Buy, Build, or Both? How NC Founders Are Rewriting the Playbook (Part 2) | Ep. 190

This is a very special panel episode of the Biz/Dev podcast: Buy, Build, or Both? How NC Founders Are Rewriting the Playbook.

This episode digs into the shift North Carolina business owners are feeling right now: the shift from buy to build and back again—and what that’s meant for their businesses and what that actually looks like for founders on the ground.

We have brought  together a few NC founders who’ve been through it—founders who’ve had to rethink, rebuild, or reshape the way they do business in this new era. 

LINKS:

RevBoss Website

Anewgo Website

Inoragnic Website

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

​[00:00:07] David: I'll relate this to development, um, because this is, that's my world. That's what I know. So it is a very common thing. You see news articles all the time that no one is hiring a junior dev anymore, right?

I only want senior people who can help me use this new amazing, magical tool and move forward. But I, I wonder, again, as business owners, you are tasked thinking you want your business. None of you guys are super old, so you business has got 20, 30 years left in it, right? So if you don't create, if you don't ever hire a junior, anybody, then you never mold into a senior anybody, right?

The next generation of senior whatevers don't exist. If we don't train the juniors to become that, what do you feel is your responsibility there? Or do you think, you know what, I'll just keep. Finding those seniors. I don't care. Again, no wrong answers.

[00:01:01] John: I real quickly and then everybody else can answer. I think the new juniors will be the seniors of today, so you know, everybody just steps up a level. So the high school education maybe everybody comes out with a college education and that's your starting point. And maybe it sounds

[00:01:15] David: Well, I mean, but that would

[00:01:16] John: they,

[00:01:17] David: time. Right? That's a paradigm shift there. I'm talking five years from now that paradigm shift won't happen. That

But not in five years

[00:01:24] John: there's a lot of, there's a lot of people that are using AI right now that are doing things they could never done two or three years ago. So to me, they are already at, they, you may call them junior, but they're already senior compared to what the, and I just think everything just moves up a level and where your starting point is just higher up in your, you already start out at year five of your music of playing piano. I don't know. That's my,

[00:01:48] Paolo: I think we have to redefine

[00:01:49] David: Paolo, what do you think?

[00:01:52] Paolo: I think we have to redefine what the juniors are doing, right? It used to be you'd come into a company and you'd throw together PowerPoints for the partners, and that was your job. And that's no longer a full-time job. And what can they be doing the, these same people who are cheating on, their papers using AI could potentially come in and be the sort of native AI expert who's, leveraging AI or helping the company leverage ai, et cetera.

I think we have to peel it back. And the traditional jobs, the traditional entry level jobs, a lot of those are gonna be going away, especially in the professional world. And so what do the new entry level jobs look like? And I think in a lot of sense it's, they're gonna be given to people who really know how to use ai.

Better than. Somebody who's used to doing things the same way and has been doing the same way for 30 years.

[00:02:36] David: Eric, I know you have an opinion.

[00:02:37] Eric: there's some precedent here, right? Like I was in undergrad in the late nineties, early two thousands when I was working in it when there was local area networking and people got blackberries. And, these were pretty smart people. Like I was working like in the business school, like working with professors, world renowned, world class in their field that could not operate a printer or operate a Blackberry.

And it created a great opportunity for me because I just knew how to do that stuff and they were like, total Luddites. And, we'll see another version of that, like there's gonna be a generation of people that just. Don't care to learn this stuff or don't wanna learn this stuff. And then there's gonna be, hopefully my kids and the kids at my kids' school, if I have any influence at all that are going to like, just be born into these tools and be super human.

And there's the, I think, there's the Sam Altman case or whatever. It's oh, just think about all of the flowers that are gonna bloom. And yeah, maybe, or, think about what people don't need or think about what gets eliminated. I don't know, I don't know what the right answer is there, but I think there's gonna be this weird hollowing out of there's gonna be the people that just don't buy into it or just can't get it for whatever reason, and they're just gonna get overtaken by these youngsters. And I don't think it's like the new entry level is the seniors. I think it's actually some 19-year-old is the senior employee.

Like

[00:04:24] John: That could be.

[00:04:25] Eric: the kid that was gonna come in and I don't know, be an intern. I was like, oh, wow. You're better at this than me. You're hired, right? 

[00:04:31] John: Yeah, I don't even think there's a choice. There's more more ethical, moral thing about it, but I'm just thinking this is a global phenomenon. It's a global arms race in a sense. It's you get with it or you get run over by it in a sense. It sounds pretty Dar Darwinian, but it's just I'm doing it partly because I have to do it, not because I'm trying to make a moral decision or ethical decision.

I'm trying to make a decision so my company survives to the next round so that I can now, play another round. 

