Todd Merrill:

Hi, welcome to Tales from the Sky Lounge. It’s a podcast about business consulting and venture investing. We get out there in the world, we talk to people who are making it happen, and we get their stories.

If you could like and subscribe, it really helps us get our word out. So today in the Sky Lounge, Bryan Dennstedt. Hey, Bryan.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Hello, everybody. Thanks, Todd, for having me. I’m looking forward to talking with you today.

Todd Merrill:

So, Bryan, who are you and what are you working on these days?

Bryan Dennstedt:

I am kind of a partners in crime over at TechCXO. I am a chief technology officer, fractionally, with the firm. I’ve been with them for about eight years now. In addition to that, I guess I’ve had a couple of successful exits throughout my years. And so I do kind of think of myself as that climate change, sustainability, I’m that crazy vegan guy. So I’m the plant-based investor on that front. So those are the places I like to put my money for both returns and help change the world and make it a better place.

Todd Merrill:

That’s awesome. And you do an awesome job and I know you get your fingers in a lot of really cool things. So that’s why I’m excited to talk to you in this kind of kickoff, the 2025 episode. So, I just want to talk to you a little bit about some trends that we’re seeing out there in the world. We talked to a lot of people. We are experiencing a lot of interesting technology trends in the trenches and also at 10,000 feet. So, we kind of put together a little list. So, I’m just going to throw out topics and then maybe we can go back and forth and pick your brain a little bit about what should we be looking at.

Bryan Dennstedt:

I love it.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. So, in our business, we’re very ingrained with venture investing, both at seed stage. Personally, I think both of us invest in the seed stage, and then also in venture and private equity. So, there’s been a lot of talk post Silicon Valley Bank implosion about that whole venture cohort of the last couple of years. So green shoots and early VC, what do you think about that? Where are we in the venture cycle? And there are all these cycles, right? Boom and bust. Where do you think we are with venture investing? Are we going to see more or less of it coming up in 2025?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah, it’s an interesting thing, right? Like as AI permeates everything, as the virtual reality starts to permeate things, and I don’t know, 3D printing and some of the big climate change things that I’m seeing. I think there’s going to be heavy investment continued in a lot of these forthcoming things, quantum computing, all sorts of avenues to explore that. So, it’s just such an interesting time. So, I think there’s plenty of money out there for sure.

Todd Merrill:

For sure.

Bryan Dennstedt:

I think they’re much more conservative with vetting and making sure that there’s a strong runway and a strong roadmap that this is going to blow up and be a big thing. So, I think that the bigger companies are doing a lot more due diligence, they’re leaning on people like you and me to help make sure that it’s the right choice. It checks all the boxes across the board, and they’re going to be able to support that company through to a successful next stage for them, instead of just spreading money out on the roulette wheel like maybe we’ve seen in years past to a degree. But I also think it’s really interesting because I do think we’re living in an age where one person can start a company and turn it into a big, huge idea in a couple of weeks with the right social media virality and a couple of AI agents helping in the background. So, you’re going to see one-man bands become millionaires. I don’t know. It’d be interesting if in 2025, there will be the first minted billionaire that’s a one-man band company. I don’t know.

Todd Merrill:

First unicorn.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

That came up on our AI episode. We had a roundtable where one of the guys threw that out. There’s a thing that’s going to happen. We see ever-shrinking staffs. you don’t need that many people to start a social media network.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

A couple dozen, but are we down to one or two? I think we will. I think we’ll see something approaching that. I don’t think it’s going to be one-man band or one-woman band. I think it’s going to be a small number just because two or three people is way stronger than one person. But I think we’re going to see a lot of companies like that that are going to get a lot more squeeze out of the lemon.

Bryan Dennstedt:

I will not invest in a one-person company.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, yeah. Right.

Bryan Dennstedt:

So, the investment community is looking for the team and the legs to do it more in a standard fashion. But I guess my point is definitely, the smaller companies can do more on their own and get to that bigger stage where they can prove to these PEs, VC firms that they’ve got the wherewithal to go to the next level.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. I help a lot of very early-stage companies. We used to say, you’re in town X. We’re both in different towns in the Southeast.” The world is not Silicon Valley, but I think everywhere, people want traction before they’re going to invest in you. So, is this kind of like a replay of when you saw cloud computing, the costs of getting started, the barrier to entry came way down real fast. You didn’t have to buy hardware, you didn’t have to have a network engineer or run a network yourself. You could just go click a couple buttons and get some resources and get going and put your web app out there. Is this the natural evolution of that where, you know, the good part is you can get started with way less. The bad part is, as an investor, I’m sitting here going, “Well, why can’t you get to a million dollars in revenue with no gas money?”

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Todd Merrill:

It’s tougher to get that first check in some ways, right? Because investors are demanding more from those early entrepreneurs. You think that that’s a thing or do you think there’s still room for super early checks?

Bryan Dennstedt:

I mean, it’s the 80-20 rule for sure on everything we’re talking about here. But it was a lot easier and a lot less checkboxes to do it a long time ago. But at the same time, it’s so much easier, but there’s so many more boxes you have to check. You have to check the security box, the compliance box, the revenue box, the customer product market fit. There’s all these things on our checklist that you have to have had our experience. I’m closely approaching 30 years in the startup spaces and stuff. I’ve seen all those checkboxes. I’ve done all those things before. So, I kind of know these are all the things that we need to look at. The younger people that are just starting, they’re so focused on just the product or I’ve got 10 customers or something. They’re completely neglecting the compliance or the privacy or whatever. And they’re going to get lit on fire when they have their first hurdle on those fronts.

So, it’s a catch-22 for sure that you can do it, but you’ve got to be a jack-of-all-trades and an expert in all of them at the same time, or you’ve got to really lean on GPT or whatever for a lot of these pieces to help make sure you’re doing your due diligence yourself internally. So, I could see both sides of that. I don’t know. I’m more middle-of-the-road when it comes to this stuff. And I want to weigh each one individually and see and help guide them.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. So where does that leave us with early-stage VC, not necessarily like that first million-dollar check, but like the first, like the Series A 5 to $10 million check?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah. I see them in 2025, I see the VCs writing checks. Maybe they haven’t done it as much in the past years, but the AI is here. There’s things there. They have to do their due diligence and they are going to write the checks this year, but they are going to be a lot more careful about it. Maybe they won’t deploy as much as they potentially want to because they can’t find them or they’re harder to find or they are a little bit more conservative. We have to see how the new government shakes out and ripples in with certain things. So, there’s a lot of still uncertainty and unknowns. I feel like they’re going to be conservative, but they’re in the business of making money through their investments. So that will continue. And I certainly hope it rallies as the year unfolds. I think it will get stronger towards the end of the year. I think this first three to six months will potentially be a little bit more conservative.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then my hope is the rising tide lifts all boats. So, we’ve been at a relative depressed, kind of coming out of pandemic times and it just takes a minute to kind of get going again. Maybe this is the year we get going again and everybody has a little bit more market action and that’s good for everybody, right?

