Rich Ziade: Hi, I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul Ford: And I’m Paul Ford. And you know, this is The Aboard Podcast.

Rich: Where we talk about AI and how it’s changing the world of software. You lied to me.

Paul: Probably. All the time.

Rich: In last week’s podcast, you told me I could type in a box and it was going to spin and all these little, little clever little agents were gonna show up, they’re gonna have a couple of beers, talk it over, build software for me, and it didn’t work. It didn’t do what I needed. It worked.

Paul: Oh, did you not get everything you ever thought of in your head in 35 seconds completely perfect?

Rich: Yes, but I hit limits. I kept asking, I kept typing into that box. Still didn’t get me there. What’s up? What’s up, Aboard, fancy new company?

Paul: No, this is actually part of the promise. Let’s talk about this.

[intro music]

Paul: AI, the world’s most powerful, super, wonderful thing ever that will lead to a giant computer to either take over the world or develop a brain and become a star baby, changing all of civilization forever. Or is it? We’ve been sold a bill of goods, dude.

Rich: What do you mean?

Paul: Everyone has said that, you know, any day now, you’ll just go, you’ll like, close your eyes and be like, [strange disaffected voice] “Build me an app that’s, like, better than TikTok, but has, like, little cats in it? And then deploy it? And then I want money? Uhhhhhh….?”

Rich: Are you supposed to be, like, a 23 year old?

Paul: No, this is actually what I’m like when I’m not at the office. [laughter] Just like, no, but I mean, that’s what it’s supposed to be.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, literally, like the laziest, just like, [strange disaffected voice] “Whatever, just do it? Write me a PhD thesis?”

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: You know, like, that is what AI is supposed to be. That’s where we’re supposed to be headed.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s not where we’re headed.

Rich: Oh!

Paul: Things are getting faster.

Rich: The butler doesn’t get better and smarter?

Paul: Not really. I mean, look, I think it’s tricky. I think there are—unless there’s this, like, ridiculous step change coming for us? I think that we’re seeing what the contours are. Deep research. It’s amazing. It goes and reads the web. It summarizes stuff. It creates a report. The report has a lot of errors. You don’t really know where the errors are. It’s hard to figure it out.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s just everything has, like, 12 asterisks at the end.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And—

Rich: Apple recently came out with a study where they found that they gave them sort of classic puzzles and it—

Paul: Oh, like, Tower of Hanoi and stuff like that.

Rich: Yeah. And it quickly fails. Like, it gets to a certain point, it starts in a promising way, and then it falls down pretty bad, even on stuff that’s not super complex. And I think it left them a little skeptical about like, “Did we reach a particular limit with where we are today?” Look, there may be breakthroughs in other ways, but right now they saw a limit hit.

Paul: I’m sure more big breakthroughs are coming, but we don’t know what or when.

Rich: Just ask AI. It’ll tell you when they’re coming.

Paul: And it will make it up.

Paul: Yes.

Paul: And I’m actually, you know what’s funny is these things get smarter, they actually start to introduce new kinds of errors and so on. There are lots of reasons for that.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And actually, to me, I don’t see this as like some great failing. I think that something really weird has happened in database technology that lets a database pretend to be a human.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Or actually lets us project onto a database and believe it’s human.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And that we’re in this sort of transformational era while we figure out what that means.

Rich: The tools are amazing.

Paul: But they don’t do absolutely everything.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: In the same—and so what we’ve learned, because we’ve been building, we had a software-acceleration platform before AI.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: We were about to go out and sell it to organizations. Good for us.

Rich: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm.

Paul: Okay? Then we started to add AI to it so that we could accelerate that.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And the reality is if you go to our website in five minutes, you can build a pretty credible business application.

Rich: We talked about that last week.

Paul: It’s real. It’s not a prototype. The buttons are real buttons. They talk to a real database.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Okay? So there’s a lot that’s changed.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: That was not there. But it doesn’t finish.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And as we started poking around and really, like, about probably three or four months ago, that started to come in—rate of change with the LLMs slowed down.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: They started to add more features and more context.

Rich: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm.

