Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to the Victory Podcast.
Hey Victors. Welcome to this episode of the Victory Show. If this is the first time you're joining us, I'm Travis Cody, best selling author of 16 books and the creator of bestseller by Design, where I've had the privilege of helping hundreds of business consultants, founders and entrepreneurs write and publish their own best selling books. And along that journey, I discovered a really fascinating pattern. A lot of businesses are hitting revenue plateaus, usually around a million dollars, and they're struggling to break through it. So on this show, I sit down with some of the world's most successful founders, CEOs, leaders and business owners to uncover the strategies they use to overcome those plateaus and scale their businesses to new heights so that you can do the same thing. So get ready for some deep insights and actionable takeaways that you can implement in your life and business. Starting now. Today's guest is a startup advisor, a product strategist and the tech CEO with deep experience building and scaling cutting edge applications. Vadim is the CEO of Diffco and an advisor at Alchemist Accelerator and numerous startups, helping founders grow faster, smarter and more secured. With a background in AI, enhanced applications, cybersecurity and product development, Vadim brings a powerful mix of technical insight and real world execution to everything he touches. He's also a sought after speaker and expert in the startup ecosystem. And when he's not helping companies scale, you might just find him in the skies living out his passion for aviation. Vadim, thank you so much for being here.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: I'm excited to be here and forward with this. Interims like, hey, I actually did all these things in my life.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yeah, really, I sound pretty good. This is all right.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: It's fun.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: I was going to start this whole interview one thing, but I realized I want to have a discussion about what are the principles of aviation that also align perfectly with business.
Oh man, I put you on the spot. I threw a question at you we didn't discuss. I'm going a whole different direction here now.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Yeah, so let me try to play this. I think innovation, it is slightly different than business. And because aviation is all about following the rules and understanding your limits and business is always about breaking the limits and testing new things and iterating and.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: Making the rules up as you go along.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Yeah, you don't want to break so many things in aviation until you go to maybe experimental things, et cetera, like for the general purpose aviation, commercial aviation, et cetera. You don't want to break things. You want to just make a Smooth transition from one destination to another. So it is simple. I think one thing that really a good executed innovation is a lot of checklists. And this is what again I'm a big fan of for our development approach and just having again the right checklist for things and ensuring that, hey, can we test this just Quickly, here's like 15 items. Just go one by one. We did this, we did this because in reality people will make mistakes. So this is like the nature of human beings. We will make mistakes. So how to avoid this? Have the things written down and actually go from each item to another one and just to check if it actually was done correctly. So I think this is the key and this is how you can manage this and use the addition there to make it work.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: I love the idea of checklists. So what are some of the ways you use checklists in the business? So you said product management, but is there like a specific. Is that because you've processed this out so much now you know that if we do these six things in a row, we're going to get a fairly, you know, similar result.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: Yeah, you're absolutely right. So again, it is things that doesn't allow you to have a predefined process. And in a lot of cases you can have a predefined process and you can have the clear understanding on what is needed to manage the execution properly. So again, project management, in deployment schemas, et cetera, all those technical things is pretty much standardized. And again, sometimes you will skip them, sometimes you're like hey, we don't have this item on the list, we'll just skip this. But it is really crucial to say when you skipping this and do this intentionally versus like hey, we forgot to do this. Because in some cases you will need to do this step and in some cases you would not go through this process.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Makes sense.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: Some projects for example, will require more like a security compliance and some oversight on things and could not be done by the same team, by the same folks that doing the deployment. Again, in some cases it's not true because it's really simple project and it doesn't have the budget or it doesn't have its needs. So great, again we can skip this, but this is intentional decision to skip versus hey, let's forget about this. So I think the structure is important for the operation but. But not specifically for, for creative part of the business.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I love it. So let's go back. So today you're the CEO of a a thriving company going back when you were in college Was. Was that your goal? Did you ever think you would be the CEO?