Bryan Dennstedt:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

And then, so these VC funds, topic two, reorg of existing venture funds. So, there was a stat that someone put out on one of our earlier episodes is 39%, which is almost 2 out of 5 venture funds wrote zero new checks, new logos in 2023. So that was a whole year ago. So that’s clearly not a sustainable model, right? In a game where you’re supposed to, you have to invest funds to get that percentage of assets under management. So, what do you think is going to happen to those venture funds that didn’t make investments or had a bad run and couldn’t get out of enough deals or didn’t get that one fund, 100X, the fund-maker, unicorn, you know, how does that all wash out? You know, where do those people go? Where’s all that money?

Bryan Dennstedt:

It’s a super interesting challenge. And I’ve actually spoken to a few firms over the past, maybe three, four months about this particular thing. And it’s something that I think I would do personally too. Like, I’m going to evaluate my portfolio and I’m going to measure the top 10% and see how I should invest in them some more and give them the support they need. So hopefully, they can get me a 100X instead of a 50, 60X or whatever I’m looking for. The bottom10%, I’m probably going to pull the plug or try and put on a fire sale and get rid of those ones. In the middle are the ones that I probably need to take it on a case-by-case basis. The VC, a couple of firms that I’ve spoken with said that they are looking for complementary investments that are going to bolster their current investments. Right? You know what I mean? Like, if I’m doing AI voice, I’m going to be looking for a company that’s got AI video pieces so I can marry those two together and merge them to try and help bolster that. So, I’m going to be looking for complimentary services that help round out my portfolio and help them potentially combine into bigger companies and that kind of a thing, which makes a ton of sense that they’re going to still do those new investments, but they’re going to sort of force that little merger management thing together in some fashion, almost like a SPAC, I guess. They’re going to have to take that approach to some degree and go down that path. That’s what I’m seeing. How about you?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. I think the roll-up play is a good one, where you get not quite zombies’ rates, they’re not ever going to grow again, but they’re not growing at huge rates. So maybe smash a couple of them together and the sum of the parts is better than the whole, or the whole is better than the sum of the parts. I do think there’s got to be a capitulation. I don’t know if that’s a term from the dot-com bust era. You know, we got to let go of the losers at some point and just let it. You know, just let it’s time and attention and lost, you know, some cost. We can’t keep that going forever. So, I think this is the year that we all finally let go of that. I mean, feel good about it because hopefully, there’s going to be a lot of really good opportunities to pursue instead of the old ones. Maybe that’s part of the problem too, is there hadn’t been great opportunities.

Bryan Dennstedt:

And there’s the other investment vehicle types, you know what I mean? There’s plenty of growth capital companies that I’m not looking for the 50x, 100x type thing. The VCs could be looking towards the growth capital companies to work out a deal that says, here’s some mediocre companies that are generating a little bit of cash and give us a rev split and you take them off our hands and give us a little cash to go out and find some other whales or something. So, there could be some trading of chess pieces per se on the board that helps people readjust their portfolio to get a better balance or something like that too.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Well, that’s topic three, venture exits and private equity exits, right?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Sounds like venture could maybe clear the board a little bit with some of these somewhat viable companies that are not high growth and then get those assets over to a more appropriate management structure. In terms of private equity, they don’t need 5x growth. They’d be wildly happy with 60% growth or 20% growth in a lot of cases. Get those assets over into the more appropriate management structure. And then that, like you’re saying, it clears the decks for what’s next. Let’s light the next bonfire. Everybody’s in weird spots in the market that are misaligned. A lot of times, private equity will come down and take on some of those traditional venture companies. Culturally, they may not be aligned. Assuming we get through all that, there hasn’t been a lot of IPOs. There hasn’t been a lot of very high-profile M&A. Used to have a little high-tech thing, sell to Google. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. That doesn’t seem to be a game or a reliable part of the game anymore. The Googles and Microsofts and Amazons don’t seem to be buying like they used to.

Bryan Dennstedt:

I mean, to me, it’s the AI play. And there’s a couple of people I follow online that explained it to me a couple of weeks back or something about just if you look at the Microsoft and OpenAI play, right? I think over the Christmas break or something like that, OpenAI and Microsoft solidified their financial terms of their relationship finally. And I think they solidified what does general intelligence mean as it comes to AI. So, they have a definition of what that means or something like that. And so Microsoft is going to get a hundred billion dollars from OpenAI when OpenAI reaches general intelligence or something like that. Don’t quote me on this. Go read the articles online for sure.

Todd Merrill:

There’s a milestone.

Bryan Dennstedt:

The basic, like they’ve set the terms of this of what does it mean for this and what’s the financial reward from that. And if you look at Microsoft, it’s obviously since its inception, only generated 700, 800 billion dollars, right? Or something like that. Like, it’s generated over the 30, 40 years that it’s been around. That’s how much money it’s generated. And now they’ve just negotiated one-eighth of their total revenue since inception as a reward for this. You say what we were talking about with the exits and the IPOs. It’s all focused on such a big wave of AI because it’s going to ripple through us in society and such a big magnification that I think Microsoft is pouring a tremendous amount of their powder and many others secretly into internal building or they are secretly buying the knowledge workers and some of these small startups for pennies on the dollar. You’re not seeing the IPOs because they’re just they’re all building their war chest for this big next arms race in my mind. So I don’t know. Read the article on the Microsoft thing. It’s fascinating to me.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Well, you know, they’re firing up Three Mile Island again just for AI up there.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Right

Todd Merrill:

It’s kind of Microsoft, right?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Right

Todd Merrill:

So it reminds me of back in the smoky days of the telecom boom and bust. You know, it was we were literally buying companies for a million dollars an engineer in telecom and networking. So, you know, maybe that’s going on behind the scenes right now. And that’s what’s going on. Well, yeah.

Bryan Dennstedt:

It certainly is. I mean, there’s not enough people that get the bigger picture for AI. There’s not enough prompt engineers. There’s not enough people that have been there and done that almost like we have. I mean, even you and I are getting pulled into some AI things for what we’re doing. So you’re absolutely right.

