Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And this is The Aboard Podcast, the official podcast for Aboard, a software platform that uses AI to deliver things really, really quickly. Richard, my co-founder, my co-host, my life partner.

Rich: Wow.

Paul: Platonic life partner.

Rich: How are you?

Paul: I’m good. You know, I’m on video.

Rich: Let’s throw a party.

Paul: I just biked here. So my glasses are steamy.

Rich: I’m moist. We’re all moist today.

Paul: I look like a piece of soap.

Rich: It’s a muggy, wet day in New York City.

Paul: Okay. But, yes, we’ve launched our product before. Let’s be very transparent with the audience.

Rich: A few times.

Paul: Few times. We have pivoted and iterated, but it’s always had this core of let’s build the software that can help people do the really boring stuff really quickly.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And to be clear, when I say boring, it’s actually exciting to us. It’s, like, data management and sort of like faster search and so on. And then AI showed up and we’re like, okay, we gotta deal with this.

Rich: Yeah, we waited. We waited a bit.

Paul: And that’s a big part of this podcast, is us dealing with AI.

Rich: Yeah. From the outside. Yeah.

Paul: But what’s happening on June 3rd, man? Where are we now? Where are we?

Rich: We’re going to launch and reveal our new platform.

Paul: Mmm.

Rich: We’re going to throw a party.

Paul: Mmm.

Rich: It’s during New York Tech Week.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: On June 3rd. If you’re in New York City, come by. RSVP and join us for a really, really fun party. There’s limited spots. It’s already kind of filling up, but go to aboard.com and you’ll see a big banner that says RSVP now. We’d love to meet you in person and hear about what you think about AI and then show you what we’re cooking. We’re cooking!

Paul: It’s, honestly, there’s just a lot of good stuff happening right now. I’m very excited. I like our product. By the way, we might make the banner kind of fixed to the bottom of the page. So if. If you’re just, like, not working hard, be sure to move your eyes just down a little bit. You know, sometimes people get confused.

Rich: It’s not GDPR.

Paul: People get real confused.

Rich: Accept the cookies.

Paul: [laughing] It’s there—I swear to God, if I didn’t say that, I’m going to get an email, like, “I went and I couldn’t find the banner.” And then you have to reply and you have to say, “Did you look down?”

Rich: On your screen, yeah.

Paul: On your screen. Yeah. So we’re not going to do that.

Rich: Join us June 3rd, New York City, in our brand-new office.

Paul: Any other marketing to do before we get to a really intense conversation?

Rich: No, let’s do it. That’s enough for everyone.

[intro music]

Paul: Okay, so eight months ago, we had a podcast. We had a couple—there wer some strong ones eight months ago. There’s one where I came in and was like, “How are we going to run this company if Trump wins?” And you were like, [incredulous laughter] “Not gonna happen, man. You just gotta relax.”

Rich: Chill.

Paul: Chill.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So here we are. So if you’re curious about how we resolved that, here we are. That was one, but another one, that was really about eight months ago, this company, Klarna, which is a Swedish company—

Rich: Fintech company.

Paul: Fintech and payments and processing and so on.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They have one of those, like, thinky CEOs, sort of, you know, like, like the Coinbase guy. Like these guys who, like, get out there and just have big ideas.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Unlike us, we have lots of little ideas, but we put them together.

Rich: Glue them together.

Paul: Yeah. And this guy was like, “Look, AI.” That’s how he said it, with a Swedish accent.

Rich: Game over.

Paul: I’m not going to do a Swedish accent, because, even that’s probably the least problematic of all accents to do on a podcast, I’ve had a lot of HR training. But he said that, he said that with a Swedish accent. And he said, “No more, no more. We’re not going to hire any more of these people, these engineers.”

Rich: I think he said he wasn’t going to hire a lot of different kinds of people. Support people as well. I think he was like, “We’re all in. There’s no need. Less humans. Be smarter with what you’re working with.”

