Full Throttle Leaders Podcast- Shawn Green

Michael Falato here again, Full Throttle Leaders Podcast, and I'm the CEO and founder of Full Throttle Falato Leads. And we got Sean Green, who's a fractional CRO who's involved in many companies, helping them grow and also investing in companies. Sean, tell us a little bit about you. What you do, why you do it, what makes you excited in the morning.

Yeah, thanks, Michael, for having me. I appreciate it. I, yeah, I've been in technology for quite a few years. I've seen a lot, crawled out of a lot of, you know, tough, tough years. And then COVID hits us and then throws us another curveball like every tech exec. Yeah, I've done, I've been doing software for over 20 years and I'm a chief revenue officer. I'm working with a bunch of startups right now to figure out, you know, what are some of the biggest problems we're trying to solve right now, especially in the, in this age of AI where it's just like, it's so crazy and cool and scary all at the same time. So Yeah, I've been doing a lot of that work recently. We sold our company to SBS last year. I was at a company called Carbon6, transitioned out of that towards the end of last year, and I've just been heavily involved in advising and investing in startups. So yeah.

And where are you based?

I'm based in Boston. Yep. One of those. Born and raised here. Yeah. So, yeah, if you ever see Good Will Hunting or anything, it's real in my family. I have like 70 cousins. My dad was one of 13. Grew up in South Boston and had a, had a wonderful upbringing, loving every single sports team that we have to offer. So, yeah.

So which character are you on Good Will Hunting?

Definitely Ben Affleck. Yeah, you know, especially when he goes, 'You're suspect, retainer.' You know, I love that part.

I love when, um, he says, 'How about them apples?' And that— not him, was the other guy, his buddy.

Yeah, yeah, he was like, 'How about them apples? I got a number.' What's his name?

What's his name? What's his name?

Kelsey?

No, his—

Affleck?

Yeah, no, his, uh, his co-character in that. Matt Damon. Oh geez, I'm losing it.

Yeah, Matt Damon. Yeah, that's how they got their start.

Yeah, I was just trying to remember his name. I remember Ben being it, and obviously poor, poor, uh, Robin Williams there.

Yeah, he was— I know, he was, he was the man. Uh, but it's, it's funny to see Ben and Matt now. It's like They're always like, they're such good friends that they're constantly just like jabbing each other, especially with like, you know, Ben Affleck doing the Dunkin' Donuts.

I was just thinking of Marshall. That was great.

And like, you know, the best part about those two is that they're still great friends and they're, uh, they just, they just like make fun of each other. That's how we do. That's, that's like pure love in Boston is when you know, somebody's constantly making fun of you just because they're like, I'm from Chicago, so what do you think the cousins do every day?

Yeah, forget about it.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we're pretty similar here. Um, but we have, we have a whole Italian side of the family, the Maganaos. So the, the Irish and the Italians, that's— they just married each other, you know.

I'm Italian and Irish.

Oh, well, there you go.

There you go. That's the luck of the Italians.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Tell me what AI is like just making you like, wow, that's pretty cool crap there, man. That's being generated fast. It's being invested in fast. And I really use it for my company every day. Or it might even be one of your clients or one of your VCs. Of one of your investments?

Um, it's really cool. I mean, I, I, it's a great question because I think what's happening right now is, um, this is going to— I, I feel like it's going to generate more entrepreneurs than ever before. Like, I, I— because they have access to all this technology where they can actually build, like, a thought that they had in their head and actually go out to market with something and they can build it pretty quickly. So like, you know, I've, I've invested in all the LLMs, like all year subscriptions, because who knows when those prices will go up on a monthly basis, right? But the one I gravitate towards now is more Claude. So it's like, you know, Open Claude, and then you have Claude Code, and then you can actually do the co-work where you can actually, you know, really We lost your—

we lost your audio.

Can you hear me now?

Yeah. Were you on your, uh, your Meta Glass?

