NVIDIA's Jenson Huang's unorthodox leadership style, and How AI agents will change marketing

0:28All right. So welcome to the Agency Owners Association. lot of agency owners, they're struggling to grow faster. They're struggling to get more clients. They're struggling with operational issues, hiring issues. And both Neil and I have been through all that, right? So in terms of covering, getting an agency to six figures, seven figures, eight figures, Neil in his case, got his agency to nine figures, right? Maybe even 10 figures one day. But we wanted to share those experiences with you to help you grow faster. And there's a lot of value in this group. You'll see below all the bullet points on the things that we currently have.

0:57And we're going to continue to add value to this group over time. And the cool thing about this group is you can cancel at any time. So there's no commitment. You can sign up right now for whatever price it says down there. It's going to continue to grow up, grow and grow. I will tell you that this group initially started at 149 and it's going to continue to rise, right? So now it's going to be the best price to get in on it. You can cancel at any time. Just know that when you come back, it's going to be at the elevated price. And that's what we thought we'd do. And those of you that are doing seven to eight figures, once you join the group, or actually you can even see it, there's an application to join a live mastermind.

1:28So this is a live mastermind that where you'll be able to hang out with Neil and myself, and we'll have other agency owners at your level, but that's for agencies that are doing seven figures and above. I think once we have enough demand for maybe the six figure groups, we'll figure something out there. But for right now, seven and eight figures for an in-person mastermind and then online community, a bunch of other benefits. If you're doing six figures and below, you'll see that right below. and then we'll continue to figure out and grow this thing as we continue on. So without further ado, go ahead and sign up below.

1:59If it's not for you, that's totally fine too, but no commitment. Why not? If it helps you, if you think it can even help you 10X the price that you're paying for one month, then why not just give it a shot, right? So that's it for this little intro over here and just go sign up somewhere over here and we'll catch you inside. Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, did an interview with Jensen Huang from NVIDIA. and I'm going to read some takeaways from this interview that they did. I think you can watch the Stripe sessions on YouTube if you want. I don't know if the NVIDIA one is available to public yet, but number one, you probably know this one, Jensen has 60 direct reports.

2:3560, 6-0 direct reports. That's a lot. Yeah, and so you know his logic for that? His logic is all my people are very capable and they're all capable of leading something and just basically making something happen from start to finish and so I don't need another layer. I just go to them directly and we just get things done a lot faster that way. Two, he doesn't do one-on-ones. Interestingly enough, on Monday, I did a podcast interview with the CEO of 8Sleep, Mateo. He doesn't do one-on-ones either. You don't do one-on-ones. What do you mean by one-on-ones? Oh, see, Neil doesn't even know what a one-on-one is.

3:06No, I do. But then it can be considered as very different. A one-on-one in a typical company, a one-on-one is like Neil and I meeting. and let's say I work for Neil, for example, right? So how we do one-on-ones is I would bring my agenda to you. I'd bring probably a set of problems and issues you want to talk through. I get the normal one-on-one. What I'm more so asking is, let's say if there's a problem with the chip and he's dealing with someone who's in charge of chips, does he actually go meet him one-on-one and discuss that? Or is that? So he doesn't have a standing one-on-one. Got it. Yeah.

3:40So he'll still do one-on-one. One-on-one is. No, no, no, no. No, I thought you meant he never meets with the individual one-on-one. No, and then Mateo, same thing, right? So he doesn't have any standing one-on-ones anymore. He just has two hours free every day for office hours. And then that's when he just calls people or people call him. And if you want to do a one-on-one with him, this is interesting. If you want to bring an idea to him, you have to write a memo out, which is kind of similar to what we do at Single Grain. If you want to bring an idea, you're forced to write it out. And it stops a lot of people in their tracks from bringing half-baked ideas.

