Digital Transformation in Businesses: Piers Linney's Secrets to Building a Tech Empire

0:00When you saw the chat GPT and OpenAI and this genitive AI come out, I thought right this is it And the question for me then was, what do I do? Do I invest in it? Do I start something out? Or do I kind of hedge my bets? I went back to the American Gold Rush adage, which was, don't always try and pan for gold, sell shovel. Here's Linny, Dragon's Den, secret millionaire. That's where he's known. But now this guy's going to blow you away with some of the stuff on AI. I know very few people where they did it in one go. Serial entrepreneurs are serial entrepreneurs because they're successful, because they've got the scars.

0:35They know where the potholes are and they can avoid most of it. But I do think AI, you're going to see it come full circle. Humans are going to become more interested in human experiences. Piers Linney, his five-step framework on how you build success in business, that's going to blow you away for real. So Piers, success, how does it happen? What's your theory or formula for it? I think you've probably heard this many times. If I had a formula, I'd bottle it and I'd be a lot more successful. I think it's after gas term this this question about the entrepreneurs is it something you're born with and I believe it's a mixture of the two and I think especially if you look in the before the dot-com really in the UK especially a most venture capital went into to manage and buyouts you know them buyouts so people that probably never expected to own a business it's became good at what they did yeah their owner their boss wanted to cash out or got too old or whatever well had no family to take over so they bought them out and they became owners and entrepreneurs and they became very wealthy and that's how the venture capital industry kind of came around in the UK especially I think it's part of that but a lot of it's about risk appetite the ability to take on risk and and take on risk over a long period of time and all of the associated effects of taking on risk.

2:01So sacrifice, you know, you sacrifice time. I mean, I go through my career, but I was a lawyer and a banker in the city. I thought I worked hard in the city, you know, when I was a banker at Credit Suisse versus Boston, where I didn't get home for days on end, quite literally. I didn't sleep for days and sometimes, but then I thought, well, how hard can building a business be? You know what I mean? And then you start building a business and it's different because it's quite personal a lot of entrepreneurs really success initially you wouldn't make money you've got this vision but it's about being proven right I think you have a thesis hypothesis and you want to go and prove it and test it and ideally prove it is right yeah I want to prove this right you might call it product market fair whatever you want to call it and then you prove it's right and then you go okay so I showed you now I'm gonna scale it and create wealth and value myself and my investors um but i i found success is something which has sort of is taking five steps forwards and probably three back on most days it does that's a good day it's it's funny though when you see you know working so hard in the lawyer and that when you're working with someone else you've worked a long hours but the emotion just isn't the same it's not personal and that sort of thing.

3:23So how did you define success as a young man, and how do you define it today? So my first business, this is not some reverse-engineered founder story. Yeah. I lived in the north of England when the Industrial Revolution started. In those days when it snowed, it covered your car, right? Right. So it's hard. I had a paper round. I did a bit of papers for five, six days a week. I got paid about five pounds,$7 in US money. and I thought there's got to be a better way than this one morning I saw that I can't believe that happened but my dad said to me can you go and get the paper on Sunday morning because they don't deliver on Sundays I asked him why I didn't and so I went and got the paper bought it back and he paid for the paper and gave me let's call it a service fee a tip yes exactly and I thought hang on a minute there's something in this I kind of cut a long story short I ended up like flying with neighbours and nobody wants to get out of bed on Sunday morning and get the papers.

4:20Then I realised, well, I can't buy the paper from the newsagent because there's no margin. It'll be the same price. They're going to give me the money. I've got to hope on tips. Then I worked out that I could buy the paper wholesale from the wholesaler. So I'm now 13 years old. I've disintermediated the local newsagent for today's terminology. And then I made about£20 on a Sunday morning. So to answer your question, really, initially, it was about making money to buy stuff. So I made enough money to buy the shiny BMX bike. I can't, this is like 1984 or something. And I got this shiny BMX bike.

