Tech won’t destroy your business. Ignorance will.

I was talking to an internet friend of mine about, you know, the future of technology and stuff like that, and he said something really interesting. It turned into a bit of an argument, but before I kind of tell you how this happened, let me tell you about this guy. By all objective means, super successful guy. I took over a family business, and what they do is like HVAC repair, so heating, ventilation, air conditioning. Like, that's their business. They have you know, multiple cities that they're in. They have these basically like service bureaus that they run and send out techs. And if like your AC breaks and you need a new one, well, they're the guys that show up and give you a bid and you pay it so your house doesn't overheat. It's super impressive what they've done. They've taken a small family business that was doing a few million a year in profits and turned into something doing, you know, hundreds of millions if not more of revenue per year. Just really like an inspiring guy, actually. His name's Chris. I'll actually put his Twitter link below so you can follow him if you want. He writes some good stuff about his space. Basically said on the internet was, hey, like, I'm not worried about AI coming to disrupt my business. I'm not worried about this new tech coming in and really like disrupting the fact that somebody has to come out and fix your AC if it breaks. And that's what their company does. And I wrote back, I was like, look, AI may not be coming for you right now, But technology will come for your business at some point. And that is a consistent pattern that has happened across every business in history, is that technology and the pace of it and the development of it keeps growing, and eventually it will come for a business like Chris's. Pretty familiar with what that disruption looks like. I mean, the classic example is, you know, Blockbuster Video getting totally innovated— out-innovated by Netflix, and then suddenly streaming happens and you don't need to go in and hope they have your DVD or tape at the Blockbuster Video anymore. I think Chris's business is gonna be fine for a long time, but you can start to see the sprinklings that eventually technology will come for it. There are hundreds of startups across the world right now trying to build humanoid robots. You combine those with AI, computer vision, at some point those robots will be able to come in and fix an air conditioner. It's not gonna be anytime soon, but someday they will be able to. The discussion here ended the way most of my internet arguments do, where I was just like, eh, Cool, you know, we collegially talked about it and let the matter rest. But I mean, the reason I wanted to make this video is to highlight this issue and give you this hot take that every business, no matter where you are, needs to be paying attention to what's happening in technology. And it doesn't mean you have to be up to speed on every single minute and every single little detail that's happening, but every business sooner or later, tech will come for it and try to disrupt it. Some businesses like that's sooner rather than later. And the reason I wanted to make this video is I was on a bike ride this morning and I was riding along in the group and I saw a sign on the side of the road. And basically it was a handwritten sign that somebody out in the country, and this is like way outside of San Antonio where I live, somebody in the country had said like, "Hey, do you want home internet? I will come over and I will install Starlink for you and sell it for you and get it all set up." And what Starlink is at a high level is it's one of Elon Musk's companies. SpaceX putting these low Earth orbit satellites up in space. So it used to be that if you wanted to get satellite internet, what you had to do was they had one big satellite that was way above the poles and it took a while for light to get there and come back down. So it was unreliable, not very good, and it was just kind of a mess. But what they're doing is with SpaceX is putting these satellites much closer to the planet. The problem is you have to have a lot of satellites to make that work. And right now Musk's company is right around 7,000 satellites with a plan, I think, to go to 40,000 over the next few years. Satellites in the grand scheme of things, as far as like the speed of light and radio goes, doesn't take that long to go up to those satellites and come back down 'cause they're in low Earth orbit. They're not way the heck up there in a polar or geostationary orbit. Like that presents a whole different ability for those satellites to make the Earth a lot more connected. People have used the Starlink service. I encourage you to check it out. That's not what this video's about. But when they use the Starlink service, like it's awesome. Like you have a clear sky, there's basically, you know, these satellites go up, they talk to each other between, with lasers between the satellites. They have laser links between, it's kind of cool. Cool. Uh, and then the internet speeds are often better than what, you know, us people here in the city are getting into our homes. Why this Starlink is so interesting is a few years ago people started to put rural broadband out in basically like the places I was today, like out in the middle of the country. And the way they would do it is they would build a tower, and then that tower would be connected to the internet. And then what they would do is use a line-of-sight kind of radio wave to connect to basically little modems that would sit in people's houses. And I know this because I had a business that was way out in the country. That was the only internet we get. And those people who built those little towers and signed up people for those internet services, what they could just basically charge us whatever they wanted to. And I remember back in the day, this was like 10 years ago, uh, we were paying like $250 a month for internet that wasn't even as good as the $65 a month internet that I pay for at my house at the same time. And look, that business of building up those towers, you build it once and then you get people to pay you by the month to use the internet that is on that tower. That became a pretty good business for a lot of people. They would go build those towers. They build 10, 15, 20 of them around the country or around the, you know, a town like San Antonio, package them up. And then after you built those towers, basically it's just free cash flow every month. All you're paying for is a little bit of internet connectivity and then you're charging these people out in the middle of nowhere basically whatever they can afford because they have no other choice. If they want internet, they got to pay what price you're offering or like, I don't know. And I remember about 3 years ago before Starlink became really popular, I had some friends who were kind of financial type folks and they went and got some investor money money, and their idea was to go buy a bunch of these rural broadband towers that were servicing these rural places. And by then, back then, I had read about Starlink, and I went and asked them like, well, Starlink's coming, it's going to be a lot better than these towers. Because the thing I haven't told you about these towers is they require line of sight, so they would get really grumpy if like fog would come through or rain. So like, imagine your internet went down when it got a little rainy outside. Yeah, that's what these towers were like. I saw this idea of like, hey, like Starlink's coming. You're going to at the very least have a competitor who's going to be potentially charging less and potentially like the Starlink service is just going to be better because it's not going to have all the weather problems and the types of problems that you have, you know, with this kind of old school technology of these towers. So you can imagine kind of what the answer I got from the folks buying up these towers was. They said, oh no, Starlink, you don't have to worry about that. That's not a threat. That's not coming. And I said, okay, well, I mean, You seem like pretty smart guys, like you probably know what you're doing. And then fast forward to today and Starlink's coming out and eating their lunch. Last I've heard, several of those folks are divesting those towers and those businesses and they're in decline because frankly, like a new technology came along and totally disrupted the thing that was the only game in town at the time. And so my fundamental thesis about all this is that eventually every business, whether it's just very basic stuff like from food to services to insurance, they're all going to be hit by technology at some point. Some of them, like these rural towers, it'll put them out of business and they won't exist as things anymore, you know, probably 10 years from now. For other ones, like, new technology will come along and they'll just have to change and be a bit different than they were in the past. A great example is railroads. Airplanes and trucks came along after the railroads and they took things that the railroads used to do a lot of basically transport of, like people. People used to take trains all over this country, but it turns out like people want to pay a little bit more and get there faster. Basically, like airplanes are better at that stuff. And they totally got the, basically the rail companies out of handling people. An example of how in a good case, like technology will allow you to continue as a business. It's just going to change you when the technology changes underneath you. You got to pay attention to what's happening with this tech. Talk to people who truly understand it. And then come up with some ideas about how you think it's going to affect your business now, 5 years from now, 10 years from now, and 20 years from now. Because the sooner you can know when it's going to affect you, the sooner you can do something about it and potentially kind of, well, get out of the way of the disruption that's going to run you out of business. All right, let me know what you think in the comments below. Thanks for being here. I appreciate every single one of you.