GA 465 | What a Unicorn Knows with Matt May and Pablo Dominguez

You think about Lean at the highest level, which is the absence of waste. Strategy and strategic planning in organizations can be painful. Most executives don't like it. They don't see it as anything that's fun, simple or even effective.

Today I'm excited to welcome Matt May and Pablo Dominguez to the show. Now, Matt and Pablo have co authored to write a book called what a Unicorn Know.

It's a.

It's a. This is a fun episode. I think you're all going to like it. So Matt, if his name might sound familiar to many of you longtime listeners, Matt's been on the show. Matter of fact, Matt, we talked about the beginning of the podcast. Matt was the actual first real guest ever on the Gimpa Academy podcast back in episode two. That's how long I've known him. And I knew him even before that. And then he came back on in episode 100, which was one of our.

More.

Well, I would say it's the most unique podcast we've ever recorded. So Matt, crazy story. He died. And like literally he was dead and then obviously he's not dead anymore. So he told that story in episode 100. So we're going to link both of those episodes up down below here in the show notes. So I would encourage everyone to go check those ones out when we get done with this one. But anyhow, this book. What a unicorn? No, so a unicorn. And Matt describes it much better than I will, but it's basically a company with a billion dollars, I believe valuation not necess necessarily sales, but valuation of a billion dollars with a B. And typically they're on a software as a service business. So companies like Salesforce and Netflix and that sort of thing, those, those are unicorns. And so what they talk about in this book and then on this podcast is, is number one, like, kind of like how do these companies get there? But then once they're there there's, you know, there's, there's certain things that need to happen for them to, to maintain that. And they have a framework called scale up and some other things. And Lean is built into almost all of what they, and that's what, that's what's so interesting for, for me and, and I'm sure for you who are really into Lean. So yeah, really fun episode at the end. I actually just randomly asked them about their take on AI artificial intelligence. So chat, GPT and all this stuff that's really seems to be taking the world by storm here in early 2023. So I wanted to get their Take on. Is that. Is that a good thing or is that a bad thing? And what about our kids writing their essays with chat GBT and that sort of thing? Is that good, is that bad? And so forth. So you to listen towards the end to hear that. But yeah, really good stuff. I think you're going to enjoy it. So show notes can be found over@gemba podcast.com. just look for episode 465. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Matt and Pablo, how's it going, guys?

It's going great.

Going well. Good beer.

All right. So. So, Pablo, I don't know you, but Matt, I do know you and Matt, we were just kind of reminiscing before we got recording here that he was. Matt was actually the very first real guest on the Gamba Academy podcast back in episode two. And so we're gonna link to that below. And then episode 100, Matt told us about how he died. And I mean literally how he died. He was dead and so. And now he's not dead, obviously, so which is fantastic. But that was Matt, we. We've known you for a long time. So Pablo, looking forward to getting to know you as well.

Likewise.

Yeah, man. So, well, before we get into what what a Unicorn Knows, which is the coolest name book that I think I've ever heard. Tell us. We. We like to go with that quote. So which one of you or both of you, how do you want to do that quote?

I'm gonna let Pablo go.

Yeah, no, you go first.

All right, well, my favorite, I think my favorite mantra is, and I actually did this at our off site last week, was what appears to be the problem isn't, what appears to be the solution isn't, and what appeared to be impossible isn't.

That's good.

I like it.

I gotta go with get busy living or get busy dying from the Shawshank Redemption.

What's that mean to you, Pablo?

Means you got to live every day to the fullest, man. Because you don't have time. Well, unless you're Matt and you can die and come back, I guess you can do that. Doesn't really apply to Matt. Yeah, but no, every moment counts. You got to make the most of it. So.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. All right, well, hey, Pablo, won't we start with you? Tell us a little bit about your background. Just short, short story. Who. Who's Pablo and what you're up to these days. And then Matt, you can follow him.

Yeah, no worries. Pablo Dominguez, originally from Texas. I'm an operating partner at Insight, responsible for leading the sales and customer success team that helps our portfolio companies. Right. So we have hundreds of portfolio companies and so we help those companies scale their go to market teams. And a little bit about me, have spent 25 years in sales and marketing effectiveness consulting, two public companies, one startup, and now four and a half years here at Insight. So excited to share a little bit about that journey.