5:01I actually still know the brand today. I remember my first Harrow. So, you know, my friend had a Harrow, freestyler. I had a Curtis, which is a UK. And it's still going. Yeah. Still tiny company, but it's still going. I still have one of my mates from high school. they still ride their bmx every weekend well my my oldest friend from school who's in bmx he's a teacher in thailand the same age as me he's in his early 50s and he's racing bmxs so how did that then evolve what's the definition now and what was sort of the process of that so so so going on from there it was always about having a bit of fun it's more about the money yeah yeah so i had um got grief university kind of doing parties and things not much university really just working in bars working for the people then a law school into law school i had a business a business kind of you know doing company formation the various other things and then with a friend of mine so there was never a point where you weren't working or doing something i always had what's now called a side hustle yeah right yeah i hate side hustle it was i was sort of a business yeah and then a friend of mine we did a film financing he led it and i got involved he went on to run lionsgate fantastic he's a big wig in the film industry great guy and um so what was that this kind of side hustles was about making money to buy stuff uh and then what happened was i was always investing my excess earnings in buying things investing in things helping friends do deals i love doing deals and over time as you do in a portfolio essentially some died some kind of living dead as we call them and some you know grew and some of those became quite large you know 40 million pounds of revenue 5 million ebda quite big businesses when the day came where i thought you're sitting in board meetings talking to management thinking i can't do a better job than these characters i mean what are they talking about i mean how many slides of numbers can they show me without actually telling me anything so one day my business partner and i who bought all business which is in the telecoms we kind of stepped in basically tentatively at first eventually we became management built it and sold it and that was it about money and then i think over time you make a bit of money um i've made i've lost money and made money as you do but then you're as you're as your sort of glass begins to sort of fill maybe overflow sometimes you go and get a bigger glass the bigger jet doesn't make you any happier yes I had the boats did the whole thing you know the usual story and then you know and then um everyone says that the best days having a boat the day you get it and the day you sell it yeah and then over time then you have children then you get married uh and then it begins to change actually and what happened to me was a lot of the time was that people said to me you're very successful not many people I'm sort of I'm half a month Barbados but that's English I grew up in a mill town in Lancashire I was the only mixed-race kid of any Afro-Caribbean heritage in my school of 2 ,000 kids so I ticked lots of boxes yeah I ended up on the secret millionaire bill undercover boss and then drag us down like shark tank I can I take these boxes whenever can look to the mirror so you're successful and I can't that way when I looked around I realized that success to me wasn't just about the money then it was about actually being successful to me started being how do i help other people be successful why do i help them avoid all the pitfalls and problems i faced but i was blinked right i was bloody bloody minded blinkered you could stand in front of me i'd dig a hole under you i'd go around you i'd step over you didn't matter but not everybody has that dna yeah and not everybody should have that dna some people are you know they don't like that so i i sort of started looking at you know sort of sharing how I can help people be successful and and I always say that ambitions evenly distributed access to capital opportunity support coaching mentoring isn't enough to change then had some periods of time where I lost a little money and then you know I don't know this stuff's not permanent then you gotta look after it yeah you can't be careless with it and then I then I'd go back into a slightly other mode of well hang on a minute I need to make some more money so it kind of changed over time but I guess the the general trajectory has been from making money the sake of making money into now doing things that I enjoy with people I enjoy doing it with and the money comes as a byproduct and it comes the body doing all that.

9:40Rolf said everyday panicking about it. Yeah. When, when do you think your standard in life became success? Like, was there a point as a kid? Was it as a young man? Or is it just always there from your family? No, so my, my, so I didn't grow up in a difficult family environment. My, my dad was a working class lad from Manchester. He was very bright. He went to Cambridge. In those days, he kind of went and he came back. He's not with us anymore, sadly. But he was my sort of role model mentor mine he was my chat GPT right he's like a psychopedia my mom was West Indian came to England in the 60s was a nurse we got the Windrush generation here yeah both that call the Windrush generation so they were kind of my role models they've had any of the role models there anyone I've ever looked to was Richard Branson I was lucky enough to go to fire with him because I donated to his charity and there's a story there but I ended up on dragon's then he sort of maybe bring the producer and tell them I'm doing it while I was with it and to no real mentors or such I had role models and then what happened was was that when I was on the secret I thought about I was on the secret millionaire program I hope people said to me you're listening to me in that program you did keep that secret you know you had like a in a portion a townhouse when I never thought of you as successful or wealthy I wasn't super wealthy right enough to sort of tick the boxes but um then you start thinking oh right okay and people start looking at inside a different library um and people think that because you've been on dragons there and shark time you're a billionaire i know billionaires right and lifestyle to me you're sort of comfortable and now i think you know you'll make more money you can see often with me i found that i've had a planted seeds yeah and then over the years you sort of sow them some don't flower and some do and um there's a period of time where i had business that sat on a fire sale i got divorced and i was just a bit like oh i didn't do much really so i wasn't kind of sowing these seeds right so there's a period of time like a fallow period almost where i had my kind of asset base and the kind of income that generated um but certainly more recently where you started to see these things trigger again and i really enjoyed that i kind of missed it yeah wise man once said to me always invest in young people because as you get older they get into their prime and they're making a lot more money for you at that point um i'm going to come back to the den stuff in just a little bit uh your idea on the relationship between failure and success like how do they relate do they relate what's your thoughts and um i know i know very few people have a lot of successful people some very probably less and when you hear their story it is one of both success under failure I know very few people back I think a one actually where it did it in one go yeah it did so they started something and they made a fortune in the exit and even if they are the Zuckerberg's he still failed at so many things along the way and made so many mistakes I then I'll say to entrepreneurs I always say because people look at you like you know it was actually talks people and kind of like well I've got a business and I'm kind of look great do your best with it but they don't expect this always be especially your first one the one that makes you you know you learn as you go serial entrepreneurs are serial entrepreneurs because they're successful because they've got the scars they know where the potholes are and they can avoid most of it.

