Everything Marketers Are Panicking About Right Now

All right. So right now there's this big panic with AEO right now. People are panicking about AEO. SEO budgets are going down overall. And this guy, Eli Schwartz, I know, well known in the SEO space. He tweeted this, says the AEO panic is the best thing that happened to SEO budgets in years. Every CMO right now is trying to figure out who owns AEO. Good. Let them fight about it. For years, SEO got stuck to reporting to marketing, treating like finishing department on assembly line structure. Never made sense because real SEO lives inside the product. You know what's interesting, Neil? When I worked at a few companies doing SEO early in my career, actually when I first met you, I think I was 24 years old and I would sit with the product people and they would treat me like a piece of garbage, right? I was on the— I was the SEO strategist sitting in product meetings and helping with the product, right?

Yeah.

And I thought I was helping with product. They, everything I said, they waved me off like I was garbage and I loved it. But point is, I think now the way, even, I don't know if you're seeing this with your outbound, but when we reach out to people for outbound for AEO, everyone's like, yeah, we definitely need AEO. We have our SEO agency for this. Yeah, but we need AEO, AEO. So let's talk about this AEO panic right now.

Well, let's first go back to the product thing that you mentioned in which when you first started doing SEO for companies, you would have to deal with product. We found something similar for most of the tech companies, like the tech startups, the ones who grew, became unicorns. For traditional businesses like a Procter Gamble or a Unilever, we don't see that and we've never seen that. But even today, we still see a lot of SEO sitting under product for really tech-focused companies that are engineering-led and product-led.

And just to be clear, this is me working at a company that was engineering-led, just so everyone knows. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I figured that as well once you said that. We haven't at this moment, because we get enough leads globally. Our leads are down like everyone, but the quality of the leads are higher. And what we're seeing right now is we're not really seeing a shift in SEO budgets yet. We're seeing AEO budgets increase. We're not seeing AEO budgets being massive yet because every single enterprise business and even most S&Bs and mid-market businesses, they all ask the same question, track the ROI.

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

And you and I both know this, dude, when people search on, you know, ChatGPT or Gemini, majority of the times they're not clicking on over. They're just either going directly to your website or they're Googling your name, brand name, and then clicking on your website. But the conversion is really AI-assisted or heavily AI-driven. The tracking is just very difficult. Even with SEO, the tracking is not perfect either with it.

Yeah. So when, by the way, when we say what the AEO panic is, when we are fielding these calls or what, let's say we're talking to marketing executives, it's more so the AEO panic is, oh my God, our competitors are ranking so well on AEO. They have so much more share of voice. What do we do? What do we do? And then when they get on a phone call with you, it's like, yeah, you know, don't worry. We got the SEO stuff covered. Right. And, but it's like AEO. And then we're like, okay, so to your point, how are you supposed to track success on this? Oh yeah. We just want more share of voice, more share of voice. I'm like, great. So you have no idea how this, this, this ties in with your ROI. Right. And so.

Yes.

But it also doesn't help. Like if you're selling this stuff, it doesn't help you to say, oh, AEO and SEO go hand in hand and SEO is still very much the foundation. They don't want to hear it. So the panic is right now, this is this new thing and it seems like they— but they don't want to accept that they're really, they're still very tightly together.

We are seeing a shift in it. A lot of our pitches were pure GEO focused because customers wanted it to be pure GEO focused. We're seeing right now if we don't incorporate technical SEO in the GEO pitches, we're much more likely to lose it and we're seeing it in our data. We're also seeing customers having confusion in the whole space, kind of like SEO, you know, 15, 20 years ago, in which companies are coming to us and they're saying, yeah, can we just, you know, so when you're quoting them and you're creating a proposal for them and a presentation and breaking down what you're going to do, They're just like, can we just pay a tool like Profound and it just does it for me and we pay, you know, $1,000 a month or $50,000 a year or whatever their pricing is? And I'm like, have you looked at Profound? They're like, yeah, you know, it'll track our mentions on these LLMs, compare it to the competitors, look at the sentiment and it also helps you get mentioned. And I was like, so how does it help you get mentioned there? And I've used the tool so I know.

Mm-hmm.

And they typically say, oh, it can help you create articles and you can just publish them on your website. And it's like, cool. So if everyone can publish listicles on their website, because majority of the time they're thinking listicles, if everyone can publish listicles on the website, is that easy for you to do or hard for you to do? And they're like, it's pretty easy. I'm like, yeah, even AI helps you with that, right? They're like, yeah. So if everyone can do this, how well do you think this strategy really works? And they're like, oh, good point. I'm like, this is like SEO back in the days where you just put keywords on your page and then you magically rank.

Yeah.

And if you also look at the the different versions of flavors of ChatGPT or Perplexity or any of these LLMs, they go through waves in which a percentage of their time, like I was with the Writesonic founder, Sam, and he had some data on one of the, a few of the different models of ChatGPT, but it went from ChatGPT barely looking at your website to the commands being roughly 20% that they're doing site: commands. So they're looking for content on your website to then they're getting reduced. So it goes through waves, but the max— you know, that he's seen it from the data that he presented to me was roughly around 20%, which means roughly 80% of the time they're looking for content on other people's websites to determine who should be mentioned for what keywords or prompts in what regions for when, right? And that means just, oh, I'm going to use Profound. And I'm not trying to talk trash on Profound, but it's the misconception that customers have Like, oh, I'm trying to use Profound and I'm just going to create some AI articles and boom, this is solved. I'm like, good luck. It's just like saying SEO is about putting keywords on your page and doing technical SEO and you'll rank for everything. Just create 10,000 pages around this keyword.

That's why a lot of people are saying that when you— software alone is just one piece of it, but this is why services and software are converging where you'd still need the human in the loop. Even if you're running like one of our creator agents, Picasso, it can spin up a bunch of ads, but it doesn't matter if it's still crap. If you're just spitting out a bunch of slop, it doesn't matter. Same thing with, same thing with the written content, whether you're using something like a Writesonic or using something like a ClickFlow, right? You still need a human in the loop.

Yes.

But this is interesting to me. I actually pulled this up from Seer Interactive. So they're showing that ChatGPT 5.5's fanout patterns reveal the importance of brand. So brand is playing way more into AEO.

Yes.

And thank God we've been creating content for a while now. And so Will Reynolds tweeted this, but he's basically saying because you have more query fanouts now, meaning that when you're searching in ChatGPT, it'll show you like, hey, these are the 15 queries that we use. Now it's maybe up to 30 or so. Same thing with Google. What it's showing now is it's, it's, it'll show your YouTube, right? It'll show it's, by the way, YouTube showing up, I think in 25% of searches or something like that now, a lot more than before.

For ChatGPT? Not ChatGPT, Gemini.

Just Gemini, yeah. Yeah. Or just search in general. But this, I mean, there's a lot in here, but the thing that you need to keep in mind now is that LinkedIn is getting cited. It'll look at your Twitter as well. It'll look at your YouTube as well. So it's no longer just an SEO thing. It's actually good that everything's kind of converging a little bit.

Yeah, and it's becoming where what is said about you on the whole web matters more than what's said about you on your own website, which makes it actually, in my opinion, harder to manipulate in the long run. The second thing is companies that focus their marketing on 1 or 2 channels will lose in the long run compared to companies that take an omnichannel approach. Even a multichannel approach is better than just taking one or two channels, but ideally you want an omnichannel approach.

Yeah, I'm just looking at this. This is interesting because Will Reynolds likes to say, well, if you want more query fanouts, you have to build more fans. And I'm like, okay, so people care about the fanout level, which means that doing podcasts like this, the reason why, you know, we spend the time to, you know, meet in person to do this podcast, one, it's— we're on YouTube, we get more clips as well. But speaking at conferences, okay, that helps too. Social media, all these things that were harder to measure before is now it's converging more now. And so it's, but here's what they're calling out, which we might disagree with. He's like, notice that we aren't seeing the usual suspects here with the listicle strategies. I still think they kind of work right now, but I do think they're getting abused still. So I think they're getting more and more, less, you're seeing less effectiveness, but they still work.

Yeah, we did an interesting analysis internally on our leads from GEO versus SEO for the people who are looking for different service items. What budgets do you think are higher, SEO or GEO?

GEO.

We are actually seeing the opposite of SEO.

Really?

What do you think the difference is if you had to guess?

It's large.

In terms of large.

It's large. 100, 150%?

It's around 11x of a difference.

Wow.

So SEO budgets are still around 11x difference higher than GEO. And I'll tell you why. When you look at most local searches, do you believe they do local searches mainly on a traditional Google search or they're doing it more on ChatGPT?

Traditional Google.

Yes. Yeah, we're seeing the same data as well. I'm not saying that can't change over time, but still people are using Google for traditional local searches. And the majority of the people who are optimizing for LLMs and going really aggressive, we're seeing them to tend to be enterprises. Enterprises have massive SEO budgets because it's been consistent.