Those are the Meta Glasses. Yeah, I, uh, I, you know, I get bored and impulsive sometimes, so I decided to buy the Meta Glasses.

Uh, that audio is good.

I'm constantly Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can't see the audio.

The audio is better without the headphones.

Oh, it was better?

Yeah, it's echoey with the headphones.

I mean, you can edit all this stuff.

No, we don't need that. This is, this is Rogan style, baby.

Yeah, so I don't even know what I was just talking about. Um, oh yeah, I mean, I would I would say that there's a lot of the startups I'm working with are actually learning.

Now your video's frozen.

Are we there? Are we there yet?

Oh, you're back.

All right. Sorry. Internet's been weird today.

Yeah.

It hasn't woken up yet. But I see a lot of startups building internally their own go-to-market software, even through like Claude and all the different things. But eventually that's gonna, it doesn't scale, right? It won't scale. But at the same time, I'm seeing a lot of these startups just figuring it out instead of like Google Sheets and just the manual things. They're eliminating a lot of that, you know, noise upfront when it, when it comes to go-to-market by, you know, having different types of technology they're building internally to actually help them get to market faster. Which is really cool. In the enterprise, I think a lot of companies are struggling because there's so much data that's in these enterprise companies that they're constantly, you know, when they put AI in, the AI is just pulling from garbage. And a lot of these AI projects never really get, it never takes off because, you know, they're not putting in the right strike teams. Like I look at like, an AI project internally is everybody has a role and they have a goal, and everybody within that strike team makes sure that those different parts of the AI project goes well. And I think a lot of companies are paying for so much storage and they're building all this AI right now, and it's turning into AI sludge. So they're building out all these PowerPoints, and it's from crap data. You know, one of the garbage in, garbage out, still true, still true. It's, it's so true. So I'm seeing that in the enterprise. Um, you know, the cool technology I'm seeing for builders, uh, are like lovable. I mean, you can go in there and literally build out a website, an app, like you can do like 90% of it. Um, and then if you have engineers and you really want to kind of own the code, it pretty much spits it out for you, for your engineer to make sure it properly gets put into your instance. Um, you know, it's, it's pretty crazy. I mean, that would take 6 months, you know, where you're going back and forth with your project, project managers and product managers, and then they're trying to like give it to the engineers. And by the time it gets to the engineers and comes back, it's like it It doesn't sound like anything you talked about. Now eliminate all of that noise and now they're, they have most of the product built.

I mean, it's pretty, yeah, I have a friend that's building a whole go-to-market strategy. Uh, that's everything you need to know about a, about a deal before you even get in there.

Yeah.

Instead of just having links, linked, uh, Sales Navigator. And Zoom and this and that. It has one dashboard of like, how do you talk to this personality? What do you need to do next? And he's built on Lovable, I think. I'm like, it's like I quoted all this with love. Like, yeah, you're gonna— you have to still continually build and know how to build and think like a builder to make something work.

Yeah, but that's the cool part now though, is that you can be a thinker, and you were never— and you were never a builder. You didn't know how to build. So now all you really have to do is think and like put your thoughts into a product like Lovable, and it will literally build the code for you, where then you can implement it. And that's what's in your brain. Like, that's the crazy part right now, is that anybody can do it. Now, does everybody do it?

No.

Like, I have a ton of bots I built Like I've really just kind of dived into it over the last 6 months just because I wanted to not feel like a fossil and like I kind of know what's going on behind the scenes of a lot of this technology. But, you know, it's constantly evolving. Every day it's changing. There's updates on all these LLMs every day. And my biggest fear is that there's software companies out there that some of these LLMs will suck in as an additional feature or functionality within the LLM. So, you know, I'm in protect mode for some of my investments and companies I'm working with because I want to— their technology is fantastic. And there are companies out there that need it that don't want to build it internally. So now's the time to be a part of that, you know, story and that journey. But it's crazy. I mean, the LLMs are doing really well. And it's all, it's now talking back to you. It's starting to really understand, like, you know, I usually get to my computer at 8:30 in the morning and it, like, I pull up my Claude cowork and it's just like, hey, you have these couple things that you wanted me to remind you today and, you know, X, Y, and Z. Here's a, you know, here's a really cool LinkedIn post based off of the skills and the things that you built in me. And to me, here you go. Like, I, you know, I want, you know, a post that matters. And the post—

What's the difference between Claude and like Gemini and ChatGPT?