Paul: The things they launched were amazing, but they weren’t, like, radically different in the same way that ChatGPT3 was radically different from everything that had come before.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: We realized that we had to start reintroducing humans into the process of software development if we were going to complete anything.

Rich: We couldn’t get there.

Paul: It wasn’t just—

Rich: We couldn’t get there, and you can’t get there with any of the tools for anything that has even a modest complexity to it.

Paul: Correct. And so—

Rich: And we’ve written about this. You should subscribe to our newsletter. We’ve talked a lot about why AI can’t get there.

Paul: I don’t think this would be news to anybody, but we’re, I think we’re going to talk—I will say very few people talk openly in their sort of marketing about where the limit is and how to get over that limit.

Rich: I think it’s okay.

Paul: Well—

Rich: The limit is—embrace the limit.

Paul: Here’s why we’re able to talk about it. We’re utterly comfortable with deploying humans to finish a task, because we used to run agencies.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: It doesn’t seem to us as a strange thing.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So I want to introduce you to a concept.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: It will not be an introduction to you, but it might be to some of the listeners. And today, what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about how—

Rich: It’s an incredible head start.

Paul: “Oh, I got an app I can show my boss.”

Paul: Yeah.

Paul: “Now I got to make it real.”

Rich: They committed.

Paul: “These weirdos on the podcast said, call us and we’ll make it real for you in a couple of weeks.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “What the hell is that? What’s that mean? First of all, do I have to pick up a telephone?”

Rich: No.

Paul: No, you don’t. You can send us an email.

Rich: [laughing] You can send us an email.

Paul: I want you to, I’m going to, we’re going to, so this is what we’re talking about today. And now we’re going to just go in a slightly different direction. I’m going to ask you, I’m going to say two words to you, and I’m going to ask you to tell me what those two words mean. Solution Engineer.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: A little corporate, a little jargony.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: What is it?

Rich: The Solution Engineer is someone that we deploy, or frankly, you could train up, that translates what people actually need in the business context so that these systems can actually deliver it. They’re sort of a translator of business needs, and then they make sure that the systems actually—Aboard, in this case, actually produces what is going to be additive to the business.

I said last podcast AI will make a million assumptions. And when you make assumptions, you’re essentially skipping the dialogue that is typically necessary for a good Solution Engineer or product manager or whoever, business analyst, to understand and internalize what a business needs. So that when they go over to the engineers, they can say, “No, no, no, you’re doing it wrong. That’s not going to be effective for them.” What’s changed now is that rather than walking back to engineers and then engineers telling you that’s going to be three months, the tools are incredibly responsive in terms of, now I can refine the platform.

Now, the other thing worth pointing out is that there are still classic engineers, because AI cannot—today, right? Finish the code on our platform.

Paul: Same with designers. You might still need product management. You might still need—but the Solution Engineer is a product manager. They just can ship.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Now, they might not be able to ship everything. They might still need to work with broader teams and bring stuff in.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: But that first version, the first few versions of the software?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They can ship, they can tweak, they can adjust data models, they can bring stuff in, they can do all kinds of things that used to be—

Rich: Highly technical, requiring highly specialized skills.

Paul: So it’s a new world. And Solution Engineer is our name for what a product manager becomes when they have these superpowered tools.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So the other thing that we’re going to do, I think, that’s going to be different than a lot of companies in this space is, let’s say a Solution Engineer talks to someone and they’re like, “I really need—my legacy systems are complicated. I need to build this new app. My team is a little bit confused.” The Solution Engineer will get onto—get ready—a vehicle. They will go and talk to people.

Rich: Hmm.

Paul: They will sit in a room and they will understand what their needs are. They will drink Keurig coffee out of their…

Rich: K-cups.

Paul: Their corporate coffee system.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they will be in a conference room, because as far as I can tell, AI can’t quite replace that just yet. Like, you still need the people.

Rich: You do.

Paul: And you still need to listen to understand—because people don’t know what, they can’t just prompt their way out of their problems. People need to talk.

Rich: I encourage people to try it. You could try it with any of the platforms.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: It’ll never say, “I don’t feel comfortable doing this. I’m gonna bow out.”

