#207 A Masterclass in Branding, Technology, and Investment for Startups with Pete Sena

0:00:02 - Mehmet
Hello, again, welcome back to a new episode of the City Hall Show. Today I am pleased to have with me Pete Senna, who is joining me from the United States, from Connecticut. So, pete, the way I like to do it is I leave it to the guests to introduce themselves. No one can do it better than you. So the stage is yours. 

0:00:20 - Pete
Well, first, thanks so much for having me on the show. One thing that if anybody that's followed me before knows is I hate to talk about myself, but at your request, I'll just introduce myself. So the question that a lot of people always ask is like who am I and what do I do? And so I'm a creative entrepreneur. I started writing software when I was a kid and got really big into design and tech at an early age. I started a digital agency when I was like 19 years old and built that up to a large company working with a lot of large brands. 

Businesses everything from venture-backed B2B tech to direct-to-consumer CPG and a lot of the clients we work with now are challenger brands. And what I mean by a challenger brand is when a business comes to us, typically they'll be looking to hit the next S-curve or inflection point, so we help them with their storytelling, their brand positioning, the strategy and the experience. And my focus, the core business I started 20 years ago, is called Digital Surgeons, which we call DS now, and ultimately what that really is is we're focused on helping people understand their story and their strategy and how to bring that to life and an experience that is digital first, and when we first started the company back in the day, not everything was digital first. Nowadays, we're on a digital conversation, we're on a digital interview. We have deeper connections with these things than we do with our family and loved ones. So we live in a digital first world. So it's like oxygen we all breathe it. So that's a little bit about me. 

I went on to build multiple businesses. I'm also an angel investor, so I've invested in a lot of early-save tech companies, some of which have had some interesting growth outcomes, and I'm really just proud and excited to be here, and I think that, as an introvert, the reason why I show up to things like this is I want to show and model for people the things that I didn't have access to when I was 19 years old. I always say to myself, like, how do I inspire my 19-year-old self, who was shy and lack confidence and didn't have those things? So that's what I'm here to do. I'm excited to be here and answer any questions that would be valuable for you and your audience. 

0:02:19 - Mehmet
Thank you very much, pete, and thank you for sharing that you were an introvert, because one part that you're trying to… you don't leave that behind. 

0:02:29 - Pete
It's funny, but thank you for saying that. 

0:02:33 - Mehmet
Yeah, so same applies for me, by the way, and people now, when they see me, they ask okay, how come this guy is on a podcast and he's a host, so anyway, and one of the reasons I like to have people like yourself, Pete, is to inspire fellow entrepreneurs and founders and anyone who's interested in business and technology that you, too, you can do with guys. So let's start a little bit from branding and marketing, right? So this topic although like I have a technology background, but with time I figured out it's very important and the reason is like you cannot actually get people to know about you without building a brand, right? So now the first thing. Of course, when we talk about startups, it's complete story than big corporate. So when you work with your clients and the people who come to you to consult, Pete, how do you approach creating a unique brand identity for a startup versus an established corporation? 

0:03:42 - Pete
Yeah, that's a fantastic question. Many of the same principles and rules apply. I think the difference is a larger, so I'll sort of start on the later stage company and then I'll sort of work my way, but you'll find that the principles I'm a big first principles guy that the principles are very similar. 

So later stage companies typically are more established, they've got a lot more traction, they've got a lot more customers. So customers already see them and the role that they take in that person's life right. So positioning, brand positioning specifically, is sort of a battle for the mind, right. What's, what's the space you're going to occupy in the hearts, minds and wallets of your customer? What do they say about you when you're in or not in the room? Right? More importantly, with your, not the room. So ultimately, I think what that means is there's a lot of established patterns or a lot of established messages or perceptions or tactics. So later stage companies, you have to sort of defame the thinking in some cases if you're going to evolve it right. So the only way to do the defame is you have to know what the frame is, which means you have to start where you stand. You have to start where the company is at and understand, like, what's driving this brand refresh or this brand evolution? Is it because the world has changed but the company hasn't changed? Is it because they're moving into a new market, launching a new set of products and services or experiences and ultimately, do they want to be doing for something new or something different than they're already known for, so that that work, I'd say, gets a bit more nuanced? I'm happy to go into as much detail as you want. I'm, you know, doing work with a Fortune 50 right now, where we're going through this, so I'm happy to talk about that. 

But I think, going to the startups, what's nice about startups is typically they move a lot faster, there's a lot more fluidity and there's a lot less that sort of, you know, set in stone or concrete, right, there's, I like to think of. Startups are like Play-Doh late stage companies are like concrete pillars, right. So it's hard to move concrete, it's hard to turn the Titanic, to use some old sort of tropes and metaphors but ultimately many of the same rules apply. You have to understand what is the vision of the leaders that are driving that business forward. You have to understand what their culture is like internally and then, obviously, you have to understand what is their customer base, what's the vision, why do they exist? So understanding the big why helps us get to the what, and then the what then drives the how. And, most importantly, I like to focus on who is going to drive the how. So there's just some of the basic principles. 

I've, my team and I have evolved this framework we call the brand DNA framework. We've evolved that over the past 20 years and ultimately what it does is it breaks a brand down into what we call the DNA of a brand, and what that basically breaks down is three key components. There's the essence, the expression in the ecosystem. So, just to really simplify it for the audience, if they don't do branding on a daily basis, the essence is essentially your positioning, it's your, it's your strategy and your messaging. So you know where, what, how. All those those core principles. That's the essence of the business and I'm happy to talk about how to do that if it's helpful. But moving on to expression, expression is how you express yourself, what you look like, how you feel, all those different things. So for the CTOs on the show, you can think about your UI and your UX from your, from a product perspective you can think about the messaging that your sales and product and marketing teams put out. 

You can think about all the different touch points in the customer journey, from awareness to the product, to trial of the product, to adoption and onboarding of the product, and then just continuously going through that loop. So that's ultimately the expression. And then ecosystem is really how do all those pieces work together? Right, so that's things like go to market strategy, that's things like marketing funnels and all the different touch points, but what I like to say is the sum total of all the experiences that people have internally and externally with your business. That is ultimately how your brand DNA and your ecosystem comes together. 

So those are the three core pieces, and what I would do with any client, whether they're a startup in a garage or a 200 year old business. 

I like to really understand where are they at right now, how did they get to this stage and, more importantly, where they want to get to. And I think that process of mapping going in there with a genuine sense of curiosity is how we're able to go in there and leave behind some of our conceptions. Right, the problem that a lot of agencies and consultants have is they walk in and they pound their chest and they think they know better and they don't come in from a sense of curiosity. So I believe when we come in with open curiosity, we meet people where they're at. We can go from where they are today to where they want to get to and the delta in between, that key change moment. That's ultimately what we like to lean into. So Delta is a big thing that we focus on is the change over time that we can create in the smallest incremental unit up to the most transformational unit. So I hope that answers your question. 

