Ep 71 - Furiously Curious: How To Stay Relevant As AI Speeds Up Work w/ Caleb Snow

Send us Fan Mail The career fear around AI is real, but Caleb Snow flips the frame: the bigger threat is standing still while everything else accelerates. Caleb has spent decades moving through waves of technology from early systems work to Fortune 500 environments to vendor architecture, sales leadership, and AI startups. That range gives him a clear view of what’s changing in the future of work and what still matters when the tools keep shifting under your feet. We dig into the mindset he ...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason McGuinthe?

  Welcome back to Inspire AI, the podcast where we explore the ideas, people, and technologies shaping the future of how we live and work. So what if the biggest risk in your career right now isn't AI replacing you, but you standing still while everything else accelerates? Because somewhere between the rise of the internet, the birth of enterprise systems, and now the explosion of artificial intelligence, there are people who didn't just watch those waves happen. They learned to move through them. Today's guest is one of those people. Caleb Snow spent more than three decades in technology,

• 0:42Jason McGuinthe?

  starting young, growing up in a household where programming wasn't optional. It was expected. From building networks as a teenager to working inside Fortune 500 enterprises. His designing large scaling systems, leading in sales, and launching AI-driven startups. His career has been anything but linear. It's been driven by one thing, a relentless curiosity about what's coming next. And in today's episode, we're exploring what it means to stay furiously curious in a world being reshaped by AI. Why trust and governance are becoming just as important as innovation,

• 1:23Jason McGuinthe?

  and how anyone from technologists to entrepreneurs can go from idea to builder faster than ever before. This is a conversation about reinvention, about community, and about what it takes to keep up when change isn't coming, it's already here. Let's get into it. Caleb, welcome to Inspire AI. Thank you for having me, Jason. I'm happy to be here. Outstanding. Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself? Like, what brings you here? How do we personally know each other?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  That's a long winding story, so but I will, I mean, I could take up a whole hour on just this. But I'm forty five years old and I jokingly but somewhat seriously say I've been in tech for thirty five years. I've had a paying job and so I started off very, very young. My father was one of the original creators of Unix back in the day. There was about three thousand of them, but he happened to be one of them. So he worked for a company called Bell Labs in the seventies, eighties and early nineties. And then he got out of that and what got my start was, other than the fact that I grew up around even in the eighties and tons of technology, my dad made us learn how to program in C and COBOL and other things as a very like before we were ten years old, that was just a common thing in our house.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  And so I had a kind of a little bit of a different childhood, good, good typical eighties childhood, except for that. But what got interesting, um, more interesting is when my dad left this company doing what today would have been seen as like a really amazing prestigious thing, which wasn't recognized as such at that time. He went into fixing PCs and that was a relatively new genre of technology work to be doing back then. It was around ninety one. So eventually it became setting up networks and then it became a systems integrator. And then by the mid nineties, we're full blown web hosting, development shop and internet service provider. At the end of the two thou, at the end of the nineties and early two thousands, he ended up selling his company to one of the larger, well-known service providers at the time nationally.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  And so that was my, that was my experience as a young kid into late teens in the nineties was learning how to set up networks, set up, run the backend of, you know, of a whole data center. That was just what we did. That was my after hours job and that was normal to me. I cared more about that than actually my education at the time and you can see my GPA at some point to sit and it will prove that. And I thought the rest of my life is going to be focused on working on that company and that idea. To me, that was the world. So when my dad sold that company when I turned nineteen, my world completely shifted. And so I went from

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Managing people who had bachelor degrees as like a seventeen year old to having to have to go find a job. And when in nineteen ninety nine, two thousand, people did not think that you that a nineteen year old kid had could have six or seven years of systems administration experience. And then obviously different maturity levels during those years, but I did. And so I had to restart my career at nineteen. I had already felt like I was in my career. And so I've had this kind of weird start. And so I had to right start right back at the bottom. And I said bottom like on the IT totem pole, right? So I had to start down at tech support. I had to restart and then work my way up. And I did. And I got myself into Fortune five hundreds and got into big enterprise experience, pretty big, pretty quickly.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Um, worked for Honda, worked for Miracle Grow, worked for Cardinal Health. And eventually about nineteen years ago, found an opportunity here in Richmond with a defense contractor. And my wife and I moved here on a six week contract. And uh, which eventually turned into two years of contracting and two years of full time employment. And um, so, so I got to kind of restart my career. And about every two or so years since I left, I've effectively looked my, my, either by intent or by boredom. I've been looking at something else, like what's the next wave? So when I was, you know, I was a, was a Microsoft shop kind of guy for a long time. I was really focused in on like AD and Exchange, if you know what that is.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  But then I also got into, then I got into enterprise storage, then I got into enterprise architecture. That led me into design work. So I actually moved over to the vendor side again, uh, for the first time in like twenty, almost twenty years. About twelve years ago. And so I started designing for a large data center solution. So there's a number of Fortune five hundreds which have my designs. Maybe still they probably not, but they've been, been a bit dated. I did that for a few years and then I moved over to business development. So sales and then I got kind of this. I got a lot of people just kind of slowly worked their way up to sales. I got involved with, you know, I was working for Worldwide Technologies, how it's very, very large. Systems and the system integrator.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  And what what that provided me was this really, really broad viewpoint of the market. I got plugged into a role, I was fortunate enough to work for the EVP of Sales in his office. Versus going out in the field and actually going out and fixing problematic accounts. So I was, it was just wonderful. Trial by fire for like 20 years. Wonderful is kind of sarcastic tone there. And then what led me into kind of where you and I met is about a five or six year old story, but I'll try to abbreviate it. Basically, we, we being a gentleman within Worldwide Technology and I identified a need, a technology need. He had the skill set, he was a former network engineer, former Marine Corps Force Recon.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Had his really wild, completely opposite history of me. But we found each other, he actually worked for me for a little bit. And then saw that he, as he moved into data science, and this is in 2018, 2019. He saw a way to to secure networks better using AI. And when we first submitted our patents through Worldwide back in 2020. There was not one company out there that had patent pending, patent secured. Via prior artwork search for any of those concepts. So everything that we were, that was so novel. And now look at where we are, where everybody can say AI with a toothpaste, right? It's, it's a, it's a wild world we live in now. So we spent four or five years building this AI startup. We had, we were very well funded, I'll just say that way.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  We had 42 people working for us. And in the end, it didn't go to market. And we could spend again another hour just on that. But we learned the people we got to meet. Powerful, interesting, connected. It was just this, again, it was this masterclass of how to and how to not run a startup. And so we walked away so many lessons learned. And I was getting plugged into things like helping out. There's this local annual AI data summit, RBA tech. I was plugged in, I was on the committee helping with them. I think people saw me there because most of my stuff was done more, not really focused on Richmond. It's focused more on the globe.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  And so as I started to refocus here in Richmond, I kind of became a, you know, to people who didn't know me. They're like, where have you been? Like you've been here for 20 years. Yeah, I've been here for 20 years. But to them, I was just working on my house for an airplane. So they didn't know me that well. So you and I got engaged about a year ago when we both joined the AI ready RBA, the board. And which has been tremendous for me. I've really enjoyed getting to see and work through all that. And it's given me, I mean, I jokingly say that I am the least AI centric person on that board. Because I'm surrounded by so many amazing people you can't talk about really well, or they're practitioners. Um, yourself included. And so I'm just somebody who's an admirer.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  I like to, I'm an evangelist and I like to recognize what's coming. And to see where we're going, if, when I can, and then try to kind of help. I've had a lot of people, I cannot, everything I just told you, I could have not done by myself. I have so many people that gave me a hand up. And so now it's my responsibility as a tech, as a recovering technologist, maybe more of a salesperson these days. But it's my, my responsibility to help that next generation. And whether that's generation could be age thing, it could be somebody's mid-career shift, whatever it is. I think it's my responsibility to kind of help guide them from what I'm seeing. That's kind of the, the short version. I don't do anything short very well.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  That's the short version of kind of what, what got me here today.