13:18Once you've learned leadership, you've learned leadership. Once you've learned sales, you've learned sales. It doesn't matter the business. You can apply the skills across the board. Bicycle business. We talked about us having BMXs as kids, but how did you get into the business of bikes? I've always loved bikes. There's a period where I didn't have a bike. I lived in London, did my thing, took my money. Then one day I realized, I can't bother with this traffic, the subway, the tube. So I bought a bike and then my old friend from school, you've got a bike, you should get a mountain bike and come with us at the weekend.

13:54Because they were riding off road or mountain bike. Okay, fair enough. And of course I go obsessed with things, right? So I got into mountain bike. You bought the 6 ,000 quid bike. I bought the boat. I had three of them. A hardtail, a downhill. It's been cheaper to buy the company. I had a hardtail. They were different brands. And then there was a phase where when I was on like Dragon's Day and Shark Tank, whenever the press did a shoot with I always tried to involve a bike it's like a joke actually I was having a bike in a city of London all over the place so there's a well-known mountain bike family called the Atherton's right so Rachel's won the World Cup six times geez won it twice and the other brother Athey he's well they were known for baseball in World Cup races but we're On Instagram, I got a message Wednesday saying, hi, you want to talk to us about building a bike brand?

14:50And he said, if you like cars, it's like Lewis Hamilton texting you. Yes. You want to start a car company? I was like, what? Anyway, so I met them. A very long story short. You've got elite athletes, a load of material scientists, and you know that that's a recipe for disaster, right? Starting a business. Then he had me. so I and then he had a chap who used to run race team called Dan who thought should be this sort of CEO so I I wrote an MOU about 10 pages thick saying right just to be clear this is what we're planning on doing this is the idea but I could see that this this additive manufactured 3d printing technology these guys that kind of they are geniuses the Affertons the brand they need this is a story of story session of excellence and then myself and Danny could actually run the business so we started the business we crowdfunded it you see where business you always think well that's just crowdfunding so you we crowdfunded about 1.5 million pounds 6 million pounds I think it was half angels half crowd raise the money you wake all these people now so you launch the product they were gonna buy a bike and not one of them they were fans not customers yeah see it's funny isn't it you always think you always make these assumptions you know it's the unknown unknowns isn't it in business about not the known unknowns so okay so then then COVID hit suddenly the supply chain of the products when you build bikes what you make is a frame pedals the cranks the bars the forks the stem anything is OEM somebody else makes it so we had a problem there, slowed it down.

16:35But, going back to success, you know, the Affertons, they ground away the design, they're testing it. You know, the material scientists kept going, design, perfecting it. And we kept going, the business and raising the finance and the marketing. And you just keep grinding away, don't you? And this is what people struggle with when you're starting a company. It's that compounding. It's very slow. It's the old, you pass a lake and there's a tiny bit of algae. He wore your dog on day one and he passes it every day and it doubles his size every day. And after 30 days, that bit of algae is covering half a lake.

