Interna Talks: Startup Execs Transitioning into Larger Companies, Macroeconomics, Latest Trends in Product Management, and More

In our latest episode of Interna Talks we talk about the evolving roles in agile tech organizations. Are organizations truly adopting Agile methodologies, or just claiming to while sticking to their old Waterfall ways? Eddie Shek dives deep into the challenges of process adaptation and why discipline is crucial for authentic Agile transformation. 

Are you ready for the seismic shift in the roles of Product Managers and Product Owners? We explore how Product Managers are becoming increasingly like General Managers, blending visionary, business, and technical skills. Eddie Shek and Mark Goldin reveal the growing importance of having an MBA and broader business experience. Then we discuss the Role of GenAI in Organizational Structures. Do Generative AI practices and processes seamlessly fit into existing organizational structures, or do they require a new paradigm? Mark Goldin shares his vision for embedding GenAI into platform teams while Ross Webb offers a contrasting view on who should own it—hint: it's not who you think! 

We discuss these and other items, like macroeconomic trends, and how they affect the technology landscape, and the rise of product ops. We hope you enjoy this episode.

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Timestamps

00:00 Companies seek broader business experience for product leadership.

06:16 Product ops facilitates success for product managers.

07:18 Rapid deployment and testing for product success.

12:54 Opposing views on waterfall and methodology.

14:50 Focus on influencing what you can control.

19:24 Establishing effective behavior for founders transitioning businesses.

23:53 Former CTO shares experience with large organization.

24:50 Discussing integration of data tools in departments.

29:07 Different cadence for internal and external deployment.

34:09 AI hype leading to financial focus over safety.

35:15 Hope for a stable outcome in the election.

38:19 AI's growth is interesting, with individual focus.

Transcript

David Subar [00:00:00]:

Welcome, everyone, to another Interna fireside chat. We have a bunch of issues to talk about today. We're going to talk about startups and execs and what happens to them when they transition or their company transitions from small to large. We're going to talk about ongoing process improvement in tech organizations, product what we're seeing, what Product Managers and CPOs, how their lives are changing, what things look, what in this world, what things look different for them and the state of play and different methodologies and agile, cybersecurity, that kind of stuff. So I'm going to jump in with what's happening in product, what Product Managers look like, what's changing, and I'm going to jump to Ross, Ross, what do you say?

Ross Webb [00:01:00]:

Well, I'd love to say they look like me, but I guess they look like probably me, more stressed out. What I'm seeing is a lot of CPOs are looking for PM's and product leaders that have got a better and wider business experience than necessarily just an engineering ability. When I say an engineering ability, I'm talking about more, especially in digital Product Managers of working. They tend to work very closely with the engineers and they're looking for more people that have got more, let's say kind of like an MBA background as well as the engineering background, which I have not seen, let's say going back 5, 10 years ago, it was more, hey, how much, you know, how well are you a technical Product Manager? But they are expecting the technical, but they're also expecting the more broader general manager. And my prediction is that technical Product Managers or digital Product Managers or PM's and whatever level stage you are in the ladder are going to move towards becoming more general managers and potentially also start getting more authority invested in them to be able to make more decisions and working closely with finance as well and trying to understand finance and having a better understanding of that as well.

David Subar [00:02:22]:

So there's this thesis of the Product Managers, the CEO of the product, that seems consistent with what you're saying, or is that different?

Ross Webb [00:02:33]:

No, no. What I'm saying is firstly, I don't believe in that at all and I'm not hearing that at all. As opposed to a CEO, the Product Manager is going to become more like a General Manager for the product and they're going to need to understand more just about. So let's say that they're looking to have more resourcing. They're going to need to, instead of doing, let's say, a basic cost-benefit analysis or hey, we spoke to customers and we need this. It's going to be much more. If we're going to be building this feature and let's say we build this, let's say it's an internal product and we build this feature and it'll save us 10,000 person-hours, then say, oh, we can save these to theoretical people to be exactly who are the two people we're going to lose? What is the HR process? How do we start with that? That's an internal example.

