Startups Capitalizing on Big Tech Trends 

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You’re listening to Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat, Serial Entrepreneur Secrets. And today my co host Mimi Ostrander and Michele Van Tilborg are joining me. And I know you don’t often hear a lot from Mimi, but she does a lot of work at the office. She’s the one behind the scenes who’s working to, uh, put everything together.

And we have a website that she runs called startup. Love and it’s really interesting. We’ve had so many great interviews. It’s been such a great time, uh, putting that website together. And there’s so many great pieces of that website. I know this, uh, app clubhouse has been a little bit confusing, a little bit hard to find us recently on the app, but we’re trying to figure that out.

So please bear with us if you’re coming to the app and looking at Startup Club, joining it, and trying to follow our shows. Uh, we, we actually do a live show and you might be listening to this in podcast. You might not know that, but it is a live show. So today we’re doing Startups Catching a Wave. A wave like AI.

And that’s what we’re working on today. What are your thoughts about today’s show, Michele? I love this topic. And I think, I don’t know, it feels like there’s not been a better time to try to catch the wave of especially new technologies and new behaviors. You know, with everything that’s going out.

Coming out, excuse me, with AI, as well as just, there’s a lot of changes calling in the way that we conduct business today, especially after COVID people working from home, people online, it’s, it’s a, it’s a new time. And there’s a lot of changes that are all. Been coalescing, and there is a lot of opportunity, we would say, to catch the next wave.

So, I’m curious from you, Colin, like, how do we do this, and how do we identify it, and then more important, how do we execute it? Like, it sounds good, and you know, like, oh my gosh, I thought of a great idea. We constantly hear people around us, we might even think that ourselves. But how do you actually execute it, and actually catch it?

Yeah, and I think that’s sort of the question we’re all asking ourselves, especially with the advent of AI. Um, and I don’t want this show necessarily to be all about AI. It’s all about catching the wave. And, uh, and if you’re in the audience and this sort of resonates with you that you’ve had a business, you caught a trend.

And you want to share that with the community. We’d love to have you on stage. Please feel free to raise your hand and come on stage. I think I saw Augustin, Augustin come on there. I can’t, I can’t, if you are there, please raise your hand. We’d love to have you up again and help co moderate the show. Um, you’re, uh, an amazing guest and speaker.

As well, and I wanted to go back a little bit here just to kick this off. I want to go back to the 1990s, right out of college when I graduated. And this is actually in the book, but chapter three of the book, start, scale, exit, repeat. Back in the 90s, early 90s, we launched an ISP, sort of a bulletin board service.

Actually, it was before the internet before a time, uh, where there was no browser, you know, there was no Online conversations. There were no video. Uh, it was a time where you had something called usenet and pine and gopher serve some really odd applications. A few of you might remember those applications, but we launched that right out of college when I launched and it became the number one largest ISP in Canada, which we took public.

Um, it was called. It was really a revolution. They called it the information super highway. There were a lot of funny nicknames that were used back then. But there are a few companies that jumped on this and really began to gain market share. And probably the company from the United States perspective, Internet Direct was one of the largest in Canada, but in the United States, uh, there was a company called AOL.

And there was another company before AOL called CompuServe. Now this is all going to come together in a minute or two. Okay, but just bear with me. Uh, but Copysurf launched in the early 90s or maybe even late 80s and became the largest and they really controlled, they really led the market because they controlled the, the, um, I’ll say it, the geeks in the marketplace, they loved Copysurf, just like before the company, my brother and I launched, um, there was another company out there and they loved that company, they did Pine and Gopher a little better than we did, Pine and Gopher and Usenet, but when the web hit, Yeah.

Mozilla in 1993. That’s when we saw a huge surge in demand. Now, AOL picked up on this in like 96 or 97 and said, we’re going to dominate this space. And so they started, um, promoting their service much more aggressively than CompuServe. And we’re going to talk about in a minute, I’m just going to, I’m laying down the foundation because we’re going to talk about.

One of my favorite authors and a gentleman that we interviewed for the book Start, Scale, Legs, and Repeat, Jeffrey Moore, in a few minutes. But we’re just talking about what actually happened in the early 90s and how we beat our competitors and how CompuServe was destroyed by AOL. As well, and we’re talking simply about the advent of the Internet connecting to the Internet, a global connection was the first time in history.

We had something of that level. Yeah, we had a phone system before that, but we’re not going to go back too far. We’re just going to focus right now in the 90s. Then in 2000, we had the advent of broadband. So all of a sudden you went from this narrow band environment where everything is going very slow.

And I know most of you in the audience have no idea what I’m talking about. Uh, but imagine a really bad connection on a subway or train and it just. It’s working, but it’s working very slow. So literally you’d see letters coming across the screen. They would scroll across the screen. And, um, in 2000, that paradigm shift of broadband changed the way the world worked because all of a sudden now we had music on demand, Napster.

Launched. We had, uh, software as a service. My partners and I, we launched a company in this space. It was a software as a service company. Uh, and we also had, um, the rise of social media. YouTube became a reality downloading videos and coming to 2010s. We began to see additional technological advances, like one of my favorite is the rise of micro brands, the fact that entrepreneurs could actually put a product together and sell it on the Internet, and that became popular in 2010s, especially around a company called Shopify, and then in 2020s, we’re now seeing the rise of AI.

Well, today’s topic we’re talking about catching the wave, and it’s chapter three in the book, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. There are Literally dozens, maybe even hundreds of waves that occur in the marketplace constantly. There are, and just give me a second here, I have the book in front of me, page 43. Here are a few of them, and this is in the book, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat.

Artificial intelligence was the number one. Yeah, of course, we’re going to always, you know, I’m focusing on that. I focused on that in the book. And by the way, so what we’re going to talk about today is how do we actually capitalize on a wave? What are the techniques that we can use to make money? And to be clear, I’ve made the statement before I’ll make it again that I believe in the 2020s, we will, this technology, technological paradigm shift will mint more millionaires.

