The Dumb Monkey Show - Simplifying AI for business leaders
The Dumb Monkey Show is your unapologetically candid AI-in-business podcast for leaders who want results, not hype.
Hosted by Aamir Qutub—CEO, AI strategist, and bestselling author—and Davina Montgomery—communications pro at Deakin’s Applied AI Institute—this show cuts through the jargon to bring you real stories, practical frameworks, and witty banter.
From boardroom strategy to frontline operations, we unpack how artificial intelligence is reshaping business, the pitfalls to avoid, and the bananas you should grab along the way. No tech-splaining. No fluff. Just smart, clear conversations that make AI useful, usable, and maybe even a little fun. 🐵🍌
New episodes every week. Whether you’re a CEO, founder, or curious leader, you’ll leave with ideas you can use today—and a smile you didn’t see coming.
The Dumb Monkey Show - Simplifying AI for business leaders
Most Businesses Use AI to Cut Costs. That's the Small Prize
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Most leaders treat AI as a cost-cutting exercise. Innovation Bay co-founder Phaedon Stough argues the bigger money sits on the other side of the ledger — using AI for business to lift top-line revenue without lifting headcount.
Aamir Qutub and Phaedon get into what's actually working: sales teams doing more through AI automation instead of more hires, founders making faster calls off better information, and why Innovation Bay's aggregated job board is growing, not shrinking. They cover agents, defensibility, why the tools race changes weekly, and Phaedon's blunt take that founders who ignore AI may struggle to survive the next 24 months. Plus the farmer test every SME should apply before buying anything.
Practical, occasionally uncomfortable, and useful whether you run a startup or a business that's been running for decades. Follow Dumb Monkey for more.
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🏝️ Innovation Bay → https://innovationbay.com/
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Dumb Monkey Show. This is your host, Amir Khutov, and today we have got a very special guest, Fedon Star. He is the co-founder of Innovation Bay, which is one of the longest running startup community in Sydney. And I have got so many questions for Fedon over here. So, first of all, welcome, Fedon. Thank you so much for joining us today. No, Amir. Thank you so much for having me on the show. And so, Fedon, you have been a founder yourself. You have been in the startup journey for a long time, and then you have founded this excellent community uh which has been helping a lot of startups and investors to come together. Can you uh walk us through your story and your journey and in and your ventures in the startup world?
SPEAKER_02Sure, sure. I'll try and be as uh as as short as I can on this. But um I kind of started my journey in about 2001 when I just moved back from London, uh, been overseas for a bunch of years, and um decided that the recruiting space in Australia, specifically around tech and scale up tech, wasn't fantastic. And I thought I could do it better than people that were doing it. So I started my own company with uh with a friend of mine. We really wanted to be innovative in terms of bringing um new and exciting talent solutions to scale up tech companies, probably in Sydney. That's where we kind of started. That was the first foray. Very quickly, I realized I didn't know what I was doing and building a business, and I needed other people to learn from. So I was lucky to kind of bump into a guy called Ian Gardner, who was running his own startup at the time in the video streaming business. And uh we both came together and both had the same problem. And so we thought, why don't we build a small community in in Sydney of other people doing similar things and try and learn from each other? And that's kind of where it started.
SPEAKER_00Excellent. And how big is your small community now?
SPEAKER_02Uh well, we've gone through a number of different pivots and evolutions, as you'd expect, you know, starting something in 2003 and being kind of you know 20 plus years old. But right now, we we made a major pivot in about 2019-2020, where there was a couple of thousand people part of the community in general. We're running a bunch of events across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane. We are national, so we operate pretty much everywhere across Australia. But we realized probably in about 2019 that we weren't driving the sort of value and the impact we wanted. And the value and the impact for us is really about helping companies scale more effectively. You know, we we want to see more hundred million dollar revenue startups in this country. Um, and and that's kind of like our core focus. And we know that in order to do that, we've got to have a really healthy venture capital industry, we've got to have a really healthy, you know, angel investing industry, and we've got to have a really healthy founder industry. So we pivoted into membership, and uh that was a bit of a transition for us, but we really kind of thought we want to work with less, and with that less, we want to make greater impact. So at the moment, we have about 200, 220 members. Uh, they're from every state and territory in Australia. We also have some members out of Singapore, out of New Zealand, out of uh the US. Um, the membership is kind of pretty squarely broken into founders on one side and investors on the other. Our biggest community is our VC industry with about 90 members, and then we've got about 75, 80, 80 founders in our members in our founder community.
SPEAKER_00That's a very good ratio because generally when you go to events, you have like a hundred founders and one investor over there, or a couple of investors who have already run out of the portfolio. So good on you on being able to maintain an active community and active balance. And so being in this uh space and having conversations with both founders and investors, can you describe how your experience or those conversations have changed? I would say, like pre-COVID, then post-COVID, then especially post-2022 when uh Chat GPT and AI first came. Have you seen any shift in the conversations?
