From Experience: Business Growth, AI Trends, and Life Lessons

You know what I want to talk about, Neil? I want to talk about how losing someone can actually completely reshape you in business.

All right.

And so this is a tribute to my mom because I lost my mom last week on a Thursday. The moment she went, there's 2 main things that happened. One, you can probably imagine, I was like, okay, fine, it's probably time to start dating someone seriously in honor of my mom, right? Because she's always wanted me to get married and have, you know, grandkids and all that for her. But 2, The moment she passed, I was like, whoa, like the way she's covered for everybody. Like, you know how a parent like will do— they'll overdo the things that—

Yes.

For their kids, right? Meaning that they'll take care of things that they shouldn't be taking care of. They'll shield you from everything. They'll protect you to the very end, right? I realized that in the past, not so much anymore now. I've gotten a little better over the past few years, but I've always done that almost as if people in my company were my friends or my family, right? And I would shield them from these things. And what's interesting is we have this leadership meeting each week. I didn't join these last 2 weeks. Right? Because of all the things that were going on. And I kind of wanted to see how the team would deal with these things. And so what happened was I have a call recorder that joins those to look for compelling content ideas. And I saw a line in it that was actually very compelling. It said that chaos is always present in the business, but it's usually the leaders that absorb it. And I was like, oh, whoa, that like, that stuck with me. It's like props to my team for observing that. But also in my mind now, I'm like, you know, I'm just, I've gotten better over the years, but I'm even more after she passed. I was just like, yeah, I'm not going to treat people the same way that I treat friends and family where I'm going to protect them and coddle them at all costs. Sure, I'm going to protect them as if they're part of the— we're part of the same team, but we're all here to perform at the end of the day. And so I think what instantly clicked for me was, or reinforced for me is like, yes, I'm going to do everything it takes to grow this business, but I'm not going to do everything I can to just be at all places at once. Because at the end of the day, I'm just one person.

Yeah, I learned something interesting from your mom's passing as well, because she did something that I've never seen before. I'm not saying it's not common or uncommon, I don't have any data on this, but your mom prepares and she prepares for the worst case, which I thought was a very interesting concept. In business and in marketing, we have so much chaos. We don't know what's going to work, what's not. Some things are bad, some things are good. Without getting into details, 'cause it's your personal life, your mom prepared for her passing. She was also in a unique circumstance where she knew eventually her time was gonna come. She planned everything out for you, your father, her husband, right? And herself to not burden anyone in your family with anything.

Yep.

And she prepared for even things like, funeral arrangements. She even prepared, and you can edit this out, Noah, if you don't want this in.

No, we can leave it, yep.

She even prepared for the eventual passing of your dad.

Yes, yes. And the way, the way that funeral was planned too.

Yes.

Yeah.

Which is really admirable and amazing for someone to think. And she didn't wanna not only burden you, her son, and the note you shared, I won't get into it, was truly heartfelt.

Yeah.

But she also didn't wanna burden her own husband.

Yep. You know, the thing is, that's actually very common in Eastern Asian cultures. So if you grow up Japanese, Chinese, or even Korean, like any of these, right? Like you just don't want to burden other people. But there is a point where— and so you can do that when you run a company too. You don't want to burden your team, but at the same time you hired your team, so you shouldn't think about it the same way. And so I've always looked at it as I don't want to burden— like if there's no extra work I need to add for Noah or yourself, like I don't want to burden you, right? Even you, when you said last week like, hey yo, like you being a friend, I'll take care of the podcast. I'm like, no, I can't burden him, right? I can't burden you in being alone. So I did literally the day after she passed, like we did a podcast together, right?

Yeah.

And so that is a thing, but I think that's great for family. I think that can be very detrimental in running a business because at the end of the day, you're hiring people to perform. And if you're just going to be there helping all the time, then people are going to be over-reliant on you. And they would love for you to do the job because they're just here to make money anyway, for the most part, right? Some people are really bought into your mission, but a lot of people, it's a paycheck, which is fine.

So I don't look at it from a burden. aspect. I look at it more for the point of mind is she thinks worst-case scenario and she plans for worst-case scenario, right? Throughout the whole process, you know, there's exciting, good moments that give you hope. There's sad moments. And she planned for the worst case and she tried to think, all right, well, if this is the worst case, anything better than that is a cherry on top. When you look at A company, the employees within an organization, or even entrepreneurs, most of them tend to be super optimistic.

Mm-hmm.

And you kind of need some optimism as an entrepreneur because the chances of succeeding are slim to none. But how many entrepreneurs do you meet, and business owners and executives that are running companies, that plan for things not going the way they want? I don't really see it. I usually see them saying, here's what our goal is for the year, this is what we're going to hit or try to achieve, and let's plan for that. But they don't really have any contingencies on if the Fed doesn't reduce rates or there's tariffs or things get worse in the economy. This is how we're going to adapt and adjust and ready for, you know, a nuclear disaster, whatever that may be in business or marketing.

I think it depends. So the reason when we did that personality test, your practicality is very high. We're like high 90s basically, right? You're like 97. I'm like 97, 98 or something like that. I got that from my mom. And I'm realizing the number of people coming to this funeral, the first time you asked to come to the funeral, I'm like, why, right? That was so weird to me. I didn't understand it, right? So I went to Thomas, who you know as well. I'm like, why, right? And he's like, no, that's like common. And then like all these other people started, I'm like, this is not even a testament to me. This is a testament to my mom, which reinforces that a lot of how you are and how I am is really just looking at our parents.

Yeah.

It's pattern recognition, right? So I think our practicality probably comes from your parents, my parents. And so I would just say for my mom, she does tend to think about what are the second and third order consequences I know for a fact for you, you've thought about the contingencies with your business. You're very protective about making sure that you don't lose your assets, right? Nor lose your ass in general. I'm the same way too. I might be a little more reckless sometimes, but I do think about the second and third order consequences. I would say a lot of people I look at with that personality test, when they're low on practical, they don't think about these things. And there's a lot of, there's crazy entrepreneurs we know. When I say crazy, I mean that they don't think about these things and they're high flying. They like, you know, they like the, They like the things more than the actual like producing things for customers, and they're a little different. That's okay. It's just not how we are. So yeah. Yeah.

I also talk to my CEO quite often at NP Digital, and he taught me something similar a while ago because when you're in the agency game, sometimes you get customers, sometimes you don't. You got to hire, sometimes economy's bad, and us being in 20-something countries, we're impacted by laws and regulations and governments from all over the world. And we can't control what people do or don't do. And he tells me probably once a quarter that when we're in some sort of situation and he's planning for it, he always assumes the worst. And it's usually never the outcome. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is so extreme. This is very unlikely. He's like, I run the ship. I have to assume the ship is always going to crash or hit something or engine's going to break and I have to be ready for whatever. And when it doesn't happen, great, that's the cherry on top, but I need to be prepared in case something bad happens, like an iceberg comes in our way and we don't see it.

Yep. And that is why CEO is the worst job.

Yes.

Because you have everything rolls up to you that you don't want to roll up to you and that's just what it is, right? So, like I mentioned earlier, just to kind of tie the bow around this, The quote I mentioned, so chaos is always present in business. I think it's not even the leaders absorb it. You get to choose if you're one of the owners of the business, you get to choose who absorbs the chaos and you have to choose wisely. And if those people can't absorb the chaos and they try to kick the chaos back to you, those people unfortunately aren't the right fit and you have to move on from them quickly.

I tend to hire executives who stress and are good at handling stress. They stress about what's happening. They stress about what isn't happening or what may happen, and they're really good at handling stress. The reason I hire people who are like that, I've noticed a trait or a trend in which those kinds of people in my organization are really good at dealing with problems and they don't put it on other people. They tend to be a little high-strung, but I like working with executives who are kind of like that because when things go wrong, like your mom passing away, and then the organization has to pick up without you. When you have people who are high strong and worry about everything, they just deal with it and they tend not to come to you with problems. They tend to come to you with solutions and they come to you with the solutions after the problem happened. And they tell you, oh, this problem happened. Here was a solution already implemented and this is what happened. And they bring it to you after everything is pretty much done.

Yep.

And it's like, those are the type of people that really help an organization.

You know, there's levels to that, right? So, there's people that don't point out the problem, then you have people who just point out the problem, then you have people who point out the problem and the solution. That's it. And then they do the— then you have the problem, the solution, and then they just do it. And then it's just like, oh, it's done, Neil. What else would you like? I plan on doing this next.

Is this okay?

Right? It's just one step after another. They're proactive. But to your point, the question I like asking people now to test their resilience, and you can't test resilience that well during the interview process, but I will— I'll be like, hey, Neil, tell me about a time when you worked your absolute hardest, right? And you might have someone that says, okay, yeah, I woke up at 5 AM and I'd work until, you know, probably 1 AM when we're doing these acquisitions. And well, why did you work so hard? Well, because I really cared and I was really involved in integration, blah, blah, blah. How hard was it really? Like, how stressed were you? Oh, on a scale of 1 to 10. Okay, maybe like a 10 out of 10. Why was it so stressful? Why did you work so hard again? Right? And then I get to the question. I'm like, okay, well, how many hours were you working per week? And they'll be like, oh yeah. You know, like in this case it's like they're working 80, 90, 100 hours. Okay, that's hard work, right? And then the other question I'll ask right after is like, what season of work are you in right now, right? So like, are you still looking to work 80, 90, 100-hour weeks?

