050 - The End of SaaS as We Know It: AI Agents & the Future of Work with Jim Weldon, CEO of Prospect Desk

Speaker A: Every other time we've had that happen, it's been one physical component replaced another. Like the train replaced horse, the buggy, then the car replaced the train. This is, this is electrons and photons. This is light and digital. Way different game. So that means the most powerful compute machine in the world better start getting creative or you're going to be on universal basic income and income inequality. The way it looks now will be a joke.

Speaker B: That spark of innovation, it's just waiting for the perfect combination of tools and talent to bring it to life. Welcome to Pitch Build Scale. I'm your host, Chris Fanchi, a recovering startup founder, veteran SaaS marketer turned dev tech enthusiast and growth specialist. Each episode we connect with the builders, the visionaries and the problem solvers who are redefining what's possible with today's technology and pioneering the websites, apps and software products of tomorrow. These are the conversations that transform how we build, how we sell, and how we scale technology businesses in a world where the tech evolves by the minute. Ready to stay ahead of the curve. This is Pitch Build Scale. Hello and welcome to today's episode. We have a very exciting guest. For those of you just joining the podcast, we are Big North Marketing and specialize in helping dev shops and SaaS companies scale their revenue. So if you want to learn how to take your SaaS or dev business to the next level, make sure to stick around. And if you're interested in a free growth consultation, just drop us the word growth in the DMs. We're really excited to have today's guest, Jim Weldon, CEO of ProspectDesk, a company powering digital platforms and marketing teams with cutting edge identity resolution technology to transform anonymous website visitors into high intent prospects. Jim has built and scaled dozens of businesses by solving one of the most critical challenges in modern marketing. Knowing exactly who's on your site and turning them into opportunities. Jim, welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Hey Chris, thanks for having me.

Speaker B: So I always like to start out by asking what my guest's origin story is. What first, uh, drew you into the world of marketing technology entrepreneurship.

Speaker A: So the origin story of me in the business, we'll go back even even further. Was a good friend of mine, had a company and it went belly up. And he goes, we gotta do something else. He goes, can you help me figure out this whole thing called electronic filing? This was 1991. And I said sure. And uh, he goes, but we can't afford to send both of us to go visit the company. You want to go, you know, more technology than me. Think about this. 1991, I hardly knew anything. And, um, so we went up there and we. This company called or tax. I didn't know any better, except all I heard was they had 75% gross profit margins. That seemed pretty good. And, um, we built a service bureau. Next thing you know, three years later, we're doing 60 million in revenue off a $10,000 investment. So, uh, the origin story was we got really damn lucky in our first business. And, uh, it's been a ride since then. And. And the tenant we took that got us into the current business was either you can generate the leads and prospects, or you can have partners that have all of the clients. And then how do you help them generate interest in the service you're selling? That's way more effective and more leverage than doing it the old fashioned way, which is pour gasoline into the marketing machine and hope she converts, ie generates horsepowers on top of funnel prospects. So that's our origin story. We were lucky, we learned. And then we've taken those tenants from company one and applied it to the next two dozen.

Speaker B: Two dozen?

Speaker A: Yeah. Whereas, um, 10 I've directly co founded, another 14 I've directly, indirectly invested in over the last, uh, 30 years, not including just one off investments. Those are active investments.

Speaker B: Wow. Have you always had an interest in entrepreneurship and being this involved in a bunch of businesses?

Speaker A: No, no, I. I was completely unemployable. I learned very quickly because it's one of those things where if you see something and you say something, usually get fired. And I did, because it's. Who are you to have an opinion, a perspective? You're nobody. And then my friend who I was working for, and their CFO took, uh, all their money. That's why they went bankrupt. He's like, I need a partner. And that was the first time anybody treated me like I had some value. And I didn't know what an entrepreneur was. There was no Inc 500 running around, and at least not top of mind like we know. Entrepreneur has such an interesting moniker to it today. It's like, oh, you're an entrepreneur. That's very. Oh, an AI entrepreneur. Oh, that's amazing. Back then, it just meant you were on your own. That's all. Entrepreneur met and people were concerned for you and your family. Oh, you're not working at Xerox or IBM. I hope you make it. So as you know, lots of baggage being an entrepreneur in the early 90s. Now it's like, hey, can I get some shares? So, yeah, no, I didn't want to. Didn't think I wanted to be one. My parents were like, uh, good luck. Turned out okay.

Speaker B: Yeah, sounds like it. Did you always have an interest in technology or did that just seem like it made the most sense as a business opportunity?

Speaker A: It was the only business opportunity we had. So the necessity is the mother of invention or. Uh, yeah, the mother of invention is necessity. I guess how you say it, we were fortunate. You know, it's like any trailhead you can take in life. You know, it could have been a services business, it could have been a restaurant business, could have been a car dealership. I don't care. We just happened to step onto the track of technology and software that had a service wrapper around it. And every company for 20 years, the first 20, had some component of that. Now we're very, very diligent on. We look for companies with large data exhausts. And that, ah, may not mean anything to people on this call that, uh, we can leverage. When it started machine learning, because there was no fancy AI or large language models or large action models, our Gentex flows. We looked for places where we could apply machine learning to companies with large data sets and impact the financials. So can we improve sales or cut costs? That's been my last intentional 10 years that I've worked on, I mean, intimately for that last decade.