SPEAKER_02Uh well, I feel like we're on a roller coaster, but it never quite stays the same. So, you know, I think in 2020, 2021, going through COVID, there was a lot of hype in the industry. There's a lot of capital. There were a lot of first-time VC funds that had raised. So we saw a flood of capital flow into our industry in that kind of early, early 20s period. A lot of new startups, a lot of lot of follow-on investing. Um, there was a lot of talk about growth, growth, growth, you know, and we were very much in that kind of 2020, 2021, a high growth market. I think that market cooled because valuations got very, very high and got a little bit kind of difficult to manage for a lot of investors. And so that market started to cool in 2023, 2024, and we went through, you know, what some might call a down cycle, where there was a lack of liquidity and investment really kind of dried up in a fairly significant way. And that was because, you know, our industry doesn't have a lot of like exits to talk about. You know, the the two main mediums for exits for our industry are really kind of like MA and listings, and listings really dried up, being a very small percentage of exits for us, and MA was a little bit difficult, and so we started to see that liquidity point change now with some exits, which have been in the news, which is fantastic. Not a lot of listings as yet, but that'll start to happen, I think, over the next couple of years. And so I'm feeling like with AI at the moment, our industry is going through another growth cycle, which is exciting to see.
SPEAKER_00Right. And are you uh with in terms of AI, um, it's being said that there was uh a hype and and some people are calling it as a as a bubble as well. How are you used?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, we're seeing it as a you know a one in multi-generational uh shift, so definitely not seeing it as hype. You know, we we are um hopefully, hopefully leading the conversation around AI for the community. I mean, ultimately, we've got a bunch of you know, first adopters, our industry is all tech and entrepreneurs put those two things together with AI, and um, there's a lot of very interesting conversations that are going on in our community right now around AI and how it is reshaping the landscape of business and scaling businesses, which is very, very, very exciting, as well as you know, we're seeing a lot of AI first businesses being created, which is also super exciting.
SPEAKER_00So, and if you have to explain to a founder why do you think it's such an it's like a an as you described as an opportunity of a lifetime? Why is that? What's so different about AI than anything else that we have seen in tech space that it makes it fundamentally different?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, I think the first thing to realize as a founder is that if you're not embracing AI proactively in a very meaningful way, I think your likelihood of survival over the next 24 months is very low. So I think we'll see a very significant transformation over the industry of people who are driving AI into their businesses and the people who are not. Um ultimately, I think it's a great enabler for you to enhance what you're currently doing and to drive scale and efficiency into your business. Um, you know, a lot of people using chat and board and playing around with open claw and creating agents and these things can be novel, you know, and I think there's a lot of novelty out there at the moment. Um, generally, what we're sort of seeing is a lot of people throwing AI at the business itself. How can I automate X? How can I drive more efficiency and Y? That's slowly starting to get the narrative at a very much higher level. But I think what we're seeing is people who are who are you know using AI very effectively is that they're increasing the increasing the capability of the business, driving top line revenue without increasing cost. And I think uh or the cost increase is marginal compared to the top line revenue increase. And that could be launching new AI products that are enhancing their kind of SaaS suite, or it could be driving the capability of the existing team, which is really what we're seeing more than more than the other, to drive a much higher level of re revenue generation and um and growth.
SPEAKER_00So are you uh are you arguing so there's this uh there's a saving in the cost, but you're saying the bigger price is in the ability to increase the revenue multiple times?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah, right. So I I think we're seeing it enhance a lot of capability within the business. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And does it apply to the tech startups only, or do you think it can apply to an SME or a larger business as well? Oh, I think it's applicable to every business. Can we go a bit deeper into it and look at an example of a business? Uh, and how do you think because generally the conversation about AI is it can actually help you reduce inefficiencies, automate your processes, and like more conversation about the cost. So, what you are saying is of course you can reduce cost, but also you can increase efficient, uh, increase revenue as well by building the capability or finding new revenue streams. Can you please expand on that and probably help with an example?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think on sales automation, there's a lot of great tools that people can use out there that can provide a range of different uh opportunities. For example, like you know, people are using CRMs, you know, sometimes effectively, sometimes not effectively, but really how do you engage with your customer pipeline? When do you know the right time to send an email? What are the right insights you can gather pre-a call, post-a-call? How can you automate conversation flows? And how do you automate um collection of data? I think those things increase the sales capability of a team without having to hire more individuals. So, what we're seeing through uh AI automations is that um salespeople are becoming much, much more capable. And as a consequence, people don't need to expand the physicality of like hiring more people. Um, as an example, we're seeing that across like a lot of our a lot of our startups at the moment. Um I think the other thing that we're sort of seeing is that the capability of the CEO and the decision making of the CEO is rapidly accelerating. So all of a sudden, you know, the CEO or the founder of the business is getting distilled information in a way that's enabling them to make more effective decisions. And as a consequence, we're seeing that the ability of that business to scale quicker. You know, a lot of a lot of the times in a startup, the bottleneck is the founder, and that that bottleneck is the founder trying to make you know 30 30 decisions at one time.
