1009: How AI Is Quietly Saving Lives, with Steve Mock

24:38So again, this is very difficult. What was hard information to get in the past now is available at our fingertips. And it's such a great usage where she was able to figure out, triage where she needed more help, get the right and understand better, and she passed the test.

24:55Jon Krohn:Yeah, coming up with quizzes, coming up with questions, and then converting those into quizzes, and having those adapt to the parts that you're struggling with the most, and meeting you where you're at in a completely customized way. is a beautiful thing that you can now do with AI. And I have a little bit of a funny story, which is that so the co-founder and CTO of my consulting business, YCaret, we recently went to visit a new client and this was like a strategic assessment. So they have a dozen people on this AI committee and we met with each, we went down to their office to meet with each member of the AI committee and kind of have this like half hour meeting and hear what's working in your business, what isn't working, and so that we could provide like a strategic assessment and try to provide them with some helpful guidance moving forward.

25:46Jon Krohn:And so with that kind of exercise, there isn't much technically that you can do to prepare. You can understand a bit about the business, but most of it is gonna be about understanding the people and listening. So my co-founder, what he did is he used AI to scrape and find all the information that he could online about each of these dozen people that we were gonna be speaking to and created a quiz. just like that so that he could. So then it was pretty funny being in these interviews with people. I could quiz him in front of them. And he was kind of like this, like, because I could say, okay, what is this interviewee?

26:19Jon Krohn:What's their alma mater? Like, what's their favorite hobby? And he had really, like, quick answers to all that. So, I don't know. Yeah. Just another example. A university student posted a story that AI saved his university office hours. And I was like, what does that mean? and he's working his he has a day job in addition to going to school and it turned out that his professor's office hours where you could go ask questions was coincide with when he had to work so he just could never go to office hours so he used ai to simulate the professor and just ask questions and get answers to his so he could better understand the material which again goes back to this is he wasn't using it to just do my homework for me i'm too busy of course it's hey here's a way to augment my education because there's a resource that I should have that I don't have access to.

27:08And now I can use AI to act as that, as that resource.

27:11Jon Krohn:For sure. That's a great one. We also have fitness. We have a college athlete said that AI saved his javelin throwing season. Okay. And he is a track competitor in javelin and he had transferred universities. He didn't have of access to the coaches. So he used AI to make a summer program for how he should train, what he should do, what he should eat, et cetera. And then he had a very successful javelin season competing. So again, we're seeing people using that way as well. Yeah, another great example of customizing, using AI to educate you on your specific thing, meeting you where you are. Really cool.

27:52Jon Krohn:All right, so you've talked about patterns emerging in healthcare, you've talked about patterns emerging in education. the third category that you talked about to me before we started recording is you saw patterns emerging in fulfillment and connection, which is a really interesting category because a lot of the anti-AI sentiment is around, you know, it continuing to further us from each other and people falling in love with AI. And then, you know, there's a few really horrific examples of especially young people or vulnerable people, you know, committing suicide or something like that as a result of an AI relationship ending.

28:28Jon Krohn:So this fulfillment and connection category is interesting. Yeah, so Phil, but I was actually talking about, I was talking more fulfillment in life, not so much the, I haven't seen as many for relationships like that. Right, right, right. But the area in fulfillment that we're seeing is the AI is doing tasks that people either can't or don't want to do, and allowing them to do the things they want to do is sort of what I'm seeing. And an example of the example, we have a submitter, submit a story, AI saved my creative spark as a designer. And what he said is that the, he would have these ideas and then he'd have to wait for someone to build it because he's a designer, not a programmer.

29:15Now, when he has an idea, he can actually build it himself and he can see what it is. Then he can iterate on it, et cetera. And so he said his fulfillment as a designer has just gone way up because he has this ability to have a closed loop system where he can take his ideas, see them manifest and build on them. And that's great. His quote was, AI helped me turn static ideas into something I could actually build and explore. And that was very powerful. Uh, another programmer submitted a story where it talked about how they're, you know, AI enables into this, able to do that. We're faster. We can do all these things.

