Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And you are listening to/watching Reqless, R-E-Q-L-E-S-S, the podcast about how AI is changing software. I don’t know why I get this radio voice, but I think I get the microphone in front of me and it’s kind of like I just gotta do it.

Rich: You’re on air.

Paul: I am, I’m on air and I sort of have this voice. And I think as a big nerd, I, I enjoy the contrast between my online persona, which definitely sounds kind of D&D, and then my actual voice, which sounds like I’m announcing—

Rich: Is nasally and whiny?

Paul: You would expect me to be that. But no, I sound like I’m announcing baseball. Anyway, that’s not what this is about. We’re going to talk about AI and jobs.

Rich: Again??

Paul: Again. Again. There’s news. There’s news. We got to talk about the news.

Rich: All right, let’s play the theme song.

Paul: Here it goes.

[intro music]

Paul: So an interesting memo went out this week.

Rich: Okay… Where?

Paul: You’ve heard—you ever heard of the company Shopify?

Rich: I have, of course.

Paul: Yeah. You go online, you buy stuff, you like to buy stuff.

Rich: I’m more of a spiritual person, but occasionally I buy some things, yes.

Paul: Me, too. And so the CEO of Shopify is this guy, I know him as Tobi, in my head, but his name is Tobi Lütke. Has two dots over the U.

Rich: Oooh! Fancy.

Paul: One of those. Yeah. Or, or he’s, or it’s like a metal album. But regardless, he’s—I don’t, what do you know about Shopify?

Rich: Shopify is, there’s, you know, it’s essentially an e-commerce platform. So if you want to sell stuff, you can sell stuff on Shopify. Like, it’s gotten to the point where you’re not just selling stuff like you’re selling on eBay or Etsy. You can create a full-blown storefront experience. The buyer or the shopper will never see the word Shopify. It’s really a full-service storefront platform for the web to sell things.

Paul: And actually behind that, very API-driven, very sort of powerful, so a lot of places use Shopify that you might not know about. I love, also, when you hit the Wikipedia page, it says don’t confuse it with Spotify because they both have green icons, and everyone does.

Rich: Everyone does, yeah.

Paul: Get a little scope in here. What’s their market cap?

Rich: Billions, probably.

Paul: $148.37 billion.

Rich: Massive company. And by the way, they went through a—they used to be point and click, years ago, little backstory, and they were like, “Wait a second, that’s too small. We have to let people—” Like, big brands use Shopify.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Like, Shopify is now one of the top e-commerce platforms in the world.

Paul: I mean, we have recommended it to a lot of mid-sized people who want to do retail stuff online.

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: Because it’s a mature platform for selling things online. All the commerce and sort of all—a good example is just like I need to ship internationally, I have to deal with taxes internationally. Like, things like that really crop up and can, can kind of wreck you if you try to roll your own. Okay, so 8,000 employees or so.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Okay? And Tobi, Tobi or CEO Lütke, as we like to call him, sends out a memo.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Sends out a memo. It gets leaked. He leaks it because he’s like, “I see it’s going to get leaked.” I do this a lot whenever I send out a memo I’m just like, “Obviously this is going to get leaked to the press. So let me just put it on X.” He’s one of the five people who pays for that X feature where you actually can write a whole blog post, which is very confusing.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: So good for him. He’s worth, he has an $180 billion company. He can afford that. So I’ll read you, just basically let me, let me just give you the gist—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because like many technologist leaders, he can’t write anything under about 5,000 words. Everybody’s got to use AI at Shopify, including the executive team. It is now part of your core responsibility and you will be reviewed on it.

Rich: Use AI.

Paul: Use AI.

Rich: Is the shortest TL;DR here. Use it.

Paul: Here is—the title of one of the sections nails it. “Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify.”

Rich: We want you to use it.

Paul: You got to use it. You got to get in there. It is… You got to use it a lot. You got to get good at it. Has to be part of your prototyping phase. You got to use it to do… You’re going to be evaluated on your peer reviews.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And here’s the key thing—and this is kind of the kicker, and this is what the media has been hitting, is no new headcount unless you prove that AI can’t do it.

Rich: I mean, that makes a lot of sense. What it makes me think of is, here’s something humans do, and it has been the downfall, historically, for especially technology companies for the longest time.