Todd Merrill:

So, AI is kind of the next subject, right? AI, trust and safety and legal assurances. So we’ve run into this recently. So, everybody’s got a couple of projects. You know, every mainstream companies thought about AI. I’ve been asked what’s your AI strategy? How are you going to use AI to be more efficient? Some people have better answers than others.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

So now that we’ve gotten a couple of projects into this in just about every company, now the hard questions are going to start coming, right? So, the reality, it’s not all roses and unicorns. It’s, hey, there’s a little bit of a dark side here. I’m going to talk about trust and safety, you know, what you’re seeing out there in the world.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah. I mean, it’s important to note that there’s some CEOs that are like … I’m leaning in on this AI thing and we’re going after it. And there’s some CEOs that got their heads stuck in the sand. But every company is an AI company right now, whether they realize it or not. If you don’t have a corporate objective roadmap for it, your employees are doing it secretly behind the scenes to make their job more efficient. And who knows all the compliance security stuff that they’re violating for sure.

It’s just incredible. So, I don’t know. I mean, like, the interesting thing for me was, you know, it’s a small side tangent, but I feel like it correlates to this is there are huge server farms out there that are just capturing every piece of Internet traffic and get its hands on. That’s all encrypted. Everything we do is HTTPS now secure encrypted. They’re just capturing all those packets and saving them in a server farm, hoping that sometime in the next 10 to 20 years, quantum computing comes along and I can unlock all of that data and I can get military secrets, corporate secrets, and I can just unlock all of those packets. So, there’s huge amounts of people just investing in saving the data for the chance that sometime in the future, I can unlock that and get some of the secrets that are hidden there. And people don’t realize that that is happening right now today, like terabytes upon terabytes of data is just being encrypted and stored on a server in the hopes that I can decrypt it in the future. And so you have to be careful. Like, I mean, we’re putting our voice, our pictures out there on the Internet right now, and the AIs can be able to come along and simulate me and you and stuff like that. So, it is a scary, scary world we’re heading into, which is where I have the hope that humanity follows the laws of robotics and AI and builds the right ground rules and framework for us, you know.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Bryan Dennstedt:

Corporations need to be taking this into consideration. Like, I think you’re going to have AI insurance policies come about very soon. Like, we’re going to have to open this can of worms and there’s going to be a, you know, you thought CrowdStrike thing last year was a big deal. There’s going to be some major incidents this year that reshape how we think about compliance, security, all that stuff. I don’t know.

Todd Merrill:

I think that’s the right way to think about it. I think it’s like cyber insurance all over again, right? So, cyber in general.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

So, you know, where are the cracks? Go get a pen test. What does a pen test for your LLM look like? Right? So, you know, is it going to get angry and start cussing at people? Is it going to offer completely absurd, you know, deals? You know, if you’re like an airline or something, you know, just because there was one like weird test case the training data that it’s going to fall back on. Is it going to, you know, there’s all kinds of crazy things. I think that’s something to watch in 2025. We’re all going to start figuring that out, right? People are going to have to buy insurance or they don’t want to buy insurance just in case, right? Because we don’t know, right?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

And then insurance is going to get serious about mitigating risk. Then you have to measure, monitor and there’s going to be some kind of policy or framework that comes out. I think you’re starting to see early policies and frameworks, particularly in Europe. I think Europe’s doing a good job with some of this stuff. You know, early thought leader, and then, you know, let’s formalize it, like we have SOC 2 or ISO or NIST in the cyber defense world. There’s got to be some kind of AI something, you know, for the LLMs for sure, since you’re talking to people.

Bryan Dennstedt:

And it’s so important for that people get educated. Most of us know the earth is round and we revolve around the sun kind of a thing and stuff like that. We have to do the same basic concept that educate the general public of an LLM is just the math formula trying to predict the next word. One of the LLMs is trying to predict two or three words ahead because it has such confidence. But the next level is those AI agents where they are going to talk to each other and double-check each other before they spit out the answers and stuff. So, you’re going to see this constant evolution of it. And I do think, you know, there’s going to people that crash and burn because they didn’t put the right guardrails on, but we’re going to evolve to the point where we feel pretty safe about certain pieces of it. But we need the NIST frameworks and all that stuff as the checks and balances.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. All right. Next topic, AI trough of disillusionment.

Bryan Dennstedt:

So, this is where you and I might disagree, I think. Go ahead.

Todd Merrill:

Well, I think there’s a natural hype cycle, right? It’s a Gartner hype cycle. And then, you know, everything, everybody gets all excited, right? Wait, what is that? And then we’re kind of clearly somewhere near the top of the hype cycle. Clearly useful technology, right? And then everybody kind of gets a little disappointed for a while. It goes down and then it goes up and then, you know, becomes very impactful. Right? So, I think that’s the natural cycle we’re all talking about. So, I think it’s natural for some people that get burned a little bit on the first one, not understand it. You know, I think it’s a natural … think that’s something I’m going to watch is the trough of disillusionment. How deep is it going to be? You know, how impactful is it going to be to people who may not be on the bleeding edge of everything? You’ve taken a bite at the apple, you hated it, or you got burned, or you spent way too much money and that didn’t save money because you didn’t know really what to expect. Right?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Now we all have experienced. I think everybody’s got to kind of figure out what, you know, how to run an AI project. What were the expectations? You know, what are reasonable risk management policies? And then once we work our way through that, I think there’s going to be a general acceptance of the technology, is a basic, you know, fundamentally, I mean, AI is not going to go anywhere. Right? So it’s just going to become more and more ingrained. We’re just going to get better at it, I think.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

But I do think they have to go through this trough of disillusionment to some extent.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Right. And I can see from a corporate perspective, there’s your typical corporations that are investing in this without knowing what they’re doing with high expectations and low investments, and they are going to fail and waste their money and stuff. But I feel like, you know, we’re expecting heat, water, food, electricity kind of a thing. And now we’re expecting everybody to have access to the Internet. And we’re going to have this very fast expectation that everybody has access to AI. So, like, it’s going to be a core basic tenet for us going forward. So, I feel like until it reaches some sort, I just think that before we get to the trough, we have 10x more to go. Like, I think we haven’t even scraped the surface on voice and video and chat. And I just think, like, we think we are hitting some sort of ceiling and heading towards this trough. But I just feel like it’s like, I don’t know. I’m way down the rabbit hole, as you can tell.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Bryan Dennstedt:

And if I don’t use GPT or Perplexity or Claude, you know, 27 times a day, it is, you know, rippling into almost everything I do almost every hour in some fashion, capacity or whatnot. And I don’t think people have embraced it as much as maybe you and I have yet. And they’re still learning it and figuring it out. But just like my mind goes wild of all the things I want to try and do and unlock with AI. And, like, I just need more time. I need more time and more money to really, really go after it. And that’s where I feel like I don’t know if I see the trough yet.