29:53And his quote at the very end is he said, for the first time in my life, I feel happy professionally. And I was like, Whoa, we were, we were in speeds and feeds. And now we're like, you're happy professionally for the first time in your life? Like, we're going back to the human outcome, the fulfillment, the human outcome. And so I talked to him about it. And he said, you know, he has a creative mind. And a lot of times when he wants to build something, you know, there's a lot of details that stand in the way of what his idea is. And from that, and it slows him down, he gets into a malaise and what and then that and he said, that's changed now.

30:29And now because he can build what he wants. And And so I think in short, people are spending more time in the band of doing things they find fulfilling and spending less time in the band of doing things that were grunt work that they didn't like, et cetera. For sure.

30:43Jon Krohn:And I think that's the – and I think this goes back to AI has taken over our jobs. This is the – and so AI has taken over tasks, right? So there's certainly tasks that will lead to job loss or job change. But what we're seeing more and more is the tasks that we don't want to do, if the eye can do those, that inherently means what's left over is us spending more time on the things that we want to do. Or what we're also seeing is people – I just had a story submitted where somebody said, oh, now with this extra time, I'm going to go spend more time with my son, which is kind of what I was talking about with the connection.

31:21And so now I'm going to go spend more time with my dog.

31:25Jon Krohn:So it does tie in a bit. It does sound a little bit. Yeah. It ties into, there's the connection. So it's making more time for us to be with each other and to connect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that is the kind of use case I was imagining, you know, either, yeah, freeing up our time and freeing up our attention as well. Because there's obviously, you know, a lot of professions, you know, I'm sure for you with, you know, as an entrepreneur, as an investor, there's a lot of situations where even if you're not literally on the clock, you could be, you know, thinking about, like, Like, have I gotten an email yet about that deal?

31:58Jon Krohn:And so your attention can be away from you, even if you're literally with the people that you care about. And I have certainly found AI a super powerful tool to make me feel like, you know what? The AI agents I have in place can handle this. You know, like I don't need to worry about this tonight. I can see how things are going in the morning, but yeah, increasing, increasing confidence in AI systems being able to handle more and more tasks has definitely given me a sense of liberation from having to worry about every little thing. And that ranges from minutiae of, you know, making sure all the spelling and grammar are right in an email, all the way through to, you know, strategic decisions when, yeah, I think you can use AI to support you in these things and you feel more confident about everything.

32:45Jon Krohn:And then, yeah, that means the time with your loved ones, people you care about, you're more focused on them and a happier person. Yeah. All right. Really exciting to hear what you're doing at AISaveMe.org already, Steve. And we're going to move on to other parts of your professional background momentarily. But before we do that, are there any other stories that you want to make sure that my listeners hear from AISaveMe.org? Thank you, John. I think there's a few that just I've received. And again, you can't make this up. First off, one of the stories I have is from a gentleman. the title of it is AI saved my self-reliant lifestyle.

33:27And this is a 72-year-old off-the-grid homesteader who's using AI to tackle all of the systems problems that he has on his homestead. So solar power, phone system, water system, et cetera, et cetera. And he basically said AI has enabled him to be off the grid. So kind of ironic, using AI, which requires power to allow someone going to be off the grid, and 72 will be off the grid. And what he said is, he said, AI has made it possible for me to learn the things I never thought I would learn at this age. And so, again, this is, you know, it's the nooks and crannies of how AI is appearing in different places and helping people.

34:10Another one, we have a young man in The Gambia who has used AI to start a youth movement. and a number of areas in his country, the Gambia. And what struck me the most was when we started connecting was he doesn't have a computer. Whoa. He doesn't have a computer. That is a surprise. And he said he has a smartphone. So he's actually learned to be a software developer and he's done it all on his cell phone.