0:08:22 - Mehmet
Yeah, definitely a dead beat. And now, based on that and on top, and let's discuss it in general, whether it's a startup or a established company, you know there is a I'm not sure if it's a belief or you know it applies but usually when we talk branding we think more about B2C companies usually and in B2B space, like you know, it's like kind of a not very much clear like what a branding means for a B2B companies. Like from your experience, can B2B companies actually establish brand in a sense, you know, when you have like followers and you know people you know start to know about the company, they, you know you get the point, like you start to have the same feeling or the same, I would say prestige, that usually B2C companies they have. So what you can tell us about that, yeah, I love that question. 

0:09:31 - Pete
Thank you so much for asking it. First and foremost, I believe that B2B companies, at the end of the day, are driven by humans. Right until the AI is replaced, I saw in the future right. But I believe that companies are driven by people and people by people and people by into people in a lot of different ways. So I think B2B companies have a absolute possibility when it comes to branding, and the greatest B2B companies understand that through and through. And I'll give you a specific example, since we're talking to CTOs. 

Many of my friends are CTOs. I've sort of kind of sat in that seat in some capacity over my career, and the thing that I think is particularly interesting is like recently I was working with a company. They're looking for a technical co-founder. They've been interviewing CTOs who've come from large companies, and one of the first questions that they've been asking is well, how would you go about bringing your expertise to this company to do it? They come in with a bias, right. Maybe they're really focused on Google Cloud, maybe they're focused on Azure, maybe they're focused on AWS. They have a preference for a tech stack, they have a preference for a developer experience that might be in their experience and they pick something. Right. Why do you pick Mac versus PC? Why do you pick Google versus Amazon? Ultimately, these solutions, they have very comparable solutions. Right, you can build the same application using all of these different cloud solutions I mentioned. For the most part, right. They all offer, you know, everything from the serverless way of doing things to the classic server world and everything in between, right? 

So, just to get techie for a second because of our backgrounds, what makes you choose one product or another is the brand experience, right? So the problem is, most people think that brands are like fonts, pretty pictures and colors, and they hear the word branding and they think like pretty. I would largely disagree with that, right, when you think about like. I'll give you an example one of my favorite tech brands right now is Vercel, and we do a lot of work on Vercel. My team builds a lot of things on Nextjs and Vercel has done an amazing job creating this great developer experience. Right, they make it fun to work on their code bases. They contribute, you know, actively to open source. They have a really robust, growing enterprise pipeline. But everything about the intention of their design, how they design their products, how they message their products. The developer onboarding experience, the CLI tools, the search man line interface tools all of these different things have brand in the intention, right, and they just actually recently evolved a bunch of that work as well. 

So brand is is not pretty colors and pretty fonts and logos. Brand is the space you occupy in the hearts, minds and wallets of your customer and what makes someone choose you over another product. So I think nowadays, if we look at the enterprise tech scene as an example, everyone looks at Salesforce now as this like Goliath company. That's like too enterprisey and et cetera. But if you go back to the early days of Salesforce, salesforce basically created the category of CRM, right, and no one was doing cloud based enterprise tech at that time. 

You looked at the oracles of the world and IBM's. Everything was on-prem right. These guys not only did they really evangelize and drive a lot of cloud adoption for companies, but it was the message in the story of Salesforce and how they created that category of one. So what I always say to people is, when you create a category of one, you have competitors of none. And I can give you examples left and right, from Netflix to Amazon, to big companies, small companies. All of these examples I give you are B2B tech companies that have then gone on to deliver either B2B or B2C or a mix of both. Right, I'll stick with the Salesforce and. 

Amazon's of the world, specifically the server side of their business, not the consumer side. But ultimately, if you look at these examples, what all these examples have in common is a dedication to design and a dedication to brand. So I think you can incorporate aspects of brand in all of these different aspects of the journey, and I think that most people confuse brand with look or with marketing. I actually think that, if you look at the fastest growing cloud companies on the planet right now, the fastest growing cloud companies on the planet right now are design led, design driven, their data informed and they really want to create gratuitous user experiences for their customers. What are those customers? Are CTOs or those customers are consumers buying a product on a website? We're all people. So I hope that answers the question. I think, ultimately, when we really deeply understand brand, it's these types of factors that I think can drive great user experience and great brand experience and, most importantly, drive shareholder value, depending on the size of the organization. 

0:14:07 - Mehmet
Yeah, 100%. This answer the question, and I hope that whoever is listening or maybe watching this later, they will get it because, as you mentioned, it's not about the logo and this I would say repetitive kind of things, because that's not the main thing of branding and even a marketing strategy. Now, you mentioned something very interesting now, pete, which is when you are first mover in the market, versus when you come into a market which is, let's say, not too much crowded, but there are some companies before you and now you need to establish yourself as a new guy on the floor and you're trying to differentiate yourself. So what are the main things that these startups should focus on in order to capture the audience's attention? 

0:15:05 - Pete
Yeah, so one. I want to sort of challenge one thing you said there, if that's okay, which is that I believe that you don't have to be a first mover to carve out a unique sense. 

0:15:17 - Mehmet
I asked for that on purpose no. 

0:15:19 - Pete
I figured you did everything with intention with you. It's just fantastic. So what I would say, the first thing you have to focus on is who the hell? You are right, you know, who are you? What makes you different, what makes you better? 

And, at the end of the day, what I always tell people when you're first getting started is the riches are in the niches, right. So the more specific you can get with the problem that you solve for the specific customer that you're going after in the start, it's very easy to go from small to big. It's very hard to go from big to small and ultimately, what I found is when you're moving up market, you're trying to acquire customers, you're trying to establish position. Typically, I like to think of a brand's positioning as a horizon window of 12 to 18 months, specifically in the venture backed tech world that I've sort of done a lot of work in, but you can look at this in any industry. But I'd say positioning changes over time. The brand's promise shouldn't change really over time, because the brand's sort of vision I think should be big enough where we're continuing to chase that big North Star. But I think, on that topic, why I say the riches are in the niches is you have to understand truly who is your customer right. And the best way to understand the customer is what is your problem, what is the problem you solve? And then, ultimately, what's the transformation or the shift you create in your world. 

