40: The Human Side of AI (w/ Gabe Caldwell)

Foreign. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Name and creative show. Today’s guest lives at the intersection of cutting edge tech AI.

We’ve all heard of it, but also deep human connections which we’re going to dive into. Gabe Caldwell is the co founder of Plainsight Ventures, a company building smarter software tools that make work and life a little more intuitive and apparently a lot more fun. From digital estate planning to networking tools that actually fuel Gabe and his teams are tackling overlooked problems with creativity and clarity.

He’s also a storyteller, an iron man and a proud human, which that’s what it says on your LinkedIn. I figured I’d include that, especially with the conversation we’re going to have. Who knows if you’re talking to humans anymore, but I can assure you Gabe is human because we first connected through NPI Networking group that I’m vice president of, which he’s a regular sub now at and it’s always good to see you there.

We actually saw each other this morning there and it also turns out we both went to grad school in Indiana. How cool is that? He went to University of Indianapolis. I chose Indiana University.

So close. But here we are. Gabe’s focus lately is a product called Quinn, which I’m sure we’ll talk quite a bit about and that helps people build real rapport and send gestures that actually mean something for follow ups and things like that.

We’re going to get into that. So Gabe, thanks for coming on the show, really appreciate your time. I know you’re a busy man.

Josh, incredible setup there. Happy to be here. I do what I can.

I’m trying to do, do better about that and let people know what they’re getting into. But you know, you, you weren’t always in the tech AI space and I actually wanted to start with. When we talked in our last meeting, you told me a story about how you were deep in the waste management realm.

Can you start there? Yeah, yeah, happy to. So grew up just outside of Indianapolis and grew up in a family business. I was third generation of a business called CGS Services.

And yeah, we were, we owned a landfill. We picked up curbside trash and recycle for residences and businesses around kind of east central Indiana. That business ended up growing into a recycling arm too.

So we handled recycling whether it was aluminum or cardboard or paper called Com Eagle. And then we also had a gravel pit or a mining company. So we dug up gravel, we sorted it, we sold it, which then led into some other businesses that were ancillary over time we had A asphalt business.

We took that gravel that we had and, and that’s a byproduct that goes into producing asphalt for the roads. So we built that company up. We had a trucking fleet, also had a porta pot business, a paper shredding business.

And we also were farmers on the side too. Farming farmland in Indiana, which is soybean and corn are the two main crops. And then we had a pretty nice sized cattle farm that we developed a business around working with food packaging services where we took different types of food and worked them together to feed the cattle that had similar nutrition as corn.

That helped cut our costs and built a nice herd up around that. So a lot of, a lot of the environmental world is in my past. And we built that business up and to about 200 employees and served about 40,000 customers around Indiana.

It was, did that with my, my dad and my brother and some other family members and we sold that business to waste management in 2016. And an interesting thing we can talk about kind of what I do today in tech is when we sold that business, Waste Management, you know, gave us a report card once the deal is done. It was good for us, good for them.

And one thing that we got a bad grade on, probably a D was our use of technology. They were going to input their technology to systematize the processes of the business and increase margins around 12 to 15%. So as a business owner, although we were doing great and made great profit, we didn’t have a software product off the shelf and we didn’t know how to develop something.

And that was definitely something I learned as a business owner to be much more open minded to technology. At that point I could barely send an email, as I like to joke. But then I’ve been on a mission for the next, the past nine or ten years, building software, adopting technology, working with the best of the best in the world to really understand this and help other business owners with my testimony so that they can run more profitable businesses.

Man, I appreciate you connecting it with what you’re doing now. That’s, it’s almost ideal and it almost sounds like too good to be true as far as a cliche on like you were in this industry which is almost like opposite of tech. Like you think of things that are opposite and that is pretty, pretty on the other end of the spectrum.

You couldn’t send an email now you’re pretty good at that and now you’re having robots do it as well. But I guess I should have maybe phrased it like what didn’t you do with that, with that company that you worked with? That’s, that’s unreal. When we had talked, I didn’t even realize the extent of the, the operation that you guys had.

And I would imagine so number one also or number two is that how special it was that you were able to work with your family on things. So, so I know now you are not working with your family, so you’ve now gotten like two worlds and then doubled that by working with family in one realm and now you’re not working with family in another realm. So that’s neat too.

