What AI Can Do For Your Business with David Shim

Foreign. Entrepreneurs, salespeople, and marketers. They all know that their decisions are in the data or their answers can be found in the analytics. But what could AI and analytics tell you about how to make your company meetings more effective? Well, today I'm joined by David Shim, and David is the former CEO of Foursquare, the location layer of the Internet. And while at Foursquare, the company exceeded $150 million in annual revenue. And David joined Foursquare through Snapchat. But today, David Shim is the co founder and CEO at reedai, which applies AI and analytics to video conference calls. So employees have fewer and better meetings. And on average, David David's company, reed, identifies that 23 meeting hours a month could be eliminated per employee. That's basically 50% of an employee's entire month that's being consumed in crap meetings. Yo. Reid's mission is to make every human interaction more meaningful, smarter, happier. Starting with more than 500 million people that use video conference meetings every single day, David Chim has focused on applying analytics early to emerging technologies to solve real world problems. And his current company, Reed AI, is on a mission to solve zoom fatigue, which is a legit problem that we all struggle with. And David's going to join us in just a second. But first, a word from our sponsors. This podcast is brought to you by the Wirebuzz team. Now, if that name sounds familiar, it's because I've spent the past decade growing Wirebuzz into a digital marketing powerhouse designed to maximize clarity in complex sales processes so we can help accelerate revenue. And we do this in three phases. Phase one, we transform your website to function like your best salesperson and then also incorporate persuasive on demand sales videos. Now, your entire team is aligned on messaging and they're injecting massive clarity into your prospect's head. So your site looks great, but it also has engaging content that helps your team sell on demand. 24. 7. The next phase phase two, we train your sales and marketing teams to sell remotely or in person to expand the impact of your sales team. And the third phase is we develop and run targeted ads to your prospects. Scale those ads to help you achieve more business results. Sign up for the Wirebuzz Company newsletter to learn more about effective and simple ways to improve your company messaging, attract more digital attention, and ultimately make more sales. David Shim, welcome to the Todcast.

Hey, great to be here, Todd. Appreciate it.

I'm so fired up to get to talk with you like I'm a super nerd for using AI and technology in business. And I have read in my Zoom meetings, I've already applied it, I've used it, I've looked at it. Talk to me about Reed and how entrepreneurs like myself can be using this platform to create happier business environments and better results.

Yeah, I think the first thing that we run into is when you set up a meeting with someone, you try to go for a longer period of time because you think you can, especially if you're an entrepreneur. You're like, I could sell them better if I had an hour versus 30 minutes. If I'm talking more, it's going to be a better conversation. You know, I really need to kind of fill up the room and make sure there's no space in reality, that's not a good meeting. In a lot of cases where if you're doing all the talking, if you're stretching out for an hour, where you might have had them on the hook for the first 10 or 15 minutes, but you're overselling at a certain point and you see the engagement drop off, we're trying to make that easier for you to pick up. Where. Rather than doing like a coaching call where you practice your pitch, because we don't have time for that. Like, I think most business people, they're kind of too busy, they've got too many meetings.

They.

They can't practice the pitch other than in real life. We go in and we measure that call and we go in and we say, like, hey, about 15 minutes in, you were talking way too much and the engagement level dropped off. You should really think about going back. And the next time you have a similar call, maybe speaking a little bit less, making the meeting a little bit shorter, making it more focused, and really kind of giving you that play by play. So if you watch football, you see that replay. It's kind of the same concept where we're acting as your coach and, and you're able to look at the game film and say, okay, this is where I could have done better. And now that I've seen it, I know what to do in the next meeting.

Okay, So I love everything you just said. I. I'm a. I train, I own an agency. But what I really do, when I'm not running the agencies, I'm training some of the largest companies in the world to use video in their sales process to convince and convert at faster rates. But what I've noticed at a lot of these big companies, like Fortune 500 companies, is they often, and the reason they're at this size are looking at they're reviewing their meetings, critiquing it and optimizing. And it feels like Reed kind of fits in in this constant and never ending improvement type of iteration that the best companies in the world get up every day to strive for 100%.

