The 24-Hour Rule That Will Save Your Company

Neil and Eric break down why AI is reshaping business faster than most leaders realize, sparked by Satya Nadella’s vision of all in one product managers, designers, and developers. They react to Claire Vo’s “You’ve Been Kicked Out of the Arena” and debate whether everything in the AI era must be done in a day. From landing pages and automation to hiring adaptable talent, this episode dives into speed, inertia, and what separates companies that thrive from those that fall behind in the age of AI. Key Takeaways AI speed is the new competitive edge If it takes a week, you’re already behind Curiosity and adaptability win in the AI era Chapters (00:00) AI All in One Future (02:20) Kicked Out of the Arena (04:52) Everything Over a Day Is NGMI (06:31) Should Everything Move Fast? (09:40) Automating Modern Marketing (12:18) Hiring Adaptable Talent

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:42Speaker 00

  They're really going to be a product manager, a designer, and a developer all in one, right? Because Neil, like you and I, even eight weeks ago, like I really didn't have developer or designer superpowers. I kind of do now. And so like, but you and I both have, I would say we have taste because we're all, we're always learning. We're talking to people, things like that. So that's, as long as you're constantly curious, you will learn these things, no doubt. I think that's what's missing with people. It's like curiosity and resilience. And this brings me to the article. And then I want to end this one with maybe a little bit of a, we had a crypto debate yesterday at dinner. And then we can talk about that too, because I think it's interesting to share our philosophies, which is not financial advice, but more so how to think about these things. Because Neil and I, even we have different thoughts on how these things are. So let me go through the article first. Let me make sure I hit the right screen here.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  Well, and as Eric's pulling it up, I think he's spot on. I do believe AI is going to impact marketing. I actually believe AI is going to impact development and product and design more than even marketing. That's just my personal opinion. And a great example of this is I'll use tools like Lovable to mock stuff up for changes I want to my app really quickly. And I just go send it to my team, not for them to use that, but for me to explain the changes I want. And I remember maybe three, four months ago, Eric was just like, dude, how do you make your changes?

• 2:05Speaker 00

  And I would tell him that, yeah, I just get on the phone with my team and I'll go into telling them to make changes. Lovables improved a lot over the last year. It's now at a point, because my team's in so many different time zones and I have people working while I'm sleeping, that instead of waiting to get on the phone with them, I'll spend twenty, thirty minutes cranking stuff out and sending it to them. I'm like, create something like this, run an A B test. Uh, and they know to not just use my version, but to modify it, make it better. The copy that I set in there is typically the copy that I want you, so they use my copy. But it just makes life easier and that's the power of A I, right?

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Even in a marketer, I'm using it to adjust my flows and improve my conversion rates at a much faster efficiency rate.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Cool. Um, all right.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  All right.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Can you see my, can you see my screen? You can see my screen, right?

