Money Don't Grow On Trees. It Grows in Go-To-Market/AJ Gandhi - Crystal Ball, B-School, AI ~ Spark of Ages Ep. 2

Are you ready to shatter the mold of traditional go-to-market strategies? Look no further. AJ Gandhi, Chief Growth Officer from Marlin Equity Partners, is your guide on this exhilarating journey through the landscape of growth marketing. Brace yourself as AJ deconstructs the old ways, advocating for an integrated, holistic approach that breaks down the silos between different departments of a business.

AJ brings to light the power of smart growth, discussing the Rule of X and its pivotal role in ensuring a company's success. His insights on the impact of AI on work, marketing, and customer support automation will reframe your perspective. Get ready to step into a world where AI is a tool for cost reduction, productivity, and enhancing customer experiences. Discover how, in the hands of a skilled strategist like AJ, this technology can revolutionize the way companies operate.

Finally, let AJ take you on a deep dive into the heart of startups. He shares valuable insights on identifying key customers, understanding their buying journey, and the importance of measured investments. Learn the art of building community, bridging divisions, and the balance between work and personal life. This episode is an exciting exploration packed with nuggets of wisdom that you can apply to your own entrepreneurial journey. So tune in, and let AJ's guiding principles be your roadmap to success.

Producer: Anand Shah & Sandeep Parikh
Technical Director & Sound Designer: Sandeep Parikh
Executive Producers: Sandeep Parikh & Anand Shah
Editor: Sean Meagher


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Website: https://www.position2.com/podcast/

Rajiv Parikh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivparikh/

Sandeep Parikh: https://www.instagram.com/sandeepparikh/

Transcript

Rajiv: 0:14

Hello and welcome to the Spark of Ages podcast, where we're going to talk to game changers of all kinds about their big world shaping ideas and what sparked them. I'm your host, Rajiv Parikh, and I'm the CEO and founder of Position Square, a digital marketing company based in Palo Alto. So, yes, I'm a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, but I'm also a business news junkie and a history nerd. I'm fascinated by how big world changing movements go from the spark of an idea to an innovation that reshapes our lives. In every episode, we're going to do a deep dive with our guests about what led them to their own Eureka moments and how they're going about executing it and, perhaps most importantly, how do they get other people to believe in them so that their idea can also become a spark for the ages.

Rajiv: 0:58

This is the Spark of Ages podcast. This episode is all about growth, and here to teach us something about growth and growth marketing is my friend, AJ Gandhi. AJ is a leader and go to market strategy expert. Currently, he's the chief growth officer from Marlin Equity Partners, but 18 years ago, Marlin is a global investment powerhouse with almost $10 billion under management. They have ownership in 50 companies, approximately two thirds of which are in North America, one third in Europe. They take a hands-on collaborative approach to partner with their portfolio company management teams to help them accelerate growth through a mix of organic initiatives and strategic add-on acquisitions. They have well over 200 investments and over 150 successful exits.

Sandeep: 1:52

This is great. I can't wait to have this conversation with AJ and find out what a growth officer does. That's the first I've ever heard that term. Well then, let's jump in. I got to ask chief growth officer? I'm the LA brother here, so I don't hear this. What is that? This is a new C-suite level title.

Rajiv: 2:19

Yet another C, another C.

AJ: 2:23

I think the intention of it is to be ahead of all things go to market. It's a holistic term for marketing, sales, customer success, post-sale things like implementation support.

Sandeep: 2:36

Do you still have a CMO? Do you still have a CMO in your company, or is it a different?

AJ: 2:42

Not explicitly at our company. We're an investment fund. We own 50 companies. Control positions are pretty much all of them. The role that I play is really that of an operating partner. I don't use my title much of anywhere, except when I'm trying to impress people. I suppose it does sound cool. It sounds amazing.

Rajiv: 3:07

I'm the chief growth officer. I'm growing things Exactly.

AJ: 3:09

There you go Definitely makes me sound more important than I am. No, funnily, I'm an operating partner in the firm and what we seek to do as a private equity firm is be in a position that we're actually supporting our portfolio companies and helping them be successful. It's title that the firm came up with to say hey look, we think go to market is a huge deal because, when you think about it, first of all, we invest in SaaS companies and over 40% of revenue is spent on sales and marketing. By far it's the most significant expense in the company and, of course, it's the enabler of growth. Given that importance, that's why we have invested in it as a firm and that's my charter is to work in partnership with the management teams of our company, Each of our management teams at our companies. They will have a CMO, they'll have a CRO, they'll have a chief customer officer, et cetera.

Rajiv: 4:09

If you look at go to market this notion of go to market a lot of folks in the software as a service world or the tech world might know what that is. They may even understand what it means to have a title of growth. But maybe if you can talk about what does go to market mean to you and why is it differentiated versus any one of those other titles?

AJ: 4:28

Sure, I would say it's about taking an integrated, holistic approach to marketing, sales, customer success, professional services, implementation and support. I think when you look at the way companies have been run historically, you've seen much more of a siloed approach where the marketing people focus on marketing stuff. Historically it would be brand. Over the last 10, 15 years it's become much more demand generation, but the metrics until really the last five, 10 years have really been focused on hey, our job is leads, but leads are just the top of the funnel. At sales, their focus is just closing business. I think the obvious reality that's it for most companies is, if you want it to work well, all these different functions have to work together in a really well orchestrated way. I think you're starting to see more executive leadership roles which actually play this more holistic, comprehensive role.

Rajiv: 5:33

The way to think about this is. Most of our energy in companies is. There's that excitement of closing a deal. Go, get a deal, get a new customer and close it. There's a lot of energy placed on that. I think what you're highlighting, aj, is just that a lot of companies are thinking less about what happens afterwards. It's like, yeah, I sold it, it's going to run, I have this customer account managers that work with them, but that's less important. I think what you're trying to think about is with go-to-market and this notion of growth is identifying those that will actually stick with you, those that what they call retail Retention. We're worried about retention and growth from that. Maybe you could highlight an example from one of your experiences like that, because I know you've been at multiple different companies, multiple different consulting firms, mckinsey Bain, at companies called Lattice Engines and Salesforce and Ring Central. Can you want to pick one and just talk about how being go-to-market oriented or even growth oriented changed because of that focus?

