Welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me.
From the last time me and you met. And today,
I would love to hear some of the moves and things
you've done to forward your vision. I think it's
very important that our audience sees the authentic
side of entrepreneurship that most people don't
share. But we love to see the good, bad, and
the ugly to give you perspective. So, your thoughts?
yeah no i i appreciate it i would um i would
kind of start with a lot of the uh things that
have been going on since we um last spoke uh
i think a few weeks ago is the meetings that
you're either raising money meetings that you're
like you in the bc ecosystem you're always trying
to make uh matches so you're matching up investors
to deal flow entrepreneurs to the right investor
advisors service providers and so the good bad
and the ugly of that is i probably had 60 meetings
since we last met, forwarding, trying to forward
the different projects that I have in our studio
itself, helping those in the ecosystem try to
make a connection. And maybe five of those have
been successful and moved forward. But that's
actually a really good. a percentage like usually
a lot of it is you're making these introductions
just to put effort put um uh put i guess uh value
into the ethos or the ecosystem and it it will
return um eventually but it's not always as cut
and dry of like here's what i need to do to make
this app make it here's what i need to do to
bring this founder into the portfolio like it's
not as formulaic as one would think yeah thank
you for sharing that yeah that's a nine percent
i would say conversion ratio about so that's
pretty high Yeah, and it's not conversion as
far as revenue. These aren't sales meetings.
It's just like, yes, that it was a good connection
and it's moving forward and the investors are
interested or it's a startup that just had their
second or third raise with an angel that is exciting,
exciting to be doing. Awesome. What did you learn
from some of these meetings? Well, I think one
of the things I'm continuing to learn is just
the product of AI and how it is shifting in the
minds. We're now in a space where investors are
a lot more intelligent. They're diving deeper
into really asking, if you're labeling yourself
as an AI anything, asking meaningful questions
where six months ago, 12 months ago, i would
be in the meeting as long as you said ai they're
like oh that sounds awesome that sounds good
and not really diving into it but ai is so hard
to take all the way through to production and
outside of just a poc that you're seeing these
investors not let founders get away with just
saying it's ai plus this it's this plus ai like
it's really diving into how how is ai different
how is it um how is it actually creating generative
value not just content that you can do in one
of the three transformers type of thing i was
gonna say hopefully i mean i think the the the
thing that i get asked the most around around
ai is how do you pitch ai and i try to go back
to you don't pitch ai you pitch like what are
the things that are like what's the differentiator
of the functionality that you're doing because
you're not just You're not going to get funding
if you're just a chat GPT rapper. You're going
to get funding if you're fundamentally changing
something and creating value in the market with
your product. Charles, let's dive into your why
and your stories behind your why. So how did
you end up into being part of this AI supporting
business model? And why do you do what you do?
I started out in basically your basic consulting,
working with businesses on how to improve their
business, small businesses that then turned into.
a little bit of it slash technical practice and
learning how how technically we can improve businesses
and then went into full -fledged actual technical
consulting for many years before i went to my
operator positions and in those times what i
learned very quickly was it's really it's really
hard to put in business terms a tech like the
value of tech and it's really hard for technical
folks to talk in business terms and me being
somebody who didn't have didn't grow up with
a cs degree i had a business degree i went into
entrepreneurship and project management and learned
tech along the way and so i was talking to your
cfos your cos your ceos to create that value
proposition for them that when i went in as cto
at la clippers and cto for united talent i was
already prepped to be talking at those executive
level spaces of how to integrate innovative technology,
baseline technology, reducing tech debt, et cetera.
