Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Innovation
Conversation. Today we are joined by Trevor Corveco,
the founder and CEO of Sapien .ai. Trevor, welcome.
Thank you. Trevor, would you like to tell us
a bit more to our audience about yourself and
all the wonderful things you're doing? Yeah,
no, I've been a founder for 15 years now. I love
it. started my first company just out of college
back in the day and kind of got integrated into
the Silicon Valley world of startups and venture
capital and stuff like that. And I really got
excited about crypto and Web3 kind of early on
when Bitcoin was just coming on online and Ethereum.
After that, I got a lot of luck along the way
just being in the right place at the right time.
Yeah, so I've kind of dedicated the last decade
or so of my life to Web3, and it's kind of my
main focus these days. Interesting. Okay, so
the moment, when did you join the whole crypto
thing? Because it started, what, 2011 or something
like that when the big white paper came along?
I think the white paper technically came out
in 2008 during the financial crisis, I remember.
And yeah, there was not a lot of people interested
for 08, 09, 2010 kind of in 2011 community started
really forming once the network was up in lives
and there were people figuring out how to buy
it and how to think about it. But it was a certain
profile of person. It was kind of more of the
crypto cypher punk type folks that got excited
about it early on a very libertarian bend mentality.
And then as time went on, it became more of a
technologist playground. So a lot of really smart
engineers started looking at what you could do
with blockchain and some of the new functionality
it enables, like decentralized consensus and
things like this that apply not just to the original
use case of Bitcoin, which is money, but also
to all kinds of other applications that we see
in the vibrant Web3 community today. Interesting.
Now, I know you're the co -founder of multiple
companies. We often interview quite a lot of
founders here. But there is a difference, right?
Because all these companies are built on blockchain,
so there's a whole different ecosystem where
they exist. How different is it for you to launch
a company in this ecosystem and then to explain
it to other people exactly what you do? How do
you find that journey? You know, starting a startup,
there's kind of a well -established path to do
that now. If you kind of follow Y Combinator,
it's the correct way to start a startup. a certain
kind of startup, like a venture backable startup.
There's kind of a framework to do it, and you
kind of follow the rules. With Web3 startups,
there's kind of two parts to it. There's the
similarities with Web2. There's a lot of similarities.
You need to recruit good people. You need to
get product market fit, et cetera. But there's
also differences and nuances and benefits. Uh,
there's, there's things that make it more difficult
than there's things that make it easier. And,
um, yeah, so there's a lot of just early stage
stuff is very similar, but as you start kind
of, um, you know, building a community and, and
actually launching a web three company, there's
a lot of kind of unique things that, um, that
make it different. What, what in terms of investment?
How does that look like? Like, do you get traditional
investors because they, and if so, do they invest
in fiat currency or they invest in Bitcoins?
How does that even work? Yeah. And just to build
on what I was saying earlier is that there's
a tried and tested way to do it in web two startups
in Silicon Valley and Y Combinator. In web three,
they're forming ways to do it. Even since when
I started, when I launched my first web three
project. polymath in 2017 -2018. There was no
roadmap. It was completely make it up as you
go along and you have to be, you know, cautious
because you don't want to do things the wrong
way. So you kind of be extra conservative. Now,
as time has gone on, there are some contours
forming of like what path makes the most sense.
But yeah, it's still, you know, Not as clear
on how to do it But there but there are ways
and if you just kind of follow the the top projects
in web3 the top VC funds and how those companies
go to market there is kind of a path To make
it possible and in the extra effort to figure
it out It's worth it because there's a lot of
interesting things you can do As a web3 founder
or community member that you can't do in web2.
There's a lot more There's different kind of
channels to fundraise. There's different acquisition
channels to get users almost faster than ever.
Some of the fastest growing companies or projects
or software platforms of all time are now Web3
because it's global by default. A lot of the
tech is interoperable so it's kind of this big
kind of Lego ecosystem where everything can connect
to everyone else and you can kind of leverage
other people's tech and other people's communities.
