel like it really helps us all build resilience and realize that being humans is sometimes hard, and we’re always learning, and I’m always learning. And I feel like me being vulnerable in that way just develops trust between me and my kids. And looking at that, what is going to help us in this moment just to increase our connection is such a valuable place to take a look. PAM: I love that. I love that you brought that up, because yeah, the whole thing, you'd say strong relationships are key. So I need to be perfect at that. I need to do my best at that. That’s the most important thing. I might have mentioned it at the time, the attachment parenting book I had read, because it’s the thing that knocked me, it’s like, oh really? That around 50% or so of our interactions with our children go awry in big ways or in little ways, and that it is the repair that brings us back, right? It’s not trying to avoid it, because imagine what someone feels if they think someone else is perfect. Oh, they’re perfect at that. They make all the right choices. That does nothing but put pressure to be perfect on them. They’ll be putting that on themselves as well. I want to be as good, etc. So, understanding that repair piece, that is so much where trust is built. That we’re coming back, that we’re going to be engaging again. We’re going to be moving through this, and as you said, using those previous examples of times you guys have moved through challenging things, and just bringing those up when new challenging things come up. We may not know how this is gonna resolve, but we know that we’ll find our way through it. We can trust that. So I love that so much, and thank you. Thanks so much to you both for having this conversation. I feel like we touched on a lot of interesting pieces, so I hope people find it helpful. Thanks so much to all our listeners for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this dive into the second stage of the de-schooling phase of our journey as we challenge some of our conventional beliefs about parenting, and we invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network to continue the conversation. It is a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents, a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional unschooling ideas, and just explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. And your first month is free, so you can get a sense of whether the community is a good fit for you. We are very excited to welcome you. To learn more and join us, just follow the link in the show notes or go to livingjoyfully.ca and choose Network in the menu. Wishing everyone a lovely day. Thanks so much. Bye!

A round-up of the main headlines in Sweden on July 16th 2026. You can hear more reports on our homepage www.radiosweden.se, or in the app Sveriges Radio. Presenter and producer: Michael Walsh

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Unlocking billions in cloud marketplace revenue. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ This powerful panel discussion featuring leaders from Google, Tackle, and dbt Labs dives deep into the explosive growth of cloud marketplaces and the radical shift toward AI-driven go-to-market strategies. With hyperscaler backlogs nearing half a trillion dollars, the conversation unpacks how top-tier organizations are transforming their compensation models, aligning executive buy-in, and navigating the complexities of co-selling to capture committed customer budgets. From the rise of AI agents acting as metered SaaS to the essential operational investments required to scale marketplace revenue from 10% to over 50%, this session provides an actionable roadmap for software companies ready to dominate the 2026 partner ecosystem. https://youtu.be/LSj49f5FEII Key Takeaways Hyperscaler backlog commitments represent a massive, nearly half-trillion-dollar addressable market that completely changes the budgeting conversation. Successful marketplace selling requires complete executive alignment, right down to the CFO, and strategic adjustments like spiffing sales teams for marketplace transactions. The AI category is experiencing staggering 18x year-over-year growth, forcing companies to pivot toward an “agent-first” go-to-market model. Shifting from traditional channels to cloud go-to-market demands a multi-year, intentional investment in operations, people, and technology. System integrators are evolving into software companies as they build orchestration agents to manage fragmented, end-to-end workflows. Leveraging cloud commitments bypasses standard 12-15 month budget cycles, allowing for significantly faster deal closures and larger initial lands. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags: Google Cloud Marketplace, hyperscaler backlog, cloud commitments, co-selling strategies, AI agents, metered SaaS, product-led growth, rev ops, B2B sales transformation, ecosystem shift, channel strategy, system integrators, Deal registration, private offer APIs, digital transformation, software procurement. Transcript: Insight to Revenue- The State of Cloud GTM [00:00:00] Dai Vu: These are all things everyone has to do to get to that first five to 10 deals, and then 10, 20, 30% of your business through Marketplace. [00:00:09] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:21] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host, and each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology. Partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:43] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes [00:00:46] John Janke: everything. Let’s start. [00:00:52] Vince Menzione: And we have an incredible session. The way that we wanted today to, to, to start the day up was like, let’s talk about what’s happening right now and let’s get three leaders in this space to come up and talk about the world and how it’s a rapidly evolving. So I want to invite to the stage dvu from Google is a great friend of Ultimate Partner. [00:01:14] Vince Menzione: Are you guys ready? Are you guys micd up already? Okay, good. Good. John Yanke, the CEO and Founder of Tackle, and Sean Todo, who is an incredible leader with DBT, but also an old friend of mine. We worked together on Microsoft Days. Good to see you gentlemen. Thanks Sean. Great to have you with us. [00:01:37] John Janke: They stuck me on the side ’cause they said I’d block the screen if I sat in the middle. [00:01:41] Shawn Toldo: You still block it a little bit. [00:01:42] John Janke: And that picture’s from like 1985. I, I, we do have to get that. I had way darker hair. It was, uh, 10 year, 10 years at a startup. Makes you turn white. [00:01:52] Shawn Toldo: Mine’s the exact same right now. So it’s all good. [00:01:55] Shawn Toldo: Mine’s AI generated. Yeah. [00:01:57] Vince Menzione: Well, you know, guys, I just took it all off at that point, you know, it’s like good. Yeah, but you lose enough of it. You pull it out over the years. Yeah. So, uh, some really exciting times. Uh, you, we gotta spend some time at you at our breakfast. That’s right. A couple weeks ago. [00:02:13] Dai Vu: A lot of folks here, too. [00:02:14] Vince Menzione: A lot of folks that are here were at that breakfast, and I thought we’d spend a few moments with you talking about all the exciting things that have been happening at, at Google. I mean the, yeah, the businesses just to, first of all, the numbers were house. Outstanding. Congratulations. [00:02:28] Dai Vu: That’s right. [00:02:28] Vince Menzione: Yep. [00:02:28] Vince Menzione: Really, some really great numbers. Commitments are off the charts. [00:02:32] Dai Vu: Yes. [00:02:32] Vince Menzione: Crazy off the charts. [00:02:33] Dai Vu: Yes. [00:02:34] Vince Menzione: Yes. Uh, and then there’s a lot happening in this little world called ai, which makes a ton of sense. Yep. I was critical about Google in the beginning because you had all the assets, but Microsoft leaned in first. [00:02:45] Vince Menzione: Uh, but now it’s like things have evolved, uh, quite a bit since those first days. Absolutely. In, in November of 2022. So, uh, take us through a little bit. Let’s, let’s go through [00:02:56] Dai Vu: it. Yeah. I could talk for quite a bit of time because obviously we came out next, yeah. At the end of April, and then we had our earnings announced, but shortly thereafter. [00:03:03] Dai Vu: But, but real quick on next, uh, for folks who attended, uh, you know, the way they framed, uh, the discussion was they showed this AI integrated stack, and that’s how they frame the keynote because we position ourselves as being the only vendor that provides this. Fully integrated stack from custom silicon all the way to the apps and agents. [00:03:23] Dai Vu: And a lot of the announcements were, were focused in those areas. Um, uh, I won’t go through the, the long list, but I think the big ones coming out of next were, uh, certainly the eighth generation TPU we announced, so we actually split this into two specialized chips for training and inference. Uh, so that’s, uh, that was a big piece. [00:03:41] Dai Vu: Uh, but the big one that we announced was this, uh, Gemini Enterprise. Uh, agent platform. So think