Yeah.

They might, sometimes they might say like, look, I just want to work 40, 50 hours a week, which is fine. But the worst is when I ask someone what's the hardest you've ever worked? And they said, you know, probably 40 to 45 hours. And—

It's not going to cut it.

It doesn't cut it, right? And so my point is resilience is everything in business. And the more resilient people you can hire, the more resilient the company will be. But then it's like, how do you test for these things? No, if you want to add anything to that.

Yeah, I don't know how to test because I haven't been too involved in the interview process in my organization or actually any of the organizations.

Not even for execs? Like high-level execs?

I tend to interview them later on. I make sure they're player coaches. That's the big one. I make sure they're willing to work 7 days a week.

Is that a player coach?

No, but I know I have my weaknesses is I can't coach. So I tend to not hire people like me. I try to hire people who are better.

Yeah, to cover your weaknesses.

Uh-huh. And the reason I look for Executives who are player and coaches. Most executives are coaches, no problem. I don't want executives who's not willing to get their hands dirty.

Yes.

It sets a bad example for the rest of the company.

Yeah. Because they think they can do the same thing. Yep. Yep.

When I interview them, I talk about problems that we're facing and I ask them on the spot how they would overcome it. And I would, I would also give them real-life scenarios of issues we've dealt with and how they would have solved it in the past. And I compare it to our decision-making.

Yeah.

Because we then learned of what worked, what didn't work, and we kind of see their thought process. You're looking for light bulbs.

It's like, oh, like that reaction, right?

I'm looking for experience.

Yeah.

And people, when they can give really high level or not, when they can give really granular details on how they actually solve something, usually they were involved in it. When they tell me more high level stuff and they can't get granular, that means they may have been the manager, but they don't know how to actually get it done without a good team.

You know, we've been interviewing these COO candidates and the difference between the ones that are really good versus the ones that aren't, the ones that are good, they can whiteboard in real time.

Yeah.

Like they can break down their thought process and go into the details, right? When we give them like a hypothetical campaign or like a scenario that we're dealing with, right? So similar to you. Now, the ones that struggle with the whiteboarding and then they tend to try to dance around it, it's like, man, they've had like so much experience, but when push came to shove, it just wasn't there. And you have to trust your gut in that situation. It's like on paper they look really good, but you got to trust your gut and just say, it ain't going to fly.

Yes, but one mistake that I've made with this whole interviewing and hiring process and even telling my team how I want them to work, a great example of this is, you know this, people in an organization tend to come with problems. They very rarely come with solutions. So in marketing, when AI overviews first came out, I remember, you know, it came out, rolled out to a lot of traffic, then they rolled it back and it was barely any keywords that had it. And then it started creeping up. It eventually really impacted the health industry.

Yeah.

AORVs were showing up all over for health-related keywords. And I remember we have a client specifically with the AORVs and health, they didn't adapt and they weren't adapting fast enough. A lot of pages, we were helping them execute. They just couldn't put enough internal resources. So when I was talking to my team and they were coming with the problem, Eventually, I'll, you know, some of them started coming with solutions, but I learned something in which I used to push people, hey, when you have a problem, you better come with a solution as well.

Uh-huh.

It slowed down how many people came to me with problems, which was a bad thing because people were afraid to tell me a problem when they couldn't think of a solution. So then I wasn't always aware of the solutions, which is bad as well. I mean, I wasn't aware of the problems, which is bad as well. If ideally want people to come with a solution, but I'd rather know a problem than not know the problem, and some people were just afraid. So eventually I made it where people just come to me with the problems. They try to come up with a solution if they can. If they can't, I tell them it's okay, but just try. I always want to know the solution no matter what. I won't get mad if you don't have a potential solution, just tell me the problem. And then eventually together we brainstorm solutions. And I'm like, well, if you look at the AR reviews, they're telling me they summarize, but I'm like, it's hard. And I was like, you know what? Why not have AI help summarize the articles we have and come up with 3 bullet points for every single article and then have humans review? And then we went in, made mass changes with a lot of keywords within 24 hours. We were noticing the AOR views were starting to pull us in because we were already ranking on page 1 for a lot of keywords. They just weren't pulling us in as much to AOR views. And then we started seeing our traffic change to that site. But the point I'm getting at is when I was going through this Learning, yeah, it's ideally great for people who plan and are player coaches and will just get things done. If you force that culture, there's always people within an organization that can't keep up, and you're gonna have people on the lower levels, and it's okay, but you want 'em to still come to you with problems because if they don't come to you with problems, you won't solve 'em. It's just, they'll just be, you know, hidden and then you won't see as much growth.

Yeah, I think one thing is, and these are people of all levels coming to you, I'm assuming, not just your executives.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Because the one thing that we do on our end is we— everyone has at least— most people have one KPI they're tied to, right? Like to indicate if they're successful or not. And it's every week it's your red, yellow, or green on its traffic lights, right? Yeah. And so for us it's like, okay, if someone's consistently red or yellow, but then they say things are going well, but they're not bringing any problems, then it's very easy for us to just call them out and be like, well, no. And these documents are public to everyone, so everyone can see if you're red or yellow, right? And it's just like, yeah, well, it seems like you've been red or yellow for a while. Like, what's going on? Right? And so how do you build in these mechanisms to just make sure that people are on track or off track? Here's the funny thing. I replied to a tweet from this guy Peter Yang earlier. He's like, I think he's just talking about agents not being there right now. Right? And I'm like, you know, autonomous agents aren't there yet. So I replied, My reply got like 100,000 views on X, and like there's like a bunch of sub-replies here. So I was just saying, oh, we use AI to help coach people, right? Like if you're not working on the right priority, it's gonna coach you in the right direction. If you're red or yellow on your thing, it's gonna coach you. It's basically an accountability coach, right? Same thing for sales, client service, whatever. So we deployed this and it's working well. Like people have, like they're moving in the right direction now. My point of saying all this is that, and we can move into this AI conversation too, a lot of the replies in there is like, Like, who would want that? Who would want that? But the interesting thing is I had a lot of DMs from entrepreneurs like, dude, I want to implement this, right? How do we do this? I just had a call today with a guy who I think he has like a couple hundred employees. He DM'd me. He's like, we want to do this, right? My point of saying all this is that I think we're going to move into a world where it's like everyone's held accountable to one or two things. And I think they're going to be forced to bring their problems and solutions, especially because they have AI as a partner now. Because for me, I'm just like, it's constantly my thought partner. I can't like not have an answer now.

Yeah.

And I hope it's just gonna make life easier for everybody, not even just the founders.

So, but I also think some people have the wrong mentality when it comes to mindset as an employee, because as an employee, you should want to improve.

Yeah.

And you should want to become better.

You would think so. Oh, you've never been an employee before?

Uh, yeah.

You say your piece and then let me tell you me as an employee. Go ahead.

Yeah. So, Technically, I have been employed a few years ago.

Oh yeah, okay, okay, okay. That doesn't really— No, no, that doesn't count. That doesn't count.

For a short period of time.

But seriously, did you work anywhere in high school?

Yeah, not very far.

Okay, that counts.

I cleaned a trash.

Okay, that counts.

Cleaning restrooms and vomit.

Okay, that actually counts. Okay, go, go, go.

I did door-to-door sales for vacuums.

Okay, that counts too.

I was a cashier.

Okay, okay. Give your thought and then like, I want to hear your opinion too.

Yeah, but I had an interesting question and I can tell where this person was going. I was at an event, I was talking about marketing and I always get, every once in a while I get really like oddball questions from left field. You know, like one time I got a question like, so with AI, how are you guys going to work on, how are you going to work on emissions and what it's going to do to the environment? And I was talking at a really big corporation, like what should we be doing? was not related anything to my talk.

They're like— Emissions as in like ESG stuff, right?

Yes. Like ESG and all that kind of stuff, right? But it was like left field. One of the other recent left field ones I got was, how do you deal with promoting people specifically in DEI, right? And this is just random. I was talking about growing traffic and AI. This is a random question. And I don't want to get into people's preferences, but I know one employee that I worked with for a long time. He's one of our longstanding team members, LGBTQ+. I forgot the acronym. Sorry about that. And he's been promoted a lot, right? Or I don't know what a lot is, but he's been promoted a few times and he's done really well. And I was talking to him this morning about it. And he's just like, he was telling me, thank you. And I was like, dude, why are you thanking me? And I was talking about everything from when I saw him to now he's owning a home. And I'm like, look what you did by yourself financially. Look at where you got in this company by yourself. You learned, you improved. He continually tries to improve himself with AI learning, just getting better, reading books. I'm like, this is the individual, right? And when I was getting that question, I was just like, people shouldn't say, hey, the AI is coaching me so I have less yellows and reds in your scenario. They should be like, The AI is making me better so I can do my job better, perform better, learn more, get raises and promotions, make the company happy, make myself happy, have progress in my life. That's the attitude they should have. When I was talking about this individual, when I got the question, I'm like, I promoted him because he's good and he's learning and he's doing better.