Nice, Matt, who are you?

I am the undead.

Yeah.

Matt, May. I guess we got to know each other. It's based on my background at Toyota. Spent better part of a decade there, gave me a little bit of insight into this thing called Lean. I began working with Pablo over a decade ago when he was at adp and then followed him through to the startup that he referred to and his exit. And now Insight Partners. And if you're not familia with Insight partners, leading global PE, a private equity firm. We've got almost 100 billion in assets under management over, you know, a dozen funds. We invest primarily in companies like yourself, SaaS companies, almost 100% software. And there's two sides to the house, and Pablo and I sit on the advisory side. So we've got 500 people or so working at the firm. We've got about 125 on the advisory side over, you know, half a dozen centers of excellence and segments. And I run something called Lean Scale up, which is a series of, you know, three or four workshops where I actively apply what I know about Lean to kind of the macro foundational processes of a company. So strategy, innovation, customer experience and process.

Pablo, do you have any background in Lean? Are you familiar with it or.

Very familiar. Just because I've been working with Matt now for about 11 years. Met Matt, he helped us solve some problems at one of the public companies I was at and worked with them extensively there. And then when I left to go to a startup and I spent five years at that startup, brought Matt back in again, helped us with customer success with sales, even went into hr, Matt, if you can remember that. And then when I joined Insight four and a half years ago, had the vision to say, hey, we need this guy on the team. And we've got so many port codes that could actually benefit from leveraging Matt. So Matt is now focusing most of his time helping our portfolio companies apply Lean principles. So yeah, 11 years working with Matt, definitely not the expert that he is, but have been able to apply it in a lot of different examples and frameworks.

Nice, nice. All right, well, what a unicorn knows so before we get into any questions on the book, I'm to know like, why did you guys write the book? Like, what problem have you trying to solve with this book?

Well, answer for me in the mcin way. And Matt's obviously a five time, you know, Pulitzer Prize winning author already.

And.

You know, I think six years ago, after we had done a couple of initiatives, we started talking about like, hey, it'd be good to put some of these principles, you know, on paper potentially. And then when Matt joined Insight and I think we've done 40 plus engagements within like the portfolio, it's, it's pretty significant with very strong results. We had sort of been already documenting, hey, here's some frameworks and you know, we had the thought of like, why don't we put these on paper and actually write a book that we could share with the broader community, not just the Insight portfolio. Just because Lean as a whole isn't really applied necessarily in business. Right. It's more, you know, traditionally comes from manufacturing and Lean startup is more about product development. And so Matt's done a phenomenal job working with our companies, really applying it to, you know, sales, marketing, the lead to cash process strategy for companies. And that's sort of how we started thinking about it.

So.

But Matt, what do you want to add?

No, that's it. I mean, there is a, there's a gap in the market when it comes to books of any nature that are specifically focused on that we target at Insight Partners, which is what we call scale up. So you have startup, right? Early, early venture that starts, gets some seed capital and struggles to find a product market fit. But we focus on companies that have found that initial product market fit and are looking to go through a seminal phase of growth called scale up. And a lot of people think that that's the most difficult phase of growth because yeah, you're, you've made it past the, you know, the gauntlet of being able to be, have a successful business model. Now you got to grow it and scale it and hopefully look for the future. Whether that is in, in our world, it's some sort of exit where we take them public or they get purchased as you, as you know, as you all did, by a larger entity. But it's very, very difficult to do and it's especially difficult to do given the, the current climate. And even though things kind of ballooned and mushroomed during COVID we're sort of back to earth now in that very difficult phase of what do you got to do to grow and scale in challenging circumstances. And there really aren't a lot of books that focus on that. And our entire business is really trying to get a company from A to B in those conditions. And so that was the gap and that was the focus. And everything that we've written about is stuff that we do on a daily basis, which also makes it kind of unique.