4:07The Amazon philosophy. Yes, I'm going to continue on here. So number three, all feedback. This is interesting. I think you would love this. All feedback is done in group settings. So there's no like, you know how Warren Buffett is like, you know, criticized privately, praised in public type of thing. He's just like, I don't like we have trust and we just get it out there. And that's that. So, and I feel like that's more convenient, but you know, teaches them. Number four, he doesn't fire people. I don't have enough context here. That's interesting to me. I can't imagine a company where you don't fire people.

4:37But anyway, I think I have to watch and talk to understand more. Number five, he believes. He doesn't fire anyone? No. Like the company doesn't or he doesn't fire? I think he doesn't. I was about to say, eventually if you're running a company, it's big enough you have to fire someone. Yeah. Number five, he believes anybody can learn anything. He learned to be a CEO from being a, so he was a bathroom cleaner. He was a janitor before. I don't know if you know that. The NVIDIA guy. Jensen, yeah. Number six, as he says, he tortures people with the greatness. I think you and I can align with that. Yeah, I can align with that.

5:05So number seven, it's hardworking for me. Yeah, I think so as an executive or a leader. What do you mean it's hardworking for you? Uh, I expect the world from people and I'll pay them the world as well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you do torture them into greatness. Yes. I help them become better and I help them push themselves. It's really hard, but I also take care of them really, really well, not just financially, but I help them out in whatever ways I can. Yeah. It's, uh, it's no pressure, no diamond at the end of the day. I I've learned and I've learned this. You didn't have to learn this. You're just like this, but I've learned over the years that trying to be nice, trying to only just take care of people.

5:40That's not enough. You have to ultimately, it's the struggle, it's the push that helps them grow at the end of the day. Number seven, Stripe and AI are going to be massive. Okay, that's nothing. That doesn't tell me much. Eight, Jensen thinks AGI is going to happen in the next five years, so artificial general intelligence, whatever that means to any of you listening. Number nine, NVIDIA uses... Let's go back really quickly. AGI, for anyone listening, it's like imagine AI going to the next level where it can pretty much operate like a human. That's what he's talking about. better than human. Yes.

6:12Yeah. And a lot of people are debating like Ray Kurzweil, he's a futurist. He thinks it's going to happen in 2029. Sam Altman also thinks it's going to happen in the next five years. People like Elon are very afraid of it. And I think, you know, rightfully so, we should think about ways to protect ourselves from it. But that's interesting, right? If we're going to have a human level intelligence in the next five years, what does that mean for people in the working class, right? Which we can, we'll talk about in a second. We should talk about AI agents right after this. Number nine, NVIDIA uses AI heavily to create their GPUs.

6:41Number ten, one of NVIDIA's core values is love and care, similar to Stripe's value of beauty and craft. Huh. Yeah. What's your main core value? My main core value or the team's main core value? NP Digital's main core value. We have quite a few of them, like Own It. You can only pick one. Okay. My favorite one is Own It. You don't have a problem owning it. Ours is Be Improved and Obsessed. But even though I don't have a problem with owning it, a lot of people do in the workplace. And I believe if you did great, great. If you did bad, own it. What did you learn from it? Let's move on and give yourself a pat on the back for learning and let's try to be better next time.

7:17Most people don't like taking responsibility. But here's the thing. If you own it, at least with me, I don't care if someone messed up. It's like, how do you learn from it so you don't make the same mistake over and over again? And if you mess up 20 times and they're all in different things and eventually you learn what to do, great. Now you know what to do to produce results and make people happy. I forgot which company this was with, but when someone made a$250 ,000 mistake, at that time it was worth a couple million dollars. Are you talking about IBM? Yeah, IBM. And the guy wanted to resign, right?

7:48I said, no, no, no. You didn't resign. I just paid $250 ,000 for your education. You're going to figure it out. I don't think it was$250 ,000. I think it was way more than that. No,$250 ,000 at the time, and now in today's money it's valued a couple million. That's the story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you and I have been talking on the phone about AI agents a little bit. And remember I talked about the tweet with Aaron Levy from Box? Yeah. Okay, just some context here. So Aaron Levy founded a company called Box, which is a storage SaaS. They compete with Dropbox. They're more known for enterprise storage.