Ross Webb [00:03:25]:

Maybe a more external example would be if we are going to be building this if it is going to take us five people, we really need to do a much better cost-benefit analysis and show how it's really going to start impacting the bottom line as opposed to just a more theoretical, hey, we've done a, you know, we've done a RICE prioritization. We can see the reach and the impact and all those kinds of things.

David Subar [00:03:47]:

Got it. Got it. So are we recruiting different people? Are we training people? What do they look like? And I'm going to Jeff, Eddie, Mark, are you seeing the same trend scares you, makes you happy, anyone can jump in.

Mark Goldin [00:04:04]:

I think it's a good trend. Doesn't scare me. I had a CEO who used to divide the necessary attributes into three, and I don't think this is inconsistent, although maybe we'd add a fourth. The three attributes which I always liked were how visionary is that person? You're not being able to see ahead. What are the project management skills? That is just, are you a great organizer, great leader, great management people? And then the third one is presentation skills. Can you articulate what you're doing effectively? And that's kind of what we looked for. You could potentially add to that a fourth, and that is perhaps more business skills, which would maybe round out the other three.

Eddie Shek [00:04:44]:

Yeah, I think that's a good thing. One thing I do see happening more in relation to that is I'm seeing more divergence between product management and product ownership for a long time. A lot of smaller companies' outcomes say, too, they're really completely different jobs. I'm seeing more and more company actually have more definition around what's a Product Owner, what's a Product Manager. And with Product Owner, more and more looks like a lead engineer than ever, from just generating their own prototypes, generating code from markups and Product Managers, to Ross point, looking more like a GM.

Mark Goldin [00:05:29]:

So would you say this is interesting to me, Eddie, I've also sort of wrestled with this a little bit. We just said the Product Owner is more focused on the team, more focused Internally, team velocity, making sure the team has what it needs to be effective, producing requirements, stories, and so on. And, the Product Manager is maybe more outward-looking, more looking to the market, to the outside world, to the customers. Would you divide it like that or not necessarily?

Ross Webb [00:05:52]:

I would add an additional thing to the mix. This, sorry, Eddie, a Product Ops person that as a job title is becoming much more popular. You know what, I interrupted you there, Eddie, so why don't you go for it?

Eddie Shek [00:06:11]:

Can you elaborate on the product Ops role?

Ross Webb [00:06:16]:

Sure. So Mark, you spoke a little bit about kind of a product as someone's doing, if someone's writing the stories. And I'm moving I think a lot of organizations that I'm seeing are moving away from Product Owners and they've got more Product Managers and starting to have more and more Product Ops people. And what Product Ops are really focusing on is, you know, the tooling basically enabling the Product Managers to be successful, whether it's what can they take out of their way so that they can focus on the more strategic and business orientated things that they should be doing, like talking to more customers, understanding exactly what the customer needs are getting, you know, finding proper, proper business requirements. And a lot of Product Ops people are looking at kind of, you know, let's say the tooling, taking whatever requirements are putting them into a roadmap, not changing, not writing the roadmap, but essentially enabling Product Managers to do that. And I've seen that role growing, especially in Europe in the last few months, growing at a level rate.

David Subar [00:07:18]:

Yeah, I've been seeing that a lot too. And I think it's critical. If you buy the lean startup methodology, if you buy you putting stuff on the roadmap, there's a bunch of bets. You want to get them out there as quickly as possible. You want to instrument, you want to see how you do on the bets, anything you can do to grease the wheel there, to expedite that process, uses capital more efficiently, get product market fit faster. And Product Ops is all about that. It's the DevOps equivalent to a product. And I think that we're early in tooling and understanding what all that means, but I think we're the trendline is positive.

Mark Goldin [00:07:58]:

Agree, Jeff. Thanks.

Jeff Yoak [00:08:02]:

So Product Owner is something that's often directly linked into our SDLC, our methodology. Changing the Product Owner. The way you're describing, how does that person fit into their role, say, in a Scrum team, for instance, or is it somebody else with a different title that's now playing the traditional Scrum.