But any other shift in history? Okay. Now think about that. We’re talking about the industrial revolution. We’re talking about the internet revolution in the 90s. Artificial intelligence will mint more millionaires than any. Other technological shift in the history of our lifetime. I don’t want to leave it at that.

We talk about others. We talk about e commerce, cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, and if teaser going through a bit of a chasm, we’re in time with that in a few minutes, virtual reality, another chasm meta. Mark Zuckerberg, augmented reality, another semi chasm, magic leap right out of my own neighborhood here, Fort Lauderdale, blockchain technology, a great technology in a mutable database, energy storage, robotics, drone technology, self driving vehicles.

We’re there yet. Elon, you know, I’m writing an article today for a magazine and, uh, it’s all about. Entrepreneurial optimism, and I refer to the 2014 statement that Elon Musk made that everybody will have self driving vehicles in the near future. And yet, we’re here at 2013 and we don’t have self driving vehicles yet.

Uh, tokenizing assets, including real estate. I actually think there’s a lot of upside on this one. We’re going to work on something, a potential project around this one, uh, in one of our companies in the incubator. Everything green. I don’t think that’s going away. It’s going to be the focus of a lot of companies.

And if we don’t focus on these greenhouse gas emissions and all the other challenges that we have in this environment’s world, then we won’t have a world left. So that’s definitely going to be whether you believe it or not. It don’t matter. We ain’t here to talk about that. What we’re here to talk about is whether it’s a growth opportunity, a paradigm shift.

Online teaching, Think Masterclass, Udemy, video based coaching, online counseling, game, gene editing, sorry not game editing, I’m sorry games are still popular, but gene editing, CRISPR, they are making huge progress in that space, cloud computing, mobile app development. The sharing economy. This is an area where we, um, have a big company called Escape Club.

It’s a real estate company in South Florida that we run here and we run a number of Airbnbs. Uh, social, audio, chat, and podcasting. It’s interesting I put that in the book because I actually identified Clubhouse. And I know they’ve gone through some hard times here. They had struggled. The app has struggled.

Uh, it is challenging to, uh, to really make things happen on this app recently. But you know what? I still believe social audio chat is a, is a, another paradigm shift. We see it with, um, LinkedIn audio. Um, we’re doing a show at the end of this show at three o’clock on entree, which is only for entrepreneurs.

And it’s, uh, you know, we’re doing a whole different presentation, but the fact of the matter is social audio chat has become a little bit of a thing since the pandemic. The creator economy, we’ve seen a huge shift in towards that and then social influencers. Look, there are probably hundreds of these paradigm shifts.

I know today we’ll talk a lot about AI and how that will shift because I do truly believe that will be the biggest one of the shift of our lifetime. I’m still with that, but we had the opportunity. So in this book, Start Scaling Street, let me like, it was a really fricking Tough book to put together. 30 years as a serial entrepreneur, 10 years writing the book, 2 years with 6 staff members, including Mimi, Michele, and 4 others.

And we interviewed over 200 people, of which 50 are in the book. We interviewed authors, experts, and serial entrepreneurs. By the way, today, today, after 2 months of being out, we are still number 1. The number 1 selling book on Amazon, ebook for entrepreneurship management. So obviously the message is getting out.

That this book, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat, has some really good lessons, some good, good interviews, some good, some, some good material that you can learn from. It’s not a textbook. It’s really a compilation of stories. My own stories, my own successes and failures, others successes and failures. That’s what this book’s all about.

But we had the opportunity, and this is where I’m coming to, and then I’ll hand it off to you, Michele, to moderate. The group. And by the way, if you’re in the audience, come on stage. This is by the way, is a syndicated podcast called start, scale, exit, repeat serial entrepreneur secrets revealed. Uh, we have over 130 episodes.

Uh, and if you haven’t already done so just check it out on your favorite podcast network. We’ve done about. Five or six AI shows, and we’ve interviewed so many authors, and one of those authors was Jeffrey Moore, who wrote the book Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado. Now, let me be clear, like, this was so cool to think, because I had read his books in the 1990s, and I had followed his theories for many, many years.

I followed them through the, through the, um, the dial up internet days, through broadband internet days at Hostopia, multiple public companies, uh, seven or eight, uh, exits of major, uh, major exits. And I had followed his theories through each one of those. I’d recognized a pattern. See, I was asked to go to speak at MIT in 2012 on the topic of how to start scale exit repeat and why I was why I was so successful at it.

And one of the patterns that I learned was that I had followed Jeffrey Moore’s Series around catching a wave. We caught that wave, the dial up wave. I talked about, we caught the broadband wave. We caught the rise of micro brand waves. And by the way, I’m deep into AI companies right now and investing in AI companies as well.

So we’re, we’re deep in all of that. We caught the sharing economy with the Airbnb business. We caught the, um, uh. The broadband economy, we have 800 employees in Ukraine who literally went online in 2001 after broadband started because they now could connect to the human race. This was a, uh, there was a book, um, called the world is flat.

Um, and, uh, he wrote that book and he talked about how it was a complete paradigm shift. That there’s no, and by the way, with AI, it takes it to a whole new level, whole new level with business process outsourcing, where you can have staff all over the world working, and they can be, they can be, uh, you can use AI to clean up their language or clean up their code.

But going back to this interview, I had this opportunity to interview, and Michele was with me there, so we had the opportunity to interview Jeffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Chasm. And I think he sort of freaked out when I first introduced to me, you know, actually, let me tell you this story. I tried to get him to come on Clubhouse and I’m like, he goes, okay, I’m not doing it because I’ve had too much social media.

I don’t want to go on Clubhouse. And that’s it. Three months later, I sent him back to none of us. You know, Elon Musk went on Clubhouse yesterday and we should be interested in. I think that might’ve got him in there or something. I don’t know. There were a lot of celebrities joining Clubhouse, but whatever it is, whatever happened, we got him on.