• 9:51Jason McGuinthe?

  Oh, interesting. How, so many things I want to pull on there. First of all. I got my start through my dad's IT shop as well. No way. He was a small owner, but basically a manager at this IT shop locally in Richmond. And I was 15 years old and looking for, you know, a summer gig that was more than cutting grass. So his shop was very much around hardware, service industry on, you know, supporting small, medium sized businesses, doing a lot of traveling and consulting in those areas. I learned how to crimp Ethernet cords and, and clean out desktops and add memory and all sorts of good things.

• 10:34Jason McGuinthe?

  I built my first computer there and I was hooked at that point. I wasn't developing in COBOL or C sharp, I think you said, but I did discover those things when I went to college and those, they were not exciting to me, I'll be honest. Like I enjoyed VB script, but COBOL just like turned me off and I can't believe they subjected me to that because I was so disappointed in my inability to understand that, that I just, I stopped trying in software engineering. So I took the help desk consultant route for the next 10, 12 years until I found my way to Capital One and you know, the rest is history there.

• 11:16Jason McGuinthe?

  But I just wanted to align with you on that because I think that's a really special background that, that I think you and I share. Beyond that, you're well traveled. You definitely have a strong technology background and you went into sales and you've run a small business. So I think you can relate a lot to our audience here. So your connection to AI ready RVA is you are somewhat of a staple in the community, if I'm not mistaken. I'll say that because I feel like there were a lot of people that knew of you and praised you and said, we need to have him on our board. And that's, that's where you came from in my mind. And I had somewhat, I guess, met you at an RVA tech event. And it just so happened that you became the board member or were on

• 12:00Jason McGuinthe?

  your way to becoming a board member. And so that's how we aligned. It's a really interesting experience watching you work with the company. I so far have seen a lot of great value that you've been driving through us. And I have a lot to learn about running a business. And I think you bring that kind of value to it. The technologists like myself, it takes really strong business minded people like yourself to pull it all together. So.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  I like to add something there. First of all, I appreciate that you're making me blush here. There's two data like that. Going to the, to the reputation thing. I am a man with a thousand faults. However, that being said, I would say that I believe that your reputation is everything. And where, I mean, where people see me do well, I've fallen down 100 times to get to that one good point. And I still do. You've probably seen me do it on the board. But I'm very open. I'm very.

• 12:50Jason McGuinthe?

  You did stand me up a couple of times.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  I have absolutely. It's only been a year of standing you up. I, you know, I've been going for two, but you, you're very adamant. No, I think that reputation is everything. And I don't know. So you're from Richmond originally? Is that correct? Okay, I'm not. When I first came here, I was in this bubble of this defense contractors. So for the first really four years, so from 2007 to 2011, all I knew was that little world. When I came out and I started working for an actual trucking company as a, as the enterprise architect, I didn't realize how small this town was, even as big as it was, when it came to your relationships. I learned that so fast. Where I'm in Columbus, you could literally be working in the Wendy's building, right beside the Nationwide building, right beside

• 13:35Speaker 01

  the Cardinal Health building. These are buildings are all side like beside each other. And you didn't know anybody between those buildings for your entire life. Here you know about everybody. Now, of course, it was also a different era. Things are more social these days, so that helps too. But I joke when you say, this is the smallest big town I've ever been to. Meaning even with all the transplants of the COVID era, et cetera. This town, everybody knows everybody and your reputation precedes you very quickly. And so I believe that that is super important. I think that if we get sit there and talk about all the other things that you probably really get to, but to me, that's like the most important thing at this point in my career is making sure that if I do something or say I'm gonna do something

• 14:16Speaker 01

  or somebody needs something that if I have an obligation there or somebody needs some help, jump in, right? And then don't burn those bridges. But going back real quick, just to how I got on to the board. When I saw, this is late 2024, when I saw all of a sudden these words around AI already are heavily. I pay attention on LinkedIn. Yeah. And when I went from, when they went from zero to a thousand RPMs really quick, or maybe seven thousand RPMs really quick, if you're a car guy. All of a sudden, it was like, where did this come from? I've known about all these other groups. But now there was just this really great marketing effort and you and I probably know the couple of people that are, that have really done a great job there. Yeah. And so I solicited Will Willis. I treated it like a sales call. Look, I'm interested in you. I want to buy your product.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Like what, how can I be involved? This really kind of that message. I remember sitting down with them at Starbucks at Westchester. And going, and going, I'm really excited about what's going on here. I don't know where you all came from, but the fact is that everything you got, not everything, but a lot of what you're saying is just hitting so hard. And it's the trends I'm seeing. It's the message I've been screaming from the rooftop. I would like to help out. How can I sweep your car out? What do you need here? And I flat out asked, like, can I come on there? I've, I've never tried so hard to get on a board in my life because that's not really kind of my, my, my, wasn't my drive at the time. But I wanted to be a part of this. I definitely saw this as being a movement and then I saw people grabbing onto this movement.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  And so to me, this was really important. The community here in Richmond is, to me, I'll never, I, I would like me to never live any other town. I like Richmond a lot. My kids are gonna grow up here and to me, this is just. It's important that we help create these foundations that can create opportunities for not just our kids, right, but everybody else is around there.