Ross Webb [00:08:23]:

Yeah. My view on that is I believe the Product Owner role is a Scrum term and it shouldn't really exist outside of Scrum. And I'm not clear that Scrum really should exist in all organizations or the way that it's done. To me, Scrum is like communism. Its words expressed that it should work this way, but it never quite works out. But all that aside, I'm seeing that Product Owner role disappearing more and more, and it's becoming more Product Managers unless they're very, very Scrum focused. And it's very highly engineered. We're not talking to customers.

Ross Webb [00:09:06]:

It's internal, in which case that role seems to work. I see the Product Owner role gradually disappearing over time.

David Subar [00:09:13]:

So that's a good transition. I agree with Ross. Product Owner is a Scrum or XP side effect. I don't think it's bad. And so I'll disagree with Ross on that. Well, it is like communism is everyone's a little bit different, but I think that's the way it's meant to be. But let's talk.

David Subar [00:09:36]:

Let's use that to have a jumping off point about methodologies and what we're seeing in methodologies. Scrum, XP, Kanban, SaFe. Are things changing there? Are they staying the same? Let's start with question a. I've got a question I gotta follow-up. Who wants to jump on that?

Mark Goldin [00:10:02]:

All right, I'll jump in. I actually don't think things are changing. I'm curious what the others experience. I think for the last number of years you're going to see, you've seen all of the above at play in organizations. I think there are a lot of organizations practicing some form of Scrum. I agree with Ross, by the way. They're all a little bit different. You kind of modify it to, you know, to meet the needs of the organization.

Mark Goldin [00:10:23]:

There are some that probably do exactly from the textbook Scrum or however their consultant taught them. But most people kind of find an adaptation that works for the organization. You do see a lot of Kanban too. You see both of them at work. A safe on the other hand, which I thought at first I thought it was going to be really big and take over. Then I thought it was going to die. And then I thought laterally that it was probably just going to survive in its current form, which I think it has. 

Mark Goldin [00:10:52]:

It's still out there. You still hear about people using it and adopting it. It's by no means dead. I it's a live methodology, but it never did become like the big wave that I think its founders thought it would be. That's my experience. What do the others think?

Eddie Shek [00:11:10]:

It turns out we're very pragmatic view of process. I definitely don't think going by the book is the right approach for any organization. And you and I see and in a lot of my team, depending on the nature of the team, have a mix of Scrum or combined and not like have the same process for all the teams. Just depends on the kind of maturity of the product. Maturity of the team people is it's trying to round path square hole.

Mark Goldin [00:11:47]:

Do you think it's. I would say it's not so much about the people, although it is partly about the people. Sometimes people come with strong opinions about how things should done, but I also think it's very much about the needs of the product and the way you plan to release the product. I think that that seems to dictate the type of methodology that you would adopt. Some things just lend themselves well towards Kanban where it's just more of a continual release cycle and some things that are better defined maybe are a better fit for Scrum.

David Subar [00:12:17]:

So I think that's true.

Eddie Shek [00:12:19]:

A lot of organizations that especially like enterprise software space where it's not complete SaaS where they have big contracts, they have committed deliverable a lot of integration. Neither Kanban nor Scrum is necessarily a complete solution. Right. You also have to couple that with long-term resource planning and all that good stuff. Then let's just try to run as fast as we can. And that's lost on a lot of organizations.

Mark Goldin [00:12:51]:

So let me ask you guys, is Waterfall dead?

David Subar [00:12:54]:

It better be. Well, it better be almost never. Well, I'm going to take two contrary opinions. Contrary opinion. One is waterfall should be dead almost everywhere. But there's some places where the cost of discovery of requirements is small and the cost of getting wrong is high and that's the only way you can do it. And that might be government contracting and maybe there's some other case, but generally it should be dead. Now here's where I'm going to disagree with all the rest of you for a moment about methodology.I argue there's a good time to be orthodox about methodology when you're trying to set a cultural bit at a company.