[00:05:10] Speaker A: I had this idea, just to be clear, but I don't think I imagined this as such a long journey. I always love the joke that where like when the, the employee think that, hey, I will be a boss someday and I will work less. And when they become a boss, they like, oh, now I basically work 24 7. And you like, yeah, this is most likely true. And it's not the case that you can actually relax and enjoy the time.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: For being able to always, always another fire to put out.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: Yeah. And like you get used to this and this is your way of living. But the difference in my perspective, like 20 years ago or more was about like, hey, yeah, I will probably build something and I will have a team that doing everything and I would be just again, enjoying my life.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: I had the same my ties at the beach.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Yeah. In reality, again, I quickly realized that this is not true. And I also realized that it would be really boring for me to just lay down on the beach. I literally cannot do this. It just like doesn't really work for me. So again, I love doing what I'm doing and I love to execute and experiment with things.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: I love it. So with your advisory work, where you're working with, with founders, specifically, do you have this conversation with them where they're like, I'm going to do the thing. And he's like, I need to let me give you some reality of what's coming.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: This is a tough one. So yes. So I definitely have this vision and especially like with the early stage folks that transition into more like a founder role, I think this is the key execution there that I would have and have a conversation with them. Hey, you know, it will be complex. It will require you to do a lot of work. It will be required that you spend a lot of time doing things that you think that would be done by someone else. And in reality you just need to do this. And especially like when you start in the business in a startup, you basically chief everything officer, not chief executive officer. And this is true for a long period of time. And many people like, yeah, I will go to series A, series B. And now I will not be chief everything officer. Like, I had one startup recently that series B or so and like I saw their CEO fixing a door in office. I was like, come on. Like, yeah. He was like, yeah. I mean, I can do this in like 15 minutes and I can call a contractor, which will take another day to show up, but I need this door Working So he just took the instrument and fixed this. And this I think like makes total sense. Again it's not complicated if you know what you do there. And again for someone it would be much more complex task for sure. But I'm just saying this is the mentality of not being thinking like oh it's above my pay grid bubble. No, you will do everything. This is the hard truth about the startups and business in general.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: So do you find that sometimes that then will create bad habits for them because they get used to doing everything and then they have a hard time of letting go of everything as they start to grow?
[00:08:07] Speaker A: Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think this is the question of mentality. And again I just had a recently conversation with one amazing founder that was asking my advice about like hiring a technical co founder position. We talked about like hey you can hire a good person to start like until you maybe 25 folks in a company this is one type of the person that you need and is completely different person scaling from 25 to 100 and it is completely different person scaling to a couple of thousand people or more. It is different mindset, it's different experience and in many cases it doesn't really mix up and it's really hard to find a person that can grow from zero not to one again growing from one to these hundreds or thousands. It is different experience and it is really hard to have those folks that even willing to do so well is it?
[00:09:01] Speaker B: So in that case then you've got a CEO that says gets to 25:30, what's the recommendation then for them when you're like hey we need to scale to 100 and you don't have the skill set to do that? Is that when they will you bring in a co CEO? Is that an operation thing or is that something where you're going, you know what your time as CEO is over, we're going to put you in this other department because that's what you're good at and we're going to bring in somebody else.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: I think 25 is early for for this type of decisions. Typically, typically you will have those decision made slightly later. And I had many cases when people started a CEO and when company grow to like 500 people plus they had a professional endurement there. And again sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. Again depends on and again I do have a lot of questions for professional management because again for example Google would not be Google without the CEO there because Sergey and Larry was not able to do this Job. Just to be clear, again, this is the Google is Google right now because of Eric Schmidt, not because of Sergey and Larry. They would be much smaller. Again, they would probably not lie there. Again, Eric Schmidt did all the heavy lifting. Again, probably most people will correct me in some things and I was not a part of this company. I didn't know the whole story. But this is the outside vision and in many cases what you will have is the team. So you need a team that can scale at some point. But the core question is can you scale well enough? And again, ability to move you to a different role is again good. I think sometimes it is a question of just learning and again, it's fine to learn. Again, I don't have a problem with people learning. I have a problem with people telling, hey, I know everything. You don't know anything. This approach doesn't really work.
[00:10:44] Speaker B: No, that happens in business.
[00:10:46] Speaker A: Oh man.
I have a company right now. I would not name but them. But the point is one person asked me about like the feedback about them and I asked around and the core problem why they not growing by the way they eat like serious beef folks is actually arrogance of the CEO and like CEO and plus again founding team that they just cannot get this control from their hand that micromanaging everything and they afraid to hire a person that smarter than them.
[00:11:18] Speaker B: Do you find that to be a younger founder problem or is that a founder problem of all age groups?