Like you have this really, really wide range of experience. My question is, I guess what were, what are some of the tangible takeaways that you have been able to apply from the farming or you know, being in like the, the, the trash realm has always fascinated me and, and it’s so important. Everybody has waste in some way and everybody eats regarding farming and vegetables and, and all that.

So I’m just curious how the, you know, maybe some of the things that you had learned and done carry over to what you’re doing today and maybe inform your decisions or how you utilize that in a creative capacity. I don’t know. Can you expand on that? Yeah, happy to.

I mean we, growing up, I was very blessed to be around some business minded folks and kind of lots of different industries. One of the great things about waste and recycling is everyone’s your customer, right? We, we all generate waste, we all generate recycling. So we got to serve a lot of different businesses.

Whether it was everything from manufacturing facilities to people building residential or commercial buildings because they generated waste to also everything down to your white collar law office and everything in between. So in order to kind of work with those customers, we needed to understand their business. So I was getting a very high level education of these different industries, understanding their use cases, what made them tick, what they cared about.

And I didn’t even under know that that was so valuable. So now when I think about building technologies we do here in our venture studio, I have a really good understanding of trends around process systems, use cases or lack thereof and also those pain points. So we were providing a service of picking up your trash or recycling and supplying some other things.

But I was actually gleaning some information around process that would better serve me down the road. So as we within Plain Sight ventures as an incubator are thinking about problems for specific industries, I’m able to use those learnings to come back and say what are their biggest headaches? What’s that pain point, it’s causing people to spend a lot of time to inform ideas that then we can go off to the market and verify those ideas and then build a solution around that. Wow.
Okay. Yeah, makes. Makes complete sense.

And it is, is interesting when you’re thinking about being in a. An industry where literally everybody could be your customer. Everybody’s got trash.

So that’s pretty wild in, in a way though, you know, worldwide, it’s hard because, you know, you can only, you know, you can’t. I mean technically, I guess if you got big enough, you’d have boats and things like that that could go overseas. But in general, everybody in that region is your customer, which is one wild.

40,000 customers. It’s pretty crazy. That’s.

That’s hard to wrap your head around. Even 200 people managing that, that’s. That’s impressive.

So now you’re here at Plain Sight Ventures. How. What was the.

How did you bridge the gap? What was that transition like? Did you just jump from one industry to the next or did you take some time off? Did you find yourself? What was that like? Yeah, yeah, Good question. So after we sold the business in 2016, I took a little bit of time off. I was trying to determine what I wanted to do next.

I had a pretty burning passion of my testimony of kind of boy we could have done things a bit better with the technology aspect that was ringing in my ears and I wanted to increase my acumen there. Also saw a potential building a nice sized business there as well. What kind of subscription is a service? And so I basically just reached out to my network here of different folks telling them what I was looking for.

And my still now business partner reached out in about five minutes and said, I’ve got this small software business. It’s a product called Web Merge that automates document creation. And it’s just me, we’re doing, doing very well, but I need some help on scaling distribution sales and those type of things and I could really use a partner.

So we partnered up at that point at the end of 2016, and we scaled that business from about a million dollars a year to about $5 million a year in about 18 months. And. And we ended up selling that business to a private equity firm at that point there in 2018.

Wow, that’s great. When you say you reached out to people, was it personal connections, friends or networking groups? Where were you putting yourself out to? Yeah, with the family business. We kind of worked with a lot of different chambers of commerce and associations around the Midwest.

We did business in Chicago and Cincinnati and Louisville and all over Indiana. And I had been president of a couple different chambers of commerce, so had a nice Rolodex of different folks. So that went out to quite a few people, and lots of people that I built trust and relationships with kind of came back and.

And, you know, Jeremy and my business partner still today was the one that. It made the most sense and kind of need met what I was looking for to kind of get into the tech scene. Okay, cool, cool, cool.

And now you. And then after that acquisition, then did you immediately start Plain Sight Ventures? Is that when that was born? No, actually, we had another chapter of the book there. So the private equity group that purchased us brought us onto the team there, and they were buying several other different software products and basically running a typical private equity play where you rebrand everything, pull the products together as more of an upmarket enterprise offering.
So that company is called formstack. It’s still on the market today. And there were five acquisitions of different products.

An online form tool, a survey tool, an E signature tool, data integration tool underneath that allowed the products to kind of integrate into different CRMs and project management tools. And I led our partnership team there and distribution of the product through different consulting firms globally. And we built that company up over the course of about three years, and then we recapitalized that business with another private equity firm in 2021, and at that point, we stepped away and we set u
Plain Sight Ventures.