And what we're trying to do that's a little bit different is not have the manager necessarily have to sit on every single call, especially with video conferencing, like it becomes too tedious. Where if you're a remote culture, if you're hybrid, you can't. If you're a manager, you've got five or six reports and they're doing a bunch of calls, you can't sit in on every single call. So it just doesn't scale. Versus like in the old days, when you're in an office, you can walk by their desk, you can jump into the conference room, sit in and then give them feedback after the call. Those types of natural moments don't happen. They have to be more planned. And I think that's where the analytics comes in, where it's giving people more scale. If you're a manager that you need to coach your team, you're able to do that. You're able to leverage Reed to coach your team for the basics. And then you might go in and say, hey, this is a really bad call, or this is a great call. What were the things that actually made it really good or really bad and really break that down with your teammates. And that's what companies, and there's a lot of companies like sales and enablement, great sales enablement, companies like Gong, Corporate, Taurus, Outreach, High Spot, et cetera, that kind of enable that kind of approach. But it's also limited to sales in a lot of cases because the price point is too high. And for us, our take is like, hey, the more that you can automate, the more that you can give automated recommendations, the more that you can use those automated recommendations for better scheduling, the better your meetings will be. And it's a broader audience. Like teachers love it. From a college and university perspective, client service teams love it because they're able to actually go in and track like, hey, I've had these 12 calls with the clients, client, is it trending up or down? And if it's trending down, I want to know that before they actually go in and say, hey, can I talk? Can you have your manager come on this call?

Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting because if somebody saw that they were speaking too long, they have two reactions. One is, how dare you Tell me that I'm talking too long. And the second reaction is the healthy one, right? Which is like, okay, I'm here to grow each day to become a better version so I can serve people and, and meet their needs quicker and easier. And Reed gives salespeople that opportunity to like, dig in and evaluate themselves without it being exposed in front of the whole team 100%.

And that's where it's more like a Fitbit where sometimes I don't walk around that much or an Apple watch. And I'm like, Okay, I took 2,000 steps today. I should probably actually go out and do something at this point. It's a nudge. But if your significant other, if your friend said, dude, you're kind of being lazy and you're really kind of hacking on a couple pounds, you get offended. And this makes that conversation so much easier because it's more just saying, here's the numbers, just like you said, you make a determination like, okay, this is not good. When I look at the trend across my last 12 calls, when I talk more than 50% of the time, the sentiment is lower and the engagement is lower. I'm going to have a really hard time arguing with the numbers versus, like, if someone gives me that feedback, I might come up with 10 excuses. Say like, oh, you misunderstood or you only sat in for 10 minutes of the call, or you don't understand my relationship. This is going in and giving you unbiased and automated feedback, which actually helps people change. Like, we even had a vc early days of Reed. We had a VC use our product and they said, I don't like it, but I love it. The reason why I don't like it is I realized for the last four intro calls that I had to a startup where I talk about, you know, what are they working on? I spoke 75 to 80% of the time. And I realized when I saw those numbers in front of me, these are not how these calls should be. It should be 85% you're pitching me the company, and 15% I'm talking. And it immediately kind of corrected their behavior.

Yeah, sales is like dating. And if you go out on a date and you just yap, yap, yap, the other person doesn't have the opportunity to relate back. And they don't. It's not like a developing of a relationship. There's no rapport. And it's healthy for sales people to get insights on where they could be optimizing it. Look with, I want to get into your unique story because your Background and your entrepreneurial drive is super intriguing to me. But while we're talking about Reed Reed's meeting navigator, listen to this, you guys. It comes with a meeting timer, talk time, and the meeting timer, by the way, measures the duration of the call compared to the. To the schedule. All right? And then talk time ensures a balanced and inclusive conversation, which is imperative for developing relationships. It also has engagement and sentiment. Transcription. A meeting report like all of these, if you're hungry to get next friggin level and play at the level of outstanding, is the kind of data essential to have an open, open eyes about how the world perceives you. What are the. When you're looking at these tools? Oh, I need. Before I get into these tools, how did you guys come up with Reid? Like, what's the origin story about this company?

Yeah, so origin story was just. It was interesting. It was during COVID or peak Covid. And I was, oh, please tell me peak Covid's over.

Are you. You're telling me it's over Peak Covid.

Okay, good.

It's all downhill from here.