Paul: Actually, it will if you ask it to do something terrible because they’ve put guardrails. But—

Rich: in in that case—

Paul: But yes, in general.

Rich: If it’s something that it doesn’t feel confident about the output?

Paul: Bad ideas are fine.

Rich: Bad ideas are fine. So it goes. And then when you see its result, you try to talk to it again. And what people don’t realize is that—two things. One is, AI doesn’t step back and zoom out. It doesn’t have that capability. What it’s actually doing is it’s continuing.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: It’s like, okay, it’s like a…

Paul: It has no judgment.

Rich: It’s like a duet.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s, like, when I finish this verse, you’re gonna take over the next one, it’s gonna be seamless. It just keeps going.

Paul: There is, there are tremendous motivators. Like, one of the great motivators at the agency was if we didn’t do a good job, the client would send us home, because we were expensive.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We had to do a good job.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And that was how everybody got to keep their…they got bonuses as a result, right?

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Like, those motivators do not exist inside of an LLM.

Rich: No.

Paul: It doesn’t—and nor does the motivator of like, “Boy, if I get this done before I go on my trip, I don’t have to think about it in Portugal.”

Rich: It just wants to continue.

Paul: [nonsense noise] Just a rotating thingamajig.

Rich: Correct. Correct.

Paul: So now there’s a thing that we will end up showing people a lot later, but right now we’re just kind of keeping it a little bit under wraps that the Solution Engineer uses all day. And it’s very similar to what you typed in the box on the screen, but it’s way more kind of powered.

Rich: Powerful.

Paul: Yep. It’s called Workbench.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Okay, so Workbench is a business-application development platform that we built inside of Aboard for our use and for the use of partners.

Rich: Now is this a coding tool?

Paul: Sort of. What it is actually, remember, okay, last, last week, and as we’re building Aboard, you know, we create a thing called the Blueprint, and it defines applications top to bottom, users, data models, all the boring things that go into building a business app.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: It tells you what they are and it gives you hints as to what it should look like, how it should feel, roles and permissions, all that stuff. The Workbench is a blueprint editor that is both, it uses a chat window. You can say, “Hey, add a data model,” and the LLM will do that.

Rich: Add a field to the person table so that I can also track their birthdays.

Paul: This is inside—

Rich: You can type that in in plain English and then it will edit the Blueprint.

Paul: This is inside baseball, but what we put on the website is a baby version of Workbench.

Rich: Of Workbench.

Paul: Okay, so you are using a five-minute version of the chat interface to create an application. What Workbench has is, it’s more like five years. Like, you can sit there—

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: You can continually develop, you can tweak, you can change and add fields with your mouse.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Eventually you could even hand-edit the Blueprint if you wanted to.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: So it’s way more in the world of classic code development. But what we’re seeing as we use it is that the results are very fast. Because when you have an idea, you can describe it and you can see that rendered as deployed code.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And if you see something you need to fix by hand, you can fix it, so on and so forth.

Rich: Worth saying to everyone out there, Workbench is not available publicly. You’re getting a light version of it at aboard.com.

Paul: Yep.

Rich: Workbench is a tool we’ll use to ship software for people. It’s also a tool that we’ll make available to partners.

Paul: The reason we’re describing it to you is that I think, again, this is our vision of the future. Our vision of the future is that people still work with building things. There are still lots of humans in the loop. And someone like a Solution Engineer, who is the new version of product manager, they need a toolkit to ship all the software they can ship now.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They can build their own apps.

Rich: They can’t ship everything.

Paul: No, no.

Rich: It’s worth noting, I think we’re going to talk about the fact that code is coming.

Paul: Absolutely.

Rich: You will still have to code, but this removes a lot of the complexity and obfuscation that engineering has sort of used as a wall, so to speak. Right?

Paul: I got nothing but love—

Rich: I’m not saying that—

Paul: I got nothing but love for engineering. But people are people.

Rich: People are people. And also, frankly, you don’t have time. Like, I could sit you down and talk to you about like RBAC security models, but you also have meetings and I have work to do. Right? So people don’t do it. And they’re like, “Okay, I get what you need. Give me a few days and I’ll come back and let you know what’s up.”