It's been easy. It's also understood.

It's understood.

Yeah.

They've been doing it for a long time. They have big SEO teams. GEO, whether it's mid-market, SMB, or enterprise, I don't, it's, and I don't believe this is going to continue in the long run, but the biggest pushback we get isn't that they should do it. They understand everyone uses these LLMs. Like that's obvious. You don't even have to convince them on that. It's again, goes back to the ROI question. So people are just really hesitant. I'm not saying you can't get $50 grand or $100 grand or even $200,000, $300,000. It is very hard to get LLM budgets to be $1 million plus at this point for GEO right now. I do think that'll change in a few years.

So here's what I'll call out too. So this, and then we can move on. So they're basically, he's testing out agency queries. Okay. So like what's the best PPC agency or whatever. So who shows up alongside Siirr? Is this Eli? No, this is now Will Reynolds. Okay, Will Reynolds. Yeah, so you got SEER plus iPollRank that shows up the most and then Amsiv, Profound, Mike King, NP Digital is number 5 on this thing.

For what type of queries?

It's like, what's the best type of PPC agency?

Is it specific PPC or?

I think it's, he was trying like a handful of these and Okay, so he said here, implied, okay, these are 2 brands treats Sears' peer set in this prompt. Talk about agencies. Okay, yeah. So the agencies, the only agencies I see here, Neil, in this top 10 is you have Brainlabs, Tenuity, MP Digital, and No Good. So there's like 4 agencies here and maybe 5, 6, Emsiv, iPollRank.

iPollRank is agency.

iPollRank is Mike King, who creates a lot of content, and Lily Rae is Emsiv. So, yeah, so that, I think their posting helps the agencies. Got it.

Well, iPollRank is an agency.

Yeah, correct.

And then Seer, was Seer in the list or not?

I mean, this is Seer plus like who shows up alongside Seer like most of the time.

Oh, got it.

So 26 of 26 times it's going to be iPollRank and Seer, and then 23 of 26 times it's Seer plus Ansip. So you have Mike King and then Lily Rae, and then you have Profound, which is number 3, which is interesting.

Yes, Profound is going for the done-for-you, we Even though they're not an agency, they will help you with all the LLM stuff.

I think eventually they're all going to just become services. Like, I think AirOps does some services too. I think Profound is going to have to do it because whenever, same thing, same conversations that you're having when people are like, oh yeah, you know, we're about to sign up with Profound as if it's going to like, they're going to solve all their problems, right? And again, I'm not saying Profound is a bad tool. I think it's a great tool, but it's like, yeah, we're about to sign with Profound. Like, I think we're covered there, right? I'm like, are you?

So And we're also seeing a huge shift with customers of all sizes not wanting to pay the same amount that they used to have to pay for LLM tracking. They're like, this is expensive. A lot of people now have these features.

I think it's just giving it for free.

And it's fraction of the price. Who's the one who gave it for free? Was it Amplitude who released a free version?

Yeah, but it wasn't that good. Yeah.

We have a free version of it, but it's limited because the costs are just so high.

Yeah. But I mean, Profound has a good dataset, so that's why people go to it as the kind of the main one?

No, it's not the dataset. I think they have the brand recognition. The dataset is you're just going and crawling anytime people put in prompts.

I'm saying that from hearing from other SEOs that have used a bunch of different ones. They're just like, the data's cleaner and it's better. So when I've used it, I was like, I couldn't tell the difference if I'm being honest myself. But what I hear from a lot of SEOs is like, it's higher quality.

So we've tested out all the tools. We've paid for majority of these LLM tools, including Ahrefs, SEMrush, negotiated on it. When people say Profound's dataset is cleaner, what people don't realize is if you sign up for Profound, their team will set up everything for you. And then within 24 to 48 hours, you start seeing reports. The big difference from what we see isn't the datasets, it is how thorough they are in tracking. So if you have a good agency, And they set it up for you no matter what tool you use. The data is pretty much the same.

Yep. One thing I want to talk about here is you have— did you see that talk with— you like CNBC. Did you see the Alex Karp from Palantir earlier this week?

I did not see it, but it was going viral on Twitter and I did not read about it on Twitter either, other than I saw David Sacks and a few others.

Mark Andreessen. He just responded today. Yeah. So, okay, here, let's talk about it. I'll give you some context here. So The real question is who controls your AI marketing stack? Okay, so when you have Anthropic that just updated their Claude design yesterday and they told Figma they're only going to have a basic version of it, and now it's like, it's pretty damn good. And Figma is like, what the heck? Or when you have Anthropic saying that they're about to get into drug discovery and all these things, right? What ends up happening, what David Sacks is saying is that if you don't have any AI sovereignty where you start to give all of your context and all of your data to these companies, then What, like, ultimately, you as a company, me as a company, we want to have our data protected, right? You need to have some type of— you need to feel secure. You need to have some type of sovereignty from these models out there. Because if they— if you start to give them everything, then they're just going to start to build whatever they want, right? Same thing like, oh, Harvey, which is that legal company that raised a bunch of money. Oh, Anthropic is now legal as well, right? And so the thinking here is that Alex Karp was just saying, look, you know, these are great models. These frontier models are great models, but they did a partnership with Nvidia. So Palantir and Nvidia, and they want to have these really open models. Yeah. models, right? And so there's been talk about how GLM 5.2 is really good. It's like Opus 4.8 level, right? Which is, as of right now, these are the really good models aside from Fable 5. But again, like with— I'll give you another example here. Claude released something called Claude Tag, right? So Claude Tag allows you to chat with your Claude inside of Slack, for example. You can have different connectors. The problem with that is once you come off of it, you've already fed all that context to Claude and they get to keep it. you don't get to take it with you, right? And then there's— they have limited connectors. You have to use their expensive models and things like that. So you don't have sovereignty versus if you start to put some of your stuff on open weights, then you save a lot more money, plus you get to control your stack and then you don't need to worry about anybody coming in to start a competitor against you the next day. So that's why I think AI sovereignty is not just important for your marketing, but also important for your business too, because you don't want to feed them all your data. Yeah.

And the screwed up part about Figma, I was skimming the David Sacks post. It was either yesterday or the day before, I believe their product person was on the board. Anthropic's product person was on the board of Figma.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, he left 3 days before, I believe it was 3 days before they released their version of a Figma competitor.

That's so bad.

That's bad. And I'm not saying the product person intentionally did it. Figma's— Anthropic's a big company, so it could have been someone else working on it. But I do understand the issue here. I believe what we're going to end up seeing a lot of marketing data is on the cloud. You're seeing it in either AWS or Google's cloud or Microsoft's cloud. I believe they'll come up with solutions that'll help companies make decisions based off their data and not use the data for anything else.

Mm-hmm.

Because your data's already in some of these cloud environments and they're not using your data to learn from or do sketchy stuff, at least from my understanding. And companies already trust Google, they trust Amazon, they trust Microsoft. really easy places to plug in and be like, oh cool, you'll allow us to, you know, get access to your data, make decisions from it, and we don't have to worry about people stealing it all.

Yeah.

And they all have NVIDIA chips.

So Microsoft actually launched something yesterday where they're putting 6,000 engineers against it and it's called the Frontier Company or something, but $2.5 billion invested and it's all to help people deploy. And one of their key tenets there is, hey, we're not— your data is your data. We're not going to build on top of it. And that's really important, right? Because if you're spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars on this stuff, it's important. And when we talk the people on the single brain side for these managed deployments, that's the number one question we get asked a lot. Hey, do you guys own the data or do we own the data? And we say, no, you own the data. We'll compound with you. You get to own your memory and we'll build with you, right? And they're like, oh, okay, sounds good. Yeah.

Yeah, no, people don't want you to own their data. When I saw the David Sacks X-Post, I literally sent a message to my team, be careful what we're sharing with OpenAI and Anthropic.

Yeah, it's big. Like, and don't get me wrong, I use it all day and it's my default, but I just, I trust it less and less. And then you see like OpenAI is like, oh, considering giving 5% stake to the US government. And then you see now the government's controlling, you know, it's like export controls. Like, oh, this model can't—

Open models.

Yeah, you can't launch this one. It has to be slow launch. And then Fable 5 came back, but it's a nerfed version. Like I was using it the other day and it found some security vulnerabilities in one of my things where I was like, hey, do security sweep, right? Once it found it, because it talked about, used the keyword security, it bumped me back down to Opus 4.8. Right. And so these things are— I'm just like, you know, it's becoming a little dicey to the point where you want to have your own sovereignty. So having your own NVIDIA chips or having and then using these open weights, it's going to save you a lot of money. And I think you can sleep better at night and it's going to help with your marketing too, because, you know, someone else doesn't have your data and they can't just steal your messaging. So yeah.