Got it. All right, so let's talk about unicorns. So I mean we all, we all know what a unicorn looks like and we've all read about them in our story books and grown up with the, with the folklore and so forth. But what's it got to do with, with business, the unicorn?

Well, we didn't come up with the term. It was, it was actually a venture capital firm that came up with it, you know, 10 years ago. And it was meant to define a US based software company worth at least to private, you know, private or public investors of a billion dollars or more. And it's grown to become sort of anything that's worth a billion dollars. But that was the original definition and they're few and far between until kind of COVID hit and 2021 was this banner year where capital was cheap and oh my gosh, you know, it was under 200 a year becoming unicorn status. In that year, I think there were almost 600 crowned. And the challenge now is all those that kind of made it to that status and that valuation, can they, can they remain in the unicorn class? So there's well over a thousand now, but at the time that the term was coined, there were less than 40 in existence. So something rare, something magical that was, that was the, the genesis.

So as a company I obviously got a company like Salesforce or something like that. They're a unicorn. Is that, is that right?

Yeah, yeah, one of, one of the first. And so we're talking about not billion dollars in revenue, but billion dollars in valuations.

So.

Yeah, I mean that's, that's probably much of what we do in, in the portfolio companies that we invest in have relations to or related to that kind of model that, that Salesforce kind of model. SOFTW Service.

Yeah, yeah, got it. So what's the current state of unicorns today?

Yeah, I think obviously, because a lot of it has to do with valuations, right. And the headwinds that we're facing in the economy. I mean, Matt and I are not economists. Right. But we all see the headwinds faced by public markets and also the private markets. Valuations are down.

Right.

And so part of why the timing of the Book actually is fortuitous for us, but for also leaders of companies is because the whole premise of the book is sharing what a unicorn knows, right? Like what the best unicorns have done to drive sustainable growth versus I think some of the unicorns you'll see today that potentially are dropping in status are because they haven't grown sustainably. Right. And it's been sort of growth at all costs. And now you're seeing those headwinds put pressure on businesses. And I think the unicorns or non unicorns that are now public, that are the most successful are leveraging the principles that Matt and I have laid out in the book and are constantly thinking about how to be effective and sustainable versus waiting for, for tough times to hit to make alterations to their business plans and their strategies. Right. Which again is human nature.

Right.

People tend to. Doctor Gives me bad news, all right, now I'll start working out now I'll start eating healthy versus it's very hard to be disciplined to say I'm going to do it because I know it's the right thing and et cetera. So I think business is sort of similar.

Matt, you've mentioned scale up a few times. I don't know if you're trying to do some planting, subconscious planting there or something like that, but. So you did mention the difference between briefly scale up and startup. You know, like lean startup. You know, many of our listeners are familiar with, with Eric's work there and that sort of thing. So what's scale up all about?

Well, it's about scaling. I mean, you know, it's, it's about exponential growth. The, the generally accepted definition of a scale up is a startup that has, you know, exhibited 20% or greater growth over, you know, the previous three years. No easy feat. And because they are growing rapidly, oftentimes they've not had almost all the time. They've not had the time or wherewithal or, or capability really to develop the kind of discipline that would take them to the grown up phase. So startup scale up. Grown up is sort of how we think about the maturity cycle of a company. And grown up can take, you know, different, you know, different forms, public company, large private company. But the scale up is, it's so difficult that, that our co founder at Insight Partners, Jeff Horing, has, has said it takes, it's probably enough work for two CEOs. And you know, if you look at the sales forces of the world and the Netflix of the world kind of cases in point, you know, both have had, you know, two CEOs co CEOs, co presidents at one time or it's very difficult. But that's our challenge and that's why it's worthy of a book that takes a look at that particular point of growth. Because a young startup can say, well here's how I get to the next phase of my growth. At the same time a grown up can sort of look backwards and say, you know, I'm not as entrepreneurial as I was when I was in the garage. I'm kind of old, I'm kind of stodgy, I'm riding on the coattails of previous success, my pipeline of products, new products, motivation.

Yeah.

How do I get back to almost the scale up phase, that entrepreneurial spirit. So we think there's a little bit of everything for everyone here.

