AI Taking over my companies

I'm excited to dive into the AI stuff. I think it's going to change everything we're doing. I think it's going to change GA and Aux completely fundamentally.

I've brought back the weekly email, like, here's what's going on in the company and I want to get better at it.

We reflect and see how things went so that we can figure out what's going to work better the next quarter. What do we need to do, change and start and stop? If you can get good at reflecting and iterating, whether it's on 2-week sprints, whether it's on quarterly planning, that's all you ever need. We called it a sports hedge fund. And like any good hedge fund, like we figured out trends where the market Seem to get things wrong. It's a holiday here in St. Louis. Did you know that? It is.

Why?

It's opening day for the Cardinals. This is Cardinals country, dude.

I just saw my first Super Bowl like ever. I am the least sporty person you ever met, but I'm working on it. It was actually fun.

I'm surprised actually because you're kind of a competitive person.

I don't like watching, which is why porn is no good for me. I like doing. Like the more I could do, the better. I'm not the kind of person who could even sit still at a bar. Do, do, do.

All right, fair enough.

Do we leave that in? Because, you know, I ran that clip of you talking to me about how irritated you were by Zoom and you likened it to porn. And I said, that's gonna kill on LinkedIn 'cause Jesse's having like this fit that so many people can relate to. And I saw that LinkedIn saw the word porn in that, in the topic or in something in the transcript. And I think that's why it didn't get much traffic. So maybe we should leave that whole thing out.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

All right.

But we're fixing it. We're putting it on your account now and we're bleeping that word out because your rant is just like so viscerally relatable. Everyone has felt that.

Dude, I mean, I've had a great week. I, I've, I've probably taken 40% of my Zoom calls and just flipped them to calls.

And what are you doing?

And then I've gotten outside, I've walked, I've, I've been on the phone and it's, it's like, you know, one of the other big things, it's interesting. I've spent so much time meditating and trying to build presence and all of this. And like sitting in front of the computer, it's hard for me to be present. Um, cause there's just so many other things around you when you're walking and you're on the phone, you can be very present. Like you just, and it's, in some ways I think it's weird to say this, but I think it's more intimate to To be on a phone call. Like, your voice is in my head. If you have headphones, if you have like AirPods on, right?

What I found is there is a jitteriness about just having a conversation. And when I talk with Dave Kashin for our coaching calls, I said, I just can't sit still. He goes, well, go walk outside. And so I take it walking and my mind is much more focused because I'm walking. I might pick a stick up and throw it, or I don't know, march into an area of the property that I don't usually go to. And I find it helps for that. But when I really need to be present, and I think you and I work differently that way, I need notes. I need the transcript. I need everything in my possession. I need to look up what you just said. There's no way for me to not be fully immersed in the conversation and still be in it.

But real, I mean, to me, it's really, it's in person. Real presence comes when you're sitting with someone.

I don't like it in person.

You're a good person, another human being.

For hanging out, yes, but I need like notes and then I get distracted. We operate differently. Like your memory for conversation, dude, it's unusual. Most people don't have the ability to 5 months later go, but we said this thing. I have to go back and look at my notes. You're just listening and absorbing it. I don't function that way.

Yeah, I have a funny thing. I tried to take notes for a while. I did this guilt thing where I was like, I was like, oh, I need to take better notes and I don't take notes and good leaders take notes. And I found that when I took notes, I forgot stuff more because there was something in my brain that told me once it's written down, I don't have to remember it anymore. And then I'd forget it.

Yeah.

And I was not good. I think the other part of taking notes, if you want to be good at taking notes, you have to have like a system to go back and look at the notes and be able to reference them. And I didn't have that system. I'd lose the notebooks. And so it actually became this horrible thing for me where notes just did not work at all. Uh, and, and it's better for me to just try to remember things or email. I mean, I reference my email constantly, so that's like kind of a little notepad for me.

Yeah. Limiting yourself to email, Slack, and text, as you said to us the other day, is really helpful because nothing's getting lost. Maybe Google Docs. So we are going to meet in person next week. You've said repeatedly, plans are meaningless. Planning is is everything, or some— I'm paraphrasing it pretty badly, but we had our annual plan at the end of last year. We're now going to come in and talk with you and the GatewayX team about our Q1 results and our Q2 plan. And I'm liking this whole plan thing because even though it failed, because I do see where we failed, I think, and I'm liking also knowing what we're going to do over the next 3 months, and it's helped me to not be so attached to the results because in the past, if I made a plan, I would inevitably fail it in some way or the other. And I would think I'm a failure and why do I want to keep subjecting myself to this annual planning thing that keeps making me feel like a failure?

