S5E3 - How to leverage AI to coach your middle managers

You know, we're getting really old. What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Surf and sales podcast. It's been a minute. I have been down and out for the last couple weeks with COVID which I got for the first time, and it has been terrible. Richard, you're the king of COVID You've had it about 16 times.

No.

What am I doing wrong? How come I can't get over it? I don't know.

You're like the biggest isolationist I know. Like, you don't like to go out and meet people. You don't like to go out and see people like, you know, like, did you, did you get it at the Travis Scott show? Maybe? Was that.

No, that was, that was too long ago. I don't know. I don't know exactly what happened. It served me well. I've been safe for years. But this is, this is only the second day I've been capable of human communication so far, so.

Well, I'm glad to see you.

Hope that I deliver. I see your brand new book all over the place. Seller's Journey, everybody.

Yes. So it is coming out. When's it coming out? February 22, but for those who download and listen to this immediately. It's actually on Amazon right now. But we're gonna do a big launch. February 22nd, the seller's journey. Thank you for bringing it up, Scott. I hope my display is not obnoxious behind me, but I'm sure you'll.

Oh, it's a, it's a pleasing color to the eye as, as I would say.

There you go.

It looks good. I got my copy yesterday behind me somewhere on my bookshelf. Yeah, well, we're, we're here today with the CEO and founder, co founder, I should say, of Grow AI, Alex McNaughton, coming all the way from New Zealand. I believe that's where he is right now. Which means it's probably about 4 or 5 in the morning, so he's a trooper. What's up, Alex? Welcome to the show, man.

Thanks guys for having me on. And it's not quite that early. It's 8:00am actually, so it's, it's not civilized. Yeah.

Oh, that's normal. Yeah.

Geez.

That's totally normal.

He's just as awake as, as Richard, maybe.

That's right. Although one of our calls, Scott, was at about 3:30 in the morning when we were first getting to know each other. So that is one of the negatives of being in this part of the world.

So let me. I Just want to make sure I understand this. So people don't know that you know. Alex, you've hired Scott on as a consultant. Right.

As I recall he's one of the close advisors.

Advisor advisors. Right. So I just like the fact that this is how Scott operates is that someone wants his advice to be a customer, to pay him money or give him equity and Scott makes them get up at 3:30 in the morning. That is typical.

If you know Scott Lees, that is his genius, he will make that happen. And I still can't figure out how he does this.

So no, no, I think Alex is maybe used to it considering where he is in the world that he's, he's got to make some sort of accommodation sometimes. So tell everybody, tell everybody real quick what grow is all about man, what you're working on.

So grow AI is a team management co pilot for sales and it is, we've, we've built it to solve an age old problem which is that management and coaching gaps are the biggest barriers to consistent sales team performance. And we're making it easier.

Yes, 100% that is the problem and it has been that way for decades. As we said before we jumped on here.

Yes.

What, what, where is the moment where you're like this is the challenge that I'm going to solve and I'm going to solve. You know what I mean? Like what was your epiphany?

I a lot of reps. So I kind of accidentally built a sales and go to market focused consultancy starting back in 2018 and worked across about 130 companies. Everything from pre revenue through to corporate and everything in between. And then I also built a sales training and sales recruitment company here in nz. And through the process of being around so many sales organizations and seeing this common challenge again and again and again.

I just kind of got obsessed with it. And then when I met up with my two co founders at the start of last year it was just this beautiful moment in time where AI can start to do things that typically only people could do and we set up to solve the problem.

Got it.

So, so walk us through a little bit about how if you can and I know you know we don't, we don't product pitch but I've got questions related to this.

What does it do? So it listens to a call and then it coaches a rep. Is it that simple? Is it more than that?

So short answers. No. Think of Taylor AI as an extension of the sales manager. Okay. So Taylor has one on one conversations with the team members.