Yep.

And I'm like, his personal life or preferences and that is none of my business. He's amazing rockstar in our organization. He deserves to be promoted because he's a rockstar.

On merit.

On merit.

Yeah.

I don't judge him. I, I, I didn't hire him because of DEI. I hired him because he looked amazing on paper, interviewed really well, was amazing cultural fit. And I'm like, this guy has amazing personality to also be on sales calls as well.

So I was like, we would be lucky to have him.

And we were lucky enough to convince him to join from a big company. We were small at the point. I don't even think we had like 20, 30 people at that point. Mm-hmm. Um, but the point I'm getting at is like, you want to find people who want to improve. And when you see those comments on LinkedIn, and it's usually places like LinkedIn where they're hating and it shouldn't be a requirement and they hate this kind of stuff, a lot of those people will struggle to do well in this world because they're pushing back anything that can potentially make their job, them better at their job. And they more so want to coast in life.

Yep. And that's the biggest problem. So, so I don't know about you, but like, did this click for you when you were, you know, at Knott's Berry Farm? Were you a very growth-minded person at that point?

I was.

You were? How old were you?

15 and a half.

Oh, but you were selling CDs and stuff already.

Yeah.

Okay. See, that's different.

No, but dude, I remember when I was at Knott's Berry Farm cleaning toilets and picking up trash. I remember I was doing it right next to a small restaurant within Knott's Berry Farm. A lady was pissed off at her service for food. Now I was in the trash services. I forgot what it was called. They gave it a fancy name. It wasn't called trash. 'Cause then no one would take that job. Yeah. Yeah. And she was really pissed off. So I tried helping her even though I was not in the restaurant area. And I tried calling— I, when I couldn't help her and resolve the problem, she spent money, she didn't get what she got. And people, the staff there was rude to her. I called my manager in the trash area and tried to get it solved. And eventually it did. Yeah. She Tipped me money. I gave it back to her. I said, no, you had a terrible experience. No one should get tipped for your terrible experience. I'm sorry about this. But my whole take was, if people are unhappy and you don't try to fix it, how many of those people are going to tell bad things about the park? At that time it was Knott's Berry Farm and not come back.

Yep.

I'm like, this is going to affect their numbers and this is going to affect people. I wasn't thinking about it from a growth aspect of, hey, I'll get a raise or promotion or I'll get acknowledgement. I was like, a business needs to keep people happy. You can't keep everyone happy, but you should try your best.

Yeah. Let me— I'll share a few stories here and then we can move on. But the phrase that comes to mind here is you help others get what you want and you'll get whatever you want. The way I was brought up, though, and this is no fault, I think it's just most people think that money should be the priority.

It's—

but like, it's the other way around. You help people first, then you make money. That the money is a residual. It's residue from the value that you add.

And so Wait, and to go back on this really quickly, when you were young, you probably also tried to do things for money for the sake of it.

Absolutely.

How often did that work out for marketing campaigns like your elderly care websites and a few of those?

I mean, even, even before that, but okay, let's leave, let's use elderly care website. So we had a, we had a website called CareSprout.

Okay.

So we were trying to go after like a place for mom, right? We're seeing hundreds of millions of pre-evac. Let's go for a place for mom.

And it was a marketing platform.

You and I, We tried to start a poker site together, right?

Yeah.

But that wasn't really what we were into. We still got on calls with executives from like, you know, big companies and all that.

Yeah, you said it was a call with Zynga.

Yeah, with Zynga.

The poker game.

Yeah, you're like, how do I set up a call? I was like, I cold emailed them. But my point is, and by the way, when that call, I think I was still 24 years old, 25, you were 26. So we're still pretty young, right? We're still relatively young right now, but a little older. But my point is, when I did these things for money, I didn't feel fulfilled and I kind of felt like I was lost, right? Whereas when I worked for that one startup, that education startup.

Yeah.

I felt very bought into everything where I was happy to work 7 days a week, even though we were working 4 days a week. And the reason for that was I felt like I was learning so much and I felt like it was like, like a drug, like the amount I was learning and implementing and seeing the results from it, it felt like a video game. And so that's where it made it fun. And I think at that point, I had like maybe, maybe a year or 2 before I started really getting into personal growth. And then from there it started to compound and where I started thinking about, okay, how can I add value first instead of making money? I think the problem For the majority of people is they don't spend— I'm not saying you need to do personal growth stuff because you've never, you've never really done that. You've always looked within, but you, as long as you have a mindset of I'm just going to keep trying to get better for the rest of my life, there's no way you can lose. But if you're like, oh, I'm just going to try to hit a certain dollar amount, the problem with that is that's very limiting and that limits your entire mindset because you're tied to a dollar amount. Yes.

But if you go back to the examples of like poker for us or the elderly care site, and Eric and I had the model of just get the traffic and the rankings and we'll figure out what to do. It never really did well because neither of us were passionate.

Exactly.

When you're passionate, you put the time. Like when you worked at Treehouse, the educational startup, they went from, if I'm not mistaken, 5 days a work week to 4-day work weeks.

No, they had 4-day work weeks, then they tried to make it 5 days and it pissed everybody off. Yeah.

But when it was 4 days, whatever the number was, I knew you guys were working 4 days. Yeah. You in many cases were working 6 days, 7 days a week.

I always work 7 days a week.

And you loved what you were doing and you were passionate and you didn't really care if they asked you, you said, hey, you don't have to work. You still did it because you loved it.

I worked 7 days a week even after the CEO threatened to fire me a month into the job. I still work 7 days a week.

Wait, he threatened to fire you 'cause you're working too many days?

No, no, no. He, so a month into it, 'cause we didn't have that much runway left. We had 3 months of runway left, right? But the previous marketer before me, we weren't hitting numbers, right? And so, but so he ended up, that guy ended up rage quitting 'cause I got promoted to head of growth at like that, at that age, right? At 25, the guy's like, what the fuck? Makes sense. Sorry for my language. Then I decided, I'm like, yo, like all our marketing is screwed up right now. I need to turn off ads and figure out what the heck is going on. So I turn everything off, right? And then a month into me being at the company, the CEO pulled me aside. He's like, hey, look, if you don't hit numbers this month, we're gonna have to unfortunately part ways. And so at that point, I can be a little crybaby and just quit, or I can do something about it, right? And so it's like, oh, okay, well I get to do something about it. Okay, all in YouTube ads. And then it worked out.

Yeah.

So then we raised our Series B, you know, things were happy for a little bit until they weren't again. So.

That's true.

Yeah. But, but to your point, it, it is, it is passion. So I think, yes, those of you that are looking to work somewhere, You have to be passionate about it and you have to feel like you're learning and you're getting better. I would just say that I have a lot of great relationships with, with ex-grainers, the ones that I'm, I'm still friends with, like Noah, for example, right? These are all people who have tried to continue to get better the whole time. And they might come up to me like I was hanging out with a couple of them in Japan. They're like, Eric, you changed my life. And same thing for you. I'm like, I didn't change your life. It's because you continue to bust your ass and you decided to make something of yourself. And that's why we continue to have a relationship. It's the ones that just keep pointing out problems. I don't really talk to them anymore.

So yeah. No. And I think when it comes back to passion and marketing, I think a lot of marketers get it wrong. Like they're like, I'm passionate about marketing. Well, if you're passionate about marketing, but you're marketing stuff you don't care about, it just doesn't work as well versus if you're actually passionate about marketing and you care about what you're involved in, like the projects and you think it's cool and you enjoy it.

Yeah. By the way, Neil and I will always hire amazing people who are growth-oriented, who are resilient. So if you think you're that, And you are smart about your cold email and your cold outreach, for sure we will notice. There's, I don't think there's any chance where I haven't noticed that before. Same for you.

Yeah, but what's interesting about you and I is we hire really good people during bad times and when it's not just bad globally, but it's also bad for us business-wise.

Yeah.

And the reason we do that is because during bad times it's easier to get amazing rock stars. During good times, it's extremely hard to recruit them.

Dude, 2021 was really hard for everything.

Yes.

Right. It's like you would make an offer for someone and then they would join the day they're supposed to start. They joined another company.

Dude, I had that.

That happened so many times to us. I was just like, what?

Yeah.

Anyway, we can move on. I picked a couple. You can pick one though.

I'm curious on this one. Famed investor asserts that AI is underhyped.

Yeah. So did you read the Bond Capital report from Mary Meeker?

No.

Okay, so I'm going to, I'm going to cite a couple of highlights here from Jason Lemkin. So Jason Lemkin from SaaStr, he cited some, some charts here, right? So first is— oh my God, I reached my time limit on X. Here, let me show you this. Okay, so AI user adoption is literally unprecedented. So you look at the years to reach 100 million users from 2000 to 2023. At the very high point, ChatGPT took 0.2 years to get there. Netflix took like 10.3 years. So we know that part already, right? To get to 100 million users.