SPEAKER_00That's right, yes, yes, and and now now as founders we are to add to a using clot to to do multiple stuff and and and being able like we are more efficient, definitely. Uh now you talked about the sales uh and how a lot of sales automation tools can actually provide a lot of efficiencies. When, especially when the AI came out, a lot of hype, especially that you see on LinkedIn, is about those go-to-market tools, like this instantly or clay, which allows you to build the list and do cold reach outs or cold reach outs on LinkedIn. I what you're talking about, is it deeper than that? Is it not just about the outreach?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, I I think if you look at the existing process at the moment, you can pretty much infuse AI into that process all the way along the journey. You know, and obviously what we're seeing at the at the moment, which is difficult for a lot of people, is seeing this plethora of applications on AI that people are building, you know, and it could be um sales automation, marketing automation, customer um support. There's just so many different applications that are kind of that have been created that are getting funding and are kind of scaling at the moment. It's a little bit of a of a of a land grab. So it can be overwhelming on the kind of like what stack are you using and how you're integrating all these different features into your into your product offering. But generally what we're sort of seeing is that people are trying different products, testing that in market, seeing if there's an uplift, and then moving on or or altering how they kind of um how they kind of do things. What what what I would say is no one's won the race. The race is very, very early on, and the race seems to be changing day by day. The difficult thing I think with AI at the moment is this scale of change and the and how rapid change is. I think it's very difficult to stay on top of things.
SPEAKER_00That's right. Uh generally, when I work with businesses though, uh especially uh if they're not startups, right? If they are established businesses, SMEs who are looking to embrace AI. Of course, there is a desire to stay on top of what's happening, but probably sometimes by trying to stay on top of what's happening, they actually miss the bigger picture because then they are running from one model to another, one tool from another. Uh, what are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_02Look, I think this is a little bit about how much time should the CEO or someone in the business be focused around leading the thought process around AI, right? You know, this is I think that's where you're kind of going with that question. Like, what's the balance between actually using different applications and then reviewing applications to work out which ones are best to use? And I think unfortunately at the moment, because it is such a changing landscape, you've got to do both. You know, you've got to be testing and you've also got to be reviewing all the time. You know, we've we're constantly coming across new models that we're amazed by and you know, or applications that we're amazed by and using, and and it's it's quite phenomenal. I've never never experienced a market with so much change, so it's difficult.
SPEAKER_00That's right. Uh now it's it's an interesting one because I fund products and I create products as well, and just some products that have been in AI space. Now you support a startup community, but when I'm helping an organization with their AI strategy or uh providing AI consulting, I generally uh I've started to form an opinion is that like if an organization starts to capture, especially from a governance point of view, starts to bring in a lot of AI tools uh in the organization, it just adds to the complexity. So my advice generally is especially with the organizations that are low, low maturity model is to bring in an assistant and try to build on the top of that stack rather than bringing an AI tool. What are your thoughts on this? Where do you think is is is that right balance?
SPEAKER_02Like like are you sort of talking about an AI agent or like a partner to help you with that process?
SPEAKER_00Uh more of an AI, uh more of an AI agent. So what I'm like, for example, my advice to an organization could be rather than uh getting an a new tool to for, for example, for your email um management or email scheduling or email labeling rather than getting a new tool. Probably it's better that you get a basic stack of Cloud, you have a basic stack of NITN, and then you do automations from there so that you don't you're not buying new tools and adding more risk from that perspective.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, we're seeing, as I'm sure you're seeing better than I, just this evolution of AI agents and their capabilities. You know, I think it's amazing to think. I mean, and you you probably looked at this yourself, right? You know, a month ago or six weeks to eight weeks ago, everything was open claw. You can build an agent on OpenClaw and deploy it, everyone's building agents on OpenClaw, you know. And that's kind of that's that's that's kind of Hermes came out, and then that's much easier than OpenClaw. And OpenClause had all these issues, and now um um, you know, Claude's coming out with their own agent platforms or at least, you know, the capability to build agents of Claude now. So again, this is kind of evolving. It's quite hard for people to understand and and think about capabilities depending on how technical you are. I guess what we are seeing is this layer of now service providers who are building agents for companies and kind of guaranteeing the process because ultimately, you know, what sort of agent should I have? Where can I deploy an agent? How do I manage that agent? How do I upskill that agent? Should I be thinking of that agent as a as a you know, as a as an employee that will evolve for me and grow for me into the business, or is it just something that is tactically being deployed to solve a specific problem? You know, it again, I think this is evolving. Uh so I don't have a clear view, clear view on that, but I uh I I think that the the the landscape of hiring and recruiting is now changing very rapidly. And I think as people start to think about hiring and looking at volume of hiring, and what's quite interesting is we have a aggregated job board on our website. You know, we scrape basically all of our members' uh job boards and bring them into one. Now, you know, do you think that job board is being growing in terms of volume of jobs or declining? Uh declining? It's it's been growing, and that's the weird thing, isn't it? So so obviously AI is show showing growth, and that growth is being supported with physical hires as well as deployment at AI agents at the same time.
SPEAKER_00That's that's really interesting. Would you say that the type of jobs that you are capturing on your board are are more specialized jobs, and as businesses and new businesses are coming up, so the startup jobs are growing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's mixed, it's really a mixed bag. There's no specific area that's kind of engineering and technical hiring is always led our job board, it continues to do so, but you know, product is is is up there, sales, customer support is always up there too. So it's right across the board, which is also very interesting. And you know, again, three months ago or six months ago, it was you know, AI is gonna replace X. There won't be any accounting roles, or you know, there won't be any customer support roles, or voice AI is gonna do this, and blah, blah, blah. We're not we're seeing augmentation rather than replacement.
