Catching the AI Wave with Colin C. Campbell

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like I Digress. Today, we'll be breaking down how to catch the AI wave. To drop these value bombs, I am brought to Colin C. Campbell in the EO Fire Studios. Colin is a number one Amazon best-selling author of Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat, owner's startup club, which has one million members, a serial tech entrepreneur, including Internet Direct, Hostopia, Two Cows, Geeks for Less, Paw.com, Escape Club, and so much more.

0:33And today, we will be chatting about a lot of cool stuff. the technology adoption curve. We'll talk about positioning yourself to win in a tornado, catching the technology waves, AI, of course, and so much more. And a big thing for sponsoring today's episode goes to Colin and our sponsors. Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Ever notice how the smallest changes can have the biggest impact? On Nudge, you learn simple evidence-backed tips to help you kick bad habits, get a raise, and grow a business. Oh, and it's the UK's fast-growing business podcast.

1:07A recent episode on how to win any argument shares decade-long research into persuasion from a world-leading neuroscientist. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker, Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Colin, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:46You're not alone. See, most entrepreneurs believe they need to do it on their own. You know, this is not a time when you'd start a business in a garage. You know, think back to Wozniak in Jobs, who started that business in the garage. You know, it takes a village to raise a startup. And whether you connect with an incubator or a shared work environment, you can increase your chances of success dramatically by bringing in a community and having the support of that community. You know, we had the opportunity to interview Bridget Weston. She was the CEO of SCORE. And SCORE is an organization run by the SBA in the United States.

2:30They have 10 ,000 volunteers. And she made the claim, and she has backed this up, that you could increase your chances of success by three times. We do an incubator at the Allen Levan Center in South Florida at the NSU, and I teach at that incubator. And they connect you with experts, authors, lawyers, and JLD, even investors. And guess what? It's absolutely free. Fire Nation, that's one reason why I love you listening to this podcast, for that exact reason. You are not alone. You can listen to this for free. You can listen to what Colin was talking about, consume the content he was talking about for free.

3:11I mean, this is the great thing about the world that we live in. You are not alone. You're right now. You're with myself and Colin. Maybe in a different space-time continuum, but you are with us right now. And we are talking with you, to you, for you. We're here delivering value for free. This is how we roll. And speaking of, I mean, man, this podcast, 12 years ago, Colin, I caught the podcasting wave and I just haven't let go. and you've started, scaled and exited well over a dozen tech companies by catching a wave of sorts. How do you figure out where the waves are and just as importantly, how to ride them?

3:50You really did start the podcast relatively early on in the podcast wave. And the earlier you can get into a wave, the better off you'll be. And let me tell you the truth though. When I go back to my 20s, I didn't really know what the heck I was doing. It wasn't until I was asked to speak to a group of 60 successful entrepreneurs at MIT on the reason why I had started, scaled, exited, and repeated it so many times that I reflected back on my career and said, okay, there's one thing that's been consistent with all the companies I've been involved with. And I've been involved with about 20 companies.

4:30And that one thing is that we would identify a potential wave or opportunity. Now, right out of college, this is back in 1993, I jumped on something called the information superhighway. Most yearlessers would not remember that term, but that was the internet. That's what they started calling it back in the early days. And we launched the largest ISP in Canada. Then we did a software download site called Two Cows, which was a PC Magazine Top 100 site. And then shortly after that, a company called Geeks for Less, which we have 800 programmers globally today. And Hostopia, which became a global leader email and hosting for companies like AT &T, Bell Canada, Vodafone.

5:10We took a public to those companies. We took public and whatnot. See, under each of these companies, the world had changed. In 1993, we saw the beginning of the browser. Mozilla came out, which led to our success as an ISP. In 96, you could now download software from the internet versus CD-ROMs, which is a big game changer. Now it's obviously very differently. In 2000, we saw the advent of broadband, which gave rise to the global workforce environment and also on-demand computing, which at the time they would call it application service provider, which later became SaaS or software as a service provider, which later became cloud computing.

5:50They often will re-update their terms. But the genesis of cloud computing was really in the 2000s. And in 2005, we obviously saw social media, 2010. There's an app for that, 2015. The rise of micro e-commerce brands, 2020, social audio. And 2023, the advent of ChatGPT and AI. Even though AI had been there for decades, there was a catastrophic leap forward with respect to AI. Fire Nation, I need you to think about this process. I mean, this is the type of thing where if you keep your finger on the pulse, if you're listening to the right people, if you're reading and listening to the right content, it's going to give you an opportunity to identify these opportunities that we're talking about.

6:36And Colin, one reason why I love interviewing you is because you interview a lot of cool people, specifically Jeffrey Moore. And he redefined the technology adoption curve. Tell us more about this. Okay. Well, first of all, he agreed to an interview and it was just unbelievable. So here I am talking to one of my mentors. I'd never met him before, but 20 years earlier, I had studied his work. I had studied his work around the adoption cycle. Now, let me take you back to college a little bit here. There was this concept of an adoption curve. So think of innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards, and it was just sort of one static up and down curve.

