Imteaz Ahamed

Introduction:

The intersection of digital marketing and the unique challenges of marketing baby formula presents both opportunities and complexities. With over 15 years of experience at Reckitt, I’ve navigated these challenges head-on, focusing on retail media and e-commerce.

Journey to Digital Marketing Excellence:

My journey began as a graduate selling to retail pharmacies in Australia. From there, I transitioned into operations, account management, and trade and shopper marketing. About ten years ago, I pivoted to e-commerce and digital marketing, launching Reckitt’s first direct-to-consumer business model.

E-Commerce Evolution and Learning Curve:

E-commerce within the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industry has grown exponentially. My career took a global turn as I focused on direct-to-consumer e-commerce, necessitating continuous learning and adaptation. I honed my skills with platforms like Google, Facebook, and Shopify, ensuring I stayed ahead in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Data Clean Rooms and Their Impact:

Data clean rooms have revolutionized our understanding of consumer behavior and media attribution. These secure environments allow for the compliant matching of first-party data with retail media data, enabling highly targeted marketing strategies. My experience with data clean rooms has been particularly impactful in the complex baby formula market.

Case Study: Baby Formula Marketing on Amazon:

In a case study using Amazon Marketing Cloud and data clean rooms, we optimized our marketing strategy for baby formula. By focusing on targeting, budget optimization, and setting media, we achieved significant improvements in purchase per dollar spent, purchase rate, and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).

Key Takeaways and Future Trends:

From my experiences, the key takeaways include the importance of delivering the right creative to the right audience at the right time, and the role of AI and automation in scaling marketing efforts. Marketers need to be data-fluent and understand the interconnectedness of marketing, sales, and supply chain data.

Conclusion:

Continuous learning and innovation are crucial in digital marketing. I encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn, subscribe to my podcast, and explore the evolving world of digital marketing and data science.

Hosted by: Imteaz Ahamed

Video Transcript

Speaker: 00:00:00:00 – 00:00:22:05
This is Imteaz. Say hi.

Imteaz: Hi.

Speaker: He is awesome. We met at this conference over here on what was it because you were packaged goods, right?

Imteaz: Yeah.

Speaker: And we just happen to be both looking for lunch and we start talking. And he’s an expert in data and digital and AI and he says we need somebody to speak. And I said, Hell yes.

Imteaz: 00:00:22:05 – 00:00:46:10
So he works for a company called Reckitt, which makes everything from Lysol to baby formula. Yeah, that’s pretty cool. So he’s going to give you a whole thing on what he’s doing and all the stuff he’s talking about. So ask questions, but let’s give another round of applause. Good morning, everyone. So in terms of what we’re going to go over today, I’ll give you the agenda first and then we’ll cover specifics.

Imteaz: 00:00:46:12 – 00:01:08:01
So who am I? How did I get here? What is retail media, which is what I really focus on right now for a job? What is a data clean room and how does that impact how we do marketing today at a global CPG? Thirdly, I’ll show you a case study in terms of how we’re using a data cleaner.

Imteaz: 00:01:08:03 – 00:01:37:04
And then I’ll give you some takeaways from that. So firstly, who is Reckitt? Reckitt is a multinational CPG. We have a whole heap of brands across multiple categories. So if you think about the business, there’s three parts to the business. One is infant nutrition, so baby formula, which is where I work. We also have a household cleaning business, so we make everything from finished dishwashing tablets to earwig to Lysol as well.

Imteaz: 00:01:37:06 – 00:02:01:21
And we also have a personal care and health care business as well. So everything from Mucinex, Dell, some airborne, etc.. Okay, So in me in particular, I’ve been with the company since I was 20 years old. I started it in Sydney, Australia, and have moved across the world with Reckitt.

Imteaz: 00:02:01:21 – 00:02:08:13
So in terms of my experience, I started on the field as a grad with Reckitt.

Imteaz: 00:02:08:15 – 00:02:29:22
Then I moved into sales operations, which means looking at the field teams that we have selling our products in to customers all across Australia. I then moved into account management, which means maintaining our business relationships with the likes of Woolworths and Coles back in Australia. And then this thing called and a bit of trade and shopper marketing in there as well.

Imteaz: 00:02:30:00 – 00:02:54:08
But then this thing called e-commerce pops up for about nine or ten years ago, which was relatively new to the CPG space. And I was kind of pushed into that role by my senior leadership in Australia, not because I knew anything about digital marketing or e-commerce, but because I was good at PowerPoint and Excel. So, you know, right place, right time and right opportunity.

Imteaz: 00:02:54:10 – 00:03:24:11
From there I was the first e-commerce manager in Australia and we launched new business models. So, you know, Reckitt is traditionally a B2B, so we sell to other retailers who then sell on to other customers or our consumers. I was then setting up new business models like direct to consumer e-commerce. So how do we cut out retailers and then shipped directly to consumers and then market directly to consumers using things like Facebook and Google?

Imteaz: 00:03:24:13 – 00:04:00:18
Then I got shipped to the UK where in a global role. So in global, we look at, you know, how how can we support multiple markets from cross market learnings and scale up things that are working and then scale things that aren’t working. So if, for example, China is very, very advanced when it comes to e-commerce, if you think about Alibaba and Teamviewer, etc., how do we take some of those learnings from China and then apply them into other markets as well from a global role?

Imteaz: 00:04:00:20 – 00:04:38:08
I transitioned into specializing in direct to consumer e-commerce, which is where I’ve been for about four years of my career thus far, both in looking after Europe from a regional role as well as moving to the US at the height of the pandemic in March of 2020, looking after baby formula in that time as well. So, you know, in this transition that I’ve had from going to school at the University of Sydney, studying commerce and marketing and then transitioning into a sales career and then transitioning into an e-commerce career through the DTC experience.

Imteaz: 00:04:38:08 – 00:04:59:14
I’ve also had to pick up a lot of technical stuff when it comes to understanding software and understanding how to use technology. And now I look after performance media, and what Performance Media is, is looking at media, but specifically within Amazon, Walmart, Target, and how do we actually directly market to consumers on those platforms and get them to purchase.

Imteaz: 00:04:59:16 – 00:05:26:08
So it’s not DTC anymore. It’s looking at total e-commerce marketing, but at the retailers in particular. So that’s my corporate experience on one half of a slide on the right hand side. Beyond corporate, I am I have a podcast called Applied Intelligence where I talk about generative AI and the applications of that within the CPG space.

Imteaz: 00:05:26:09 – 00:05:51:03
I also do some stuff with the Harvard Business Review in terms of contributing into generative AI content. I have some passions around startups as well. There’s a thing called startup buzz. You guys should Google that. Everyone should do the startup competition. I’m not going to go into a detailed today, but it’s basically a hackathon on a bus where you build a business in 72 hours, launch it, pitch it, and then get going from there.

Imteaz: 00:05:51:05 – 00:06:04:18
So even if you don’t do the business, the whole learning experience that you get from that process is super valuable to anyone doing growth marketing marketing today. Okay, cool. So

Imteaz: 00:06:04:18 – 00:06:19:18
If you think about the CPG category or the CPG industry vertical over the last, let’s call it 5 to 10 years, it’s gone through two massive shifts. The first one is in distribution.

Imteaz: 00:06:19:19 – 00:06:41:14
If you think, let’s say 20, 30, 40 years ago it was all about brick and mortar sales. If you’re talking about CPG goods, every category was being bought at a physical retail location over the last ten years. E-commerce has taken off, Amazon has taken off here in the US. Alibaba and the likes have taken off everywhere across the world.

Imteaz: 00:06:41:16 – 00:07:11:01
But now we’re coming to a place where from a marketing point of view, we’re thinking not just about the digital retail, where a lot of the growth has come from over the last few years. But we’re thinking about the holistic journey of consumer when it comes to where are they actually shopping from. Right. So when the pandemic kicked off, you know, people like Instacart or companies like Instacart, by the way, the two founders of Instacart bet on startup us as well.

Imteaz: 00:07:11:03 – 00:07:41:01
Fun fact, but we’re thinking about the holistic consumer journey. What are those digital media all marketing that are touching the consumers along that journey and where are they actually shopping it? Where are they actually making that purchase? So we don’t just care about, you know, did they purchase online or did they purchase in offline? What are those touchpoints in that consumer journey that we can actually expose media to and we actually can influence to make them buy our brand versus somebody else’s brand?

Imteaz: 00:07:41:03 – 00:08:09:07 The second piece here is that digital revolution when it comes to media. So, you know, 50 years ago, reach and frequency media across television, print, radio, you didn’t really know who you were marketing to or who those actual consumers were. You just knew the audience titles. So, you know, people who watch the news at 7 p.m. have a certain demographic profile.

Imteaz: 00:08:09:07 – 00:08:31:06
That’s what you were buying from a media point of view. Digital kind of changed that with the likes of Facebook and Google in terms of getting clearer signals, in terms of who people are. So someone who’s typing in baby formula on Google is obviously very interested in buying baby formula or interested in understanding what baby formula is about.

Imteaz: 00:08:31:11 – 00:08:56:18
We didn’t have those signals when we were doing analog media before and now this. This third wave is retail media, which is, you know, an interaction of both media and shopping in the one place. So Amazon is not just a shop. It’s not just a place where you buy stuff. It’s also a place where you’re being influenced to buy stuff as well through media.

Imteaz: 00:08:56:18 – 00:09:21:14
And Amazon owns lots of things like Prime video. There’s a football free V, etc. and is becoming a much bigger media organization and not just a retail destination as well. And similarly, I think, you know, if you think about retailers like Walmart, this is why they’re doing media partnerships with the like some of Paramount plus Roku, etc. as well.

Imteaz: 00:09:21:14 – 00:09:40:15
So retailers are evolving and digitizing their not just their store footprint, but also the media footprint and how they influence consumers. So delving deeper into what a what a retail media network is,

Imteaz: 00:09:40:15 – 00:10:13:19
If you think about the major retailers here in the US, all of these retailers have a wealth of first party data. They have transactional data on who is purchasing what at their physical stores as well as their digital stores and even more on digital, right When you’re signed into your Walmart app or your Amazon app, they know everything about who you are, where you live, what frequency you are buying certain products, what frequency you are seeing certain ads before you’ve actually made that purchase.

Imteaz: 00:10:13:19 – 00:10:42:02
So for us as a CPG, there are certain media tactics that we play across the retail media ecosystem, starting with Page Search. So when you’re typing in baby formula, for example, on Amazon or you’re typing in any product category that’s relevant to one of my brands, I’m trying to actively make sure that my product appears at the top of the page.

Imteaz: 00:10:42:02 – 00:10:50:20
So you click it. The higher up on the page that you are, the more likely you are to be clicked on, the more likely you are to win that search. Right.

Imteaz: 00:10:50:20 – 00:11:10:13
The second part of it is targeted display and video ads as well. Similarly, on Amazon, when you’re making that search or when you’re interested in a particular category and you haven’t converted, you’ll start to notice that those ads, those visual ads are following you around the Internet trying to get you to convert.

Imteaz: 00:11:10:15 – 00:11:34:17
So the retail media network has seen the signal that you have searched that you did not purchase within a certain timeframe. So companies that are actively advertising to you, trying to make you convert into that brand. And then thirdly, what is this actually doing for us as a CPG is giving us a whole heap of customer insights that we never had before, right?

Imteaz: 00:11:34:19 – 00:12:01:16
So again, remember I told you, you know, we’ve always used to be a B2B type company. We’ve always had retailers maintain that relationship with consumer when it comes to transaction and purchase that data now is way more accessible to us than it was ever before. So we’re actively mining that data and trying to find use cases and uses of that in order to continue to grow our brands.

Imteaz: 00:12:01:18 – 00:12:24:22
And then finally, is data clean rooms. And we’re going to go into more detail in the following slides. But basically what’s happening now is there’s a framework or a technology available for us for brands to take their first party data. So the data that we have on our customers match it in a compliant way with retail media data and then activate that accordingly.

Imteaz: 00:12:24:22 – 00:13:12:16
And we’ll go into detail in, in the case study. So what are clean rooms and how do they work? So on the right hand side of this chart over here you have retail media network. So data clean rooms are places where ad publishers. So Google met Facebook as well as Amazon now, as well as Walmart Connect. They’re sharing their aggregated data rather than their customer level data with advertisers such as myself whilst exerting strict control because you can’t Walmart when you’re signed up to Walmart or when you’re signed up to Amazon in the privacy agreement, you’re agreeing that sorry, Walmart is agreeing that they’re not going to share your data with somebody else in a

Imteaz: 00:13:12:16 – 00:13:44:07
Very explicit manner. Right. There’s privacy controls in place. So in terms of that first party data to match that compliantly with a brand advertiser such as myself, it’s that data is actually put into a clean room. What that means is all of your AI, all of your personal information is hashed in a way that I can’t identify who you are, but I can use certain signals and understand certain behaviors that you have on that platform to match up to my data.

Imteaz: 00:13:44:09 – 00:14:15:02
So say, for example, I want to look at over the last 30 days, I want to see people who searched for Nike shoes but did not purchase. Okay, so keyword Nike shoes did not purchase. I can go into the data clean room and create an audience of people that search for that keyword that did not purchase. And the data clean room will give me back an audience of 2000 or 20,000 identities.

Imteaz: 00:14:15:06 – 00:14:41:21
I don’t know who these people are, but I know that they had a certain behavior on that retail media network and then I can advertise against them. Okay. So from there, we see how different datasets match up and look at any inconsistencies between the two to understand if we’re over serving ads, if we’re giving too many ads away, or what activity do we actually need to run.

Imteaz: 00:14:41:23 – 00:15:05:08
So the three ways that you can use a data cleaner, one is through measurement. So you can look at historical performance of your ads within that retail media network. You can use it also for media planning. So if I change the media tactics that I’ve done, what happens? It’s like a scenario planning situation and then you can also use it on the fly.

Imteaz: 00:15:05:14 – 00:15:34:11
So from a media activation point of view, which is where the case study is going to head go, I think I’ve covered this one. So to make it really easy, a dairy clean room is akin to a middle school dance. So one on the left side and left hand side. Here you have your own or your brand or the advertiser’s first party data on the right, right hand side there you’ve got someone else’s first party data, right?

Imteaz: 00:15:34:13 – 00:16:06:18
And there is a heavily chaperon temporary interaction happening in between them. Okay. So after you’ve done that interaction, everyone goes back to the wall and remember, who owns the gym isn’t as important as you know what you’re dancing to in the music, what the music is, right? So this is a very new way for advertisers or CPGs for us to match our data with other people’s data in a compliant way and activate against it.

Imteaz: 00:16:06:20 – 00:16:38:09
Okay, guys, if you have any questions throughout my slides, please, please feel free to ask as well. So the retailer that’s leading data clean room activation here in the US is Amazon. Amazon has a product called Amazon Marketing Cloud and in this case study, we’ll go over some of the things what we’ve done with them. So the objective of this initiative was to shoot more bulls eyes with our media.

Imteaz: 00:16:38:11 – 00:17:00:11
Right. If you think about the baby formula category, if you don’t have a baby, you’re not interested in this category. So there’s no point of me exposing my ads to people that don’t have a baby. In the US, there are 10,000 babies being born every day, and then there are 10,000 babies leaving this product category every day. There’s only 1% birth rate growth in the US.

Imteaz: 00:17:00:13 – 00:17:34:00
So like and breastfeeding is increasing. So from a volume point of view, there’s no volume growth in this category. It is all about how do I acquire more customers from other people’s brands as well as how do I extend that lifetime value within people that are built. My brand as well. So in terms of the how, what we did was create weekly cohorts from our own database, from our own first party data that we have, and we put them into Amazon Marketing Cloud and delivered sequential ads to these consumers.

Imteaz: 00:17:34:01 – 00:18:04:02
And we measured the difference in conversion versus control groups. Previously, we also built lookalikes within the Amazon audience layer as well to find shoppers that had similar sorts of behaviors as well to further get to more consumers. So in terms of how we activated this, so we did a specific we did some specific campaigns around our infant vitamins portfolio.

Imteaz: 00:18:04:04 – 00:18:29:14
So consumers that fell into the audience behaviors that we were looking at would deserve display creative across. We started with our vitamins range, then we moved onto baby formula as well. But to give you some perspective of some of the ads that people were looking at, and then what were we optimizing and testing against? So as a performance marketer, I really want to drive two things.

Imteaz: 00:18:29:18 – 00:19:06:18
One is I want a direct purchase. I want more people to buy my brand. And secondly, I want to optimize against cost, which means I want to spend less money acquiring those customers into my brand. Right? So the way this works is across these three vectors or these three levers, we were either upgrading or downgrading things to find the optimal way to acquire new customers, 10,000 babies every day, acquire more of those customers in the most cost effective way possible.

Imteaz: 00:19:06:20 – 00:19:30:04
Okay, so how do you kind of do that? So firstly, you start with audience. Who is the right audience to target? So you go into the data clean room, you look at what are these behaviors that people display when they’re shopping on Amazon, for example? Search is a very good one, right? Because if you searched in the last 30 days for baby formula or you’ve searched in the last 30 days for a bit.

Imteaz: 00:19:30:06 – 00:19:53:06
Sure. Go ahead. So it’s just about what is the right budget to spend? How do you what’s the process for that? Like, how do you find the right budget if it’s not? You start with a seed budget. You start with $10,000 a week, for example, and you see the performance against that. And if you want to scale that up or down, you can.

Imteaz: 00:19:53:08 – 00:20:13:17
So you just start somewhere. Obviously, it needs to make sense for that category right? So if you’re in $1,000,000,000 category, you’d spend a lot more money than if you were in a category. And if your brand is only like $1,000,000 big or $10 million big, your advertising budget would be significantly different versus someone who’s, you know, shipping billions of dollars worth of product.

Imteaz: 00:20:13:17 – 00:20:24:08
Right? So you’ve just got to pick a number that kind of makes financial sense for you to start with. And then based on that performance, you can scale up with that.

Imteaz: 00:20:24:10 – 00:20:53:10
So you start with audience. So what are those signals that you can take out of that retail media network? So search is one of them. But you could also think about things like, you know, if someone’s buying Lululemon gym pants, they might also be interested in sweatshirts from Lululemon, for example. So you’ve got to think about what are those correlations between behavior on a platform and then create that audience and then test against it.

Imteaz: 00:20:53:12 – 00:21:20:01
Right budget. So to your question, you start with something and you say if you need to scale up or down. But also what’s very cool about this is the machine is actively making decisions on do I spend my entire budget today like that $10,000 if I’m spending, let’s say, $20,000 a day right now? Do I spend all of it today, or do I hold on to some of that budget and optimize for total sales?

Imteaz: 00:21:20:06 – 00:21:44:01 Right. So it’s not just about spending your marketing dollars today. It’s also thinking about what’s the best way to spend my dollars so I get the maximum return. And then finally is settings. So when you’re setting up Amazon campaigns, you can do things like frequency caps. So what a frequency cap is, is the number of times somebody is exposed to an ad, right?

Imteaz: 00:21:44:06 – 00:22:12:09
So let’s say for a particular category, if you are exposed to nine or more ads, anything above nine doesn’t increase conversion anymore. So why would we want to do a frequency of 24 that has no impact? So I can cut down my frequency and cap the number of times that the same person sees the same creative and save money and, you know, share my ad to somebody else.

Imteaz: 00:22:12:11 – 00:22:34:20
So the machine was doing all of this stuff for us to look at how the model actually works. So on the left hand side there, we have our CDP. A CDP is basically a database where all of our first party consumer information sits. The second part is we looked at Amazon ads, we looked at how our historical campaign performance was happening.

Imteaz: 00:22:34:22 – 00:23:04:12 And then within our media platform. So we used a specific software to buy our media. We’re looking at the audience reports. All of this information was fed into our ad optimization model, which processed all of this information, created new campaigns for us. It served those ads into Amazon ads. It monitored the performance of those ads in real time, and then that information gets sent back into the optimization model.

Imteaz: 00:23:04:14 – 00:23:34:06
And it continually optimizes on the fly. So it’s using machine learning to do all of those three things that we talked about in the previous slide in real time on the fly with real budget at all times, right? So instead of me having to have multiple performance media managers sitting there like updating certain budgets down, weighting budgets, looking at which audiences to create and a number of things that they could be doing.

Imteaz: 00:23:34:11 – 00:24:07:11
The machine is doing that for us because machines are better at process driven tasks versus humans. Right. Any questions on this lot? So, all right. So what did it achieve? So across the key metrics that we were tracking for this particular case study, we saw significant improvement on the first KPI, which is purchase per dollar spent. What purchases per dollar means is for every dollar that I spend, how many transactions did I get from that?

Imteaz: 00:24:07:12 – 00:24:36:07
Right. So, you know, in the benchmark periods, we were getting very low conversions per dollar spent versus when we were looking at the cumulative performance. In the case study, we significantly improved against the baseline in terms of purchase rate, which is similar to your conversion rate in terms of total sales coming across from a conversion point of view that increased as well.

Imteaz: 00:24:36:09 – 00:25:15:08
And then finally, when we look at the return on ad spend, which is your sales divided by your ad spend, it significantly improved as well. So across from a result point of view in performance media, this is exactly what you want to see. You want to see higher sales and you want to see lower cost, right? Because typically when you scale spend, especially in the old world of traditional media, your performance drops very quickly because you’ve already if you’ve already if you’re already spending too much money, spending that next dollar might not necessarily be a good thing.

Imteaz: 00:25:15:10 – 00:25:31:09
This model kind of showed us on some of our paracatu diaries. We were already spending too much money. It didn’t improve our sales, but it cut our marketing in half, meaning that I could take that savings and then spend it somewhere else.

Imteaz: 00:25:31:11 – 00:25:57:03 So to some takeaways. So by using a clear data clean room, you can deliver that right creative to that right audience at the right time. You can optimize your media and optimize what ads you’re showing to everyone in real time. And you can do all of that through AI and automation at scale as well. So what does that mean for you?

Imteaz: 00:25:57:05 – 00:26:24:05
So if I was in your shoes, what I would be focusing on right now is how and understanding how data flows through multiple things or multiple pieces within an organization, across sales, across marketing, across consumer insights, across all of these things. So improve your data fluency. I would also learn how to start small and cheap and then walk away if it doesn’t

Imteaz: 00:26:24:07 – 00:26:48:16 And this is something I learned by doing Startup, by the way. But this project that we started off initially, we didn’t know if it was going to work. It was a very big risk that it wasn’t going to work, but we thought, What’s the cheapest way to get started? What is the smallest category that we can kind of get, you know, throw a little bit of money that wouldn’t hurt us to get started with and see if it works.

Imteaz: 00:26:48:18 – 00:27:13:10
And then you can scale up from there and ask for more money from the business. And then finally always be learning, which is, you know, this stuff didn’t exist when I was when I was in college. I also I also took a data science course through Harvard Online a couple of years ago because, you know, when I studied marketing and commerce, data science wasn’t really a big thing back then.

Imteaz: 00:27:13:10 – 00:27:21:03 Right? But now it’s a very important thing to learn as well. Cool. That’s it for me. Any questions?

Imteaz: 00:27:21:03 – 00:27:47:02
What what’s the project on this topic? What was my project? Okay, so this is back in 2014 before Pokémon Go made air. Like augmented reality a thing. So Mike, my team, we made this thing called Spec See Me, which is custom designed 3D printed glasses using augmented reality from your webcam laptop.

Imteaz: 00:27:47:04 – 00:28:16:04
So yeah, so we actually had built a functioning product. I had a girl on the team. She was 20 years old. Atlassian had already hired her. She found out right then had some open source software allowing you to put glasses on someone’s face, you know, within the browser. This is like nine years ago. This is like revolutionary at the time, another person who was a mechanical engineer, he found In-Browser CAD.

Imteaz: 00:28:16:06 – 00:28:51:08 So we were customizing the look and feel of the glasses. Another person on the team who was building e-commerce sites, so he built a functioning website and then a go from Spectrum PR, who managed the PR for Samsung in Australia, and she did all of our content marketing. She got us into 3D printing news and we did all of this with dodgy wi fi traveling from Sydney to Melbourne, which is about 700 miles and back in in three days.

Imteaz: 00:28:51:10 – 00:29:14:20
So, you know, if you want to build stuff using technology, it’s very accessible now to do and with such a pity with all of these no code solutions as well, I think it’s really important to understand the problem you’re going to solve for consumer or your target market more than it is the technology. The technology now is just becoming even more and more accessible.

Imteaz: 00:29:15:02 – 00:29:39:00 It’s I don’t want to say it’s not important to learn code or not important to learn data fluency or data science. But the bigger challenge that we have is how do we actually create stuff that’s going to get used and make money and add value? Yes, I’m going back to that slide that has like three different circles.

Imteaz: 00:29:39:02 – 00:30:04:16
Yep. In terms of like jobs and how that works through your team. Like, yeah, that one like, is the oldest a one person job? Like how does it flow through like your company? Great question. So there are two teams that were really instrumental in making this happen. One was my performance media team and the second team was our data partner.

Imteaz: 00:30:04:18 – 00:30:37:13 So an external agency that we worked very closely with. So we had three dedicated data scientists, a business analyst and like a project manager who kind of orchestrated all of the technical stuff or the data science, building the product, understanding and connecting the APIs and the data points. And then a commercial person or a marketing person who had to clearly define the problem that we were trying to solve and what the output kind of needed to look like.