AJ: 6:41

Okay, Sure, you know, I think the easiest one to think about is sales force because it's a, it's a company that most people be to be. No, you know you have to use the product for kind of the sales here and product. And it's a classic example because you know, when you look at the very early days of sales force, it was actually selling the s&p. You know seable was the dominant player. Over time they actually prove that hey, this is actually good I user experience. So they actually start doing quite well against seable, but in pockets. So initially seable might still be there at the headquarters solution, but you might have divisions and business units that actually could make independent decisions. They would actually say you know what I actually want to use sales forces, my crm, and so that was kind of the initial seed that was established in the business.

AJ: 7:32

And of course step one was hey, when that seed make the customer successful. But once you're successful there, your goal is not just renewal. It was hey, maybe I got you know, one division within merrill lynch. You know some something within private wealth management. But merrill lynch is a giant company and has many different business units within it and of course now it's part of bank of america, but at the time merrill lynch is one of the first big, large financial services company. So step one after getting them successful was well, let's sell that same sales crm product To other business units and let's go beyond north america, let's sell it globally. So initially might have been just a couple hundred licenses that was sold into merrill lynch, you know, over time it became tens of thousands and that's something that my buddy, yeah ready monohand, played a big role in certain development what did they do when they?

Rajiv: 8:24

when they did that, was it just saying, hey, I want to put more resources on it? Am I gonna hire folks that really dig in on the on the on the customer side? Am I gonna like change the way my sales people sell like? Was there a couple things that you found when you, I think you you headed up a strategy group at the company to help think about the whole customer life cycle. So what is there something that you found specifically? It said what the company said hey, let me allocate resources there. And then you found some insight.

AJ: 8:56

You know, we knew to become a market leader you have to really win in large enterprise and when you're an emerging company it's hard to win those large enterprises up front. So we said, hey, we want to target those large enterprises. So there's a pretty straightforward targeting model that says, hey, let's go after big companies in hyphen industries. So pretty straightforward that you go after them. But the initial seed was this sort of hundred to two hundred licenses and there was a much bigger opportunity. This is where we actually really did apply some resource allocation judgment. So what we did was we actually built a strategic accounts program when we said, hey, what are the companies that were, for the most part, already in? We got some, we got a foothold, we received positive momentum where we're showing value and we're getting strong engagement by executives at the customer that they feel like this is a strategic solution for them and we're gonna identify this company's, we're gonna double down on those companies. I put extra resources is he suggested to say, hey, we really are gonna do something much more tailored and invest in the relationship to show how our solution can be strong and then build a strategy to expand. And so that ended up being done at Merrill Lynch. That ended up being done at places like Wells Fargo, the early big global accounts. Other ones are things like HP and it.

AJ: 10:20

But it didn't happen overnight, it took, it happened over time and that was really just with one product line. So it was hey, we got the seed and then we want to expand With that. We're just getting a broader coverage of the business with our solution. So that was kind of step one. Then step two is what's, what's the make them successful? And you kind of win that. You know, over time Salesforce launch new products and then also acquired a bunch of different businesses like their you know services, kind of see a run product and data com. You know technology integration platform, so that it became much more of a cross sell opportunity. And then Salesforce eventually launched more sophisticated Offerings versions of the platform. So then there was an upsell opportunity. So the thing to think about is when you take a company, what is the long term full revenue potential of the company? And then how do you build a plan to actually fully kind of penetrate that In partnership with your customer?

Rajiv: 11:21

it's amazing, right, because Salesforce had the underlying core of data about customers and how they were eventually acquired. Then they kept Looking at it, brought it out in the company and kept broadening it to different types of applications. So it's really cool. And then it's actually not that simple as just doing that. It's like you need folks that really think about it mindfully. So let's switch a little bit to what the environments like here in Silicon Valley. There's a lot going on right now. There's this crazy AI boom, generative AI right. Things were looking tough a few months ago in the In the venture capital world in terms of funding. Vc fundings was down like 60 70% year over year and they were layoffs with everything from meta to Google to not as much Apple, but A number of different companies in Silicon Valley were laying off. I think even probably some of your companies were looking to get more efficient. Now things seem to be getting better. Yes, no, maybe so.

AJ: 12:14

Well, I think things are. People have accepted the new reality that it's about smart growth and you know, balancing efficiency and growth. I mean in private equity. You know, because we're control position investors, we are always kind of focused on, you know, running companies in a disciplined way. You know, when you have control position, that means you kind of own the balance sheet. So if the company is burning a lot of cash, well we got to put more money into the company or just make sure that they don't run out of cash. And you know we don't want to go back to our investment committee to do that. So we feel what's important is to run the company in a responsible way.

AJ: 12:52

So we're very much rule of X oriented. So that means and what rule of X simple, for I'll give you the simple definition of it is you think about what is the percentage growth rate in a company and then what is the percentage operating margin or EBIT Margin percentage, and you add those two numbers together. What you'd like it to be is the sum of those two things to be at least 40%. So that means if you're really the only way to for us to like, really tolerate a company that's burning cash as well, you better be growing like 50, 60 plus percent reliably If we're gonna let you kind of burn cash like that and you know that can be a good investment, especially if you're more of a land grab kind of market.

AJ: 13:34

But I would say much more of our companies. You know we have them. You know you can't margin of more like 20% as well as a growth rate target of more 20%. So it's much more long term sustainable growth approach. If you compare that versus a lot of VC back companies, you know they're running at minus 30 to even minus 100% EBIT. You know that those ranges narrow as the company gets larger. But that's just burning a lot of cash and at a time when you know money was I highly available and virtually free because of interest rates, companies could do that.

Rajiv: 14:10

But that's not a long term sustainable approach and that's right, yeah, when, when interest rates now go up to 5%, which seems like a big number, but actually stop that big right. Some of us bought, got our houses at interest rates of like 8% more. So that was a time, a while I might be dating myself.

Sandeep: 14:26

It's not free and horrifies me For sure, because I wasn't one of those people, but yeah yeah, I hear the horror stories from my brother for sure.

AJ: 14:36

That's the risk free rate, especially for an asset backed transaction. You know, if you're trying to do leverage buyouts, you're paying closer to 10% for company and I suddenly becomes an extremely material cost, especially when you modeled that it was gonna be meaningfully less. And you know, depending on the terms from the lender, can be much more than 10%. And you know when you look at venture venture debt that's out there, it's meaningfully higher. So when you start doing discount rate models With 10% plus interest rates, it's a whole game.

Rajiv: 15:08

Changes, yeah, changes right, because before we're looking at yeah, when the cost of money is zero, right it's yeah it's like simple math one over zero equals infinity, so that I can I get you know, as long as I got growth, it doesn't really matter, right, but when you actually have a number there, you actually have a huge hurdle rate to hit.