of it as the comprehensive platform for companies to basically build scale, govern and optimize their agents. And of course, once they have that, they can bring that into, uh, what we call a Gen Gemini enterprise app, which is really the front door for AI for. [00:04:03] Dai Vu: All customers and all employees to manage a mix of agents, um, as part of their daily workflow. And, uh, and a big part of it is, you know, certainly they’ll have some custom agents, but we think a lot of the agents will come from the ecosystem. And obviously there was a big announcement around what we’re doing there. [00:04:21] Dai Vu: Um, and in fact, one of the things that’s interesting is this shows the evolution of, of marketplace in our, in our partnership, which is we’ve taken a lot of the marketplace experience. And brought it into Gemini exp uh, Gemini Enterprise app, right? So search, discovery, uh, the ability to invoke agents, uh, in context. [00:04:39] Dai Vu: I think that’s gonna be very powerful as we think about the evolution, uh, of, of go to market. And then the last thing maybe I’ll highlight is this, um, is. 750 million, uh, investment fund that we’re gonna drive with the broad partnership. So this cuts across all partner types, global system integrators, uh, uh, you know, AI, pure plays, uh, ISVs, uh, the big management consultants as well, uh, because we recognize that partners are gonna be critical to drive business transformation with our end customers. [00:05:08] Dai Vu: So we’re investing around things like. Technical enablement, access to our product teams, access to our FDE for deployment engineers, and then a lot of incentives to drive usage and deployment. So, um, so a lot of, a lot of activity and obviously the ecosystem’s gonna be very critical for us to drive that impact’s. [00:05:25] Dai Vu: Fine. And the last thing, I know we’ve going on and on fine, but the last thing I’ll just mention is just on the earnings announcement, uh, Vince touched on the backlog, so people have been tracking Yeah. Two quarters ago. We were 155 billion on the backlog, and then a quarter later we were 240 billion. And then in the last quarter, just recently, 462 billion. [00:05:46] Dai Vu: So obviously that’s a, a massive signal of customer intent, but more importantly, it’s a, it’s, it’s a addressable market for this ecosystem to go after as well. [00:05:54] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Almost a half a trillion dollars. Yes. In commitment. So a lot, a lot of reason why we should be on the marketplace. [00:06:01] Dai Vu: Absolutely. Absolutely. [00:06:02] Vince Menzione: Um, each of these gentlemen have some things to talk about as well, about their companies and the exciting things that have been happening. [00:06:08] Vince Menzione: I’m gonna start, John, I’m gonna start with you because Tackle has, has transformed quite a bit since the last time you were on stage with us. I thought maybe introduce the company. Take us through the transformation and then we’re gonna do the same thing with Sean with his organization. [00:06:21] John Janke: Yeah. Thanks. Uh, thanks Vince. [00:06:23] John Janke: Great to see everybody. Uh, John Yanke, GM of Tackle at App Direct. So the big news there is Tackle was acquired in Q4 by a company called App Direct, and I think the why behind this app, direct Powers, marketplaces, they run 400 marketplaces around the world for telcos, for ISVs, for system integrators, channel partners. [00:06:42] John Janke: And we were talk like, when you build a marketplace and diagnose this, stocking the shelves is actually really hard. Uh, and we were talking to them about how could we connect the dots between the hyperscaler marketplaces, the iscs we support, and these additional routes to market. Uh, and that became more strategic and we ended up joining forces in December. [00:07:00] John Janke: And since then, the other part that’s really hard when you build a marketplace is how do you generate demand? Uh, so four weeks ago we acquired a company called Partner Stack. And Partner Stack does affiliate content. They have an affiliate content platform that allows you to connect with 150,000 content providers to be able to start to tell your story to drive leads to. [00:07:23] John Janke: Marketplace. So we think there is a tremendous opportunity to continue. We’re in the earliest days. I think the, you know, Jay, I was with Jay at Channel Partners a few weeks ago and he is like, we under called it, he didn’t say this on stage yesterday, but he is like, uh, the 82% growth. He’s like, we totally under called it. [00:07:40] John Janke: Uh, and I think just listening to dies commit level increase mm-hmm. Reinforces the fact that we’ve under called it. But I also think we’re at this tipping point in the market where all of the new capabilities coming out, we have to all rethink our better together stories. So I think the challenge to all partner leaders, it’s like, how do we. [00:07:58] John Janke: Figure that out. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a fun time. As we transform the way we worked. We wrote the first helping people kind of list, launch and sell through the marketplaces. And now to be able to take that to the next level to hopefully unlock the next a hundred billion of marketplace throughput. [00:08:13] Vince Menzione: And are we at a hundred billion? [00:08:15] Vince Menzione: ’cause that was the number, right? [00:08:16] John Janke: I mean that’s, that’s, that’s the number that’s talked about. I mean, we’re seeing the data signals we see, I mean, we will process 20 billion plus this year. Uh, and that number’s growing faster than Jay’s stated number. So I think we’re excited to see where this year lands. [00:08:30] Vince Menzione: We’ve come a long way from three years ago and we all got on stage and talked about marketplaces together. Right. It’s been, it’s been amazing. And then Sean, let’s talk about DBT. You’ve had some excitement. I know some things maybe we can’t even talk about yet on stage. [00:08:43] Shawn Toldo: Uh, yeah, go ahead. [00:08:44] Vince Menzione: No, I was saying I, I could, I’ll pre-announce things, but No, I’m just, uh, tell, tell us about DBT for those who don’t know in the room, sure. [00:08:49] Vince Menzione: Mean Yeah, that might help. [00:08:51] Shawn Toldo: So, uh, Sean Todo, I lead the partner business at DBT. I’ve been here about 18 months. Um, DBT really started as an open source tool. That help data engineers be successful in SQL transformation with cloud data warehouses? Right. And so back even to the Redshift days now into what I would call more the BigQuery, snowflake, Databricks fabric led days, um, DBT is the tool of choice amongst the data engineering community in terms of how they wanna drive SQL transformation. [00:09:21] Shawn Toldo: And so more recently, we kind of jumped into this kind of paid world. Which is why we needed to bring in additional experience leadership around go to market product, sales, et cetera. And so when I walked in the door, one of the things I noticed really quickly was we were running on AWS, which was great. [00:09:40] Shawn Toldo: We were doing some AWS marketplace stuff. We were running on Azure in Europe only. And one of my first strategies was we have to be everywhere, right customer. We have to meet customers where they are. And so we, uh, made some major investments to be on Google Cloud platform to then be able to really take advantage of marketplace, to then really be able to take advantage of the co-sell opportunities that exist in the field from a day, day-to-day AI perspective with Google. [00:10:07] Shawn Toldo: And it has been a hell of a ride. We launched on, uh, Google Marketplace in July of last year. We went to Google next and we were Google Partner of the Year. Wow. For data and analytics in a very rapid way. We’re now in three, uh, data centers around the, the world. So we’re here in the us, we’re in Frankfurt, we’re in uh, uh, UK as well. [00:10:30] Shawn Toldo: And so it’s been a pleasure to work with D and the broader team. Because the enablement we’ve had and the support we’ve had from that group has really helped our growth be up and to the right. The data point I would give is that when I walked in the door, we were 10% of our business from an A RR perspective was transacting through marketplace. [00:10:48] Shawn Toldo: Last quarter we cracked 40%. Whoa. We will be at north of 50, uh, next quarter. [00:10:53] Dai Vu: Wow. [00:10:54] Shawn Toldo: The other piece that Vince was talking about is we’re getting ready to merge with a company called Five Tran. And so there will be a new company name at some point down the road. Uh, pay attention on June 1st for a public announcement around that merger. [00:11:06] Shawn Toldo: Uh, but we’re really looking forward to what we’re gonna be able to do with folks like DI and the Google team as well as others in the ecosystem. Um, ’cause I think in this data world that we’ve played for so long. This trusted foundational element of data and what it’s gonna mean to context in the AI world. [00:11:23] Shawn Toldo: We’re in a very interesting place to really continue our growth