34:40Jon Krohn:Wow. And he's super motivated. And for him, this is just this amazing tool where he can do all the things that he wasn't able to do and he just has a smartphone. And what he said, and I liked his quote, is he said, technology does not replace determination, it amplifies it. And so I've loved interacting with him and just seeing how, again, in the Gambia and the Africa, people are using AIs in ways that we would not have ever thought of. Finally, there's one more. This is from a gentleman who's a banker in Florida. His parents were getting a lot of scams, online scams. And so he built his own app.

35:25He vibe-coded his own app to educate his parents on the types of scams and to help them prevent them from getting scammed in the future. So this story is called AI Saved My Parents from Online Scams.

35:37Jon Krohn:How does the app work? Does it kind of, is it like, I realize this isn't what you would ever build, but it would be kind of a funny thing to like, if you're, you actually, you make an app that scams your parents to test them. So it's more, it is more educational. He's just starting it. It's more educational at this age. It's more to educate people, et cetera. But it's a, but his, his quote on the site was, what started as a side project, it turned into a new form of caregiving. So, uh, yeah, I mean, these, it's the, this richness of stories about how people are using AI in ways that we never knew.

36:11And I think it's going to keep happening. And again, I'm super excited to see what else comes.

36:15Jon Krohn:Really cool. In several stories on your platform, users describe moving from feeling overwhelmed to feeling in control, like we've just been talking about. And this ranges from things like managing ADHD. We talked about the college office hours example that you gave. There's an example involving a Grand Canyon hike. And so with all of your experience in tech, decades of experience as an entrepreneur, as an investor. What do you think about the line between AI as an empowering partner that restores human agency relative to it being an addictive tool that breeds dependency? What do you think about the line there?

36:56Yeah, so that's a great question. I think the stories that you just mentioned were, again, I'm learning from my own site and I have dyslexics and people with ADHD ADHD sharing that they're able to use the AI as a partner to organize their ideas in a way where they then can feel, they can then, you know, communicate them outward. They feel resolved internally. They're less anxious and they're able to operate more effectively in their personal, professional and, you know, romantic lives. So again, that was, you know, nobody ever said, let's invent this to go solve that, but that's one of the outcomes for it.

37:32I'm sorry, what was the second part of the...

37:35Jon Krohn:Yeah, so it's this, you know, we've been talking a lot and I was giving examples about, and you've been giving a lot of examples about AI being an empowering partner that restores human agency. But, you know, we also, we hear these stories of it becoming an addictive tool that breeds dependency. So if I could have, if I could wave a magic wand and have the, my dream outcome of this project, it would be to illustrate all the healthy ways we can use AI and warn people about the negative ways to use AI. Going back to the healthcare example, do not ask AI for healthcare advice. Do use AI to help you be an advocate for your healthcare needs.

38:12So I think that we're learning as we go in all these different arenas. And it's something we're learning as a society. We're learning individuals. We've got to capture that and then institutionalize it. If my site can be helpful for making that happen across society, that will be an incredible win.

38:33Jon Krohn:Yeah, the examples that you have on AISaveMe.org could potentially even be helpful for helping people realize, oh, I am like, I'm in an unhelpful loop here. This is a bad habit that I'm developing here relative to, you know, these are some great ways to be using AI that are actually empowering me. Yeah, so yeah, great. Something that I mentioned at the outset of this episode is that you, is it fair to characterize you as a non-programmer? I'm a non-programmer. I'm a proud non-programmer. Okay. But you built the site entirely on your own. That's correct. And so you used AI tools to build it, to get it online.

39:12Jon Krohn:And you've had to deal with all the same kinds of concerns that as a career entrepreneur and investor, you've had development teams that have had to deal with issues of scaling and security. And now you managed to handle all of that yourself. So tell us about the experience of doing it. How did you get started? Did you always feel confident you'd be able to figure all these aspects out? No, it's great. First of all, it's been a fun journey. And again, my day job is I'm an investor at a venture capital firm, and we're meeting the best and the brightest of our engineers every day with their ideas.

39:48They're all building all these tools of the eye. And I just got to a point where I couldn't look them in a straight eye without having built something. It's like, okay, we're critiquing you and what you're building, but I need to build something as well. So I can't look in their eye without having built something myself. So that was part of my motivator.