Todd Merrill:

Well, let me tell a story about my dad, right? So, LLM, he’s like, what is Chat GPT? And we said, hey, ask it about something you know about. So, he’s a big old car guy. He said, hey, tell me about why the Model A is a big deal. Because he has a couple of Model As. And then it said, you know, beautifully written several paragraphs. He got through the first paragraph and it said the Model A was the first car. It’s notable because it was the first car that had an assembly line. And he’s like, this is stupid. I hate this. That’s not true. Because the whole Internet would tell you Model A, it was the first car to have an assembly line. It wasn’t. It was the Model T, which was still the same guy, same factory, same everything. But it was just wrong. Right? So, I mean, I think there’s a little bit of that where people don’t trust. They’re like, some of these, you know, particularly the note- takers from meetings. You know, I’ve had a couple of them where it said, Todd committed to blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, no, no, I did not. Like, that did not happen.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah, right.

Todd Merrill:

So, you know, stuff like that, you know, people don’t trust it. Next topic, AI is an important tool to sift through massive amounts of data. Right? So, I think we’re all figuring out what it’s not like LLM. It’s only a small part of AI. So, there’s lots of different things. What is it good for? What can it do? And what can it not do? And what should you trust it for? And what should you not trust it for? Right? So, I think where I’m coming down with is, you know, is AI great at being very technically precise at summarizing conversations? Not ready to say that that’s true yet, but is AI really good at finding lots of alternatives I haven’t thought about? Heck, yeah. Like, it’s really good at that. The LLM stuff, you know. Is AI good at sifting through just vast amounts of data? Yeah, I think how else are you going to do it if you don’t have a piece of software?

Bryan Dennstedt:

And I just want to go back and touch on the trust thing before we jump into the big data. I agree with you completely, because like I say, AI is going to permeate society. I feel like it’s almost going to usher in this new renaissance era for us as humanity. And I equate it equal to water on a degree. I grew up in Rochester, New York, and I grew up in this place where I don’t remember ever growing up having a water boil order or not drinking water out of the faucet. And I just took for granted my whole life growing up that you drink water from the faucet and like, no, you don’t think twice about it. And then, you know, spent some time during COVID down in Mexico. And like, you don’t ever drink water from the faucet when you have reliable electricity half the time. So, like, where we grow up in our culture affects our basic things like for water and different places, even in the United States, there’s still places where you don’t trust the water that you’re drinking in that city. And I think AI is about that education thing. Like, your dad’s new to it, and he has to learn how to properly prompt it using some of the prompt frameworks and things like that to get the answer that you’re looking for. 

And I know chat GPT. Your dad, the right answer if it was prompted the right way. And that’s what’s creating that level of distrust to a degree. And we have to level up society as a whole to a higher educational level.

Todd Merrill:

Sure

Bryan Dennstedt:

Especially when it comes to AI.

Todd Merrill:

I think that’s that trough is disillusionment, right? So, we’ve …

Bryan Dennstedt:

…yeah

Todd Merrill:

Oh my God, this is great. And then well, maybe not, it failed.

Bryan Dennstedt:

 Yeah

Todd Merrill:

It’s not perfect. Right?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

So you know, let’s not flush it, right? It’s really good. And then now we kind of understand how to work with …

Bryan Dennstedt:

…and you bring it back to this data sifting thing, like that’s probably one of the key things that I do on a regular basis with it is I just say, you know, “Hey, here is the whole spreadsheet, copy and paste it into the GPT.” Say, “Look, I’m looking for a formula that helps me with column L and common column S that does this, this and this, and it spits out the formula and I plug it in.” Or “Here is the whole spreadsheet, I’m looking for XYZ answer.” And it just gives it to me in a heartbeat. Or for planning purposes, like you’re planning a trip or an event of some sort. Like, you know, you just open up the… I open up the voice talk, and I just babble about whatever I can think about babbling about for 2, 3, 4 minutes, nonstop. This is what I’m looking for at this event. This is the kind of thing I’m hoping for. This is what I want there. I want this color blue at sunset or whatever it is I’m looking for. And then I stop and say, so what are your top 20 recommendations, and it’ll spit out based on all the stuff that you just said this, this, this, this and this, you know, and just like, that’s awesome. And it troubleshoots it and sifts through all the data 10x better than a Google search would, in my mind, that’s very, very specific to what I just babbled about.

The other day at New Year’s, I was like, I don’t want to go to the store. It’s going to be mobbed. I opened up the door to the fridge. I opened up GPT. And I said, “Look, in my fridge.  I’ve got this, this, this, this. I opened up the pantry, I got this, this and this, I’m looking for a nice little relaxing New Year’s Eve dinner, give me a couple recipes.” And said, “Well, based on that, you can make a creamy orzo. ” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, “with the mushrooms.” And like, boom, it spat out the recipe. And that’s what I had for New Year’s dinner. It gave me everything I wanted based on the ingredients I had just because I babbled into it.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Bryan Dennstedt:

So creating through that data is just amazing.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. I remember like, you know, one of our partners, Greg, you know, went to a conference and said, download all the, you know, the investors that attended this conference, and then he used GPT to filter that by, you know, given this list of investors, you’ll find the ones that have made an investment above, you know, it with the following criteria, because he’s does a lot of M&A type work, you know, so who’s involved in M&A, and it’s just like, boom, just kind of worked. And then so…

Bryan Dennstedt:

… yes

Todd Merrill:

You have to have the precise answer. No, right? But, you know, can it do a lot of work in a hurry and get most of the right answer? Heck, yeah, right. And then so that’s, I think that’s what it’s, it’s good for.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Things like that, you know, a million.

Bryan Dennstedt:

And I’m so excited about the next level that I think is really going to come to fruition in 2025, which is the agents. Like, you go into the slack channel, and you’ve got the BA agent and the research agent, and you say, this is what I’m looking for guys, and those two talk back and forth, and come back to you 5,10,20 minutes later with all the answers that you needed.

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha!

Bryan Dennstedt:

You know, it’s just like, the agent concept is going to further blow people’s minds.

Todd Merrill:

So can I throw a nerdy one out there. So, I’m excited about the idea, and this is something I’m looking at for 2025 is emerging. So, you’ve had graph databases, right? So, you have things that relate to other things, a lot of kind of not so formal ways. And then applying neural network type technologies on top of that, you know, so LLM plus a graph network database of things, you know, so that’s… I think that’s one more step towards generalized intelligence, or like, you know, taking these different techniques that we’ve had laying around for a while, and stitching them together in very powerful ways to make inference in knowledge insights that we haven’t necessarily had before. And it’s going to be super powerful.

