#409 From Product to Innovation: Mike Todasco on AI, Automation, and the Future of Technology

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Mehmet: Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO show with Mehmet. Today I'm very pleased joining me, Mike, Todasco. Mike, the way I love to do it is I keep it to my guests to choose themselves, but for you, you know, it's like a [00:01:00] great mix. We're going to talk about a lot of things, innovation, AI and gen AI, and you know, also about startups and investments.

Mehmet: So I'm going to keep the floor to you now, and then we're going to take it from there.

Mike: All right. I'm at, um, well, first thanks for having me. I'd love to be here. I'm really excited about the conversation. Uh, so my background is I started my career as an accountant way back in the days, and I know you have tons of accountants on the CTO show, I'm sure.

Mike: Um, but that's actually how I started way back when I moved in. I started a business. Um, I moved into PayPal, was doing product there. For about six years and then running innovation for PayPal more broadly. Um, went to a bunch of schools in that time. And, and most recently I'm, um, for the last couple of years, been at the AI center at San Diego state, uh, working on teaching research and many things in the.

Mike: And the [00:02:00] ever changing world of AI.

Mehmet: That's fantastic. And again, thank you, Mike, for and I'm very transparent with the audience. They know about it. So it's very early for you on the West Coast now in the U. S. So thank you for making it that early to just record this episode with me today.

Mike (2): No problem.

Mehmet: Yeah.

Mehmet: So usually what I like and, you know, personally, I'm very curious to know is what, you know, attracted you from, you know, doing this shift in your career from, you know, kind of finance to product management and then to innovation. So was there anything that You know, drove you to take these decisions or like, it was like, Oh, happened as a, I would say out of destiny or luck.

Mike: Yeah, no, I would say what really, [00:03:00] I will, first of all, I was a really bad accountant. I think that's the first thing I, I think right in the beginning, I didn't even know what debits and credits were like when I got in there, I couldn't remember which one was which. And if you don't know that as an accountant, you're not going to be very good at it.

Mike: So, uh, that was part of it. That's part of it. Look, I was always a very curious person. I was very into technology. Uh, I remember I was living in Ohio, which is kind of central in the middle of the United States and in 2004, so this has been, you know, 20 years ago, we actually had a robot lawnmower. Um, which is this company called friendly robotics.

Mike: I found it. Um, and, and like, I was just always into technology stuff. So, so yeah, 20 years ago, literally had a robot cutting our lawn. Um, it didn't necessarily do a good job, but I love tinkering. I love playing with stuff and so forth. And it was always just very curious and very excited about technology.

Mike: Um, emerging technologies, the history of technology, all that stuff. Uh, so. I [00:04:00] was doing, you know, finance, accounting, corporate strategy, private equity type stuff. Uh, but then moved to Silicon Valley. And when you're out here, it's kind of hard to avoid all that. I mean, to me, it was, I remember just driving around like, Oh my God, there's, there's eBay's headquarters, there's Yahoo's headquarters, you know?

Mike: Cause in 2006, that was really exciting to see those type of marquee names are out here and just became part of the culture here very much. And when I had an opportunity to take a job at PayPal, I just jumped on it. Uh, it was doing product analytics. At the time. So just introduced me to the world of products.

Mike: So it was sort of adjacent to finance kind of a little bit, uh, was at least people make a case that they would hire me, but like the whole world of product excited me because it was just about, you know, how do you service your customers? And that's something I've always been. Just very passionate about.

Mike: So you take your, um, customers wants and needs and translate them into something that [00:05:00] you and your team can actually build. And I love doing that. And again, did that for the first half PayPal and they worked on some next generation type stuff, which brought me into the world of innovation.

Mehmet: That's fantastic.

Mehmet: Now. You know, within PayPal, you moved from, you know, product. And by the way, I'm very product biased person because I leave product people. And I repeated every time I had someone with the product management background, because you are a very centric person, you know, talking to marketing, talking to sales, talking to engineering, like you get going to customers also as well.

Mehmet: So. But PayPal is a special, it's a giant, of course. So during that tenure for you, Mike, um, what was like one of the main, I would say exciting things for you, especially because it was kind of, you know, the new thing. And at the same [00:06:00] time, you know, not many people were like, okay, if you ask someone, you know, probably, I don't know, like, 10 years ago, uh, like, do you think this is going to become mainstream?

Mehmet: And, you know, you think like these online payments will become mainstream. Maybe they will have some doubts like, like any other new technology, but you did it with something which was kind of, you know, considerably new. It wasn't new. I know, but I mean, having, you know, this in, in, in something which is kind of, uh, emerging, you know, talking to customers, what I'm curious about, honestly, The feedback from customers, especially if someone is like kind of okay Will this really work like will this become really mainstream?

Mehmet: so If you can share this experience of you know Being a product manager for an emerging kind of new technology or a new thing in in the market

Mike: Yeah, [00:07:00] um, I want to give actually two examples the first one kind of Exceed our expectations. The first, the second one did not. So the first one was when I joined PayPal, I joined in 2011.

Mike: What was the mobile? So mobile was its own separate kind of weird group within PayPal. Um, they had just acquired a company called Zong that David Marcus, who later went on to become the president of PayPal. Um, he, it was his team and they were kind of taking over mobile. Mobile was a tiny sliver of PayPal's business.

Mike: I think in 2010, if I'm remembering the numbers, right, it was like less than a billion dollars of payment value. So less than a billion PayPal today does over a trillion total. So it was tiny. And I think they're including iPads in there as mobile, to be honest, it was like really kind of squirrelly as to what was a true mobile payments.