Is that when you become really, really great at something and you find incredible success, and as you look back, you create a corner of your big office complex that’s like the museum and how it all began and here’s the original laptop. You essentially become very enamored with and very engrossed in your history and your success. And when technology just comes barreling through again at you, right, what you used to be great at is not so great anymore and is not so impressive.

And the examples are all over the place. Xerox not moving into computing because they thought everybody would, you know, make photocopies.

Paul: Kodak.

Rich: Eastman Kodak. Yeah. And the truth is it takes a certain level of humility and a certain willingness to sort of shed what you thought was so exceptional about your expertise and realize that you’re gonna have to move forward. And I don’t know if anyone has done that better than Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Microsoft just dug in and they had their own browser code base, right? They had their own, you know, renderer. And they were like, he said, “Why? Who cares?” Take Chromium—and you know, the idea of doing that, the idea of releasing Excel for the iPad was, like, big news. Because it was like, “Wait, Excel helps us sell Windows.” And he goes, “But it’s Excel, everybody needs it.”

Paul: You know the most dangerous words in the world if you’re at Microsoft?

Rich: Mmm?

Paul: “That’s not very Microsoft.”

Rich: [laughing] Sure. Exactly. Exactly. And the way I’ve said this way back in one of the 4,000 podcasts is to really progress, you have to fall out of love with your own legacy, your own expertise. And it takes a willingness to be a novice. First off, being a novice is a gift. Learning something new is actually a gift. But look, people are in their careers, and they’re incredibly good at what they do because they’ve been sharpening it for 20 years. And now all of a sudden, a dumb robot seems to do it pretty well, and people can’t help but be defensive about it. And what this guy is essentially saying is not only do I not need you to worry about that, it’s actually how I’m going to determine if you’re doing a good job. [laughing] So he just—

Paul: What I love, too. Do you remember the off-site that we had when we ran an agency?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And we all went out and there may be, like, 10 people on the executive team.

Rich: Yeah. For a 26-person agency.

Paul: Yeah. [laughter] A lot of executives. And we’re like, look, we’re seeing a lot of inbound. We’re seeing a lot of growth.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: How do we want to handle this? Obviously we want to keep our margins up. We want to give you guys big bonuses. Here we go. And we went around the room and every single person, what did they do?

Rich: They suggested we hire someone else.

Paul: Yeah. By the time we’d gone all the way around the room, we were, like, $4 million in debt. [laughter] We had gone from like—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Everything’s great, like, good margins to like negative 35% margins, and yeah. And so we said, like, “Well, you know, we’re an agency and if we add all those bodies, we’ll have to pay for them.” And everybody got real quiet.

Rich: I remember. I remember this very distinctly.

Paul: It was in a breather, which is a sort of, like, rent an office for a couple hours kind of space. So what I’m saying is, like, I think there’s also an element of, you know, CEOs are always doing two things at once. “Hey, I want to inspire you guys and I want to guide you in your career because this is what’s going to be good for the company. Also, you’ve all been really annoying for the last 20 years. I would just love to just, like, drive it in just a little bit. The headcount comes from the top.” So I’m kind of, I’m reading it both ways.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, I’m reading him go like, like, “Hey, maybe rather than us hiring a whole team of new AI experts who are going to build out this new part of our platform?

Rich: Go learn it.

Paul: “Maybe you—why don’t you sit down with Claude for $20 a month and just shut your Shopify pie hole until you show me some results?”

Rich: Is that how you read it, by the way?

Paul: Every CEO comes out—there’s no way that you run $140 billion company.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Purely by making high, like, high-minded, let’s-go-team statements.

Rich: And we’ve said this in the past, the instinct is to get defensive. And look, by the way, we’re not speaking to the creative side of things, like the arts and journalism and writing. That’s a more complicated, knotty issue here.

Paul: No, no, this is about building Shopify.

Rich: Exactly. Exactly.

Paul: APIs.

Rich: And the truth is there is no neutral state. You’re either going to put a jersey on where you’re like, “AI is going to ruin everything and I am an expert at my craft,” or you’re going to go the other direction and you’re going to say, “I think I could be better at whatever it is I do, and I could probably learn some new things with these tools.” Neutral is really not an option. Look, it’s a disruptive technology which creates a lot of emotions and strong reactions about it. So nobody’s like, “I don’t know, I guess, whatever.” Nobody’s saying that. They’re either jumping in one camp or the other. And he’s saying, “Look, for the health of my business and for us to continue to innovate, you got to play with these things.”

