Welcome And The Real Career Risk

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Welcome back to Inspire AI, the podcast where we explore the ideas, people, and technologies shaping the future of how we live and work. So what if the biggest risk in your career right now isn't AI replacing you, but you standing still while everything else accelerates? Because somewhere between the rise of the internet, the birth of enterprise systems, and now the explosion of artificial intelligence, there are people who didn't just watch those waves happen. They learned to move through them. Today's guest is one of those people. Caleb Snow spent more than three decades in technology. Starting young, growing up in a household where programming wasn't optional. It was expected. From building networks as a teenager to working inside Fortune 500 enterprises, his designing large-scaling systems, leading in sales, and launching AI-driven startups. His career has been anything but linear. It's been driven by one thing: a relentless curiosity about what's coming next. And in today's episode, we're exploring what it means to stay furiously curious in a world being reshaped by AI, why trust and governance are becoming just as important as innovation, and how anyone from technologist to entrepreneur can go from idea to builder faster than ever before. This is a conversation about reinvention, about community, and about what it takes to keep up when change isn't coming. It's already here. Let's get into it. Caleb, welcome to Inspire AI. Thank you for having me, Jason. I'm happy to be here. Outstanding. Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself? Like what brings you here? How do we personally know each other?

Restarting From The Bottom

SPEAKER_01 3:26

Yeah. That's a long and lighting story. So but I won't, I mean I could take up a whole hour on just this. But uh I'm 45 years old, and I jokingly but somewhat seriously say I've been in tech for 35 years. I've had a paying job at it. And so I started off very, very young. Um my father was one of the original uh creators of Unix back in the day. Um, there was about 3,000 of them, but he happened to be one of them. So he worked for a company called Bell Labs in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. And then he got out of that. And what got my start was other than the fact that I grew up around even in the 80s and tons of technology, my dad made us learn how to program and see and cobalt and other things as a very like before we were 10 years old. That was just a common thing in our house. And so I had kind of a little bit of a different childhood, good, good typical 80s childhood, except for that. But what kind of interesting, um, become more interesting because when my dad left this company doing what today would have been seen as like a really amazing, prestigious thing, which wasn't recognized as such at that time, he went into fixing PCs, and that was a relatively new genre of technology work to be done doing back then, and it was around 91. So eventually it became setting up networks, and then it became a systems integrator, and then by the mid-90s, we're full-blown web hosting development shop and internet service provider. At the end of the 2000s, into the 90s and early 2000s, he actually ended up selling his company to one of the larger, well-known service providers of the time nationally. And so that was my that was my experience as a young kid into late teens in the 90s was learning how to set up networks, set up, run the back end of you know, of a whole data center. I mean, that was just what we did. That was my after-hour shob, and that was normal to me. I cared more about that than actually my education at the time. And you can see my GPA at some point just sit in it that will prove that. Um, and I thought the rest of my life was gonna be focused on working on that company and that idea. To me, that was the world. So when my dad sold that company when I turned 19, my world completely shifted. And so I went from managing people who had bachelor's degrees as like a 17-year-old to having to have to go find a job. And in when in 1999, 2000, people did not think that you that a 19-year-old kid had could have six or seven years of systems administration experience, and then obviously different maturity levels during those years, but I did, and so I had to restart my career in 19. I had already felt like I was in my career, and so I've had this kind of weird start, and so I had to write start right back at the bottom, and I but say bottom like on the IT total pool, right? So I had to start down at tech support, I had to restart and then work my way up, and I did, and I got myself into Fortune 500s and got into big enterprise experience pretty big, pretty quickly. Um, worked for Honda, worked for Miracle Grow, worked for Cardinal Health, and eventually, about 19 years ago, found an opportunity here in Richmond with a defense contractor, and my wife and I moved here on a six-week contract, and uh which eventually turned into two years of contracting and two years of full-time employment. And um, so so I got to kind of restart my career, and about every two or so years since I left, I've effectively looked my my either by intent or by boredom, I've been looking at something else. Like, what's the next wave? So when I was, you know, I was a Microsoft shop kind of guy for a long time. I was really focused in on like AD and exchange, if you you know that is, but then I also got into then I got into enterprise storage, then I got into enterprise architecture. That led me into design work. So I actually moved over to the vendor side again for the first time in like 20, almost 20 years, about 12 years ago. And so I started designing for large data center solutions. So if there's a number of Fortune 500s which have my designs, maybe still today, probably not, and they've been abided. I did that for a few years and then I moved over to business development, so sales, and then I got kind of this. I got flipped a lot of people just kind of slowly worked their way up the sales. I got involved with, you know, I was working for World Worldwide Technologies and very, very large systems and uh system integrator. And what what that provided me was this really, really broad viewpoint of the market. I got plugged into a role I was fortunate enough to work for the EVP of sales in his office versus going out in the field and actually going out and fixing problematic accounts. So I was it was just wonderful trial by fire for like 20 years. Wonderful was kind of sarcastic tone there. And then what led me into kind of where you and I met is about a five or six-year-old story, but I'll try to abbreviate it. Basically, we uh we being uh a gentleman within Worldwide Technology and I identified a need, a technology need. He had the skill set, he was a former network engineer, former Marine Corps Force Recon, had his really wild, completely opposite history of me, but we found each other, actually worked for me for a little bit, and then saw that he, as he moved into data science, and this is in 2018, 2019, he saw a way to secure networks better using AI. And when we first submitted our patents through worldwide back in 2020, there was not one company out there that had patent pending, patent secured via prior artwork search for any of those concepts. So everything that we're that was so novel, and now look at where we are, where everybody can say AI with a toothpaste, right? It's it's uh it's a wild world we live in now. So we spent four or five years building this AI startup. We had uh we were very well funded, I'll just say that way. We had 42 people working for us, and in the end, it didn't go to market, and we could spend again another hour just on that. But the lessons that we learned, the people we got to meet, powerful, interesting, connected. It was just this again, it was this uh masterclass of how to and how to not run a startup, and so we walked away so many lessons learned, and I was getting plugged into things like helping out there's this local annual AI and data summit, RBA Tech. I was plugged in, I was on the committee helping with them. I think people saw me there because most of my stuff was done more not really focused on Richmond, it's focused more on the globe. And so as I started to kind of refocus here on Richmond, I kind of became up, you know, to people who didn't know me, they're like, where have you been? Like you've been here for 20 years. Yeah, I've been here for 20 years, but to them, I was just working on a house or an airplane, so they didn't know me that well. So you and I got engaged about a year ago when uh we both joined the AI Ready R VA, the board, and which has been tremendous for me. I've really enjoyed getting to see and work through all that. And skimmy, I mean I I jokingly say that I am the least AI-centric person on that board because I'm surrounded by so many amazing people you can talk about it really well, or they're practitioners, um, yourself included. And so I'm just somebody who's an admirer of it. I like to, I'm an evangelist and I like to recognize what's coming and to see where we're going, if when I can, and then try to kind of help. I've had a lot of people. I cannot, everything I just told you, I could have not done by myself. I have so many people that gave me a hand up, and so now it's my responsibility as a tech as a recovering technologist, maybe more of a salesperson these days, but it's my my responsibility to help that next generation, and whether that's generation could be age thing, it could be somebody's mid-career shift, whatever it is, I think it's my responsibility to kind of help guide them from what I'm seeing. That's kind of the the short version. I don't do anything short very well, but it's a short version of kind of what got me here today.