And by the way, you can listen to that episode if you just search Serial Entrepreneur Secrets Revealed on any podcast network and Jeffrey Moore. It just starts with a G, not a J, but. So we interviewed him and this was just incredible. Because he talked about a lot of concepts that he talked about in the book.

And let’s, let’s talk about that in the context of AI. But I’d love to get him back, Mimi, for, you know, a conversation. That included how to catch the wave with a I with Jeffrey more, but in any case, we talked about the bolt. One of the concepts of bowling alley strategy. I call it a laser beam strategy.

Michele and I invested in a company here in the incubator called pencil. Uh, it just came out about 2 weeks ago and it’s really all about replacing your your marketing staff. Replacing or augmenting? Because maybe a lot of people can’t afford a 200, 000 CMO. And what it does, it writes ads for you. It does posts for you.

It actually, um, runs your entire e commerce. Marketing staff. Why e commerce? Because that’s the space that we’re in here. And that’s something that we work on. And, uh, the gentleman who’s the CEO of that understands that space better than anybody else. And he’s going to deliver a product that is very focused on serving the needs of the e commerce market.

So we’re going to think about Laserbeam. Uh, Jeffrey Moore calls that the bowling alley. The bowling alley strategy where he’s focused on a particular niche. Once you win that, then you can expand that. Think of Amazon when they first launched, they were the only a couple of people now in the room who know what I’m talking about, but when Amazon first launched, they were only focused on books.

They literally sold books and shipped from their house or garage, uh, Jeff Bezos. They began they want in that space, and then they expanded to additional spaces. The second thing that I want you to think about is make it easier. Easy. Let me be very clear that it is very complicated to launch a technology and sell it.

Most people who use the technology feel that it is way too complicated. Michele, I know you want to jump in, but I want my third point, my third point. Then my 10, 15, 20 minute siloquy is done. My third point is deliver faster than anyone else. I talked about AOL and CompuServe. Thank you. AOL beat CompuServe because they distributed diskettes or CD ROMs and they distributed thousands of them.

They were so ubiquitous that we use them as coasters in our office. So think about those three things, the laser beam, Think about delivering faster than anyone else and making it easier than any other company. And if you combine those three strategies with AI in your company, you will succeed. That is your strategy, but you got to believe in it and you got to be focused.

If you think you’re going to be, uh, take on Canva. And just kill it and you’re going to be killed. You think you can take on Canva and focus in one particular industry? Yeah, you can beat it. And that’s what Pencil is doing. Michele, you are moderating. I am done from the mic. All right. We have lots of members up here on the stage that are ready to ask questions and share their experience.

So I want to make sure that we get to it in the 40 minutes that we have left. But one thing I just want to say looking at the book that particularly resonated with me on this topic is, um, you said, and this is what I’ve noticed about you, Colin, in terms of where you’ve made money, is you specifically said, for me, I’d rather position for evolutions versus revolutions.

It’s a lot easier to predict the former. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a disruptive in the marketplace, but the more disruptive you are to the customer’s behavior, the less chance of success. So, when I think of you, Colin, in this topic, that’s what I actually think of, and that’s where I’ve seen you be able to be successful.

Okay. So on that note, I want to encourage the members to think of, you know, it’s not like you have to change the world. Like we’re not all able or whatever going to be, um, you know, Elon Musk or whomever it might be little things matter too, in terms of solving problems and coming to market, but let’s go to Augustine.

He’s been very patient. Love to hear what you have to say, Augustine. Thank you. Thank you, Michele. Uh, Colin, great to be back. I was absent for a couple of weeks, but I was busy. Um, but, um, great topic. Um, when you said, look at page 43, I, I opened up and I looked at my notes here and, um, I had made three notes on, on page 44, actually, and the three points and, and I guess, Michele, it’s going to your point.

You know, our products need to be evolutionary. Um, and we have to have revolutions, of course, but what is the small steps that we take every time to make our product offer much better, all the items that. Are listed on page 43, artificial intelligence, e commerce, uh, virtual reality, augmented reality, and you go down the list, everyone can leverage that technology to the needs of their product and service, um, to different scales.

Uh, right now AI is incredible because all the individuals, companies, and even for the companies that I’m working, we’re fostering, how do we change our servicing levels and internal workflows? Leveraging AI, um, triggering chat box, treating any information that takes our product, our service, our knowledge base, and makes it very, um, affluent to our customer base.

And then I’ll just leave you with the three points that I mentioned in the beginning. We need things that are risks tolerant. We need that our audience is very important to us. You have to be specific to their needs and wants. And then the third one, the one I always say is not really time to market, but for me, it’s really time to revenue.

So those are the three things that I would say are outcomes, at least in the world that I live in, where I can leverage the tools that, um, you’re proposing and you are identifying as well. Thank you. Yeah, I wanted to add here that. Um, you bring up a great point. Both of you that, um, when you grab onto a technology shift.

You have to make an evaluation of that shift. Okay. That that Jeffrey Moore calls it a discontinuous innovation or a continuous innovation. So when you’re trying to think about certain shifts. Are they, do they change human behavior? Now, I’m okay with you grabbing onto a shift that changes human behavior.

Let me give you an example of this. Back about 12 years ago, Apple tried to launch a version of the iPad, and it was a disaster, okay? That concept fell into a chasm, hence the book Crossing the Chasm. Mark Zuckerberg went all in with 10 billion dollars on Meta to create cartoon characters. Metaverse is in a chasm, and I’ve no, I’ve no doubt that Metaverse will come out.

That, uh, you’ll see someone who’s a developer of Roblox, because, you know, 50 percent of kids are using Roblox today. Somebody from there is going to be The one who creates the real metaverse. But the reality is the metaverse is in a deep chasm. And if you build your technology or you build your business around that concept, and by the way, maybe even audio chat and clubhouse, I’ll throw that out there.