David Subar [00:13:42]:

We release quickly right now where everyone's scattershot about what they're doing and we, everyone say they're doing methodology A but in fact, we're doing no methodology and it's inefficient. I think being orthodox and please argue with me on one of the methodologies that seem appropriate and forcing everyone into it to set the bit of here's how we work can be a good thing so long as part of that methodology is measuring how well it works and modifying.

Mark Goldin [00:14:20]:

I like that and I do agree. I think there are times where you just need to do that if you have a certain amount of chaos and you don't have good agreement on how things should done and you have teams that aren't working well in unison or on lockstep because each one wants to do their own thing. Sometimes the leader just has to come in and say, you know what, we're all going to do the do this the same way and you've got to get on board and like you say, we'll measure the results and we'll see how we're doing and see how it's working. I think there is a time and a place for that as well. Yes.

Ross Webb [00:14:50]:

So I think it really depends what you can influence. You know, I remember working at an organization where adding all process, Scrum masters, etcetera, it was just really slowing us down, but I didn't really have the influence to change it in a different way. So all I did was decide I'm not actually going to work with Scrum masters or I work with a specific process that the organization needed to do because I needed to launch something really quickly and I couldn't really influence that to change it. I needed to just say, you know what, I'll be my own Scrum master. I'll do my own process. I'll communicate it with my team that I can influence, but I couldn't influence much larger teams. Talking about are we Scrum agile or whatever. It was just not a problem that was a high priority enough or that I could solve to take enough time to do that, which is a long winded way of saying it just, it really depends what you can influence.

David Subar [00:15:47]:

So you decide you made a business, you made a business case is launching this product or this feature was more important right now than the overall health of the organization. I'm not arguing that was a bad choice. You made that or that's all you could do. So you focused on that, got the win there, and worried about the rest another day.

Ross Webb [00:16:13]:

It was almost. Yes, it was almost a waterfall decision. I had to, by September of that year, get an app in the app store, contractually, because we had a contract with Comcast and 260,000 employees, whatever, had to have access to that app. And I knew that if we spent time debating, discussing, trying to speed making the boat go faster, that actually would have slowed the boat down. And we just needed to adopt a. Basically a waterfall methodology divided into two weeks sprints, as they called them. That was it.

David Subar [00:16:41]:

So you chose expediency over process. That's fine, Eddie.

Eddie Shek [00:16:46]:

Because that's very common where people somehow because some exaggerated, got the agile religion of me through Scrum and a lot of company, essentially what they end up doing is waterfall, two-week, whatever. They picked me. The period, the two-week reporting never released anything. It's just this for sure. Back to, what you thought was a contentious opinion. I think we all agree having a sub-optimal process to start, to get people used to discipline about how they do things is rather no process. But until people have that discipline to actually follow a barebone process, then we can start improvise and adapt to what's really appropriate to the organization and the need of the team.

David Subar [00:17:41]:

Okay, so let's say we're hitting success. We have a company, maybe it was a small company is starting to scale, or some growth, equity firm or PE firm bought our company. That's a platform. They're tucking in other companies into it. Now we get a bunch of executives, CTOs, Chief Product Officers, let's talk about who have experience at scale in, and suddenly the company's successful or growing, or are scaling at that point, or there are tuck-ins. And so now they've got five other products they never had before. You have to learn what to live with it.

David Subar [00:18:20]:

How well does this work out? And then what do we do to increase the chance of success? The first question was rhetorical.

Ross Webb [00:18:29]:

Okay, Dave, training, right?

David Subar [00:18:32]:

Yes. Okay.

Ross Webb [00:18:34]:

I mean, that just seems like the logical first step, but I feel like training because they don't have the communication to be able to talk to the different, let's say, business units or new units that have come on board. You know, they don't talk product or engineering. I think there's a lot of training that would need to go into that because they've obviously got a lot of domain knowledge and subject matter, expert knowledge. Um, so training, definitely a lot of.

David Subar [00:19:01]:

So what kind of training? How do you get it? Because I'm gonna. I'm gonna argue for something other than training, but I'll let you. I'll let you. Are you training?