Paul: Let’s roll with these bots. Right? And so what is the upshot of that? Now the upshot of that, which was positive, is he didn’t come in and fire everybody. Like, he was just like, “Look, I think we can—” And this is always a move when you’re, you’ve grown a little too fast, as you say, “Hold on a minute. Hiring freeze. Nobody has to go home.”

Rich: But there’s also these great tools…

Paul: Let’s actually use what we’ve got.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And part of the argument back then was, “Oh my God, we’ve spent so much on Salesforce. That’s not the right tool for the job.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “And now we got these new tools. Let’s build the custom stuff that we really need, that works for us.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then what does he announce? What does he announce just, like, a few days ago?

Rich: Okay, so fast forward, he put this initiative in place.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: He announced that he’s hiring people again.

Paul: Hiring engineers, because it turns out the code isn’t quite up to snuff.

Rich: And he’s hiring support people because sometimes customers want to talk to a human being.

Paul: It turns out when your payment processor is, like, driving all your revenue and bringing all your money in?

Rich: You’d like to know…

Paul: You might want to talk to, like, a guy named Sven.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Absolutely.

Paul: And so here is, here’s this situation—and I think this is something everybody’s learning. Let me also, what does our company do?

Rich: We ship software that’s been built much more quickly, much more efficiently, much more cheaply, with AI.

Paul: With AI—we sort of set up the scaffolding, but the code itself isn’t necessarily written by AI.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: I think it’s going to keep making that—it’ll be more clear after we launch. But I want to keep making that distinction. We just hired a very nice person. I won’t share her name because people don’t like their stuff out in the world. But she’s great. We’ve worked with her before. And what is her job?

Rich: Engineer.

Paul: That’s right. Right? And it just goes back to us talking about, like, why is OpenAI the ultimate super-accelerating everything company trying to buy a giant coding platform? Right? I mean, just answer that for me. Why? Why did we hire another engineer if AI is so good at doing all the coding?

Rich: I mean, put bluntly, AI’s not there yet. It does some, a lot of really cool tricks. But for it to contribute to a large effort? Our effort is large, our platform is big. You can’t do it yet. I hope she uses tools, so that the thing that was supposed to take four days will take two.

Paul: All of our engineers are doing that.

Rich: I think everybody’s doing that. But…

Paul: But you know, if you go into our GitHub, there’s pull requests and there’s people commenting. And so, like, humans are still the measure of quality in our organization.

Rich: I think there’s another aspect to it, and this is not all engineers, but the way we happen to work, we talk to engineers. We’re non-engineers, we’re product thinkers, business thinkers.

Paul: They hate it, but we do it.

Rich: We have to talk to them, and we have to tell them, and we have to guide them, and we have to reprioritize what they think is most important. Because engineers oftentimes meander, like, that’s a thing.

Paul: They don’t meander, they just solve things with more engineering.

Rich: All of it, right?

Paul: That’s, like, I sometimes solve things with…pretzels. Right? Like, it’s the same idea. It’s just like—

Rich: You know, it’s not the same idea.

Paul: Yeah—

Rich: But I get what you’re saying. I get what you’re saying. So the interface of between non engineers and engineers, how engineers work together, the opportunities they see. The human brain is really complicated. It’s very strange and complicated, and its ability to sort of synthesize all the inputs coming and coming up with paths and ideas and thoughtful ways to solve something? AI is very impressive. It is very, very impressive. It’s great at sales. It’s very good in those first 10 minutes. And what’s happening is a lot of these executives are, like, “If you can do that, you can do anything.” And it turns out it can’t do anything. It can’t do everything.

Paul: Let me tell you about… So there’s one executive skill that you develop and I think it actually differentiates—

Rich: Executive as in business or executive function, because that’s like a medical term?

Paul: Function I’m still working on. But in business.

Rich: Fine. Pretzels.

Paul: Yeah—exactly. 80%. There’s the old joke. Okay? And I’ll let you finish it. We got the first 80% of the project is done. How much is left?

Rich: 100%.