There’s a lot of creators on Clubhouse who’ve built their businesses and got sort of, you know, shellacked. Including, you know, including our club, it’s Startup Club, because the app itself sort of disintegrated. And I know they’re coming back. And I don’t want to speak negatively of Clubhouse, but the fact of the matter is they’re in a chasm.

They might be in a chasm of their own doing, but the reality is a lot of technology shifts are in a chasm. You can spend a hundred million dollars on a meta company and it doesn’t work because only 2 percent of people actually use their glasses that they buy. Very small percentage of people use the VR glasses.

And I’m not going to get into a debate whether it’s right or wrong, it’s the reality. We’re going to deal with reality and we’re all, what we’re talking about here is trying to make money. Talking about trying to capitalize on a wave, make, you know, gain the benefit from positioning ourselves. But we have to pick and choose those waves.

You know, NFTs, Web3, Meta, that all crashed. It ain’t coming out for some time. Even blockchain went into a chasm. Do I believe blockchain is going to come back? Yeah, I actually really believe. I think blockchain database, and I think there’s applications there. You know, do I believe, uh, cryptos, you look at Bitcoin, it’s already at 38, 000 this morning.

Right. Look at, um, tokenizing real estate. This is a concept that’s never gotten out of the gate yet. And I’m convinced it’s going to be something. And if you combine that with a reg CF, and I don’t want to get in details here, but we do in the book, but you can actually raise money for real estate through, uh, crowdfunding.

And I think that’s brilliant. Now it hasn’t taken off yet. It’s in a chasm. Do you position yourself around that? Do you build a platform around that? Do you build technology around that? Because this is what you, this is what happens when you actually get into a tornado like we see with AI. By the way, AI was invented in like the 60s or 50s.

But it’s not the first concept of AI. How many years have, have, have, have, oh, uh, IBM Watson 15 years ago? Nobody cared, and all of a sudden ChatGPT hit it, they had the right technology, they hit it right out of the gate last November. Anyway, pick and choose your paradigm shifts. You want to think about those shifts that will actually change the, uh, way that people behave if they’re, if they’re discontinuous innovations.

But then it’s a lot easier to sometimes back a shift. That’s a continuous innovation and innovation based on a concept that already exists. It just takes it to the next level. All right, Michele, it’s back to you. I know you’re moderating. I don’t want to jump into your moderation. All right. Thank you, Augustin.

All right, so Jordan love to hear what your question is, or what you have to say on this subject about catching waves and how do we actually. Leverage these opportunities that pop up Jordan,

you’re on mute Jordan on the right bottom hand corner. You can go off mute. All right. We have a lot of folks here on stage. So Jordan, we’ll come back to you. Let’s go to Stefan. Stefan, you’re up. What’s happening? Hey, Michele and Mimi and Colin. How are y’all doing? Great. So good to have you, Stefan. It’s good to be here.

And so I just have to say the way you all break this down to make it simple is really amazing. Colin, you’re extraordinary with words. And when you said keep it simple, I know you’ve been doing that with domains. And people gravitate towards domains that are simple, um, companies that keep their methods and their strategies simple so people can understand and how they help people.

So thanks for breaking it down that way. Um, the idea of Waves, yo, you know, I’m older than for sure a lot of people here, but I’m really into kind of knowing where those waves are and how to, um, catch them. You know, I was in Southern California, bunch of folks out there surfing. I don’t surf, but man, did they know how to just wait and wait for that right wave.

And again, I don’t surf, but I was out there with somebody walking around and the professionals know how to surf that wave. all the way in. It like goes forever. And, um, it’s, it’s pretty amazing to watch. And I think kind of keeping your ear to the ground is really big. Um, watching where some of the thought is right now.

And just, uh, I bet you’re gonna fail on some of those waves. I bet some of those waves are going to sputter out and stuff. But It’s still worth, um, trying and getting on the forefront of that. So, you know, I’m here for sure in the AI space, still working with, uh, some things in, in metaverse, but very, very strongly.

You know, with looking at some of the ethical and bias issues in AI, I’ve been in this space with connecting and sort of being a bridge there for a long time. But, um, the need is there in AI. It fits me. And, you know, I’ve been working. So that’s part of the wave that I’m in right now. But, um, you know, The wave for equality and equity has been here a big way for a long time.

So I’m just sitting in that space anywhere. I can help folks. Last thing I’ll say really quick is I spent my morning at Salvation Army with Starbucks. So I have a nonprofit. We brought in Starbucks. All we did was decorated the whole place for Christmas and we put Christmas trees in every room for these mothers and their kids living in the shelter.

It was a small thing. But it’s a big thing when you see these moms coming in with all their luggage. It’s all they have and three kids and they’re signing in and it’s in a shelter and that stuff, you know, I’ve had plenty of deals that didn’t go through and all of this, but just reaching back like that and doing something, whether things are going well for me or, um, not well, but still giving back in the middle of that, um, It’s it’s uh, what life is to me anyway.

Thanks. That’s everything. Thank you all so much. That’s awesome, and we’re thankful for you for doing that. So thank you for sharing. All right. I’m just gonna, you know, read a little another expert excerpt here, which I think is really good when we’re trying to catch that wave. So we’re striving depth, not breath.

So Colin, if I’m interpreting this right, We’re not like, Hey, we’re going to address the whole market and have whatever, let’s just say an AI product that solves all the issues and problems for the advertising world. We’re focusing on a niche and we’re really learning it well and we’re going deep before we start going across many other channels or whatever it might be.

Is that accurate? Campbell.

All right. We can’t hear you. I’m going to answer for you problem with the headphones. I tried to switch the headphones and, uh, there’s not working, but, um, no, it’s a laser beam I talked about, right? Look, it’s a tornado. Think about AI. Let’s just look at the tornado that’s occurring right now. The huge companies, and by the way, it’s a little bit rare that companies grab a paradigm shift so fast.