I was on a call, and you forget a lot of the times when you just follow your calendar and you're ruled by your calendar. You go wherever your calendar says. Like some of the biggest, the most successful executives say, whatever's on my calendar, I go do. And that's how I prioritize my day. Well, in reality, like, if you've got a reoccurring meeting that started three months ago because your numbers were low in Q3 and that meeting continues to go on, the same people who were there three months ago don't necessarily be the same people there today. And what I found was I was on a call with like 30 people. And this meeting originally started with like six people. Like three months ago. There's 30 people on this call. And I just realized, like, I don't need to be on here. I'm not talking at all. So then I started to look at other people on the call and I'm like, you're not paying attention. You're talking to your wife, you're talking to your husband, you're petting your dog. You're on espn, because I can see off the reflection on your glasses. I'm on ESPN too. So you start to pick these things up. And I started to say, okay, this is a big waste of time. Like, these are expensive people on the call. And you've always heard, like, if you take all the people on the call and you multiply by the salaries, how much does call cost? Well, I did some of that math and I was like, this is ridiculous. Like, these people shouldn't be on the call, and they should be doing what they're best at, not sitting on a call, surfing the web. And so I started to go in and say, okay, this is an interesting opportunity. Does the technology allow you to be able to kind of measure engagement and sentiment? And the answer was yes, Hard to do, but it was just potentially a solvable problem. And the next step was like, are the platforms big enough? And this was when Zoom, WebEx, Teams, Google Meet, all had record highs in terms of new users because people weren't meeting in person. So all those things aligned perfectly to the point where we're like, okay, let's go into this because it's a big market, huge opportunity, lots of users, and the innovation has only happened in about the last kind of 12 months. Cause if you think about video conferencing pre Covid, we were doing a couple calls occasionally but would still meet in the office. We travel, et cetera. Now the default is let's go remote first and then do you want to meet in person? And so we don't have that instilled training from a sales perspective where, hey, I go on 10,000 hours of calls, I can figure this out. People hadn't had 10,000 hours of virtual meetings until the last two years where it just got ramped up. So I think this is an opportunity for us where we can go in and say, how do we make people smarter but also make it easier for them to have better calls without having to spend that 10,000 hours to become a video conferencing expert.

Yeah, that's so cool. We have the same breakout moment. Pre Covid. Right, Right at the beginning of COVID I should say peak Covid. Excuse me. Tony Robbins reached out and asked me to start training each of his 100 plus sales teams how to use video to sell to their prospects and their revenue took off. And so he pushed me out onto a stage, and now I'm speaking for him every month. And the cool thing, it's like when you're about to go through a crisis, the last thing you're thinking in your head is opportunity. Right? But like, great technology, like Reid is born in crisis and it allows us to up our game. I like this part of Reid where the. The videos are. The data is deleted within 24 hours. Tell me why.

So we want to make people comfortable to join on the call. So let's say you're on a call and all of a sudden, Reid joins as a participant. You might be like, what is this? What's going on here? We highlight right up front center like this call is being deleted after 24 hours. So it's more Snapchat esque. We're going out and we're saying like, hey, we want to make this call more efficient for everybody. We'll give you access to the reports, we'll let you know that we're measuring the call. If you type in opt out into the chat, we will leave the conversation and delete all the data faster than 24 hours, like right after the call. So the goal here is we want people to be comfortable around the measurement. What we found is it's in the very, very low single digits now where people actually opt out because they feel more comfortable, like, okay, I have the choice to opt out. And there might be cases that you might want to opt out because it's a sensitive topic. But generally when it's a sales call, it's like, no, this is good. This is going to help me become a better seller. It's going to give me notes that I can actually make sure I follow up better with you. It's also going to enable me to actually schedule better that I don't waste your time. And I realize an hour isn't necessary. It's a 30 minute meeting and this is what the metric you're saying. So it really, it's more about benefiting everybody at the end of the day.

So, David, one of the things I've discovered is I review, I listen a second time and I become a significantly better service provider or vendor by listening to the call again. I actually find that the second time they're dropping all of these clues all over the place that I didn't hear the first time because I was juggling too many tactical decisions to understand that they just served up what the next opportunity was. So I become significantly better by reviewing.

