Data, AI, and Marketing Innovation with Bill Balderaz, Founder of Futurety

In this episode of Curve Ahead, host Brian Wiles interviews Bill Balderaz, founder and CEO of Futurety, to discuss the power of data analytics and AI in driving business success—especially in regulated industries like healthcare and finance. Bill shares his entrepreneurial story, how clean data transforms organizations, and his thoughts on the future of marketing analytics.

Key Topics Covered:
✅ Building a career in data-driven marketing and analytics
✅ The role of AI and machine learning in actionable decision-making
✅ Addressing data challenges in regulated industries
✅ How core values build successful, lasting teams
✅ Key marketing trends, including agency consolidation and innovation

Tune in to learn how data and AI can revolutionize decision-making for your business!

Transcript

0:00

Hey Bill, welcome to the podcast. Do you mind introducing yourself? Great, Grant. Happy to be here. Brian. I am Bill Valderras. I am the founder CEO of actually2 Ventures right now. One is called Futurity, one is called Huckle. Thanks for having me on. So can you tell me about your background that kind of led you to both of those ventures? Sure, absolutely. So born and raised in Ohio, came to Columbus in the first dot com boom of the mid to late 90s, you know, when we really had software and tech and investment dollars starting to flow more into the Midwest. Here I worked for four venture backed startups. I learned a lot, knew that's where I was supposed to be. And all four of those had some kind of equity event, some better than others. But by the time I was on the fourth company, I went to my CEO and said I love what I'm doing for you, but I want to do it for even more companies. And she said great, I'll be your first client. So she was super supportive. That was back in 2006. And this was a digital marketing agency which today is, you know every I joke that if you go to any coffee shop in America and ask who's a social media consultant, Everybody would raise their hand. In 2006 though, we essentially had almost no competition between Chicago and New York. So were, you know, five, six, seven people in our 20s and 30s working with Fortune 500 companies, setting up big brands, getting that phone call from the, you know, the Fortune 500 CEO saying what's Twitter, you know, what's Facebook, what's YouTube? So just a, you know, once in a lifetime experience. The company had very rapid growth. Sold that company after about five years. I went on to another venture that was in the healthcare space, Healthcare consulting. And this was the early days for any of your listeners who know healthcare. Things like readmissions, penalties, patient satisfaction surveys. Essentially the way hospitals got paid changed from being like the way you public, your utility gets paid. You just pay them whatever they say to pay them to value based, care based, you know the whole landscape changed pretty drastically. So we had 20 healthcare systems as clients. You know the biggest invest in the country coast to coast. I was living out of an airplane visiting those organizations. But same thing, really rapid growth, really great timing. I'm sold my equity in that company and then I started futurity, which turned 10 years old last week. Celebrating 10 years and then we can get to it here soon. But out of the work of Futurity, Fun up Hako, which is the Software platform and recently launched own company as well. So how is your background and the experiences through these venture backed organizations influenced what you're doing currently with Futurity? You know, I, I was so blessed. I had in that background. I had great CEOs I had CEOs that should, that brought me to tables I had no business being at. You know, I was a 20 some year old kid with a journalism degree and they were bringing me into the conversations they hear to talk to the vcs, to do strategic planning, to talk about mergers and acquisitions. So they brought me to the table. I think what I would advise anyone, no matter what stage in your careers is find a mentor and just really be quiet and listen. You know, you kind of, I think you come out of school or you're early in your career and you want to kind of be that force. I found by being the guy that does this and listens to really smart people, your career will advance much further. So find a good mentor, find someone's going to bring you to the table and then shut up and listen. You know, be quiet, listen. So got that great information in. It's funny because I met with a founder yester, a co founder of an organization and he's been at it for like five years now and he's only 26 and it was one of the most engaging conversations that I've ever had through kind of this process. And to know that he was so young and has to overcome that hurdle on a daily basis. He was just so on top of it. I think he was more so because he is younger and has to overcome that bias that he has. Yeah, that's great to hear. I'm sure he's got good people in his life, you know, supporting him and that's the fastest way, you know. You know a problem you face as a founder, you're sure it's insurmountable, you're sure no one's ever faced that. You stay up all night, you put on a whiteboard and then you go to a mentor who has seen that problem 10 times and maybe nine times she made the wrong decision, but the 10th time she made the right. It saves you years, it can save you millions of dollars, say nope, you're having all these things. The answer is this. And you're like, huh? The answer is that. So it's reinventing the wheel. It's a cliche. So I try to avoid terms like that. But, but essentially someone I don't believe there's a single listener that is facing a problem another entrepreneur hasn't