Eric Siu and Neil Patel describe how they run their companies. Eric uses evenings to experiment with AI and categorizes employees as fanatics, converts, or anchors based on their adoption. Neil, who has no direct reports, hunts weekly for the single biggest revenue opportunity and pursues it aggressively, even if it disrupts teams.
You both are running sizable businesses. I mean, like, and, but you both sound like practitioners. So I'm trying to understand, like, how do you actually structure your operations, your week? Like, you're messing around with MCPs. Like, that's surprising to me that you would actually be doing that. Why aren't you just passing that off to some dude in China? Right? Like, so I'm kind of curious, like, both of you, Neil and Eric, like, how are you actually structuring your time? Are you spending 5% of your time on content and this is actually the highest leverage activity and then you're dumping it off to your team or how's that work? Yeah.
Yeah, so for me, and I definitely wanna get Neil's day too, 'cause it's really interesting how he structures it. Mondays are a mess for me, it's all meetings, but then the rest of the time, especially in the evenings, 'cause I'm not married, don't have kids like Neil does, so I have a lot of time on my hands. And so that's where I spend my time on MCPs and AI in general. And I think, so how I've defined it before on the podcast was that you have fanatics in your company, you have the converts. So the fanatics are crazy about AI, and they're on everything. The converts are, they need direction, they need— they're down for it, but they don't know where to start. And so the fanatics will kind of bring them along. And then you have the anchors. The anchors are resisting. They're like, oh man, I don't want AI to take my job type of thing. And so for me, I feel like it's my job as a fanatic and a leader to have it come from the top down. If it's not coming from me, we were talking about it this morning, even Neil's playing around with this stuff quite a bit. If it's not coming from us, the most incentivized people to drive it, it's not going to happen. And we see this as pretty existential for us. And I don't know, I'm personally excited about it, but— I'll transfer it to you, Neil, because Neil's structure is interesting because he doesn't have any direct reports.
Yeah, I don't have direct reports. I'm a terrible manager, so I never manage. I'm a terrible CEO, so I'm never a CEO. I just go around the business and look for the biggest opportunity of the week that needs to be solved that would help us make more revenue and profit, and I just focus on that, and I go disrupt and make a mess and solve a problem. and probably irritate or piss people off. Oh, probably, for sure. Yeah, and then I go to the next one the next week and I just keep doing that every week now.
I just hop around. I think the big thing is we want to focus on the new things, the bold things, and the big things. They say big, bold, new. Those are the things that we want to focus on. I'm actually different. I just focus on what's going to make me the most money.
I like that.