Speaker B: What got your attention drawn to machine learning specifically?

Speaker A: I didn't know anything about it. So if I don't know something about something in my field, I immediately become a student. So I actually went back to university, went to Georgetown, got a degree and applied a, uh, master's in applied diligence. Because it was like I was tired of not. I was tired of being outgunned. And you can only learn so much by reading articles and books and, you know, when you, in a forced environment of producing something. And we came up with my own theoretical models in that space. Now I had a point of view. Back to the thing we talked about before we got on the call is I'm not a really big fan of opinions, but, boy, if Chris has a earned point of view in this area, I want to hear about it. Um, so that's what triggered me in that space, is I wanted to learn.

Speaker B: Okay, so how many businesses are you currently working on?

Speaker A: 1. I'm obsessed and, uh, responsible for one. But I have my hands financially and many others where I don't consider advisory and board work hard because I'm not doing anything. I'm just giving perspective. And if I don't know Anything in that area, I don't give perspective, I'll ask a question. Uh, so that's not hard for me. People say, oh, you're on eight boards or this or that. I don't, um, it's not an obsession. I'm only obsessed with one company right now, Prospect Desk. I'm the operator, visionary. I'm the one responsible for which direction we're going to go and my people are responsible for how we're going to get there.

Speaker B: So what was the pain point or problem you saw in the market that made you decide to start Prospect Desk?

Speaker A: Uh, we were selling the. We created something called Trovo and that was a data management platform, a DMP that preceded it. And we were selling another portfolio company and we had to take the technology out of Trovo, put it with the asset we were selling, and there was this resolution technology that was sitting in Trovo and I couldn't leave it in there. So we spun it out into its own little company. So the deal was the necessity. And then we said, hey, uh, let's see what we can do here. And over the last, uh. Shit, what is it? Almost two and a half years, we went from zero partners and customers to we only have a dozen partners, but our technology for resolution is on 25,000 end client websites. And we've resolved for our clients over 2 billion prospects off of their website traffic. So it helps with first audience development, it helps with icp, ideal customer profile, it helps identify where they should do their retargeting. Uh, it helps where they should do their hit list for their reps for outbound on their sales development reps. I mean, where they should double down on their roas, return on ad spend. Yeah, we took five companies. So whether you're doing Live Ramp or Live Intent or Apollo or Zoom Info Clearbit, we just, we didn't know better. We didn't know how hard it was going to be. We just rolled it up under one and said, yeah, we got all these capabilities and people are like, what? And then we did a super attractive financial model. We give 70% of, uh, the rev share to our partners. We keep 30. And the reason we did it was we wanted fast adoption, traction. We got the seven figures super fast in the first year, doubled up again. We're profitable, no outside capital. And guess what you can do when you have that, whatever you want. So, um, that's what we do. I've learned the hard way, investors are a pain in the ass. It's like, I'm not trying to be anthropic I don't need $50 billion to do it. So be. People don't understand. Those are not normal, those companies. That is, you're 99 times more likely not to get venture investment than you are. Think about that. So why make your whole model about getting venture? I think it's insanity. We've been sold a bill of goods in the world of entrepreneurship.

Speaker B: Yeah. Do you think that it's easier now to run a business without venture capital than it has been in the past?

Speaker A: Uh, I think there's. I don't know what your thoughts are. I'd love to hear them. But I think there's three things that were disadvantageous for years. One was you couldn't spin up an environment in an hour. Like, you couldn't get servers, you couldn't get lambda functions, you couldn't get applications. Now we're like, okay, uh, I can get cursor up and have a development platform. I can do N8N. I got a gentic flow. I can tie it into my S3 buckets. I can tie GitHub in the back end for GitHub actions. And then I need one other piece of technology, Confluence, and I'm in business. I can build a company. Oh, and by the way, I hook in instantly. I hook in three or four other outbound marketing, um, tools, and I have seven pieces of technology. I am literally in business in one day. I mean, it's so fast. And by the way, they'll give me 30 days free. I could probably get some entrepreneur credits from AWS so I don't have to pay for that bill for a while. Snowflake will give me credits and I get, you know, access to tier one data warehousing capability. It's like that shit didn't exist. I'm, uh, like they said, what is it going to be? The one person company that does a unicorn. That's what. There's already five person ones to hit unicorn status. I think because we're doing this right now, we're humanizing and sorry to diatribe here, but we've now basically said we will have a digital twin department for every person. So if you're an sdr, you'll have six to eight smart agents that work for you that you run as part of your team. Think about that. And I feel horrible, but it's like that's the leverage. You have to apply that kind of leverage in your company or you're not going to survive. Benioff's been talking about it. He says his customers will deploy 1 billion smart agents within the next five years. Think about that. Just autonomous agentic flow bots. Fancy term smart agent.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no I couldn't agree more. Uh, and that's definitely what I'm seeing as well. I think that's definitely the direction that we're moving. So uh, absolutely. In terms of prospect desk, what kind of companies are utilizing your technology? What size of companies?