Imteaz: 00:30:37:17 – 00:30:53:07
Right? So again, you know, the technical stuff, there’s a lot of technical people out there in the world. But clearly defining the problem that you’re trying to solve is the tricky stuff which, you know, everyone in this room can do.

Imteaz: 00:30:53:07 – 00:31:09:17 Like how do you determine when to change the parameters of the benchmark? Okay. Good question. And this comes down to studying your category and studying your brand and studying your competitors.

Imteaz: 00:31:09:17 – 00:31:32:20 Right. So, for example, if your competitor comes in and start spending twice as much as you do for no apparent reason within their particular category, you have to respond to that. Right. But you need to know that they’ve done something. So on a monthly, bi-weekly, and then quarterly basis as well, we monitor our market share.

Imteaz: 00:31:32:22 – 00:32:08:23
We look at how are our brands performing against all of the competitors and the total market. And if there is a significant change, we determine what do we need to do about that. And to your question, I think you go, when you have like an industry that’s a very defined like customer life. Yes. How much of like when you’re looking at data, like deciding how to go on, how much it is focused on like new customer acquisition, the 10,000 babies entering like every single day versus, you know, trying to take you with your competitors And like any market share that way.

Imteaz: 00:32:09:04 – 00:32:44:08
Sure. Great question. By the way, because I’ve worked in the baby formula category is very different to most of CPG, right. If you think of CPG toilet paper, yogurt, all these other different categories where, you know, promo price your for your traditional full pace, play a huge part of your purchasing decision. Right? Baby for me is different because you’re buying this one category for nine months and you’re spending between 400 to 1200 dollars in nine months.

Imteaz: 00:32:44:08 – 00:33:15:13
That’s a lot of money versus toilet paper an average household might spend, I don’t know, 120 to $150 on toilet paper on an annual basis, which is completely different and is heavily influenced by who’s on promo that week, for example. Right. So it comes down to understanding the shopping behaviors that we talked about. What what is that path to purchase in terms of choosing the brand that you’re going to go with or and what priority does brand have?

Imteaz: 00:33:15:15 – 00:33:38:04
What priority does media have in that equation to actually make a purchase? Right? So let’s say I’m picking on and this is a hypothetical example. I don’t know is the toilet paper category in the US that well, but let’s say media doesn’t matter in that equation, right? It doesn’t matter who is doing as many display ads as possible.

Imteaz: 00:33:38:06 – 00:34:10:23 The customer only cares about who is on promotion. This week. Yeah. Then promotion is more important than media. So then you have to change your strategy and really, you know, compete against your competitors who might be on promotion, promotion every single week and then determine how do I differentiate myself against everybody else. Maybe for this completely different, highly emotional category doctors, health care professionals, your midwives, everyone has a huge part to play in terms of making the decision of which brand you’ll pick for your baby.

Imteaz: 00:34:11:01 – 00:34:48:16
So yeah, the answer is it depends. do you mostly target or focus on getting new or find new customers? Or is it like, what’s your customer base stick with that? Is the experience I don’t know about big. Yeah. Because that the only time you use this formula then you’re just more so your experience is that once a customer has become a customer because they stay for nine months or they experiment with different, you spend money and and keep keeping them the so this is like the general customer behavior within baby formula.

Imteaz: 00:34:48:17 – 00:35:13:23
So you get when you, when you’re at hospital and if you’re having feeding issues, the hospital will typically give you a formula. And all of the companies are trying to be that formula of choice, that hospital, because that’s the first interaction that we have. We also we all do sampling programs as well. So we actually sample products to to to the home as well.

Imteaz: 00:35:14:01 – 00:35:36:04
So we want to be that brand that’s there at that moment of need. Right. Secondly, what happens is one in three babies in the US has a feeding issue, which means digestive issue, cow’s milk, allergy intolerance to something whatnot, and one in three babies are switching within them in the first, let’s call it 60 in the first 60 odd days.

Imteaz: 00:35:36:04 – 00:36:07:10
Right. And sometimes people switch twice, depending on the severity of the food allergy or intolerance to the formula. After that, after baby is comfortable with the formula. Switching behavior is not there anymore. It’s a very high, highly loyal category. So for us, even though you might have a nine month baby who can still drink formula for another three months or another six months, once you’ve bought the same formula for 90 days, another switch.

Imteaz: 00:36:07:12 – 00:36:24:00
I don’t need to market to you anymore. I’m not going to convince you to buy anything else again. Comes back to understanding your category dynamics and understanding how your consumer is buying into your category and what can you actually do to change that.

Imteaz: 00:36:24:00 – 00:36:36:10
all right, how awesome is this? All right. So let’s spend about 20 minutes on a project and you guys can get out of here for the holiday segment.

Imteaz: 00:36:36:12 – 00:36:50:06
All right. There you go. And then you can log to show us. So, yeah, if you guys want to learn more or reach out anything, please do.

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Introduction:

In the latest episode of Applied Intelligence, we had the pleasure of hosting Jack Lindberg, the Director of Media, Insights, and Analytics at the Mars Agency. Jack’s unique journey from an opera singer to an AI and e-commerce expert gave us many insights. This blog post captures the essence of our enlightening discussion, exploring the intersection of AI and e-commerce and delving into the future of retail media.

Jack’s Transition: From Opera to E-commerce

One of the most intriguing aspects of our conversation was Jack’s transition from the world of professional opera to the dynamic realm of e-commerce. His shift, catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic, is a testament to the fluidity and interconnectedness of career paths in the modern world. Jack’s journey underlines a vital lesson: the skills and experiences we gather in one field can often pave the way to success in another seemingly unrelated area.

Decoding Amazon Marketing Cloud

A significant part of our discussion centered around Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and its impact on e-commerce. Jack provided an in-depth understanding of data clean rooms and the unique position of Amazon in this space. His explanation of AMC as a “code-first interface” shed light on how brands can leverage this powerful tool to enhance their marketing strategies, underscoring the importance of adaptability and technical knowledge in today’s marketing landscape.

The Role of AI in Retail Media

Jack’s insights into AI’s transformative role in retail media were particularly striking. He discussed the early stages of AI in content generation and review summarization, highlighting its potential to revolutionize customer experiences. The conversation also touched upon the challenges and opportunities presented by AI, including privacy concerns and the need for customized solutions in various sectors.

Future Trends and Career Advice

Looking ahead, Jack anticipates significant developments in AI-driven search, predicting a shift towards more specialized AI models tailored to specific industries. His advice for those aspiring to enter the e-commerce analytics field is invaluable: master the basics like SQL and Excel and gradually build up to more complex tools and models.

Conclusion:

Jack Lindberg’s journey and insights offer a unique perspective on the evolving world of e-commerce and AI. His experience reminds us that the willingness to learn and adapt is crucial in navigating the ever-changing digital landscape. As we continue to witness the integration of AI in various facets of retail and marketing, Jack’s story serves as an inspiration and a guide for aspiring and established professionals in the field.

Hosted by: Imteaz Ahamed

Video Transcript

Imteaz (00:02.544)
and then we’ll get kicked off. Cool. Very cool. Yeah. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Applied Intelligence. This week, I have a really fun guest, Jack Lindbergh from the Mize Agency. So Jack is the Director of Media and Insights and Analytics at the Mize Agency and the product lead on Noctis, which is an AI copilot for Amazon Marketing Club. He is the 2023 Amazon Ads Partner, Macedo.

Jack Lindberg (00:04.744)
Cool, sounds good. Looking forward.

Imteaz (00:31.24)
and they’re full of professional opera singers as well. So there’s just so much to talk about with Jack and his very colorful background. I also met up with Jack a couple of years ago, well, he was at Pacview, which is another great e-commerce partner. So yeah, looking forward to this lovely conversation and welcome to the show.

Jack Lindberg (00:53.696)
Thank you so much for having me, excited to be here.

Imteaz (00:56.288)
So the question I ask on my guests on my podcast, and I love asking this question, which is if there was an autobiography of your life and it had five chapters, what would the chapter titles of each chapter be in your autobiography, Jack? Just so the audience gets to know who you are.

Jack Lindberg (01:16.24)
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think for anyone my age to say that they have five chapters of an autobiography would be a little bit disingenuous. I’m 26, so going out in the world and saying, wow, I really lived five chapters worth of a life might be kind of hard. I think I would be at best at the beginning of chapter three. So I would sort of think about the chapters

Imteaz (01:34.456)
Thanks. Hahaha.

Imteaz (01:41.694)
Okay.

Jack Lindberg (01:47.96)
transitioning from being a professional musician to the world of e-commerce, sort of getting my bearings, my footing in the world of e-commerce. And then what I’m doing now, which is really like those initial opportunities of going out and trying to make waves and seeing what’s happening. I think my journey to e-comm, if there’s anything I’ve learned, is that everyone comes to this field because it’s so nascent.

from really random, totally off the beaten path, other fields, and listening to my story about coming from professional singing. If you talk to people in e-commerce, it isn’t actually that strange. Like I have one friend who was a professional portrait photographer before coming into e-comm. So I did my undergrad and my master’s degree in opera performance.

Imteaz (02:39.676)
Okay.

Jack Lindberg (02:47.568)
I studied at the Guildhall School in London in the UK. I was completing my masters right when COVID hit. I had my first professional season of swinging for the fences, being a freelance sopersinger in Europe, sort of rolling. And all of those gigs got canceled. I moved back home to New Jersey at my mom’s house. And three months in, she was like, I need you to get out of the house and get a job.

And the feeling was mutual. There’s only so much you want to live with your parents, as much as you love them. So with my two music degrees and no skills, I was sort of in a tough spot. And luckily, my godmother is a career coach, Debbie Walter. She teaches at Stanford Business School.

Imteaz (03:21.337)
Of course. Completely understand.

Jack Lindberg (03:42.604)
and runs her own consulting firm called Redbed Boon Consulting in Silicon Valley for professional career coaching. She’s my godmother. And I called her up and said, Aunt Debbie, I’m calling in all of my ex years of favors right now. Cash them all in. And I think I ended up trading her SAT tutoring for her daughter as a swap. But she talked me through.

Imteaz (03:56.31)
Cash in mid. Yeah.

Imteaz (04:03.592)
Okay, that’s a good trick.

Jack Lindberg (04:10.548)
basically figuring out what the next steps were. What did I like? What did I not like? What sort of soft skills could I play up in that first interview to say, yes, I don’t know how to use Excel because they don’t teach you that in music conservatory, but how do I get my foot in that door? And also how to pound the pavement and talk to people and learn about what’s out there. I didn’t know what.

analytics was or I didn’t know what a product manager was. And I was like, how was I supposed to know that was a career that I wanted if I didn’t know it existed? So I spent a lot of time just reaching out to random people and saying, hey, can I talk to you for 20 minutes about your job? No ask from you. Just tell me about what you do and what you like about it and what you don’t so I can learn about what’s out there to see what might fit.

Imteaz (05:01.337)
Can I ask you a question about that? How many people turned you down for that ask for 20 minutes of that time?

Jack Lindberg (05:08.032)
Oh, basically no one. I would say like 80% of people, 90% of people said yes. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that people love to talk about themselves. And if you go in and say, hey, I want to give you the opportunity just to tell me about yourself, and I’ll ask you questions, most people say yes. Because the key is like, you’re not asking them to do anything. You’re asking them to tell you about them.

Imteaz (05:14.816)
Okay.

Imteaz (05:19.88)
I’m sorry.

Imteaz (05:27.468)
Mm-hmm.

Imteaz (05:34.904)
Right. And this is the thing, right? Like a lot of times in our lives, we’re too scared to ask for help. We’re too scared to like, really leverage our relationships and or just, you know, reach out to someone and say, Hey, I’m going through this thing. Can you just help me through it? And, you know, I’ve had a similar experience every time that I’ve kind of had a

career issue or personal thing that I’m trying to figure out anytime I’ve reached out to a friend or like somebody relatively in the know about that topic or area, everyone’s always said yes, here’s 20 minutes of my time or half an hour of my time to figure that out. So yeah, sorry, keep going.

Jack Lindberg (06:18.792)
No, definitely, yes. People are generally much nicer than we give them credit for. And people will say yes if you ask them for help, especially if it’s something that they’re uniquely positioned to help you with. So I think I had maybe 25 or 30 of those conversations of tell me about whatever you do. And I was like, well, that gave me a lot of lists of things that I really didn’t want to do. And e-commerce was…

Imteaz (06:29.516)
for sure.

Jack Lindberg (06:49.172)
sort of the best bet because if there’s anything I’ve seen it’s that prior experience in this field because it changes so much doesn’t help that much. That being a 15-year e-commerce professional if you’re not up to date on the cutting edge you’re behind right and that sort of shelf life of knowledge doesn’t maintain the same way it would for banking or something like that.

Imteaz (07:16.609)
Yep, and we work, and I’m sure you work across multiple clients now, but even in CPG, right? The way things have been done within CPG have not really changed that much, especially from a supply chain. Maybe the marketing side of the equation has changed with the advent of Facebook and Google. But

in terms of how consumers are purchasing products and brands, how they’re discovering products and brands, how they’re experiencing products and brands has shifted and is continuing to shift. And we’re going to get into Amazon Marketing Cloud even later, but the partnerships that Amazon is leading within this space right now is only going to further fuel that change. So I know I’m taking too much thunder from our conversation later, but yeah, certainly.

100% agree with you that, you know, having, not being able to unlearn what you’ve, like what you’ve learned in your career thus far, and then picking up new skills, you can’t do that ecom is going to be a struggle for you.

Jack Lindberg (08:25.812)
I definitely agree. And my first job out of grad school was literally as an intern at a small agency in New York, learning how to manage Amazon PPC ads. And I swear to God, I told my boss, my then boss in that interview, I don’t know anything about this, but I promise you I can learn. And I think that held true. And then I shifted over to working at Pacview.

HackVue is filled with some of the smartest people in the industry. A bunch of really dear friends are still there. But my first role there was in customer success, which basically was you’re the person people ask questions to about e-comm retail media. And you’re seeing a huge wide swath of accounts from all different types of verticals, all different levels of expertise on the client side, different agencies.

And it was sort of a great trial by fire to say, you don’t know anything about this, and you need to come in and figure out how you can be helpful in that half an hour or hour to the person on the other end of the phone and know your stuff cold to be a valuable resource during that window. And what I found was I was answering the same questions over and over and over again and thought, there must be a better way to do this.

And the way to do, you know, solve all of those same problems at scale is to move from talking to the customer to building things that talk to the customer. And I shifted over to the product team at Packview, where I did a lot of work on the Amazon DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud products and helped out a little other places. And then most recently in April jumped over to the Mars agency to pick up Amazon Marketing Cloud efforts there.

and most recently have launched Noctis in collaboration with some of our friends at Analytic Index, which I’m really proud of. It’s an AI co-pilot. Basically, we’re using a large language model to retrieve all the information you’d never need about Amazon Marketing Cloud. So, ask it questions. It knows the answer about what does this field mean? Should I use table one or table two? And even more concretely,

Jack Lindberg (10:53.136)
ask it a question in English, and it gives you back the code you need to get the answer. It’s very cool.

Imteaz (10:57.707)
Super cool. And, you know, based on your LinkedIn posts as well, Jack, over the last few months, you know, even using…

chat GPT to write the SQL queries to like go over Amazon marketing cloud and just like the basic stuff, right? That was super helpful for me. And now seeing it in a product that’s fully scalable, usable across multiple platforms or multiple use cases within Amazon is super cool. So well done there.

Jack Lindberg (11:30.964)
Thank you. Yeah, I was something we’ll talk about later. But with the OpenAI releasing this OpenAI Agents feature, you can basically build your own custom LLM-powered tool. There was a lot of concern from some of the people in our company that didn’t really understand the product, as well as those folks in the weeds. Like, hey, can I have someone go build this via an OpenAI agent?

And the answer was, I tried it. And you can’t. It’s really hard. There are a lot of companies out there that are using AI in a way that our VC friends call a thin wrapper, where it’s basically a prompt and maybe a little bit of data manipulation on top of a LLM. Something with that level of sophistication, OpenAI basically killed overnight.

Imteaz (12:05.039)
Yep.

Imteaz (12:17.456)
Yeah.

Jack Lindberg (12:29.708)
And you need to be adding value on top of that to actually be competitive in the market and not be killed by the proliferation of these sort of agents.

Imteaz (12:34.656)
for sure. Yeah, I also think the level of base level of consumer or customer understanding of these products is massively increasing very quickly over time as well. So the snake oil salesman who’s trying to basically give you some user interface with a little bit of prompting.

that generates specific outputs for you, that’s not gonna fly. Maybe you made a few sales now, but yeah, that lunch is gonna get eaten very quickly by a lot of players. Very cool. Okay, let’s go into some detail and some clarification of what data clean rooms are, what Amazon Marketing Cloud is for the audience. It’s a relatively new technology.

Jack Lindberg (13:15.45)
I definitely agree.

Imteaz (13:33.38)
I think data clean rooms have been around for a bit of time. And obviously, Amazon Marketing Cloud has been around for a while, but certainly making a lot more noise over the last two years since unboxed, I want to say two years ago, and now the latest unbox conference where, you know, every, I want to say almost, it felt like 80% of the announcements were around what Amazon Marketing Cloud is. So if you didn’t take it seriously previously, you should take it seriously now.

Jack, what’s your definition of what a data cleanroom is?

Jack Lindberg (14:07.096)
Yeah, I’ve had to explain this to a lot of people, and I try to do it two ways, depending on the audience. So I’ll do both here just for the sake of the audience. The technical definition is basically there’s a scenario in which you have two data providers, company A, company B. And they know that there is a valuable output from the aggregation of their two data sets, but they’re not willing to share the raw source material with the other party. So.

A common example of this would be like a researcher and health data. My mom’s a public health professor. This is something that someone could do in her field. For example, I’d want to know how many people who live near within 15 miles of an oil well have cancer relative to people who don’t live near an oil well. And you could use that data from.

a partner in a data cleanroom to say, hey, I can get anonymous aggregations with some privacy controls to sift through that data. But I can’t ask what’s Joe Blow’s address. You can’t reveal that level of PII. What Amazon has done that’s kind of different is in most data cleanrooms, there are three parties at minimum.

Data partner A, data partner B, and the intermediary, that cleanroom host. Amazon has decided that they’re gonna be two sides of that three-way relationship, and say they’re gonna be a data provider providing the Amazon ads data signals, and they’re using the AWS architecture to be the host. And then you as the advertiser can add in your own data as you see fit. The more fun way to describe it.

is thinking about my favorite episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, where there’s a great scene where Andy Samberg decides he’s going to buy a DJ turntable. And very much like data cleaners are like that, where the table itself is the architecture, and the different records you place on are the data sets. And you’re mixing them together to get some sort of aggregate output that.

Imteaz (16:16.197)
Okay.

Imteaz (16:25.68)
Okay.

Jack Lindberg (16:29.148)
is different, unique, and hopefully more helpful and better than the source input you have. In that episode, he ends up trying to mix two Klezmer records, and it goes horribly wrong. And I think that’s what most people’s experience, like using data cleanrooms, is if you put in garbage data where you don’t know how to get data out effectively, you’re not going to get anything useful.

from the cleaner of itself. It’s an enabling technology, not a spoon feeding of the right answers.

Imteaz (17:02.673)
Yeah, and I think the, let’s call it the advertising industry and the media industry, one of the, you know, paradigms has always been pushing ads and pushing more media and more creative, right? And now…

You kind of have to balance the mad men with the math men. And this is all math, right? Like in the sense that this is all enabling analytics technology that allows you to look at historical performance, allows you to look at future scenario planning of if you changed something within your media signals, and then finally it enables you to activate audiences on the fly and do like audience activation in real time.

It doesn’t necessarily help you with the art side of the equation, right? So if you don’t, if you have an agency partner that is very focused on the art side of the equation and doesn’t know how to balance the math side of the equation, you’re not necessarily going to win here. And similarly, if you’re too focused on the math and too focused on the numbers, uh, of your, you know, campaign performance, media spend, et cetera.

and you don’t look at the creative side of this equation as well at the same time, then this is not going to work either. So this is what I find is fascinating because you studied music in your past life, I studied visual arts in my past life and math, but for me this is a really cool amalgamation of two fields that from a marketing point of view.

Jack Lindberg (18:26.662)
Mm-hmm.

Imteaz (18:48.584)
is the synergy between the art of the possible versus how creatively can you find customer problems that exist and solve them through an enabling technology as well as add creative that actually really works within that scenario as well.

Jack Lindberg (19:06.5)
Right. Yeah, I think to add to your point, I think the data within a data cleanroom is really good at telling you the what and the how. Not so good at telling you the why.

Imteaz (19:16.617)
Yep.

Imteaz (19:19.868)
Exactly. And this is where you need humans, right? Like until we have an LL that can essentially be a brand marketer and or, you know, someone that really understands why people do something because of other causal signals. Yeah, you really do need humans to interpret all of these data and turn it into useful information, slice insights to actually do something with this stuff, right?

Jack Lindberg (19:47.556)
agree.

Imteaz (19:48.812)
So what really sets outside of the two parts of the three way relationship, what really sets Amazon marketing cloud apart from every other data clean room out there in the market. I know some of the retailers already have data clean rooms and have had data clean rooms for a while. But what really makes Amazon different?

Jack Lindberg (20:10.756)
Yeah, so I think what makes Amazon data clean rooms super different outside of the infrastructure piece is the way you interact with it. I’ve had a lot of conversations with other retail media partners or other retailers that are seeing the traction and press that Amazon Marketing Cloud has gotten and saying, hey, we need to step up our game with regard to clean rooms. And I think they are taking the opposite approach.

Amazon’s cleanroom is a code-first interface. You need to know how to code to see value from the platform, by and large. They’ve done some work to start rolling out, you know, no code or limited coding solutions that allow you to access some template types of data. But what we’re seeing from other cleanroom partners out in the space is something that I would describe as more greatest hits, where…

your access to the source tables to say, what’s here so I can make up any use case in the world is much more limited. It’s like, here are the 10 things we think you might want, and here’s a partner that’s going to show you a dashboard to access them, rather than saying, here’s our API go nuts, which is sort of Amazon’s approach. And I think those are really targeted at different types of people, like my colleagues who are expert media strategists and don’t know how to code.

would probably benefit much more from a platform that shows them the top 10 use cases, rather than someone like me who much prefers to look at the data and figure out for myself what I can do, rather than being spoon fed every use case.

Imteaz (21:55.795)
Of course, I think, yeah, Amazon’s.

a tech company first before it is anything else, right? So I think the quality of documentation that they give to highly technical people really enables people to kind of just come up with their own thing and then really customize solution to whatever they want. Whereas a lot of other partners will give you a stock standard, give the top things that you might be interested in. And if you work in a certain product category,

There’s very different to other categories. For example, if you’re in like pharmaceuticals and or healthcare, some of these lifetime values or some of the interactions that you have with the brand may only last for a couple of months and it might not be a sustained relationship with a brand. And like, for example, you know, the fashion category, there’s a lot of one-offs that you might buy from certain brands, but

Uh, if you’re in athlete, like athletic leisure, there might be more consistent purchase, right? So that customer journey is very different to, I don’t know, buying dishwashing tablets, for example, which you might be a lot more of a habitual purchase. Um, so clearly defining what you need and building custom queries and models to mine Amazon marketing cloud and then doing something with it, not just looking at what happened.

is super interesting and it’s very cool to see so many different use cases coming out of Amazon. So if I’m, let’s say if I’m a brand already doing over a hundred million dollars in sales annually on Amazon, what are the key steps that I need to take in order to kind of get started with AMC?

Jack Lindberg (23:45.664)
Sure. Yeah. So step one is checking to see if you’re eligible for Amazon Marketing Cloud. I know. If you’re doing over a hundred million in sales, I hope you are running upper funnel media through Amazon via Amazon DSP. That is a prerequisite from getting access to Amazon Marketing Cloud. If you manage to do a hundred million in sales and run no DSP, my hats off to you. I would probably still recommend it. Not knowing your business, you know, don’t take that as gospel truth, but

Imteaz (23:50.663)
Okay.

Imteaz (24:08.524)
Wow.

Jack Lindberg (24:16.584)
I would be surprised if you got that much, got that far without using any upper funnel media. Then you need to set up an instance, which is basically gathering the identifiers of your sponsored ads account and your DSP accounts and saying, hey, make a clean room that contains this data set to your Amazon rep. From there, there are really three options in terms of, or three combinations you could use to get further down into.

engaging with Amazon Marketing Cloud in a substantive way. So option one is you build out your own team. You hire some folks that know SQL and say, hey, your job is going to be to dig into this data set and figure out how to provide value to the company. That is, by and large, the least common approach. In many ways, I think it’s the best approach as someone who’s been a tool provider and an agency.

Imteaz (24:52.573)
Okay.

Jack Lindberg (25:15.473)
I’m gonna neg myself and say do it yourself. That being said, no.

Imteaz (25:17.546)
Yeah

Imteaz (25:21.304)
But that’s not for everyone, right? Like, you know, you need to have a base level of understanding of data science, a base level understanding of Amazon DSP. And then you need to be comfortable with hiring your own data scientists, whether that’s, you know, internally hiring your own data scientists, but also, and, or looking at, you know, data science providers that can really learn and specialize in this stuff. This is some stuff like I’ve had to do personally.

in like to, to really maximize Amazon marketing card. But I know even within my own business, most people, most econ people, or even marketers would not be comfortable doing that because it’s just so different to any other form of data that we’ve had access to previously.