40:05Jon Krohn:And to be clear to listeners, you've built companies, but you'd never built software. I've always been on the business side. That's right. So my background has always been go-to-market, business, fundraising. So I've helped build many, many technology companies, but I've never been on the technical side. I've always had great teams who've done that. I've always to a certain extent be able to just say, oh yeah, that's on that side of the business. I'm on my side of the business, et cetera. So AI has changed that. And so AI has enabled me as a non-programmer to actually now be able to build these types of sites.

40:36Jon Krohn:Do you have any AI Save Me stories on aisaveme.org yourself? So I actually do. And I'll talk about that in a sec. So the actual, my first foray into using AI to program was last year. My grandfather was a prolific artist for many years. He passed a number of decades ago. And I was always saddened because his art is all around the world, but none of it's documented, et cetera. So I decided to create an online art gallery. None of it's documented online. Well, none of it's documented online. That's correct. So I decided to create an online art gallery in tribute to my grandfather. And I, last year, was looking around.

41:10At that point, I just used Lovable. And I found Lovable, and I built a site. And it's vernmock.com. And it's my grandfather's art. and the, I was able to over, you know, about a month, I was able to get it, digitalize all the photos, build the site, et cetera. And what it really showed me was how powerful the AI is. The chat to full visual coded interface experience was amazing. And speaking of addictions on AI, I got addicted. I was like, oh my God, I've got to like keep doing this. So I built that site and And it was very empowering. And I did. And by the way, again, going back to the technology versus the human benefit, my AI saved me story on this.

41:51It's AI saved my grandfather's art legacy. So that's the overarching benefit. AI saved my grandfather's art legacy. So there's Lovable. There's tools. I use Supabase. I used Cloudinary to store all my images. I have all the technology stack. But the ultimate benefit is I saved my grandfather's art legacy, which was part of the inspiration for the I Save Me story. So that was a great experience I had last year. For this project, I did notice in my lovable experience that there's limitations to what you can do. And I would get to certain areas, and I would just get stuck. And then I would look around and say, yeah, you literally just can't do this in lovable.

42:31It's just not possible. It's very difficult. So this time I said, okay, I'm going to go a step further, and I just want to create a full developer environment where I have to – I'm just going to create an environment that develops. So I downloaded Cursor and with Claude in the back end using my terminal, using ChatGPT. And I said, I'm just going to learn everything that I need to learn to do this. So I primarily used ChatGPT. It was my AI architect and my AI product manager. and then Cursor and Claude are my AI coder and my AI QA manager.

43:03Jon Krohn:So why did you, was it through kind of empirical experience that you decided to use those two different providers that you kind of like, you know, you, in the beginning, you tried out ChatGPT and Claude as a developer and you tried it out as like a systems architect and you found that they had different strengths or? So where it started is with my grandfather's art project and lovable because it's all in GitHub. I just, when I got stuck, I actually then first got into cursor where I could actually then go in and do more detailed things that I couldn't do in lovable. So I actually learned, oh, well, I can modify this website through cursor.

43:35So that was very powerful. It also scared me because just the interface itself is all, there's a whole bunch of things for developers that I just don't know what they are. I just don't know what they are. But you can chat and say, I want this, I want that. So I think my insight was, it said, I want to use this environment, but I didn't want to actually be doing the coding, et cetera. So my actual workflow that I've now persisted for the whole time is, and this may not be the best way to do it. It's just what I ended up with. I would have long discussions in chat GPT around features, products, architecture.

44:12And again, I know enough about product management where I was like, we've got to build a database. But I was like, okay, let's talk about where the future is going. We're not going to build the future now, but let's talk about what the future looks like so we get the schema at least in place so that we're not architecting ourselves into a whole. So I had some best practice that was going. But the ultimate workflow that I got into was I would have long, long discussions in ChatGPT around architecting and the product. And we make all these decisions. And then I would say, okay, give me a prompt to give to cursor.