It 100% and where we're going with the product. We just launched a new feature yesterday where we will enable recording the call. And the way that we've done that is like we will use, if you use Zoom today, we use the recording option so it's even abundantly clear. And then everyone has to opt in to be recorded because. Exactly. In your case, people want play by play because you're not going to watch a 30 minute call or an hour long call. When we interviewed a bunch of sales leaders, they said like, they might watch it for themselves, but when you've got a sales team of 50 or 100. What they run into is, okay, we've got way too many calls. I don't have time to look at this. What I will do is I will go in and send the video out to the people that have closed deals recently and say, everybody watch this video. There's something in here that is interesting because they close the deal. Now what we're able to do is actually show when engagement increases, when sentiment increases, what were the talking points and topics. So you can use that as almost navigation. So rather than using time as navigation, you can figure out where the moments that the client was peaking in interest and then play that back. So you could go in and say, okay, this is really helpful. Clients care about X, Y and Z, but they don't care about A, B.

And C. I love it. And then you can recreate that in real time when you're in front of the next client. Now clearly, David, you have a go get them attitude when it comes to work ethic. And that's vital, right? That's like a key element of who you are and what you bring to the projects that you're invested in.

100%. 100%. And if I don't believe in it, like this is where it's more about the startup versus the sales. I get a lot of startup kind of entrepreneurs reaching out to me and they go in and say like, hey, what market should I go into? What problem should I solve? And it's like, no, that's the worst thing you could do because you're chasing the puck. You're going to where like you think the market is hot versus like tell me what you're interested in, tell me what problem you're trying to solve and what gets you excited because you're going to have a deal with like three months, six months where people tell you it's a horrible idea, nobody uses it, everything breaks. And you just had to have that determination to say, I will continue to push through.

And it's got to be like passion. Like you've got to have a never ending passion because the passion is the fuel that'll help you get through the technology isn't working phase.

Again, 100% on that too. Because what you run into, especially if you're building on new technology, is people haven't done it before. So if you try to do a Google search, you might find no results or you might find something that has like 10 years old that is not related to what you're doing. You have to have the passion to believe that you can solve the problem. I think that's the difference where there's also a point where you go too far. Like, I wouldn't necessarily spend 12 years on a problem with no traction at all. But you have to believe that it's a solid solvable problem and it doesn't have to be solved by somebody else. You are the person that is going to solve it. And there's pieces and there's little hints along the way to say, this is how I do it.

All right, so let's talk about solving problems. At 17 years old, you became the youngest registered investment advisor in the nation. Did, did you learn that kind of like self determination from watching your parents running a career and create really?

Yeah, because so my parents, it was different though because they were, they're college educated from South Korea. They moved to the U.S. my dad was a car dealer and so he was selling cars. You know, his English got better over time, but English was not his first language. So he was able to go in and become a car salesman. That was like one of the biggest in the 80s and 90s as an individual seller. My mom worked at a deli that then she bought a deli in a grocery store. And she said, I kind of did the stereotypical like Korean mom, just working really hard, working at the store. And what they did was it was very entrepreneurial, was they said, hey, we might not make as much money as we want to right now, but what are the factors that I could change here? And the factors they could change was they could throw themselves into their work. So that's where I learned the ethic of like, okay, you're waking up 5am to go to the store and you're not going to hire that extra person. You're just going to go there earlier to do the prep work yourself. You're going to stay later, you're going to go to Costco on the weekends and buy the supplies. Like all these things, like became a tradition. And then every Saturday, Sunday, my mom's like, okay, you guys ready to go? It's like where we go, go to Costco. Okay, here's a list for you. Here's a list for my brother Henry. And we just go out and shop. So we're kind of put to work really early on. And we thought it was fun back then, but it really did instill kind of that nature of, all right, there's nobody else. Like, you've got, you've got these people. Solve this problem. We need to make more money. The revenue's down in the business, we can't hire another cook. Like what are the things that you're going to do there? And that, that really helped me kind of say, like there isn't a problem that you can't generally solve if you don't put effort and your mind to it.