And it's just getting started. A lot of value,
I think, in startups accrued to Web3 companies,
whereas in newer things like AI, it's still dominated
by big tech, all things considered. So my point
there is there's a lot of new things about Web3,
but there's a lot of great reasons why it's worth
the extra trouble to figure it out. So there's
been a lot of conversations around how hard it
is to get investment right now. you know, in
a traditional startup. Have you found the same
thing to be true in your side of the world, but
also in your area or not so much though? Yeah,
you know, I would say Web3 is kind of a Web2
startup on steroids. So everything is magnified,
like the cycles are magnified, the bull and bear
markets are compressed and magnified. So In general,
yeah, there was a big overhang from the crazy
2001 days and then the subsequent kind of correction
and crash in some areas. And that hasn't fully
recovered. There's a lot of nuances behind the
scenes as to why that's the case. Like there's
a lot of VC funds that are trying to extend their
runway a little bit because their bosses, the
limited partners have kind of tightened their
belts a little bit. And that has trickled down
to startups. So the cadence is a lot slower.
the valuations have come down a lot. I think
generally though, it's been healthy. Like the
crazy bull markets I never feel comfortable in
because there's not a lot of signal. It's just
a lot of noise. And yeah, so it's kind of a much
needed correction that was needed. It flushed
out a lot of excess liquidity and kind of dislocations
in the market that needed to be liquidated. But
yeah, it is still, you know, it's You need to
have a lot more traction. It's better as a founder
if you have a bit of a history. But if not, you
just have to really kick ass in terms of being
in the right market, having the right team, and
having the right traction that you can go to
the investors and say, hey, we've got a trajectory.
It's not just a story. It's not just a slide
deck. We actually have real meat on the bone
here. And therefore, give us a fair offer and
we can accept your money. When you get those
conversations with investors, do you find that
they need to be very specific? Do you need to
find the right investors to even have this conversation
in the first place? Do they really need to understand
the ecosystem or is it something you can talk
with any investor and say, hey, you know what,
I will not double your money, but 10X your money?
Do you need to be very specific when picking
investors to talk with? Yeah, it's very important.
Know who a good investor for you is. And by good,
I don't just mean someone who's going to help
you a lot, but someone who's actually got a mandate
to invest in your type of business. So venture
capitalists are not looking for lifestyle business
entrepreneurs that like cashflow positively immediately.
They're looking for like hyper scale winner take
all markets. That's how the venture industry.
works is you have like a portfolio of 20 companies
and like all but three or four of them go bankrupt
and then the four that do succeed are hyperscalers.
And so the only way they want to talk to you
is if you have some kind of a pathway to becoming
one of their return the fund investment. So if
you're a big ambitious idea that has a global
ambition, VCs are a great place to start. If
you're more of, hey, we just want to build a
marketing website and sell some courses or something,
that's probably not a good use of time to talk
to Silicon Valley VCs. They're a little more
like winner take all. Is this a billion dollar
company within a multi -billion dollar market?
Kind of minimum. That's what these VCs want to
see. Trevor, I'm curious about one thing. Can
you tell us a bit more about Sapien? What do
you guys do in Sapien? Because I think it's quite
interesting. But tell people listening in, pitch
yourself to the audience. Yeah, sure. So my quick
background, like I said, I was early in Web 3,
before it was called Web 3. And then I started
a project called Polymath, which I was kind of
heavily involved in for five or six years. really
proud of that project. We're actually doing really
well now. We've kind of evolved to be more than
just what we started out to be. So we have our
own layer one blockchain. It's called Polymesh.
That's fully decentralized now. And we made a
lot of progress there. We have really good traction
and numbers on the protocol. But yeah, after
we decentralized it, I kind of moved on to a
new a project called Sapien, which is in the
AI space. We're basically trying to really understand
how humans and AI work together and how they're
symbiotic to each other, especially AI needing
humans. So it turns out that modern LLMs use
a lot of human feedback to make their models
perform as well as they do. So that could be
as simple as just getting a lot of humans, millions
of them even, answering questions. about data
to help fine tune the data or to help structure
the data before it gets trained. So you can think
of it kind of like the AI data supply chain.
It starts out as just raw data, just like raw
crude oil or something in the ground. And then
you have to refine that data, you have to structure
that data. And that's kind of where we're at
is like taking raw data that someone else has
custody of and then helping them organize it.