44:42And it would generate a five-page prompt. I would hit copy. Then I'd go over to cursor, I'd hit paste, and I'd hit go. And then I'd go get a bowl of cereal, I'd go hang out, I'd do whatever I do, come back like a half hour later and then the thing would be at a certain point. Then the other thing I would do is I would say, oh, we'd have a set thing where it'd say, give me, give a report on everything you built, what worked, what you thought I was going to do, et cetera. And it would generate these giant reports, which I would go copy and then paste back over to chat GPT and say, here's the report.

45:11Then I would get this big analysis from there. And then I would get that. Then we'd go back and say, oh, we need to change these three things or all that. We'd go back and forth. And so I basically had the AI managing the AI. And that was the real opener that I thought was – that really opened up. And I was like, holy cow, I can do a lot. Because the AI has all the safeguards. It would put in all the things to make sure that I'm not – if I was just typing into cursor on my own, I would type something and not think about a boundary condition or something, et cetera.

45:41Jon Krohn:Really exciting. And when we last met in person, you were like a little kid at Christmas with how excited you were. about all this. Is that continue to today? So I feel when I'm in this process, this goes into the fulfillment bucket. When I'm in this process, I feel like an eight-year-old boy with a box of Legos. I'm literally like stacking them together and I'm like, oh my God, I can build this, build this and build this, et cetera. And it's also, as a lifelong learner, I'm also asking ChatGPT, why are we doing it this way? Why are we doing, I'm asking the AI, it says, oh, we're going to do this.

46:20Like, what is this? Explain to me why we're doing that. Oh, oh, why are we doing the database tables this way? I don't get it. Explain it to me. So I've been learning best practices and why, you know, in addition to just getting it done, I've been learning about all these different development practices. So it's been a lot of fun. I will say this also, which is fun. In my stories, so I had a couple people submit stories who are developers, and they said they were, one of them was like, oh, I'm a manager who's now becoming a programmer again. Oh, something important I forgot to mention in the stories.

46:51Every one of the stories has a how-to section. So for the, you know, how do you create exams for, you know, for the night before a test, et cetera. We actually have the prompts. So I got my... Oh, really? We try to include the actual how-to. This goes back to, this is for people who are ahead of the curve in AI to teach, you know, to show people who are learning about AI, et cetera. So we actually include prompts and how-to, et cetera, so people can do this. So I had somebody submit a story about how to do things and they started talking about context files and they started talking about Skills and things like that and this is a few months ago.

47:28I was like I didn't know about those yet So I was like as I said, what are these and I was like, oh, I was like, oh, I should be doing that And so I learned about skills and Claude and then I learned about My I have a project context file and and it's the context files is literally a game changer, where you have all your context of what your decisions you've made, et cetera, et cetera, and you include those into every prompt, and that just reduces hallucination, much more efficient, gets you where you wanna go. Now, at work, I use that as well now. I'm like, okay, what's all the context for this project, et cetera?

48:01So again, I learned to build the site, and the site has helped me learn more.

48:05Jon Krohn:That's really cool. Has it impacted, I'm sure it has, but maybe you have some concrete examples of how this has impacted the advice that you end up giving to companies in your investment portfolio or to founders? Well, a lot of what we're seeing now is because we invest in AI, and we're trying to find companies that have a differentiated advantage, a lasting different advantage in a vertical space. So what is it? It can be different ways. So now what may have used to be a black box, Now, I know, oh, a lot of these like, oh, I now have an idea of how that could be built. Or when somebody presents something, I'm like, oh, something's like, oh, yeah, this is easy.

48:48I could build it. And again, I still put the I could build it. And it's really not that difficult. Versus, OK, there's some real magic going on here that requires incredible smarts. So there's a little bit of, you know, we're trying to find difficult problems to solve. And so with humility, I'll say if it's a problem that I can solve, it's not going to be that difficult. Right.