Enterprise Work Then Vendor Sales

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Oh, interesting. How so many things I want to pull on there. First of all, I got my start through my dad's IT shop as well. No way. He was a small owner, but made basically a manager at this IT shop locally in Richmond. And I was 15 years old and looking for you know a summer gig that was more than cutting grass. So uh his shop was very much around um hardware service industry, on um, you know, supporting small, medium-sized businesses, doing a lot of traveling and consulting in those areas. I learned how to crimp uh Ethernet cords and and uh clean out desktops and add memory and all sorts of good things. I built my first computer there and uh I was hooked at that point. I wasn't developing in COBOL or C Sharp, I think you said, but um I did discover those things when I went to college and those they were not exciting to me, I'll be honest. Like I I enjoyed VB script, but COBOL just like turned me off, and I can't believe they subjected me to that because I was so disappointed in in my inability to understand that that I just I I stopped trying in software engineering. So I took the help desk consultant route for the next 10, 12 years until I found my way to Capital One and you know the rest is history there. But I just wanted to align with you on that because I think that's a really special background that that I think you and I share. Beyond that, you're well traveled. You definitely have a strong technology background, and you went into sales and you run a small business. So I think you can relate a lot to our audience here. So your connection to AI Ready RVA is you're somewhat of a staple in the community, if I'm not mistaken. I'll say that because I feel like there were a lot of people that knew of you and and praised you and said, we need to have him on our board. And that's that's where you came from in my mind. And I had somewhat, I guess, met you at an RVA tech event, and it just so happened that you became the board member or were on your way to becoming a board member. And so that's how we aligned. It's a really interesting experience watching you work with the company. I so far have seen a lot of great value that you've been driving through us, and uh I have a lot to learn about running a business, and I think you bring that kind of value to it. The technologist like myself, it takes really strong business-minded people like yourself to pull it all together.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

So I would I'd like to add something there. First of all, I appreciate that you're making me blush here. I there's two things I like that going to the to the reputation thing. I I am a man with a thousand falls. However, that being said, I would say that I believe that your reputation is everything. And I and where I mean, you where people see me do well, I've fallen down a hundred times to get to that one good point. And I still do. You've probably seen me do it on the board. But I'm very open, I'm very unbecured.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

You did stand me up a couple of times.

The AI Startup That Never Shipped

SPEAKER_01 14:23

I am absolutely it's only been a year standing you up. I you know, I forgot for two, but you you're very adamant. No, I think that reputation is everything, and I don't know. So you're from Richmond originally, is that correct? Okay, I'm not. When I first came here, I was in this bubble of this defense contractor. So for the first really four years, so from 2007 to 2011, all I knew was that little world. When I came out and I started working for a national trucking company as an as the enterprise architect, I didn't realize how small this town was, even as big as it was when it came to your relationships. I learned that so fast. When I'm in Columbus, you could literally be working in the Wendy's building, right beside the nationwide building, right beside the Carnival Health Building. These buildings are all right beside each other. And you didn't know anybody between those buildings for your entire life. Here, you know about everybody. Now, of course, it was also a different era, things are more social these days, so that helps too. But I jokingly say this is the smallest big town I've ever been to. Even with all the transplants of the COVID era, etc., this town, everybody knows everybody, and your reputation precedes you very quickly. And so I believe that that is super important. I think that we could sit there and talk about all the other things that you probably really didn't get to, but to me, that's like the most important thing at this point in my career is making sure that if I do something or say I'm gonna do something, or somebody needs something, that if I have an obligation there, or somebody needs some help, jump in right and and then don't burn those bridges. But going back real quick, just to how I got onto the board, when I saw this is late 2024, when I saw all of a sudden these words around AI radio have like I pay attention on LinkedIn. Yes, and when I went from when they went from zero to a thousand RPMs really quick, or maybe seven thousand RPMs really quick, if you're a car guy, all of a sudden it was like, where did this come from? I've known about all these other groups, but now there was just this really great marketing effort, and you and I probably know the couple people that are that have really done a great job there. Yeah, and so I solicited Will Willis. I treated it like a sales call. Look, I'm interested in you, I want to buy your product. Like, what how can I be involved? Is really kind of that message. I remember sitting down with him at Starbucks at Westchester and going and going and going, I'm really excited about what's going on here. I don't know where you all came from, but the fact is that everything you guys, not everything, but a lot of what you're saying is just hitting so hard. And it's the trends I'm seeing, it's the message I've been screaming from the rooftop. I would like to help out. How could can I sweep your car out? What do you need here? And I flat out asked, like, can I come on there? I've I've never tried so hard to get on a board in my life because that's not really kind of my my my wasn't my drive at the time. But I wanted to be a part of this. I definitely saw this as being a movement, and then I saw people grabbing onto this movement. And so to me, this was really important. I'm the community here in Richmond is to me, I'll never, I I'll likely never live in any other town. I like Richmond a lot. Our kids are gonna grow up here, and um, to me, this is just it's important that we help create these foundations that can create opportunities for not just our kids, right? But everybody else is around our.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Yeah. No, well said, and I draw some parallels there as well. First, the reputation. I got to grow up in a household where my parents were pretty well connected to the community around because of you know the the businesses they were in. My mom worked for Reynolds Metals for probably 25 years or something like that. And she got to know Richmond very well through that organization because people came and went, but they always knew each other. And then she worked for Wells Fargo for 10, 15 years after that, where then she retired two, three years ago, something like that. You know, I got to know the community around me through her eyes for many years. And then when people started recognizing my last name, McGuinthe, they were like, Are you Sharon's son? And so that that happens to me sometimes. I think I know most of her community by now, the ones that are connected to us. And so I've been able to take my own initiative and and build my own network, thankfully, through her inspiring stories. The the connection with Will Willis, I'm not sure if he reached out to me or I reached out to him on LinkedIn, and I was like drawn to the words AI ready RVA. And I'm like, I want to know more about that. And that's that was pre-uh 501c that I got connected with the Wills, Vic Liz, all of them. And they were really gung-ho about the whole thing, and they've had so much drive, still do, and and it really draws you in if you have that much energy to kind of put behind it as well. It's interesting. Early on, we had a lot of energy, but it was hard to kind of pull things together and and make them happen, and now they just seem to happen, and there's more of a gravitational pull around this community that we're building than I I would have ever imagined. So it's a really special place to be.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

