The Aboard Podcast

Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And this is The Aboard Podcast, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software. Rich, how are you doing?

Rich: AI-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi.

Paul: [laughing] I’m so sorry that just happened.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Let’s play the theme song and I want to make some dumb jokes.

Rich: I love jokes!

[intro music]

Paul: Okay. The other day, I was asked to come talk to a prominent local media organization, to their designers.

Rich: Newsday!?

Paul: Yes, it was Newsday. [laughter] For those who don’t know New York City, Newsday was a really special publication, actually, because it was like a mix between, it had a little tabloid to it, but it was very Long island-focused.

Rich: It was Queens, Long Island.

Paul: And this is why people are tuned into this episode. [laughter] They want to hear us talk about Newsday.

Rich: Don’t talk about Newsday.

Paul: No. But Newsday was a good paper.

Rich: A prominent, New York City-based, but really truly global, organization.

Paul: Yes, yes, exactly.

Rich: You gave a talk.

Paul: Anyway, so I gave a talk. And it was to designers. And I have to say, you know, when you are asked to give a talk, there’s a little bit of an assumption that you might have some answers.

Rich: You better have some answers.

Paul: And I had to go up there and I had to say, “It’s all changing really fast. And I just want to tell you, as someone who’s operating a firm around AI, that I really don’t know exactly what the future looks like. I don’t know what the present looks like.”

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: “I just want to talk about some of the ways that categories and boundaries are blurring and collapsing.”

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And the way I did that was by making up the dumbest words I could.

Rich: Fun!

Paul: I’ll give you an example.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay? When you’re a company, you have two kinds of potential people who might buy your product or services.

Rich: Okay…

Paul: Okay? We used to run an agency. What are the buyers of an agency?

Rich: Clients.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: And then if you sell a product, what’s that?

Rich: Customers.

Paul: Put them together and you get…clustomers!

Rich: Oh my.

Paul: Yeah, I know. But that—

Rich: You ran with this?

Paul: I did. I ran with this. And then, And you know, people laughed.

Rich: Okay!

Paul: Well, they had to.

Rich: Okay…

Paul: I told them I got into a little bike accident on the way up.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: So if they didn’t find me funny…

Rich: Out of sympathy.

Paul: Yeah, you need to just laugh.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So anyway—it was bad, too. Like, I just slammed into a car, but it wasn’t.

Rich: Nice.

Paul: I didn’t really hurt myself. It just [bike crash sound effect].

Rich: Ugh.

Paul: It was Midtown. I shouldn’t be riding a bike in Midtown in the middle of the day.

Rich: Certain parts, yes.

Paul: Anyway. Regardless.

Rich: Chaos.

Paul: That didn’t work, because apparently Mailchimp uses “clustomer” as a term.

Rich: Really?

Paul: Yeah, in their ads. That’s what people have told me.

Rich: Oh…

Paul: Because I workshop all this at the…

Rich: Uh huh?

Paul: What’s the, at the Gotham Comedy Club. I go at two and I give—

Rich: Dangerfields?

Paul: Yeah. I give keynote decks at the Giggle Hut. [laughter] All right, so let’s go a different direction.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Customer plus client.

Rich: Clientomer.

Paul: No. Custolient.

Rich: Ugh.

Paul: Yeah! But the point is—

Rich: Yeah. What’s your point here, Ford?

Paul: No, I don’t have a point. No, I think that the boundary, what’s happening, and I just want to put a name to it, right?

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: So most companies think of having customers for their products, or having clients for their services.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: But when you can deliver a product as a service along the way, which you can do when you can build an app in two hours.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Okay? What is that? And what we’re finding, as a firm, and as I’ve been going out and talking to more and more people, this is very common in the industry right now, which is, wait a minute. Everything we understood—we still are providing value. We’re still shipping stuff, we’re still making stuff.

Rich: Uh huh.