49:09Jon Krohn:Right. Don't invest in something that Steve could pull. If I could write the code, we definitely should not be invested in this. Where are the opportunities? So you mentioned there that you like identifying. So Blumberg Capital is the name of the VC firm that you work at. Do you want to tell us a bit about Blumberg? Yeah. Blumberg Capital, we're an early and growth stage venture capital firm. It was founded by David Blumberg over 35 years ago. We invest primarily in B2B software, enterprise software solutions. We do very little consumer, very little in hardware, but we just love the problem about how does technology improve businesses.

49:47It's just been very rich. We've been, as a firm, we've been through Web 1.0. We've been through mobile cycle, cloud, SaaS. So every major technology cycle, we've survived and thrived as a venture capital firm. We have a very rich set of advisors and entrepreneurs in our network. and then now we're in the agentic AI space. So we're very, very focused on how do we find companies solving problems in the enterprise using AI.

50:18Jon Krohn:What are the kinds of things that lead to you saying, okay, this is an investable business? I mean, so obviously they can't just be vibe coding it. It can start that way. It can start that way. Or yeah, it can't just be vibe coded with Steve Mock level skills. But what are the kinds of things that allow somebody to have some moat or something that differentiates them against competitors? Yeah. So there's a few things. I'd say our biggest focus is vertical AI where we look at AI solutions in different verticals. So we have a company that is an AI for auditing company. and there are world-class auditors who got together with a world-class data team and came together with a solution in that space.

51:04We have an AI in the legal space. We have an AI in mining, not mining like crypto mining, but actually digging minerals out of the ground mining.

51:12Jon Krohn:Real mining. And so we're always looking for teams with deep vertical expertise in their area, and then an insight about how that can be disruptive in the area and do things in their vertical in a different way than they've done before. And so within that, there are areas where a lot of the recursive learning models now are where if there's a problem, the longer the models are running, the better they get at their solution. So we're funding teams right now who are demonstrating that. And they have two, three years head start now, where they have two, three years of data where anybody can build a software.

51:52So two, three years from now, somebody else could just build a software that does exactly what they do, but they're going to be two to three years behind in the recursive learning curve. And then once you're the leader in the space, you have the best logos as your customers. You might have the best distribution partners. So then there's a first mover advantage that actually comes with being the first of this. So we call it the data flywheel. It's the new proprietary technology. That's one area that we look for. There's other areas that are structural. I mean, one of the questions we ask is, you know, data and customers are obviously important, right?

52:26So today, all the incumbents in the space, they have all the data and they have all the customers. So you and your two friends, like, why is it that you're going to be able to do something that they can't do? So a lot of the conversations start with that. And then, you know, because they're coming from their vertical, they'll have an insight. They'll be go, they're structurally, they can't do something for these reasons. or their data is limited to this or where we can get new data that they can't get. So usually then there's some insight around that that the incumbents can't do. And then we lean in and do due diligence and look for these types of companies.

53:01Jon Krohn:You were mentioning not long ago that a mining company, which I believe they're called VAR AI, V-E-R-A-I. And so companies like that, I think there's probably others that Bloomberg invests in. They're not just having this kind of two to three years of data moat and getting ahead on logos. Businesses like that, that have complex, that require complex scientific or regulatory breakthroughs to make happen. How do you go about investing in a business like that when the time horizon can be so much longer, when the time to monetization could be so much further out? Yeah, well, this is the core business of investing.

53:44and you really just have to look at each company on a case-by-case basis. Ver.ai is a very exciting one for us. It's using AI to do mineral prospecting. So when you're trying to identify minerals in an area, then traditional prospecting methods don't work as well. They're using AI that's about 1 ,000 times more accurate.

54:05Jon Krohn:1 ,000 times? 1 ,000 times. Investors are often looking for like a 10x improvement, right? Well, this is to prospect. So the idea is the problem they're solving is that mining, prospecting today, it hasn't changed much in the last 200 years. People look at a cliff and they're like, oh, there might be, there's some coloring there. Let's send a geologist up there to get a sample and maybe there's some minerals there. I'm simplifying things. What they can actually do is they can find minerals in covered terrain. So whether it's foliage and earth and soil and trees and they have an ability to see what's underneath that.