It's not momentum out this point. There's an orbit around this momentum. And if this was a rolling stone, there would be 1700 little pebbles floating around this right now and getting drawn into this. And again, we can sit and talk to it.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

We're at 40,700 now on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

Shoot. I would that bad numbers. And I we did not, by the way, we're not getting paid by AI to AI Radio RBA to be this promo. Here we're just this is something that we're passionate about mutually. So we're very biased here, and we're also biased about the greatness of the city and not only the current, but also the potential. And so for me, I think all of that comes together, and what we're finding is a lot of other people are too.

SPEAKER_00 20:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

So yeah.

Richmond Community And Reputation

SPEAKER_00 20:09

Yeah, we when you're enthralled in a subject that is as vast and disruptive as AI, yeah, and you recognize that like your community could easily be impacted, your family, your friends, every company that you could ever possibly work for, you you kind of start paying attention and wondering, more than wondering, like, what do you do? Like what what how do you prepare for that future? And should you prepare now or should you wait and see what actually happens around you? And if things like that, like you know, I think the leadership of AI Ready RBA is uh real more motivated to not wait than anything I've I've seen before. And and being able to open our eyes and open the community's eyes up to the change that's happening around us because you know we're all kind of futurists in a way, is I think what makes us special. So what what do you see uh uh around you happening? Like you've touched on a few things. This there's a lot of people that aren't paying attention, some that are, some that really don't know where to go with this information. Maybe like what do you see and and how are you personally taking this journey on your own in your own career path outside of AI ready RVA? Like what are you doing personally?