Ross Webb [00:19:09]:

I don't think training is the full answer. You just said, what do we do first?

David Subar [00:19:12]:

Yeah.

Ross Webb [00:19:13]:

So to me, the question what do we do first? Is training.

David Subar [00:19:16]:

How do you train? What do you train, Mark?

Ross Webb [00:19:22]:

I'll let someone.

Eddie Shek [00:19:24]:

But establishing what's the right kind of behavior that's effective for a different kind of scale for these model founders. Right. What's effective for a smaller company is not necessarily effective for a company that is looking to scale rather than survival, for example, for long-term and a lot of time. What I see, what lacks in a small organization is you have a team that's smaller. Wherever communication visually just comes from, people knowing each other and opaque organization. You have to be very disciplined about creating visibility and not just go talk to your special projects guy if you have a problem and no one else knows about it. Right. I mean, I think, is it training? Is it one establishing right behavior and having someone help the board or someone helping the people making the transition on breaking the bad habit, I think that's the big challenge.

David Subar [00:20:29]:

So, Mark, you've done this on both the buyer and the one that was scaling. Talk about your experience a bit.

Mark Goldin [00:20:40]:

Let's start from the buyer's perspective first. If you have a large distributed organization and consists of many teams, maybe in different parts of the world, different locations, and some may have come from different companies like we discussed. Some may have come through acquisitions, some have come through organic growth. The first thing you got to do the leader, you've got to have a very good understanding of your inventory. What have you got? You've got to know your teams, their capabilities, their leaders. You could have a very good sense of that. What you don't want to do is just immediately impose a top-down methodology on everybody. Now, a lot of people do that. Granted, that is extremely common.

Mark Goldin [00:21:14]:

That's often the SOP and many companies. Here's our methodology. Just follow it. Putting that to one side, because I'm not a believer, I would do it differently. First, understand what you have in the strengths of weaknesses and how you can optimize that team. If you immediately try and make people do things your way, you're going to have a lot of fallout. You're going to lose a lot of people.

Mark Goldin [00:21:36]:

In some cases you're going to lose very good people before you even know that you have them. You've got to understand what you've got, the value of the personalities, the value of what they're doing, how they function as a team. For example, let's say you have a team and they are just fantastically productive and they do what they need to do and they just churn stuff out. The quality is good and they follow, let's say they follow Kanban. I'm thinking of a real world example. The rest of the organization is not doing Kanban. Very tempted to say, oh, we don't do Kanban here. We do sprint, we do sprinting. And everybody's on the same cycle.

Mark Goldin [00:22:06]:

We all have our same calendars, we all have our ceremonies at the same time. I just like how that works. That may not make the most sense to try and impose that top down. You're probably really disappoint the team who think they are excelling. They're moving faster and they're doing things in a way that works for them. So that's like, for me that's number one, is to really understand what you have and not try and impose the same structure everywhere. Now on the other hand, if you find chaos, you find a lot of problems. You find people who maybe aren't so good and things aren't working, then you go a different way.

Mark Goldin [00:22:40]:

Then you say, you know what, we're going to structure you. You're going to do things the XYZ way because we know that works for us.

David Subar [00:22:48]:

So is it a alignment, independence or design and incentives?

Mark Goldin [00:22:57]:

Find a way to marry those two competing. There are two competing initiatives. One is distributed organizations. The teams often really value their ability to make local decisions and to have as much autonomy as possible. The organization tends to not like that unless they're like, you know, new wave, super advanced. They tend to like conformity, they like uniformity, they like having a common goal. So you, you have to find the right balance. And there's no magic answer for that.

Mark Goldin [00:23:24]:

I can't tell you if it should be 60 40 or 1000. I don't know. You have to figure it out, but you have to balance those two things. Centralization versus autonomy. It's not easy, but that's why they pay the CTO the big bucks. That's why we do what we do.

David Subar [00:23:40]:

Great, great. I think a lot of it's also incentive structures. What are you trying to accomplish as a business? How do you align around that? And thats going to pull a lot of these answers through.