• 16:02Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah, no, well said, and I draw some parallels there as well. First, the reputation. I got to grow up in a household where my parents were pretty well connected to the community around because of, you know, the businesses they were in. My mom worked for Reynolds Metals for probably 25 years or something like that, and she got to know Richmond very well through that organization because people came and went, but they always knew each other. And then she worked for Wells Fargo for 10, 15 years after that, where then she retired two, three years ago, something like that. You know, I got to know the community around me through her eyes for many years. And then when people started recognizing

• 16:46Jason McGuinthe?

  my last name, Ghenty, they were like, are you Sharon's son? And so that that happens to me sometimes. I think I know most of her community by now, the ones that are connected to us. And so I've been able to take my own initiative and and build my own network, thankfully, through her inspiring stories. The the connection with Will Willis, I'm not sure if he reached out to me or I reached out to him on LinkedIn and I was like drawn to the words AI ready RVA. And I'm like, I want to know more about that. And that's that was pre 501 3C that I got connected with the Wills, Vic, Liz, all of them. And

• 17:30Jason McGuinthe?

  they were really gung ho about the whole thing and they've had so much drive, still do. And and it really draws you in if you have that much energy to kind of put behind it as well. It's interesting, early on, we had a lot of energy, but it was hard to kind of pull things together and make them happen. And now they just seem to happen. And there's more of a gravitational pull around this community that we're building than I would have ever imagined. So it's a really special place to be.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  It's not the momentum at this point. There's an orbit around this momentum. And if this was a rolling stone, there would be seventeen hundred little pebbles floating around this right now and getting drawn into this. And again, we can sit and talk.

• 18:10Jason McGuinthe?

  Seventeen hundred. We're at four thirty seven hundred now on LinkedIn.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Shoot, I was that bad numbers. And we did not, by the way, we're not getting paid by AI to AI ready RBA to be this promo here. We're just this is something that we're passionate about mutually. So we're very biased here. And we're also biased about the greatness of this city and not only the current, but also the potential. And so for me, I think all of that comes together. And what we're finding is a lot of other people are too.

• 18:37Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 18:38Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah, we when you're enthralled in a subject that is as vast and disruptive as AI.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:46Jason McGuinthe?

  And you recognize that, like, your community could easily be impacted, your family, your friends, every company that you could ever possibly work for you, you kind of start paying attention and wondering, more than wondering, like, what do you do? Like, what, how do you prepare for that future? And should you prepare now? Or should you wait and see what actually happens around you? And it's things like that, like, you know, I think the leadership of AI ready RBA is real more as motivated to not wait than anything I've I've seen before. And and being able to open our eyes and open the community's eyes up to the change that's happening around us.

• 19:29Jason McGuinthe?

  Because, you know, we're all kind of futurists in a way, is I think what makes us special. So what what do you see around you happening? Like, you've touched on a few things. There's a lot of people that aren't paying attention, some that are, some that really don't know where to go with this information. Maybe like, what do you see? And how are you personally? Taking this journey on your own, in your own career path outside of AI ready RBA, like what, what are you doing personally?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's a loaded question, loaded answer. I'm gonna take a little roundabout way of getting to the answer to that question. When, and I'm gonna for just a second, go back to a younger part of my career. When I was coming up, I have an older brother, I'm the youngest of four and jokingly the oldest of a hundred, because we had over a hundred foster kids come through our house.

• 20:18Jason McGuinthe?

  Oh, wow.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Another backstory there, my mom has, is actually just, she's phenomenal there. She's one of the good stories of that industry. She's just received a lot of accolades, et cetera. She's, there's a very low success rate in, with that whole system. And the fact that she has like a 80% high school graduation rate, success rate. That's crazy, crazy.

• 20:43Jason McGuinthe?

