The Achieve Podcast - Peter Lisoskie (Default)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. My name is Jesse Warner and I'll be your host today. And today we're excited to learn from Peter Lisowski, founder of Default. Peter, it's a pleasure to have you on our show today.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jesse. I really appreciate it, man. It's a It's nice to get out and talk to people and, you know, be on different shows, just kind of have some fun, you know?

So, hey, well, we're glad you're here. So our audience can get to know you a little bit better. Give us the quick backstory of your business. What do you do? How did it get started?

Yeah, well, you know, Jesse, I've been in tech my whole life. Well, people go check me out on LinkedIn. I've always been in product development, you know, worked my way up. I ran divisions for Verifone, Hewlett-Packard, Nike. I've managed small teams from 13 up to over 1,100 at Hewlett-Packard. So, I got out of that biz just because, Jesse, I got tired of running all around the world in planes. In fact, I thought I was going to end up dying in one of those things in my 50s. So, here I am now, fast forward, I'm in my fourth startup. I've had a couple exits, a lot of battle scars, I guess, a lot of some successes, lots of failures, but you learn from that. It's kind of what we do now is in this startup I have is it's really about how do we make and create impacts for the good for people in the world. And so, that's part of what Default's about. I'm sure we'll talk about that. And also, recognizing where things are going. I mean, we can't pack all this in 20 minutes on your show. AI is a progression of technology that's gone on along forever, but we're still moving towards holographic technologies, towards the spatial web, virtual IoT, satellite tech. All this stuff are things that in my company and in my own brain, we have to consider to say, okay, how can we fit with all of these types of things but still put the human being at the center of it all?

When did you start your business?

Uh, Iprolio started, uh, I think about 9 years ago. Um, Iprolio is Latin for engage, and out of that, then we've, you know, done several products. Um, DefaulT is the one we're working on now. Uh, and so I don't— you know, the thing that's funny, Jesse, is, uh, and actually I hang out with a bunch of men and women around the world. It's kind of a consortium of people. And, you know, that's one of the fascinating trends to me, Jesse, is there are more and more and more companies like myself that— I thought this time last year I was going to hire a bunch of extra software engineers. I'm not hiring one. Uh, we're— in fact, I was telling somebody a story the other day. So I was in— I used to live in Hawaii because I ran, uh, the division for VeriFone, was the original one there. And so I was recruited to come turn that division around. But I was there visiting, you know, that was several years ago. So I'm running down Kamehameha Highway on the North Shore of Oahu with my phone. I had 4 agents running and I was developing a McKinsey red team study and doing AI coding all from my phone while I was running. That's where our world is now. It's To me, it's fascinating. Um, so that's kind of how things have evolved. I, and I know a lot of businesses now that are choosing to, to stay smaller and more intimate and not have a mass of people. Um, and I actually even know a couple founders, their goal is to get to a billion dollars with just them and AI agents. And some of them are in the millions now. So it's a new world we live in.

Talk to me a little bit about what's changed from 9 years ago. How big is your team today and kind of what was that evolution from, from what it was then and versus what it looks like today?

Well, you know, it's kind of a— the interesting thing about it, Jesse, is like what I was talking about is my team right now is 3 people and I'm not sure we're going to get any bigger. I mean, We utilize, you know, services. I know people that as we continue to grow, we'll draw from their expertise and things like that because it's like you can't know everything and be everything. But at the same time, you know, with technology and how it's changed, the ability to do a lot of this operational things and like we're even doing now, there's tools you can do whole go-to-market. With a proper tech stack that just all runs where it used to be a whole bunch of people you needed to do that. You just don't anymore. And so, we're in this interesting transition. I mean, you know, a lot of people, you probably have run into this too, Jesse. Some people, it's like there's two camps, you know, there's a world of like, oh my God, AI is terrible. It's like going to be Terminator. We're going to— humans are going to be extinct. And it's like, I don't I don't agree with that. But, and then there's the other camp of, well, how do we, how do we use AI but keep humans in the center of it? Because, you know, I'm sure you've probably used ChatGPT a lot, right? It's kind of like garbage in, garbage out. It's the quality of your questions. If you don't ask good questions, you're not going to get good, you know, responses with AI. Uh, but AI can do a lot of things. Um, I read a McKinsey study about I don't know, it's 11, 12 months ago, between 2025 and 2030, there's going to be about 15 million people in the United States alone that are going to lose their jobs to AI. But there's also going to be growth and creation. You know, if you look at kind of where we came from, ag to industrial age, knowledge worker age, now to the intelligence age. Like I tell people all the time, my grandfather, he was a coal miner in Merion Heights, Pennsylvania. You think he'd have a job now if he was alive? No, I mean, you know, we change and progress. So I'm just— it's like, for everybody I'm sure is listening out there, it's like, well, how do I change and progress to keep current, to, you know, maximize the opportunities with these new technologies that are coming and that are already here?