successfully solved. So go find that person that's already solved the problem, ask them for the cheat code, and you're going to save yourself a lot of heartache. One of the other things that I've noticed right. With talking through with other founders is that problem as you scale upwards, that problem that you were having like a year ago is such a. Just a. Such a small thing in comparison to where you are now as you've scaled up. So, like, finding someone who's. Who's been through those steps previously to who has gone through those issues as a mentor is, I think, key. And once you've gotten past where they've been successful, it may not be time to lean on that mentor as much because now you're playing in a different ballgame. Sure. Yep. I think then you, yeah, you look for the next mentor up, and then you turn around, you help the person next in line behind you. You know, you find, say, all right, come, you know, come up here. So I think that's the way Columbus is blessed. I think probably a lot of cities are this. We have a really healthy entrepreneur founder ecosystem where there's a line and, you know, like, once you're here, your job is to help this person and then your job is to get help from that person. Yeah, I would say that's also the case here in Denver. It's becoming very quickly another tech hub that we're seeing quite a bit of, see money that's coming in to support new ventures. So I've met with a lot of really cool founders here locally. Actually part of my mba, one of the courses essentially was just a TED Talk week. They a professor teamed with a local business owner who had done a massive exit, and he kind of went through his Rolodex and bringing in other founders who were in that like 10 to 100 million ARR realm to just come in and talk to us because, you know, were all there getting our mba. So it's really cool, like listening to their stories. And that's kind of the reason that I got into this, because I thought that was such a valuable part of my mba, that I got more from that class than I feel like I got from a lot of the other things that I was doing in the program. And just having those conversations, engaging with other business owners, in my mind was just something that you couldn't really pay for. Now. That's. Absolutely. I also have my MBA and It's great, a great investment. But I think I've learned much more from spending time with my mentors than, you know, that I needed that knowledge. I gave the mba. I needed to know how to read a balance sheet and how to write a statement of cash flows like that. Those tactical skills are super important. The greatest learning I've ever had has been from, you know, I've got about three mentors I lean on for everything. But getting out there and doing something also is super important. Yeah, absolutely. The best. I think it's a Walt Disney quote. The best way to get started is to stop talking and start doing. And I want a preneurs. So we have a phrase here where there's a group of folks that, you know, they always talk it, they post on LinkedIn, they're out of the coffee shops, they go to all the meetings, but they can't quite, you know, take their foot off first base to steal second base. You know, there's kind of a, there's the folks that get out there and do it and there's folks that kind of get stuck in that. I can't quite make that launch. So, I mean, that's a good point. What advice would you give to those people that are feel kind of just stuck or bogged down? Like how would give them as a mentor kind of that push to get them going, getting that momentum for them in their organization? Yeah, I would say, you know, go to your network, go to your contacts and really uncover a true market need. So if, you know, maybe it's, maybe you love baking and you're really good at baking, you love baking, but you go to the market, no one's going to your town at the end of their bakery. You know, I would say this whole idea of follow your dreams, follow your passionate about. I believe that if what you're passionate about is starting and running a business, but if your passion is just baking and you're going to stick with baking no matter what, there's no market for baking. Don't follow. Follow that dream. That's, that's harsh. But it's, you know, you really want to, your goal is to run and launch a successful business. And if, when I started Futurity, you know, my contact said we need help with someone that can engineer and visualize our data. And I, I took statistics past fail in college. I know nothing about that, but I could put together a team that could do the work. But if my contact said we need a better Supplier for office chairs. I'd say we're going to start an office chair company. You know, what I love is starting and building businesses. The things of building culture and figuring out the finances and figure the marketing. That's what brings me joy. If the end product is data analytics or the chair you're sitting in, that's not as important to me. As long as there's a great team and a great model and I'm getting to do the stuff I love. And so I would say talk to your market, talk to decision makers, ask the question, what is the problem you're trying to solve today? And then go figure out how you can solve that problem. If you're dead set on, I'm going to build the Uber of tool rental or I'm going to build, you know, a unified patient health system. Then make sure the market wants that. You know, don't do it just because you think it's a great idea. Go out there and make sure someone's going to write you a check. Yeah, there was a good book that I read or. Well, in all honesty, I listened to it. It's called the Mom Test. And basically it's saying that, right, you're getting, you need to get feedback before you really start investing in building