And this actually is an important step to help
make the models perform well and to be efficient,
you need a lot of specific human kind of infusion
into these data sets. So yeah, that's kind of
the data part of AI. That's how I was taught
by one of my friends who's a master's student
in machine learning at the University of Waterloo,
which is a technical university where I'm from.
He really taught me that AI is really just a
couple of things. It's just data and compute.
There's some algorithms that kind of tie them
together. But we're in the early part of the
data structuring side. So once the data is structured
and ready for training, then it moves over to
the compute side, which is like the GPUs and
the running inference and sucking up to NVIDIA
to get all the H100s as well. So that's AI. So
we identified a part of AI at the beginning of
that funnel. which is the human aspect of how
data is created and organized. And we saw an
opportunity there to do things a little bit differently.
And that's what Sapien is. And who's your target
audience? Who are your clients? Is it Google
and chat GPT or is it actually smaller companies?
Yeah, actually, we started out kind of focusing
on the long tail. So going after models that
are smaller. So these would be like enterprise
models. Basically anything other than a large
language model is a long tail model now because
the LLMs dominate the market so much but We've
kind of also quickly moved into the high end
of the market too. So we've gone after we've
have 13 paying customers across like the long
tail which would be like a medical vertical like
we have a pancreatic cancer researcher that we've
labeled data for we have a large education company
in Asia that is using us to label their math
gtt data, which has been really fun. And we have
a web three customer where we're labeling their
ether scan data to help build a pricing model.
So yeah, we started out with kind of these really
fun, really interesting long tail customers.
The reason I really like the long tail is because
they need it. The big tech models are just so
much better than the long tail models that it's
hard for anyone to compete. And one of the reasons
the big tech models are so much better is because
they can afford a lot of human fine -tuning in
their data and the small guys can't. So we're
trying to equal the playing field a bit and help
kind of close the performance gap between the
little models and the big models. And one of
the ways we do that is kind of by empowering
and lowering the costs for anyone to be a data
labeler. So the industry is technically called
data labeling and there's some really big startups
already. in that market that are doing a good
job servicing a lot of the high end customers,
but the smaller customers where we think a lot
of the growth is going to come from. Like I said,
these are like the researcher models, the open
source models, the enterprise models. They need
humans even more like desperately than the big
tech people do. So we're trying to just make
a platform kind of like Uber where anyone can
be a data labeler, like anyone can drive. their
car. You don't have to be like a professional
taxi driver. You just need to be a human and
have a car. And we're trying to do that same
kind of dynamic, but for labeling where, Hey,
even if you're not a professional data labeler
in the Philippines or whatever, you can still,
um, label data for money as a, as a form of gig
work, but you just don't need a car to do it.
You can just like literally log in on your Android
phone at a bus stop and play the game for five
minutes, make a little bit of side money and
then just log off. Go about your day. How are
you finding like, is the market super responsive?
Like, are you getting, because I imagine that
a lot of companies are looking at AI models now
and thinking, you know, we need to implement
some sort of AI, we actually need this. So how
are you finding the market, Ron? People open
to this idea and saying, you know what, this
is exactly what you need. Or is still, there's
still a lot of education that needs to happen.
Because that's always the case with new technology,
right? You still need to educate the market on
exactly what you do, but also why they need your
services. So how are you finding that? Yeah,
I would say generally I've been very surprised
how much latent demand there is for a service
like this. I've been involved in a lot of projects.
I found it in the past where the market doesn't
exist yet and you have to like evangelize this
problem and convince people they have a problem
that they might not have and then it's more difficult
to do that. But that's what I usually do. It's
like a brand new like virtual reality or when
Web3 came along. I did a security token, which
was like a super early platform to do that, which
is now finally becoming more mainstream. But
anyways, with Sapien and data labeling, it's
there. Like the demand, we're having crazy conversion
rates on our outreach that I've never seen in
previous stuff I've done, because there's already
demand. There's already budgets. Everyone's scrambling
to keep up. And everyone is like, hey, we don't
want to use chat GPT. uh, we want to build our
own model because we have to for various privacy
reasons or for, um, you know, we need a permissioned
model for regulatory reasons. So everyone's like
scrambling to build their own models. Just like
back in the day, everyone was scrambling to build
their own websites and you needed a website to
even be relevant. And then it moved into like,
you needed an app just to be relevant or you
needed a social media account. And now it's like,
you need a model. A lot of these big enterprises.