Why AI Ready RVA Became A Movement

SPEAKER_01 21:30

Yeah, so that's a loaded question, a load of the answer. I'm gonna take a roundabout way of getting to the answer to that question. When and I'm gonna for just a second go back to a younger part of my career. When I was coming up, I have an older brother, I'm the youngest of four, and jokingly the oldest of a hundred because we had over a hundred foster kids come through our house. Um, there's a oh wow, another backstory there. My mom has is actually just she's phenomenal there. She's one of the good stories of that industry. She's just received a lot of accolades, etc. She's there's a very low uh success rate in with that whole system, and the fact that she has like a 80% high school graduation rate success rate. That's crazy, crazy. Yes, and like a 20% college. That's how they metric those things. So going back to not even necessarily my childhood, but just watching being in this, uh, you know, I'm the youngest. My brother is the oldest. My brother went down the technical route as well. And I'm and then this is I hope he's listening to this because I very clearly say he's the smart one and I'm the pretty one. So he's West Coast, he went down the Cisco route. So you coming from a technical background, he focused on not the food company, but the technology company. And if you're familiar with their certifications, he is a five-time CCIE. He is an incredibly intelligent person, he's done really well. He's doing some really cool things with AI himself now. Different conversation. But I always felt whether it's him or watching peers in my industry, I've always been a victim of the you know that complex of having imposter syndrome, right? That has just been something I've always been, I've always looked at other people because I always always, and still to this day, perpetually, I'm always just looking at what people are doing. What am I doing? How are they doing it? Going into sales fixes all that for me. You always know exactly where you're at. I mean, you can still definitely compare yourself, but you you yourself know where you stand because there's always a metric over your head now. And now that you're starting to see other people metrics outside of sales. More heavily to me. It's like, oh, welcome to the crowd. This is just kind of how you operate now in life. That's just because I've pretty skewed. But I watched people like him go down this. And for a long time, even myself as an engineer, we kind of did things very statically. We did technology did not like, despite what new innovation came out, most things were relatively the same. To this day, we still manage networks, mostly the same. And this is like sacrilege words, to the same way we managed them 25 years ago. Now, there are tools that help accelerate, there's automation solutions, things like that. And AI is slowly making its way into those as well, much slower than probably I would prefer, and maybe other industry leaders would prefer. But we're still seeing a lot of things. And when I say now and I move into this sentiment, we're still seeing a lot of people operate the same. And being a person, if you go look at my career and my resume, I change every couple years because of the anticipation, or frankly, you almost said the boredom of the situation. The concept of staying the same is very foreign to me. But when I look at people and I understand you're comfortable with something, stay with that. I get it. I've always said that until now. If you're comfortable being a network, if you're comfortable being a desktop support server person and you've been doing it for 30 years, and that's what makes you happy, do it. The thing that I would emphasize and what's caused me myself to change more dramatically than I've ever changed is this wave of change that is here, not coming, it's here, and it's only going to increase in potency over the next months, years. And I wouldn't even look at it the decade because it's gonna be changing the way the expectations of the way we operate. Now, whether it actually does or not, that's the difference between, you know, is it because an executive saw it at some conference and now they're being AIs that you should be 40% automated now through AI? Yeah, maybe, right? And so then they put that pressure downward. And does that tool actually exist to do that? Sometimes not. Each of the situations are very different, but the pressure is there. And if people are sleeping on that right now, they're gonna wake up and find their job is shifted so hard they don't know how to recognize where the coffee machine is. And so that to me is like that's if I was to stand on the roof, which is not a good thing. Um, never fell off a roof yet. I've done fell off lots of other things, but not a roof. And I would just say, like, that's what I'd be shouting, is be paying attention. If you're not, you need to be furiously curious right now. That's what I tell people. Like, you need to be intensely curious around what you can be doing to optimize. So even if someone's not asking you to change, you need to be a person setting that standard of this is how we should be making a difference. Because whether we want to, and I know this is a little comfortable statement to listen to. We ourselves just recently have seen where messages are not received well that change is coming. And I will say, I hate to say, I'm not the one bringing the change, I'm the one saying it's coming. Be prepared so you can take care of your family, take care of you know yourself, your your children, whoever, right? And so your family, because everybody, I mean my mom, who's kind of at retirement age as well, she's at the last year or two of her work, and her job is changing very so very fast. They're expecting expecting reports much faster. So I'm teaching my mom how to use Chat GPT and Gemini and all these other solutions, which by the way, I found older people for some reason seem to like Gemini. I don't know what the deal is with that, but we should dig into that at some point. But that's caused me to look at I can't ever look at traditional, go to a traditional sales role, traditional job again, because I don't want to necessarily be the one that's having my life dictated by it. And even even I say that, I know that's it will still be, but I want to have a little more control over that. And so I made the hard decision last fall to quit my job. And I I was at this job, I was helping an organization, and they were acquiring some small tech companies. It was very traditional tech, and they were doing some great things specifically for this organization as an Indian tribe, it is an Indian tribe, and they're helping their people kind of leave their nation. It's a full different story again, and I think you've heard some of that from some of the people on your podcast in the past. Tremendous amounts to unload. I could spend a lot of time talking about that. I'm still friends with that full organization, I'm still helping them in different ways. But I got to the end of the year and I was like, this is not for me. Like just that type of tech because it's more traditional managed service provider tech. It absolutely needs to be done. There's absolutely a need. I had left this AI startup where we were seeing the craziest, latest breaking things that are some of them are still just kind of coming to public, and some have been public for a while. But it was like it was wild to see some of that stuff from industry experts at places like Sequoia and you know these other places that they were like we present an idea, they're like, That's great. We thought about this, and we're like, nobody's thinking about that. So that's crazy. That's okay. Actually, that makes a lot of sense. So you're seeing these different, we had these perspectives, and I was craving that. And so I uh I made the decision, I had the conversation with them, and I just said, I need to make this change, and basically where I've moved into is a position of entrepreneurship again. I'm investing in four different companies, I'm advising in a couple more. One example, and I can't say their name because of confidentiality, they're not on LinkedIn, but they brought me in because they supply infrastructure management that specifically addresses AI scaling needs. And their biggest challenge was not building the tech, it was getting their salespeople to adopt AI-centric mentalities and tools, as well as their marketing department. Their marketing department needed to create a video. The one specific example before we create a 40-second video, it was a four-minute video and it was not from the snuff. I turned around with the tool and made it in maybe 20 minutes. And I was like, that's how we need to be operators. Not saying everybody has to do that all the time, but that's the mindset is that we can't just lean on our traditional tools to do the things that we were doing to get work done anymore. And so I didn't even know what that tool was, by the way, until I got presented with that challenge. I had to go find something, but that's the mentality. We need to create this curious mentality, and um, and then figure out ways for those things to start working for you. So, what I ended up doing, my primary thing is I'm focused on um a company called H Parallel. So I have invested in four different companies, like I said, of helping build four different startups. One's a cybersecurity, one is AI governance, which is eighth parallel, which happens to be based here in Richmond, um, one's an educitech, and one is a HackerTech company. So that's that's my dance card right now. Um, and we sit on a board and I sit under the board. So dance card's very full at this moment. I'm enjoying it. It's probably the most fun I'd ever had. But the what I so without necessarily being an advertisement for this organization, I think I loved it be that the thing that AI or the eighth parallel addresses, which is to me like this next wave of things that we need to be addressing.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

This is why I was so drawn to them when I this is the governance company, yes, okay is truth for AI.

Furiously Curious In The AI Wave

SPEAKER_01 30:45

You know, we've heard for years about things like what's the term? Um bias, no, not accuracy, uh well, what's the uh hallucinations, hallucinations everything else you said too as well. Yeah, and with all that, so we see these great tools. The question is not do we have powerful tools and powerful models that we absolutely do. We have great, and they're only getting better and a little bit scarier each time they release an update. But what we need now is this so if a tool says we're great, we're honest, and we're correct all the time, who's to say that that's truth? What validation is going on? So for us, the the reason I really kind and you hopefully notice a little bit of a trend around me, is what I really learned about organization is wrapped around trust. We're not there to replace a tool. What we're there basically to do is to create those tools as commodity. Are you familiar with the the phrasings of ontology? I was not a year ago. You I would imagine you are. Among other mindsets, that's one that we firmly embrace. And it's basically not just understanding what the answer should be, but what's the understanding around it? So, what providing more context than just hey, you know, favorite LLM? Give me this new uh give me a course menu for my entire week of all things I've been eating based on what's in my refrigerator. I've done this by the way. Take a picture of what's in your fridge, tell me make me a meal. And I love that because I lack creativity sometimes. It's going okay, but also aren't you on a diet right now? Aren't you doing like pulling these abstract contextualizations outside of it? Maybe it knows more about me because it saw my LinkedIn profile and it saw that I'm posting about doing something. So the idea is creating more of not just what the answer, like getting a quick answer, but getting a broader understanding around those information and then creating validation models around that. And so, oh again, the idea is not so much that we're gonna go in there and be this new palantier or be this open AI or whoever else is out there right now. It's about helping add either context or putting in maybe even a presentation layer that is custom to the customer. Because right now, almost everything is wrapping the customer around a tool. This the concept that we have here, and that mindset I think that we need to be embracing is wrapping the tools around the customer. And when you can create an abstraction layer, uh presentation layer and abstract it and disconnect it from whatever back-end models are, you can now have basically something that looks at all the different models and goes, Well, of all the models they're running, this company over here is consistently off by like 40%, and the other ones are only off by like 15%. This is a commodization conversation at this point. Swap it out, and it becomes a cost conversation, it helps reduce risk, helps make better decisions, things like that.