Yeah. So you're liking the dynamicism of it? What are you liking about it?

I'm liking that it's like a pause to think about where you're going without a shackle to say, if you don't get there, you're going to jail and we're going to pull you in. I like that part of it.

Yeah, I, I think it builds some structure around getting to where you want to get to, uh, and figuring it out. I mean, look, dude, this business is like less than a year old, and I think that one of the, you know, you can't pretend that you know more about the business than you know. And obviously, like for a business like Growth Assistant, that's much more mature. I think there are things we know about the business and like behaviors we would expect to take place, how much churn happens or, How we, how clients expand. Now there's still tweaks and shifts that you're doing around that if you miss the plan, but it's a little bit of a different exercise. Whereas in this exercise we're actually trying to use, to me, we reflect and, and see how things went so that we can figure out what's gonna work better the next quarter. What do we need to do, change and start and stop? And I mean, honestly, I, I think if you can get good at reflecting and iterating, whether it's on 2-week sprints, whether it's on quarterly planning, whether whatever it is, I think that's all you ever need. Like, I would argue like that, that's Rick's superpower at Red Ventures. I mean, that business has been through like 8 different transformations and it's just because Rick every is constantly going, yeah, what's working? Yeah, this is working. Let's do more of this. Let's do less of this. Okay. This is, and you know, there's this famous story that Reed Hastings tells from Netflix. I don't know if you've heard this one, but he says essentially, In his first company, they wanted to dummy-proof everything, right? And it's a very common thing entrepreneurs wanna do. Okay, there's a system I need to come up with an SOP and I'm gonna make it dummy-proof so anyone can do it. And he goes, the problem with that was then over time, this was his first company, not Netflix, that we attracted all dummies. Like only dummies wanted to work here. They, people who could do, follow a basic SOP and do it. And that was fine for a while and it grew the business for a while and it grew it very efficiently. But then what happens? What's the, the only constant in the world is what?

Change. Is change.

So what happened was his business was built around, I think, C++, and then Java became the dominant language and they could not make the pivot. They didn't have the people, they didn't have the horsepower, they didn't have the mindset to be able to shift in that direction. And so then he essentially, I mean, it wasn't a, it wasn't like a failure story. They sold the company because they couldn't keep up with the market. So his, His argument is the market is always changing. And so if you don't build an organism on your side that can constantly evolve and change, eventually it's gonna, it's gonna be, it's gonna like fail. It's gonna find itself not be able to keep up. And so if you take that, that's why they, Netflix is such a dynamic place where they hire really smart people, kind of constantly changing. And it's crazy when you think about Netflix. I mean, you and I are old enough to know that it used to mail you DVDs. That was like the first 10 years of the business. Then it started streaming other people's content, and that was like five years of the business. And now it makes all of its own original content. Like imagine a business of that scale and size pivoting three times to keep up with the market. And and I think you know go back to this stuff for the quarter. Like to me, we ultimately want to get the businesses good at like feeling what's going on and being able to reflect and iterate and change, reflect and iterate and change. And that's going to keep happening. Even at scale, if we get good at this, that we're going to want to keep doing those things.

Are you still doing that at Aux Insights, at Growth Assistant?

Yeah. I mean, I think you know this, but I'm like, I am extremely excited about AI. And in some ways I'm excited about it in a way I haven't felt probably since I started Ampush, which is like, I don't understand it fully. I don't think I've been near something in a long time where maybe mobile was the last big shift, which was almost 13 years ago or more than that, where I was like, whoa, this is going to be big. And I don't fully get how, like, I can't imagine all the ways the world's going to change because of it. And that feels like a really exciting space to be in. And then like, from my perspective, like, you know, I'm a little younger than you, but I remember talking to my co-founders at Ampush all the time and being like, Man, I wish we were alive during the dot-com bubble. Like we would've crushed it. Like we were alive, but we were, I don't know, 6, 17 or something like that. Right. I was like, oh, I wish we were. And now I'm like, wait, I'm 40. Like I already have the exit under my belt. I've got a platform with a bunch of companies and smart people running around. I'm like, this is like my dot-com, maybe bigger than that. And I'm excited to just like dive into the AI stuff, uh, with all the companies. And I think it's gonna change everything we're doing. I think it's gonna change GA and Aux completely fundamentally.