And I believe all of this is just going to cause NVIDIA to grow even more.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, there's a thinking I was listening to Gary Tan and Naval on a podcast today and it's like, oh, I think Gary, apparently Y Combinator did some math on this saying, oh, maybe this stuff is still 90,000 times more upside to human usage with these things.

90,000 times?

90,000x. And I'm like, that's a lot. So anyway, I don't know how that pans out, but I do believe that we're still in like the first or second inning right now.

Yeah, I think it's really early.

Yeah. So anyway, I mean, that's how I'm thinking about it. I mean, Like when I sit in these AI chats, like we're all talking about GLM. You can use OpenRouter for this, by the way. So if you want some AI sovereignty, you can sign up for OpenRouter. You can sign up for GLM 5.2. It's like 5 to 10 times cheaper than using like a Claude. I still just, for myself, I just buy a bunch of Claude Max and OpenAI subscriptions for myself. Then I go to town on it. I just keep switching the keys. But for your company, if you want predictability there, I would say you can do that. And then I am prepared to start paying API costs again for Fable 5, because as of next Tuesday, it's going to switch back to usage only. And then I made a little video game the other day. Did you see that?

No.

Dude, I made this video game where it has like, have you played like Age of Empires or StarCraft or any of those games?

No, I played back in the day. Do you remember Star Wars? It was like a podracer where you have Anakin Skywalker on like a little Not a race car. What do they call them?

Like the—

The pods? The pod racing. Do you know what I'm talking about, Noah?

Dude, you play the most garbage games, man. I saw this guy playing like Fruit Ninja before and all this stuff.

No, you never seen me play Fruit Ninja.

I have seen you play Fruit Ninja.

I've never downloaded Fruit Ninja.

Fruit Ninja, okay.

No. Sudoku, yes. Monopoly, yes.

This game here, I'm going to— here, Neil, just take my phone. I'm going to explain it as Neil's looking at it. So that's basically like a city, right? That's dummy data and it shows your city and what's on fire in your city and what needs help and what needs attention. And then you can basically create quests for your employees to take on and you can award bonuses for those quests.

Is this real data of your company or this is just like—

That was dummy data, but I just added real data as of this morning. And then now like it's building right now and I'm just like, okay, well some stuff I want to keep private from like some people in my company, but I, so maybe I want to shade it out, but then I want to give them quests and then maybe a quest is repeating and you can award them in stablecoins and smart contracts, right? You can award the money, you can escrow the money and it just award them. But then imagine the world can just grow, right? And then you can have other, maybe I want to trade with your business or maybe someone from your business, needs extra work and then they're working on quests in my business, right? So my point of saying this is that these models are so strong where you can start to make previously stupid things like this that actually can help your company because if you gamify the company, it actually makes it fun and you can see who's doing a good job and who isn't doing a good job. So anyway, that was a little tangent for me, but yeah, it's only gonna get crazier.

You should make the fire bigger in the game so people can see it.

Like burning? You know, when I open it, I'm like, it's actually on fire.

Oh cool.

It's moving and then you can see people moving around and stuff and then you can, the ones, the stuff that's going Well, you see gold coins coming out of it.

Yeah, you should see who's working on putting the fire out and you can create a little character that's throwing water against it if they're actually working on it.

Or like, let's say your character becomes really more powerful, you level up in the company, right? You start to look cooler and cooler with your gear, right? And so I think there's a whole thing because I looked into this. Do you know how much World of Warcraft was making at its height, like per month? Profit or revenue? Revenue.

I don't know, like $500 million, billion dollars a month?

Wow, it's a good guess.

So this is a massive company.

World of Warcraft at its peak was making $180 million a month. And so I'm like, one day when I have more time for this, if you make a World of Business, WoB, instead of WoW, I'm like, how much is that gonna make? 'Cause you're charging at World of Warcraft, you're charging $12 a user per month.

Was that it? Because didn't Microsoft buy Activision Blizzard for like, $80 billion or something crazy.

They did, but that was when World of Warcraft was already like out.

Oh, so they have more games than just Warcraft.

Way more games. Yeah, they have Call of Duty. Um, they have, yeah, a lot of franchises.

I just know Activision Blizzard as Warcraft.

Yeah, well, no, Blizzard's also Diablo. It's also StarCraft.

Diablo is the game Elon plays?

Yeah, yeah. So he plays Diablo 4. But anyway, all that to say is, um, I want to say something real quick. I noticed something. I've, from a recruiting standpoint, because we're still talking about AI, I've been talking more and more about this forward-deployed marketer. And I don't know if I explained it well here, but I've been posting and these posts didn't get a lot of reach on LinkedIn, but I've had a handful of people from large companies reach out saying, and these people are like, these are, you know, companies doing billions a year in revenue, right? And some of them were leads for Single Grain. And they're like, hey, you know, after 20 years of working at so-and-so multi-billion dollar company that everyone knows, I like what you're doing right now. I want to come work with someone at the, you know, talking about the front end, right? Like at the frontier. And then I was talking to someone else. He's working 15 years at this company doing billions a year. And his comp is like, let's just call it like a million a year or something like that. And then he's like, yeah, I know I'm probably going to have to take a cut if I work with you. I was like, yeah, you are. And then, and then, but he's like, but I want to, I want to be in the next wave or whatever. And then all that to say is these people are so motivated. But then the challenge is I almost have 2 companies right now. This is where I'm going with this. I have one side where everyone is super motivated, having fun, and just cranking all the time, right? Because they want to crank. And then the other side, it's a lot of, I don't have the time for this. I can't do it. Oh, it's— I'm too overwhelmed. And but the other, the side that's super cracked out, they see the other side.

Wait, is it 2 different companies or 2 different cultures?

2 different cultures. 2 different cultures. So you have one culture that's super, super AI native, super AI build. You have the other one that is like, You know, you start— when you start to hear the clients that work with them, right, you start— I just asked my Gong, like, what are they saying? Not proactive enough, right? Not coming up with strategies, not fast enough, right? And that's a cultural thing. And that's why I keep harping on this AI-native piece thing, because AI-native for us means it covers all 4 of our core values: be a relentless learner, be biased to action, be unreasonably resilient, make bold long-term bets. If you're not AI-native, you violate all 4. And so, The challenge right now, and I'm seeing this in these CEO chats too, that these people have thousands of employees, they're seeing the same challenge. And then when we have new people coming now, they're just like, dude, Eric, like I've seen the training stuff, I've seen the committee stuff, it doesn't work, right? I'm like, so what do you do? It's like, you know, I'm a fan of not trying to keep trying to fit square pegs into round holes and just make— it's better off if we find them a better spot to work at. And that's what I'm seeing. I don't know what you're seeing.

Yeah, either people culturally want to embrace it or they don't. It's too hard to get people to embrace it who don't want to. It's just, if you—

All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com/eric. Joel.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side.

Don't have a role for them, switch them out, as cutthroat as that sounds. And do you want to know why your forward-deployed marketer is gaining traction right now?

Why?

Because so many people are funding money into forward-deployed engineers.

Engineers, exactly.

Billions and billions of dollars. Anthropic is doing it, OpenAI is doing it, Microsoft's doing it. I think you just mentioned Microsoft today is $2.5 billion. A few of the private equity funds have been jumping on board as well. It's just, you know, everyone's just like, oh, companies are going to struggle to integrate this. Let's spend a lot of money. These are their new versions of Accenture or McKinsey or Bain, but they actually do more hands-on stuff. And yeah, and then on a side note, did you see Accenture stock? It's been taking for a while.

Yeah, I've been watching. I was wondering if you looked at it.

Yeah.

But dude, so one thing, one of our mutual friends, Syed, likes to say that AI is IA, which is intelligence amplifier. But I also think AI is TR, which means truth revealer. Never has it been easier for me to have like informational density or the informational advantage where I can see everything in the company, right?

Yeah.

And so if I try to hide from you, you smell it from a mile away. And like you already probably have a good nose because you've been doing entrepreneurship for a while, right? But now it's like probably 10 times faster. You can just get to the point. And so I think this is more for anybody. Like one, if you're super AI-pilled and you want to be a forward-deploy marketer, we're hiring. So is Neil. Neil's hiring too. But I would also say that if you're not down for that and you're working at a company right now and it's uncomfortable for you, I think you should find something else. I think you should find something else that fits you because it's better for you and it's better off for the company as well. Don't make it hard for the company. Don't make it hard for you. And I think if you run a company right now, it's hard to rip off the bandaid, but you're better off putting people in a better place. So.

Yeah, we're seeing AI, one of the biggest disruptions it's causing to marketing that people don't talk about too much is valuations of agencies.

Hmm.