Rajiv: 15:29

And so it sounds like with when would you put your outlook right now I mean before there's a lot of concern about recession people are taking preemptive moves. During that time, during that time, do you feel like that time is switching, it's over? Is there is a? Is this still a time for concern and watching things as heavily? I can tell you, at least in my business, marketing gets hit first. So we definitely saw the impact of slowing spend, lower budgets, getting more efficient, and then just recently it's a end of June, beginning of July All of a sudden, those things that were being held up are starting to pick up again. Not explosively, but they're picking up.

AJ: 16:12

Well, I think it's back to running your company in a smart way, and so smart way is you're still going after growth, but you're being much more mindful about the investments that you make and being much more focused on evaluating the metrics in the ROI. And I think for a while it was just kind of a race for growth and people, just through caution to the wind and there was a lot Growth at all costs.

AJ: 16:38

Yeah, very much growth at all costs. So I think that's gone. You know what's the market outlook, I think. So people cut back a lot in the first half. I think a lot of companies did cost reduction because they had to get their financials more in line to be sustainable and to preserve cash. That was critical. Where we go from here, I think everyone's just watching closely. I mean, what we haven't really seen yet is enough quarters to see hey, is this squeeze really going to impact earnings? In most the environment? For most public companies, revenue minus earnings equals cost. So if you're going to have earnings pressure, you're going to take out more cost. I think companies are just trying to be smart and much more efficient, which, after many years of kind of bloat, I think there's still opportunity. There's lots of different macroeconomic factors, so I don't have a crystal ball.

Rajiv: 17:38

I think you're still running it as let's see how things go, let's invest as we go. There's not necessarily a macro like turn it on, turn it off. Maybe before people are saying turn it off, be careful. And maybe now it's like okay, now run your business like a real business.

AJ: 17:52

I think that was the first thing. So I think there was a need to actually batten down the hatches and sort of tighten the ship. So that's what you saw occur in the first half. So now I think people have hopefully gone through most of that period of slowing down where they needed to. Now they're just focused on smart growth. I think the smart company right now is very much playing scenarios. We don't know what's going to happen in terms of the economy. Could things slow down? The consumer slowing down? Does it take a while for interest rates to really sort of hit? What happens with commercial real estate? What happens with some of these geopolitical factors?

AJ: 18:31

There are kinds of things that can hit an economy. So I think what we see our CEOs and CFOs doing is they're just being mindful about that and they have a number of different scenarios and we have very detailed targets that we kind of put out by quarter and even by month, and so you want to get a sense of what are the leading indicators so you can get caught flat footed if things turn on the downward side. At the same time, if you are able to grow, you want to make sure that you're fun to get, but using good judgment.

Sandeep: 19:00

So my takeaway is investing crystal balls. I think I got to get into that game. I'm going to throw a couple quotes at you and I want to get your reaction then. In the modern world of business, it's useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. David Ogilvy, and then also you've invented something new, but you have an inventive and an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business, no matter how good the product is. Peter Thiel. Well, these quotes are essentially saying the same thing, right, some business leaders across generation. Sales are. The ability to sell your product is critical to the success in business, and I think they resonate with how you look at a company's operations. Does that sound fair?

AJ: 19:38

Yeah, no. So I 100% agree. But let me say a few things in my own words. I think B2B companies are fundamentally about product, or you could say solution, and historically we just say more simply, sales. But now I more broadly say go to market. So it is about product and go to market.

AJ: 19:58

And if you look at many business schools, they don't really have courses on product and they don't really have courses on sales, including where I went to business school at the time, and now that's starting to change because I think there's kind of recognition, especially with the whole tech economy. But at the other day it's a very big market out there. If you look at number of companies just in North America with over 100 employees, there's like 125,000 companies. If you look at number of companies with over 1,000 employees, there's about 12,500 companies. So, and all those companies people are targeting.

AJ: 20:37

So you have to know who to go after and you have to know how to engage them across the buyer's journey, especially in a market where so much more of the buying process is being self-driven by the customer. It's not all occurring because the salesperson knocked on the door. Buyers are smart, they're getting educated, they're doing their own research, they're figuring it out themselves. So you need to not only invest in the different aspects of go-to-market, but you need to make sure that they're evolving with how customers are buying, and it just couldn't be more different than it was 10 years ago. The whole digital marketing world has evolved dramatically, and then the way that sales works and has had to work has changed dramatically, and I think we only had some acceleration of that because of the whole COVID experience.

Rajiv: 21:23

I mean, I think it's interesting what you said was like in business schools we were educated on marketing strategy operations finance.

Rajiv: 21:33

Those were the first few classes. Then you got into competitive strategy and general management. Very little on sales. It wasn't until I took a class on entrepreneurial management that they got to my field, which is what I was in before I got into business school, which is sales. So question for you is like when you got into all this right, you actually focused on sales Right. Even when you went to various consulting firms like Bain McKinsey, you went into sales-related fields. What got you into it? What drove you towards that Is like oh, this is a missing thing of some thought, or is it a missing sign, a missing capability?

AJ: 22:10

Yeah, AJ, what's your spark? What's the spark? So I think there are various sparks.

AJ: 22:15

Over time, my pre-business school career, I was at Bain and what I observed at Bain there was three types of work strategy, cost reduction and growth-oriented work. Cost reduction was not a lot of fun. I didn't really enjoy it. Strategy was interesting but it was hard to really think about a long-term career on that. My favorite project was with a big food company and helping them do sales force effectiveness. They had 30 sales regions or sales offices and I worked with them hand-in-hand to basically build a CRM and build a territory planning and a campaign strategy and all their metrics and I spent almost a year and it was super exhaustive. So I generally just saw the importance of it and kind of loved the work.

AJ: 23:01

I then went to business school. Sorry, I'll talk a little bit more about the business school experience in a moment and sort of what was missing at the time. That thankfully, has been addressed. But I went to Harvard Business School and didn't have any courses offered in the curriculum on sales. There was a course called Business Marketing and that included sales as a subset and what I later found out was there's a professor named Ben Shapiro, who was before my time at HBS, who had been retired and he was the sales professor.

Sandeep: 23:32

But then no one else Different Ben.

AJ: 23:34

Shapiro.

Sandeep: 23:35

Right, very different. Ben Shapiro, very different, not the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah, different one. There's probably a few Ben Shapiro's out there.