I'm not saying everyone needs to build their
own model and spin it up, but a lot of folks
do. And again, if we want those models to work
and perform well enough for your customers to
use it, you need a lot of human input in your
data set. So yeah, to answer your question, it's
been really nice to have a fertile market that's
really super, like I said, the conversions are
really, really good. Just wondering, you know,
there's a lot of talk about how dangerous AI
is. Now, you're an expert in, you know, all these
things. So do you think it's actually dangerous
or not so much so? Actually, just change and
change is always positive. There's negatives
and positives, but overall, it's going to be
quite good for everyone. Yeah, I wouldn't call
myself the world expert or anything, but yeah,
my anecdotal kind of What I'm not worried about
is like the job destroying aspect of AI because
just new work will be created. We just don't
know exactly what it'll be, but just like every
technological paradigm shift, you think it's
going to kill jobs, but I don't know. It looks
like we have record unemployment right now in
spite of all these software and job killing automations.
There's less and less. unemployment. So part
of that I don't buy. I think people, we should
embrace this because it's going to open up a
lot of new potential ways for people to be more
productive. So we might not fire people, we'll
just make everyone more productive and make everybody's
company better and bigger and more dynamic. So
that's my views on the job side of it. I think
it's an economic fallacy to think that new technology
is going to crash the economy or something. Secondly,
on danger, you know, this is kind of like the
Skynet Terminator stuff. If I had to be honest,
I'd be a little more concerned about humans using
that scare tactic to centralize control over
AI for other reasons. I think open, transparent
models, especially open source ones, are a net
good. they're substantially safer than these
black boxes that we see today. So my view is
it's still too early to start overly regulating
LLMs. They should be allowed to breathe and innovate,
just like the internet was early on, just like
crypto was, just like apps were. Let it evolve.
Let's see all these amazing things it can do.
given to special interest groups who want to
make sure that they kind of control the genie
themselves and not everybody can share into the
benefit of it. Interesting. I always like to
ask personal questions on the podcast because
a lot of the mindset that's necessary for a founder
in running the company, you know, it doesn't
happen overnight. So what was Your hardest day
when you just say no i'm gonna quit this i'm
gonna find a job doing something completely different
and no one's gonna call me ever again so what
was the hardest thing how do you overcame that
day. Like early adversity in the process i think
adversity like the days where you just wanna
give up how do you how do you overcome them as
a founder i see ya. Yeah there's a lot of there's
a lot of those days. I think for me it was just
like a identity thing like i kind of. Um, if
you're like a soldier, that's what you are and
you go to work and you're a soldier. If you're
a, an athlete, you, you know, that's what you
do and whatever challenges come up, that's just
part of the process of, of who you are. And I
decided kind of in my early twenties that I wanted
to be a founder and that's kind of how I identified
myself. And part of the decision of committing
to being a founder is there's one, a 100 % forecast
of adversity and challenges and crises. And so.
For me, it's just more of like kind of a duty
is just like I this is kind of who I am. This
is what I do and Any any challenges you don't
overthink it. You don't get emotional about it
You just like hey, I just show up to work the
next day and oh, you know, we'll figure it out
that's kind of what being an entrepreneur is
all about like Relative to you know, really hard
jobs. It's not that hard, but it's pretty hard.
Like it's pretty hard to do I respect founders
so much. I have such a soft spot for anyone going
through our times and try to empathize with them.
And at the end of the day, the best founders
are ones that a lot of things have to go right.
You need to have the right strategy. You need
to have the right timing, which there's a lot
of luck involved. And so I always respect anyone.
who's able to start and sell a company, that
to me is like a huge, huge, huge achievement
to go the full life cycle of that. But even people
who don't quite get an exit, I respect the effort.
And especially when you're in a place like Silicon
Valley, where I am, it's, you never know. Like
anyone can rise out from anywhere at any time
and build a really impactful, lasting company.
And it's just really fun to be in an environment
like that because, you know, anyone you just
randomly meet up with or hang out with or who
you work for who work for you can strike hit
it big with with a really exciting new company.
So I don't know, I think that's the fun part.