So here's an interesting question for you. What do you think? Is the world a better place because of unicorns or a worse place?

I would argue it's actually great question. I would say better, right? Because I think the unicorns and all asterisks, potentially the ones that got there during the pandemic when cash was readily available, that maybe should not have been valued that high yet, right? So let's assume that it's normal times. I think those companies are doing something uniquely different, right? Because there's a reason why there aren't that many unicorns, right? There's a reason why majority of startups fail or don't make it, right? Because it is extremely hard. And so to get to that level of maturity and status where someone values you that high and granted you still have to deliver on that valuation, right? Means you've got to have a lot of innovation to bring products to market in a way that is efficient, innovative and you're growing an organization and building teams, but not everybody can. So I think they bring to light role models that people want to emulate, right? Like how did that company get there? Is it leadership? Is it the product, is it the team? Is it, you know, culture, all of the above strategy, probably. So I think it's a good thing. And again with all good things, there's probably some bad unicorns that shouldn't have been unicorns. But I think it gives people something. You know, Matt said it before, it's something magical, right? Because there are, because the failure rate of startups is so, so high that magical, like how did they get there? Like how did they do it? I think is a something that founders wake up and go, I want to be the next X, right? Or whether it's the salesforce or, or something. Right. So, yeah, I think it's great.

Yeah. So in, in the book, you guys talk about this kind of cool tie in, like with F1, Formula One and different things like that. And you talk about that there's four primary forces against an object in motion, so drag, inertia, friction, and waste. I'm wondering if you could maybe, I don't know, tag team it however you want to do this, work through each one of those and talk about how they are impacting, maybe not even just scale ups, just any company, really any organization, especially a lot of lean thinking organizations out there trying to grow and be better and more productive. They might not be close to a billion dollars, but drag and so forth are still pulling on them. So what are each of these and how do they play a role and what you're up against, first of all.

The notion of we use a Formula one car as sort of essential metaphor for how we cast the principles that we'll discuss in just a moment. And Pablo was really the one that come up with that metaphor. He spoke often about a Ferrari. Do we need a Ferrari? Do we need a Toyota? And it got us thinking about the motion of that particular car. And all of a sudden, certain things came to light. Some parallels between the companies we were working with and the notion of a Formula one car. And a lot of people now are very familiar with Formula one, not because of anything other than really the, the Netflix series. And all of a sudden people, you know, the drive to survive. Nice parallel there. Because quite frankly, the scale ups that we're working with have a drive to survive this, the sort of next wave of macroeconomic conditions. So the, the analogy was that, that both entities are at the pinnacle of technology. So you think about a Formula one car, highest level of technology out there. It's, it's the most complex thing. I don't know if you ever spent any time in a Formula one, in a pit or anything like that, but it's, it's unbelievable, the level of technological advancement. They're both very, very fast moving. They both face the kinds of physical forces that you're talking about. So inertia, you know, drag, friction, and waste. And there are organizational corollaries to that. If you think about the notion of, of drag, which is just simply the resistance of air against the moving body, I'm sure you're, you know, around facing this in your own company, but the notion of, hey, can you make, you know, tough decisions, strategic decisions quickly, or does it feel like turning a. You Know, a battleship. So there's that notion of. Of drag. And how do you achieve what cyclists in a peloton achieve, what geese, you know, flying in a. In a V phase. And in Formula one, there's. There's a little wing on the back of the car, and there's certain zones that can make or break a race called the. The DRS system. And you can only use your DRS system, which is a panel that produces more or less resistance at certain points, but you can pass the other car if you've got a little bit less in the way of drag. So drag in an organization takes the form of not being able to make quick market moves. There's misalignment across the entire organization. Inertia is just the resistance to anybody in its current state of motion. So you've got a big organization, really tough to make it nimble and agile. Again. A lot of that hinges on its inability to do what it did in the garage, which is run quick, fast, frugal experiments and iterate, iterate, iterate. Friction. It's good and bad friction. Obviously, you need friction to keep your tires on the road, on the tarmac, but you'll see in a Formula one race, they change their tires at least once and different levels of friction. Friction, when it comes to working with customers can be the difference between a successful company and one that experiences in the SaaS business. And I don't know if you've experienced this in your model, but Churn, which is, you got a subscription model, it's something you want to look at. And the less friction and the. The more effortless it is for a customer to pull value from you, the more you're likely to have. Be able to have renewals, expand your sales into different offerings that you've got, you know, upsell, so sort of speak, so to speak. So there are organizational equivalents to everything that a Formula one car, high velocity, high technology vehicle is experiencing. I'll let Pablo take the waste with.