8:20And obviously you have like Google Drive and all these now. But here's what he said. I'm not going to read the whole thing here. But in this tweet, Aaron Levy says, AI agents have the ability to fundamentally change the business model of enterprise software. Today, when you build a SaaS product, the primary business model is to sell seats that are tied to end-to-end users of your service. For quote-unquote same-store sales, you can essentially grow at the rate of the headcount growth of that customer or by adding additional capabilities on top of your offering. This business model, of course, is fantastic and has been around since the early days of enterprise software and will keep going forever.

8:52And then this is the last paragraph I'll read. But AI agents unlock an entirely new business model in software because you can now grow in a way that is uncorrelated to direct enterprise headcount or even external factors to your software. What's amazing about this model is that the AI vendor actually can directly grow itself within an enterprise account due to direct productivity gains. For instance, imagine an AI agent that can generate outbound sales demand for a startup. Traditionally, B2Bs will start hiring a very small team of maybe one to two people and increase resources in that area in a very incremental fashion.

9:25Essentially a process that looks like a guessing game where you try to predict how much demand that there's going to be in the market. In a world of AI agents, you would simply set a budget and then decide how fast you want to grow. This is much closer to the business model of Google AdWords than it is a traditional SaaS service. It's interesting. Curious to see how it actually plays out. Yeah, I think it's going to make a major impact. so my thing is in the next 5-10 years or so I don't think you're going to need as much headcount these are my predictions right and you know you're going to have AI agents that can do the bulk of the work and really the people that you're going to a lot of people that you're going to have on your team are the top 5 % of people at the end of the day I told my team you know earlier this week I was like you know there's this book called 21 questions for the 21st century, written by the Sapiens author.

10:12And he wrote in that chapter, there's going to be a class of useless humans. I was like, guys, I don't know about you. I don't want to be useless. And I will not accept anybody at SingleGrain wanting to be useless, right? Like, we're going to embrace this change. Who knows what's going to happen? But we all know for sure AI agents are coming and it's already starting to happen. So the way I look at it is the question is, what industries does it impact the most and how long does it take corporations to adapt? And I'll give you a prime example of this. So at NP Digital, we work with mainly enterprise corporations.

10:49And everyone talked about how the cloud is going to change everything. And it did. But dude, do you want to know how many publicly traded companies we work with that are still not fully on the cloud? It takes a lot of these big corporations years and years and years and years to adapt fully. Well, still, a lot of companies haven't even done digital transformation, right? It's taken 20 years or so, right? So when people talk about these AI agents and stuff, like, don't get me wrong, in theory, I agree, but it's not that simple to just integrate them with an organization. And I'll give you a great example of this.

11:23I interviewed this guy named Max years ago. He worked at Dentsu Aegis. It's a big ad agency based out of Japan, or I think headquartered out of London, but originally founded in Japan. Good-sized corporation, roughly 10-ish, 9, 10 billion in revenue. That's a good-sized business. That's a large corporation. Max's job was to implement AI and technology and automate as many things. How long ago was this? A few years ago. How many years ago? A few years, like two, two and a half. Okay. To get rid of humans where it's not needed, right? I'm not really sugarcoating. I'm just being really blunt. I'm cutting to the point.

12:07Cut costs, et cetera. Yeah, his verbiage was much nicer how he explained it. All right, welcome to the Marketing School School Group. Okay, so Marketing School, S-K-O-O-L Group, right? And so this is a free group that Neil and I are doing. And what I want to do with this free marketing community is I want to build a very strong group of people that are sharing the latest knowledge, the latest trends, the latest topics, and we'll share our content as well. And we just want people to engage with each other and build a strong community, right? Because people ultimately stay for community at the end of the day.

