AI Investing in Seattle with Ascend.vc General Partner Kirby Winfield

It belies this thing of like putting the technology out front. Nobody cares about your AI. Like customers don't care about your AI. They care about the problem that you're solving. Are you doing it 10 times better or 10 times more efficiently as same as it ever was. And AI just enables a new set of challenges and tasks to be tackled organically in a way that maybe wasn't before. But to do that as a new CO from the ground up in every motion of your product versus trying to bolt it on, you know, to a 15 year old technology stack, I'm not worried about that as an investment.

Yeah, that makes sense. Hi, I'm Boaz, founder and CEO of Simply Augmented. I'm excited that you're tuning in to Shift AI, a show that explores what it takes to thrive and adapt to the changing workplace in the digital age of remote work and AI. In today's episode, I am thrilled to have Kirby Winfield as our guest. Kirby is currently the general partner at Ascend and previous to being a vc, had a storied career as a serial startup entrepreneur with four of his companies being acquired and two going public. If you're someone interested in startup culture in Seattle and AI in general, you will love this episode. It's great to have Kirby on our podcast. We can't wait to learn more from him. Let's get to it. Kirby, welcome to Shift AI podcast. Thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate having you here.

I'm stoked to be here, man. It's good seeing you. You've got an illustrious lineup of prior guests and I'm honored to join them.

Yeah, well, you know, I'm really, I'm thrilled, I'm thrilled to have you on the show. So, as you know from previous episodes, I like to read back your experience to you and then have you correct me if I get anything wrong. Are you cool with that?

Oh, yeah, man. I've been waiting for it.

So I was reading back over your experience and it's really interesting to see how far you've come. A lot of people now think about you as a investor only, but you are an operator. For a really long time, you were on the founding team of GoToNet, which went to IPO, was went public, and from GoToNet you went directly to Marchex, and Marchex went public and then you had several other companies that you were involved in. You were president and CEO of Ad Expose that was acquired. You were part of the founding team on the board of directors at Sharp Agent, and then comscore was acquired after that. And then Dwellable was acquired after that. Am I missing any companies along the way?

Well, you give me to give me too much credit. So let's see, I'll go, this is fun. I'll go back and correct you. So the first, first mistake is saying that I went directly from GOT to March. I actually spent about nine months in law school in between those two startups. I was, I was a trustee law scholar at Seattle University School of Law. And then I got a call from John Keister and he said, hey, we're going to do another startup. And I literally left my law books in my locker at Seattle University and ran away never to come out to do the startup thing. I learned a lot in law school and one thing I learned was that I'm not going to be a lawyer. The other, and then the other thing is, you know, sharper agent. I was just fortunate enough to be on the board. That team, you know, did everything on their own. I was not a part of the operating team there. They did get acquired and actually live on to this day as part of Zillow, which is, which is kind of fun. And then the third company I ended up running, we sold the Comscore. And then the fourth company was Dwellable, which we sold to Expedia.

But yeah, it's a pretty good track record.

You know, you get. Oh, I meant you were pretty good with your accuracy. The track record. Track record just says a lot about the people I chose to work with. That's the thing I realized after 20 years and that's why I'm sitting on this side of the table now.

And, but since then you've been on a lot of boards. You've also been investing quite a bit. Now you're the managing, you're the founding managing partner in Ascent. And are there other things that you're doing right now in the investment community besides running Ascent?

No, I mean this is my full time, full time, full time, full time job and it's a lot of fun. We have two funds now and three SPVs. And you know, probably, probably more to come in the future. And yeah, I've fully embarked on this new career and yeah, focus is entirely on asent.

I love it. Well, I'm excited to dig in and talk about the portfolio companies, talk more about your thesis. But before we do that, I want to know a little bit about your past. But what was the first job where you got paid?