Jack Lindberg (26:11.152)
Yeah, I think also for most organizations, unless you have someone, frankly, like one of us, who is sort of fluent on either side, where I can talk to a data scientist, and I can talk to a marketer, and I can sort of figure out what the other means when they’re trying to talk to another, typically there’s a big communication gap in that sort of in-house system, where the marketing team is like, this is what data I need to, these are the questions I have. And the data science team doesn’t understand.

Imteaz (26:21.484)
Hehehehe

Jack Lindberg (26:40.144)
what data answers that question or what you would need to know to figure out whether that’s true. If you execute it well, it’s definitely the best way. It is a large organizational challenge for folks to execute well.

Imteaz (26:56.402)
And I think it comes down to data literacy on the marketers part as well. Like, you know, if you understand that the internet is a giant pivot table and each one of the tables has attributes and those attributes are basically columns. And if you can define those columns and explain to anyone in very simple English.

Jack Lindberg (27:00.832)
Mm-hmm.

Imteaz (27:18.788)
what each one of those columns actually means and does in relation to not just the table, but the rows as well. Then you fundamentally understood one, the internet, but two, Amazon Marketing Card is just a different level of pivot table. You’re just calling on all of this information at specific points in time versus the product table, the order table, the customer table, the ads table, et cetera.

Imteaz (27:48.664)
answered and you can really easily call out the parameters in which you want to call. A data scientist can help you figure out the technical side of that equation out, but the challenge is really articulating the problem and the parameters you actually need to solve that problem.

Jack Lindberg (28:06.388)
I agree. Typically, what I do when I’m talking to someone on the media side who’s trying to figure out how to use Amazon Marketing Cloud is they’ll ask me a question, and I’ll open up a literal whiteboard and draw them a table. And it said, is this what you want? And then I can figure out how to get what they need. But I have to show them what’s available to see if that helps them answer their question. So option two would be using a tool provider.

Imteaz (28:20.224)
That’s a great technique. Yeah.

Imteaz (28:26.136)
Mm-hmm. That’s a great one.

Jack Lindberg (28:37.62)
the tool providers in the space, by and large, are all doing some variation of the same thing, which is they’re saying there’s some number of things out of the box that you can ask, and that’s it, unless you pay us additional money to build you custom reports. Hope that doesn’t sound pejorative, but that’s what everyone is doing by and large.

Imteaz (29:01.252)
Yeah, I’ve seen so many dashboard solutions. Yeah. And I’m like, guys, this is a very generic way of trying to solve the problem or trying to find the opportunity within Amazon Marketing Cloud because it has no context of what my business channel actually is. So you’re trying to sell me a square peg for a round hole. And you’re telling me it’s gonna work when I have a very specific use case and a very specific

Jack Lindberg (29:05.106)
Yep.

Imteaz (29:30.376)
or a very different product category that is not very similar to most of the product categories that are sold on Amazon, right? Okay, so tool providers.

Jack Lindberg (29:39.304)
Yep. Tool provider’s number two. And I think that’s why I took a totally different approach at building Noctis, which was my goal is to enable people to do custom first. Like, you can ask it any question, and it’ll try to write you code that gets you the answer to that question. Not, we’re going to give you the 10 dashboards that we think are going to be most common. It’s to help you figure out your custom questions on your own. Because if all I did was give you the same stock dashboard,

Imteaz (29:58.225)
Very cool.

Jack Lindberg (30:08.88)
All I did to the industry was raise the floor. I didn’t provide anyone competitive advantage. I just said, now everyone has the same dad boards and we’re all starting from square one and square zero.

Imteaz (30:11.472)
Yep. So you know how you just talked about whiteboarding the solution to, or whiteboarding the question and then referencing the parameters to actually answering that question. How does someone like build up the skills to do that themselves? How do you improve that data fluency?

from a non-technical marketer point of view.

Jack Lindberg (30:43.7)
I think really the core skill is just understanding what data is in there. You could even take it further, like ask the person to draw you a chart. Say if you were going to present this data to a client, what would the chart looks like that tells your story? And then we back solve from the chart to the table and then the table to the code. And if you ask a marketer, what chart do you need on the slide?

They typically can get pretty close to what they need because what they’re used to is storytelling. And you just say, OK, what plot do you need to be able to tell in order to have this story work? And then you figure that out and backs off. I think part of that is also understanding what data is in there. I find with Amazon Marketing Cloud, what happens to most people is they get overwhelmed. And they’re like, oh, I’m going to do this.

They realize that there are all these questions they wish they could have answered, or they couldn’t conceive that they could ask because they didn’t know the data was available. So there’s some sort of exploratory work that I’ve done, which is just describing to people what is in there. And then they can sort of understand, oh, I can ask for this and this and this and this because I know what the available parameters are. It’s like, you know.

Jack Lindberg (32:08.148)
trying to play Scrabble when you’ve never seen a dictionary before? You know, it’s a little bit hard.

Imteaz (32:15.103)
For sure, for sure. Yeah, I’m a super nerd, so I love reading data dictionaries for specific databases and stuff, so I really get to the nuts and bolts of what is actually available. I think…

With Amazon marketing cloud, I think something similar is needed to kind of give, you know, marketers a world win crash course in terms of how to use this stuff outside of just looking at the dashboards, which is fine. But when you truly understand the audience signals, the media interactions, the path to purchase analysis, the number of exposures to conversion, like when you see the

level of granular detail that’s even just available from the basic stuff, it blows your mind, right? Like Google Analytics kind of has this stuff when you think of direct to consumer e-commerce and the interactions that are being recorded within GA. But given the size and scale of Amazon and how much sales of multiple brands are going through Amazon, this is just different level of scale.

Jack Lindberg (33:05.12)
Mm-hmm.

Jack Lindberg (33:29.972)
Sure. It is definitely exciting. To finish off the question, option three is you work with your agency. And as you mentioned, MTS, the goal is to have an agency that can do both the math and the art. Or at Mars, we call it art and algorithm, which is very pithy. That being said, if your agency, like I’ve seen with a lot of folks.

Imteaz (33:30.029)
which makes it super exciting.

Imteaz (33:36.181)
Okay.

Imteaz (33:50.927)
I love that. Yep.

Jack Lindberg (34:00.404)
If your agency doesn’t take the call from analytics, because they’re very expensive, I’ve seen frequently, luckily not at Mars, but working at other places or with other partners, hearing horror stories about people who said, hey, I can’t get my agency’s analytics team in the room because we don’t have an extra $100,000 around for them to do something. I’m like, you know, there’s…

Analytics is now table stakes. It’s not an add-on. It’s not a nice to have. It’s a must have. And watching agency partners do a disservice to their brands by scoping it independently as an extra line item sends me up the wall.

Imteaz (34:33.749)
Yeah. Yeah, that doesn’t make sense to me. Which is a good lead into the next question, which is, you know, what are the hesitations that you’re seeing from clients slash

Jack Lindberg (34:50.697)
Yep, I agree.

Imteaz (34:58.064)
sellers on Amazon in reference to using Amazon Marketing Cloud.

Jack Lindberg (35:03.632)
I think some people think it’s too hard, and they just sort of give up before they’ve given it an honest try, which if I was a non-technical person and you showed me the AMC native console, I think that’s a fair reaction to say, I’m not gonna be able to figure this out. And I think the really big piece, which I harp on a lot is,

Imteaz (35:21.773)
Yeah.

Jack Lindberg (35:32.66)
The worst thing that can happen to me as an analytics professional is I do a really beautiful analysis. I put together a great story, and then no one changes their behavior. And I think that’s what happens with AMC a lot, is folks say, hey, isn’t it wonderful that your path to purchase goes through these campaigns in this order, and this is your Beth conversion path? And isn’t that awesome to know? And then no one does anything differently. Which I was like, what was the point?

of this analysis if we didn’t use it in a way that drives business impact. I think most brands don’t know how to take it to the next level and say, what’s the action step? And their agency partners and their tool providers don’t help them as much as they need.

Imteaz (36:20.16)
Yeah, so you know, this is literally just another tool and just another way of you know, you seeing your data. But if you fundamentally don’t take action from it and or change your behavior or change what you’re doing, definition of insanity is expecting a different result if you do the same stuff, right? So yeah, so again, we’re only going to get more as AI develops as

Jack Lindberg (36:28.608)
Thanks for watching!

Jack Lindberg (36:38.925)
Yep

Imteaz (36:47.996)
access to analytics develops as we get faster and faster computers the velocity of which this stuff will keep coming out is only going to increase but fundamentally if we don’t make little tiny changes or big changes and then measure the impact of that change relative to what we were doing before what’s the point so yeah okay where do you see data cleaner in

you know, Amazon’s announcements at unboxed in terms of connecting everything to Amazon marketing cloud, AWS, AWS’s partnerships now with Meta, Snapchat, TikTok. I think it was a couple more, as well as plugging in all of the video partners as well, like Free V, Prime Video, and Close Night Football. As this ecosystem just keeps getting bigger, where do you see?

the technology heading.

Jack Lindberg (37:49.216)
Yeah, I am probably going to give you an unorthodox take here. I think what I’ve heard a lot of people say is that there’s going to be some sort of aggregation of clean rooms, a clean room of clean rooms, or how I like to think about it, like the one ring from Lord of the Rings, the one clean room to rule them all. That’s not going to happen. Data privacy laws.

Imteaz (37:56.162)
Let’s go.

Imteaz (38:13.053)
Yep.

Jack Lindberg (38:18.236)
and especially like GDPR and whatnot, don’t allow you to use data for anything that the customer didn’t consent to. And building a massive clean room of clean rooms is definitely one of those things they did not sign up for. So this idea that you’re gonna be able to have like universal identity graphs that are, have 90, 100% match rates across all of your partners. And you’re gonna know track one consumer across the entire journey flawlessly and seamlessly. That’s not gonna happen.

Imteaz (38:48.401)
Nope.

Jack Lindberg (38:49.728)
If anything, the opposite is going to happen. Even now on Amazon, there are… The way Amazon identifies who you are is based on your status being logged in on amazon.com. And they use that email to see who you are. And all of your campaigns that are targeted via audience track you around the web and show you ads based on your browsing behavior and what you’ve looked at.

That being said, there are a large number of ads, like offsite contextual, so on and so forth, that target based on the content of the page, not who the person is. And therefore, when you look at the Amazon Marketing Cloud records, you see I have an impression and I don’t know who the person is. And if you say, what’s the total number of prescience when I have a known user versus when I don’t have a known user? The.

no user number or percentage is going to drop over time. And where that’s going to lead is basically conversion modeling to say, can I take a wild guess or a scientifically informed guess, depending on who you ask, on can I figure out maybe without cookies who that person is, or what type of person that is, or what sort of things could I say about them? Like,

If I show them an ad that’s contextually targeted to dog food, can I make a guess that they’re in the in-market for dog food audience? Probably. And as Amazon Marketing Cloud and all data clean rooms get further down this path of third-party cookie deprecation, the ability to track users seamlessly across the web is going to become more and more broken, more and more fragmented, and you’ll need more intense modeling to figure out. In the instances where I got…

I know I served an ad and I don’t know to whom. How do I figure out what happened?

Imteaz (40:43.358)
Yep.

No, the cookie deprecation piece, the following consumers around multiple parts of the internet when they’re logged in or incognito and or using privacy filters, et cetera, is only going to become more difficult.

Imteaz (41:15.056)
AWS clean rooms and being and letting AWS basically be the clean room provider of choice for multiple publishers and now social media networks as well is kind of Amazon’s insurance policy against all of this stuff. Right. I think this is a very intelligent play to at least in the Western markets have a strong defense.

against cookie defecation and at least marry up so much of the media sphere, the publisher sphere as well as the, obviously the e-commerce sphere as well and try and keep people as closed loop as they can within Amazon’s infrastructure. Now how Amazon navigates the privacy part of this and the consent matching across all of this stuff.

Imteaz (42:12.884)
I think their PR lobbies and a lot of their industry influences have a bit of work to do here, but I think this is the strongest play to marry all of this stuff together so far within ads.

Jack Lindberg (42:32.084)
Totally agree. Thankfully, there are lawyers that get paid a lot more than I do and are smarter than me that will figure this stuff out.

Imteaz (42:39.987)
Super cool. Let’s transition into analytics and AI. How have you seen AI transform the landscape of retail media and analytics so far?

Jack Lindberg (42:53.396)
I think what we’re seeing with AI is really just like step one of where AI can go. I think when we like conceptualize AI, the sort of seismic change it is, is at least on par with the advent of mobile. If not like the advent of the internet.

Imteaz (43:15.608)
Mm-hmm.

I’m going to go ahead and turn it off.

Jack Lindberg (43:22.548)
like I’m overselling it, but I think we’re still very much at the early stages of what that’s going to look like, right? For media, I think we’ve seen a lot of folks start with AI-generated content. Like Amazon released a feature that allows you to basically prompt an image generation LLM that says, take my product image and put it on my kitchen counter surrounded by a Thanksgiving meal for my toaster oven, whatever it is.

And we’ll see AI content continue to improve. Like Amazon’s also released like AI review summaries to allow the consumer to say, what’s the gist of all of these reviews in aggregate? I think what we’re seeing right now is our use cases where AI is very good, like out of the box, which is simple image generation, summarization,

where it’s not so good out of the box is complex generation or anything that requires fact checking or technical knowledge. It’s a little bit less good. With analytics, what I’ve seen that’s really quite interesting is how far you can get using, for example, like ChatGPD to, especially its code interpreter, to push.

the envelope of what someone who isn’t as data-fluent can get out of their data set with some help from an LLM. If you ask it the right questions, it’ll generate the code that gives you the response you need, which creates what I would describe as a plethora of citizen data scientists. It doesn’t scale. It’s not a model that you can build into an enterprise-wide application, but it does give people the tools to get much further on their own.

Out of the box.

Imteaz (45:24.758)
Super cool. Sorry, go ahead.

Jack Lindberg (45:26.036)
Um, one thing I would add to this is what’s going to come around the corner and that most people aren’t prepared for is prompts driven or text driven LLM based search. Our conception of the digital shelf, which is like a series of tiles of product images, um, is potentially fundamentally broken by someone going into chat GPT and saying,

Imteaz (45:47.383)
Yeah.

Jack Lindberg (45:55.752)
What’s the best orange juice for me to buy for breakfast? And the LLM delivering you a single response of this product rather than showing you the entire plethora of options.

Imteaz (46:09.653)
Or even just your four options rather than one, right? Like all 20 on a product listing page on Amazon, right? Like how do you influence that?

Jack Lindberg (46:19.035)
Yeah.

Imteaz (46:23.244)
is going to be super interesting. I think, again, Amazon’s play with Alexa, and I made sure I turned off my Alexa before we had this conversation, because every time we talk about Alexa, she goes off. But even with Alexa and more Alexa screens being available, I think it’s a perfect use case of a chat interface leveraging search and being more conversational.

when it comes to purchasing decisions for consumer as well. So, and that’s going to be in marketing hub too, by the way. Super cool. So as a product manager, how did you leverage AI to enhance product operations and decision making processes within the work that you do?

Jack Lindberg (47:14.052)
I think AI is a really great sounding board. It’s very good at… So I’ve been trying to adopt, to back up on stuff, some sort of Amazonian processes about the PRD, this sort of writing the press release before you ship it, before you write any code. And I found that sort of writing helps to codify your own thinking.

Imteaz (47:35.288)
Mm-hmm.

Jack Lindberg (47:40.932)
Even better is when you feed that into an LLM. It’s just going to take your thoughts and sort of flesh it out and give it back to you. And basically, if I handed someone a bullet point list of my ideas and it were to write the press release for me, would that press release make sense? And if the answer is no, then my thoughts aren’t very clear. And LLMs are great amplifiers of what you feed it. And they sort of fill in the gaps.

with what an average person might fill in the gaps with. And if they fill in the gaps incorrectly, that’s probably because you gave it like incomplete or imperfect lines of thought. And I found that super helpful.

Imteaz (48:25.594)
That’s really interesting, Jack, because the beauty of being a good communicator is being able to communicate things with a lot of simplicity. And an LLM kind of gives you that, right? Simplicity because it’s operating for the masses.

As long as the input that you are giving it is unique enough that it stokes something new, brand new and creative, then the language of the LLM kind of helps you get to the simplest way of communicating that. That’s really cool.

Jack Lindberg (49:06.256)
And if you put in something too generic, it fills in the blanks with something super generic. And you’re like, this sounds like an undifferentiated idea, and I don’t know what this means. Ha ha ha.

Imteaz (49:18.75)
Super cool. Okay, so what are some of the biggest challenges you faced in terms of integrating AI into analytics and how did you address it?

Jack Lindberg (49:28.924)
Yeah, I think some of the biggest concerns that we’re going to have with enterprise applications of AI, specifically third-party large language models, is going to be data privacy.

Jack Lindberg (49:48.276)
The big challenge is how do you enable folks to use these technologies without divulging their data to the owner of the LLM or some other system that enables the LLM to learn from your data and potentially regurgitate your results to someone else? So we sort of approach this in two ways. One is thinking about how much value can I provide using an LLM?

that knows about the problem generically, but not about your specific data. So the way we set up Noctis was it knows about Amazon Marketing Cloud. It knows nothing about your data. It doesn’t even have access to your data. So you can ask it, how do I see my top 10 products that drive new to brand sales? And it’ll help you with that. It just doesn’t know what the answer is, because it doesn’t have access to your data, which sort of firewalls it from saying,

I’m Pepsi, what are the top 10 best selling products for Coke? And having the response come back with a real answer. The other way you could solve this that we’ve been working on too is what I would describe as containerization. Maybe that’s not the right technical term. But the idea that you, on a per client basis or a per account basis, you’ve basically built a self-contained LLM that

Imteaz (50:59.739)
So, I’m going to go ahead and start the presentation. presentation of the

Jack Lindberg (51:14.056)
whatever the generic data set is, plus this advertiser’s unique data set and nothing else. So you don’t have that risk of advertiser A learning about advertiser B. We’ve gotten guidance from a lot of clients that they don’t want their data in LLMs at all. So if you’re trying to leverage this technology, I would definitely recommend thinking about what can you do with AI that doesn’t involve

ingesting customer data, that’s still valuable. And what customer data means depends on who you’re talking to. It could be the existing bullet points on your PDP. Could be considered customer data. So even for the simplest tasks of generating PDP content, you need to make sure you’re within the rules of engagement you set up within your brand or with your clients if you’re an agency or a tool provider.

Imteaz (52:05.86)
Right. That’s really interesting. I mean, from my point of view, all of that stuff is public.

Right? Like it’s published in the open web. There are a million scraping providers scraping Amazon on a daily basis. So like, you know, for someone to pull an Excel spreadsheet out of top 20 ASINs in category X with all of the bullet points links to the A plus B plus images and the content associated with all of that. So relatively basic and easy exercise to do.

Jack Lindberg (52:25.684)
Hehehe

Imteaz (52:49.768)
Um, but I, you know, I hear your point in terms of, uh, being very careful in terms of, I don’t think it’s just customer information. It’s more like sensitive commercial information being ingested into an LLM and then, you know, being aggregated and published elsewhere, but it’s more so. No, this stuff is here. It’s, it’s a race to find the use cases and the value. What risks are you willing to take?

Jack Lindberg (53:03.601)
Sure, yeah.

Imteaz (53:19.376)
in order to find that value. That’s the call that most corporations are trying to make today is do we go softly and you know be a follower rather than a leader within this space because the risks are too high or do we lean in very heavily to you know to find the use cases and to find the value ahead of everyone else.

Jack Lindberg (53:43.184)
Yeah, if I were to…

start a new company with my clone. I’d want to start a company that basically does LLM and AI implementation for enterprise. That all you do is you go in and say, hey, this LLM stuff is scary. Here’s how we do it with all your privacy concerns addressed. And you can make a lot of money that way.

Imteaz (54:04.12)
Yeah, and one, of course, and one easy approach is to, I say easy, it’s easier to say, I’m sure the technical people will tell me I’m crazy. But one, and one other way is basically masking and pseudo-anomizing your data, right? So if you’re uploading customer data, you can hash all of that out or make up names and then de-identify, keep all of the purchasing and transactional history, you know, consistent.

but pseudonymize that data so no one else can actually make any meaningful information out of it. But at least from running a model point of view, you can see the impact of, you know, your media activity, for example, against your user base. So there are lots of approaches to it. And it just comes down to how open are you to the risk? Yeah.

Jack Lindberg (54:57.724)
Yeah, for sure. I think.

Jack Lindberg (55:02.216)
The LLM and AI approach is going to be one of those things where two guys in a garage can build a $500 million company. And if you’re an existing CPG and two guys in a garage can build a bigger company than you have, you should be wary of not adopting this technology.

Imteaz (55:13.765)
Yep.

Imteaz (55:19.765)
Yup.

Imteaz (55:23.444)
Yeah, for sure. For sure. With your unique educational background in music and opera, how’s this influenced your approach to analytics and AI in this business context? And more specifically, how would you recommend someone with a background in e-commerce get started in specializing in the analytics space?

Jack Lindberg (55:45.872)
Yeah, I think what people think about product managers and analytics professionals and what they think about musicians. If you’ve ever seen those alignment charts of what I do versus what other people think I do, product managers and professional musicians have very similar charts. I think what most people think product managers do

Imteaz (56:04.608)
Thank you.

Imteaz (56:12.126)
Okay.

Jack Lindberg (56:15.992)
is they yell at software engineers and release really cool features. And then they take all the credit, and they feel very popular, and they wear a black turtleneck and stand in front of a giant projector. And I think most people think professional musicians perform. And they get up there, and they sing it on the huge stage, and they have adoring fans. What they actually do as a professional musician is you spend 90% of your time practicing alone.

Imteaz (56:37.607)
Yeah.

Jack Lindberg (56:45.744)
in a room by yourself. And that process of practicing is one that requires ruthless, ruthless precision to say, you’re the only person in this room that can give you feedback. How do you develop the skills of active listening and introspection and diagnosis to say, something went wrong.

Imteaz (56:48.104)
No.

Jack Lindberg (57:15.228)
What are the possible core things that I know are the inputs that make this thing happen? How do I diagnose this problem? How do I solve it on its own? And then realizing that music is an art form where it could never, ever be good enough, or it can never be perfect. It can only be good enough. And how do you basically self-diagnose in a way that you actually unsupervised build that muscle of self-improvement?

Jack Lindberg (57:47.509)
It also causes people to have what I would describe as either extremely strong or extremely weak egos. That process of like ruthless self-analysis breaks people. There’s only so much negative self-talk. You can say, oh, that was bad, oh, that was bad, before you’ve crushed yourself. And the folks who are doing it most successfully…

by and large have figured out how to compartmentalize in a way that says, when my singing isn’t going perfectly, it’s not because I’m a bad person. Um, and I know that sounds silly, but it’s very easy in our professional lives to conflate our professional success with our personal worth. And as a musician, you get really used to that. Like either being the thing that breaks your career.

or the thing that drives your success, because you’re the person who’s most able to go into the practice room and say, I’m going to build this better than it was yesterday. And it doesn’t matter if all my fans and my teachers and my mentors thought it was amazing. I know there’s incremental gain I can get. And being a product manager is very similar, right? You are the person who’s saying, the bar can be set externally. Like maybe I get…

I went from a zero to $100 million in ARR in a short time frame. And you need to be the person to tell yourself, self-critically, those accolades don’t mean anything. I’m the person who decides what good for me is, and I need to go out there and make that happen and feel that drive without the external measures of success being the driving factor. If you wanted to go and make money or if you wanted to go and get famous.

Imteaz (59:23.049)
Yep.

Jack Lindberg (59:38.728)
being a professional musician or a product manager are not the easiest ways. I think also what professional musicians do that I think we all need to take into business context is that level of practice and preparedness is industry standard. If you show up like I’ve seen happen,

If you show up to the first rehearsal, like what’s called first day of school, you show up to the first rehearsal of a gig and you’re not prepared, you will get fired. Like on the spot. And because if you’re singing, for example, some relatively common opera like Don Giovanni and you’re singing a role, you get fired because you don’t know your music.

There are 100 other people that are a phone call away that could fly in tomorrow and do it because they know the music. So the level of professionalism that you need to have just to get in the room is really high. I think we all sort of, we get busy in our business lives and we fly by the seat of our pants and we say, oh, I’ll just go to this meeting and sort of figure it out as I go.

Imteaz (01:00:46.258)
is very high.

Imteaz (01:01:01.589)
doesn’t work.

Jack Lindberg (01:01:02.088)
That’s something that we all need to do better at. As a professional musician, you get fired on the first day. You’ve met my old boss when I was at Pac-V, Riyad Iddu. And our first meeting together, when I was like the first one on one we had, he was like, hey, the number one rule we have as a team was no winging it. And as a musician, he and I are both musicians. He plays bass. I sing.

Imteaz (01:01:09.994)
Thank you.

Imteaz (01:01:25.793)
Mm-hmm.

Jack Lindberg (01:01:29.64)
We were like, OK, we would never show up to a gig and not know our music. So you would never show up in professional context and if not have done your homework. I just see this happen too much and this is something that I wish people did a little bit better job at.

Imteaz (01:01:46.188)
I love watching documentaries on superstar athletes and just superstars in general. One of my favorite ones is, I think it was in Jiro loves sushi, where he goes and sees this Japanese soba noodle chef who’s like the top soba noodle chef in Japan. And the guy has been at the top of his game for 20 plus years.