SPEAKER_00 33:44

All based on trust, like the value of trust.

SPEAKER_01 33:47

Yes. And again, not trying to be so much a commercial, I think that is what these last couple months have been teaching us around artificial intelligence. February 5th was a really big day in model release for both Anthropic and for Open AI. And they were trying to get out these new models, they both got them out the same day, which happened to coincide a couple days before the Super Bowl, which happened to have big commercials around both of them. And then I don't know if you tracked, I have talked with a few people on the board about this, but one of the big issues is that both of those models, for whatever reason, were caught in testing, producing results. They were being generous with the performance indicators of how that app would work in production. As soon as it was production, it did not meet the the same level that it said it would. And again, it was being generous, is the word I'll say, right? Because these are all friends of ours. But we need somebody that's going to keep those companies on the straight and narrow and then validate and frankly call them out when they're not. And that is not an easy task, it's a very heavy task. The mindset that I would say is that again, taking it away from a particular thing.

SPEAKER_00 35:00

You mean going toe-to-toe with uh Fortune 5 companies, uh trillions of dollars behind them is isn't easy?

SPEAKER_01 35:09

Um, it can be daunting at times. Uh the message I would say really kind of to everybody, because you know that's a bit more specific to me, is that people should be nimble with what they're using AI for and which AI tool or solution or how they're creating, what agents they're doing, what approach. Because everything we're doing now, the only thing consistent right now is change. Yeah, everything is changing so fast. I can't imagine being in a position like yours where you're responsible for this, you know, the these architectures and these applications, and also knowing that vibe coding is kind of new part of this, whether we liked it or didn't, at first, it doesn't matter, it's part of it now. And so the expectation, whether it's even the right thing or not, the expectation is now speed, right? Yeah, Frank over in uh you know in his garage, he can produce an app and make it go live on AWS in 15 minutes. Why is it taking us six months? Quality assurance, security, fat code, you know, all the things you would think that that make a difference in in your normal pipelines of how you build code, that all matters, but the expectation is still speed. So the point is, is whatever you're using, whatever you're doing, expect, you know, we're our I'm already seeing people who settled in to particular models and they've not changed them in three years. Like they might change like the versions of them, but they change the state of that company. But why are you not looking at other things? So all the things are changing so fast, and as we engage with any of these tools, we uh kind of constantly be looking at what that next that next thing is. One last thing I'll say is 18 years ago, I was at Norford Grumman. There was a gentleman, he's probably fully retired now. He was uh flying in from California to help us on this project here in every single week in Virginia, and he was one of my maybe not my first, but he's one of my in a long line of mentors over the years, and it was Jeff. And Jeff, I was trying to get this full-time role within Northrop Grumman that was a contractor for consultant for for two years, and I finally got it. He'd already rolled off the program after by like a couple months, and I said no, I was so excited. I was like 28 years off, so excited. I said, Oh no, I said, I said, I got it. This thank you for your help. And he goes, Congratulations. Now start preparing for your next role. Completely took the wind out of me. But that's the mindset we need to have. I'm so glad that you got this to work. Now start preparing for the next channel.

Quitting The Job To Go Entrepreneur

SPEAKER_00 37:39

That's a technologist mindset. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. I've spent all of my career, any part that I would like spend any time talking about, in that technologist mindset. My my dad preached to me early on that if you're gonna be in technology, you you got to keep learning because every six months something's gonna change about your job. And and that that persisted. I would say it it persisted because there was always somebody with a problem that needed to be solved over the last couple of decades, even without AI. And with AI, it just accelerates it even more. And everybody's trying to catch up and stay up to up to speed on the latest stuff by following this, that, or the other industry leader and testing these things with their spare time on their nights and weekends. And then if they are lucky enough to have really cool tools and access to them on their enterprise networks, they're actually getting real-world experience with them. What I'm trying to say is that the evolution is something that we're all agreeing upon now. The parallel, again, that I'm drawing on this is being a technologist and specifically one that that's worked in many different fields and now latest software engineering, I'm seeing the impact up close and personally. As AI over the last couple of years has learned about computer systems well enough to be able to write them themselves, that scares a lot of software engineers. A lot of developers are beside themselves of the fact that they no longer need to actually handwrite code. Yeah. This the only saving grace right now is that enterprise mentality of the things you said is like you can't just tell the system to build this thing and deploy it to your production users. You will fail quickly if you do that. So the engineering aspects of all of it are really important. Some of the software development aspects, many of the software development aspects are still important, but it hit the most capable, probably one of the highest paying roles. The fastest. And they're being commoditized through the nature of the commodity of AI commoditization of AI across various applications. The first one that's the most successful so far is coding. You got your WindSurf and your Claude and your GPTs, your cursor and codecs, all taking part in everything that we used to find to be of our unique value in what we did and hands-on coding and being able to like take an idea, design it, put it on paper, have some conversations, spend a few months thinking through it, and then developing it, right? And now you can do that in minutes. Yeah, you have a great idea, you can just tell the system to grow it.

SPEAKER_01 40:44

Artists are going through a parallel challenge right now.

SPEAKER_00 40:47

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so my point is not to harp on coding and software engineering. It's more like now that AI has done that to that industry, what's next? Yeah. Which is where you're going with this, is all industries are going to be impacted because we've been able to teach AI one of the hardest things. Now, since AI can code, it can research, what's to stop it from going and taking on the law industry or sales industry or manufacturing and you know, name the industry. So that's the direction I see it taking in the next couple of years personally. So what I was interested in digging into is you're considering yourself a sales guy these days with a technology background. How are you leveraging these systems in your day-to-day that is waking up other salespeople around you, especially in the companies you've invested in? And uh what are you getting on on your soapbox about with them every single day?