So the first time I got paid by anyone that wasn't, you know, my dad, you know, stiffing me on, on landscaping. Hourly payment was I. I went to work for my high school buddy's parents who ran a bakery on the east side. But their real cash cow was every summer they did the festival circuit and they sold strawberry shortcakes. They were there before Barringer Farms and it was called Shuggies. And I sliced strawberries. I, you know, got there 6:30 in the morning and, and hauled strawberries from the freezer truck out to the, to the stall and back again. And I, and I hawked strawberry shortcake at festivals. And it's probably my first sales job. You can't have a whole lot of shame if you're selling shortcake. I realized I wasn't comfortable with sales. I wasn't, you know, it took me a long time to get comfortable with, with outbound sales and public speaking and a lot of these kinds of things. But the initial thing that helped me as a shortcake salesman was thinking about the value that I was providing to people and realizing like, hey, I'm getting good here. Like you're getting a shortcake out of this deal. It's not like a sa. I mean it's a lot easier to sell shortcake at a summer festival than it is to sell, you know, software as a service to a mid sized enterprise. Like, like I can tell you what, like it's a time to value in shortcake. It's very short, it delivers. And then the other thing I learned was, which actually we did a lot of in the 90s at go to Net was barter. So we would take shortcakes and we would go to, you know, the folks at the burrito stand and say, hey, shortcake for a burrito, shortcake for a cheesesteak. So there was an entire like barter economy at these festivals. It was actually really cool.

Yeah, that's interesting. That was fun. Now tell the audience I mean, where you went to high school because I think that you know, being part of the Seattle startup ecosystem now and you're, you know, you're a big part of this community and you've been here for a while from, you know, you grew up here. So can you tell the audience a little bit about, you know, where you're from?

Yeah, I actually, so I was actually raised the first eight years of my life in unincorporated King County. Now I was going to school in Seattle and my parents just said, well, we got to move. So we moved to northeast Seattle, where I still live today. Yeah, I attended Seattle Prep for high school. I always say, you know, my sister was the Lakeside kid in the family. I was the black sheep. I actually got in a fistfight at the Lakeside sixth grade application test. My, my dad always says that was you showing us that you really didn't want to go to Lakeside. Seattle Prep was great for me. It changed my life. You know, I was, I was a bit of a wild, wild kid. And in ninth grade kind of made this commitment to the folks at prep that I was going to, you know, put my best effort forward and that, that sort of Jesuit mindset of, you know, forming this person, being a person for others and, you know, this whole process of high school as like a formation and not just a, not just a set of classes, like really, really, really helped me out and I think has really continued to be important to me in my life. My son now attends the school and I'm a big believer in it for, you know, for a lot of reasons, obviously.

Yeah, well, you know, part of this show is about technology and about AI, but it's also about work, the way people identify with what they do for a living, but also how work is changing for everybody in the future. And so when you think about that and about your family, was work a big part of growing up? What did your parents do? And did you guys talk about work at the dinner table? Did that show up for you as a young kid?

So my dad is no longer practicing, but he was a radiologist, he's a doctor and he was a part of a private practice that actually they were the first ones in Seattle to buy the big MRI machines. Kind of, you know, they were entrepreneurial in the sense that that ended up being a pretty good business and, and they kind of got ahead of that curve. But no, he was, you know, we didn't talk much about business. He was, you know, he's out the door at 6 in the morning and home at 6:30 at night, and then he's on call for as long as I can remember. So he's always told me he doesn't understand anything that I've done because he hates all like, he hated the hospital administration stuff. He hated that he had to go and take a, take a turn as like the CEO or president of his group because he just wanted to treat patients. My mom was a nurse and then took some time off and then ended up going, getting, getting her college degree at the UW in a two year timeframe and then got her master's and is now a therapist, licensed mental health counselor. Pretty different folks. But no, I, I was just like, let me get away from medicine went straight to entrepreneurship.

Well, let's dive in a little bit to Ascend. Tell me about Ascend, about your thesis around investing. And then also I want to hear a little bit about some of the portfolio companies. What you're excited about, what's bringing you energy these days.

Sure. So Ascend, you know, we like to say we're the most prolific preeed investor in the Pacific Northwest. We Invest, you know, 100% in software, 100% business to business. And vast majority of that touches in some way artificial intelligence, machine learning or data or, or vertical software, which we'll, we'll talk about a little bit. But I just think is, you know, AI is basically applied AI is basically vertical software 3.0. Like it's SaaS. It's just better technology to do SaaS.

So what are some of the portfolio companies that you have that are. And also I want to dig deeper into the AI side of things. I know you've been thinking a lot about it. I can imagine that every pitch that you have these days has AI somewhere in the pitch deck. And so I want to know how you think about it as an investor.