Mark Goldin [00:23:53]:

Yeah, that gives you, that certainly informs how you, how you make those decisions. I was once on the other side. I was acquired and I was a CTO of a company with a decent size, but I got acquired by much larger organization. And, you know, it was fascinating to me to learn about really large organizations and how that works. And I spent a couple of years doing that and traveled to headquarters a lot, understood the difference between different levels of executives and what executive perks look like. Eventually I got tired of it, and I didn't like being six levels removed away from ultimate decision making. And it just didn't work for me. I really wanted to be at the table, as they say, and I wasn't going to be at the table, at least not for many, many years. And that just didn't suit me.

Mark Goldin [00:24:41]:

I'm not sure there's anything that organization could have done to keep me on board, honestly. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

David Subar [00:24:50]:

I promise not to talk about this next subject, but I'm compelled to talk about it anyway because we're about process and or design and such, with the tooling around data and GenAI and such, changing the speed at which models can be developed, therefore changing org structures, not having to build tooling. You can lease it and so you can, you can license it and such are these departments, independent of what is traditionally engineering and product management, or they integrated in. Now, when I say these departments, I mean the folks that are, that are of building, building and using GenAI models. The ones that are using it as part of their product suite, I'm adding some GenAI model to my product suite. So if my product suite is some software that was developed by the engineers and the Product Managers, UX people, QA, and now there's a thing that gets better in it, maybe helps doing some pattern matching or things like that, but it's not the same product release cycle, right? Because we're releasing models and we're refining models at a different frequency, a different rate than our product release cycle. Two departments, one department.

David Subar [00:26:20]:

Do they operate differently? Do they operate the same does this change our conversation about process or they're two different apartments, they have independent process, we don't care.

Mark Goldin [00:26:32]:

I take a stab at it if you like. I don't think, GenAI I should change your process or your structure. It should probably fall into the structure that's already in place. I have a preference. My preference is a platform team and product teams, and the platform team should own centralized functions that are reused by the products. If you have that kind of a structure, I think, GenAI, I should fall under that and then it's consumed by the product teams. Now of course that's not everybody's preference and not all companies work that way. So it kind of depends.

Ross Webb [00:27:02]:

Yeah, I don't understand the question because I don't understand what GenAI is. I sit on a board of a startup that has implemented AI in it and essentially it's, the Product Manager owns what that is. And it was originally OpenAI and then it became clawed with their LLM. So it essentially became a question of almost creating a wrapper around an LLM. And then that talks to Mark's point that you could centralize which LLM is coming and which is going to be used for it. I still don't understand what GenAI is and I don't say that to be sarcastic or silly. I literally, I feel like when a lot of people are talking about machine learning or AI, they're talking a lot about like a machine learning input which, you know, that would potentially be owned by a data team or data process team. Again, not trying to be sarcastic, just don't understand exactly how that would fit into that organization.

David Subar [00:27:57]:

So I think that's fair. I'll be more specific, and I'm just going to agree with you, is for most of the cases of GenAI that I'm talking about, it's really about clustering and pattern magic, what goes with what, and that it actually happens to be an LLM or GenAI or VAE or something like that. I would argue, and I think this supports your case, Ross, is don't care, don't know, don't care. It's a, it's a platform out there I probably like. Unless I'm building that platform.

Ross Webb [00:28:34]:

Yeah, probably. Unless the, that's your primary, you know, work what you need. Similar to going back a couple of years ago, creating machine learning models for data, data chains, the data cleaning where that came in. And at the time I remember also going through a lot of these kind of conversations like who owns the machine learning? And that goes back to Mark's point? Well if it's a centralized function that everybody's going to end up using because it's the Azure ML, whatever it is, then I think it really talks to what Mark said.

Eddie Shek [00:29:07]:

One was depends on whether these GenAI thing, are they part of the product that the company is selling or is it just some internal tools that they use? Right. Just like technology deployed for product and technology deployed for IT. Internal use have different cadence on how they're deployed. Right. Obviously just like most any product or any, like any SaaS product. Right. Not just because you make a change doesn't mean just throw it out there. You could do CI and it could be daily hourly update or it could be for big enterprise supply chain software type things you release after everybody's trained.