Okay, cool. Yeah. Yet another chapter.

But all these. You’ve had so many experiences. I mean, you’re not an old dude.

I’m just putting it out there. I mean, I think people would be able to hear from your voice. You’re not.

You’re not. And you’ve had a ton of experience, like acquisitions of companies. You know, that not everybody gets to experience that.

I’ve never quite experienced that. I’ve been like, I’ve just missed it or left an agency right before they got scooped up by what is now Salesforce. Some people may have heard of that one.

But, you know, I. I just. I think that’s. That’s awesome as far as your.

Your experience. And it’s clear that based on what I’ve learned with Plain Sight and. And all these products here, you’ve created and, like, your brand.

Um, personally, I’m picky and I’m, you know, I align very much with, like, your style and what you guys are doing, so it’s very cool. And I want to talk about some of those tools but before that, like maybe you could give one specific example. So we talked about overlooked problems that you guys are trying to solve, right? There’s tons of AI technology out there, There’s a lot of people who are, or even before that, softwares.

So first off, how do you identify an overlooked problem that isn’t already saturated in the market and determine what to work on? And can you give us an example of one of those things that you turned? Amazing. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

So we use a framework in house that a lot of product development companies will use called a jobs to be done framework. And so the initial idea might be something that it’s a pain point that we currently have in house or a partner of ours or someone within our community. So Plain Sight has a global community of different designers, creators, entrepreneurs, whether they’ve done something or they really have a burning desire to do that.

So we share a lot of our ideas and things that we’re working on with our community and they share them back. And we share resources for free back and forth. So any of your listeners that are interested in that, they can follow along with us and we definitely add a lot of value to that brand.

But our framework that we use the jobs to be done and one of our business, our co founders, Brina Fane, is amazing at this and she runs all of our branding. Kind of first identifying the job to be done. So not looking for a toy or something that can do a magic trick out there, but truly taking a look at your process internally and what is the job to be done and clearly stating what that is, then from there is kind of find the struggle.

Why is this painful? Is this taking you a lot of time? Is not getting this job costing you something that you really care about? Then if you can get through those first stages, which believe it or not, a lot of ideas fall flat and don’t make it through those stages, then you’re looking for kind of describing the desired outcome there on that. If this was done even better or quicker, what would this look like? And then at that point then you’re looking kind of like analyzing the c
alternatives, looking at the market out there, doing your market research, talking to different professionals out there to really learn what that is. That takes a lot of time.

You don’t want to skip these steps. And so you can, even if it’s a very manual process, you’re using a spreadsheet or you’re doing this making sure that’s actually being done, because you don’t want to build something that’s Idealistic over here that yeah, I should do that, but I’m not. We call that painkiller versus vitamin.

People will pay money for help with a toothache that they can’t. It doesn’t allow them to sleep at night. But if it’s a vitamin, you know, they’ll stop taking those after a while if they can’t really see an outcome or it’s something they really care about.

And then the last two steps there is kind of segmenting the job not by demographics, but actually what the job’s being that’s being done and who’s doing it and then kind of design the solution to be hired. And if you can make it through all of those steps and clearly state those things out, then you can bring that value prop discussion to the market and talk to different professionals and say is this true? Is this painful? If something like this existed and it was looked like this, would you u
it? Why would you use it? How would it make your life better? And spending a lot more time on the interview process of these different professionals to determine that is something that is a burning pain point that keeps them up at night and they are have been trying to solve it, they can’t find a solution. Once we get to that point, we know that we’re really onto something.

So from a framework perspective that’s kind of what we use and a lot of other professionals use to give you an actual story. So the best one here is our main focus right now is a project you talked about called Quinn. It’s a virtual AI assistant that helps salespeople on the go automate some of their admin process, whether it’s entering data into a CRM, notes, writing follow up emails, sending out availability for calendar invitations, those type of things that salespeople hate to do after a l
day of meetings.

You know, Quinn could be that almost like human assistant that you could have do for you. And Quinn would have. Quinn has access to those different tools, CRM, email and calendar.