They tend to hold off, wait a couple years, and figure out what’s going on. This one just seems to be different than for me. It seems to be different because the big corporations are grabbing onto it so fast and, you know, I used to love it when, when generally like go back to the nineties when internet access started, we launched our, our internet access business in 1993.

Bell Canada didn’t start competing with us until 1996, three years later. You know, that’s the thing is you do want to try to position yourself ahead of the waves, but a laser beam and being in a laser beam, that bowling alley. Uh, metaphor that Jeffrey Moore uses is you want to win when you’re in that chasm, you want to be able to target one particular audience.

You want to be able to survive, first of all, and target a particular audience. And then once you’ve got that, then you can expand your audiences, you know, in a, in a, in a, in a, in an environment like this, whoever can deliver the fastest to make it the easiest is going to win. Whether it’s Microsoft, Google being it doesn’t matter.

It’s whoever can do that faster right now. It seems to be open AI. Leading the market, but I want to be very clear. That’s not the market that any of us are going to be competing in launching our own eyes. What we’re going to be competing is how do we utilize this AI to make it simple and easy? And how can we prompt engineer a concept?

One of the concepts we’re working on at startup club is business plan dot com, which will be a free business plan. That you can present to your investors based on, uh, some inputs or prompt engineering. Now, do you need us? No, you can go to chat GPT and do it and spend, figure out what questions to ask and try to chat, try to prompt engineer it yourself.

But that might take you eight hours, 12 hours, 24 hours of work with us. It’ll take you 20 minutes, right? So that’s the concept. That’s in any industry you want to think about. What is it that you’re, what is it, what is it, you know, about your industry and how can you take AI into your industry? And turn it in from 24 hours of work on Chachi BT to 24 minutes and people will pay money for that.

People will pay, pay you so that they don’t have to do that prompt engineering. Anyway, that’s my thoughts right there. And that’s the laser beam. That’s the bowling alley effect. And I’ll pass it back to you, Michele. Awesome. We’re going to become experts in that one area that we really have passion about.

We believe about, and we’re going to build our, you know, viable product. All right. So let’s go to Shadow. Shadow, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Funny, Colin mentioned the, uh, people paying you to, uh, prompt engineer. I had a, a out of the blue contact this week from a local person who wants me to put some images into.

Uh, other style of images using AI and going to pay me to do it. So I guess they will do it. The other thing is I’ve been earning on blockchain for the last seven years. And I was, I’ve absolutely killing myself laughing, watching some of the arguments going on on the chain where they’re trying to figure out how to fight AI coming in.

I’ve pointed out to them on more than one occasion, you’re a disruptive technology. They’re now trying to fight the arrival of the next disruption. So I, you know, some people just don’t welcome things.

Yeah. And it doesn’t keep it from happening. Does it? Shadow? No, it’s common. And I’ve pointed it out more than one occasion, you need to become a chain that, that figures out how to use AI and move forward with it. Yeah. How do we make it work for us? I love that. Thank you. All right, let’s go to Richard.

Richard says big thinkers only. So lay it on us, Richard. Hi, Michele. Hello, everybody. This is always a great room, uh, led by, uh, you and Colin and Mimi. So I greatly appreciate this. And I think somebody asked about action steps or what’s to do next. And one thing that will make the biggest difference in everybody’s business.

is find something that you have the greatest level of uncomfortableness with and move forward at least one percent every day with consistency. So for example if it’s asking people for money, that’s what a lot of my clients they are afraid to just ask people for money, prospect. It could be whatever it may be, but the main thing is Focus on that 1 percent and just like this room, get yourself around other business owners because we all often have similar challenges even though we’re in completely different industries and just focus on why you want to make your business successful.

If it’s a generational wealth or is it just to become a legend like Colin is. So, um, but yeah, love this room and glad to listen, participate in any level of value I can add. Thank you. Well, I will challenge you on the legend part. Uh, we’re not there yet just ’cause we’re, ’cause we’re bestselling books for two months.

Doesn’t mean you’re a legend. Uh, look, I, I think that we’re trying to figure it out. We’re trying to figure out what it is that you can do to catch a wave, right? I’ve done that my entire life, uh, grabbing onto companies, uh, or technology shifts and, you know, it’s almost like an addiction. It really is, Richard, like it’s almost like an addiction.

So one of the things I do to try to figure out the waves that are coming is I call, there’s a part of the book I talk about live in the future. And what do I mean by that? I have the number nine, I have number nine hundred and eighty four zero zero zero zero nine eight four model X in 2015. So I have one of the first electric SUVs on the planet.

I was the number two or three person who got an HDTV television in Canada at the time is 1998. And it was a, um, it was 18, 000. I, I also had a 35, 000 HDTV projector in Canada. One of the first, so probably talk about insanity, you know, those things that, that those TVs obviously dropped in value dramatically, and it can be sometimes very expensive to try to live in the future.

But, you know, I go back to when I was seven years old. And my father bought a 4K Sinclair computer, and ever since then, it’s changed my life. It changed Bill Gates, it changed so many people to have early access to technology, to be ahead of the curve, to live in the future. To have the fastest broadband in the future, we paid way too much for broadband early on because we wanted to figure out what, what’s good.

What’s world can be like when people actually have fast internet cheap. And when you, when you live in the future, it can be a technique for catching the next wave. One of the things I would encourage everyone to do, and I did this and I talked about this in the book, is that just try to live in the future.

I know there’s a lot when you start getting older, like, ah, I could do it this way. I’ve done it my whole time. No, buy an NFT. What? NFTs are bullshit, blah, blah. I paid 50 for an NFT. It was hell. It took three days to purchase it, almost. I had to get a wallet, I had to get Paragon, I had to do this, I had to do that.

It was very, very tough. And I realized that there’s an opportunity there for, eventually, for people who want to simplify that process. Remember, make it easy? That’s it. So that’s what I’m talking about in the book, in my life, live in the future. That’s one of the techniques to catch a wave. Back to you, Michele.