Mike: But I remember one time we put up a slide saying something like. This was internal, but like, uh, it's going to grow [00:08:00] 50 X in the next four years or something, something like that. And I was like, are you kidding me? How's this going to grow 50 X to where we're at today? This, this just doesn't make any sense.

Mike: And we kind of did it like, okay, we're, we're going, I don't get it. Um, and then I actually remember years later, looking back, I'm like, Oh, we were, we were underestimating how big mobile was going to be. Um, and so to be kind of at the epicenter of that, when it's just a weird part of the business to actually becoming the entire business essentially is mobile payments now, um, that was super exciting to be part of and to be in the middle of.

Mike: Another one, which is mobile related, uh, which I was more closely involved with is something called PayPal Beacon. And this was in 2013. Uh, we had a really a brilliant engineer who was kind of doing this as a side project. He was looking at the new Bluetooth 4. 0, uh, specs that were coming out. He kind of came to the realization that, huh, this little piece, you know, we could take a little piece of hardware as represented by the pen here.[00:09:00]

Mike: And this could actually talk to a mobile device. And you could actually have these two things passively talking to each other. What does that mean? That was kind of the fun stuff that the rest of us on the team got to figure out. Like if you have hardware that's in a retailer store talking with. The mobile device that the customer has on their person.

Mike: Well, what can you do in those circumstances? So it was super exciting building that out. And that was a circumstance where the merchants, the retailers, they loved it. I mean, I will say we talked to a very large coffee retailer for one. Um, and that coffee retailer was like, well, does this mean that if somebody pulls up in the parking lots, That this little device can actually know that this person is actually pulled up and is talking to that passively and we could start making their coffee the second they pulled in because we know what their favorite is or whatever.

Mike: Like, yeah, that's the kind of stuff that you could do here. So I don't [00:10:00] think there was a large retailer in America, potentially the world that we weren't talking to about this product. Um, the flip side of that is consumers. hated it. And it's not for the reasons that you would think that they would hate it today.

Mike: Um, so we actually had, so where PayPal's headquarters is in San Jose, right up the highway, Highway 101 is Palo Alto, which is where Stanford University is headquartered. There's University Avenue there, which has all these little retail shops, and we had relationships with many of them. So we put a few of these in stores.

Mike: Pushed out some app updates. So just if you were in those three stores, you would actually see it. And once a week I would spend the day there just talking to people using the PayPal app, sometimes giving them money to do that. And look, these were Stanford, mostly Stanford university undergrads going to stores.

Mike: They use PayPal to send money back and forth. But the feedback that we're getting [00:11:00] from all the students was why would I. I use my phone to buy something in a store. That was like universally the feedback that we got from them. Um, they're just like, why I have a credit card. I don't need that. And look, these were as tech savvy as you could possibly be, but in 2013, it was not the right time.

Mike: And look, and here's the reality. Merchants loved it. Consumers did not love it. They just did not see the use of that. And this was a great. Great way. We tried some tweaks to the product. We tried to do some value add, like, you know, you can only do so many offers and a new payment product because the margins and payments.

Mike: You know, like if somebody spends 10, like 30 cents of that is going to PayPal roughly. And then, you know, out of that, the actual profit PayPal keeps is can be pretty small. So there's not like you could just start throwing money at these things. Um, there just wasn't the energy within the company to like create this entirely new business.

Mike: Cause we're frankly too early. So that was a time where. [00:12:00] I mean, thank goodness we did talk to customers and did do the small sample because the world really wasn't ready for it. Now, pandemic comes around, all these other things change. And then like the world was ready for it then, but in 2013, not at all.

Mehmet: Right. And then later on you move to innovation and you know, you did. things, you know, and you mentioned in the intro, like, you know, you like also emerging technologies. So at PayPal, like what were really the, you know, some of these emerging technologies that You know, really, you know, you, you, you bet on them.

Mehmet: And then later on, you know, they, they really became something, you know, mainstream.

Mike: Yeah. Um, well, let me start with a failure. Cause I like to start with those. Cause, cause I do want to have both sides of the coin. Like, I mean, that is part of innovation. It's like, if you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough, uh, as, as I would always [00:13:00] say.

Mike: So, I mean, look, we would explore things like we were doing a lot in like the Exploration of augmented reality. Um, we were using like Microsoft HoloLens, Magic Leap. Um, I even remember Epson, the computer company had some weird AR thing. We actually had some Epson people give us demos, did a whole presentation for a bunch of innovators in the company.

Mike: We have those. We were building all of these experiences on there, and this is, you know, 2016 at, around that timeframe, um, thinking that, hey, we're moving to a future where this is not going to be the, the standard, but it might be something like a glass or something like that. Uh, again, like probably the right thing for an innovation group to work on, but for bringing that to market.

Mike: It was, it was not the right time at all. And yeah, there was some like phone based AR innovations. We did kind of prototypes put out there, but for the most part, like this was just, these were experiments. It's just trying stuff. Um, one thing that, that didn't work really well was on the blockchain [00:14:00] side. So I'd say probably around 2016 as well.

Mike: That's when I really started the role. We were exploring with blockchain technology for amongst like the first times within the company, a lot of just internal tests and pilots and so forth, but we're just building those muscles and, you know, fast forward a few years, we actually built out a full blockchain research group.