AI Governance And The Trust Problem

SPEAKER_01 41:52

Well, I'll tell you a funny story and then I'll answer that. About three years ago, I was I was not the earliest adopter of a GPT, but I was an ear early, I don't know, it was early for me, right? So it was 2023, I think, and uh maybe even late 2023, early 2024, and there was a CTO of a$60 billion technology company. I'll I'll give him grace because he texts he'll start texting me if we because I we hadn't talked about this ahead of time. I um I for the startup that I was building with my partner at that point, I needed his audience, I needed him to be an advisor on what we were doing because it was adjacent. And I we knew that we were ahead of them of this$50,$60 billion company, but we knew that they had a good mindset, and frankly, we wanted them to buy us at some point. So I did not know how I'm the worst cold caller. I had a ton of examples of cold calling either through LinkedIn, cold calling, so to speak, or through emails that failed. But I had a couple that were successful, so I trained a GPT on those. I said, here's here's examples of failure. Don't do that. Here's a couple slivers of success. Here's who I need to reach, here's the topic, help me build that. And it wrote me and I said it needs to be like three sentences, and it didn't. And I sent a LinkedIn message that was on a Friday night. I'm driving with my screaming crazy kids on Saturday afternoon. He calls me and he goes, I'd love to talk. And I'm like, now and what are you gonna say? No, this guy who's a founder of a major technology that got bought and now is the CTO of this much larger household name company. No, you're gonna talk to him. I said, I'm so sorry. Kids are screaming, like legitimately screaming. My eight-year-old was losing his mind. He's he was like you know, five or six at the time, and you just went with it and created a great relationship. But that in itself is like even that's dated now, right? That was mind-blowingly amazing at the time. So, hey, to my point, I can sit there and name a tool or name a process, it won't matter because it will be changing in six weeks. So I would harp more on stay focused and stay on on what's changing. Use AI to tell you what's changing, right? Use for your research tool, and that needs to be not no longer a monthly or a quarterly thing, it needs to be a weekly conversation that you're having with other people in the industry, with the tools that you have at your disposal, what's changing you might be paying attention to. Um, this is working well, because things like traditional cold calling are very dead. The whole smile and dial mentality that we had in the boiler room or whatever that was a long time ago, like that's gone. It still works, but that's mostly, frankly, scammers these days. And so that's one thing. And and two, it's like looking at anything though that's helping you organize your thoughts, especially if it's like post-meeting or for the day. To me, as someone who's a highly distracted, easily distracted person, like having something in front of me. I call in the end of the day, I have what's called a hit list, and it used to be manual, and now I have something to help me create this automatically. It looks and listens to what I'm doing during the day and it creates this for me. And the idea is that there is a document or a web page that's waiting for me when I open my lab first thing the next morning of all the things I didn't get done the day before, or the things I said I was gonna do, and mostly more leaning on that former rather than the latter. And I am you will find that I'm the busiest first thing in the morning because I'm going through those. So anything that helps you organize your thoughts, anything that helps you look at people from the perspective of what like. If you're trying to reach somebody, understand this has never been a better time to understand about their business. And so you go in a call and say, and you go meet them, you get their meeting with them, you have that big meeting with them. Do not show up. There is no reason, do you think, to show up uninformed. But going kind of rewinding just a little bit, talking about industry and how things are changing. I spoke in maybe just kind of on the edge of here's all these challenges coming out. The thing that I would say that is hope. I'm a big hoke, I'm a big optimist. Most of the time, probably when I shouldn't be, ask my wife. But I am I'm a huge optimist that yes, this life is going to be changing over the next six, twelve, twenty four months dramatically for a lot of people. But the hope that I inspire is that I would argue as a creator, as an idea person, people say I don't need idea people anymore. I say we need idea people now. We have never been in a better time to be an idea person. And that could mean to your subject matter, maybe you're a PhD, maybe you got maybe you spent 20 years as a florist, right? And you've had an idea for a long time, but that requires capital, requires time, requires talent that you don't have. You can spend$20 a month and go build that, or$100 a month and go build that. And you can tell it what to do. And when you have a problem, you understand, you can literally ask it, well, how to fix this, and it'll fix it for you. So from a creativity point of view, this is never a better time. Now I'm not saying it's always gonna be like that, but to me, I would embrace that. I would not turn away from that. So whether you're a legal, whether you're an artist, whether you're a creator, and even a developer, be embracing this change, these two because it's the world is literally ours right now, and the people that are falling behind are the ones that aren't keeping up with that, including looking at the trends of their neck, their you know, of their particular field. So I would be looking at if I'm out there, if I'm a developer, whoever, I would be looking at what's the trend of my role. Is it going away? Okay, well, where the where do you see the natural evolution of that role? So it's all these contextual things you need to apply. That was a I was very heavy into martial arts a very long time ago. I mean for a decade and a half. Anytime you get into like practice or college, it's not so much about hurting the other person, it's about just like finding as you know, detecting where that next hand's gonna go and figure out how to block it, and then you detect the next next hand's gonna go in the block, and just doing that over and over and over and over again. That's kind of the moment we're in right now is just keep paying attention, keep detecting. And yeah, so I don't even know what your question was at this point, by the way. I have gone down the road.

SPEAKER_00 48:03

You nailed it, man. Okay, uh, to be honest, yeah. I mean, I don't remember the question because I was just so deeply thinking about what you were saying, too. Yeah, um, yeah, so there's so much to that I wanted to say, and I let it.

SPEAKER_01 48:15

I have all the time for you that if you need to cut things into later or cut out, I'm that's fine.