17:13And you think, how long will it take to cover the whole lake? And it's a ditch, one more down. So it's that compounding that we saw. And then eventually, then the product began to show its ability. And we won the, Rachel won a World Cup race. The team won two World Cup races. The bikes won the World Championship first and second. And then suddenly it takes off. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, suddenly magic. These five years of like graft and staring at each other thinking where's the next investment coming from. You know, that is business. You have to put in the time. It's the same as investing. It's the same as anything.

17:49It looks like nothing's happening. My personal trainer said to me, yeah, when I got back on training again, he said, yeah, for the first 30 days it'll feel like nothing. For the next 30 days you'll feel something. and then for the next 30 days, someone else will notice. Absolutely right. You know, but business, that's for the first year or two and then a year or two of you noticing and then a year or two until the others. Well, Beach has been as well as the, you see the basis using the aircraft technology, that Formula One race technology in bikes and doing it in different ways. Because normally when you buy these carbon fibre mounting bikes, they have to make them months in advance and ship them from usually Taiwan.

18:26Our record is, it was a race in the Alps, One of the afters didn't like the way it's set up. So we actually changed the design, changed the geometry, reprinted the lugs, the joints, put the frame back together, got it back out to them for a race three days later. You can't do that. See, this is where, like, your standards, and you even said this when you bought the bikes for yourself, your standard is best of the best of the best. Do you think that's a reason why you're successful in business? Do you think that's a part of it? No, I think I've been successful because it's the people you choose to work with.

19:04But they're the best of the best. You've got the Athensons and the scientists. Oh, yeah, and that's not absolutely right. But I could see that. But even then, even then when you think you've got all the ingredients for the perfect cake, it doesn't quite rise the way you think it's going to. And that's the beauty of being an entrepreneur. Yeah. But it's also what gives you a great... So Den, Dragons Den, Shark Tank in the States, Den over here. How do you pick someone to invest in or do you pick the ideas? What's your theory, person or idea, or is it both? So I will say that. So my background is venture capital lawyer, banking, and the debt.

19:47Being an angel investor as well. I was on the board of the government bank in the UK during COVID, right? So in the US, you had the… Like$90 billion dollar debt. That's getting me rolled out, yeah. so it'd be like the was it got the pp ppe in the stage yeah that wasn't aboard the bank so i know sort of financing marketing people raising money and i think in the den essentially it's an angel investment okay yes televised your camera's point but the problem the issue was trying to business on tv is that we both know that most of these 10 years of graft of admin right but that moment where you put your dreams aspiration on the table and someone sat in a chair over a hunk of cash next them that that's televisual yeah but most of it isn't so I think whether it's whether you're in the den whether it's a very young company like you've got a spectrum you go from personal that idea to buying out a very large utility company that utility company it's regulatory risk the whole manuscript disappear in a horrible accident wouldn't matter place the next day whereas with that person with the idea you're investing really in person because the idea by the time it makes money won't be the same idea can you work with them can they pivot can they put up with the sacrifice of the hours of stress of building a business um and can they do it for probably everybody always says you know three to five years it's ten it's a decade to get from that that compounding curve gets anywhere valuable it's 10 years okay anybody says so can they are they have they got 10 years of energy to put into this like it's always the person but as you move out you know if you look at series angel investment seed series a b seed each one really is like an ring you're ticking off different risks but when you're starting out the idea it's all risk yeah oh yeah any favorite ones that you've you've picked to invest in so I did um the best one actually was a mess in news a personalized children's content and it was one of the first deals and dragons then was a proper tech deal so I only got four percent for a hundred thousand pounds and all the other dragons car we doing the program with the users are 50 grand for 30 percent I was like well these guys had a term sheet for VC and they're some three PhDs I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

22:11And they sold that for, the number's not popular, but I got a 45X return. So that's a favourite, obviously. Any fun ones that you did that didn't work out? Yeah, there's one, the curry company. Great, great, again, great team, great story, great product. But this was kind of like, most curries are like curry paste. It's like long-lived. And this was like fresh curry, a bit like pasta sauce. And the supermarkets loved it, but had nowhere to put it. Because there was no, like, fresh. So part of the problem was not the fact the product wasn't great. It was the fact it didn't have a chilled, fresh place to put this product.

22:49Yeah, no one knew what it was or where to place it. So it just didn't work out. Yeah, a lot of times people come up with an idea that's just too new. They're like, well, I got the newest, latest, greatest idea. No one knows about it. And it's like, yeah. Well, look at.com 1.0, right? A lot of the ideas then, they resurfaced 10 years later and worked out. Yeah, I like being second into a market once they've proven that it works and that sort of thing. When you think about growing any business today, what are some of the ingredients you say they must have these things for us to know it's going to succeed?

23:24So I did a talk today at BizX in the UK, and the one on AI, and one of my five factors. So they're quite generic, but it was planning. You need to have a plan. You need to know where your point B is from your point A. they make decisions to get you closer to it not some shiny object syndrome people it was a big one about you've got to look at yourself as well no maybe need a coach you could whatever it might be support guidance and not execs mentors who knows but look at yourself look your team how did the right teams go on a journey even from generalist a specialist operations there's no point trying to scale a business unless you've got your ducks in a row in the UK a pantomime horse on stage.

24:05So the front end moves way too quickly, it attaches. It's very hard to put it together again. It's done. And then finance, the big one, understanding finance, the options, what raising money means, not trying to raise the wrong money, push a square peg through a round hole. And the last one was kind of technology. I went through those five. And to me, they're the five pillars. And within there, don't forget, you or somebody you employ it needs to be able to sell stuff. Yeah, marketing and sales is kind of important in business at this day and age. Well, hey there, and thanks for listening. I've noticed that 78 % of you are brand new, which means you haven't hit the subscribe button yet.

24:46By subscribing, you help us bring on even better guests, better quality content, and serve you better with even more podcasts. So please hit that subscribe button. It only takes a second. It makes a huge difference. If you support us, we're going to support your success and help you achieve big success together. Piers, AI. Everyone's sort of like enamored by it or scared by it. Give us your thoughts on where it's at and where it's going first. So I was a trustee of NEST, the UK's largest innovation foundation, about six years. And we don't, well, we, they, I didn't do it. A lot of research on the impact of, this is pre-generative AI, AI robotics on kind of workforces.

25:30one of the interesting things well the outcome was the creatives are safe which hasn't quite proven to be the case but you know I I grew up in the northwest of England okay literally where the first Dutch Revolution started it was a school we talked about mills and weavers cottages and we looked out the window and we could point out and the teacher and then I was fascinated by in revolutions and then web sort of 1.0 when I left the city and Wall Street became an entrepreneur i kind of played around in web 2 a little bit made a bit of money in web 3 been okay recently but uh but then when when you saw the chat gpt and open ai and this genitive ai come out with two years ago now i thought right this is it this is productized commoditized intelligence right it's only good at certain things i think that the ai we're using today it might not be the one we actually end up using down the line it'd be different technologies models different approaches but I thought this is the wave that I was born to swim into the paddle into yeah and the question for me then was which I thought about quite long and hard was what do I do do I invest in it do I start something now and what's that going to be or do I kind of hedge my bets I went back to the the American gold rush adage which was don't always try and pan for gold sell shovels.

26:55Yeah. So we started out with Implement AI kind of selling shovels. So we kind of productized how we help you understand where your business is, how you could use it, where would add value, training, because obviously quite important training. You can't use the tools that you get kind of garbage in, garbage out. And then we kind of said to companies, okay, there you go. It smells great. We want to see it work. Now we're kind of, oh, hang on a minute. Now we're into MBPs, proof of concept, no code, low code, code then we insert proof of concept from the company say it works quite well the roi is amazing can we pilot it now we're into pilots over long longer periods of time proving the roi and then the client starts saying great implement it yeah and then you get into the conversation of what is our product where's the value going to accrue almost like a pipeline do you want to get into developing applications.

27:53I believe that software as a service will not go away with old because when you can talk to machines and code yourself in plain English, you don't have to use applications that have been designed by third parties with the biggest TAM. You can design an application automation that runs the business the way that you want to run your business, not how company X is telling you to. So that's quite exciting, I think. So we kind of thought, and then I was thinking, oh, we build these AI agents. What is this? What's our product? How do I describe it? So I was on one of our motorways. Actually, I talk, chat GPT +, because it's a fantastic sounding board.

28:32Yeah. And I said, how do I explain all these different agents to people that we want to have that can communicate, collaborate, and learn? Chat GPT said to me, think of them as musicians with instruments. Okay, I get it. Your product is not individual musicians of instruments. you're selling the orchestra. I was like, thank you. I said, but nobody wants an orchestra. Yes, but someone might want like a jazz band where you pick certain musicians and instruments to create. I was like, thank you very much. And then you start thinking, I'm talking to a machine that is, you know, you don't need to do certain things.

29:09I'm talking to a toaster really, but it's giving me these fantastic ideas and help me think in ways that I come up with things I wouldn't have done myself. Yeah. So the joy I stood out on, I think where the value is going to accrue, the real value is in the tech stack, the fabs, the GPU, the cloud infrastructure, the hyperscan infrastructure, the LLMs. And then innovating across the top is exciting and also nerve-wracking. You never quite know where the next iteration of LLM is going to just disrupt you and put you out of business. When you look at the basic tasks in a business, AI is eating them up.

29:48I mean, the customer service capabilities, all of that stuff. It's just eating up all of that stuff. When we get to that top end of town, like for us as business coaches, you know, we're live and local. We do the coaching with you. We're live. We're local. But still building the Brad bot right now, teaching my bot everything from my brain, it's kind of fun, but it's also kind of challenging to think of where will we go with this. the average business owner my gut feel is that AI is not going to be something they need to really dive into straight away big companies are getting in there where do you see it impacting that SME right now how does AI impact the SME?

30:36A couple of things one is I did a presentation today I have this ship I built it's a picture of a ship in a harbour with millions of people around it couple on it and it's about to leave the harbor i built it and did it mid-journey and the point is is that this technological ship is leaving the harbor right now and the people left in the harbor are not going to be admin assistants uber drivers you know truck drivers it's going to be very expensive knowledge workers because they've got a nose bullseye on their back lawyers accountants eventually that's knowledge workers eventually got embodied air robotics so you're gonna have people that surgeons you know you know probably maybe in my lifetime with my children it'd be illegal for a human to work on a construction site because you can't get insurance you know or drive a car to an urban conurbation conurbation who knows so that's one is you've got to start get onto the boat start using it embracing it understanding it because as it moves away if that's the gap between the quayside and the boat becomes too big it's going to be very hard to catch up so my view is most companies is just get involved and understand it the next point really i would say is that i think there'll be a battle for the middle ground so i mean this is very generic but the big the large enterprises okay if you make jet engines while the nuclear power states quite different now they so they were always the big enterprise the big customers let's look at fmcg and then you've got this sme the small company with that personal touch customization so if you make you know custom out of their wooden furniture the g is never going to either.

32:13You're never going to make jet engines. However, in the middle, lots of services where the big players now can hyper-personalize. They can come after that long tail. And the long tail has now got the technology to go after some of the big enterprise customers because they can now, it's credible. They don't have to write, and they're expensive writing code and applications, LLMs, doing a lot of the hard work for them. So I think you've got this overlap at the middle, and if I could the battle for the middle ground, and that's going to play out, that's going to be interesting. That's a, yeah. I love the fact that we as small business now have an ability to compete, where we, you know, previously had to spend millions of dollars building a piece of software, and now...

32:57Well, cloud was the first. Yes. Cloud was first, all the infrastructure. You could buy a subscription model, whatever the hell you wanted. Anything in a big company could. And now, LLM means that, you know, I have to, maybe you have. I've lost millions of pounds or spent it trying to build software and investments or direct projects that never worked and you're like, oh my God. Whereas now, if you can talk to machines and ask them for an outcome and it writes the code and you get an outcome, and that's not quite right, it needs to do that, and it re-writes the code, that means that your ability to innovate in using code is kind of exponentially increases.

33:35But it also means big players can do it as well. So let's talk the old scale philosophy of business. Obviously, AI is going to assist in scale. Pre-AI, though, what were your things about a business scaling must do A, B, and C? Is there certain things you see in the ones that really scale versus those that don't? I mean, the ones that obviously have really scaled in more recent years are the ones where, you know, the marginal cost of producing another product or adding another customer is minimal. hence why venture capitalists love software as a service right it's just built for them essentially but I think you're going to see that I think software as a service is going to be disrupted I think there's been billions of dollars invested in SaaS especially B2B SaaS over the last 10 year funds 7 year investments last say 5 years it's probably not going to be worth what the authority was because of generative error so that's the beauty of software is the ability to scale and that marginal cost of adding your customer revenue doesn't scale with it but the beauty of ai i think is that you can now limit your cost maybe it's people especially i'm a big fan of voice for the voice interface essentially and you can maybe increase your um revenue growth so the gap in between is more margin more profit more valuable business more more well essentially to scale it's my five factors really it's the i'm the plan obviously but it's the the people the operational excellence and it's ready to scale front ends and detached from the back end your finances but increasingly it's technology but i do think interestingly that i think with ai you're going to see it come full circle but humans are going to become more interested in human experiences yeah so you might find an interesting thing is this I took your head around is that we value knowledge work hedge fund managers lawyers accounts consultants right that's been productized been commoditized so in the future who are we going to value is it gonna be a hairdresser a stonemason a masseuse a coach because machines can't do that stuff well there's all these stuff we value for you know probably two industrial revolutions at least is going to become other times are going to go to zero so whereas if i go to zero scale it but the the value may start to accrue elsewhere yeah i mean it's really interesting i was just in um monterey mexico and i got to go to one of the car plants there and just see the level of robotics in that car plant and you know i i look at it i look back to when they first started making cars to this and the speed with which that change has happened the speed with which ai is going to shift the market are you seeing it going as faster and faster pace or where do you see that yeah so it's that it's again it's like that exponential curve it's compounding we don't quite know how steep it's going to be or where when the foothills or the trajectory is going to be of that curve what is happening and also again i said before the ai we have now may not be the AI we have seen abuse the way the with the models the way actually works a lot of AGI which is a whole different thing where it's recursive and it can learn that changes the game but it is there and it's compounding so after saying my presentations that you're gonna start to see a little 24 months one more news articles about we're not hiring this people these people are need them anymore and it'll start to see that trickle become a flood of news.

37:19Buddy, I've played with it. One of the keys to my success is I'm really good at marketing. I'm really good at testing ads and refining the message and doing all that stuff. Well, I feel like I'm out of a job with that. Like AI can now analyze hundreds of versions of an ad for pennies on the dollar to what it used to, I'd be able to. Or forget this. And it'll do it instantly. You can launch an ad and in real time it'll test it and amend the copy and the imagery Yes created in real time. Oh my god. That's where it's going. And the other thing people don't understand is my The internet's going away this in the current version This cyberspace of all these these little shops and HTML locations where you you turn up there and These search engines searching for them give you a list of stuff, right?

38:11you're going to have an agent that's going to know what you like who you are, what your heartbeat is what mood you're in, what's in your diary so you're going to say I want a barbecue for the weekend for the family coming, I want a new one really I'll pay, I don't know,$300 but I'll pay$150 for a second hand if it's in good condition, thank you very much so your AI goes away talks to all the other AIs that have Barbies new ones and old ones and they say, all the internet becomes is an AI, an agent with an inventory Your AI talks to it, negotiates, comes back to you and says, I'm getting a new one here.

38:45I'm negotiating this second-hand one. It could be delivered by Friday or this one on Saturday morning. Could be risky. I'll take the second-hand one Friday morning. I think it's gone. That's the internet. Yeah. So this place we find ourselves lost in and searching around is going away. I do love the fact that, you know, Apple, are they behind in their head? Well, talking to Siri or talking to Alexa is going to be a big thing. in the future that's going to be a game changer that i'm waiting to see a day when you can have a conversation with siri or alexa as you can with say chatty plus yeah that i mean they're they're not far off this stuff and google home their distribution is enormous but i think they've got to work out a way of paying for it yes monetizing it will be a thing um final question then uh i ask everyone this what's the best quote you ever heard on or the best advice you ever got about being successful?

39:40One of my favorite quotes, though, I think does apply to entrepreneurs, is from Winston Churchill. It's not quite exact, but it's roughly he says this, is that there is nothing more exhilarating for a young man than to be shot at and missed.

39:56Why that one? Because as an entrepreneur, that's what it feels like quite often in many ways. It's that excitement of being out there on the field, essentially. and trying to win battles or win a war and you're sort of winning small battles. It's not quite. That's what it feels like. I always remember that one. Big success. Piers Lenny, follow, read, study, learn all you can. We'll be back next week with more of your success. You've been listening to the Big Success Podcast with the number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. To learn more about how to achieve business and personal success as well as how to level up or listen to past episodes, visit www.bradsugars.com.