The power of attention
#42

The power of attention

Justin:

Welcome to the panel where founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, cofounder of transistor.fm.

Jordan:

And I am Jordan Gal. I'm the cofounder at Hey Rosie, AI phone receptionist. And we've got a special

Justin:

cohost guest, Henry. Special guest hailing from New York, New York. He's been using computers for quite some time now. Founder of Steady, Henry Poydar. Welcome to the show.

Henry Poydar:

Thanks for having me, guys. I'm Henry Poydar. I'm the founder of Steady. Runsteady.com.

Justin:

Runsteady.com. And maybe just give a little background on what Steady is. Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

So Steady is a lightweight OS for teamwork.

Justin:

Okay.

Henry Poydar:

And what it does, it continuously distills updates and activities from your tools, as well as intentions and a human narrative around the work that's going on and the work that's going to happen. And then on the other end, it it produces, personalized intelligence that keeps teams and companies aligned. And today, that works for people and with tools and with agents, but now we're starting to introduce agents as first class teammates. So maybe

Justin:

we

Henry Poydar:

can talk about that a little today.

Jordan:

Wow. Okay.

Henry Poydar:

That's where the product is headed.

Jordan:

Yeah. You're the Mark Benioff announcement, I think it's all relevant, you know, to see Salesforce open up and basically say, agents now have full access to everything is is very interesting to kind of you know, for that, the leader in the CRM space to push that concept out will have an impact.

Henry Poydar:

There's been some really interesting announcements. I don't know if you guys have followed Linear's story.

Justin:

No. No. Tell us about

Jordan:

He's so thoughtful. I think that founder is so is really, really helpful to read because because his product sits right in that right in that spot of trying to figure out how all this stuff works. Yeah. I'm sure it's very applicable for you, Henry.

Henry Poydar:

Same. And what's what's interesting for me is we we work in cycles. So the other folks in my company, they come from Basecamp, so they know about how cycles work. Don't if you guys have heard of The it

Justin:

full Shape Up process? Full Shape Up.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. We follow that sort of. And this is the first cycle where we stopped using linear.

Justin:

Okay.

Henry Poydar:

And the reason for that is that we are all Claude coding, and we're using actually a plug in from Every called Compound Engineering.

Justin:

Okay. Yeah. I'm familiar with it. Yeah. And know the folks at Every?

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. You know the folks Every? Cool. Well, they built a that that's an awesome plugin, and we've sort of standardized around it. And so what's happening is we are sort of controlling the robots, and so there's not this need to break things into these very discrete tasks and then hand them off between us because we're sort of sitting one level above that.

Henry Poydar:

And actually, our product is handling the coordination quite well without having to have that project management layer. And that was that sort of coincided with, the the founder of Linear putting out a blog post that said I don't if this is the one you're the thing you saw, Jordan, that said issue tracking is dead. Yes. Okay.

Justin:

So he Which which

Henry Poydar:

his product is is

Jordan:

issue tracking. Right.

Henry Poydar:

An issue tracking company, and he wrote a blog post that said issue tracking is dead,

Justin:

which I thought

Henry Poydar:

was pretty brave. You know, it was a hook to get you reading the whole thing. Sure. And I kept that, and he did. Great.

Jordan:

Yeah. May as well go with it instead of fighting. Yes. Makes sense.

Henry Poydar:

But the larger point that he's making there is that as the agents the waterline for what these things can execute, you know, goes up, the need for these kind of these human to human handoffs at the issue level sort of, like, disappears. And so what they're trying to do is and I think a lot of SaaS apps will head in this direction. Instead of linear being a an interface that I go to and interact with and move issues around, it's just gonna be another agent that's on my team,

Jordan:

right? That's

Henry Poydar:

managing the work that maybe the coding agents are doing. Maybe the, I don't know what his grand vision is. Maybe it's lit the actual linear agents are doing the work. I'm not sure about that. But, but the very least, the linear agent is gonna handle all those handoffs because we don't that can be automated.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about this a bit more. This was on the topic list, but this is fascinating.

Justin:

I mean, there's even let's go further on it because there's also this idea of we used to ask a lot of what ifs in planning. Like, oh, what if this happens? Oh, we need to be prepared for this. Or we need and it seems like now things have gotten a lot more fluid, a lot more like we don't need a six month plan. We need a plan for the next month.

Justin:

How is that working out on your guys' teams? Actually, Jordan, why don't you start? How are you doing all that kind of stuff?

Jordan:

Our our VP of product, who's now the only person in product because we we only need one person in product.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jordan:

She is very proactively it's I admire it because if you're in that position, you kind of have one of two responses. One is to clam up and deny reality and ignore it and hold on for dear life. Yeah. And the other option is to go with it and be more flexible. So I remember I had some fear around her role and how she would handle it.

Jordan:

But Jess is kind of every single time I have that worry, she surprises me to the upside every single time. So this is no different. And and now it's it's trying to find what the right balance is. Basically, what level of fidelity is required in a product spec before it's handed over to engineering. And even the word before is being challenged because it's kind of back and forth and back and forth as opposed to here it is.

Jordan:

It's perfect and it's end state. All the requirements and all the things and all the details, all the decisions have made. Yeah. And then it goes over to engineering. It's not really necessary.

Jordan:

Yeah. And so what does that back and forth look like? And so our two engineers are very clawed pilled, and they have been working out, and it requires an enormous amount of, like, empathy and and good assumption on the other party's behalf. Yeah. Because you're like, you're giving me this.

Jordan:

It's too much. It's okay that you gave me too much. I understand that you don't know how much to give me. Mhmm. Or it's not enough.

Jordan:

Let me give you feedback that this isn't enough detail. Or when you get it back to your desk and you start to view things, don't be mad at me that I went off in a different direction because you didn't you you didn't give me enough direction and so you gave me that leeway. And so the back and forth is not, well, this isn't what I asked for. It is, why'd you do this? Oh, that's kind of a good idea.

Jordan:

Let's go with that. Let's eliminate that. Don't have ego about me saying eliminate this. And then our engineers are like, well, there's no ego. Didn't do anything.

Jordan:

I just wrote some words. If you want me to change it, it doesn't hurt. So it requires like very good human connection in order to keep the fluid process between product and engineering. That's that's how our experience has been over the last few months.

Justin:

Yeah. And and so if the old thing the old way was to throw it over a very tall fence, And now are we tearing down the fence? And the way it feels to me is that this moment the only way I know how to deal with this moment is we've just increased communication. Like, more Zoom calls, more like, let's get on a call. Let's really communicate.

Justin:

Henry, how are you dealing with this at Steady? I I'm assuming this is what Steady is partly for. So and I also feel like as much as I'm embracing this moment, I'm also kind of like a little bit off kilter. I remember the old way of doing it. Yeah, how are you seeing this, dealing with it?

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. I mean, I think we're we're all kind of in the same boat. Like, you know, work is kind of getting reinvented in front of our eyes.

Justin:

Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

But I think, you know, there's there's certain ways of working that haven't changed that I think are gonna apply to the new way of working. And namely, I think kind of what you're referring to, Justin, is in the history of of knowledge work, there's always been a need to balance accountability and autonomy. Mhmm. Right? There needs to be some way that those things are kept in check because if you're too high on the accountability side, you're into kind of micromanagement territory.

Henry Poydar:

Yep. And if you're too high on the autonomy side, you're into the wrong thing. Now in the in our world today, going too high on the on the autonomy side with these agents just means, like, you know, like polar bears are getting killed. Right? Like, it's it's you're burning tokens, you're building the wrong because these things are the terminator.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. Right? And they will go and build the wrong thing. So there there's a need to kinda put those in check, and that's the problem I think about all the time and I talk to our customers about

Justin:

Mhmm.

Henry Poydar:

All the time. But, you know, that's sort of in parallel with where we are in the, I think, the AgenTek movie, which is and and, you know, this would be a great I'd love to hear Brian's opinion about this. But, you know, I there's I think right now, we're kind of in single player mode. Meaning,

Justin:

Okay. Like Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

You know, Oprah comes out, everybody gets an agent. Right? Like Mhmm. You know, I've got co work, Jordan's got co work, Brian's got open claws. But Brian's got, like, 10 open claws.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. And and we are we have our assistants kind of sitting behind us, right, and doing our thing.

Justin:

You know,

Henry Poydar:

I probably have, like, six terminal windows open right now with Mhmm. Code running, doing different label different things.

Justin:

Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

But that's that's not the the conduit for communicating that you're talking about

Justin:

Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

Jordan. That's still happening through me and through other people who have these agents behind them. But I think where it's and and that's sort of like working. It's like, okay. Well, I'm working faster.

Henry Poydar:

And then there's there's things to manage around that, like, I can't be the the slot portal either. That's something we talked about actually in our last retro. It's like, what is the human narrative that you put around this stuff? And what's good and what's bad?

Justin:

I know

Henry Poydar:

we were going talk about the Gen Z thing maybe. Yeah. But you have to have some kind of you know, guidelines or standards and we're all reinventing them Yeah. Right now. But that but that's that's the single player mode.