[00:05:01] Paolo: Yeah, I think I, I think a lot of the necessity is gonna come from consumer expectations, right? I've, SaaS in particular has been a slow leveling up over time. When it first started in the early two thousands, it was, Hey, you fill out forms, you twist these knobs and oh, look, it regurgitates back the data in a graph or something, right?

And then, there were APIs and all of a sudden data started magically appear. So it was like slowly creeping up, getting more sophisticated. And this is just, off the charts in terms of a step change where all, you know, all of a sudden people are expecting software to do magical things for them.

Like with them just giving it very vague instructions. And I think you have to keep up, you have to keep up with this because everybody's gonna be expecting your software to be magical. And so I, I don't think there's much of a choice if you're in software and are and really anything consumer facing to where you, you need to adopt this stuff to meet expectations.

[00:05:57] David: Very good. Okay. I'm gonna shift gears a little bit. We have mentioned a lot of vendors and things that you have used. You mentioned Repli. I think everybody's using Repli. We are cursor people. Tell me some other ones. I think that is if you are a, a new founder and you're dipping your toe in this, 'cause everybody, no one's an expert, which I think is hilarious.

It's like a, you see all these people on LinkedIn or whatever, I'm an expert. No, you're not, none of this stuff. And if you were an expert a month ago, you're not anymore. 'cause it just changed again. And I, I find that to so interesting. So everyone's kind of dipping their toe in the water. What tools do you recommend?

We mentioned rept, are there other ones things that you've found that have borderline magical that you brought in? Things that have helped you build? Again, if you wanna talk about those tools, just, I mean, I'm always fascinated to find new tools. So what are some of your favorites that you've found?

[00:06:50] John: my software developers, they, I wanna say they cheat a little bit too, but they use cursor as well. And they said that even my CTO, you probably going to kill me for saying this, but they said that he took a bite of the apple there and it's actually increased his productivity by, what normally would take a week is now a day. It's not like he gets to go home after one day and, work one one day a week. It's allowed him to iterate and try many different things. To me, as much as they're saying we're getting outta work, to me, it just makes us more productive for this, for the time we are working. So instead of taking, a year, you can do it in three months, which is better for your business, better for your customers.

[00:07:28] David: Yeah, so we got a vote for cursor. Anybody else have any favorite tools?

[00:07:35] Paolo: I, I can't recommend it as a tool 'cause I really haven't used it enough. But I think this is where, I was explaining earlier how I don't know who the winners are gonna be because there's just too much, the pace of innovation is just too fast. I used one the other day, it's a Y Combinator company that just launched and it was called Blink.

And I think it's at blink new, but it basically does what these vibe coders do, except you can just basically put in instructions of just replicate this site and then hit a button and it builds it, it deploys it and it hosts it. And so all of a sudden, like you've got this thing sitting at, Palo do blink new.

So it does all that with one sentence instruction which is mind blowing to me. 'cause I've dabbled with some of the other ones lovable specifically. And I do remember it was a bit of a chore to actually get the thing into production. So I just think, some of these ones that have had fan phenomenal growth over the past six months, like who knows?

Like they may be the legacy solution that, circles the bull after, the next thing comes out. There's just like too much, innovation going on to where you can count on anything to be persistent over the long term.

[00:08:41] David: Eric, you got any faves?

[00:08:43] Eric: My favorite products are the ones that are 5% the cost of the current products that I can replace.

[00:08:56] John: You keep squeezing the living more,

[00:08:58] Eric: it's just, it's like why? So we use active campaign for email. I don't feel six or eight grand a year, just pretty cheap. 'cause we were on something that was a lot more expensive. And then, I got, had a reminder that the renewals coming up. I was like why wouldn't I like, honestly, why wouldn't I just take six hours?

Fire up Rept and a Syn Syngrid, API key. I can probably build like almost everything that I need because I don't need to track Clickthroughs, I don't need to, I just need a way to get a lot of email to different audiences at different times. I don't need like a fully baked, overly engineered, bloated SaaS product to do what I need to do.

And so it's I can do this myself for a little bit of time. Or there's another one that was I think it was called Loops or something like that. It's like a hundred bucks a month. It's okay, we'll just use that. And the thing is like that's going to keep happening, especially now that Paolo told me about Blink New because that's exactly where this is going.

Go.

[00:09:57] John: there's a kind of a little rule of thumb there when I, 'cause. I'm not ditching my software people so that anybody listening there should not be concerned. There's a part here where I use like vibe coding for like creating the speedboat very lean to mean, and, I don't have to work, but I'm, I don't, I'm not building a cruise ship that's, trying to host 4,000 people on there.