And when they’re interviewing him, he wakes up in the morning and every day he has a routine in terms of how he cuts his soba noodle. And he says, one day I will perfect my craft. And he’s been doing this exact same thing for 20 years straight. And when you see that level of diligence, discipline, and practicing your craft on a daily basis to make sure that you’re still at the tip of the spear.

It’s only commendable, right? Like, you want to operate with people who are at that level consistently all the time.

Jack Lindberg (01:02:56.616)
Yeah, it’s definitely something that seems non-concrete, but it’s definitely helped me transition from music to e-commerce and product. Because

As someone who’s relatively new to the industry, there’s no way I can know everything. I can be the most prepared. And that’s just something that you can just, that’s like a grind rather than a like innate skill. I think we like need to collectively reflect on like what things that are our own successes are due to innate talent versus effort. I think you’ll find that the majority of the time things are due to effort, not from innate talent.

Imteaz (01:03:21.46)
Of course.

Jack Lindberg (01:03:43.664)
Ahem.

Imteaz (01:03:43.712)
No, of course. I think it’s a balance between the two. And obviously having talent is a gift, but no amount of gifts can excuse hard work or make up for hard work.

Jack Lindberg (01:03:56.252)
Right. Yeah, so the second question you had, which is about how do you get into e-commerce and learn about analytics, it’s a lot of drinking from a fire hose, I must say. I think the places I would start would be, you can get by and do a lot, just like learning Excel and SQL and some dashboarding tool.

Um, like if you are a data analyst, that’s probably the majority of the skill set you’ll need to get moving. Um, if you want to get further down the road and start building models and Python or R or using some more advanced technologies, that’s definitely open to you. I think the first thing I would do is just like, go learn the basics of SQL and thinking about the basics of SQL.

I found has been, because I had to learn it from scratch too, was a really helpful way for me to conceptualize how data works and how it’s structured and how to access it. And thinking about, like, when I describe data to people, I accidentally frequently describe it as SQL in my brain. Ha ha ha. Because it’s just the way I’ve learned now to logic through, like,

Imteaz (01:05:18.74)
Hehehehe

Jack Lindberg (01:05:25.204)
How do I get the data I need from this thing? I think that will be the best place to start. Be kind to yourself. It’s not going to happen all at once. You’ll make mistakes. It’s not going to be perfect the first time. But just going out there and trying will be very useful. And if you have SQL skills, even intermediate SQL skills, you are much more valuable as an employee to any company because you can.

get your own data and figure out what it means without any help. So I would recommend that to anyone in any field if you have any data that you potentially could touch. SQL is a good skill to have.

Imteaz (01:06:07.32)
So based on your experiences, what emerging trends in AI do you foresee having the most impact, specifically on retail media and analytics in the near future?

Jack Lindberg (01:06:19.316)
I think the I think LLM search is going to be really powerful. I think we will really have to see whether the giants of traditional digital media being searched and social are going to basically self disrupt with these technologies. Like, is Google going to throw out?

AdWords to say our search is actually completely LLM driven. And my hunch is there are strong forces saying no, but the universe is saying yes. I think we’ll have to see, like, will the incumbents figure out how to self-disrupt before they are disrupted themselves? Because what we’re seeing in the industry is building an LLM is so expensive.

Imteaz (01:07:02.52)
Thank you.

Jack Lindberg (01:07:17.6)
favors incumbents to some degree. But the incumbents need to be willing to basically blow up the bridge that got them to where they are.

Imteaz (01:07:29.088)
or work out a financial model that still works for them, right? Like, it’s a balance between the two.

Jack Lindberg (01:07:31.762)
Right, right.

Yeah, I think that’s going to be really, really interesting to see how that unfolds. Basically.

Jack Lindberg (01:07:45.04)
I am hesitant to say it’ll happen, but I feel like if I were to place my bets on what’s going to happen, there will be only a few sort of incumbent technology providers that are operating towards this AGI sort of approach, and then a wide variety of vertical specific LLMs or AI tools that are saying,

I only know about XYZ type of data, and that’s what I’m going to focus on. Something to help lawyers write things for. For marketing, something that helps you write PDP copy is something you can get really specific and train a model to do better than any other model, but then it’s not used for everything else. I think we’re going to find those sorts of specialist models start to pop up that pick a very narrow sliver of what you can do within an e-commerce business and say, I’m just going to build that.

like sort of what I’ve built that says, I’m just going to write code for Amazon Marketing Cloud. Just pretty niche and say, I’m just going to nail that one. And I’m not going to worry about writing poetry or PDP content.

Imteaz (01:08:55.105)
So, on a personal front check, what habits and productivity hacks make your life easier?

Jack Lindberg (01:09:03.432)
Um, I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts. Every time I’m commuting or walking anywhere or in the gym or in the supermarket, I’m listening to a podcast. Uh, I find I don’t like sit still enough to read. Um, I’m just like listening to a podcast is how I’ve, I kept trying to learn new things and stay up to date. Um, definitely go listen to the other.

podcasts that MTS has been on or has published himself. They’re a good listen. Oh, I can shamelessly plug you.

Imteaz (01:09:38.316)
Thanks for the talk, man.

Imteaz (01:09:45.908)
Which other ones do you recommend?

Jack Lindberg (01:09:48.724)
The podcasts I really like, I like 20VC with Harry Stebbings. I like Lenny’s podcast, which is about product management. The Y Combinator team has a really good podcast. The A16Z team at Andreessen Harwis has a very good podcast. And then…

I also listen to a few political podcasts, like the All In podcast, which talks about politics and tech. And then I listen to Breaking Points pretty frequently as well.

Imteaz (01:10:20.086)
UK.

Imteaz (01:10:24.256)
Yep.

Imteaz (01:10:27.904)
Very cool. I have a book recommend- I know you don’t read to, you know, just find this book on Audible. But the book recommendation is The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s a book by Ben Horowitz from A to Z. And there’s a specific two, three pages in that book called Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager. If you just Google Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager, you’ll find it.

you’ll find the excerpt online on the A16 website. But it basically goes through with the good behaviors of a good product manager versus the bad behaviors of a bad product manager. And Ben Horowitz actually produced this document and gave it to, I think it was 16 odd product managers that he had reporting to him, half of which, whom he thought were ridiculous and people who was gonna fire.

And out of those eight odd people, I’m butchering the numbers, but out of the eight people, six of them read that document and understood what he was actually looking for as a manager and they improved dramatically. Two people he wanted to get rid of anyway and they didn’t get it and they didn’t change. But I think communicating what you want in a team is a very good thing that a lot of leaders don’t do very well.

So yeah, definitely I would recommend you have a look at that book and in particular that section. It’s a great read.

Jack Lindberg (01:12:04.8)
Thank you. I’ll definitely take a read.

Imteaz (01:12:09.389)
To close out, Jack, how can people reach out to you if they want to learn more?

Jack Lindberg (01:12:14.748)
Yeah, so best way to reach out to me is on LinkedIn. I’m posting there a couple of times a week about Amazon Marketing Cloud or Noctis, and updating people about what I’m thinking. You can also track down the Mars Agency at themarsagency.com or take a look at Noctis at analytics, analyticindex.com slash Noctis if you’d like to learn more and sign up for a trial and give it a whirl.

Imteaz (01:12:44.952)
Super cool. All right, thank you for coming on the show, Jack. Pleasure to have you any time, and all the best with all of the endeavors that you are currently on. Would love to have you on the show, let’s say in a year’s time, to hear developments on Noctis, developments on you, and then take it from there. Thank you so much.

Jack Lindberg (01:13:05.214)
That will be awesome. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a blast.

Imteaz (01:13:09.068)
super cool. Thank you.

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Introduction:

In a world driven by relentless technological innovation and transformation, the convergence of leadership and mindfulness is pivotal. In a recent enlightening conversation, Lisa Gable and Imteaz, two stalwarts in applied intelligence, delve deep into leadership, innovation, and personal growth. Their dialogues uncover profound insights into the symbiotic relationship between technology and human consciousness.

Unveiling Leadership Brilliance with Lisa Gable

Lisa Gable, a renowned visionary, elucidates the intricate facets of leadership. Her extensive experience paints a vivid picture of how adaptability and resilience are the linchpins of effective leadership. Lisa’s journey is not merely about leading; it’s about manifesting visions into realities, fostering a culture of innovation, and driving transformative changes.

Key Insights:

1. Innovative Leadership: Lisa emphasizes embracing innovative approaches to effectively navigate challenges and lead teams.
2. Adaptability & Resilience: Adapting to evolving scenarios and bouncing back is pivotal in maintaining a progressive leadership trajectory.

Synergy of Mindfulness and AI with Imteaz

Imteaz, a prominent figure in applied intelligence, explores the confluence of mindfulness and artificial intelligence. He discusses the critical role of staying connected to one’s essence while harnessing the capabilities of AI. For Imteaz, integrating consciousness and technology is about shaping a future where AI complements human abilities and enhances human well-being.

Key Insights:

1. Balance: Finding an equilibrium between technological progress and intrinsic human values is crucial for harmonious development.
2. Enhanced Well-being: The confluence of AI and mindfulness can lead to augmented human experiences and well-being.

Navigating Innovations: Strategies & Insights

Lisa and Imteaz collaboratively dissect the strategies to navigate the innovative landscapes of today’s world. They reflect on how one can balance personal development and technological progression. The interplay between ambition, innovation, and inner peace emerges as a central theme in shaping perspectives and driving advancements in applied intelligence.

Key Insights:

1. Holistic Development: Personal growth and technological evolution are interconnected, requiring a holistic approach to development.
2. Symbiotic Relationship: Ambition and innovation, coupled with mindfulness, can lead to a harmonious symbiosis, advancing individual and collective progress.

Conclusion:

The conversation between Lisa Gable and Imteaz is a beacon of wisdom for enthusiasts and professionals in applied intelligence. It brings an enriched perspective on leadership, innovation, and technology integration with human values. As we venture deeper into AI, these insights are guiding principles in fostering a balanced and enlightened approach to leadership and personal development.

Closing Thoughts:

The journey of exploring leadership and innovation is continuous and ever-evolving. The insights from Lisa Gable and Imteaz encourage us to reflect, adapt, and grow in our pursuits. It’s about embracing the synergy of technology and consciousness and moving forward with an enlightened perspective to create a harmonious and progressive future.

Hosted by: Imteaz Ahamed

Video Transcript

Imteaz (00:34.001)

Welcome everybody to Applied Intelligence. My name is Imteaz, our major host. Today I have a very special guest on the podcast. Her name is Lisa Gable. I’m just gonna give you a bit of background in terms of who Lisa is and we’ll dig straight in. So Lisa is the former US ambassador. She’s a CEO, a former UN delegate and a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author. She’s the author of the book, Turnaround, How to Change a Course When Things Are Going South.

Lisa speaks on leadership and partnership, mentorship and relationship building and big ideas. Her goal is to support the next generation of leaders and organizations that are solving the world’s biggest problems. She serves as the chairperson of the Diplomatic Career Futuristic Think Tank World in 2050 and is a distinguished fellow at the Hunt Institute of Engineering and Humanities, the SMU Lyle School of Engineering. Welcome to the show, Lisa.

Lisa Gable (01:30.106)

Well, thanks for having me. I so enjoy being on.

Imteaz (01:33.949)

Thank you so much. So to give everybody a bit of background in terms of who you are, I love asking this question beginning of my podcast, which is, what’s your story? If you were to break your life down into an autobiography, which only had five chapters, what would the chapter titles of each one of those chapters be?

Lisa Gable (01:56.998)

The first chapter would be character building. When I was growing up, I lived in a small town in southern Virginia with parents who spent a great deal of time making sure I had every single encyclopedia, a variety of different ethical training. And so it was really the time period of building my character and being able to explore who I am. Chapter two is what I call my credentialing phase.

I went out to the University of Virginia and then Georgetown while also working at the Defense Department and the White House under Ronald Reagan, and then left to go work for Intel Corporation where I had an opportunity how to apply processes to solving complex problems. And so by my third chapter, which I put in my 30s, it was how did I take those processes, those credentials, and transition them into leading organizations, to applying them to help people move to the next level of performance.

And today I would say that I’m in phase four of my life, which is not leading the charge, but being the person who supports others who are going to be solving the complex problems of the future. That’s really what the world in 2050 is about. And as I tell people, I’m going to be around my mid eighties in the world in 2050. So I want to make sure that the next generation of leaders have the resources and the training and the support they need in order to get us to where we need to go.

And obviously, like everybody else, there’s always the fifth chapter. And the fifth chapter is enjoying looking over my life, hopefully having done good things to support good people and setting the world forward and being able to step back with it, from it, with the knowledge that I’ve done all that I can do.

Imteaz (03:37.681)

Super cool. I read your book and thank you for the recommendation. So mastering turnarounds. It’s a lovely read. One of the key questions that I had in terms of, you know, the book is you’re recognized as a turnaround mastermind. What do you believe are the core principles or strategies that are essential for successful turnarounds within an organization? And if we could speak specifically, you know, in terms of this next wave of generative AI that’s coming now,

Lisa Gable (03:37.958)

Thanks for watching.

Imteaz (04:07.573)

What are the key things that organizations that have been around for a very long time, be they in the public sector or the private sector, what are the key things they need to watch out for?

Lisa Gable (04:18.31)

Well, as you know, in my book, I focus on four things and I’ll relate how that goes with the AI conversation. The first is to envision the future. What future do you want? If you could wave your magic wand, what’s the perfect world that you’d like to see achieved? But a key critical step that most people forget is breaking down the past. That’s truly auditing everything that went on before you because the reality is there are decisions that have been made, there are systems that have been put into place, there are things that currently exist

going to enable you to get to that perfect future state. As you come up with that audit, what you need to do is understand what are the parts of the existing array of tools in your toolbox that you need to focus on. One of the things we learned at Intel was the concept of job one. What’s the number one thing you need to do in order to get to your perfect future state?

And once you’ve identified that, you need to start ranking and rating what you’re currently doing, where are your expenditures going? How are people spending their time? What types of staffing do you have in place? Do those things currently fit with the future that you’ve dynamically outlined? And once you have grasped your key core competencies, what you need to do, what’s job number one, what I call jobs two and three that are sort of the supporting cast, the backup singers.

to get you to where you need to go, you’ve gotten rid of things, at that stage you’re ready to run as quickly as you possibly can. And what I believe is happening in the world of AI is as we look at where we want the world to be, we’re all acknowledging that it’s not where it needs to be. One of the areas I focus on is health and wellness. And we know that medical files, medical storage that we have of our entire personal history isn’t necessarily consistent. It’s not consistent.

either within the way that it’s been entered into the system, systems between Johns Hopkins and Stanford are different than each other. And so you need to fix that stuff first, right? You need to go through and fix the data, make sure that the data that’s being inputted into the system is going to allow us to get to that early diagnosis, that’s going to allow us to get to where we need to go, that needs to be fixed. Another element is that our systems don’t talk to each other. One of my personal pet peeves is lack of conversation between clinical health and behavioral health.

Lisa Gable (06:38.406)

and also consumer data points. An area that I am passionate about is diet related disease. Each of those data points is critical if you wanna try to do an early diagnosis and get the patient what they need to get to a healthy profile in the future. So there are things that are required within the audit. And I would say the final thing, and I do talk about this a lot in my book, is the people that are involved. I discuss my diagnostic.

challenge, which is where I look at what are the key things that have led us to where we are. And one of the largest issues is hubris. And what I do worry about as we move forward very, very quickly is that people will become enamored with what they can do. And they’re not going to step back and say, should we be doing this? I’m a big proponent of AI and very excited about where it will take us, but I want smarter humans at the helm.

I want people that have taken time to study history, that understand where hubris, where wrong decision-making, where people putting their own self-interest above the interest of the organization have led to a negative outcome. That’s really one of the key areas that I’ll be focusing on in my writing and my conversations over the next two years.

Imteaz (07:49.809)

That’s very cool. One of the frameworks that I love when it comes to thinking about deployment of technology is it’s the three P’s people, process and platforms. So typically what people or, you know, business leaders think about when they’re deploying, let’s call it AI or any form of technologies that they focus on the technology and not necessarily the problem. Um, that.

can only be actioned by the people within their organization, as well as the processes that they have within their organization as well. So, you know, when you think about it that way and realize the technology is only an enabler, you fundamentally haven’t, you know, gotten to the root of what you do as an organization and who you serve as customers and how you do that better using the available technologies that you have and the talent that you have, then you fundamentally miss the point. You can buy…

Lots of very expensive Ferraris in terms of more technology, but if you’re not going to use them properly, it’s just going to be a significant waste of money. And I was just reading in the Sydney Morning Herald, I’m from Australia, so I like reading Australian news, that in Australia, there are 34 different business registries that a small business would need to, could, and sign up for. And the government spent over $4 billion on a project trying to piece all of that together.

I’m like, why does a small business, why do we need 34 different government agencies to just do such a simple thing as register their business and get the applicable licenses to do their thing? And why does it take $4 billion to simplify something so simple as registering what a business does and making sure that they have the right credentials to do so? So if that’s Australia, a country of only like 26, 27 million people,

and it’s struggling to put this existing data together. Imagine the amount of data waste and duplication and mess that exists in the healthcare system here in the US. So if there’s a language model or if there is a process that can kind of merge and sync all of these disparate data sets across multiple…

Imteaz (10:11.721)

private health institutions, public health institutions across America, that would be insane. That would be an incredible unlock.

Lisa Gable (10:21.346)

It would be incredible from all different perspectives when I think about the different state tax filings that exist and how much a small business person, if they’ve managed to give a speech in Ohio or a speech in Kansas City, all of a sudden they’re being asked to file taxes there for a $5,000 speech, it’s crazy.

Imteaz (10:37.321)

I’m sorry.

Lisa Gable (10:39.798)

And it’s very difficult to do. And I have a friend who works at a company called Nortal. They got their start with the turning the Estonian government into the perfect D government system. And some people say, well, Estonia is a tiny little country. How does it apply? But the reality is that technology happens to be able to ramp up. Bureaucracies can’t. All bureaucracies do is grow.

And so I’m perfectly fine if we as a US government start looking at Estonia and going, what can we do? We can always extend the impact. We can always bring on more users. But the reality is that we have broken systems throughout our process and the degree to which we recognize that we need to start channeling money back into creating and supporting innovation, not into supporting bureaucracies around the world, the free world, then we’re going to be in a…

position to put more money into R&D and to other things that are very important to create revenue on behalf of the people we serve.

Imteaz (11:41.733)

I’ll give you a very small example. I’ve migrated from Australia to three, I’ve done three expat assignments, one to the UK, one to the Netherlands, and now here in the US. We’ll start with the Netherlands. The Netherlands, my application for the visa was a two page application plus my CV, and that’s it. And I got my CV turned, I got my visa turned around, I think, in seven days. The UK.

It was a 42 page application plus my CV and some other business documents, which was fine, turn around time about four weeks. The US, my lawyers had turned my three page CV into 250 page dossier with all of my company’s credentials, who we are, etc. Six month process on top of that. So, you know, it is amazing. There are lots of things that America is very good at.

very fast. But from a bureaucracy point of view to attract talent into the US, I think there’s certainly a lot more improvement that could happen versus other developed countries as well.

Lisa Gable (12:51.386)

And I’ll tell you another place that’s hurting us desperately is that you may know one of my jobs early in my career was working at what’s called Presidential Personnel at the White House. And what that meant is that we were the executive search firm on behalf of an administration. And there are a number of high-level government positions that exist. And those positions used to go to people that were in the top of their field. You had people like Casper Weinberger, Secretary of Defense, and he’d been CEO of a number of companies, Bechdel being one of them during

greatest points of growth. And yet today, no one wants to go into those jobs. One, people are worried about the risk, right? The risk of disclosures and what that might mean to them. But secondarily, it’s just the hassle. A friend of mine made a decision. It took her three years to get a very major appointment. And I think the amount of paperwork that she had to fill out was something like 250 pages. And the worst is she had to go back and find every speech she had given through her whole life.

I, you know, my mom poops all the records because she loves tracking all the places that we’ve traveled. I’ve gotten every security clearance just because my mother’s records are so darn good, but not everybody has my mother.

Imteaz (14:04.133)

No, no. Okay, let’s come back to your book. It seems like we’re on the precipice of the next technological evolution through generative AI. What were the key lessons from previous tech evolutions that you saw that would help companies navigate the significant change that’s about to unfold?

Lisa Gable (14:27.23)

I think there are two things that I learned and were just bored into my head at Intel and they have proven true through the last 40 years at every business government and philanthropy effort that I was in charge of. Most importantly, you’ve got to focus. What is your core competency? Why did someone create your company or your organization in the first place? What problem were they trying to solve and is that problem still relevant today? I would say that the second thing is partnerships.

One of the key things that I saw, because it was the early 90s, is when Intel, Microsoft, and IBM went in and pitched together to heads of IT departments around the world. What they were saying is, each of us have a piece of the puzzle, and we want you to standardize on our piece of the puzzle. That’s one reason why we exist the way that we do versus the Microsoft Intel platform that originally was put together.

And so partnerships are going to be even more critical as you’re talking about AI. We’ve got to be able to, as I call, jump the walls in order to get that information that you and I have discussed in order to streamline things. And unusual and uncommon partnerships might be what bring us there. The final thing is mergers and acquisitions. You may find people merging.

across very unusual categories. And I do believe that is one thing that’s going to happen is you’re just going to have categories collapsing. My career has been in technology, agriculture, food and beverage, manufacturing, and biopharma. Those are all coming together with AI. They’re coming together with the advancement of biologics. They’re coming together with the way in which we use apps for tracking health and wellness. And so people need to be very nimble.

They need to not get stuck in their silos and they have got to be able to link arms with others and run very, very quickly in order to become the de facto standard of whatever category they’re in.

Imteaz (16:28.957)

Supercore. So transitioning to breaking barriers, you made history as the first woman to direct the US Pavilion at the World’s Fair. How did you navigate the challenges of this groundbreaking role and what advice would you give to women aiming to break barriers through their fields?

Lisa Gable (16:48.294)

Well, I appreciate your asking. And I have to say, I do think it’s the craziest thing on the face of the earth that in 175 years of World’s Fair history, dating back to the Eiffel Tower, that they’ve never had women serving in this role. And what’s also an interesting dynamic of this role is I’m the only person in that entire time period that’s delivered a US engagement at a World’s Fair under budget and without a huge inspector general’s report and legal problems. Why is that?

I was saying, when I walked into the role, it wasn’t as much just being the only woman there. There were 200 countries and I was the only female representing another, you know, representing one of the countries who were participants. Australia, by the way, had a woman and she ended up, I believe, getting cancer or something. So she had to drop out even after the first week when I met her. So it was me and 199 men. But you learn to do what’s right and…

One of the key critical factors is that I treated everyone as if they were coming into my home. And I embraced the delegations, I embraced the families of the various ambassadors and heads of state that were coming in. Morgan Freeman brought his grandson to the fair, which we thought was very cool. We had been one of the premieres for Batman in Tokyo. And

I was with him in the green room and I said, well, what are you doing after this? He goes, well, I brought my grandson and he really wants to go. What does he need to see? I made it human. And I do think that women sometimes are a little better at doing that, is making that human touch that’s so important for people to feel as if we’re in this together, we’re all achieving a wonderful objective together. But the other is going back to the thing I talked about earlier, which is hubris.

I mean, some of the men that had the job before me and after me were into spending on lavish dinners and lavish events. And I wasn’t. I knew that we had a financial issue with how money could be spent. And so while everybody else was doing black tie dinners for the day, it’s called National Day. Every country owns a day that is their day to show what’s best about their country. And you have to host a lot of events and do a big show. I made ours about baseball. And we had.

Lisa Gable (19:12.174)

beer and popcorn and peanuts. We had Tommy Lasorda, who’d been the manager of the LA Dodgers. I invited all the family members of everybody who was going to be attending our event. And I pretty much think that we blew it out of the water as the most fun.

World National Day that went down at that particular fair. And I talked to people today, I get Christmas cards from people and they still remember that. They still remember that we did ours a little differently, but what we captured is values that the Japanese and the United States had, which was we love our baseball, we love our countries, we love that commonality of what baseball brings to us and finding the emotion that was attached to that, it enabled me to just put a little

icing on the cake.

Imteaz (20:01.629)

think when you address problems or address opportunities with authenticity, magic happens. So, you know, even in my career, starting out in my career in sales in CPG in Australia, you know, there are many times where I was the only non white person in a room. And I didn’t notice that until other people had called it out and been like, wow, you know, this is the first time we’re seeing a brown person doing

uh, sales in this organization. That’s amazing. Um, but you know, for me, it was kind of like, well, I have a job to do. I’m going to go out and do it. Um, if I achieve the results that I said I was going to achieve, super cool. Um, if I don’t, I’ll take the learning and I’ll kind of move on. Um, but when that was called out to me, you know, I kind of realized, okay, cool. Um, you know, I’ve been given an opportunity to do something cool, uh, or, or something great. I should.

do the best that I can and then, you know, transpire that to people behind me as well. So you know, when, when it comes to breaking barriers, taking those learnings and sharing that with other people so they use that as motivation for themselves is super inspiring. So thank you. Moving on to mentoring the next generation, you’ve been actively involved in mentoring initiatives like the rarest one project. How has mentorship shaped your own journey? And why do you believe it’s crucial for experienced leaders to?

guide upcoming talent.