Paul: Just for the people who are going to make the transcript of this podcast, that’s RBAC, Role-Based Access Control.

Rich: Yes. Yeah.

Paul: Okay. The Solution Engineer has to sort of, they’re getting all the requirements. They just got home off the plane ride, and they’re using Workbench, and they sort of keep talking and keep that conversation going. Essentially, the person stays in the loop.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: That’s a big part about what we’re doing here.

Rich: Yeah, and look, I think it’s almost like—humans are crazy. Like, one minute it took nine months. Now we’re telling them five minutes. But it might be weeks to get the final thing, and they’re annoyed about the weeks. People are still absolutely relevant and necessary, because—

Paul: Oh, they won’t be annoyed when they actually, like, try to use Claude to ship a business app.

Rich: I don’t think people—I think people have bailed on that.

Paul: Yeah, right.

Rich: Right? And so—but I think what this highlights is A) people talking to each other still matters very much because it’s clarifying, and B) every single customer I’ve ever dealt with has their own special thing. Their special problems, their special challenges. And software just can’t intuit that. It just simply cannot.

Paul: Let’s be really practical here. Let’s come up with a prompt, and then, you know, there’s a—we’re going to, let’s spend the rest of time kind of talking about the breakpoint. So the Solution Engineer has been asked to build a…

Rich: Stick with pumpkin patch, because you built it last time.

Paul: Okay. So it’s the, a pumpkin patch company—a pumpkin patch owner is about to acquire another pumpkin patch.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Okay.? There is, a lot of pumpkins involved. And it’s, you know, Halloween is around the corner.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And now this person needs to deal with integrating the legacy pumpkin patch’s records and employee records.

Rich: The data’s got to come over.

Paul: Okay. And for whatever reason, it’s not in CSV, it’s in some legacy system or whatever. Can’t really Workbench your way out of this. Can’t AI it. Can’t just click a mouse.

Rich: You get some help. You get engineers to help.

Paul: I’m going to go talk to the engineering department.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: The engineering department, by the way, unless it’s a partner, is at Aboard.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That’s worth noting. So Solution Engineer works for Aboard. They use Workbench. They talk to you, the client.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Now they go to the Aboard engineers. And now they’re kind of in a classic product- manager role.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: What do they say? I got to put these two pumpkin patches together.

Rich: Yeah. They say, “Look, this data is over here. It’s on some other system which doesn’t exist. Like, it’s not supported anymore, but they ran their business on it. And I need to unify all the data.” Right? And you know, that sounds like, Oh, wow. Okay. That’s just data migration.” Yes, it is. But oftentimes data migration requires other little nuanced things…

Paul: Names are all-caps.

Rich: Yeah, all the usual.

Paul: We capture pet ownership. They don’t have pet ownership. Like, it’s endless.

Rich: It’s worth highlighting a good, savvy, experienced, classic engineer, coder, knows how to use a lot of these awesome AI tools like Cursor and Windsurf and whatnot, to do what you just asked really fast.

Paul This is real.

Rich: That’s still good. That’s still great.

Paul: We’re not dropping people back to 1999.

Rich: No, no, no. You can still get it back way faster.

Paul: Everybody, all the engineers get all the subscriptions to AI gee-whiz that they need.

Rich: Right.

Paul: But these are tasks that we’re—we’re just not there. Like, nobody’s there. There’s no task.

Rich: Go ahead, migrate it just their own work can accelerate. But you still have that person that is sort of orchestrating it all. And that’s the Solution Engineer.

Paul: So the Solution Engineer, so now we’re a little bit—it’s agency style, but boy is it accelerated. And we’ve been doing this for clients, like, sort of quietly as we’re building this company.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And I don’t want to promise speed-ups because everybody’s problems are different. But we’ve seen 5x, we’ve seen, like, 8x in speed-ups.

Rich: Totally.

Paul: And especially around things like migration or API integrations. Really, sort of the grizzly stuff.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That used to take a while—let me tell you why, because I think it’s worth it. It’s like, it can read the documentation and offer a summary. It can look at output from the external API.