rate at a high level. [00:11:28] John Janke: Yeah, that maybe just a comment something there. Start there. I think we, we used to hear people say we wanted to be strategic with cloud, go to market and get to say 10 or 20% of revenue. I think this like 40, 50%. Yeah. Th that’s where people are setting the bar these days. [00:11:43] John Janke: Yeah. So the numbers are getting really crazy. Yeah. Uh, and people are showing up and being like, I have to go big. Mm-hmm. So a huge change over the last few years. [00:11:52] Vince Menzione: Yep. What’s the experience you’re seeing as well? I mean, it, it was a huge amount of buzz at next. [00:11:57] Dai Vu: Yeah. I mean, so interestingly, um, you know, typically when, when people get started on the, on the marketplace in Cosal journey, I always try to caution them and say, this is, uh, this is like a multi-year. [00:12:07] Dai Vu: Yeah. Uh, process. You have to be very intentional. You have to invest. It’s not gonna be a thing where you just list and, and, and, and, and, and sort of this channel opens up. So in some ways, Sean is describing an acceleration that is not common, right? Uh, so they’ve done, we’ve done some amazing things together and we hope to keep that acceleration going. [00:12:22] Vince Menzione: What does that require, by the way? Is it engineering resource? I mean, there’s, I talk about executive commitment and maniacal focus. Yeah. But it’s all those things, right? [00:12:29] Shawn Toldo: Well, all of it. But we went to a QBR in Austin, and I put up a slide and I said, we have to do this. And everybody in our ETE agreed. So when you have a chief financial officer that’s bought into the partner business. [00:12:43] Shawn Toldo: Yeah. And I guess qualifying coming into this role at this company, I qualified the C-level staff. Uh, like are they really serious about partner or not? And it’s one of the reasons I took the role. So I think executive commitment was one thing. I think the second thing is we were really well supported, um, by the Google team across the board, right? [00:13:02] Shawn Toldo: Yeah. So folks, Indy’s team that we would work with regularly on, these are the things you need to do to have an effective marketplace offering. Here’s what you need to do operationally with folks like John and team and others that are in the market, right? That helped us a ton to be able to scale. And then the other thing that we did is we changed comp. [00:13:20] Shawn Toldo: So from our VP of sales levels down, we have a 5% kicker for everything that goes through marketplace. [00:13:26] Vince Menzione: Hear [00:13:26] Shawn Toldo: that everyone. So as soon as we incented the sales team, I love that, right? We, we created the foundation on the partner side, but then from top down on the sales side, they were all in. And as a result of that, the question would become, okay, which marketplace stage two sales cycle are we gonna go use? [00:13:42] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:13:43] Shawn Toldo: Who’s the right partner to go partner with? And then my team is reaching out to make sure that co-sell connection happens. [00:13:48] Vince Menzione: That is such a best practice, Sean, to, because there is, as a seller out in the field and we talk about, you talk to John, talks about rev ops all the time. But getting rev ops eng getting the field engaged in the right way. [00:14:01] Vince Menzione: ’cause it feels like it’s more work for them. ’cause they have to think, they have to have more conversations with their customer about their cloud commitments and things like that. Mm-hmm. And then getting them incentive to do the right things. The right behavior. [00:14:12] John Janke: Yeah. It’s a strategy process. People, technology problem. [00:14:17] John Janke: Yeah. It’s not just some flip API automation, go list something if you don’t like that top down view. I think the other thing. Like there’s a, there’s a theme in startups where VCs fund second time founders. I think Sean and team have done this before and they took a lot of learnings over the years and reapplied them, which I think helps them go faster. [00:14:36] John Janke: It’s like that second time. Yeah. Second time cloud go to market Founder theme. [00:14:41] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Yeah. Um, so we could talk about the platform and all the changes there on the. The, the commitments and everything. Mm-hmm. Uh, what separates ISPs generating real incremental revenue on your, in your marketplace? What, what do you see? [00:14:58] Dai Vu: Yeah, so I mean, I, I think there are a couple things. Number one is, uh, the, the foundation has to be, uh, this better together story, uh, with Google Cloud. Um, so this idea that what, you know, what do you bring, what does the Google platform bring and how does that drive impact with customers? And I think this is the reason why Sean and DBT Labs has been very effective. [00:15:16] Dai Vu: ’cause our field recognized they, they can recognize that better together story and communicate it to their customers. So I think that’s the foundation. For everything. Right. And I think as you get started, uh, you know, we do tell partners that they probably need to lean in a little bit, uh, in terms of focus, uh, you know, pick a vertical, a customer segment, um, you know, a geography where they’re particularly strong and, you know, get that momentum going. [00:15:39] Dai Vu: And once you do that, the field knows about it and starts to pull you into deals. Um, so I think that’s the other big opportunity. And then the other thing I just mentioned. Which, uh, the panel already touched on, which is be very intentional around all the things you need to do to invest. Whether it’s like, uh, you know, the business functional alignment, uh, the policies around like, uh, pricing and, and comp, uh, making sure you have the operational capabilities. [00:16:02] Dai Vu: These are all things everyone has to do to get to that. First five to 10 deals, and then 10, 20, 30% of your business through marketplace. And not to, not to top you Sean, but our very top partners are driving 80 to 90% of their business on marketplace. And in fact, some of these partners are actually only marketplace first, uh, uh, because they started out that way. [00:16:21] Dai Vu: Obviously it’s the bigger challenge if you have an existing channel, you’re trying to shift that. But, uh, the aspiration to be more marketplace focus, uh, is up there. [00:16:28] Shawn Toldo: So I just set a new goal for the business plan for me. So that’s exciting. I love it. Looking forward to seeing you in six months on that. [00:16:35] Shawn Toldo: It’s good. [00:16:36] Vince Menzione: I love [00:16:37] Dai Vu: it. Work together on that. [00:16:38] Vince Menzione: Well, di I’m just gonna add, add this because I, I got to see operationally with some of the things you do. Mm-hmm. You, you have an overlay organization. [00:16:45] Dai Vu: Yes. Yes. [00:16:46] Vince Menzione: And so you put accelerants in place within your own organization Yeah. To drive the ISVs into the, into the lines of business. [00:16:54] Vince Menzione: Right. You have, you, you do some of that to accelerate. [00:16:57] Dai Vu: Yeah, I mean, I think, I think this is somewhat unique. I don’t, I don’t wanna speak to the other [00:17:00] Shawn Toldo: hyperscalers, [00:17:01] Dai Vu: but we do have, um, uh, you gotta know the field roles, right? [00:17:04] Shawn Toldo: Yeah. So [00:17:04] Dai Vu: obviously at Google Cloud in the regions, we have, uh, ISV sales specialists who are effectively quoted on marketplace revenue, right? [00:17:12] Dai Vu: So they’re a hundred percent focused on that. And, uh, in addition to that, uh, we also have these, uh, co-sell teams, partner teams where, you know, opportunistically if there’s an opportunity, uh, in a, in a, in a particular area. This team is responsible for connecting the regional sales leadership, uh, the regional, uh, sales teams with, with the partner on the opportunity. [00:17:32] Dai Vu: So there’s a lot of things we’re doing to sort of accelerate that. And of course, the foundation for all this is, you know, our, our, you know, registering deals. And as you definitely get started on that, it’s very important to be very mindful around when you register deals. Uh, be very clear around what the ask and the engagement is with the field reps. [00:17:51] Dai Vu: But once you have that going and get the right rhythm, it becomes sort of a natural way to sort of register all your deals and get that engagement. And then, um, and then maybe the last thing I would say is it isn’t always the sales specialists. It’s, you know, the FSR, our field sales rep as well as our customer engineers are also very motivated. [00:18:08] Dai Vu: To work, uh, with, uh, with our partners because they know that this, you know, whether it be solution completeness or it’s part of a bigger workload or helps unlock greenfield opportunity, they really are motivated to engage with the partners. [00:18:21] Vince Menzione: Nice. [00:18:22] Shawn Toldo: Yeah. I’ll just add, I’ll just add to that statement too. I think, um, it’s one thing to have a