What are you seeing that is already working?

Um, well, let, let's talk about kind of the DFS for the desired future state, right? If you look at a business, if you look at any business, let's, let's, but especially a marketing services business, which broadly Aux and GA are both marketing, or Ampush is also a marketing services business. There's at a super high level, there's 2 type, there's 2 parts of the business. One is what you're delivering to clients, like the actual product or service you're selling. And the other is how you run the business, right? So in every case, in the product and service, I think selling AI is going to be a big part of both of those businesses a year from today. So for Aux, I think we already have traction with private equity firms. Once we have a handful of use cases for AI, I think we can go in and say to them, hey guys, we have ways we can either make your teams more productive, save you money using AI. And we've already proven to you that we can be very effective partners on the digital marketing front. Now, like, give us a shot with the AI stuff. And I think we're like, you know, we're going to launch a practice group there. Like, I think that will be a functional area of Aux a year from today. And then for GA, I think creating GA-enabled or AI-enabled GAs is going to completely bring another leg of growth to the business. So it's not just, I can get you a Facebook ads support person, or I can get you an influencer outreach person. This person can reach out to influencers, they understand the business, but they also know how to use all these AI tools. So they're gonna be 5 times more productive than they were a year ago. So I think those are, those are like, go ahead.

Because Growth Assistant hires assistants who help with growth tasks, and already people are getting more leverage by hiring them. You're saying, I'll also power up these assistants with my own proprietary AI agents that they will then be able to do their job faster and better.

Or at the very minimum, just a, just a really keen a really strong skill base, even if we just train them on how to, like, I mean, Adam, our CTO, is like learning how to do all these things with ChatGPT. And if I just train people on that, not to mention if we have our own proprietary tools are attached to it, or we have ways of driving against it. And so I think the products are, I think the services themselves are gonna shift a year from today, and that's gonna create huge growth for both businesses. I think it could be true for BG also. I think we can start offering AI-related things to sales, marketing, how to run your business using AI. I think that there's like an obvious thing for us to do. Why? I mean, think about how much easier it makes it to bootstrap your business when you know how to use AI. Um, and so I think that should be an interesting paradigm. So to me, in some ways, all of our products are gonna shift. Our services, our products, what we sell in the market will shift. And then operationally, how you use it. If you think about a business like, let's talk about GA, they've got a marketing team, they've got demand-side marketing and supply-side marketing, right? So you've got marketing to customers and marketing to, to talent. Then you've got sales, sales teams, you've got account teams, you've got recruiters and sourcers, and you've got operational APA. And you just think if you can go department by department essentially, and there's different ways they can be using AI to basically get way more productivity out of the people. So the marketing team's already doing it, as you know. Which is the guy, you know, the guy who does a lot of the content for Adrian. He's said he's doubled his output in the last month because of stuff we've, we've taught him with, uh, with AI that he's writing double the amount of content with the same amount of time. Um, I think there's—

Show and tell a little bit on this stuff because I don't know it internally. I'd love to see what they're doing. What I get is a little bit of Slack, like Carolyn, just before we started said, check out what we're doing here, how we're getting customers from AI. And I res— oh, you're in the chain. I wanna know what they're doing.

Yeah, I saw it. Well, there's a, there's this whole other part of AI, and this could be another business we start a year or 2 from today, maybe sooner, which is, you know, the LLMs now having their, their sort of version of SEO is emerging. Um, and do you know what I mean by that?