something. So make sure that you're getting that feedback on. Is it really a problem that's worth solving? And, you know, are there a group of people out there who's willing to pay for it? And then kind of gauge what they're willing to pay to make sure that you're not just burning capital to burn capital to build this thing that you thought was going to be super useful. I love the mod. Wrote that down. Mom test. I'm not familiar, but yeah, set your ego aside. You may think it's the best idea in the world. No matter how smart you are, the market's smarter than you are. So build with, you know, build with that market. Demand is what passes the mom test. Exactly. So let's get back into it. Tell me, tell me about your futurity. And I'm going to get this wrong so many times, and I apologize. It's just I have a mental block on it. Yeah, you said it right. Most people don't. So I'm terrible at naming things. I own that. Yeah. So futurity. Our goal is to help organizations organize, engineer, and visualize their data into one place. And we think, you know, our hypothesis 10 years ago was data is going to be what businesses are going to be running on in 10 years. And today I think that's kind of true. You know, we got a little ahead of the curve again. The market time was just right, it wasn't a super crowded space. We were doing very early machine learning, AI work, you know, even a decade ago. And so kind of got ourselves a little bit of a head start there. But let's say you are a healthcare system and you've got, you think you have around a million patients, but you're not sure because in some there's a guy named Brian Wiles with a Y and some it's Brian Wiles where it's W, Y, L, I, E, S and so one you don't even know how many patients you have and maybe moved a few times. And you have is, you know, MyChart and Epic Records, you got Clangs data, you got CPT codes, you got parking data, you've got social media data. And none of that stuff talks to each other. You know, our job is to come in, identify that single record. And I'm using healthcare, but we work with restaurants, we work with government. So help voter, donor, member, customer, whatever that is. So here's a half million of them and of those 30% are young Hispanic moms with kids who spend this much at your restaurant a week and who are looking for these type of menu options. And they haven't, you know, this section hasn't been in four weeks, but they typically come in and buy your chicken salad. So we're going to automate send them an email for chicken salad at 20% off next Tuesday. They get that email said, what a coincidence. I was just thinking about having that chicken salad. You know, the idea is we can build that model and understand or uncover surprise markets. You may think oftentimes people think they're customers are wealthier than they are and we do wealth attending and we can say actually your customers tend to use a lot of credit cards and tends to, you know, not have the amount of wealth. And you're targeting a higher, you know, your advertising and marketing target a higher tier than you should be targeting. What's preventing people from buying. Here's all the, I own a gym and here's all the people that are members and stay with me for years. Here's all the people that join on New Year's Day and quit two months later. How do I understand the difference between those and how do I never market to the ones that are just going to churn again? And how do I market and acquire the ones that are going to be great customers forever. So it's really deep dive data that is actionable. It's not meant to be just pretty or interesting. It's meant to say, I'm going to now run a more successful hospital gym, restaurant, you know, government agency, whatever it is, than I ran without this data. I think that, and I've brought this up on previous episodes, that data, in understanding data and using large language models to be able to interpret and manipulate the data to better understand your customers. The organizations who are able to do that now or can do that in the next, say 18 months are going to be way ahead of the curve because they're going to have this opportunity to have a deeper insight, to be able to connect with their customers, to either, to market to them, to retarget them, to attract them back. So you know, guys, understand your data, understand where it's coming from, understand if it's clean or not. And yes, you know, because cleanliness of data, like garbage in, garbage out, I think everybody understands that notion. Right? Understanding the data, being able to make data driven decisions is pivotal as an organization. Yeah, well said. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you specialize in highly regulated industries. Correct? Correct. Right. So why one, why you know, one. Just, it's good business for us because most companies don't. When I, when you are go and talk about patient data, most data companies will say not for us. You know, we're not going through HIPAA training, we're not going through SOC 2 or not. So generally speaking, most, you immediately lose 80% of your competition. Even the big five consulting firms, a lot of them are, you know, remote environments, they're not going to do SOC 2, they're not carrying, they're not background checking folks. So even when you look at like the big options, you know, we're winning businesses away from those folks because even they don't want to go through the hoops that it takes touch patient data, financial data. So there's an inherent risk, but with that risk comes a lot of upside. And we've gotten really good at it, we've gotten really efficient at it. You know, once you build a network in an industry like healthcare finance, everyone tends to talk to each other. So referrals come