story as it relates to. [00:18:30] Shawn Toldo: Google Cloud and what you do with marketplace. It’s another thing to have a story in terms of how you impact data and analytics in our world. And there’s a set of specialist sellers inside of Google mm-hmm. That really care about us because we drive a lot faster consumption of big query. And our ability to tell that story across the world effectively has really created a pull now. [00:18:54] Shawn Toldo: And so I, I would say it’s almost, you know, back to, you know, being 12 years at Microsoft and watching kind of that. Phase and how that went. As we went to the cloud and we picked specialty areas, um, Google is doing that as well and they’re doing it extremely fast in a very, very productive way with partners. [00:19:12] Shawn Toldo: And so, you know, I’ll get comments from like Levi who runs west in north region for us, and he’s a, he was at Google next and he was like, I, I gotta, I, I just gotta go to bed. I’m tired. Like we wore him out over two days with their sales team and gave him a host of follow ups and actions related to specific sales areas as well as specific accounts. [00:19:34] Shawn Toldo: And I think that’s the other thing that, um, Google’s done a good job of, but we’ve pushed and we’ve had to work really hard to earn that seat at the table. To help make those people successful from a comp perspective inside of Google as well. [00:19:45] John Janke: Yeah, and this is a huge failure zone for partners with the clouds because they think enablement’s a one and done thing. [00:19:51] John Janke: Like I did a training for the field and I told them the better together story. That doesn’t work. Like you have to literally. Have consistency around this message every day. Oftentimes you need experts who can partner with your reps to give them the confidence. ’cause they may be able to ask the first line question, but someone asks a follow up and they fold up ’cause they know your product. [00:20:11] John Janke: That’s right. They don’s don’t understand all of the nuances of Google and the clouds and the questions that may come back. But if you do that well, it is a huge unlock. [00:20:20] Vince Menzione: Talk about the coaching you provided on the tackle side of that as well and kind of helping. Through this maturity model? [00:20:26] John Janke: Yeah. I mean we, we, over the years, I mean we started as a pure SaaS company and over the years our customers would consistently ask us for more help and we would struggle to figure out how to do that, and we had to invest in services and we actually acquired a company. [00:20:42] John Janke: Five years ago now, that was the foundation. Aaron Feiger, who’s in the room. The core consulting was the foundation of our services business. And that continues to evolve with us. And you know, we see customers at scale saying, I wanna operate my cloud, go-to market really consistently, and I want you to do all the backend operations so my teams can be outselling our products, selling the better together value with Google and others, and not have to figure out how to run the machinery. [00:21:09] John Janke: So we’ve invested a lot there. We have services around strategy, like how to help people think about their business strategy and translate it into a better together story and able to get executive buy-in. And then we have coaching, which is really a phone, a friend, because I think these things get complicated. [00:21:24] John Janke: And I had a customer who was doing the largest deal in their company history. It was the end of the quarter and it was Friday, and they’re like, this is going to be the most complex transaction we’ve ever done and we have no idea how to do it. Our team gets on the phone with them, they work through, what are you selling? [00:21:40] John Janke: How are you selling it? Is your listing set up the right way? Can we actually create all the offers? In a way you have confidence to execute. ’cause those are failure modes. You try to build a cloud, go to market business, and you mess up the largest deal in the company. On the last day of the quarter, uh, that’s something you can’t recover from. [00:21:55] John Janke: So we try to really wrap support around our customers to help them have the confidence to grow. [00:22:02] Vince Menzione: Di you’ve seen tremendous growth in marketplace. Mm-hmm. We don’t publish the numbers specifically. Yeah. We kind of try to figure it out on the back end, but [00:22:09] Dai Vu: Yep. [00:22:09] Vince Menzione: I know you’re accelerated. Your, your marketplace numbers are astounding. [00:22:13] Dai Vu: Yes. I can share some numbers, if that’s [00:22:15] Vince Menzione: okay. Please. Yeah, let’s go. [00:22:18] Dai Vu: So, um. I would say that for a few years now, we’ve been talking about growth. So we’ve been consistently, uh, you know, north of a hundred percent year over year growth. Uh, for the last few years we’ve been processing, uh, what I say, uh, billions of dollars, uh, annually and, uh, uh, millions of transactions. [00:22:36] Dai Vu: And again, that’s for a few years now. Now for 24 to 25, that full year we also doubled. Wow. Uh, which is, uh, which is amazing when you think about the scale in which we operate. But more importantly, if you look at specific category areas, right? So, you know, historically, marketplace has always cater to, uh, those solution pillars that are tied to cloud migrations, like, uh, like security and data and analytics. [00:22:59] Dai Vu: And those continue to be very strong areas for us. But the biggest growth area is, uh, is in the areas of business app. So obviously, you know, the, the ServiceNow workday, uh, Salesforce of the world, as well as the AI category. So one number that we threw out next was 18 x. Year over year growth for the AI category. [00:23:17] Dai Vu: Wow. So in one year now, a lot of it is models, right? So foundational models with our, with our ecosystem. But a lot of that is around agents. So this whole agent go to market model is gonna be, continue to grow and it’s gonna be a huge focus area for, for the coming years. [00:23:32] Vince Menzione: Fantastic. Yeah. Fantastic growth. [00:23:34] Shawn Toldo: Yeah, and, and I’ll add, Diane and I talked about this at Google next. This is a. Very complex thing for DBT, where today we sell seats. [00:23:42] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. Yeah. [00:23:43] Shawn Toldo: To data engineers. [00:23:44] Yeah. [00:23:44] Shawn Toldo: And now we have all these agentic things that are hitting our engine. And di and I are talking and we’re like, okay, so how does this work in an ag agentic marketplace? [00:23:54] Shawn Toldo: Yeah. Kind of a scenario. And what should we build? Where should we play it? ’cause we’re gonna spin the meter in a different way, so to speak. [00:24:01] Dai Vu: Yep. [00:24:01] Shawn Toldo: And so candidly, we got stuff to figure out related to that. Um, I think what’s been fascinating for DBT is our partner ecosystem changed overnight. So now it’s like I talked to x.ai on Monday. [00:24:15] Shawn Toldo: Mm-hmm. We got time with open AI on Thursday and we have a call with Anthropic and our, uh, CEO and co-founder and uh, chief Product Officer next week. [00:24:26] Vince Menzione: Mm. [00:24:27] Shawn Toldo: We don’t have anybody managing those partners. [00:24:29] Vince Menzione: Right. [00:24:30] Shawn Toldo: Today our focus is on managing the large, uh, hyperscalers plus Snowflake and, uh, Databricks. [00:24:36] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. [00:24:36] Shawn Toldo: And then the SI ecosystem and some tech partners. So we’re having to like, to your point on Agile yesterday. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Like we’re having to change our strategy, operating model and organizational model to support that. And candidly, we don’t have all the answers yet, so we have a lot of things to figure out fast, which is a little bit scary. [00:24:54] Shawn Toldo: And challenging, but it’s also a huge opportunity we have to kind of embrace and get into. Yeah. [00:24:59] Vince Menzione: And they’re figuring out as well. ’cause they’re, they’re new to partnering as well. Yeah. As organizations [00:25:03] John Janke: and these AI agents. I think to demystify for a lot of people, and what Sean said is totally right. [00:25:08] John Janke: They’re disrupting everyone’s business model. But in reality from a marketplace standpoint, they’re metered SaaS. This is a thing that’s existed for a long time. Yeah. They look like product-led growth products. There is a lot of patterns around how product-led growth products work in marketplace. Mm-hmm. [00:25:24] John Janke: But you have to bring your business strategy, your product and pricing strategy to those two categories. Metered SaaS and product-led growth. Put that all together to get cross-functional alignment. So we are seeing like. A lot of people get tripped up here and it really does go back to more of the company strategy, product strategy questions, and a lot of partner leaders are not in the room for those conversations. [00:25:48] John Janke: So I think at, at this point in time, as you see