Oh, I know you’ve got, you’re taking the cue here. Absolutely. All right. Let’s, let’s shoot back to Jordan. We’re just checking in Jordan. Are you there now? All right. I don’t think he is. Let us know. All right, Louis. Thank you, Michele, Mimi, Colin. Uh, Colin, I would like to go back a little bit to what you said about Meta and their headset by Facebook.

And I forget the term, but it was really good. Um, there’s, there’s stuck in some, I forget the term, but I’d love to ask. Chasm, it’s chasm. Chasm. That’s that, that’s a wonderful term that I understood. And, and, and, uh, my background developing VR stuff back in 2014 and 15 was on the side of live action. So I really dove deep for years and, and we did some interesting stuff worldwide.

I really got into it and I see what’s happened from my perspective. And I think there’s different perspectives on this, but what I love about what you said was to keep it to the facts and the facts are of their chasm. My question to you is space, spatial technology and what Apple’s doing with their headset.

I think Apple, well, it’s obvious Apple and Facebook do deployments of technology differently and Apple has proven time and time again for decades they have something figured out. However, it can be quantified. Do you anticipate or how closely do you feel you will get involved? Do you think you’ll work on catching a wave on what Apple’s going to do?

Or do you find yourself you’ll wait longer than shorter? How do you anticipate that market to go and what they’re going to do? No, I’m not going into it. Tell you why it’s, it’s, it, this is, this is a world that, um, They’ve been trying to launch VR for 20 years. Every time I see it, I’ve been saying to my brother, my brother by the way, this is, this is what makes it work for me.

My brother is a total geek. I’m a, I’m, I’m not a geek, I only aspire to be one. Just for the record. But the fact of the matter is, he’s like, he’s playing, he buys everything. He’s got every robot since, since I was like 18 years old, 16 years old, whatever. He’s bought every robot you could possibly buy. He buys every VR headset.

Uh, it ain’t there, and one of the reasons it is not there is that it’s, does it solve a problem in your life or replace something? And I know that’s sort of a traditional way of thinking about it, but I really Don’t see it yet. Now. I was almost there a little bit. We interviewed, um, we had two, um, sessions on this show.

You can go back and listen to them around the metaverse and, uh, we interviewed a lady, uh, can’t remember her name, but she was a president of a company up in Canada that was doing incubators, virtual metaverse incubators. And I’m like, education, maybe that does work. But then I said to her, but why couldn’t you just do it on zoom?

Okay. You know, why can’t like, do you really want to see cartoon character? And I shouldn’t, I, I, I’m being mean now because you’re going to probably hit me real, if you were in a room with me, you’d probably punch me by now. They’re not cartoon characters. I know that they’re, they’re, they’re, um, they’re your characters and there you are, you’re in the metaverse.

I look, has there been a market there? Yes, and by the way, just because it’s in a chasm doesn’t mean there isn’t a market. Doesn’t mean there isn’t products, services, those kind of things. They exist. But what it does mean is that the early majority So 2 to 3 percent of the population are playing with it.

The early majority is 30 to 40 percent of the population are grabbing onto that. That is the tornado. So the moment you shift from 2 to 3 percent to 30 to 40%, that is the, is the, is the, is the tornado. And the, the, the businesses, the entrepreneurs that are positioned for that, they will succeed. I don’t think Apple’s going to crack this one.

I was surprised by the way. And, and, you know, because, because there’s definitely a counter to this and I’m going to counter myself on this one. I was very surprised that they were able to take the Dick Tracy watch. And turn it into something because I use an Apple watch and a lot of people in this world use an Apple watch now because it does more than just tell the time and maybe communicate.

But Dick Tracy watches were definitely 20 years in the chasm. There’s so many companies that came out with it. And then Apple, like you said, like, you know what you’re saying there is when Apple came out with it, then all of a sudden they made it work. So we’ll be. Will they be the ones to break through with this technology?

What, what, what quantifies, how do you assess a success versus not? What makes you say, okay, that works. So for me, it’s, does it solve a problem? Does it change my life? Does it make a difference? Um, you know, a lot of this is anecdotal and a lot of it is. You probably could get a lot of data around some of it, but usually data comes out after the fact.

As entrepreneurs, we want to try to figure out, you know, what are the technologies that are going to come out that are going to change the world? When blockchain came out, I truly believed in blockchain. When NFTs came out, I truly did not believe in it. And I’m not saying I was some seer and I could figure it out what’s right or what’s wrong.

But I said the same thing about Meta and I said it publicly multiple times in the book I wrote about Meta and how they had misstepped Facebook and how they made big missteps. And then AI came out, and by the way, we submitted the book to Forbes last November. This is just this just as chat GPT was launching and we talked about this chapter and how to catch a wave and how AI would be the the revolution of the 2020s.

We were a little bit ahead of ourselves on AI. So we definitely stuck our neck out there and predicted that AI would be something big. So how do you do that? And that’s a great question. Like, is there an instance? Like for me, it’s all about instinct. See, I could, you know, there’s so many times I touched AI and they’re like, Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. Like in February of 2020. Three, um, this is the first time AI touched my book. They asked us to do an inside cover, so I went to chat GPT and I wrote, hey, can you write the inside cover of the book, of a bestselling book, by the way? And I didn’t know it was going to be bestselling, but anyway, I said it anyway, just for fun.

Can you write the inside cover of a bestselling book for, um, uh, for a Starscale Exit Repeat? And by the way, and so I, and I fed the introduction of the book. They came back. It was perfect. I, I made two little, a couple little edits. Submitted it, how do I know it’s perfect? Four months later they used it as the Amazon listing and I asked the Forbes team and I like, why are you taking our stuff?