It's like, it's like a mix of a skill based game
like poker, and then just going to the casino
and having fun. So what advice would you give
to to, you know, a young entrepreneur just getting
started? Because, you know, it's a hard, like
you said, but it's also fun at the same time.
So What are the things you would tell them? You
know what? Just follow this, you'll be okay.
Who will that be? Yeah, I would say, look, figure
out what you want to do. Do you want to like
chew glass and build a unicorn company? Then
you have to move to Silicon Valley. And that's
step one as you move to San Francisco. And there's
not much to talk about other than just just move
there, go all in. That's where you want to be.
It's like if you want to be an actor. You go
to LA. If you want to get into finance, you go
to New York. So that's my number one piece of
advice is just move to Silicon Valley. If you
want to build a big impactful company, it's just
objectively speaking where these companies are
built. Like just look at any stat about where
unicorn companies are that are tech companies.
It's so ridiculously one sided to San Francisco
Bay Area. It's insane. So That's step one. Step
two is try to not reinvent the wheel in certain
areas. Follow the path of people who have already
made mistakes before you. Don't repeat those
mistakes. I did a lot of that early in my career
when a lot of these resources weren't as widespread
as they are now in terms of Y Combinator videos
on how to start a startup. That stuff is absolutely
gold. like to consider myself an expert on this
stuff. And I still really watch that stuff whenever
I'm starting something new because it's so important.
Just kind of the way to do things, the way to
explain your company, the way to make your first
hire and when and how to find your co -founders,
like all these basic things. It's true. Some
of it you can't really be taught it. You just
kind of have to go and do it and make mistakes
yourself. But there's smart ways to do it too,
like to really do things in the right order,
follow the well -established path and then You
don't want to start innovating on legal structures
and agreements and stuff like that. Just do it
the way other folks have done it. And then just
thirdly, it's all about the people. I can't emphasize
how much I've learned that in the last decade.
It's all people. Everything you do, especially
in business, it's all people. It's all relationships.
Whether that's raising money from investors,
that's relationship based. That's how people
give money to people they know, like, and trust.
It's just a fact. And then go down the list,
whether it's hiring your first team and getting
the right people on the bus, that is a 100 %
critical thing early on, especially. So everything's
about people. You need to learn how to manage
people. You need to learn how to recruit people.
You need to learn how to keep them happy and
engaged. And there's no way to kind of be taught
that you have to Interact you have to put in
the hours and the face time. There's no shortcuts
to building relationships You just have to kind
of do it by by always being honest by delivering
Overachieving or over over delivering and under
promising kind of thing And that's what's good
about Silicon Valley. It's got that culture of
like there's not a lot of sizzle Like no one
cares about like beautifully designed What slide
decks and websites and pretty language? It's
just like it's about substance. It's about like
doing real work and and real valuable work that's
like adding value. So it's kind of that culture.
Like I could sum it all up. It's like the culture
of like being a founder, the culture of like
being all in on something. Silicon Valley doesn't
work if you're like halfway, half in, half out.
You have to like, it's so competitive and it's
so difficult that you really have to, and that's
something kind of I did early on. It's like,
you know, I kind of said, Hey, I'm burning the
bridges. This is the industry I want to do. No
matter what, like win, lose or draw, this is
the life I've chosen. And I think all that can
help me get to the ups and downs. I was just
wondering, you mentioned a lot about finding
resources, but also about networking and actually
building your community around you. Is there
a better way of doing things or a way that you
know for a fact actually works super well and
you can give some advice to people on? The saying
is true that you're the average of the sum of
the five people you hang out with most So I like
this is kind of a selfish thing to say but like
try to hang out with people ahead of you a bit
in some ways like you want to put yourself in
front of people that have been to where you want
to go and like learn from them and write in their
jet stream as much as possible, but just like
be very judicious and particular and deliberate
about how you spend your time and who you spend
your time with and Yeah, to me to me that's the
biggest thing and there's like little tactics
like I'm pretty big on having a digital Rolodex
So like everyone I meet pretty much all put in
the Rolodex and have like a system to tag them
and say, you know How could I learn from this
person once a good time to follow up? What industry
are they in? And it's good to like not only meet
a lot of new people but to like have a system
to like stay in touch with them But nowadays
there's kind of no excuse, like everyone's more
accessible than ever on social media and everyone's
doing events every two seconds that you can go
straight up to the people that you want to learn
from or people you want to partner with or co
-found a business with. And so a lot of it is
just like making the decision of understanding
how important your network is and then like making
sure you're fostering it and nurturing it on
a regular basis. Interesting. In terms of resources,
you mentioned Y Combinator a lot. Is there anything
else that you also think is very relevant for
people to know that exists? Y Combinator is just
the best for startups. It's so good. That's all
you need. It's all in one place. Try to apply
to get into Y Combinator as well. That's a huge
signal to go through that program. It's a bit
of everything. It's learning, it's fundraising
and networking all tied into one thing. If you're
in crypto, Y Combinator isn't like known for
being a super web 3, you know, specialized accelerator.