One of the entrepreneurs I've had the pleasure of getting to know and also having on my podcast is David Kansel, who was really responsible for one of the leaders that brought the HubSpot product to an incredible growth position. He went on to then start Drift, which we know is the really amazing chat bot technology really transformed conversational commerce and the B2B space. And what's interesting is, if you look at, you know his business and the business that they built, that drift. He talks a lot about this concept called the shift right. So this is where I was inspired by that language, which is what's the world today, what's the world in the future? And I think when you stop selling features and benefits, when you start selling transformations for customers, that's when the magic happens. So I'll give you an example. I'm I mentioned Vercel. I am not. Vercel is not a client of mine. I spend lots of money a year with them because we're an enterprise user of their software. 

But why I'm talking about Vercel. What Vercel does is the shift that they created for me. If all they did for all of my developers was put an ad up or a billboard up or whatever it was, and the ad basically said are you sick and tired of downloading a million packages to get started on a new project? In one line, we can set up your entire tech stack using all the best dependencies, all the best things. That's what Vercel does, right? So they've created this shift in this transformation, which is you're going to save me time, you're going to save me money and you're also going to make it fun, right? So they've got a lot of little nice things that are built into their software experience, their CLI, their CLI experience, their developer relations and developer experience. They're listening to their community. The community asks for things they're constantly shipping, right? 

I believe velocity and the measurement of velocity is a direct correlation to a company's possibility. Most people think the faster you move, the more mistakes you make, and that's not untrue. But the faster you move, the more that you get those dopamine hits, the more you can learn, the more feedback cycles you can get right. All of these things, I think, are designed within the DNA of an organization. So it goes so much further than you know fonts, colors and pictures. So that's why I get so excited about brand experience, because I use the example of Versailles, just because it's top of mind for me. 

But that's the shift right. The shift which is everybody else is scalable, large solutions for enterprise and you know, no one ever gets fired for hiring this tech stack. But when you work with this enterprise and they weren't always the Goliath company they are today they used to be the underdog, right, but because of the contributions to open source with their CEO and founder, I got really behind that. My tech team got behind that. So when it came time to make a choice and you know we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of investments that we're making infrastructure we went with their solution over others, simply because of how it made our teams feel. 

So I know that sounds a little bit squishy. Some people are like, well, feelings, you're getting a little bit too whoopie, but I think feelings is everything right. Think about yourself as a consumer, think about the books behind you in your chair. It's ultimately how something makes you feel and the shift it creates. Like I mentioned from David Kansel's metaphor that, I think, is what you have to lean into. So I hope that helps the audience start to think about how I think about these things and, more importantly, how everyone can think about it, because I believe that everyone that's contributing to a product or a brand or a service every single person can contribute to helping to make that brand experience better. 

0:20:02 - Mehmet
That's spot on, and you know about failing and failing fast. We were speaking with Mark Raban in a few back, few episodes, I think two weeks back, and exactly hit on the same point, but now you mentioned twice one word, which is actually I prepared a question about it, but I would like to ask it differently Storytelling, storytelling, it's an underrated, I would say. You want to call it branding, you want to call it marketing, you want to call it a sales technique, I don't know, but it's very underrated. So, from your experience, pete, what is the what makes a good story? In a simple way, yeah. 

0:20:47 - Pete
So I believe that what makes a great story is, first and foremost is relatability. I think it's a really important thing, but I think tension and emotion and resolution are some of the key components that make a great story. I've studied storytelling from just the greats that have done it. You know, from writers like Stephen King to you know some of the early. You know storytelling that we did back, you know, when we were in caves, right. So, like you know, thousands of years ago. I think ultimately, it's the component of emotion and connection that is really important for story. So I'll give you a really good example. I just had this conversation, literally two hours ago, so it's fresh in my mind. I was speaking with someone and they're in an emerging category right now. There's a lot of regulatory pressure on the on their category there, and I can't say too too much about the details, but I'll share the example that's relevant for the audience and and as a result of it, there's just a lot of statistics right when it's like. 

You know, 150,000 people are facing this problem every single day and you know one billion, one billion impressions of these things happen every single week or whatever, and those are just like really crazy things. So what I basically sat down with was I said, okay, if you have, I'm like, tell me about your family. And they're like oh well, I have a brother and I have a sister. I said, okay, great, so you're a family of five? Right, it was your mother, it was your father, it's you, your brother and your sister, right? So, family of five. So imagine if I said something like you have a family of five. For every 10 families that go through this process, five of them are going to get denied. How would that feel if you and your family were denied? And instantly like, just that conversation sparked a whole nother set of conversations with him, because what he realized was now, we made it personal, right? So the reason why everybody's getting so crazy right now about the AI stuff is because it's personal. They're like oh my God, I'm going to lose my job, something's going to happen to me, me, me, me. Nobody cared when we went from riding horses and buggies to having a car. Nobody cared when we had to stop going and developing film at, you know, taking our roles of film and bringing them and waiting a week for someone to develop our camera. No one cared about that, right. But now, when it's coming for people's jobs, when it's making it, when it's challenging people, now it's personal. 

So I think when great stories, they're relevant to us, they're personal to us, we connect with them on an emotional level, right. So I think that it's those emotional stories that create resonance and it's that resonance that ultimately creates behavior change. And that's what I think great marketing is right, which I've been a marketer for 20 years. Marketing is about changing behaviors to bring more people closer to a thing that they need or want, and I think it's about deep authenticity, which I think is an overused buzzword, but I think it's. How do you get authentic? You connect with people you know here. You connect with people here and when you can, when you own the mind, you own the wallet, and that's the thing that you have to understand is we're battling the position in the space we occupy in people's heads. So that's what I think makes a great story, and I think you could do that in a million different ways. 

A perfect example is I was working with a tech company recently and they saw job applications double when they added a command log in their, in their JavaScript, where when you just did a view, source the. It would just log out to the console. A URL where are you? A curious person like us apply here. So now, who do they want? They want engineers who go one step deeper. They want people to dig in. That's a brand choice, that's a product choice, right? Some would say we're not just marketing, right? It's no different than when I saw someone do a billboard that used a hash and you had to sort of decrypt the hash to be able to understand what the URL was. Right, these are marketing ideas, but they're authentic to the audience. And again, I'm speaking to engineers here because it's the CTO show, right? 

0:24:53 - Mehmet
Yeah. 

0:24:53 - Pete
I think this, this connects with everyone, so I hope that that helps give an illustrated point as to how I see stories 100%. 

0:25:01 - Mehmet
Let me ask you now, pete, how hard is it to come up with a story that is close to the heart and mind? Because I'll tell you why I'm asking you this question. Because maybe people watching or listening to us would say, hey, these guys like are talking about it, like it's very easy, but you know, like it's really I don't know, and what I'm seeing personally, especially in the enterprise tech and tech in general, that people are going the easy way and, instead of, you know, going the heart and mind way, they try to over complicate things. So, either by comparing themselves to a competitor, or they try to, as you were saying, talk about their features, what we used to call them. You know feeds and speeds, exactly, so is it something that hard? Like? Do we have a scarcity, I would say, in people who can really come up with good stories? 