AJ: 23:41

He was concerned that there was no course on sales but no faculty member wanted to teach it because the average faculty member was much more of an academic and they didn't actually mix well with sales people. They didn't understand each other. Sales people thought academics were kind of BS and the faculty members didn't know how to connect with sales people. So that was kind of a second one and I recognized the gap.

AJ: 24:02

But the third one was I did a startup after business school and what I realized from that startup was two things would be to be matter product and sales and I didn't learn much in business school about either one of them, and this is Harvard Business School, so that was like the spark for me. So when I you know, thankfully we managed to get an exit from the dot-com era kind of startups, I just kind of realized it and I was actually head of sales for the first year of that company before we brought in a hired gun head of sales. I learned tremendously from that experience and that's where the spark really came for me. And literally these basic things like sales and marketing is the most expensive thing on the income statement. It is poorly understood by CEOs, CFOs, boards, investors.

Rajiv: 24:48

It's a black car. Yeah, it's a black car. Yeah.

AJ: 24:50

Yeah, and it's like, if things didn't go well, you fired the head of sales and got another one, and well, guess what? You ended up firing that guy as well, or Gal, and so I think that. But what I came to realize is there's actually a lot of, there's a lot of different levers for running a sales organization and there's a lot of structure to it. And in fact, I'll kind of put it this way you know, look, sales is very much. A huge component of it is process. I mean, yes, there's a bunch of art in there as well, but there's a lot that's processed.

AJ: 25:21

And if you actually look at the other things that are processed, like manufacturing, well, we've had Six Sigma endeming for like 70 years to optimize things to Six Sigma. If you actually look at sales, sales is like 0.2 Sigma. There's crazy amounts of waste, there's crazy amounts of variance in terms of what does one rep do versus the next, so it's just really a badly run function. Historically it's evolved a lot, just like marketing has over the last kind of five to 10 years. So I think that and I worked for a boutique consulting firm where I had a chance to work with just a ton of companies, and that's where I really kind of got my spark and my passion for this and I just thought is unquestionably it's the biggest value creation opportunity in any B2B company is optimizing, go to market, and I worked with like 100 companies literally every single one. I can find multiple levers to improve the business either growing the business 5% faster or improving productivity by 5%, and that's not a big number.

Rajiv: 26:22

It's huge. It's huge. I think it's one of these things. We kept thinking it was a dark art. We kept thinking it was a bunch of closing techniques. It's a bunch of clever things that you say to win someone over, it's the best pickup line, like as if you're at a bar, but it's really not. You can design those pickup lines and it can totally change based on that. So I wonder this is awesome to learn about what drove you into this whole field.

Rajiv: 26:48

Let's talk a little bit more about the innovation mindset with regard to sales or go to market and what you're seeing as either technologies or techniques that's enabling greater innovation in this field, and this is not just. I'd say that, while SaaS companies tend to be a little more into this, this is what they live in, because they see it as such a big line item and how important it is to drive growth. But I think it's broadly available, broadly applicable to anyone anyone starting a company or building a company and thinking about that notion of what drives. How do I get greater innovation in this area of go to market? What are things that I could do to really enable me to move quickly and then get deeper into it?

AJ: 27:37

Yeah, you know, I think over the years there's a bit, there's been a bunch of things. So software tool the first, first of I think you do have to think of it holistically it's not just sales, it's very much marketing and some of the other things. So, you know, we start off with like sales CRM. Now there are all kinds of tools for driving demand generation. You know, I think some of the account-based tools, like Demand-based success, are actually really really important tools and especially the whole kind of intent data thing that they've developed. I think managing customer success in a really structured way is important. So I think these are all, but these are all kind of like foundational tools. Of course it's time to talk about AI, because that's got got all the buzz over the last you know number of months in particular.

AJ: 28:23

And look, I think the reality is, if you look and we go back to, hey, go to market is a lot of process and a ton of resources. There's a big opportunity for efficiency and effectiveness improvement Across go to market and I think AI can actually help us a lot there. And I think in most places, it's less about you're gonna replace. I think in most places it's gonna be about augment and you're gonna make things better. The one place where you can't see more of a replacement opportunity is maybe in customer support. So customer support, if you think about it in an old-school way hey, people calling into a call center, you know, like how many calls can an agent handle in an hour?

Rajiv: 29:05

Easy, easy place for cost reduction and efficiency measure right exactly coming in. I'm good they're coming. They're gonna call me anyways. They're gonna call my airline anyways. Let me try to earn my credit card anyways. Let me try to answer the questions right up front. That's Tyler the. Then let me give you a chat thing where you put in a bunch of stuff and it gives you some pre-baked answers. But maybe you can go further. Where they I right with this. Maybe it could be more natural and more personalized.

AJ: 29:31

Well, I'll give you a bunch of different use cases within customer support and I think how it actually drives that ought that kind of automation Capability, which is what everybody's seeking, because the volume if you're a consumer oriented company or an SMB century company is crazy. I mean, when I was at Rick central, we had like 700 agents On customer support within like a 4,000 person company because we had I don't like 300 400,000 customers. So what you try to drive is automation and the benefit of AI is first of all, your knowledge base. So you can like scoop up all this information of everything, all the historical calls that you've had in your customer interactions, plus your product info, and put it into a knowledge base. That knowledge base can be made available both for the end customer to actually self serve to say, hey, how do I do X? You know, imagine typing in something into a chat, gpt like thing, but it's for how to use your product, so it can be used that way.

AJ: 30:26

But it also because you're still gonna have agents that the hope is. First of all, you need less agents because customers yourself serving much more of it, but second, you're able to actually have the agent be way more efficient because they can get the answer much more quickly Instead of having to pull in a specialist. They have access to that same system and probably more than what you're gonna put in front of customer, so that drives big cost reduction. What it also does is you know agents and customer support turn over quickly, so you're gonna actually been able to ramp those agents to productivity much more quickly. So here on customer support, if I want to pick one area that I think is gonna get the greatest automation opportunity, it's probably in customer support a lot of what these AI vendors are saying.

Rajiv: 31:10

Does that, unlike the hallucinations that are coming from like? You use chat GPT and it's wonderfully imaginative. It's a great way to say hey, I'm gonna speak to this crowd today. Give me five different ways of talking to them, from humorous to serious right, or speak to it in the voice of Bugs Bunny. Or speak to it in the voice of Barack Obama right, you can. You can really do some interesting things with that.