Shouldn’t this be your thing? And he goes, no, actually it’s perfect. They didn’t know it came from chat, GPT. Now I know we’ve gotta be careful with SEO and, and, and, and that I, I’m writing a multiple, multiple articles and I can’t even touch chat GBT to write these articles. It’s make very frustrating. But where we can use chat, G-B-T-I-I definitely use it.

Uh, for all of my companies. I can see it’s something of value. It can, it’ll, there’s two things. Two ways to look at it. You can look at AI as being a way of saving money and cutting staff. Um, or, or maybe by the way, some of that staff might go to Philippines or India or Ukraine or whatever, or South America, or you can look at it as being, Hey, I don’t even have that staff, but now I can afford it.

To have an AI marketing team, and I can actually compete with bigger corporations. So I actually believe that AI will be one of the greatest, um, technological shifts, paradigm shifts for startups and entrepreneurs and founders, because now we can actually compete with, it’s, it’s like a, an equalizer. We can compete with the big companies.

I’m going to add in a three, a third case there, Colin, at least for me. I think of it as a, a great productivity tool. It helps me and my staff be much more efficient. I’m not looking to replace them. I still want them reviewing it. Their input is still immensely more valuable. And I really do believe that.

But it greatly improves productivity and helps us see some blind spots. Alright, on that note, I think we’re at Rathwan.

I hope I’m saying your name correctly, Rathwan come off from you and ask a question or, uh, let us know if there’s something you want to add to the conversation.

All right. I think Rathwan is not ready. That’s okay. I think we go popcorn now, I think. Wait, wait, no, no, we got Jayesh. Oh, sorry. And then Louis. Okay. Sorry. I’m not the moderator. Did I forget you? No, you didn’t forget me. I just wanted to finish with a thank you. And okay. Uh, am I already? Yeah. Yeah. Let’s um, we’re going to get to you in a second.

Louis, go ahead and finish your call. And it’s interesting. It’s interesting to see, uh, your, um, you’re not confident in the apple headset. This will be interesting conversation next year. I really, okay. Truly look up to you and respect you. And I listened to you and I hate to disagree with you, but I believe it’ll be interesting to see how AI will impact.

The development of what Apple’s making with the headset due to the fact of their team, their ecosystem, their app development system, how they intend to make it a computer on your head. And it’ll be real interesting to see if they strike it with what I’m anticipating, I’m waiting for. Nintendo had Super Mario Brothers, Game Boy had Tetris, Xbox had Halo.

It wasn’t the device, it’s what brought us to the device that I find valuable. And I’m looking for that to see the devices are okay, but I anticipate, like you said, somebody in roadblocks is going to build that special or whatever. So I’m waiting for somebody who builds roadblocks to build that, that experience that’ll make me.

Go buy the headset as opposed to the headset. So I agree. Look, I mean, look, I’ve made fun of my brother for 20 years wearing the Dick Tracy watches. Okay. So I totally agree with you that all of a sudden I got the Apple watch on and I love it. It tracks my heartbeat. It tracks when I work out. It tracks so many different things.

It became a different, they, they, they really did. Uh, now, I don’t know, is this wrong? Like, do young people, like, is this cool? Still like to wear an Apple watch? I think it is still, I don’t know, but um, but all actually pulled it off, right? You know, it’s, you know, it’s, you know, all your friends drop. They did pull it off.

Is there all dropping their Rolexes to wear the Apple watch? I’m just going to say, you know, that I dropped my, I still have a Rolex, but I don’t wear it. I wear my Apple watch, but you know, it’s more practical buddies. So let’s get, let’s make certain we have an incubator here, Michele and Kyle. I think he’s in Mimi.

Let’s make sure we order this Apple headset and let’s play with it and let’s see with it and let’s have a I want Oh wow! Lewis? A month from now or six months from now? I don’t know where you live. We’re in Florida. But if you’re in the hood, like, we expect you to come in and we’re going to try it out together.

Okay? I think that’d be wonderful. Wow, what a cool thing. I really thank you guys and I’ll be listening. Thank you so much. You bet. And I want to get to Jayesh. Jayesh, you’ve been so patient. Jayesh, go ahead. Okay, uh, so I am a 18 year old kid from India and, uh, I am really excited, uh, because this is my first time I’m speaking something like this.

So my main question is, like, how can we trend a? The next big thing by ourselves only, like, like, uh, suppose we are not interested in tech sector, like, uh, how can we, uh, trend something like if climate tech will be big or a biotech sector will be big or any hardware companies will be big and how to know, like, if the perfect time is arrived, because in India from 2010 to 2020, lot of, uh, food delivery apps.

Uh, e commerce platforms like, uh, Amazon started, but after, uh, internet revolution came in India from Jio, then these companies boom before that they were not there. So how to know that if perfect time is arrived, like right place, right time. Yes. My question is this. Yeah, and you know, we never know what it’s going to arrive.

We never know 100 percent of anything, like Lewis pointed out there, like, you know, this technology is coming down, but we really don’t know, um, what’s going on. And we sort of have to make our assessment. So as we talk about the book, a lot, Starscale likes to repeat, like, we try to figure out, like, how is it, like, what is it that you need to do to understand those things or technology shifts that occur that you can get onto, that you can grab onto, that you can ride that wave and you can succeed.

And, and, you know, maybe it was by accident. I don’t know. But 1993, when I graduated from college, there was this thing called the internet. And my brother and I started it became the largest ISP in the country of Canada. And we also launched a company called two cows, which became the second largest domain registrar in the world.

And also a, uh, Popular software download site in the nineties. We also launched a company that called Hostopia, which became the largest hosting and email company in the world for telecoms. And then we launched dot club. Michele was working with me on dot club. We sold that to go daddy. Now that’s a different situation.

We didn’t really talk about that. And I feel like we’ve, we, we spent too much time talking about technological shifts and not talking about regulatory shifts. Um, the fact is in 2020, 12. I can the Internet Corporation for assigned names and numbers decided to deregulate the space and open up the domain extensions from dot com dot net dot org and a few others to hundreds of domain extensions.