So for the robust product that, you know that those are the ones I use my in-house expert staff and and my outsource and part of that is also control over your data and security of it and, all that stuff. And then the other part is for really quick prototyping or just little widgets and apps that you can just plug in to accentuate something instead of waiting for the whole cruise ship to be built. So I think if you're the CEO or CTO, being able to pick the right weapon, the right gun for the right hunt. It's probably gonna be very paramount because now you're, you have a variety of tools that you can, at your disposal instead of only using the same hammer for everything.

[00:10:57] Eric: Yeah, in context is important, right? Like I'm talking about my small business where, you know, we're, I'm, I'm not in a regulated industry. I don't have 10,000 employees. You know, if I were the University of North Carolina or PepsiCo

[00:11:11] John: or selling stocks or something.

[00:11:12] Eric: Yeah. I get that they have a different, but that's, small businesses, a much larger portion of the overall economy, that, that's exciting because suddenly there are tools that that enable scrappy, resourceful, thoughtful people to do a lot without.

Without a lot of resources or time.

[00:11:31] David: So as the professional software developer of the crowd here it is interesting because, is my job at Jeopardy, that there's no question that doesn't sit on my shoulders. And it's scary 'cause I use these tools. I'm building a tool for the first time in 12 years, we're building our own product.

Why? Because I can do it and visualize it and turn it into code faster than I've ever been able to. All of the, everything you're saying is true. But at the same time, it's like what we do for our clients, which are often larger, but even the startups, we are putting a seal of guarantee. 'cause we know what we're doing.

One of the things we, we talk about internally is these tools have all the knowledge, but no wisdom. They've never done anything. And that's where when I was asking about the juniors versus seniors, you're, I agree with you. Those juniors are gonna level up and they're gonna do things now that our seniors can't do.

But there is something to be said about someone who's been in the trenches for a while. And have seen the ugly stuff and has, and have gotten through to the other side. That wisdom matters and I think that there is something to be said about that. And that's across industries, not just software. Okay.

We are running low on time. I have one more question, and it's almost the opposite of what I just asked. You've talked about all the tools, you've talked about all the things that you are using. What would you, what do you wish was out there? What AI gizmo, not necessarily startup idea, I'm just saying what tools are missing?

What is the next jump that you see happening? What does that next generation of tools look like to y'all?

[00:13:05] John: I alluded to a little bit. Right now. I've dabbled it a little bit 'cause I have my four ais like working together and, but it's still in my, I or I say the builders siloed system there. I think the next level, at least with the complex buying a new home customer journey is having at the top level, and I don't wanna use a lot of jargon, but the MCP where the, the different major ais can talk to each other and they're working that, that model context protocol, they're working at the top.

But as you move down the funnel to be able to connect to all the other businesses and industries that are creating their own AI agents to be able to talk to each other. 'cause I think there will be a time there where people are gonna have autonomous ais doing the shopping, doing the, looking and I don't wanna say transactions, but I guess task, executing task, but it's gonna be doing it across the entire network of AI agents.

So I'm looking forward to having that happen because particularly buying a new home, there are so many other important agents well beyond my capabilities financing and insurance that needs that expert secure AI agent to be part of the process.

[00:14:16] David: Paolo, what are you looking forward to?

[00:14:23] Paolo: Touches on what John was saying, but yeah, I agree that some sort of data interoperability between agents would be a phenomenal phenomenal new, new direction. So the fact that these things are siloed I think is a little bit painful. So some sort of connectivity layer between them would be really interesting.

I also think getting some of these applications that are built with AI Bulletproof and patching security holes and things like that, I'm sure there's stuff out there that does it. I don't know how reliable it is, but it wasn't obvious to me in my dabbling that there was an end to end. Let's go from creating this thing to testing it to making sure there are no security holes in it to deploying it.

I think, who, whoever can stitch those together, I think it's gonna be a, an interesting level up.

[00:15:13] John: I have one more. And Zuckerberg with meta has talked about the personal super intelligence and then Apple, if they ever get their AI straight, is talking about putting AI on a chip. And I think, and now that this really crosses a lot of privacy things, but if it's AI on a chip that knows every place you've ever been, every transaction you made, all your friends and all the photos you've taken and able to take all that knowledge in a sense, graphically and textually and through.

Texting or whatever and to actually help you in whatever problem you wanna solve. Whether it's shopping or, figuring out your next trip or whatever. I think having that personal super intelligence and a private level, I think it would be transformative to the way people live

[00:16:00] David: Sounds like a hacker's dream to me,

[00:16:04] John: I into it, but

[00:16:07] Eric: I.

[00:16:07] David: man.

[00:16:09] John: the cloud.

[00:16:10] David: Holy cow. It's of my favorite guys. The podcast guys NELI Patel over at the Verge. He's like the killer app for all of these glasses. Is simply the thing that can recognize everyone you look at and tell you who they are on. All you need is a complete police state to have it. It's like I, how much do you really want to give over to these overlords?