Yeah.

It's at 0 to 800 million weekly users in 17 months.

Okay. But the internet adoption has also skyrocketed since people like Netflix first came about.

Now, infrastructure math is unprecedented. So we know that the big 6 tech company CapEx, they're spending a lot on infrastructure right now. Right. So $212 billion annually, which is 63% year-on-year growth.

Right. Wow.

And you like numbers. I'm going to keep going. This will be interesting.

Infrastructure, including like power plants and stuff like that.

Yeah. Amazon CapEx as percentage of revenue, 49% versus 4% during initial cloud buildout. So it's way higher now, right? Microsoft AI business, $13 billion run rate, 175% year-on-year growth. Nvidia data center revenue, $39 billion quarterly, 78% year-on-year growth. Okay. I'm going to keep— I'm going to read off a couple more numbers here. So token costs have collapsed 99.7% in 2 years, right? So inference cost, that means the cost to do something using like a ChatGPT, fell 99.7% from November 2022 to December 2024. Nvidia's GPUs are 105,000 times times less energy per token, right? So what costs dollars now costs pennies. So the cost of intelligence is coming down a lot, right? And this is, I still think we're in the very nascent stages right now. And so you can see this graph over here, the AI efficiency gains over time. It's basically dropping to near nothing. We're talking pennies, right?

Yep.

Now just a couple more things and I'll turn it over to you. So you look at, there's a couple enterprises. So Cursor, obviously, you know, from $1 million to $300 million ARR in 25 months, and it's used by millions of programmers, edits over 1 billion characters per day. Harvey, the legal AI.

Wait, didn't Cursor go public recently? Or was that something else?

No, Windsurf sold to OpenAI for $3 billion. Are you talking about that one?

No, I thought— who went public in the AI space recently? It wasn't Cursor. Okay, that's fine. Someone went public recently and their stock just boomed.

I forgot.

CodeWeaver or something? Code— what was it? I don't know.

You're talking about the one that has the data center stuff, right?

AI stock IPO booms.

Okay, well, I'm going to keep going here.

So— CoreWeave.

CoreWeave, yeah. So they help with data center stuff.

Cool.

Yeah. Harvey Legal AI, $10 million to $70 million ARR in 15 months. That's legal AI. Abridge, which is healthcare AI, $50 million to $170 million CARR in 5 months. I don't even know what that means. And then physical world AI scaling even faster than software. So Tesla Full Self-Driving, 4 billion fully self-driven miles. Waymo is now 27% market share of SF rideshare bookings. And then Anduril, you know, the defense company, 2x revenue growth for AI-enabled defense systems. And the final thing I'll say here is AI job postings are up 448% while traditional IT jobs fell. So the great reshuffling. So I think you and I can both agree, maybe we're in the first inning of AI right now. I think it's very early. I don't think we're going to see the full gains of this for a while. Like, it's just like the internet, the dot-com era. We didn't see a lot of these gains for a very long time.

No.

That's— you have Shopify CEO, reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify. Duolingo CEO, AI use will be part of what we look for in hiring. AI use will be part of what we evaluate in performance reviews. Headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.

So I believe a little bit different than Mary Meeker. I believe that's her name, from Bond. I believe AI in the short run or right now is overhyped. I think it's underestimated and underhyped For long-term potential. And the reason I say that, and I'm specifically talking about marketing, when you look at marketing and AI and you talk to organizations, they believe AI agents, AI tools, as it stands right now in today's world, can just do everything for you and run marketing campaigns. And we're seeing startups fire all marketing teams and be like, we're just going to run it through AI. That's not the reality we live in today. In the long run though, I genuinely do believe people underestimate what AI can do for you in marketing and just in general when it comes to advertising. From a global aspect, like knowing your fingerprints on a fridge and you're the one opening it up and figuring out what items you take and weighing milk and being like, this is how much of this food you— Neil ate or Eric ate or whatever it may be, and this is how they need to optimize their health. And then insurance companies can adjust premium or figure out if they want to target you because you're a better potential patient or candidate, or life insurance companies could figure out how much they're going to end up charging you and they can adjust. how they do their marketing based on a lot of those devices. Now data comes into play here and what they can or can't take and laws and all that kind of stuff. But I think AI is really going to change the way we do marketing in the long run. And I believe the pyramid's going to be flipped upside down in which right now you have few executives, a lot of people underneath. I think it's going to be flipped around in which executives portion-wise, percentage-wise, right? Not total number of headcount, but percentage-wise will make up a bigger number of your pool, and then you're going to have a lot less people on the bottom end of a pyramid because it can— a lot of that kind of stuff can be automated by AI.

Let me read some of these valuations here, then I'll give you my thoughts on underhyped long-term and short-term. So private market valuations, OpenAI is $300 billion valuation on $9.2 billion in revenue. So 33x multiple. Anthropic is $61.5 billion valuation on $2 billion in revenue, 31x multiple. But it's already— it grew to $3 billion ARR already. And they did.

Yeah.

And then xAI, $80 billion valuation on less than $1 billion in revenue, so greater than 80x multiple. So combined, $95 billion raised against $11 billion in annualized revenue. So I think the valuations are— some people might say it's rich, but I actually believe that AI is underhyped in the long term, and I think it's underhyped in the short term too, just because the vast majority of people right now, I do agree, they can't do a lot of things that we want to do, right? But the vast majority of people also, when I'm playing around with it, like I was playing around with the connector yesterday with HubSpot and ChatGPT, I'm like, I have all these superpowers that I didn't have 2 years ago. I feel freaking unstoppable. And so I think we're just scraping the surface right now. But I think long term, the stuff you mentioned versus like, I'm going to be able to see what's going on with my body every night, what's wrong with my biomarkers. Oh, something like, I don't want to make it disgusting or whatever, but like you're going to have toilets that can scan everything that's wrong with you. Like we are going there. And I told everyone earlier, we talked about my mom passing. I told everyone, I don't know why I've been doing this. I think it's the growth-oriented side. But when I talk to my relatives, like, how are you doing, whatever? And I just, I go into like, you know, guys, as long as we just live another 10 years, like we don't have to worry about this stuff anymore, right? And I truly believe that cancer, disease, and all this stuff, if we can just live 5, 10 more years, AI, healthcare, all these things, we're just gonna be in a good spot. By the way, speaking of AI, do you know who might sponsor this podcast? Sam Altman.

Really?

Yeah.

They hit us up? Yeah. OpenAI did.

Not OpenAI.

Another company. ChatGPT?

No. Yo, you don't know about— you know about this? They have like this eyeball scanning thing, the world thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there was a crypto company that he had that's doing this, no?

Yeah, yeah. So it might happen. Who knows?

We're—

That'll be cool. Figured out. But yeah, anyway, that's what we think about AI. But dude, can I just talk about that OpenAI connector? You like this.

Yeah, go for it.

You're gonna do this over the weekend. I guarantee it. Because it will make you money. This will make you money, guys.

Okay. It will or will not make you money?

Will make you money.

All right, let's talk about that.

All right, so the OpenAI version that we pay for right now is the Pro version, which is $200 a month.

Yeah.

As of 2, 3 days ago, ChatGPT just added connectors, MCP connectors to HubSpot, to your Google Calendar, to your Gmail. So what I did 2 days ago, I was like, hey, so I just connected my HubSpot. I was like, tell me about the last 6 months worth of deals versus the previous 6 months. Tell me about all the key metrics and everything. It started summarizing conversion rates. It started summarizing the weak points. Oh, here's your sales velocity over here. Here's what it looks like. And the numbers were accurate, right? And it spent 2 hours researching. And I'm like, dude, this would've taken an analyst days, maybe even weeks to do. And it just did it. And now I can make decisions faster. I instantly compiled that. I sent it to the team. I was like, guys, here's our new sales plan for— and I want you guys to talk about it next week when I'm not going to be in that meeting because I want to see how they do without me. And so then I started asking about, oh, on the carrot side, right? Because that's more of a startup right now. Oh, who should we be following up with there? And it And it listed the reasons on who should be followed up with next, and then when the last contact was and what we said to them in that contact. And I'm like, oh, okay, my calendar, help me, tell me how I've been spending my time in the last 6 months and how it's been trending upwards or downwards for each of these different categories. It did that for me, right? That used to have to be done by hand using an EA. So my point of saying all this is that someone like you or me who likes to look at numbers, you can get these things quickly. And some of it's like, Why are you even spending time on this? But some of it's like, okay, yeah, this will make you more money.

Yes. The interesting thing with the connectors is a great idea. I bet you I will not be able to use it this weekend, or it'll take a while. My legal team will have to look into who owns the data. Are they training off our data and all that kind of stuff?

They're not training on it.

Yeah, but I had to— we still have to check contractually because we are based on their terms of service and privacy policies. The reason I say that is We have clients with strict contracts. The bigger organizations, usually the stricter contracts you have. The last thing we can have is other people's data being passed into OpenAI, them using it for other purposes. Like it'll just cause me to get a lot of—

Can you use it for your Salesforce or your HubSpot?