Paul: But the ways and the boundaries around what we thought we were doing, like a designer designs and an engineer writes code.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And a product manager makes them talk to each other.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: Everybody’s finding that it’s all blurring and that producing software is, it’s not cheap, exactly, because product and thinking is still hard.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Thinking is still hard. But the coding and the building is easy.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And we’ve gone through this a bunch of times in the podcast. I don’t think we need to belabor this part. But what it means is that as the news gets out—when the news first showed up, it was a lot of engineers going like, “Okay, wow, I can code really fast.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But I’m getting emailed to me relatively complicated code artifacts from people who write articles.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, they’re smart, they’re technical’

Rich: They’re building software.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And they’re not engineers.

Paul: It’s functional, deployed software. They want to show it to me.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And it really, it’s okay. Like, it’s okay. I think one of the things I’m starting to realize is everything in this space, we’re all looking for what I call the asterisk. And the asterisk is the reason where you go and you go, “Well, I can never really do this one thing.” But that’s not actually necessarily the right way to think about it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because what happens is you basically set yourself up.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because then someone will be like, “Ah, you just write a certain kind of loop. And now it does that thing.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s more about where can I provide value to people who are talking to me right now?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: How can I move stuff along? So designer.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: You add engineer, you add product manager.

Rich: You’re putting all three together?

Paul: Because that’s, I think, what you got.

Rich: Okay…

Paul: What do you call that? You call that a DesignGeneerManager?

Rich: Sure.

Paul: No. You can actually take the “de” from designer, the “er” from engineer, and the “duct” from product manager. And then that new job is called a Deerduct.

Rich: Have you lost your mind?

Paul: A little bit. What would you call the job?

Rich: I want to say something interesting instead. I want to talk about, for a moment, labor.

Paul: I came in with cheerful wordplay to approach a complicated subject. And you say—no go. Robert Reich, please.

Rich: We sell two things.

Paul: Two things.

Rich: Goods.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: And services.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Goods is like, “I have chewing gum that tastes like mint.”

Paul: That sounds delicious.

Rich: “I will take care of packaging it, I will make sure it’s not poisonous, and I will sell it to you.”

Paul: Can you spend hundreds of millions dollars on a campaign about twins?

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Okay? Services—

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Breaks down like this. “I am an expert in—” Let me pick an industry. “The law. You are not. You will pay me for my expertise as a lawyer.”

Paul: As a lawyer, you like to bring this up.

Rich: “I am an expert. I make custom drapery.”

Paul: You’re a radiologist.

Rich: “I’m a radiologist. You are not.”

Paul: No, I’m not.

Rich: “I will sign off on my results, and my interpretation of those results. You will pay me a lot of money. The less of me there are, the more you will pay me.”

Paul: You know what I hate? I hate the heavy smock.

Rich: Hmm?

Paul: You know, when you go to the radiologist, you gotta lie down?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they put that heavy smock on you.

Rich: Oh. So the, like, radiation doesn’t make it through you?

Paul: Doesn’t mess up your giblets?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. I just—as I was saying radiologist, I mean, it was, like, “Ugh, heavy smock.”

Rich: So here’s what’s happening. What’s happening is this: The buyer of my expertise who needs a contract or an x-ray read, right, is late at night, after dinner—not even late at night. It’s 8 o’clock. Taking the problem that they would have taken to the expert and giving it a go.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: And they’re like, “Check it out!” One of the dumbest things you can do is go back to your lawyer or your radiologist and say, “Hey, what do you think? It’s pretty good, huh?”

Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rich: Right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Why? Because a huge percentage of the economy is driven by the delta between my expertise and your non-expertise.

Paul: This is real. That is the definition of white collar, of high margin. Right? If you run a Wendy’s, the amount of money you make per hamburger is really low. It’s, like, probably pennies or nickels, right?

Rich: It’s low margin.

Paul: Yeah. And one of the reasons I think people are so anxious about AI is that that gap, that labor gap right there between where I really get to charge you a lot of money because I will deliver that much value to you from what’s in my brain.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Yes. Now what you’re finding people say, and their skepticism when they say it is, “That’s cute.” They minimize. Like, engineers when they first saw, like, cool-looking demos coming out.

Paul: “It’s not real.”

Rich: “It’s not real. You can’t put that in production.”