54:37So they're able to detect whole deposits that other people can't even find. So they're able to do that. However, this is a, as you said, it's a new technology, right? So from an investor perspective, what we do is we look at, first of all, does the technology work? And so if someone has a SaaS application that's doing payroll differently, then you can sit down and in a half hour, you can figure out if it's going to work. That checkbox happens pretty fast. In this type of business, though, it's a multiple year process. So the initial investments that we're making is to just figure out if the technology works.

55:17So it's a little bit longer. I guess more of a deep tech. It's a longer horizon. Then once the technology works, then we can then... We have brought on more investment now to say, okay, now we need to roll this out into more places, et cetera. So this is sort of a classic, okay, does it work? Is the initial investment is let's just prove that it works. Once you prove it works, now you can attract other investors and say, we've already de-risked it. We've proven that it works. Now please come on board and let's go roll it out more from a rollout commercialization perspective.

55:45Jon Krohn:Scale it. We kind of understand the unit economics. And then once they get to a certain point beyond that, there'll be like another threshold. Now we really need to scale this and bring in the next level of funding, et cetera, et cetera. That's kind of the path. So you try to figure out what I think the real answer is, is any business at all, whether it's your SaaS payroll widget company or this is what is the next significant milestone that the company should hit for the next funding horizon. But you don't want to spend two years doing something trying to prove that works and then two years, oh, it's still we haven't proven it yet.

56:17So there's a lot of rigor to make sure in that period you're actually hitting the milestone that you set to set you up for that next round of funding.

56:23Jon Krohn:Really interesting. When you're evaluating those prospective early investments where you don't yet know the unit economics, you don't yet know if this technology is going to work, do you make the decision then on kind of the track record of the founders and kind of the research that they've done in advance that gives you – you're kind of like the prospector looking up at a cliff and being like, I think we see gold out there in those cliffs. That's funny. Yeah. So founders are absolutely important and critical and resilience is a very important trait that we're looking for. In this era of AI, in this era of technology where things are changing constantly, all we know is that things are going to change.

57:06All we know is that things are going to pop up. Things are going to get away. We do our best I can to map out all the risks. As soon as we're done, something will pop up that we didn't know about, a new competitor, a new whatever. So what you really need are what you're looking for are teams that are very smart and are resilient and are able to stick with it and able to solve the problem. So we're really at the end of the day, we're not betting on a roadmap of exactly like we know exactly what's going to happen. We're betting on a team that's going to be able to navigate the shifting roadmap that they're up against that's going to change over time.

57:41Jon Krohn:You just said the word resilience, which reminds me of something that came up from our research, is Bloomberg Capital's logo is this flying sphere. And that flying sphere logo apparently also ties to the company's philosophy that emphasizes staying upright regardless of which way the wind blows, which is like fundamentally this idea of founders being resilient. That's exactly right. Good observation. I'm impressed. I'm also, this is a complete non sequitur, but when you were describing mining, like finding, you know, digging in places to try to find gold, my favorite film directors are the Coen brothers.

58:22Jon Krohn:And they created this anthology called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which I avoided watching for so long because I thought the idea of watching an anthology as opposed to getting like wrapped up into one story, having, you know, half a dozen stories, I was like, eh. But it's a brilliant an anthology and it's all kind of tied together around this like Wild West theme. And one of the stories, I think the most visually stunning of the stories in that film is one that tracks kind of an old school Alaskan gold prospector working on his own digging holes. And yeah, great that you're managing to find the digital equivalent today so effectively.

59:03Jon Krohn:All right, Steve, what a great episode as we start to wind it down. Do you have a book recommendation for us? The first one comes to mind is a book I read many years ago, Team of Rivals. It's a book about President Lincoln. And he was the first president who put his team of rivals, who put his actual political rivals in key cabinet positions. So until that time, if you became president, what you generally did is you put your cousins and your brothers and all the people that really liked you in all the key positions in the government and you guys ran the government for four years. Lincoln was different and he said he thought highly of all of his political competitors, his rivals, and he said, well, they're second, third, and fourth in our election.