So effectively you can leave that meeting, talk into your phone and Quinn can take the information, add a contact, an account, an opportunity in your CRM, add a nice digestible rewritten note, create tasks with this with the right reminders and dates in place, or assign those to other folks, draft emails for you that are in your tone and that you can go back and forth similarly to like a ChatGPT or any other other LLMs or share over availability. And then down the road when you’re meeting with a person again, you can ask a question as opposed to Logging into your CRM. Hey, what’s an executive summary of the last time I met with Josh or this client? Provide me a meeting agenda and it can do that in a similar fashion that folks are using ChatGPT today.

So that’s kind of the product there. But what we did before we started building that was ran through the jobs to be done framework of meeting with a lot of people. The problem, salespeople don’t want to do their admin work and it takes 5, 10, 15, sometimes more hours per week.

That’s the pain. And then you’re confirming that pain with the market. You’re looking at alternative solutions which is all manual data entry, manual writing emails, manually sending out calendar invitations and going back and forth to find when people have availability.

It was very clear when we talked with the market and did our research there wasn’t a great solution out there yet. And the market we’re specifically going after is the Salesforce ecosystem. So folks that are using Salesforce and either Gmail or Outlook, our product today is really helping those folks.

So hopefully that helps to kind of set the framework that we use an actual product and how we took it through that framework and alertings to determine if this is something that we wanted to build. And because we have to invest money, capital and time and there’s an opportunity cost that so we want to be very discerning of what we focus on. Sure.

Well, you did a great job. It’s like as if you, you work on this day to day and really care about it, have talked about it a lot. I, I, I do want to like dive into some of the, the tech technical aspects.

But before that I, for us, you know, process is huge and for instance designing a logo, we don’t just jump into Illustrator in the program and start designing. We don’t know what we’re building and so we need to strategize and figure out what, who is the brand, who is this company, what are their goals and get an alignment. And I’m curious on the process that you have with the outreach to the market.

Number one is do you, do you have a system on who to hit up or different buckets of people and then how long is that process usually? I would imagine maybe it differs between products or things like that or how gung ho you are about moving forward with one. But can you talk a little bit about that market research process? Yeah, yeah. Really A lot of the things we do are, are built up from past network.

Right. So we talked about growing up in my family business the past businesses we built working with private equity and the other acquisitions. So we’ve built a pretty nice Rolodex of folks that we’ve added value to, whether it’s been a customer base, partners, et cetera.

That’s kind of a secret sauce for us to reach out to. These folks know that we have high integrity, we’re not here to waste their time and we’re building really amazing tools and products here. So they’re excited to chat with us about what’s, what’s down the pipe, what we’re working on.

So we really have that built in trust with a network here of lots of different role types, whether it’s executive to salespeople to customer success in different industries, since a lot of our products have been an industry agnostic or horizontal. So we’re able to reach out to a warm market that’s part of the Plain Sight Ventures community and do research fairly quickly. It’s.

It never happens quick enough because you, you know, you only have so many hours in the day and we have a small team. But I would say that that needs to take several months and as many conversations as you can fit in there. But to start getting that gut feeling, which is good, and then using the framework as kind of a scoreboard to make sure that everything’s passing those filters.

But I’d say two to three months. Okay, cool. Yeah, quarter year.

You need to give it time, the time that it takes, you know, it’s like marination and understanding before you invest a whole bunch of time that you could waste and just flush down the toilet. All right, don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back after this quick break.

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Thanks for sticking with us. Now back to the conversation. You had mentioned a small team.

What’s. What’s small? I know, I would imagine Jeremy knows development because he built that software merging or file merging. So is he your Main developer or do you have some more developers on the team now? What does your team look like? Yeah, team’s very small.

There’s four of us or five of us. Excuse me. So Jeremy heads up our engineering.

Jason Walkow heads up our design kind of UI UX product. I like Jason. Yes, he’s very talented.

I already like him. And then Brina Fane heads up kind of our branding and, and our marketing aspect. And then my role here is around partnerships, distribution and running our sales arm of our businesses.

Awesome. It’s so amazing what you can do with a dedicated and talented group of five. I mean, isn’t it wild? Like what if you, if you, when people are listening, go to Plain Sight Ventures and check out the website.

You would think this is much bigger than five people. And obviously you talked about the community and some of your collaborators and partners and that’s where the magic happens as far as making your business scale or be bigger than you are because you have resources or teams that are either leaning on your team or utilizing your resources or vice versa. You have multiple products, some of them.

Let’s see. Adio, jive pano, Quinn, sweep, Stop. You guys like one word which, which I, I dig.