0:26:00 - Pete
Look, I would like to think that I'm a unicorn, but I'm not right. I'm just as replaceable as that and as anybody, and I think, ultimately, there's a lot of really great storytellers out. There, is a lot of great marketers, a lot of great product minds. Here's my belief system. To answer your question Is it hard? Yeah, it's a little bit hard because it's a lot of work and these days, what I found is people don't like hard work, right, they want the easy way out. They want the instant gratification. They want the Amazon one click experience. Show up at my door in an hour. Right, so it's hard. Yes, because you have to listen. 

In my experiences, some of the greatest stories that me and my team have ever come up with have come from a real customer, right? So one of the things that we love to do is people talk about, like, immersion and discovery, and there's a lot of buzzwords people make fun of, but when you really dig into how people talk about your product and how people talk about your experience, the stories just come out right. You know, a very easy example that everyone in the world probably knows about is Dunkin Donuts right, you know it's a global brand, right? All right, everyone walks around now giving a consumer example, but I'll also give some tech examples in a second. This is one that just comes to mind. I say that as I'm finishing a Starbucks coffee but all the consumers were saying, hey, I'm going to go make a Dunkin run, I'm going to Dunkin, I'm going to go to Dunkin. Do you want to go to Dunkin? Do you want anything from Dunkin? 

The business's name was Dunkin Donuts and certainly it was a brand decision, because there's so much more than just donuts and coffee, blah, blah, blah, and there's all that kind of strategy stuff which I won't bore you with. But at the end of the day, the consumer came up with that story, right, which is like the whole America runs on Dunkin and Dunkin, like that was consumer language that someone just listened for, right. So I'll switch us to tech for an example. Right, when you think about tech, the best stories that you can ever tell about your business are real, true customer stories. So even if you have three or four or one customer that like you, you know I always say go with more than one because you want to make sure it's not an anomaly, but, like, those stories are things that you can hook into. So is it hard? Yes, but I think if you can find out where the tension is, so what I would say is like you know, some of the true frameworks are like what's the product truth, the consumer truth, and you know all these like truth, truth, truth, and I think that that's great advice. But the best way to figure out a story is is do a. We do a lot of design thinking sessions where we're bringing in real customers and we'll talk about, like I'll use a cloud platform as an example. So how has this, how has this technology changed your business? How has this technology changed your day to day? How has it changed your developer experience? Or how has it changed your customer experience? 

And you just listen and you just keep asking a question. I do this thing called the five why's, where I'll ask a question and the person will answer it, and then I'll say why. And then I'll ask a question and the person wants to answer and I'll say why, and I just keep going down and when you get to the bottom of why, typically what you find is it's either fear, it's greed or love at the most primal level. It's driving these emotions and I think that when you understand the things that drive those emotions, then you can understand the things that drive the decisions. And that's where, when you lead with the story first and you lead with the shift right, like sell that promised land in everything that you do. 

And that, in my opinion, is why I think product led growth, which was not a term that existed five years ago right, everyone's talking about product led growth now and, at the most simple level, the best way to create product led growth is to solve a problem for somebody that they just rave about on your behalf and you never ask them to. 

And then, when that logo pops up and the freemium version of the software, or when that logo pops up or that URL pops up, or whatever it is, now, all of a sudden people are like yes, I need that thing, I'm sick of doing it this way, I want to do it that way. Now I'm going to jump on your product or your service. So I think a lot of these things are just branding and storytelling at the most core component. We just have a lot of fancier terms and adjectives that we stick on them now, because we, as marketers, we want to feel smart, you know. We want to feel that the couple hundred thousand dollars we spent on those MBAs or those expensive education programs really paid off. 

0:30:12 - Mehmet
So we're going to give it a bunch of buzzwords because that makes us feel smarter, but at the end of the day, it's all about human behavior and how to understand it 100%, and I liked, you know, the five wise actually, I've seen it multiple books, but the one that came to my mind I think it's in the in startup book, where he was. He was talking there about, you know, it's from the Japanese also as well like, this is the way they. They try to enhance things. So by asking five wise, it's definitely, you know, a good, a good one, I would say. You mentioned a couple of times speed, and let me first ask you about what do you think I would do to branding and marketing in general, like is it gonna help? Some people are saying it will create like junk data also as well, and you know there will be these articles generated by AI and so on. So what's your take on that? 

0:31:14 - Pete
I have a lot of takes on it, so I think that. So, when you're talking about AI, I just want to make sure we get more specific. Are you talking about the advent of large language models and what we've seen the past months just to? Get part of. 

AI because that you people like you and I know that AI has been around for 30 plus years, right, but I think why it's making the news headlines is a very real reason. My belief system is that I think all these llms are bigger than the Internet. I think they're bigger than the Internet. I think they're bigger than the cell phone. I think that these things are going to fundamentally transform how we exist as a civilization. So one of the things that's happened with any technology is the more we democratize it, the more we make it easy to access, which is one of the reasons by chat to be grew to over 100 million users pretty much overnight was because they took a familiar thing right a text message conversation. They took a familiar thing a website. It took a familiar thing free sign up and they gave people a really, really good experience. That wasn't a cheesy, annoying chat bot like we've all experienced before, right, and they did that with three things, and you know this, but the audience might not one. They just they basically consume the world's knowledge that was available and clean the data and ingest the data and trained a lot of expensive models. Member. They started out as open AI, started out as a research lab before they became the you know, the very successful nonprofit in for profit entity that they are today, but back back then. So, knowledge engine very powerful, right. Reasoning engine generally pretty powerful, and then it was that human reinforcement, learning specifically that went through and really tightened up what this thing could do, and it was that human touch and that human finesse that made it special In a lot of ways in my opinion, and why I believe that when you look at, say, gpt two to three, point, you know three, five turbo to now GPT four, and now they just filed for the trademark for five right. But I think what's interesting about this is to answer your question Now that we've democratized the ability to pop something into a prompt and have it spit out stuff, that means that we can create more things, and no different than when Mark Zuckerberg made Facebook open and went from college invite only to completely open to the planet. No different than when Instagram became Instagram or YouTube became YouTube. The ability for people to create content opens up tremendous possibilities for the human experience. That being said, what I think is going to do to your point is I think it's going to create a lot more garbage, is going to create a lot more over saturation of stuff, but it's going to be mediocre stuff, and I think what's going to define experiences in the future is going to be deep understanding of our customer and the human experience. It's going to be creating craft driven experiences that have that have a higher quality over quantity, because I think people are sick of quantity at this point. You know we're being bombarded with just so much crap, right, and I think that quality and craft and a deeper sense of connection and effort is going to be something that people value in the future. Will it bring more crap? Absolutely, but it also creates more possibility. 