It's funny, I kind of woke up 25 years in and realized I've been doing AI since 1996 as an operator and then now as an investor. So we did at GoTonet, we own the two largest metasearch engines on the web. So very early in semantic search, I actually saw a picture at Google's offices that they have on the wall of their old, their old search traffic charts. And there's literally, it's a whiteboard and they literally wrote down in two spots like, GoToneT goes live and GoToneT driving. Like, we drove the third most amount of traffic to Google in the year 2000. So we were at it pretty early. And I got to work with, you know, one of the foremost minds in artificial intelligence, Oren Etione, you know, side by side at a really formative time in my career. He was very patient with me. I was the marketer and the revenue guy trying to force him to, you know, put his thumb on the scale and search results. And he was, you know, adamant that we not do that and that we let the technology do the work to give the best results to the users. And, and then all the way through I did, you know, we did structured Data in the 2000s and Big Data analytics in the 2010s, and then back to some vertical search. And then, and then Oren called me in 2017 and asked me to help him with the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence incubator program, which I've been fortunate to hang around. You know, they let me, they let me crash for, for free lunch once in a while. And so that's a long winded way of saying I have a pretty, as, as a non practitioner, as a non technologist, I still think I have a pretty deep and you know, comparatively, you know, well informed background and opinion about, about artificial intelligence. One thing that, that has led me to, in, in looking at AI today and looking at all these pitches that we see is just trying to be very cognizant of the fact that it is just a technology that is applied to problems that humans have to solve. It's novel, certainly generative AI and certainly the, the lower cost of compute and all the things that have kind of come together to create this current hype cycle. You've got to remember, you know, being there in the 90s for you know, Web 1.0, the vast majority of the value created on the commercial Internet was created after 2003. And if you look at this current like cycle of AI, you might wonder, are we in the 1999 of that particular cycle? And I think you can make an argument either direction. But I think that framework really forces you to ask a couple basic questions about artificial intelligence as an investor. And the first is, you know, if you're looking at an opportunity, is it an applied AI opportunity or is it a structural AI opportunity? And if it's applied it, in other words, if it's applying a new tech, a novel technology approach to an existing workflow or problem, then you got to think really hard about how it differentiates and how it maintains an advantage over time. Now does it do the job 10 times better than the current? There needs to be an AI first salesforce. And there will be, I guarantee there will be, there'll be an AI first oracle. The question just becomes, okay, how can you differentiate and solve the problem better than others? What data advantage do you have? What feedback loop and fine tuning advantage do you have and what brand and user experience advantage do you have? If those are advantages, then you kind of do get back to this world where we thought we escaped two years ago, which is the world of capitalism. And you know, we'll be the first mover, we'll sweep up all the chips and sort it out later. And that's scary as we've seen recently in town and other places time and again there. And you know, is anthropic really worth $4 billion or is it, or is it Lycos? You know, can't be Google, like history has told us. But now you've got seven companies, you know, that are valued over, you know, multiples, billions of dollars, in some cases tens of billions of dollars. So it'll be interesting. And then the second flavor is these sort of foundational technologies that are going to. If you think about what's happening at the enterprise today, you know, companies are changing the way that they're behaving and new companies are being built with entirely different fabric and structure with regards to how, how code is written, how goals are managed against, how communications happen internally, how data exhaust is captured and leveraged to make decisions, what roles take on what tasks. And I think, I don't think anyone who is at all active in investing in artificial intelligence would tell you that, you know, an enterprise that started today is at, you know, scale 20 years from now, that that company is going to look entirely different than any company operating today. And so it'll be unrecognizable. And so the question then you go, well, if that's true, how can you create a solution today that's impactful enough and durable enough to grow with those enterprises as they become this next generation of not only technology company, but, you know, commercial venture? And those are really big questions. And so then you go, well, is this, you know, is an autonomous agent platform, is that going to be durable or is that a short term problem? Is, you know, security for bringing your own data to LLMs, something novel and potentially protectable. And so those are like the two mental models that I try to apply when we look at AI investments.

What do you think about the incumbents that we have right now? When you talked about trying to develop a moat for your portfolios or look for those in the pitches that are being pitched to you? Seems like a lot of people are tacking on AI to what they're already doing. They already have distribution, they already have a customer base. So how do you think about that? You know, when you look at the sales forces of this world who now all of a sudden have pretty deep AI technology that's associated with pretty great technology that they already had.