Where a manager can't be there all the time. So imagine you've got a team of 10. Taylor runs one on ones with every single team member and is also available on demand to prepare for a meeting or debrief from a call and just answer the questions that you typically go to your manager around. We then analyze and draw insights from those conversations that Taylor is having with the team to surface both individual and team insights and highlight areas that that manager can then put in place. The right intervention to bring up performance, highlight a gap across the team and then from an executive leadership perspective, it gives them visibility across the sales org. And one of the big challenges at like a CRO VP level is that you just don't have visibility at what's going on at an IC level if you've got 100, 200 sellers across the org.

So, and then Scott, you can ask a question. So what this is really telling me is, is that it's going to show me how sucky my CRO is at actually providing feedback. Because even when Taylor AI gives my reps feedback, how do I as a CRO make sure the rep's doing the job therefore and or the CRO still doesn't know how to actually have a conversation with that rep when it comes down to the human side of it. Right. So does it call out the rep more? Does it call out the CRO for their crappy leadership style?

The idea is it rises everyone and if we, you know, maybe if we step back a second and put ourselves in the position of your typical frontline sales manager, they were probably the best seller maybe six months before. And then someone said, hey, you're now leading the team. You've got 10 direct reports. They got a pat on the back. Here's the number. Go, hit it.

Agreed.

No one ever gave them any sales management training.

No one shows them how to coach.

And you know, as a result, they typically revert back to what they're good at, which is dive into deals, sell. And you know, that unfortunately doesn't scale very well. And that's, that's the fundamental problem that we're, we're trying to solve is how do we get these, how do we get, how do we give frontline sales managers superpowers and then also make sure that their sellers are getting regular expert coaching that's relevant to them.

That part I love, I love the fact that a rep can get all this stuff. I, I, I'm wondering, it'll be an interesting, and this is where it should start, right, is at the level you're at of like getting it to the reps, get them the coaching. It'll be interesting to see how it builds on top of that to get to the management level, the VP level, while maintaining sort of the human, the humanity of it all. But I don't know, maybe, maybe everybody's okay being coached by a machine and I'm just an old man.

It's interesting, right? So Taylor helps the manager as well because it services things that they didn't know are going on across their team. So I'll give like a real example that happened recently is Taylor surfaced across one of our customers that in one of their sales team, they had John, a sales rep in that team, who was outperforming but was running a slightly different process to everyone else. Their manager wasn't really aware of this because this manager had, I think was nine direct reports.

And Taylor highlighted this and then made a suggestion to that manager, hey, why don't you get John this rep to show the rest of the team what he's doing? Like, run a run. Run a lunch and learn. So then the manager then was like, okay, cool, that's interesting. I didn't know about that. Facilitates that lunch and learn. John shows the team. And then the following month, they had a record month that I love.

That's what I wanted to know. How does it help the manager and leaders get better? That's brilliant. So cool.

Richard, you said something interesting that.

Is fundamentally flawed that I'm always point out, go for it. Well, you said, you know, maybe you're just old. You don't like. You don't like the idea of being coached by a machine, but that's actually false. We've been slowly being coached by machines without realizing it. And this is just a natural evolution of it. You think about, I don't know how long ago this was, but remember the first time you went through an automated phone tree when you called into some doctor's office or something like that?

Right.

That's the machine coaching you where to go.

Right.

Remember when you used to have to write directions on a piece of paper or use a map, Richard? Well, you've been coached by a machine via Waze or Google, you know, maps or whatever, Apple Maps or whatever.

Right.

This is already happening in other areas of our life.

Yes.

So it's not that foreign of a concept or should not be that big of a leap to suddenly think, oh, wow, I'm gonna get sales advice.

Yeah, but you know me, Scott, right? You know, do you think I'm gonna Take the advice of a machine.

Well, first of all, Richard, Richard, you'll barely take the advice of anybody.

Right?

My point is, my point is all of us have been coached by machines already in different areas of our life. So I don't think it's going to be that big of a leap, especially for people who are maybe newer into sales or into their careers or who are growing up this way already. And this is all normalized. Right. So it begs the question for me of at what point does the middle manager disappear? Because I don't even need them necessarily. If Taylor, the AI is coaching 47 of my reps simultaneously, they're all getting attention. I've got intelligence put in there and it's, you know, mining this wealth of data every single day of what works, what doesn't work, what do I want them to do and whatnot. And it's reporting back to the CRO or the VP of sales with those insights that they're not getting right now. How long until we don't need a middle manager, sales manager type person who I think we all agree is often struggling to deliver coaching and value both to the reps and up. So where does Alex sit on that kind of fence, that dynamic that I'm talking about?