I'll give you a good example. I'm using AI in almost every aspect of my life from. I'll just start as a personal experience and then I'll move to business if it's OK. So I'm a person, my wife and I have, you know, my wife has some had some specific health challenges and she has some specific dietary needs, right, I've used LLMs to basically automate building recipe ideas, ordering food, doing all these things. These are things that anyone that wants to spend 20 bucks a month US dollars can do. With chat, you can hook up to a plug in, you can do Instacart and all these other things and you can very powerful stuff without having to write a line of code. Now I've seen me with a software background. I can also do a lot of fancier stuff using the API is and blah, blah, blah but I'm using it for idea generation, I'm using it to rewrite things, I'm using it to automate notes for my meetings, I'm using it to task team members, follow up with team members, understand people's strengths versus weaknesses based on, like, their personality tests that they've taken. There's so many different things, personally and professionally, that AI is doing for me right now. 

And do I believe that we're going to see a lot more crap? 

Auto written articles, misinformation, disinformation, deep fakes, all the other stuff? 

Absolutely, but I also think we're going to see a lot of rapid innovation, right. 

What people are not talking enough about is how can these AIs help with drug discovery and health care? 

How can these AIs help with truly help with climate tech? 

How can they solve problems that would take humans hundreds, if not thousands, of years to solve that now through the power of computation, and when we look at what has happened with the concept of a GPU, right, I mean, you and I have been in this tech space for a long time. There's more GPU power on this thing than I think I had on my first super computer that I had access to. The technological innovations are amazing. So ultimately, I think we're going to see a lot of crap, but I think that we're at the dawn of a new era and I think that in the future, we're going to be repaid with our ability to capture people's attention. I believe that the currency of the future is data, but the way to capture it is time and attention, because people have so many options now if they choose you whether it's your product, your experience, your brand if they choose you, they're choosing to make an investment in their time, which now we're all time-starved because we've filled our times. We've filled our news fees with a lot of things. 

0:37:11 - Mehmet
So I hope that answers the question 100%, if you allow me, because I'm happy. You mentioned there's a lot of crap. So I had a conversation with a friend the other day and we were discussing the same topic and he said, yeah, see all these crappy videos coming out and see the articles. I said, hey, listen, if you think about it, actually us humans, we were generating more crap than what they are generating now. Open these Instagram feeds and TikTok and I don't know what, and you see this guy who's sitting. I don't know what he's doing and people are watching him. Isn't that crap? 

Honestly, why, as you mentioned and I had, a couple of weeks back, an MD with me, kasha she was talking exactly about the use case, about how AI actually can be leveraged, for example, in rural areas where there is no even a practitioner, and maybe there is a guy who's maybe a nurse, he or she, and they can leverage AI to do simple diagnosis for patients. Or, for example, you can have, as you said, in drug discovery, because these models, they have this ability to go, find the data and process it faster than us. I might say, maybe better than us, but of course, you know, when you mentioned about people being afraid of losing their jobs and we repeated it multiple times. Now I have a theory that in the future maybe we will not need even to work. 

0:38:43 - Pete
I think that's an interesting theory, one that might be a good conversation for another time when we have more time to dig into it, because I'd love to understand your beliefs and I'd love to share some of mine. I think that we're going to see an evolution of the human condition as a result of technology. I think you know some of the signals that I've seen is, if you look at, I'm a millennial. If you look at the generation before me, the generation after me and the generation after the generation, if you go from sort of millennial to generation alpha right, so millennial, gen Z alpha right. If you look at that, the concept, there's a lot of changes right in the human condition, right, the way that people are seeing things like gender, the way that people are seeing things like what is physical reality versus digital reality. I think we're seeing a lot of convergence on previously separate things are now being much more fluid, and I think that that's changing a lot. So the example I would give you is like my son's two years old. When my son is 20 years old, I'd be willing to bet that he, because of the experiences that he will have been exposed to and a part of, I believe, he will not delineate or differentiate between what we call reality versus the metaverse. I believe for him he'll understand. He'll live in a world where spatial computing is the norm. He'll live in a world where it'll just be reality. It won't be mixed reality or XR, won't be augmented reality or virtual reality, it'll just be a reality for him. Right, the way in which people will connect, whether it's through physical computing or ambient computing or digital, you know whatever, whatever the mediums or modalities are, I think we're going to see continuous shifts and ultimately, what that means is one's relationship to where they put their time, attention and effort, I think will change. 

And I think that with that new civilization whether it's a world where no one works is, I believe, that everyone will work, because work to me is just a direct correlation of the word effort with the way that I see it. Right, it is work to get, to get in the gym and work out. That's work, right. But it's work for me to think through a problem and write some code, or ask an AI to write some code for me or whatever. All of that requires effort. So I think that the relationship that we have with work will transformationally change and we're already seeing that in a lot of ways. 

I think that's where, like, the sense of like purpose and discovery are really important in people's lives, and I think the more like a good example just to kind of close the point out in a way that's relevant for this audience is we're going to see more multimillion dollar solopreneurs in the next three to five years. Then we've seen in the past 30 years what I mean by that specifically is that what was possible to do? It's hard to do anything alone. Right, you have teams, whether they're part time, full time, whatever it is. I think now, like I have friends of mine that make over a million dollars a year and they do it as individual people, content creators, etc. Right, and right now, up until today, they've had to work with a lot of different resources contractual, you know, contract relationship, fractional relationships, employee relationships but now, with these AI tools, you know, a good example is I have a friend I was recently helping out to take writing samples of his long form and short form and I was doing some fine tuning using anthropics API, which is called Claude and helping him to sort of scale content creation, but in his very specific tone of voice and in order to do that was doing a lot of fine tuning with exact, exact writing samples, because I found that, using like regular prompt engineering with like a Jasper or copy, ai or some of these tools, it was a little bit generic, but when I started to fine tune it on a deeper level of his content, the quality got so much better and then I was able to do that. So why do I tell you that? I don't tell you that to flex on AI technologies, I tell you that to say nowadays, what he used to spend thousands of dollars a month on proof reading, social posting. 

Nowadays people can go online, they can use a tool like make or Zapier and they can automate so many of the different things and you don't need to know one line of code to do that. Right, people like you and I can write code to do all this stuff right. But again, what do we do with these tools? We've democratized them, we've made them more available, so much that these things will be implicit in the experiences that we use in the future. Right, as we're starting to type an email and Gmail, it auto completes the email for us. 