Uh, no. You can't?

Because you have client information in there.

We have client information in there.

Okay.

So I had to find out. And also personal information too. We let people know and our privacy and terms of service, I don't know which one it is, that we're collecting data. We list out tools and things like that. And I don't know exactly how it works, but we have in-house counsel plus outside counsel. I just know for a fact we can't just use tools that may access the data. We have to see exactly how it's being accessed. Is it ours? Is it, they don't store it? Like I have to get checks on all this kind of stuff. That's the hardest part about growing right now in our organization.

So send them that message. I mean, it's, so you can play around with this in a couple of weeks.

No, no, but hopefully the, the reason I say this is the hardest part, like this is what's frustrating for me as an entrepreneur, and, and it totally makes sense and I'm not trying to break any laws, is my growth potential is also being stumped because of rules, laws, and regulation. And I'm not saying that's wrong or right.

Yep.

Usually when you're a startup, what allows you to move fast is you don't have red tape. You just do whatever you want.

Yeah.

There's not really any consequences. You're not making money. When your organization is scaled up and you have revenue, you need to protect. You need to protect.

Yeah. Which makes sense. So I trust that you might be using this in the next couple of weeks because I think you would love this.

I hope so. I'll have to find out what I can.

You guys are on Teams and Microsoft too, right? They have a lot of Microsoft Connect. Oh, because they're partnered with Microsoft, obviously.

Yeah, they're the big partner.

You can do, you can do a Teams integration too and all these things, but you can just ask whatever questions without having— I think that's the big thing that bothers me the most. It's like, why do I have to wait so long to get these seemingly basic things? Basic things because I just want to make decisions fast.

And everyone talks about how open OpenAI is crushing it and they're making all this money and they're growing so fast. Very few people talk about how much Microsoft will make from this because they were the earliest funder and they put in the most money at the earliest time. Now they've raised tons of money from other players at crazy high valuations, maybe more in total than what Microsoft funded. But percentage ownership-wise, I don't think it's public or I don't have the data. Maybe it is. I'm pretty sure Microsoft owns a majority of— or not the majority, they're the largest individual—

Individual shareholder.

shareholder of OpenAI.

Yeah. And you can tell OpenAI is trying to break out of it a little bit.

Yeah, I think they're having issues. But dude, people talk about like, oh, it's too high valuations, this on Perplexity or OpenAI. These investors, what people aren't seeing is they're giving the crazy valuations to the ones that are already somewhat proven and the most likely to win. And they have bottom side protection where some of these deals, they're getting liquidation preferences and things to make sure they're making at least double their money or triple their money.

Yeah.

So yeah, they're giving high valuations, but a lot of these deals usually have downside protections for these investors.

I do think before we move on from this and we can talk about Meta for a second, then we can move over to the Elon versus Trump thing. I do think that these MCP connectors, me using it the other day with OpenAI, I was like, oh wow, I feel like a lot of apps that go through it this way when you, when you make like a custom MCP connector, that's going to be the new app store. It's not the OpenAI app store. It's actually connecting it through AnswerThePublic or Scout or whatever else that you have. And helping people use your product from ChatGPT. I think that's the new App Store.

I think that will be the new App Store. Time will tell though. I have no idea. The real problem with the App Store is what are they going to restrict? Because Apple and all these players really do try to restrict. Yeah.

And they charge, they take a big tax too. Yeah.

But if it affects their revenue, they will restrict on what you can do. And maybe they open it up, you know, with connectors and all this kind of stuff, but they probably want to make sure they're still making money.

I just love the fact that I can get this data at my fingertips now and I feel like I'm unblocked. It's like I'm getting more and more unblocked every day. That's what it is.

Well, but wait, you can get the data right now. Wait till some of these platforms start blocking you. Like, I was in France the other day. Did you know there's no AI overviews in France?

No.

Yeah, there's regulations. Every country is different. It's not as simple. Really?

I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just wait. I'm telling you, it'll get harder and harder because then you're going to have to deal with laws for individual countries and be like, You can't do this with AI, or you can. Like, just think about that for a minute. You're talking about data and connectors. I'm talking about Google has already scraped content. They can't just quickly and easily roll out AI overviews in certain countries because of regulation.

I was listening to BG Squared this morning, and I think there's like some enterprises saying, oh, that you can't train off like your own data or something like that, or like even though you paid for like a— oh, Salesforce said this in their terms now. They've updated their terms Apparently, someone can correct me here, but if you imagine you're paying 7 to 8 figures a year for a Salesforce contract and they say, oh, you can't train off that data, you can ask whatever you want, but you can't use like an LLM to train off of it. That's in the terms now.

I believe it.

Yeah. Which is, which is, which sets a precedent that maybe if you're enterprise software, even mid-market software, that you might just put that in your terms now where it's like you can query whatever you want, but you know, you can't, you can't, it's not your data even though you're paying big money for it.

But they want you to use Salesforce's LLM. Their agent. Their agent to do everything. And collect more revenue.

I just— Which is fair. Like you would too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I don't blame them for it.

Do you want to talk about the Meta is letting AI do all the ad work now?

No, I mean, yeah, we can talk about it, but go for it.

I don't really want to talk about it either, but like—

We can. It's not just— and you're saying that they're just— you're talking about how they're—

This is from Wall Street Journal. So basically the high level here as it pulls up is that—

It's the whole creation part that I—

Continue reading this article with a WSJ subscription. Archive.

Yeah, I don't want to talk about how to get around it.

I know, I know, I know how to get around it.

But I believe, yeah.

I pay for it.

Me too.

Yeah, I pay for Wall Street Journal.

I pay for so many of these subscriptions.

Yeah.

Like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times.

Wall Street Journal's good.

Bloomberg, like the list goes on and on. Bloomberg's expensive.

Okay, Meta aims to fully automate ad creation using AI. So AI-powered advertising is part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision for the company's future. Let me give you a couple more things here. So AI-powered advertising is part of Meta chief Zuckerberg's grand vision for his company's evolution. Advertising makes up the bulk of Meta's business. It brought in more than 97% of overall revenue in 2024. And what he's basically saying here is in the not too distant future, we want to get to a world where any business will be able to just tell us what objective they're trying to achieve, like selling or getting—

They just want to run everything.

A customer. Yeah. And the thing is, I think for someone like you or me, or like the companies that we work with, they do want an agency helping them for a lot of these things. But if you're a small business, you would like to have a lot of these things done for you. And I think they might— that's kind of what his argument is.

Like, we'll just do it for you and just connect your bank Yeah, but I already see a lot of small businesses using AI tools for the creative and letting Meta just run the ads, right? Because they already have AI that helps with a lot of stuff. And you want to know the number one problem when small businesses hit us up when they're using AI to do everything related to their ads?

It doesn't perform. It's off.

They're just like, we're losing money and we can't figure out how. Now I'm not saying paying a human is going to solve that because sometimes you pay a human and you just can't make it work because the offer is bad or the product's too expensive. Like I've had people come in and be like, we sell this kitty litter. It's such an amazing product. And this is our closest competitor. Our product is better because of A, B, and C reason. And I'm like, you're $400 for kitty litter and your closest competitor that has amazing reviews that people love is $100 or $50 or whatever.

Yeah.

And I'm like, I get you have these features, but let's actually survey people and figure out, do they want the features? And then you find out people don't really care for them. And I'm like, you're just trying to charge so much more. This is going to be a very hard sell and we can run whatever the ads we want, but I'm like, this is a hard offer to make it work when you're pitching features that the market doesn't care about. But outside of that, what we find is with a lot of the AI for these ad platforms, they do optimize for your interests, but they also optimize for their interests. And having human intervention typically produces a higher ROI from what we see for most of our clients.

Yeah, I think, look, I do think inevitably marketing is going in this direction. We've talked about the future of marketing being one click. What I found interesting, so someone from my team earlier today shared this, but basically this is an ad here from Coach and Coach apparently, I think a Google rep probably sold them on their AI features and the Coach thing here says made with waste, coach.com made with waste. And so someone was just calling out that, hey, like you need someone to at least a human in the loop to check this stuff. You shouldn't just blindly believe it. So I think we're gonna get a lot of issues in the next couple years.

Yeah.

But I think inevitably, inevitably, like even you talking about it is about the offer and all these things, but most people don't even know how to create a good offer, right?

No.

So how do we, how do we skate to a direction where we're just doing a lot of these things for people? Like how do you create a really good offer? How do you do this? How do you do this? Eventually you'll get there. This is where I think we're not quite there yet, but I do think we need to prepare for the now and the future. Yes.

My team always talks about HAI, right? Human combined with AI.

Ah, I like that. HAI.

Yeah. And we believe that's the future. And we— that's why we think the pyramid is going to be upside down. You won't need as many people. You'll still need the talented execs that have the experience and stuff like that, but you won't need as many people doing grunt work.

That's why I tell my team—

You can just automate a lot.