So I think if we look short to medium term, this gives middle managers serious leverage is what it does in the short to medium term. I think there is a potential future here where you reduce the number of frontline managers you need across an organization and actually free up that headcount to be out there selling and doing a lot of the time what they're best at and what they like doing more. I think. Can it fully replace a layer of management? I'd say maybe. But where AI is less good right now is at the kind of random stuff that happens across managing a team. The stuff that's not systematic and programmatic and can fit in a nice neat process. The random things that just happen with people management, I think that's where fundamentally you'll need some people is to deal with that.

So what is, what he's saying is when I need to leave early because someone's sick or the cat has to go to the vet. Scott, is. Is Taylor gonna let me go? Is Taylor AI going to let me go to the doctor? Right.

Yeah. Well, the current, the current state of AI.

Isn'T. Doesn't have the capacity yet to like have that nuanced conversation. Right. But it's interesting what Alex said. He's like, well, short and near term, it's A boon for the sales managers, which I agree.

But is it a Trojan horse? Because it's like we get in with this short, near term boost, but oh, watch out because in five years or 10 years you might be gone. Because we don't need it, that middle, middle layer anymore. Because the AI has progressed to the point where it can have that conversation with Richard about his cat and understand the emotional element of it and understands Richard's personality and knows when to push, when to support that type of thing. I mean, to me that's the natural direction that we're headed.

Yeah, I don't, I don't disagree with you. I think, I think Scott's, I think you're going to be patient too for neuralink from Elon. Right. Scott, because you, you actually, Scott, for all things Scott, has this capacity to understand the human at a really unique and specialized level that, that I've always admired. And, and you're right. Once we can get that level of sh. What's the word? Satiency or whatever that. Sentient.

Sentient.

That'll be an interesting point of view. But Alex, how far away for. Are we from that, do you think?

In some aspects. Already there. So Taylor's already having, Taylor's already having emotionally charged conversations and handling them better than.

Can you give us an, give us an example.

Oh my God.

Give us an example of, of one of these kind of nuanced emotional type conversations that Taylor, the AI is, is pulling off.

So imagine a very frustrated, stressed out rep who's actually hitting their number and doing really well, but just burnt out, angry at the world, angry at her boss, angry at the, you know, the systems that she's working with, etc. Etc.

And basically I call that Tuesday. I call that Tuesday.

Well, exactly right. Like maybe that's a lot of people's lived experiences all the time, but imagine that person having a rant with Taylor and Taylor navigating quite an emotionally charged conversation and handling it better than I've seen most humans do, which is somewhat creepy. But you know, managing that conversation, asking the right follow up questions, bringing the emotional level kind of down in the conversation throughout the conversation and then also with some, you know, what's the word? Useful practical feedback thoughts towards the end as well and then surfacing those insights to the leader around, hey, this person's actually a retention risk and they're really good. So you need to sort that out.

Can you, can it, can it sense that? Can it sense that?

Wow.

Richard seems tense based on his email situation, how he's Talking to customers or.

Does like anticipate you're talking about anticipation?

Yeah. Or do I need to go, hey Taylor, I'm feeling stressed today. You got any advice.

At this stage? It will pick and pick these sorts of things up in a one on one conversation. I think what you've described is, you know, pattern matching and, and what's the word prediction is, is where, where this ultimately can go. But for now it's, it's reading cues in a conversation.

How does that make you feel, Richard, that this is already happening?

And you know, it's interesting because you know me in mental health, it actually makes me feel good. It actually makes me feel like this is the support that, that you know, I never got and you never got, a lot of us never got that that's available to them. So it leans me in a little bit more that that's available.