Yeah, I love the waist one. Right. So WAIS is all about doing work that's ineffective, that doesn't add value. Right. And I love it with regard to F1 because, Matt, sorry, if I butchered the exact time, I think the fastest pit stop was less than 2 seconds. I think 1.86 seconds, potentially. So if you think about it, car comes in, four tires come off, gas goes in in 1.86 seconds. Like, I can't even fathom that. Right. So they've. They've basically removed, for all intents and purposes, Any waste and, you know, any process that is basically not adding value. Right. And so if you think about businesses, what I love about the work we do at Inside is we get to see companies early on. Right. Million in ARR. Potentially less. And as they scale, you know, you don't really have waste that early. Right. But as they start to scale, you pick up technical debt. Right? You pick up go to market debt. And sometimes when you're engaging at 100 million, when Matt and I first engaged at a public company, you know, over time you inherit all this waste, Right. Because you've built processes on top of processes, people on top of people. And so undoing that is very fulfilling and adds so much value back into the organization. So that's the, that's sort of the fourth model there that we have.

I want to go back, if we can, to the difference between friction and drag, because I feel like there's, I don't know, for some reason, I think about, in a car going down, drag is the air pushing the car and friction is the tires. But it's almost like, is there any sort of, sort of relationship between the two in particular in a business context?

Well, I mean, there are certain things that can produce drag, and friction might be one of them. Right. So let's say that you've got a strategy at the corporate level of your, of your company, and let's say that the next line down, your chief marketing officer, your chief revenue officer, don't necessarily agree with what the CEO has laid out in terms of an overall enterprise strategy. And friction might now produce drag. Right. So there is a relationship in the, in the strictly scientific world, drag is something moving through air, so it's friction against air. So it's, it's kind of a nuance there. But when we talk about friction in an organization, we're talking about people on people, organization on organization. It's the interface between human beings and the decisions that they're making, the actions that they're taking, and those can either slow things down or they can speed them up. And does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah. No, it helps. That helps.

I'm sure you, you know, I'm sure, you know, maybe you and Kevin have had discussions where there's been a little bit of friction. Right. You agree to do one thing and then, well, let's not do that. Let's go another direction and there's a little bit of friction disagreement. What does that do to your speed in market and to market, to the decision that you're trying to make it slows it down.

Yeah. And what's interesting, just thinking about our, our story of our little company here, it's like, yeah, like you said early in the early days, it's just like, huh, let's try that. Okay. You know, and you go. And then you get a little bit bigger and it's like, well, let's try that. Whoa, hold on. You know, there's ramifications now. Like, you know, what if, you know, what if it doesn't work? And then what are the you. And so, yeah, I feel like it does get harder, right. There is more friction the bigger you get. Right. Because the stakes are higher, right?

Yeah. We call it big company syndrome. Right. It's kind of an anti flywheel. Right. So all of a sudden you've grown and now it becomes maybe even a leader in a category. And all of a sudden you've reached number one in a given space and now you take on a different stance. Now you're defensive. Now you're more conscious of your costs, and all of a sudden the notion of taking a risk in the marketplace seems more daunting. So you pull back from your new products and your experiments and all of a sudden, gosh, lots of people, we need programs, we need budget costs escalate. At some point in time, they get out of control and now you got to pull back on those costs. So the program mentality gets frozen and all of a sudden that negative flywheel, you've become essentially stationary, stagnant. It in unable to grow and move forward. And that's when some bad things can happen. So yeah, it can be debilitating.

Yeah.

For that is experimentation, by the way.

Well, that's good. So I mean, in the subtitle of the book, you're promising some lean talk, right?