Paul: All right, so you and I have been talking about this for a year, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I think sort of what you’re saying, like, people, what people want to talk about with AI is, is it good or bad?

Rich: Yeah, a lot of that.

Paul: And that’s the, you know, they want that position and our position is very different. It’s a technology. It has wings, like it is flying. And you either kind of are going to go with it or you’re really going to spend a lot of time pushing back against it. And for me, that conversion moment was when it wrote me some Python that was pretty good. And I was just like, “Okay, that’s not going back in the box. Here we go.” I didn’t care too much—

Rich: Same for me for other outputs, right?

Paul: Yeah. I didn’t care too much about its bullet points. I didn’t like its creative work. I’ve never, you know, as a writer, I’ve never, like, fed it all my stuff and said, “Be Paul.” I don’t want to do that. I like—

Rich: I have, by the way. I fed it all your stuff.

Paul: Well, that’s great. So I don’t have to come in anymore. I can, like, I can just learn piano.

Rich: I’ve been ranting and chatting with a version of you for weeks now.

Paul: Do you know how happy you would be if you had a Paul that you could actually get to, like, behave? [laughter] It’d be so exciting.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah, no, it’s, it’s definitely, I mean, business partners should never be able to actually control the other ones. It’s what keeps it lively. [laughter] So anyway, I thought this would be a good opportunity because, look, this is an inflection point. Klarna has been doing a lot of stuff like this and so on, but this is sort of like the bellwether, late-stage, post-web 2.0, API-driven, tech-first company. And not only that, I think the important thing about Shopify, it grew to that valuation, grew to that scale, nowhere near as the first mover in the space.

Rich: No.

Paul: There are many, many e-commerce options that you have out there.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so it’s a good example of, like, for—whether you like them or hate them, right, like, they executed really well on the idea of everyone having more access to commerce. And they generated an enormous amount of value for a lot of people. A lot of people are very, very loyal to them. And they did it through a very, very tech-forward, very aggressively, like, we’re going to use all the new technologies and we’re going to really make use of the web and we’re going to be, make it easy to build your site and easy to transact and so on and so forth.

So when I think about them, I think about them as a real, like, not a super mega ultimate giant. Like, they’re only $100 billion plus, right, compared to Apple or Microsoft, which are kind of, like, giant battleship ecosystems, you know?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They’re like whole fleets. This is still one thing, but it is a thing that really represents kind of the state of the web and tech to me. And so when that CEO says, “Hey guys, guess what? This is your job now.” That means a lot. Like, it actually means, like, here we go. And so to me, I think what we should do, because we’ve been thinking about this for a year.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: My guess is some of the people listening are like, “Oh God, I guess I have to do this now.”

Rich: [laughing] You do.

Paul: You do.

Rich: I mean, you just kind of do. It’s hard to avoid it, yeah.

Paul: So let’s do the five things they need to do. Okay?

Rich: Okay.

Paul: I’m going to start with zero, which is pay a certain amount of money a month—for God’s sake, you work in technology, you can afford it—pay a certain amount of money a month if your business doesn’t provide it, and just get access to Claude or ChatGPT. Those are kind of the two big ones.

Rich: Get in there.

Paul: And start using them. You should really be using them to learn them, I would say, like, an hour a day at least.

Rich: They seem like magic and simple, but to get good at them, you actually have to use them, manipulate them. They are not magic tricks. They are actually not as smart as you. I think that’s the big message here, which is how you negotiate and how you sort of evolve your dialogue is really important. You get much better output from it if you’re willing to put that time in. You’re manipulative. You’re a manipulative user here. That’s really the best way to put it.

Paul: But that is step zero. It’s a skill. And what I’ve noticed is a lot of people have a lot of strong opinions, pro and con, like, haven’t really dug in, they’ve just kind of received what they’ve gotten from the media. And so…

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: So I think that is one. And I think, like, what you ask it to do, you know, go draw the pictures you want, have it “draw you pictures” in quotes, it just kind of generates them, if you want. But really, like, think about tasks. What can it do? What tasks can it accomplish?

Rich: Yeah, and discrete tasks with discrete deliverables.