Henry Poydar:

And I think, you know, we're gonna see in the later half of the year and we're starting to see this already is like, how do you deal with the multiplayer agents? Meaning, and this is where, you know, I was talking about agents as teammates, right? Like, how do you deal with the the success bot that is off, like, monitoring the all the customer service announcements, looking at customer health scores, producing report, maybe putting it in our daily briefs or in a Slack channel or something like that. How is that thing how do you keep the context window fresh for that thing? And I think that's the problem we need to solve Because right now, I don't think any of those things are working.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it feels like I I I've been trying to contextualize all the steps. Right? So it's like step one stuff I would normally ask our web developer to do, like, hey, fix this thing, do this thing, whatever.

Justin:

It feels like that's step one. Like, hey, oh, instead of asking a person to do that, I could just ask Claude to fix that. That's low level work. We can get Claude to fix that. Feels like the next stage after that is and again, it's a lot of this isn't very social.

Justin:

A lot of this is just me talking to my agent. And I've just started experimenting, putting some of that public in Slack, like at Claude. Hey, fix this thing, which review you know, shows it to everybody else. Like, oh, we have this thing working now. It's doing this kind of work.

Justin:

It feels like the next level is Claude, on a repeating basis, I want you to be bringing stuff to me. You know, I want I want your daily report to me about what I should be thinking about as a founder. And then it feels like the other level after that is opening that up to the team. But it still feels hazy to me. Jordan, do you have a

Henry Poydar:

Well, I I have an opinion about that.

Justin:

Okay. I wanna hear it.

Henry Poydar:

And the opinion goes back to, again, like this balance of accountability and autonomy. Now how did we solve that before? We solved it through this is what the steady product is today. We solved it through a continuous loop of intention, declaring intentions or plans and accomplishments Mhmm. And keeping them going.

Henry Poydar:

And then that compounds over time because you see what worked and didn't work and you learn. And I didn't come up with that, right? Like, the agile methodology is based on that. The commander's intent in the military is based on that. That's how newsrooms work.

Henry Poydar:

So my opinion about the answer to this is to put agents in that loop. I think that's what you're getting at. So if an agent is gonna like, Henry's gonna declare his intentions, and the agent's gonna declare them too. And the whole team is gonna see that. And that gives me, as a manager of the agent, a chance to course correct them in the same way that I would a human because in the fact, kind of, the agent is telling you the future.

Henry Poydar:

This is the thing I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go burn tokens on this particular thing, and I'm gonna come back with this particular report or this or fulfill your specific request. And then, okay. You know, now that you've got all I mean, it comes back to having those if you treat it like a teammate and they're aligned in the same way that the that people are Yeah. I think we get closer to actually how we solve this problem.

Henry Poydar:

Now I'm not I'm not saying that we treat agents as like anthropomorphic teammates as like bot, you know, like

Jordan:

humanoid robots. It's to understand that way though.

Henry Poydar:

But I'm just have like, their interface language is like is English. I mean, it's like they're LLM. They're based on LLM. So Mhmm. They can surface intent, and they can also absorb context in the same way and readjust if they're truly good autonomous agents and not just like a An explainable Right?

Justin:

Yeah. What what's your take on this, Jordan? What how are you processing some of this?

Jordan:

So two things come to mind. The first thing is that it feels very achievable in a small team. Yeah. Because it is just these small number of individuals with a whole bunch of new leverage for each individual's, you know, hub gets a bunch of spokes.

Henry Poydar:

Mhmm.

Jordan:

And there's not based on their effort and their knowledge. And, like, that's very understandable. Five, six people, 10 people, everyone gets these superpowers. Everyone kind of does what they're supposed to do, what they always wanted to do, but they do more of it faster.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jordan:

I can, like, wrap my mind around that.

Justin:

No you

Jordan:

know, no That's a

Justin:

good way to put it.

Jordan:

I I don't know. I don't even I'm not even sure if I'm that interested in what happens when you have hundreds of people. Mhmm. Because it feels like a different problem entirely. And I think that's the three of us have small software companies, but, Henry, you're solving problems for large companies.

Jordan:

And I think that's kind of where you look out into basically bigger topics. Big bigger problems to solve that we are not confronting yet. Mhmm.

Justin:

Yeah. How how are you seeing that, Henry? I mean, that's that's the like, just being in this bubble, it's hard enough to navigate it with six people, honestly. Like, me and my cofounder had to go through some fights to get to where we're at. Then you got people people are just that's six people.

Jordan:

Some adopting, some don't adopt, others love it, others hate it. So it's it's even complicated at that level. But it feels like you can, like it's not that it's not that it's not that different, but the goals are similar. You can just get there faster. The the second thing that I was gonna bring up and and I wanna ask you about is, like, the the business outcomes.

Jordan:

Because, you know, I'm not a developer and I'm kind of watching this unfold and create super humans out of my team members. And what but but I it's not that I don't care, but what I care a lot more about is what does it mean for the business? What does it mean for the outcome and the speed? And that part of it, if there's anything that I'm feeling right now is that marketing and go to market is just way behind. To see the leverage on the development side and product side and design and then look over at marketing, it feels like marketing's in the stone ages.

Jordan:

And right now it feels very immature. We're like, oh, I figured out how to, you know, use this thing called Larry and post an enormous amount of AI slop onto social platforms.

Henry Poydar:

Like Yes.

Jordan:

That's not good enough. Mhmm. And there are efforts being made in go to market to improve, but it's it's just not nearly the same.

Justin:

Yeah. So, Henry, there's a there's a three different things you could touch on there. What what's your response?

Henry Poydar:

Well, I I think yeah. So there's the question about how do small companies like ours and Teams work with these things.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Henry Poydar:

And I

Justin:

agree that different than big companies?

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. What but I could tell you what it's like at big companies by talking you know, there is a tremendous amount of FOMO. There is What was that mean?

Jordan:

The big companies are jealous of the speed of the small companies kind of thing?

Henry Poydar:

No. I would say the employees there are are are jealous of not be or not jealous or fearful of not being completely up to speed with latest and greatest so that they could be effective in their role. I mean, they're incentive incentivize to climb a ladder just like every other human. Right? And so, you know, the FOMO is around being made irrelevant.

Henry Poydar:

Mhmm. You know, like Lenny's podcast came out. It's a similar thing to Lenny. Right? He they had an episode with Keith Rabaugh

Justin:

Mhmm.

Henry Poydar:

And he said, the the product management podcast had a had a had an episode where they said product management go is going away. Right? Mhmm.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. Oh,

Jordan:

Keith is good at audience doing that.

Henry Poydar:

He's like listening to this and what we do. And meanwhile, on the infrastructure side at these bigger companies, now we this is something we don't kinda deal with because we're like, you know, we'll do we'll do our thing. I mean, we are SOC two I should say we're SOC two type two certified. We're audit

Jordan:

Brought to you by Delve. Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

But at bigger companies, it's kind of like everybody's bringing it's like back when everybody was bringing their iPhone to work and, you know, had their calendars on and the IT guys like, what are you doing? How do we lock this down? How do we figure this out? And now at q one twenty twenty six, you know, I talked to some of my customers and they've got OpenCaught instances running on their machines. And I'm like,

Jordan:

went too far.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. Don't do that,

Justin:

you know.

Henry Poydar:

But they are, you know, there I mean, there is I can't tell you how many engineering managers that I talk to are doing the chief of of of staff AI thing, right, somehow. Mhmm. Co work usually, where they've got a thing, they've got all this MCP stuff and they're getting a daily brief in the morning. You know, so so that's happening and I'm, you know, and meanwhile, I've seen that happen at companies that have a policy of no external AI.

Justin:

Oh, wow.

Henry Poydar:

So, you know, it is this moment when people are are experimenting with because they're self motivated and incentivized to understand this technology. Yeah. But at the same time, kind of like we were talking about before, Jordan, the the infra is kind of like lumbering along and Yeah. And trying to keep up with the with the pace of change, which is faster than any anything I've seen with other technologies in my career.

Justin:

It's funny. You just said a few things that I wanna that are different topics that I wanna bring up because you can just let's let's actually

Henry Poydar:

fast There's another episode here, right, on this marketing and AI thing, John.

Justin:

I mean

Henry Poydar:

I mean, that's a whole another

Justin:

I've I've got

Henry Poydar:

more. So much. I deliberately skipped that,

Justin:

by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's a lot there.

Jordan:

It's it's less interesting than than development right now. It's it's not there yet, but you can see it it's coming. There's too there's too much value.

Justin:

All the

Henry Poydar:

meals are gone. Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah. Although, I I'm always I'm always, partly because it's self serving, but all of these AI founders, it seems their primary marketing is to go on podcasts and to buy popular podcasts. So the in some ways, I'm still feeling like the future of marketing is human, lots of friction, lots of old school, lots of focusing on what worked in the past. I actually wish I would love to see what Steve Jobs would have done in this moment.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah.