So.

And I know when you get into that, you, you, you have a mnemonic level thing here called scale. So talk about what's scale.

I'll give the high level, Matt, and you go into it. So it actually worked per. Perfectly for us, Right. Because when Matt and I started thinking about this, you know, Matt gave the definition earlier about scale ups, right. Which is where insight sort of plays in between that startup and grown up phase. And so what better way to get our lean principles across than in a scale moniker, right? So the five letters basically represent the areas where we support our portfolio companies with Mat's lean scale up program. Right. Us being focused really on strategy with companies. Right. Making sure. And Matt can go into detail here. Companies today are trying to do everything right, and they're trying to be everyone and trying to touch every customer and sell too many things. And the. In the current economic environment, you've got to be very focused. Right. So yes is all about being focused on strategy. Right. Matt leverages the play to win framework and talk about that in a second. And that's really at the core of really getting leaders aligned. Like where should I be and where should I not be? Right. So C is for constant experimentation. Core lean principle. Obviously A is for driving accelerated value. Also core lean principle. L is for lean process. Really ties to the, to the part on waste. Right. Reviewing processes especially like the lead to cash process and then E esprit de corps. Right. Not necessarily lean principle at all, but sort of core to driving a successful business is having strong leadership and a very strong culture and having people aligned to a common vision to really reach your goals. So that's sort of how we laid out scale.

Matt, I'm wondering where from your Toyota background and Hoshin Conrad, that kind of thing, like, are you getting into any of that in particular on the in s in the S phase?

Yeah, you know, you, you know me, I, I am not the, the traditional lean. Right. Nothing I've ever written would, would classify as, as, you know, what we traditionally think of as lean. So I would call all of these principles lean infused. In other words, if you think about lean at, at the highest level, which is the absence of waste strategy and strategic planning in organizations can be painful. Most executives don't like it. They don't see it as anything that's fun, simple or even effective. And so these are just all lean and few. So is there a leaner way to think about strategy? And indeed there is. And we use a simple framework. It's not my framework. It comes from a gentleman by the name of Roger Martin, who ran the Monitor group, our leader at onsite Part the advisory side of insight came from Monitor. So the, the whole playing to win framework is what we use to deploy that framework or any strategy. We use the notion of cascading goals. And so whether it is Hoshin Conry, which is, you know, as you know, that's how I learned it, or the, the kind of the tech community equivalent, which is okrs, objectives and key results and the notion of playing catch ball, which is what we called it at Toyota, I'm sure that's a term that's famil to you, but the notion of starting at the top, cascading down to the next level, going horizontally, feeding back up, going back down, going across, feeding Back up. And so it's bi directional. Get into that as the, as the preferred method of deployment of strategy. And what I like most about OKRs versus kind of the, the general Hoshin Kanri is the notion of it working on quote of a quarterly basis coincides very nicely with most corporate accelerators. I don't know if you're familiar with the OKRs. Google probably made it the most famous. It started back decades ago. There's a book out there by John Doerr, who's chairman of Kleiner Perkins in our general space. But it's setting aggressive goals on a quarterly basis. So you don't set annual goals, forget about them till November and have an oh crap moment, right? So everything is quarterly, they're set aggressively. So stretch. 60 to 70% completion is considered success. So innovation is required. So it helps drive into the second part of the model, which is constant experimentation. Because if you're asking people to stretch and think innovatively now, they got to do new stuff. And you can't lock and load on anything inside of 12 weeks really. So you're forced to sort of experiment and test. So one kind of feeds into the other other.

I love it as we wrap up here, guys. And I, I, I, I am looking forward to, I just told you before, I, I haven't actually read the book yet because I, I like to do the interviews before I, I, I read the book. And when, when's it coming out? Because I don't know when the, this podcast, I know it's not even released yet. When is it?

February 21st.

February 21st.

Okay. Yeah, so this, this podcast probably will be out by then. So. Okay, so we'll link to it in the into the show notes. Everybody can go about and buy it. What advice do you have again? We've got a lot of folks that aren't part of unicorns. You know, they're just out there trying to make the world better and they're in their company, they're trying to make improvements, trying to improve themselves. What's some general advice or takeaways that they can get from this book and that they don't even have to wait for the book because you're going to give it to them right now. What are some practical tips that, that you guys can offer them them?