Paul: Yeah. Or 80%. Now it’s time for the second—but that idea.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so what, that last mile? I actually think one of the real jobs of these—a lot of times, and you’re funny in this, because you come down, you’re like, “Let’s get this done on June X, and we’re going to go out and we’re going to go live,” knowing that that will be a forcing function. But what’s the side effect of that? How much you—you cut scope.

Rich: You cut scope. You kind of hover more.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: As the cycles get tighter, you lose you—you’re sort of, you’re starting to get scared, as a business leader. Right? Because that last mile can go on forever.

Paul: You accept that last mile exists, though.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: There’s no, like—no promise anybody made eight months ago?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Is still valid in the world of software.

Rich: No.

Paul: In any project. Right? Like no, there’s no project—if I told you eight months ago, “Rich, it is gonna be done on this day, and I’m feeling really good about it. I got this great project plan, and it’s gonna work out good.” And I show you a couple iterative things, and I’m like, “See? Told you. All done. We’re good.”

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: Do you believe a word I say?

Rich: No.

Paul: And I could be the best engineer in the world. You can’t, as an exec, because you know that, like, 8 million creeping bugs are coming for you at the end, and you’ll never see them until the users show up and the testing gets serious and so on.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They just won’t show up. And so what’s funny with Klarna is I think the guy took a big swing. I think he said, “Hey, you know, this is coming. Let’s get out in front of it. The market’s going to think that’s really exciting. And I want to, I want to—you know, why, why hire a bunch of engineers if they’re telling me we can use this stuff to get stuff done?” And then I think he started sort of trudging down the infinite last mile.

Rich: I think he got a double hit. I think two things happened. One is, and this is, I’m gonna apologize in advance to all engineers who listen to this podcast. No engineer has ever told me, “I’m gonna get this to you five weeks early. Like, what else you got?” No engineer has ever said that to me in my entire career. No one has ever said it. Instead, they will—some, some are very reliable and they hit their dates, but they show you more on the date. They never say, “I did what you asked. Now I’m going to stop in case you have anything else to offer.”

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: No, what they do is they’re like, “You thought it was just going to be pea soup, and I cooked up a rack of lamb,” and I’m allergic to lamb.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But they cooked it anyway.

Paul: Wait, you’re not allergic to lamb, are you?

Rich: I’m Lebanese.

Paul: That would be be a crisis in your family.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I would have heard about it.

Rich: Yeah, you would have heard about it. So problem one is that he made this declaration and he assumed that the engineering group within his company was going to translate that into coming back to their managers much more, much earlier and saying, “I’ve got extra cycles.” It never happens. That’s problem one.

Paul: That’s problem one. All right, let’s come back to that in a minute. But what’s problem two? You probably have a lot of problems.

Rich: Problem two is you can’t parachute code that has been vibed into large-scale software platforms. You can, you better make—and so what you end up is back to square one. So it’s spitting out code, which is the efficiency bit. But if your engineers are, they’re shifting from code review, from coding to code review. So they have to comb over all of it, or they just push it through recklessly and you actually end up with more problems. So problem—

Paul: I have a third problem.

Rich: You have a third problem. So those are both, that’s a hell of a double whammy. And I have a lot of thoughts as to why this guy did this. We’re going to record another podcast soon.

Paul: No one can stop us.

Rich: No one can stop us. Where we’re going to dive into what I think the executive thinking and where they’re going off the rails. Well, give me the third problem.

Paul: The third problem is that, so, build versus buy. Build versus buy is should we get salesforce or should we make our own, “Hey, look, I found five open-source libraries that let me move cards around and save stuff in a database so we could build our own CRM.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We had somebody, a very good friend who’s very smart and really AI-forward, and he saw our tool, a beta of it, and he went, “Well, you know what? I hate QuickBooks. Could you guys clone QuickBooks?” And the truth was, cosmetically? Yes, because QuickBooks is a general ledger with a bunch of pop up windows.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: But the part that integrates with the banks and prints the checks? No.