Mike: Within innovation, uh, and that was looking at things and among them was, um, what would a PayPal stable coin look like? And for folks who don't know, so what a stable coin is, is it is a cryptocurrency, just like Bitcoin or something like that on a certain network. Um, but unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, it's actually pegged to something.

Mike: And in this case, in most, most stable coins are usually pegged to the U. S. dollar. So it's an easy way to exchange dollars. But you know, if you have this stable coin, there is an actual dollar that you could get back at some point. So there's a lot of advantages of just [00:15:00] like lowering transaction costs, especially across borders and things like that.

Mike: So I was doing a lot of the work on that. And while I'm no longer at the company, no longer on the team, I think I just saw something posted within the last month that they've done over a billion dollars. Um, and market cap, yeah, yeah, I think a billion dollar market cap now for what they call PYUSD, um, which is the, the PayPal stable coin that they launched last year.

Mike: And so like, you know, that was exciting to see that. And, you know, while we started in 2019, it was almost like, you know, three, four or five years later that that really starts to become a reality.

Mehmet: Right. And now like further, like, I mean, besides, or let's say putting, you know, what you've done at PayPal aside.

Mehmet: I want, you know, Mike, in general, like, because you're on, you know, the, the innovation lab over there. Right. So to, and I'm asking this question maybe for [00:16:00] corporate or maybe like even some big companies who are thinking to start their innovation labs. Right. So what are like the main things really they need to Focus on, right?

Mehmet: So do they need, for example, to follow the trends? Let's say now AI, right? So everyone talks about AI, so they want to put everything in AI or they want really to go and see Okay, what are like the problems that us as a company, you know We play in this sector and let's go and see what new innovation we can bring there And you've done this for a long time.

Mehmet: So i'm sure like you can share a lot of experience around running innovation labs You

Mike: 100%. Um, I mean, I would say for starters, the first thing I would ask if you're looking to start an innovation lab, like it is what you're alluding to here about it. It's like, what's the goal? Like, why are you doing this?

Mike: Are you doing this? Because you're You want to tell shareholders or employees that you're doing innovative stuff? I mean, maybe [00:17:00] that's it. Maybe that is a good reason to just say like, Hey, yeah, we got, we got innovation. We're checking a box there. Um, is there some competitive threats in the short, medium, or long term that you think you're facing?

Mike: Um, are there other things that are happening where, you know, you just need that, or you need to build up the culture and work these muscles or whatever it might be like. I think the first step in it is to perspectively see what it is that you're actually trying to achieve, then what I would actually do with that alongside, I would then kind of take a look at the, um, I think this was McKinsey put out like the innovation horizons.

Mike: There's like horizon one innovation, horizon two and horizon three. And horizon one is like, and again, none of the, this is not said disparagingly for horizon one specifically, but like it's incremental innovation, it's existing products, existing markets, but improving constant improvements, you know, just like, how are you building, building out better, kind of what's going on in the next six, [00:18:00] uh, six months.

Mike: 12 months, almost, uh, horizon two would be like new technologies for existing customers or existing technologies for new customers. That would be that. Um, and that's a lot of what we focused on at the innovation lab at PayPal was horizon two. Horizon three is also going way further out there. That is much more like new technologies.

Mike: New markets done in a completely different way, different timeframe. This is Microsoft research, you know, or, or Bell labs. This is looking at quantum computing. This is, this is much further out there. We strategically said we were not going to be playing in that game. Like the focus was going to be on horizon to innovation.

Mike: So once you sort of have that defined, the next thing I would say, and look, just because you define it now also doesn't mean that it can't change.

Mike (2): Like one

Mike: of the things about innovation is like, you need to be flexible. Uh, for us at PayPal, the focus was really, it [00:19:00] really wasn't about the products as much as permeating the innovation culture that we had as a company.

Mike: That really was at the company's core from its starting. There's so many, you know, both little and big innovations that just came out of necessity. From the very early days at PayPal, a guy named Jimmy Sony wrote a book recently called the founders that kind of walks through a lot of that. He talked to Elon Musk and read Hoffman and everyone like Peter Teal, the original kind of founding group to pull together this book, and I highly recommend that Jimmy's great.

Mike: And if you're interested in that, you could kind of see that. And that's the history we were sort of building on. Well, that was when we were. 200 people, 300 people. How do you make that work for 20, 000, 30, 000 people? And so a lot of that was the focus that we had at the company, within PayPal. And the, and the last step that I will actually give on that was do it with not much money, start low. Like. [00:20:00] Basically, I, when I started that job, I said to my boss, Hey, boss, I need this, this, and this, this, because I got to spend for this and this and this. And her response was the best thing that I could have ever happened.

Mike: She basically said, Mike, you don't got it. Uh, you, you just, just figure it out. Like you, these are the goals that you need to achieve. Figure it out, go do it. You really don't got money for it. Find a way. That was the best advice I could possibly have. Cause one, it gave me much more freedom to experiment and force me to experiment as well.

Mike: And two, it also kind of, there was never corporate rigor, like from the CFO or for the finance team, I'm like, Hey, what's, what's Tadasko doing over there with it? Cause we had no money. We had, we were begging, like, almost all the resources, unless it was a specific project, like the blockchain group, which was always had a corporate sponsor that was funding it directly.

Mike: All of these things basically came down to, um, it was me begging, borrowing and stealing and getting volunteers from across the company to say, Hey, do you [00:21:00] want to work on some AR stuff? I know you've got a few hours a week. Why don't you come over here and do that? And like finding dozens and hundreds of people to do that across the company.