Paul: So now that you’re using it, that was level zero. Let’s go to level one, which is, and this is funny, it’s not AI, but literally make sure you know the business you’re in and then—let me, what do you think I mean by that?

Rich: Understand the business drivers for the place you work for. How it makes money.

Paul: Not just your discipline. You might be a designer or a product manager and you know a lot about—yeah, how does your company make money, what tasks and what functions? This is just good general advice. But the reality is if AI is coming for you, it’s going to come there. It’s going to come around bureaucracy and generating things that are expensive.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: It’s going to, it’s going to be used to optimize things. Like, if it can be, if there are ways that it can do a thing that is cheaper than the way that was done before, it’s, that’s where people are going to apply it. So if you want to be ready for the changes that are coming, start to look around and get ready for that stuff. So I think like, if you work at—if you are the designer at a company that sells dog treats, learn where the dog treats are sold. Are they mostly sold online? Are they sold in stores? Who markets them, how does, how do people learn about the dog treats, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So that, that’s one and it’s kind of meta. But the second thing is like when you sit down and use this stuff, you’re rehearsing and you’re practicing and you need to focus on concrete things, deliverables, summaries, code. I actually don’t buy this whole thing where it’s going to be really creative and you want it to invent and it’s going to be your buddy. Like, I get that it works sometimes, but the actual thing you really want to be doing is thinking, what are the documents and the emails and the things that I produce that are maybe a little generic? And how can I get the robot to make those for me or speed them up or do, or I can give it a couple key facts and it’ll do the rest of the work? What templates can I create? How can I templatize my stuff? That’s sort of part two. Actually, why don’t you take number three, Rich?

Rich: All right. Don’t factor out humans, factor out bureaucracy. That’s a beautiful bit of wordplay there. [laughter] Very cute, very cute.

Paul: What did whoever wrote that mean by that?

Rich: There’s a temptation to take whatever AI is producing wholesale, just put a bow on it, and send it off. Right? And the truth is, it is an accelerant, but it really doesn’t have any contextual purpose or goal in mind when you’re asking it to do things. It’s good to know that about it, right? It doesn’t have like, well, you know, in the context of this, I should really be factoring in that you’re in this business. It doesn’t do that, right? You can set it up to do that, to some extent, but get people, especially experts, those experts that we sound like we were marginalizing before in the mix because that’s how you get it to really light up what is being produced.

Now, bureaucracy is another matter. I love the story of how, like, Goldman Sachs, which takes years to decide if they want to let software into the bank, had Zoom working within like two weeks of COVID.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Like, once the pandemic kicked in, they just signed off. And the truth is that’s just bureaucracy, right? And so the truth is AI is incredibly anti-bureaucracy. It can be quite a sledgehammer if you use it the right way. But you still need people to round out the edges. Like, that’s just absolutely still the case. Don’t get a blob of output and paste it into an email. Read the output. Edit it.

Paul: Well, I think here’s, here’s the thing. AI has slurped up the entire web and a lot of other things, too. And the world is full of bureaucratic documents, full of tax forms and ISO 9000 standards and resumes.

Rich: Process.

Paul: And so it’s really good at using a statistical model. You put, you put a prompt in, and if you tell it to make you a resume, it’s a credible resume.

Rich: Totally.

Paul: Cover letter, a little bit less. If you tell it to outline—if you tell it to write a performance report, it’s okay. It feels a little weird.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: If you tell it to outline a performance report because you’re going to do an annual review and then give you a couple sample bullet points? Great. Like, and you’ve now, that starting point? You have saved yourself sometimes hours, sometimes days of time.

Rich: It’s a great synthesizer, right? It’s a really good synthesizer of all the knowledge out there. Usually we have to do that work. You should still do it as well, because it tends to overdo it, but it really has, it does a great job summarizing and crystallizing what’s already out there.

Paul: So you’ve got this, this CEO of a giant company saying you got to go with AI before you get more headcount and so on and so forth. What I’m hearing there is, like, start to factor all that stuff out. It’s not get rid of all the humans. He’s emphatically not saying that. He’s saying, let’s not add humans. And let’s be clear to the CEO of a big company with 8,000 employees? Humans are bureaucracy.

Rich: I mean, at that scale? Always, yeah.