Although like the word stop I. It’s interesting how you would like compete for SEO, but that’s a whole nother conversation. But I’m just wondering, you know, how do you prioritize what gets your energy and where your focus is? So obviously Quinn, you’ve identified is hot, but how do you prioritize? Yeah, I mean our expertise is around building product led growth type SaaS tools. So in a way that someone can come to our website, they can sign up for the product for free for a trial.
We invest a ton of time around the onboarding experience to very clearly educate how the tools to be used, the problem, the solution, the outcome, developing a very clean and clear UI there internally as far as how to use the tool and get the outcome and provide a lot of educational tutorials there within the product. So we do a lot of that work up front so that we don’t have to build a big team to support all of this. And that’s from a release standpoint.

So that’s helped us to really scale everything that we have in place place from those products. Not all those products you listed out there are commercialized products. Sometimes we’ll do a, do a sprint and we’ll build a product that’s solving a, a problem that doesn’t necessarily have a monetizable business model around it.

You mentioned Stop. So Stop is a, an email blocker, basically, right? There’s lots of email blockers out there. Arguably they’re not that great.

What we did was stop is we looked at the top 50 different tools that salespeople are using to send out cold outbound emails and grabbed. Each one of those leaves a trace of metadata in the emails that come over. So we train stop on all 50 of those.

So it can determine if this has been an email that someone actually wrote or if it came from a service. And if it comes from a service, we are recognizing that and automatically putting that into the junk folder for you and then and setting that up so it’s just a little bit better than things out in the market. But it’s not something that we ever intend to charge for.

It’s just a value add to our community. And we have thousands of users around the world that love the product. And that’s just a contribution that we built very quickly released.

We used it internally and people can use that product along with a few others that are free for our community. That’s awesome. It, I mean, that in itself is, I feel like a testimonial to maybe your culture, your guys’s mindset, how you’re approaching the market with your brand.

Because you could easily monetize that as just throughout as you were explaining, I was like, I knew about it, but you explained it a little better. Now that I know and slightly like, man, you know, five bucks ahead or, you know, whatever it is, or a dollar a month, something stupid low. But you don’t even do that.

And that would be low hanging fruit. But I, I think that’s a good business decision. So that’s really admirable.

And again, it’s, I think, a clear representation of who you guys are and who you want to be and how you want to be perceived. Not everything has to be mon monetized and sometimes you just give back and like, you know, you’re going against black hats or you know, not necessarily black hats, but people who, people don’t want to have to deal with that I get inundated with. So maybe I need to download that and we can talk about that offline.

Oh boy. So we got Quinn. I want to maybe dive into the AI aspect a little.

You know, it’s obviously moving fast. It’s growing. Like you can’t, I’m sure you specifically cannot have a conversation without someone bringing up AI.

I don’t know if that becomes exhausting or you’re just like super pumped about that. But either way, kind of curious, it’s moving fast. And I was wondering from your perspective being so close to the pulse or closer to the pulse than most, do you see something that’s for sure coming that you know nobody is really thinking about or normal people who aren’t on the pulse are not thinking about where, where do you see it heading? What’s the next big thing in AI? Yeah, I think we’re living in a
amazing time, right? Like how we get about the different, different hinge moments in civilization.

Think about the industrial revolution, right? Like one of the biggest companies back in the day was the buggy whip company because everybody had a buggy and a horse and all those things. And then within less than a decade, buggy whips weren’t bought as much anywhere close and people were driving cars. So that was a big change in life.

And we’re living in an even bigger change right now with AI and it’s early days. You know, everybody uses the term AI but they’re not quite sure what that means. Artificial intelligence might be a stretch.

Augmented imagination maybe a better term to use for that acronym. And I think it does a incredible job on certain things. But you know, it also is air prone for certain jobs.

So they call it hallucinations. Whether you’re trying to write an email or search the web, check your sources, make sure it’s clear. Yeah, you’re asking for a medical remedy, check with your doctor, some things like that.

So I think, you know, the sky’s the limit here as far as this technology is going to take us, it is going to change our lives. It is a tool to be used by a professional. No matter if you are in marketing or you’re in waste services or you’re in high tech, spend your time learning about these tools.

There’s a lot of tools out there that oversell or over promise and under deliver. So verify and then trust. Because there’s a lot of get rich quick schemes going on there that aren’t giving 100% accuracy on the deliverable.