Then as I flipped into the VC world, what I'm
doing today, I now have that entire roadmap of,
okay, here's the business proposition. for a
new product here's the like internal strategy
and business structure that you need to do to
be able to bring this to market here's the um
investor um group that would fit perfectly for
you and like that that overarching narrative
how do you sell that in 30 seconds or less that
makes you sound like you know what you're doing
i had to do that my entire career to be even
allowed in the room wow so then why go into doing
this for AIs? I want to know that. Why did you
choose that field? And why it would get you out
of bed in the morning to do this every day? We're
at a point where you can take an idea and get
it to something that would be go -to -market
ready in 90 days. You can get... any product
that's out on the end sorry today 90 days because
of ai development practices and a lot of the
frameworks that have come out in the last two
to three years like the scaffolding that allows
some of the most um unique and um opportunistic
products be released to market never would have
been able uh never would have been viable three
four five six years ago in the way they are they
are today you can scaffold these things and create
tremendous um pieces and so much so that even
this time that we're at i'd like to make the
joke of take any app that's in production like
a Dropbox or a Notion or whatever it may be,
you could rebuild that entire company, that entire
app in six months or less these days. When in
reality, it's been 12 years that they've been
continuously building. But because they have
that product market guarantee and product market
fit already, it's so easy to translate that into
actual buildable code these days from utilizing
AI. So that's why you see the potential in AI
coming in and I want to say scaling these businesses
and growing the businesses. So that's why you
chose to use that path. Is that correct? I would
actually shift it to AI has reduced so many barriers
that didn't make sense. So the ability to make
a production quality product doesn't require
as much of the manual work that it used to. The
open source community absolutely exploded when
GPT 3 .5 came out. And there are so many open
source boilerplates that you can start from a
really solid first stepping stone rather than
have to go through the heavy lift that it used
to take to start basically from scratch. And
so while you're standing on the shoulders of
those who have created a production ready, whether
it's a SaaS, app a b2b and internal app whatever
you could go on github and you'll see the awesome
template libraries and it will blow your mind
how many things are available for you to build
on top of and that only came from in my opinion
that only came from this ai revolution last few
years and you it's very rare that there's a big
enough moat that you can't overcome As a single
developer, as a small team, you can really utilize
a lot of these pieces that have come from this
AI revolution. So those barriers to entry have
been almost eliminated. That's awesome. Wow.
Thank you for sharing that. That goes directly
to my next question with you. If you see a future
with your business and in your vision, where
do you see it going in the next maybe 1, 2, 5,
10 years? You can define that. The hope is...
being able to enable and empower anybody who
has an idea to get all the way to a viable successful
business and also build that same model for many
other industries for example a lot of what we're
doing with startups we can easily take the same
back -end platform and flip it over and we're
having conversations with like the UN and the
World Bank of how do we do this to make it easy
to submit grant proposals even if you've never
written a grant before or apply for funding for
your idea in countries around the world that
normally would be very heavy or too difficult
for the local population to be able to do. And
so my vision is to rapidly scale and empower
as many people as I can, productize that process
of how I'm doing it, and then just keep scaling
in multiple industries itself. A lot of times,
Charles, we learn from making mistakes and doing
the wrong things. But I think it takes a certain
kind of skill and leadership to learn from other
people's mistakes. In your career, Charles, what
held you back? Things and lessons you learned,
maybe the most impactful one that probably changed
trajectories in your life? I think what held
me back early on was not valuing my own time.
And so this hustle mentality of putting absolutely
everything into whatever you're doing leads to...
10, 15 years later realizing how many things
you might have missed out on or you didn't value
back then because you get so laser focused on
whatever piece of work you're doing. And one
of the concepts that I preach today is thinking
about all of your time should be billable time.