Right, that's AI. Right, as we exist as a society the ability to scale our output exponentially because of these AIs means that we don't have to scale our workforce exponentially, right. So what that then creates is leverage and through and a reduced set of effort for people. So are we still working? Yes, but we're creating so much more output and outcomes from that work. So I hope that example is prudent and relevant for the group. But I'm really excited about these technologies. I'm more excited for the application of these technologies and solving real problems than I am in. Hey look, I can make an AI selfie of myself using mid journey or Dolly or whatever like. But yeah, that's just my thought. 

0:44:00 - Mehmet
Right, and a couple of weeks back I shared something on LinkedIn and people you know start to ask me you shared your secret source. I said it's not secret anymore. So people were asking me how you were able to do multiple things at the same time. So you have the podcast, you have your consultancy business and you do a lot of things simultaneously. And I said, guys, majority of these things are automated. Like I use make a lot I'm a big fan, by the way, and I keep playing with it, and the more I play with it although, as you said, I know I know basic coding I never claimed that I am a coder. Of course we used to use some code back in the days but I mean what you can do now. 

0:44:41 - Pete
You can create full solutions, you can build I would not say big SaaS, but you can build like kind of a micro SaaS or but you can absolutely build big SaaS, right, but, like I'm going to push back on you, right, here's an example you could use softer with air table and right, and you can use those two tools. And if you have a sticky product, whatever that product is right. Maybe it's some type of a subscription business, maybe it's information, maybe it's access, it could be a million different things. Right, you could literally build a multimillion dollar subscription based SaaS company using those two tools. Yeah, can you build a um? You can't build meta on that sort of no code, low code tool stack. Right, but could you build a business on that? That is, you know, access to a like. Could you build a mastermind group that allows you a subscription, that has access to a bunch of cool people like you and they pay for a subscription for that content? And you're using a tool like circle, which is, you know, a SaaS community platform or software for doing your portal or air table for storing your records and information. Absolutely, you can do that, right. 

So I think then the limiting factor becomes can you create enough value where you can get enough people to be able to do that and like just to do the math really quick, if you hear me typing, it's cause I'm just doing the math, cause I'm really bad without a calculator. If you take a million dollars, right? A million dollar business, right, divided by 12 months, is 83,000 a month, right? 83,000 a month, like, just to give you an example of like what that looks like, right Is like. So just taking, taking you know, I'm estimating just round numbers here but like, if you take that number and you and you change that by 29, let's say you divide that by a hundred, right, just to use basic math, that's 830 customers, right? Like, so 830 customers like that are paying you, you know, a hundred bucks a month by making examples. $83,000 a month, right, $83,000 a month, just to use, like super easy math, is $996,000 a year. 

So the question I ask for everyone is find a problem that someone has that's worth $100 a month for them to solve in, solve it for them in perpetuity in a way that they don't have to solve it for themselves, right, it's ultimately the done for you solution, done for you solutions like that, in my opinion, and that's where the riches are in the niches, right? Like if you try to say like, oh, I'm going to solve this fancy problem or this important tech problem, you're going to get smoked by tech companies that have crazy design, coding venture capital. But if you're solving, like some random problem that one to 20 person dry cleaners have that are family owned, multi-generational dry cleaning businesses in America, specific to how they manage their I don't know timesheet or some other thing, and you purposely target people who are multi-generational, non-technical driven businesses, I would be willing to guess, or bet, that there's a service. There's a service the addressable market or a total addressable market in that category that could be a multimillion dollar business that could be built on the tools that you just described. 

As you know, make Zapier, you know, string together a couple of web hooks and API's and the tech stack that would cost you a couple hundred bucks a month could create millions of dollars in revenue. So ultimately, that's where the riches are, in the niches, right. But if you wanted to say, hey, I'm going to create a scheduling tool for businesses, well, guess what? There's got mind body online. They've raised millions of dollars. You got all these companies that have head starts to have market share. But if you solve that problem that you know that that one specific person has and you can scale it and that was just like a off the top of my head example. I'd be willing to bet that you can really turn that into a transformational business, so you got me passionate about that. I hope that that build on what you said. 

0:48:45 - Mehmet
I think we share the same passion, pete, because I'm always, you know telling people, based on what you said, if you can find and actually it's something, I'm on the hunt myself to find it you know, as they say, you need to have your southern fan. Yeah, kevin Kelly. Thousand fans, super fans, love that. 

0:49:02 - Pete
Yeah, super fans, and think about if you can charge. 

0:49:04 - Mehmet
You know I will not go to the one million dollar immediately, but like, if you can make 100 K, like 100 grand a year you know 120 to be exact, You're right. So if you can charge $10 for each of your fans, so this is $10,000 a month, which is 120 K. And then think about scaling it, because these 1000 super fans will bring you, like maybe another 1000 super fan and they will bring another, another, another, and then you will end up by having like the one million dollar business. Well, it also scales, but let me multiply that. 

0:49:34 - Pete
I love that you just said that right Once you've got those super fans right. So let's just use your example here. Right, so you got 1000 super fans right? Right so, 1000 super fans and you managed to convince them to pay you 10 bucks for something and they love it and they're happy with it. Right, then, what you do, because they're super fans, is you deeply understand the patterns that they all share in common. Right, you know you can't just say you know I'm not going to pay you 10 bucks for something. Right, you really understand how they're using your product or your service, and you do that through conversation. Right, so what I might do is go to events, bring the community together. 

With consent, I would record those conversations. And then what I would do is I would, I would take those conversations with consent, I would send those off to an API to start to find patterns in the data. Right, you can use, you know, gpt force code interpreter for that If you don't want to send any sensitive data to them. But but my point right Now you understand the jobs to be done that they have, how you solve the problem for $10. And now you can understand all the other things. So, for example, if you know that your super fan is a um first time consultant that's doing tech consulting because they don't like coding, but they like being around technology and they drink more than five cups of coffee a day and they also happen to travel on making this up. But let's say that that was a truth that came out of this. This consumer set Right. You can go to a coffee tumbler company that sells, you know, portable coffee tumblers and say you know what we're going to offer the, the CTO edition of this coffee cup, and I would like for you to give me $10 or $5 for every cup I sell and then give me a custom affiliate link or something that I can spin up Now that that those super fans that are making you 120,000 a year. Now, if, if, 50% of them right, so I'll just use easy math that's 500 of your audience. If 500 of them, you were able to get an additional $5 from, as an example, like 500 times five, $2,500. And then you multiply that out and again, that's just a bad example. Right Now, if people actually liked it and they started telling their friends and family about it and that was actually spreading, now you might have an entire new e-commerce business on your hands that solves a problem for those super fans. And then that 2,500, if you can scale that, that's another. You know, if you have a super fan, that's like a 30,000, that's another 30,000. 