Speaker A: So there's two things. One is we didn't know at first for a long time because we just, we didn't, we created. So here's the way we did it. I went and partnered with folks that had four and 5,000, um, real, real strong performance marketing agencies. We partner with them and they just didn't really want to give us their client list. So we didn't make a big deal of it and we said hey listen, if we can start analyzing just even the tag fires and understand who the customers are, revenue wise, employee wise, sector wise. Because when we do it a resolution, we put it straight into their S3 bucket. We don't analyze them and review them or share them. So uh, we Chinese wallets. So they, they have, you know, we have Home Depot, Pampered Chef. I mean we have some monster end clients now that we know of. Can't tell you through which partners but it's like they don't really want us to have that traffic like out on anywhere. So guess what, we home run it to the client. Once a week goes by, we get rid of it and we just keep a rolling seven days for our clients. So that if there was anything we have PII compliance, just ccpa. There's all kinds of interesting things we have to stick with. Um, but what we learned very quickly was Pareto's laws apply. 80% of it's long tail, low volume, unsophisticated SMB. Just you pick it. Whether it's a small roofer, a dentist's office, a chiropractor, somebody with an insurance, one person insurance office, long tail, I'll call it less than a thousand website visitors a month type volumes. And of those 40% of nefarious crawlers and garbage and 600 maybe clicks a month, that's about 80% of the business. Nice thing is with 25,000 people using our technology and the container technology on their site, now you're talking 5,000 serious businesses that we have that are at the top end. 5,000, 10,000amillion tag fires a day. Different players, different things we can bring them. And the way I describe what the platform does for Folks, so they get it is if you're familiar with how Stripe was architected, it's one JavaScript line of code on the client side that unlocks an entire capabilities of an ecosystem of financial options and modules on the backend server side. So this whole ecosystem gets unlocked and everybody thinks it's a payment processing. They missed it. So we did the same thing with ours as One line of JavaScript unlocks an entire ecosystem of audience building and prospecting server side. So I don't care what capability you need. We can custom home run it for folks. So that's what really changed for our clients. They got that analogy. It wasn't hard to explain. We're easy to demonstrate. It helped with compliance, it helped with security. So yeah, you learn fast.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, very interesting. So what does your ideal client look like? Is it the partnerships? Do you, do you really care what the end client looks like or is this the partnerships?

Speaker A: Uh, that's our ideal for sure. That's where we focus. So they have to have three core attributes. One is they have to have an existing book of business of over 2,500 customers and they just, they, it just seems to be the minimum number that we work with. We have some with 40, 50,000 clients, like instantly at 50,000 clients. And that's a number that's public, so nothing secretive there. We have thousands and thousands of people on their portfolio. My thing is I haven't unlocked how to help them with more because we're like, we're trying to figure out, hey, why aren't more people doing it? Why are we stuck? Where's the value mismatch? Right. So first thing is they have to have large install bases of clients. The second thing is they don't want to invest in this area, but they want the uh, capability to create a little bit of a moat for themselves. So when we partner with somebody, we are intentional about not partnering with six people that are competitors of instantly. We don't. So let's say they're focused on SMB and SME and somebody else is focused on middle markets and corporate, you know, Fortune, uh, 500. That would be two or three different partnerships and maybe they overlap a little bit at the edges, the margins. We don't care. But I won't go with six companies in SMB. And we're not an arms dealer. We're king makers. We want to help them be successful and control their revenue and their kingdom and what that's worked really well because we can get super close to you and you don't feel I'm going to move away. So big client install bases. Second thing is we look at the sectors they're in. Is it a dying or growing sector? And then the last thing is, um, how flexible and what's their past experience with partnerships? Uh, do they see this as a seven figure relationship in the next 12 to 18 months? If they don't, we don't do the deal. We can stumble and fumble over half a million in revenue the first year without even trying 40, 50 grand a month in revenue with them. So then the goal is, hey, how do we double triple this down next year and then double it again? So how do I become a multimillion dollar revenue stream for them? And they didn't have to put a dime in, just some emails and get an attach rate. That's our ideal customer profile. So nothing fancy. Um, I don't worry about industries. I'm looking more for their approach to the business. Was there with every one of our partners. So it's. I know it works.