Mehmet: You know, this is really exciting. It's like, You know a startup within a corporate I would say because you need to pivot sometimes you need to you're always looking for You know the next challenge or the next problem you want to solve and you keep looking and looking and once you solve One you just go and you know get the other one Here I remember one of my guests like dr.

Mehmet: Andre la plume and you know, we're discussing, you know he has his theory that You Majority of the startups, they don't come out from garages, as we see in the literature of the Silicon Valley. And, you know, he has this, you know, like usually they come out from these innovation labs or like, you know, when a corporate decides to have a such dedicated maybe, [00:22:00] uh, department, maybe they don't call it innovation lab necessarily, but, you know, kind of a Place where people get out new ideas and they spawn out startup from there.

Mehmet: Like, have you seen someone, you know, or any company that comes to mind when it comes to spawning the most, you know, or the biggest amount of startups out of their innovation labs or, you know, R and D, whatever we want to call it.

Mike: Uh, out of, I mean, out of company, look out of companies, it would have to probably PayPal and Google and so forth.

Mike: I would say like, you know, um, but the, out of the innovation lab, I don't know specifically, but I, but I will answer it this way, though, which I think gets to your question. Uh, I have, I have pretty incredible deal flow where there's at least a dozen people that worked in the innovation lab that if they came to me and said, Hey, Mike, I'm starting something, I would, without a doubt, just cut them a check before they even explained the business to me.

Mike: I'm just like here. [00:23:00] Take my money. That's great. You're starting something. There you go. I like that. The first check in or for the first five checks in and I am not a professional angel investor. I want to make that very clear also. So it's not like my full time job doing that. But, um, the people that are attracted to doing something like the innovation lab again, these were people who are doing stuff part time.

Mike: They were, they had day jobs, they had to perform in their day jobs. And this was something that I really liked about PayPal's culture overall, was that if you could do your job, then you do your job and you do that well. But if you've got time left over and you want to go work on a robot, you want to go work on an AR project, you want to go work on blockchain or whatever else, or, you know, like you do that.

Mike: And that was just part of the culture that we did whatever we possibly could. To just like emphasize. And if you're that type of person who finishes your day job, does that well, and they're like, okay, okay, boss, what else you got for me? Like, give me some more stuff. Give me, I want to work [00:24:00] on something new and challenging.

Mike: You know, I had finance people in San Jose here. We actually had a robots and. The person leading that project was actually on the finance team at PayPal. And he would get in the office at like seven o'clock in the morning, like a couple hours before anybody else in finance, he would be hacking away in the innovation lab, working on this robot, trying to get things to work, just figuring stuff out, like, and those are the people.

Mike: We're like, yeah, I will fund that person without any hesitation at all. Because like they have shown in a corporate environments that they have this grand ambition that they won't take no for an answer. They're ultimately curious. They want to find stuff. They want to figure stuff out. They will hit barriers and they'll move past.

Mike: Those are the exact same kind of things you want to find an entrepreneur.

Mehmet: Absolutely. Yeah. Like the people who are always on the itch to solve problems and, you know, like they don't accept the status quo and, you know, like the, and this kinds of [00:25:00] founders that, you know, usually when someone, you know, show me idea, okay, I'm working on this.

Mehmet: So the guy who really, Manage to, I would say, I'm curious person by, by nature, don't get me wrong, but you know, that there are like these pitches where the guy really throw the problem in a way that is very thought provoking. Oh, hold on one second. This guy is really up to something because he knows or she knows what they are doing.

Mehmet: Right. And then once they start to talk, they spend time explaining the problem more than they That time talking about the solution because they want to make sure that okay, we are really solving something big It's not like just yeah, we're building another. I don't know like I see this a lot.

Mehmet: Unfortunately, or fortunately I don't know in the web 3 space I'm building this Web3. I don't, or AI now, right. So I'm building this AI application. Okay. What do you do, ? Yeah. Now [00:26:00] mentioning ai, Mike and I know, like you, you're focusing a lot currently, uh, on, on AI and you know, especially generative ai, part of, uh, uh, of that branch, you know, of, of ai.

Mehmet: Um, and from innovation perspective, like. What first, like, let me, let me dissect the question. What was your reaction when you start to see these gen AI tools coming out as someone who, you know, was working in, in innovation?

Mike: Yeah. Um, I would say Mehmet, like one of the reasons why I think I embraced the generative AI tools so wholeheartedly was because.

Mike: By nature, I was, I was not an engineer. My background did not come from engineering. So I remember being in the innovation lab, having these machine learning and deep learning engineers come in, show these demos, show the things that they're doing with data within the company, all [00:27:00] these different experiences.

Mike: And just kind of being in awe, but then also being like, God, I can't do that. Like, like, Hey, that's really impressive. But like, I'm not a machine learning engineer getting paid 600, 000 a year to do this. We have teams of those at PayPal and so forth. Like that ain't me. So, you know, the very first time I remember so distinctly playing with GPT three.

Mike: And I was working on a, just a little side project where I was like, well, it was a little writing project I was doing that was asking if the president of the United States was an AI, what would their inaugural speech be like? So like, you know, when they kind of introduced themselves to the nation and so forth.

Mike: So I was writing this, I kind of wrote some of it and so forth. And then I put. The piece that I had, I also stole some from Barack Obama, to be honest. And like, and like, I put all that in there and then I basically threw that in there and I like said, okay, GPT three go. And it [00:28:00] went and like, honestly, I mean, like it was, it was magical because, because like I was literally seeing from the prompt that I gave.