Rajiv: 31:37

But, when it comes to getting accurate information, that may not work. So there's actually a form of the AI where you can pull Company information, make sure that it's true and real and combine it with some of the more creative aspects. So that's one. So I can take a and if they actually talk to a real agent, I can take that agent, who may be in the bottom 20 percentile or brand new to the company, and lift them up to be the 80th percentile. Right, somebody was really sharp and really good, like when you call in for when you call into United, and you get the really good one that knows that's right.

Rajiv: 32:08

That doesn't just follow the script, that actually knows how to get stuff done for you, right? So there's, you can lift people to that level with AI.

AJ: 32:16

That's right.

Rajiv: 32:16

So that there's huge power in this.

AJ: 32:19

Right, very much. So. I mean, I think the worker productivity thing is is huge. So, yeah, I think support will be super transformational with AI and it's happening very, very quickly.

Sandeep: 32:30

I guess I'm wondering, for you know, because you mentioned cost reduction, right, like that can be a euphemism for we're slimming down the workforce big time, and you know. So, what happens to these workers, like, I just know a lot of my buddies, right, they do customer service, you know, as a as a day job, to to then support their creative endeavors. Yeah, how are we, you know, bringing everybody along so that they can be trained for tomorrow's needs?

AJ: 32:52

Yeah. So I think what the mindset of the worker has to be hey, work is evolving, so I need to evolve as well, and so you know who the. Let's say you want to stay in customer support. You know who, the people who are going to be the most valuable, and customer support it's the people who embrace these new tools and actually become experts in them, and this will create all kinds of opportunities for them. One if you just want to stay a support agent, well you'll be way more productive as a support agent than the next person if you're embracing these tools. But if you actually really embrace these tools because you actually really understand the customer support function, plus you understand this technology, well you can actually probably build a career that actually takes you to the next level.

AJ: 33:34

So, look, if you're somebody sits on their hands and just says, hey, who moved my cheese, and Then I think you're kind of screwed. Or you, you're just you're, you're gonna get diminished, and I think the changing workplace full of innovation, that's just kind of a loser's game. You, you need to be continuously learning. You know, are there other Other areas that are hiring? Yes, but I think you want to be proactive in embracing these technologies and figuring out how you use them to your advantage.

Sandeep: 34:06

Yeah, I gotta dive in. Start using them, start start messing around with them, start understanding how they can. They can augment your skills.

Rajiv: 34:12

I think what I think. So they've to your point like what's really different from today Versus in the past? In the past we would say, oh, there's a new technology, but look, there was a time where there were people who used to just press elevator buttons right Right there were. There was a time where people used to just change signals on lights, yep, or clean up the poop from horses I think that that were going across trees. But I think this time is a little, a little more.

Sandeep: 34:38

Accelerations right.

Rajiv: 34:39

Yeah, because we're those. Other technologies took decades.

Sandeep: 34:43

Yeah, that's right.

Rajiv: 34:45

To any meaningful scale. They like. You know, you looked at a lot of these and you're like, oh Okay, this looks cool, I could see the future, I can make a cool video about it. Right, remember Microsoft information at your fingertips, but the reality was that the computer was crashing all the time. I'm dating myself so. But this is like. I can write something, I can put a prompt in and it comes out way better than I would have thought about it. Yeah well, maybe not for you something because you're a good writer, but maybe for, maybe for one of us, right? So how do, like, I wonder, it's just open question how do we all think about it?

Sandeep: 35:20

Yeah, the velocity, right, the velocity of change. You had time to become something else besides the elevator button pusher.

AJ: 35:25

Well, well, here's, here's. Here's what I think is different about this. This is hitting a community of people who never really expected to get disrupted like this, and that is knowledge workers.

AJ: 35:37

Like well, if you think about what is the use case for AI, that's arguably the biggest one and I would say it's from an Augmentation, it's not a replacement standpoint. It's engineers who code. Suddenly you can code with these like sort of copilot tools. You can code way more quickly and you know same thing. For, like you know, if I'm a marketing writer, you can write way more quickly and it's gonna, it's gonna give you a running start and that enables you to again Be, if you embrace it, more productive, if you're doing in marketing. I'll talk about the marketing use case a little bit now, but I think that's what's been the shock for a lot of people, or sort of the big watch out.

Rajiv: 36:17

Yeah, there's a McKinsey study is open. Anyone to see they were saying that for PhDs, ai can impact up to 50, 50, some percent of their work. So, all of a sudden, a lot of their expertise and going out looking for studies, building off of studies, driving those studies it a PhD level person is finally being impacted. Before Anyone that was a knowledge professional, anyone that was writing code Sure, there were code, there were Things that allow you to write better code faster. There were security checkers and ways of making it more efficient. But my guys on my team today they tell me that as they start to write a line of code, it doesn't just auto complete, it actually pulls a full module from code repositories, places where there's lots of code, and then modifies it to what they're writing right now. It's that ridiculously fast.

AJ: 37:17

Absolutely. I'm less the technical leader, but you guys have a big, massive technical team at Position Square, so I know your team is actively taking advantage of this. My colleagues who are CTO yeah, we're looking at it in all our companies to just say, hey, we all need to be thinking about the impact of AI and developing a strategy. I'll shift to another part and that is marketing. I think that's the other one where I would again put it in the augment category. I'm not going to go into a large language model tool like chat, gpt and have it write stuff that I'm going to just go send out. I don't need to look at it. What it can do is it can help you generate that draft very quickly, do a lot of the research for you.

AJ: 38:05

I think it really enables from an effectiveness standpoint is enabling the personalization, because a lot of B2B companies look, a lot of people have demand generation Strategies, of course, and you'd love to tailor things as much as you can, but it takes a lot of work.

AJ: 38:24

It takes a lot of time to say, hey, here's how my solution, here's the value proposition, here's how it varies and impact for different industries and here's how we target it to a different persona, like a CTO versus a procurement leader versus a sales leader versus CFO, blah, blah, blah. Well, suddenly you actually have the ability to do that kind of tailoring with these tools and there are some really good ones out there, whether it's Jasper Copyai, a company called Rider. Those are the three that we think are especially interesting in the space. People are experimenting up with it and that's actually very much. The goal is to say, hey, I was at Ring Central for a bunch of years and then also at Salesforce. These are horizontal solutions like telephony in the cloud, ring Central, clcrm. They're not industry-specific solutions, but people are thinking about, hey, what is the business value for my industry?