  Yes.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  And like a 20% college, that's how they metric those things. So going back to not even my childhood, but just watching, being in this, you know, I'm the youngest. My brother is the oldest. My brother went down the technical route as well. And this is, I hope he's listening to this because I very clearly say he's the smart one and I'm the pretty one. So he's West Coast. He went down the Cisco route. So you coming from a technical background, he focused on not at the food company, but the technology company. And if you're familiar with their certifications, he is a five time CCIE. He is a incredibly intelligent person. He's done really well. He's doing some really cool things with AI himself now. Different conversation, but I always felt whether it's him or watching peers in my industry.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  I've always been a victim of the, you know, that complex of having imposter syndrome, right? That has just been something I've always been, I've always looked at other people because I was always, and still to this day, perpetually, I'm always just looking at what people doing, what am I doing, how are they doing it? Going into sales fixes all that for me. You always know exactly where you're at. I mean, you can still definitely compare yourself, but you, you yourself know where you stand because there's always a metric over your head now. And now that you're starting to see other people metrics outside of sales more heavily, to me it's like, oh, welcome to the crowd. This is just kind of how you operate now in life. That's just because I'm very skewed, but I watched people.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Like him go down this and for a long time, even myself as an engineer, we kind of did things very statically. We did, technology did not, despite what new innovation came out, most things were relatively the same. To this day, we still manage networks, mostly the same, and this is like sacrilege words. It's the same way that we managed them twenty five years ago. Now, there are tools that help accelerate this automation, solutions, things like that. And AI is slowly making its way into those as well, much slower than probably I would prefer and maybe other industry leaders would prefer. But we're still seeing a lot of things. And when I say, now when I move into this sentiment, we're still seeing a lot of people operate the same.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  And being a person, if you go look at my career or my resume, I change every couple of years because of anticipation. Or frankly, I always said the boredom of the situation. The concept of staying the same is very foreign to me. But when I get people, and I understand you're comfortable with something, stay with that, I get it. I've always said that until now. If you're comfortable being a network, if you're comfortable being a desktop supporter person, you've been doing it for thirty years. And that's what makes you happy, do it. The thing that I would emphasize and what's caused me, myself to change more dramatically than I've ever changed is this wave of change that is here, not coming, it's here. And it's only going to increase in potency over the next months, years.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  And I wouldn't even look at it the decade because it's gonna be changing the way, the expectations of the way we operate. Now, whether it actually does or not, that's the difference between, you know, is it because an executive saw it at some conference? And now there being eyes that you should be forty percent automated now through AI. Yeah, maybe, right? And so then they put that pressure downward. And does that tool actually exist to do that? Sometimes not. Each of the situations are very different, but the pressure is there. And if people are sleeping on that right now, they're gonna wake up and find their job is shifted so hard, they don't know how to recognize where the coffee machine is. And so that to me is like, that's if I was to stand on the roof, which is not a good thing, um, never fell off a roof yet. I've done a fell off a lot of other things.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  But not a roof. And I would just say like, that's why I'd be shouting is be paying attention. If you're not, you need to be furiously curious right now. That's why I tell people like, you need to be intensely curious around. What can you be doing to optimize? So even if someone's not asking you to change, you need to be. Person setting that standard of this is how we should be making a difference. Because whether we want to, and I know it's a little comfortable statement to listen to. We ourselves just recently have seen where messages are not received well, that change is coming. And I will say, I hate to say, I'm not the one bringing the change. I'm the one saying it's coming.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Be prepared so you can take care of your family, take care of yourself, your, your children, whoever, right? And so your family. Because everybody, me, my mom, who's kind of at retirement age as well. She's at the last year or two of her work and her job is changing so very fast. They're expect expecting her proof reports much faster. So I'm teaching my mom how to use chat G P T and Gemini and all these other solutions. Which by the way, I found older people for some reason seem to like Gemini. I don't know what the deal is with that, but we should dig into that at some point. But that's caused me to look at, I can't ever look at traditional, go to a traditional sales role, traditional job again, because. I don't want to necessarily be the one that's having my life dictated by it.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  And even, even I say that, I know that's it will still will be, but I want to have a little more control over that. And so. I made the hard decision last fall to quit my job and I, I was at this job was helping an organization and they were acquiring some small tech companies. It was very traditional tech and they were doing some great things specifically for this organization was an Indian tribe. It is an Indian tribe and they're helping their people kind of leave their nation. It's a full different story again. And I think you've heard some of that from some of the people in your podcast in the past. Tremendous amounts to unload. I could spend a lot of time talking about that. I'm still friends with that whole organization. I'm still helping them in different ways. But I got to the end of the year and I was like, this is not for me, like just that type of tech.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Because it was more traditional managed service provider tech. It absolutely needs to be done. There's absolutely need. I had left this AI startup where we were seeing the craziest latest breaking things that are, some of them are still just kind of coming to public and some have been public for a while, but it was like, it was wild to see some of that stuff from industry experts at places like Sequoia and you know, these other places that they were like, we presented the idea, they're like, that's great. We thought about this and we're like, nobody's thinking about that. So that's crazy. That's okay. Actually, that makes a lot of sense. You're seeing these different, we had these perspectives. And I was craving that. And so I uh, I made the decision. I had the conversation with them. I just said, I need to make this change and

• 27:16Speaker 01

  basically where I've moved into is a position of entrepreneurship again. I'm invested in four different companies. I'm advising on a couple more. One example, and I can't say their name because of confidentiality, they're not on LinkedIn. But they brought me in because they supply infrastructure management that specifically addresses AI scaling needs. And their biggest challenge was not building the tech. It was getting their salespeople to adopt AI centric mentalities and tools. As well as their marketing department. The marketing department needed to create a video, the one specific example. Before we create forty second video. It was a four minute video and it was not enough. I turned around, the tool made it in maybe twenty minutes.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  And I was like, that's how we need to be operated. It's not saying everybody has to do that all the time, but that's the mindset is that we can't just lean on our traditional tools to do the things that we were doing to get worked on anymore. And so I didn't even know what that tool was, by the way, until I got presented that challenge. I had to go find something. But that's the mentality we need to create this curious mentality. And uh, and then figure out ways for those things to start working for you. So what I end up doing, my primary thing is I'm focused on a company called Eighth Parallel. So I have invested in four different companies, like I said, of helping build four different startups. One is cybersecurity, one is AI governance, which is Eighth Parallel, which happens to be based here in Richmond. Uh, one's an edgitech and one is a agri tech company.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  So that's that's my dance card right now. And we sit on a board and I sit on the board. So dance card's very full at this moment. I'm enjoying it. It's probably the most fun I've ever had. But the what I so without necessarily being an advertiser for this organization, I think I'd love to be that. The thing that AI or the eighth parallel addresses, which is to me like this next wave of things that we need to be addressing. Is why I was so drawn to them when I.

• 29:10Jason McGuinthe?

  This is the governance company?

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:12Jason McGuinthe?

  Okay.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Is truth for AI. You know, we've heard for years about things like, what's the term?

• 29:19Jason McGuinthe?

  Bias?

• 29:20Speaker 01

  No, not.

• 29:21Jason McGuinthe?

  Accuracy.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Uh, well, it's hallucinations.

• 29:24Jason McGuinthe?

  Hallucinations.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Everything else you said too as well.

• 29:27Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  And with all that, so we see these great tools. The question is not do we have powerful tools and powerful models that we absolutely do. We have great and they're only getting better and a little bit scarier each time they release an update. But what we need now is this. So if a tool says we're great, we're honest and we're correct all the time. Who's to say that that's truth? What validation is going on? So for us, the the reason I really kind and you hopefully notice a little bit of a trend around me. Is what I really learned about organization is wrapped around trust. We're not there to replace a tool. What we're there basically do is to create those tools as commodity. Are you familiar with the the phrasings of ontology? I was not a year ago.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  You, well, I would imagine you are. Among other mindsets, that's one that we firmly embrace. And it's basically not just understanding what the answer should be, but what's the understanding around it? So what providing more context than just, hey, you know, favorite L L M. Give me this new, uh, give me a course menu for my entire week of all things I've been eating based on what's in my fridge. I've done this, by the way, take a picture, it's in your fridge. Tell me, make me a meal. And I love that because I lack creativity sometimes. It's going, okay, but also aren't you on a diet right now? Aren't you doing like pulling this abstract contextualization outside of it? Maybe it knows more about me because it saw my LinkedIn profile and it saw that I'm posting about doing something.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  So the idea is creating more of not just what the answer, like getting a quick answer, but giving a broader understanding around those information and then creating validation models around that. And so, oh, again, the idea is not so much that we're going to go in there and be this new Palantir or be this OpenAI or whoever else is out there right now. It's about helping add either context or putting in maybe even a presentation layer that is custom to the customer because right now almost everything is wrapping the customer around a tool. This, the concept that we have here and that mindset, I think I'm going to be embracing is wrapping the tools around the customer.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  And when you can create an abstract, a presentation layer and abstract it and disconnect it from whatever backend models are, you can now have basically something that looks at all the different models and go, of all the models are running, this company over here is consistently off by like 40% and the other ones are only off by like 15%. This is a commodization conversation at this point, swap it out. And it becomes a cost conversation, helps reduce risk, helps make better decisions, things like that.