SPEAKER_00 48:19

Yeah, by the way, whenever you explain your name of the table, you hear a pop, just so you know. Okay, yeah. I I won't let this go beyond another free recording time frame because it'll take me forever to edit. So now by the way, I think the editing part of these podcasts. Oh yeah. So anyway, there were a couple of things I wanted to talk about. One was AI ready RVA's role in all of this. Where do you see that? Also, where do you see like the future of work? What can people go and learn from an organization like AI Ready RVA? What what do you think they should be attracted to personally? And I think there was something else there I was gonna ask you about, but let's just start with that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 49:03

I'm gonna be cocky for a second, if I may. I'd like to believe the influence of AI Ready RVA is bigger than RBA. And I know that's our focus, yeah, but I would like to believe, and I personally share with other communities, I'm very connected. I spent a lot of time in San Jose and San Francisco and things like that. I talk all the time about what we're doing here. Why don't I mean I see those areas so very fragmented where I see this area very centralized. Now that's a very different work, and I'm not saying it's apples to oranges or something like that. But what I would say is to be cocked that you're saying it is that the influence of AI Radio RBA, in my opinion, is becoming bigger than just Richmond, although that is our further focus. It is to me the obligation of groups like this. So actually, I'll pull back. Sorry, long phrase words. If you're looking at an organization, if you're here in Richmond and you're looking at AI Radio RBA, you're like, what so what are what is the best way to get engaged? How can I help? And I again, this is gonna feel like a paid commercial here, but it's not if you're not engaged in a cohort, get involved. We have we're we typically hit capacity, but we're constantly opening more and more cohorts. If there's something that you're interested in, somebody mentioned something the other day that I don't think it was governance, but it was something else. Oh, that's what it was. Somebody asked for there was uh a gentleman I met for coffee and he's building an HR startup from a very different perspective we've ever seen. And I said, You should go talk to us officially, because I can't go do it on your behalf. Come talk to us about starting your own cohort. I said, That's that's a couple things are gonna happen. One, you want to bring awareness, not we have an HR cohort. I know we do, but we also have multiple cohorts around different things. I was like, go start another one, is my point. Exactly. Yeah, so I was like, go to the ones that we have, and if you're so to me, I've always been more of a salesperson that I don't like to chase, I like to be where people are going. And so to me, it's like if you you want to sell here at Richmond, you want to sell your new idea, or maybe it is an existing idea, go sponsor those cohorts and be there. The people you want to talk to are right there. It is to me the best type of networking you can do. If you are putting yourself out there, like you and I are doing right now, this is raw. Very little, unfortunately, I did not do a good job of pre-scripting here. We're putting ourselves out here. We're not selling a product, we're just truly trying to share some things that we see in the market. But to me, if you're trying to sell something, put yourself out there. Being raw is such a potent sales tool in a world where everything's manufactured now. Every LinkedIn post, every single one of them. It's not saying they're fake, it's just manufactured. Mine too, sometimes. When you can go there and be a human in a world of robots, you're gonna stand out. And so to me, quote that by the way, boom.

SPEAKER_00 51:52

I'm gonna steal it.

AI For Sales Workflows That Actually Help

SPEAKER_01 51:54

Please, please take credit for it. I'm okay. You can cut that out and just say that that's that's a Jason McGuinty. No, uh, but to me, like getting involved there, so in likewise, in any other community, if you are struggling to figure out where you want to go next, or oh, is there a threat to your job, or just maybe you're curious about artificial intelligence or quantum or whatever it is that seems to be applicable, be looking at these tech-centric communities. Never found a more friendly group of people. Yeah, we're we're kind of all in the same boat here, right? We're all trying to figure out. I mean, occasionally you'll find you know somebody that's not great. That's actually one of the things I love about this board, is we really don't tolerate a lot of that of that nonsense. Because there are some absolute knuckleheads out there, and don't spend your time with them. There's there's 400 solid people to replace that knucklehead. So if you're around somebody, they might be great with their idea, but they're a knucklehead. Find somebody else, find a different group. There's so many more better groups out there. And so, again, within specific to AI Radio RBA, again, get in those cohorts. I see people also know how to I they come to me for questions. I'm like, maybe the best thing you can do, or you're go to the legal pool. You know, you're in fintech, go to the fintech cohort. So, or or you want to do you have a you think you have a different spin on this, consider starting one. This to me is great. We want that growth, yeah. Um, and I'll go support you in your first couple months, right? So, yeah, I think that's the number one thing you can be doing right now is getting there, show up for the events, and um, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:28

Great. So, one of the things that you just triggered in my mind was when I was thinking about the previous question I provided you. You said it's a great time to be an idea maker or idea creator or idealist, whatever you said.

SPEAKER_01 53:44

It's kind of a slander for the last 20 years. I I've got a great idea. Oh, great. Do you have$500,000 to see that idea? Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 53:50

Well so the idea makers or or ideators out there are now capable of becoming builders. There was another um article I read on Medium. The guy said it is the best time ever to be a builder. And so if you're already a builder, it's now even a more more awesome time. It's like the time is is amazing to be a builder. And the I Dators are now capable of being builders. So almost everybody that has a creative sense in their life and a desire to go do something about that is now fully empowered to do that. Yeah, which is amazing.

SPEAKER_01 54:33

I have a neighbor right on the other side of this wall. He I've been blessed to have just phenomenal neighbors. I have not always had those. But these last 12 years living in this house, my wife and I and our kids, uh, he's 72, his wife's like 68-ish, uh, both retired technologists. He was a sales engineer for my VM, she was a sales BB. They have an RV. It's a 10-year-old, 12-year-old RV. He tinkers, he can fix anything. He has a nuclear engineering degree, he has uh an electrical engineering degree. You know, this guy can. I call him Mr. Wizard if you're old enough to remember who that is. So he can just create anything. So he's always like tinkering, and he's always fixing or changing or upgrading something on this RV whenever he brings it over here. And he asked me one day, this is like two years ago, do you know anything about Raspberry Pi? Is it like, well, I mean, I know a little bit. I'm not a developer by nature, but what are you looking to do? He's like, I don't like I have three or four different tempered climate control systems. I don't like any of the brains of them. I'm gonna build my own one. I'm like, what in the world? Because these guys are always tinkering, and I said, Okay, and she's like, I'm gonna learn visual basically and I'm going to build my own. I'm like, okay, good, more power for you. And about six, probably six weeks later, my brain went, you need to learn. Uh we actually put it on hold for a while. So this is actually as recent as like the end of the last fall. He we were talking about, and then a couple weeks later, I remember I said, Have you tried one of these solutions out there? So I introduced him to Claude. He has built his own completely unlocked solution that he's now putting on GitHub. Like he's 72 years old. This is to me is now empowered to do it. Yeah, exactly. So, and again, the plug that that's what we're doing with AgriTech is a lot of small median farms are their next generation, are gonna every farmer I've ever met. I grew up in the rural Ohio. Well, I grew up in Columbus, but I grew up outside the city, and there was farmers everywhere, and I did not meet a farmer that couldn't fix something like bailing wire or duct tape. And that same methodology applies, they just happen to have kids that know how to use coating and they can integrate it with their drones or their irrigation sensors. And so to me, instead of fighting that, let's embrace that and give them a way to a place to integrate all that. So, whatever that solution is, like that's the mentality we need to have. Is exactly what you said is the idea people have never been more enabled to be creators.