Rajiv: 39:21

Yeah, I think you nailed it on the head. I mean, marketing is one, or even sales is one. Where you can marketers can help the salespeople completely customize their conversations with someone. So it's like oh, you're AJ, you live in Silicon Valley, you've had this kind of, you've had a background of innovation and strategy for sales, go-to-market, revops, that kind of thing, and I could tune something to you. I could even figure out your personality. I could do a little disc profile and figure out do you like long things versus short things? You want detail, do you want straight up to the point?

Sandeep: 39:57

Yeah.

Rajiv: 39:59

Do you like going to a golf event or do you like going to a concert? You can basically write these. Things can literally almost write themselves, and because it's marketing, you're going to review it before you send it. That's right. So it's not like doing, it's not like you're in surgery and OpPops on your screen well, this is the next cut you should make to the artery. You're not going to trust that. It's a whole different thing. So, aj, if you had a favorite technology innovation and it doesn't have to be AI or something geeky like SaaS or there's a favorite tech innovation that you have it could be in cars, it could be in anything. What pops to mind?

AJ: 40:41

I think Spotify. I love music and just to be able to have the world's music at my fingertips and being able to tailor it to my interests and share it with people and help it have it, help me discover new artists that I like. I think music is one of the most universal, maybe the most universal art, I would actually say, because it doesn't matter language, age, whatever. If I were to think about what's a service that I love that's sort of enabled my enjoyment to the next level, it'd be something like a music service like Spotify.

Rajiv: 41:23

Exactly, you have kids too, so it's a way I find it cool that I can get my kids' playlist.

AJ: 41:29

That's right.

Rajiv: 41:30

I can riff off of their playlist.

AJ: 41:32

Then you're like, oh my God, it's like what are they listening to?

Sandeep: 41:35

Yeah, I was just talking about this because the kids can't really rebel and go off and listen to their own thing now my parents had no accessibility to. If I wanted to buy a Red Hot Chili Peppers album when I was younger, they weren't going to be able to listen to that on their own, no way. They didn't know what I was getting into. Now I can listen to anything that any of my nieces and nephews or my kids are into and be like yeah, you know what I like that punk band too. It truly is. It truly is, yeah, right, an incredible innovation.

AJ: 42:05

That means all innocence is lost, of course at a much earlier age.

Sandeep: 42:08

Yeah, yeah, my son, my four-year-old son. We took him to a John Williams concert because he knew the whole canon, because he hasn't seen any of the movies. He's four, he doesn't watch screens, he's listening to, but he knows oh, that's the Jurassic Park soundtrack. So he's learning movies and IP from the music first. All thanks to Spotify.

AJ: 42:36

No, I have a quick comment on music. I think it is just so immensely powerful. Can you imagine watching any film without a musical score? No, you can't the film would be flat and just.

Sandeep: 42:51

Music is your tether to the emotions. That's exactly right and that's what you want out of a visual experience anyway, or any of these art forms. You want an emotional experience, and music ties you along in a way that almost no other medium can, I think. So it's impossible to imagine for me.

Rajiv: 43:08

So, aj, I know you're kind of a fan of going to music festivals, so is that your way of unlocking?

AJ: 43:16

It is. Yeah, I actually I just enjoy all kinds of genres of music. It just came back from a great trip went to Montreal and Quebec City and Montreal went for the Montreal Jazz Festival. So live music every night, giant stages. And then, actually it was kind of a surprise Went to Quebec City didn't realize there was a music festival and there's this massive music festival. So Weezer and a band that I now love, the Foo Fighters, that are just it was just super fun and it's and Deep was saying it's sort of the I forget how you put it exactly, but it's sort of the gateway to emotion and to energy. It's like what does an athlete do before? Like a big event or big performance or anybody you know. You pump yourself up with music and I just think it's such an amazingly powerful force.

Rajiv: 44:09

It's incredible. Yeah, I just found that by going to the music festival instead of like. Usually, if you go to a concert, you go to things that you know and like. Right, because you're gonna pay a lot of money. Yeah, I mean, you're gonna pay a lot of money you might as well go to something you know and like, and the festival exposes you to so much more. I had a chance to do that with some good friends Towards the middle to tail end of the pandemic and I got exposed to so much incredible music that now has become part of my Spotify playlist. Yeah, never would have I. I was exposed to trends that I didn't even see. So and then I would. My kids, I'd, my kids are, they're beyond teenage years. So I write hey, I'm listening to this and they're they're, and I'm like this is kind of amazing. They're like, oh, papa, that's kind of funny. You know they'd make fun of me like I'm so out of it, but they're like I can't believe you're into my, my, the same thing I like.

AJ: 44:58

Yeah, like they didn't know that you were like seriously into Megan the stallion, huh.

Rajiv: 45:03

Oh, just yeah.

AJ: 45:11

No, it's, it's, it's cool. I actually I've been like this obvious pro tip for folks but like go put in Lollapalooza 2022 playlist and you'll like find all the stuff. Like, if you can't make it to Chicago and make it, you know, shell out the hundreds of bucks for the tickets. You can get that kind of exposure and anyway, for me, music is life.

Rajiv: 45:32

It's really awesome. So, asia, one of the things you have done is, in addition to working for early stage companies larger ones, big consulting firms, large firms is, and and now you're helping all these mid-sized companies get successful is that you've also been involved in Go to market, but for early stage firms. So if you were to give advice to entrepreneurs today who are now Potentially dreaming up the next business, what advice would you give them? I know you're doing seed stage, go to market funds, mid stage ones especially, and doing it at mid and large.

AJ: 46:07

Oh, right, right, yeah, it's really Neil. The basics. I think the first one is It'll sound really obvious and maybe try it's like, really understand the customer. What, what business problem do they have? And solve a relevant business problem? Who cares about it? What's their slice on it? How does the IT leader thing versus the CFO, versus the head of sales, versus the head of operations? So it's a really kind of nail the crap out of like defining the problem and understanding the personas and Because at the end of the day, you're not selling a product or if you are, you're gonna get commoditized pretty quickly. It's about hey, what is that problem? That and demonstrate that you understand extremely deep level and Then work with them to help solve it. And the way you're gonna understand it is actually go talk to prospective customers pretty intensely. So that's sort of number one is you're sort of crafting what problem you're trying to solve with your solution and then how to position your value proposition. That's number one.

Rajiv: 47:03

And is that what you guys will do as part of that? Go to market fund, help them hone how that raw concept and some maybe initial traction Will help them scale. Is that, is that, what you think about doing as part of these?