And solving problems is at the core like it should be for every entrepreneur if you want to be successful because you're hunting problems where you can add massive value into this world and solve it. But still, incredibly bright people fool themselves into believing that they're smarter than everyone else and then they set themselves up for like classic setbacks. Tell me about what you learned from when you over leveraged yourself in a stock that was being acquired and you ended up losing 50 of your net worth that you had developed into your 20s.

Yeah, so I traded stocks really early, like you had mentioned, 17 years old. I started trading on this platform called SOS, which is small order execution system. Where this was in the 90s where, so this was before high speed Internet dial up was still around at this point. And what would happen is if you wanted to buy a stock, the broker could take as long as you want unless you use this order system that was electronic and it was developed to say if someone puts an order, the dealer has to either buy it or not buy it within 30 seconds and then after that move off the price. So what happened was this is really early. You could actually go in and buy stocks where it's like, okay, I hear the news because the Internet didn't exist. News wasn't real time. So I heard the news on a wire service that this company was going to get acquired. I could actually get about a two minute head start over everybody else and just start buying the stock. And the broker doesn't know what's going on because they don't hear the news because it's someone on a computer back in New York doing it. They're buying, they're buying, they're buying the stock. So they're seeing the buy orders come in, they stop taking orders, they move off the price. So from a technology perspective, it was very much like, and I'm lost in the original question now, but it was really focusing around.

It's about how incredibly bright people can even fool themselves.

Oh yes, yes. I was crushing it. I was 16, 17 years old at the time trading. And then they said you got to stop trading because you're doing too much volume of stock trades and you're only 17 years old. So in theory your contract is legally binding and you can undo these trades. I was like, okay. Most people been like, I quit. I'm done. All right, it's not legal. I'll wait a year. I was like, well, what can I do? And then the lawyer said, well, you can get emancipated from your parents, so your contract is legally binding. I was like, I like my parents, but it's like, no, just for your contract. It's like, okay. So I go to the courthouse, sit in the courthouse, wait for my turn. There's these other people getting emancipated, and you get emancipated for generally not positive reasons. So I go to the judge and he's like, oh, you want to get emancipated? You're like, why do you want to get emancipated? I don't trade stocks. And they're like, what? Yeah, I'm still gonna live with my parents. They're great. Like, I just wanna trade stocks. They won't let me do it unless I'm like, legally binding. Adult with the contract is like, oh, this is the easiest one I've ever had. So he signed off on that. So. So it did feed my ego a little bit. And then I started trading. And again, I wasn't the smartest person, and I kind of knew that, but I had the technology and the edge for a limited time with the speed of information. And so I was making more than my parents from like, 17 to about 19 years old doing this thing. And so I got a little cocky near the end where I started training adults, and they were paying me thousands of dollars to train them to how to actually trade on this platform. And they were making good money, too. But then Internet got faster, computers got faster, and my edge started to disappear. So I started to do this thing called arbitrage trading. And I won't go into too many specifics, but it's saying you see an opportunity and you try to arbitrage it. And I thought I was super smart. I made a couple thousand bucks here, a couple thousand bucks here. Then I started to use margin. And then I got really cocky, and I was like, oh, I'm super smart. Let's just go all in on this one thing. And what happened was the spread started to get wider because it looked like the deal wasn't going to happen, but I wasn't smart enough to pick that up. And so I kept on buying more, like, this is a great deal. I'm going to make so much money. And then the night before the deal was supposed to Close. They canceled the deal. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, man. And then I was doing the math in my head. I was like, you know, if it hits this price, I've got to cut a six figure check on top of everything that I've lost. And it was bouncing in after hours all over the place. So ultimately I lost 50% of my net worth. It was a horrible experience, but it also kind of taught me about, like, you're not the smartest guy in the room. There's always going to be someone smarter. And also diversification actually does matter.