12:39People are logging for community. And we thought with all the free content that we do, well, what's been missing? A free community where we can continue to help people level up in terms of their marketing. And hopefully we can help people find jobs in the group. We can even maybe even create a job board, but even offer a lot of our other content, package it up for you just to help you get better at whatever it is that you do in the world of marketing and whatever it is that you do in the world of business, right? So Neil and myself, we thought that from a retention standpoint, we do very well with acquisition on all the channels that we have, all the audiences that we have.

13:13But from a retention standpoint, building something that we think we can be proud of for a very long time, why not do a free group, right? So we have a paid group, obviously, called the Agency Owners Association. That's for agency owners. And if you want to go to that, there'll be a link somewhere over here to that. But this group will always be free. and as long as people are continuing to engage, this group's continuing to grow, then we'll continue to invest more resources into it. But we thought this was a long time coming. So you can sign up for free. You might have to fill out some information or you will have to fill out some information just so we get a sense for where you are and then we can start to help segment the group too, right?

13:47Based on whatever it is that you're looking for because we want to continue to add value. And hopefully we'll have a very strong database of people and you just tell us what you're looking for, what you need, and hopefully we can make those connections. So go ahead and sign up somewhere over here and we'll see you inside. You want to know what the biggest struggle was? To do that fully effectively and efficiently, he still needed somewhat help from the people in the original roles. If you tell someone, hey, I'm going to replace you with this AI, help me replace you. Most people are like, screw up.

14:21And you want to guess how much traction he made? Not much. Very little. And does it mean that other companies won't get that? No, I think there's going to be a lot of companies that make a ton of progress with it. But I also think there's going to be a lot of companies that struggle to make tons of progress with it as well. And does it mean that those companies will fail or succeed because their competitors may be more efficient? I don't know. Time will tell because there's some companies that are happy to operate at 5%, 10 % margins versus 20%. Or maybe those other people cut down their costs.

14:53Or maybe the technology doesn't work as good as it's supposed to. do you remember Sam Altman talking about how it's scary on the type of content that AI can produce and the quality of it and how crazy it is and hard it is to tell if it's written by a human or not do you remember when it started coming out, chat GPT and everything and talking about that the content that AI produces today and we produce a lot of it as in we test a lot of it it's crap and I'm not saying it won't get better but in its current form, it's crap. I'll believe it when I see it. I know it is going to happen. Is it going to happen in four or five years?

15:32I don't know. Is the AI agents going to happen right away and be able to think like a human and go really advanced? I eventually think it'll get there, but I don't think it's just going to be an instant switch, just like with the cloud. Oh, it's just going to replace everything that was off-premise. No, it doesn't. Companies just move so slow, and we work with so many enterprise companies, like big ones, right? That are publicly traded worth hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions. And crap just moves slow, no matter what people say. Like technology may be there, but they still move slow.

16:04I think startups will embrace it really quickly. And it'll change the way startups do businesses, but not necessarily the way that big corporations do businesses or business right away. Eventually, sure, but not right away. All right. Right. So we're going to come back to this monologue in five, 10 years or so. I disagree with Neil. And what I will say is that the way cloud, not really much, right? When you look at the internet, big step change. When you look at AI, big step change. No, cloud was a huge change. You can't interrupt me. You got to let me go. So you went monologue like five minutes, my turn.

16:42So cloud, not as big as a deal as the internet, right? Not as big as a deal as electricity, not as big deals as AI. When you have some of the smartest investors in the world going like, this is probably bigger than the internet itself. Like, you know, you can look at the biggest tech founders out there. And the difference this time is that the Microsoft of the world, the Googles of the world, all these people, they're deploying a ton of assets into this, right? The cloud, like, yeah, the cloud was big, but like minuscule to me in terms of how big AI is going to be, right? or AI is right now. And to your point, which you just reinforced, you said that you guys are producing a crap ton of content with AI right now.