Yeah, it's definitely interesting, the acceleration of it too, right?

We're— yeah, it's so fast.

What was available yesterday versus what's available today is changing, right?

Yeah.

You mentioned using agents and kind of a go-to-market motion. When you're looking at sales, marketing outreach, where are you seeing the traction? What's working for you and what's not?

You know, it's, um, so where we're going in, you know, cracking this code is this whole from concept all the way through to go-to-market and beyond, which is client retention, lower customer churn, onboarding, and things like that. But in the go-to-market realm, the things that I find fascinating, Jesse, right now is there's kind of a lead filtering. So, for example, we're all up on LinkedIn, right? So, you can use LinkedIn to find, like, I look for chief product officers, chief marketing officers, people like that, founders, solo entrepreneurs, you know, people that are looking for what default has to offer. And so you can take those and bring them in. You can do lead enrichment like with an AI agent using Apollo as one of the tools, or Clay, and actually get, you know, good ways to connect with them. And then it's obviously it's reaching out can be email sequences, can be video sequences. I'm big on video because our product, which we're growing now, is called Relatable, and it's an interactive video platform. But, you know, there's different ways to do that. There's also ways to go out and do lead scraping and finding certain types of leads that you're looking for. And then again, doing lead enrichment, bring them in to make sure that it's an accurate email address and not junk. Um, but I also think too, part of this is running agents for— like, I know people that are running whole podcast shows with AI agents now and their AI twin. Um, I also know, you know, as far as communities, that's super important. You can have agents do 90% of the heavy lifting of community and community operations. You still show up as the human and inject yourself in, you know, to interact with your community. But a lot of that work in community growth and development can be done with AI agents as well. So that's kind of where things are right now. And, you know, you're going to see more and more of that, the personalization and the, the use of that. I will, you know, for me, this is my own personal opinion. I think what could possibly happen here is just like what we did to destroy people's belief and trust in human beings. One of them is email marketing. You know, it was way overused and just attacking people's inbox and spam and all the stuff that you saw that went on. You know, people are pretty cynical now. So I think, you know, AI personalization is great, but only up to a point. And I, fear that a lot of marketers, because it's push-button technology, they're going to go too far down the pipe and it's going to cause a lot more people to basically throw up their hands and go, I don't even know what's real anymore. What do I believe? What's real and what's not real here? And hence, that's why we also are developing DefaulT, because I really believe that verif— our category is called verified human intent. I think the humanness has to be at the core of all these technologies, including artificial intelligence. Because if we don't do that, we're, we're in big trouble.

You know, it's funny, I was just thinking about an email I got. There was like, 6 kids in Lehigh, you know, because we have 6 kids and yeah, yeah, bigger family. And I'm like, okay, why are you, why are you even saying that, right? It's like some bot had scraped information about me and Somehow, because they knew that I had 6 kids, that that was going to open a door for them. Right. You know, like, like, okay, great. AI. Right. And we're getting great at reading that, that AI. Right. We know what it's starting to sound like.

Yeah.

What it feels like. Right. Obviously there's a ton of buzz around AI automation. Sounds like your company is very involved in it today. What other ways are you using AI in your business? So you mentioned some list building, some outreach efforts. How else are you using AI to build your business?