And we applied for dot club. Well, that same thing is going to happen again in 2026 May of 2026. They’ve announced the date. So we have a future paradigm shift coming up, a regulatory shift coming up. I’m not saying you should necessarily buy a TLD. They’re very expensive and you have to go into auction.

It could cost you millions of dollars and you need to be able to distribute it, you know, globally and have the relationships to do so. But paradigm shifts happen all the time. In 2012, we didn’t have those relationships. You know, we, we knew a few people in the industry and whatnot, but we were able to launch it, build it up to a million domain names and sell it to GoDaddy Registry.

Um, so I don’t want you to. Think as a shift is only being technological. Think about regulation. There was a regulation change three years ago around prescriptions for. Medicine and Congress in the United States passed that. So we want to watch what’s going on. We want to pay attention to the legislation.

We want to look at the, um, the shift towards green energy. That was a, that was one you could have positioned yourself around as well. Although I think that’s more for the big corporations, uh, in, in this economy in the U S but, you know, we want to look towards those things that are changing and position ourselves in advance of that wave.

You think you’re gonna catch the wave after it’s already taken off? No, you ain’t gonna do that. You’ll catch that wave just before it goes off. And how to know like, uh, you are going in the right direction? How do you know you’re going in the right direction? You never know. But I’ll tell you this. You got to try.

You know, I often think that try it out yourself, like try the technology, use it, buy an NFT. If you feel like it makes an impact on you, it could make an impact on others. I will add this though, uh, we only have 60 seconds left because we’re going over to Entrez. We do a show once a month on Entrez. It’s a new platform, 120, 000 entrepreneurs.

We’re going to go live on that show in 2 minutes and we’re going to talk about what makes a startup successful. And I’m actually going to try to do a presentation on that as well, but I’m going to let you, Michele, like, uh, maybe do 1 more question, but I’m going to try to log on to that platform right now.

If you want to join us, just go to entree and. Uh, there’s an app on the, on the, um, uh, on the app store, download the app and you can join us for another conversation for another hour. On what makes a startup successful, I’m actually going to try to present the application, if I can, of the, sorry, the presentation that I’m doing next week on Entrepreneurs on Fire with JLD, John Lee Dumas, and I’m going to try to present that, um, at, in the show.

I know we got more people waiting to talk, but please join us. Michele, if you can close the room in about like 60 seconds and let me get the other room open on Entre. This has been a great session, and I’m going to say, I think we might do a part two of this next week. A lot of really great interactions.

So thank you to all the members, Jordan. Yeah, go ahead and ask your question, but we do need for you to be brief. We tried to get you a couple of times, but I think you were. Yeah, just go ahead real quickly. So we can get you in. Yeah, sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. My name is Jordan. I’m a corporate investor in a telco company in Africa.

And I think you can use AI as innovation and innovation co pilot. So I have one question quickly in terms of problem in the studying. How can startups use AI tools to gain valuable insight into a specific problem? That’s my main question tonight. So the question is, is how can startups use AI to get into, to what can you say?

To gain valuable insight into a specific problem. Okay, to get insights into specific problems. That is a great question. Um, you know, I would say, and I’ll let a couple of others, Augustine, maybe you can help me out here, and Shadows, uh, and Richard, you know, that’s the beauty of this, right? Language, large language models, if I think you really need to formulate what your question is, and really think about it.

And how you would have a very active, engaging conversation with somebody. That’s an authority. That’s that’s how I look at it. That’s how when I’m researching it, I read. That’s how other people approach it as well. So, if you’re building a business plan, just think of all the different stages that you would go through the primary research.

Where you’re even looking at the competitive market and tailor questions around that, then going to the far extreme when you have, let’s just say you have a written business plans, putting it into chat GTP and perhaps asking it to tell you where it’s missing and maybe score it and fill in the blanks.

But Augustine and Richard, maybe you can help me out here a little bit. What are your thoughts? Um, I think that’s a great way to go, um, Michele, um, you know, from, from our perspective every time or any idea that I have, because I’m always thinking about something else. The focus is for me is I like to do my research first.

I like to understand if there’s an audience out there and good point with chat GPT. I always go and say to jet GPT. I have this idea. Give me. You know, a generic layout, I go and I work through the process and then I throw it through chat, chat, GPT again, like you said, to fill in the blanks that will get you a lot closer as you envision what you want.

Obviously, like Colin said. There’s just no right answers and things are going to change. There’s market volatility, however, that will actually help the individual home in on the aim or where he needs to focus to drive the business forward. Otherwise, what normally happens, there are a lot of little outriggers that actually always throw us off course.

Um, you start up with an idea. You have to be very true to, let’s say the top. 10 items you want, but thinking that you’re only going to focus on the top three. And then you build on the other ones that you want to work on. Hope that helped. Great answer. Thank you so much for your insight, Richard. Did you want to add anything before we close out today?

All right, it’s that time we are at 303. Thank you everyone for attending today. We greatly appreciate it and we hope that you’re able to take something away. Um, don’t forget we’re here every Friday at 2 PM Eastern time. Um, actually next week show, I think we’re going to cancel because Colin and I are at a conference, but we’ll we’ll make sure to post that.

So everybody’s aware. We have another guest coming up very soon. The week after, um, the gentleman is an expert and it’s actually our personal business attorney that we use for intellectual property. Um, he’s worked for Yahoo and other big notable companies. He’s just going to talk to us in layman’s language about what do we do when we get those big ideas?

When is it worth? Seeking attorney’s advice. When is it worth trying to file a patent or a trademark or a copyright? So I’m really looking forward to that. Um, he is a very good business sense attorney that I I’m sure that the members here will benefit from. So everybody have an amazing weekend and, um, please do join us on entree if you’re able to, which is another app and we’re going to continue the conversation.

Thank you and be well.