So some agencies that are very AI-centric have extremely high valuations, which I don't believe will last. I don't see a service-based company, people could disagree with me. There's some AI-forward ones that have been trading for over 30 times profit. I think that is very excessive for you know, AI-forward marketing type of company. And the very traditional ones who haven't adapted, their valuations are getting cut. And a lot of people in AI right now, they see the opportunity as, hey, how do I take this technology and implement it in an organization? Which definitely is an opportunity and is a massive one that people should focus on. But another opportunity that a lot of marketers and agencies aren't focusing on is, Oh, there's a lot of marketing agencies that generate a lot of revenue, have lower margins. Their growth has slowed down because of AI and they haven't adapted. I can pick these companies up for maybe 2 times profit on the front end and do an earnout, and they may not, you know, make a large chunk of the earnout. So net-net, you may have paid maybe only 3x profit for a very stable company that has low churn. And that you can fix, and maybe your net cost after you fix it is 1.5 times, you know, EBITDA, which is just dirt cheap. You can arbitrage that with bank money all day long.

I think it's the euphoria right now that's with this. There's a lot of euphoria around 4 deployed engineers right now, for example, and thank God to Palantir for putting that out there. And—

I didn't know they're the ones who came up with that.

Yeah, they're— but they have a different version. I think it's become like this new, like people just morphed it in, like growth hacker, they've morphed it into their own definition, right? So that's why when I say 4-deployed marketer, a 4-deployed marketer is someone who's a really smart marketer, that's a good strategist across the board, T-shaped, deep in one area, go across, but they can speak strategy. Like I tend to think that you and I, when it comes to marketing, we can kind of talk around the, like almost any subject around marketing, right? But I think when you're working with other engineers, you're paired with an engineer, you can build solutions that compound. The key thing with a 4-deployed marketer is you build it for these clients and you have your own book of business, but then you bring those learnings back to the product team, And you say, hey, I'm seeing this over and over, we need to productize this. And then you just keep scaling the scaffolding. And then, and then like, by the way, when we talk to, because these single brain deployments right now, when I talk to the clients, because it's my CTO and I, we're on these calls, right? The difference is it's constantly like, oh, this is amazing. Oh, this is so good. How do you do more? This is great. Can we do this? Can we do this? Oh, hey, can you add this person into this Slack? Can you do this over? It just, it grows, right? Same thing with ClickFlow too, right? It's when we talk to customers there, oh, this part's broken over here, but this is really good right now. I love it, man. You move over to client services side, not fast enough, not proactive, not this. And I'm not saying that's like that across the board, but you don't hear those complaints in this new area. And my point of saying 4D play marketer too is you need someone who's humble, hungry, smart, that can scale with this stuff. It's not for everyone.

Yes.

Yeah.

And generally your comment on hungry, if you don't find people who are hungry in all positions, they tend not to work out unless you want mediocre results.

You know, you know what I'll say? So think about this in your org, right? I think I would venture to say 99% of the people that we hire, both you and me, I'm speaking for you, you can push back on this, are nice people, right? Yeah.

Okay.

I would say most of them are humble. We tend to find hungry people, but sometimes like what I'm seeing with AI stuff right now, because it's an intelligence amplifier, the smart piece is a little more difficult recently. I'm only talking about the last 12 months or so.

I think it depends what kind of roles.

Yeah, it does. I'm only talking about marketing roles in digital marketing, for example.

No, no, I know, but what kind of roles inside digital marketing?

I'm talking about, let's say you have people that are client-facing and these are people doing the work. So they're the strategists that are also kind of account managing.

Yeah. Usually for us, people who are client-facing aren't doing too much of the work. We've never really had account managers being the ones who do the work. We found that it doesn't work well with enterprise. That strategy does work well with SMB and mid-market though.

Yeah. So we, my whole take, like these new people that we're bringing in, like they're used, some of them are used to that model and I'm like, I'm here to just, you know, we're going to try to flip that model around. Because my whole thing is if you have a book of business, you don't need a ton of clients. If we're talking about scaling these exponentially, 5 to 10 per person, right? And that's all they need to handle. Then they should theoretically, like when you did ACS consulting back in the day, okay, and when I was consulting back in the day, I was happy to work with the customer, right? Typically they want to talk to you directly, but I do think if you're in a different environment where you have a large team helping the enterprise, you do need that layer, that account manager, but I don't— maybe there's a smaller version of that in the future. I think that's going to evolve as well. I don't know how much, but I do think it's going to evolve.

I think it all comes down to client size, but for big corporations, I don't know how much it's going to evolve. And I would say for big corporations, it's probably one of the things that's going to evolve the least. The reason being is big companies have too many complexities. So I'll use a real-life example. We have a client, one of the largest financial companies globally. Everyone's heard of them, and I think their logo's on our website, so someone could try to figure it out. They operate in so many different countries with their solutions that we have to have an account manager that's just dealing with them directly. It's too hard for an account manager to go and do the work as well, because let's say if you operate in 15 or 20 countries for this client, you have to go and get all the data from all of these different regions or countries, aggregate them, make sure the strategy is going well, everyone's aligned, and continually communicate not just with the people in region doing the work, but also with the customer. The customer doesn't want to communicate with 20+ different contacts, and in that scenario, an account manager is extremely busy.

So I agree with you. That's why I'm saying it's going to evolve, but I don't think it needs to be as big, right? And we haven't talked about how big it is, but I think when you have like a When you have a bot that sits in like the client can ask questions across all the divisions, right? I think they're going to be able to get what they need faster. And I don't think there's going to need to be as much, as many people on that team necessarily. So I think again, like I don't disagree with you. I think you need someone to manage the complexity. I think they're going to be able to manage more with less is my point. Yeah.

And we also see in marketing, working with companies varies drastically region by region. So I was with my managing director of LATAM. His name's Javi. We were in Medellín, Colombia, I don't know, like a week or so ago. And when I was chilling with Javi, we were going back to airport because he lives in Miami. So we were both flying back to Miami and then from Miami I went to LA and he was just telling me some stories of his past life and how LATAM works. Even though we've been in LATAM for a long time, I don't understand the culture anywhere near what he understands. He's a native Spanish-speaking person. He was born in Spain and lived in Mexico for a very long time. And for most of his career, he dealt specifically with Latin America. So he's like, man, I remember doing some work for Samsung and they were so happy with me that I gave my work on time. And I was like, wait, what? And he's just like, yeah. He's just like, I submitted the work on time for marketing. And Samsung emailed us and told us they're so happy with us. I'm like, what do you mean? Do you like the work quality? He's like, no, no, you submitted it on time. People don't submit work on time.

Yep.

And I was like, what? And he's like, yes, this is a lot of Latin America. And he's like, you don't understand how Latin America works. I'm like, explain it to me. So he's like, let's say, and Eric and I both don't believe in this philosophy of doing shit work, but the example that Javi gave, and I'm not saying we do shit work, is He was just giving me a generic example that if you work with a company in Latin America and your work is mediocre, subpar, they, and you take them out for drinks and events, you're much more likely to retain the contract than if you did really good work and you did not take them out for drinks and wining and dining them.

Hmm.

And I'm like, seriously? He's like, yes. He's like, that is the culture of Latin America. It's about relationships, it's how well you treat them. And he's like, a lot of times you'll go out for lunch meetings and you'll finish after dinner. The same meeting at the same place, people keep drinking, eating. They like being wined and dined. That culture, from my understanding, you know, I wasn't born in America, but I've lived here almost my whole life. I've never seen that culture in America. It's a very transactional economy where like, what's the results? What's the ROI?

Mm-hmm.

Very different in certain countries for marketing. Dude, if you and I were running a company in Latin America startup and our team was paying marketing professionals who are wining and dining us but producing mediocre results and wanted to keep those, I would want to fire my employees and fire the people doing the mediocre work. I would just be pissed.

Yeah. You know what's— as you say that, that reminds me of Japanese culture. So Japanese culture is you better do good work. You better also wine and dine us as well because it's a heavy— they drink a lot. But it's like, that's why you see the people like, Actually, Noah knows this. Noah lived in Japan, so you hear about kind of the salarymen, right? They work really hard, they don't get paid much, and then they're required to also drink out, like go out and drink and party, wine and dine with their customers. So Noah's nodding his head. So you get double in Japan, so be grateful for your Japanese employees.

Yeah, and I know from Japan, they have a saying in Japanese. I don't know what it is, but I know the US version is death by work. Yeah, like they'll work themselves to death. But I didn't know that you have to drink like crazy. We have a mutual friend, Andy Liu. You've met him a few times, right?

Yeah.

Andy lives in Taiwan, does a lot of business also with— in China and just Chinese people in general. He was just like, if you ever want money from Chinese people, you have to drink and you have to drink heavy. But he's like, but you can have someone who drinks on your behalf. I was like, what? He's like, yeah, when you're doing business, if you don't really want to drink, you can have someone who drinks for you. to build that relationship. So I'm like, wait, wait, wait, I'm networking with someone, I'm trying to build a relationship with them, they want to go out to drink. If I don't want to drink so much, I can have someone with me or pay someone to drink for me. He's just like, yeah, usually it would be someone in your organization. But yeah, that's what they expect. And I was like, I never realized that either.