Speaker B: Yeah. Was there a moment when you realized that this business had that kind of

Speaker A: potential, Bob, still, we still haven't even come close to hitting our stride. We've given away most of the value and the reason we did it was we needed to get adoption. So in the use cases, people do not believe we have the install base we do. Then when we show them in Snowflake, our live dashboards are like, okay, you guys are real. That's not our play. We have a much bigger play on the agentic flow side we've been working on for the last year. Because being able to trigger an agentic flow and for the people in the audience who don't know, uh, what that is, just think of anytime you go to a chatbot and you were kind of blown away by how well it interacted with you, it's probably sitting on top of OpenAI or a large language model, not a decision tree of answers. That's the old chat bot approach. Now it's you upload four or five thousand hours of customer support or sessions. It learns from them, it knows what a good answer looks like, it can rate them. Now it's thinking and knows how to respond as if a human was on the call. That's the kind of stuff that's going to get automated. That's where we're going, is how do I use my snippet of code that starts with a resolution? And it does so many other things. It helps with icp, it helps with your media spend, it helps you wrap on Email marketing. It helps with your SDR hit lists, it helps with your upsell cross sells. I, uh, mean, there's so many things that help with. Okay, so what? I want to build a organization with smart agents that can do those tasks for me so I don't have to keep expanding my employees. That's why I'm worried about, you know, where's the entry level marketplace going to be? You know, if you look at what Reid Hoffman's talking about, he goes, the bottom rung of the corporate ladder may be gone. You may not be able to jump up and get in the marketplace because in three to four years, is there going to be, uh, a, uh, rung. I mean, think about it. I have an SDR that's in charge of 11 bots right now. We're not hiring for those roles. His job is to make the 11 bots work for him on his team. That's his team. Yeah, and we called it Pam. So Pam is above him. So she's our prospecting activation machine and she reports in his boss. So it's an MCP controller to control all the smart agents. And he's just on Pam's team. So the whole virtual team reports to him, he reports to Pam. His stuff rolls into Pam, into the person that's handling all of our digital marketing. And for people who aren't doing this or sophisticated enough, you're going to get rolled over by firms like us because you're not going to be able to compete on cost. Now here's what we don't do. Copy strategy, which programs to kill yet. Because you don't have enough learnings to know where to divest. Whereas as a sophisticated performance marker, you're like, it's just as obvious which ones to kill versus a call of performance. You're like, no, this thing's doing pretty good. Let's let it run. The messaging. They can test ab, but it's not the same as a human who goes in that you can't get the tonality right yet. There's just so many things I think humans do better for now, but two years from now, I'd be worried if I was a growth performance marketer.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's. It seems like AI agents are coming for virtually all white collar jobs. Do you see that being the case?

Speaker A: Yeah. You know, it's funny, we, we, we can't help ourselves in the press to talk about the negatives, the ghosting, the hallucinations, all fair. The inaccuracy of answering questions. And um, I was reading the Microsoft article this morning that talks about their medical diagnosis, LLM they have, and they compared it to a normal physician. Now it's 4x more accurate. 20% the physicians get it right, 80% of the bot gets it right. Now the smart agent. Holy shit, I want the agent. Did you run this through AI before you gave me a diagnosis? That's how, how crazy is that going to be? Where we're double checking and guessing our doctor, which we should anyways, because, you know, what did they talk about the ability to read a high, high contrast scan from an MRI is way easier because it understands the pixelated shadows versus there's a tumor way better than a human does because the, you know, they're seeing in 4K. We don't process at 4K. So anyways, that's the, you know, in 60 seconds, frames per second. We can't, we can't deal with that as a human, we have a blank. They have critical data. So I think it's, I'm interested to see how it handles in medicine. I think it's going to be very helpful in hedging in financial markets because think about what's going on with the craziness of tariffs. Not to get political, but it creates a lot of uncertainty in the market. So the issue is, if you have a wealth manager, they're almost worthless to you because they're like, cost, uh, average. Write it out. Because they don't have a better answer. What if you and I are like, hey, you know, I don't have time. If the market dips 25%, if I have a certain amount of money, I don't have 10 years or seven years to make it up. Right? So how do I hedge? So based on the insanity, what do I go? Fixed income. Are, uh, T bills really going to be worth it considering our credit rating? Should I be doing offshore international funds? AI is going to have this hedged out and be like, oh, no, no, no. This is what this. All right, here's how the President leads into it. Here's the implications. Here's where you want to do it, here's why it's worth it to Lost Harvest. I am telling you this. Uh, think about what D.E. shaw did on Wall street, revolutionizing how, uh, quant heads, and Jeff Bezos was one of them in that shop, the guy from Juneau, another guy, Paul Charlton, who I know very well. These guys, they invented quantitative analytics for one of the most sophisticated trading shops on Wall Street. These, these models are so much better than them. And they're just Going to get smarter because they have look back, they can do validity testing and say, hey, if we would have guessed the last 10 years of the market with these events, what would have happened? And then they can go and show, oh my gosh, we're 90, you know, 97% confident, you know, which is crazy in the financial markets anyways. I think that's the two places that you know, think about health care and financial services to the biggest industries. I think of what's going on with Robo taxis. People don't understand BMW for the first time. I think it was five years ago or maybe seven. Their entry level car went down year over year over year for new buyers. Kids aren't buying cars. Mhm. Uber or Uber or Lyft now with Waymo. Waymo now has the most car rides in San Francisco over Lyft. 27% of all rides are with a driverless car in San Francisco. Now what's Tesla going to do? They're doing driverless delivery now. That just happened in Texas. How fast before he figures out autonomous driving on grid cities. I'll call them. You know, once you know where there's 90 degree intersections. Much easier by the way to navigate. Yeah, so anyways, I think those are gonna be transportation. I think it'll make energy more efficient. I think it'll require less around insurance. I think it's gonna require less cars, which, oh shoot, that industry's gonna shrink. People don't realize there's a whole game afoot right now on the AI side. And guess who's playing at the helm of it, you know, for good, bad or ugly. Elon's in the middle of the whole darn thing.