SPEAKER_00But do you think that's a permanent state, or do you think it's it's gonna change as well?
SPEAKER_02I think anyone who's got a crystal ball, uh, the one thing we know it's gonna change, but we don't know what it what it's gonna change to, you know. Yeah, and again, I if we think about it, I can't remember when when when did Claude Cowork came out come out? It's literally been like months, hasn't it? It's not been more than a couple of months. So if you think about the transformation and the impact that Claude Cowork has had on people's lives, and you think we've only had that for like two months or three months, it's kind of not even a better model.
SPEAKER_00It's it's it's just the orchestration on how you actually use a model to do things. Um and like now with the skills itself, uh, the capability is that anyone in the world can actually build skills. So we are seeing engineers building AutoCAD skills, we are seeing every profession is like started to build their skills and will have all of these skills on the marketplace. And only with some incremental increase in the models, uh, we would start to see more and more work being automated as well. My my view on on this is, and I I like to really think about what's going to happen to professions is I believe uh accountants who are on the top of their game, who we would still need accountants in the system so that we can interact with the taxation office. But the roles that accountants are going to play is going to be significantly different. And their expectations from them are going to be significantly different as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I I agree that it's going to transform existing business models and those business models to a previous point, they need to change with with AI and lead that kind of conversation flow, otherwise, they'll get left behind. So I think not only like in accounting firms and law firms specifically, I'm sure recruiting firms, um, all of those kind of service provider organizations uh need to transform fairly quickly. People will still want to deal with people to a certain degree, but a lot of people can't tell the difference sometimes whether they're dealing with an AI or a whether what or a person. And I think that's only going to get better and better, right?
SPEAKER_03Um, in the future.
SPEAKER_02Um, and so yeah, I I think that those we don't know though, is that going to affect the job rate at X? What new jobs will be created out of out of this? What new product offerings may these law firms or accounting firms start to offer? You know, where accounting firms start to offer wealth management services now and tie your kind of financial view into a whole bunch of different categories. It's hard to kind of get a view of that, but it's also very exciting because we're seeing so many companies trying to tackle these potential problems.
SPEAKER_00That's right. And you would have seen how Y Combinator is actually inviting not the product companies, but the comp agentic companies uh who where it's saying rather than developing a software for a law firm, you create an agentic law firm and and come to us. Don't you think it's a matter of time when these agent tick first companies would emerge and what they are will do to the market is because They will be able to take a bigger share of the market, like Uber almost uh not not fully replaced the taxi industry, but had a huge impact on the taxi industry. Wouldn't we start to see agent tick law firms and agent tick accounting firms that will start to disrupt the market?
SPEAKER_02I think I think there's a couple of yeah, I maybe. I'm probably uh I'm on your side in terms of I think there's an evolution that's going to happen. But at the moment, because it hasn't happened, we don't know how people will engage with it. You know, ultimately, people still love to deal with people. Do you trust, do does society in general trust an AI over a person? You know, theoretically, you probably should trust an AI over a person because the AI's got a lot more knowledge, but ultimately, you know, it hasn't got your back in some ways. And so people have very tight relationships. And if there's one thing in business that's you know been drummed into my mind over the last sort of 30 years is that people want to do business with people, not just having the best solution, it's having the best kind of relationship. That trust piece is a big factor in terms of in terms of working. So you know, I I probably I I don't know, but I would expect that the the the the hybrid nature of how many agents will a business have to human beings and how will that business operate is the question that you're really asking. And I think you know, we're uh we're a ways out from sorting that out.
SPEAKER_00And and you mentioned initially uh uh an AI-first business. So in your view, how would you describe an AI first business?
SPEAKER_02I think generally, you know, they're they're businesses with very low, you know, um team but very significant growth. You know, that the the scalability of AI first businesses is what's very attractive. You know, I think there's a notion in the valley at the moment, which is all about how can you get to a hundred million dollars in revenue in the shortest period of time with as few employees as possible, like a competition. And so I think that generally is an AI-first business that has that capability to go through hyperscale without going through hyper hiring. So love lovable is the reference point, I think most people use.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Do you have any uh startups that you can think of or that you can talk about that are doing some interesting work uh in the AI space?
SPEAKER_02Uh in Australia in Australia, I think there's a there's a lot. And I think we're looking at um our angel group is just um put some money into a company called FT, which does uh rope AI robotics for rail and and infrastructure, where um I think we're seeing a lot the combination of AI and robotics at the moment as a as a vertical is very, very attractive to our investor base because the IP layer over IP application is not huge. So generally, investors are looking at the application side of things as you've either got to have a huge amount of scale and demonstrate that scale, or it's going to be very difficult to understand how you can compete with the models and their ability to deploy applications. So, therefore, you know, what we're looking at at the moment is this kind of application layer um around robotics and infrastructure as an area that creates some defensibility. So FMT is a classic example. They're fairly early on in their journey, but they've been able to raise quite a significant round. They're based out of out of Queensland. Um we've invested in a couple of others that are in the visualization data space, which is also very interesting at the moment because again, it's a bit more application oriented, but they're using AI to help drive a stronger visualization perception around large data sets, and they're deploying that around um called um Storybot AI, and they're a very interesting business where you can basically give them your financial decks and say, crack create a model for me for my investors, and it does that in a very visual kind of way by summarizing all the key and the key data points that you that you want. We recently did that for our investors, and they were kind of blown away by by it. So we're seeing we're seeing a lot of things like that.