Rich: Also a billion business rules are in that—

Paul: Just so much in there.

Rich: It’s 20 years of software, right?

Paul: There’s certain things about software where it transitions into culture. It’s not a set of components—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s not a set—and so I think that, to me—

Rich: It’s a fun project, we’d do it. If you want QuickBooks built just for your business, we’ll do it.

Paul: But it will cost you $4 million.

Rich: Not if you enter coupon code NEEDITBAD.

Paul: ABOARD20.

Rich: ABOARD20.

Paul: All right, this is one guy, one company. He took a big swing and now…

Rich: A big Swedish swing.

Paul: And to his, I don’t even know, I guess it’s a soccer country. There’s probably some weird specific Swedish sport like gooseberry eating that I just don’t know about. But regardless—furniture is their national sport. [Rich makes a derisive noise] But the—thank you. Thank you for that reaction.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I needed it emotionally. Okay, so the guy, he’s a big pronouncements guy and now he’s like, “Ah, I was wrong.” Which is, you know, the CEOs love to admit when they’re wrong because then they get to, everybody—

Rich: Humility.

Paul: Well, everybody goes, “He’s so humble.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And he’s kind of, like, “Yeah, this is what I do.” You’re the CEO of this company.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: All right. So, yeah. Okay. So another anecdote in this wacky world of AI.

Rich: Well, it’s really not, like, what they’re finding, and we’re seeing this too when we talk to people, is that companies that are rushing to AI are not finding, like, the returns that they expected. And that’s not surprising at all. IBM did a survey—by the way, when IBM calls you to do a survey? Do the survey. Don’t just skip over it.

Paul: I always do. They’re really, they’re great guys.

Rich: Good guys.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Surveyed CEOs report that only 25% of AI initiatives have delivered expected ROI over the last few years. ROI being “return on investment.”

Paul: It’s so inspiring when you read it that way.

Rich: And only 16% have scaled enterprise-wide.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: AI’s been around for a couple years now.

Paul: Okay, wait a minute. That is very different than what Sam Altman is telling us.

Rich: Well, I don’t, I don’t know what Sam Altman said recently. He says a lot of things. I think he’s in Qatar now.

Paul: But here is what, I think what the promise is, is don’t hire anyone, don’t do anything. Use this technology and you will get there so fast. Like, we’re saying this. We’re saying you’re going to get there a lot faster. We’re saying this on this podcast.

Rich: We are.

Paul: What is—what are we, we’re going to get you there 16% of the time faster?

Rich: No.

Paul: No.

Rich: No, it’s not—here’s the issue. The issue is… There’s a few issues. There’s a few issues. I think the main issue is structural and cultural within big companies. That this is a tool is actually, it is an, it is a grassroots technology. It really took off, not by the corner office buying it and deploying it. It took off on people’s computers and phones. Right?

Paul: That’s a very abstract—what is another grassroots technology? What’s in your head there?

Rich: The web. Slack. Slack is a little—Slack was not killing it with enterprise sales to CTOs. Slack was like, “Oh shit, everybody in my company’s talking over here.”

Paul: Even more so. It was, like, “We failed at making a game again.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah. That’s right.

Paul: “Let’s take the chat tools we’ve got and at least get some money out of this bad boy.”

Rich: There are many examples of routing around the bureaucracy and culture of a company. A lot of software gets pushed out. Now, this one was nuclear.

Paul: Pause for a sec. Because people don’t know this. The web was not welcomed. It was…

Rich: Scary.