So there's a lot of other good resources like
Andreessen Holowitz has a really good program
for web 3 specific companies. That's kind of
like the Y Combinator for web 3. It's called
Crypto Startup School. So anyone interested in
getting into web 3, I highly recommend you watch
all of that content. It's extremely free. And
then there's some other resources on YouTube.
I like this channel called Finematics, I think
it's called. It's cartoon overviews of taking
kind of semi -complex crypto concepts and bringing
it down really simply. So those are the areas
that I'd start. I was just wondering, you mentioned
how important it is to be in San Francisco now.
Most of our artists, some of our artists was
based in Europe. In terms of the crypto world,
Is it still very important to be in San Francisco?
Not as much. Not as much. Not as much crypto.
Yeah, that's another benefit of Web3 is it's
extremely, extremely global. There's no center
to be in San Francisco, maybe, but still not
as dominant as it is for Web2. And if you just
look at the top Web3 projects and the top Web3
founders, ask yourself, where are they from?
and where other companies based out of. And a
lot of it is outside of the US. And part of that
is just because of the regulatory environment.
But part of it is just because there's so much
talent, especially engineering talent outside
of America. So that's some of the top founders
in the space are from India. They're from Eastern
Europe. They're from Australia. And they're from
Canada. That's where Vitalik's from. And a lot
of those folks didn't build their massive multi
-billion dollar networks Inside of Y Combinator
or inside of San Francisco. So it is it is a
great equalizer in that sense It's a good point
that web 3 is much more global by default and
then and by the way, I'm not saying You ever
have to do something like there's tons of exceptions
of this company built in, you know, Wisconsin
or Spotify is Europe and and Skype so there's
obviously like big outcomes you can do outside,
but I'm just speaking if someone's young and
looking to maximize their chances of big outcomes
and big impacts, it's definitely San Francisco.
I was running on something because we talked
a lot about like having a global team. How do
you manage all that? Because that's not easy,
right? Everyone's coming from a different cultural
background. They have different time zones. Like
how do you even get started with all this? Well,
if I had the answer to that I'd be a lot less
of a stressed gray -haired man, but um, you know,
I've I'd probably sum it up my little anecdotal
feedback on this would be Front -running human
teammates as much as possible. So like You can't
outsource hiring your core team. You have to
do it the long way you have to Do tons of reference
checks. You have to ideally know these people
for a long time. You have to know if your working
relationships work together. And so whether it's
your early co -founding team, that's your job
to find your co -founders. And it's your job
to get product market fit without the help of
anybody else. That's what Y Combinator teaches
you. Like it's the founder's job to get product
market fit. And it's the same as Web3 in my view,
same steps. After that, so the first part is
like you got to find people that compliment you,
people that are trustworthy, people have a lot
of energy, people have a lot of agency, so you
don't have to like manage them. They shouldn't
be motivated enough. So that's your co -founding
team, which your sole mission is to get product
market fit with the two or three or four of you.
And then part two is after you get product market
fit, that's when you raise your next round. That's
when you start hiring. And then to answer your
question about hiring a global team, you know,
it's exciting you had you can get great talent
for great value and It's a it's a beautiful thing
like our parents didn't have this luxury of being
able to tap into a global market where you can
get a top engineer for like 20 bucks an hour
in some cases, it's unbelievable, but In terms
of managing them, you know, it gets into the
tactics. So now it's like, okay Are you micromanaging
people or are you getting the best people and
letting them kind of manage themselves? That's
something I've always tried to improve on over
the years things like asynchronous versus synchronous
like is this an in -the -office type of arrangement
that's a little easier to build trust If it's
a remote team, obviously, it's not office -based.