Rich: The tools are still really cool.

Paul: It can write you the first draft of a lambda function that could call that API.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Now you have to test it and do things with it. But that three days of clearing your throat and rearranging your desktop when you avoided this task?

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Just went to three-day heaven. And we don’t have to do that anymore.

Rich: It’s a couple hours.

Paul: And so we’re figuring, and what we’re finding—it’s funny, because we haven’t been talking about the fact that we’ve been working for people.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But what we’re finding is that that acceleration is real. It is nowhere near as pure and unfiltered as people would like to pretend it is. But it is very different than it was five years ago. Like, shocking.

Rich: Already.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I would not—if I was building software as a company right now, I would wait as long as I could or align myself with a framework. I mean, it’s marketing. But I would not do anything without really understanding these tools.

Paul: Yeah.

Paul: Because it’s ridiculous. Like, we’re building faster internally.

Paul: Yeah. The core platform. Yeah.

Paul: So now we’re back to software.

Rich: And that’s okay, because we got to fast forward through the first five chapters of the book.

Paul: And so we’ve gone—so first five chapters, last chapter, some humans are in the loop.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And now we get to the epilogue. And the epilogue is nice, happy software. Looks good. And now it’s deployed to my team. They log in.

Rich: It was a lot cheaper. It was a lot faster.

Paul: Okay. And now the last part of our business is now we go away forever and you never hear from us.

Rich: Bye bye.

Paul: No, I think that would be a—I don’t think that’s what people want from a software provider.

Rich: In my experience, if you’re shipping software efficiently, and things got better on the business side, the appetite opens up.

Paul: Yeah, that’s real.

Rich: And that’s not because they’re forced to or they subscribe to some service that they have to pay into. People are like, “Okay, you did that really well. I could use it over here.” Because business people are tuned into all the pain points on their side, and they just don’t know what—like, some things are easier than others to solve, and if they see things delivered quickly and reliably, they come back for more. They always do.

Paul: I mean, we recently talked to somebody who is very high up in a very big fund.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they’re a technologist and their boss is like, “We can fire all the engineers, right?”

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: He was like, “No, not one of them.” [laughing]

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: We’re nowhere—

Rich: Let’s use them better and educate them on these tools and see how we can empower them.

Paul: He’s like, “I’m going to get you 10% improvement this year.” Right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So I think we can go faster than that because we’re smaller and more nimble. That’s a very big org.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So now let me ask you the question. Okay. All right. What happens now? When am I paying Aboard? And, like, do you just give me the code and go away? Like, what happens?

Rich: Well, there’s a couple of approaches. One is some people want the code, they want to own the code, and they want to purchase the code. And that’s a conversation we can have. You’d rather buy the car than lease the car.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: What’s interesting about our model is we see, like, the upfront implementation work that has to go into building anything? It’s kind of been blown up, and now you can get there a lot more quickly, and—

Paul: So I don’t have to charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars—

Rich: To stand it up.

Paul: No.

Rich: Before you’ve seen any value out of the thing, right? So the building process has been reduced so much that you could effectively license the software. So it’s sort of like, wait, is this like SaaS? Not really. Because it’s perfectly customized to you. We didn’t pull up, you know, some generic tool and then tweaked it.

Paul: There is no SaaS product that will do the thing that you, like—

Rich: Exactly as you’ve defined.

Paul: Let’s be clear. We’re more expensive than SaaS.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Right. You don’t do—if you can make, I don’t know, Salesforce out of the box do the right thing for you.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, well, Salesforce is expensive, but like, Pipedrive.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Like, $80 a month a seat or whatever the hell it costs.

Rich: Right.

Paul: Like, if you can make that work for you, for your CRM, and you’re really happy with it, we’re not a better choice.

Rich: If you can make it work. But the truth is, we’ve been inside enough companies to see that everybody works in specific ways. And no tools are like silver bullets.

Paul: I do think that’s—so when you are just starting out, a lot of times what you do is you just use SaaS and you just, whatever it tells you—

Rich: You must hack it together.