You know, I, you know, my next hesitation is, oh, now it sends it up to my CRO or whatever and you know, then my concern is how does the CRO know to have that conversation with me as being a potential flight risk, which they still don't have. But I can see where one begets the next. Right. The more this stuff comes up, the more someone learns. Like I've said this a lot about the AI is that, you know, you can go into AI and say, teach me how to negot with procurement and you read it and you learn it and you use it and then you do it and then you're starting to get better skilled at it. So that's the part I see that I really do like about this. You know, I think I'm just, you know, afraid of the machines taking over.

And that's totally fair. And yeah, I think more people should talk about that and, or admit it and, and think about what that world is like. It is a different world. It's a different world in building a company right now. Right. Can you talk a little bit about what it's like to build a company in particular, like.

The revenue growth, sales, marketing, cs, all these things. How is it different right now than the times that you did it before?

So.

I think there's a few things. I think the constraints seem different with building this sort of company because it almost feel, a lot of the time it feels like there aren't any on the technical front in terms of what we can do now. I am blessed. I've got two incredible technical co founders, one of whom's a published ML researcher and a master's in machine learning and machine Intelligence from Cambridge and then the other who's a data scientist and engineer. So.

Kind of that's the context for. When I say it doesn't feel like there's that many constraints in terms of what we can build.

Because they're just very, very smart people. But in terms of the other sides of the business, I think business fundamentals are still important. Like you still have to, you still need to, you know, a go to market plan and distribution and all the things that were relevant with all types of companies and that have been been relevant for a long time. I think candidly we're fairly early in that journey. So we've only been charging folks for the last two months. So we're really figuring out some of these areas right now in terms of go to market, in terms of what does customer success look like with, with. With a platform like Taylor, you know, there.

But yeah, I think the short answer here is some things are different on the product front for sure. But in terms of like the other sides of the business, a lot of that's. A lot of that's quite common. I think actually probably the final thing is there's some really interesting ideas and feedback we've been getting around folks asking us, can I give, can I put my way of doing things into Taylor? Oh, yeah, we've had that conversation with another like, you know, Scott, we've had that conversation.

We had that.

That seems to be. That's a common conversation we've had. We've had with a lot of both.

Imagine Richard. Imagine Richard, you program.

The seller's journey.

Oh, I've already talked about it.

Style and the methodology you teach. And that's what your license of Taylor.

AI Scott, you figured out, do you know what you would do with that? Have you figured that out? Because I already have.

Well, I'm not sure where you're headed.

If you were going to take that, put all the Scott Lee stuff, all the advice you've given, all the things. How would you leverage that monetarily? Because I have the answer.

Well, give me the answer then.

The give me the answer is that everybody who wants to call and pick my brain for 20 bucks can talk to my AI me.

That's right.

30 minutes. Yeah, right. Like I won't charge.

That's a beautiful thing. Yeah. And you're not limited by. You're not limited by time either. Right. Because you can have a hundred thousand of those conversations happening at 24, 7.

Yeah. Right. So one more idea that I come up with that Scott will probably go and do Better than faster than me.

Well, somebody smarter than both of us will figure out that out.

I just got to figure out who will build it. I just got to figure out. I need Alex to tell me who, where I can find a good engineer on the cheap.

Like we're already doing this in, in a company context where we're ingesting playbooks and you know, this is, this is how that org sells and this is who they sell to, et cetera, et cetera. So that Taylor is not just broad sales expert, but relevant in the context of that space.

And.

You know, one thing we are definitely keen to start experimenting with throughout the course of this year is then.

Giving Taylor all kinds of context. You know, like what you guys are both talking about there and figuring out what, what, what does that look like in the context of an organization? We have really well sorted, I think how you just talked about it, Richard. There's that, that's, that's, I think something similar.

I mean, the.

Easy, a little different.

Yeah, I mean for me or for Scott, it's, it's the biggest way to look at it is that career advice. That's the one I get the most. I think Scott does, you know, you know, and then, and then startup advice or founder advice, you know, so anyway, so yeah, so because I, I've got it all written. There's 500 podcast episodes of us, there's countless LinkedIn and blog posts and books. And you know, it's not that hard to, you know, theoretically do it. I just don't know how to do it. So I just need a smart person. So anybody listening who wants to partner with me, I'll give you 51% of all the revenue. Seriously, I don't need to make decisions. You can have half, more than half the revenue.