If there's a subscription or recurring thing to it, maybe it's not just a physical product, maybe they're buying some consumable things, whatever that might be Note pads, because note pads we run out of paper, right, if they tend to write stuff down a lot. So now let's say, for example, those thousand super fans, let's say they're super fans, they buy everything you do, right? So if they're super fans, let's say that they're going to buy a special notebook from you that's got some inspiring ideas, all of the ideas that they write down. They're going to do that. I'm making this up. Let's say they're going to do that three times a year when they run out of paper. And let's say that every one of those notebooks you make $25 on, right. 

So now, everyone of those notebooks you make $25 on, they buy three a year. So 25 times, three times a thousand, that, right, there is another $75,000 a year in business for you, without going out and spending any additional money on Facebook ads or Instagram or TikTok ads, without having to hire a sales person. All that is just $75,000 right to your bottom line, assuming that that's your profit. But obviously it could be top line and there's good margin. But you know this because you and I are doing this for a living right. But I want our audiences to know that like we can create forced multipliers where they're thinking if we start from that basic principle and that principle happened to be like 1000 super fans that love everything you do, knowing what their problems are and then solving a problem that they have that is unmet or not established. 

0:53:23 - Mehmet
Right, and the question I want to ask is this the way you choose, because you mentioned at the beginning, you are an engine investor, so is this what you look at when, when you decide to to invest in a startup? 

0:53:36 - Pete
So that's a great question. I would say the short answer to the questions no, my thesis specifically. So as an angel investor, my check sizes right now are typically like 10 to 50. K is my check size as an angel and I do a minimum of a few of those a year. Typically I'm part of a bunch of other investor syndicate groups, so sometimes I'll write bigger checks. You know, I just recently worked $100,000 check for a new business and so I say that not not to talk about my spending, but I say that to talk about I will break my principle right 10 to 25 is my usual number or 10 to 50. But in some cases I'll go more if the investments bigger. 

What I look for, my investment thesis again, this is what works for me. Everyone has their own thesis is I look at businesses that my network effects can help scale right. So the three principles I look for now in a business is, first and foremost, I look for network effects. Does the business have network effects to multiply? The second thing I look for is marketplace arbitrage. Can I, if I was able to create supply and demand economics, can I? Can I arbitrage off that network effects? And then I look for limited customization because, as someone who built a couple of different service businesses, service businesses don't scale right there, directly constrained to your ability to. It's like you generate a certain amount of revenue with a certain amount of expenses at a certain point in time. The only way to really scale that is, you know, more work, more teams, more customers. I believe that SaaS companies and other types of business models scale better, but, more importantly, it's not to argue for organ service companies. More importantly, limited customization is important. 

For me, a lot of the areas I'm looking at right now is I've been I just recently invested in a health tech company. Just recently invested in a wellness brand. I also invested in a physical co-working space recently that met a unique need. So for me that that's my investment thesis is those sort of three components of network effects, marketplace arbitrage and limited customization. But I think that I often will bet on a founder that I believe has the work ethic and ability to take it to the next level. You know the old argument is horses versus jockeys. I always bet on the jockey and I bet on are they solving a problem that I believe that people need and want? And then they can demonstrate some early traction to demonstrate that for me. So that's my thesis as an angel. If you interview me a year from now, my thesis might change. That's been working pretty well for me so far. 

0:56:09 - Mehmet
Just before we, because you know, I know like I took too much from your time, pete, just. But when I was preparing again I've seen that you have bootstrapped couple of times eight, I think. Right, so something like that. 

0:56:23 - Pete
Yeah, I mean, I kind of are you are you fond of bootstrapping versus going to an investor? 

So I'm a creature of habit and in that regard, when I, when my partner and I were first sort of launching our first you know business, that became something of value. We went out to raise some capital and it was a service business, so it was primarily like a friends and family type of situation. We found a local person and the they had agreed to sort of sign the terms. It was right around the time of the recession, you know. This is, you know, oh six. At that time I believe it was oh six and so the recession was coming in oh eight, obviously, as we know. So like the times were weird and they committed to a bunch of dollars and then it didn't work out. So I had to bootstrap our first business. We would have liked to raise capital. I didn't even know what venture capital was because I was, you know, still a teenager in my early 20s or whatever. But I think the answer to the question me personally that's a world that I understand. The last couple of businesses that I invested in, you know, I invest in my own money in, so that worked well. So I've just never been one to go raise venture capital. I've helped a lot of my clients raise venture capital. You know, one of the things that people pay me for all the time is help them rewrite and redesign their pitch deck in a way that they can read capital and do that all the time for clients. But the challenge I'd say is I don't think one is right versus one is wrong. I think that that's just the path I've been on. I've known some friends who have been very successful and very unsuccessful using, you know, venture capital or other forms of debt or equity based Fundraising. But in my experiences, how I've built my businesses have primarily been with my own capital. I think that future businesses that I'll start. 

Now that I have a bit of a track record, now that I've proven a couple of things, I think my partners and I will potentially look at third party sources of funding. You know it's funny in the early days, when you really need an umbrella, no one gives it to you. But then, when you don't need the umbrella and it's sunny out, everyone wants to give you the umbrella. So it's true, right? I think I said that a little bit wrong, but what I meant to say there was when you really need funding, you're too early and banks won't give you what you need or others won't give you what you need. Once you've been successful, then when you kind of don't need the money, then it comes to you. So that's just been my experience. 

Again, I have a podcast where we interview entrepreneurs and I'd say more than half of them have raised venture capital to build and sell their businesses in terms of how they got to scale. But I love the stories of people who bootstrap, because I think bootstrapping helps you build a different muscle. But again, I want to be clear I don't believe one is better than the other. I think everything really depends on what's right for you, what's right for your market, what's right for the business that you're starting. And that's just been my experience, for what it comes across. 

0:59:30 - Mehmet
Great. Thank you, pete, for you know extending this Now where people can find more about you. 

0:59:39 - Pete
Yeah, so I am. I write to clarify my thoughts and also helps me with my insomnia. A lot on Pete Senna, which is just Pete Sennacom. I'm on Medium quite a bit still, so mediumcom slash at Pete Senna. I'm currently still on Twitter, or X as we call it now, but I'm going to never stop calling it Twitter, just Pete Senna. And then, obviously, I'm on LinkedIn as well, but pretty much. You know Pete Senna on most social channels and would love to connect with anybody if they ever want to. You know, use on AI and tech in the future and just some of the things we talked about today. 

1:00:22 - Mehmet
Sure. One final question, which is it's like a legacy for me now Anything, Pete, that you wished I had asked you and how you'd answer it. 