[00:11:25] Speaker A: I think it's a personality problem. Again in those cases folks is I think around 40s.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Okay, so yeah, so it's so it's typical Gen Z. You think by 40 they would have figured it out by now?
[00:11:36] Speaker A: Yeah, but again I don't think it's a problem of specific age group or anything of this nature. I think this is just like a feedback loop. Sometimes you just need to be hit harder to be able to change. And again, I mean the point is if things that you're doing is working, doesn't really matter. Again, Steve Jobs was not a great person in many ways and many people will hate him for doing things that he's doing he done. But same as like Elon Musk. Many people would praise Elon Musk and many people will hate him. Not talking about any politics stuff, I'm talking about the companies that.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Well, you know, to your point, I've heard multiple people say that Steve Jobs would have never been able to accomplish what he did if he wouldn't have had Tim Cook fantastic at visioning and Tim Cook was actually really good at getting Stuff built and done. So it's sort of like Google that they had the vision, but Eric Schmidt was the one that like was able to take that vision and put it into reality. And I think. And so like when you're doing in your consulting, is there anything you do with your leaders and founders to help them kind of understand what their skill set, what they're good at and what they're not good at so that they can sort of avoid these or is it that more of like a one on one sort of private conversation you're having with them?
[00:12:51] Speaker A: It is a hard conversation to have because you want to slightly arrogant CEO still.
[00:12:57] Speaker B: Slightly, yeah.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: Again, they need to know where they go in and they need to be confident and they need to do things that they believe is right. The problem is again, you really need to understand what you're doing good or are you doing bad. And for some folks it's basically mean, hey, we can do the product development correctly. And they really good. Product folks, for example, great. Love this. Some cases they not so great with product, but they good with sales. Okay, do this, help with this. And in many cases they would try to also have a different hats and be for example ecpo. And in many cases they fail here or sometimes they cannot do the operations properly because it's boring. Again, for many folks it would be like, oh no, I cannot do this because I can sit here. It's like, okay, hire a person that can. And again, the worst thing that you can do is try to do things that you believe is you're capable of doing and you care about it. Like as example, I can do finances. I love finances. I cannot do accounting. Again, don't get me wrong, it is impossible for me to do accounting. I will be like, absolutely. I'm not like the most terrible person there, but like, I would probably do everything else in my life before I will start doing this again. This is just like how I'm doing things. Again, I cannot do this properly. And I know a lot of wonderful people that can do this stuff properly. And this is just like their way of life. This is what they capable of doing. And I admire them. I'm just saying, hey guys, you can do things that I cannot. Like, I literally, I cannot concentrate on like hundreds of different transactions and doing credit and debit and understanding where things are like, no, it's like I would be dying there. And they do this all day long, which is amazing for me. So again, I'm hiring folks that can do this for these positions and I can execute on things that I'm good at. So I think this is the key for the startup founders and for any executive.
Just know what you actually can do best. And again, I'm not saying that this is static. It shouldn't be static. You should learn again, in some cases, you should not think that, hey, I need to learn everything. Again, probably accounting is not something that you should learn. Unless, again, you're doing an accounting startup. If you do a startup for accounting, SAS tool, some financial tool, etc. Maybe this is something that you should know.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: I love it. Yeah, you know, we, I had somebody on the show maybe a month or so ago, and he's, he's a consultant. They help scale an exit, and they've done 70 exits now at this point. And he was, he was talking about the, the biggest sort of roadblock to a lot of companies scaling is like founders doing things that are not really good at. Instead of. And you know, he's like, when he goes into companies, the first thing they do is they're like, what are the things you suck at that you're trying to do because you feel like, oh, I got to work on my weaknesses and get better on this because I can do everything. He's like, no, like, you suck at that. Like, hire somebody and get rid of it off of your plate asap. Like, don't wait, do it now. And you know, I see that with people and I think maybe partly it's an American culture thing of like, oh, we're supposed to be well rounded and be able to do everything because I'm the guy in charge. I need to know every job. But the reality is like, eventually you're going to get to a point where that's just not feasible. Right? So, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Again, I think you should know every job on some level.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: But you need to manage your experience and what you good at. Because if you're good at sales, for example. Yeah. And you try to do all operational stuff in the same time, great. But you can close like another 10 deals in the same time while you try to do this operational stuff. It's like, it doesn't really make sense for the business perspective. So just again. And sometimes you would be like, hey, I don't have the things that I'm good at. It's like, okay, it's just make a decision what you would do there and learn. Because again, like, the worst advice that people can get is like, follow your passion. The total thing that doesn't really make sense.