Idea People Become Builders Now

SPEAKER_00 56:57

Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that lovely story about your neighbor. I that's very inspiring. I'll tell you one about beer cans and a hinge someday. That's a whole different story. Um so you you said a moment ago, which I think is a is a is very aspirational about AI Ready RVA, and that is operationally speaking, it's really hard to start a cohort because we're not like fully operationalized with employment. Like everybody's volunteering, and you know, our our website just got launched like two months ago, and we're building this space right now. Um Will Willis and I are working on a the cohort management space in the website, and we'll be publicly launching it soon. But thinking about how hard it is to run an organization like this, I'd like your thoughts on what do you think that we should be building for the community, whether it's a space for displaced people to get get help or a place for stronger networking vibes and and being able to manage our cohorts better. Like what are one or two things that you think would be like important for us to become a more empowered uh technology-driven platform?

Career Coaching Tools And Helping Displaced Workers

SPEAKER_01 58:18

Yeah, um I think with the newer release of the site has been a great shift towards just that. I think we ourselves in Richmond are not immune to some of the changes that I would say both AI trends and the economy, and add anything else you want to uh as far as how it's been affecting attrition. We've seen a lot of job changes, a lot of uh layoffs in the last just couple weeks and months. Um, I think I assume you've known people, I definitely known some people that have been impacted trying to help a few people. And especially for the ones where the reason is artificial intelligence has replaced your job. That's a very tough pill to swallow because now you're going, I'm being replaced by a robot. I love what we've done with the site as far as coaching. There is these built-in modules, um, which I believe are now publicly released. Correct me if I'm wrong there. But I think that is when I was playing around with it just last week and you and I were talking through it, I was blown away. It's all things you can go do. You know, you can figure your way out within a GPT to and and you can muddle through. But what I like about it, it's curated, it's specific to the need and the challenge that has happened recently. And frankly, I think that wave uh or those ripples are going to be happening over the next few months and years. I think building on that, there's it's I I almost I don't want to solve by saying it's a great start, but it is a core foundation, I think, to a lot of people on ESPARIDAS and and to people who haven't seen it, please go check it out on the site. There is a career coach built into it using AI in the background. You upload your resume, you plug in your LinkedIn profile, and it coaches you on how like how to change it. I myself am going to start making some changes just because I really like the feedback and I was just testing it. It's not just a resume writer, it's actually coaching you on here's some cohorts you should be along to, here's some networking groups you should be plugging into, here's some certifications you should be looking at that's applicable to you. So for the people who don't know where to start, especially here in the industry in Richmond area, my goodness, start there. And the fact that we're now getting a lot of attention because this is something that I think started off fundamentally as probably a pet project two couple years ago is dynamically changing people's lives now. It's phenomenal. I can see that in itself being one of the biggest parts of what we do over the next few you know, months, years, is how do we help people in this transition and help them? Because we we ourselves are not immune to that. We are going to be going to it ourselves, and so we can sit there and talk and we're gonna be confident, but at the same point, we are all having that same internal conversation of how do I handle what's next? And the thing I would say about this, and I you asked two things, I can't think of a second thing off the top of my head, but it's just that we're all in this together as we go down that path. Understand we're not building this because we know everything, we're building this because we're discovering this and we're turning around and sharing it with you all immediately as soon as we can find this. And so, yeah, I would tell people to embrace that, and then I would talk to if I was looking in the mirror, I would say, keep doing those types of things. I would say keep finding ways to plug into the community, keep finding ways to talk to the governor, talk to the mayor. How can we help improve? What do you see that can help us improve? So, to me, that's dynamic about what you see on the site, expect it to change in six months because that's the world we live in. But it's better to change to be a wrap around the needs of the community.

Power Of Possibility And Closing Challenge

SPEAKER_00 1:01:50

Yeah, outstanding. Well, I think you just made it very easy for me to close this out because I was gonna ask what advice are you uh carrying on for the audience here today? And I think you just nailed it. Yeah, so put on a positive note, I would love for you to uh pitch for us openly, however you wish. What does the power of possibility mean to you? What does it mean to the community and why should people show up?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:17

Man, well last year was the first one and was my first one. I was just fresh on the board, and I did not know the waves of change that were gonna come. I came on because of the waves of change, and there was so much I could not have even predicted when I remember we all sat on the stage and I had a photo taken. I was like, this is a really cool moment. I did not know from that moment until this how dynamically wild this whole environment was gonna be. And so uh as round as far as like how fast how things are accelerating, I think we all knew they were going to, but to actually see it was just it still takes your breath away. So to me, this is a great time to kind of like pause. I'm a big fan of like if you win a deal, if you lose a deal, pause. Like stuff, you might like to freak out and lose your mind or go buy a brand new BMW, whatever it is, like just take a moment. Everything's gonna be okay because we're gonna make it okay. Not like everybody together, take this moment, make it a celebration of the things we learned, and make it about looking and getting excited and intrigued by the things we're about to learn. I think knowing that you're coming in here, knowing what's happened over the last 12 months, you're gonna walk in here going, okay, I realize I don't know what the next 12 months are gonna look like. And so just take that moment. Like a lot of people are getting overwhelmed right now. And I would encourage us to have this moment of like actually a celebratory moment. Might not feel it going into, but it definitely, to me it does. And then say, okay, we're gonna now take, we've got our positive, we took our deep breath, let's go finish running this race. And and basically get up and get inspired to start moving forward in whatever your path is gonna be. But meet people when you're there, talk to people, find 12 people you've never talked to, and go ask them their name. Try not to focus on what their employment is, try to focus on what the human is because we're focused on a lot of different data. Go find a human and talk about human things when you're there, and you'll have some of the best conversations every day.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:16

Beautiful. Thank you, Caleb.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:18

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:20

Alright, man. I'll see you around. See you later.