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: “You can’t rely on that. You can’t run your business on that.” And that’s a natural reaction. A lawyer will say, “You cannot, please do not attach that to an email. That needs to be reviewed by, like, a proper experienced attorney,” et cetera. Is it defensive? It’s actually not. Because this stuff has landed so fast that it’s a normal reaction for either a doctor or a lawyer to say, “Slow down, this is dangerous stuff that can cause harm and we should review it.”

Paul: Well, you know, one place to learn here is from the doctors who are like, “Wow, this cuts down on bureaucracy.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I’m going to use it that way, but obviously it will not be able to diagnose. And if any of my students try to diagnose with it, I will hit them with a stick.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Because I have this set of 100-plus years of protocols and systems that are, I stayed awake 72 hours in a row in order to internalize.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So I’m pretty confident that I know how this needs to behave.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: I think what’s really tricky is in a lot of other spaces we don’t have the confidence that the doctor has. Lawyers know how a lawyer is supposed to behave.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So the minute the LLM doesn’t behave like a lawyer, they go, “Uh uh.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But most people don’t really know how a product manager is supposed to behave, including most product managers.

Rich: I mean, product managers, designers, engineers. That’s sort of the three-legged stool there.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: There has always been interdependency between their core skills, and there’s always been kind of a bizarre tension between all three of them. Right? The product manager has effectively felt somewhat powerless, but depending on the setting, could have real authority. The engineer, I mean, everybody’s exhausting, because they have skills.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: If you have skills and expertise, you’re by default a little exhausting because you’re getting lectured by people who don’t have your skills.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And now the people that don’t have your skills are giving it a whirl at home.

Paul: Well, they have skill simulators.

Rich: If the outputs would have just plateaued, it would have been, like, you still need the expert. But boy, they keep getting better.

Paul: You know, there’s an analog here in Flight Simulator. Like, early versions of Flight Simulator, I wouldn’t necessarily put you behind the cockpit.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Current versions are pretty good.

Rich: I think they use them for training.

Paul: And they do. Right. And actually like the big 737s and so on, they have big simulation environments.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: The boundaries between being really good at flying a plane and simulating flying a plane?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: If you have some of the right equipment, you get the tactile feeling and you really study it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Those start to blur. We’ve been down paths a little bit like this. It’s just they’re so hyper-specific. That said, you cannot certify as a pilot in Flight Simulator.

Rich: No.

Paul: We make you go up with another pilot into the sky.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And I think your exercise here of mushing words together is because those protocols between expertise have been threatened. They are threatened. They just are. Product managers feel—everybody’s feeling empowered for the thing they’ve been told to stay away from because they can mess around with it. Engineers are designing, product managers are doing everything, designers are coding. All the normal sort of niceties and boundaries that existed have been kind of threatened.

Paul: So let me be clear here. I hear from a lot of people about their reaction to this technology.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Sometimes, like, a dozen a day.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I get emails and I get signal.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: There’s no one consistent response. But what is very clear to me and the reason why we’ve been pushing a certain direction is that the days of saying that boundary collapse won’t happen or it will happen under certain sets of rules and that buyers and customers will want things to be the way they were? That is fading, and we can’t change that.

Rich: Right.

Paul: So it’s very hard because I really, you know, every fiber of my being wants to say, “Don’t you worry, people are what matters.” But I actually think it’s, it’s, we’re not, it’s not, like—

Rich: It’s more complicated than that.

Paul: Yeah, I’m not saying worry or panic. I’m just saying like we’re getting kind of into the weeds, right, but we’re reacting to this just like anyone else. But you know, one of the reasons I’m smushing together the words is just trying to make it kind of, like, something we can talk about.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: Because these words have so much sort of weight associated with them. Like, we used to run an agency together and people would be like, “Oh, you’re an agency? What kind of agency?” What, like, if people are in an agency—

Rich: People need to frame you to understand you.

Paul: They really, really do. And no one can frame what’s happening right now because it’s changing so fast.

Rich: It’s not a new tech, it’s not a VR headset, which is additive. It’s something you introduce into culture and into social dynamics. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that has actually threatened the status quo quite like this. Meaning it’s not a new technology that you bolt on. It’s something that is empowering everyone to question the way things are.