Small teams, big businesses. That's why I'm so involved with hiring now. I'm actually driving down to OC on Monday to meet a recruit to just, you know, hopefully seal the deal there. But I'm so excited about like it actually, when I ran that time report in Google Calendar, the one thing that is continue to compound month on month is my time spent on recruiting. And so like, it's good to know how your time's being used. Your calendar is not scheduled, so it wouldn't be helpful for you, but it's helpful for me.

So, oh, okay.

Yeah. Anyway, you can pick the, you want to go to the Elon one? Yeah, go for it.

So I'm assuming people saw a lot of the drama from Elon saying, hey, the Epstein files haven't been released because Trump is on it.

It just started yesterday, didn't it?

Yeah, it started yesterday. I was on a plane when I was, you know, reading it all. I bought the internet because I wanted to read.

I was like, $20, this is worth it. You would've bought it anyway.

No, I actually, a lot of times I don't buy the internet.

Really?

Yeah.

'Cause it sucks.

It sucks. And it's $20. And when you're going over the ocean, just if they said, oh, we have Starlink, I'll be like, okay, sounds good, I'll buy it. But it's just so terrible for, and I know which planes it's going to be terrible on. So I tend to avoid purchasing it on the plane.

That's good. Here's a good question for you. If a plane has Starlink, what is the upper bound of what you would pay?

How long of a flight?

14 hours.

$100, $200, $300. Exactly.

So there's a period of time where If you have Starlink on your plane, you can make a killing because I would easily pay $100, $200, $300 for that.

$1,000, I wouldn't.

I think it's just— $250.

$250, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the hope that it comes down a lot.

Yeah. Because I look at it as like, if I could get work done and things don't slow me down, it's worth it. But there's a certain point where you're just ripping me off.

I mean, even, okay. So that's a principle thing, right? Because even if you pay $1,000, you know, you're going to make way more off that $1,000.

But I just can't. The Indian in me, and I don't mean to stereotype, I am Indian.

I just can't pay it. It's okay. The Chinese in me wouldn't pay for it either.

Dude, it was like today I paid a bill for LLC and it was $104 for one of my LLCs. And they had a form, it was credit card and it autofills for me. And then I saw in parentheses 3% fee or e-check and you save 3%.

Yeah.

I'm not going to pay the 3% fee. It took me probably extra like 5 minutes and it was a headache and I couldn't just automate I had to log in and takes me forever to log into bank accounts because of all the security stuff.

Yeah, this is what we call not able to figure out the value of your time because how much is 1 minute of your time? Thousands and thousands of dollars.

Yeah, I just can't pay the 3 extra dollars or whatever it was for like—

But actually on the other, on the flip side of that, it's important to have these principles because it is how you do everything. And if you decide to cut corners in this area, you'll cut corners in other areas. So I think it's actually more important to keep the principles.

Yeah, but my sister has the same problem. It's— we both have it selectively. Like, for example, when I was in San Francisco at her house, she has the nicest house in her neighborhood. She has VCs and other people who have homes in her neighborhood. No joke, the nicest house in her neighborhood.

Uh-huh.

It's a community where there's HOA, so the outside looks, you know, the same. But if you walk in inside the house, you'd be like, what the heck? And how much money did she spend? Yeah, right. And like, it straight up looks like from a really nice magazine. But I have the same problem of her in which some things I'll spend money on, other things I'll count a dollar and I'm just selectively cheap.

You know, another Indian, Ramit Sethi, talks about money dials, right? And so money dials mean you might spend— for me, it's convenience. I'll pay for convenience. Like, my setup right now is super convenient, right, where I live. You might— some people might want to pay for luxury. Some people might want to pay for experiences. Some people might want to pay for Like you have some things you would splurge on. So we all have that is my point. Yeah.

Yeah. No, no, that's true. We all have that. Uh, yours is homes.

Yeah.

But going back to the Elon lesson, you know, he posted a lot of stuff online. Trump talked about contracts. Elon's like, okay, it's fine. Forget it. You don't need my Starship or I forgot which Dragon thing capsule. I don't know all the names.

Yeah.

It was like, okay, you know, maybe I'll do it. Uh, I'll cool off.

Yeah, sure.

I'll, I'll, I'll keep it in there. The, the, and I get where Elon's going with this. I think he has mentality. I don't know him, I'm not in his head, but if I had to guess, one, he doesn't care for money. He's publicly stated that, and I genuinely believe that because he'll say stuff that causes his stock to tank and him lose billions of dollars, and he really doesn't care. But 2, he also genuinely believes that if I build the best product like Starlink compared to my competitors, he's the one who got the astronauts down. Doesn't matter what Think or don't think. And when I say he, I'm talking about his company and the team. Yeah.

They went up there, brought the astronauts back when NASA couldn't do it.

Yeah.

Or Boeing couldn't do it.

But Boeing or NASA or whoever.

Yeah.

I believe he looks at business as also, you can't threaten me. I'm the only option. And if you need this stuff, you have no choice but to pay me. But then if you wanna talk about like the nuclear option, uh, one of the politicians, senator or congressman or someone, or congresswoman or, you know, whoever it was, talked about, oh, we can just take over SpaceX if it is related to national security. There's some clause in there that can allow— I don't think the US would ever go there. But the reason I put in this Elon and Trump topic, it's a lesson of what you shouldn't do online. When you have reputational issues or people coming at you or disagreements, put your stuff all on the side, not on the internet. It's not the place to air your dirty laundry. I just think in most cases it's going to bite you in the butt versus help you out. You're just better off keeping your feuds and, you know, in business, whether it's legal issues or it's feuds or problems, you know, you see it on like social media where someone can badmouth a company or a product, you know, kill people with kindness. Don't put your fuse online.

The thing I'll say is I think the majority of people do believe that Elon's right. I literally looked at a poll from one of the reporters, Robert Scoble, I believe, and 73%, thousands of people voted for this, believe that Elon's right. And like his whole thing is, look, right on Right on just making sure that we don't add more to the deficit, right?

Yeah, I believe that you pay more taxes.

We all support that, right? I think to your point though, I think this could have been handled behind closed doors. And look, Neil and I, we're not politicians or anything, but I think if you have a feud with somebody, like we know someone close to us who, you know, there's someone attacking them online right now and those things never end positively. And especially, by the way, when you have 2 powerful people with 2 powerful egos like that, it's just, they're just gonna keep going at each other and nobody's gonna give any way. The interesting thing in my mind, so yes, I agree, like, you know, let's just, they should keep it on the side. But when Elon said that he would decommission Dragon, I think one of the Dragon spaceships, one guy with like 200 followers on Twitter responded and was like, hey, this is not a good idea. 'Cause you get like what you're doing for what you both are doing for the United States, whatever, like it's helpful. And like, this is for national security, this is for the US, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah.

like, that's good advice.

Well, no, he said cool off. You guys should just cool off for a few days and then think about it. And you know, before you guys just—

And so like, you never know, like some random person can just come and save the day, right? But hopefully in this situation, cooler heads will prevail because I do think that Elon is net positive. He's just trying to help, right? And yes, no matter what you think about him, like he is trying to help.

I agree with the statement. Like, I don't want to pay more taxes. I think my tax dollars are misused in the first place and inefficiently used. I hate to say this. I think we shouldn't get any tax breaks because we already have just too much debt. It's just going to screw up the future of the country. And I know this is a little extreme. When you look at the percentage of taxes generated from people who make $0 to $100,000 a year, it's actually pretty slim. I think they should just not charge them federal taxes and charge people like me and you more money because I think that'll help stimulate the economy because that money is just going to go straight up to being spent on businesses, groceries, products, Cars, rent, et cetera.

Yeah.

Make their lives better. And if we pay a little bit more, all right, I think that's okay. We can afford it. And I really do believe that'll help the lower class income class just make, do better in life and be more comfortable, you know? And it's just, and I think that's a way to help stimulate the economy a little bit more and at the same time not add deficit. But I don't think they will do that because my opinion on that is probably really unfavorable for a lot of people in power.

I just remember one time that I kind of got into it with someone online. This is the only time actually. I do troll people in my YouTube comments. So like I do that for fun. Like they'll say something and I'll call them something back. But that's for fun. But there's one guy that invited me to speak at an event, right? And then at the last minute, he's like, oh, the speaking slot's gone. And he changed me into like a panel, right? And then at the last minute, he uninvited me basically to the whole thing. Okay. I'm like, okay, I'm just going to let that go. And then we actually had him speak on one of our virtual things during the pandemic when we used to get like a bunch of people together for like these little marketing sessions. I don't know if you remember that.

Yeah.

That's part of the mastermind, right? And so he spoke once and then later he, we agreed to do something together. And then at the last minute he rug pulled me again and he's like, oh, it's just going to be this instead. Oh, it's going to be a panel again, panel again, right? It was solo and then it became a panel again, right?

Yep.

And so I'm like, man, this guy can't honor his word. So I like, for whatever reason, I just got I was not having a good day, so I got pissed, right? And so like, I basically called him out. But what did that do? Absolutely nothing. And in fact, we're not talking anymore. But my point of saying this is that it doesn't help to take these things online. We probably could have just settled it on the side, and it probably would have been a net positive. So yeah, and I'm sure you've had many situations like this.