big pivots with the partners to go all in on agents, you have to go elevate. Those discussions to be like, what is our plan here? ’cause I, I mean, pricing and packaging will be the thing that trips almost everyone up. [00:26:02] Dai Vu: If I could, if I just build on what John John mentioned, um, so I do agree. [00:26:06] Dai Vu: P it looks a lot like POG, but, uh, but the difference I think is POG has. More historically been in like the data and developer space, now it’s like the general business user, right? So this idea that you want a business user to be able to search and discover, um, agents that could actually be part of their like everyday workflow is going to be very critical. [00:26:26] Dai Vu: And uh, you know, I do think that when we think about the ecosystem building agents. Uh, you know, a lot of the ISV partners aren’t necessarily gonna own end-to-end workflows, right? They’ll, they’ll have a very specific, uh, domain and scope area, but you have to enable yourself to be orchestrated and managed by, you know, orchestration agents or, or, or meta agents that are gonna span end, end workflows. [00:26:49] Dai Vu: And sometimes that includes system integrators and, and others who can stitch that, that automation. So I think, I think that’s, that’s one piece of it. But the other area that I think is gonna be different is, um. There’s going to be a lot of agents. I mean, literally you’re gonna have a very fragmented set of, uh, uh, of players, right? [00:27:07] Dai Vu: It’s not just gonna be the incumbents, it’s gonna be a lot of disruptors and, and, and, and startups. And so the, uh, for the incumbents in the room, it is a mandate that you need to, to innovate because if you do not identify and go to like an agent first, go to market model. Uh, you’re gonna be, you know, disintermediated. [00:27:25] Dai Vu: Somebody’s gonna go build an agent that’s going to leverage you as a dumb database. Um, and they’re gonna own the workflow. So you have to, you have to push the, the, the, the limits here. And I think it’s creates a big opportunity for everyone in this room. [00:27:39] John Janke: I’m going off script. I’m curious. Let’s do it. I’m curious on your take on the system integrators. [00:27:44] John Janke: ’cause I think this, this puts like they’re all, a lot of them are creating agents for people and I think that’s turning them almost more into software companies than they’ve ever been. [00:27:53] Dai Vu: They are, and I think they’re, you know, obviously they’re being, uh, impacted from like, you know, typical like, you know, SOW you know, time and materials type type business models. [00:28:02] Dai Vu: But I do think they play a big role because a lot of the system integrators are bringing, um, you know, vertical and business process expertise. And, um, like I said, I said before, a lot of the ISVs are not gonna necessarily have big enough scope in their area to own end-to-end workflows. And that’s really the promise of agents, right? [00:28:20] Dai Vu: You really need. This cognitive, you know, reasoning, planning, executing across end to end workflows. And I think, you know, the system integrators are gonna bring that capability either, either through, you know, these custom, uh, orchestration or meta agents or if they’re able to productize that and bring that to a model, they can also sort of go through the marketplace model as well. [00:28:41] Dai Vu: So who knows is how it’s gonna evolve. But you know, we’ve always been talking about. Marketplace being a broader opportunity for all partner business models. And I think that will extend to not only, uh, you know, traditional sort of, uh, sell and services partners, but also some of these system integrators as well. [00:28:58] Shawn Toldo: If I could comment on that, please. Yeah. I, I was in London two weeks ago and we did an SI partner day. Mm-hmm. We had 25 sis in a room, probably about 50 people. We had no, um, hyperscalers or cloud data warehouse providers. And when we started talking about open data infrastructure. The role that they can play. [00:29:17] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. [00:29:18] Shawn Toldo: Cross platform in a cost efficient manner for customers and the advisory orientation of that. They all leaned in and we, we stopped talking and they started talking. [00:29:28] Vince Menzione: Right. [00:29:28] Shawn Toldo: So they’re all facing this kind of same problem, which is actually causing a little bit of a shift, I think, in how they think about, I’m a Databricks partner. [00:29:38] Shawn Toldo: Uh, you sure you wanna do that? [00:29:39] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:29:40] Shawn Toldo: So this, this whole thing that’s kind of evolved in the last six to 12 months, when you kind of pick one horse to ride, I, I would tell you be cautious about what that means. You may pick a horse to lead with mm-hmm. But you’re gonna have to flank yourself a bit in terms of other providers that can help you be successful with that, that that partner you’re gonna roll with. [00:30:00] Vince Menzione: So you’re suggesting data vendor agnostic. [00:30:04] Shawn Toldo: I’m suggesting you really have to think about your strategy. Yeah. Because I think the AI, AI disruption is gonna make you think about that strategy. [00:30:13] John Janke: Yeah, I mean there’s, someone mentioned anthropics First Partner Summit. I was not there, but I’ve heard from a bunch of people were there. [00:30:20] John Janke: You know, they had a hundred partners in the room. 95 of them were system integrators. Five were technology companies, the three Clouds, Databricks and Snowflake. Like if you just think about the, the one of the major disruptors in ai, ISVs, were not in the mix. So I, I think, are they trying to disrupt all of us? [00:30:40] John Janke: Uh, do they need us? And they haven’t figured out how to work with us. I, I think. It’s, it’s, [00:30:44] Vince Menzione: and I’ve heard they only have five people in their partner organization, so I just, it’s, [00:30:49] Shawn Toldo: it’s 11 now, but it’s 11, [00:30:51] Vince Menzione: so it was five [00:30:51] Shawn Toldo: last growing fast in the, in the new company I have 50. So like, to put it in perspective, they have to make some pretty big priority. [00:30:59] John Janke: Yeah. And everyone’s been there a hot second, [00:31:00] Vince Menzione: like, right, exactly. Yeah, they, well, we will talk about the learnings we’ve had over the years, getting to where they need to get to. It’s exciting times. We got a lot to talk about here. Um, I, you know, we have about 15 minutes. I I, I want to kind of gauge, ’cause we could talk, we, we have a few things we could talk about, I could ask about, but I want to see if there’s an, like, an interest in opening up to the room for questions. [00:31:25] Vince Menzione: ’cause I feel like we’ve got a very interesting group here. [00:31:28] Shawn Toldo: You got a hand here? [00:31:29] Vince Menzione: Uh, are there hands that wanna Yeah, there’s some people that wanna ask some questions. So Yeah. We have a mic? Yeah, [00:31:37] Dai Vu: we have [00:31:37] Shawn Toldo: a mic. We, [00:31:37] Vince Menzione: we [00:31:38] Shawn Toldo: got one here. [00:31:38] Vince Menzione: We got one here. One here. Thank you. Sorry we went off script, but [00:31:44] Shawn Toldo: that’s fine. [00:31:45] Vince Menzione: It’s fine. [00:31:45] Dai Vu: Off [00:31:45] Vince Menzione: script. Better is good. [00:31:46] Shawn Toldo: I’m sure you planted the questions outta anyway. It’s okay. We [00:31:48] Vince Menzione: did, we did. [00:31:55] Audience Guest: Okay. All Eva, Sean Lightner, quick question to your, uh, increase on the marketplace, and you said you spiff the salespeople by fifth percent. 5%. Mm-hmm. So, and that obviously drives a very large adoption of, uh, marketplace transactions. How are you accounting for the margin you’re losing on, uh, you know, going through the marketplace? [00:32:14] Audience Guest: And also have you done analysis? I’m sure you have, how much is, uh, shape shifting or shifting from existing versus incremental? [00:32:22] Shawn Toldo: Yeah, it’s a great question. Um, um, lemme make three points. Number one, the backlog statement makes the margin statement not matter. So do you wanna play in that space where a customer’s already bought or not? [00:32:36] Shawn Toldo: Yeah. Or do you wanna force a budget conversation that you have to drive on your own in a direct model? That to me, I think it was 484 4 62 [00:32:43] Dai Vu: 4 6 [00:32:44] Shawn Toldo: 2. [00:32:44] Vince Menzione: That’s new Tam available to you? [00:32:46] Shawn Toldo: Yeah. That, that’s just with one. Right. And we are, we are, uh, running on four marketplaces. So that just increases our tam and makes our, our sellers lives easier. [00:32:55] Shawn Toldo: So on that piece, yes, there’s an expense, but we believe it’s right for growth. So there’s a balance there. Um, I think the, and then the second part of your question again. Sorry, [00:33:05] Vince Menzione: shapeshift. [00:33:05] Shawn Toldo: Oh, shift. We, we actually don’t think we would’ve won the business. So if I go back to our Q4 and I