Bryan Dennstedt:

I agree completely. Because I started out one of my first CTO opportunities was in energy trading. I was helping collect weather data from five different weather sources, helping collect electricity outages, construction events, you know, these 25 different data sources, to put them into some sort of SQL database to try and run through the trading algorithms to figure out what we could predict. And the only thing I got close to was like, there’s an anomaly in January, why does electricity always spike around this middle of January thing, and it’s inauguration day when everybody turns on their TV and swipes the electricity up.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Bryan Dennstedt:

Like we could predict to make a little bit extra money on those couple hours that the inauguration is going on. But gosh, imagine doing energy trading in today’s day and age with the LLMs at our fingertips. But you’re right, the vector databases, and all that kind of stuff is just going to continue to blow our minds with the inferences that it can detect that we would never connect together, but they see it somehow and plug it in.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, watch this space. I think it’s good. That’s for sure.

Bryan Dennstedt:

I mean, the one downside that I see right now is that you have this token limitation right now, whereas you chat with GPT, like Claude will just run out and say, look, you’ve reached the end of this chat, right? Well, GPT doesn’t do that. You just keep chatting, and it just forgets the stuff you talked about 10 minutes ago. And so that’s our problem, is you and I have memory for as long as we’ve been alive, more or less, and we can recall things 20 years ago and trigger that, but they forget. Like, it might have the whole knowledge of the internet in its back pocket, but it forgets what we talked about 10 minutes ago because we’ve been talking nonstop. And so that has to change in 2025. We have to have a 10x better memory capacity to get better results out of the AI.

Todd Merrill:

Yep, yep, yep. The memory of the ADD poodle.

Bryan Dennstedt:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

So, we have to get it to an elephant or something.

Bryan Dennstedt:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

So, you know, one of the things to talk about with AI LLMs, generative technology, you know, its effect on marketing, maybe this is a little bit of a shift. You know, next topic would be rise of the podcasts. Why? Why do you think people are going to podcasts? You think it’s, you know, we’re running from all this spam email and inauthentic content that’s just kind of layered on? It’s too easy to create, you know, content every day?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Are people becoming numb to that? What do you think is going on with podcasts? Is this the future? Is this something, you know, it’s just kind of a fad?

Bryan Dennstedt:

I don’t know. I believe like, we are generating an extremely individualistic society that, you know, I love Star Wars, Star Trek, sci-fi, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, I like to do triathlons. And I like to do investment and hang out with people like you. So, I’m just naturally gravitated towards these very specific nichey-type things. And I can find a podcast on any topic that I want. And I can go way down that rabbit hole. My kids are addicted to the Pokemon trading podcasts and stuff like that right now. And so, you can get the dopamine and the addictions that you want that is so specialized for what your passions lie as a society with I can be connected to somebody in Nigeria, and we are best friends, best buds, because we have just alignment on all these topics and stuff. Like, it’s we grew up in the era where we got to play with the people on our neighborhood.

You didn’t play with the people to neighborhoods over because you didn’t even know who they were. Right? But now I see my daughter hanging out in Minecraft with other friends from school that she just wouldn’t normally play with, but they’re on the Minecraft server building some… the house tour that my daughter gave me the other day was just mind-blowing. Like, her house in Minecraft is like, you built this? She goes, yes. Like, she’s been watching YouTube videos. I’m just blown away at what she has built and constructed. It’s just so gorgeous and beautiful. And that’s what it’s doing. And I think it goes back to our earlier topic around trust, right? Like, we know the bigger Main Street medias are controlled by old oligarchies at the top kind of a thing. The billionaires that own different, you know, organizations and stuff. And so, you know, when you can get them to pair out your message across the board, like, it’s great for the traffic and the weather and the general news that you may want to get a quick update on, but, you, at the same point don’t quite trust it. And I crave more personalized things. I love your opinions on stuff more than I care about Joe Schmo mayor in my town. So.

Todd Merrill:

So access to evermore niche media, and it’s not necessarily consumption. It’s two-way. Maybe podcast is a way for people to get out there and get their message and you know, have conversation starters.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah, I mean, I’ve been following Jason Calacanis and Kevin Rose for years. Kevin Rose was on TV long, long time ago back when cable was a thing. And I’ve been following him since and he sent out his newsletter the other day. And like, it just resonated with me on every level. This is the meditation tool I’m using. This is the new notion tool that I’m using. You know, I’m just like, I got to check that out. I got to check that out. I followed his podcast and stuff. And I’ve gotten to, I think, meet him once. And Jason Calacanis once and shake their hands. And to me, they’re celebrities, right? Like, you know, but most people don’t even know who they are, right? You know what I mean? Like, yeah, that’s my mom and dad, they have no clue who they are, right? You say, you know, Barack Obama or Donald Trump, and they immediately know who they are. But they have no clue who, in my mind, who these celebrities are. And then the fact that they’re so reachable, like I could go to a conference and hang out and just shake their hand and get a quick picture with them at the end of it, is just, you know, so it helps bring it to reality to a degree.

Todd Merrill:

So niches make riches. You ever heard that one?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Todd Merrill:

So that’s kind of where your heads at, is there’s so many more niches out there now available, right? So you can get traction for ever cheaper amounts of money, time and attention. And find your tribe, so to speak.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah, absolutely.

Todd Merrill:

Well, one of our other partners, Lewis Goldman, who’s in marketing, likes to talk about the rise of genuine marketing content. You know, so he and I did, we had one customer that was an internet clothing manufacturer, distributor. And then so that was eye-opening for me, you know, where the whole world of influencer marketing, you know, started a couple years ago.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

And then, you know, what does that look like? And then, you know, I look at my son, my youngest son’s 20. He’s got buddies that are doing TikTok influence, you know, cleaning up like little single base hit, you know, marketing opportunities. He’s got a TikTok shop with like, just eclectic mix of things. He just kind of, you know, close following on some of these TikTok trends and trying to knock down a few bucks, and then you ask again in a month, he’s got a completely different storefront, you know. So, it seems wild how fast things can and do change. Do you think that’s healthy? You think that’s the way of the future? You know, is everybody going to watch Kim Kardashian, or we are going to watch, you know, 1000, you know, Jason’s of the world who are exactly into the exact same things you’re into?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah. I mean, when you have a super strong influencer profile, I think that the brands come to you and say, look, help us promote these things. But like, I follow Dad Chats, and Mom Chats, but Dad Chats is this, I don’t know, lawyer guy. I don’t even know where he is. But he talked about this hero fire blanket or something like that. I don’t know if you’ve seen this video, but like, he had to use the fire blanket.