So how do you build a culture? How do you how
do you? Oversee people is it a synchronous. So
let's say you're remote You're either in person
or remote or hybrid. So that's part one. Part
two is if you're remote, are you synchronous
remote or asynchronous? So does most communication
happen in real time? Or that's kind of hard.
Like if you have good people in Asia or something,
the time zones don't sync up. So I think it's
good to build that muscle on how to communicate
asynchronously. That's what we try to do at my
organizations. Put everyone on a late level playing
field so people that are in the same city don't
have an unfair advantage to the people who don't
but It takes it's different. So now it's like
a lot of making sure everything's documented
making sure you know, you have a wiki to kind
of update the company knowledge as things go
on and And this kind of but it all comes down
to like getting getting the right people on board
first so it's a lot easier to spend like weeks
and weeks and weeks getting the right person
higher slow fire fast that's a good framework
um and then once you have the right people life
is good if if you don't have the right people
even the best systems and the best operating
procedures are uh are going to say new what about
culture because when you have people remote it's
always hard to tell them about the team culture
and all that. So how do you manage that? How
do you even try to create a culture when people
are abroad all the time and they're not working
in the same time zone? So how do you build that?
You know, culture is a tough one and there's
no silver bullet. It's really a reflection of
what the company does. That's kind of like culture
is not just like a slogan on the company exit
sign or something. It's what you do. It's Ben
Horowitz has his book on it about kind of, it's
not what you say, it's what you do. So it's like
building a culture of where people respond quickly.
That's a cultural thing in the organization.
Building a culture, like whatever, culture reflects
the founders more than anything. So are the founders
working long hours? Are the founders doing the
dirty work? Talking to customers in person as
much as possible, you know versus just doing
you know research that's a cultural thing is
Is a cool the quality bar like that's the founders
lead by example as much as possible so if I would
sum it up like it's just a reflection of the
founders and it's a reflection of leadership
and it's a reflection of What you do so it's
it's much better. I think to have a culture emerge
just based on how while you operate rather than
doing a top -down approach. Although it is important
to communicate what your values are as a company.
But again, it's easy to say these are your values.
It's a lot different to actually do them and
actually act them out. And then the culture kind
of re -self reinforces itself. If you bring the
best people in, they don't want to work with
B players. And so that's why it's so important
to bring in those A players early on. Interesting.
I was just curious on one thing. You've seen
a lot of changes in technology. you are, you
know, leading the way in a lot of very, very
new technology developments. If you had a magic
wand, what would you change? Like, if you had
the superpower to change, you know, something,
what would that be? You can't say I want to fly
with our wings because that someone already said
that. You know, I still I think gosh, I think
having There's so many unforced errors that are
so, you don't need like fancy AI or anything.
It's just like the right roadmap on like, let's
just talk about startups. Like so many man hours
are wasted every year of people doing the wrong
thing. Just like having, if I could wave my wand,
like having a, maybe it is an AI, autonomous
agent. It's just kind of like, Here's the path.
Here's the steps. Just do things in order don't
Hire a bunch of people before you have product
market fit so people like I don't know how many
millions of dollars is wasted doing that every
second of the day, but like things like that
like just like a little tool tip of saying kind
of like a Y combinator in your head worth just
like you should find a lead investor before getting
everybody else you and Not knowing that, you're
just going to waste a lot of time doing things
the incorrect way. So I guess it would be like
an autonomous business coach that helps you do
the simple things, not necessarily the hard paradigm
shifting things, but just like the simple things.
I know it would have saved me a lot of time and
heartache. I think it just created a new product
for anyone listening. There you go, yeah, business
idea alert. Trevor, if people want to reach out
to you and get in touch about all the amazing
things you do, how can they do so? Yeah, the
website is sapien .io for any project and I'm
on socials, just add my name at Trevor Caberco
on different socials. Awesome. Trevor, thank
you so much for your time. I really appreciate
it. Thanks, Ricardo. Appreciate it, man. Thank
you. All right, so let me just click stop.