Justin:

What do you guys think he would have done? Because we're talking about, in some ways, like, tearing down the walls and some ways, like, now everybody's fluid and talking. How do you think Steve Jobs would be operating Apple at this moment in an AI age? Do either of you have a take on that?

Henry Poydar:

I I I can so I was talking about this with somebody the other day. I think in this moment, Jobs would have somehow jumped in well, by the way, let's ignore the fact that I don't think he would have let some of these things happen that have happened

Justin:

Sure.

Henry Poydar:

Since he was gone. Right? Like, once on the product side? Yeah. But I think there would be, some sort of well crafted agent product.

Henry Poydar:

It would be a personal agent something. It might be baked into to iOS something Yeah. That would that felt like as embedded in my life as an iPhone does Mhmm. And not in the way that they're sort of doing it now. And I don't think they blew it with AI, but I they're they're do they're taking a different path and, you know, maybe he would have done that too.

Henry Poydar:

But I think there would be some sort of, like, thing that we would be talking about. Yeah. And it wouldn't be a pin. It wouldn't it might not even be a physical product, but it might be just some, autonomous kind of piece of software thing that we have that becomes our it's sort of like the open claw for the rest of us, which is typically a thing that Yeah. That Apple would do.

Henry Poydar:

I don't know what you think, George.

Justin:

Do do you think he would change the culture? So if if if AI has shaken the way that we think about doing product development in our little companies, and Steve was kind of the prototypical opinionated, sees the vision, design first person, do you think he would have been adjusting the culture the same way we're trying to adjust our cultures? Either of I you have

Jordan:

don't know if it's mature enough yet. It feels like it's in an early chaotic you know, the the iPhone was not the first phone. And it's almost like they waited a little bit to see where it was going, and then fully understood, okay. Where it's going is one device with everything, and that's what we're gonna do. But I don't think they would be getting away from their general approach of a closed system looped into every piece of hardware Yeah.

Jordan:

Of their own. And that doesn't seem to be where AI is right now. AI feels like it's kind of open and wild west and uncertain. Mhmm. And and when I think of Jobs and Apple, I I think of consumer first.

Jordan:

Mhmm. So the the individual I mean, I I think you have this as a topic coming up. Most people aren't there yet. Yeah. Most people aren't like, we're we're at the very very edge and we everything.

Jordan:

Yeah. But I don't know what small handful of percentage points that actually means. And sure, it's accelerating. But in many ways, the pop culture understanding of AI is like this fearful thing and political debate about data centers and job. Like, no one really knows what is happening or what's on the way or if it's gonna be good or bad.

Jordan:

Politicians are using it to their own advantage and media talks about it and you listen to their stories and you're like, clearly don't know what you're talking about. So surface level. Right? Like, the podcast I listen to are talking about, like, we're we're talking about right now. I when I overhear my wife's podcasts where she's not in tech, it's very basic surface level stuff.

Jordan:

Oh, OpenAI did this and

Justin:

Yeah. It it doesn't seem

Jordan:

like it's matured yet into the the public domain.

Henry Poydar:

I I will say though, my, you know, my 87 year old father has an iPhone. He's loved the iPhone, you know, got it when it first came out. Mhmm. And he is he has ChatGPT on his iPhone, and that's and I think there's a lot of people who are doing that, and I think there's, you know, there's there's a space there that Apple probably should be owning somehow. Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

I don't know if it's a ChatGPT client or something like that or whatever. But, like, he's not using Siri. He's using this other thing. And, you know, it's, by the way, a constant pain for me. Like, I try to educate him on what's real and what's not and the notion of hallucination and all of that.

Justin:

Yeah. And how sycophantic these interfaces are. We've talked about this a bit. Let's just bring it up now because I've got four kids, 16, 18, 20, and 23. My kids are not a fan of AI.

Justin:

And when I talk to their friends, they don't seem to be a fan of AI. There seems to be a real gap here. I don't think it's all because of AI, but a lot of anti AI sentiment. And in a sense, we can understand why that might be true. So here's some things I've heard.

Justin:

AI is a thing for old people, and it's making everything worse. It strips the challenge out of life. So the struggle struggle of learning to write, learning to code, etcetera, which is where a lot of our personal meaning is. It makes you soft. If you never have to do hard things, how can you develop?

Justin:

And it's removing these entry level positions that typically is how you got your your foothold. And often when I'm telling them about my excitement about AI, they're like, yeah, but dad, you built a successful business. So, yeah, you are now the boomer in my life that's done everything right and is now lecturing me on, well, kids, if you just get the AI, you'll be home. You'll be fine. Know?

Jordan:

Learn to code.

Justin:

Yeah. Learn to code or or pull up your bootstraps or whatever. Henry, what are you feeling about this?

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. So I I have twin boys. They're 18, so they're firmly in the the

Justin:

Gen And Z

Henry Poydar:

and, you know, they are both freshman in college. I ask them about AI all the time. Mhmm. And I I would characterize their attitude towards me is is kind of like that famous Don Draper in the elevator

Jordan:

meme. I don't think about you at all.

Henry Poydar:

What is it? I don't think about you at all.

Justin:

Oh, I don't think about you at all. Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. So they're kind of like yeah. They're the like to like I think when I was when I was thinking about answering this question, I think there's, like, some notion of novelty that we've latched on

Justin:

Mhmm. That

Henry Poydar:

they're not latching on to.

Justin:

Mhmm. You

Henry Poydar:

know, and actually brought a I brought a little costume for this

Justin:

Oh, yeah.

Henry Poydar:

Here. There we go. It's for this novelty.

Justin:

I'm ready. See if

Henry Poydar:

you guys get it or not. You guys know what this is?

Justin:

I mean

Henry Poydar:

Do you guys don't know what this is?

Justin:

I don't know what this is, but Okay. Okay. I don't know what this is. So Henry has a This is

Henry Poydar:

for the Gen z audience then.

Justin:

Okay. Oh, okay. So I'll put a hat on. Yeah. For the listener.

Jordan:

Yeah. There's a white piece of paper coming off the hat. There's a yellow triangle in the middle surrounded by a bunch of black polka dots.

Henry Poydar:

That's right.

Justin:

Yeah. Triangle man?

Henry Poydar:

That's right. So there is a a band out of Quebec

Justin:

Mhmm.

Henry Poydar:

Out of Montreal that has just gone viral.

Justin:

Okay. Are these the people with the spots? Oh. And they're playing and Okay. Okay.

Justin:

Yes. Yes. I know about these. Yes. Okay.

Henry Poydar:

They play microtones and they're doing and it's it's like it's a completely fascinating awesome thing to watch. They're incredible musicians, but they've also added this novelty piece to it, which is just fascinating where they're in these costumes and they've got this their own language or or or this language in. Yeah. It is it's it's like in the comments on all this, it's like it's like music two point o. Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

It's like the way to think about it.

Justin:

I had clips of this sent to me by three different people.

Jordan:

Yes. I I watched good two, three minutes of it and I was like, this is just some cool art, but I don't know what's going on. Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

But but that that's viral right now. And by the way, it's not viral with Henry, Justin, and Jordan. It's viral with Gen z. Yeah. And and, like and and why is that?

Henry Poydar:

Like, because there's novelty there Mhmm. And they're breaking the mold, they're doing something different. And I think

Justin:

Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

That that that AI and, like, having automation come into their lives, they're sort of, like I I don't know. They're used to it in a sense.

Justin:

They just

Jordan:

haven't they haven't suffered.

Henry Poydar:

They haven't suffered.

Jordan:

We we have been suffering manually for decades. Mhmm. And then this comes along, of course, we see it as very novel. Yes. It's it's kind of like a transition period.

Jordan:

Everyone makes the analogy to horse and buggy to car. But we don't know what it felt like when that kind of invention came along and you Mhmm. Literally didn't have you could get places much more easily. Is that what we're experiencing? But then when you come along and the cars are already invented, you're like, yes, so what?

Jordan:

Just drive there. It's not a big deal. Is is that

Justin:

is that

Henry Poydar:

what it is? I mean, because all it's doing for them as far as I can tell when I talk to my sons about this is it's compressing the timelines. Mhmm. You know, like, and I remember when the Internet first came out, like, couldn't do research on the Internet to do like, figure out how to, you know, write web applications. So I go like Barnes and Noble and like find a book and like, you know, like Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

And like now that whole timeline has just been compressed into like a like a prompt.

Jordan:

So they're not impressed. Oh, so you can write an app with English. Okay.

Henry Poydar:

So Yeah. You've compressed a thing that just take longer, which is what technology does.

Jordan:

Yeah. It's funny that they don't appreciate the opportunity because they don't appreciate the the novelty in some ways.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. One it's one take on it.

Jordan:

Well, Justin, I was prepared to, like, talk trash about your kid's feedback assuming that it was gonna be this shallow critique.

Justin:

Yeah. But

Jordan:

it's it's not. The fact that they're latching on to, like, well, it takes away some meaning because it compresses struggle is actually a very wise Yeah. Way to look at it.