Speaker B: Yeah, and um, robotics as well. That's another big, big one that he's involved in. And the door is opening wider and wider with that.

Speaker A: Uh, uh, yeah, I mean they're already talking about dark factories. There's 290,000 production robots in manufacturing worldwide. 250,000 of them are in China. How are we moving factories here? We can't. We don't have the lowest energy costs, we don't have low land costs, we don't have low labor, and oh, by the way, automation out the gazoo. So to think we're going to move production back here is a fool's errand. And a bunch of simpletons who believe it. Yeah.

Speaker B: So are your partners seeing things the same way you are? Are they looking at the forward looking like this, thinking about AI, uh, agents in the next generation, next round of things? Or is it taking a lot of explanation to kind of show your vision?

Speaker A: No, my, my son and his co founder of the data cooperative, they're on the cutting edge of building the single most powerful data cooperative in the world outside of the big five. So the big five surveillance agencies is what I call them. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, they are surveillance organizations. They spent tens of billions of dollars to collect data. That's what they do. So they can turn it into targetable markets. That's how they work. This is the largest independent identity graph and cooperative that uses three to 400 companies to act as proxies for those collections. So they compete independently because Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft don't let you see what's under the hood. You have to pay retail to access them. The data cooperative allows all these ad tech martech companies to do it at a wholesale basis. So the reason I bring that up is that's two of my partners. So yeah, they see it. Uh, everything we do is, remember I said earlier, large data exhaust that leverages AI. That's why we built a data cooperative. My other partner is the founder of a Fortune 500 company that he's still the chairman of. And at their board level, it's a conversation every quarter of how are we going to handle what's going on? Because the markets or the maturity of the technologies are not ready to handle the tier one markets. Some people are like, what? And if I can go on a diatribe to explain AI in my two sentences, that's okay.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: Thank you. So I try to explain this way because most people don't get what's going on with AI. Uh, so, so I said think of a giant field and there's five, seven wells have been dug and everybody has their little brick thing and you have your little bucket and you put your question in, you reel it down the aquifer. Underneath it that everybody taps into is the Internet. We all have same access, but we're at different parts of the field. So when the answer comes back up, we filter a little different. The minerals are a little different in our part, you get a little different answer on your large language processing model. That's the seven companies. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI. Those and maybe Baidu. And there's 10 players. Uh, the issue is, is that's kind of cool for generative AI. And we all got hooked and it was like a new novelty. Then we're like, what do we do with it? Then smart marketers like you figured out, hey, this is how you can do this and this. And we shortened a whole bunch of stuff and it's getting smarter. So what the issue is, it's not the tent pole in the middle, it's a tent pole on the edge of the overall circus. Then I said, all right, what if we were on a river and we lashed together six Zodiac rubber rafts that the Navy SEALs use, those black boats with the high powered engines, lots of horsepower, LLMs, lams, and you had the buckets out the side and you're going 80 miles an hour down the river. All the boats are lashing, pulling in all kinds of information. Then the boats are transmitting to each other. They're smart agents, their agentic flows to finish a task. Then they have an answer, the task is done, they go to the shore, they throw it off, the person gets their answer, they keep going down the river. That's where we are right now practically. The problem is you need to go on the open seas and you need to have a giant cruise ship or aircraft carrier to service Fortune 500. They can't handle dealing with a tiny little raft that may flip over with a wave or it doesn't have deep support domains, it doesn't have AES and pre sales. Think about what you get at a cruise ship. What floats it at the bottom of the ballast is financial stability. That's, that's the keel of a giant cruise ship. These things don't tip over. The next level is the engine room. They have the horsepower, the Data centers, the GPUs from Nvidia. Then you have the engineering team that makes it all come together. Then you have your pre sales application team. Then you have your staterooms. Each one of those clients does a service level agreement. They sit on the boat, it rocks a little bit, they get a little seasick sometime. And then you have your customers on that, the Fortune 500 customers on the top deck having a party using the services. That is the stack that's going to have to come into and deploy and it's not going to AWS and one company doing it. The whole thing needs to be integrated like you do today. That is does not exist. So what you're seeing is a lot of bullshit in the market about oh, AI is coming, when in reality the Fortune 500 are struggling. The next thing is an aircraft carrier AWS. I take my company, I land it on the deck, it takes me below deck, it lets me use their services, shared services, aws, gcp, Microsoft with Azure allows me to take off, give my answer to My client, over wire, over fiber. It doesn't matter. Different models. One is a heavy, intensive, supportive model. The other one is on consumption. These two things do not exist at any level yet that people can solve real problems at scale, globally. What they're getting is I can solve a department or a piece, but what's going to happen over the next two years is those cruise ships are getting built. They're going to be a little smaller. Like if you're in Europe, you know, where there's 20 cabins on the ones on the river cruises, there's going to be hundreds or thousand of those customized ones to solve for HR tech, for ad tech, for fraud tech, for certain vertical markets. You're not going to be a giant cruise ship or you're not going to go to Accenture, you're not going to go to PwC. They don't have the chops to move fast enough. They flat out don't. So they're, they're theoretical. Their consulting models, all that are going to have to get blown up. They're going to have to cannibalize their business to get smarter and compete smaller. Regional ones aren't. So that's how I look at the Internet. I think we're a bunch of zodiacs all racing down the river with instability, and we may get flipped over and we'll make a little money, and every once in a while, we'll bring down your organization with bad services. So that's my diatribe for this, which is that's how I see the Internet and AI right now.