Lisa Gable (21:29.99)

Well, I was very fortunate to have two mentors when I began my career. I had a woman by the name of Barbara Barrett, who later in her career would end up being ambassador to Finland and also secretary of the Air Force and a board director at Raytheon. Barbara introduced me during the time with the Reagan administration as I was getting ready to leave. We served together. I actually have a story in my book about how we met in the basement of the White House and where we bonded.

But she knew I was doing my master’s thesis on dual use products and the Chinese ability to use both semiconductors and supercomputers, both in the commercial sector as well as in the defense sector. And she said, you’ve got to meet my husband. His name’s Craig Barrett and he’s SVP of a company called Intel Corporation. And so at the end of the Reagan administration, I contacted Craig and he hired me. Craig would later become a CEO and chairman of the board of Intel.

But the two of them truly were instrumental in the first 10 years of my career, and I want to say that if you can help somebody in this first 10 to 12 years of your of their career, you will make all the difference in the world for them. My husband ended up getting quite ill when I was first married. And I called Barbara and I said, I don’t know what to do. He’s got a startup. I have my own company. He’s pretty sick. I don’t know what’s going to happen. And I don’t I think I have to step away from work.

And she worked with me to identify different boards, business boards, a philanthropic board, as well as a Department of Defense board and a business school board that I could serve on. They were boards that she had served on. She goes, you know what? We’re just gonna stick you on boards for a couple of years. That way you’ve got certain meetings you’ve gotta go to, but you don’t have to work every single day and you can take care of the ebbs and flows of your husband’s illness combined with what’s, you know, your daughter growing up. And that…

Having a person who cares about you as an individual, as a human being, that knows what your potential is and is willing to be there for you when you hit those bumps in the road, that’s what makes the difference. Sometimes we help people get into college, we then help them go to graduate school, get their first job, and then we kind of leave them there. Well, the reality is that senior 30 is when a lot of things happen in life, and Rare is one, with Chan Zuckerberg as a perfect example.

Lisa Gable (23:49.358)

The two mentees I had were very, very high performing business women. One was in corporate finance. I think she was at JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley. The other had been at the top of her career and brand management communications. And both ended up with children with severely debilitating rare diseases. They took their talents as early 30 women and they decided to

form organizations that would do research to help solve the underlying problem that causes that disease. So that’s what you need to look out for. It’s not just the person who’s, you know, running up the ladder and all the world’s great for them and you’re out golfing with them. What mentorship to me is, it’s finding those unique people and helping them along the way because we desperately need people who are empathetic and have the ability to multitask and solve complex problems at the top. But the

The path forward isn’t very straight.

Imteaz (24:48.065)

I think finding mentors that enable you to find balance and are aware of the things that you are very strong at versus the things that you’re very, you have areas of development, someone who can call that out. And even if that is, you know, someone who’s an over worker and someone who’s burning themselves out at work and not spending enough time on themselves or on their family, someone who can give you that frank advice.

a person like that in your life is fundamental. Otherwise, you can work and be extremely successful, but if you don’t have that balance, it’s all gonna fall apart at some stage. Whether you pay that through your health or you pay that through your relationships, finding that person is super critical. So moving on to health and wellness advocacy. You advise startups in the health and wellness domain and…

led the world’s largest founder of food allergy research. Why is this sector important to you and how do you envision its future?

Lisa Gable (25:53.35)

Well, I began working in diet-related disease in 2009 when I led the largest industry coalition that made changes in our food supply. We actually changed 35% of this food sold in America by reducing calories. So it’s basically reducing sugars and fats. And then I was recruited to FAIR to basically turn around that organization. We’ve restructured it by 83%, raised, as you said, $100 million to put into research around food allergies, which are growing rapidly.

have been growing rapidly since 1998. Ironically, what happened is I was already involved in the space, understanding the relationship between food, therapies, biopharma, technology, in order to adjust someone’s lifestyle to accommodate the unique health profile that they had.

And there are a lot of characteristics that are very similar across all diet related disease, right? You eat, you, you consume a food or you avoid a food because you have some medical reason as to why. What is interesting and one reason I’m even more passionate about it today is that my daughter was diagnosed last summer with eosinophilic esophagitis, which is a rare form of food allergies that affects one in two thousand people a year. And it is

normally a disease that is identified within young men under the age of 18. And so my daughter, even though I was in the driver’s seat for the largest food allergy organization in the world, no one thought she had food allergies. I kept going back to everybody and saying, well, don’t you think she has some form of food allergy and they go, no, she doesn’t fit the profile. And the reality is that the profile, as we went back to our earlier conversation about what AI can do, the profile was there.

but it wasn’t identified because the information was living in different silos and no one was seeing the red flags and the patterns that would cause them to explore that disease and whether or not she had it. So I have always been passionate about it. I think that it is, unfortunately, all the diseases, whether cilia, excreta, and colitis, food allergies, EOE, obesity-related diseases.

Lisa Gable (28:09.082)

They affect all of us. They affect our ability to function. They affect our ability to work. They affect our family lives terribly, especially during the holidays. And so there’s a lot of mental behavioral issues, stress and anxiety. I’m passionate about it, but now I’m even more passionate because it affects my daughter.

Imteaz (28:28.573)

Super cool. And it’s, you know, from a food allergy point of view and food choices point of view, you know, having lived across the world now, I find America has an amazing assortment of food from, you know, anything and everything that you’ve won, every cuisine that you could want. But generally speaking, I find from a cost point of view,

High quality food in this country is relatively more expensive than it was in Australia and than it was in even the UK or the Netherlands. So I think one of the challenges this country has is the transition from processed foods, fast foods, et cetera, into something that can be really relatively accessible or very accessible for the general populace. We’re very blessed that we can cook at home and have the time to do so and et cetera, but not everyone does.

and not everyone has the access to the healthcare to find out what, you know, issues or nutritional profiles that they might have which may impact their diet. So I think certainly an area of opportunity here in the US. Moving on to legacy and future endeavors, looking back at your journey, what do you want your legacy to be? And as you look ahead, what are the new projects or challenges that you’re particularly excited about?

And how do you prioritize and pick those opportunities?

Lisa Gable (29:57.41)

Oh, I have been extremely blessed. I have had a very unusual life working with CEOs, presidents of the United States, billionaire philanthropists, people who had a passion about a thing and wanted to see it change to benefit someone else. And at this stage of my life, what I’ve really focused on is how I can take all of those connection points that I’ve had.

my unusual knowledge of a variety of different industries and also a reflection of how those industries operate because I’ve seen how they operate from the top and use that to solve the world’s most complex problems. We talk a lot about climate change, we have geopolitical unrest, rising inflation. As you point out, we are a country that has a lot, but it’s very inefficient. And so how can I, and that’s one reason I was interested at

SMU and focusing on humanities and engineering is that there are people who have, we are on the cusp of solving a lot of these problems, but one of the critical driving points that we have is being able to get them to the people who need them. It is not that we don’t have the answers, it’s that we can’t seem to get the answers to the individuals that are in need of those answers.

And we have the ability to create great change, but we also have a number of barriers. And so through my work at SMU, through my work at the World 2050 for the diplomatic career, through the work that I’m doing on the geopolitical front with the Kroc Institute on tech diplomacy, I am trying to help people use my network to connect and make the relationships that will shorten the time span of getting us to the end point we need to be at.

And to be honest with you, I don’t think we have a lot of time right now. I am very concerned that we need to move very, very quickly. And I’ve been given the opportunity to have that access to make that happen.

Imteaz (32:05.373)

Cool. Lisa, for people like yourself who are so driven by purpose, so driven by service to others, what drives you to do that? What drives you to, you know, wake up in the morning, think about all of the, you know, opportunities that you, you know, you’ve had previously and will have in the future. What really makes you passionate about what you do?

Lisa Gable (32:32.858)

It’s an obligation. And I come from a family and when you look back, we’re very fortunate and my husband and I, our families are very similar in certain ways. We got to different places in different ways, but we were this past month looking at his family history. And what I realized is that his great-great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather were in two different states that happened to be next door to each other doing exactly the same thing.

which is using their positions that they had within their communities to help change the lives of the people in the communities. In both cases, they spend an inordinate amount of time and actually gave up wealth in order to make sure that during the downturn, the people who worked for them had the financial structures that they needed to survive. And so it’s a family history. I sought out someone who had a similar mode of operation.

But I do believe it is fundamentally our obligation. No matter what you believe religiously, I think we all believe that we’re here for a purpose. Someone put us here, we have a job to do, and I wanna do that job the best that I can, and I feel that it is a requirement that I do so.

Imteaz (33:44.913)

Lovely. On a personal front, what are the habits or productivity hacks that make your life easier?

Lisa Gable (33:52.65)

I am, people, I started this one crazy process that now everybody who works for me does, and I know it doesn’t fit anything that all you high tech people are saying we should do and all the various apps that exist. I take my calendar and at the top of my calendar, I put down the things that I must do that day. And I fill up that calendar in advance. So I put all my deadlines into the calendar and it is my daily calendar. It doesn’t matter if it’s an Outlook calendar, if it’s an iCalendar.

I literally have all the things I need to follow up on, what the time period is that I have to follow up with them on. And I tell you, as I delete those items from the top of my calendar, I am so utterly and completely happy. I’m sure there are lots of cool, sticky things that people have come up with in order to do that, but that’s what I do.

Imteaz (34:42.053)

Lisa, I have every, I’ve tried every productivity app in the world. I think at least 25 of them. And I always go back to my leather down notebook. Every night I just write down all the things that are on my mind. And then I go one, two, three in terms of what are the must do things for tomorrow. And that’s, you know, if I get those three things done, there’s always going to be overflow. Um, but then I’m super happy. So yeah, I’m a hundred percent with you that you don’t, you don’t need.

Apps don’t do the work for you, you need to do the work for yourself. So yeah, super cool. What books do you recommend or do you give the most outside of your own book, which is The Love Reade by Lauren.

Lisa Gable (35:25.886)

I used to make everyone who worked for me read High Output Management by Andy Grove, which if any of you’ve read it, many people in high tech have. It’s not easy reading for someone not in the technical field. However, John Doar’s High Output Management, I found, really takes the key concepts that Andy Grove developed and brings them to people in a way that, and it’s a book I give out to a lot of people.

A book that I’m very excited about and it has not come out yet is Conflict, which is by Andrew Roberts, who Andrew and I interned together when we were 18 years old and he’s become one of the foremost historians and thought leaders within the European sector. It’s a book he wrote with General Petraeus and it takes us through the history of war from the early 1900s to Ukraine today. And as we look at the shifts in the geopolitical atmosphere, I’m…

quite keen on reading what Andrew and Petraeus have written.

Imteaz (36:25.449)

Super cool. How can people reach out to you if they want to find out more about what Lisa does?

Lisa Gable (36:33.058)

Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m extremely active on LinkedIn, also Instagram and Facebook. But if on LinkedIn, you send me a note, I am always happy to respond. I make sure I go through my inbox every Saturday and make sure I’ve gotten back to everybody. But focus on connecting with me there. And I write for a number of different magazines on a regular basis. My writing is varied. I do women in empowerment on a monthly article

do in sway. I write for CEO World, I write for Diplomatic Courier, and I actually just started writing for the Washington Times in their ethics and religion category, because as I said with AI, I think we need smarter, more ethical humans.

Imteaz (37:17.513)

super cool. Laysa, thank you for being on the podcast. It was a fascinating chat. You have an inspiring story. I’m very motivated to contribute more by listening to your story. Thank you for sharing. Is there anything else you want to leave the audience with before we wrap up today?

Lisa Gable (37:36.214)

No, just that each of us have the ability within our daily lives to make one small change for another person every single day. It does not need to be earth shattering or life shattering. It’s truly a small bite. It’s doing one thing for another person, whether it’s sending them a job opportunity, giving them some input on their resume, helping them with a child issue, or even liking and commenting on a post that’s important to them.

But if we do that, we’re going to be able to see massive change throughout the world.

Imteaz (38:08.623)

Thank you so much. Thank you for being on the show and I look forward to connecting with you in the future, Lisa. Take care.

Lisa Gable (38:15.072)

Thanks.

Imteaz (38:19.145)

Thank you.

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In a rapidly evolving tech landscape, Generative AI stands as one of the most promising innovations of our time. In a recent podcast episode, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Justin Feinberg, the visionary mind behind Cassidy AI, to explore the vast potential and practical implications of this groundbreaking technology.

The Age of Generative AI

Generative AI is no longer just a buzzword; it’s an emerging field that’s shaping the future of technology and how we interact with it. During our chat, Justin highlighted how Cassidy AI aims to make people’s lives better both personally and professionally by making AI incredibly easy and useful to use.

Staying Ahead of the Tech Curve

How does one stay current in such a fast-paced industry? Justin emphasizes the importance of intentional learning and curiosity-driven exploration. He urged individuals not to pressure themselves with words like “should” but instead play around and see what works. He advises a delicate balance between staying informed through newsletters and avoiding unnecessary noise from social media.

Unleashing Creativity through AI

Combining creativity and technology can lead to incredible innovations. Justin’s insights into content creation, product building, and leveraging AI’s power to enhance our creative pursuits were not only inspiring but practical. He believes that it’s in the hands of content creators and product builders to spread AI’s benefits to the masses.

Mindfulness Practices in a Tech-Driven World

In an unexpected twist, the conversation shifted to personal growth and mindfulness practices. Justin’s unique perspective on how to disconnect from the daily chaos and focus on what truly matters offered valuable takeaways for personal development. Could technology and mindfulness go hand in hand?

A Beginner’s Guide to AI

One of the key highlights of our discussion was Justin’s approachable guide to diving into AI, especially Generative AI. He believes in letting curiosity guide the way and not putting unnecessary pressure on oneself. Are you interested in starting your journey into AI? Justin’s tips could be just what you need!

Stay Connected with Justin

You can learn more about Justin and Cassidy AI by visiting Justinfineberg.com or Cassidyai.com. Subscribe to his newsletter and don’t hesitate to reach out if he can help.

Conclusion

From unlocking creativity to balancing social media’s impact, the conversation with Justin Fineberg was an enlightening exploration of the intersection between technology, personal growth, and the future of AI. The evolving landscape of Generative AI is not only fascinating but offers a glimpse into a future where technology empowers us to live better lives.

Catch the full podcast episode for even more insights and to see where Cassidy AI is heading. You might just find the inspiration you need to embark on your own journey into the thrilling world of AI!

Hosted by: Imteaz Ahamed

Video Transcript

Imteaz: 00:7

Hi everyone. Welcome to Applied Intelligence. Today I have a really cool guest that I’m super excited about. His name is Justin Feinberg. He’s the CEO and founder of Cassidy AI. Now, Justin, I met through TikTok. I follow Justin on TikTok along with over 300,000 other people, where he regularly talks about the applications of generative AI. And Cassidy AI, which he’s the founder of, is helping businesses implement custom AI solutions without actually writing any code. Justin also writes a weekly newsletter which you can sign up to on JustinFindberg.com and I’m going to leave all of the notes on how to follow him, etc. on the digital linear notes as well. But yeah, welcome to the show Justin, glad to have you.

Justin: 00:52

Yeah, excited to be here, man. It is always fun to do these podcasts. I love doing these. And especially with your podcasts, and the amount of awesome people that you’ve had on here already, it’s super cool to be here.

Imteaz: 01:07

Very cool. So I’d love to ask this question at the beginning of my podcast to really get the audience to know who my guest is. So the question is, what’s your story? How did you kind of get here? And if you had to write an autobiography of yourself, of your life so far, and it had five chapter titles, what would the titles of each chapter be and why?

Justin: 01:30

Yeah, totally. Well, I think if I was to write an autobiography or a biography about my life, it would definitely be one of those books that has no chapters. And it’s just like something you continue to read through. And one part connects to the other. And the lines of the chapters just don’t get there. I kind of be a lazy author, I think if I wrote a book, to be honest, about my life. But yeah, I mean, my background, you know, it’s kind of been on a long winding journey. you know, through lots of different places. And I think I talk about this in my content a lot, but, and it all kind of comes together. So I started my kind of career, like actually in the film industry. So, you know, when I was growing up, I wanted to be a writer and a director and make movies. And I started doing that very early on in high school. I had a short film that got into South by Southwest, which is a popular, obviously, film festival. And. It was kind of in that introduction at South by Southwest that I started kind of being introduced to the tech scene early on and it was through that festival and through just the fact that you could create movies and you could create films. It’s actually really compelling to people in tech and people in startups because that is the story of marketing. It’s the story of growth marketing generally. It’s just how well can you convey a story of a company. And so… From that point on, I started getting more interested in the marketing side and using those skill sets around film to actually make different commercials and worked with a bunch of different startups and different brands and actually kind of ventured out to build a growth marketing agency fairly early on. Ran that for a couple of years. That was really my introduction to tech and started working with lots of different startups. It was from that journey, starting to work in there that I realized I needed to learn to code. because if you don’t know how to code and you work in tech, it’s kind of a limit to what impact you kind of have. So I learned to code, started working on different projects with that. I started just building my own projects, got really into AI around that time. So it was right about GPT-3 was coming onto the scene. Some people would get early access. We got early access, we started playing around with it, we were building different products. At that point, I was also working and I got a job in tech as a product manager. worked at a few places, worked at a company called Blade, which is like Uber for helicopters, public company in New York, was a product manager there. And through all that, I think just a continued interest in AI, we started a startup that was essentially a social news platform that kind of used early GPT-3 to help you get these recommendations and was utilizing that in our product. You know, through that about I started making content, you know, I think there was so much interest that people had in how do you use AI? Um, it was a lot smaller amount of interest at that time when I started making content than where it is today. Uh, this was pre-chatGPT. So, um, basically like BCE, uh, pre-chatGPT and, um, and then, you know, chatGPT came out, it came on the scene and there was just so much interest and no one really saw that coming. No one who was building an AI really saw that was going to be that thing that clicked in everyone’s minds. Right off the bat of that, I was getting so much inbound from companies wanting to build custom AI solutions in their products that I teamed up with my co-founder and we decided, hey, let’s go build a company around this and solve this problem. That’s what we did and we are on that journey.

Imteaz: 05:19

So what do you think the pivotal moments in the last, let’s say, three to five years, that’s enabled generative AI to like get to where it is today?

Justin: 05:29

Yeah, I mean, I think if I look at, you know, generative AI, and I think specific look, I think there’s really one pivotal moment that matters. And I think you could back it up. And there’s a lot from like a technological perspective that’s happened over the five years that, you know, made generative AI and the technology to get to the point where it needed to be for it to kind of grab the mass adoption. But I think from where I am interested in and my focus is definitely on the mass adoption. It’s around the education of people and businesses on how they can utilize this technology. And the one pivotal moment, the obvious one, is that you know, release of ChatGPT. You know, even that really early on, I tweeted and I made the point of like, GPT-3 had been out for a while, it had been out for over a year, but it wasn’t until the user experience changed, that it was in this chat interface that unlocked in people’s minds. And I think that when you break that down and you look at that, it just shows really how important the user experience is. And I don’t think anyone was really thinking about that in the world of AI, because pre-chatGPT, the only one who was people who were necessarily interested in AI, were the researchers, were the engineers, were the technical folks. But because the UX changed, we had restaurant managers, we had dentists. We had teachers who were excited about what they could do with AI and generative AI specifically. Um, so yeah, if I have to bring it down to that, like, what is the pivotal moment? It is, it is that, uh, release of chatGPT.

Imteaz: 07:13

And you think back to Steve Jobs launching the iPhone, right? Like there’d been cell phones around for a long, long time before that. Um, but he just made it so easy for everyone to adopt. It just became mainstream. Now, you know, the same thing, it seems like the same thing is going to happen with, uh, Chadjibbity in particular, but also generative AI in the sense that, you know, the kids that are growing up today will, that will be their natural interface to interact with. technology in the future, rather than, you know, first step, go to Google and look for something and hunt for something on five pages of Google and look for it. Right.

Justin: 07:51

Exactly. And, you know, it’s, it’s still in the so early days, right? It’s like the iPhone came out and the reaction to the iPhone was like, all right, who’s buying, who’s going to buy that for, you know, a thousand dollars or whatever it was. Right. You know, and so there is still the adoption curve. And I think what chatGPT has kicked it off. But I think going back to like, you know, crossing the chasm, I don’t think we’re necessarily there yet. I actually saw a statistic where still one third of McKinsey just put out this report that you know, one third of these respondents of businesses, utilizing Gen.ai, say their organizations use it more than one function. And so it’s still less than a third, which is the actually the same number as it was in 2021. And so I still think that goes to show that like, all right, everyone knows what it is now, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s being implemented or used, which is so interesting.

Imteaz: 08:49

Yeah, I did a presentation recently where I had to explain a really complicated AI model that we were using to senior executives that have never worked in technology, let alone applying artificial intelligence. And I was just too lazy to do it. So I just used ChachiPT to break down what a multi-ombatted model is and put it into a slide and give me a graphic to describe it through Midjodi as well. So it’s yeah. hard anymore. It’s just very surprising to see that a lot of people are just staying in their own ways and that creates a business opportunity to come in and solve that for companies at scale. Which is a great segue to the next question which is what are the pain points Cassidy AI is solving for your customers?

Justin: 09:40

Yeah, for sure. So I think the biggest thing, right, and I think the way we think about it, I think going back to what you said, right, it’s like, we are still looking at the AI adoption curve. We know this stuff is powerful, we know it’s useful, but there’s still a level of like, it lacks that adoption. And, you know, we really look in and dive into like, why is that? And I think when you look at it, there’s a few different reasons. Number one, I think these models work really well when they have the proper context. Right. And so if you go to chatGPT right now, and you say, you know, write a blog post about our business, you probably don’t have a blog post that’s worth publishing. It’s not that good. You know, now if you take the level and you can prompt it properly and you understand how prompting works, you could probably get it to that place where it’s even more useful. But then even further on is like, what, what would it look like if this model essentially had all the context of your brand guidelines and it was attached to You know, the knowledge base of here’s all of our prices, here’s our products. Here’s all that relevant context about your business. Um, so that when it produces that blog post, not only is it in your writing style and your brain guidelines, but it actually knows who you are on a deep level. It’s connected to your data sources, wherever they are. And so, you know, the pain point for us is really just how can you customize these models and also bring in your own internal knowledge and data. So you can actually get better output easier. Um, and for people who are not necessarily technical or understand what the best way to use AI, making it very intuitive and easy to use. Um, so that’s really kind of what our focus is on, uh, at Cassidy. Also, am I lagging at all?

Imteaz: 11:27

So from them

Justin:

Sorry.

Imteaz:11:31

No, you’re like, it’s, it, even if you’re, you’re not lagging on my end. And even if you are, it’s no issue because the uploaded file is going to get edited. So it’s the audio

Justin: 11:47

Oh, okay.Got it. That’s really cool

Imteaz: 11:52

Um, coming back to custody AI in terms of, you know, having, uh, I understand the technological solution here in terms of, you know, uh, absorbing a company’s brand guidelines, looking at, you know, historical contents, tone of voice, uh, looking at, you know, product pricing, going through PDFs of, uh, FAQs, uh, ingesting customer service. Um, manuals, etc. to kind of answer a lot of the questions from previous users. But what’s, you know, in terms of your secret sauce or in terms of, you know, how you’re really going to push adoption within the companies that you are targeting, you know, how do you ensure that users are going to find that value that you promise?

Justin: 12:44

Yeah, I mean, that is such an interesting challenge. Something I think about a lot is that the user experience of AI has just been default chatbot. ChatGBT came onto the scene, and this is the user experience that worked. It’s what clicked. And it clicked for a lot of people. And for the past six months for the early adopters, it worked really well. But it’s not the best user experience, right? An open-ended chat experience where you might not know what to type or if you type, you don’t know if you’re gonna get the right output or you have to have all this prompting done to the experience. 99% of people shouldn’t have to do that. The people building the products, or the people who are the early adopters, the people who set up the tools can do that stuff and build that experience. But for the 99% of people… Using AI has to be incredibly simple and the results it gets back has to be exactly what they want without having to tinker and play around. And so I think what we’re setting up at Cassidy is really trying to lead adoption across the organization. And so I look at like a product such as retool, you know, if you’re not familiar, which, you know, allows you kind of like a no code to build internal dashboards is really awesome product. And it’s not like every single person in a company. uses and sets up retool or they know how to write the SQL queries in order to properly get the dashboard set up or they know how to structure it and make it easy. No, it’s one person at your company or even you build the product and you release it and 99% of people just interact with that dashboard. And so I think right now when you look at like how you use ChatGPT, it’s basically like everybody’s building their dashboard for themselves. And I think what we’re trying to build at Cassidy is the experience where 99% of people don’t have to get into the weeds. They could use AI. They could get what they want. It’s intuitive, it’s easy to use, it’s simple. And I think that is what’s gonna actually lead that adoption. So, yeah.

Imteaz: 14:53

One of the analogies or one of the similarities I really see is I used to work setting up warehouses for direct to consumer order fulfillment. And the particular warehouse that we were working with had just moved to a pick to light system. So, you know, in a traditional warehouse, a picker will get an order manifest, which is literally a printed piece of paper. And they

Justin: 15:20

Mm-hmm.