• 32:13Jason McGuinthe?

  All based on trust, like the value of trust?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yes. And again, not trying to be so much a commercial. I think that is what these last couple of months have been teaching us around artificial intelligence. February 5th was a really big day in model release for both Anthropic and for OpenAI. And they were trying to get out these new models, they both got them out the same day, which happened to coincide a couple of days before the Super Bowl, which happened to have big commercials around both of them. And then I don't know if you've tracked, I talked with a few of you on the board about this. But one of the main issues is that both of those models, for whatever reason, were caught

• 32:54Speaker 01

  in testing, producing results. They were being generous with the performance indicators of how that app would work in production. As soon as it goes to production, it did not meet the same level that it said it would. Again, it was being generous is the word I'll say, right? Because these are all friends of ours, but we need somebody that's going to keep those companies on the straight and narrow and then validate and frankly call them out when they're not. And that is not an easy task. It's a very heavy task. The mindset that I would say is that, again, taking it away from particular.

• 33:29Jason McGuinthe?

  You mean going toe to toe with Fortune five companies, trillions of dollars behind them isn't easy?

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Um, it can be daunting at times. Uh, the message I would say really cut to everybody, because that's a bit more specific to me, is that people should be nimble with what they're using AI for and which AI tool or solution or how they're creating, what agents are doing, what approach? Because everything we're doing now, the only thing consistent right now is change. Everything is changing so fast. I can't imagine being in a position like yours where you're responsible for this, you know, these architectures and these applications. And also knowing that vibe coding is kind of new part of this. Whether we liked it or didn't at first, it doesn't matter. It's part of it now.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  And so the expectation, whether it's even the right thing or not, the expectation is now speed, right? Well, Frank over in, uh, you know, in his garage, he can produce an app and make you go live on AWS in 15 minutes. Why is it taking us six months? Quality assurance, security, fat code, you know, all the things you would think that that make a difference in in your own pipelines of how you build code. That all matters, but the expectation is still speed. So the point is, is whatever you're using, whatever you're doing, expect, you know, we're, I'm already seeing people who settled in to particular models and they've not changed them in three years.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Like they might change like the versions of them, but they changed, they're still that company. But why are you not looking at other things? So. All the things are changing so fast and as we engage with any of these tools, we constantly be looking at what that next, that next idea is. One last thing I'll say is, eighteen years ago, I was at Norfolk Grumman. There was a gentleman, he's probably fully retired now. He was flying in from California to help us on this project here in, in every single week in Virginia. And he was one of my, maybe not my first, but he was one of my, in a long line of mentors over the years. And it was Jeff. And Jeff, I was trying to get this full-time role within Norfolk Grumman.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  I was a contractor for a consultant for, for two years. And I finally got it. He'd already rolled off the program after like a couple of months. And I said, no, I was so excited. I was like twenty-eight years old, so excited. I said, no, I said, I said, I got it. This, thank you for your help. And he goes, congratulations. Now start preparing for your next role. Completely took the wind out of me. But that's the mindset we need to have. I'm so glad that you got this to work. Now start preparing for the next challenge.

• 36:08Jason McGuinthe?

  That's a technologist mindset.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really is.

• 36:11Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah. I've spent all of my career, any part that I would like spend any time talking about, in that technologist mindset. My, my dad preached to me early on that if you're going to be in technology, you gotta keep learning because every six months, something's going to change about your job. And, and that, that persisted.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:32Jason McGuinthe?

  I would say it persisted because there was always somebody with a problem that needed to be solved over the last couple of decades, even without AI. And with AI, it just accelerates it even more. And everybody's trying to catch up and stay up to, up to speed on the latest stuff by following this, that, or the other industry leader and testing these things with their spare time on their nights and weekends. And then if they are lucky enough to have really cool tools and access to them on their enterprise networks, they're actually getting real-world experience with them. What I'm trying to say is that the evolution is

• 37:15Jason McGuinthe?

  something that we're all agreeing upon now. The parallel again that I'm drawing on this is Being a technologist and specifically one that that's worked in many different fields and now latest software engineering, I'm seeing the impact up close and personally. As AI over the last couple of years has learned about computer systems well enough to be able to write them themselves, that scares a lot of software engineers. A lot of developers are beside themselves of the fact that they no longer need to actually handwrite code.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:51Jason McGuinthe?

  This, the only saving grace right now is that enterprise mentality of the things you said is like, you can't just tell the system to build this thing and deploy it to your production users. You will fail quickly if you do that. So the engineering aspects of all of it are really important. Some of the software development aspects, many of the software development aspects are still important, but it hit the most capable, probably one of the highest paying roles, the fastest.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:22Jason McGuinthe?

  Right? So software engineers are now becoming commodity, right?

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:27Jason McGuinthe?

  And they're being commoditized through the nature of the commodity of a commoditization of AI across various applications. The first one that's the most successful so far is coding. You got your wind surf and your Claude and your GPTs, your cursor and codecs, all taking part in everything that we used to find to be of our unique value in in what we did and and hands-on coding and being able to like take an idea, design it, put it on paper, have some conversations, spend a few months thinking through it and then developing it. Right? And now you can do that in minutes.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:10Jason McGuinthe?

  You have a great idea, you can just tell the system to grow it.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Artists are going through a parallel challenge right now.

• 39:16Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 39:17Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah, so my point is not to harp on coding, software engineering. It's more like. Now that AI has done that to that industry, what's next?

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:28Jason McGuinthe?

  Which is where you're going with this is all industries are going to be impacted. Because we've been able to teach AI one of the hardest things. Now, since AI can code, it can research. What's to stop it from going and taking on the law industry? Or sales industry? Or manufacturing and, you know, name the industry. So that's the the direction I see it taking in the next couple of years personally. So what I was interested in digging into is you're considering yourself a sales guy these days with a technology background. How are you leveraging these systems in your day to day?

• 40:09Jason McGuinthe?