Yeah. And I've actually, it's funny, I was talking to a friend the other day who runs a $150 million revenue business and has a number of places where he thinks AI can help him and is wondering, hey, do I need to bring people on to do this? And I said, well, first just try whatever bolted on AI solution your current vendors have because it's probably good enough for now for many use cases. But again, Generative AI Chat Copilot is a feature, right? And so is a feature going to make Salesforce unassailable? Like, like is that feature going to make. And I keep picking on them, but you could say any number of other companies that are entrenched and so you say probably not. So they're still vulnerable now. You're not going to beat them by just building a chat feature for, you know, you need to build a CRM. That's really hard. But I, I, I don't think, I think the, I think you're thinking about it wrong if you think incumbents bolting on AI means that incumbents are unassailable on the AI front. I just think you need to think differently about how you're going to beat those incumbents. And again it belies this thing of like putting the technology out front. Nobody cares about your AI. Like customers don't care about your AI. They care about the problem that you're solving. Are you doing it 10 times better or 10 times more efficiently as same as it ever was. And AI just enables a new set of challenges and tasks to be tackled organically in a way that maybe wasn't before. But to do that as a new CO from the ground up in every motion of your product versus trying to bolt it on, you know, to a 15 year old technology stack. I'm not worried about that as an investor.

Yeah, that makes sense. Are there some portfolio companies that you have right now that you're excited about that you want to talk about?

Yeah, always. Let's see, Overland AI, great, great company that, that we're really excited to be invested in. The founder Byron Boots HD at the UW has run an autonomy lab there on the software side for years. You know, it's had students go on to do amazing things at Cruise and Waymo and all the other usual suspects. And he is building an incredible team at Overland to tackle the autonomous software stack for off road vehicles. Specifically the go to market is in defense and robotic controlled vehicles. So sadly, you know, defense is a growth industry seemingly always, but certainly given some of the geopolitical unrest even prior to recent events, you know, it's been emergent and it's been urgent for our defense apparatus to, to ensure that we're, you know, that we're bringing best practices forward to support, you know, troops on the ground. You've had drones, drones in the air for a long time. You haven't had autonomous movers of materiel active for a long time. And so that's the opportunity that Overland has. And they're, pick my words carefully, they're excited about that opportunity and seeing a lot of traction.

I saw him present recently at the GeekWire Summit and it was amazing. He showed some videos. It's really, really cool technology. If you, you can describe some of the videos to the audience, that would be, that would be great.

I mean he's basically, they've built this software that allows an operator to put in two waypoints, a start point and a finish point in unmapped terrain off road, you know, in, in a, in a combat theater. And you know, a buggy or a tank or a truck then can simply navigate over whatever obstacles, merge autonomously with all the data sitting on the edge and all the decisions happening at the edge. And so, you know, the coolest thing is they've got this proving ground over in eastern Washington and they've got these, these buggies and these off road buggies and they're, you know, there are some pretty high ranking folks who are jumping into those buggies and letting them drive themselves based on our software, which, you know, is scary but also really impressive. And yeah, I mean it's, it's definitely one of the most exciting things we've invested.

Yeah, that's an exciting one. Is there another company that jumps up for you?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's a company that is called Clarity. So they are on the forefront of detecting deepfakes. So the deepfakes, for those who don't know, are the. It's the practice of bad actors generating, generating false video or audio assets and then distributing them and in order to misinform or defraud. So Clarity is a team of incredible software engineers and cyber warriors out of the 8200 division of the IDF. And they have been for the last year creating cutting edge technology to identify and prevent the proliferation of these types of deepfakes. And I actually caught up with Michael recently, the CEO and, and you know, he said, well I knew we would be applying these in, in a conflict, you know, at some point. I just didn't know it would be a conflict that was so close to home. It's our, is, most of it is in Israel, but it's also being applied, I don't know if I can say the publishers, but there are three major news networks that you would know that have three letter acronyms that are currently evaluating the, the technology implying it. It's, you know, it's hard to imagine a world where, you know, deep fakes are an immense problem. And so, you know, it's exciting to be hopefully a small part of trying to, to solve it or at least prevent harm.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Oren Etzioni was also on the show and he met with President Biden and one of the things they talked about was deepfakes as it related to elections. And so I just think it's going to be a huge thing. I was just in Hollywood talking with a bunch of folks there about actors getting scanned and their representations being protected. And so deepfakes are going to be everywhere. So I think that's a really interesting use case.

Yeah, and Hollywood is another prong of the go to market and they're actively engaged there. And actually, you know, non coincidentally, Oren is on the board of advisors of Clarity. So it comes full circle here on the pod.

Absolutely. Well, let me ask you this. I know that you care deeply about Seattle and about not only the startup ecosystem, but the city itself. So what are the opportunities for Seattle to become a hub of AI technology and just, you know, startup technology in general?