Imteaz: 15:22

have to go find. that particular order within the warehouse. Whereas this warehouse, they still had humans, they didn’t move to robots yet, but they literally had a, the manifest was connected to lights within the shelving. So as the picker was walking through the shelving, the lights are turning on and they just pick out of the thing and put it into the box. So that was, you know, user behavior change using technology. But for the picker, it just meant, oh, I don’t have to literally go hunting and searching for it. It just natively happens to me in my existing user experience, in my existing process flow, and I can adopt that very easily. So I think the startups and the companies that, you know, create generative AI companies, if you can augment the existing processes of a company and you can natively just flow into their existing workflows without. fundamentally changing that human experience. So you’re augmenting the human rather than just, you know, fundamentally coming in and saying, we’re replacing you right now. I think that adoption will be significantly faster as well. What do you think to that?

Justin: 16:33

Exactly. It really is. I mean, the core of what, how you drive adoption, how you drive these different things is the user experience. It’s all the UX because the technology is there and the technology has been created and you have to look at the parallels of other technology and other cycles, whether it be the phone or the computer. It’s like the operating system has been built. It’s like, what can you build on term of the operating system so that it makes it really easy for everyone, for my grandma to use a computer, for my grandma to use AI, you know, it’s like kind of the way you have to think about it.

Imteaz: 17:15

So in terms of building up Cassidy AI, what are the key professional experiences that you’ve had and that you’ve kind of reflected on in terms of building out Cassidy AI?

Justin: 17:14

Yeah, I mean, one of the best things and why I think, you know, we have such a unique position to really build a great product is just the extent to which the fact that we started with content and content creation and that we’ve been able to tap in and educate people generally about AI, it’s led me to connect with hundreds of businesses at this point. I see the comments, I get the DMS, I get the emails on a constantly on a daily basis. And so. What we’re able to do with that is we were just so tapped in to how people think about AI outside of tech, outside of the people who are publicly talking about it, but how, how did the teachers, how do the everyday people use AI? And something that I just think about a lot is really my focus is I, I’m so driven by like, how do we make this so easy to adopt? So you see it in my content. And so what Cassidy is, what the product that we’re building is just the extrapolation of. what we can learn from talking to people, really having that human relationship and that connection and understanding and translate that into a product that we know will work for these people. And I think that’s just really an advantage of like any sort of startup that you’re building. You got to talk to your users, you have to understand the problems. And if you could do that at a massive scale, like you can when you produce content online and you’re talking and connected with hundreds of people, you really add a massive advantage to know what product to build. And what are the features that will have the most impact? So that’s how I think about having that advantage and having that experience of starting with the content is really what’s going to let us build a really strong product with Cassidy.

Imteaz: 19:14

Very cool. So if I’m a non-technical founder of a generative AI startup, and let’s say I have a business idea right now, what are the key things you should, outside of focusing, obviously, on content and building a community of people to actually sell your product to, what would you focus on in the immediate term to kind of get started and validate?

Justin: 19:38

Yeah, so if I was non-technical, I was non-technical. My background was in marketing and I took six months and I did a coding bootcamp where I learned to code. There’s no other, I really think there’s really one way to learn to code and it’s like you have to just commit and go into it and do it, right? It’s so interesting right now and I’m so excited and I think bullish basically on people learning to code right now. I think there’s a lot of people who… You know, like, oh, there’s no reason to code anymore because who’s going to need engineers with AI the way I think about it so differently like that you Will there will be a need for software engineers? There will need a need for people to implement and to build these products out And so sure a lot of code is gonna be written by AI But that’s a benefit to people who know how to code because it means it could take a 1x coder and turn them into a 10x coder, right? And so like if you don’t know how to go from 0 to 1 in terms of engineering, then AI is not going to do much from you. But if you have that one, if you’re able to get to that first base, it could take you, AI will take you to infinity. There’s won’t be anything you can’t do or can’t build. And so I actually think right now is a great time to learn to code. So if I was a non-technical founder, I would start there. You really, it’s hard to beat around the bush and I could give the advice, go use certain tools and You know, go build it on bubble, the no code product. And that’s an option and people do that well. But I think like at the end of the day, it’s worth it to take six months to learn this skill. So honestly, that would be my advice.

Imteaz: 21:24

Very interesting. Like, uh, I like your analogy. No, for me, you know, I, I’m a non-technical person. I pretend to be a technical person because I understand how things are connected. Um, but for me, it’s, it’s always been problem definition and customer adoption. Those are the two things that I’m hyper focused on tech for me, technology. And especially new technology. Like I’ve seen.

Justin: 21:25

Do you agree? Do you? What do you think?

Imteaz: 21:53

uh,I like amazing things before, but there’s no customers. There’s no business model. And then you burn through cash so quickly that it fails. And then somebody with the same idea comes up, you know, six months later, but has a ton of customers to go with and then they succeed. So for me, you know, yes, I think what I was reflecting on was I really like how you said if you’re a zero. AI is not going to get you from zero to one, but if you can get above one, then it’s an amazing coding. It’s an amazing tool to help you become extremely good. And that analogy is also true, I think is also going to be true if you’re a content creator, right? Like I personally have been trying to get into content. Oh, sorry. I’ve been trying to put in the time to do content for many, many years. I started in newsletter, I want to say like eight or nine years ago and then just left it because you know. For me, I’m a closer, I’m a finisher, I’m not a starter. So what I use Genite AI for in terms of my content is ideation and just getting me started. And then when I’m in the flow to actually write, because I’ve already got a base or somewhere to start from, I can just crunch it out and not it out very quickly. And I don’t have that, you know, excuse of, oh, I have to ideate all this stuff. And I have to think about all of these. I have to. think about the template or I have to think about all the things that I have to say, because it kind of helps me do that. So yeah, if you want to build a tech startup and you don’t have the vocabulary or the enough insight to know what your technical team is going to be doing, you’re obviously going to be at a loss. So yeah, I agree with you. I think you have to get to at least one and then leave. the heavy lifting or leave a lot of the grant work to the experts. But for sure, if you don’t understand what you’re trying to sell, it’s very, very hard to sell it.

Justin: 23:59

Yeah, I mean, go learn to code and then don’t code. You know, I think it’s totally reasonable, right? You know, with Cassidy, I’ve, you know, my co-founder’s the best engineer I’ve ever worked with. He’s the single best engineer I’ve ever worked with. And you know, what would take me two hours, four hours, five hours to build, he could build in 10 minutes. I honestly don’t even think that’s an exaggeration. And so, you know, like,

Imteaz: 24:28

way to.

Justin: 24:29

but, Exactly. When you work with the right team. But the, but the difference here is that we have such different skill sets. But at the end of the day, he understands what I could do. And I understand what he’s doing. I understand when he says this is what’s going on or what he wants to build or what we want to build, I understand and can resonate with this is the scope. This is how long it’s going to take. I could talk the talk. And I think that really goes a long way in tech. Even if you don’t know how to code, even if you aren’t coding, The fact that you know how to code will give you a level of confidence that you can actually lead a technical team. Um, cause you know, if you go learn to code for six months, should be people who are better coders than you, but there might not necessarily be better coders who are also better leaders or better marketers. And so I think that’s the advantage there.

Imteaz: 25:23

Very cool. Um, so what can a non-tech business professional do today to kind of get started in generative AI? I

Justin: 25:32

Okay.

Imteaz:

know someone with some, you know, good enough proficiency when it comes to technology, they’re on, um, multiple like social media platforms there. They use Excel very well, et cetera. How do you think, um, someone who hasn’t delved into generative AI can really get started?

Justin: 25:54

Um, yeah, I missed the first part of the question just because I was lagging out. Um, you said, how,how can I, how can a person get an generative AI?

Imteaz: 26:00

That’s right.

Imteaz: 26:05

Yes, a non-tech person into generative AI.

Justin: 26:10

The thing about these tools is that if you take the time to play around with them, you’ll find the use cases in whatever your field is, you know, um, it’s so, you know, the, the prompting advice that anyone will give you at prompting 101 is that you start your prompts with, I want you to act as, and then fill in the persona and the fact that you could fill in that persona as literally any persona out there, whether that be a copywriter, whether that be a personal trainer, whether that be a comedian or a math tutor, I think just shows how powerful this is. So when you go and play around and you’re someone who’s non-technical and let’s say you work construction or you… Whatever it is, whatever field you’re in. There is some value that you could be like, wow, this is powerful at this sort of workflow in my, my work, because there, no matter what you do, there’s not a profession out there that couldn’t have a little bit of help and receive some benefits from utilizing a large language model, because it’s in the name. It’s large language model. Is there any job out there that doesn’t use language? You know, I mean, it’s really at the, so it’s such as versatile tool. Um, that I think there’s just, you know, there’s no profession out there that really can’t have the aha moment. Like, wow, it could do that in my field, in my industry. You know, I think that’s really cool.

Imteaz: 27:50

The mantra I love is having the ability to unlearn to relearn. Right. So, uh, if you take the time to just, you know, open up a chatGPT account and get started and, you know, put in some basic prompts, very specific to your own field. It gives you, it opens your eyes to the art of the possible with this stuff. Right. And the more specific you get to your use case. the more blown away you’ll probably be in terms of what it could actually do. So, you know, being set in your own ways or being thinking that this stuff is way too far fetched, way too complex is I think very stupid because it’s so easy to get into. If you want to do more complicated things on, you know, in terms of image generation or video generation, et cetera, those things are getting much easier as well. But from a very basic point of view, just starting on chatGPT, there’s no excuse not to do that. if you’re a business professional anymore. But yeah,

Justin: 28:51

Exactly.

Imteaz: 28:57

cool. So. So moving on more so onto a personal front. You’re a startup founder, you’re a very busy person. What are the habits and productivity hacks that you have in your life that make your life easier?

Justin: 29:10

It’s a great question.

Justin: 29:14

Look, to be totally honest, and I’ve been more transparent about this, I really, I wake up, I work, I go to the gym, I work, I go to sleep. I pretty much just work anytime I’m not in the gym. And when I’m talking about what my habit is, it’s 100% that. The gym, right? It’s exercise, it’s running, it’s sweating. There’s a mantra in my life that I make sure that I sweat every day. At least just one beam of sweat. comes down my forehead at least once a day. And I actually think that is what keeps you sane. If you plan and want to work at a caliber of just a lot of work and you want to handle all that, and there’s a lot of pressure and lots of decisions, there really is no better way than making sure that you’re exercising. On top of that, I really am strict about diet. I think that also plays a really big component. I mean, your physical health is your mental health. And so I’m sort of basic, right? That’s kind of the classic advice, but I think it is, you know, 90% of what you could do in order to ensure that you can work at a great level, that you remain happy, um, and, and that you just can operate at that caliber and that’s, and also, you know, caveat, you know, maybe you don’t, you know, you, you don’t, you don’t live to work, you know, you, you work to live and I think that’s so reasonable. I think everybody’s different. Everybody’s got a reason. But I think no matter what you do, working out, eating healthy, that’s gonna allow you to be at your peak performance through your happiness. Whether that is you work your nine to five and that’s fine. It doesn’t really matter. You’re gonna find what it is for you. But I think for me, when I think about personal habits and the things that made the biggest difference in my life, it’s really just strict exercise and strict diet. So yeah.

Imteaz: 31:09

How do you take the time to learn though, Justin, in terms of like all this stuff is exploding right now, how do you keep on top of all the things that are happening within the generative AI space?

Justin: 31:20

I listen to podcasts like this. It’s really hard generally to stay up on all this stuff. I think really talking and meeting people, really getting out of your comfort zone, talking to as many people as you can, staying updated on social, there’s ways to do it. And I also think don’t put the pressure on yourself that you need to stay updated. You can miss some news. I mean, delete Twitter, get off Twitter for a month, who cares? You know, like, you know, like

Imteaz: 31:54

It’s not Twitter anymore, Justin, it’s X. Come on, man.

Imteaz: 32:03

Yeah

Justin: 32:17

life’s

Justin:

gonna… Oh

Imteaz:

anymore, Justin, it’s X. Come

Justin:

shoot,

Justin:

It’s like, what interests you? You know, if you like let go and you’re just like, oh, I’m curious about this, like you’re gonna get the news, you’re gonna get the information that you need. And I think that’s the way to really treat it is don’t try to force yourself. I gotta stay updated. I need all these newsletters. I need everything. Just like, hey, does that sound interesting? Do you wanna listen to that podcast? Do you wanna, you know, make an intentional effort to stay up to date with this? But. It’s always a challenge to stay up to date, but I don’t think it’s a necessity.

Imteaz: 31:48

For me on this one, it’s unsubscribing, religiously unsubscribing from like stuff that I don’t like and only being attuned to the content that I do like and I find is adding value. Like, especially on social. For me, it’s just, if I open up LinkedIn or TikTok, it’s giving me content that’s relevant to what I’m doing. And I make sure that I’m really subscribed to those people. And then as I randomly, you know, subscribe to some random stuff that’s not necessary anymore. I just make it a very good habit of trying to like get out of that stuff. Otherwise you just go down the rabbit hole and then just lose so

Justin: 33:24

I totally agree. I even added on my newsletter. I have two unsubscribe buttons. I have one unsubscribe button. You’ll never hear from me again. That’s it. But then I have the other one, which is like just unsubscribe from me from the week and I’ll only email you when I really think you need to know something. And I think that’s like a very like transparent, honest thing. I know people’s inboxes are filled. And so if they’re receiving my newsletter, you know, once a week and that’s too much and they don’t want that kind of noise, Well, I want to give them the optionality that like, wait a second. Sometimes like I don’t, there’s something beyond just a week that’s like, Hey, I would definitely recommend knowing this. And I almost think that’s a great option for like anyone with a newsletter is like, give your subscribers an option because there is really, they might want to keep hearing from you every once in a while, but they just can’t handle the once a week or the everyday type of thing. And so giving that option of cadence, um, it also builds a level of like trust. Like I’m not going to email something to that people who have opted out of the week unless I truly, from where I am, want and know that this person needs to know this information. And I think it’s the job as a content creator. It’s like, you wanna provide, you really, I overly index on like, is this a valuable piece of content? Will this be valuable to this audience? Will this be valuable to the people who unsubscribe from the weekly newsletter? Should they know this? And if you really put value at the forefront of like what you’re trying to do. that sets you up really well as a content creator and someone who does spread the AI news and the information. So, yeah.

Imteaz: 33:59

I’m curious to know your process for coming up with new content when it comes to generative AI. How does Justin decide this is the thing I’m going to talk about today?

Justin: 35L12

personal curiosity. I think like we’re all kind of the same, you know, like, and it is even transparent and like when you make a piece of content on TikTok and you post on Instagram and the performance of the video does well in the same exact way, even though it’s a hundred percent of different audience, probably no one who saw it on TikTok rarely would ever see it on Instagram. They’re separate groups, but the fact that they perform well on both platforms for me shows that We’re all kind of, we like the same stuff. We’re all interested in the same stuff. And so if you really are focused on like, I’m gonna make content that I would like, and you put it out there, and you make a video or share educational information, you go, I would have liked to have seen that from someone else, then you know it will be valuable to everyone else. You know, and so like, I really do feel like we are the best judges of the content because you can know if something’s interesting to you, it’s probably interesting to a million other people.

Imteaz:

Super cool. My next question is, what are the books you recommend or gift out the most to friends and family?

Justin: 36:32

Yeah, I think well there’s one book in particular that I gift out the most which is waking up by Sam Harris So going back to the kind of personal front so waking up is basically in Sam Harris wrote this entire book basically on how to meditate and How to be spiritual without having to be religious right and It’s one of the most I was one of the most kind of eye-opening and fascinating experiences when I read it just about how much something like meditation or mindfulness can really impact, you know, who you are, the way you operate. I mean, I’ve gone through periods in my life where I’ve meditated a lot and there’s gone through periods in my life where, you know, I have meditated a little. But I think the through line of it all is just like being able to be mindful and being present and knowing what that means and actually having a deep understanding of what that means that you can’t. become happy, you can only be happy. And so that’s a book that I give to a lot of people because it really breaks down that concept in a very scientific manner. You know, there’s no pseudoscience. I think a lot of people have the connotation of meditation and you know, wow, you know, the pseudoscience and all that stuff, but it really breaks down that science of what’s going on and why it is so powerful.

Imteaz: 37:58

In a similar vein, I love the book, Never Split the Difference, which is about negotiation, but it goes through how, from a negotiation point of view, before going into negotiation, you can do breath work and literally just calm your mind and calm your heart rate down in order to focus more. So like, you know, at the beginning of some meetings, internal theme meetings, I’ve used that. to kind of, when everyone’s just agitated by a situation that’s kind of going on, can’t necessarily take a logical decision, right? So just taking three day breaths as a group sounds weird, looks weird, um, but really changes the tonality of the situation and allows you to really make a very logical decision in a very hyped up state. So

Justin: 38:46

should check that out. I’d be interested in the negotiation. What are your negotiation tips? Do you think you’re good? Like, I mean, maybe read the one book, maybe read a couple others. How do you become a good negotiator?

Imteaz: 39:00

Um, it’s really understanding what the other person is looking for and what, how do you solve that problem for them and really understanding how you’re adding value in that equation and getting them to a yes, uh, by thinking two or three steps ahead of where they actually are. So, um, that’s, that’s the logical side of the equation. The other side of the equation is you’re only going to buy something or you’re only going to interact with someone. that you like, not going to buy something from a douchebag. So on the emotional front, you know, keep your promises, do what you say you’re going to do. Follow up when you say you’re going to follow up and tick all of those boxes. And then on the logical front, it’s kind of like, okay, I’m going to listen to all of the things that you have to say in your business situation, personal situation, et cetera. I will then map out. from my point of view, how I can help you achieve those goals. And through the relationship side, as well as the logical side, present all of that information back to you so it makes like complete logical and emotional sense that you would choose me as the solution to what you wanna do. So for me negotiating, I’ve worked in sales for the first six, seven, eight years of my life. And I wasn’t the… uh, over extrovert type of salesperson. I’m actually quite introverted. I had to be extroverted to kind of do my job and do like public speaking and stuff, but I’m naturally introverted. Um, so for me, it was kind of like taking that step back and really just actively listening to all of those problems that my customer was telling me. And then playing it back in a way that it was like, Oh, okay. This guy kind of has the solution to what I’m really looking for. So I think if you think about negotiating less like, you know, salesmen trying to like a second hand car salesman trying to push something onto you and more like this is a problem this person has, how can I help them through that? And then, hey, if I sell them a product, super great. And then it becomes just really easy to do. So I don’t think it’s that hard. It’s just taking a balance between the emotional side of the equation as well as the logical side. you kind of push it through.

Justin: 41:28

Yeah, I love that. I think that’s great.

Imteaz: 41:32

Super cool. Any other final closing statements from you, Justin, in terms of what people can do to kind of get started in Gen. AI?

Justin: 41:44

Yeah, you know, I think, uh, let your curiosity, let the, let your curiosity guide you. Um, never say the word should, I should use AI. I should, I should, you know, it’s like, you’re putting unnecessary pressure on yourself, like I think if you play around, you try it out, see what works. But I think ultimately it’s in the hands of people like us, content creators, people building products to really get it across to the majority to the masses, how they can really make their lives better using these products and these tools and this technology. And so it’s something I try to do with my content. It’s clearly something you’re trying to do with your podcasts. And it’s something we’re trying to do with Cassidy is really how can we actually make people’s lives better, both personally and professionally, obviously, uh, using AI and, uh, we’re going to make it. incredibly easy and useful to use. That’s, that’s the goal with Cassidy. So, yeah.

Imteaz: 42:50

Justin, pleasure to have you on the podcast. It was a fascinating chat. I’d love to catch up with you, let’s say in a year’s time or so to see the progress of Cassidy and to see where it’s at. How can people reach out to you if they want to learn more about Cassidy AI and learn more about you?

Justin: 43:08

Yeah, they could come to my website, Justinfeinberg.com. They can go to Cassidy’s website, Cassidyai.com or Cassidy.ai. They both go to the same place. I got a newsletter, send out once a week. You could try it. And if you don’t like the weekly newsletter, unsubscribe to the weekly newsletter and I’ll email you when there’s something you need to know about. And reach out if I can help.

Imteaz: 43:38

Thanks so much, man, take care.

Justin: 43:40

Thanks.

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In a recent in-depth discussion on a popular video podcast, Pasha Rayan, Co-founder and CTO of the online training platform, Forage, offered profound insights into the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education. Rayan’s innovative EdTech venture, part of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 batch, revolutionizes how education and recruitment intersect.

Forging Ahead with Forage

Forage’s unique vision stems from Rayan’s determination to use technology as a force for educational progress. He aims to align education with real-world business requirements and provide a learning platform that exposes students to practical experiences.

Pasha Rayan’s vision is not just about making information available, the host noted. It’s about engaging learners and equipping them with the skills that today’s businesses are searching for.”

Forage is a testament to this vision. By partnering with top companies, Forage offers extensive online training programs that educate and provide hands-on industry experience.

The Role of AI in Education

The interview delved into the transformative power of generative AI in education. Pasha explained how AI has the potential to create personalized learning paths, taking into account each student’s learning style and pace. He elaborated on how AI could revolutionize learning outcomes and open new global student opportunities.

“As we evolve, we’re looking at how we can use generative AI to really help drive personalized learning experiences,” Pasha stated. “By understanding each student’s individual learning style and needs, we can provide them with a truly tailored educational experience.”

Aligning Technology with Impact

On aligning mission and technology for impactful work, Rayan was vocal about how Forage seeks to solve real-world problems. “It’s about your mission and how your technology can help you achieve that mission,” he said. He emphasized that it’s essential to align the tech solution with the mission of any startup to create an impact.

Conclusion

Pasha Rayan’s views paint a vibrant picture of a future where education and industry work in unison. Through his endeavors at Forage, he’s creating a learning ecosystem that benefits students and businesses alike. His infectious enthusiasm for innovative learning and recruitment solutions makes him a leading figure in educational technology.

By leveraging the power of technology and aligning it with the mission, Rayan is not just shaping the future of education – he’s shaping the world’s future leaders. Connect with Pasha Rayan on LinkedIn or Twitter @Pashpops to follow his insights.

Hosted by: Imteaz Ahamed

Video Transcript

Imteaz – 00:09 Hi everyone, welcome to Applied Intelligence. Today, I have a very fun guest to speak to, Pasha Ryan. Pasha is the current CEO, I’m sorry, CTO, and co-founder of Forage. And we’ll get into that a bit later, but more importantly, I met Pasha many, many years ago. And Pasha was actually my intern back at Racket in Sydney, and now he’s gone on to do.

Pasha Rayan – 00:21 Yep.

Imteaz – 00:37 some many wonderful things and we’re gonna get into that in a lot of detail. Very recently though, however, we’re both in New York and I got to catch up with him, which was very cool and hear all the stories of what it’s like to be a startup founder and there’s so many crazy things that we’re gonna talk about today. But Pasha, welcome to the show.

Pasha Rayan – 00:57 Oh, it’s good to chat again, MTS. It’s funny, right, because when we met, you know, I was just at university, figuring out what to do with my life. And I think it’s a little bit better nowadays, but yeah, definitely, definitely a long time ago.

Imteaz – 01:14 Yeah, don’t worry man, I still don’t know what I’m doing in my life. I just, you know, happening to get through day by day. Um, but anyway, just so the audience gets to know who Pasha is. Um, I love to ask this question, which is if you had an autobiography and if it had five chapters, what would the title of each one of those five chapters be?

Pasha Rayan – 01:18 I’m gonna go.

Pasha Rayan – 01:38 Yeah, I mean like I love this question because it really makes you distill like into those phases of like your life, right? Um, and it’s funny, right for me, a lot of my first chapter would always be that introductory childhood chapter of just like you know Basically, you know being a pretty normal kid not really caring about too much except for video games and movies um, I guess the second chapter in my mind really would be

you know, like being young and trying to figure out the world. So that was a period of my life when I was, you know like maybe 16 to like 21, where before I knew anything about anything at all**, you know,** like, you know, I didn’t really. I grew up in a single-parent family, so I had no real exposure to the outside world and like what was going on and like what work was like or what different things you could do at school, at university.

So my second chapter would basically be this phase of like, yeah, trying to figure things out by going deep. And that second chapter would be that phase where I picked up books about philosophy. I read a lot of books across different topics. It’s when I started to learn the code on my own or at school. Yeah, I was just kind of a voracious reader and trying to figure out things there. So that second chapter would be, oh, you know, like, let’s go deeper and try to figure things out.

My third chapter would basically be, you know, probably a chapter of my university years where I kind of took the approach of university where, you know, I had to kind of figure it out at that younger age that this is a great time to actually, you know, figure things out but also like do things at a lower risk, you know, like I had not learned anything about the corporate world. I hadn’t learned much about academia. I decided to…

I did pure randomness to a degree in commerce and philosophy and computer science with the liberal studies at UNSW. And for me, it was really just a distillation of, okay, you know, like I had read a lot in the previous years. I had only started to figure out what the world was like, but I thought university or college was the best way to actually test out some of these ideas and have fun, you know, trying to do student.

society things have fun trying to build things on the side, have fun learning. You know, I would go out and just. Pick up random textbooks from the library, read them for fun and try to understand what the topic was about. It could be economics, could be random things around history or sometimes the sciences and, yeah, put them back and just kind of like get back to, like, tinkering and trying out things in the real world. After that, I guess chapter was that chapter. Yeah, that’s chapter three.

a chapter of my life on actually kind of like doing real work for the first time. That’s when I entered with UMTA as you know, like when I entered at records, I worked in the corporate world, I spent some time working on**, you know, in**, as a consultant, I spent some time working as a product manager at a tech company in Australia, and that would be like that fourth chapter, just a chapter of exploring work.