Yeah, no, totally.

And by the way, we should also talk about why you shouldn't clout chase either, because there's certain people that go after people. Yes.

But before we go to the clout chase, the one thing I want to talk about that I noticed with the Trump and Elon thing, when they're talking about all this stuff that's happening to the economy, I get they don't want to add debt. We do marketing in so many countries that we see different patterns. We're seeing, and the US has been slower to reduce rates. They haven't really cut down rates. The ECB, European Central Bank, reduced rates 8 times in the last 12 months. India, How about China?

China too?

China just reduced because they're trying to stimulate the real estate market as well. India just reduced 0.5%. UK has been slowly reducing. Same, I believe, with Australia, Canada as well. So most markets are, and they're trying to push things up to stimulate. The US isn't, but we're starting to see in the countries that have been reducing rates, our growth in marketing has actually been much better from getting new clients, clients spending more, them generating more revenue. We're starting I'm starting to see upward momentum in marketing for the regions where we're seeing rate cuts.

You know, I think a lot of stuff ties in with global M2 money supply. So in the white line over here, you can see it's continuing to move up now. It dropped for a little bit. And what happens is the S&P or Bitcoin, whatever, tends to lag it. So the world is stimulating again. I think what's going to— I do think that we're going to have to drop rates relatively soon. What do you think about that?

I hope it happens earlier than Q4, but my guess is they probably will drop rates sometime in Q4 because of tariff stuff, right? Because they said specifically they want to wait and see. I'm hoping maybe Q3 if we're lucky. Yeah, because we're pretty much almost done with Q2. Yeah.

So I think, look, your point here is that marketing is picking up in countries where rates are getting cut. And what is your foresight on the economy?

I think we won't see a better economy till at least in the United States, you're looking at more towards end of 2026.

End of 2026.

Yeah, because if they cut rates, they're not going to cut like 2, 3%, right? It's going to be much slower, gradual. And when they cut rates, we don't see the impact of it right away. I believe they say it takes like 6 months.

Yeah, I would say my prediction— so your prediction is end of 2026. My prediction is hopefully beginning of 2026, things start to pick up again. Like when we say pick up, we mean, what do we mean by pick up? Do we mean like the economy's ripping?

Are you talking just US economy or global economy?

Global economy.

I would say sometime in 2026 is— I don't think the economy's going to be ripping like it was during the COVID days.

Not 2021.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I think it's going to be in a much more steady growth-oriented way for private businesses. And the reason I say private businesses, a lot of government-owned businesses have been growing in headcount spending. A lot of private businesses have actually been shrinking.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even the governments are shrinking the—

At least now because the IRS, 18,000 people.

Anyway, so I think, look, I can just say on sales numbers for us, lead count has picked up again and we're closing a lot more predictably. And so that's been good for us. So.

Yeah, we see a slump during the next few months.

Summer is typically slow for us in marketing, which is good to talk about because you said, is there really a summer slump in B2B marketing? Because I actually talked to my team about this too. So what's your take on it? And then I'll give you my thoughts.

We usually don't see a slowdown too much in traffic. or leads or self-service revenue, we do usually see a slowdown in enterprise contracts during the summer consistently every year.

How about when you go back to your software days with, let's say, was Kissmetrics mature enough for you to have good data there on, was it a summer slowdown or not?

Yes, there was not a summer slowdown, but the price points were much lower and we usually, non-enterprise, so self-service, non-enterprise, we typically saw Or yeah, self-service, non-enterprise, we typically didn't see much of an impact during the summer months. But for enterprise, we typically do see more of a slowdown because a lot of people are taking vacations with kids.

Yeah, my guess. So I think we can both agree that agency side, there's almost always a slowdown when it comes to summertime. I think software side, we're actually seeing a pickup right now. We're just going into summer. But I think software side, we'll see it be more consistent. Which is good. That allows us to maybe focus more on building out the software side during this summer slowdown with agencies.

Yeah, but I also think you see the software picking up for a different reason. It's new, you're not at scale yet, you're growing. It's a solution that people need. There's not a ton of good alternatives. And when you look at your base, you've grown really well, but it's, you're still starting from a smaller base. So you shouldn't see any slump or slowdown for a while.

Well, when I say that, the reason is in the last week for Carrot, which is our LinkedIn account-based marketing product, I think we closed 3 or 4 in the last week, right? Which wasn't like that before. Like all these people are coming out of nowhere. It's like, hey, we're ready, we're ready, right? And they're just like paying the thing, right? We're just, we're ready to go.

Yeah.

On the ClickFlow side, which is our SEO software, there's a lot of good mid-market enterprises in there. So, and I wouldn't say that's a novel solution. I would say there's some more mature solutions out there, but I would say it's consistent. The lead flow is consistent on those sides. And it doesn't feel like, if anything, it feels like it's picking up there. Whereas on the agency side, you see the summer slump coming.

What's the price points?

So on the Carrot side of things, if for a pilot, it's 3 grand, 4 grand for 45 days, okay? And then it's basically 2 or 3 grand a month, and then, or 5% of ad spend, whichever is higher. That's the first one. Okay. And then on the ClickFlow side, we're just rolling that into services. So it's like, we'll give you 25,000 words for free. And then we just try and roll them into services, which is agency services.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is a good idea. During the Kissmetrics days, we usually didn't see a slowdown for things like sub $10 grand, $20 grand. We typically saw a slowdown in buying cycles when it was things like $100 grand, $200 grand. No, annual, annual.

Yeah, so yeah, yeah, this is like we're talking—

When they needed more of a sign-off.

Yeah, yeah, $30, $40, $50 grand, so you don't, you still need a little something sometimes depending on the company size, but not always.

I don't, yeah, I don't have too much data on the, for software, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 because at Kiss we were, we had contracts that were even 6 figures, but majority of them were sub-$20,000.

Yeah.

And I would say majority were actually sub-$10,000. So I just didn't have good data points on price points like $50,000, $60,000, but I do know from $100,000 plus, because with Kiss we had a lot of lower and then some crazy high, like $100,000 plus. Yeah.

Who sold those?

We had a sales team. There was a guy named Ben Sardella who ran all sales for us. And what we always found was summer slowdown with the higher price points, not because we weren't getting leads or traffic. It was, it just required more of a sign-off. And a lot of those people that we're trying to get sign-offs for were taking summer vacations.

Yep. Yep. By the way, I mean, because we're kind of talking about this, let's talk about how we're managing multiple offers right now, because I mentioned earlier, the ClickFlow, the offer is we'll give you 25,000 words for free. free production-grade content. Carrot is basically, okay, we'll help you create personalized LinkedIn ABM ads and you have different offers too. And so how are we managing different offers right now? That is the prompt.

So the way we manage different offers is we have different teams for different offers, and then we have people placed within each of those teams that work cross-organizationally. I'm probably using the wrong term, but where they work in all divisions and their goal is to integrate and make sure people are cross-selling and doing what's for the company and not just doing what's best for a division. We also have incentives aligned for the different divisions to focus on what's best for the organization, not what's best for their own individual unit. I'll give you a great example of this. We have AnswerThePublic.

Yeah.

We collect leads from AnswerThePublic, right? We have it in there where if AnswerThePublic helps collect more leads, but it hurts their revenue, you can do cross-company charges and give them some of the marketing budget or budgets from some of the other organizations where it helps them to offset some of the hurt that Answer the Public is taking by helping some of the other organizations. And then on our end, we just look at the math formula on what is best for the overall organization. And then we do that. Yep.

I have nothing to add there. That's basically, you guys do that at a higher level than we do. So we do, we do a couple of things there, but the main thing is just make it, I think the main thing I want to cover from that one is just we have alignment. We don't want silos where it's like, oh, I'm just on this one, I'm just on this one. Doesn't work out. No, we need you guys to understand everything across the board because that's how we're all going to do better. Because you build in more lock-in, you build in more retention.

And we've had people who are supposed to operate on a thing company-wide, even when the incentives are aligned that way, but they only care about their department. And when we had that, those people don't last long.

Yep. Yeah, it's about how do we help the team, not how do I make more money individually.

Or for my department.

Yeah.

Because if the person does really well for the organization, the organization will figure out a way to compensate them.

Yep. So you have one here on what are we doing to build brand or how valuable are in-person events for enterprise marketing?