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, you've been kicked out of the arena title. You just don't know it yet.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Yep. So this is, this article is from Claire Voe. She's a, I, I, I love the stuff that she puts out. Sometimes I listen to her podcast. So, um, the title of this article is you've been kicked out of the arena. You just don't know it yet. So let me cover some of the, um, the key points here, right? So if A I had, if A I adoption had seven stages of grief, almost all of you would be in denial. No matter how many A I memos your C E O sends, the amount of Claude that's being coded, um, the chatbots and app and evals and data, I'm here to tell you, you're not competing. In fact, you probably can't anymore and you won't notice until it's too late. So the going concern is the walking dead, right? So she's like, I look around and I see a lot of businesses that would have three years ago been pretty enviable. Hundred million plus in revenue, solid customer base, mature executives and a good enough team.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  So on the surface, a few of them are trying to meet the moment, whether by choice or by force. It has worked its way into little parts of the business and the product. They have some internal power users. They're slapping on chatbots and M C Ps of their product suite. They have a natural language interface for their product named after a girl or a gem or a spaceship. They start to say things internally, like we need to be cursor for X or Claude code for Y or perhaps worse. We have a proprietary data note mode that they'll all need. And in the meantime, the pot keeps boiling, right? So where she's going with this is like, look, your peers aren't your competition anymore. So the reason it's so easy to convince yourself and entire company that you're totally in the game is you think your competition is who they've always been and will act the same way they always have. Because guess what? You, you're who you've always been and you'll act the same way you always have.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  You'll be in the same deals, have the same marketing tactics, you'll ship same, uh, equal proportions of new product and make noise about them in the same. You call on and hire the same class of VPs, engineers with the same YOE backgrounds. I don't know what that means. The same PMs with domain expertise. You'll listen to the same podcasts and forward the same tweets. You have the same ideas for how AI is going to transform your business and you'll pitch the same mini pivots to the board. So let me wrap this up here.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  So your competition, that's not your competition anymore. It's really the startups are doing everything you claim to be doing with AI, but without thinking about it or working too hard. They naturally reach for the right tools and have no processes that they need to circumvent to get access to them. While you're debating what percent of R and D you should be allocating to AI initiatives. They built the right product idea you have sitting on a slide, called on your customers, established their wedge, and you probably won't know it until renewal time. You probably won't appreciate it until the best talent starts to leave, best talent starts to leave and work for them. You won't know until you're cooked. So this is the main point here. Everything that takes longer than a day, so everything greater than a day, NGMI. NGMI means what? Not gonna make it, okay?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  And I've been talking to one of our mutual friends here at this event, our little retreat here. So she's like, look, I have a simple heuristic for identifying who has been kicked out of the arena and it's this. And Neil, this is something we could debate on. They can't do anything the same day. It doesn't matter what it is, but I'll give you a list of things I've seen companies be unable to do in a day. Fix bugs, launch landing pages, upgrade to a new model, get a PM on a call with a customer, get access to a new AI tool, turn our negotiations on executive comp. Before AI, this was a less useful heuristic because many of these took scarce expertise like engineering and therefore time. But now we have the clarifying light of AI. And if you can move fast and yet you don't, it's a problem. It's a you problem, babe.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Okay, so let me, let me get the, the last part here. Let me see if there's anything else there. So here's what she's calling out here. So she's like, look, I can't blame you for wanting to try. So if I were at one of these companies, this is what I would do. Get everyone upskilled immediately, stop the presses, show up in two weeks and show me how you've automated eighty percent of your job. If you've done this, congrats, you have a new exciting job. Number two, get legal, security and finance to stop being annoying about trying new tools, right? That's, that's a problem at bigger companies. Number three, let your engineers loose on making your repo agent friendly. Four, resisting executives are out the door. Five, resistant engineers are out the door faster. Six, more aggressive than comfortable M and A. You probably can't build what you want, you might be able to buy it.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  And then there's a lot more here, but we'll just leave it at that, like hire executives sparingly and carefully.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Neil, what do you think about this? I, I think it works for some things like the simplest example there. She says, if you can't do this in a day, it doesn't make sense. And one of them is turning around. Planning pages. Executive comp negotiation within a day. I disagree with that. Some things, just in business, you do not want to turn around in a day. And example of this and Eric shaking his head agreeing. And we've both been through this. When someone asks you for a raise, you don't always want to get back right away. Sometimes you want to make them sweat and think because Eric and I have both been in this game long enough where there's some people who will want to raise every two to three months. And it's just like, you don't have the experience, the expertise.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  You, you don't deserve it. It doesn't make sense. I can hire better people than you for cheaper than what you're expecting for. Dude, they don't have the double E A T. That's what they don't have. That's right. So double E A T, we're joking around and you guys all know this. Experience, expertise, authority and trust as Google likes calling it. But yeah, sometimes you just want to make people sweat. I agree though. I, I, I think.