Paul: They’re no longer the answer to everything that is going wrong. They are often more problem. And so what he’s saying is, don’t bring me more problem. Bring me more solution in the form of computer. And then if computer is not enough, we will allow the risk of more human to come into our organization. Now, did I make him sound like a terrifying robot? I did. I’m not going to explain that anymore. [laughing] So, but that is what’s being asked. Again, I feel like I got to double down on it. Like, I don’t know if this is the right thing or not. I just know that this is the thing that seems to be happening. And I worry about people who aren’t actively engaged with this world because I think it’s going to come real fast.

Rich: Well, I mean, it is coming. You looking away isn’t gonna make it not come. It’s coming.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Like, it’s gonna show up, and it’s gonna show up in more awkward ways later if you don’t get ahead of it now. And the good news is, gosh, the overhead is real low to start playing around. Your first bullet was go get it and play around. You don’t need six months of training. Eventually, what this guy has done is he’s essentially skipped the orientation. Instead of saying, “Hey, we’re going to have a workshop.” It’s like, “No, we’re not going to have a workshop. Go play. Go play with it and go be more productive.”

Paul: No, he literally says that. Like, it’s on you.

Rich: I think the most important thing he says, and you can go look up the memo, I’m sure we’re going to share the link, is we’re going to factor this in to your success metrics when we do your review. That is it. It’s over, at that point. He’s not saying, “Give it a whirl.” He’s essentially saying, “Your success here, your promotion, your bonus or whatever it may be, is tied to you using these tools.” Game over at that point, right? So he’s essentially, in a very subtle way, kind of set the rules up here. Like, if, that’s it, right? And the truth is there are artists at Shopify. There are content editors at Shopify. There’s all kinds of people where this is really hits a nerve, man. But he’s essentially saying, “Look, man, I’m not saying you’re now rendered useless, but you got to play with these tools.”

Paul: So let me—I got two more things I think people need to do.

Rich: That’s a long list.

Paul: It’s five.

Rich: You get this from AI?

Paul: You have, how many fingers do you have? Okay, so you have 10. So it’s half as many fingers.

Rich: Keep going.

Paul: Calm down.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Okay, so the last four, and five is kind of a cheat, five is like, “Go read.” So I’m just going to just, we’ll get there, don’t worry. It’s really just the fourth one. Measure your results. And this one actually turns out to be unbelievably hard. This is not the easiest thing to do because you can, how do you measure your results with a technology that kind of stochastically spits out a bunch of tokens? I want to hear your ideas. My sense of like, how do I measure my AI results? Is one is if it’s coding. It’s actually not just that, did it solve the problem with the code? It’s like, am I able to come back and get started and iterate? Like, is it creating artifacts that actually work in the long term or is it just kind of like waving its arms, doing magic tricks, you know, and then suddenly, like, you come back later and you’re like, oh my God, I don’t even know where to start. Because that’s not work, that’s not progress. That’s a demo.

Rich: Yeah. I think there are two ways to measure results. One is self-measurement, meaning that problem that I thought was going to take up my whole Thursday took an hour.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: If it did, that is a wonderful metric of around success. And it worked. Meaning you truly solved the problem that you would have spent a day on, right? But there’s a more important one here, and this is what’s so sly about this memo. And the more important one is when you take an artifact or a deliverable to your colleagues and they’re very happy, that is the ultimate measurement. Here’s what’s happening, Paul. We’ve been talking about people defying AI, not wanting to use it. The truth is, a lot of people are already using it and not telling their bosses and they’re not telling their managers. And the truth is they got to take the afternoon off and they went to that new ice cream place because the output was good, they refined it, and they took it to their boss and they were very happy. What this is essentially—

Paul: Three words. League of Legends.

Rich: [laughing] What he’s essentially saying is, not only do you need to not be not, you don’t have to hide and you don’t have to be ashamed, not only should you not be ashamed, we encourage it and we expect it. That’s a big difference because probably half of Shopify is banging away at claw at ChatGPT just so they can have the, you know, three hours of, I don’t know, Starcraft 3.

Paul: There is another element of that, right, which is he’s going, “Hey, I know you’re using it.”

Rich: [laughing] Exactly.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: And you know, I pay you for that afternoon.

Rich: Exactly, exactly.