Paul: I’ll give you one example of a thing that was this threatening which was Linux servers running web browsers in the closet. [laughter] Right? “We are an all-Microsoft shop. The web is not to be trifled with. We are very secure. 25,000 people hacked into our system on Windows for work groups in the last two hours. But doesn’t matter.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “We’re not publishing no website and the last thing we’re doing is letting some Unix machine, open source come into our system.” And actually what happened is nerds kept setting them up. They kept setting up these little servers with free software. And that was sort of, the web bloomed on those.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: What happens now is you can run Linux inside of Windows. Like, eventually it kind of all reconverges.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But at the moment they saw that as existential threat because it was going to take their market share.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because it was unimaginable that things would get too much bigger than they already were.

Rich: If I’ve got a pretty good spot in the status quo, and a threat shows up?

Paul: Which is Microsoft in the 90s, that was the status quo.

Rich: And then again later—Microsoft was threatened multiple times.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But let’s go back to the individual or a particular profession that is being called into, you know, is being threatened and whatnot. There are certain tactics you do to sort of preserve your place. You have to try to preserve your place because there’s, you got to pay for college tuition.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Like, it’s just normal stuff.

Paul: So here’s, here’s humans and I, the term I keep coming up with is like, we have a product and we are an agency, and you put that together and you get a praygency.

Rich: Praygency.

Paul: Yeah. You put a Y—

Rich: P-R-A-Y.

Paul: Put a Y in there. Because that’s where we’re at.

Rich: I mean, let’s pause on that for a second. I think over a year ago, I forget who, I think it might have been Noah Brier who said SaaS is software as a service, and I think he flipped it—or maybe it was you who said service as a software. Right?

Paul: I don’t know who said anything anymore. It could have been Noah.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Could have been me.

Rich: I think the rigidity of products that you buy and/or lease, or license is being called into question because you assume that those require massive investment and they’re requiring a lot less of it today. So much of the assumptions we made are being turned upside down. That’s just reality. You got another one for me?

Paul: Well, this is the worst because what they really want for the company, the services-oriented platform company to become, is just an agency, but you put a T in there. It’s the Agentcy.

Rich: Ohhhh.

Paul: And you know what that’s called?

Rich: What?

Paul: Agentrification.

Rich: Oh boy!

Paul: Yeah. So I’ve been working hard.

Rich: [deep exhale] This is tough, Paul. [laughter] This is tough, Paul.

Paul: We’re gonna stop that because I really thought that would be fun and light.

Rich: Yeah, I agree with you. I like what you’re doing here because you’re clever. You’re a clever guy.

Paul: Oh, thanks.

Rich: You essentially are highlighting that the walls and the boundaries, which, by the way, you’re making a joke of it, but boundaries are often—an enforcement of boundaries is how people make a living.

Paul: You know why I’m making it, that’s why I’m making a joke about it. Because it’s so real and I’m seeing it happen.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And people are absolutely pissed. They’re so pissed.

Rich: Are they?

Paul: Oh, God, yeah.

Rich: Like, explain.

Paul: Software could never do that. Right? It’s very threatening. This is a very threatening moment. The people who are—and you don’t even get direct—

Rich: Everybody?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Everybody’s threatened?

Paul: Yeah, sure. [laughter] It’s not—the vibes are bad, man. Like, it’s a lot of stuff.

Rich: Yeah, it’s a lot.

Paul: The country’s at war. Like, it’s a mess right now. And this just is one more frickin’ thing that keeps coming.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I like to—I keep an active LinkedIn feed of articles that are related to this subject that are interesting. Right? And man, there’s a lot of engagement these days, like, people—and it’s not my words. Right? I’m just sort of like, this is interesting signal. Not endorsing it or not, but it’s a lot of engineers trying to, a lot of software people just trying to internalize what’s going on. And there’s a lot of hot responses to just sort of like, “Wow, you know, this is all a bunch of crap.” And just sort of like—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: This is LinkedIn. It’s not Bluesky. Like, it’s—

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you surprised?