7:15So Jeffrey Moore comes in and says, hey, wait a minute, there's something more to this curve, right? There is a chasm that exists between the early adopters and the early majority. And if we can figure out how to survive in that chasm and then make the leap to the early majority, then we can enter what he calls a tornado. I'm talking about a lot of concepts here, but quite frankly, this is what exists. when any new technology, when podcasting came into the marketplace, when it first started, there were not a lot of platforms that you could listen to your show. So you're right there at the beginning, the very, very beginning.

8:00And the one thing that Jeffrey Moore talks about is the bowling pin strategy. Try to focus on a particular niche. And you focused on entrepreneurship, startups, and you really honed in on that particular space. You came through, and today you're one of the most successful podcasts out there. So this idea that there is a technology adoption curve, that you can learn how to live within that adoption curve is very important. And you can learn how to thrive in a tornado. Fire Nation, you're here to thrive. And we're going to really be talking about this in detail as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors.

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10:59Taylor has put together a free training that's going to teach you how to land a TEDx talk in as little as 90 days. Join Taylor to learn exactly what TEDx organizers are looking for in their speakers, how to write a talk that goes viral once it goes online, and more. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire. Join Taylor for this free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart, and out into the world where it belongs. That's thought-leader.com slash fire. Now, Colin, we're back, and I really want to talk about the tornado concept because I think it's something that's very interesting.

11:36We went into it a little bit before the break, but I want to get really detailed about how we can position ourselves to win in a tornado. What does that mean? What does that look like? Give us some examples. Okay, well, the first thing you can do to win in our tornado is to pick the right wave. There are technology shifts, there are paradigm shifts, there are regulatory shifts happening all the time around us in society. So we want to pick and choose the waves that we think are going to take off. You know, the early adopters grab onto it, you know, think like NFTs,$500 ,000, bored apes, you know, back a couple of years ago.

12:11Well, obviously that technology, that platform is in a deep chasm right now. And actually, Nick, I actually came up with a term before coming on the show today called the chasm dwellers. And these are individual companies that try to survive in that very difficult period. And we actually have one in our incubator, IMX3. And what it is, it's a company that scans and replicates museums in the metaverse. See, I've been very negative about the metaverse for many, many years. And this company is in our incubator. I don't have any investment or anything like that. But they're in our incubator. And then all of a sudden I start looking and watching them and they're doing really well.

12:50They have a number of contracts with governments and they're surviving. They literally create museums. And so there's an opportunity for them to own a particular space. And in the space, what I talked about earlier, what Jeffrey Moore talks about is this bowling pin strategy. See, their bowling pin is to own museums and scanning museums in the metaverse. And they're winning in that space. They're surviving. They're chasm dwellers. Well, if you can survive the chasm and get to the other side, the rewards are tremendous. But there's three things. There's three things I want you to think about. One of them, I touched upon it already, which is the bowling pin.

13:33Bowling pin? I call it the laser beam. We want to be the best in the world at one particular issue. There's a company, another company, our incubator, they were doing sort of a Canva-like product using AI, a company called Pensilla. And I did invest in this company and I went to him and I says, well, I'm going to invest only if you do one thing. You focus like a laser beam only on the e-commerce market because that's what you know, and you can build and develop better products than anyone else in that space because you're a laser beam. The second thing, and this is something that I learned throughout those years of starting these companies, is that, and you probably know this, JLD, that the vast majority of people's world are technophobes.

14:16They don't like technology. Things are too complicated. The fact of the matter is the easier you make it, the better off, the easier it is for people to use your technology. And a lot of the companies that succeed in this space are ones that – in the tornado – are ones that make it easy for the early majority. See, the early adopters and the innovators, they want to see the Unix prompts. They want to get deep and dirty into the technology. But the early majority, they're pragmatic. How can it change my life? How can it make my life better? That's all I want to know. And you've got to make it easy for them.

14:53The third thing comes directly from Jeffrey Moore, who I think this is one concept influenced me more than any other concepts when it comes to catching a wave, which is whoever delivers the fastest wins. Okay, go back to CompuServe and AOL, the 90s. CompuServe appealed to the early adopters and the innovators, and they dominated the space. They were well in the lead. But then AOL became sort of the ISP for the rest of us. They're the ones that appealed to the broad majority. Well, you know what they also did? They blanketed every magazine, PC magazine, with CD-ROMs, diskettes. They were so pervasive, if we were using them as coasters in our office.