Mike: It was giving semi coherent, semi rambling responses of like, okay, well, what would the rest of that look like? And and look, this was 2021. I think. Yeah, it was 2021. And, but like, I was so excited. I was like, literally like, like my heart was racing. I was just giddy because I had never seen a computer do something like this before, where it's actually putting something out there that like, as a human was perceived to be cohesive thoughts, at least semi cohesive thought.

Mike: Like it was sputtering at one point went and, and, and, and, and it just got in this weird loop and like all this stuff. And like, it was magical. And I think from that point, because I mean, I was hearing rumblings of GPT 2 and so forth, and like, I heard like, hey, GPT 3 is really awesome, but like, then actually playing with it, though?[00:29:00]

Mike: That became something special. And so for me, just kind of seeing the evolution of that, you know, the other things like that product improved, you know, things like Dolly two were released where you could do image generation and mid journey and all that, that's why by. You know, I left PayPal and then summer of summer of 2022.

Mike: That's when I was like, I'm all in on this. And I think the very first thing that I publicly wrote about was, uh, it was called the one technology that everyone should be freaking out about. Because. And I meant it both in a positive and a negative way, like freaking out, like freaking out, like, Oh my gosh, this is the most amazing.

Mike: You need to be running up the stairs of your house, screaming about this thing. Cause it is that amazing. But like, this is also world changing. Um, and so like, I think ultimately not being an engineer was an advantage for me because I think the people who are most excited about GPT 3. We're not the machine learning engineers because they were like, yeah, I can do that.

Mike: I can see that [00:30:00] it was, if you will, normies like me who, uh, who don't have that deep expertise and then could actually do it themselves for the first time.

Mehmet: Yeah. You know, I, I remember the first time I saw chat GPT, I mean, once they release it, uh, So, so, you know, there was a lot of tools because they were built on GPT 2, right?

Mehmet: So there was like the Jasper of the world and, you know, like the other tools. Pseudo rights. There are a

Mike: whole bunch of different tools out there. Yeah.

Mehmet: Yeah. And, you know, honestly, I tried them a couple of times, but, okay, they are good, but I'm not impressed. And I think it was November 2022. I saw a guy tweeted, uh, about gpt.

Mehmet: I said, okay, let's see this, what they are talking about. So, you know, once I type. [00:31:00] Maybe the first two prompts, they were not called prompts even that time. And I see the way it's, it's answering. And, you know, like the interaction, I said, wow, I was mind blown. And I know I knew like that moment that, you know, this is just a, a new era in, in, in humanity, not only in technology, because, and to your point, Mike, and I think, you know, coming from a non technical background, the biggest advantage is for the first time, like It's like kind of democratizing, you know, the use of technology in a sense, because, you know, usually we always see Okay, they invent a technology and in the US, maybe this happened a lot of times.

Mehmet: So the Internet was used in military and, you know, such use case before it goes to the public. And then, you know, the same thing happened to the mobile phones and the GSM and all of, you know, the great things we saw. [00:32:00] But with the AI, so the first time, you know, before even going to, I would say, B2B or like enterprise, So the consumer was able to try it, and this was like really mind blowing.

Mehmet: I know also, Mike, you talk about like, so other than writing and all these things, and I believe you kind of have a prediction that You know, a lot of industries, they're gonna change, uh, with, with AI. And of course, I think maybe you agree with me, we are still on, on the early days. So, what do you think the AI is hiding for us?

Mehmet: And like, how long it gonna take before, like, we really see Like already we are living the shock. I mean, not me, but I mean, the people still, Oh, wow, I can do this. But when are we going, I mean, to, to, to see like they are becoming really like [00:33:00] more dominant in the marketplace. And then what do you think people should worry about it?

Mehmet: It's taking our jobs or like, what's your point of view on, on, on that?

Mike: No, it's a great question. And I do, I will say this, like. Public perception about the AI and understanding what it really can do is always going to lag vastly the actual capabilities of the AI. Like if open AI announces tomorrow that they have AGI and it's out there.

Mike: The world doesn't change the day after, and I'm not the first person to say that, like, but is it six months? Is it 12 months? Is it, is it weeks before the world really changes? Like, I don't know, because bureaucracy, because habits, because all these things take time. And I remember seeing this with the internet.

Mike: Like, like, so I, I started college in 1995. Uh, and I just happened to be going to the university of Illinois. I love to say that was [00:34:00] strategic, but I actually happened to live in the state of Illinois and it was cheap among other things. And when I got there, like all of a sudden, like they got these computer labs because they had that back in the day and.

Mike: There's online, there's internet, there's all this stuff. And then Netscape, I guess it was Netscape browser or I can't even remember at the time, but like, cause it was basically founded at the university there. Netscape was, and it was. It was completely blowing me away to this. Now, then I remember like coming home over like Christmas break, talking to other friends who I went to high school with who didn't have that same experience.

Mike: And they were kind of like, Oh, why do I need to send these messages? Why did I, like, I can look up, I don't fully get it, but you know, within three or four years, like, yeah, everyone got it. I remember my, my father even saying like, why would I ever use email? Like, like I would, I would never use email and believe me, my, my dad is constantly on email that like, like, I mean, like, [00:35:00] you know, people's perceptions of what they need and the utility of things, you know, did we ever think we would be addicted to these devices, the phones that we have that we currently are?