Yeah, so let's talk about what are we doing to build brand. I just went to an in-person event and there was a lot of publicly traded organizations and they're all talking about if we don't get the clicks to our website as much, because things are changing. If you're doing shopping, A lot of it's coming to social commerce and in-app purchasing. TikTok Shops, Shopify, you can buy in-app now. I mean, not Shopify, Instagram, right? I don't know about Shopify. I don't know if they even have an app, but Instagram, TikTok, you know, you can just buy natively within their own applications. You have AI overviews, Google AI mode, ChatGPT. Yes, you can get clicks, but you're not getting as many clicks. And there was an interesting thing that we saw in the room. So most of the organizations that were there, there, almost actually all of them, I'm pretty sure all of them, they're publicly traded or owned by a publicly traded organization, or partly owned by a publicly traded organization, and almost all of them had data and analytics divisions. And most people saw interesting consensus. Conversion rates from what, and you're talking about maybe 20, 30 companies in the room, multiple people from each company, most organizations saw actually a higher conversion rate from ChatGPT than most sources. They're like, we don't get that much traffic, but we're getting really high conversions from the traffic we can track. And what was interesting here is, is you're probably not getting as high conversion as you think from ChatGPT. You're only able to assign the conversion to the clicks that you're getting, but how many other people are seeing the brand and learning about it and not clicking over versus Google or some of the other platforms that are clicking over to learn. So I believe the conversion rate is actually really lower, but the total number of people that learn about the brand is much higher than they're able to track. And if you look at what you and I are doing, we are still focusing on building content heavily and unique content that is on new topics that most people aren't talking about because because it increases our chances that the AI platforms are going to continually mention us. And as they mention us, we look at that as a huge way to build a brand and a way to stay relevant and drive revenue.

Yeah. And as you're saying that, by the way, so us doing this podcast, we do try to stay— we do talk a lot about marketing news. But I think about my YouTube channel, the videos I've been making recently are a lot tied to latest trends around business marketing or AI. And guess who's going to pick that up in AI Well, Google owns YouTube. Yeah. So like, we're going to show up, right? And so it's— we're playing the long— I think if I were to answer this question directly, what are we doing to build brand? There's a lot of video that comes into play and we're really building for the long term and we're trying to compound for the long term with the understanding that the game is much different than it was 15 years ago where we could just crank out blog posts. You actually have to spend time. Noah setting this up, you coming downstairs, me driving here. Right, 5 minutes away to do this, but sit in person and actually have to bring our A-game and actually have to experiment because that's authentic.

Yes.

And so it's, it's, it's easier to build a brand if you're being authentic. Yeah.

And I think if— and what really opened the eyes for me is when we were at the YPO Marketing Summit that you threw in Miami, we gave a talk. Noah was there. Noah tends to record all our podcasts, but at that time he couldn't record our podcast because he was recording the talks at the YPO Marketing Summit.

Yeah.

So we were in our room or your room and you pulled up some sort of camera on a stick. I don't know what it was called.

Yeah. So what, it's a DJI Osmo. And so Noah gave me his, his extra one and I had what?

I thought we only had one running.

No, we had 2 running.

Oh, we had 2 running.

Yeah, we had 2. Yeah.

And then I think we just had DJI mics or something like that, right?

Yeah.

And it was, it wasn't as good quality as this because we didn't have Noah doing the lighting and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

We know you couldn't be at 2 places at once.

Yeah.

So we understand. And that episode or that string of episodes, 'cause we recorded straight for like an hour and 20, hour 30 minutes.

Yeah.

We had no scripts. You and I just free flowed for literally almost an hour and a half.

Yeah.

And we had some of our best feedback and view counts on those episodes.

Yep.

And it was purely because we were just being authentic and transparent.

Yep.

And I think after that, you and I started being like, oh, let's just be more open and transparent.

Yeah.

It's not like we were trying to hide anything. It was just more so, let's just be off the cuff and real.

Yeah. 'Cause the reality is, by the way, If you're doing interesting things, you should just talk about those things. It's easier to just talk about stories about things that you're doing already.

Yeah.

Versus trying to react to the news cycle. Yes, we talked about Elon today, but that's a bigger topic. But it's, and that's what makes you authentic too, 'cause you're out there, you're trying things. And so that's what, and that podcast, by the way, the comments we got were, it feels like 2 friends having a conversation. And then another comment was, this is the type of content we follow you guys for. And we're like, oh, okay, fine, we should do more of that. And by the way, sometimes it's not like we need a lot of views or whatever. You just read like 1 or 2 comments And it's like the qualitative feedback sometimes matters more than the quantitative feedback. Yeah. Yeah. So, but there's one thing I sent you and I ran a test here. This is kind of, maybe you call me crude for running this test after my mom passing, but I basically shared this poem with a lot of people. Okay. I shared it with you.

Yeah. It was not crude. It was sweet. I thought it was a beautiful poem.

So I shared this poem with a lot of people. I shared it with like my mom's best friend the other day when I saw her and she started crying. Right. I cried a lot when I read this poem, right? Now, the crazy thing about this poem is that it's a note that my mom wrote to me, right? Now, here's the crazy thing. I had my mom, she wrote me this note in Chinese. It was a 3-page note. I can't read that stuff. So I went to ChatGPT, I translated it. It did a good translation in English. It was pretty good. And then it asked me a question at the end. It was like, do you want to make this poetic? And I was like, sure. So I made it poetic. And it was levels above the original. The English translation, it was not even close. Because then I had my mom's best friend the other day, she was reading it. I was like, I need you to read the original. So I showed her the original, right? She's like, yeah, the poem crushes the original. Not to say my mom wrote anything bad, it was pretty good.

No, it just took the emotional aspects and emphasized them. It was taking the true meaning from what your mom was trying to write and write it in a way of someone Who's a talented writer.

Yeah, it made it a really talented writer. Now, my mom, what she wrote, like the essence is still there, I think to your point, right? But I'm just like, wow, this is the first time where I've seen something AI-generated make multiple humans, like a lot of humans cry. Obviously, I'm going to cry from it, but I'm just like, yeah, you know, and this is the worst it'll ever be. It's just going to get better over time. So the poem was so good that I'm having a version framed for in front of my— and I'm having a version framed for my bedroom, but it's like, I think if there's one thing that I want to pass to everyone here is the one thing I have no regret on here, and this is not necessarily an Eric Siu story podcast, but I read on Reddit a long time ago, it's like, what's the biggest regret you have before your parents going? Everyone was like, not recording more content. So that DJ Osmo that we recorded in Miami, I made so much vlog content with her before she passed. And we, I basically interviewed her like a podcast, right? Got her stories and then had her write this in the stories book you can buy from Amazon called Tell Me Your Story, Mom, or Tell Me Your Story, dad. And then that's where I got all those things, right? And so all that to say is like, a lot of people hit me up afterwards, they're like, we're going to do that. And if your parents are still around, do that too. And maybe you too can have an AI-generated poem that makes humans cry. Yeah.

And before we go, the one thing that I learned from your experience that really changed my life, and it was touching, is when you're going through this, You started doing things with your parents that you normally wouldn't, because I've known you for a long time. You were single-track-minded and work was your priority and work came first for everything. I saw you do things like take your mom to some place in Pacific Palisades or something like that, right?

Rancho Palos Verdes, yeah. Yeah.

And spend time. I saw you do the books. I saw you go over to where they live and spend way more time and not put business first. And you know, when you told me about the book and you can't get back time and filming, it made me realize, because if I look at my life, yes, I travel more and I don't have a choice because the economy's bad, but I would make decisions like, if you look at me in a home, I've switched homes roughly once every year and a half. And I optimize for what makes me the most money and what's best for my business.

Yeah.

Versus what's best for my And when you pointed some of those things out, like going through your experience, you're like, is it worth making extra, a little bit extra more money? And like for me, not having a yard for my kids to go and run in or something like that, it starts making you think, what is the extra money really worth? Because when you pass away or you're about to pass away, are you going to remember the money you made?

Are you going to remember the house?

You're not going to take it to heaven.

Yeah.

You're not going to take any of it. I was like, all right, you know, there's a point where it's like, it's just not worth it.

Yeah. So let me— I think there's one thing that sticks out to me here. So it's the line that comes to mind is, there is no greater poverty than being rich in things and poor in relationships. And so one of the things that my mom wrote in that book, the question was, what is the accomplishment that you're most proud of? And it says, my friends and my family. And I'm like, yeah, that's all that matters. And so I think that is one thing that she helped reinforce there. Like, what else are we working so hard for at the end of the day? Right. And then the final point here is like, you know, the time that we get to spend with them, it's like that, that is worth way more than it's worth its weight in gold. Like, what do you get more of working for another hour or 2? And I would say that if you watch this or you listen to this podcast, we talk about creating content, we talk about software, we talk about creating business or hiring amazing people. You're looking to build all this leverage, but then like, do you really need to crank that hard? As hard as we like, we used to crank pretty hard, right?

Yeah.

As we get a little older, maybe not as much.

That's right. Like, I was on a plane, I watched a movie. I'm like, you know what?

You usually watch movies.

I usually work while I watch movies, but I actually watched the movie without working.

That's rare. That's rare. Yeah. Yeah. A full movie.

A full movie.

Wow. I haven't done that for a while.

Yeah.

Maybe I'll do that next time.

It was like an hour or 40 minutes or something like that. I was like, oh, I watched the movie without working. It was like something called like Novocaine or something like that. I don't know.

Oh, he's nodding. I don't know what it is.

You know, Novocaine? It's an action movie with a person who doesn't feel pain and tries to rescue a girl. I think it's called Novocaine. It was a bank teller or bank manager or whatever, but like, I just relaxed for a minute. It was kind of nice.

Yeah. So enjoy your lives, guys. That's what it is. And take it one day at a time. And, you know, it's all about friends and family. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.