Paul: Whatever it tells you you must do, you simply do. Because you can’t spend thousands of thousands of dollars, you know, like, on software every minute.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: Then you grow and you go, “This sucks.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “I don’t want to have this experience every day.”

Rich: Or I just want the report.

Paul: “My sales team complains all the time, and I feel bad. They make me feel bad.”

Rich: Yeah. But I also don’t have $3 million.

Paul: That’s right. That’s where we live.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That’s what we’re for.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We are for, like, that middle, and actually, what’s funny is that middle exists in, that can be a whole company that’s trying to turn stuff around. Or it can be the department inside of the giant company that just, like, kind of can’t get what it needs.

Rich: Always.

Paul: So we’re, in a funny way, we’re back where we started launching this company. You and I are agency people. We like servicing clients. We actually like the relationships.

Rich: Yeah. The difference is the tooling. That’s really the difference. Right? And the ability to deliver because of that tooling.

Paul: So there we are. We are going to, our goal is to go out and get a lot of people to work with us, hopefully thousands over time.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Build tons and tons of software. Everybody can get their thing. It’s not quite the mission statement, but in my heart it is. You can have your thing, your software thing, and we’ll save you a lot of money and we’ll get it to you really fast. And that’s what we are about.

Rich: And last bit, shout out to partners and potential partners. We’ve built a platform. You’ve got your relationships, you’ve got your ecosystem that you work within. We’d love to talk to you about how this platform can empower you to to ship software. Maybe in a future podcast we’ll take a shit on Salesforce. I think I’ve shit on anybody who may ever want to acquire us down the road. Like I think I made a joke about Oracle, Microsoft, now Salesforce.

Paul: We’re never going to get acquired because we’re a beautiful community.

Rich: Salesforce is the ultimate wedge, the square peg into the round hole software platform today.

Paul: It’s just, Marc Benioff is a giant hammer that smashes the square peg.

Rich: And credit to them.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: So many clouds, fill in the blank cloud—

Paul: Money.

Rich: Vaccine cloud during the pandemic.

Paul: Money cloud.

Rich: Money cloud.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And those are all half-baked. Why? Because you’re negotiating with Sales, the Salesforce product. You’re kind of bending and jamming it.

Paul: Yes. You know what? It’s fine. We can all live together happily. I don’t even want to trash them right now.

Rich: Oh, that’s very nice of you. It’s not a matter of trashing. No, I—look, Salesforce is a force in the world. Literally. Salesforce. But what we’re saying here is that you can get the custom-tailored suit that used to be impossibly priced for a lot less.

Paul: Well, you, you can get seven.

Rich: You can get a few.

Paul: Yeah. You can get five for the cost of one.

Rich: Yeah. Exactly.

Paul: So that’s, that’s what we’re about.

Rich: That was salesy, man.

Paul: I know. And look, I’m back in sales mode. And let’s be clear to everyone who’s listening, our next, we’re going to do like a quick AI summer school after this.

Rich: [bored monotone] This we’ll talk about government and AI.

Paul: No, we’re gonna, we’re gonna go back to like the broader stuff. This is not just go to be pitch after pitch. But then again, it’s been, like, a year-plus of us kind of figuring this stuff out and it was time to tell the world what we’re doing.

Rich: That’s great. We appreciate all our listeners. Our audience is growing. Give us five stars wherever somebody asks for stars.

Paul: It’s also, look, we want you to use this and tell us what you think about it. But we also need people. We need Solution Engineers. We need to build our pipeline of humans because even as of now, we’re realizing we have to grow.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So…

Rich: Reach out. Hello@aboard.com. Partners, job applicants, customers, prospects. Reach out. Also if you’ve got thoughts about what you just played with, we’d love to hear.

Paul: We would. All right, my friends—

Rich: Have a beautiful week? Month? Summer?

Paul: Summer.

Rich: Summer.

Paul: Hello@aboard.com and we are here for you anytime you need. And thank you for listening to our pitch. We’ll talk soon.

Rich: Keep listening.

Paul: Bye!

Rich: Bye bye.

[outro music]