in really well. So in general it's just, I like those industries, I tend to like the people industries. Like I really tend to vibe well with healthcare people. But the biggest reason is from a business perspective, your competition just, you know, drops off a cliff. Your competitive set gets Very narrow. No one wants to be on the front page of the New York Times for, you know, leaking patient records. We put all the safeguards in place so we won't be. But if you don't have those safeguards in place, I've talked to people in law enforcement who talk, you know, say, like there are very active campaigns from domestic and foreign threats who are just actively spend all day trying to get a hold of things like patient financial data. If you're most consulting firms, you don't want to be trying to keep foreign agents out of your servers and you have the resources to do that. Once you make that investment though, you know, your business can really grow. So how do you balance innovation in such a complex sector? It's the team. We've got a really smart, driven team that understands, you know, we recruit specifically people that want to innovate, that want to grow, that are highly entrepreneurial in themselves. There are, you know, someone that just wants to turn a crank for eight hours a day is not a good fit here. So we really want people that innovate. And so the best idea is it doesn't come from me, it doesn't come from, you know, most of our leadership team. It comes from the team that's in there doing that and they'll see, they're working with three or four clients and they see this opportunity to innovate and they'll jump on that. You'd mentioned team a couple of times. Tell me what it is that makes you successful in building the right team for your organization or for any organization, because you've done it seems like a couple of times. Yeah, absolutely. And in the services based world, that's your differentiator. You know, whether you're an accounting firm, a law firm, a consulting firm, you're essentially offering similar services to everyone else. Maybe you're innovating, maybe you're faster, but all that is driven by having the right team in place. So I'm a big proponent of team. We start with core values, so we define those very early on in the company. We revisit them every year or so, we refine them. But it's. I think most businesses have core values, but they sit in a handbook and most employees couldn't tell you what they are. For us, it is how we hire. So the very first interview, I'm not talking about where you work and what school you went to. I'm aligned. I'm asking questions to see if you align with our core values. And so I'm looking for storytelling around that. The people that come in then promotions, raises, firing and terminations are all really centered around core value. So if a, you know, if a sales rep misses quota, that's not enough to get a warning, but a core value violation is. And that sounds kind of backwards and a lot of people scratch their head. But I can tell you it works. We have, you know, we recruiters call our team all day. They, they get hit up nonstop. You know, they're high demand employees in the fastest growing city in America. And we are, have had a hundred percent retention for probably 8 months, 12 months. Like we report on this every company meeting. And it's because, you know, hire well, promote well. When someone's not a fit, address it immediately. But if you stick to those core values, the skillset, the experience, everything else stays the same. And what makes us a human being. There are probably 10,000 quirks and individual things in each of our identities. And we're saying we want diversity, we want a lot of different types of thinking, but we have to agree on four things. So yeah, the other 9996 we can disagree on, we can think differently, we can complement each other skill sets on. But these, if you don't agree on these four things, you can't work here. And that's, you know, that's just something we've stuck to. I learned that in my previous companies if you do that, you're going to get the right team and they can be non negotiable. You can never be in a meeting where it's like, I know they're not a core value fit, but they're the best salesman we have. That's happened to me and I said we got to fire them. And a couple of companies ago, you know, we fired our highest producing salesman because he repeatedly that, you know, violated core values and it hurt for a quarter and then everyone else started performing better because they didn't have to work with it. So it's our decision. Yeah. Did you want to shout out what those core values are or do you want to just kind of move on? Yeah, I can talk to some of them. So sure, let's go. Yeah. Relentless. Forward momentum is the first one. So that means, you know, we're always looking forward. It's. We don't dwell on the past. I like clever sayings, but don't look backwards. You're not going that way. So if you're in a meeting and we say, you know, we. Someone says well, the CMO at our client quit and, you know, we're stuck. And so I don't think we should. We need to put this on pause. Like, no, we're not putting it on pause. We're going to push even harder now because we're going to meet the new cfo, we're going to make friends with the director, or we're going to take the CEO out to coffee. So it's that there's no dredging up the past. We learn from it. But if it's a, you know, so if there's a pattern we've seen, we change our behavior. But dredging up the past, just to dredge it up does no one any good. So it's always, we got to move forward, we got to push through relationships. Run the world is one we have. So, you know, essentially there we're saying most of our team members, most of our clients, they all come from