So it's the same cadence like to Mark's point that the company does having new model training that should follow the same cadence template. Change management for internal use then obviously that's less than just the impact scroll. Impact is different but I think it probably just mean if that process is very similar, whether GenAI or just old school, you have your people because building excel macros to help do their job and then you can productize it. Very much the same process of taking experimental ends and then prioritize it. Maintain that.

David Subar [00:30:24]:

Okay, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do a lightning round on some macro trends. I'm gonna, I'm gonna list a couple macro trends and I'm gonna give you my opinion, good, bad or otherwise. And I'm gonna ask you guys to comment on the same macro trends and you guys can throw some in as well. So here's the macro trends. The November election, GenAI and interest rates. Or, and I'll define GenAI as the general hype that Ross can't define November election. I'm saying bad because people aren't going to want to make a lot of changes.

David Subar [00:31:01]:

It's going to compel less investment in the industry for the top. That's November election. Interest rates bad and good because no one knows what's happening. And interest rates going down will compel more interest rates. We'll get to do more fun stuff. And GenAI good bad than good, which is good because we're doing some stuff. Bad because it's going to get overhyped and good. Eventually be good.

David Subar [00:31:33]:

Eventually it'll actually do useful stuff. Those are my three calls. Jeff, you want to go next?

Jeff Yoak [00:31:43]:

Sure. I have, other than a reticence to engage with new people and new projects. I haven't seen too much that seems like it might be related to either interest rates or the November election, but it's a great explanation for the change in the way people are behaving. I don't see a lot of it. I'm not receiving it as an explicit reason for making decisions or doing things so much as that feels like a good explanation of why everyone steals sort of frozen at this particular moment. As far as the GenAI, I'm starting to see more and more success.

Jeff Yoak  [00:32:21]:

I was going to jump in and.

Jeff Yoak [00:32:23]:

The timing was just ever right. And that Eddie said much. Same thing I'm seeing in a couple different ways. One is very low key, very locally owned. Working on some existing product company generates tens or hundreds of thousands of web pages and automatically generates its meta information, such as keywords and descriptions through the APIs. And then it doesn't, you know, it doesn't have to be owned by a separate group. It can just be a tool that's being used. And then there's people who are trying to train models and do things like that at a bigger level.

Jeff Yoak [00:33:00]:

I have not seen a lot of people succeed with that yet. They will eventually. But I think a lot of people are trying to work on that in very problem-specific domains where the problem is theoretical in general. So I'm too, I too worry about it being overhyped. I remember when whatever company you're doing, you're also doing social, or when I don't have a company, you're doing also doing blogging. And I feel like that's where AI has become again for the third time for AI. So I think we're in that period of overhype, and I don't know personally where the long-term solid stuff will come. But I think I agree with you.

Mark Goldin [00:33:38]:

Let me start with GenAI. I, because that's the last one Jeff touched on. I think it's. Look, it's been a fascinating thing to watch. It's growing leaps or balance. It's getting a tremendous amount of adoption. All the developers I know are utilizing it to improve their code. I know people who are non-engineers who use it too for document synthesis and document creation and analysis and summarization, and everybody wants to know more about it and find better and better ways to use it. I'm a little concerned at the arms race nature of the thing.

Mark Goldin [00:34:09]:

There's a huge amount of money chasing it almost to the exclusion of everything else. Similar to what we were saying earlier, this AI has become a really big cash praise. If you're not doing AI, an AI could apply to things which really aren't AI, you're not going to get any investment. So it's crazy. It's a real bandwagon mentality going on here, which we've seen before with other hype trends that I can't remember anymore, but it's similar to what we've seen in the past, but even bigger. And with all of that, we've definitely taken our eye off of safety, which is very concerning in a way which I think is very, very cynical and very troubling. So that's my thought in GenAI. I haven't really changed my P(doom) number.