So it's pretty good. That's pretty good deal out there for somebody.

Yeah, yeah. So careful, you're going to end up.

With a full time job, Richard.

No, that's why you give away 51%.

That doesn't mean you're not working full time for 49%.

That's a pretty substantial equity state. 49 is a good chunk.

So I want to shift Alex and, and you know, I know we've talked a lot about what y' all do and, and I hope everybody understands this was not a paid product pitch. I think it's fascinating and it's a topic none of us are talking about. So it's massively relevant. I want to understand, like where did your entrepreneurial spirit come from? Like what Was little Alex like, you know, what would mom and dad say if I said, when did you know Alex was going to be a successful entrepreneur? What would they say? He was five and he.

Oh no.

God. For a while they probably would have said, oh, we're not sure about him. He's, he's, you know, messing up a bit here. When I was at early days at university, I was studying finance and accounting and bloody hating it and quite lost and then. But my dad as an entrepreneur and he's, he's had his own business for, for decades and so I think he's probably, you know, probably he's definitely instilled some of that in me. But yeah, I fell into sales at 19 and completely by accident applied for an internship at a tech startup and ended up being their first sales hire. And that's where I fell in love with it. And then.

It was really, yeah, like my early entrepreneurial journey.

Pause right there. What did you love about sales? Because I think this is so many people. I'm the opposite of, of someone. You know, people fall into sales, right, and they fall in love with it. What did you love about it? What was it that was like, oh, this, this feels good?

Well, it was, it was sort of love hate thing at first because you know, my first, for context, my very first experience of selling was here's some phone numbers and email addresses of construction companies around New Zealand. Go call them, we want to sell them something. And that was, that was really it. And you know, Scott, he got phone.

Numbers and company fun. We had to find them on our own.

I know.

Yeah, that's true.

Right?

Like I was blessed. I was, I was pretty blessed.

But you know, I found it really hard and I'm a natural introvert and putting myself out there like that, I found really uncomfortable. But I sort of got addicted to it in maybe, maybe a masochistic way. It's like, you know, taking, taking a lot of the no's and then, but figuring out how to, how to do this and teach myself this skill. And then, you know, I got addicted to the success that, you know, the first org I worked at, we kind of did a crazy 0 to 0 to 2 mil run in the time I was there. And I built, built a team and I had, I think it was 12 people reporting to me by the time I left. So yeah, I really just got addicted to figuring out problems and like solving problems.

And just hyper learned from there.

What do you mean by hyper learned?

I suppose what I mean by that.

Is like it came to you very fast. Like, you just got good at it quick.

I don't know if I'd say it came to me really fast, but I, like, actively, from a very young age, would be out there reading, trying to speak to anyone who's two, three, five steps ahead of me.

And student of the year. Just consciously. Yeah, consciously doing it, I suppose. Not just on autopilot. And then back to your original question, like, entrepreneur spirit. My very first business was an accident. It literally happened because I had a few startups in my network who needed some help and I helped them. And. And I was doing on the side of a day job at the time and then realized about four months in that I was earning more money from this than I was my day job.

After I had, I think maybe four, four clients or five clients. And then I was like, oh, wow, like, New Zealand sucks at this. Let's see if I can help.

New Zealand sucks at this. That's hilarious.

Right there is what I do. And I, I mean, I say it with love. I love music. I'm half New Zealander.

It's a real thing, right, that your part of the world is a little behind our part of the world in terms of adopting new technologies, new strategies. Right. This is not just hyperbole.

No, no, no. I've talked about this at length. And like, in New Zealand, even culturally, sales is, I think, hard because New Zealand is a fairly understated culture. People don't like tooting their own horn.

And you know, as a. And in sales, like, sales is not that, but like, there's an element of it at times. And I think Kiwi culturally struggles with it. But yeah, like, in terms of adoption, I think it's one piece of technology a Kiwi company will have for about four or five that a US Company will have in their sales. Org.