You're saying when I'm searching on an, when I'm searching on OpenAI's chat or Perplexity or whatever, it's not just giving me answers, it's now starting to link me to places where I get the thing that I'm trying to do. And Growth Assistant could show up when I'm saying, how do I find an assistant to help me with growth? Or—

Yeah. Or let's think bigger than that. I mean, Red Ventures has a multi-billion dollar business off of financial services lead gen, essentially. So you go online and you go, best points credit card for Hyatt Hotels. And one of the links on there is The Points Guy, which, who owns The Points Guy? Red Ventures owns The Points Guy. And then that, that's, I mean, that's a, you know, that's a billion dollar business for them. Right. And so now what's going to happen if people are going to LLMs and going, well, here's my budget for the month, which credit card is best for me? Oh, well, we think these 3 credit cards are best. Well, where are they linking those to? I mean, Amex is going to want to rank there, but maybe third party, there's just going to be a whole, it's like a whole new media channel essentially. Just like SEO was this massive media channel. I mean, not including Google's business, there's got to be at least A trillion or $2 trillion in value that this organic search has created for the travel business, the Expedias of the world, and the, there's just so many people that go on there and conduct commerce using the organic stuff.

So Jesse, what would you do at GatewayX? Would you be an SEO company that helps companies rank higher in AI results, or would you be a content company that is like the points guy, but meant at—

I would probably do more of the points guy play. I mean, just given how early we are, I think the, there was an entrepreneur who approached me the other day who's launching an S, like a Semrush for the LLMs.

Interesting. Yeah.

And you know what Semrush is?

Yeah. You can, you get data on how you're ranking.

And you get analytics on how you're ranking, how you're, and I was like, this is cool. This is a cool business, but it's like 3 years too soon because nobody knows about this problem. Like, it's a good idea. It's just, I was like, I was like, if you're good at this, if you actually know how to analyze these things, let's go start an actual SEO business. Those businesses have incredible staying power, by the way. I mean, they print cash.

SEO-based content businesses or SEO agencies?

Yeah, that are like lead gen. Got it.

Just create content.

But SEO agencies, yeah, I'm not, I like the first version of Ampush, as you know, was a performance marketing business. It wasn't an agency. It was, we made money off the margins of what we delivered. And I think that's a way better business, especially if you have organic traffic.

Meaning someone would click on a result in Google, end up on your page, sign up for something, and you get paid.

PujjiCards.com, and you come to me and I charge Amex $500 every time I get them an application, but I'm attracting traffic from the LLMs.

And it was all SEO?

We start, yeah, I mean, we had a mix of things when we started. We were a little late to the SEO game because SEO was already a thing. We started in 2010. Um, but I just think, I think it's a, I'm excited. Like, I think there's so much we're going to learn here in the next year. And then it's all changing so fast. I mean, did you see this image thing that launched?

I did, I did. I saw—

I've been making images all like the last 48 hours. I've been—

It's not as fun though, because it takes, it takes like 3 minutes for it to pop up. So I can't keep playing with it. Um, but I saw Nathan May created a bunch of ad images and he said, look, you want, you're running an ad now, you get the perfect image created for you. And look at how polished these look. It's true.

You know what else I like?

So I've been interviewing Adam about how the Gateway Access CTO, about how he is creating, uh, AI agents. agents, the whole idea of like an agency that will create and manage your AI agents sounds really interesting. You go to them and say, I don't wanna hire a person to do the job. I wanna hire an AI that does the job you created for me. And then I want you to level them up every month. Just come in and see what other features can we add into this. And it's like custom software to some degree, but it's also a little bit like using Zapier and other tools. So it's, yeah, it's lighter than creating custom software. It's fantastic.

Well, then, Nak and I were talking this morning of like, then you're gonna have to have a Rippling for AI agents, like an onboarding system and a management system because it's It's gonna, instead of being the employee, you don't need employees anymore. You have agents and you're like, well, I don't want that agent having access to this. And you know, how long, how long has this agent been around? And so on and so forth. And I think it's, I mean, you know, I was telling Nat this morning, I'm curious what you think, like, 'cause you and I are a little older and we've seen some things like, I've, every time people say it's different this time, you immediately get your, you know, I get, I get my guard up and I go, yeah, every time they say that, it's not that different. And at the same time, there's been massive technology change in the world, right? So there was the internet, then there was mobile, there was social. I mean, there's some big shifts that have created tons of value. And I told him, I go back and forth between debating. On the one hand, this feels different because it's so fast. And all of a sudden it's like the creative thing. You're like, you don't need a graphic designer. You can just use this thing. And that's different. That feels different to me than anything I've ever experienced. It feels different than mobile. It feels different than the internet. It feels just even bigger. And then the flip of me goes like, I walk into clients for Aux and there are these big businesses that are private equity backed and they don't even have their pixel installed correctly for Google Search, which is a 20-year-old technology.