1:00:35 - Pete
Wow, that's a great question. The one thing that I think I'm so. I nothing comes to mind except something. Now that you've asked the question, it popped in my mind is what do you believe would be something that your audience would get a tremendous amount of value from if they knew the answer to the question? What would that question look like? 

1:01:06 - Mehmet
This is a hard one. Now you, now you put me in the corner. 

1:01:20 - Pete
I think about your, think about your audience. I'm sure many of them are writing into you. What are some of the things that have been most helpful for them? By tuning into your show the topics, the problems, the questions, because I love to really help people is like real scenarios. 

1:01:38 - Mehmet
Usually, you know, like they look for hints about whether using AI, which we covered. Sometimes, you know they come and ask about how they can start their business. You know, and overcome fear and this kind of feedback I receive. And sometimes they ask also about you know one of the famous questions they asked me is like how, how you are able to attract such great guests like this also some some of the questions that I always receive. 

1:02:11 - Pete
So let me see if I can unpack that. So I can't speak to great guests because I don't know anything about that, so, but what I can speak to is the best way to overcome fear is to lean into it and to explore it. Right, so in my experiences, you know, one of the most primal things that's built into our neurology or our body composition is fear. Right, you know, fear is our brain trying to keep us alive and not get eaten by animals. Right, despite the fact that we're probably not going to eat my animals anymore, right, I think fear is an interesting dance. I think that fear anyone who says you can't have fear, I think is full of shit. Fear is real and we all experience it in different forms. Leaning into the fear is a really important thing. 

I'm a big believer on just Google shit, you know, like any question you have, you know, you can Google, you can ask chat, gbt just be careful, it lies a lot. But but, all jokes aside, I think I think leaning into the curiosity, if you do, if you hear a word, like one of the things I remember I think I was in like grade school, was a kid and I didn't know what questions to ask, right. Like you know, new questions unlock new possibilities. But I didn't have any good questions, right. So I had asked one of the teachers and she, she, she looks at me and she says to me she's like, have you heard me use some words in this class that you don't know what they mean? And I said, yeah, you're always using words and out the they would mean. And she's like, well, look them up in the dictionary again. This is sort of pre Google, right, but I think the idea of like, look it up is a really important thing. Like if me and you were talking about Kevin Kelly super fans and I'm sure you'll put that in your show notes I know who Kevin Kelly is and hasn't read his essays, should read his essays. So go and read that, right, if it peaks your curiosity. 

Anytime you hear a stat that is compelling to you, or you know the example of Versailles that I gave like, go out and Google those things. What I would say is it's a matrix quote follow the white rabbit, right. The old matrix movie of counter is right, follow the white rabbit. If you have a curiosity, go down that path, read about it, watch videos about it, listen to books about it. Just go down the curiosity, and that's the one thing I would say is to dance with fear. 

The second thing I would say is see if you can find someone who might be in the situation or place that you want to be in or you think you want to be in which is the keyword here and then start to unpack and model how they got there, start to understand their actions, their relationships, the steps that they took, and don't be afraid to ask for help. So that was the third thing I would say is I've been really terrible at asking for help. I almost never do it. It's something that I'm working on a lot and I can thank my therapist for that. But but, all jokes aside, I think that that's a really important thing is I tell founders that all the time, if you ask for money, you're going to get advice. If you ask for advice, you're going to get money. I've seen that countless times with people who have gone and raised capital with that advice. So if, if you're looking for an outcome, ask for advice. 

1:05:27 - Mehmet
That's really one of the best great insights I had in the final question. I would say thank you very much, pete, for mentioning this, especially the last one. Like if you ask for money, you will get advice. If you ask for advice, you will get money. Like, really, this is you know. I hope that it will leave the audience with some. It left me with something at least, I would say. 

1:05:50 - Pete
And I hope to hear that again. I believe, if we I'm on a mission to create more curiosity and creativity in people's lives and I believe that when we live more curious and creative lives, we are more fulfilled and we experienced more moments of joy. So if you're one of the million people in my mission right, so like, let's just check one has more inspired than I'm one step closer to getting to my mission. And when I reach a million people, then I want to move it up to 10 million and a hundred million and I'm going to keep doing it as much as I can and while I still have this time here on this planet, which we know is scarce and limited, that's fantastic, pete. 

1:06:27 - Mehmet
Of course, like you know, like I never you know how I would say this like I never felt that I did a wrong decision ever and I never felt that, you know, I should have maybe waited more to do something. And the reason I'm saying this, because now people come and tell you know, I remember, you know, when you are saying you have this mission, I started the podcast I think it's in Jan yeah, it was beginning of Jan and people like thought, yeah, like this guy, he will give up after like. And I said, guys, I have a mission. You know, and I said, if one guy, one guy, whether he or she, tunes in every day and listen to this podcast, I'm going to keep doing it. And today I find out that, okay, I'm the only one who's listening to my own podcast, I can't shut it down. And what happened is, you know, it's slowly but in a very, very steady way, where I reached now a place where, after seven months of, you know, daily podcasting, you know, daily. 

1:07:30 - Pete
That's amazing. 

1:07:31 - Mehmet
Yeah, and you know I receive messages from people, keep it up. We enjoyed the show with Pete, we enjoyed the show with Mike, with whoever Sure, you know. I say you know what my, you know my mission is going in the right direction. And when you mentioned this, I'm hoping that first I will add more tick boxes other than me for you, and I will be adding also for my own tick boxes as well, because the main reason I have this show and people ask me why you call it CTO show like, but you discuss sometimes topics which are not related to technology and I say the word CTO has in it many things. It has tech, it has entrepreneurship, it has startups, funding, marketing, sales. Everything comes into the CTO show and this is why I'm very happy and I was very pleased to have you with me, pete, here today. Thank you for your time, precious time. I appreciate. 

You know all the insights and hints and you know the thoughts that you left us with and I'll make sure that in the show notes we will have you know all the links that you mentioned and, of course, all the things that we discussed there will be in the show notes as well, and the way I like to end my episodes is to go back to the audience. Guys, keep them coming, your feedbacks, your questions, like if you want special topic to be discussed on the show. Please you know how to reach me out, Like mainly on LinkedIn I'm more active, but you can send me a message also or an email on all the platforms. Also, if you are interested to be a guest, same as Pete was today, don't be shy, like we can make it up. Don't think about time zones. 

I keep repeating this because some people they say, yeah, but you know we are on the West Coast, you are in Dubai, like 11 hours. Now when you know you are back to the winter time, it will be 12 hours. Guys, no problem. Again, I have to record at 2 am in the morning. I will record at 2 am in the morning, no problem. So don't be shy, reach out to me and I hope you enjoyed this episode. We'll meet again very soon. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. 

Transcribed by https://hello.podium.page/?via=mehmet