deep relationships. So I spend many hours of my life at coffees and lunches and happy hours because we build those relationships and those. It's the right thing to do. It also always turns into business. So we treat our clients as clients. A really simple thing. We would not say, I'm going to go meet with Saint Sisters of Prudence Hospital today. We say, I'm going to go meet with Rebecca today. So we call our clients by name, not by the company they work for. Challenge yourself and others is another one. So there, you know, we say the whole good enough's not good enough. Like, we've got to push ourselves to grow, especially in our industry. For the first eight years of our existence, we'd go into a pitch and no one could do the level of data engineering were doing. No one even understood what machine learning and AI were. But we still kept pushing to get better and better. Now everyone's an AI or machine learning person. So now that idea of being, well, I'm glad we never got complacent because now that culture of just always challenging and pushing is going to keep driving what we do. And then we, you know, we basically, it's an ego check. You know, there's the fourth one is we've really got to keep in line. Like it's a we, we don't say me or I. You know, this is about a team environment. This is about celebrating each other's wins. It's about winning and losing together. And so, you know, if you identify that person that is that, you know, the hero complex Again, that top performing salesman or that rockstar developer that is the one that has to be the hero, the martyr. I bet everyone your podcast has worked with that person. You got to get it out of the system. It's painful. Yeah, your next Sprint release is not going to be as good. Yeah, you're going to, your next quarter is not going to show that revenue that person brought in. But in six months and nine months, in a year, you'll be thanking yourself. So there's two things that, from what you were saying that I really picked up on. The relationship being a Keith factor. Right. When you're building rapport with clients and just having a one one relationship, if you're coming into trouble on a project, they're going to be more lenient with you because you have a relationship and it's going to be easier for you to address because it doesn't seem like you're overcoming such a big obstacle if you're taking time to really build rapport with people. So like I've run into that a couple of times in my personal career where it's like we're totally going Mrs. Dev release and we're going to be a month or two late on delivery. But like having the rapport and just being like, look, I just want to be straight up with you. This is what's going on. And as soon as you realize it, just letting them know like that kind of, yeah, they're going to be upset, but they're not going to be like, yeah, no, you're fired. Yes, exactly right. And we could just like hiring. You know, you get to get smart at same thing with clients. And, and when you're in a growth industry, it's a luxury that you have, but you can be more selective on clients. And if in those first two meetings I look across the table and think, we're never going to have a relationship with this guy. We are a vendor. His goal is to beat us up through the procurement process. His goal is going to beat us up during the project process. And it's a future X client. So we will, you know, I would say one in five opportunities we walk away from because I just get the sense this is never going to be a relationship. And to me, life's too short to have to spend eight hours of my day working with a client that just wants to beat us up. So again, we don't have. On the futurity side, there are no outside investors, there's no PE firms breathing down our necks. We don't have to do those deals and other companies just have to do that. You have to take it because you got to hit the number. In our case, we've got the luxury of saying, yeah, this person is never going to be someone we want to work with and we're just going to walk. The other thing was the team concept that you continue to talk about. Right. I know that I've been in positions where I have been reprimanded about not necessarily taking enough personal credit for my deliverables in something or on a project. And it's like, look, I didn't do this by myself. I can't do this by myself. I am not going to sit here and take credit. I just made sure that the rest of the team was delivering on time. Like that was my role. I brought them to the table, cleared out all of their other obstacles to make sure that we got there on time. I didn't do anything other than that the hard work was all there doing. So yeah, I've gotten in trouble for quite a few times for that. Yeah. And I think it's ridiculous. Yeah, no one would ever get reprimanded. And for me it's, sometimes it will slip someone say like, oh, the client loves me and everyone else like twitches just because we're so used to saying like the client loves us. And so when that happens there is like a noticeable like change in temperature in the room. So yeah, it's, it just fundamentally changes the way you think. When you think of yourself as the individual savior, the person that's based on versus you're part of something bigger than yourself. It just changes everything you do 100%. So I'm going to change topics a little bit. Let's talk about some of the trends. You had mentioned that you guys have been working in AI and data driven modeling for quite a while. What do you think the next step is? Yeah, everything is just getting so much faster and cheaper. So I, you know, I started my career, my first job. We didn't have the Internet in the office. So I've started my career like, you know, the rise of the Internet, the rise of mobile, now