Justin:

I I think this is because you said they haven't suffered. And I think one concern is we know that suffering has value. We know that it actually was incredibly helpful for us. And as a parent, frankly, I've always struggled with sometimes making things too easy for my kids because the suffering was so hard. But then having my wife go, Justin, we we gotta they have to have some suffering, but you don't want them to suffer too much.

Justin:

You don't want undue suffering. And so it feels like we're in this real interesting time where, of course, people suffered less once you know, you could plug your computer into the Internet. And then we suffered even the friction got removed even more once we got broadband. But with that, we also saw the worst thing about that. Once we got broadband, we also got the worst things, you know, Internet addiction and way more porn and all sorts of things that are that's tough on kids.

Justin:

And now I'm worried about, are we just gonna keep raising the floor, reducing all the suffering until there's no suffering less left? And now we're completely devoid of meaning. What do you think, Henry?

Henry Poydar:

I think the kids are alright. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think I think I don't I don't think they're they're necessarily shying away from suffering. Mhmm.

Henry Poydar:

I think they're they're I mean, curiosity to learn new things is, you know, that's gonna transcend generations. I don't think that gets cut off because of technology. I think though, I mean, you're right in a sense. They're just, they're probably not gonna suffer in the same way. I wouldn't characterize anything that I've experienced in my life as suffering like that because it's longer maybe.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. Do That's

Jordan:

what it feels like.

Henry Poydar:

Thing you're talking about that is the most harmful or dangerous or gives me pause is the notion of filling up otherwise reflective space. I think like now in today's world, like that's gonna have to be on purpose.

Jordan:

Yeah. Deli deliberate work.

Justin:

You have to make up your own friction. Yeah. So let me use a a real example from my son. So my youngest son, he is very interested in science, electrical engineering, all sorts of things. Learns a lot on YouTube, is just fascinated to dive into hard things.

Justin:

He's got Raspberry Pis and Arduinos and everything.

Henry Poydar:

Kids are alright.

Justin:

He well, he comes up and he's just angry. And, you know, like emotional. Right? And he goes, I hate I hate this life I'm in. I wish I was born in 1980 like you, or I wish I was born in 1990.

Justin:

Like I'm like, well, why? And he said, I'm interested in learning assembly, which is, like, one of the hardest things to learn. And he's like, I want that because I want a challenge. I want to have something in front of me that feels impossible, and I wanna climb a difficult mountain to get there. But what's the point when some chud this is what he says, you know, some chud can just type it into ChatGPT and can get the same result in less time?

Justin:

And it'd be interesting to hear what you respond to him. I actually made him a bet, a $500,000 bet. Maybe I shouldn't have bet this much. But

Jordan:

My sister's doing real well.

Justin:

Part of it was to part of it was to make a point, and I could be wrong about this. I might have to pay him 500,000. But I said, listen, Liam. I said, if you apply yourself like, you if you'd honestly wanna learn assembly and embedded firmware and all this kind of stuff, if you go deep on that, if you are applying stuff, you find a mentor or you go to college or something, and for the next four years, that's all you're doing. And you're learning how to do it by hand.

Justin:

You're learning that you're you're actually suffering a little bit to get to that information. You're being reflective. You're having all of these things. I guarantee you in five years so after you graduate, in five years, if you have applied yourself, there will be a job for you where someone is looking for someone like you. And I give them a few examples.

Justin:

Like, in the future, there's gonna be companies and organizations, governments and banks who can't use LLMs. We all we think everything's gonna use LLMs. There's gonna be things where there's security concerns, where, you know, the government's like, we can't have anything touch only a human can touch this system where you're gonna still have to write things by hand. But even if it's not true to have someone who's thoughtful, who's really learned this stuff, I'm just convinced that there will still be a job for you. So that was the 500.

Justin:

I said, if that doesn't happen, I will just give you $500,000 and you can invest it and, you know, live off that. But what do you guys think about that? His his his struggle and then, you know, what's the hope there?

Henry Poydar:

Well, I think the advice is right because, you know, think about assembly language. I mean, that before AI, before chat, you know, that problem was already there. Mhmm. Like, we've already figured out how to abstract away so that we don't have to write assembly language.

Justin:

Mhmm. Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

Right? But people are still learning it and fig you know, because they have to diagnose it, you know.

Justin:

And there's still use cases for it. Like, some there's definitely people at Boeing that have to learn some of these low level languages in order to make those planes and jets fly, I'm assuming.

Jordan:

Yeah. Yeah. My instinct is is to say that that mountain no longer needs climbing, but there are new mountains.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah.

Jordan:

You got to figure out which mountains to there are a lot of things that became irrelevant for us as we matured into adulthood. Mhmm. That just were not worth climbing because they were solved in some way or made obsolete. But it's not like we we don't have new mountains to challenge us. Yeah.

Jordan:

Yeah. So I I would be worried about I I agree that there's almost certainly no downside in becoming obsessed with something and going deeper than 99.9% of people. Mhmm. There's always payoff at the end of that tunnel. One way or another.

Jordan:

But it does feel it feels more risky to do that in a field that might just not be worth climbing.

Justin:

Mhmm. And you can you

Jordan:

can you can be sad about it, but there are people do things the hard way on purpose now out of love, out of as hobbies.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jordan:

And and they're rewarded for it very often. The the the people that do furniture building with no machinery whatsoever are in incredibly high demand. Or as like a random example. But I don't know. For the most part, I I think you gotta find new challenges that are worth it.

Jordan:

And and the idea that there are that it's all solved. And it's all soft. And there's Mhmm. There's no struggle left. I think that's premature.

Justin:

Okay. Let me bring up another related thing. I'm worried about the younger generation. I think there are some challenges that we just didn't have. So I think about someone like Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel, incredibly successful.

Justin:

If you ask Taylor, like, how did you get into this? Well, Taylor grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. He goes to college for, I think, electrical engineering, does a two year diploma or four year degree. I can't remember which. And who hires him?

Justin:

Well, a local trucking company at the time was hiring dozens and dozens of these graduates from Little Rock as dot net programmers. Taylor had never been a dot net programmer before. His degree is in something else. And he gets his first step. Somebody gives them the opportunity.

Justin:

Right? And if you talk to kids, like, as much as I want them to have, like, all the foresight and just kind of know where to go and like, they don't know what they don't know. And often they don't know until they get that first job and they can kind of look around and go, oh, here's what an opportunity looks like or whatever. I'm worried that this lack of entry level jobs is really going to It's going to The kids are going to suffer for it. There's just not going to be the same opportunities.

Justin:

And the only advice I can give, you know, when we have people, we have young graduates coming to this tech meetup I do every month, and they're like trying to figure out how to get their first job. The only advice I can give them is I've said, listen, this sucks. No one's hiring juniors right now. And so you're going to have to bootstrap your own senior engineer path, meaning you're going to have to choose a lane. And so whether it's cybersecurity or whatever it is, you're gonna have to choose a lane and you're going to have to bootstrap your own senior engineer level experience and education.

Justin:

But the challenge is it's so hard to know how to choose a land, even like Jordan was like, like, could choose a land be wrong. And until you get into that first job, it's hard to see it. So what how are you guys thinking about that? Any thoughts?

Jordan:

I'm relieved that my kids are a bit younger, and they have a few a few years. Honestly, my my oldest yeah. My kids are 10, 12, 14. So my oldest is 14 and a few years away from school and then a few years away from the job market. And I feel like it needs to sort itself out a little bit.

Jordan:

And I feel fortunate in general that we have that padding. Mhmm. I don't think it's gonna be as dramatic and bad as we fear. Mhmm. These things have a way of sorting themselves out.

Jordan:

The market sorts itself out,

Henry Poydar:

really Mhmm.

Jordan:

In terms of just supply and demand for roles and companies and services and so on. I'm sure if we looked at census numbers of just the sheer quantity and percentage of the job markets in individual fields, it shifts over time. And we may just not need as many software developers. I have a feeling we're gonna need even more.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jordan:

But it'll shift. But I don't think catastrophically, yes, if you get kinda caught in the middle, you may need to choose a different profession or you know, and and that, again, has a way of sorting itself out.

Henry Poydar:

Mhmm.

Jordan:

I think I think extreme agency is the thing that I

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. Try to

Jordan:

instill in in my kids. There is no you can put yourself into a victim role Mhmm. And you are powerless, and that's actually the enemy. That's actually the only way to lose is to admit you are 25 years old and there's nothing you can do. Like, that's just an unacceptable conclusion to get to.

Jordan:

Mhmm. As long as you don't get to that conclusion, you you can figure it out.

Justin:

Yeah. I we could probably leave this, but I I I do I I'm a I'm a highly actualized self proactive individual. But when I think about myself at 18, that kid had no fucking clue. And the only thing that gave me a clue was people giving me a chance. I think it was oh, I can't remember if it was Ben Stiller or who it was.

Justin:

But, you know, often actors will say, man, the best thing that ever happened to me is someone gave me a job. And I I am just a little worried about this this this toehold thing that I think we all benefited from. And if it it is going away. I can see it in these young Comp Sci grads right now. Like, there's it's hard to get a job.