Mike: I mean, like, these are all things like they will change and the power that you see. I see it on a case by case business basis, actually, of just like how powerful AI is going to be, how much it's going to influence and change our world, but you could see pockets of this for sure. And for anybody who's trying to, you know, think like a futurist, if you will.

Mike: Like, you know, look for that, what is out there? Like, like I'll give it actually another example of my, my family. I was, um, going to a hospital with my, my parents, you know, getting a procedure done, they're kind of sitting around forever waiting for the doctor to come back, you know, and none of us are doctors.

Mike: I don't understand any of this stuff that they're getting done, but like in the app, it's actually giving us test results. So I'm like, Oh, cool. Well, once you [00:36:00] actually show me what you have, our test results, let me open chat GPT. Let me just screenshot all these and let's have chat GPT kind of just tell us what's going on.

Mike: Um, so that was like, Oh, this looks normal. This might be a little bit high. And then also chat GPT. What questions should we be asking the doctor? Can you help inform us a little bit more of like how to think about this? Like what, what should, like, what are the things you think we should emphasize? What are the things we should ask?

Mike: And like, my gosh, this was like, it was so, like, like, like I think my parents saw there in their seventies and eighties. But like they're, they're like, Oh my gosh, like you can do this stuff like in 20 bucks a month and you could do this and you could do this. Like they got it. And People will start to see that and there's going to be different applications.

Mike: Like in the business world, all of our jobs are going to change period. Full stop, all of our jobs change because of the internet, all of our jobs could change because computers, all of our jobs change because of phones. You could go and trace it back to any [00:37:00] big, uh, technology out there. Our jobs will change period.

Mike: Uh, the thing is the thing you need to ask her, like, well, what will your job evolve into? Um, you know, are all customer service jobs going to go away? No way. There is absolutely no way that they're all going to go away. Why? Um, because sometimes you just want to talk to a human. Sometimes it doesn't even matter the answer.

Mike: Sometimes it's just reassuring. Sometimes you just want to know that the company on the other side cares. Now, what percentage of the queries going into a customer service? Are going to be run by humans versus an AI that I don't know, is it going to be a minority? Possibly. Um, but like, so with all of this, we need to look at the tasks that we have in our jobs, the things that we're trying to accomplish as a business.

Mike: And then just kind of start to look at, well, what goes away? How does it evolve? How does this allow us to do better? Um, the piece I'm writing right now for my [00:38:00] blog is looking at how poisoned the term artificial intelligence is. It's going way back to the 1950s at Dartmouth when they kind of chose that moniker of artificial intelligence, taking us up through the present.

Mike: We're actually surveyed a couple of hundred people. And I would basically ask them, Hey, what do you think about taxi drivers using Google Maps? And then I would ask the next hundred people, what do you think about taxi drivers using AI navigation tools? And just kind of looking at the difference between the two, because what is Google Maps?

Mike: It's an AI navigation tool, but like, it doesn't have the word AI in it. And we don't think about that as being artificial intelligence when that's, what's driving it. Like you can't do traveling salesman problem and all that without the AI and machine learning that's required. And just people are so much more negative on just when the term AI is used.

Mike: No, I think what we just, we need to look at this as augmenting ourselves. Like this is augmented intelligence is making us better. This is not a new thing. And that's like, that's one [00:39:00] of the big things I wish for all of us to just focus on.

Mehmet: Um, you know, sometimes what I think on the term artificial intelligence, I think what we are missing because people, you know, I asked people this question, how do you define Intelligence or how you why you say someone is more intelligent than someone, right?

Mehmet: And of course, I know like computer scientists will not agree with me because you know, we have the AI or artificial intelligence and then we have like these sub things. So you have the vision and then you have the Machine learning. And then you have plenty of things to me. It's like, it's like machine learning, right?

Mehmet: So actually you're teaching the machine to act in a way that looks like a human to me, right? Because the other day I saw like a post on LinkedIn and you know, like people were [00:40:00] arguing about AI, you know, and then, you know, I, I was like very, you know, Kind of, I did like this reaction, I said, guys, what are you talking about?

Mehmet: Because when you talk about LLMs, so you need to understand what LLMs are. Of course, I'm not a technical guy in the AI field, but of course I can understand. And I said, like, the best thing you need to understand is what these tools you see today, they are trained machines. So they do You know, training for the LLM to go, so they feed them with data and then they need to get out.

Mehmet: So think about a black box, right? And then you have an input and then you get an output from this box and whatever you program this box to act like, this is what it's The results that you will get. And you know, this is why, you know, I'm like you, Mike, like, uh, when people start to exaggerate about the AI and, you know, and then they say, Hey, like there's the AI and there's a gen AI.

Mehmet: Hey, come on. Like, yeah, it's, it's, it's, [00:41:00] it's machine learning, dude. Right. So, uh, yeah, it's machine learning. And they're all tools.

Mike: These are just all tools for us to use no matter what we call it. Um, the thing that freaks me out is just like, sometimes these tools are getting a bad rap because I think.

Mike (2): Right.

Mike: Some of us deserve to be clear. I'm not saying like, I'm not a I maximalist. That's just saying like, yes, I should be doing everything. No, I'm actually saying it should be augmenting us. It needs to be there in service to humans to make our lives better. Like, and that's what we need to focus on with these tools.