Speaker B: Interesting. Very interesting. Do you think it's possible for a purely software company to actually have a moat anymore?

Speaker A: No, I think, uh, Satya has it right. At Microsoft, AI is coming to eat SaaS applications. So just like Benioff said, SaaS will eat software. Even though we all know SaaS is software. It's the delivery mechanism that changed. Yeah, I think the libraries that exist and the functions within just N8N. It's an orchestration platform for agentic flow, one of the four or five better ones I think the libraries are getting. So it's not going to take somebody like you and me a week or two or a month to build what the company needs on a tech stack, let's say, for Martech, we're not going to have to go sign up for a tier one Marketo. Like, you're out of your mind. If you sign up for Marketo now, like, why would I spend half a million or a million bucks to run that? You're Insane. Like I wouldn't go buy my own dsp. I would rent one on the API calls. Way better. Just leverage trade desk or beeswax. And when I want to place media, I place media. Uh, pay the tax. I don't give a shit about the extra costs. So I think two things. One is a mission critical stuff. They're going to have to do it firewall it. Find the firewall in the data center. Yeah, most stuff's not mission critical. I think 80% of the market will be good enough and that stuff will get eaten up and replaced.

Speaker B: Yeah. Do you see the possibility of cutting uh, it becoming possible for any company to basically spin up the exact kind of SaaS style solution that they need on demand.

Speaker A: So we've learned the hard way on vibe coding with cursor. You're like oh my God, this is amazing. And then you try to use it. You're like this shit doesn't work. Like so we spend. And so here's what we would do. So we would log in and literally screen cap everything. We don't have access to anybody's code. And then you're like, you have a visual equivalent of a product requirements doc. Then you go back in and you, you start editing of uh, what you want to build, put your features in. Then you have a PRD and then you start working with figma with AI and you start cranking out with Gamma or whatever tool you use to get the cursor. What we found was the technical capabilities. You still need a senior level person on the back end to pull it off.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Then another 18 months, you're probably not going to need that. You're going to be able to talk to it and tell it what you want and it'll capture your voice. And then it's going to be like hey, I need to build a rapid prototype of this. But it's got to have this capability from this data ingest. We want it to do this kind of processing here and I want to deliver it here. That's where it's going to go. It's going to be voice activated. So I think that's two to three years out where it's like it'd be reliable at scale. But look at what, how long ago, what was it? November of 22nd when we released uh, OpenAI ChatGPT. Look what's happened since then. I mean have you, I don't know if you track the numbers. Um, $300 billion in 20,000 AI companies. And then the top seven players have put 250 billion in infrastructure, almost 600 billion in the last 24 months has gone into AI. Think about that. It's the single largest investment in the history of mankind in any field in that period of time. What do you think is going to happen? It'll be a little change.

Speaker B: Yeah, just, just a little, yeah. If you were advising a young person right now as to where to go, what to do, what to learn, what would you, you say?