So test those. But what we build here internally, you know, like a Quinn, we’re not going to launch something and unless we’re very close to 100% accuracy there with a lot of safeguards in place. So we feel really good about what we’re building.

But as far as where it’s going from there, your, your guess is as good as mine. I would just look at any industry’s processes, kind of the jobs to be done framework. What’s the job to be done and then what’s my current process? How much time and pain is that? And then can I find a solution to come in and solve that problem? And those folks that are getting clear on the job to be done leveraging AI, whether it’s chat GPT or any of the other LLMs out there, or tools like a Quinn, they’re going to b
moving from a horse and buggy up to an F1 race car and they are going to win.

Folks that aren’t adopting this technology and aren’t don’t have a growth mindset are saying, well, this is how we’ve always done it. They’re going to, there’s going to be consequences and they’re going to be either put out of business or losing business because they won’t be able to keep up with kind of the new way of doing business here. So it’s an exciting time for those that have that growth mindset, that are curious, that are willing to be early adopters and try new things and there’s a
amazing tools out there today and they’re only going to get better.

Yeah. And stronger. And also the use of one tool.

You know, one thing that I love is you can learn so much by how other people use, for instance, Chat GPT and just the different prompts that you can do or the different uses of it that you would have never thought until you see someone go, oh, and then you could actually apply that. Like, oh, I could upload that image and then actually have it analyze that for what I do. You know, like maybe I’m a farmer and I’m trying to look at, you know, ingredients on seeds or I had no idea.
I’m way out of my realm here and I don’t know why I chose that example, but you know what I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s absolutely fascinating. And like there’s no ceiling it seems, I like how you put it that I do think it’s a milestone moment. Yeah.

You had the Industrial revolution, we had like the birth of the Internet and the dot com kind of explosion and, and now we’re super connected. I think social media was kind of another milestone and AI is like a massive one because AI touches all of those things. It touches building cars, it touches social media and the Internet and websites and everything that we could possibly think of or hasn’t yet.

It’s going to be interest integrated and you know, it’s a cautionary tale to, you know, there’s many out there that do not adopt things like this. Like I I tell clients and people I interact with if you, if you aren’t at least trying to utilize AI in some way, even if you’re not a business owner in your life, like you’re, you’re missing out. And if you are a business owner, you are going to fall behind on your competition because there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle.
There’s just nothing. There’s, it’s not going away, so might as well put it to use. And in my, you know, one thing that I’m interested in your perspective on is okay, it’s not going away and there are people who are nervous or scared about it.

Do you have any reservations about, like what is it general intelligence or where, where you know, it learns how to learn and any Runway there, or do you see any negative consequences that, that could be that we need to be careful about? How do we go about that? Yeah, I mean with any tool can be any, any tool since the beginning of time. Right. Could be used for good or for bad.

Right. I could use a hammer to build a building or I could use a hammer to hurt someone. So you could argue that on any tool that was ever created.

Is there a risk for bad things being done with AI? Yes, there absolutely is. And those that are building out there need to be good stewards of doing what they can to one, protect data, two, protect the misuse of those products. I think our government is having hard conversations around that.

I think a lot of the different leaders that are actually building LLMs that ultimately are being used by other creators to build their industry specific products for different jobs are having those tough conversations and are doing what they can. Are we going to have like a judgment day like in Terminator 1 and 2? I hope, I hope not. We all, I think probably saw that movie at scary, but you know, it’s, it’s going to get, it’s going to be an interesting time to live in the next 10, 20, 30 years o
where we’re going to get.

And there’s definitely going to be points where there’s going to need to be more regulation and compliance brought in once we see where this is going and we start seeing some problems being developed. But that’s been the same case since the beginning of time. As things move, we can’t forecast what those are going to be, but when they come up, we need to address those and address those very quick, quickly, especially now and then put safeguards in as we go.

So hopefully we have the right leaders in place that have the stewardship and Integrity in place to take us to the next level with these different tools that are pretty amazing. Yeah, 100%. Yeah.

Like nuclear, you know, we can, we can make wonderful energy from it. We could destroy Earth as we know it. The good stewards is a great way to put it.

Just like development. Black hat versus white hat. Someone doing really good with their code.

Not AI or someone who’s using it to try to hack, you know, what are you doing? You could make more money doing it. White hat, you know, come on. And it’s interesting because you brought up something that I think is, is a difficulty where it’s like, how do we put regulation on something that we don’t fully comprehend, Especially the people who are setting those regulations in place.