Todd Merrill:

Oh!

Bryan Dennstedt:

In the kitchen or something.

Todd Merrill:

You throw the blanket on the kitchen when you’re burning the turkey or whatever.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah. He’s always got these beautiful little anecdotes about his fatherhood and his kids and funny things him and his wife have done. And so, I just enjoy relaxing and watching his little anecdotes and videos. And then he comes on with this very poignant, you know, on the edge of tears, like this blanket saved my life. And I just want other people to be aware of this blanket. And then the blanket company reached out to him and said, our sales spike through the roof because of this, we want to partner with you and, you know, help, you know, do that. And so I don’t know. I felt connected to him. I bought 10 of those blankets to give out to all my friends and family at Christmas time, just like, pop this in your kitchen, you just never know, like, that’s a really powerful thing that you could see that.

And then I had another influencer, I think it was Rachel, the neuroscientist, if you follow her, but she’s in England or Ireland or something, and was talking about, you know, some people that were in Gaza and Israel and were affected by a bomb and their husband got killed or something. And she just said, “Look, if all of my influencers, all of the people that follow me just donate $1, we’re going to help get this family out of that area and set them on a new path after this horrible trauma, tragedy.” And, you know, I’ve been following her for years, and she just did this heartfelt thing, I clicked the link and donated three bucks without even blanking, you know what I mean? Like, and I hope that she got 100, 200 grand.

Todd Merrill:

Oh yeah.

Bryan Dennstedt:

So, influencer market, like, when you talk about with Lewis, and what he’s trying to say, like, there are so many amazing products out there and amazing services and amazing people and companies and that genuine, authentic self, like you are who you are, I’m who I am. And we want to come in and help companies express that genuine appeal of why we got started in this business in the first place. Now you and I know there’s 20% of companies are shady, crappy, trying to steal as much money from people as they can. I still think in the good of society that 80% of us companies out there are trying to genuinely change the world, help build a product, have fun, all that kind of stuff. And so, you know, I hope the AI helps us weed out the bad ones from the good ones and helps the good ones rise to the top.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Well, something to think about what platforms are you on? You know, social media, you still do social media? Are you on more like Substack and blogs and that kind of thing? Or what do you how do you consume? You know, information. Like, has that changed in the last years?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah, the bigger question is Todd, when they can implant the chip in our heads, we’ll get one for you.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Bryan Dennstedt:

I wish I had more time. I mean, I’m curious to see how the TikTok thing plays out. Because I still think the TikTok algorithm is par, are none the best algorithm out there for surfacing the content that I want to see. And I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve trained it, you know, but like, I do have multiple accounts on different platforms. I mean, I help run some of my podcasts and stuff like that as well. So, you know, it’s interesting to see the feeds as you switch between different personas online, as I’ve curated, you know, certain ones that maybe are a little bit more plant-based versus more technology or AI-driven on that front. But the one account that I use the most has a wide variety of stuff that just hits me right between the eyes every single time when I’m watching it. So, but I guess it’s I’m still leaning towards local connections, family connections on Facebook, you know. Instagram is beautiful recipes and food and things like that for me. And TikTok is just this wealth of knowledge. 

Like, you almost have this decision when you’re searching for something now, do I search TikTok to find some quick tips and tricks? Do I search YouTube? Do I search GPT? Or do I go to Google? Like, it’s a hard decision to decide, you know, like, people realize how many times Todd have you gone to Amazon first to search for something instead of Google. And then you don’t find it on Amazon, and you’re like, okay, I’ll go try Google. And then it pops up in Google, because you’re like, well, why didn’t Amazon have this? Right? Because you’re like, your brain is just wired that well, Amazon don’t have it. And we don’t think twice about Walmart or eBay, or these other marketplaces you go to, you’re just wired that, by default, certain things go certain ways.

Todd Merrill:

Right. Well, you’d buy Pokemon cards on eBay, right? You wouldn’t buy them on Amazon necessarily.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Right. Yeah.

Todd Merrill:

Luggage on Amazon and, you know, software on Google. I don’t know. And then recipes on Instagram. So, it’s kind of like, it’s going back to your kind of like, these niches, right? So, everybody’s got this focus, you have to be good at. So be good at something, and stick to it. Sounds like that’s something to watch, right, for the next couple years, is how is everything going to shake out in terms of what lane everybody’s going to try to occupy in terms of these information services? You got to shake it up, right?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah, you got to get your 10,000 hours in and something. And hopefully, it’s something that you’re passionate about because you can probably make money with almost any passion you could throw at it. Quote choice #2

Todd Merrill:

So well, next subject is patents and intellectual property, you know, so what, we talked about, you know, AI, training on anything and everything and get his hands on. So intellectual property isn’t what it used to be when we started life, you go grind through something and think about it for a year and come up with something hard and go get a patent on it, you know, and then spend 50,000 to get a patent. I don’t know if that’s the right way to go. You know, if I was going to do a startup now, I would say, get out there, you find your market and then you go fast and hit hard, you know, but you know, pictures and images, you almost have to assume that, you know, is intellectual property even a thing anymore? It’s a hard thing to defend in this.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah, the lines are an infinite number blurred at this point, in my mind, for sure. I mean, you know, back in my old days, when I was with IBM, I was part of several of the patents and stuff. And I could see the value of, you know, IBM’s patent empire. But now I, you know, that video, everything’s a remix, like, go watch that video. It’s just like, the lightbulb is still being sold on Amazon and eBay and stuff. There’s just a million iterations of it, you know, to remix it, you know, and strips and fancy shapes, all that kind of stuff. And so it’s that question of, is there’s definitely new innovation 100% and that goes back to like, you know, the AI isn’t going to think of original stuff. It’s going to find that middle ground and regurgitate what it thinks is the middle of the road type answer in my mind. And that’s where I think you and I can get together on a podcast and just talk through something. And we might spark a brilliant idea that that somebody listening might think, man, that’s brilliant. And I need to create a business around that. But I think it’s usually in today’s day and age, it’s usually a remix of something else other people have built, you know, 10 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 1000 years ago, right? How do we bring back some of the old, old board games from 1000 years ago and give them new life and make some money with that? So I don’t see a lot of the companies I’m working with going down the patent front in a whole bunch of stuff. And I think, you know, I know, we’ve talked about this before, but it’s just like the startups don’t have the defensible money to guard against the Magnificent 7, if the Magnificent 7 wants to come in and distort you and rip you off, they’ll do it in one month or less. And you probably can’t defend against it, I don’t think. So, unless you’ve got the association legal defense fund to back you or something.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, but good luck, right?