  That is waking up other salespeople around you, especially in the the companies you've invested in. And what are you getting on on your soapbox about with them every single day?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tell you a funny story and then I'll answer that. About three years ago, I was I was not the earliest adopter of the GPT, but I was an early. I don't know. It was early for me, right? So it was 2023, I think. And maybe even late 2023, early 2024. And there was a CTO of a $60 billion technology company. I'll give him grace because he texts, he'll start texting me if we because I we hadn't talked about this ahead of time. I um, for the startup that I was building with my partner at that point, I needed his audience. I needed him to be an advisor on what we were doing because it was adjacent.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  And and we knew that we were ahead of them of this 50, 60 billion dollar company. But we knew that they had a good mindset and frankly, we wanted them to buy us at some point. So I did not know how I'm the worst cold caller. I had a ton of examples of cold calling, either through LinkedIn, cold calling, so to speak, or through emails that failed. But I had a couple that were successful. So I trained the GPT on those. I said, here's here's examples of failure. Don't do that. Here's a couple slivers of success. Here's who I need to reach. Here's the topic. Help me build that. And it wrote me and I said, it needs to be like three sentences. And it didn't. And I sent it a LinkedIn message that was on a Friday night.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  I'm driving with my screaming crazy kids on Saturday afternoon. He calls me. And he goes, I love to talk. And I'm like, now? And what are you gonna say? No? This guy who's a founder of a major technology that got bought now is the CTO of this much larger household name company? You're gonna talk to him. I said, I'm so sorry. Kids are screaming, like legitimately screaming. My eight year old was losing his mind. He's like, you know, five or six at a time. And you just went with it and created a great relationship. But that in itself is, even that's dated now, right? That was mind-blowingly amazing at the time. So, A, to my point, I can sit there and name a tool or name a process.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  It won't matter because it will be changing in six weeks. So I would harp more on stay focused and stay on, on what's changing. Use AI to tell you what's changing, right? Use for your research tool. And that needs to be now no longer a monthly or a quarterly thing. It needs to be a weekly conversation that you're having with other people in the industry, with the tools that you have at your disposal. What's changing? Maybe paying attention to, uh, this is working well because things like traditional cold calling, very dead. The whole smile and dial mentality that we had in the boiler room or whatever that was a long time ago, like that's gone. It still works, but that's mostly frankly scammers these days. And so that's one thing.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  And, and two, it's like looking at anything though, that's helping you organize your thoughts, especially if it's like post-meeting or for the day. To me, as someone who's a highly distracted, easily distracted person, like having something in front of me, I call it. And the other day I have what's called a hit list and it used to be manual and now I have something to help me create this automatically. It looks and listens to what I'm doing during the day and creates this for me. And the idea is that there is a document or a webpage that's waiting for me when I open my laptop, first thing in the next morning, of all the things I didn't get done the day before, or the things I said I was gonna do. And mostly more than on that former rather than latter. And I am, you will find that I'm the busiest first thing in the morning because I'm going through those.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  So anything that helps you organize your thoughts, anything that helps you look at people from the perspective of what like, if you're trying to reach somebody, understand this has never been a better time to understand about their business. And so you go in a call and say, and you go meet them, you get their meeting, they have that big meeting with them. Do not show up. There is no reason, do you think, to show up uninformed. But going, kind of go rewinding just a little bit. Talking about industry and how things are changing. I've spoken, maybe just kind of on the edge of here's all these challenges coming up. The thing that I would say that is hope, I'm a big hope, I'm a big optimist. Most of the time, probably when I shouldn't be, ask my wife.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  But I am, I'm a huge optimist that yes, this, this life is going to be changing over the next six to 12, 24 months dramatically for a lot of people. But the hope that I inspire is that I would argue as a creator, as an idea person, people say, I don't need idea people anymore. I say, we need idea people now. We have never been in a better time to be an idea person. And that could be your subject matter, maybe you're a PhD and you got, maybe you spent 20 years as a florist. Right. And you've had an idea for a long time, but that requires capital, requires time, requires talent that you don't have. You can spend $20 a month and go build that, or a hundred dollars a month and go build that. And you can tell it what to do.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  And when you have a problem, you understand, you can literally ask it, well, how to fix this and it'll fix it for you. So from a creativity point of view. This is never a better time. Now, I'm not saying it's always going to be like that, but to me, I would embrace that. I would not turn away from that. So whether you're legal, whether you're an artist, whether you're a creator, and even a developer, be embracing this change, these two, because it's, the world is literally yours right now. And the people that are falling behind are the ones that aren't keeping up with that. Including looking at the trends of their, their, you know, of their particular field. So I would be looking at, if I'm out there, if I'm a developer, whoever. I would be looking at what's the trend of my role? Is it going away? Okay. Well, where, where do you see the natural evolution of that role?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  So it's all these contextual things you need to apply. That was a, I was very heavy into martial arts a very long time ago, I mean, for a decade and a half. Anytime you get into like practice or a call, it's not so much about hurting the other person. It's about just like finding, you know, detecting where that next hand is going to go and figure out a block. And then you detect the next, the next hand is going to go on the block. It's just doing that over and over and over and over again. That's kind of the moment we're in right now is just keep paying attention, keep attempting. Yeah, so I don't even know what your question was at this point, by the way, I have gone down.

• 46:31Jason McGuinthe?

  I think you nailed it, man. To be honest, yeah, I mean, I don't remember the question because I was just so deeply thinking about what you were saying too.

• 46:40Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah, so there's so much to that I wanted to say and.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  I have all the time for you that if you need to cut things into later or cut out, that's fine.

• 46:49Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  By the way, whenever you slam your hand on the table, you hear a pop, just so you know.

• 46:53Jason McGuinthe?

  Okay, yeah, I won't let this go beyond another free recording timeframe because it'll take me forever to edit.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  There's tools for that now, by the way.

• 47:03Jason McGuinthe?

  The editing part of these podcasts.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 47:06Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah, so anyway, there were a couple of things I wanted to talk about. One was AI Ready RVA's role in all of this. Where do you see that? Also, where do you see like the future of work? What can people go and learn from an organization like AI Ready RVA? What, what do you think they should be attracted to?

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 47:25Jason McGuinthe?

  Personally, and I think there was something else there I was gonna ask you about, but let's just start with that stuff.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  I'm gonna be cocky for a second, if I may. I'd like to believe the influence of AI Ready RVA is bigger than RVA. And I know that's our focus.