Speaker A: Well, uh, the funny part was three years ago I'd be like, you gotta understand coding. No, I sound like a moron. If I advise that. You know, I look at my own personal experience on applied intelligence and um, it's a fancy way of saying how do I take advantage of the data and the ecosystems that drive how companies interact with data and technology. So it's the applied part that's interesting. I still think someone's going to have to. And I think AI does a fantastic job doing the market research and recommending strategies. But I think, you know, the thinking man's thinker, I think there's still an opportunity. We're still more creative than the machines still. I don't know for how long. I mean, if uh, Eric Schmidt's right, these things will have IQs of 4 or 500 within 3 to 4 years. The smartest, the highest captured IQ, I think is 210 or 220 in history, twice as. I mean Einstein was only 170 supposedly. Oh my God, what is. We won't even be able to understand them. So where would I go? Um, you're going to laugh. My Irish background, I would look at blue collar. I would look at building things that can solve blue collar problems. So do I build a bot that can maintain and build a road? Do I build a bot that can deal with forestry management? Do I build drones that do remote telemetry and security procedures for perimeters on construction sites? Do I build. So I think there's a whole tech and data and visual optics field that can supplement because with the way immigrations, we're becoming isolationists. You know, we're talking about a uh, workforce that's going to be so small compared to what we need in the US that I think you're going to have to use leverage with AI robotics to replace that workforce. So if I was them, I'd be robotics, I'd be anything airborne. Think about what's going to happen and what's already going on in England. So Amazon's been working on package delivery. I think it's for two years. Now in remote parts of London or, sorry, up towards Scotland and north of England and they're dealing with the, how do I not deal with the power lines? How do I deal with signs? How do we drop it? And they're talking about having Hindenburg type size ships where people, you know, the drones come to a neighborhood and uh, they load it in the morning and then instead of home running it back and forth to the warehouse, the, you know, the blimp goes out, becomes the remote warehouse with today like a mail truck does. But you just move the mini part of your warehouse so the drones can go back and forth. Because think of the distance, it's, it's too far to control them. The radio, the battery, if I can put it over a city and I have 50 of these out there, okay, they may not look great and I may not allow it in Beverly Hills, but do you think somebody cares in Riverside, California? I don't give a shit. So what's that going to do to ups? What's that going to do? Units, postal service, what's that going to do? Short haul trucking, delivery. They're going to annihilate it, so get ahead of it. So are you the guy that um, I just watched 60 Minutes and they talked about um, unmanned drones, they don't have a way to defend them. What if you're the person who writes the code that can track them, identify them and take them down? You're going to have. I can do it for my company, I can do it for my house. Like right now. If somebody wanted to hover a drone with a 4K camera a thousand foot over your property, there's nothing you can do to get rid of it. You can't shoot it, you can't hit it. You just uh, you discharge a firearm in most cities, you get a felony.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Oh, it's on my land. Yeah. Good luck. Proving it is. You actually can show that things over your property and you discharged a high powered weapon in the city and they, they catch you, oh, by the way, you're on camera shooting it, they have film to turn you in. So that's what I'm talking about. Uh, I think what's going to limit us is fear. And I don't think this is, this is the first time where new jobs will be fine and replace it. That's every other time we've had that happen. It's been one physical component replaced another. You know, the car replaced the horse and buggy, you know, the train replaced this, that, or the train replaced horse the buggy. Then the car replaced the train. This is. This is electrons and photons. This is light and digital. Way different game. So that means the most powerful compute machine in the world better start getting creative or you're going to be on universal basic income. And income inequality, the way it looks now will be a joke. 90% of people or 80% of people will be on some sort of subsidence. And we know that's a disaster because then you lose purpose, you lose drive. I mean, uh, you saw the experiments in Sweden. It doesn't go well. And that's a good country to work with. They're already happy. Imagine in the US how well that won't go.

Speaker B: So do you have something more optimistic? What is your optimistic view of the future that you can leave us with today?