the rise of AI. I think it's moving faster than either of those have. Or maybe I'm just older and so it feels that way. But I see like the very rapid adoption of that. I see for the first time in my career, working 25 years, I've never seen unemployed developers. If, yeah, if you could write a line of code. You had your choice of jobs in the last six months. I see really good developers who aren't finding jobs. I never thought I'd see that day. So I think you're seeing what one human can produce is magnified so much. I think we're also going to see though, just, it's just like, you know, I use the example that QuickBooks didn't put any accountants out of business. It just got them doing the stuff. They were no longer hand typing in, you know, receipts from a shoebox into a spreadsheet. It just let them focus on the high value stuff. I think what we're going to see with the future of data is fewer people doing the stuff that can be automated and replaced and people doing more higher value stuff. So I think we're going to see and everybody's talking about the rise of prompt engineers and that being a, a new job. But I think there's a lot of stuff beyond that. It's a, I'd say there's like an automation sandwich where you need the human being to have the idea, figure out ways to solve it, you know, create that. That's the first bun in the sandwich. The AI sits in the middle. That might accelerate it. The cost of data. You know, two years ago for me to know everything about you, from what you watched on Netflix to what podcast you listened to census public record a few years ago, you know, that might have been seven or eight dollars, you would have been very insulted. You know, today the of that is probably about a dollar or less. And that's, you know, there's almost nothing I couldn't know about you for that amount. So that the cost of data has dropped by two thirds, the speed has increased by a hundred times, and then the other side of that sandwich, then the other bun, the other human side is what do you do with the data? So what's, you know, the what, so what now what, that's the human saying now, here's what we do with that, here's how we, you know, implement that. And again, AI can make suggestions, but you really need a human to sit in the middle. So what I see is the job titles you see in the workplace today and a year ago and two years ago will be different than the job titles we see in three or four years. And those titles will reflect what someone does on a day to day basis. Humans writing lots of line of code or pouring through, you know, CSV files to look for patterns and stuff is probably going to be replaced. But the new jobs will be created on the. What happens before that and what happens after that. You're seeing, you think we'll see kind of a waning of like the analyst role and more focused on something else because the, the actual analysis can be done through machine learning. Yeah, yeah. A waning or a shifting, I think there'll still be value. But now the work that would have taken, you know, there's work that we would have had entry level analysts or even interns do that would have taken weeks. Now takes minutes, you know, with ChatGPT and Gemini and those types of models. But now we've hired more people who figure out how to design those prompts, design the experiment. Right. And then take the results and say now do this stuff only a human being can do. And how do we apply? We've identified this trend within a hospital system, but what do we do with that? Yeah, it's interesting to think about just the number of organizations right now who you didn't think would do layoffs, who are. And then not necessarily blaming it on AI, but I think that there's probably a large component of that can be and will be in the future blamed on being able to automate a lot of those roles or a lot of those tasks. There's so many new products and tools coming out on a regular basis. You had mentioned good developers who are now at work. Like I was on a forum yesterday and it was like, what good tools are out there that are like no code or AI driven to be able to write an app. I have a client who needs an app. I'm like, well you can do that through Claude, you can do that through ChatGPT Canvas, you can do that through Cursor. Like there's a ton of tools out there right now that like you can just be like, I need this. And as long as you know how to create the prompts, you can get the output to be able to put into a compiler and then start going back and forth with AI to be able to debug it so it will actually run. Exactly. Then that's the perfect example. But the sandwich of what's, you know, what's the app I want to build, how do I refine it sits in the middle. And you look, I have a presentation I love giving, but essentially, you know, four generations ago, seven generations maybe, all of our relatives were poor. 90 plus percent of the world lived in poverty. And I don't mean it drives me crazy when people like say they're Broke and they have like a new car at a Starbucks. I mean, like poor. Like you don't have enough to eat porn. Almost all of our relatives came from poverty. And every time there was a big advantage. So most people worked in an aggregarian job. We were all farmers, 90 plus percent of the world, you know, and then you had automation, you had, you know, the steam engine, you have locomotive engines, you had combines, you had plows. It reduced the amount of agricultural workforce. But then everyone started doing something else. And so then for a long time, everyone worked in textile plants. All of our, if you are from English descent somewhere, a great grandfather sewed boots for a nickel a day. I mean, it just again, abject poverty. They went from an agriculture society to this manufacturing, a