• 47:40Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  But I would like to believe, and I personally share with other communities, I'm very connected. I spend a lot of time in San Jose and San Francisco and things like that. I talk all the time about what we're doing here. Why don't, I mean, I see those areas so very fragmented where I see this area very centralized. Now, that's a very different market. I'm not saying it's apples to oranges or something like that. But what I would say is, to be cocky for saying is that the influence of AI Ready RVA, in my opinion, is becoming bigger than just Richmond. Although that is our heart and our focus. It is, to me, the obligation of groups like this. So, actually, I'll pull back. Sorry, long phrase of words.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  If you're looking at organization, if you're here in Richmond and you're looking at AI ready RBA, you know, what, so what are, what is the best way to get engaged? How can I help? And I, again, this is gonna feel like a paid commercial here, but it's not. If you're not engaged in a cohort, get involved. We have, we typically hit capacity, but we're constantly opening more and more cohorts. If there's something that you're interested in, somebody mentioned something that it, I don't think it was governance, but it was something else. Oh, that's what it was. Somebody asked for, there was a gentleman I met for coffee, and he's building an HR startup who were very different perspective I've ever seen. And I said, you should go talk to us officially, because I can't go do it on your behalf.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Come talk to us about starting your own cohort. I said, that's, a couple of things are gonna happen. One, you want to bring awareness, not

• 49:11Jason McGuinthe?

  We have an HR cohort.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  I know we do, but we also have multiple cohorts around different things. I was like, go start another one is my point.

• 49:18Jason McGuinthe?

  I see.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I was like, go to the ones that we have. And if you're so, to me, I've always been more of a salesperson that I don't like to chase. I like to be where people are going. And so to me, it's like, if you want to sell, here in Richmond, you want to sell your new idea, or maybe it's an existing idea, go sponsor those cohorts and be there. The people you want to talk to are right there. It is, to me, the best type of networking you can do. If you are putting yourself out there, like you and I are doing right now, this is raw, very little, unfortunately, I did not do a good job of pre-scripting here. We're putting ourselves out here. We're not selling a product. We're just truly trying to share some things that we see in the market.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  But to me, if you're trying to sell something, put yourself out there. Being raw is such a potent sales tool in a world where everything's manufactured now. Every LinkedIn post, every single one of them. It's not saying they're fake. It's just manufactured. Mine too, sometimes. When you can go there and be a human and alone over robots, you're gonna stand out. And so to me, quote that, by the way, boom.

• 50:22Jason McGuinthe?

  I'm gonna steal it.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Please, please take credit for it. I'm okay. You can cut that out and just say that that's that's a Jason McGinty. No, but to me, like getting involved there. So in likewise, in any other community, if you are struggling to figure out where you want to go next, or oh, is there a threat to your job? Or just maybe you're curious about artificial intelligence and it or quantum or whatever it is that seems to be applicable, be looking at these tech-centric communities. Never found us more friendly group of people.

• 50:53Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  We're we're kind of all in the same boat here, right? We're all trying to figure out. I mean, occasionally you'll find, you know, somebody that's not great. That's actually one of the things I love about this board is we really don't tolerate a lot of that, of that nonsense. There's there are some absolute knuckleheads out there and don't spend your time with this. There's four hundred solid people to replace that knucklehead. So if you're around somebody, they might be great with their idea. But they're a knucklehead. Find somebody else. Find a different group. There's so many more better groups out there. And so again, within specific to AI or RBA, again, get in those cohorts. I see people also how to, they come to you for questions. I'm like, the best thing you can do? Or you're the go to the legal court, you know, you're in fintech, go to the fintech cohort.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  So or or you want it to you have a, you think you have a different spin on this? Consider starting one. This to me is great. We want that growth.

• 51:46Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  And I'll go support you in your first couple of ones, right? So. Yeah, I think that's the number one thing you could be doing right now is getting there, show up for the events and yeah.

• 51:57Jason McGuinthe?

  Great. So one of the things that you just triggered in my mind was when I was thinking about the previous question I provided you, you said it's a great time to be an idea maker or idea creator or ideas, whatever you said.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Kind of a slander for the last twenty years. I've got a great idea. Oh, great. Do you have five hundred thousand dollars to see that idea?

• 52:18Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Okay, well.

• 52:20Jason McGuinthe?

  Idea makers or ideators out there are now capable of becoming builders. There was another. Article I read on Medium, the guy said, "It is the best time ever to be a builder." And so if you're already a builder, it's now even a more, more awesome time. It's like, the time is, is amazing to be a builder. And the ideators are now capable of being builders. So, almost everybody that has a creative sense in their life, and a desire to go do something about that is now fully empowered to do that.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:01Jason McGuinthe?

  Which is amazing.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  I have a neighbor right on the other side of this wall. He, I've been blessed to have just phenomenal neighbors. I have not always had those. I've been these last 12 years living in this house, and my wife and I and our kids. Uh, he's 72, his wife's like 68-ish, uh, both retired technologists. He was a, a sales engineer from IBM, she was a sales VP. They have an RV, 10-year-old, 12-year-old RV. He tinkers, he can fix anything. He has a nuclear engineering degree, he has a, an electrical engineering degree. You know, this guy can, I call him Mr. Wizard if you're old enough to remember who that is. So he can just create anything. So he's always like tinkering, and he's always fixing or changing or upgrading something on this RV whenever he brings it over here.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  And he asked me one day, this is like two years ago, "You know anything about Raspberry Pi?" I was like, "Well, I mean, I know a little bit, I'm not a developer by nature, but what are you looking to do?" He's like, "I don't like, I have three or four different temper climate control systems. I don't like any of the, the brains of them, I'm gonna build my own one." I'm like, "What in the world?", because these guys are always tinkering. And I said, "Okay." And she's like, "I'm gonna learn Visual Basic." And, "I'm going to build my own." I'm like, "Okay, good, more power for you." And about six, probably six weeks later, my brain went, "You need to learn..." Uh, he actually put it on hold for a while. So, this is actually as recent as like the end of last fall. He, we were talking about it, and then a couple of weeks later, I remember, "Have you tried one of these solutions out there?" So I introduced him to Claude.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  He has built his own completely unlocked solution that he's now putting on GitHub. Like, he's 72 years old. This is, to me...

• 54:41Jason McGuinthe?