AJ: 47:18

Yeah, I mean our kind of the funds you speak of. It's that there's a couple funds once called GTM fund, once called stage two capital. It's that what's unique about them is their early stage investment funds. But the limited partners are Our sales and marketing executives, and so we bring some expertise there. You know the cup, the management team still gotta do the work, so we're not doing like the hands-on customer interviews etc.

AJ: 47:45

But if you are a startup leader, these are the things that you need to do and they're there. They're probably some companies where you get a little bit more involved than others, just depending on the situation. That's number one. The second one that I would say is just think really intensely about your ideal customer profile. There's a lot of people that you can sell to. I think in the beginning you just really need to think about it this way what is the type of company that is going to get the is experiencing the, the most pain by the problem that you're solving for and for which you can provide the most value? So I'll give you a bigger company example.

AJ: 48:21

When I was at ring central, we had we're trying to move people to cloud-based phone systems, away from those you know. Pbx is in the closet. It was really multi location businesses that needed to communicate a lot with other people externally, so doctors offices and the like clinics, labs, things on the healthcare side and Healthcare providers side ended up being among like the first targets for us, because the importance of the use case like the reality is like 40% of phone calls into doctors offices are never returned or never answered Because people are busy so painful tending to patients.

AJ: 48:59

Yeah, it's like absurd. So that's, that's the so. Once you define that ideal customer file profile, then be super intense about, you know, identifying your target list of companies and going after them. Because the reality is, when you're an early-stage company, you have very limited marketing and sales resources. There's no way that you can cover the entire market. So what you want to do is you want to figure out who are those customers who can gain the most value and then you want to be just Really focused on winning that business. And yes, you can do Google AdWords and SEO to actually drive inbound demand too, and you should do some of that, but you should be heavily focused on trying to win over those potential customers who right, and I think I think earlier stage in that is that you have to.

Rajiv: 49:38

Not because a lot of people use Google and SEO as a way of trying to attract folks. That's great if you're doing consumer work, but in business to business, you got to talk to real people. That's right, and so if you're shy, go find someone who's not shy.

Rajiv: 49:52

That's right, hold your hand and and because a lot of folks they get one deal or one show Expression of interest and they think, oh my god, I nailed it. No, go sell 10, really sell 10, and find out what their pain is and be curious about it, otherwise it just won't happen, right, and that's that's critical.

AJ: 50:10

Yeah, I think the final bit of advice, the third one I would give, is make measured investments. You know, look, in the beginning you're learning, so you actually don't really want to hire, like, let me go hire the, you know, expensive head of sales and right Sales reps. It's like you, you're still learning. So, first of all, the head of sales should really be like the founder of the CEO and the other executives, so you're gonna be involved in winning those initial deals. So don't burn all these resources until you figured it out. That's right, I remember. I mean like I'd be able to acquire a company. This is back my management consulting days. And then they say, okay, great, we're excited about this product, we're gonna hire a hundred reps. Well, you haven't figured it out. The only thing I can guarantee you is two things you hire hundred reps, they're gonna sell a hundred different ways. And then, number two, you're gonna have terrible numbers because you most of them will be doing it wrong.

Rajiv: 51:02

Right, most. It just doesn't translate yet to a large sales effort until you get enough traction or enough people Buying it in a particular way. So it's not just buying it, but it has to buy in a particular way of buying. That you can translate to a sales.

AJ: 51:18

It's understanding the customer, their buyer's journey, and then, once you do understand that it's about you want, you want to hire a bunch of people when you have a replicable sales model that's going to have a predictable level of Productivity and that's what you just have to be really disciplined on before spending too much money, and I think that's been a mistake over the past number of years for a lot of companies. That's like hey. It's a race we got to go and, but they ended up burning a lot of cash inefficiently.

Rajiv: 51:48

That's right, exactly All right, aj. So now that you've, you pretend you could be in the multiverse and start a parallel life. Right, and you want to go and start something new because you know you love what you're doing here and you're going to create an alternate AJ. So, uh, what would you start and what would you do? Would it? Would it be around what you've learned in business? Would it be around things that you love to do music, skiing, tennis? Would it be a book? Would it be a podcast? Would be a video game? What do you think? What would you want to do?

AJ: 52:17

you know, from a professional standpoint I'm pretty charged up about still kind of good a market. So it would be to be honest, I have thought about it enough. I don't have a specific in mind. I can tell you some problems that I see. I see there's a crazy amount of variance in the effectiveness of salespeople and I think there's actually a massive amount of data that exists about are those people good or not, and it's well beyond what you see in a CRM and I think there's a way to actually codify all that information and get insight and, you know, frankly, probably turn that into a business. That's one thing, and you know I think the other one that I would highlight.

Rajiv: 53:00

Would you throw? I mean, you throw amazing parties.

AJ: 53:03

Yeah, no, that's that's. That's that's where I was gonna get it. Would you become like the super?

Rajiv: 53:08

look, think about AJ, right he's, he has a house that he got mostly because he likes to throw good, good, great events. He's like, yeah, good entertainment house. He is like the membership. He may not be that entitled, but he's like the membership head of like three different clubs. Whether it's entitled or just in his flow through, he's a.

AJ: 53:28

Harvard.

Rajiv: 53:28

Business School alumni board. I mean, yeah, you wouldn't. You would not come off as an extrovert if I first met you, but somehow you've transformed yourself.

AJ: 53:38

So I'm kind of situational Reggie, but here's the thing I'm probably passionate about as well, and that's community building, and I think a lot of things in our society have actually broken down for a lot of reasons. It's more than just COVID, covid. What I found coming out of COVID was I miss being around people and I want to be. I had a great set of friends, so I maintained a good community of close friends during COVID, but I wanted to expand out and meet other interesting people. But I don't want to go to random things. I wanted to meet people who are in areas that I care about, people who have backgrounds that I respect. So that was one thing that sort of drove me to set up these communities. I is what you're referring to as I host stuff, a variety of things, here in the communities. One is like go to market executives. I'm starting to do stuff with other VC and private equity leaders. Third is social, and I work it through alumni organizations of, like you know, top schools and MBA programs and I enjoy that.

AJ: 54:42

There's actually one other reason why I think this is super important. This is a total soapbox issue for me. I think the level of discord that we have and are just sort of civil dialogue. It's. I think it's just really alarming and horrible. I think it's destroying the fabric of our society and I actually think that there's an entity to blame for this in particular the fights between, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans and and just sort of the, the absolute lack of collaboration, and it's actually not the politicians, it's actually the media. It's actually the media. I think the media has poisoned, is poisoning our society. Daily television news. I don't think there's any more form of toxicity in our society than CNN, that MSN, dc, then Fox.