59:48They should be in the second, third, or fourth most important positions in the government. So that's really interesting. The whole book is about how he manages all these personalities of people that had historically not supported him. So I just think it's like super leverage. Like how do you get the most leverage out of people? and we're talking about AI, we're talking about modern this, all these tools. Well, this is a couple hundred year old lesson that still exists today.

1:00:10Jon Krohn:It would be amazing to see something like that happen going forward at some point in our lifetimes in US politics. That would be an amazing thing to see that kind of across the aisle working. It's basically unimaginable today, but we'll see what happens. Yeah. It sounds like a great recommendation. And then Steve, from across AISaveMe.org to your experience as an entrepreneur and an investor, I'm sure lots of people have really enjoyed this episode. How can they follow you for your thoughts after the episode? Thank you. Yeah, I'd say following me, LinkedIn, go to Steve Mock at Blumber Capital.

1:00:44You can find me on LinkedIn. Also for AISaveMe, it's AISaveMe.org. And you can follow us there on Twitter, as well as we have a daily newsletter where we're sending out a daily story, an AI story per day that we're sending out. As some of these stories come in, please come sign up for the newsletter, be part of that community, forward the stories to the people that need to learn about these stories. And that'd be great.

1:01:09Jon Krohn:Love it, Steve. Thank you so much for your years of friendship and mentorship for me. And now some of my audience gets to experience some of your wisdom as well. Really exciting things that you're doing with AI Save Me. And I look forward to seeing how it continues to grow and help more and more people and maybe bring some more of those anti-AI people around. We'll see. Thank you. It's a pleasure. What an inspiring and highly informative episode today. In it, Steve Mock detailed how AISavedMe.org grew out of his 84-year-old father's question, how does one use AI? And became a forum where people share the real ways AI has helped them as an antidote to all the doom in the press.

1:01:50Jon Krohn:He told us why the best stories turned out to be about human outcomes rather than technology. As an example, there's the jaw-dropping story of an Australian data scientist whose dog had cancer, who used AI to sequence the tumor, track down an experimental treatment, and have a custom version made after which the tumors shrank away. He talked about how being a self-described, proud non-programmer, he nevertheless built the entire AISaveMe.org site on his own by having ChatGPT act as an architect and product manager, while Cursor and Claude handled the coding, essentially letting the AI manage the AI.

1:02:25Jon Krohn:And why from his seat as a VC at Bloomberg Capital, the durable edge in AI is the data flywheel, a two to three year head start in recursive learning that a competitor simply can't copy overnight. As always, you can get all the show notes, including the transcript for this episode, the video recording, any materials mentioned on the show, the URLs for Steve's social media profiles, as well as my own at superdatascience.com slash 1009. Thanks to everyone on the Super Data Science podcast team, our podcast manager, Sonia Breivich, media editor, Mario Pombo, partnerships manager, Natalie Zajski, researcher Serge Massis, and our founder, Kirill Aromenko.

1:03:01Jon Krohn:Thanks to all of them for producing another super episode for us today. For enabling that super team to create this free podcast for you, we are deeply grateful to our sponsors. You can support the show by checking out our sponsors links, which are in the show notes. And if you yourself are interested in sponsoring an episode, you can get the details on how by making your way to johnkrone.com slash podcast. Otherwise, please help us out by sharing this episode with folks who would be inspired by Steve's work. Review the episode on podcasting platforms or YouTube, wherever you listen to or watch your episodes of this podcast.

1:03:39Jon Krohn:in particular written apple reviews are super helpful for us so uh extra points for doing that subscribe all of course if you're not already a subscriber but most importantly i just hope you'll keep on tuning in i'm so grateful to have you listening and i hope i can continue to make episodes you love for years and years to come till next time keep on rocking it out there and i'm looking forward to enjoying another round of the super data science podcast with you very soon

1:04:09Thank you.