Mike: Yeah,

Mehmet: no, no, 100%. And you know, like also Mike, um, S like, I never bet on a technology in my life and I was wrong. And AI is one of them so far. Or let's call it machine learning and whatever. ai. Yeah, artificial intelligence. Because, uh, I look at the problem solution, kind of what this technology is trying to do, or people trying to do with the technology [00:42:00] because ai, whether like it's chat, GPT or like the API of all these AI companies, like.

Mehmet: Open AI, Google, Anthropac and all these Companies so they solve actually real problems I was just talking today to a founder and he was describing me an application. He built for the insurance company Hopefully he gonna be on the podcast soon Um, so he said like what used to be done in two weeks, it can be done now in 30 minutes.

Mehmet: So yeah, this is the real use case, right? And this is why I tell people sometimes you don't need AI to solve a problem. Maybe you need just, just automation. Right? It's just a little bit of automation. Scripting!

Mike: Well, and I think that is something that is actually hard for larger companies to do. And that's why, like, in this future, like, companies that are, you know, for lack of a better term, AI first.

Mike: But if you're building this thing from the ground up, [00:43:00] and you're using You know, make. com to automate processes in, you know, that are piggybacking on, on top of, um, you know, Anthropic and open AI and all of these other large language models and as new models come, you swap them in and out. And you're always focused on efficiency and doing things better with these models.

Mike: I think. You are so much more nimble and we'll be able to do so much more that like, sometimes like these big legacy companies, that's going to be the biggest challenge. Like how do we make it that we take these processes, these, um, to quote a movie called office space from the, uh, about 25 years ago in the U S like they have this concept of TPS reports.

Mike: No one knew what a TPS report was, but everybody had to generate it. And like, it was just like, what was it for? No one knew all this, like, there's so much of that in business today. There is so much bloats. Um, there's so much of a focus of like, you know, every manager's importance is [00:44:00] identified by the number of people on his or her team.

Mike: And. I mean, like, that's not an efficient way to run a business at all. If you're just saying, well, the more people I have, like the more, the better leader I am, um, it's kind of ridiculous. Like in some ways, maybe the opposite should be true. I don't know, but like, um, that's not how you're compensated out here.

Mike: And people will follow the path of compensation. So like, I think for big businesses, like all of those things need to be reconsidered, reevaluated, changed. Because look, it's going to be hard to compete with a lot of smaller companies who might be doing things adjacent to what you're doing. Who can be nimble?

Mike: Um, Sam Altman, I think is no, I don't think it was Sam Altman. It talks about like, you know, there's going to be a company worth a billion dollars started by two people. Do you say two people or one person? I can't remember, but like. You know, we're starting to see like glimmers of agents that can do stuff.

Mike: And you just have effectively one person directing that, like that becomes a [00:45:00] real possibility now. And I mean, it's an exciting future, but one for, for existing businesses. You got to kind of look at that path and to say like, okay, how do we compete in this world and what are the big changes we need to make sometimes hard to do that because again, the financial structure to make those big changes, especially if they lead to some short term pain, um, they're not always aligned that way.

Mike: Like if you have to spend a bunch of money this year, you might not get a bonus. Employees might not like, and those are the really hard things for, you know, for, for larger businesses to think through.

Mehmet: Yeah, I think the big, um, the big thing that. People should be prepared for is first to change their mindset first.

Mehmet: And the second thing because you mentioned about like how we can compete and with all what we are seeing now with single founder being able to do a lot of things using these agents. So I believe people should try to see how we can collaborate, not only, you know, [00:46:00] compete because, and this is the nice thing because you mentioned something Mike about like people need to speak to each other also, right?

Mehmet: So you can just. Be like one machine and I think this is an opportunity for You know people to start to talk to each others again because hey For example, mike i'm working on this and I know you are working on that So probably we can like, you know, you you do your stuff. So you have your own startup. I have my own startup But we can find a way where we can compliment each other's.

Mehmet: And again, we have, you know, these agents working for us. So that's why we're imagining things going forward. Um, but of course, this requires, you know, a change in the mindset and, you know, the founders would need to be more open minded for big corporate. You know, as, as they say, sorry, but not sorry. Right.

Mehmet: So , yeah. You need, you need to move fast, you need to be, you need, you need to be really, really agile. Like more than any time before. So [00:47:00] Mike, what is like what you currently up to and what's like, other than ai, what's exciting you? At the time moment,

Mike: my daughter is in a play right now that excites me. So, but I don't, I don't know if your listeners want me to talk about my daughter.

Mike: Um, no, uh, look other than AI. And so what other technologies other than AI excite me out there? Is that, is that the actual question or yeah.

Mehmet: Yeah.

Mike: Okay. Um, boy, actually, that's a, that's a great look. I think. Look, I think getting rid of these things does excite me. I think like I, I keep my phone in grayscale mode.

Mike: I try and make this thing as boring as possible, possibly can on these things. And I still find myself just habitually just grabbing these darn things and looking at them and getting sucked into these worlds and so forth, like, and it's only going to get worse. I mean, the AI is only going to give you a more customized, more tailored [00:48:00] information.

Mike: Um, that is potentially, potentially, you're going to be seeing a whole lot of videos and images and sound clips and posts that are made just for you. Uh, and in fact, there is that one AI social network. I can't think of the name right now. Um, but like literally it is a social network of one. It is you and just all bots on there.

Mike: So when you post something, it is just bots responding. I can't think of the name of it, but like, is that going to be more like our future possibly, and that sounds awful in so many ways. So look, the things that get me excited, like I do love what's coming in AI, but like, I also love, uh, going for a walk with no device, um, other than.