AJ: 55:30

News and whatever you know crap you know some conservative politicians create. They have just monetized, you know, people fighting with each other. No, it's far more than fear. They monetize just acrimony. They're like, hey, suffering.

AJ: 55:50

I'm going to make the Democrats hate the Republicans even more, and I know you hate the. I know you hate the other side, so I'm going to do it even more. I hate to pick on them, but not really. You know the other one, actually my, my daughter, kira, was actually talking to me about this and sort of educated me on this insight.

AJ: 56:06

You know, the other force that's actually really, really dangerous out there is actually social media and it's it's the ad targeting. So if you're on Facebook and they know that you're, you know, really extreme on one side or another, they the term that she told me is that they bubble you and so like, well, we're only going to direct ads to you that are going to reinforce this negative belief that you have about the other side and it's going to demonize even more. So the sides get further and further apart, and that's why I think when an average intelligent person which probably the three of us are, you know goes into the like the political dialogue, I mean it's insane how toxic it is it's so hard, it's so hard, you end up in a.

Rajiv: 56:47

You end up even going. Depends on what circle you're in, but if you go towards the other side, just to say you know what, I learned this from the other, the other folks. Here's something that's interesting All of them, you're all the sudden labeled right, you're, you're, you're not. What. What that means? It's high. It's high. That must mean you pick up all of there. You must be picking up all their beliefs.

AJ: 57:06

I'm like no no, no wait, I'm just. If I were to think of another thing, that would be a cause that I would go after. It would be doing something to change, discredit, destroy traditional daily television news, because I think it's destroying our society.

Sandeep: 57:21

Yeah, so. So a connective tool that helps, an antidote to the outrage machine, maybe that's. You know your own version of a like a Spotify connect. You know where people? People connect over playlists, right, and it's like we have. We have 95% in common. We should come to a party at your house. That's this. I'm just spitballing here.

AJ: 57:43

Well, I mean no, I think it's great, but I think that's the community thing. So get, get high quality people together and attack these problems.

Rajiv: 57:50

Yeah, I would go as simple as sometimes you know, walk into a bar, in a, in a place that where the beliefs are likely to be antithetical to your own, and start chatting with people. And I find it when I do that, and I don't let the let the vitriol get to me Sometimes people listen and that's the beginning of a conversation and that's the beginning of potentially some understanding Of connection.

Sandeep: 58:17

Yeah, it's the same thing that my couple therapist says yeah, listen, listen. If you want to be listened to, then then listen first Some others and then maybe there's a there either is a platform way of doing it.

Rajiv: 58:29

That would be much better. Maybe threads will be better that way than 20.

Sandeep: 58:33

Maybe threads, yeah yeah, of course, zuckerberg's to the rescue.

AJ: 58:36

That's right, sure, because he's very noble. Yeah, scott.

Rajiv: 58:41

Galloway was saying that this is potentially their Anakin moment, when he goes from being you know from Darth Vader back to being good against you never know.

AJ: 58:50

Sure.

Rajiv: 58:50

Let me just give you a couple, give you one wrap up thought in this, which is you know, there's a lot that you do, You're working a lot, you're a parent. What do you do to chill out? What do you do to get some balance, sort of integrate the worlds together?

AJ: 59:05

So I think music is actually a big thing. I was actually feeling a little fried before I went on my vacations and I went to Puerto Rico for a week and hung out with friends and saw music every night and my Montreal Quebec city thing was music every night. So I think that was a big one and I started playing tennis again and I'm getting back on the slopes this fall as well, after after a low mishap in February. What you may have heard about I don't know what that mishap.

Rajiv: 59:32

There's still a dispute as to how that happened, so but I will be happy to get back on the slopes with you anytime, any way, and go to any music event that you'd like to go to, because I know it's a blast to go with you. So thank you, AJ, for joining us today and thanks Sundee, for helping us get from really geeky to something broader, so I really appreciate both of you for this.

AJ: 59:52

A pleasure, Rajiv. Thanks guys, I appreciate it. It was fun. I enjoyed being on.

Sandeep: 59:57

It's literally my job, so I'm happy to do it. That was an awesome conversation, Rajiv. What was your takeaway?

Rajiv: 1:00:10

I think it was what he talked about in the end, where he talked about the divisiveness of community and the importance of building community. And that's how he tries to bridge some of those divisions by enhancing the community through what he does with what he's great at, which is go to market as well as building folks in a social manner.

Sandeep: 1:00:34

It's like how, when we were talking about Spotify Playlist, and it's like, oh, this is connecting me to the next generation, actually like this innovation is making it possible for me to have a more rich relationship with my loved ones that I normally maybe would be more separate.

Rajiv: 1:00:49

So that's right. I mean, I thought that was amazing how he connected his kids to his world and it just allowed people beyond that world that he's in to go beyond that, just go outside of that, to stretch the tentacles to connect more people in a more fundamental way, and that's what music and the innovation of Spotify enabled him to do.

Sandeep: 1:01:12

So my takeaways were like I loved all the stuff where he's talking about the ideal customer profile and I was like, oh yeah, I probably should get to know my customer a little bit, but like that was good, that was good stuff. And then like measured investments, like my brain always goes to like, oh, how can I just hire someone to solve all my problems.

AJ: 1:01:29

And then it's like no, you got to do it yourself.

Sandeep: 1:01:31

Yeah, where's that silver bullet? And you got to do yourself, you got to experiment, you got to get in there and really do it until, like he said, you get a replicable sales models. I was like, oh, all that stuff for me as a budding entrepreneur was really useful. But I think the most important thing to that I learned was that Harvard Business School. It's like you didn't even learn the most important stuff that you needed for business from Harvard Business School. So that's amazing. I was like, oh great, I'm glad I didn't try to go to B school.

Rajiv: 1:01:58

So the founder of Boston Beer Company basically said that in one of the sessions that I went to, jim Koch I went to a lot of CEO sessions and that's the one thing he said is you're sitting there all day being taught about marketing and strategy. Get out there and sell. Go talk to go to bars, talk to beer distributors. That's when you're going to find out what you're selling. What you're talking about, really has value. Learn them, understand them, dig deep into them, and that's what AJ was looking to truly understand in the area of business that he's focused on. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the pod, please take a moment to rate it and comment. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, google Podcasts and everywhere podcasts can be found. We'll catch you next time and remember folks be ever curious.