And you know, sales training, investment, et cetera is like way down. And you know what I've noticed and, God, I've been across so many orgs in this part of the world is that most of them are just not even doing the basics that a US startup would be doing.

So that's legion for Scott and I to get down to New Zealand.

And that's right.

Surfing, sales, New Zealand.

Totally.

Yeah. We'll be there in 16 hours.

Right?

Just clean up.

Yeah. So.

You know, what is, you know, what are the fundamental pieces of advice that you try to give the humans? Right? Like, you know, you know, I get the concept of how to have this conversation or, or, or those things, but what are the. What Are the pieces if someone can't afford grow AI right now. Right, like that's totally fair. What advice do you try to give managers who've never had coaching or training or what advice did you used to give to managers? Because I want to make sure people walk out of here with like something they could actually use tangible.

So I think there's so much amazing educational content out there for free. And you know, there were some incredible books that I read throughout my journey that I was recommended, you know, for when I was a seller. Like the Transparency Sale was, you know, from a seller's context is one of my favorite books or the Transparent Sales Leader, you know, both by Todd Capone. And the reason actually I, I mentioned Todd is he was my very, very first podcast guest back in I think 2019.

And he was like the first US sales sales guy who like gave this random kiwi kit a chance when I was, I think, yeah, 25, 26, whatever it was. So I think there's so much information out there and I think, you know, chat, GBT and all these other tools make it even easier to access good information.

Now that is a double edged sword because there's so much. But yeah, like be, be active about it, like follow folks like you on LinkedIn and listen to the podcasts and like be deliberate in terms of leveling yourself up. I always say this to like new sales managers or you know, because folks ask me about advice like, what do I do? I've just been promoted, I don't know what I'm doing. I say, well, if you're not getting the, if you're not getting the coaching internally in your org, like you're just gonna have to create that yourself. You're gonna have to take charge of your own development.

Yeah, I think that's really good advice.

If you're not getting what you need where you're at, you've got to go get it somewhere else.

Yeah, yeah, you have to. And like I've, I've had both extremes. I had like amazing mentors early in my career and then equally I had, you know, not so amazing bosses. And I didn't stop learning in both those scenarios. You know, I was still learning even, even if my manager wasn't giving me what I needed.

Yeah.

Well, how can we be helpful to you, man? What kind of questions do you have maybe for us that we can try to. Try to answer?

Yeah, you guys are, you guys have been already helpful, massively offline. So, you know, but firstly, a massive thank you to you both. You Know, I think one of the. Well, actually here's a question. It's more of a fun question, but you know, our team's moving out to the US.

Later this year and we're trying to figure out where to be.

Are you trying to figure out where to move?

Yeah, like Austin, I would not come to.

So you're a challenge. Well, here's the, here's what everybody I think is.

San Francisco, you know, quote unquote is the hub. It's the hub of AI. All the AI companies are here.

That's our default.

Right. It's just expensive. Right, right. And, and so.

And Austin's got a great startup community. I think they're beyond this. Maybe startups will do. There's enough people around who have skills in various parts of sales and marketing and IT and tech and all those kind of things. I don't know the AI infrastructure. I don't know the, you know, scotcher guy. I, well, hey, I'd love you to be here so I can go hang out with you. Right. I don't get to hang out with kiwis, but.

You know, I would. I, I think San Francisco's obviously a default.

Yeah.

New York's a default. But you know, towns like Nashville and Austin and other places I think are, are doing great. I mean, Scott, what do you think?

Well, I think that San Francisco and New York are and will probably always be the hubs of everything and the, and the biggest and best place to go for startups if you want to be around lots of founders, lots of venture capital people, lots of people with that kind of mindset. But there's massive trade offs because like Richard said, it is super expensive. For one thing, you know, you can get lost in the sea of.

Millions of people out there as well and can be a little hard to make a name for yourself perhaps.

So default to me is San Francisco, New York. Right after that. I think it's difficult to argue that places like Austin or Boston, Massachusetts would kind of fall next in line in terms of places to go. Both of them have great startup scenes, talent hubs and whatnot. Little bit less expensive.