can probably point to three or four deals that went, um, Google Marketplace, we would not have won those deals because we couldn’t have created the budget cycle and that quarter. [00:33:23] Shawn Toldo: To make it happen. Generally a budget cycle is gonna take anywhere from 12 to 15 months. Bingo. Because of the spend that was available to us, we were able to close it in that quarter, and we had the largest Q4 in company history. [00:33:35] Vince Menzione: That is such an important point. I’m sorry. [00:33:37] Dai Vu: Okay. [00:33:38] Vince Menzione: But I, I just wanna, that is such an important point of the budget cycle. [00:33:42] Dai Vu: Yeah. [00:33:43] Vince Menzione: Being a year to a year and a half versus being able to tap into a commitment that’s already been made. Yeah, so I just emphasize that [00:33:51] Dai Vu: I was, I was just gonna add real quick, even, even when we see sort of a, uh, a channel shift renewal, which is, you know, it’s on partner paper and it moves to marketplace as part of the renewals, we do consistently see that the, uh, renewal rates on marketplace and the incremental a CB on the expansion and new opportunities tend to be better when it’s on the platform marketplace than than offline. [00:34:12] Dai Vu: And that’s why partners choose to continue to drive renewals on marketplace at a reduced to rev share. But uh, because they see that that growth, [00:34:20] John Janke: we, we, sorry. [00:34:22] Shawn Toldo: We see that as well. Yeah. And I would also make the statement on our land business, when we go through marketplace, we are two x higher across marketplaces. [00:34:30] Shawn Toldo: We’re three x higher with them. [00:34:32] John Janke: Yeah, I think separate new from renewals and then instrument deeply. [00:34:37] Shawn Toldo: Yeah, [00:34:38] John Janke: go proactively talk to your CFO and your head of rev ops to understand their mindset. Because I was with a billion dollar seller a couple weeks ago, their CFO still creates friction in the process, even though they’re selling a billion dollars through these channels. [00:34:52] John Janke: But when they broke it down, their deals are three times bigger. They do them faster. They use more components of the product, which I thought was a really cool one. So customers who buy this platform, many component platforms through a marketplace, end up using six components of the product. Versus a normal land customer who uses two increases gross in net retention. [00:35:12] John Janke: So you have to get to the point where you have the data and you can tell that story real really clearly to your finance team to get support ’cause that they will trip you up if you don’t get them on board. [00:35:23] Vince Menzione: And you’re saying there’s friction in that company. I’m just kind of curious ’cause a billion dollar company. [00:35:27] John Janke: There’s a billion dollar marketplace seller [00:35:29] Vince Menzione: market marketplace company. That’s what I meant. Yeah. But, but the fact that this, their CFO friction, like, is it, is it because they’re not doing a good enough job or? [00:35:37] John Janke: Uh, in, of educating, I, the root of the question is from this person is, would they win without it? [00:35:44] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:35:45] Shawn Toldo: Oh, and is it worth the three points? [00:35:46] John Janke: Right. It’s, it is And, and I think some pe like to me, it’s the cheapest channel in the world. Yeah. Like with committed budget and people to support you winning. Like the, that formula, the math is so simple. [00:35:57] Shawn Toldo: Yeah. For, for a company of our size to go to like the classic resell ecosystem, I gotta walk in with 30 points. [00:36:02] John Janke: Yeah. [00:36:03] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:36:03] Shawn Toldo: It, it’s an illogical conversation. Outside of public sector and growth, you know, geos around the world. And so I, I’ve been lucky to have a CFO that I haven’t had that challenge with, at least at DBTI should say. [00:36:19] Vince Menzione: Really great insights. I think we have, we have another hand up here. [00:36:28] Audience Guest: Yeah. Thanks Susan. The question is for Dai. Uh, my name is Latif Hamani. I’m the founder of Partner System ai. Um, so what we’ve done is we’ve built a, a co-sell AI agent mm-hmm. That your partners can use to Yeah. Reduce all the friction in the co-sell with you. Uh, the questions that I have is, I guess I should back up, so XAWS Madison with a very large alliances, and then I worked, went on the other side. [00:36:55] Audience Guest: For software companies, and even though I had an operational team, I was spending two to three hours on on the keyboard, right? Mm-hmm. Deal registration, emails that can’t be automated, et cetera. So the question that I have for you is, I’d love for you to validate that. You know, unless you are one of the big companies, one of the big enterprises, if you go to the lower end of the enterprise or the mid market, uh, would you validate that there is a challenge? [00:37:20] Audience Guest: There’s a lot of friction for a smaller company. Mm-hmm. Uh, ’cause these marketplaces are complex. Yeah. The cosell is complex. Uh, that there’s an opportunity to really break down that friction with some automation and ai. [00:37:33] Dai Vu: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, we have already been, uh, part of the journey to remove some of the, uh, the friction as part of that selling and purchasing journey. [00:37:43] Dai Vu: Uh. We’re not quite there yet. But, uh, we’ve done things like we have, uh, you know, private offer APIs. We, uh, we have co-sell, uh, registration automation. Um, you know, we have tools like, uh, propensity to buy, tooling to help, uh, partners do, uh, more targeted efforts. Um, but the a i piece is still coming. Um, so I think, uh, the idea here is that we have launched a number of agents as part of our, um. [00:38:08] Dai Vu: Uh, part of our, uh, Google Cloud Partner network, partner hub. Uh, so these are, uh, agents that are gonna do a bunch of things to help partners as part of their workflow, but we’re gonna extend this to the marketplace and ISV area as well. Uh, so I think there’s a lot of opportunity. So, uh, I know there’s probably a lot of feedback in friction, uh, in, in certain parts. [00:38:29] Dai Vu: So we can, we can go tackle together. [00:38:32] Vince Menzione: Hey. There you go. There was a little [00:38:34] Dai Vu: plug [00:38:34] Shawn Toldo: there for tackle. Exactly. [00:38:37] Dai Vu: Uh, and I wanted, and just to be clear, I want to take a look at it from the end to end, uh, uh, flow, right? It shouldn’t just be just marketplace. It should be all the way from like, you know, top of the funnel, demand generation, all the way to like post transaction follow up. [00:38:51] Dai Vu: So we really need to take a look at, at the, the end, end flows and figure out a way we can remove some of that friction [00:38:56] Vince Menzione: three sense. [00:38:57] Dai Vu: Yeah. [00:38:59] Vince Menzione: Any more questions [00:39:00] Audience Guest: back here? Hey. Hey guys. This, this is a really good discussion. Uh, di this question’s primarily, uh, from, I’m interested in the hyperscaler response. [00:39:09] Audience Guest: Yep. Uh, but all of you, uh, can you talk about the patterns or say more about the patterns between. Um, the consumption of just platform capabilities versus industry workflows. Mm-hmm. And how industry where I, I mean, I, I, my sense is that industry workflows are becoming more [00:39:27] Dai Vu: Yeah. [00:39:28] Audience Guest: Uh, the easier thing for enterprises and SMBs to buy. [00:39:33] Audience Guest: Yeah. Especially SMBs, I think. Um, but say more about those patterns that you’re seeing develop and kind of what is. Uh, who are, where, where are those kind of, where is the demand being driven? Is it, is it, yeah. The search and discover in the marketplace, or is it being led by field sales of mm-hmm. Either GCP or partners? [00:39:55] Dai Vu: Yeah, so let me, I’ll mention a couple, a couple areas where, where it’s growing. So I think number one I mentioned before about some of these large horizontal business apps that we’re partnering with, right? Um, and, uh, and of course the fact that we’re, we’re, we’re transacting them through marketplace is, is a huge. [00:40:14] Dai Vu: Evolution from a few years ago. So who would’ve thought you would be buying like, you know, a hundred million dollars a CB deals, uh, through, through marketplace with like a Salesforce or a ServiceNow workday. But it’s happening now. And to be clear, all these. Horizontal business app. They’re not doing this in a very, you know, opportunistic, transactional way. [00:40:32] Dai Vu: They basically see marketplace and cloud go to market as a strategic growth lever for them. So that’s one big area. So from just a pure large deal perspective. Okay. Then you mentioned before around sort of corporate and SMB. Well, we find that a lot of the big opportunities are mostly around as they scale their business, uh, they’re not necessarily looking for things in the traditional sort of