In certain cases it does. Right. So you know what's funny is like, you can ride out a competitive advantage that you discover early and you could write it out for like six minutes or six months or six years. But eventually the rest of the world catches up. And my career started in with a news site. I was on the air, on the radio in Phoenix and I read this one article about Google News was being launched. This is, this is 2002 in the summer. And I had a news site. But I read that you have to actually have all these news creators. It can't just be an individual. So anytime I had a dignitary, the mayor, the congressman, the governor, I would speak to their press secretary and I'd get their weekly speech and I would publish their speech. And then I repositioned my whole site for Google News. And when they launched Google News, and I know the date and I'll know it for the rest of my life because it's the best day of my Life. It was September 22, 2002. I launched my news site with a new layout. It also happened to be the day that I got married. And I did that in the morning, got married right after. But Google indexed me, made me the primary news site for the state of Arizona. And I was outranking Gannett's, which owns USA Today's paper here. And I was getting 36 million visitors a year on zero ad dollars. And it got me hired for like the next decade. Yeah. And then all of a sudden it disappeared and I was screwed. Screwed. But, but I know the thing, like after a while you start to really get confident that you figured it out. But what you figured out is one tactic that allows you to dominate for a limited period of time and you just don't know how long it is. And David, I'm, I'm intrigued by what you're doing. What is next for Reed AI? Like, where are you guys going with this tool? Because it looks to Me like you've got something incredibly valuable. But what's even more valuable is, is how this information can impact business going forward.

Yeah, so one thing that we're doing is the video playback. So recording the conversation so people can go in and actually take a 60 minute call, a 90 minute call, and nobody reads the transcripts. On average, 30 minute calls generate about 70, 17 pages of transcripts. So nobody reads that. Nobody's going to watch outside of like you or I occasionally to become better. There's a certain population that will watch the videos, but just generally you don't rewatch the videos, especially if you have eight hours of meetings a day. That means you'd have to watch, you know, eight hours of meetings, a video after you're done with your regular work. So we think there's a huge opportunity around streamlining what is the most interesting thing in that meeting, the most actionable thing, not just based on the words that you say. Because as a seller, I think a lot of people know you could say, this product is the greatest under the sun. It's going to improve your life, it's going to make you five feet taller, make you rich, you carve your dreams. Incredible. All these things, right? And it sounds great. And if I process just those words, it's going to say, this was a great meeting. But if the client is rolling their eyes, if they're saying this is the, this is just bull, like they're going in, looking at their phone, they're distracted. Those are things you want to pick up. And so that's where we're seeing a lot more people go in and say, combine these two things together. Show me those moments that matter the most. Almost like an ESPN highlight reel. And people are going in, click, clicking on those moments and then take those moments and then learn and apply those rules moving forward. So we released a product called Smart Scheduler. So when you schedule something on Google Calendar, normally our behavior is to go and say, what's the first availability that somebody has? And schedule that time. In reality, that's one of the worst things that you can do because that slot they might have left intentionally open for 12 o' clock at lunch or they like to work out until 9:30, and then at 10 you schedule it right. At 9:30, well, they're going to be late to your call. So the idea is like based on sitting on the calls, we can learn your schedule and within your organization, everyone else's best schedule so that people don't have people that are 10 minutes late to a meeting that they don't have crappy calls where they're stuck in traffic and they're trying to pretend that they're listening, but they're driving on their phone.

Yeah, that's so. That's super cool. He's David Chim. He's the co founder and the CEO of Read AI. And for more information, I encourage you guys to all go to Read AI. Or you can just go like I did. You can go into Zoom and go into the Zoom app store and then browse in the apps. Just type in Read and you'll be surprised how quick it comes up. You install it, and then that sucker goes to work on your behalf, helping you get to the next frigging level. David Shim, thank you so much for joining me on the Todcast.

Excellent. Thanks for having me, Todd. Really appreciate it.

Yo, that was a powerful episode. And from what we just learned, it should be obvious how you can now implement these lessons in your life to get to the next level. Now, before you bounce, I just have three quick thoughts. First, thank you for taking me on your incredible life journey. Second, if you receive some value from me and you want to pay it forward, it would mean the world to me. If you left an honest rating and review and Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen, I'd be incredibly grateful. And lastly, if you share this episode, whether it be a screenshot or a photo from where you're listening, anything via Instagram stories or LinkedIn, Facebook, or any of the social media sites, just tag me and the guest. I'll repost your content and I'll reply back in the comments because I love mixing it up. In fact, I'd love to share your shout outs in my feed too. Not only are these shout outs really good for you and for me, but they also help us book more amazing guests because they'll be able to see the reach that you're helping to cultivate. This is a way for you to help contribute to the show. So thank you again for listening and I look forward to earning a regular spot inside that ear of yours. Let's grow.