I think the opportunity has never been brighter. And you know, and there are a couple reasons. I mean, number one, you just do a cursory search on LinkedIn and realize that we have more AI software engineers than anyone else in the US outside of the Bay Area, that the talent pool is so, so deep. And we have centers for excellence like the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. We have a top research university in the University of Washington. We have incredible amounts and always have had incredible amounts of technical talent. I think the reason why this point in time is really an inflection point for Seattle as an ecosystem is we now have the ingredients we had lacked for decades that had kept our big outcomes as a startup ecosystem sort of sporadic. And the things that we lack that we now have and only really New York and the Bay Area have these things to the degree that I think we're going to see in the next 10 years. In Seattle, number one is a thriving ecosystem of growth stage technology companies that provide both a magnet for and an off ramp for high octane technical talent from the trillion dollar companies that sit in our backyard. Historically you would have an amazing leader or engineer from Microsoft, have to leave a $10 billion P&L and do a zero to one startup with no stops in between. And that does not usually turn out well. Now, once, if every five years there's going to be a rich barton like once every five years there's going to be another exception. That proves the rule. But historically there just hasn't been that depth and breadth of growth stage technology where folks can matriculate themselves into position to be successful doing a startup on their own. And the second is that all of that growth stage technology is homegrown. And so now you have business folks who have taken a company from series A to series D. You have marketers who've taken a company from seed to 400 million in revenue. I remember when I was operating you couldn't hire. I mean I was, I was a marketer in Seattle and I wasn't a very good one and there were like five of us. You just couldn't hire. Venture scale growth talent here. That is emphatically not the case anymore. In fact, quite the opposite. I think those two elements really combine to prime us for a world where it looks a lot more like there's a. There's a tableau and a ocusign and an auth0 and an ally and a world where that's happening much more frequently as opposed to once in a while we catch a winner. And that's the thesis of the fund, really.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I appreciate you sharing that framework because I don't think a lot of people that are listening understand that and where we were and where we are now. So that's pretty interesting. One other thing I was wondering, we had talked about some of your early influences before, but I've never talked to you about your mentors along the way as an operator, but also as an investor. Are there some people that stand out for you as, as mentors that were really impactful in your life?

Yeah, for sure. My father in law is probably the first. He, you know, grew up in Kansas, his parents owned a grocery store, he worked there since he was a kid. He went on to start a title insurance company that's, that's now the largest, you know, largest privately held title company west of the Mississippi. And then he's also, he also started a couple banks. Just a really. And he did it all with no idea is he never understood startups because he'd say what are you doing? What do you mean you're going to expel it? What do you mean you're going to exit it? You know, you build these things for life, you build it for community, you build it to treat your employees right. And he taught me about the, you know, the journey being the thing and, and the end, the end kind of taking care of itself. He taught me, taught me, you know, everyone, I think everyone who's successful at all, has had someone tell, teach them this, but he was the one to teach me that. That you got to ask the question that no one else is asking because they're scared it might sound dumb. And I've probably taken this, you know, to an extreme. Being non technical in a world where I'm investing in highly technical startups, but just being able to slow it down, say, I don't know what those words mean. What do you mean? Was like, I think it's on his gravestone. He was, he was an incredible mentor. I'll say. John Keister, not the almost live comedian, but the other Seattle John Keister, you know, gave me a copywriting job while I was still in college and when I got out of college, recruited me to come and help him start GoToNet. During the time I worked for him at my first job, he tirelessly, I was just a silly kid and he just tirelessly redlined my work, walked me through it, let me go rebuild it, redlined it again, walked me through it again. He took me into meetings I had no right to be in when I proven that maybe it wasn't a good idea to have me in those meetings, gave me responsibility that I probably hadn't earned and cared for me as a friend first and foremost as well. John is probably the most powerful mentor I've ever had and still a dear friend and an investor in his current startup. So fortunate in a lot of ways there, you know, from an investing perspective, I think I have 10 or 20 people on speed dial folks, many of whom are, you know, 20 years younger than me, but who I still receive mentorship from because they've been doing this longer than I have. And a lot of folks who, you know, when I was pitching them my startups told me, hey, you think like an investor. Which was not a compliment, but who I kind of came back and told them, yeah, you know what, you're right. I'm an investor. So, you know, help me get this thing right or help me understand, you know, whether we should be following here or how should I. I should say that you never asked someone what you should do, but how should I think about it?

Yeah, no, I love hearing the stories about kind of early day mentors because I think a lot of people that hear the answer to that question on this show long for those kinds of mentors that have the patience to be able to work with you like that as a young person. I think it's, it's an art. It really is.