15:39The fact of the matter is, in every tornado, those who deliver the fastest are the ones who can win. That's those three strategies. If you can boil it down, and by the way, in the book, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat, we go into a lot more detail, but we don't have much time right now to do that. But in the book, we do go into a lot more detail. It is fascinating. I mean, I can just remember opening up my mailbox every day, and every day in my mailbox was something from AOL. It was a CD. I mean, like you said, coasters. I think we developed a game where they were like the CD-ROMs were Frisbees. I mean, it was crazy.

16:11But guess what? When it came time for us to get online, we used AOL because that's what was there. And that's what we knew. I want to talk now about AI. I mean, it's been crazy over the past year plus. Can you talk about how we can specifically catch a wave in that sector? Or is it too late to get in the game? Okay. Is it too late to get in the game? I mean, was it too late in 1995 when Jeff Bezos launched Amazon? Was it too late when Mark Zuckerberg in 2006 launched Facebook or TK in 2008? I mean, come on. The reality is the internet started in the 80s, but really with the World Wide Web in 1993.

16:51And it was two or three years later. Look, we are at the very, very beginning of one of the greatest paradigm shifts in our entire life. AI will meet more millionaires than any other paradigm shift in history. And I want to also emphasize here, you don't have to run an AI-only company to become a millionaire from AI. You can utilize AI in your business today. You're the expert in your business. You're the expert in your industry. Now you need to become an expert in AI, understand the bottlenecks in your industry, and then use that AI to develop products and services to make you a dominant leader.

17:32This is an opportunity for every entrepreneur to really redefine themselves as not just an e-commerce company. We're an e-commerce company that uses AI the following ways. And there's many, many different ways that you can use AI. I'll tell you one thing that I do. I spend about four hours a week doing nothing but studying AI. And here's an analogy for me, JLD. It's like Tony Stark. You remember Tony Stark from Iron Man? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it's like when he straps on that Iron Man suit, he can do so much with it. Well, that's exactly what you're doing with AI. And there are a lot of AI technologies out there.

18:12There are AI technologies. I'm going to throw this out there. There's an AI for that. Okay. So there's AI technologies that are going throughout platforms. Like right now, you could use Microsoft. They've got Copilot. There are many, many different platforms. You want to watch out for those AIs and how they can help you. Then you've got perplexity.ai, for instance, that can give you up-to-date information. I had it write a press release for the book, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. It wrote the press release, went into the Amazon listings, pulled down some of the best quotes from the Amazon listings.

18:45Sorry, not listings, the reviews. pulled down the best quotes, even though they were just posted a few weeks ago, whatever, pulled them down and wrote an almost perfect press release. Obviously, ChatGPT is out there. It's been doing very well. But, you know, Claude is really coming in strong. You can put much larger file sizes into Claude. You now have AIs that can help you with images, with videos. I mean, the world is just opening up and it's absolutely incredible. And here we are in 2024. and it's happening all over again. Catch that wave, and this is it. This is gonna be the biggest in our lifetime.

19:23Fire Nation, this is exciting. And Colin, again, he's putting his money where his mouth is. He's investing time, energy, effort, dollars into becoming better in this space, into learning this space, into catching that wave that is absolutely coming. Start, scale, exit, repeat. We have two awards this has already been given. Talk about this book, Colin. Share with us about these awards. Tell us where to get it, and then we'll say goodbye. After that talk at MIT, that was sort of the beginning, and it was 10 years ago. So it took almost 10 years to write the book. In the last two years, we hired six full-time people.

20:00We interviewed over 200 people, including people like Jeffrey Moore and Joe Foster, who founded a rebook. And the book really is the guide to help you start a business, scale it, exit it, and repeat. and it's written for the ADHD entrepreneur. It's 57 chapters. It's 200 call-outs. It's 30 illustrations. It's all color-coded. You can buy it on Amazon right now, hardcover, Audible, and also e-book. You can buy it at any bookstore. And yeah, we were so excited. We just won the award very recently by IBPA, Benjamin Franklin Award, silver medal, and then we won the gold from the American Legacy Book Awards very recently.

20:51It's been a number one bestseller in 13 categories on Amazon, and we're so excited how well it's been doing. But the message has been getting out. It's time to start, scale, exit, repeat in an AI world. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with Triple C and JLD today, so keep up the heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Colin, C-O-L-I-N, in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And Colin, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.

21:28Thank you. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Colin for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, successful entrepreneurs are great at three things, productivity, discipline, and focus. That is why I created the Mastery Journal so that you can master productivity, discipline, and focus in 100 days. And we're talking step-by-step. Visit themasteryjournal.com. I will catch you there or on the flippity-flip side. Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Ever notice how the smallest changes can have the biggest impact?

22:03On Nudge, you learn simple evidence-backed tips to help you kick bad habits, get a raise, and grow a business. Oh, and it's the UK's fast-growing business podcast. A recent episode on how to win any argument shares decade-long research into persuasion from a world-leading neuroscientist. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker, Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions.