Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And you’re listening to Reqless with a Q, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software.

Rich: The Q stands for “quality”.

Paul: Boy, does it. All right, let’s play our theme song, Rich.

[intro music]

Paul: All right, Richard, you and I together, we are building an enterprise company. It’s a set of powerful software tools called Aboard.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: And the deal in 2024 is that if you’re building something like this, you can really accelerate solving common business problems, but if you want to really accelerate common business problems—

Rich: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm.

Paul: You do it with AI. Because with AI, you can now say, “Hey, build me a data model for tracking office chairs throughout the company.”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And it’ll do it, and it won’t be perfect, but you can just start iterating and going. Things that used to take months of people walking around with little notebooks now can be like, two minutes, and then you go, “Eh….let’s fix it.”

Rich: It’s wild. Yeah.

Paul: So this is the new world. This is the world we’re building right now. You can use parts of it right now online, go log into Aboard, a new website coming, all kinds of stuff, we’re building all kinds of stuff we’re excited to share it with the world. But it’s not just us. There was an article out in Seeking Alpha, which I don’t know if you know, but I—

Rich: I’ve been reading Seeking Alpha for many—not reading—

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I’ve run into it for many years.

Paul: I haven’t tattooed on my chest because I am—

Rich: Oooh!

Paul: I’m seeking Alpha.

Rich: Ah! Are you achieving it?

Paul: No.

Rich: That goal?

Paul: No.

Rich: No? Yeah. The best you could do was a tattoo.

Paul: [laughing] Yeah. That’s about it.

Rich: Fair enough.

Paul: So Seeking Alpha had this little sort of mini article, and, you know, there were some tweets about it and so on. It says about this company, Klarna. [imitating Swedish accent] Klarna.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Which is a Swedish company. It’s a fintech company. They do a lot of, like, financial services stuff.

Rich: Fine.

Paul: And, you know, they’re worth billions in revenue kind of thing, like, yet another giant thingamajig.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Okay? So the CEO of this company is out there. His name is—I’m gonna do it—Sebastian Siemiatkowski. No…

Rich: Fine.

Paul: Siemiat—ugh, God damnit. All right.

Rich: Don’t worry. He’s not gonna call you out on our little tiny podcast.

Paul: No, he’s not. So he was interviewed by the good people of Sequoia Capital. So, you know, just—

Rich: Kind, nurturing Sequoia.

Paul: Just a lot of, just a real hard-hitter of an interview.

Rich: [laughing] Okay. Okay.

Paul: That really went in there. But it is a good interview. And what they were talking about in Seeking Alpha and what got sort of metabolized and turned into tweets is, like, essentially, the way it came out in public is like we’re throwing away Salesforce and Workday and we’re just going to build custom AI tools to solve our problems.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: When you listen to the whole interview and you start to drill a little more, it’s not like they are a pure sales organization that was built up on Salesforce in every possible way.

Rich: Salesforce isn’t just the CRM—

Paul: Yeah, it’s sort of in there—

Rich: It’s sort of in the world, right?

Paul: So there’s, I mean, it does fundamental stuff for them, but it’s not like, it’s not like I turned to you and I was like, “Rich, let’s get rid of Google Docs and make our own word processor.”

Rich: Right, right, right, right.

Paul: You know, I don’t want to do email with Gmail anymore. I want to make my own email client.

Rich: Right. Okay.

Paul: Like, that would be the equivalent, that’s what it sounded like—

Rich: So this is the CEO?

Paul: This is the CEO.

Rich: Okay. And he’s saying we don’t need Salesforce. And he’s saying that why? It’s functioning today. Is it because, money?

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And sort of, also, he has some sort of broader, extremely kind of European points about, you know, when people collaborating, working together instead of siloing into systems, I think he believes that if they build their own system that everybody has to organize around, that won’t create as many silos as the software as a service products.

Rich: Okay, so let’s articulate that point, which is an important one, which is most companies have—run their business on a lot of cobbled together systems. That is just a fact of life.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Whether it be how you manage documents in Office 365, or how you deal with leads and contacts in Salesforce, or how you communicate in Slack. It’s often stitched together.

Paul: Look, let’s help people. What is enterprise software? It is normal everyday software, and then you put a blazer on it, and you teach it accounting. It’s just whatever it does, it can also do some accounting.

Rich: Yeah, it’s communications, workflow, you know, financial capabilities. It’s software that helps your business run.

Paul: It answers questions like, “Where is my aluminum?”

Rich: Inventory management.

Paul: Yeah. Or, “How many people are available in the Belgian office?”

Rich: Customer service.

Paul: Exactly.

Rich: All of these things, they’re software tools, right? And so…

Paul: And so you glue those together, you go out—sometimes you buy a big solution like a Salesforce, or you know, something from SAP. And then there’s zillions of things like Workday and so on that you can, they’re not quite…

Rich: You can kind of bolt on.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. CRM is a big one for like things like HubSpot. So everybody kind of ends up working with these tools as part of their job.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And so the thesis here is that, and let’s say like, not super mission-critical, but something that you’ve brought in to solve a problem over the years. I mean, they’re a big company.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: We can get rid of that now. We can get rid of Salesforce because we can build our own software. We have a big engineering team.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: We can build our own software much faster with AI. It can be very customized.

Rich: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm.

Paul: And so this used to—why wouldn’t, let me ask you, why… So let’s say this really is real. Let’s say I can sit down and build my own CRM-like thing that’s good enough for my company with AI tools. Why wouldn’t I have done that before without AI tools? Because it’s not, like, you know, why wouldn’t I just do that? Why is it this new thing making that so possible?

Rich: It’s a very basic answer, which is building big software, software with a lot of surface area, was incredibly expensive. It costs a lot of money to build your own software.

Paul: I would also point out, right, like it is, it’s super expensive and it was, people did do it. I’ve been involved in many internal tools, and like—

Rich: We are, we are software, we are enterprise software anthropologists.

Paul: And boy did it—

Rich: We’ve been into a lot of companies.

Paul: It failed a lot. I mean, I’ll give you an example. One of the things that people don’t think about as enterprise software a lot, because it has been taken over by these more popular open-source frameworks, was content management, which is where I came up in my career.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And you would go into really big organizations, and they would all be developing their own CMS because they’d be really frustrated with everything off the shelf.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And places like Condé Nast and the New York Times and so on and so forth. And they’re like, “Damnit, we’re going to get the one that’s just right for us.”

Rich: Because we’re special and we have our own processes and we have our own way of working.

Paul: And then they would give up. They’d license something and it’d be really complicated. And then somebody would graft WordPress into the organization and just say, like, “To hell with it, just go with WordPress.”

Rich: Yup.

Paul: And then WordPress would hit a limit and then they’d write their own CMS again.

Rich: Yeah, always.

Paul: And then WordPress would creep in on this one component and then it would take—

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And so this is sort of a cycle.

Rich: It is. It is.

Paul: That you go from custom to enterprise—build, buy, build, buy. It’s not actually one choice, it’s like a continual thing. And actually what happens is when they fire the CTO, whatever you were doing, if you were building, the new CTO comes in and buys.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And if you were buying, the new CTO comes in and builds.

Rich: Oftentimes.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Oftentimes. So I want to talk about a few things here. I want to articulate the pain in the beginning, and why it never seems to work out. I mean, it does work out. The global economy is powered by software, very complicated software. So it is working, like, let’s get that out of the way.

Paul: Congratulations, everybody.

Rich: Exactly. Exactly. When you’re considering buy versus build—

Paul: Uh-huh?

Rich: And you decide to buy, it’s never a perfect fit because you effectively have to accept the negotiated terms of the software you’re buying. Now, you can customize on top. And there is a multi-billion dollar industry of implementation partners that let you customize on top of soft—of Salesforce. On top of it.

Paul: I mean that’s what, if you are a programmer at a consulting firm, that’s probably what you’re doing. You’re taking a platform and you’re customizing it for your client.

Rich: You’re customizing, they make APIs and they make it easy to build stuff on top of it. But still, you end up with there a double punch, which is a, you’re getting a tool, I can’t tell you how many times, this is not meant to shit on Salesforce, but we, we ran an agency for many years, and I can’t tell you how many times people told us they hate Salesforce.

Paul: Boy, really—

Rich: It was constant.

Paul: Something about Salesforce really pisses people off.

Rich: Pisses people off. Right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s expensive and even if they customize it, it’s never quite right. And so you get a double hit. You’re paying the licensing fees and you customize it, but you know what? The customization is never exactly what you want.

Paul: I will say there was a point, we bid on a, you and I, we worked on a project that was going to be a government-based Salesforce implementation.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And we talked to some salespeople from Salesforce about how this would all go.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it was the darkest void I have ever looked into.

Rich: It’s dark. It’s, it’s, it’s dark. But look, what I’m trying to say is when you buy, you’re never really fully content. You’re sort of always falling short. Why? Because A) it would never be met on your terms. You’re sort of, you go to training, you’re like, “Wait, you’re not going to adjust the software to how I work? I got to go learn Salesforce training to know how to use it?” And then they do customize, but customization is expensive and costly and it takes time.

Paul: Let’s be clear. Everybody has a vision. They’re like, “I want a…I sell sneakers online and I want an e-commerce experience where the sneakers can actually jump out of the screen and go on your feet.”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And then the agency goes, they sell you the business and then they go, “Mmm, I can’t do that. Because you actually can’t make things manifest out of a screen.”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And so you go, “Well, what can we do?” And they go, well, “You could use Shopify, or you could pay me $1 billion.”

Rich: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Paul: And so everybody’s like, “Well, I guess we’re doing Shopify.”

Rich: So now let’s jump to the build.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Build is the holy grail because build means you’re going to build, essentially, a custom solution that is perfectly tailored to exactly how you work and exactly what you need. For a lot of businesses, that they just can’t afford it. They just don’t have the money to do it, and they have to buy something, because they don’t have the team, they don’t have the people. Some do it. Sometimes if you reach a certain scale, you do do it. But here’s the issue with build. The issue with build, let’s say you have the budget and you have the money.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: You have the time. The issue with build is what I call the cost of change. Once the software gets out into the world and it has 500 users and millions of dollars is pumping through it every day in some way, shape, or form, there’s always a desire to refine and change and update. There are entire software teams that are inside of big companies that are constantly tweaking software.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: All day long, like, every day, and they launch new releases all the time. The challenge you have with the status quo is that the cost of change is severe for those companies. And it’s severe because software, historically, there is a very deeply rooted way of shipping software, and it takes time and we have to be careful and we have—and so, when you ask for a thing, you’re told, “Yeah, we can get that into the spring release,” and it’s the fall. Right? Like, and so what you end up with is this power dynamic where IT and the technology group that built your thing, frankly, holds the keys. You thought it was a $5 hose. That’s why the engine was overheating. But they’re like, “Oh, I got to talk to you about the transmission, my friend.”

Paul: I mean, the irony here, too, is like, the greatest software companies in the world are invariably late on their deadline.

Rich: Always!

Paul: Like, Windows was famously—

Rich: Always.

Paul: Like, they couldn’t get, like, Windows 7 was this great process that occurred because all the previous versions of Windows were just so—

Rich: Caked on. Late.

Paul:  —they had to reboot everything.

Rich: Here’s the ugly, ugliest part of it all. I just sort of talked about the cons of both buying and building. Most do both. Most pay for Salesforce and they have either perpetual consulting agreements, or they have teams of people—I’ve met people who are like, I work on Salesforce, but I work for this hedge fund. Like, I just work on Salesforce.

Paul: Yeah. Absolutely.

Rich: I work on it for the hedge fund.

Paul: Right.

Rich: So they’re getting a double hit. They never got the software they actually wanted. And on top of that, they have to wait a really long time to get changes put in place.

Paul: I will say the whole industry, I love the industry, but it is a long sigh of an industry. Every meeting where you are doing something that is supposed to be good for the business or the organization?

Rich: Yup.

Paul: Someone senior is going [long sigh].

Rich: The senior on the tech side or on the business side?

Paul: On the business side.

Rich: He’s saying that because what happens is this is, I think this is fundamentally human, man.

Paul: She’s saying that, Richard, damnit.

Rich: She’s saying that.

Paul: Thank you.

Rich: Something fundamental. Let’s talk about the head of IT. The head of IT reverts back to something very basic about human beings, which is you protect your team.

Paul: Right.

Rich: You obfuscate and protect your expertise because they don’t understand why it should take that long. And so what you end up with is a misaligned dynamic.

Paul: I think IT might be the most hated department in most companies. It’s like the internal affairs with the cops.

Rich: It’s the worst.

Paul: Does anybody like IT?

Rich: No.

Paul: No.

Rich: What IT is today, and this is all about to change—and we’re going to get to that.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Where IT is today was a massive shift in power and knowledge that left business stakeholders on their heels. And that is a product of just normal human dynamics. When I have the keys and you are asking me for change, I know you’re excited about it and I know you really need it. You can pound that table all you want, but guess what? QA is QA. And it’s gonna take three months.

Paul: Right.

Rich: And you really do not, do not have an answer to that.

Paul: I gotta tell you, I’ve seen billionaires stomp their feet.

Rich: I’ve seen billionaires stomp their feet as well.

Paul: And I remember once you and I were working on a project and somebody offered to just give all of the engineers new MacBooks.

Rich: They were trying to move it faster.

Paul: They were ready to go to the Apple Store with their credit card. “What will it take?”

Rich: And the answer was, none of your power and money is going to move this. It’s just, it is what it is. And so now we have something that has landed, the metaphor—

Paul: We gotta bring it back so that people, like, we have AI, meaning you can issue a prompt to a piece of software and the piece of software will write, will do its best, essentially, to write some code for you. And the code will be pretty standards compliant, for the most part.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Okay. And this is, this is just, we’ve talked about in previous podcasts, but this is a real sea change in the industry. Like, you and I both believe this.

Rich: Sea has not changed yet.

Paul: Not yet.

Rich: It will take years, and it will take years for a handful of reasons. It might take less than years. I think there’s opportunity to disrupt, but it won’t come from within the organization. It isn’t going to be Stan and his little hacker group inside of Mastercard. It’s not going to be them. It’s—

Paul: [German accent] It’s pronounced STAHN! All right, keep going, I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from.

Rich: It’s fine. It’s fine. Yes, there should be a power shift here. And let me give advice to the business stakeholder. I’m reading a lot about AI. Why is it taking three months? Why not one? Say that. And then they will tell you why it can’t be.

Paul: I was about to say it. [laughter] Okay, here we go.

Rich: They’re gonna be like, well, yeah, I know, but—

Paul: Well actually, hold on a sec—

Rich: —there’s legacy data.

Paul: We’re getting into this world and, you know, there are many listeners to this podcast, but it’s not truly defining our business just yet.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So let’s do, let’s go ahead and do it. So, Rich, you know, I heard you guys are up to some stuff with AI and software, and I heard that Klarna, who’s one of our competitors, is ripping out Salesforce.

Rich: Yeah. Yup.

Paul: We’d like a custom tool to manage all of our relationships with our vendors, let’s say, as a fiction—

Rich: And our sales workflow.

Paul: And our sales workflow.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: We need a custom tool for this. It’s pretty abstract. There’s a lot of legacy data in our Salesforce implementation, so on, so forth. You’ve told me, you have a good story. Right now I have a one-year run—roadmap, for what we’re going to do next. I’ll show it to you. But, I mean, you said you had a solution. What do you, what do you got for me? What are you really going to do for me?

Rich: I’m not going to be Aboard, because I think what, what I’m about to describe in this fictional scenario is going to happen.

Paul: Okay, so you’re not—

Rich: It’s going to happen in many organizations.

Paul: You’re not representing our company. You are just a consultant.

Rich: No. I’m a consultant.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I need to spend two to four weeks with your team, and then two weeks after that, I’m going to show you software.

Paul: I think that is right. And I think that if I was, like, at Deloitte right now, that’s where I would be pushing my career to be.

Rich: The currency that we call the consulting hour is about to have runaway explosive banana-republic inflation, because the hour as a currency for value is about to get replaced with actual business value.

Paul: This is the fundamental thing. Right now, there’s been this correlation between developer hours and a kind of overall productivity.

Rich: Output.

Paul: Yes. It’s a weird one, because when you actually look at the numbers, like, engineers and the giant consulting firms who are overseas, it’s like, not, they don’t make much money. Right? So it’s sort of like there’s a big global, there’s all sorts of weird—

Rich: Commodity engineering, like, very basic, like, rote engineering is really under threat.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But I would even argue that, look, I’m—it sounds like we’re gunning for developers here. Let me get this out of the way. This is going to create such a massive sea change in productivity and frankly, probably some creativity, that you can get ahead of it and actually deliver more value than you’ve ever delivered to anyone.

Paul: I do think—

Rich: But do not guard the city. If you think you’re going to just guard the city—

Paul: The city, what’s the city? The city is my hourly rate?

Rich: The status quo.

Paul: Well, I think there’s two things going on, because we’ve been talking about this—

Rich: What do you call a walled city? There’s a name for it.

Paul: Walled city’s pretty good.

Rich: Thanks.

Paul: Yeah. Okay, so you are making $200 an hour right now as a senior engineer.

Rich: Wow, that’s really good.

Paul: It is. And you get billed out. I mean, it’s a consulting relationship. You get billed out at that rate.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And so the customer with AI has the right now to go, “Why am I paying you to tell a robot to write code?”

Rich: Mmm, no, we still need you. Are you an architect? Are you like a really savvy, well-educated coder? Like, knowledgeable coder? Doesn’t have to be well-educated.

Paul: I guess. I mean, the way you’re asking that question, I guess I better be.

Rich: You better be.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Because—

Paul: Yeah, that’s a, I think there’s something interesting I don’t like when you dig into this, the, you know, there’s sort of people upset about this Klarna narrative, and it’ll happen and it won’t, and they can’t replace Salesforce, or they can or whatever. I do think that in the same way that the engineering hour, not the engineering profession, but the engineering hour as the artifact of how stuff gets built?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Is under threat. I think that the software as a service, as a bundled package that gets dumped at your flaming, at your doorstep and you have to bring it in the house?

Rich: Why do I have to work on your term—why do I have to accept your terms, Salesforce?

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: Why do I have to accept your terms? I now, the power is now in the world’s hands to give me exactly the software I want. Why do I have to train on Salesforce?

Paul: So it’s really like, you know, if you’re going to cannibalize your own business, you’re coming back with a set of tools that you’ve built as—if you’re a software-as-a-service tool, you’re like, “Hey, man, that’s cool. If you’re going to use AI, use it to work with us.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We want to be in there with you. We’re your buddy and your partner.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Yeah. So two major artifacts of this particular world are going to artifact heaven. Artifact one is the hour.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Not tomorrow, but—

Rich: No, I mean, I’m gunning for the hour, but I think the engineering hands-on-keyboard hour is going to get replaced with the architect-product-thinker hour. Like, if you want to bill by hour—but why bother? Why bother billing by hour? Because here’s the thing: With AI now in the mix, the cost of change is going down to almost nothing. If it’s bad, you could literally throw it in the garbage and try again. So what is my hour?

Paul: I think what’s going to happen is they’re going to just, like, reevaluate the hour.

Rich: Fine.

Paul: This industry is too scared to change to value-based pricing.

Rich: This is, I mean, that message about throwing Salesforce out?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: There’s going to be a lot of resistance to it on, like, five levels. Right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: That’s a given and that’s humans and that’s process. Even the users—people who invest five years and become Salesforce experts, they will resist change, even though it’s not the best process.

Paul: Let’s also be clear about what’s really going to happen, which is that software is a cost center in these giant orgs.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And what you’re going to try to, what people want to do is get the cost down.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But that doesn’t happen. It’s not existential, of their business is profitable—

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: —that they get all the software costs down tomorrow.

Rich: Right.

Paul: What will happen is they’ll start to get the message and get embarrassed.

Rich: Right.

Paul: And that they, you know, and the CEO will go, “I just heard that one of our competitors has, you know, one fifth the cost on software as a service that we do.”

Rich: Right. Right.

Paul: “So what are you going to do?”

Rich: I think, I think that’s, it’s going to get pretty ugly, because there are going to be players that show up and be like, “Ah, you’re paying $10 million a year, why not pay $3?”

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Like, I’ll put the work in, don’t worry about it.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Your burn is $10.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Why not $3? Now look, the implications of that, I’m just being sort of cold, calculating business guy for a split second. But that’s not unrealistic. That’s what people need to start to get ready for. Now you could be in the mix on that $3 because I think the time to value for these businesses is about to shrink from like that five months I had to wait for that feature is going to be two weeks. If it’s not, you should really raise a flag.

Paul: Let’s give really positive, proactive advice here because I do think, like, what I worry about frankly, is if the market figures this out and the market can be a real dick sometimes, it’s going to go, why do you have all those engineers? And then one company will let everybody go and then the next company will be like, oh, I guess I have to too. I think there could be a bad precipice here. The positive thing I would say here, the thing to do is not just to like double down on the tools and figure them out, but to actually internalize and embrace the concept of value delivery.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Meaning, can I deliver software with this software-as-a-service toolkit? And can I deliver value quickly? Can I—regardless of my hourly rate, can I get more value? Can I be—and what that requires people to do, and this is often really hard for people to do, figure out how you and what you do make money for the company.

Rich: You know what, man?

Paul: Most people don’t know what—

Rich: You know, that’s good advice without this revolution.

Paul: It is. Thank you, but—

Rich: But for most people, they kind of hang back. And I’m not singling anyone out, but it’s easy to just sort of stay just below the cubicle line of sight.

Paul: We’re also, we’re on, like, year 15 of a very sort of like, “You are an IT angel.”

Rich: Yeah. Untouchable.

Paul: I don’t know. I could be, I really could be totally wrong here, but I’ll tell you, I do, I’ve always had an okay Spidey sense about the industry. It’s why we were able to build an agency.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s not like tomorrow, and I’m probably wrong about 80% of it, but this is pressure. This is going to change things.

Rich: I think so. And I think it’s going to come from, like, little spunky agencies and little spunky startups. They’re going to be like, I can help you real fast and real cheap. That’s gonna happen.

Paul: And the story is going to be some variation on value as opposed to hours or packaged software as a service.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: Right? Like, it’s going to be more about orchestration and coordination. And the Klarna thing is just one little signal. I wouldn’t over-read into it today, and I think there are years to go here.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But it definitely, like, I saw it and my pattern brain went, “Huh!”

Rich: I will say, I want to close with this thought. Everybody’s talking about like, wow, engineers are so empowered and engineers have all these amazing tools. I think what is coming is actually a power shift back to the business stakeholder, where they actually have leverage again, where they have not had it for a very long time.

Paul: Well, you know—

Rich: Which is not a bad thing.

Paul: A business stakeholder with a product manager sitting nearby could build a pretty good interface with, you know, basic widgets like dropdowns and things—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That describe exactly what they would like to see.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And then engineering would be on the hook to build it.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And that, that’s different than whiteboarding. It’s like, well, why can’t—

Rich: They’re in the mix.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They’re in the mix because they can actually describe their business problems and get things.

Paul: And you could get them, you could get that going in an hour. That’s not, like, go to a two week seminar.

Rich: That’s real.

Paul: So I think, like, those dynamics destabilize the power structure where, like, IT is this alien entity.

Rich: Yes. That’s right.

Paul: You know, so anyway, here we are. It’s a, it’s a genuinely exciting—

Rich: This was a futurist episode.

Paul: It’s kind of—well, no, but, I mean, here’s Klarna ripping out Salesforce.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: They’re gonna give it a go.

Rich: Give it a go.

Paul: Blessings. It’s PR. Like, it’s, you know, they’re telling their story.

Rich: Yeah. Maybe we’ll have another podcast on PR.

Paul: Great. That sounds great.

Rich: Check out Aboard at aboard.com.

Paul: Absolutely do that.

Rich: We are in the mix here. We are excited to be in the swirl of change that’s happening around software and AI. It is a platform that gets you what you need really, really quickly. Check it out at Aboard.com.

Paul: And we’re using our solution to build things for other companies now.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: So we weren’t, we can’t talk about that too much right now. But, you know, it’s finally happening.

Rich: It’s happening.

Paul: All right, Richard.

Rich: Have a lovely week, everyone. Reach out to us at hello@aboard.com. We love to get emails.

Paul: We sure do. Bye.

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