Mm-hmm.

And so part of me goes, yeah, you can gimme all the best technology out there you want, but human beings are, they're slow to adopt things. But the, again, the counter to that with AI is It makes it so easy that you don't need to be technical to do, like installing a pixel is still somewhat of a technical task versus sitting on a chatbot and going, make me an image that says this. Now put my wife's name at the top. Now do this. Now make this. Like, so I don't know, I'm torn between like, this could literally, the whole world could upend in 5 years, or it's gonna be just another mega trend to ride like mobile or social. And maybe it's somewhere in the middle, but that's kind of what's been going through my mind.

Get this. One of the people who came, we did a meetup, Bootstrap Giants meetup here in Austin yesterday. One of the people who came is Jeff Woods, and he gave me his book called AI-Driven Leader and told me about how he's teaching it. I go, you're teaching? What's the business here? He goes, I've got this group of CEOs who are paying me to be in a group where they're all learning how they possibly could use AI. And I said, and you're teaching them how they could use it? He goes, no, no, we're just brainstorming ideas. We don't have an answer yet because it's all shifting. They're paying to be part of this group to just think through and experiment together. And it's a smart— It's a fantastic model.

Yeah, I think it's smart.

But I'm surprised that people would pay for that though. Couldn't you just do that on your own?

I don't know, man. It's hard to make time for things. It's like, I go to a personal trainer once a week and I like wanna add a second session. I do 2 heavy lifts a week, one with him, and then he sends me one that I do on the weekends. And I'm like, I've been texting him. I'm like, let's add another one. And it's like, man, it's just good. It's like he's waiting for me and I know it forces me to make time for a thing that I know is good for me that I think would be harder for me.

Yeah.

I was like, can we do it at 8 in the morning on Wednesdays? And he's like, I can't, I've got something else. I'm like, I guess I could just go myself and do it. But then I'm like, I just don't think I will at the same rate. And I'm a relatively high agency person that's got flexibility in my time and stuff. Imagine the average person. It's very different.

I'm doing a pushup challenge with a friend of mine from San Francisco, and he didn't send me his numbers today. So there was no urgency for me to send him my numbers. And I was just thinking that same thing.

I did a thing with Ricky, Ricky and I, my son Ricky, we like, we, we waver on this, but we did a thing for a while where we said every time we see each other first thing in the morning, we're just gonna say hi and then do 10 pushups together. And it was a fun thing to get at, 'cause I want him to start to build, build those habits.

You know, I was doing it with my kids at night. Let's do pushups before going to sleep. It was what, it was my youngest son who was pushing for all of it. And, uh, and then I felt like they're putting too much pressure on themselves at this rate. Like there's something about the numbers and the pressure and they're doing it every night that became this thing that I had to stop them from continuing.

They're getting that from their dad.

And their mom. I think that the two of us are really very Type A, very driven and I wanna make sure we're not exhausting these 2 kids. Uh, all right. So one thing that would, that people have been asking is demystify what's going on at these companies at GatewayX. And so coming back to where we started with the annual planning, is annual planning, is quarterly planning something you're doing formally with other companies or is it just us at this point because we're less than a year old?

No, all of them. All of them. I mean, Adrian's got her whole team here this quarter.

To rethink Q2.

Yeah, same. I mean, more or less the same thing. What went well? What didn't go well? What do we need to shift? What do we learn? And sometimes it's tactical things at the top of the bubble, which is like, oh, this employee's not working out, or we're going to kill this initiative. And sometimes it's like, we're not moving fast as a team. We need to move faster. And I think creating that room and shifting where you're going is super, super important. I mean, it's like a basketball game, right? Like the, you get done with the first quarter. Could you imagine ending the first quarter of a basketball game and not having any conversation about how to make adjustments and shift? I mean, they used to say Bill Belichick was, his genius was he was amazing at adjustments in the game. And I would argue that's probably what I'm good at too. Like Ampush probably could have gone outta business 5 times and we kept it going and we kept shifting it because, I mean, dude, it was crazy, right? Facebook was changing so fast when we started.

Yeah.