Actually, when I went to Japan for the first time, this is what I told you, they knew my face because I'm yellow, right? And you're brown. It's So Neil's Indian, I'm Chinese, right? And so they're like, oh yeah, we're gonna, you know, we're so excited that you're here. Let's go. I'm like, go where? Let's go have dinner. And then everyone started getting wasted at dinner. So it was that. I'm like, what the heck is going on? So yeah. Did you see here, this chart over here? So this is from Financial Times. I'm sure you might have seen it already. Yeah, looks familiar.

Yes.

Okay, so I'm gonna read it off right here. So companies that spend more on AI also increase worker numbers, right? So change in headcount by intensity of use. So this is all jobs on the left side over here, you can see that 10.2% average increase for companies that have high AI adoption, right? And then low AI adoption, no change basically. Now, if you go to the right side, if we're talking about entry level, 12% average increase, high AI adoption companies, and then you have low AI adoption, no change. It kind of went down slightly. And then this has been months since AI adoption, about 20 months or so. Here's the caveat that I want to add. So a lot of people are saying like, oh, what's the ROI on this stuff, right? So I just want to keep in mind for everyone that This stuff didn't really start to take off until December 2025. The last week of December 2025 is when everything went parabolic, at least for me. And so it hasn't even been a year yet. I was just thinking about it this morning. I was like, dude, it's— we're only like 7 months into this, the new step change. And like, it just keeps getting crazier and crazier. So I, I don't know about you, like, I'll just speak to my experience first. I want to hear from yours. I do. I am looking for more people, definitely, especially on entry level. I'm looking for a little more because they don't come with a lot of bad behaviors. But you do need experienced people too, right? So I, for me, I do look at this as job increase for people that are AI native. Go ahead.

I was having a debate with this with a guy named Manik who is a founder or co-founder of Search Atlas, SEO tool.

Oh yeah.

And he believes that AI is going to cause massive work reduction in white-collar jobs. All right.

We should define white-collar.

So white-collar is like corporate jobs, not someone flipping burgers. Yep. I can see AI causing huge disruptions in blue-collar jobs for things like flipping burgers, but not things like repairing your roof or your plumbing or things like that, right? And I was telling him, we're seeing the opposite in white-collar jobs. I don't have good data on this. And I told him, I'm like, look dude, I'm not into AI like you. And he's talking about his mentors like at Anthropic and some of the leaders. I'm like, I don't have those people who are my mentors or anything like that. So I don't see what you see, but I'm like, we work with hundreds, if not thousands of companies globally, and we haven't seen really any reductions in headcount. The reductions in headcount we see are from people who really quote unquote just overhire. And he's talking about efficiency gains. And he used Google, I believe it was Google as example, or we were talking about Google. And what I was getting at is there's a few oddball companies like Google and Meta, or maybe Nvidia, or maybe some of the memory companies where you can just keep making more margins. And Google's the best example of this because they make so much money from ads. You don't really need a lot more people to keep making more money from your ad ecosystem.

Or you can be like Micron. You could just charge more because of supply and demand. Correct.

Which is what Google's doing, right? It's supply and demand. They're just charging more. You don't need more employees. I would actually look at those organizations, even if you take out AI, Would you agree they're bloated and they don't need anywhere near the headcount that they have in the first place? Eric's shaking his head yes.

Nodding, nodding, nodding.

Oh, nodding yes. So in those type of companies, I don't think it's an AI thing. I just think those companies are really efficient and, or could be even more efficient and has nothing to do with AI. You just don't need as many people. I was telling him, I'm like, my viewpoint is very different because if you have efficiency gains and I can at least talk to marketing or I can actually speak to engineering, but he is an engineer. I was like, Because he's saying, I don't need as many engineers. And I'm like, but we're seeing because of efficiencies, companies spend more money hiring engineers than ever before. Yes, some people are getting let go because they can't use the tools, but they need to figure out how to learn these new tools and adapt to the new times. But we're seeing a lot of SMBs hire more engineers because you can now do things you couldn't have done unless you had a million, $2 million budget. And even though each engineer is more efficient, There's a higher need for engineers because of how much more you can do at a much cheaper cost. So we're actually seeing more engineers being needed even though things can be more efficient. And in marketing specifically, you know, because all of us are in marketing, I was like, if you can do more things efficiently, companies are expecting you to either do more or charge way less. We're not seeing it where companies are like, oh cool, Oh, you can do a lot less, or you can do the same amount with a lot less employees. So we can just go and fire a ton of people in our organization. We're not seeing that come to reality. We're seeing companies adapt and expect more in this timeframe. And we're not really seeing budget cuts. We're seeing companies look for more strategy and things that require the human element more. And they expect the same amount of execution still because AI can help with a lot of the execution.

So I used to think that AI was going to take a lot of jobs, but my stance is AI is going to cause a lot of abundance. And sure, you might say, okay, do truck drivers actually want to drive trucks? No, I think they're going to be able to find better jobs, just like nobody wanted to do farming, you know, a long time ago, right? And that's changed. It used to be 98% of people are farmers and now it's like 1 or 2% maybe, and it's decreasing over time because they've automated a lot. The way I look at it now is AI is going to create a lot of abundance. There's going to be more jobs than ever. More people are going to be happier doing what they're doing. And to your point, we're hiring more engineers. I talked to my CTO.

Yes.

I'm like, we need more engineers, we need more engineers. And so the good thing, guys, by the way, X is great for recruiting engineers. It's been good for us. So we're recruiting more engineers and let's use some examples. This is why let's disprove the whole myth that AI is going to take jobs because that's BS. When you look at radiology, people are like, oh my God, radiology is, that job is dead. Once AI figured out how to handle the image tests, but there's more radiologists than ever. There's more job openings than ever. Oh, the ATM came out. Oh, tellers are not going to have jobs anymore. There's more tellers than ever because more banks ended up opening, right? The spreadsheet is going to kill jobs. That created more financial jobs than ever. And if you look at all the jobs today, 60% plus of the jobs that we have today are net new since World War II. Okay? So humans always find a way to create new abundance, new jobs, new— You look at this, by the way, you look at the toilet that you use, the air conditioner that you use, the phone that you use, the car, the self-driving car that's outside, all these things that you have, the net new jobs. Because here's the thing, if we go with the narrative that AI is going to take jobs away, then who's going to pay for all this stuff, right? Correct.

I totally agree with you. It's just like people saying, oh, AI is going to replace all these software companies. Well, these software companies are probably some of the largest users of these LLMs and all their tokens. So who's going to pay for it then? And I wholeheartedly agree with what you're saying, and I think you phrase it really well, in which AI will cause disruption to jobs, but new jobs will also be created. And you and I both feel people will eventually transition into new jobs like they have done historically over time. Yes, there may be some disruption in the short term. They'll learn new things, but net-net, there'll be a bigger demand for these new jobs than the ones that were lost. And you know what? These new jobs will pay much better than a lot of the ones that were lost. So people will have an opportunity to earn more, assuming they're willing to learn and get the education and adapt. And I think that's where the disruption comes because some people will, some people won't, but over time people will have no choice and they'll have to do it.

Yeah. You know, this is more philosophical thing and then I want to show you a chart, but one, do we agree human nature doesn't change?

Yeah, I agree.

Okay.

Well, I think human nature doesn't change when someone's really old. When they're young, it's much easier to get the human nature to change.

So I'm hoping with AI, it's going to lift everyone else up to want to create things, because I actually think at the pinnacle, humans are creating stuff, right? Like, I'm very happy creating, like Noah creates as well. When you're creating, you're in a very happy place. I think most people just haven't found their thing to create, and I think this is going to enable it, and most people are going to be a lot happier. That's what I think the net gains are, right? But people are like, oh, So, you know, I'm showing this chart to Neil right now, this AI bubble. Okay, so this is the generative AI economy revenue. Okay, so you look at the annualized run rate last month times 12, trailing 12-month actual revenue, right? And so this actually shows that the AI economy revenue is actually growing over time. And like I said, it's only been 7 months since this stuff really started to take off for broader consumers. And I don't even think it's reached a broader consumer market yet.

What's the line underneath? So the top line, the purple one is $175 billion. The one below is $110 billion. Yeah.

That's banked trailing 12-month revenue. The above is annualized run rate.

Got it.

Yeah.

So, and this is all AI revenue?

Yeah. And this is a 1.6x gap. The spread reflects the growth rate.

Got it.