17:19And I do agree, like a lot of stuff is, there's a lot of stuff left to be desired. It's not that good right now, right? But keep in mind that this started to really get bigger in the last year and a half or so. So it's like, it's still a fart in the wind right now, right? But the fact of the matter is there's a lot of resources going into this and I just don't see a world in the next, I do agree it's going to take time for stuff to change overall. So I think we can agree on that part. But I do think a lot of people are going to be at risk because the things that we're seeing right now that we're building with co-pilots and we're reviewing code internally, we're just moving a lot faster.

17:56And imagine someone like, imagine you 10 years ago, no MP Digital, right? Imagine me 10 years ago. We have a lot of ideas, right? All of the stuff that we want to build in the next five, 10 years or so, these people are just going to build it for us, right? Am I saying all humans are going to be replaced? No. I'm just saying that the best of the best, those people will always have a job and potentially other people are going to be at risk. So I actually think we're on agreement. I'm just getting at in which I don't think it's going to be five years where it impacts most big corporations. I agree on that.

18:28Yeah. I didn't know you were just focusing on just the big corporations. Yeah, I do think it's going to have a huge impact on a lot of jobs. But the transition period between startups and big corporations is going to be drastically different. You're going to see startups out there from day one leveraging all this technology and adapting. And big corporations just have way too many layers in bureaucracies. And a lot of them are going to adapt, but they're going to adapt much slower. And you're going to even see some not adapting, and who knows what's going to happen. Okay, so I would say, who's the big tech company that's moving really fast right now with AI stuff?

19:00Microsoft. Microsoft is. I would say Google is, but they're kind of stumbling a little bit. And I can't remember the last time someone's, for example, we're talking about advertising for this podcast. And Microsoft is going hardcore on AI ads across the board. They're trying to push their co-pilots everywhere. And so they're going hard. They're deploying a ton of resources towards it. I don't think I've seen a time when all these big tech companies have all rallied together to do this. I don't remember the last time. Do you? I haven't seen this in a long time. Forever. Well, they did rally around the cloud altogether.

19:40Tell more about the cloud. In which all tech companies were pushing for the cloud and they were talking about it's the future. You're seeing the same rally on AI. I do agree, AI is going to be bigger than the internet. There's no doubt on that. I agree with you as well. I don't think cloud was as big as the internet. it's just more so the time for people to adapt is going to range drastically depending on the company size and the bureaucracy that they have. And like, for example, I know a lot of people that work at Microsoft dude, they're making leaps and bounds in investment in AI. But if you talk to a lot of people who work at Microsoft and I know tons of executives there's still tons of divisions and departments that are backwards and running like they should have been running companies that are 10 years old.

20:29They're really behind. It really depends on the division, the department. It's hard to make a company of that size adapt and be perfect for everything and for today's world or the future of technology. Dude, check this out. I'll try to link to this graph, but I think what we should get at too to show people is adoption curves. When you look at technology adoption curves, you have AI in the red over there. Is that the McKinsey chart? No, this is eMarketer, actually, so we don't know how legit this source is, right? So eMarketer, basically, generative AI from 2022 to 2025, is that it went from 7.8 million users to about 117 million users.

21:08Tablets went from 12.9 million users to 124 million by year four. So it's got a steeper adoption curve. It's growing faster, but by year four, tablets are winning out. But I think it'll pick up again. Yeah. And look, time will tell, but in the next five years, you're going to see a lot of startups come and they're going to be leveraging AI technology and they're going to disrupt a lot of corporations. I think that's going to be a huge wave of potential investment opportunity is companies who are just more efficient doing what big companies are doing, but they're just doing it way better because of AI.

21:44Do you know how long it took for the average American to use electricity from its inception? No. So from about 1900, 1910, sorry, 1910 electricity comes out and maybe there's like 5 % of the population using it. By the end of 1950, it's 100%. So it took a long time, 40 years to get there, right? But, but the adoption curves get steeper over time, it grows a lot faster. So that's with everything. Right now, when you're talking about AI, dude, people in this world, there's more people with cell phones than actual laptops and computers. Yeah, smartphone adoption from like 2005 until like 2020, it goes up to 75%.

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