Not billable as in you have to think, I need
to make this much money off of it. But if there's
value in every single thing that you do or don't,
it's like a... balance sheet where sometimes
you're doing something that creates value sometimes
you're doing something that creates liability
or takes away value so what i like to say these
days is for every hour that i don't get to be
with my daughter play games on the weekend because
i'm part of a networking event or something i
needed to truly internalize what that value that
i might lose or i'm giving up is for that and
sometimes it's not a big thing but sometimes
it is and so earlier on i didn't value myself
i didn't value my time i thought it was um something
that just like you got to keep doing it and i
didn't respect the um value of others time because
i would i would have that same mindset of like
why don't you just put as many hours in as i'm
putting in like why why is this uh not something
that's at the top of your the top of your agenda
or whatever that may be so really understanding
the value of time and respecting others um how
others value time too yeah wow thank you for
sharing that um and what has valuing your time
um helped you do i think the most impactful one
is the things that aren't really related to monetary
value actually starting to create some sort of,
maybe think about it like mileage plus or coins
or points or something that isn't just dollar
value, but it's helped me start to really attribute
some structure to the many things in my life
so that it doesn't just fall to the wayside or
I don't properly value that. Can you tell me
more about that so I understand it clearly? Yeah,
sorry. So when I'm saying the valuing of my time,
it's really easy to talk about billable hours
when it is, this is for a project, we're billing
this many hours, and I can make this much an
hour. times out by 2000 that's how much i'm making
salary but in those other pieces like i mentioned
like spending time with my daughter going to
the movies with my wife like talking to an old
friend that i haven't talked to in forever it
it has it used to be really easy to let those
things that don't have a monetary value kind
of go by the wayside and so what i'm trying to
do is like actually like think think through
and assign something some sort of monetary piece
to those non -monetary items i understand that
now yeah yeah okay that makes a lot more sense
wow i think that's yeah that is very powerful
thank you for sharing that um hopefully the audience
found that valuable as well a lot of times we
do get do get caught up in the hustle culture
and uh we don't realize it i mean all points
to grand cardone for for doing the 10x and hustle
culture i i don't like that mentality i don't
follow that mentality though um well the one
caveat with that i would say is like the hustle
culture like i i am not saying that no you shouldn't
work 40 hours you should do the four hour work
week and that that's going to work out it is
just understanding like what you're giving up
for what you're putting in and if if you see
value in what you're doing maybe 80 hours a week
to get your startup up and going because you're
so passionate and like you have that drive that's
great as long as in the back of your mind you
know you're not going to the gym because you
don't have you're not really having that time
you're you're losing out on your friendship network
which is a really valuable thing but doesn't
have that monetary aspect to it so I definitely
don't want to say everybody should work as little
time as they can and go do all the fun stuff.
It is just trying to have that value framework.
You mentioned that. I think yesterday I had someone
on the show. She mentioned this with five categories.
Or was it four categories? I can't remember.
But she mentioned, yes, your work comes. So does
the food you put in your... put in your stomach
so eating healthy your body so exercising right
um your social interaction so talking to people
and then your brain so just thinking about and
calming down your mind meditating and for everyone
that seems like a lot of work um but these habits
can be i think indulgent can be can be put in
your schedule one one at a time and and then
add it on as the as the days and weeks go by
so it's not overwhelming to you to see what you
value yeah i think it's it's very important to
be centered in why you do what you do and making
sure you're taking care of your body because
10 years down the road you might have a lot of
money but you will not have the body to enjoy
that money or you might not have the people to
enjoy it with or you might not have the brain
to appreciate what you have yeah and that's very
burnout is very real and that's also a possibility
so thanks for sharing that charles yeah it's
hard to until you just start trying it's hard
to relate the monetary value to the non -monetary
items earlier especially earlier in your life
But even if you just start with a little bit,
like you said, I think those five categories
are great. And say me going to the gym is the
same as me making $200. Okay. Now, at least I
have some baseline for I should go to the gym
every week because I'm putting $1 ,000 into the
bank of my body. Oh, my gosh. So I just clicked
what you just said. Okay, so what you were saying
is attach a monetary value to what you don't
count as a monetary value. Yes, yes. So you attach
one. So let's say, so for me, like, okay, I go
to gym probably three, four times a week. So
that would be, I don't know. I don't know. It's
$500. I don't know what it is. It's $500, right?
Every time I go to the gym, it's $500 I spend
on myself or I gain $500. i'm gonna go play pickleball
i'm like oh let me let's do that um i don't know
300 yeah and then the the the easy the easy math
that i usually start people out is is think about
your yearly how much you make in a year divided
by two thousand so if you have um uh if you make
two hundred thousand dollars a year that's uh
what 500 bucks no that that's a um Now I'm going
to mess up on the math, but basically it's worth
$100 an hour for you to go and do something.
So if you back that out, if it spends an hour
for you to go to the gym, technically that's
not an hour making that $100 an hour in a business
site, but it is banking that $100 an hour in
your personal. Maybe if you even take those five
categories and you're like, all right, I have
a budget. of how much i want to make in each
of these five categories and start with something
and then adjust the the value of it based on
what you feel how it's changing Thank you for
being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned
in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to
seeing your reactions as these episodes continue
to move forward. This is going to get more and
more fun. We'll have more and more engagement
as well. We'll invite people to participate in
the show. And thank you for giving us your time
and attention. Have an excellent time building
out your vision and becoming a vision pro yourself.