Again, you create your passion. You create things that you're good at.
We all burn with almost equal opportunities. Again, if we remove any kind of disabilities, etc. We can learn anything. And especially nowadays, like you can literally learn anything. And almost for free. Yeah, in most cases for free. Again, you may not get the degree from some university for free, but in the same time it's not really required. And especially with age of AI, I don't think it will be in any value, by the way, in 10 years. I still question this doesn't really make sense. So I think this is the just angle that you need to have as a leader.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: So a minute ago you're talking about, you know, having a company that's gone from 25 to 100 employees to a thousand employees. What are from a business perspective and a leadership perspective, what are the challenges that you've got to deal with from say, go from 25 to 100 and then, you know, secondly, once you get to 100, scaling to 500. Because when I talk to people, a lot of them think, oh, when I get to XYZ revenue, then everything's going to be easier. But the reality is like, you've just created a whole new set of problems that you're not even aware of right now. Right. So. So for people that are like, I want to scale, I want to get to the 100 employee. What, like what. What are sort of the disadvantages to actually getting that big and what are the challenges to get there?
[00:18:09] Speaker A: You really asking the right directions for the questions. I really like it. So I think like the core challenge that you have is understand that you need to set up structure differently. And again, it is a.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: My co host decided to join us.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: The best co host ever.
[00:18:24] Speaker B: She's bringing the good questions. Now you're in trouble. Now she's going to ask the hard ones.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: It's like I have a box for.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Her on my desk. I got a little bed. That's where she's at. She's like, time for my nap.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Ah, I see, I see.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Good timing.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: So coming back to the question. So I think that the core competence there that you would need to really understand what is actual structure that you want to set up, how many direct reports you want to have. And it is a long conversation about this. And for example, again, Jason from saying, hey, we need to. And he had like 50 or 60 direct reports, if I remember correctly, which is like totally crazy. But in the same time, the best stock performing asset ever lived, again, like no question asked.
And the most important company of the century for sure. So Again, I think it's like makes sense to consider different practices and sometimes just diving deeper into things and being able to change. Again, not like sticking to one policy.
And because things will change things, you will grow. And again, I think that the core question is to hire people that smarter than you on things that you would do. Because again, it is kind of counterintuitive to say, but in many cases it's really hard for people to hire those folks because they doesn't they have a clearance. Like that's not a good fit. Not a good fit. It is a great fit. The problem is they're afraid, they don't.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: They don't want to, they don't, they don't want to be acknowledged as not being the smartest person in the room.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: And again, I think like the best thing that founders can do is say hey, I'm not the smartest person here. Yes, I brought this company to X level and now I want to have your perspective on how should things be run. Again, I will still have the final say, etc. But again, tell me what the direction are and explain me. And I think this is the key component because in many cases you will not know how to do things and especially if you never dealt with enterprise deployments for example, or like enterprise sales before, like hey again, explain me how these things work and create a structure that will do the job. Again, I would like to understand why this structure, I would like to understand how this working and I would try to probably be annoying and try to optimize things here and there sometimes. And again it's fine to tell me like again it is stupid that what you suggested because it explains it. And this is the best thing and this is the best culture that I think you can have. Like when some regular employee can tell you like hey, what you're doing is completely damn and you should be doing this versus this. And again as example like the Sergey Brin is coming back to Google right now and he was in recent interview all in Miami and he told the wonderful thing that like hey, he started doing some commits to the code, et cetera partially and it was a joke about like hey, do you think that you will have some comments about that what you're doing is dumb. He's like, yeah, I want to and this is the best approach, this is the best attitude that you can have because in this case you open to feedback. Even the folks that like just maybe regular developer, they're not afraid to tell you this is probably should be done this way versus this Way. And again, feel free to explain. And again, if you're willing to accept this, this is where your company will be succeeding. So really damn simple.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: Why do we make it so complicated? All right, so we had a conversation before we got started here about, you know, the power of innovation. So can you talk a little bit about why innovation is actually the most important thing that businesses actually can do versus all the other sometimes seems like nonsense that they think they should be doing.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: I think the core point is not only innovation, it is experimenting. And I call it experimenting. In reality, it's a lot of things that mean the experiments in the art, but the core I think, meaning is being able to catch something as quickly as you can and just run as many experiments as you can because. And double down on things that work. Because the truth is, not the smartest person wins in business. And this is maybe kind of like will upset a lot of people. But again, the people that trade fast will win because if you're smart enough, you will think and like say, yeah, it will probably not work. And I will think another three months to make something better. And some other folks will be just doing 20 different experiments at the same time.