Bryan Dennstedt:

You know, yeah.

Todd Merrill:

So, it’s time and attention too.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Well, and then so is this kind of, you know, we talked about books like the fourth turning and then here is the generational demographics. So there’s these theories that, you know, every generation is a product of their parents and their grandparents, right? So, you know, there’s a periodic generation that occurs where everything’s a remix, you know, everything’s dubbed, or recombined, there’s nothing really new, right? And then every third or fourth generation is like the Edison and the Tesla, you know, all those guys kind of appear and it’s like, Oh, my God, like all this stuff’s brand new white sheet of paper.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

So it’s a cyclical thing. But, you know, if you’re part of that generation that remembers, you know, invention and how to how to do things brand new, and everything’s kind of squished in the middle of the bell curve where it’s, you know, there’s a lot, but it’s, you know, all in the middle. There’s nothing truly novel and inventive. It’s just kind of marginally different. You know, if you can differentiate and get way out there on a brand new idea, boy, howdy, you know, you can you can make a lot of progress in a hurry. So…

Bryan Dennstedt:

… yes

Todd Merrill:

So, I don’t know what those companies are going to be. As we go, you know, surely it’s not going to be AI feels super incremental right now, but where are these other weird things going to come from?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah. And to me, I always tell people like, we can go down the patent path, but you know, that’s going to cost 20 to 50 grand. But the question is really, can we outexecute them? You know, we small enough nimble enough team that we can go faster than them. And we can get six months, eight months ahead of them. So that’s what I think it’s really about. It’s interesting. Like, I think the original Mickey Mouse patent expired last year, March 31, this year, something like that.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Bryan Dennstedt:

So, it’s just going to be interesting, like, well, how will people try to capitalize on that now that that has expired to a degree? So, you know, are we going to see that resurgence of stuff that is passing those limitations and new ideas coming out of the ability to remix that without getting sued by Disney? Or other companies that patents are expiring on that front? Because that whole concept is fairly new in my mind, you know, that whole concept of patents, trademarks has got to be 100 years old. I mean, I’m sure it’s older than that. But you know, the enforceability and all that kind of stuff is a relatively new thing. And we’re going to see some interesting things happen.

Todd Merrill:

Next subject is crypto regulations. You know, any time, we have regime change in Washington. It’s always exciting, you know. There’s always going to be some kind of new set of rules to get used to. And, you know, my hope is actually, some of the some of the hesitation the market has been, you know, waiting to see how that stuff shakes out. My hope is that we’re on the other side of the election, you know, people have certainty, whether you like it or not, you know, as you know, you at least you know what the rules are going to be probably.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

And you can kind of plan and execute against that. So, for me, you know, we had a lot of, I was involved in a couple different crypto projects around the world. And you know, it seemed to be super hostile in the United States, particularly to get off the ground, anything that was decentralized finance or any kind of crypto adjacent was super hard to get, you know, services, having digital custodial services was next impossible, getting the right combination of licenses where you can operate in and be okay with SEC among other institutions was almost impossible.

Silicon Valley Bank was one of those that would bank you if you did things with crypto and they went away, you know, and so there’s a couple of failures there that were just perfectly lined up were made hard, if not impossible. When I went to a couple of conferences, you know, permissionless was one of them in Texas, the DeFi, you know, Crypto Bros were kind of weird little sideshow, you know. They have these little niche projects, nothing huge, poorly attended, and then you go to the institutional room, the institutional track, and then all these ginormous banks that are multi-continent, were embracing crypto techniques, you know, the smart contracts and that kind of thing, going internationally to settle their own books, among, you know, trusted business partners already.

So, when completely anonymous, and it wasn’t, you know, anarchy. It was just solid math, you know. It’s a good way to do business. I kind of think that’s a trend I’m going to look at is when these things open up, and we get some more permissive environment to operate in those with those technologies, I think you’re going to see some more interesting projects come out. Like, you know, Western Union remittances to third-world countries out of the United States is one of them that really wants to work on, you know, but it’s been hard because so how do you do that? You know, how do you raise money? You know, you can’t do an IPO. It’d be cool if you could do like a mini IPO, through crypto, you know, on a blockchain kind of market with this decentralized finance.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

You know, a lot of people would throw in 1000 bucks. It’s not that many people that can throw in 100,000 bucks. So, you know, right now in America, you have to go to people $100,000 checks or $50,000 checks to raise money. How much faster could you do, you know, crowdsourcing it with some of these other techniques? I don’t know. I kind of think that that’s something I want to watch. Good to see. I think there’s still a lot of crypto scams. So your buddy in Nigeria you’re talking to, you know…

Bryan Dennstedt:

…yes, yeah.

Todd Merrill:

You’d be his buddy, but don’t send crypto, unless you don’t want it back.

Bryan Dennstedt:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

So I don’t know, are you exposed to any of that stuff? Or what do you how do you think? I mean, there’s something to crypto, right? It’s not going away. I think Bitcoin is, you know, it was designed as digital money. And we’ve kind of gotten away from digital money because of the taxation and all that kind of stuff. You know, capital gains, it’s not money. It’s truly like gold, right? It’s a thing that goes up in value.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Right

Todd Merrill:

How do we get back to the roots of digital money is going to be interesting play.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah, I mean, everybody on their journey wants to take a percentage of our transaction. I mean, that’s kind of the capitalistic society we’ve created. If it’s not Visa, MasterCard, it’s Amazon egress charges.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, yeah.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Everybody wants it. Yeah, everybody wants their little percentages to do that. So, it’s really interesting. I mean, we know blockchain is here to stay. Blockchain is going to be the basis for authenticity going forward to know if what Bryan said is real versus an AI pretending to say it right? Like, without a doubt, blockchain is going to permeate society just as much as AI does for authenticity checking capability. The crypto side of it, you know, like, that’s where I think it’s really, really ripe for disruption, right? I mean, if you look at all the money transfer services, like Wise and some of these others, I mean, they’re playing these weird shell games with the money, right? They’ve got the special arrangements like Plaid does with everybody’s bank account now, that, you know, we do trust us, and we’ll keep the money there. And we vouch for Bryan’s money as we transfer it around the globe. But secretly, it takes several days behind the scenes, and they’re making money off the floats. And it’s a really, really interesting concept in a big, big way.