I mean, look at like social media and the discussions around that that were like on the public stage or in Congress where the people asking those questions were just absolutely oblivious to how social media even worked at a deep level. And they’re the ones deciding on the laws and regulations that go into place. But with AI, you, you’re talking about who knows how many people really grasp what’s going on and how do you regulate something that you don’t really know where is going? So you, you h
mentioned as you go trying to figure out that regulation, but how do you put regulation ahead of it to try to safeguard in advance, to be proactive? Do you have any thoughts on that specifically? Yeah, it’s a, It’s a tough discussion I’m sure the, the White House and our leaders are having.

Right. There’s, There’s a. There’s.

You can learn more. Yeah, there’s a, there’s a. Yeah, there’s a changing of the guard to a certain degree.

I mean, those rooms with those people making those decisions, they need to either be educated and get up to speed, or they need to be replaced with people that are more informed and closer to kind of the risk or the opportunity at hand. So. And that’s why we live in America.

We have a democracy here. There will be people that have terms that come up and they’ll be, either they’ll get reelected or they won’t. And I think those right people we put in those rooms hopefully to make those decisions.

But that’s, you know, the beautiful kind of system that we have here in place. Indeed. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, let’s all hope for the best on that. We can just exercise our vote and getting out there.

So, yeah, I love it. Obviously we could talk about AI ad nauseam. I wanted to get to a part of Our episode called the Rapid Fire sound effects.

It’s where it’s at. I ask guests, all guests, pretty much the same questions, and I like to see the similarities and the differences because I have a lot of different people on, and so you’re no exception. So the goal is try to be concise.

If you need to expand. All. All good.

But hence the name Rapid Fire. You ready? Let’s do it. All right.

What is your biggest source of inspiration? Biggest source of inspiration? I would say God and Christianity and church. Okay, three. I’ll let it slide because those all go in hand in hand.

So do you get inspiration in regards to the technology you’re building or more like motivation? Is that more the accurate way to put that? Motivation, values, stewardship and guidance. Right on. I promise I didn’t tell you these questions ahead of time, but you seem so prepared.

Cool. One AI tool other than your own that you use almost daily that you love. Oh, we have so many.

I would say, if I’m Honest, I use ChatGPT a lot. Whether it’s writing an email or scheduling or crafting certain things. It’s an amazing tool or just.

It’s the new search engine. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a big one.

That’s. That’s the most common one I use. And that’s interesting you say it’s the new search engine because that’s so true.

Now they’re talking about, like, AI or SEO for AI, which is an interesting thing for, you know, my business to think about. And. Yeah, but we’re opening Pandora’s box there one book that you love.

Maybe it’s something that you. You shaped your, you know, your thoughts about tech or creativity or just maybe. Maybe it’s fiction.

What’s your favorite book? Favorite book I recommend, and I’ve gifted the most, is a book by Carol Dweck, the author called Mindset. And I think it’s critically important for us to read right now to have a growth mindset of adopting new tools and being on the cutting edge of AI. When you mentioned growth mindset earlier in the episode, I was almost positive that you had met read that book.

It’s funny because I just hired a relationship manager on and I had him read Mindset first thing. I feel like it’s. It’s very powerful book.

So we are in very much alignment there. It’s really powerful because it stems from everything personal business, what you name it. Working out, you know, that’s huge.

Like, as an ironman, mindset’s huge. How do you get through? How do you push through. You know, when I was in hockey, doing hockey through high school, we had a trainer, and in those moments of training where I thought, I have no, nothing left.

I can’t do another rep. And then understanding that not only did I have one more rep, I had, like, five more reps. It was all in my mind.

It was not my muscles. And that was enormous. It has rippled across my life.

And that’s just one small example of mindset. But great recommendation. I endorse that as well.

Cool. You’re. You’re winning, by the way.

Just to let you know, two more. One musical artist or album that you can listen to only on repeat for the rest of time. Who or what is it? It’s a tough question.

I know. It’s. It’s fresh on my mind right now because I just went to the concert a couple weeks ago, but Rufus De Soul.

Oh, really? I just discovered them, and I was really impressed. Thanks for reminding me. Cool, cool, cool, cool.

Solid stuff. Where’d you see him? The Tampa Amphitheater. Oh, was it.