Paul: No, I’m not surprised at all. That’s why I’m making little jokes, because it’s a way to just kind of get the conversation going a little bit.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You know, I would say, I wouldn’t give my delivery the highest marks to today, you know, I think, but, you know, give me a couple more rounds at the Chuckle Hut.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I’ll be able to kind of land these ideas.

Rich: No, I think you’re hilarious.

Paul: But we got to make it possible to talk about the fact—look, one of our designers asked for a good task with Claude code because they’re learning.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I said, make a component system and then build the full React storybook library so that engineers could cut and paste those elements, right? It’s for those—

Rich: React storybook is UI components neatly organized in a catalog.

Paul: So for those who don’t know what this is, this would be, the designers work a whole lot on the component library, and then the engineers set it up inside of React storybook. And there’s a high cost of change in this world.

Rich: Well, the designers wouldn’t work on React storybook.

Paul: They would never would touch it.

Rich: And what happened?

Paul: Popped right up.

Rich: What popped right up?

Paul: Like, two hours later. He’s like, “Check it out.”

Rich: On his own?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? So you gotta, like, that’s an artifact. That’s real.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it looked good. I showed it to you. It looked good, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right. That’s an artifact that’s real. That exists.

Rich: Yeah. Let me close this with a question. Pretty hard one. I don’t think you have the answer to it.

Paul: I hope not.

Rich: When I think about people and their expertise and how they transact with one another, it’s like a currency exchange.

Paul: Often it is.

Rich: It is a currency exchange. Right? My currency as—let me be a lawyer for a second, costs this much. Here’s a running joke. It’s a known thing. Tax attorneys are the most expensive attorneys. Like, real expertise around tax law.

Paul: Yeah. Because they constantly kill themselves. So there’s only, like, three left.

Rich: There’s not many.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: There’s not many, actually.

Paul: Actually, they probably have amazing lifespans.

Rich: They might have amazing lifespans.

Paul: That’s not a job—first of all, that doesn’t take you, like, you don’t do a lot of heli-skiing.

Rich: Let me— [laughing] Let me stereotype for a second. They’re rarely the rainmakers.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They’re kind of weird. They like the IRS code. They like to get in there. But they’re very, very expensive. And the reason they’re very expensive is there aren’t very—there are very few of them. And there are very few people who have an appetite for tax law. Like, when the new code lands, they’re all over it. It’s like an album dropping for them, right?

Paul: This is kind of the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

Rich: Right.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: So now fast forward to today, and I’ve done this, by the way. I’ve asked ChatGPT to give me some tax advice on a business that is located in a certain city, in a certain state, and in a certain country.

Paul: Okay. You’re a lawyer, and you’re pretty good at receiving tax advice. You’re an entrepreneur and a lawyer.

Rich: It wrote it in plain English.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It didn’t think I was a lawyer. It didn’t assume I was a lawyer. And I have a call the next day with my tax lawyer. My tax lawyer charges $2,000 an hour. Not unusual in tax law. Higher-end corporate tax law. My perception of that person’s value after my session with ChatGPT on this stuff has changed. How do you price? How do you adjust currency exchange amidst all of this? How do you price your value?

Paul: You’re asking me, Paul?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Not the tax lawyer, but anyone. We are, full transparency, as a shop, that is about as good as it gets in shipping software rapidly are trying to figure this out.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: How do you price?

Paul: It’s the wrong question.

Rich: Oooh, you went there.

Paul: Yeah. It’s the wrong question. Nobody knows. [laughter] And everybody who tells everybody who says that they know is absolutely lying. And I’ll tell you why. Because at some level, even during pitches we’re building. Okay, so it changed. The deal is different than it used to be.

Rich: The deal is different.

Paul: So “how do you price” refers to the old world. Refers to, like, how do I keep a tax attorney worth $2,000?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay? That is absolutely not the question that capitalism has ever allowed.

Rich: I’m okay with him getting cheaper.

Paul: So here’s the question I want you to ask every day when you wake up.

Rich: Okay?