I mean, this is one of the things I am excited about to see David Sacks is taking over as the new AI and crypto czar of the government here. And he’s part of that PayPal mafia from way back when he helped build Yammer, and some of that stuff. So, a really strong, smart guy is in charge of that. And I want to see where he plans to take it and help shape the future of how America is going to define crypto and AI. And hopefully, we can be the leaders and innovators that help set the tone for the rest of the world to follow. But I do think other countries that are reliant very heavy on the dollar are dipping their toes into crypto heavily to try and disassociate from the dollar where they can and control their transaction costs and all that stuff. So, it’s wild, crazy times. It’s definitely ripe for disruption and on a lot of levels.

Todd Merrill:

Somebody told me a story. I think it was a VC. I mean an LP in an AI fund. I don’t remember if those were the people. So, imagine an AI self-driving car, negotiating as you’re going down the road for a lane change with like a micropayment to some other car, hey man, I’ll give you a nickel, let me pass or go faster, totally contrived. But if there was digital money, you could start to do interesting things with micropayments or payments in general.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

So at what point do you… I don’t think this is a 2025 thing, but I think once we loosen up and get a little bit more deterministic on the AI and trust it more, and then same thing with crypto and payments, a lot of interesting use cases we might not have thought about can start to emerge.

Bryan Dennstedt:

But it’s still … you make me think of the real use case of that. I live in Charlotte area and I drive down to Atlanta. And when I drove down to Atlanta recently, I was stuck in traffic and since I make decent money with what I do and stuff, I took the express lane. So, we already have segregated it with the microtransactions to let me go faster than the people that can’t afford to pay for it. But I did not realize when I went to Atlanta on the Peach Pass or whatever they’ve got down there, on my way back, that my credit card on my North Carolina Quick Pass or whatever had expired.

Todd Merrill:

Oh-oh, ha ha ha!

Bryan Dennstedt:

North Carolina couldn’t charge my account to pay Georgia the fees. So, I got a license plate picture in the mail with a fine from Georgia that says, “Hey, we couldn’t get the money from North Carolina, so we’re attacking all these fees” and whatever. It was a $3 toll or something that turned into like $42 because my credit card expired. I didn’t even know about it. You know what I mean? So, it’s really, really interesting. You bring that use case forward, and I can totally see the smart cars negotiating the ability to go faster if you want to. Or now, I know I take my time and I just sit in the traffic and listen to some podcasts and I don’t care how long it takes me to get there for certain trips. And other trips I want to get there as fast as I can. So that’s where we’re heading. We should be paying for everything we consume on that front and depending on the speed that you want to go. So, we’re going to head there on lots of levels.

Todd Merrill:

Well, there’s a company here in Atlanta that’s doing these drone vertical takeoff electric vehicles, like the air …

Bryan Dennstedt:

…air cars

Todd Merrill:

Right. Yeah. And then so they’re going to be flown autonomously or autopilot or something. I don’t know how that’s all going to shake out. So, you have one road that’s almost like 1D, right? You can just go from year to year.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah, yeah

Todd Merrill:

2D and now we have 3D. What’s that going to look like? So, there’s going to have to be a lot of autonomous real-time negotiation. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to be coordinated. And then money has got to be a part of that priority. How do you influence? I don’t know. It’s going to be interesting. Talking about remote working and that kind of thing. That’s another subject, digital nomad employees. You think that’s postcode, talk about the shift that everybody had to do to remote work, to embrace it, just to be in business. Now you’re seeing like Amazon RTO (return to office) and some of the bigger companies want that. There’s been a big shake-up in commercial real estate because of all those trends. You think we’re going to return to the office? You think digital nomad is a lifestyle that’s readily accessible now? We work with people all over the world. How many people do you work with or what percentage of the people you think are living digital nomad lifestyles?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah. I mean, a much larger percentage than before COVID for sure. Right? I mean, I know I even took advantage of it during COVID and worked remotely from a few exotic places. It was a breath of fresh air. So, I think, I don’t know, it’s a significant amount of people that are traveling and working from the hotel room or working from an Airbnb and it’s decoupling us. There’s just something about early in your career, getting the experience about being in an office that I know I got, looking over somebody’s shoulder, being able to talk about stuff at lunch. So I know I personally try to foster, like I just brought on two brand new junior developers for this one client and I’ve just encouraged them, like you’re in different parts of the United States, but I need you two to be best friends and hang out on Zoom all day long, preferably with your camera unless you guys are eating lunch or want to take a quick bio break, but lean on each other, pair a program, figure that out as much as you possibly can because it’ll be well worth it to create those kind of relationships.

I think we’re moving into a very transactional, almost disconnected thing unless you’ve worked with somebody. Like you and I have worked together for a few years now, right? So, we’re still going deeper down the rabbit hole together to get to know each other like when I was at Xerox or IBM and got to work with the same people for years. So, I want to encourage you to take advantage of the office space. If you can’t take advantage of it, go to a co-working place and build your in-person tribe and community, and don’t just sit in your bedroom with the door locked on the Zoom all day. So that’s invaluable for sure. But yeah, I don’t see us heading back to the offices and I think there’s going to be a huge rental collapse in the bigger cities as people figure this out more and more.

Todd Merrill:

All right, last subject. You’re in Charlotte. I’m in Atlanta. What’s your favorite SkyMiles program? I’m Delta being in Atlanta.

Bryan Dennstedt:

I’m definitely the American Airlines guy over here for sure. So yeah, there’s definitely some disparities.

Todd Merrill:

When’s the last time you got an upgrade for anything with your program? I can’t remember ever getting any kind of upgrade.

Bryan Dennstedt:

It’s probably been a year or two. But yeah, I mean, I guess I don’t mind taking the weird flights now and then because whatever I relax in the city or fly out the next morning or something. I do think in the past year or two, I’ve probably gotten upgraded once, but definitely not as much as I used to for sure. That is by far. And I do find like the American Airlines lounge is jam-packed. But yeah, you get to load up on the free snacks at least kind of a thing. So, for sure.

Todd Merrill:

Well, it’s been good catching up with you. And maybe we’ll come back in a couple quarters and see how we’re doing on our predictions here.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Absolutely

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. So, people want to get in touch with you after this. What’s a good way to get in touch with you, Bryan, on the Internet?

Bryan Dennstedt:

Yeah, I’m all over LinkedIn. That’s probably the best way. It’s I think my handle is phingers on LinkedIn, P-H-I-N-G-E-R-S. You can look me up there or Bryan Dennstedt. And I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn. Or you can check me out on TechCXO’s website. Got my profile out there and you can reach out through that. But it’s been a pleasure, Todd. I really appreciate you taking some time to put this together. Some good, healthy debate on where AI is going to take us.

Todd Merrill:

Sure. All right. Bye for now.

Bryan Dennstedt:

Thank you.