Was it really good live? Yeah. Incredible show. Definitely recommend it.

Okay, cool, cool, cool. Last one. How do you define success? I define success by living your authentic life, determining your gifts, talents that were unique to you and deploying those in an act of service to the world.

It seems like these were rehearsed. I promise. I didn’t send you these did I? Did not.

Yeah, but it’s clear. You have. You know it.

How do I frame this? You have thought through the. These bigger questions to align yourself in what you’re doing. It’s very clear.

I mean that now. Now talking to you in this manner that has been established. So, yeah, I. I appreciate that.

Not everybody. You know, sometimes these are like, oh, my gosh. I’ve never thought about how I define success.

It’s. It’s very clear in your mind. So that’s.

That’s really cool. You definitely won. Rapid Fire.

Congratulations. Appreciate it. Oh, yeah.

I appreciate your time. We’re going to do just a couple closing just to kind of like tie a bow on this. Where do you see Plain Sight Ventures five, ten years from now? Are you going to get scooped up by venture capital, or are you sticking with this till the end and just going to keep growing? What may be some products that are in the pipe that you can tease? Yeah, yeah.

Our venture studio will always be around. We’ve been blessed with some success of past products that we built and sold, so we bootstrapped all of our ideas. We work with amazingly talented people Whether they have an idea, it’s something that we generated.

We look to buy businesses and then once we have traction on something, then we bring amazing folks in to run those businesses for us. So we will continue to do that in five or 10 years, hopefully. We have many successful ventures and other products that are out there that we have amazing teams running.

So that’s kind of where I feel like we’ll be at. We’re living in an amazing time for finding new problems and building new solutions with amazing technology. So our team is hard at work with a growth mindset, learning every day.

And you know, Quinn at that point will be a really nice size company and product that’s out there adding even more value than what it is today as we continue to add on to that to further serve our clients. Love it. I really look forward to seeing where you guys take it and, and yeah, learning more about what you do as we continue to engage.

One piece of advice that you, you either have or have heard that is super powerful, maybe for someone building out there, working on a business or, or farming or young or old, what’s your best piece of advice that you can leave people? Yeah, I would say probably this might be two things, but I’ll allow it. Yeah, repetition’s the mother of all skill. So pick something that you want to be good at and the more you do it, the better you’ll become at that.

And there’s no shortcuts to that. Hard work is how you become good at anything. And no matter where you start, whether it’s public speaking and you’re terrified and you want to grow that skill, desensitize yourself, get reps.

Or if you want to be great at marketing or building product or writing code, put the work in and do the reps. The person that does the most work will have the highest level skill. And once you realize that, pick something that you really care about and put the time in and you will eventually become the best and you’ll reap, reap a harvest on the back end of that.

Hmm. We turned it all the way back to the, the farming in you. No, that’s great, great advice.

That’s solid for anybody. I love it and I appreciate that. It’s a good reminder.

So last thing, how, how do people connect with you? What’s the best way someone interested, someone interested in partnering, collaborating, purchasing a subscription to one of your softwares? Where do they go? Yeah, yeah, so you can go to our website. Just PlainsiteVentures Co is a great place to kind of look at Plain Site Ventures and all the different ventures that we have. Quinn is the main project or company that we’re working on right now.

If anybody’s looking for a virtual AI assistant to help them with their admin tasks around their CRM, email and calendar, we’d love to see if we can help you out. Share knowledge, lead with education. That’s Heyquin IO Heyquin IO or feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.

That’s where I have most of my engagement. We do lots of sharing, entertainment, education and I try to get back to people as quickly as I can there to see where we can add value. Love it.

And we’ll make sure to also have those links in the show notes, so make sure just go to naming creative podcast.com regardless of where you’re listening, you can click those links and get in touch with Gabe. Highly recommend checking out their stuff. Checking out their website which is just like eye candy.

Super cool brand. Really appreciate your time Gabe. This has been awesome and just cool to get to know you better and what you’re doing.

Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. Josh, thanks for having me on. Yeah, thank you.

And so that’s a wrap on this episode of the Name and Creative Show. Just want to say if this conversation got your wheels turning or your human heart pumping, make sure to please subscribe. And even better, you could share this episode with someone you think is building something cool or really into AI or just trying to figure out what really matters to them.

I think this is a this is a great conversation to share. So until next time, please stay curious, stay kind, and remember that at the end of the day we are all humans. It sa.