Paul: How can I use the change in the world to drive value to the people who can most take advantage of it? To me, that often comes down to not-for-profits, local press organizations, things like that. But it also is medium-sized business and it can be parts of large businesses.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: The tax attorney, at some level, is going to have to stand up for themselves and figure out where they live and they’re going to have to identify the value they provide. And this seems unfair, and it is, but they have to identify the value they provide and they have to self-commoditize. And what’s happened is we have this world where everyone has been told what their ticket is and what they’re going to cost and they line up. I did it. I was a consultant for many years. I was $150 an hour when things were going okay, and I got more expensive as time went on. When I was a freelance writer in my 20s, I was $50 an hour. I know my value.

Rich: It’s gone up.

Paul: People will do the math on that. But then you’re paying your own healthcare and you’re really only usually able to get work for about three weeks out of the month. [laughter] So it sort of balances out.

Rich: Right, Explain “self-commoditize.” I think that’s a very exciting way to end this podcast.

Paul: Okay. I mean, look, you’re in a market and you go and you learn how the market works, and if you’ve never freelanced—here is what was always tricky about running an agency is that people didn’t know what business they were in because they were aligned with their discipline.

Rich: When you say people, you mean people in the agency?

Paul: I’ll give you—yes, of course, like, designers. Right? And this is not to pick on designers. Product managers, too, and engineers. So our job was to find and identify leads, bring them in, ask them for as much money as they would give us, and then turn that into a project that people would then bring their labor to it, and then if they paid us a little more than the labor cost, we could have some money.

Rich: We made, we were profitable.

Paul: Well, after rent, you know, capex and opex, et cetera, et cetera.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay? What happens is that, and I would always advocate for this, and it’s really not something that people find interesting, and I think this is where so much pain is coming from. Most people don’t know what business they’re in. They know what discipline they’re in. They know that they work at an agency and they get projects from their boss.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And I think when you are in your 20s, that’s really normal. I’ll be frank, I didn’t know what business I was in half the time. When I was—

Rich: Just doing good work.

Paul: I got some freelance work.

Rich: You’re outputting.

Paul: But when I went freelance, as I got into my mid-20s.

Rich: Now you’re closer to the sun.

Paul: And there used to be a culture around freelancing where you would, there was a book of rates. Right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: There was an understanding in the industry and you get hired by large orgs and small orgs and they paid differently.

Rich: Uh huh.

Paul: And so you developed an internalized sense of what you cost.

Rich: What you could attract.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: Your price is wholly dependent on what people are willing to pay.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: So now fast forward to this madness today.

Paul: The tax attorney, if anyone should be able to figure out what they should cost in the new world, it is a tax attorney. Right? Like, what value are they going to bring? First of all, if I was a tax attorney, I would double down on, “Let me validate any of your LLM checks as a free service to you. Let me stay in your world.”

Rich: So you’re telling him or her to embrace the tools.

Paul: I’m not telling anybody to do anything. I’m just telling you that—

Rich: It’s coming.

Paul: If Rich is here, a regular purchaser of tax strategy is sitting here telling me and the 2 million people who listen to this podcast.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: That it’s okay to get on ChatGPT, and you can be there as the tax attorney, you can be like, “God no. It’s the worst. ChatGPT gives the worst advice. Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it.” But you’re yelling at this podcast and it can’t hear you. And everybody else is like, “Well maybe I will ask it.” And that’s happening. It’s just happening and happening and happening. I can’t fix it. Nobody can fix it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And not only that, even if you had a perfect strategy for explaining why this is a really bad idea and you’re losing the spiritual aspect of taxing, [laughter] you’ve got multitrillion dollar aircraft carriers coming into port.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: Right? So at some level, can everyone just admit there may not be a perfect victory on the other side of this?

Rich: I mean, we’re agency people. There are never perfect victories.

Paul: No agency is—people don’t understand. An agency job, you usually cycle through in about two years and it’s pretty punishing. And the people who are good at it are fricking weird. And that’s just real. Like, you and I are, we are a kind of special and painful form of business person.

Rich: Yeah, I agree with your non-answer.

Paul: No, but—

Rich: A lot of your mushing words together.