Yeah. So the growth rate is actually accelerating. That's what this thing is saying. And so I like, I believe, I think it takes time for this to go throughout the organization because one company I talked to, 8,000 employees, and I asked him how many people are AI-pilled? He's like, maybe 12. I'm like, really? 12? It's probably more than that. But when we asked one of our mutual friends, Has about 1,000 employees, 1,200 or so. He said maybe 40. So this stuff takes time. And I think we're— the fact that we're talking about right now, like you're listening to this, you're probably in the top 1%. But, you know, this is going to disseminate through the economy. So I think this is a— it's a— this whole AI is a bubble thing is a nothing burger.

Dude, when I was— months ago, we partnered with a company called HighLevel. And when we first started talking to them, I think they had around 2,000-ish employees. Now they're around 3,000 employees.

Wow.

Right? It's somewhere around there. They're growing extremely fast.

Where are they based again?

They're global, but their headquarters are in Dallas. And one of the biggest things that's made them grow fast is, yes, they're great at marketing, but it's more so they've leveraged AI to build tech that helps SMBs do more and grow faster, like voice AI. So then that way an SMB, like a home service business, doesn't have to follow up with every single lead and AI can just do it for them, right? And I was using this example on the past podcast with Monique because when people talk about AI job displacement, if you're using AI correctly, you're offering a better product or service to your customers, and that's causing more demand. That causes more growth in your organization. As you have more growth in your organization to keep up with the demand, you end up having to hire more people even than when you create efficiencies with AI because you can do so many more things that you couldn't have done before. And I use that as an example because it's like, dude, you're talking in like maybe a 6-month span or somewhere around there. My numbers are a little bit off, but 2,000 to around 3,000 employees, right? It wasn't maybe as big of a jump, but it was close, like massive growth just because adding in AI and creating technology that helps businesses do better. And I believe that's what most businesses are going to experience if they use the technology Mm-hmm. But I think the biggest problem that we're seeing when people talk about AI and integrating with their organization, they try to do basic stuff, and I look at that as like table stakes. They're not trying to really— forget creating efficiencies for their employees, they're not trying to figure out how to use the technology to make their product or service better. I look at it as most people, especially in marketing, it's always about Oh, how do we just get more done? Well, it's not about how do you get more done with the same amount of time? It's how do you do better new stuff that you weren't able to do before that helps you really get a leg up on the competition when it comes to your marketing?

Yep. By the way, it just clicked to me. You mentioned Search Atlas. I, this guy and I are trauma bonded because we had one person that stole from us. It's one person that left my company, went to his, remember, stole clients, stole employees. Went to his company, did the same thing, and he was actually the one that discovered it all. So he was the one that discovered that this person was doing the same to his company, Search Atlas.

Search Atlas was doing it to his company?

This person was doing it to Search Atlas's company.

Oh, they were stealing their work.

So they did it to me, then they went over there and then they did this, they tried to do the same thing, but then they caught them and then he came back to me and then showed me all this stuff and then he didn't want to get in trouble. So yeah.

Well, I'm confused on this. Let's back up here.

So you had an employee leave She was, we put her on leave because her family member was sick and we said, hey, we'll put you on paid leave. Like, go take care of your family. We love you. We got you. Right. During that time, she was actually taking our, all of our leads. She had a VA in our channel taking all of our leads. Right. And then she picked off a couple of employees that, and then dragged it over to that.

So her mom wasn't really sick or her family wasn't sick?

A family member was sick. That was a real thing, but—

wait, wait, she was starting another business. Oh, I know who you're talking about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She started working at that company while she was still with me, took on a COO job, right? And then started doing the same thing at his company too. The only thing is, and then you can see in the channel that a couple of ex-employees were actually there. And then at the same time she was working at this new company, Search Atlas, she started to do the same thing for— she started something on the side.

And she was doing— she was working at Search Atlas while she was on leave for you?

Yeah. Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan.

That's messed up.

Yeah. Yeah.

So she's getting paid by you saying she's on leave and she needs to take care of family stuff, which was very nice and generous. And I think that's the right thing you did to pay her to go handle her family stuff.

Yep.

And instead of focusing on family, she took another job, double dipped, and then at the same time had a VA in your Slack channels and stuff trying to take your leads and create her own company.

She took leads, tried to take, tried to steal a client, took a couple of employees as well, and then did the same thing to Search Atlas. So then when I went—

Oh, she was doing to both companies?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So then when I hung out with, I met, I met Manik, you said?

Uh-huh.

I met him at HubSpot Inbound a few years later, and then him and his wife, and we're just like talking about how we're trauma bonded. So you just brought back all these memories. Yeah, so small world. Anyway.

Oh, so the same girl was taking clients from both of you at the same time. That's so screwed up. And then taking paychecks from both of you and creating her own company with all the leads.

And let me give a one lesson for everyone in this. So yes, that happened, but you might be thinking, okay, destroy this person. And that's well what's— that's a human, I think, reaction. But the right move is actually move on. Move on.

Yes.

And just get on with your business, because running your business is already hard enough. And so we just kind of gave like a slap on the wrist and we moved on, because some of my friends were like, no, you must absolutely destroy her. I was like, no, but then that would, like 50% of my attention going to that means 50% less on my business.

I know one person who really likes destroying people when they screw him over. He invested in a company in China, blew up really well, Grew up well? Like grew really fast.

Oh, grew well, grew well. Okay.

Worth a ton of money. They tried to screw him over on his equity and his investment. He's US-based. So then he created a competing company across the street and gave it away for, did similar things for pennies on the dollar, lost money there. He did it to make a point and screw the other person over and screw the other company over. And that company went from being worth hundreds of millions of dollars to literally pretty much nothing. And he himself lost money on both ends. My guess is he lost over $100 million from his shares. The guy's a multi, multi, multi-billionaire, so.

Oh yeah. He's just like making things up.

But I was like, why don't you just focus on your company? Come on, dude. You know? And he's like, no, No, you can't let people do this. I'm like, just focus on your company. And him and I were talking, he's just like, no, I'm not going to let people do this to me. But I don't know, this is just the way he is. And he also, I don't know how much he actually really works. I think he's at the end of his life cycle as an entrepreneur and has been for like 15, 20 years.

Yeah. So maybe it was just entertainment.

It could be entertainment, but that's expensive entertainment.

Yeah.

Didn't care.

But also that $100 is not, you know, there's, if he's worth billions and billions, it's still, it's still a little bit, but it's, you know.

When I say he's worth billions and billions, he can buy a sports team and if it doesn't do well, he can buy another sports team.

So that $100 is really not a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

When you can buy 2 sports teams, you really have a lot of money. Maybe I know who you're talking about.

Maybe I don't. Okay. So I want to talk, because we're kind of talking about something that's So Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, I don't know if you noticed this, but whenever he talks on CNBC or whenever he does these interviews, he never really talks about Palantir that much. He talks about, he might talk about politics a little. In this case now he's talking about AI sovereignty 'cause it's the hottest topic.

No, it depends what interview you catch of his 'cause I watch CNBC a lot and he'll tell you sometimes he'll be crazy and he usually is crazy and he talks about a lot of random stuff, but A decent chunk of the time, not majority, but a decent chunk of the time, or let me rephrase, majority of the time he talks about Palantir almost on every single appearance. It's just not the majority of the talk track. And I think that's what you probably mean.

This is what I'm saying. So because he used the way he was like, he was doing media before was he talked about Palantir, he talked about the product and the service or whatever that bores people, right? But when you start to talk about the latest topic, like right now it's AI sovereignty or like another case, it might be talking about, oh, you know, securing our defenses or whatever it is, right? So Marc Andreessen said this, my friend Marc Andreessen from Twitter. So he says, Alex Karp almost never talks about Palantir in interviews. He might talk about it a little bit, right? But he calls it the single best marketing strategy he has ever seen and then revealed a number that proves it works better than anything else in the history of investor communications, right? So what he does is he talks about the future of the US military, which is what I just said. He talks about superintelligence. He talks about whatever is genuinely interesting to him about the world right now. And because he is CEO of Palantir, the company just sits there attached to all of it, right?

Yes.

And so it's like the Seinfeld way. You talk about something that's interesting, happen to you and just you put your offer at the end, right?

But it's also related. What he talks about is related to what Palantir does, even though he doesn't talk about it.

So Marc Andreessen drops this number. So what percentage of Palantir investors have actually read the S-1? Practically zero. What percentage have seen Karp on YouTube or CNBC or whatever? Close to 100, right? So an Edelman B2B, I don't know how much you can give credit to this, but no shade on Edelman, but Edelman B2B study found that thought leadership content drives purchasing consideration more than product marketing does by a factor of nearly 3 to 1 among enterprise buyers. Karp did not read that report. He just built the playbook it describes. So here's the thing. So sure, even though the lawyer spent thousands of hours on the S-1, he is able to kind of just be out there all the time and he occupies a little bit of mindshare. Because when I think about him, I think about his crazy hair. I think about how quick he talks. I think he talks faster than me. So he talks really fast. He's like this and then he's very expressive as well. And so I'm like, oh, Pound here. He's like kind of the crazy guy that's on CNBC.