Justin:

Like Microsoft and Oracle and all they're not hiring juniors anymore. And it feels like, this whole generation is gonna really struggle with this.

Henry Poydar:

I think it really depends on where you are on the spectrum of shift versus, like, a 100% displacement. Right? And I think what what Jordan is saying, he's he's sounds like he's pro shift. Right? Mhmm.

Henry Poydar:

Yes. The comps the traditional junior Microsoft engineering job is going away. Mhmm. But I think, and I'm of this opinion too, I think there's a shift to something else and I think the toehold is gonna exist elsewhere. I really do.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. Yeah. Think Go ahead. You know, the the I went to engineering school and what I learned at engineering school was how to learn and be an engineer. Mhmm.

Henry Poydar:

Like, I have forgotten I have mechanical engineering degree. I have forgotten all that syntax. It has gone away. Yeah. So, like, software engineering was never like, coding was never a bottleneck.

Henry Poydar:

It's never about syntax. Mhmm. So I think there is I I just think those toeholds are gonna somehow be redistributed because there there's just a a need for that kind of decision making that's happening at the human level.

Jordan:

Mhmm. One possibility that negates a lot of our worry is non software companies hiring software roles. Mhmm. That that alone would have a dramatic dramatic shift on, I mean, software graduates, for example. Yes.

Jordan:

Oh, no. Software companies don't need as many people. Okay. But now law firms are gonna hire software engineers.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Jordan:

As just one example the other example that's easy to kind of point at is just cars. People drive cars for a living. There's literally tens I mean, millions and millions and millions of people drive for a living

Henry Poydar:

Mhmm.

Jordan:

In in ten, twenty years that just will not exist the same way at all. Those people are not just gonna, like, you know, starve. Yeah. It it'll shift. And a lot of what we're talking about is macro.

Jordan:

And I can't help but think micro first, meaning, like, my kids, my peeps. You know, and and everyone does the same thing. So everyone always ends up being less confident and more worried in the macro.

Henry Poydar:

Mhmm.

Jordan:

And more confident in the micro. Like, I'm not gonna let my kids just, like, you know, hit the wall and just not know what to do. But everyone's gonna do the same thing in their own households, in their own communities, in their own towns, and and so on. So that's part of how it starts to sort itself out. Everyone pursues their own self interest, and it doesn't just melt into oblivion and no jobs and depression.

Henry Poydar:

Well, you you also have to remember that I think we're also on the receiving end of some pretty incredible marketing that's happening at the front of

Jordan:

your

Henry Poydar:

model level. Mhmm.

Jordan:

In terms of convincing ourselves that everything's gonna be different, everything's gonna be amazing.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. That's in their best interest that, like, it's AGI is around the corner and all that.

Justin:

Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

I mean, the technology is amazing. It truly is, wonderful and but it's it's token generation. Mhmm. It's it's a probability machine based on the last, you know, incredibly sophisticated probability machine. So, yes.

Henry Poydar:

Awesome. But, like, the the you know, it's again, we're, like, we're in this this almost this environment where, like, you know, we are telling these kids, like, you're gonna this is gonna totally change. There's nothing for you, you know, like Mhmm. Because that's sort of in their best interest a little bit, which is kind of

Jordan:

Yeah. It's like, dad, how come you haven't doubled your MRR? Okay? If you're so smart, it's gonna change everything. How come your MRR isn't doubling?

Jordan:

No.

Justin:

I do want to move on. Maybe just to close this part off, what is some advice you would give a kid who's 18 to 25 right now, who's in this environment right now? What do you think they should be doing? What's a practical thing they should be doing?

Jordan:

I just think apathy is the enemy. Just find

Henry Poydar:

I stuff that agree with that. Mean, curiosity for learning, trying out new things. That's one thing. Again, what I really appreciated about an engineering degree is, like, it's it's kind of like this learning thing. I I encourage people to get an engineering degree.

Henry Poydar:

I don't I think maybe something that's syntax oriented is not a great idea.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

It's something that's

Jordan:

If you combine interest, passion, energy, and then you go in that direction, that that's when it becomes practical. Okay. Find a mentor. Find someone who's doing something that you think is awesome and reach out to them and try to work with them and make your way forward toward the thing you care about. I wish I had done more of that in my twenties instead of thinking that I knew what I wanted to do, and then realizing ten years later, like, I actually really into the Internet.

Jordan:

I should go in that direction. And I kind of burned ten years on on other things.

Justin:

Yeah. All right. That was good. I'm gonna send that clip to my kids and say, hey, won't listen to your old man, but listen to these old men.

Jordan:

Yeah. The old men have concluded that your kids are right. They're right. They're good.

Justin:

Alright. Let's let's do something a little bit fun. Jordan Gal, what is going on with this Alburge deal?

Henry Poydar:

Oh, yeah.

Justin:

What is going on?

Jordan:

Oh, my god. Look. You know, I just talked about passion. I just talked about things that interest you. Oh, man.

Jordan:

This my favorite. This stuff is my my favorite. Oh, okay. So alright. I'll I'll I'll try to explain my point of view on this.

Jordan:

The first reaction is, oh, another sign of a bubble. People are doing ridiculous things. Right? Like Kodak turning into, a crypto thing for the attention online. Okay.

Jordan:

Fine. The story that we

Justin:

Explain what happened. Like, what what is The

Jordan:

story that we see, like, you know, the the from the outside looking in, the picture that we're getting is Allbirds, I'm wearing their shoes right now, is a shoe company. It was one of the first direct to consumer darlings selling shoes direct online. Yeah. They picked up an enormous amount of attention. Everybody loved them.

Jordan:

They were cool for a minute, and all the tech people were wearing them. Mhmm. Then they went public. I think they reached a valuation of, like, $4,000,000,000. So, you know, amazing success.

Jordan:

Amazing. And unfortunately, the business didn't work out. Things got competitive. Customer acquisition became difficult. Lifetime value wasn't what they wanted it to be.

Jordan:

They opened retail stores that ended up burning money and not working. And sadly, the company didn't work out and therefore was moving toward bankruptcy. Mhmm. So the story that people are seeing and talking about and commenting on is that it is absurd for a shoe company to just wake up one day and say, you know what? We're actually an AI company, and, oh, would you look at that?

Jordan:

Our stock price went up 800%. And isn't this Investors. Okay. So okay. So I'm gonna

Henry Poydar:

tell. Right?

Justin:

Who's investing in that?

Jordan:

I'm gonna

Justin:

Yeah. Get

Jordan:

Okay. So that's what we see. Yeah. And that's fun to comment on because it's absurd. Yes.

Jordan:

Here's what my interpretation of what really happened.

Justin:

Okay.

Jordan:

This is a reverse merger into a public company shell. What what that means is the most valuable asset that Allbirds Incorporated, the the legal company owned, became the fact that they're a publicly listed company with access to the capital markets. And in that situation, when that is more valuable than your shoe company, you admit defeat, but instead of going into bankruptcy, why would you do that? Mhmm.

Brian Casel:

What you do

Jordan:

is you take your shoe related intellectual property and assets, you sell them off to AEG, I believe, which is an ecommerce holding company that manages a bunch of ecommerce stores. A lot of brands that we would know, I think they own things. I don't know if it's the same company, but a ladies holding company's own, like, Toys R Us. Things that are, like, very recognizable, and they manage them and they know what they're doing, and they're gonna make more money selling Albert Shoots. Fantastic.

Jordan:

What you've done is you've taken your IP and your inventory, and you've turned that into $39,000,000 in cash. There's a good start. Start. Mhmm. So now your investors, your board, your management team, you know, the people involved in Albers Incorporated, now all of a sudden, you're much better off than a zero.

Jordan:

You're far better off. You're $39,000,000 better off. Yeah. Then what you do is you go out and you find and I'm saying you do it's tough to know who the parties are and who's involved and who's making the right? But these are human beings.

Jordan:

People in companies making these decisions.

Justin:

Is it the original leadership team?

Jordan:

I I very unlikely. Yeah. Because those people don't want don't care to run an AI infrastructure company. Okay. Yeah.

Jordan:

So now you have a public shell company. You have Allbirds Incorporated that is no longer in the shoe business. But it has access to the capital markets, it's gotten all the filings, it's gotten all the legal render, all the stuff is buttoned up. You are a public company. So what you do is you go out and you find an institutional investor and you say if you can commit $50,000,000 to us as an investment, we will use that to buy hardware to sell to the open market that needs more inference.

Justin:

Mhmm. Right?

Jordan:

What the institutional investor then does is say, great. I will commit $50,000,000. I'm actually gonna give you $5,000,000. And in exchange for that, you are gonna give me a convertible structure, a convertible note. I'm gonna lend you $50,000,000.

Jordan:

And in exchange, that's gonna be convertible at your current stock price minus 20%. So I'm gonna buy $50,000,000 worth of stock at $2 a share. Then you're gonna go out to the press and you're make a big announcement. Everyone's gonna make fun of you, but you're gonna get a lot of attention. Guess what?