Half of them is dumb, but one will win and they will double down there and they will grow again. Many people would be like, oh again, wasting your time, etc. But in reality, if you can run those things faster and if you can iterate fast enough to get the feedback and talk to your clients, understand what is going on. Especially for B2B sales, any B2B business in general, I think this is where you will get the most efficient success rate. Because if you just thinking through but not executing, you wasting a lot of time.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's, that's a really good point. Right? Thinking versus executing. And you can get, you can get caught up in like, okay, well we need the, we need the analysis and we need this and we need to do projections before we can do it instead of just going. So I'm working with a client right now. He's on his book and it's called Fail Hard, Win Big. And the subtitle is 30 ventures, 20 failures, 10 wins. And he talks about over his career he started 30 different businesses, 20 of which he's like, oh, it just fell flat on my face. But 10 of them succeeded really, really well. Right. But if he didn't have the ability to start businesses and grow them and get them going really quickly, he would have never figured out what was the one that thinks for him that worked. Right now I know that's a little bit different than innovating and inside of a business, but I just, that's what kind of comes to mind with the fact that, you know, he, he was moving fast. And so. And I think also the, what you said there was important, right? There's one company that's going to test 20 things and you know, 12 of them just may fail, right? There's, I've noticed in the people that I've worked with is that like even with something as simple as a book, they just get hung up on tweaking it forever and tweaking it forever because they're like, oh, what if I put this out and there's a typo in it and I'll get embarrassed, right? Where it's just like, yeah, but we're not going to know it works until we get stuff that's out there. And then, and then you can adjust as you go.
[00:24:33] Speaker A: I think this is true in life a lot because like again, like if I would not be trying multiple things, I would be just again, like having like again, I would be stuck in past again. You cannot grow unless you fail. And again, failing is good. I mean, same as like when people tell you no in sales, it basically means, hey, now I have like a hundred different options how we can lead this conversation. Because if you give me yes, it is boring because now I'm like, okay, let's just do this. But if it's no, it's a lot of fun because you have like, no. Why no here? Why, et cetera. So you can understand the actual pain points and sometimes much, much more helpful and like in executing any kind of the angle in direction of like bringing the value to the customer and understanding what their actual pain point are. It is sometimes, I mean, in many cases they would not know. And the only thing that you would be able to do to execute there is actually to have a different perspective and just sometimes show them this. And again, nowadays it's simpler than ever. You can build some prototypes with no quotes, with AI, like 10 different options that you can do literally today and show this to your customer tomorrow. And when you like, yeah, but I need this, this and this. I was like, yeah, but like, if you're not trying to do this, at least on some level you already failed. Because the truth is many people would do this. And again, I have a wonderful example of the folks that one started with, that we worked with. They started as a self funded, they got some funds from the family, friends, et cetera, and built A really simple product.
Again, the product started working and they did a lot of, a lot of bootstrapping in terms of the marketing efforts, in terms of product efforts. And they pushed a lot of things to make sense there. And in two years they got acquired because other companies decided that it's much faster than to buy those guys versus again try to build this again under the hundred mil exit. But come on, it's two years.
[00:26:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it's remarkable.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: And you can do this. And again, those guys was like first time founders but they was not sitting around and waiting like what the best solution. They executed, they tested things, they failed so many times. They shipped broken products many, many times.
And they did a lot of things manually, which again, they got some negative feedback, it doesn't really work, blah, blah, blah, come on. Doesn't really matter as long as you keep pushing this and you fix it, et cetera. Again, obviously it is limits to this, but the point is this limit is much higher than you think. In the same time I had another funny story about folks that told me like hey, we're not ready to launch because again, it's not perfect. It's have some bugs and this technology will need to work only if it will be 100% execution. And we're talking about AI specifically. They decided not to do this. Half a year later another competitor show up with worse technology that they had. They grow, they raised some funds and a year later they were bought by large company. And you're like, come on, really?