There you kind of like, I went through multiple types of business cultures and I think kind of learned what I thought would work and actually is kind of what we want to do for the rest of our lives. And the fifth chapter would be**, you know,** quite, and I guess you could probably sub-subdivide chapter five into a ton of subchapters, because it’s still ongoing, but really would be my journey with forage and kind of life ever since starting a startup. So chapter five would basically be titled Forage. And then under that would probably be about five or six subchapters for the gamut of jobs and roles that we’ve had there and the crazy journeys and stories. So yeah, Chapter Five is probably a bit of a undersell, but yeah, that will probably be the fifth chapter because that could be its own book and its own rights.

05:46

Imteaz – 05:50 But let’s dive into that, Pasha. So what led you to create Forage, and what problem does it solve, and how does it kind of work? Let’s go into a bit of detail to give people perspective in terms of what you work on right

Pasha Rayan – 05:52 Hmm.

Pasha Rayan – 06:00 Mm-hmm.

Pasha Rayan – 06:05 Awesome. Well, we step back, like, Forage is a platform that runs virtual job simulations. So when we started Forage, we basically had this idea that, and this thesis that the model of hiring someone just doesn’t work today. Because today, a company would spend a lot of time to figure out how to hire someone, then spend two or three years to train them up. And then after that, either that candidate or that person just doesn’t fit the role or isn’t good enough for the role, or on the flip side, the candidate realizes that career isn’t for them. And what we thought was we’d flip it around and go, well, why don’t we actually train people first, then the company can hire them, then they can stick around for much longer. And the vehicle to kind of prove that these are our virtual job simulations and Forage basically is the platform to…do a three to five-hour virtual job simulation with any company, any like, you know, we try to work with any big company in the world. So a university student or college student can jump on to theforge.com and do a job simulation with the Boston Consulting Group, Pfizer, Lululemon, General Electric, you know, work with a lot of these companies around the world. And in that simulation, a student actually tries out what it’s like to do a job.

I guess in my mind; it’d be like, they get to like experience what it’s like to work with their own version of MTAs at records. But it’s the actual stuff, nothing theoretical. And when they do that, students actually start to realize what is, what they find interesting. And on the flip side, employees today are finding that the students that do these forage job simulations are much more hireable.

So a student on forages three to four times more likely to land the job than a student who hasn’t done forage in the application processes that we work with companies all around the world. Companies love us because the students that do come on board, you know, like when they interview them, they know the key terms of an industry. They know what the work is like, and they know that they’re not gonna be someone that drops out in a year or two. So that’s kind of like the core bit of forage. And I guess like, you know,

Before I get into what led to it, where we are today, we’re quite lucky, right? We started in Sydney, Australia, but we’ve been lucky enough to grow around the world. We have offices in here, in New York, in San Francisco, and in London. When we started, we had 300 students on our website when we were in Australia, but now we have 4.5 million students around the world. We have 150 employers, and we’ve been going down the venture capital startup route. We’ve been lucky enough to raise around $40 to $50 million.

and venture funding in the last five to six years. So that’s Forage. And what allows us to create that ecosystem really is a much more personal journey of story for me and Tom, my co-founder. I think the funny thing is when we created Forage and wanted to create something in the student space, even before the first lines could be written, Tom, my co-founder…

And I independently were just always helping the students out with their resume and how they could land a job. And I think for us, you know, like, you know, I mentioned, you know, like we grew up in a single parent family. We had no idea about this. And I think for me, a lot of it was like, I feel like I got really lucky landing into really cool jobs, doing cool internships, meeting amazing people who could help out with our resume. Um, and.

my co-founder I think felt the same. And I think for us giving back was always a way to actually really kind of like help the next generation of people who maybe didn’t have the best of luck. Tom grew up in Waka and didn’t know anything about any of this stuff as well. So that’s kind of like, that was the feeling of us wanting to give back was really the genesis of the company. And I think, you know, what led us to create it was us realizing that there probably should have been a better way.

to do this at scale, right? You know, and I could probably go into the story of how we started off as a mentoring marketplace to solve that, but you know, we really just started Forage as a passion project to solve that. But as we went along, we realized that there were other way to productize the main experiences required to get someone to be ready for a job, do that at scale and do that in a way that really impacts education and hiring.

10:43

Imteaz – 10:48 That’s incredible. It’s very cool to see a story where the work that you do has an impact on the way that you’ve perceived the world and not necessarily received that help or seen that help growing up and then landing in a place where you can actually do that. I never knew I wanted to do sales. I wanted to do commercial. I never knew that I wanted to manage a P&L.

and I kind of stumbled into corporate more than anything else. I thought I was going to be a lawyer growing up. And I didn’t necessarily have the mentors or the people around me or even, you know, my dad’s parents, my dad’s friends or my mom’s friends, they weren’t necessarily in the corporate sector because they were first generation immigrants to Australia, right? They did, my dad had a white collar job, but it was a very technical role, not necessarily.

managing commercials. But I’m faith my way into record, and I’m still that record. But that was pure chance. And it shouldn’t necessarily be pure chance in terms of how people find the right career path that really lets them shine.

Pasha Rayan – 12:06 Yeah, and you know what’s funny? I remember your story back when I was an intern and you were chatting it through, how you got through two records and went through it. And that and many other people have similar stories where they’ve been able to find their great careers for luck. And I think the thing that I always have pinched myself with is that not everyone was as lucky as us, right? There are lots of people at the different schools I’ve gone to that maybe…

just what as lucky they’re like land into a pool or figure out that, you know, for you, commercial was good for me being in tech was kind of something that I wanted to do. Um, and some people just get kind of like swept away. And, you know, I actually think it’s also like, let me step back, you know, the, the scope of them, the, there are so much talent out there in the world, but getting that talent to the opportunity where they can flourish is actually something that isn’t done very well yet. And, you know, it can be.

it can be done better in so many ways. But I think for us, you know, like being able to solve that problem you mentioned of like having, you know, like being able to like, bridge that gap of going, oh, I, someone doesn’t know, it doesn’t have the connections about it industry to, Hey, in your own time, one safe space in your own safe way, you can find what particular, you know, what particular career will, will align with you, I think is, you know, and it’s more, we’re going to be really impactful. And I think, you know, for us, it was always

trying to create a way where we could align getting that impact while at the same time proving that you can actually try to solve this problem, which means a lot to a lot of people and turn it into a very good business and turn it into something that is also unique and didn’t exist yet. So all of that kind of packaged together into kind of what ended up becoming Forage.

13:52

Imteaz – 13:56

Like I think about working in commercial and working in sales in particular, and that’s not something that’s necessarily taught at university, nor is it taught at high school. So you don’t necessarily hear about becoming a salesperson or a commercial leader. You hear about being a business person, right? But you don’t necessarily hear about being a salesman as growing up.

14:22

Imteaz – 14:27 giving the opportunity to people that already have these innate skills of building relationships and or other very technical things or not non-technical things and then putting them in a situation for them to actually flourish, which is very, very cool. So coming back and steering more towards applications of generative AI, which is such a hot topic right now. How is that?

Pasha Rayan – 14:44 Yeah.

Imteaz – 14:54 How is GenAI really changing the way that you’re going to market with Plurage in the near term?

Pasha Rayan – 15:01 It’s a great question. And recently at Forage, we had run an internal hackathon around generative AI. I think maybe, you know, a bit of context and preface is that, you know, obviously as Forage we’ve been growing a lot and have been doing a lot with, you know, helping place amazing students and talent into like great companies out there. But Gen. AI kind of like came in like a storm essentially and kind of like… shook the world of technology because it allows you to do so much more than you could have done before, right? Before to even get close to anything close to what OpenAI and these other generative AI tools offered, you’d have to spend millions and millions of dollars on a data science team and they themselves would not have enough general content to be able to train a powerful AI.

Pasha Rayan – 15:59 I think at a high level, the question is, how does generative AI actually change the world of recruitment education? I’ll start with education in that generative AI is very powerful because it allows basically anyone to have a personalized tutor and allows anyone to have.

Imteaz (42:37.833) You got it.

Pasha Rayan (42:44.938) why I’m really proud of like us realizing that our core hypothesis for our original product was really not on solid footing was that we kind of really like, you know, I think what happened was we listened to this great video by Y Combinator about what product market fit should look like. And what we had done was, you know, we’d listened to it and Tom and I, I think, you know, we had realized after watching this video that we don’t have product market fit. And I remember, I think we both independently just had sleepless nights and felt really sick about that fact.

Like we were like, we knew we were doing something that was not going to work. And I think for us, it was at that realization and really early on that we were like, this isn’t going to work, but we’re going to figure out what does work. And we’re going to figure out what does work, but that still hits our mission. Um, and I think that, you know, like when we made that decision and we were screwing up and spending a lot of time with something that wasn’t working, it was really pivotal for us because for us.

We then turned around and changed all of our behaviors and our processes to go find product market fit, you know? So after like three months of working on this project, the mentoring marketplace, and it wasn’t working, we had basically turned around and go, we’re gonna just iterate every week on a different kind of idea, make learnings on that idea, and talk to so many people to the point that we would just actually be sick of talking to people.

every day and we were exhausted. I think we ended up talking to like a few hundred people by the end of like, by the end of it. We had iterated so fast, like within the next two months, um, that we had built up a list of learnings. Like actually students don’t know how to get mentored, but they do want to know what a job is like. And companies do want to give out more work experience programs, but they literally can’t physically, like, like just as you imagine, you can’t physically manage that many people. Companies can’t physically manage a thousand to 3000 interns in a new month.

moment in time. And it was interesting. We had learned so much. I mean, it started picking up these learnings. And I think what I didn’t realize, you know, and what made it eventually a success was that like, we had spent an extreme amount of time talking to users and figuring out what did or didn’t work. And at that extreme, after that extreme amount of time, I think Tom and I were just drinking and exhausted one afternoon. And we had just joked that like, Hey, what if we just gave every student an internship?

we were all like, yeah, let’s just give every student an internship. And then we just kind of laughed about it. And then the next day we sent an email being like, Oh, well, then we’re like, let’s go do it. So we went out and said, like, we’ll go out and like create these virtual internships. And the thing was like, I remember we weren’t bullish on the idea in itself. We knew that we wanted to solve the mission, but the virtual internships, virtual job simulation idea that we ended up with, we kind of saw it as fallen from everything else that we had done.

But when we sent out an email to our user base saying that we were going to do some virtual internships, virtual job simulations, the thing that kind of like makes me proud like I think the funny thing is that we had put all this effort into it. And Tom had written this email, very basic email, and he had press send and he walked to the toilet. And I had set up the system where when a student signed up to something, we would get an SMS. And the seventh…

Tom Press sent me that email. We had basically, like my phone started ringing nonstop and we’re sitting next to our investors at that point and our investors are like, oh, what’s going on there? And I’m like, I don’t know what’s happening, but everyone is signing up to this thing that we’ve just sent out. And you know, in the multi few minutes that Tom took to go to the toilet, it took a while, he had interest, we had initially gotten like 180 applications to our virtual internship, virtual job simulation then. And I think the crazy thing was that like,

looking back, you know, we was just part of our consistent process of learning and trying to figure out what could be helpful to students. But that was it. That was us finding the thing that would have actually had both the fit for the market and what students wanted and the employees wanted. And yeah, it was something that really kind of like, that was the culmination of all of the hard work after we realized we had screwed up thinking and being so stubborn that we had an idea that was going to be it. And I think for me, that was probably like…

the failures to hope that I’m most proud of in the whole startup journey, which is like we had almost come in too stubbornly, but we had really realized we had failed on what we wanted and what we achieved to do, which is build product market fit, but then corrected and tried to really solve it and probably at an extreme level to get to where we were. So yeah, I think getting to what our first product became was probably crushingly, crushingly

sad when we realized we had failed in our first run through of it all. But we’re proud because I think we’re able to pick ourselves up and almost work at an extreme level to solve that problem down there.

Imteaz (47:41.61) So talk to me about the point where you realize you didn’t have product market fit. To the time that you got all of these pings on your phone, what kept you motivated between those two times?

to keep going.

Pasha Rayan (48:00.619) Motivation is such a funny thing when it comes to doing a startup. That early phase was like, I think it was pure stubbornness. We had left our jobs, start this company and we had really wanted to make a difference. I think we’re all like, well, if we’re going to leave our jobs and we’re well paid, we’re lucky enough to do a lot of these cool things.

Pasha Rayan (48:27.794) I was running like growth and acquisitions at a, at a marketplace company. So like we had left our cool, we had left some pretty cool jobs, good positions. And, and we wanted to make a difference. And I think for us, the motivation was actually at that stage and motivation changed over time, but I’ll never swap out in stages at that stage of like, Oh, we don’t have something when you figure it out. Um, I think it was just pure stubbornness. I think for us.

We wanted to make a difference. We didn’t want to fail and we wouldn’t let ourselves fail. That was our motivation then. We didn’t want to let ourselves fail because we thought that the problem was so big and so real that, and someone had to figure it out, that we may as well make it us. I mean, we may as well make it us and do it in such a way that it actually would work. So I think that first bit was pure stubbornness and just a desire to achieve our mission.

I think we’re a little, Tom and I were a little zealot like that. We really, we had that zealotry around really trying to make a difference. Um, and then when we got there, it was interesting, the motivation afterward, after you get to something that kind of works because you know, once we had the core products, we were lucky enough to grow and get students from like amazing universities and start getting these amazing brands to come on board. Um, you know, we had KPMG on board, Kim and Malisyns, and then BCG came on.

government departments started coming on, it was really like quite good. But like at that point, the motivation to charge through like, really like, you know, like this is our sixth year now doing forage and we know that it’s going to take a decade or more of commitment to even get to where we think it can go. Um, the motivation right now is really, A, trying to achieve a mission. Like every time we find things hard, it’s like, we’ll do something worthwhile. B, I think the biggest thing as we kind of grow is this idea that you know, we’ve

worked really hard to bring out amazing people to join our team to make a difference. We have amazingly talented leaders, amazingly talented engineers, amazingly talented product people, salespeople, who could all probably be out there making a lot more money but are choosing to work with us because we are making a difference. So it’s how do we do them right? How do we do them right at a day-to-day level as working with them, but also at a year-to-year level so they feel like that they’re getting…

you know, they’re growing and they’re getting their worth and spending their time here with us as a company. And that, you know, like I wake up and that always keeps us going. I think thirdly as well, right? Like when we hear of these amazing stories of our students landing jobs and our employees being able to find amazing students, like it really keeps us going, you know. When we started, we wanted to do a company that did a line of admission, but like it has been such an advantage because, for us, there’s really no reason.

to quit, you know, like there’s, there’s always, we are helping someone every day, someone out there. Um, you can see it on, if you look up social media or LinkedIn, you’ll see people posting about Forge every day. Um, I think the crazy thing is like that keeps you going because that alignment of being able to have a good mission, um, a good business, and really something quite unique as a technical challenge and a product level or as a business level. If you’re thinking about the economics of it all. Um,

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s kind of what keeps us going, being able to help people out in such a unique way that can become a big company. So yeah, motivation, you know, that early motivation was pure stubbornness and really wanting to make a difference. And then as we’ve grown as a company and organization, it really is, I think, a sense of, yeah, being able to make that difference, a sense of duty to the people that have put their time and investment and being custodians of like, you know.

our team members’ effort and the custodians of some of our investors’ money, custodians of the effort that the students put into the hours on our platform to be able to turn that into something valuable, I think just keeps us going.

Imteaz (52:26.398) super cool. In wrapping up the podcast, Pasha, what are the three things that, or the three takeaways that you want to leave with the audience today?

Pasha Rayan (52:36.898) Yeah, I think there’s a few takeaways. I think one at a high level, I think going off the topic of motivation, I think it’s okay to be motivated to make a difference and make, I think people separate the idea that you can make a good business and it be both nourishing and helpful for people around the world. I think there are ways to pull that off most of the time. And I think…

More people should be willing to try to build businesses that align with those three things, companies that can be big, companies that make a difference, and companies that are unique that don’t exist yet. I think that’s a huge thing that, A, as the years go on is almost like ridiculous how much keeps us going every day to kind of work hard for forage and everything that we do. The second takeaway is I think with generative AI, the opportunity is quite…

large, especially when you think about generative AI as a tool to get you past current limits. I think one of the interesting things about generative AI versus, let’s say, the era of the internet is that because it can be so personalized, it really gives you the chance to become much faster, much more engaged, much smarter, much more understanding of things that are happening than before.

And if you use that world, you can really, I think an individual can make much more impact in the world overall. And then I think the third thing is like, yeah, I mean, I think, I think, um, hopefully, the last takeaway is that someone out there listening, whether, you know, they’re a bit younger or they’re kind of in their career thinking about making a difference, you know, like it is, it is possible to be able to like, you know, pull it off and like actually create like, you know, cool things.

by putting the effort into it and having fun and being able to mix this idea of mission and technology and work altogether. So yeah, I think hopefully someone out there gets a little bit more energy to make a difference in their community or in a way that makes sense to them. I keep thinking about generative AI, but helping small communities out, like running small organizations, helping…

Helping families be better, helping companies become a bit more, you know, like streamlined. I think there’s so many opportunities and hopefully, this gets you going a little bit more on.

Imteaz (55:12.126) Super cool. Pasha, lovely to catch up with you, man. It’s insane to see. I remember you as this tiny little intern that came into the office and then 10 plus years go by and then you turn into this guy. I’m super proud of you and super proud of the work that you do. It’s mind-blowing. So congrats to you. Keep going. I want to see bigger and better things from you going forward. Just for people that want to reach out to you.

Pasha Rayan (55:26.728) Yeah. Ha ha.

Imteaz (55:42.304) for any other questions and whatnot, how should they do that?

Pasha Rayan (55:45.95) Yeah, I mean, visit theforge.com to visit the website. My email is pasha at theforge.com. Always happy to help companies and people out, you know, who are trying to make a difference. Yeah, feel free to reach out anytime. I know there’s never, I’m never too busy to try to help, like, you know, someone trying to do some cool stuff in the world. That always excites me. But yeah, feel free to email us and reach out and connect us on LinkedIn and other things. Pasha Arian is my name and unique enough to hopefully be found pretty quickly.

Imteaz (56:20.234) Super cool. Thank you so much, man. Take care.

Pasha Rayan (56:22.99) Thanks, Imteaz!

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Introduction:

In today’s ever-changing financial landscape, individuals with complex financial situations and international lifestyles face unique challenges regarding wealth management, taxation, and estate planning. To shed light on these topics, we had the pleasure of interviewing Mohammad Uz-Zaman, a highly qualified financial planner and esteemed Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEP) member. Muhammed shared his expertise, providing invaluable insights into strategies for optimizing wealth, minimizing tax burdens, and safeguarding assets. Here are four key takeouts from our conversation:

1. Understanding the Impact of Domicile: One of the crucial aspects discussed during the conversation was the concept of domicile. Muhammed explained how individuals with nomadic lifestyles or those residing in multiple jurisdictions must consider their domicile status and how it can affect their investment holdings. He highlighted the potential benefits of acquiring deemed domicile status in different jurisdictions based on the time spent in each location. This insight emphasizes the importance of seeking specialist advice to navigate the complexities of domicile and its implications on financial affairs.
2. The Power of Specialized Professionals: Muhammed emphasized the significance of engaging professionals with high-level qualifications in multiple disciplines. These professionals should be well-versed in legal services, trust management, taxation, accountancy, and regulated wealth management. By consulting experts who understand all three disciplines, individuals can benefit from comprehensive advice tailored to their unique financial circumstances. Muhammed also highlighted the importance of engaging regulated wealth managers and members of STEP to ensure a holistic approach to financial planning and protection.
3. Mitigating Tax and Maximizing Wealth: Tax planning was a vital focus of the conversation. Muhammed emphasized the need to consult specialists who can offer strategic solutions to mitigate tax burdens. While accountants play a vital role in filing tax returns, tax specialists and regulated wealth managers are better equipped to provide advice on tax optimization strategies. Muhammed provided real-life examples, showcasing the potential financial benefits of implementing sound tax planning techniques, such as mandating income from trust funds to eligible family members for specific purposes like funding private school fees.
4. Taking the First Steps: Muhammed highlighted the importance of taking the first step towards preparing for a secure financial future. He encouraged listeners to contact highly qualified financial planners for an initial consultation, as many are willing to provide valuable insights and guidance. By reviewing their financial situation, individuals can better understand the steps they need to take to achieve their financial goals. Muhammed cautioned against relying solely on online resources and stressed the significance of seeking professional advice to navigate the intricacies of financial planning effectively.

Our conversation with Muhammed provided knowledge and actionable insights for individuals seeking to master wealth management, taxation, and estate planning. By understanding the impact of domicile, engaging specialized professionals, and implementing sound tax planning strategies, individuals can pave the way for a secure financial future. Additionally, Muhammed shared productivity hacks for entrepreneurs and stressed the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle to optimize performance.

We invite you to listen to the full podcast episode to explore the full extent of Muhammed’s expertise and gain a deeper understanding of the topics discussed. By leveraging the insights shared, individuals can confidently navigate the complex world of finance, securing their financial future and maximizing their wealth.

Hosted by: Imteaz Ahamed

[Podcast Episode Timestamps]

00:00:00 – Introduction to the episode and the guest’s background

00:01:15 – Understanding the impact of domicile and its implications on investment holdings

00:05:42 – Importance of engaging professionals with high-level qualifications in multiple disciplines

00:10:20 – Exploring the role of regulated wealth managers and members of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEP)

00:14:55 – Strategies for mitigating tax burdens and optimizing wealth

00:19:30 – Real-life examples of tax planning techniques and their financial benefits

00:25:10 – Taking the first steps: Importance of seeking professional advice for financial planning

00:29:45 – Productivity hacks for entrepreneurs and maintaining a healthy lifestyle

00:33:20 – Discussion on the importance of learning from others’ experiences

00:36:45 – The impact of global economics on financial planning and the social contract with governments

00:40:15 – Recap of the interview and key takeaways

00:42:50 – How to connect with Muhammed on LinkedIn and learn more about his work

[Include related hashtags: #WealthManagement #Taxation #EstatePlanning #FinancialPlanning #ProductivityHacks]

Don’t miss the opportunity to gain expert insights from Muhammed and discover how to secure your financial future. Subscribe to the podcast now and embark on mastering wealth management, taxation, and estate planning.

Podcast Transcript: Imteaz and Mohammad Uz-Zaman

Imteaz: Okay. Hi everyone, welcome to Applied Intelligence. In this episode, I’m gonna be interviewing your dear friend of mine, Mohammed Zaman. Mohammed Zaman is the director and the founder of ADL Estate Planning. And he’s also a very good friend of mine. I got introduced to Mohammed, I wanna say, seven or eight years ago as I moved to the UK. And he was introduced to me by a mutual friend, Bilal Hassam, and I’m gonna have Bilal on the show, in the future as well. But Mohammed is just a very fascinating guy and full disclosure, I’m an investor in one of his companies and I’m an avid supporter of people that are creating some really cool things for consumers as well as people that are looking to improve their overall wealth. So I’m going to have a fascinating chat with him today and I know you are too. So let’s get started.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Thank you very much, NtLs. It’s a pleasure to be on board.

Imteaz: So the way I like to open my podcast and the way that I like to get the audience to know who I’m talking to is asking this really important question to me, which is, you know if you had an autobiography and it only had five chapters, what would the chapter titles of the book of your autobiography, what would it be? Let’s go.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: I got it. All right. The five chapters of my autobiography. I would probably say chapter one, adolescence. All right. Chapter Two, inquisitive thinking. Chapter three, marriage. Chapter four, well actually, I think… Between chapter three and chapter four, there would probably have to be a sub-chapter around entrepreneurship or initial entrepreneurship and then marriage. And then I would probably say ongoing entrepreneurship or an ongoing journey in business.

Imteaz: Okay,

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Yeah.

Imteaz: give me the cliff notes of H.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Okay, so I guess what is it? The first chapter was adolescence, I guess. I’m a kid, all right. So primary school, secondary school, that’s, you know, becoming acquainted with the way of, you know, the world as such in that particular immature domain that I had. During that particular time, I guess, I thought… I was learning, I was experiencing relationships. I was a quiet kid growing up. So I was very reflective, I was a dreamer. All right, so I guess there could be a few things to be said about that. That can be elaborated on during my adolescent period. Chapter two, what did I say? Critical thought and critical thinking slash entrepreneurship. During that particular time, yeah, certainly. I started I started questioning a whole load of things. So history, I enjoyed studying history around that particular time. I started asking questions about faith and religion. It became a very big part of my upbringing, especially in relation to a whole host of topical events that were happening globally. And also around that particular time, I got my first foray into entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship has been a big part of my upbringing. And moving on to the following chapter, it actually continues because, post my marriage, I took on a lot of responsibility quite early on. And yeah, needed to acquire a whole load of new skills. I guess what I would say, sorry, and the final chapter. Is ongoing entrepreneurship. Okay, ongoing entrepreneurship is effectively a space where I am right now. And in that particular space, it includes combining entrepreneurship, I guess, with having a family too, and what that actually entails. So yeah.

Imteaz: So in terms of becoming a founder of your own startup, of your own business, what are the key experiences that have led to where you are today?