Well, you know, here— and we were talking about this off air a little bit, Jesse— and everybody that is listening to your show, I almost guarantee they all have the same problem, and they're probably starting to think about this, which is, man, you know, I use ChatGPT and I type in questions and I get answers. Could be for services, could be for local businesses in my community. It could be about a particular, how do I do this in my business, right? We're all doing it. Even elderly people are using ChatGPT or Perplexity or Gemini or whatever their preference of choice is to ask questions. Well, used to be, right? Back in the day, we had this thing called Google Search and people would go up to Google and they would do, they would Google it and it became the default, and you get the page 1 of the 10 links, right? That was called link services. Well, now if you've noticed, in fact, as of November of— there was a crossover point, I think it was November 2024— answer services, which is I type into ChatGPT and get an answer, took off, and SEO started declining, and it's been going downhill ever since. In a massive way because people just aren't going up to Google anymore. And so, there's two pieces of how— well, so the question a business owner wants to know is like, well, how in the heck do I— if they type in a question, how do I show up as the business? Because right now I'm telling people, if you don't figure that out in the next 12 months, your business is dead. Because if you're invisible, no one's going to know how to find you, right? So there's two parts. The fancy terms are AEO and GEO. AEO is the answer when someone types in a question, your answer, and it's typically a 40-word is the sweet spot answer, shows up. You want to be that business that answers that, that authority. Right, for whatever you do. It could be accounting, could be tax prep, could be, you know, executive leadership coaching. But you want to be that, that business owner that shows up. And then GEO is the actual authority of what you have or who you are. And those are the sources that the AI will cite. So what you want as a business is you want to show up as the answer and also as one of those sources because people trust that, right? You know, the funny thing I will say about where we are now is if you go back a few years, you know, around 2004, social media was starting to take off. What social media did is it manipulated what we saw, right? Algorithms, they filter. We all know that to be true. And that's still going on today. But what's interesting and a little bit scary and creepy is AI is manipulating how we think. And we have to be careful about this because, you know, this is— I have a neuroscience background. Our brains are lazy by evolutionary DNA. They just are. We go to the simplest answer, whatever that default is, right? And so, you know, people have to really like If they're asking questions, it's the quality of the questions they're asking AI to get the quality of answers right. Now, there is a scary thing going on here this year. In all the research and reports that I've looked at and read, over 70% of all content that's going to be produced on the internet is going to be what's called AI slop. It's going to be synthetic. It will not be from humans. And this is a problem because the Big Four are feeding that AI slop into their AI learning models. And I don't know a simpler way to say this, but it's making AI stupider. So this is a real problem because have you ever had that happen? Like when you did ChatGPT, you ask it a question, it gave you some answers, and then you didn't challenge all of them and you came back and asked another question and all of a sudden one of the ones that you knew that wasn't true showed up as truth. That happens, is happening more and more in AI. And then that makes people go, well, how do I know that's even right? And then they throw up their hands and go, I can't believe any of this crap, right? So this is why you have to have humans in the loop, humans with actual experience and scars and understanding, like what it takes to build a business and how to go through growth. Mechanisms and how to exit companies and things like that. AI will have knowledge, but it doesn't have the human scars, the context and experience that humans have. And this is where we come into play in working with the AI to help AI stay smart and not become stupid.

So you, you mentioned you've, uh, scaled and built multiple businesses. You— sounds like you sold a couple as well. Or exited them. You know, as you're trying to scale, what are some of the constraints that are showing up for you? Time, people, systems, capital, leadership. What are those things that you keep bumping into as you're trying to scale?

Well, you know, what's interesting is I'm able to do a lot more with a lot less people now. I think the constraint really is Um, what I'm really struggling with, to be super honest with you, is cracking this last mile code, uh, which is how do we get, uh, and utilize some of the agents and things to get out to the marketplace. Um, could I do it now? Yeah. The problem is for me, right, because I don't know how big your team is, but if we're both You know, I'm a small, smaller, and I want to stay not solo, but a pretty small team. I don't know. I've managed 1,100 people and that's like herding a huge cattle farm, you know? So, you know, it's— I like to stay nimble, stay quick, bring things to market. So our last thing to crack is this go-to-market piece with the different AI agents. There are people, I have friends of mine that are doing it right now. They're very good at what they do. The challenge though is they charge between $10,000 and $50,000 a month. So, if you're a smaller company, you probably can't afford that, right? So, it's like, how do you do this on your own to be able to have that go-to-market effect and expand and bring people in and, you know, not only bring these cold leads in. But that's what default does, is it turns you into the market maker. You become the default. You become the Band-Aid, the Velcro, uh, the name that people pop in their head when they think about your type of service. That can be done locally, regionally, nationally, globally, because it's a, it's a neuroscience effect. But that's my last piece, is I'm really trying to crack this piece. I've met some really, really interesting people around the world I'm talking— in fact, I just got off with a guy who's a founding partner. He's an ex-Microsoft guy, very high up. We formed a partnership. He's doing something. He lives in Denmark in the go-to-market, and I'm actually partnering with him to develop this last mile piece in that. So, you know, that's for me. Once we get that cracked, you know, I thought 2026 we'd maybe launch a product. My goal is now to launch a minimum of 4, and they're all infrastructure protocol products. So I couldn't have done that a year or so ago without artificial intelligence.