lot of it in textiles. And then we figured out how to make automated ways to build clothing. And for a while, everybody lost their jobs. And then we started building some more. You know, the work landscape changed to more refined skills to where we are today. So if you look at every significant thing, whether it's looms, printing presses, steam engines, there's always this dip. And then there's a growth. Every single time, without exception, that there's been a disruptive technology invented. It actually raised people out of poverty and created more jobs. AI is going to do the same thing. You know, I'm not, I won't get political, but I'm not a believer that I'm gonna. I say that, then I get political. Right? But. But I'm not a believer in universal basic income. I'm not a believer, you know, the lump of labor fallacy. If we get really philosophical here, I don't subscribe to that because history has shown every time there's a significant advance, there's a population of society that says no one will have jobs. Now if we automate farm work, what will we all do? Because everyone's farmers. Well, we all do. We all start making textiles. We automate textiles. What do we all do? And that's going to keep happening. AI is the same thing. It's going to automate all these jobs. We're going to have a year or two where developers are going to have trouble finding work. And then after that, there's going to be fewer people living in poverty, more growth, more jobs, and the next revolution will do the same thing. I would agree with you, but there's another component to that, like I was thinking of while you were talking through, that as technologies advance, it's also distributed additional wealth. So it's raised those people who were in poverty to up a little bit and up a little bit throughout time as we've become more technologically evolved. Do you agree with that? Yes, yes, absolutely. Let's get back into trends. What are some of the biggest trends that you're seeing in marketing analytics and how do you think they will shape the future of industry? Sure. I think knowing your customer better that just wasn't available to us. We did very general Personas in the world before, but now if I know what you're watching on Netflix, if I know you play pickleball, if I know you have two young kids and a golden retriever, you know, the, you mentioned the people that are going to get left behind. Marketers who are still relying on things like zip code based targeting or Personas that were built by a handful of PhDs around a whiteboard are missing out. You know, the idea of doing a focus group with 20 of your best customers and expecting that to drive a Persona is really dated when we can look at all 10,000 of your customers in real time and tell you everything we know about them. So I think it's going to be the sophistication and highly personalized marketing. You're also seeing this really big growth in private equity firms and you know, consolidation in the industry. So even here in Columbus, probably four of our biggest digital agency type firms have, you know, been acquired, merged, have taken private equity money. So you're seeing, you know, this consolidation and a little bit of loss of your boutique specialized firms and consolidation in those sectors as well. So yeah, I think there's a technology shift of knowing customers, they're more of the cultural financial shift of I think we're going to start losing some of our mid market and even large market independent marketing agencies. Do you think that the consolidation is happening because of the data that they own or the way that they're able to process the data? I think so. I think private equity people are smart. That's how they become billionaires. Right. So they look for these early stage companies that are doing something really creative and have a head start and they jump in there. So I think that's a big part of it. You know, I also just think you look at other industries from car repair to apartments, you know, private equity has moved into those and marketing is probably the next logical step. So yeah, I think there's two sides. There's that technology is interesting, it's early stage, you can buy a 10 or 20 person agency at a bargain and bet on them knowing they're probably going to do something really great. There's also the trend of there's still, you know, some cash and capital in the economy and there's not a lot of other stuff left to buy. So I think marketing is kind of the next frontier. Very interesting perspective. I've asked you a ton of questions. We've come to the end of the podcast. This is where I give you 90 seconds to plug anything that you're passionate about. It could be, you know, finding a mentor, it could be a charity, it could be either one of your businesses. So, Bill, without further ado, the floor is yours. All right, thank you. I wasn't prepared for that one, so I guess I should have read my notes better. But one thing I would say, I think a lot of people listening are probably aspiring entrepreneurs or founders themselves. So I would say that, like, stick, you know, some of the things we talked about. Find a good mentor. Find people that can shortcut your road to success. Surround yourself with great people. Hold those standards, hold that accountability high. It's hard sometimes it's hard to stick to those standards and to hold other people to them. But you'll be grateful if you do. And for anything else, I'd say reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find. I think I'm the only. Bill Valderra is probably one of the only Balderas is out there, so you can find me pretty easily. I'd love to connect with your listeners. I really appreciate your time this morning. Great conversation. Yeah, thank you, Brian. I'm glad you had me on.