SPEAKER_00Very nice. So as you see, like every with every cloud update, uh, there is they say this cloud update has killed this startup, right? And I've we have seen us stories of a lot of founders where they say, oh, this open AI update killed our startup uh as well. So what what happens is that as these uh companies are growing bigger, they are actually building more features as well, but they are pushing more updates. Uh, and we are seeing some of the startups that were trying to patch those problems uh uh are almost becoming irrelevant uh on on a day day-by-day basis. What are your thoughts about where should that innovation live when you are actually building on a either using a model on a top of a model or or using multi-models? Where where can have we have that competitive edge?
SPEAKER_02Well, I I think part of that is how do you create a level of defensibility? Right? And defensibility is you know comes up a lot when when you're looking at investing as you as you know, you're an investor into businesses. And so that could be the data that you're collecting and how you're shaping and evolving that data, so building your own data set. That could be in the in the pace that you're going to market, so creating a brand, and how strong can that brand be in market as a piece of defensibility? You know, those are things that we probably look at on the application level when when companies are pitching to us or or engaging with us and seeing how they sort of scale. It still comes back a lot to team vision capability, right?
SPEAKER_00Hmm. The the the challenge with defensibility is like with some of the startups that you would see that had a lot of hype and they picked up pretty fast. Because the cost of producing code has become so low, unless there is a very like unless the the the knowledge uh is uh retained, which is sort of separate from the the the model, it's very difficult to identify defensibility in some of these things, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02It can be. It really can be. And again, I think that's indicative of the fact of where the market's at at the moment. It's a land grab. You know, it's kind of the gold rush type time. It's how quickly can you get a customer base, how quickly can you build a brand? Those things are and without a huge amount of capital. You know, we're also seeing the pace of AI startups scale quite rapidly without having to take a lot of a lot of investment. So I think the good thing about that is you can proof them out quite quickly, like how quickly have you scaled, how quickly is your capital efficiency been in that sort of scale, how often are your customers using that product or service, how are they engaging with it? You know, those are the key things that I guess lead you to down that devisibility path.
SPEAKER_00And there's also a question about how because it's very easy to right now, everyone is interested in AI, it's very easy to get the customers on board, but then how can you make sure your customers stick to it? So, for example, I remember there's a tool that we use, Gamma AI, which for presentations, and I was using it heavily, I was talking about it heavily as well. But now you can do presentations using Claude. So uh again, sort of like I would say for a lot of users like me, it has become irrelevant very soon as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean it's really interesting, isn't it? How um the larger players are not only they're scaling breadthwise at the moment by launching all these differentiated products off the top of it. And I think that's a continuous conversation that we have on the investor side trying to work out you know what the level of defensibility or capability is like. Ultimately, though, you know, we have to remember that we're going through a global market transformation. Yeah, you know, that you know it's amazing to see um GenTIC now doing what close to 40 billion in revenue. It's quite amazing how quickly they have sale up. But um, you know, everyone, where will AI not be in five years' time? I guess is where I'm going with that. You know, so how big a market are we talking about? And will other people use presentation platforms who kind of afford boards, for example? Or you know, what's the use case for that? How do those companies then find a market for themselves? Is there a round of acquisitions that happens in the next three to four years to help consolidate market share and branding? You know, who knows?
SPEAKER_00That's right. And and so what would be your advice to founders who are exploring this space or who have got some idea that they want to implement?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think the first thing is a lot of research, you know, you really kind of got to go deep and work out um, there's a lot this AI can be applied to so many different sort of verticals and needs. So you need to kind of look at what really is the problem here. Uh is it a new problem? You know, is this something new that people would spend on, and how valuable would that be? Or are you replacing something that people are already spending on and driving a level of efficiency and then swapping out? Those are things you need to think about sort of right off the bat. The other things you do need to think about defensibility, how are you collecting data, how are you capturing data, how you leveraging that data to create and build on the AI that you're that you're launching? Those are some of the things I'd be thinking about straight off the bat.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and what what I have found is where we are getting a lot of success citizens, the more boring the industry is, the more boring the business is. And then if you really go down deeper towards a problem that people feel painful about, but it's not very uh attractive or lucrative to solve because it just doesn't look fancy, but it really solves one real problem. Uh, we see being able to solve that problem really easily, but then really like really easily sort of like scale that solution across multiple organizations as well. Uh any thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_02And do you do you think that are you seeing sort of people trying to solve for growth or trying to solve like a problem within the business? Because you know, it's interesting about how people are tying spend on AI to the PL.