• 8:12Speaker 01

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• 8:47Speaker 00

  Things can move a lot faster. I don't think eighty percent of everyone's job in an organization can be replaced by A I. I think in some roles, a hundred percent can be replaced. I think in some roles, it's only going to be ten, fifteen, twenty percent. It really varies on what you're doing. And the way I see the world moving, at least in the marketing realm, I can't speak for every single division out there. There's certain things, like if someone was doing what uh keyword research manually, they say, okay, you don't need to do keyword research manually. We can have AI just go through this and do it for you. You should still review it and you should just double check.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  And over time, AI will be good enough where you don't need to actually review the keyword research. So that'll just save you time. Like there's basic mundane boring stuff that should and could be done in an automatic way. And it's going to be at least in marketing. And here's the kicker, a lot of people are have been asking me over the last three months, how do we go and automate all this stuff in our organization when it comes to marketing? You know what I tell them, Eric? You don't need to. And I'm like, there's enough marketing software tools out there that are already building and doing all of this stuff. And I'm like, instead of you trying to figure all this out, just use one of these tech stacks that eventually you'll be able to spend a hundred dollars a month per seat. And they'll just do it all for you.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Yep. So my my take on this one is I think there's obviously nuance to Neil's point. I do think in a lot of situations, if you're working with people on your team where it's like, oh, it's going to take me a week to do a landing page mockup. I'm like, you're basically, I'm sorry, you're probably out. If you tell me like, if I see you responding slowly or it's going to take you forever to, for example, like if if let's say if if Neil, you're leading sales or something like that. If a big lead comes in and you haven't, if you're the sales leader and you haven't figured out how to automate that piece yet, where it's like, send them a text message immediately, that's more personalized. Or even make a phone call quickly, like maybe not a phone call immediately yet because it's not that good yet. But my point is you should be able to figure out a lot of these things to make your life easier. Like, yeah, those things should take less than a day, right?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  When you're telling me like it's still old timelines, you're still working the same way. Like, don't like, I'm telling you guys, those of you listening, like if you're a founder, you can probably see this already. But if you're working for someone and if maybe you're working with people on the team, like you either have to confront them or do something about it because these people are unfortunately holding the company back.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the landing page example Eric gave is perfect because if someone, if I want a landing page, either A, I'm gonna do it myself, at least tell people what I want created and show them inspiration. And B, if someone's in charge of it, if they took a week, it's not gonna fly. Even if they took a day, I would kind of be irritated. I want something, especially if they have time, turned around within an hour. Like straight up an hour, two hours max, like, and I want it deployed within the same day, maybe the next day at the latest. Right? But if you're taking a week to deploy something, I'm just already pissed and irritated and I'm like, this isn't gonna work out for me.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Or Neil, like, I don't need like a full budget projection, but if I wanted a data dump of finances and some analysis around it, that that should be a lot faster now. And so, you know, it's interesting, Syed told me this, Syed's like, dude, and you've kind of said this yourself. Like, he's like, Syed's like, Eric, you believe in people too much. He's like, you believe in people too much because you like giving them chances, you like to let them learn, right? But you like, not everybody's like us at the end of the day, right? But I'm like, I can't, like, I just, I just want to like strangle people to like, wake them up and say, hey, like, this is available now. Like, I want to help people, but some people just don't want to help themselves, right? And that's unfortunate, because like, we truly do want the best for people, that's all I have to say.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  So, we're out of time, but before we end, I want to clarify what Eric just said. Eric and I, and it came out the wrong way, and I'm not trying to, uh, uh, talk down to Eric or anything to that. Eric and I both believe in people. We do see the value of humans and we think people are extremely valuable. What he's actually saying is, from his experience, there's some people in an organization that he's trying to help and educate and bring forward and teach them all this new stuff, but they don't want to adapt and they don't want to learn and they're stuck in their ways. And what he's getting at is, and most businesses believe this, you gotta be careful who you hire. As we both stated earlier on,

• 13:24Speaker 00

  On this podcast, we believe talent is the most important element, AKA people. But you gotta pick the right people and be careful and make sure either A, they know everything that you're looking to. And B, if they don't know everything, that's okay. They have to be open culturally to shifting, learning and adapting instead of being closed minded. Because when someone's closed minded, it's very hard for them to adapt.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the final thing I'll, I'll, I'll close on this one is inertia is a very real thing, right? Um, you know, people are, you know, when it comes to physics, for example, like things tend to go back to their resting state. Um, but you know, if you're more entrepreneur, which most people aren't, right? But you, you're tend to, you, you wanna increase the temperature all the time and you, you cannot like, I know for Neil, I know for myself, like we can't. I'd be very unsettled if I was in a resting state all the time, right? I, I need to keep, um, we wanna keep pushing. And so all that to say is like, yes, you know, very much focus on talent, focus on, on getting good at hiring talent. But even if you get really good at it, you may be only right, maybe fifty percent of the time if you're, if you're good, right? Um, maybe a little higher than that if you're like world class at it, but just keep that in mind. So, um, that's all we have for today. We can lead the crypto debate for another time.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Um, and we will see you, we'll see you next week. Goodbye.