Paul: Nerds put spare computers in a closet in their colleges, hooked up to ethernet cables.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: And they ran a little server on it, and then that server might link to another server and kaboom.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: Then the second version of the web, Web 2.0 was literally, like, everything had kind of melted. The Pets.com puppet had died and been buried. And we were all grieving.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then Tim O’Reilly, sort of a very big, sort of serious thinker and publisher in this world, goes, “Okay. Actually, we’re seeing a lot of patterns. There’s this photo site, Flickr, and there’s all this other stuff going on where people are talking back and forth and using the web like normal software. And I think this is called Web 2.0.” And that was like when the just, it went off to the races. That’s when the trillions came in.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And that was, but it was a very conscious effort to be, like, “Here is the new stack. Here is how you will build these things. This is what’s going to go on.” And this is like in the early to mid 2000s is when this starts to take shape.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Okay. So to me, if you say AI is grassroots, what I don’t actually think of it as the Slack technology because the companies are so big. They have hundreds of billions of dollars and they tell me over and over that the best thing ever and they’re the future of the operating system. Their products all suck, but the chatbots are kind of cool.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And so, but you’re telling me it’s grassroots. So…

Rich: So, like, what I mean by grassroots, I mean, I, I say this in the context of… Grassroots makes it sound like it was, it was started in Northern California on a farm. It wasn’t. Well, close to a farm, maybe.

Paul: Kind of, yeah.

Rich: What I mean by grassroots is in companies, organizations, governments, nonprofits, those organizations tend to want to control the tools that are, that get in, right?

Paul: That’s true. They like tools like those provided by Palantir. Right?

Rich: And even, even, like, “When you do your expenses, you’re going to use this.”

Paul: Salesforce Expense Cloud.

Rich: Boring, crappy stuff. Why? Because a lot of times these organizations have to comply with certain laws, have to report their accounting when they file their taxes. Like, it’s complicated. It’s messy and shitty and complicated.

Paul: It’s just the nature of bureaucracy, too. Everything sucks. So we’re going to get this other thing that kind of sucks too. But you’re all going to behave just the way you used to behave. But we’re going to be a little more compliant with that thing.

Rich: That’s right. Email. Like, serious, big law firms are, they have, oftentimes use certain email clients that are really weird and buttoned down.

Paul: I love the signatures from a lawyer. A lawyer, like the lawyer—

Rich: The disclaimer at the bottom. These are tools that are necessary. And so AI shows up as a tool. I can get my expense account out, I can get my AmEx out. And I have a tool and I write responses to my customers regarding a reminder for some event. And I want to write better, better emails. And I didn’t ask my boss. I don’t have to ask my boss. It’s a tool I have. I can install it now. Mind you, some organizations don’t let you install software on your—

Paul: This, this is real. The average desire, I would say, throughout an organization, like let’s say General Electric.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: To bring in a chatbot two to three years ago—

Rich: It could take months.

Paul: Months? There’s—none of that, please.

Rich: That’s right. And so what you have is a lot of tools that make their way out by appealing to the end user rather than to the buyer at the company or the organization. Right? They start there. And why? Because those tools can, if they’re good and they’re really additive, it’s a much shorter path. You’re just routing around the paperwork effectively.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And AI is probably one of the most extreme examples of that because everybody just started doing it, everybody just started using it. Like, the paralegal at the law firm was like, “I don’t have to do this shit as slowly as I used to. I’ll use these tools.”

Paul: Humans can’t—when you give them that out, they’re going to find… We’re watching, you know, we’re watching our friend Clay Shirky, who was on this podcast, just had a big piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and he’s, you know, just kind of coming clean, just like he did on the podcast. He hasn’t been covering anything up. “Like, we don’t know how to put this back in the box.”

Rich: It’s too much. Right? And so—

Paul: And because the students just are not putting away. We can say, like, “Hey, we all need to get our pencils out and do this the old-fashioned way.” And they’re like, “Why?”

Rich: Right. So the corner office, the big, you know, floor-to-ceiling glass, they’re always laid to these things.

Paul: Well, and also, just, like, colleges are big bureaucracies too. Like, can we please—

Rich: Colleges are big bureaucracies. General Electric is a big bureaucracy. These are companies that just move slow. They’re not really playing with toys. Like, a lot of times these executives, like, you know, “My kid, my teenage daughter has been using these tools. I feel like they could be additive.” Like, you often hear—

Paul: All right, so we’re over here. We got the big company saying no, but we got Klarna saying yes. Put those worlds together for me.