Mark Goldin [00:34:51]:

I don't think it's going to end the world. But all the same, I think we should be cautious. The election is similarly frightening to me. I just see increased polarization. I agree with David. There's a certain amount of stalling that has taken place. People aren't going to embark on very large financial projects, M and A significant new investments until after the election, most likely.

Mark Goldin [00:35:15]:

And I hope at that point things start to stabilize. But honestly, depends how it goes, depends who wins and depends on what follows right after the election is decided. The number one thing I hope for is that there's a clear outcome to that election, that it is clearly decided and we don't fall into the same mess that we fell into last time. The third thing on interest rates, I have no predictions there, but I think it's a problem. It's stalling. It's certainly impacted, obviously impacted the economy and also the rest of some decision-making. And so be nice to see things return to what's been a bit more of a historical normal trick.

David Subar [00:36:01]:

Eddie.

Eddie Shek [00:36:04]:

AI, good relative to previous hype technology like blockchain or crystal, because it's actually real. It's not a pure technology looking for a problem. I think we actually came down from the peak of hype. So now actually for the hype is actually reasonable. Will people better understand what possible one of the pitfalls so good in general, from my perspective, election stay neutral in the sense that it doesn't matter who wins. The system so broken, the government's not going to get anything done. The US political system works based on the lawmakers actually have people's best interest in mind and willing to collaborate. That does it.

Eddie Shek [00:37:03]:

That's not, that's already broken. So whoever doesn't matter who wins, it's already too broken, doesn't matter. Interest rate, I don't have a strong opinion on that. I don't understand how Federal Reserve works well enough to know what's going to happen.

David Subar [00:37:22]:

Ross, you get to close it out.

Ross Webb [00:37:26]:

Sure. One interesting thing. Well, as far as the elections in November go, we've got elections in July 4. So for your Independence Day, the UK is having an election and there have been elections all over Europe in the last few weeks, which have been really, really interesting. It's a fantastic. Well, it's been fantastically interesting, I should say, to see how Europe has changed in the last, in the last few weeks, which is really, really interesting. So I don't have a view on the November elections. I just hope, like Eddie said. I think Mark said that whatever the result is, it's a clear result.

Ross Webb [00:38:04]:

Things don't devolve. But, yeah, it's a difficult one. I don't want to say anything negative. Let me move on from the elections, US interest rates. I don't have a viewpoint on AI.

Ross Webb [00:38:19]:

I think it's great. You know, I remember seeing an interview and someone was saying, you know, unlike, let's say, the internet from, let's say, from maybe 1995 plus, you know, the net, the internet is interesting because as a grew, it had a network effect, whereas AI is more targeted at individuals using it potentially. I'm not saying there isn't a network effect of more and more people are using these tools, but it's really interesting. It was a really interesting lens to look at the growth of AI and through that lens, I think it's really early days, but I'm really enjoying it. I'm finding lots of use cases to really improve my work in product, various other projects that I'm doing. 

Ross Webb [00:39:03]:

Really speeding things up, really being able to scale things from what I'm doing. So super, super excited about it. I don't think it's overhyped. I think. I think it's got a long way to go, and I'm super excited about that.

Mark Goldin [00:39:18]:

What's your p doing, Russ?

Ross Webb [00:39:21]:

My what?

Mark Goldin [00:39:22]:

Probability of the world ending through an AI singularity from zero to 1000?

Ross Webb [00:39:29]:

Zero.

David Subar [00:39:31]:

I think there's not a zero.

Eddie Shek [00:39:35]:

I'm the passivist. I'm still on zero.

David Subar [00:39:37]:

I think I'm zero. I think it doesn't matter, because if the world's gonna end because of AI, we won't know anyway. So there you go.

Ross Webb [00:39:49]:

They gotta keep the. They're gonna keep the computers running long enough for that to happen. I mean, without having to go out and go to a data center and reboot, things like that. I don't see.

Mark Goldin [00:39:58]:

There are many other things that could end the world first. Anyway, who says it's going to be AI?

David Subar [00:40:05]:

Well, thank you, everybody.

Mark Goldin [00:40:08]:

Thank you, everybody.