Paul: So, yeah, this is what I’m saying about CEOs always communicating on those two levels. There’s always—it’s not just about, it’s always very friendly. And then there’s a stick is right behind.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So I think the other thing is, like, be very careful. This is the fifth point. Be very careful what you read. Okay? There are a lot of, there’s a lot of people talking about how the future is magical and there’s going to be total AGI. That’s irrelevant to this. There are a lot of people who are saying, I’m not even talking about the naysayers. Like, I actually think your biggest risk is, like, going on LinkedIn and just, like, just gobbling up AI sort of dream content.

You have to really curate your sources. I think you have to just, this is kind of on you. Like, there’s a million Substacks. The one that we come back to a lot, you and me, is Ethan Mollick, who is very much, very pro- the technology, but he’s also a professor at Wharton at UPenn.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And he actually just had a big, he just published a big paper. That is really interesting. I’m not all the way through it, but I did, I did start reading it. And it’s, what they did is they worked with 700-plus people at Procter & Gamble. One group could use AI and one couldn’t.

Rich: Hmm.

Paul: And they found it’s not like this wonderful miracle cure, but they did find, like, people who used AI in their creative, sort of, like, Procter & Gamble project management, R&D-type of tasks, ended up a little bit happier and it became kind of the group’s buddy. It was about less about the individual working together and groups working together. And I got to say that isn’t—that’s an undiscovered country. And I think that’s also something Shopify is going for. We’ve all been using this technology in isolation, kind of getting stuff done.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it’s not really, you know, Google Docs is collaborative. Everybody gets in the box and types together. But that’s not what AI is about. You don’t use Claude and ChatGPT together.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: You use it—and so what he’s saying is when people are using this stuff together, and actually it’s a big part of the Shopify memo, too. If you start collaborating using these technologies, we want to really see what’s coming next. And Mollick’s point is, no, it’s actually kind of powerful. So that’s worth talking—maybe we’ll talk about it in a future podcast. The other one that we come back to all the time is Simon Willison. Simonwillison.net. Classic technologist, a thoughtful person, very much a humanist of technology, who, similar to you and me, but earlier than us, saw this stuff and went, “Oh, well, that changes everything. And really decided—

Rich: Yeah, is deep in it now.

Paul: Yeah, and builds a lot of really good open-source tools and kind of has created ecosystems—

Rich: Simon is a little more technical. Simon is definitely—

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Ethan is sort of thinking about implications for the rest of the world and culture and business and whatnot. Where Simon is, like, “New library came out. Check it out.” And he’ll make a duck and put it in the newsletter.

Paul: Well, his big thing is pelicans. He likes to test everything with pelicans.

Rich: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And look, there are other good sources out there. Vet them out. And be suspicious because there’s a lot of overhype right now. There’s a lot of nonsense right now. A lot of, like, sort of recycled language and it’s a little silly. So there, we’ll share some sources that are good. Noah Brier’s newsletter is very good, too.

Paul: Oh, that’s really good. We’ll put those links in here.

Rich: There’s one more that’s really great. Written by Paul Ford, the Aboard newsletter.

Paul: And sometimes Rich Ziade. Sometimes you, too.

Rich: So you can, you can check that out at aboard.com, along with all the goodies we’ve been building. We are—

Paul: Well, to be clear about what we’re trying to do here, we are building a software-acceleration platform. It is very AI-powered. It’s good. It’s coming into focus. We’re going to share it with you really soon. Been saying that for a while, but now, clock’s ticking. But we want to bring people gently into this technology, not just to use our technologies, but kind of as old software people. Like, we feel a need to kind of bring these worlds together.

So it is our marketing newsletter. This is our marketing podcast. But at the same time, our goal here is to help your career along and we’ll feel successful. That’s how we measure our success is people coming to event and saying, “Hey, I like the podcast. And it encouraged me to do this, that or the other.” So if you get anything out of this, let us know. And, you know, wouldn’t mind those five stars. Wouldn’t mind them.

Rich: Thumbs up. Thumbs stars, check boxes, wherever, Apple podcasts.

Paul: Yeah, I meant to wear my glasses during this podcast because I think they make me look smarter.

Rich: Oh it’s fine… No, oh, shoot. Ah, we got to reshoot it.

Paul: Yeah, let’s redo this whole thing. All right, so how do people reach us if they need us?

Rich: Hello@aboard.com.

Paul: Sounds amazing. And thank you. Thank you, everybody. We will talk to you soon.

Rich: Best of luck. Have a lovely week.

Paul: Bye!

[outro music]