Let's look to the future for a minute. What are you most excited about?

I just am excited about the continuation of technology and, you know, how we fit within that and usable pieces of technology. And, you know, One of the things years ago when I was at Nike, I was brought in, it was a smaller team, it was like 62 people. We developed the world's first VR glasses. This was way before Oculus and all this. And they were like, you know, Nike-type sport glasses. We worked with Chinese chipset manufacturers, really cutting edge. But you know, it was before its time, right? So a lot of this stuff is like the timing of launching things at the right time. I mean, you could go back to Steve Jobs, and when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007, there was cell phones before that, but he hit it right with the type of user interface that people go, oh, this makes sense, I get it, right? Um, so I'm really excited about the future and all the technologies and what they can do, uh, but I do think that we have to make sure that we always keep humans in the center of that technology and not push them aside. Because when we do that, you know, I can go back to a very simple rudimentary form of that, which was email marketing. We pushed humans aside and we just pummeled people with emails until they, you know, just said, "Stop," and they, you know, got angry about it, right? So, we have to, you know, keep that humanness in all this technology that we do. That's what excites me.

Let's look back now, your journey, your wins and your mistakes. What are some of those lessons that stand out as you tried to grow your businesses and worked in various industries?

Yeah, it's a— I, I think, uh, a lot of it is you can be, you know, and I've always been pretty good, I think, at like you know, growth mechanisms, watching capital, cash flow management, all these kinds of things that, yes, you need to do in a business. But I think the, the times when this is where it's really a delicate balance and I don't know, I've never really found an answer for this that goes, yeah, just do it this way and it works every single time. You know, if you listen to guys like Steve Jobs, he would always say, I create products that people don't even know they need yet, but when I create them, they do. Now, it sounds kind of arrogant, but I mean, think about it. iPod, iPad, you know, iPhone. He's kind of right. But at the same time, I think you can't just go, you know, like that movie, If You Build It, They Will Come, because that doesn't work either. And I've done that and I've had some things fall flat on my face. So there has to be this balance, right? And I don't know exactly what that balance is. It's kind of an innate gut feel based on maybe experience. You have to involve people in and get their feedback on things and see what they think. But you can't design the product based on what everybody says because that is called gravity and it brings back— it brings the product down. It's so watered down that it's not good for anybody. Right. So that's my lesson learned, is it's that fine balance between listening. And I think now, you know, technology, we have communities and things where people come in and you can show them, you know, minimum viable prototypes, and they can give you feedback and stuff like that. And then you have to kind of filter through your own experience and go, here's what I'm going to keep and here's what I'm not going to keep.

So the last question for you, Pete. As you know, we're talking to business owners, entrepreneurs growing past the startup phase. They're continuing to grow. What advice do you give to them?

Uh, well, I guess my advice is, you know, use your capital really, really wisely. And if you don't need to go get capital, don't get it. If you can do it with technology and do it on your own, then do it. You know, I really think the VC, angel, family office market in the next 3 to 4 years, it's going to be some massive shifts because all the guys I know, everybody is out there bootstrapping and not accepting capital because they can. So not all businesses are like that. Not all businesses are super tech heavy. But I just say, you know, make sure you have a good growth strategy. You know what that strategy is going forward. Obviously, it's a living document. There's nothing that's ever stable because everything is moving so fast. Even in what we would consider traditional service-based markets, you know, like plumbing, electrical, there's still things that are happening in technology and marketing that are changing things. So, you know, have your plan. Execute it, but make sure you're coming back. And if you do need to use capital, use it very, very wisely because that can get you in trouble. I had one time where I had a business, it was overcapitalized and it crashed because of the economy. And that was not fun. It caused all kinds of stress. You know, that's one of my failures. But, you know, you live and learn. And hey, I'm still alive. I'm still standing. So All good.

Well, Pete, thanks for sharing your story with us, your insights. For those listening, if you want to learn more about what Peter's doing, you can visit defaulteffect.com. Learn about more about his company Default and iProleo as well. I'm sure Pete would welcome any visits on LinkedIn as well if you want to connect with him there. And that'll wrap up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. A big thank you to our sponsors Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executives for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed today's conversation, follow the show, share with other entrepreneurs who'd also find value in it. We appreciate you listening. We'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.