You can do all the same things. There's the code capability in Claude Pro, I think it is, is like it can build anything into JavaScript. I like Claude because it also can like build out a PowerPoint. Like at least something to start with, you know, based off of all your thoughts. And then it can also create a video. Gemini really focuses everything on your like Google instances, really. I mean, they all, they have MCPs into everything. So you can connect your Gmail and you can connect to all of your worlds to it.

What's MCP?

Well, it's, it's basically the ability to get all of these connections and connect it to your AI product.

Is it multiple control points or was it—

Yes, it's just, it's bi-directional and it constantly like you, it can update like your Gmail accounts. It could, it could, you could build an engine where you would send out an email at certain parts of the day with specific messaging. I mean, once it has access to your accounts, it just talks to all of your accounts.

And that's scary too at one point.

Yeah, no, but it's happening right now. That's a crazy thing.

Don't you ever talk to me again like that, Steve. Yeah, running emails, you're like, whoa, I know, I swear, your honor, that was not me, that was my AI, it was my digital twin, it was my avatar.

Yeah, that's not that far away, man.

No, it's— I'll be back. I, I built a digital twin in Delphi. It took all my interviews and things like this, and that's amazing.

But you said it went well though, right? I mean, it's pretty cool.

It's, it's, you know, it's It's my voice. I didn't do like a video digital twin, which I don't know, I think that might be a little creepy, but I don't know, we could be, uh, I think there's— who wants to look at my face? It's a face for radio, you know?

Yeah, well, you got the Rogan face, you know, it's to see, it's, it's nice.

Yeah, he, uh, he's definitely— he thought he's a black belt jiu-jitsu as well, and he's he's a very talented guy, you know, I mean, as far as what he does, but also jiu-jitsu.

I mean, you know that whole world pretty well, right?

Yeah. I actually worked the Rogan UFC 56.

Yeah.

So I did that for like to about 140 and then my company got sold. But yeah, I got UFC, NFL, USTA, a lot of 35 different teams. I was just doing all the mobile marketing texting for them at the time.

What was your favorite, uh, what was your favorite like sport industry working with?

UFC.

Yeah.

And I wasn't even doing jiu-jitsu at first then, but not too long after I started 2006 for a text station and then about 2011 I got into boxing, jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai. So about 2 or 3 or 4 years I got into that and talked to Dana a little bit, you know, some of the conferences and stuff like that.

But is he as cool as he, you know, kind of is, you know, on TV?

Yeah, he was pretty cool. Joe was cool. But, you know, that was when Goldie was there.

That's just a crazy story.

Of how all that could have collapsed and it didn't collapse and it came back and it was just like, no, Royce was brought in just to kind of showcase jiu-jitsu and he was a smaller one and not the most talented one and they basically put him against people that he thought he could beat and also bigger dudes and he did. Yeah, yeah. So I met the Fertittas, which were the guys that put the money up. And so they were— I mean, those guys were smart as hell. They own the Stations casinos, so they were heavily into casino business at that point. But wow. Yeah, the NFL was cool. I was in the NFL headquarters and working with NFL Network and NFL. We did the whole text team campaign for the NFL and Win a million bucks in Super Bowl, uh, in one, it was in Indy, was, I think it was, uh, Giants and the Patriots.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Well, they crashed the whole system. So I'm getting yelled at by the VP of digital. I'm like, oh God. I mean, we couldn't control the carriers, you know. I mean, the carriers could not handle 50 million people texting and trying to win a million bucks. Yeah, yeah, there's a, there's, there's a certain amount of things you can control, you can't control. Like if everybody hit ChatGPT all at once in the, in the world or whatever, it would belt the servers, I would think.