Again, the difference is only one, they was not afraid to launch. Not perfect thing. Again, simple as this.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's probably the best advice that I think you could give. Right. Don't be afraid to launch an imperfect thing. So if somebody's listening to this or they're reading this chapter in the book and they want to get involved in what they're doing or they want to kind of follow or how do, how do people find you? How do they, how they get involved, what you guys have got going on?
[00:28:09] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So for the company you can just find us at divco. Yes. And just Google for divco. For me personally, again, you can find me on LinkedIn, Vadim Peskov there or Twitter X. So this is the best way to contact. So it's. If you have any startups that you are doing in AI and cybersecurity and you're looking for some mentorships or advisory or investment, feel free to reach out. So this is how I can help.
[00:28:35] Speaker B: I love it. So Final question for you is what excites you most with AI for over this next 5 years? Next 5 years, where do you think it's going?
[00:28:43] Speaker A: What excites me? I think it is, I think the next wave of.
The next wave of AI products will be doing things slightly differently because now we telling AI what to do. And I think the next wave of AI product would be actually telling us what to do.
So let me make an example there. Let's say you. I want to achieve something in life. You want to become, you want to lose weight or you want to eat healthy, etc. So yeah, I can actually be proactive into things and telling you, okay, if you want to lose weight and half a pound this week, you need to reduce these products. And I see that you bought another set of chips.
[00:29:25] Speaker B: We like have AI like monitoring our bank accounts so that when it sees us buying, it's like, hey, you said you want to lose weight and that is not going to help you reach your goal.
[00:29:34] Speaker A: Yeah. And again, the point is, I think it can mitigate you to your goals and be your assistant in life knowing things that you just sometimes afraid to tell yourself. I think this is one of the differences that we will have. So the being proactive and really like replacing main things that we get used to doing today. And I don't think we will need to do the same things tomorrow. Again, the I think interface will change and how we execute on things will change and begin five years ago. Five years ahead is for every way. I don't think we'll still have AGI, but we'll see.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. And to that point, you know, I've been playing around with AI and I was just testing something out and I thought, okay, look, I'm a guy, you know, I'm a writer, I set my computer, I've gained a little weight. Like I need to lose weight. I'm like not in my 20s anymore. So I just got on chat and was like, hey, I'm a this year, this old male. Here's my health issues. This is what I want to do. This is where I want to get to. What do you recommend? And it gave me the most detailed like, okay, you need to stop doing this and you need to start doing this now. It made me laugh because when I was working in Hollywood, I hired a trainer and he charged me five grand for three months. And what he put together was not as detailed as what AI did for me for free in five minutes because I actually pulled out the old plans and was looking at them, and I was just like, up to that point, I had primarily looked at AI as like, oh, AI is a business thing. It's a marketing tool. It's a content piece. And that's when I was like, already knows. Yep.
There's way more uses to this than I think most people are realizing.
[00:31:06] Speaker A: And especially with deep research functions from OpenAI and Anthropic and as well as Gemini, I think those models, absolutely amazing. Again, those things is doing research that is impossible for me as a human to do. Or sometimes, again, it will take me forever, like, two weeks to do the same thing that I literally can do within 30 minutes with deep research products there. And it's allowing me to be like again. It's allowing me to dive into things that I would never be a part of. Like, I need to have a team of, like, 20 people executing this and it still will take a week, et cetera, versus me just asking multimodal questions and navigating through this process. I think this is the key component and it's really challenging not to use this anymore. I think I get addicted to using this and to quality of output. And I would be like, how we did things like, five years ago, like, do we really just search in Google?
[00:32:00] Speaker B: Remember when you were in college and to, like, find something, you had to go to the library and dig through books because you couldn't find it on the Internet because it hadn't been digitized yet.
[00:32:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember those days. It was a lot of fun.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: Well, Vadim, thank you so much for your time. This has been fantastic. I love our conversation and thanks for taking time out of your day.
[00:32:17] Speaker A: Absolutely. I love this. Thanks for inviting.
[00:32:18] Speaker B: You're welcome.