You know, after that you re you really. It depends what you're looking for personally and what you're trying to do. Like are you going to have an in office culture? So if you're trying to build a team of 250 people in an office building, AI working on tech, you might not want to move to Boise, Idaho or Fargo, North Dakota. Right. If you have plan to have like a distributed kind of team all across the US or all across the world. And you're trying to optimize for, you know, cost of living, you know, Runway. Yeah. It's like close distance everywhere, like short flights, wherever you want to go. So you don't have to do any cross country flights and stuff like that. You want people working across all time zones, then you have to think about those, those kind of things. But you know, to me there's really like four major cities that make sense and that's San Francisco, Austin, New York and Boston. I don't know how anybody could argue with those four. And there's lots of other ones that you know, to me would be kind of a tier below.

Like I think you could do Seattle, I think you could do Atlanta also Chicago maybe. But you know, again the. I, I agree with Scott. Those are sort of the places you'll probably end up. And, and, and I agree with him that are you going to have an in law office culture or a remote culture because that opens the door dramatically in terms of where you decide to go because then you can make a lifestyle choice to some degree.

But I'm not sure how much it matters anymore. That's the interesting thing.

Yeah, that's a good point to be.

Like, if you want to raise money, you better move to San Francisco and everybody move to San Francisco. It's not that way anymore.

You know, damn near every like mid major metropolitan area has a cluster of venture capital. Yeah. Folks and universities and you know, a lot of people have left places like New York and California. Right. A year or so ago everybody was like Miami is the place to be. That's going to be the new like hub. All the startups are going to Miami.

So you've got, you've got people who've kind of made their money and made their mark in California or New York or place. And now they've left and gone, you know, elsewhere. So access to these folks is just a lot easier now with normalized. I mean you could raise money over zoom. You don't have to fly.

I was gonna say you don't have.

To fly to San.

You're more open to it.

San Francisco to go to Sand Hill Road. Just you know, so.

Right.

There's a lot of, there's a lot of questions I guess that you just ask.

What do I want my company to, to kind of be like, and what makes me and my co founders like happy? What are we looking for?

Yeah.

Right.

I think, I think there's a, there's a point of like to the point of what makes you happy and then talent and I think the talent is, is now democratized and dispersed. Right. It was harder to find that talent, you know, for Google and you know, you know, you know the cool thing about a Bay Area or you know, an Austin or New York or Boston is that there are people who do want to leave the big companies and go take their shot and take their moonshot. And so there's value to having a little bit of close proximity, particularly at an early stage, you know, but you know, you don't have to sort of look at like talent as a big driver. Like I think a big piece came, people came to the Bay Area. A that's, you know, Sandhill Road, Silicon Valley, that's where it started, has the legacy. But I also think that's where the talent was, you know, and just like everything else that's now democratized more.

Unless like I said, you want to have a 100% in office culture and you're planning to hire 250 tech workers, you're going to have a much harder time doing that in small town middle America.

Yeah, totally.

Than somewhere else. Right? Oh good.

Food for thought.

Yeah, yeah. I appreciate you getting up early and spending some time with us, Alex. Tell everybody real quick where they can get a hold of you and learn more about grow and tailor the AI and what you're up to.

Sure. So grow AI is GRW AI and for folks who've listened to this and want to want to give it a go with their team, you know, either reach out to us on the website or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Alex McNaughton and happy to give give you a trial to experience it for yourself. So yeah, and the best place to find me probably is. Probably is either LinkedIn or, or.

Yeah, or, or Twitter, which I'm less active on but you use a little bit.

Cool, sounds good. Do we even have to say LinkedIn anymore? Where should you find me? You know where to. Yeah, I feel like we have to. We've, you know, we've been, we've been coached by the machine to tell you.

Talk to are familiar with it.

Yes.

There are people out there who don't use it though.

Right. They probably don't listen to us either.

That's also true. That's also true. Thanks so much Alex.

Thanks Richard.

Good to see you. We'll see everybody next time on the Surf and Sails podcast. Cheers everybody.

Thanks having me on guys.

See everybody.