infrastructure space, but they’re looking for, you know, full SaaS applications to help scale their business, right? [00:40:58] Dai Vu: So it would be CRM, finance, hr, these types of solutions to become very attractive for some of this, uh, downstream market. And then lastly, as I mentioned before, which is, uh, when we think about this gentrification and owning, um. Uh, driving, uh, this business process and vertical, the ISVs become very important along with the services partners who bring that domain expertise to drive the end to end workflow. [00:41:25] Dai Vu: So I think that’s gonna be increasingly important. So those are three areas I think we need to watch out for. We. Okay. [00:41:30] John Janke: Maybe one thing, like as the cloud commit grows inside of companies, it’s shifted from being an engineering department, IT department budget line item to a corporate finance budget line item. [00:41:40] John Janke: Typically one of the top five to 10 expenses in a company. So that has shifted. Who is thinking about optimizing? The cloud commit with marketplace contracts. And that opens, that’s really opened up the avenue in addition to like these biz apps, vertical apps players. Yeah. Like having success. So I, I do think even inside your own company, evaluating where your cloud commits are, who owns them and are they thinking about the intersection of marketplace? [00:42:06] John Janke: ’cause I, I think it’s smaller companies, they’re still figuring it out. I run into engineering leaders who still own the commits, uh, but in medium to large companies. Very different. [00:42:16] Vince Menzione: Really good point. Because it, you know this, the optics change dramatically, right? This large commitment is now at the board level, [00:42:23] John Janke: right? [00:42:23] John Janke: And then you do have to teach your sellers as a vertical or business application player how to ask that question. ’cause the first resistance everybody says is, oh my, my person, my stakeholder, we. Manufacturing vertical application provider talking at an event last week, and they’re like, the shop floor manufacturing owner doesn’t know anything about the cloud commit. [00:42:43] John Janke: But if they ask the question, be like, Hey, do you guys have a strategic relationship with Google? Would it be easier to buy our product on the bill? Eight out of 10 times they get a yes. So [00:42:52] Vince Menzione: which is why the 5% comes in And that really accelerates the conversation happening. Yeah. We’ve got three more minutes. [00:43:01] Vince Menzione: Um, if we don’t have any other questions, I ha I have one for each of you really about the maturity model and partners are in the room that are not committed yet, right? We’ve talked about some very significant DBTs doing some incredible things, right? So we, there’s maybe a sense that like we, you, you are working with the be the biggest and the best out there, but what about everyone else that’s in the room that maybe isn’t committed yet? [00:43:23] Vince Menzione: And maybe they’re in motion, but they need some help and advice on what to go do next. What? What would you say die first? [00:43:30] Dai Vu: So they’re early stage, [00:43:31] Vince Menzione: early, early stage or not, they’re not on board yet. They’re not, yeah. They’re not with you yet. [00:43:35] Dai Vu: Yeah. So I’ll, I’ll go back to my earlier comment, which is that as you go into the journey, just be very intentional about what you need to do from an operational, investment people, uh, technology perspective. [00:43:47] Dai Vu: Uh, because it could be, it could be a multi-year journey. Um, uh, so I’d say go into it with the right expectations as opposed to thinking it’s going to be some accelerated six month thing that Sean has been driving here. It’s, he’s the outlier. [00:43:59] Shawn Toldo: But, but the reason for the outlier, [00:44:00] Dai Vu: yeah. [00:44:01] Shawn Toldo: And just to add to the intentional point Yeah. [00:44:02] Shawn Toldo: Is, you know, hire the right people. Right. So, somebody told me a long time ago, uh, hire slow, fire fast. That’s a really, really, really good principle that I take. Mm-hmm. I don’t like the fire part, obviously, but just for context, I, I am very lucky to have a great set of leaders that we were able to add people in. [00:44:24] Shawn Toldo: When I walked in the door, we had a person that was leading the Snowflake and AWS partnership. I had nobody on GCPI had nobody on Microsoft. I had nobody on Databricks. And then we made prioritization decisions on where we’re gonna go next. And so we hired people that had the experience and could drive the outcome in the right way. [00:44:43] Shawn Toldo: But we were very thoughtful about when we made those decisions on a quarterly basis, not a daily basis. So who you’re gonna bet on and then who you’re gonna put in the seat to make that bet come to life, I think is a really important thing as well. [00:44:58] John Janke: Yeah. [00:44:58] Vince Menzione: John, you worked with the be biggest and the best out there, so Yeah, sorry. [00:45:01] John Janke: Well, I think there’s the, like there’s the bottoms up and the tops down. Like seven years ago, this was all bottoms up. It was a partner leader who thought launching a marketplace would be good and they would go figure out how to do some deals and then sell their way up. Today there’s a lot more top down where people get it. [00:45:17] John Janke: But you can evaluate top down pretty fast. ’cause if you go talk to your CEO, you talk to your head of product, you talk to your CFO, and they have an allergic reaction to these concepts. You know, you have to go bottoms up. But there also are success story examples in every single ISV category that exists. [00:45:33] John Janke: Like this is not just security and data and DevOp like the, I think the ServiceNow. Salesforce workday. Examples are really great, like the marketing tech examples, more and more business of vertical apps every day. So I do think you can look at those people who’ve been successful. Maybe they’re your competitors, maybe they’re people you aspire to be and reference them as you’re trying to figure out how to do top down. [00:45:55] John Janke: But like you need both. You can’t win long term unless you get top down and bottom up aligned. [00:46:01] Shawn Toldo: And, and when I, when I would go ask for resourcing, I would always get the question, do, could you go faster with more? And I’d say, no. Gimme the one or two humans here, let me go prove it out and I’ll come back. [00:46:13] Shawn Toldo: So there’s a little bit of a strategy in doing that, that you’re gonna get more over time when you’re, you know, very measured in how you go ask for investment and resource. And so I would just add that point also. [00:46:27] Vince Menzione: Was, was hiring a significant component of your executive commitment, Sean? I mean, [00:46:33] Shawn Toldo: yes. So when I walked in the door at DBT, we had eight people in the partner organization. [00:46:38] Shawn Toldo: Today we have 25, and that was 18 months ago. But that did not happen. I didn’t go in and ask for, you know, that 16 people. Right. I asked over time in a very measured way with, you know, the programs and strategy team, like, what can we also support? You don’t want to bring somebody in to go do something and you don’t have the programs and operations side to support it ’cause they’ll fail. [00:47:01] Shawn Toldo: So we’ve been very thoughtful about how we’ve done that as well. [00:47:04] Vince Menzione: Die from you. I know you had something. [00:47:06] Dai Vu: No, no, no. I, I was good. [00:47:08] Vince Menzione: What is the one thing that people in this room need to go better and differently? Is there one, is there one specific thing other than what we’ve already discussed, did we miss anything? [00:47:16] Dai Vu: No, I would just, the whole identification. So obviously, uh, identifying this is not just like slapping a chat bot, but more around thinking all the things we talked about, product commercials, but also go to market where it’s agent first, where you can surface your agent in a workflow like Gemini Enterprise app. [00:47:34] Dai Vu: That’s gonna drive high alignment with how we work and go to market with Google. [00:47:38] Vince Menzione: Awesome. [00:47:38] Dai Vu: Yeah. [00:47:40] Vince Menzione: Wow. Good stuff. Yeah. Very good session. [00:47:44] Dai Vu: Thank [00:47:44] Vince Menzione: you guys. What do you think? Everyone? Thank you very much. [00:47:47] Shawn Toldo: Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. [00:47:50] Vince Menzione: If today’s conversation resonated, share it with a partner leader in your network. [00:47:55] Vince Menzione: Subscribe where you listen, and head over to the ultimate partner.com. For show notes related content and the resources for this episode. And if you haven’t already, now’s the time to register for the Ultimate Partner Live Event in Reston, Virginia, [00:48:11] John Janke: October 26th through October 28th. [00:48:14] Vince Menzione: Until next time, keep showing up in the rooms that matter because being in the room changes everything [00:48:22] I.