Paul: It’s not an answer. It’s figure out if. Okay, if the boundaries are blurring, how can you preserve what’s good and drive the value? Because I swear to God, if you’re really valuable?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you drive the value and you don’t try to hold it and you don’t be the person who uses GPT and keeps telling them, like, don’t ever, you know, but if you, if you do that, they will reward you.

Rich: Yeah, I agree.

Paul: But it won’t look like the billing sheet from back in the day. So that’s real confusing.

Rich: Let’s pitch people. We always end this with a little bumper ad on Aboard. We’ve got a couple of offerings now. Do you want to tell them about them?

Paul: This is the irony of the firm, right? Which is while I am telling you, I do not have answers about what’s happening in culture.

Rich: Yeah, but if you’re going to give us money, we can give you answers.

Paul: Not about culture. Not going to pretend.

Rich: No, no, no.

Paul: But I can give you answers about how—

Rich: We’re not therapists here.

Paul: But I can help you really quickly ship a platform in a variety of different technologies. I mean, this is real, right? So, like, while all this is going on, we keep honing and honing and honing our skills. And so things that I’m thinking about a project, it’s related to a really sort of really sticky billing issue that we just unlocked. Right? How long would that have taken at the agency?

Rich: Four months.

Paul: And we went, what would we charge? We can just be upfront about that.

Rich: Half a million bucks? $600 grand?

Paul: That’s right. It would have been a team of five, right? So how long did it take?

Rich: A month.

Paul: How much did it cost? Much less.

Rich: A fraction.

Paul: A fraction. Right? In fact, we finished a lot of it before we finished the contract.

Rich: Yes, that’s real.

Paul: We’re very good at these tools now. We have our own custom technology. We have a sort of very structured way of building and understanding data models inside of AI in order to get very predictable results.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then we sort of put the foot on the gas at that point. And then we go to our good friend Claude Code.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And we say, take the smarts here and let’s get an app.

Rich: We’re experienced enterprise software people that know how to use these tools to ship to production.

Paul: And we are not trying to hide the value. We are sharing the value with our clustomers.

Rich: Yes. You can partner with us in a couple of ways. You can hire us and give us a goal line. And we ship software. 30, 60, 90 days. We call it Aboard Launch. And that’s a very goal-driven, let’s get you to production as fast as possible. Except it’s reliable, it’s secure, we test it and everything, but it’s five times faster than it used to be.

Paul: In the future, we’ll actually talk through this process.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Because I think our listeners will care to hear how you get a big platform in 90 days that’s very reliable.

Rich: Another way you can work with us is a product offering we call Aboard Transform, which is us, frankly, putting our talented teams into your org, helping you sort of deal with all this change.

Paul: Yep.

Rich: And just accelerating across your org shipping much more quickly. We don’t have the legacy and the sort of history that slows us down. And we’re glad to help.

Paul: There is no pricing sheet.

Rich: Well, there is. It’s in a briefcase and when you open it, it glows.

Paul: And I would say if you want this kind of transformation and you want to talk to us, it wouldn’t be bad to get in touch soon. Like, not because we want your money, but just it’s hectic out there.

Rich: It’s hectic out there.

Paul: And we really want to talk to people who kind of do connect to the story. And so if you’re interested, get in touch like it’s a good time.

Rich: And if you have questions, we like questions. Podcast topics. Hello@aboard.com

Paul: So Rich?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Our goal is to reach lots and lots of people with an inclusive and thoughtful message about how to build stuff with these new technologies, even when it is confusing.

Rich: All right.

Paul: And I want more and more people to pay attention to that.

Rich: Share.

Paul: Like.

Rich: Subscribe.

Paul: Five stars.

Rich: Thumbs.

Paul: All of it. Every thumb you have. I need it. [laughter] Okay. But anyway, it would be nice if you did it. Thank you.

Rich: Thank you.

Paul: Sounds amazing. All right, friends.

Rich: Have a wonderful week.

Paul: Yep. Don’t worry. The boundaries are going to collapse, but we’re still going to be nice.

Rich: You can’t say “don’t worry…collapse.”

Paul: Yes, you can.

Rich: Okay. Have a great week.

Paul: Bye.

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