Speaker A: Uh, good question. So I think a couple things. There will be some event that will cause massive change, whether it's regulation, control, that will allow us to get our hands around this. If you look at the bill going through Congress right now, they're talking about hands off regulation for 10 years in AI crap. That's a mess. And not that I want high regulation, but it's gotta be some guardrails. You can't trust business to do the right thing. They never do. And I'm an entrepreneur and I love capitalism. Um, but when left to its own demise, it will continually crank. So what's the positive thing? I think there's a couple things. One is, does this give us more time to reflect? And is there a, uh, part of the population that has enough willpower to make the change of how do we treat each other? Because if you look at the wars and you look at the discourse, what are we really doing with our wealth? I mean, if you look at what MacKenzie Scott's doing. Jeff Bezos White she's one pebble in the pond of philanthropy, and she's. Bill Gates is the largest philanthropic entity ever, and he's trying to eradicate disease, hunger, get people power they can read, lift themselves up. What happens if a third of our billionaires decided we're going to do good? What would it do to our politicians? What would it do? I think there's an appetite, humanity. As a rule of thumb, as a lot of decent people, we tend to focus on the outliers, the crazy man in Germany, Hitler. We look at the nut job in our White House. We look at there are people that have convinced other people that they're going to solve something for them. We're not stupid. We can be fooled. A Lot. Here's the good thing, I think out there, as a rule of thumb, we're decent at our stick, really care about others more than not. We're the most giving planet on the earth, philanthropically in the US and we're one of the two most technologically advanced and we have more wealth here than any country on the planet. Something will happen where I think a light will go on and go, this is ridiculous. Huh? And that doesn't mean the billionaires are going to give all their money. I think what will happen is think of what the Koch brothers did. They ruined this whole thing. They went to 14,000 local elections because they thought the agenda was too woke and BS on, um, the Democratic side and went hardcore Republican. And then the Koch brother who didn't die, obviously he came out and said, we made a mistake, I need to fix this. Uh, they got 120 billion between him and his brother's spouse, widower. How many of them does it take to really move? Look at what Elon did. There could have been so much good. So to me, I think the hope is there are a lot of people doing little pebbles. What happens when somebody comes with the big boulder and decides we're going to go left? To me, that's, that's what I always look at is because it's to our best interest to save the planet. It's to our best interest to support each other. It's to our best interest to take care of the less fortunate. It's to our best interest to advance our healthcare. I think Harvard, uh, did an amazing study on negotiations and it was about perception. And most people presumed perceived. We were only halfway there. We're still halfway apart. What it was, was the last 10% were actually only 10% apart. You were 90% of the way in agreement, but the last 10% felt like 50. It was 5x more than perceived. I think it's the same with the U.S. and here's why I say that even though the politics are very divisive, name me anybody on either side who doesn't want to see their children do better. Name anybody on either side who doesn't want to retire with a comfortable living. Name anybody on your side who doesn't want to pay their bills and take care of their, their, you know, their living expenses. Name anybody on every side who doesn't want to have some kind of purpose and get up. Not that everybody does, but the bell curve says we do. The issue is, is we're our extremists who drive it ideologically. Uh, have got us in a little bit of a hair bunger right now. So guess what happens? We got to straighten it out. So my hope is we know more about more things than ever, but so little about the right things and it's just calming ourselves down. I think that's going to be part of the, I don't want to call it an enlightenment. I'm not some um, you know, spiritual leader here. But I think there will be a self awareness and enlightenment where like this is insane because we're a values driven culture. The things we're doing now are not our values as Americans. Yes, we are greedy, hardworking mental cases, but boy, mistreating people at an epic scale like this, uh, it's not who we are. It's just, I don't believe it. So that's my hope. My hope is you can use technology, you can use opportunities. There's so much wealth that's been aggregated and I'm talking the real wealth, the fortune, the forbear 400. I mean, what is it? That list controls 30% of the world's wealth? Whoops. 400 people out of 8 billion. Yeah, this is going to take a concentrated effort at the top because they get elected who they want. They have that much power. So guess what? And we've already seen, I guess 120 days. I was on to the day with my wife. I said, yeah, the love affair between Elon and Trump, uh, would be over because the narcissism is untenable. And one of them actually builds stuff, the other one doesn't. The other one tears down Elon, builds stuff. Good, bad or ugly. He builds stuff the other one does not build anything. Doesn't build alliance, doesn't build coalition, doesn't build trust. So people who tear stuff down don't usually last long. In my experience. The builders laughed. So I, I think we need more builders that take over this thing. So my thing is I'm an optimist as an entrepreneur, I'm a builder, I'm an operator, I'm an entrepreneur. So I invest in people, I invest in causes, I invested in pro democracy, which all different discussion, but that's my hope. I don't think technology is a panacea. I just think the wealth accumulated by the technologist could be interesting. That's why I'm disappointed in what the tech bros did. They could have just given the collective go pounds sand and instead they, they bent a knee because their businesses were more important to them than their values. So that's a perspective I don't know if it's the right one. It's just a perspective based on lots of insights. So I don't know if you wanted to go that far on this thing, but that's a. I, um, truly believe it will take something large and we will rebound because we're decent people is what I feel as a country and so are a lot of other countries. You know, I mean, have you met any really bad people from Canada? I mean, Mexico is a wonderful country as its cartels, but just a loving people. So have you met a Filipino? I mean, come on. Like, if it wasn't for them, our healthcare system would collapse on elder and end of life care. Uh, have you met people from Sweden? Lovely people. There's lovely people everywhere. Some of the countries in Africa, I'm m like, guys, there's some of the most amazing loving cultures in the world. It's like we just believe the rhetoric is the problem and social media has ruined us. The cycles of insanity are faster, tighter and more narrow and the echo chambers getting louder.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yep. And I, I think that's, that's the concern and that's why I think there will be some rough times as well as some positives in the future. So I think we're, we're going to see both.

Speaker A: It's just, you know, how do we get through it? You know, how do we preserve our sanity? How do we preserve our integrity? Um, and how do we not hurt each other? I mean, think about how many relationships have been lost over the political divisiveness in this country. I mean. And you know what, though? It's like anything else. It's, you know, can you weather the storm? And I think we'll weather the storm. Just how many body blows do we take during the storm exactly? I don't know if this is where you wanted to go, but I appreciate you letting me, uh, share. It's a pretty important topic to me. It's a very difficult question.

Speaker B: I think think this is the most important topic right now, honestly.

Speaker A: So, Jim, Beacon to each other.

Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. Jim, this has been great. Thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Where can our listeners connect with you, learn more about you and prospect desk.

Speaker A: Um, I appreciate that, Chris. So, um, they can go to www.prospectdesk AI or they can send me an email. Jimprospectdesk AI easiest way. Or if they dial our phone number, you'll get to see a smart agent working. If you haven't talked to Alex, he is literally a smart bot. It fools about three out of four people. That's a smart, smart agent. It's frighteningly good. So if you haven't had the chance, call Alex on our main number on our website.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show again, and thanks to everyone that tuned in. As always, please subscribe, leave us a review, share with anyone you know, and please keep building, keep pitching, keep scaling. Until next time, thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Pitch Build Scale. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast provider so you never miss an episode, and we'll see you next time.