SPEAKER_00Right now it's mostly uh solving for the cost itself. Uh, but it's also the the blockers of the pain points. We call them robots, repeated obligatory boring operational tasks. Uh, especially when when we work with SMEs or large organizations, they they the idea, and that's why I was really interested when you were talking about it, uh, that like AI can actually help them with with growth requires a completely different thinking at the leadership mindset. When we are still working with CEOs or boards at the moment, they're still trying to grapple with the idea of AI, and for them, an easier sell is a reduction in the cost or removing a blocker that would allow them to grow, but they're still not able to quantify what that growth would look would look like as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's very interesting, isn't it? I guess it depends on the business and the vertical in many ways, but I think that most of our our community, I think, going up from a purely from a growth point of view, primarily.
SPEAKER_00And your community would would they be more like startup-ish, uh more more innovative. Scale up tech. Yeah, scale up.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, basically, yeah. Most of our community are probably revenue-wise in that five to kind of fifteen million dollar ARR sort of space, and then trying to scale it, you know, 50% year on year.
SPEAKER_00Right. And so for them, it's more about being able to expand quickly, grow quickly, and grow efficiently.
SPEAKER_02Totally, totally, you know, and and for an Australian, I think AI is even more applicable for a lot of Aussies than it is maybe for others in many ways, because we're so isolated down here. So, you know, the examples are most Australian startups get pulled into the US because you know they they have a B2B SaaS solution in some way, and that they'll start start to find that US customers will find them and engage with them. And then that'll draw them into okay, well, how do we launch in North America now? How do we scale? And I think that mindset is altering and changing quite a lot. You know, historically we'd fly over there, we've reached to the business, set up a new new business entity, and then we'll start to look to hire a whole sales team over there. Does that still happen? Probably right now that's a little bit more in flux where people are looking at agents. Why don't I engage some agents over there as a pre-leader, top of funnel to engage, and then maybe hire one or two salespeople that have that last piece kind of closing element to it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I guess the one of the reasons why uh it's easier for the scale-ups to look at uh look uh look towards AI for growth is because as a nature of startup, you have already worked out your business model, you have already worked out your processes, so there's some level of scalability in in there. But when you look at traditional businesses like SMEs, uh even larger organization, manufacturing, construction, and so on, once you go in there, that you identify there are so many inefficiencies and there's so many processes that are actually broken, is that if you try to scale that process, it's just gonna go burst. So sometimes it's actually important to set the foundation right for those businesses because it worked for them at that scale, but you know that if they are going to get even like 5% or 10% more customers, they won't be able to survive. So it becomes more of a question of probably making their baseline right and making them ready to be able to deliver what they need to deliver, and then looking at growth.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's interesting. We yeah, it's interesting because when we look at ag tech businesses as a vertical, and I think AI can be a little bit like this with maybe SMB and SME, is that when we see ag tech startups, you know, one of the first questions we ask is if they're selling into a farming vertical, is is this gonna help grow the revenue line for the farmer, or is this gonna help save money for the farmer? And if the if the founder says it'll grow revenue line, then we'll go, there's no point, the farmer won't buy. The farmer will only buy anything that's gonna save him money, not grow his revenue line. He knows how to grow that through, you know, and he's skeptical around that, but they will only they'll only change something out if it's gonna save them on the bottom line. I'm assuming that's kind of what you're saying with a lot of traditional businesses, they'll engage AI if it's gonna save them money. Absolutely, yes.
SPEAKER_00That's that's a very clear consensus across every business that I talk to. Because there are so many pains of running running a business on a day-to-day basis. Uh and the very first unlock, sometimes when you talk about even sort of some larger use cases, it's very difficult for them to fathom that. So it's when we have the conversation with leaders, we talk about very simple things like how this report can be automated, or how you can get a daily briefing of what's happening. And they're like, oh my god, that's gonna be a lifesaver. I was working with uh one of the construction companies, and we're talking about all of these larger things, and I was talking to uh the CEO, and then as I'm having this conversation with him, I said, in terms of all of the calls that you receive, uh, because you're always on the road, you know there is this tool uh which you can put on your phone, have the call transcripts, and uh then you can put them in in your AI brain, and then from there you can you you just know what you talked about. And then out of everything that we talked about, that was the most uh uh interesting thing that actually excited him out of our conversation. So sometimes it's actually about solving some very simple problems for uh for those to actually bring them on board to look at solving larger problems.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? We um we just did a session yesterday, so we run an AI forum within our community, and we're probably not running it as frequently as we should. We're trying to get to a point where we're kind of everyone's gathering on a weekly basis because the landscape's changing so much. And this is kind of like a really a chance for founders to come on board and show other founders what hacks they're doing and how they're using AI and how they're deploying AI. Again, just for us, it's really important to be a thought leader in this sort of space. And so um, we did a session yesterday, I think we had 50-ish, on the call where one of our founders has now just built himself an AI coach. So he's used OpenClaw and basically he's given OpenClaw, you know, his sort of 10 favorite management books. And he said, This is the sort of leader I want to be with my team at the moment, you know. And he's hooked the agent into granola and he records every call that he does. And at the end of the every day, his AI coach agent gives him a script on this is what worked well, this is how you you know what you did well today, these are the sort of three areas that you can improve on in this continuous coaching sort of space, which is great for him. Yeah. So things like that are amazing, I think, how people can use it.