And there was a ton of companies that went out of business along the way or didn't get there because Facebook would change something and then it would destroy the way they did business and they'd have to be able to shift around it.

Again, never seen basketball really all the way through. One time the retargeter guys took me out for a basketball game. All I did the whole time was just kind of chat with them and it was like on the court or something really impressive. I had no idea who we were watching and I still don't know. I think it's the Warriors in retrospect, 'cause we were living in San Francisco. I, I keep trying. You know what, when I was like a nerd in high school trying to figure out how to connect with people and prepare myself for a life of success in business, I read a book that said you have to understand sports and keep up with it because otherwise you're left outta conversations. I worked so freaking hard to understand it. None of it stuck in my head. I was very much like in the girls' corner of high school with all this stuff. And it's really challenging. I can understand from the context of what you said.

It's funny, I was really into sports until my kids were born. And I mean, I can still really get into a game if it's on. I've watched every sport a lot. I mean, we started in college, we started, we called it a sports hedge fund, but there was this business, there was this website called tradesports.com. And there's a new one now that it's becoming legal again. I think it's, there's like one called Intrade or there's all these, you know, these second, you can bet on anything sort of markets. And we would watch NBA games and like figure out where to bet on these NBA games because you could bet inside the game. And like any good hedge fund, like we figured out trends where the market seemed to get things wrong.

Okay.

Based on the probabilities that you would expect that a certain thing was happening, right? So for example, if a good team was So the way that it worked is you would buy a contract that would trade between $0 and $100, right? So if I bet, if it was a 50-50 chance that one team would win, you could pay $50 to win $50 essentially. But as the game went on, if a team was winning, then like it would be, you could buy it at $80 to win $100 essentially. And so what we observed, we like pulled all this data, we literally built like a little hedge fund. And what we observed was that when a good team was leading, In the 3rd quarter of a game, the markets overvalued their likelihood to win.

Makes sense.

They would just always think that the team would win. And the reality, so it was almost like if you do the math, it was like they would, the market would say 85% of the time they'd win. And the reality we did the math on, it was 75% of the time. So we just shorted all these contracts every time they'd hit 85 and we made the spread of the $10 because we were right that on average, you know, it was a classic sort of hedge fundy type strategy. Um, but anyway, I, I've watched a ton of sports and I just, I don't, I, I don't have time for it anymore. Uh, because I get it. I focus on my kids and stuff. I'll watch, I'll watch playoffs and certain things, but I generally don't, don't make time for sports.

No, I saw all the Cardinals paraphernalia at your house. Like it really is a big, big thing there. All right. So internally, quarterly planning, that's a big thing. What else are you doing internally at, at Aux and Gateway and And Gateway and Growth Assistant?

Yeah, the big stuff. I mean, the big stuff that's going on at the Gateway level, it's all about AI and how do we get in and start understanding it and transforming parts of the companies that are doing it both formally and informally. Informally, you're seeing all this stuff on Slack, but formally we're going to almost go to the companies, like we're going to go to Growth Assistant next quarter and be like, we're consultants. We're going to redefine your product and process using AI. Like we're going to come up with steps and basically build those things. So that's kind of what's got the, me, Nak, and Adam in our focus. And then for each business it's different, right? I think for Growth Assistant, I'm helping think about how to expand accounts, open up certain marketing channels, you know, their strategy. There's just different things going on there. For Aux, it's, we're opening up an office in Chicago, so we're like getting in touch with a bunch of private equity firms in Chicago and wanting to get on their radar. And there's a bunch of hiring stuff going on there. We have a new COO there. And then for BG, we're redefining the product, as you know, and trying to figure out what that product should look like. So they're each, I mean, they're all different businesses with different priorities. And typically I will have 1 or 2 major rocks for each business that the company and the CEO wants me to push forward on.

One ritual that I've started stopped and now have brought back is the weekly email. Like, here's what's going on in the company and I want to get better at it. Are other CEOs doing that?

They aren't. I think, well, actually, Adrienne, she is, she was for a long time. I think it's a great practice. I think, I don't think Casey is doing it, but I think that may change as she gets her feet under her. That business is having a ton of traction and it's like, It's got the classic like sold out product, you know, it's, it's a, it's, it's really hitting its stride. So I don't think she's doing that. Adrian used to do it. I don't know if she's still doing it. I think it's a great practice, the weekly email. If nothing else, it centers you. Um, you know, when John took over for me as CEO of Ampush, one of the things I did was I just, I, we got on the phone with 10 hired gun CEOs.