I there it has to be a limit

[00:16:33] John: It's scary, man, but you know, you think about if you're on social media and anything, I mean, it's already out there. AI's already kind of stitched together. That's why I actually think if it can go onto your, your phone on your chip where it's more private and it's rendered there and only stored there, I think you cross over some of those obstacles.

But that's, then I'll really buy Nvidia chips. 'cause there'll be another huge jump.

[00:16:54] David: man, I'm telling you man, I'm already making my 10 foil hat over here. I'm just telling you, I'm just,

[00:16:58] Eric: Yeah I was gonna leave everyone with that comment. I think that everything that we can conceive of. Based on what we know right now is locked in. Like I, I think what you described, John, 100% will happen. I think. I think what we don't know is what we don't know, and there'll be applications and use cases that we just can't conceive of yet because we don't know where the technology's gonna go.

And I look forward to just being on a boat somewhere in Eastern North Carolina

[00:17:25] John: have a AI robot as well.

[00:17:27] Eric: totally outside of all contact with technology and just like drinking

[00:17:33] John: island of AI misfits.

[00:17:34] David: bunker. I am convinced of it by the end of this conversation that Eric's gonna have a bunker. This is what's

[00:17:40] Eric: not a bunker just detachment.

[00:17:41] David: A boat a

[00:17:42] John: All you gotta do is pull out the wifi. What? You pull the wifi out. Everybody goes back to the stone ages.

[00:17:48] David: Oh, yeah. And we're gonna be even dumber than we ever were before.

[00:17:50] John: Exactly.

[00:17:52] David: let me reign this in. I got, we're gonna do a twist on our normal final question, which you guys have all answered in the past. But I want to ask each of you one piece of advice instead of the three, one piece of advice on if I'm a new business owner and I want to incorporate ai.

What is your best advice to, how do you jump in there, Pao? We'll start with you.

[00:18:13] Paolo: Yeah, I mean, my advice would be just started, right? I, I, I think certain amount of mystique behind it, but once you sort of dig in there, like it's be easy. Uh, and so, Like that's certainly how I get And you could even argue that even today, you know, having operationalized this stuff for six months or so, it's still pretty modest.

We don't use it in everything, but we use it in something. But I understand a lot more than I did uh, you know, six months ago. get started, you know, use it modestly. Start something basic like chat, GBT or something that's out there and inexpensive and just start using it.

and you know, you, you'll get it

[00:18:48] David: John, you wanna weigh in there?

[00:18:51] John: because I'm the king of content in a sense, but also it is really about the data. And I think the data is what's gonna differentiate you from all your competition. Like in our industry, our domain in a sense, having all that builder's data and all the customer experience there. But if you're able to, you can use chat GPT or whatever, upload all your webinars, your blogs, your your manuals and all the things that's unique to you, and that proprietary data.

'cause ai without that data, as dumb as a doorknob and all the websites have already been scraped. So you don't need what's out there in the public domain. If you're able to now marry that public domain with your private knowledge and expertise, I think that's where you're gonna have a strategic advantage.

[00:19:35] David: Very good, Eric, finish yourself.

[00:19:38] Eric: I think talk to it.

[00:19:40] David: Okay.

[00:19:41] Eric: Just do the voice mode while you're on a long drive by yourself and just talk to it like it's person and,

 uh, it remembers things. It's crazy. It remembers things and it's helpful and it's smart. 

[00:19:52] David: I'm still struggling with that one. I did that exactly. I was on a home to Charlotte and I had a bunch of AI questions like how to implement it. I was, had this, I was noodling on this idea and I was like I'm just gonna try it. And it's still super awkward, like to get started. Especially like you push go and you're like hello.

You know what I'm saying? And then it starts doing ums and giggling and you're like, this is so creepy. And then you get over that and you just start asking the questions and then you're blown away. That's the process.

[00:20:17] Eric: yeah. Talking to it was pretty fun for me and it's easy way to just ease into it.

[00:20:23] David: Very good. Well man, this has been so much fun. This was, this went better than I even imagined. And we gotta have, I had high hopes and you guys blew it away. So thank you all very, very much for joining.

 This has been so much fun.

[00:20:35] OUTRO: That Wraps up this episode of the Biz Dev Podcast, and this time you get me, Scott Bailey. I'm the lead dev over here at Big Pixel, and I know what you're thinking. I thought David did all the work. Well, I'm not exactly. We have an awesome team of people to back him up. Biz Dev is a production of Big Pixel, the US-based provider of UX design strategy, and custom software.

This podcast is edited by Audio Wiz Matt McCracken and Christie Promto, marketing guru for Big Pixel. Want to connect, shoot us an email at hello@thebigpixel.net, or you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X and LinkedIn.