SPEAKER_00Oh, absolutely. And how are you personally using uh AI in your day-to-day life?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, I'm using it across everything, it's quite amazing. I think uh coworkers really helped from an execution point of view. So, you know, we've really pivoted as a business from going to using AI to help us maybe distill some ideas or to create some content or um help us think through an issue or a strategy. And that has been very useful, sort of you know, late last year to kind of early this year. And then I think what we've seen over the last three months is we now have the capability to execute on that and actually deliver that through AI. So getting AI to run projects for us, that could be um outreach to prospective members, it could be um helping run internal internal teams and projects, so keeping accountability, managing comms, um, helping us re-execute on strategy and making sure that the teams across all that and that there's a clear line of ownership across each member of the team of what they're doing. There's no there's no end to it. I think actually what we're seeing at the moment is founders are achieving so much through using AI, the pace of decision making and the pace of execution is increased that we're actually exhausted by it almost. You know, you kind of you kind of can't keep up. It's kind of like working five days in a day uh and doing that on a constant basis. Is it's it's quite interesting.
SPEAKER_00Excellent. So we are also using Cloud heavily, and one thing that we have done, it's it's a I'm sorry, I'm uh to the audience, I'm going a bit geeky over here, but it's a it's a very interesting concept that we have worked out is we have created a system of folders, uh, which is called uh with markdown files, which is what we call as agent OS, where what we have got is like in every folder for every agent, we have got uh a task list, which is again by markdown files. So, what's essentially what's happening is earlier we were using OpenClaw, but open clause API, like the clause API became expensive, and we were doing a lot of processing through that. So now what we have done is we are running a claude schedule task. What it does is it actually goes and just look it into that folder and just pick up the next task that's actually allocated to it and then actually execute on that task. So, what what it means is they've got multiple agents. So, example, in the SEO team, we have got an SEO strategist, uh, then executor and so on. But those agents are just like piece of dot md files allocating tasks to each other and working work working together. But instead of having to use an API or something very fancy, we're just using schedule tasks in the cloud cowork to be able to do that. And it's it's just fantastic.
SPEAKER_02And how how has that changed the business?
SPEAKER_00So for for us, so for example, with uh just let's talk about search engine optimization. So we we work like we've got around eight brands that uh we take care of the the like we uh manage the marketing for. And we initially we were just focusing on search engine optimization for two main brands because we didn't have the appetite to be able to do that, but now just on that, we are able to plug in those eight brands, and we have got these agents who are able to identify the issues, identify the opportunities, being able to go into the website, make those changes, and we are starting to see the ranking go up. Like it we deployed it around a couple of months ago, and uh the rankings have already started to increase, and not only that, uh our citation, so like Chat GPT or OpenAI or Publix City recommending the business is actually starting to go up without us having to put any more effort. So we actually had one uh full time SEO person and one content person who was doing the work. We still have one person, but we are able to take care of eight brands with that. Awesome. Yep. That also uh uh leans down into the concept of how simplistic some of this stuff has become to implement where you do not need a lot of fancy tools to do uh do the thing, and it's been developed by non-technical guys at our organization. So the the the uh the the the earlier the challenge was that it was very difficult for non-technical people uh to be able to code or to make something happen, and especially as founders, we were dependent on people doing things, but now at least uh as as founders now we can actually go in and uh do some of that stuff and play with it and and make it happen. Are you seeing uh a lot of that in your community as well?
SPEAKER_02Definitely, you know, uh that kind of sandbox, like playing around with things and trying to work out how it can engage. Yeah, I think all of our founders are working on those things, all of our VCs are working on those things, you know, it's not only changing uh the founder landscape, but it's definitely changing the investor landscape at the same time. So definitely a lot of people are playing around with a lot of different tools, trying to work out what the sweet spot is, so to speak, on the product offering and different verticals they can focus on, whether that's leadership or sales or customer, customer service or marketing or engineering, whatever that might be.
SPEAKER_00And and I know we don't have a crystal ball, but what are your thoughts of how this space is gonna evolve in the next one or two years, or or not even a definitive answer? What directions can this space go in?
SPEAKER_02Well, crystal ball time is always a tricky one. Um, I think what we're sort of seeing in the short term is you know, we everyone's using everyone three, four months ago and and currently is using Cord and or OpenAI or um or Google or what it might be, basically, these major models. I think then you've seen this plethora of smaller, kind of very highly niche um AI platforms come out come out, whether that's you know um email automation marketing or a whole bunch of other different things. I think what we're seeing now is a whole bunch of those tools sort of more coming together to provide more of a um suite of products under one banner. So we've started started using town assistant. I'm not sure if you've used that one as yet, but it's kind of like uh a mix between an agent almost and uh and an application that comes together and manages your you know your your daily schedule and really does act as like an assistance that you can give a task, it manages your inbox, it manages you know, receivables on zero, you can integrate it into basically all of your um business applications and it can give you like a consolidated view.
SPEAKER_00What does it call it?