Rich: Okay, so Klarna—and there are others, by the way, where they’re like, “Get in there. This is tons of efficiency, tons of, like, opportunity. Do it. I’m tired of pouring money down a hole because things are slow.”

Paul: There are certain CEOs of big companies that like the new thing because they think they’re going to find more efficiency.

Rich: They like the new thing.

Paul: Especially tech.

Rich: I want to end this podcast and by talking about sim racing gear.

Paul: Absolutely. This will bring a lot of people in and make a lot of, a lot of women are going to get really excited by this story.

Rich: [laughing] From the outside looking in, there is an appeal to me to sit in a car seat in my basement.

Paul: Oh yeah.

Rich: Big wraparound screen, rumbling speakers under my seat, and I’m able to drive in a simulation and feel really great about myself.

Paul: Except that you don’t have a marriage anymore, but that’s okay.

Rich: That’s true. Downside number one.

Paul: [laughing] You bring that into the house?

Rich: No, it’s not a good scene. It’s got to be in a different apartment now.

Paul: And when you get the different apartment for your sim racing gear?

Rich: [laughing] Other things have gone wrong, by the way.

Paul: I don’t want to derail. Your marriage is great.

Rich: Let me finish this thought. I could not, I thought this through, I was like, “This is great. It’s a hobby. Building it is fun. And then I’ll drive a race car in my basement.” And I was talking to a friend about it, and I said, “I think I’m gonna do this. It just checks all the boxes.” You know what he said to me?

Paul: “You’re a huge loser.”

Rich: [laughing] He did say that, actually. And then he said, “You’re gonna use it four times.”

Paul: This is the problem.

Rich: Right.

Paul: I will say, now there are hobbies. Like, I got into my little. I got into piano and stuff. And my wife watched me bring large devices and was, like, “Is this about dopamine? What’s going on here?”

Rich: Yeah, well, you got a good wife.

Paul: I do. But, you know, when I went and started taking the lessons, I noticed everybody, like, relaxed. They’re like, “Okay.

Rich: “He’s trying. He’s working hard.”

Paul: “It’s your thing. It’s your thing.”

Rich: My point—so to bring it back.

Paul: You’re right. You would not spend four hours a day in the racing rig.

Rich: I would probably bail on it.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And what, what that means is you got to be calm and thoughtful and, and really think through big declarations, like this guy did eight months ago. He didn’t think it through. He didn’t understand the inertia of humans working together and how powerful it is. And he, I have to give him credit. He’s acknowledging, he’s like, “I kind of overshot here and it’s not gonna work as, as easily as I thought.” I think that is the mistake that’s happening. There’s paranoia and anxiety right now. Like, “I gotta get AI into my company.” And people are rushing to it and not putting, like, real thought into how it insinuates itself.

Paul: So what the hell should somebody do then? They’re just caught in the middle.

Rich: We’re going to talk about that in the next podcast.

Paul: All right, let’s talk about it in the next podcast. Everyone just, boy, what an exciting. Is like a cliffhanger.

Rich: Unbelievable. This is like Game of Thrones.

Paul: Oh, yeah.

Rich: Except not Game of Thrones. Hit us up at aboard.com. If you go there now, you’ll see the RSVP for the event. Join us for the party.

Paul: I’m a dragon.

Rich: We’re also going to reveal a lot of this platform timing-wise around the event. So if you can’t come to the event, you’re going to learn a lot about Aboard.

Paul: It’s true. And there’ll be a very good, actual type-things-in-the-box, cool stuff happens demo on the website. So just prepare yourself.

Rich: Also give us five stars or whatever, thumbs or whatever body parts.

Paul: Don’t… [laughter] Okay, we’re done. We’re done. We’re out.

Rich: Have a lovely week.

Paul: Hello@aboard.com. We love you. Talk to you soon.

[outro music]