In this book we offer some practical tools, right? And it doesn't much matter whether you have your eyes on becoming a unicorn or not. What matters is that every company you're in business to grow, right? If you're not growing, then why Are you in business? And we're all facing resource constraints right now. You know, we've come through three years of crisis condition. So how do you grow in some of those circumstances? And what we're trying to offer here is kind of a path forward that requires you to take a look inside your organization. Ask yourself, you know, a few tough questions. Are we making, you know, decisive strategic moves quickly? Do we have a robust pipeline of products and services no matter what what, you know, area of business that we're in? Right. Do we have a strong robust pipeline? Are we providing, you know, effortless our customers, or are we making it painful for them? Is the burden to do business with us so great that we're in danger of losing them? Do we have processes that can be optimized, streamlined to make things less complex? Are we doing work that's actually being asked of us to do by customers, internal or otherwise? And do we have the team spirit and the leaders in place to take us to the next phase of growth? Growth, and we're irrespective of the unicorn part of this. Sustainable growth is, I think, the watchword right now. And I guess as a practical matter, those kind of five questions that I laid out, the careful balancing of those and optimizing those using principles that could make all of those heady concepts a little bit more palatable, is the key takeaway. And we offer a lot of tools, a lot of resources, a lot of agendas for certain meetings. So I encourage everyone to take a look at those we make. We have made them the additional resources free, so you can download them with links from the book. So hopefully it's nothing if not practical. Is the takeaway.

I lied. I got one more question for you guys. So we're recording this in the early part of 2023 and I feel like all that is being talked about right now is AI ChatGPT. You know, all these various tools, I mean, there's a million of them already. They're just. And every day there's a new one. Oh, now we can make this. Now we can do that. What's your take on artificial intelligence and the role it's going to play in the business world, whether unicorn or not, but for each, even definitely for unicorns, because they got a lot of, a lot of people and you know, is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? Is it both?

I think it's a great thing. Well, until we look back and say the Terminator was right, right? And now you've got this machine controlling the world, but I think it's going to be great for businesses in the sense that it will automate again. I think it'll, it'll apply lean principles. It'll automate tasks that, you know, whether they took 10 minutes, now they take 30 seconds or you know, specifically in the, in the go to market space. We're already seeing Intercom sent out. I think it was on Friday or Monday, man, I know I sent it to our team. They're already leveraging Chat GPT for customer support, right. So people that are answering customer, customer support issues. I've got to read through an entire email from a customer, digest it, figure out what the issue is. They've now built functionality with Chat GPT where ChatGPT is summarizing the issues. So when I open the ticket up, here's the three bullets. The AI has basically said focus on these three things. So I've now not wasted three minutes, right. It helps me write a custom email that is tailored to you in an easy way. Right. That takes in information and stuff. So I think it will definitely in the business world world make things easier so that people can focus on other tasks. I think there's a fear though that will it replace certain jobs, right. And so only time will tell, but I do think it's going to add a lot of value and remove, remove a lot of the waste in the process in business.

Along the way I have, well, my kids range from college to, you know, first grade. And so now I'm, I'm petrified of, you know, the amazing, amazing essay that my son's gonna write, you know, with Chat gb. But, but in all seriousness, it's like my fear, I suppose is I'm excited from a business perspective. I'll be honest with you. I mean I'm, I'm ready. We're, we're, it'll make us better. I'm confident. But are we going to forget how to think as a species?