And super fit.

Yeah, he is super fit. I was thinking about that yesterday too.

Dude, the amount of skiing he does, outdoor stuff. I think someone ended up releasing, it went viral on X, his Yeah. Body scan. It's like 8% body fat.

Yeah. Well, here's the thing. He gets a lot of clips for the things that he said. That's why he had that clip that went viral, right? And then this reminds me, I look at my YouTube, it's like, you know, sure, I can talk to finance people or dating people or whatever and get all the views in the world, but at least what he talks about is directly related to his business.

Yes. Totally agree with that. And if you look at what you and I do, most of the time we talk about marketing stuff, We talk about what's happening in the industry or strategy. We don't talk about specific tactics, but I've also seen it backfire. And a prime example of this is Snap. They lost $1 billion in market cap from the launch of their Spectacles, which I believe is $2,400.

Yeah, tell me what happened.

So Evan Spiegel, right? I believe that's his name, Evan Spiegel.

Yep, yep.

Showcased the Snap Spectacles and talked about the future of Spectacles. And where the industry is heading instead of breaking down why this product costs more than Meta Ray-Bans by a lot, by magnitudes or multiples. And he didn't really break down what it does. So people are like, so you're not going to even really break down what your product does and you're just going to talk about the future and you want $2,000-something stock tank. Oh, it's $2,000?

$2,000-plus stock tank. Dude, at least, see, that's where he should copy Apple. Apple does a good job of explaining.

Yes.

Yeah.

And I think what he should have done is broke down what it does, and then, or he could have started off actually breaking down why Snap is making this investment and why this is going to be remarkable. He can then break down what it's doing right now and what it's going to do in the future iterations and where they're going with the product. He could have covered all 3.

Yep. Yeah.

So— Doesn't mean the stock wouldn't tank. I think it was a bad job of marketing.

And I also— What is their market cap now?

It's gone down a lot.

Let's look at this.

It's not that big. It's single-digit billions.

So Neil forgot to bring his iPad, guys. So let me do this for Neil. Neil, it's $8 billion.

Yeah.

$8 billion market cap.

What's the stock price at?

Stock price is at $4.84. So year to date, it's down 40%. And then if you look, at max, it's down 82% all time. So it shot up to like $75 during 2021 when everything was hot. So, Neil, there's some shocking sales quota data I have for you here. So I'm curious to see what you're seeing.

Okay.

But Jason Lemkin tweets this, sales exec quotas are up in 2026. They sort of have to be since comp OTE is up too. So per Iconocap, Their latest GTM survey quotas at top quartile startups. Enterprise is $2.25 million. Okay, that's— and then mid-market, $1.35 million, and then SMB is $750K. So again, these are the quotas, these are the targets they're aiming for. 3 years ago, enterprise was $1.8 million. That was considered aggressive. Now it's considered medium. So what he's saying here, and we can react to this, one, deal economics have shifted. So logos that were mid-market 3 years ago are now enterprise. So the GTM bar has moved up, quotas follow. Number 2, AI pipeline generation actually works. I think we should talk a little bit about this too. So companies embedding AI in marketing and SDRs are seeing 10+ point conversion lifts at the top, more pipeline equals higher quota. I think we should talk about loops as well. Number 3, hunter-farmer model came back in 2026. 65% of high performers have AEs owning cross-sell versus 49% of others. And then number 4, attainment at leaders is 85 to 90%. That's not tight quotas, that's a different operating model. So basically, I think he's saying a lot of AI enablement is happening. And he's like, if you're planning enterprise AE comp for 2026, 2.25 million quota is the new baseline, but you need to 3 to 4x the pipeline behind it. You need to have territory modeling, you need to have rep quality bar high enough to sustain 85%+ attainment, and then comp that ties to expansion. So 33% NRR or 23% net dollar retention.

So love to say a few things about this first. is one, Jason Lemkin mainly deals with B2B and software as a service. Software as a service over time has moved more into all-in-one where it does more things for you than just a feature or a specific solution that's caused these companies to be willing to charge more. The next thing is, is if you look at over time, we've seen, if you look at just the stock market and the value of companies and how much more money is being printed, buy a lot of these companies, it has continually gone up. And he did point that out. A lot of those mid-market companies are now enterprise companies, which means they have bigger budgets. And we're also seeing in this new world where it is actually more competitive than ever because of AI. So companies have to do more, they're willing to spend more. And because of that, companies are also generating more income. they're being sold more things to help them do more. But I do believe a lot of it is not just because of efficiencies, it's due to efficiencies, companies growing, and then them having to spend more to compete as well in today's world.

Yeah. And so, you know, the interesting thing is he shared a lot of stuff around their AI SDRs and how they help qualify and they help, you know, there's a lot of things you could build now like trigger-based agents, right? Where he's like, oh, you know, They raised funding, they're looking to hire like that, that those things are kind of becoming more stale table stakes. I also think that we've talked about having a deal reviver, a stalled deal reviver that can look through your pipeline and also look at lookalikes as well. Like these things are all very doable and should help with your pipeline piece, but you need to kind of have that piece. He, I mean, he, I think he said what, 3, you need to have 3 to 4x more pipeline behind it. So you need to have these things to support the pipeline generation if you want to hit this 85%, 90% attainment. And yeah, Neil's right, there's more all-in-one happening. I mean, you look at, let's use, Let's just use HubSpot as an example for fun. They have an AEO tool. They have all these other tools that I never use. Like, I just use it for my system of record. I don't know how you use it. Probably same thing, right? For your HubSpot and Salesforce, you pay for both, right?

We pay for so many different solutions. I don't know how we specifically use our CRMs because I haven't logged into our CRMs in a long time.

Nor should you be logging in. You should be headless and asking your Slack all the time, what's happening? What's happening?

What's I don't even have to do that. I get a report every single day.

From human beings.

Yes, but they're using technology. It just gets forwarded to me because I don't want to pay per seat.

But you're in a chat, right? When they send you that, you're in a chat.

No, I'm not in my corporate chat.

No, no, no, no. Your text message, they text you in a group chat, right?

My team? Yeah.

The reports.

It depends what division, not sales. We don't have a group chat for sales.

How do you get the sales report?

Email.

Email, okay, got it. Yeah, the reason why I'm asking Neil this right now is like, if he's getting these reports, I'm just imagining if it's like in a Slack channel or even an iMessage channel, then you have an ambient bot sitting in there and then Neil can ask follow-up questions because Neil always has follow-up questions, right? And Neil's going to needle you.

It's usually email or text. We have Slack and we have Teams. I don't use either really unless I had to put a refund request into Slack.

See, Neil's a boomer already.

Bank balance, financial updates, I get Monday through Friday. I don't get Saturday and Sunday. Banks are also closed Saturday or Sunday. I get Monday through Friday. Every Thursday I get global balances, but Monday through Friday I get US ones. Thursday I get US combined with every single country. And it's done currency basis. And I get comparisons of week over week and day over day. So I can see what changed and has notes on why everything's changed.

Because they know I'm going to ask a lot of questions.

Big questions.

Yeah. So should you, okay, why don't you tell everyone which reports you find to be the most helpful? Because you get a lot of reports, right? So—

No, no, no, I don't get too many reports.

Okay. So which reports do you find the most helpful? And tailor this towards maybe someone that is starting their business or earlier in their business career. So if more people can get value from it.

The bank balance one is very important, especially if you're starting off, you have to live and die by your cash. And you need to understand why things are going up and down and where there's wastage. And when you see things on a daily basis and you really look at the numbers, and I get a— I don't just get a number on a daily basis of the bank accounts, it's by division, and I can see which one's going up or down, and it has notes on why it fluctuated up a lot or down a lot. If it's just a little bit here or there, there's no notes, and I don't expect the notes for that. But this is important because it also helps you find if there's something that went wrong and you can avoid making that again. The other number that I tend to end up getting is RFP counts. So that is more of a spreadsheet of how many RFPs we're getting per region and all the countries keep track of it. It then gets aggregated. They put it in a spreadsheet for me because I just like looking at it and then charts are automatically created from it. And the reason we have to end up doing that is a lot of people speak different languages, different CRM solutions based, you know, they may not be compatible with language or they may not be cost prohibited for certain countries, right? Depending on their currency exchange. And with the RFP count, I like seeing patterns over all the years, what's going up, what's going down. And I get notified when new ones have come in and when we've lost them or when we've won them or when they go silent or when they've been sitting there too long. Because I know that, hey, I should be bugging some of these people. Hey dude, this deal's dead, or why is it not moved or whatnot? So I know who to push, especially for the big logos. And they have pricing in there on what they think it's going to roughly be. So that way I know who to really spend my time with to push them to try to win the bigger account. Another report that I get is, what is it called? Any big potential customer that we're talking to and where they're actually based. So I just get notified of that through email. So that way I know because I travel a lot or I could be willing to travel a lot.