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As AI investment keeps growing, our strategists Carolyn Campbell and Vishwas Patkar discuss the many ways tech infrastructure gets financed and the opportunities for investors.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Carolyn Campbell: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Carolyn Campbell, Morgan Stanley's Asset-Backed Securities Strategist. Vishwas Patkar: And I'm Vishwas Patkar, Morgan Stanley's Head of U.S. Corporate Credit Strategy. Carolyn Campbell: Today, how fixed income markets are helping fund the AI build-out. It's Thursday, June 18th, at 10am in New York. Let's get right into it, Vishwas. We've both come on this podcast before to talk about how credit markets are financing the AI build-out. And over the last ten months, I think it's fair to say that things are faster, broader, deeper than we perhaps expected initially. This investment now spans investment-grade corporate bonds, high yield loans, and a range of securitized products. From your seat in corporate credit, why does AI infrastructure matter so much, to investors right now? Vishwas Patkar: This is a big talking point in our client discussions. it's also telling that less than a year ago, we wrote about this topic for the first time, identifying a $1.5 trillion financing gap that credit markets could help bridge. At that time, data center debt was not something that investors were really focused on. Yet less than 12 months forward, this, I think, is the number one theme dominating both your and my market. And why it's important, I would say, is across, three key vectors. First, just the scale. So, if you look at overall AI-related debt issuance so far this year, we're close to $250 billion. For the balance of the year, we expect that number to double, so about $500 billion of total AI debt financing for 2026. Increasingly the second vector, I think, is around the complexity of deals. So initially, while AI financing was dominated by vanilla investment-grade corporate bond deals, we are now seeing that broaden out into project finance style deals in the high-yield market. We have seen an uptick in chip financing across the different credit silos. And that's important for investors, as identifying value across these different options does require deep credit expertise. And third, as this investment cycle rolls along, it's also important to be cognizant of risks that are building. Not just from a very broad top-down sense around the demand for compute. But also, what are some of the nuances in these different structures – whether it is in data center construction or is in chip financing that investors will need to monitor. So, it's across these three themes that we think data center debt financing is gaining importance. Carolyn Campbell: Now, the underlying demand for AI infrastructure is very strong. That doesn't necessarily mean that every bond tied to this theme is automatically going to be attractive. And as you mentioned, [$]500 billion of supply for the year; a large amount of complexity between those structures.How should credit investors think about the various risks within these different structures? Vishwas Patkar: So, in investment grade, the story is a bit simpler. So, we have had unsecured hyperscaler bond issuance. We have had issuance from semiconductor names. And then we've had some, what we call, private style data center deals. But the vast majority still comes from hyperscaler investment grade rated bonds. For this market, our focus is less on fundamentals because fundamentals are very strong. And then hyperscaler are some of the more most creditworthy companies that we've seen in the history of the market. Our emphasis more is on just the quantum of supply. So, year to date, we have had north of [$]100 billion of hyperscaler debt in the dollar market. We've had north of [$]50 billion being issued in other currencies. If you look at the overall investment grade market, supply is up almost 25 percent versus last year. That's consistent with our call for a year of record issuance this year. And increasingly, if you look forward and then map these issuance numbers to our CapEx estimates, where we could very much be on track for another record to be hit next year. So, the issue of the investment grade market is not around the fundamentals of the companies or these deals. It's more about the quantum of supply, which we think eventually will test the demand capacity of this market. And our base case for the investment grade space is similar to 1997-1998, where credit was starting to finance the business cycle, spreads widened modestly, and IG could underperform other risk assets. But over a longer time horizon, spreads still look historically very low. Carolyn Campbell: Now, what about further down the credit spectrum into the non-investment grade portion? What about that part of the issuance spectrum for AI? Vishwas Patkar: Yeah. So, what we're seeing in the sub-investment grade space, especially in high yield, is very different. There, the growth in data center financing has happened around project finance deals for data center construction. In many cases, these have come from crypto miner companies that effectively provide what we call speed to power solutions. We've also had some unsecured issuance from neo clouds, although that's relatively small. But this sector has expanded from effectively zero billion around the fall of last year to about [$]40 billion this year. We expect to see another [$]20 billion of issuance by the end of 2026. And the way they fit into this whole ecosystem is – these project finance deals we think are interesting diversifiers for regular credit investors. They do come with construction risks, especially initially for the first two to three years till the data center is up and running. But on the flip side, you do get a lot of structural enhancements and creditor protections, which is something you don't see in the vast majority of the high yield market. So, I think a key shift in the framework that investors have to do for these deals is focus on asset-level risk, which is again, I think a big divergence from how the vast majority of the credit market trades, which is largely unsecured corporate-level risk that investors have been used to. Carolyn Campbell: All right. You just brought up construction risks. Do you think that's the biggest risk facing the high-yield investors today? Vishwas Patkar: Yes. I think for the high-yield deals in particular, construction risk is the dominant vector that investors are focused on. Because it's important to remember a lot of the debt issuers are first-time borrowers. And they have a limited track record of construction in the past. So, you could see potential delays and things like cost overruns that can affect sentiment on the sector. Or at least on specific bond deals. And this will be especially important to monitor going into the second half of the year, as we have some of the first delivery dates coming up for the deals in the sector that were announced last year. That being said, you know, even though some of the tenants have termination rights, if delays go beyond 180 days, our view is that given the structural power constraints, these termination rights are unlikely to be exercised. So, while construction milestones can affect sentiment and short-term valuations, we would look at any blips as buying opportunities in the space. Alright. So Carolyn, let me throw this back to you. So, construction risk clearly very important for the corporate credit market, especially for high yield investors. Is that something ABS investors or commercial mortgage-backed investors care about? And in what other ways are these asset classes different from corporate credit? Carolyn Campbell: Okay. So first and foremost, the biggest difference is that in securitized products, the assets are stabilized, they're cash flowing, they're online. We don't have that first vector of construction risk in our space. The second biggest difference is while in high yield and IG we've mostly seen – or we've entirely seen single campus, single tenant data centers; in securitization issuance, it's mostly multi-tenant, multi-asset, multi-regional, deals that have come to market. And so, it's a very different risk profile. And as a consequence, investors are focused not just on who is behind this one single lease and what are the termination rates, but what does the landscape look like in general for compute? How does that affect vacancy and churn rates? And then lastly, the issuers themselves are different. You talked about the crypto companies. You get a little bit more of the data center, data center construction. Whereas in securitized products, these are companies that have been around for 5, 10, 20 years. They're accustomed to managing a fleet of assets, dozens if not hundreds of tenants. They've got a little bit more of a track record for the most part, than the types of issuers we're seeing in the credit market. Vishwas Patkar: Your market post-construction, more leverage to the thematic of demand for compute – and how the AI investment cycle is playing out. Versus the corporate credit market, which is largely exposed to construction risks as the data centers get built out. So that's a very important difference.That being said, one theme that ties both our markets are just healthy fundamentals, but at the same time heavy supply. So, I talked about how we see that affecting our view on investment grade. How is that same tension showing up in securitized products? Carolyn Campbell: So exactly as you said, the fundamental story is very strong. We don't see deterioration in performance of the assets either that has happened yet or that we expect to come in the near term. So, it really is a technically driven story. Supply in this space, we're forecasting at around [$]30 billion for year, so smaller in magnitude, but relatively large for the market. That has very elevated supply expectations, and so as a consequence, we've seen spreads back up across the space. We do think that some of the cross-asset comparisons will help keep spreads contained from here. And so, we do see value in securitized credit across the stack for the rest of the year. Vishwas Patkar: All right. So, you brought up the cross-asset comparison. And so, we've discussed the fundamental differences in our market, how much issuance we expect. But, you know, just to end on a commercial note – if we are advising investors on where is the best relative value and what's the framework for comparing opportunities, how do you think about that? Where do we see value across the ecosystem? Carolyn Campbell: I mean, I think this is probably the biggest question that investors that are looking at this space are facing today. And there's... If we're thinking just about the data center backed assets, I think there are two main things. One is the asset itself, where we're focused on things like the geography, the tenant, the interconnectivity, the flexibility of this asset for multiple uses. And then the second is on the structure of the deal itself. How much leverage is being raised against the asset? How cash flowing is it? And then of course, the duration as well. But it's a great question. And because of the complexity of this space, it can be really hard to compare one to the other. Vishwas Patkar: Yeah. And, at the risk of providing a non-answer, I very much think investors are in the process of coming up with a framework because these deals have come very quickly. This is a new sector for most credit investors to analyze. But I think what we can say with a high degree of certainty is this is blurring the lines between corporate credit and securitized credit. So, you know, this opens up more avenues for us to collaborate on this topic going forward. Carolyn Campbell: All right. That's a great place for us to leave it today with that nice cross-collaboration. Vishwas, thank you so much for taking the time to talk. Vishwas Patkar: Great speaking with you, Caroline. Carolyn Campbell: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.

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