Yeah, potentially. Right. Because here's, here's something that happened. We tried this out like, like three, four weeks ago. I asked it to write a blog. I said write a blog between. I'll pretend it was Matt, but it wasn't. It was one of our investors. Write a, Write a blog written as Pablo and Matt, who are XY Z. And we want a topic on the three things that companies should worry about as we go into 2023. Right? Like what, what are the three things we would recommend as investors and an operating partner given the UN unknowns in the economy? Quote me, quote Matt and use Our tone, based on what's out in the Internet, two minutes later, blog is written. I send it to my boss and I go, hey, wrote a blog. What do you think? And she responds back and goes, this is pretty good. Send it to marketing so they can clean it up. And I'm like, hold on, I did not write this. Right. And so to answer your question, it was actually very well written. Kind of sounded like me and this other person. But it would have taken me a little bit of time to do some research and pull some things together in brain power. And so did it make the process more efficient? Yes. Can I now pump out blogs more easily?

Sure.

But to your point, am I going to be dumber in a year or two? Because I'm not using that energy to learn and I'm just assuming the system is doing everything for me potentially. Right. But I don't know, is Tony Stark any dumber because he asked Jarvis to do everything and he just. I don't know.

So what do you think, Matt?

I think it's just a new flavor and perhaps the scale, scope and spire of it is greater than anything before. But every time we come upon a new bit of technology, we go through the same gyrations. Right. Maybe this one will be different. But I got to believe that whatever worry we have around AI vis a vis, you know, writing a college essay, you can use AI to battle AI.

Well, you can. I saw one the other day where it says it's chat. They created it from chat GBT to. To decipher if CHAT GBT was used to create it.

I tested it.

I created something in chat GBT and I ran it through and it said, this is fake. And then I sent one of our blog article that I wrote, you know, back in the day, and it's like, yeah, there's a real person wrote this.

Wow.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, and think about all the gosh. I remember. I'm really going to date myself. But remember when it was like, probably you won't remember this, you're too young. But the first, you know, when you were like gonna buy something on the Internet, it's like, oh my God. Yeah, you actually put your credit card right on the Internet. What are you crazy? And then, you know, the, you know, five years ago was everything was going to be autonomous by this point in time. Many prognostications were autonomous. Cars would be the thing. Right? We're getting rid of drivers. It's a same kind of thing. I think there's a, there's kind of A human balance to technology that makes sure that we don't go over to the Terminator side at the dark side. But we'll see. I could be wrong. If we know anything, it's. We're notoriously bad at predicting the future. Right. Kind of stay away from that. That.

Yeah. Cool. Hey, if folks want to connect with you gentlemen, what's the best way?

LinkedIn.

Yeah, okay.

LinkedIn. Yeah.

Matthew Eme on LinkedIn, we've got a website for the book what a Unicorn Knows Dot Com.

Okay. So awesome. And every. Just scroll down on your app, whatever you're listening to. We're going to have everything linked up and everybody go out and buy the book, connect with these guys and, and well, we'll come back on a year from now and we'll see who. See if. Well, maybe you'll be talking to some AI robot or something next time you come on the podcast. But who knows?

One that I saw that you might. That we all may want is that the one that no matter where you look when you're on, on camera like this, it makes it so that your eyes are looking straight at the audience, no matter which way you're looking on your screen.

That was cool.

I saw one yesterday where it. They could take a video like a. They were. They did like Tom Cruise. You can't handle the truth. What is that movie? You know, Two Good Men and they, they. And they took like Tom Cruise's face and then they, they overdubbed Japanese and Chinese and then that changes the lip movement of Tom Cruise to match the Japanese. It was so real.

That's awesome because I love some foreign like net on Netflix like the foreign series and movies. But what I hate is when they overdub with the English language and it doesn't match.

It's like Bruce Lee fighting movies, you know?

Cool.

Hey guys, this has been fun. I appreciate it and yeah, we'll look forward to, to checking out the book. And I'm sure Matt, for sure you and I will talk down the road. And Pablo, maybe I'll wrangle you back in as well.

Thanks, man. It was a pleasure.

And you're in Texas, right?

Yep, yep. We got all kind of ice and stuff on us right now. You know, it's one of those February's here in Texas.

So are you in Austin or Dallas?

Well, the Fort Worth area. Keller, Texas is where we, where we are here.

Yeah, you guys are shut down with a little bit of ice, but that's understandable.

I came in, I just slid in, you know, it's fine.

It's all good.

All right. Thanks guys. Take care.

Cheers.

Cheers.

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