Mm-hmm.

And just said like, hey, what do you, what, what are some of the things you do well? And almost all of them said, Sunday night, I get the data from my team and everything, but Sunday night I sit down and I write an email. I share our metrics. It shows everybody I'm paying attention. It lets me actually see where we are and it creates a rhythm for the organization. And the professional, when you meet professional CEOs, you realize it's a trade. And there's like the founder CEOs who are a different breed of people. And then there's the CEO CEOs and they don't have the founder energy. And so they, they, they, they act very different. They, they get a lot of shit done. They're, they're worker. I mean, they make sure that they make the thing hum. They're like maestros at an orchestra. Again, you think about the difference between like a Beethoven who like makes up the music and the guy at the thing who just makes the music go. And, and these professional CEOs are kind of a different breed, but they're pretty impressive when you meet them.

I talked with, uh, Dean from Winback, who's one of our members, about how long it takes him to do his update. It takes him a couple of hours. It was actually really reassuring to hear that his update takes a couple of hours. I've gotten them for years as an investor in startups, monthly, quarterly, and I discounted how much work went into it. I imagine they must have spent half a day, if not a day, just getting all the data, organizing it, writing it, and then eventually other people took it on. The challenge I had was it's like 2 hours I don't have. And how does John, how does a CEO put together an update I understand the value for retrospective for me, thinking about what we, what we did, being aware of it. I also realized, I think everyone knows everything that's going on because they all should see it somehow, but they don't. And so I see the value for them, but how do you find 2 hours to put it together?

Well, I, I think that I, there's 2 things that come to mind for me. One is I gave Adrian this analogy one time of like, if you think of a company as a house, think of a bird's eye view of a house. So the roof is gone, so you can just see the rooms in the house. Typically what a company is, is a bunch of people sitting in rooms that may have windows inside of them so they can see inside the other room, but they're not in the other room. And the CEO typically is the only person, maybe the CFO, who sits above the house and can see how all the rooms are connected and how they're all talking to each other. So I think it's a huge misconception that people have any idea what's going on. They have the view from their room and their room says, okay, I've got my stuff going on here and I can look in my windows into the other rooms and see what's going on, but I don't have that bird's eye view. And I think that, that value of that, to zoom everyone up and show that bird's eye view is, it's where some of the most important things happen in a company because dots connect that otherwise wouldn't connect. And then the time, I think, again, the 2 thoughts I have, one is the better your organization gets at it, it's like, hey guys, get me numbers by this time, or I want to see dashboards. Like it forces you to actually, the data gathering part should go from an hour or 2 down to 5 minutes. Over time, some people like John would have his chief of staff draft up the email. So that's one way to handle it. But I think you also have to look at it as an opportunity to reflect and do your own. I mean, we started at the top of this podcast talking about iterating and accounting and response, and it's your own weekly version of like, oh, what went well? What could have gone better? How am I feeling about things? And it gives you that space and time to do that. So I think if you just do it as a task that you have to get an email written, it's not gonna be that valuable. But I think if you do it as a As like a way to do quickly account and response on how the week went, I think it can be very powerful. It's worth the hour. Let's put it that way.

That's a challenge, but we'll see. What I did that I think will speed it up is I created a channel for just saving things that I want to make sure people hear. So sometimes something will be incredible and I go, this is great. Everyone should know about it. I'll put it in the channel in addition to that. So then we can go in on Friday and hopefully grab everything that was important and put it in there. All right. This has been fantastic. Here's my idea for this. I take notes incessantly, coming back to what we said in the beginning. I'm going to ask Michael Lagorita, the video editor, to pull a couple of clips from this, and we're going to turn it into a few clips to show people like how Growth Assistant will use AI, talk about how you are transitioning from like the dot-com to AI, well, recreating the dot-com opportunities within AI.

Yeah.

And a couple of other things that I think will be good as clips. And then we'll see if we can turn this into some social posts too. We'll turn it over to Jamie, the writer.

All right.

Sounds good.

All right.

We'll see everybody.