  It's now empowered to do it.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So, and again, the plug, that's what we're doing with AgriTech is a lot of small native farms, their next generation are going to, every farmer I remember, I grew up in rural Ohio. Well, I grew up in Columbus, but I grew up outside of the city and there was farms everywhere and I did not meet a farmer that couldn't fix something with baling wire or duct tape. And that same methodology applies. They just happen to have kids that know how to use coating and they can integrate with their drones or their irrigation sensors. And so to me, instead of fighting that, let's embrace that and give them a way to, a place to integrate all that. So whatever that solution is, like that's the mentality we need to have is, exactly what you said is the idea of people have never been more enabled to be creators.

• 55:26Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that lovely story about your neighbor. That's very inspiring.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  I'll tell you one about beer cans and a hinge someday. That's a whole different story.

• 55:36Jason McGuinthe?

  So you, you said a moment ago, which I think is a, is a, is very aspirational about AI ready RVA and that is operationally speaking, it's really hard to start a cohort because we're not like fully operationalized with employment, like everybody's volunteering and you know, our, our website just got launched like two months ago and we're building this, this space right now. Will Willis and I are working on a, the cohort management space in the website and we'll be publicly launching it soon. But thinking about how hard it is to run an organization like this,

• 56:19Jason McGuinthe?

  I'd like your thoughts on what do you think that we should be building for the community? Whether it's a space for displaced people to get, get help or a place for stronger networking vibes and, and, and being able to manage our cohorts better. Like what are one or two things that you think would be like important for us to become a more empowered, technology-driven platform?

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, I think with the newer release of the site has been a great shift towards just that. I think we ourselves in Richmond are not immune to some of the changes that I would say both.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  AI trends and the economy and add anything else you want to as far as how it's been affecting attrition. We've seen a lot of job changes, a lot of layoffs in the last just a couple of weeks and months. I think actually you've known people, I definitely know some people that have been impacted, trying to help a few people. And especially for the ones where the reason is artificial intelligence has replaced your job. That's a very tough pill to swallow because now you're going, I'm being replaced by a robot. I love what we've done with the site as far as coaching. There is these built in modules, which I believe are now publicly released. Correct me if I'm wrong there. But I think that is when I was playing around with it just last week and you and

• 57:44Speaker 01

  I were talking through it, I was blown away. It's all things you can go do. You know, you can figure out your way out within a GPT. And you can muddle through, but what I like about it's curated. It's specific to the need and the challenge that has happened recently. And frankly, I think that wave or those ripples are going to be happening over the next few months and years. I think building on that, there's it's I almost I don't want to say it's a great start, but it is a core foundation, I think, to a lot of people are near as far as and to people who haven't seen it, please go check it out on the site. There is a career coach built into it, using AI in the background. You upload your resume, you plug in your LinkedIn profile, and it coaches you on how

• 58:29Speaker 01

  like how to change it. I myself am going to start making some changes just because I really like the feedback and I was just testing it. It's not just a resume writer. It's actually coaching you on here's some cohorts you should be along to here's some networking groups you should be plugged into here's some certifications you should be looking at that's applicable to you. So for the people who don't know where to start, especially in this great originally area, my goodness, start there. And the fact that we're now getting a lot of attention because this is something that I think started off fundamentally as probably a pet project two couple of years ago is dynamically changing people's lives now. It's phenomenal. I can see that in itself being one of the biggest parts of what we do over the next few.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  You know, months, years, is how do we help people in this transition and help them? Cause we ourselves are not immune to that. We are going to go to ourselves. And so we can sit there and talk and we're going to be confident, but at the same point, we are all having that same internal conversation. How do I handle what's next? And the thing I would say about this, and I, you asked me two things. I can't think of the second thing off the top of my head, but it's just that we're all in this together. As we go down that path, understand we're not building this because we know everything. We're building this because we're discovering this and we're trying to share it with you all immediately as soon as we can find this. And so I would tell people to embrace that. And then I would talk to, if I was looking in the mirror, I would say, keep doing those types of things.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  I would say, keep finding ways to plug into the community, keep finding ways to talk to the governor, talk to the mayor. How can we help improve? What do you see that can help us improve? So to me, that's dynamic about what you see on the site, expect it to change in six months because that's the world we live in. But it's changed to be a wrapper around the needs of the community.

• 1:00:19Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah. Outstanding. Well, I think you just made it very easy for me to close this out because I was going to ask, what advice you carrying on for the audience here today? And I think you just nailed it.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Get your head in the mud and everything's going to be okay.

• 1:00:33Jason McGuinthe?

  Yeah. So on a positive note, I would love for you to pitch for us openly, however you wish. What does the power of possibility mean to you? What does it mean to the community and why should people show up?

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Man, Lacher was the first one and was my first one. I was just fresh on the board and I did not know the waves of change that were going to come. I came on because of the waves of change and there was so much I could not have even predicted. When I remember we all sat on the stage and I had a photo taken, I was like, this is really cool moment. I did not know from that moment until this, how dynamically wild this whole environment was going to be. And so as around, as far as like how fast, how things are accelerating, I think we all knew they were going to, but to actually see it was just, it still takes your breath away. So to me, this is a great time to kind of like pause.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  I'm a big fan of like, if you win a deal, if you lose a deal, pause. Like, you might freak out in your mind or go buy a brand new BMW, whatever it is. Like, just take a moment. Everything's gonna be okay because we're gonna make it okay. Not like everybody together. Take this moment, make it a celebration of the things you learn, and make it about looking and getting excited and intrigued by the things we're about to learn. I think knowing that you're coming in here, knowing what's happened over the last 12 months, you're gonna walk in here going, okay, I realized I don't know what the next 12 months are gonna look like. And so just take that moment. Like, a lot of people are getting overwhelmed right now. And I would encourage us to have this moment of like, actually a celebratory moment. Might not feel it going into, but it definitely, to me, it does.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  And then say, okay, we're gonna now take, we've got our pause and we've took our deep breath. Let's go finish running this race and basically get up and get inspired to start moving forward in whatever your path is gonna be. But meet people when you're there, talk to people, find 12 people you've never talked to, and go ask them their name. Try not to focus on what their employment is, try to focus on who it is, because we're focused on a lot of different data and things like that. Go find a human and talk about human things when you're there, and you'll have some of the best conversations, I believe.

• 1:02:45Jason McGuinthe?

  Beautiful. Thank you, Kayla.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

• 1:02:50Jason McGuinthe?

  All right, man. I'll see you around. See you later.

• 1:03:03Jason McGuinthe?

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• 1:03:46Jason McGuinthe?

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