Yeah. And I'll Say in my career earlier, I strived to be that kind of person, but I don't think I was. I think, I think it's sort of, it's sort of like being an Olympic sprinter. Like you can work really hard, but it's gotta be in your DNA. And you know, some people, some people are really gifted and, and they're great at it. And, and yeah, you, you get, if you get, if you find someone like that, you work with them as much as you can and you know, that's. I spent the first 10 years of my life working with John. Nice.

So when you look into the future, I know we've talked a little bit about this, but I want you to look farther ahead. Five, ten years. What are a few things that you're thinking about that you're excited about five or 10 years out from a technology standpoint that you think is going to have a big impact?

Yeah, it's so hard to pick one thing. I'm, I'm very hopeful that as we remove and automate a lot of the drudgery of day to day work that we will unlock an incredible amount of human potential focused on higher order work. Have you ever read the, the Sci Fi trilogy, the Three Body Problem? They basically the concept is these, this alien entity puts a block on our technology development. So we're stuck, we can't get past fusion or whatever it is, right. And then once that block is removed, like spoiler alert, incredible technologies begin to develop and flow that change society for the good. And this is super oversimplified, but I feel like generative AI is sort of like the removal of that block and that, and I think it's really hard for us to conceive of what, what those second and third order effects are going to be when folks are not building spreadsheets and you know, emailing each other reports every day. It's very, very hard to conceive of. It is science fiction. That's what I'm excited about.

So you think it's. We'll look back now and think about this as kind of an inflection point and who knows what's going to happen in the future, but things are going to come out of this that are pretty interesting.

I mean, I think so and I think we've lived through others and I think we just take them for granted now. We all walk around with the most powerful computer in the world, you know, in our pocket and, and we were, you and I were around when you, you couldn't get the Internet at your House. I mean, we were around when the Internet was only for, you know, spies and hackers and. And we just take the world is all. We're living in the future right now. We just don't see it because the future happens slowly in when you're there for it, but in retrospect, very, very quickly along the long arc of history. So I think that it's, you know. Yeah, I think it's an incredible time to be alive and investing in this technology for sure.

All right, two words to describe the future of work and this exceptional future that we're about to go into. And then you can elaborate.

So after I just talked about how great everything's going to be, the two words that I did select were new boss. New boss.

Okay.

Yeah. And I'm taking those from a famous song by the who. And the actual lyric is meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. So. Well, I think that we have infinite potential for freeing ourselves from a lot of the shackles of the work that we're doing today. We'll find a way to forget that it was bad before, and we'll find a way to forget that it's much better now. I mean, all you have to do is look@humanprogress.org and understand the progress that we've made as a society in the last hundred years against preventable deaths, you know, infant births, child children, childbirth, death, standard of living. We're all.

And.

And everyone lives in the moment. And so everything's still horrible when again, if you just look back like a hundred years over your shoulder, you're like, holy shit. That things are pretty darn good. It kind of. It's kind of incredible how good things are. So I just, you know, at the same time as I'm an optimist, I'm also somewhat of a realist and a cynic. And so I think, you know, you can hold those two ideas at the same time, right? One, that things are going to get incredibly, incredibly more efficient, that we will, as a society be able to do higher order work. And that that higher order work and our horsepower focused on that will yield things. That's the second order effect, right? It will yield things that we can't understand because they don't exist yet because we haven't had millions and millions of people putting their brains on it because they're too busy pushing pixels.

Well, Kirby, I really appreciate you having you on the show. It was really, really interesting to talk to you and I. I'm really excited about the future and I appreciate your input and insights.

Well, you're one of the people creating it so I'm glad that you had me. Been a really a ton of fun. I I super enjoyed it. I'm not surprised.

Thanks Kirby. That's a wrap. Thanks for tuning in. Such a pleasure to have Kirby as our guest on today's episode. Kirby's knowledge and experience in the startup scene in Seattle and his career in operating fast growing companies is really amazing. If you want to learn more about Kirby, you can find him on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you're interested in how he thinks about venture investing in AI startups, definitely connect with him and keep up with his posts online. I continue to be amazed by the guests we've had on the show and I'm truly excited about the ones joining us in the near future. I really appreciate you spending time with us. Thanks for listening to the episode and don't forget to subscribe to the Shift AI Podcast for more exciting interviews in the near future and to Simply AI weekly newsletter for updates on how AI can help you scale your business. The Shift AI Podcast is produced and sponsored by Simply Augmented, distributed by Geekwire, and our theme music was created by Dave Angel.