Jordan:

AI infrastructure and selling that as a commodity to the open market that needs inference, it's a much better business than a shoe business. Mhmm. And that business is totally fine to value at a $100,150,000,000. So the stock price goes up to 20. The management team now has a capitalized public company with money and access to more money and a lot of attention.

Jordan:

Mhmm. And the institutional investor just made a ridiculous upside because they put $5,000,000 in cash, made a promise, and is now able to exercise $50,000,000 worth of stock at $2 when it's actually at 18.

Justin:

Wow. And now Is

Henry Poydar:

it live right now? Because the stock is moving while we're talking.

Jordan:

It's it's it never got delisted which is the single most valuable thing that it had in its possession. And so some people made a lot of money on day one, and now if the business does well and turns into a nice boring infrastructure company with AI inference to sell, then they're gonna do ridiculously well on the investment. So we see this thing to make fun of, but somebody very crafty made a very smart move with a group of people and they they I I it's super interesting thing. I love it.

Henry Poydar:

I love it.

Justin:

I mean, the stock's up oh, wow. It was up let's see. It's up 372% 373 in the past five days.

Jordan:

Right. And you see this big spike in all the attention. And now now the company can sell stock to the open market to raise even more money to buy more infrastructure to turn it into a real business. So whether or not it succeeds, I don't know. But the move itself, you have to appreciate for doing it at this level so publicly, will being willing to take all the arrows, the attention, the heat, all that stuff, but beautifully executed, at least on the surface.

Justin:

Okay. I I have a comment and then a question, and Henry can take the question if he wants.

Jordan:

Okay. I hope I explained that properly without That was excellent. Too many gaps.

Henry Poydar:

That was excellent. Way way ahead of what I was thinking. Dude.

Justin:

Cool. Cool. Yeah. So my comment is this does show the power of attention in this economy. So why did TBPN get acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars by OpenAI?

Justin:

Attention. Attention is hard to get. And what's one way to get attention? Turn a shoe company into a Controversy. Infrastructure.

Justin:

Yes.

Jordan:

That's it.

Justin:

Henry's got his hat on. He's showing it right there.

Henry Poydar:

I got one.

Justin:

Yeah. So that's the comments. And you can comment on that if you want, Henry, about attention. Or you can also answer the question, is there arbitrage in becoming an infrastructure company? Can you actually buy the hardware and actually resell it at a profit right now?

Justin:

Is everybody doing that?

Jordan:

Mean Those companies are making I'm blanking on the names of some of them, but it is one of the things most in demand in the entire market. And there's a lot of credible assumptions that everyone is underselling the demand, mostly because of regulatory and political interference with AI infrastructure build up. Interesting. I think of all the data centers that are either planned or started, I think it's 30% are actually being built actively. And an enormous number of them are trying to get financing still or in in regulatory, to get permits.

Jordan:

States are blocking data centers at this point. People are trying to come up with solutions like building them on Indian reservations. Because just to get away from the complexity of the regulation. So if you look at the difficulty that that is required to get supply online, and then you look at the demand line and where that's going, it's not a bad business at all. It's not the business that I would get to, but I don't know.

Jordan:

But but if you are an investor and thinking at that level, then there's definitely demand and there are definitely people out in the market that know how to do this and how to sell and how to set it up. And you can hire a management team and you're in business.

Justin:

What do you think, Henry?

Henry Poydar:

So so no question. This is brilliant. On the on the commodity piece though, I don't know if, like, inference is electricity. So I'll just give you a quick example. Like, when I was doing my open class setup and stuff like that, I'm like, okay.

Henry Poydar:

Well, there has to be a better way than, you know, trying out all these models as everybody does. I'm like, okay, well, oh, what is this? This is this other I forget what the the name of the model is, Gwand or something.

Justin:

Okay.

Henry Poydar:

Just so Brian would know. Yeah. Figured out this way to basically compress You're only using part of the parameters, as far as I can tell, the the technical piece. So you can actually fit, like, a fairly big model Mhmm. Onto, like, a 32 gig GPU video card.

Henry Poydar:

Right? And so, like, people are using that. So so I'm like, okay, well, you know, where does that go? Mhmm. Like, does the models get lower and lower and lower?

Henry Poydar:

Does Apple get really good at They build chips that work with the models and then we're we've all got a a model in our pocket at some point and then, like, the data center thing. Yeah. It was a way. I mean, I think in terms of enterprise software, we talked about this before, like, you know, on cloud or prem is that on prem has always been a tension with that Mhmm. Because of the data.

Henry Poydar:

But it's real tension when cloud means training on your data in a way that might get, you know, violate your your privacy or your data security in some way. So I think I don't I so I don't know where the future holds for for that. So I don't think like I know I understand like today we're in this situation where, yeah, we need we need more data centers to house this this compute, but I think the the the footprint of that compute is gonna change. Mhmm. Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

That's one piece. That's one reaction. And think wrong about that.

Jordan:

There's always Elon out there trying to make your entire industry obsolete by putting it up in space.

Justin:

Yeah. Or that. Or that.

Jordan:

Which which is a real that's a risk.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. And then the other thing I think about with this Allbirds thing, like, what's another brand that's similar to Allbirds? I was trying to rack my brain.

Justin:

OluKai is a Yeah. A Moshe brand.

Henry Poydar:

What if Marine Leather did this tomorrow? Do you think that that it would work for them? I don't think so. Like, I think this this there's we talk about attention and novelty

Justin:

and Mhmm.

Henry Poydar:

You know, if another, like, band came and did this Mhmm. It's kind of they're not gonna they're it's not gonna work. Right?

Justin:

Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. So I I I wonder if this is a like, I think your insight is brilliant, Jordan. I just wonder if, like, could it be repeated?

Jordan:

This happens.

Justin:

It got

Henry Poydar:

the attention. It got, you know It happens

Jordan:

all the time. So reverse merger is like a well understood concept.

Henry Poydar:

But I think

Jordan:

the But way that this way right.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jordan:

If they had pivoted to anything other than AI, it would not have worked the same way. So they nailed the the the recipe. They put it in the oven. Everything came out perfect. Timing wise, topical, cultural, with the fact that Allbirds is also loved by tech people, they nailed it.

Jordan:

Absolutely.

Justin:

Okay. Well, we're circling around this. So let's do last topic. We'll do this, and then we're gonna finish off with some updates. You still good for time, Henry?

Henry Poydar:

Yeah, I'm good.

Jordan:

Okay.

Justin:

And attention. If that's the game, is that the main thing that's difficult? And how are you thinking about it? Let's start with you, Henry. What are your thoughts?

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. I mean, my thoughts are well, I'm an engineer first. Right? Like, I have to be a marketer and a salesperson as I'm I'm doing this business. But I think that there this this is a time when there is a a call for storytelling above all.

Henry Poydar:

So, like, you know, because, for example, for me, and this could be my update too, like, you know, I'm thinking about what we're doing and the things I explained to you at the top of this call, and that that's a lot of calories to get over the transom. And it needs to be packaged into a story somehow that's compelling. Mhmm.

Justin:

You know,

Henry Poydar:

I've talked to Jordan about this Mhmm. At length. And I think that's a real challenge, and it's hard. And that's why not everybody can pull it off. Mhmm.

Henry Poydar:

Right? And so I I try and think about how to package this up. You know, there's storytelling and distribution, those are kind of two different things. But I think you have to you can't you can't be like limp into the hand on the storytelling. You get the distribution right anymore.

Henry Poydar:

Mhmm. So I think about the storytelling a lot.

Justin:

Can you give us an example of that? I mean, you can package it up with your update, but I want to hear how you get yeah, you got a lot of calories. How do you get that in a way that's digestible for market?

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. So I I had a customer ask me to do a a talk about this agents as teammates thing, and they had,

Justin:

like, a

Henry Poydar:

lunch and learn. And so I was like, okay. Well, you know, I should really be hitting that out of the park in a way that is challenging to me that I've never done before. So so I'm I'm kind of, like, thinking of that as, like, a TED talk. And I am spending a lot of time trying to and I'm, like, reading about how people do TED Talks and that whole that's a whole art and thing.

Henry Poydar:

I don't know I don't know if I'll I'm gonna try.

Justin:

We'll see

Henry Poydar:

how it goes. But that's Yeah. That's what I'm thinking right now. It's like, okay. I have to really get the story into this incredibly compelling thing, and that vehicle is gonna have to have novelty.

Henry Poydar:

Mhmm. That vehicle is gonna have to have a story arc. It's gonna have to have tension. It's gonna have to have characters. So so that's sort of what how I think about that right now.

Henry Poydar:

I'm probably not thinking as hard as I could on the distribution side of that story other than to say it's a TED Talk, and if people like it, then maybe they'll invite me to give it in other places.

Justin:

They might give other distribution. I mean, you should certainly probably get someone to video tape it.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. I think that's what I'll that's the the first step here is to video it and then, you know, give it to Justin Jackson and Jordan Gal and have them Yeah. Party. Yeah.