Mike: I live in Silicon Valley. I live in a beautiful place, like where I love to go out and get outside. I walk a lot out there. I love to think I love to just be away from devices, spend time with friends and family, like honestly, that's, that's the stuff that excites me. Yes. I do love the [00:49:00] technology. But I also I know like this is powerful stuff and it could be used for evil in many ways and I used evil sort of loosely there.

Mike: I don't actually think the, uh, apples and Googles and so forth are actually evil, but it's just. Um, their incentives are to keep you tied to these devices and using these devices as much as you possibly can. And given that incentive, um, I try and do what I can to not succumb to it as best as I can.

Mehmet: Absolutely. So to your point, um, I think I, I need to find time because what excites me is, um, I can train an avatar, you know, on, on my character, kind of a digital twin. Right. Of course, not, not for recording podcast. No way on my dead body. I want to do this because I enjoy it. But I mean, yeah, for to your point, like to have this time to go and connect with nature, have a walk, [00:50:00] uh, socialize more.

Mehmet: You know, sometime I wish like I can have, you know, an agent that has the same traits characters as be, you know, it comes to business and answer my emails, answer my phone calls and just have the device far from me. So, so for me, it's the same. Same thing, actually, Mike. So

Mike: if I, if I can comment on that, one of the things I did this summer was I said, I was going to, you know, kind of take a little bit of a pause from my AI writing and actually focus on AI movies.

Mike: So I was just writing about nothing but movies that had AI as a central premise this summer. And of course, one of the most famous movies about that is her and in the movie of her, in some ways it's dark because spoiler alert, but at the end of the movie, like the AI gets bored with the humans and kind of moves on as part of that.

Mike (2): Yeah, but

Mike: it's also beautiful in so many ways because like when you really look at what the humans do for work and those It's fascinating like Joaquin Phoenix's character He's a [00:51:00] writer and he will write reading cards and he dictates these cards Then they're actually written and by a computer doing human handwriting and all that but like the creative part of that The creative part still exists and it is with those creativity where you find passion.

Mike: Like I love to write, I love to weave a story. I, I actually have an AI alter ego, alter ego called Alex irons, which I actually, I published entirely AI written works by just as an experiment. I throw them up on Amazon. I give all the money to charity. But those, those books suck. Like they just do there's, there's like nothing to them.

Mike: They're very average, like all that, but it's an experiment for me to play with tools. But like, I take zero and enjoyments and building those things. But for me to, you know, write a thousand words for a blog post and to go through it again and again and again, and to coalesce my thoughts and think of a good quote and all that.

Mike: And to do that with an [00:52:00] AI by my side. I love doing that because like the AI, I'll say like, Hey, can you help edit this for me? Like, like, what's a good example of this, whatever it might be. And it makes me a better writer. But again, it's making me more human. It's, it's taking the creative stuff. Like what you're saying, like you would never give up this podcast.

Mike: Even if an AI could do it, even if an AI could do it better, you still want to do it. And like, that is the kind of choice I want us to be able to make to just say like, Hey, there's certain things. Like one more thing, like, um, Steph, Kurt. A basketball player in San Francisco, one of the greatest players of all time.

Mike: He is renowned for being able to shoot. And from large, from very far distances, he can shoot a, a ball into a small hole. We can do that very easily with machines that could do that much better than Steph Curry. Nobody cares to see that. Nobody cares. And because I look, cause it's [00:53:00] human, we have some sort of human connection.

Mike: We want to see the potential of humans and so forth. So like humans have a future in this AI world. We have a very big future. And like, I hope the future is that we become, we have an opportunity to write less TPS reports, the meaningless, the tactical, the mundane, do less of that stuff and more of the hosting podcasts, the shooting, the basketball, the writing, the blog posts.

Mike: That are the things that we love. Like that's, that's my hope for all of this.

Mehmet: Same here. Same here, Mike, Mike, really, you know, the, the time flew honestly. And, uh, we, I think we, we, we will definitely do another episode, but, uh, yeah. So as final words to the audience and where they can, you know,

Mike: Yeah, um, look, I, I love to write about this stuff.

Mike: I try and write all some very practical terms. I try and make it fun and funny if I can, whenever [00:54:00] possible. Um, so just look up Mike Tadasco, uh, and Medium or on LinkedIn. I post all my stuff. It's all free. I'm not trying to monetize stuff. And look, if folks have a question, just, you know, send me a message on LinkedIn or something.

Mike: Always happy to chat about, you know. All things AI or about good places to go for a hike in Silicon Valley. So either way

Mehmet: Yeah, we need to take that offline about hiking definitely mike Uh mike, thank you very much for uh, you know being with me here today. I really Enjoyed the discussion with you and You know, I, I believe the audience will, will enjoy it also as well.

Mehmet: So thank you very much. And of course I will make sure the links are in the show notes. So if you are listening this to this episode on your favorite podcasting platform, you'll find them on the show notes. If you are watching this on YouTube, of course you can find them on the descriptions. And as I say, as usual, [00:55:00] um, if you enjoyed this podcast, you discovered us just now.

Mehmet: Thank you for. Uh passing by and I hope you Can give us a thumb up and subscribe and if you are one of the people who can come always again and again Thank you for doing so and thank you for being loyal to the show. I really appreciate this And thank you for tuning in. We'll meet again very soon. Thank you.

Mehmet: Bye. Bye