Yeah, you would think so until, I mean, everything's going, everything's going nuclear now. So maybe not, you know.

Tell us, tell us like something you learned in the last year of like what not to do? Like I did this and it didn't, it failed, but I learned, or something that you did really well. Like you kind of mentioned that with, with, uh, um, what was that AI platform you liked? Um, you just talked about Claude. Claude. Yeah. You talked about that, but tell us something that you kind of learned. You lost it and you learned.

Uh, yeah, I guess, uh, We put it— so one of the things we did in 2023, which was pretty much unheard of, we did a lot of research on where most of the— because we kind of partnered with Amazon, uh, we did the revenue recovery for their 3P sellers, their 1P sellers, and we did a lot of research on like where is most of the products coming out of Amazon. And, you know, it wasn't really like public knowledge. Because it wasn't reported anywhere. And we were kind of like, you know what, we should probably go work with the suppliers and manufacturers in China. So we put an office in Shenzhen, which is about 2 hours from Hong Kong. And I never thought I'd ever go to China in my whole life, like ever. It wasn't kind of like I just— it was never on the plan to go, like. So, you know, being over there building that office and then realizing we made the right bet, right? Based off of the research that we were doing. I thought that was like a really, that was a huge win that really took us, you know, a year and a half, 2 years to really build the momentum over there.

And what company are you talking about building momentum for?

Carbon6, which was my previous company. So that was, you know, that was more of the moment a year ago where we had the, oh wow, this is working moment. And it took like a year and a half to get there. So that was like one of the good decisions we made. I have a bunch of, I like to fail fast and pivot pretty quickly. So I'm very much into the numbers. I'm very much into what's feeding what we're trying to accomplish, whether it's like, 'cause there's a bunch of different pipes. From a go-to-market perspective. So what are we trying to accomplish with partnerships? What are we trying to accomplish with marketing? There's 5 different things through marketing we need to like fuel. So we've made a lot of like good decisions and some really, oh, we need to pull back on this quickly decisions. Um, because, you know, technology in our company was always— my goal was we need technology to clear the boundaries for people to use their calories in the right way to help the company grow. So that was just kind of like my thing that I had with operations, uh, revops, and all the go-to-market teams. Like, if it was lead— like, if we went to events, I wanted the leads in the system executed through Slack, automated, different ranks based on what rep, all the different things, and then build that automation. So it's in the hands of the salesperson within like minutes. And then after that, it's like, I need to know that there has been some sort of communication back with that seller that I need to know that that has happened within, I think I had like 2 hours or something like that. Yeah, right. So, um, I— we, we solved for a lot of that because it was very manual. Um, now I— if I were to reorchestrate all of that now, I'd have a totally different tech stack in my head, right? So it's, it's, yeah, pretty crazy.

So who, who should reach out to you and why right now?

What's that?

Who should reach out to you and why in this current state of of your, your career and what you do?

Yeah, I mean, if anybody just— I like to network. My network is, is, is one good currency I think I have, um, or the people that I know. So I love to, you know, add to my network. I like to, you know, really just kind of figure out some of the problems that we're trying to solve right now and go to market. Um, you know, if there's any tech companies out there that are looking for some advice. Uh, you know, usually startups. I love the startup world. Um, I am going to be probably going full-time into something pretty quickly here that I think is gonna really change one of the aspects of this AI world right now that nobody really wants to solve, um, which is figuring out the garbage before you you set up an AI project. Um, so yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it. If they're in Boston, they want to shoot me a note, what's your email? Uh, well, it's a Gmail for now, uh, sg8584@gmail.com.

So, well, thanks for your time, Sean. I look forward to working with you in the future.

Yeah, Michael, let's, uh, let's do some intros on your end too.

Thanks.

Alright.