Justin:

I mean, you know who is a master at this? And it's just their approach just plays into this AI era so well. Is Jason Fried and Thirty Seven Signals? They're just a master. So they pick something like real work doesn't happen at work.

Justin:

And then he gave that as a TED talk. And he knew if so you need both, right? You need the novelty of it's like what makes a comedian good is they articulate something that people feel but has never been articulated. And then there's so much. It's so cathartic to hear someone articulate like, yes, I go to work and real work doesn't happen at work.

Justin:

It happens when I get home after work or I wait till everyone leaves the office. Then so he has always been a master at

Henry Poydar:

this. He is. He he has. Yeah.

Justin:

And this is, I think, is just going to become I think cults and religion and companies as cults and religion is going to become a bigger thing. You're gonna have a like, the Basecamp way, that's gonna become more attractive than less attractive. And it's all about capturing this novelty. You have to do it in a way that's genuine to you. Yeah.

Justin:

Right? Like, we can't pretend to be Jason Fried or We gotta find our own piece of this. But, man, in terms of having great another great example is Derek Sivers. Derek Sivers has just made a whole career of writing books and essays that are the counter melody to what the culture is doing. And that's why he resonates as people are like, woah.

Justin:

I've never heard anyone talk about this before. What a master. Jordan, how are you thinking about

Jordan:

this? I think that's so rare that it's not even worth pursuing, if I'm if

Henry Poydar:

I'm being honest.

Justin:

That's the counter melody, Jordan. You're you're doing it.

Henry Poydar:

Is that is that your TED Talk, Jordan? Don't do a TED Talk.

Jordan:

Look, I'm not that special.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan:

Yeah. No. Look, that is the ideal. Mhmm. That the story is the message, is the distribution, is the person, is the company, is the Mhmm.

Jordan:

Like, that that is exceedingly rare. We can we can name a few of them on one hand. Great. And we've named them, and I always think it's very, very dangerous to pursue replicating Mhmm. Something so exceptional, so rare.

Jordan:

I I just don't I don't like it doesn't seem like a high enough probability for success.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jordan:

I do think the storytelling is an inevitable, like, central role, and it's really hard these days because you need to be really good at storytelling. You're telling the same story, but a different version of it to the market, to your investors, to your customers, and to your teammates. And that is like a that's like a full time job. And if you forget to tell the story and you let it just kind of the the narrative just go on its own, then it turns into boring work that everybody hates. And then it devolves into like these weird human things that we do in the absence of a story to pursue.

Jordan:

Mhmm. So that that I think that's really challenging. The distribution part of it is I think that's where we we end up focusing. We we just complained that AI is behind on the marketing front. In in many ways, it feels like all that will do is have a very, very short shelf life of everyone's gonna have superpowers in a within a year, and then none of it will matter because it won't be differentiated and it's pointless anyway.

Jordan:

And it'll go right back to who has real attention, who has real love, who has a real audience. Mhmm. That is worth pursuing. Figuring out how to tell your story properly and distribute it properly without the goal of being a unicorn that everything I say cuts through all the noise and it also leads back into exactly what I sell. Like, that's just absurd.

Jordan:

Yeah. And so okay. I'll wrap my update into it. This week, we it's not gonna happen this week. It's actually gonna happen on Monday.

Jordan:

But this we thought it was happening this week. We partnered with a national Fortune 100 gigantic company who is going to distribute Rosie to their customer base. Okay. Okay. And when I asked them, like, oh, what does this mean?

Jordan:

Are you sending us, like, 10,000 people, a 100,000 people? And the number shocked us. And it was it felt like one of those things that are difficult to replicate. Because we are in the market competing right now on ads on Instagram and Facebook and it is crowded. And it is hard to differentiate.

Jordan:

But the relationship that I built up with this very large company over the span of four months that is then leading into an email campaign to millions of people, that feels like distribution that you can't replicate

Justin:

and that's

Jordan:

worth investing time into and relates directly back to the story of the company. Why did they wanna get involved with Rosie? Because it's the right story for their customers. So I don't think it's straightforward. I don't think you can just be like, well, we're good at email marketing therefore we can grow or we're just good at this so we can grow.

Jordan:

These like new angles to figure out with the assumption that everything gets commoditized, never get attention, everyone can post a 100 times a day because there's that stuff doesn't matter. Yeah. So it still comes back to how do you generate attention and love and have people connect with your product and your company and your positioning. I think it's different different context Go

Henry Poydar:

ahead. That you told that story to this to this partner. Right? Like That's right. That's how you that's how you got this to work.

Henry Poydar:

Yes. Yes.

Jordan:

It was very interesting because one of their biggest concerns was Jordan, we normally work with, like, you know, recognizable brands that everyone knows.

Henry Poydar:

Right.

Jordan:

And I had to tell the story of there is no recognizable brand. You're gonna help us become the recognizable brand. And here's why you can trust us. And here's how we've built our product that lines up directly with your audience. It's not overly complicated.

Jordan:

It doesn't talk about tech. It you know, all these things that match up with you. So I had to go into you know, I got twenty minutes to tell our story in such a way that they say it matches for our audience, and it's okay that we are gonna work with the brand that no one recognizes when the people write the companies right next to them are, like, Super Bowl commercial companies. That was

Justin:

it was like How did you meet these people? Like, where how did this relationship start?

Jordan:

In every investor update that I send out every month, at the bottom of it, I say, here are my asks. And I try to limit it to just one thing. And so I sent out and it's like a it's like a whole, you know, investor update. And then at the very end, it's the only line that's bolded. Like, okay, you read this, this is what I have been doing.

Jordan:

Here's what I ask of you. And so that was, I am interested in meeting companies that have huge national distribution, such as x y z, you know, all the like different types of companies. And one of them said, how about this company? And I said, I don't know, but sure, it's worth the conversation. And then the first conversation was a failure.

Jordan:

The first conversation was this is cool, but it's not right for us. But I did a good enough job in that that they said, you know what? You should actually talk to this other group. Maybe they've got something cooking. And then that was the right group.

Jordan:

Then, you know, realistically three, four months and a bunch of legal and all these other things. So that that was my big win for the week. We were so pumped up on Wednesday. And then and then it was actually promotions live, but the big email's going out on Monday. So hopefully Monday, my life changes.

Jordan:

You know what I'm saying?

Justin:

Wow. Really? Well done. Awesome. I do wanna highlight because before you said, you know, it's impossible to get the kind of attention that 37 signals does.

Justin:

That feels a lot more accessible to me as someone who likes attention and has been working my whole life to get attention. What you do that's always felt like a superpower is your ability to do sales, your ability to build relationships and leverage those relationships. I think the thing I keep seeing in terms of how you stand out now is you as a founder have to have a superpower and you gotta double down on it. And I think that's a good example. Like, so many people would be like, Jordan, how do you get that how do you get that thing?

Justin:

And how do you have the balls to keep going even when you mess it up the first time? And, like, that's all superhero territory, I think.

Jordan:

So maybe it's worth, like, course correcting a touch on my comment around, you know, don't try to be Jason Fried. Yeah. It's it's it's don't get lulled into trying to do the superpower because the superpower of other people are visible. Absolutely. Go go with your superpower.

Justin:

The the the allure of

Jordan:

the social media and the audience in that way is that it's very visible and so people want it as opposed to, you know what I'm good at? I'm good at networking. So that's what I should do.

Justin:

You are. You are very good at it. Yes. That's awesome. Henry, what's going on in your world?

Justin:

What are you working towards, struggling with? What's the update over at Steady?

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. So I guess the the the update is we switched to a credit based pricing model, which I guess we could probably spend a lot of time talking with.

Jordan:

Were you at seat based?

Henry Poydar:

We are at seat based Okay. Up until the beginning of the year, and then we switched to credit based for new accounts, and then we've been switching existing accounts over to credit based. Wow. So we've heard about

Jordan:

the shift, and and you are an example of it.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. And I think, you know, generally, the trend of our software is following the trend of, that I described earlier, which is we are becoming sort of a a headless application, meaning that customers are accessing us through different portals like it used to be.

Justin:

Jordan might have some PTSD when it comes to headless. I don't know if we should bring that up.

Jordan:

Yeah. Here's the crazy thing. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen now. Agentic headless commerce is gonna happen now.

Henry Poydar:

I know. You're just early.

Justin:

Yep. So what does headless mean in in your sense, Henry?

Henry Poydar:

Headless means in our sense that there's the the the product is the compounding coordination intelligence, And the way that you access it is going to be flexible.

Justin:

That's what Like, in that way

Jordan:

UI and all the records that people are logging into and clicking on every day.

Henry Poydar:

That's right. Because, I mean, already we were sort of, we had departed from SaaS. Like traditional SaaS, you look at, you know, you look at the screen and as soon as you close the screen, it's gone. The value is gone. And now we're pushing value to you where you are.

Henry Poydar:

It could be in Slack, it could be in Teams, it could be on email, it could be some other way we haven't thought of yet, but through our API or through some sort of MCP mechanism. And then on the other side as well. And so that direction doesn't line up with a per seat model. Directly lines up with credit based. When I say credit based, every credit is directly aligned with value.