SPEAKER_02It's called town assistance. So the very the very early US-based seed seed stage, you know, just raised a I think a 17 million US seed round. Um and so you know, I think that's what we're seeing as the next stage because it's kind of like a land grab between people who are building agents for companies and deploying them, and then the ease in which to build agents and the applications in which you can get agents off the shelf. Yeah, so I think we're only going to see an evolution where in the next six months you won't need to go to someone to build an agent, but you can go to a platform and say, Yeah, look, I need a HR agent. This is what it needs to do for me, adapt it, ingrain it, manage it for me, and give me some analysis on it. I think that'll be the evolution that we'll see over the next six to twelve months. And a bunch of companies will provide those different agents. You know, it'd be very interesting to see who you know who kind of gets out there in the market. And then um, and then I think that you know it's hard to get a view on it right, given the fact that it's so broad. Kind of one of those you know, question marks of where is AI not going to affect our future state. It's hard not to know where it would have.
SPEAKER_00And what happens to startups?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think for startups, I think ultimately we'll see again as the adoption of AI grows, we'll see um a once you know generational, multi-generational chance for ideation to really come back to the forefront. So I think that we will see more companies being created over the next uh you know two years than we've seen collectively in the last you know, eight. I think that's because the ability to create, uh have an idea that a lot of people do, and then test that idea, validate that idea, and then actually create and deploy that business has never ever been easier. So um we'll see that personalization that we really kind of want um evolve at a much more rapid pace. Because as you know, every business is different, and you know, you've got to customize your suite to every sort of business, which is the painful bit, but also the enjoyable bit. I think AI will um allow us to provide very deep solutions specific for people rather than the off-the-shelf solutions that people buy now.
SPEAKER_00Very interesting. And so, in the middle of all of this excitement, and this is probably my personal question, how do one sleep, man? Because I'm finding it very difficult to actually sleep or stop thinking. And I I I slept at like two last night, and believe it or not, like I was dreaming about the agents and God stuff and so on. Uh have you been going through that as well?
SPEAKER_02Well, I'm I'm definitely with you there. I think the level of excitement um we have, but also our community has there's fear, I mean there's apprehension, right? Where people are going, will I have a business? I'm a B2B SaaS provider, I'm a B2B SAS startup, will I have a business in 12 months? Right? I think we're kind of evolving through that fear at the moment to that level of actually we can pivot, we can evolve, we've got this knowledge base, we've got some IP, we can leverage that, and we can drive AI into our business and help us scale and really engage in market. Uh, I think we're at that level of excitement now where it is hard to kind of contain, but that's a better state to be in than you know being fearful. So I'm sleeping, I'm sleeping better to answer your question. I'm sleeping better because I'm more hopeful rather than fearful.
SPEAKER_00Uh that's that's that's such a nice answer, really. So you're right. So we've we've been through fear, we are now in in a more excited state. So I think we need to move into a more comfortable state where we can, of course, contain that excitement, but also have uh clear governance and safety around it as well. And hopefully that's that that's gonna follow as well. Before we finish, do you have uh any final thoughts uh on our conversation or anything else that you would like to share?
SPEAKER_02I I think from my experience with um medium-sized businesses, and maybe there's a few people out there who are earlier stage founders, there's a bit of an apprehension, you know, how do I get into it? What do I do? Where do I go? You know, how do I kind of learn more about this? And what I would sort of say is the greatest way to learn is through other people. So, you know, connect with communities and engage with other people who are doing things, reduce that fear and apprehension, and get it kind of excited by it. Because if we can get excited by it and engage with it, then we can shape it in the right direction. What we don't want to have is have a few people directing us around AI. We want to be kind of leading this uh evolution in the future as a community rather than you know one or two businesses. So, you know, I think you've got to stand up and you've got to jump into it, is my parting words for you.
SPEAKER_00Wow, that's great. Stand up and jump into it. That's that's awesome. And talking about community, uh, if anyone is keen to join your community, how can they do that?
SPEAKER_02There's an application on our website, it's a really simple process. Reach out to me. Um, we've also got a head of growth, Carly Norman, and that's just Carly Innovation Bay. You can reach out to her also, but uh just connect. Perfect.
SPEAKER_00Excellent. Very good. It was a very lovely conversation. Um it went for longer than I expected, and you have been an uh amazing guest. Thank you so much for sharing all of the information. It was really insightful to talk to you. And uh thank you for being here.
SPEAKER_02Thanks to me for having me on the show. Really been a great pleasure. Thanks for the first thing to realize as a founder is that if you're not embracing AI, I think your likelihood of survival over the next 24 months is very low. We want to see more hundred million dollar revenue startups in this country, and that's kind of like our core focus. And we know that in order to do that, we've got to have a really healthy venture capital industry, we've got to have a really healthy, you know, angel investing industry, and we're gonna have a really healthy founder industry. People are going, will I have a business? I'm a bit of the tax provider, I'm a bit of the tax startup, will I have a business in 12 months? I think we're kind of evolving through that fear at the moment to that level of actually we can pivot, we can evolve. It's how quickly can you get a customer base, how quickly can you build a brand without a huge amount of capital? You know, we're also seeing the AI startups go quite rapidly without having to take a lot of what sort of agent should I have? Where can I deploy that agent? I don't want to manage that agent. I don't want to obstacle that agent. Should I be thinking of that agent as an employee that will evolve for me and pride for me into the business? Or is it just something that is technically being deployed to solve a specific problem?