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: I think, you know what, InterEarth, wealth management has been my high-income skill, okay? I’ve been fascinated with the way money works for a very long time. I’ve been fascinated with the way the economy around, within the UK, and how it interacts globally also actually interact. I’ve been fascinated by the evolution of companies around the world. So looking at the history of major companies like Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, yeah, fascinating. And I think I took a lot from that. But that is at a global level, right? But even at something that is more, say, more reachable. I’m also fascinated and I am even to this day with boring businesses or dare I say boring businesses. So even your laundry or even a plumbing company or an electrician company or a very successful small restaurant business or a cafe business. Knowing that these businesses retain profit. And how they retain profitability in a highly competitive environment have always fascinated me. That’s one side. The other area that I really like to look into is particularly around branding. So branding is quite key. So branding has fascinated me from day dot to day dot.

Imteaz: So just coming back to small businesses, personally one of the most, I want to say, highest cashflow ROI businesses that I’ve actually invested in is a small business. And it’s the family business, which is in property management. And

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Yep.

Imteaz: outside of all of the sexy sorts of startup ventures, tech ventures, et cetera, the one that cash flows the best is by far the small business. So. It goes back to what Warren Buffett said, talks about in terms of having multiple sources of income, diversifying your income portfolio, and managing your expenses. It’s not all about just putting your money into tech stocks and high-risk startups within the tech sphere. It’s also balancing out your portfolio and having things that also cash flow. There’s enough, I can’t remember his name now, but cash flow is happiness to many people. But yeah, it comes back to the importance of, you know, when you’re assessing that business,

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Yeah.

Imteaz: look at the cash flow.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Cash flow is very important, again—no doubt about it. But… It also depends on what you want to achieve from that particular business as well, from that particular business investment. Because one could actually be investing in a business where there’s very little cash flow, but the equity position over the next five, 10 years could become far greater. And also cash-rich businesses, when you’ve got cashing regularly coming in, it doesn’t necessarily mean the actual equitable value of the actual business is actually increasing X number of years. So it’s something that one needs to consider but it’s phenomenal to give you liquidity and as an entrepreneur, you need to have liquidity. If you don’t have liquidity you’re on a back foot. Okay, so one of one of the most difficult aspects about setting up your own business is where on earth do you get that liquidity from. All right have you got that?

Imteaz: But I think this is where I think starting small is actually not a bad idea.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Yep.

Imteaz: Because, you know, especially if you don’t come from a commercial background, and if you didn’t study finance and didn’t study marketing, even if you studied marketing, you don’t necessarily understand cash flow. So investing in a small business and really getting into the nuts and bolts of a P&L of that business understanding. You know how much money is coming in every month versus how much money is actually coming out of that business every month.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Yeah.

Imteaz: I think if you’re a non-commercial person trying to get into investing, it’s actually not a bad place to start. Even if you lose your initial 5, 10, 15 thousand dollars worth of investment and it goes to zero, if you learn how to manage that monthly P&L, that is a pivotal skill that every investor needs to have. That, you know, a lot of people just look at. The equity upside and see 30, 40, 50, X multiples and get excited. But they’re

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Thank

Imteaz: so, you

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: you.

Imteaz: know, they’re very rare to happen, and you have to be amazingly good at picking them. So it’s not a bad place to start in small business.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Identifying alpha is what every particular type of active fund manager out there is trying to actually achieve. But unfortunately, they struggle with it. The best of us struggle with it. And also, when you have a cash switch business or any type of investment to be fair, as an it could mean something very, very different, depending on your own entrepreneurial context. I mean, you could have a family with a few children, or you could be a single person, no dependence, all right? And losing 5K is not an issue at all. I mean, before I was married, I lost around five grand. It didn’t have a huge impact on my well-being in the slightest. It just disrupted me for a few months. Okay, but this, but that journey was fundamentally important to, to my growth and my mindset in approaching entrepreneurship today. This is being able to take those particular risks. In that particular situation, we did something crazy. So I was at, I was in university at this point. And I had invested just a little bit, a little under 5000 pounds into into closing stock with a couple of other guys, but with no idea as to how we’re going to execute the actual investment, i.e., right, we’ve bought a whole load of stock which cost around 12 grand, I think it was, which had a retail value of something like 60 to 70 grand. But, and it was stock that would be on a… You know one of those markets on the high street, okay But we didn’t think about who’s gonna open up the store who’s gonna get the license All right, who’s gonna be manning the store day in day out? Right because we all had full-time jobs Right. So so yeah, that was quite funny. All right, so we saw all right, we’re gonna lose this particular deal We figure all of that out later Sometimes you can you that does work. Most of the time it doesn’t. And I have the type of attitude where plan, plan. All right. And this is where I tend to be quite good at, which allows me, when I take those calculated risks, it’s less of a burden to me. It’s less of a stress to me as well.

Imteaz: So, just drilling down on analyzing risks, talk to us about your experiences when it comes to employment. Like what are the companies that you’ve previously worked at and what are those key skills that you gained there in terms of wealth management?

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Ah, yeah, totally. So my first foray into private client world back in 2003. So, and particularly on the mortgage side, I don’t advise on mortgages anymore, but it’s a good place to actually start your career. And this is shortly after university as well, a few years after university, was in the legal sector prior to that. I’ll speak about that shortly, but that was one of my first roles. And the learning that I got in that particular role very early on is client interaction. It’s basically sales and customer service. And what I learned during that particular time, it was so important to have an attitude where you can actually build trust and rapport very, very quickly. Because you don’t actually have long to actually make a really good impression. Whether it’s over the phone at that particular time or whether it’s face to face. So you need to leverage as much as you can. Now, the way I look at fostering relationships, first and foremost, is to be authentic. And before thinking about the actual sale or value, think about what problem can you actually solve for that particular person. Everything else will come out of that. Don’t look at the sales figures first or don’t look at your commission first. Rather look at how can I solve this particular problem for that particular person, and I guarantee you the blessings will come out.

Imteaz: So, in terms of struggles that you had in terms of the wealth management sector, what are the key things that did you struggled to reconcile when it comes to

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Oh yeah, totally.

Imteaz: your outlook?

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Oh yeah, totally. So I have a lot to say about the wealth management sector. And among the areas that I disliked was particularly in relation to how investment philosophy or investment strategies are actually priced. In actual fact, in one of my previous roles, I politely critiqued an investment strategy at a major wealth management firm. That actually led to an internal departmental review and then a one-to-one training indoctrination to justify the firm approach. All right, so I’m not shy away; I’m not a person to shy away from critiquing something. And bear in mind, I left that firm, and shortly after, without any association with me, there was an FT article on that particular firm. Basically speaking about everything that I had actually said, which is

Imteaz: Wow.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: great. All right. So I felt I felt quite vindicated in that particular regard. But yeah, I decided to leave that particular firm and join another particular wealth management firm shortly after. I’m the type of person I can’t be at an organization where their values don’t align with mine. And those values relate to integrity, those values relate to equity, those values relate to transparency as well. I cannot advise on something that to me, I wouldn’t be able to put those types of solutions in front of, let’s say, people who are nearest and dearest to me. On another note, okay, I’m probably not a very good employee as well, bro. So not only that, in one of my previous roles, I let a staff strike at a law firm. All right,

Imteaz: Oh, wow.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: so, and that was once again, because of poor corporate practices towards employees and things like delaying staff salaries and the like, and a whole lot more, which we don’t need to really get into. But yeah, that was a whole load of fun. Okay, so yeah. Let us off Shrike, went to the cinema.

Imteaz: So how does this, in terms of being a founder, in terms of setting up ADL estate planning, how did all of these experiences lead you to setting up ADL?

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: You know what, I think it was a case of a combination of circumstances that really came to the fore, which allowed me, you know what, let’s do something that could be quite different. And bear in mind; I had that entrepreneurial experience early years of university that… gave me experience in a whole host of different industries, not just the legal sector, but also in retail and distribution and manufacturing as well, which I haven’t actually really gone into. But you’ve got that on one side. And on another side, you had someone who was passionate about economics, who were passionate about global economics in fact, okay? And who was also passionate about community as well. And passionate about faith and religion. So all of these particular areas came into focus when I was also looking at a particular career change post-marriage as well. So in that particular context, I thought, look, I’ve got enough skills and experience behind me now to actually explore setting up a particular practice. In a way that I feel is being missed in the UK. And this is particularly around private client services, where the goal with us anyway is less about building assets under management, but more about solving complex problems. Now that mind shift is very, very important. If we can solve complex problems like, look. How wealth transfers from one generation to the next generation, if that is done well, the next generation may not need to worry about a mortgage. That next generation may not need to worry about paying the rent. That next generation may not need to worry about how they can put their children through really good schooling or a fee-paying school. Especially if you can do that. The formative years of a child’s development phase. I mean, think about it this way. My work, all right, isn’t necessarily just for the wealthy. Okay, yes, without a doubt, most of my, practically all of my clients are, they come from a very privileged position. But they weren’t always so privileged, not at all. I mean, some of these characters, right, they’ve got the successes based on new money. They’ve got no idea about financial literacy. They’ve got no idea about legal literacy. Got no idea about how to plan for income tax, corporation tax properly. Okay? They’re really good at making money. They’re even better at spending money. Okay?

Imteaz: Hehehe

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: and also potentially investing in the wrong things. I often say that I’m a really bad salesperson. And I am, I’m a terrible salesperson. Okay, and the reason why I say that is I’ve got several clients and connections who’ve invested in a whole load of things that I, me as a regulated person and my colleagues as well, in the industry would would find incredibly questionable. I mean, but simple things like putting in place a protection plan, okay? Let’s say 50 grand protection plan that pays out at the right time, that could do wonders for that particular family. Imagine if you didn’t have it.

Imteaz: I think exactly and I think you know the main thing for me when I reached out to Muhammad was you know my particular family situation back in Australia where my sister has an intellectual disability and one day you know she’s going to become a responsibility of mine I simply was not aware of all of the facilities and benefits available to my family back in Australia. Like my parents had a very simple will put together which transferred assets to both myself and my sister, but there were all of these provisions specifically in Australia and imagine that the same in the UK and in many other Western countries and if not in many other countries as well where you know you have a special disability trust that is not uh, taxed the same way as, um, you know, a regular person would be. Um, so, you know, there are so many things that are involved in terms of inheritance planning and wealth transfer that people are just not aware of at all. And, you know, my parents are going to pass on a house, a business, et cetera. But, you know, not having that information would have literally cost. um, me in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions over the, over the course of my sister’s lifetime. Um, had I not done this just a little bit of planning, right? So, you know, in terms of understanding this and getting your, you know, if you’re just starting out or, you know, you, you have a family who owns some property, how do you kind of get started in terms of updating your financial literacy to become aware of all of these things that are very accessible and available to everyone. And let’s park that question for a second. I think the other side of this equation is, in terms of understanding inheritance,

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Yeah.

Imteaz: I think the big gap that I found out by speaking to you was your accountant doesn’t necessarily understand inheritance. Your lawyer who does your… who does a will doesn’t necessarily understand tax and an estate planner might not necessarily understand everything that’s available to you. So when you’re doing this stuff, it’s so important to have somebody who understands all three things at the same time, otherwise you’re going to get misinformation or not enough information to make the appropriate choice. How do you get started if you’ve got absolutely no clue what to do here?

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Yeah, really good question. Okay, so I’ll answer it at length, but it all comes down to two approaches that, or two goals that we have at ADL. Or ADL, bear in mind, it’s now effectively a group who have got subsidiary companies underneath that does different things. They’ve got the regulated wealth management side, and then you’ve got the legal services side. But in combination, the goals are two. Okay, number one, improve financial, financial and legal literacy, okay? So people can be a hell of a lot more confident with the specialist advice that they actually receive. And it’s not just the quality of the advice, but speed of implementation, it is crucial. Because for the right person, or for certain persons, they may not have sufficient life expectancy in order to mitigate inheritance tax. If they die before seven years, which relates to gifting rules in the UK, then it’s classed as what we class as a failed pet, a failed potentially exempt transfer. Or the other term that one needs to know about is the two-year rule. and the two-year rule relates to how long you actually hold certain investments. But without going into technicalities about strategic inheritance tax planning strategies, the seven-year rule and two-year rule are fundamental. Now the other goal that we actually have in addition to improving financial and legal literacy is reduce absolute inheritances. What I mean by that, do not give your children a single penny. All right, don’t give them a single penny. It is one of the worst things you can actually do. All right, if you were to give your child or your daughter a decent amount of wealth that is in their personal name, so they hold legal title and they hold beneficial title, it exposes them to a numerous number of threats and they include things like divorce settlement claims. All right, heaven forbid they divorced. 50% of that inheritance is gone. They may not be as good with money as you are. 100% of their inheritance could be gone. They may have alcohol problems, drug abuse problems, which a few of my clients have had, and they don’t want their child to receive sizeable inheritances. What do you do in those situations? Okay? Then you’ve got… things like generational inheritance tax. That is where you’ve got inheritance tax that is charged at 40% on the wealth that cascades from one generation to the next generation. It’s essentially a hidden tax. Now, if you can solve inheritance tax at the first stage, at the first generation, maybe solve is the wrong word, but if you only have to pay it at that… first generation point of view because you haven’t been able to do anything else. At least structure your affairs in such a way your future lineage for at least 125 years won’t need to pay it. And the way to actually do that is to put in place strategic planning during your lifetime. And that includes, well it can include trust based structures, it can include family investment companies too, or a combination of both. So yeah, don’t give any of your children a single penny, pass everything ideally into trusts and… appoint professional trustees along with lay trustees to manage the underlying assets.

Imteaz: And specifically on this, I’ve moved around a couple countries now, so across the US, Australia and the UK, and I’ve had to do this exact process in each one of those countries because the legislation and the setup of such trusts are completely different per jurisdiction, right?

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Correct, correct. So yeah, so someone like you, who’s a nomad effectively, so you’re going to need specialist advice throughout your life until you begin to reside in one particular area permanently. Because one of your issues is going to be confirming where’s your domicile. And even now that’s not necessarily quite clear. All right, I would say your domicile would remain in Australia. but you could acquire something called deemed domicile status in different jurisdiction based on the time you’re actually staying there. And that can have an impact on a whole host of your investment holdings in various locations. But yeah, so

Imteaz: super

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: effectively,

Imteaz: cool.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: good advice is really important, all right? And you highlighted something a little bit earlier, the fact that you’ve got multiple professionals who are specialists in their own fields, but… they’re not necessarily conversant in others and it will actually impact the client. So what I say is that particularly in the private client domain, you ideally need a professional who holds to, sorry, you need a professional who holds high levels of qualification in at least two disciplines. Okay, two of the three disciplines would be fine. but they still need to be conversant in all three areas. And those three areas are effectively legal services, particularly with specialization in trust administration, trust management, trust taxation, regulated wealth management services, and also accountancy and tax. All three of those disciplines are fundamentally important. Now, I’m dual qualified on the regulated wealth management and also… I’m an associate member of the Society of Trusts and Estate Practitioners. But I’m also well aware of accountancy practices and also taxation implications on various different strategies that take place. Now your accountant though may not be a tax specialist. Okay. Don’t think you go to an accountant and you’re going to know about that you want to learn about tax. different strategies to actually mitigate tax. Now, accountant’s role isn’t that. An accountant’s role is to file your accounts every year compliantly to the relevant authorities depending on which jurisdiction you are. Mitigating tax, that is where it requires different types of discipline. An accountant who holds chartered tax advisor status, they would be the type of person you’d speak to, but you’d also… speak to regulated boss managers too, and you’d also speak crucially to members of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners.

Imteaz: Um, and step is exactly where I found, um, outside of yourself, obviously in the UK, um, but back in Australia, as well as here in the U S, um, that’s where I found, um, local step members to kind of guide me through the process for the, um, local jurisdictions when it comes to setting my affairs here as well. So.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: You can probably appreciate he thinks differently as well. I mean, he approached the subject very differently from any accountant that you’ve actually dealt with previously.

Imteaz: Oh, for sure. Like my accountant, you know, doesn’t necessarily have any clue in terms of, you know, the implications of tax when it comes to, you know, money that I would be receiving in my inheritance. Like when I spoke to my accountant about this stuff, he was completely unaware of all this stuff. And their job is to file your annual income tax and not necessarily wealth managers or tax finance, right? Okay, so what’s the most important thing that people can do to get started or start to prepare for their financial future?

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: All right, so fortunately, right, I come from an industry, okay. I’ve got a lot of positive things to actually say about it as well. Right, most of my colleagues in the UK, okay. And I’m not talking about colleagues who I just work with, I’m talking about industry colleagues here. They are among some of the most highly qualified financial planners in the world, based on the standards that have been set now by the UK regulator. I would say, near enough, any one of them would be willing to have an initial 30 minute conversation with somebody. They may not take you on as a client, but within that half an hour, you can probably get a really good insight on what you should be thinking about based on your current financial context. Many of them are actually quite resourceful as well. So when you’ve got complex financial planning needs, they will be able to point you in the right direction of somebody like me, let’s say. But yeah, it’s taking the first step, picking up the phone or going online and just booking in that initial consultation to have a review of your personal financial situation. I wouldn’t trust Google, by the way. All right, so Googling ways to reduce your inheritance tax bill. Googling ways to reduce your corporation tax bill, right? It’s not gonna come to much, right? If I were to say protective cell companies, if I were to say define benefits SaaS arrangements, okay? You’re gonna find very little information and how that can actually apply to individuals and businesses in the UK to a high degree. online because

Imteaz: and

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: it’s actually really bespoke because you need to structure these type of solutions very carefully for that particular individual. And also, particularly when it comes to some of the strategies, it also requires knowledge of multiple disciplines as well. And many wealth managers in the UK will not have access to the knowledge in-house to implement some of these type of solutions.

Imteaz: Like I think about this particular situation when it comes to you know investing in said advice in terms of ROI and You know, yes, you could just go to wheels calm and get a will set up for 50 bucks hundred bucks, whatever But you know, had I not and my parents had already done that But had we not got the specialist advice and yes, it did cost you know in the thousands of dollars I would be missing out on and my sister would be missing out on hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of Benefit over the course of a lifetime. So yes, it was a steep price to pay initially But it pays multiples if you know do it properly and at the right time as well

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: I’ll give you an example, each other, right? You structure your planning well, okay? Let’s say your parents set all assets into a trust, or into several trusts. It should never be one trust, by the way, for various different reasons. Ideally, it should always be multiple trusts. And they’ve got a few children, okay? And the children get along. Assume the children will get along. And there are grandchildren here as well. The trust has its own trust tax rates. But what you can do, you can mandate the income from the trust fund to a grandchild, okay? That is very powerful. Why is it very powerful? Because I’m probably sure that most of you are not gonna be putting your grandchild to work if they’re minors, okay? And… if they are minors and they’re not at work, they will have their personal allowances available to them. So the income that’s now been mandated to that particular child or that particular grandchild because they’re not paying any tax, right, could be received legitimately tax-free. That will be crucial in relation to funding, let’s say, private school fees, okay? That could be crucial for funding those private school fees. you thought you would never have been able to afford for your child. But now you can because you’re not paying 40% tax.

Imteaz: Bang on.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: game.

Imteaz: Okay, when it comes to on a personal front, shifting the conversation a little bit now, what are the productivity hacks that you use in your life? As a founder and as a person who’s leading a business and has got a family and all of these things going on, what are some of the productivity hacks that you use on a day-to-day basis to make your life more efficient?

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Good question. All right, first of all, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re in that phase of growing your business, okay, you’re not gonna find a balance, all right? You have to be all in, right? All in. And your family are also going to need to make sacrifices. So you need a hell of a lot of support from the children, from your spouse, if you want to invest the time. energy, money, effort into setting up a particular business. Now that doesn’t take away from the importance of improving your productivity. Now I spend a lot of time in how to make my work that much more efficient. Now the setup that I have, particularly with the nature of my work. is I’ve set up a whole host of different systems to make my work a lot easier. So I have a CRM tool that I use, which is fantastic, which is ActiveCampaign. I also combine that with a tool called Zapier. And Zapier, I think you introduced me to Zapier some couple of years back. Yeah,

Imteaz: Most

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: of course.

Imteaz: likely.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Yeah, indeed.

Imteaz: I introduce you to a lot of things. I should have set up affiliate commissions, man. I would have made

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: You

Imteaz: a lot

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: probably

Imteaz: of money

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: should.

Imteaz: out of that.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: You probably should. So yes, I’ve connected a whole load of different types of software. So all of our lead gen that happens on the landing pages, the Facebook, all of that feeds into the CRM. And then I have our caller who calls the lead. So I don’t actually have to be involved in any of that until I get a ping on my phone saying, call has been booked into your diary for X date X time with all the relevant notes and I just enter into it enter

d them, dude, I’ve done this, I’ve made this investment, don’t copy me, don’t do this, they end up doing it anyway. I’m like,

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Yeah.

Imteaz: you know, why did you just waste your time and money doing something that… you could have leveraged my experience from, or you could learn from someone amazing, for example Warren Buffett when it comes to investment strategy, and take the same thing, take the same principles from that and just believe, rather than thinking that you’re better than 99% of the world.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Yeah, no, good point and good observation. It’s something that I’ve observed as well. And I don’t know what to say other than a lot of people have a gambling type of innate disposition.

Imteaz: when it

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: And

Imteaz: comes

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: they

Imteaz: to investing.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: feel

Imteaz: Yep.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: when it comes to investing correct. You know, the irony is, all right, because I’m very much in the regulated space. So it’s… very controlled the type of work that we do by the regulator and rightly so, even though my industry colleagues, many of them do lambast the regulator quite a lot, but having worked on the regulatory side as well as part of my background, I can most certainly see the value add of the regulator, particularly in the consumer space. But putting that to one side, all right. when it comes to investors who then seek to go into some incredibly high risk initiatives, I mean investing in small startups when they don’t have the capacity to handle the loss of that particular investment. And it’s not just the loss of that investment, it’s also the lack of liquidity. So they invest in a particular business or invest in a… in a tech fund of startups, and there are so many of right now, okay? And they can’t get their money out. And their money’s locked in for like 10, 15 years. They can’t do anything. It’s as good as gone in any manner of speaking. So yeah, so I would actually say it is very important to do all of the boring stuff first. and the boring stuff is actually quite straightforward. Protect your lifestyle. How do you protect your lifestyle? Okay, you put in place the right type of protection policies, okay, which are affordable. Some policies you may not need. Other policies you would. It will free up your mental energy. It will free up your need to do sophisticated planning later on in life if you. set up some of these protection policies while you are younger, healthier, because they are so much more affordable. Okay? If you do, if you, in addition to the protection planning, if you do things like utilize your annual allowance for your pension, that is a step in the right direction. Because if you were to do that, you’re benefiting from income tax relief, potentially corporation tax relief. and you’re also building up within a particular tax wrapper, which is free from inheritance tax. But…

Imteaz: which in the US is very similar to a rough IRA for

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: correct.

Imteaz: US listeners.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: But the issue here is people don’t want to go down that particular route and what they do is invest in property. They invest in property and they forget the fact that this low interest rate environment, i.e. a few years ago, isn’t going to last forever. Okay, and that’s a whole other subject area that we could actually talk about and that is very much linked to… the nature of global economics. I mean, the US debt ceiling right now, I think it’s like Congress has granted it to like 31 or 32 trillion a couple of months ago. Maybe it was last month. That cannot continue to be extended year upon year upon year. Now, when it stops being extended, what do you think the reverberations are going to be globally? It will be immense.

Imteaz: chaos.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: So the other thing that I mention is that our social contract with our government is going to be radically changing. Oh yeah,

Imteaz: official.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: maybe one for another video.

Imteaz: your thing. So wrap up, one of the things I want to say is that, you know, just like you would get a coach or a personal trainer when it comes to your health and, you know, building muscles and building your fitness regime, I think it’s very important to have the right advice from the right people who actually understand the trifecta that we talked about. So tax planning, estate planning. as well as the legal implications of having a will. So you need to find someone who knows this stuff in and out for your local jurisdiction, so that your family doesn’t go through a nightmare when the inevitable happens, right? So, you know, I’ve personally gone through this in three countries, and thanks to Muhammad, I’ve done this properly now across the three countries that I’ve lived. So that, you know, there’s nothing else that you take from this conversation today. Please do this properly for yourself and particularly for your family. To close, Muhammad, do you have anything else you want to share with the audience before we close out?

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Let’s see. I would say… me sing. This is the bit you’re gonna have to edit.

Imteaz: Yeah, that’s fine.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Alright, so… I would say, let me think. Yeah, so what I would share with the audience that we have here today would be, like, it’s never too late, okay? At the very least, something can be done, okay? It may not be the most optimum solution, particularly if you’ve left it till you’re within two to seven years of you passing away, all right, but something can actually be done. To mitigate a whole host of different types of threats that could affect your family. The crucial thing is to get advice as soon as possible. W.

Imteaz: super cool. So in closing out, how can people reach out to you if they want further information?

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Cool, they can connect with me on LinkedIn. They can also connect with me via the website, www.adlestateplanning.co.uk, and on the site,, there are options to actually book a 30-minute no obligation conversation with one of us. Cool.

Imteaz: Thank you for being on this week’s episode of Applied Intelligence. It was always a pleasure to chat with you, man, and I look forward to coming.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Good

Imteaz: across

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: night.

Imteaz: the ditch and visiting you sometime soon.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Looking forward to it, bro.

Imteaz: All right,

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Take care, man.

Imteaz: thank you.

Mohammad Uz-Zaman: Bye.

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