Justin:

Okay.

Henry Poydar:

Every time we push you a piece of intelligence, you're spending a credit. And in fact, the old way of, okay, when you add people, we do a true up and we there's procurement and all that, we reverse that. And so it's like, we're gonna give you bonus credits every time you you add people. We're gonna give you bonus credits every time you hook up an integration.

Justin:

Oh, interesting. Here's the we use Netlify for our marketing site, and they just switched to credit based. I can tell you, at first, I don't like it because it seems so amorphous. It's like, what does this mean? I I'm curious how you're addressing that.

Justin:

Was there pushback? And the other thing I noticed with pricing is sometimes you choose a value metric that might not be the actual, like, cost center or thing, but it's just helpful for people to understand. So, like, in the hosting business, a famous one is storage. We give we're just gonna give you two terabytes, six terabytes, 20 terabytes. And some people say, oh, you gotta go value based billing.

Justin:

But there's a lot of hosting companies selling terabytes of storage that have a nice upgrade path and a nice business. Although, I guess, Netlify just switched. So what's what's been the feedback? What's the thinking there?

Henry Poydar:

Yeah. I mean I mean, we wouldn't have done it unless we had gone through a lot of feedback cycles

Justin:

Okay.

Henry Poydar:

With customers. Right? And and sure, there's customers who are used to purchasing SaaS through SaaS. Mhmm. And I just don't think I don't think our company is gonna survive that way.

Henry Poydar:

And also, I don't think that we can deliver value that way and still make money. Mhmm. Because, you know, we are spending inference costs on producing this intelligence. So, you know, there has to be a way to to map that back.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Henry Poydar:

But but, yeah, there's there's headwinds and tailwinds. I think the tailwinds are are exceeding the the headwinds right now, which is great. But we're feeling it out. And I do think it's very important for us because we are already in a business that was not commodified in the sense, like coordination intelligence, what the hell is that? Right?

Henry Poydar:

So we're already in this thing that doesn't have a comparison. You know, it is sort of a new category in a sense. We need to differentiate ourselves from all this traditional SaaS as much as possibly can. Yeah. And so this is one way of doing it, but it also happens to align value.

Henry Poydar:

And I think the other thing that's been really great about it that we've heard from customers is that it it moves the decision cliff because we're doing this bonus credit thing when they're adding people in a way that makes that part frictionless. Because it used to be, okay, I I know this thing is gonna be better if I add Justin's team and Jordan's team to this.

Justin:

Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

But, I gotta I guess I gotta do a trial or I gotta, like Get

Justin:

approval of it.

Henry Poydar:

Buy these seats and maybe remember to cancel them if it's not not gonna work out.

Justin:

Yeah.

Henry Poydar:

And now that that decision cliff is just removed, like add the whole company on. You're not going to spend credits until value is extracted.

Justin:

You just unlocked a whole new thing in my brain, which is this idea of giving the customer credits. That's such an interesting like, you can imagine, like, what would a phone company look like if they were doing stuff like that? Or what would that I I like that idea because a credit normally, like with your phone companies, they fucked up and they they give you a credit. Right? Right.

Justin:

But this is like your rewarding behavior. You're saying, hey, you add more teams, you get a credit. You're gonna you get a you get a token of value. And it maybe even some of this utopian dreaming people had around crypto, like, I get a token, you get a token. We just keep sharing tokens.

Justin:

There's something there. There's seems like a lot that's fertile with possibility.

Henry Poydar:

It is. It is. I'm excited about it. But, know, the devil's in the details and execution and

Justin:

Dude, you gotta write about that. If you have don't know if you have been, but that's

Henry Poydar:

I haven't been.

Justin:

Oh. Yeah. That feels like an

Jordan:

It's interesting item to interesting to do that right at the point of that, like, pricing decision. I I I've seen others do it around onboarding. Right? So so take this next step.

Henry Poydar:

Mhmm.

Jordan:

Even, like, extend the trial. Get extra days. Get extra minutes. Get some other type of credit. And I I guess that is really focused on the most critical.

Jordan:

We we have one of these issues that we're keep playing around with. 89%? Yes. 89% of people that turn to paying customers put their credit card on file within the first twenty four hours. We have a seven day trial, and 89% put it in within twenty four hours if they're gonna become a customer.

Jordan:

And so we look at that, we're like, well, what what do we what are we supposed to do? Can we do anything? Is there something to be done to begin with? Because, you know, not everyone wants to put their card in. But how do you incentivize people to take the behavior that you want them inside of your product?

Jordan:

It's interesting. Yours is focused right at like this very very critical moment of expansion.

Henry Poydar:

And at the beginning too, there's we don't have trials anymore. You just go when you sign up, you get credits. And when you hit your limit, you can buy a credit pack.

Jordan:

Oh, interesting. So even the adoption.

Justin:

I do think there's gonna be a fluid I I like, I think now the terminal has become one of the most interesting, entry points for companies. And I think it's still there's still so much friction there. But you can imagine when I'm in Claude code and I wanna deploy a Ruby on Rails app to DigitalOcean, it's saying, well, you should use Hatchbox. But I can't just say, okay, well, create an account for me on Hatchbox right now.

Henry Poydar:

Yeah.

Justin:

That once that friction gets removed and Steady's able to say, well, we just use the LLM is just saying, we use Steady for this. Right. And you've already got a 100 free tokens Right. Or credits. I might not even know what that means, but it's like, okay.

Justin:

Like and we're all burning credits all day, so we know what that is.

Henry Poydar:

Know what that is.

Justin:

Yeah. Oh, that's

Henry Poydar:

And and and again, like, you're not gonna buy credits until we've proved value to you. Yeah. So you're never like, that's the thing with Perseat SaaS. Like, yeah, we've we've all gotten away with it for years. Mhmm.

Henry Poydar:

You know, we you're still you still have to you're paying with you're you're in a decision cliff before, your value is proven.

Justin:

Yeah. There's also an interesting curiosity loop you can open up with marketing there, which is if you're selling steady, to say, have a whole campaign that's just like, just prompt this in Claude right now. And so it's just like you just paste this into Claude and all of a sudden it's like you immediately get some value and then they're in. And there's enough there that people are like right now wanting to I want to try some things in Claude, you know?

Henry Poydar:

Totally. And yeah. And again, like, did that on purpose, like, giving away credits is, like, kind of, you know, it's giving away the the dime bags of value, like, you know, pull you in and Wow. Get you there faster.

Justin:

This is great. Quick update for me to close things off. We are building video podcast hosting at Transistor. Upload one video file, distribute it everywhere. YouTube, Spotify video, Apple podcast video, distribute via HLS, even through your RSS feed to things like Pocket Casts and Fountain and True Fans, all these little indie apps.

Justin:

We are in my favorite time of marketing, the most potent time of marketing, which is the anticipation phase. Everybody wants this. We haven't launched it yet. And I we're just building up anticipation. We're we've got a waiting list.

Justin:

I'm gonna send out a automatic email now is going out saying, here's what's happening. Here's what's coming. Get ready for it. Just like you're getting ready for a big blockbuster movie at the theater. I love this stage.

Justin:

There's a balance here. Attention of like, you can't hold on too long because everyone's moving so fast. We want to get to market first. But I love the anticipation phase. It's so potent.

Justin:

It's like the best part of marketing is when you're building up to something and then you release it.

Jordan:

I would love to spend when when you're done with the process Mhmm. For you for you to give a bit of a breakdown on how you run that type of a campaign. Mhmm. Because we we we have gotten better at

Justin:

it. Mhmm.

Jordan:

But it would be great to have some type of a blueprint on, like, you know, how long do you wanna hold the attention. Mhmm. In the past and I think what most people do is make the mistake of announcing the feature after it's been deployed. Mhmm. Clearly, that's not the right

Justin:

way to do it. That's the worst thing you can do. Yeah.

Jordan:

Right. Right. That's kind of like yes. Absolute minimum. Mhmm.

Jordan:

But it would be great to, like, hear what that looks like. Okay. It's three weeks. In week one, you're gonna talk about it. Week two, you're gonna show it.

Jordan:

Week three, you're gonna demo it. Week four, you're gonna launch it. Mhmm. Something like that. Yeah.

Justin:

I'm happy to go into it in the future, but that's all the time we have for today. Henry, this was just an absolute pleasure. So nice Thanks. Having

Henry Poydar:

Thanks, guys. I really appreciate the opportunity. Well,

Justin:

we've we've we've broken the seal. Now you're gonna you got to come back again. We're gonna have you back again in the future. Jordan, great to see you. And, Brian, we missed you.

Justin:

Thanks to everyone in the chat. Ryan Hefner. Seth showed up. Keith showed up. We had lots of great conversation here.

Justin:

We had Steve. I haven't seen Steve before. That was nice to see you. Thanks for being there. And we'll see you next week.

Justin:

Thanks, everybody.

Henry Poydar:

See you. Thanks, guys.