To meet them.

To meet them, to try to build a deeper relationship and try to close them or to try to see if I should go to that city and meet up with multiple tighter people and cultivate that relationship. The other report that I get, and this one's over WhatsApp, I get notifications anytime a new product is launched and what did it do and a summary of that feature and how to test it out so that way I can just go and check it out. I also get a weekly report of, and this actual individual sends this to me, his name is Colin. He sends me the stats of the emails, how many leads are generated, how many emails did we send, open rates, click rates, and then he also sends me the next week's emails before they're scheduled so I can review every single email, at least the English ones, and then I can modify what I want modified in all of the emails.

I still go through my emails every single week ahead I think the point to call out for everyone, the reason I asked Neil this question is so you all can see that it's not just reports, it's very specific things that he can take action on.

Yes.

It's to move the ball forward every day. It's not just to have this like dashboarditis where it's like you have all this stuff that you're looking at that make you feel like you're doing something. People have a problem with dashboarditis.

Yeah, and I don't like dashboards. I really don't. I want really specific things that can help me improve the business. So dude, I was talking to my team and some of them were complaining how leads are down and I was like, okay, leads are down. So then a few of them were just like, I'm like, what are we going to do about it? Exactly.

Right? That sucks. What are you going to do about it?

Yeah. So then someone was like, well, it's not in our budget. And I'm like, who comes up with the budget? And they were telling me, you know, how they create the budgets because I'm not in any budget meetings. Like genuinely my teams meet up multiple times a year in person by divisions to go over future budgets. I don't go to any of those meetings.

Yep.

So then they tell me what they want to end up doing and I'm like, so it's not in budget. You're losing leads from, let's say, top of funnel from informational queries because that's happening to a lot of businesses because we had really aggressive capture intents to generate revenue from our informational queries with like exit pop-ups and quizzes and stuff like that, which worked really well, but those aren't as effective Because AI answers a lot of the questions for people. So I was like, all right. I'm like, for your country, how much have you optimized for LLMs and actually turned rank? I'm like, are you getting good leads from them? They're like, yeah, the leads are amazing. I'm like, of course they are. Have you done more in-person events? No, it's not in budget. That costs travel and costs all this kind of stuff. I was like, all right. I'm like, so I'll go to the regions that'll complain. I'm like, I'm going to make a deal with you. They're like, what? I'm like, we don't have a money problem. You have a budget problem. Those are 2 very different things. If we have money in account and you're not spending it, and I did the same exact framework with Brazil when I was in Brazil for Web Summit, Rio. You're telling me it's harder. We're going more upstream. You want more of them, but conferences are more expensive. Brazil, you get tax on revenue. If I bring the money to US, I face another tax, right? Because they don't have a tax treaty and it just sucks. I was like, all right, why don't you do a few more vets? It's not in my budget. Approved. If you generate revenue for it, I'm going to count the expense against your budget. So you better pick the right ones. And even though I don't count it against your budget in future years, I'm going to slowly expense this to your future years revenue.

Yeah.

Not from accounting perspective, but it has to make them responsible based on bonus And they're incentivized on this. Yes. And they're incentivized on this. And then I'm like, cool, you want to do more press, help with GEO, hire a PR company, do way more digital PR? They're like, yes, but again, it's not our budget. I'm like, cool, I'll give you a lump sum budget. What do you want? $50 grand, $100 grand? And they're like, whoa. They were like, you have to keep in mind currency exchange. I was like, whatever, in your currency because everything is cheaper. I was like, figure out what you want to spend, go hard. Over time, you're going to have to pay for that experience. expense. You don't have to pay for any of it this year, so you better make wise decisions.

Yeah.

But a lot of these problems are solvable, and the key is you want data to figure out where there's blockage or where there's political issues. I'm not talking about political issues like Trump or Biden or any of that. I'm talking about internally, as an organization grows, there's always excuses. And the reason I started asking for some of these reports is I listened to an interview, I think it was a DealBook interview with Jamie And I don't know what their profit is. You can look up JP Morgan's annual profit. It's large. And he was just like, one of the worst things that he hates hearing is, oh, we can't do this. We don't have the money or the budget. And when you look at JP Morgan, I think it's a $600-ish billion company from a market cap perspective.

$16.5 billion for the first quarter in profit.

So $16 billion a quarter in profit. Mm-hmm.

Right?

That's roughly $64 billion a year. So I'm just aggregating—

$896 billion company.

$896 billion company. Look at that. That's large. And he was just like, we don't have a money problem. So when someone says there's a budget issue or we can't do this in marketing, if things can produce an ROI and you know it, you have to just make a case for it. And the problem that I see in companies, and I see this in marketing all the time, People just go by a budget or by a number and they don't make a case on why they need more money, especially when companies are profitable. Like if I look at my organization, even your organization, you're looking at bootstrap companies. That means we're operating based on cash in our bank account. That means we have money to some extent. We don't have JP Morgan money, but we have money and we can make investments for our level and where we're at. So when people say they can't do stuff to make us grow faster because of these random excuses. It's the way they're thinking and it's just a bunch of BS.

So related to this, we have this thing now, I think I've explained it before, command through negation. So we have a mutual friend, ex-military, okay? And so in the military, if you have commanders that basically they say they can't get anything done or like they don't have the approval to get something done, it's basically, no, I will do X because of Y by Z date, date unless otherwise instructed. And so this guy, my friend who runs a company, he told the entire company, he's like, if you block yourself on something and then you don't use this command through negation directive, I will fire you. Like it was in front of everyone, right? And after that everyone's like, it's like you can't just say, oh, I'm waiting on someone, I'm waiting on the client, I'm waiting on this.

Yes.

It's like, I will do this stuff by this time unless otherwise directed, right? And you need to repeat it over and over. I found that one day, a couple weeks ago, I did it 4 times, but it felt so relieving every time I just kept saving it in the HTML Command through negation. But what you're doing too is like, I think if you stick this in front of them next time, it's like they'll know, right? But I think the lesson's already pretty clear with this one, but I've just found that having that directive and I just keep sliding in front of them each time, it moves things along and I don't have to re-explain myself on how to think about it because they're not as incentivized as you are to think about it that way.

Totally agree with what you're saying, but there's one issue that I found no matter who you end up dealing with and no matter what position they're in at You and I are entrepreneurs. Would you agree we have more aggressive personalities? Of course.

Yeah.

Hired employees tend to never— hired guns tend to never have, maybe never, almost never have as much aggressive, go-getting, risk-taking appetite as let's say the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are much higher risk-takers, hence we're entrepreneurs and we're not employees. So, those types of people balance you and I out.

They do.

But it's giving them a little bit more of our risk-taking and enabling them and just making sure that they understand if they believe it's the right decision. And what I've always found is the key to getting them to do this is, especially if it costs money, you don't have to deal with the expense in the short run. We'll deal with it later on. Yes, it'll affect you and your future budgets, but if you're so confident that it'll work, I will give you the money right now to go and spend for this.

Yeah, and I feel like this just needs to become like a skill or a doctrine where everyone, all of your divisions can just look at it whenever they run into this problem, which leads me to my last point and then we can end here and then I really got to go pee. But we ended up making a Skills Dojo, okay? So we're making it public for free. In fact, if you go to skillsdojo.com by the time of this recording, you can access it. So we're going to put all our skills out there. Neil can share all his skills out there as well. Noah can share all his skills and everyone's going to have like a little profile as well where you can see how many skills they have.

Noah can share all his skills?

Yeah, no, you can share all your skills. Everybody can share all your skills. Skills that you— yes, Noah can share all his skills. So, so—

You got the joke.

I got the joke. So everyone can share their skills. So anyway, sorry, inside joke, guys. But the cool thing is you can now see who's the most engaged in there. You can see who's good to maybe hire. We can also see Hey, who maybe needs more help? Who do we need to help, right? But I think it's really cool to have something like a GitHub and then just give it away for free. But I even look at, I look at Ubersuggest, I look at AnswerThePublic, I look at ClickFlow. A lot of this stuff is kind of going to zero and it's just like, how do you build distribution? And I think this is one of those ways. So you can check out skillsdojo.com and you can implement your skills there and you'll see how many downloads, how many forks are there and just pick them off. It's almost like a skills marketplace. That's what it is.

So It's like a version of GitHub, but for marketers.

But for skills. Yeah, for any skills, business skills, whatever it is exactly, because we find ourselves copying each other's skills, forking off each other. And my team, when I send them something, it's usually 70-80% built. But oftentimes, like they make the skill 10 times better. And so you, someone like you and me, we can make these skills all day, just pop them out and then they know what you're thinking too. So anyway, that's it for today, guys, and we'll see you tomorrow.