#204: Paul Roetzer (SmarterX & Marketing AI Institute) — Accelerating AI Literacy

Paul Roetzer [00:00:00]:
The hardships create appreciation for the moments, the good moments, and I learned a long, long time ago building my agency to just enjoy the journey. I am not in this for some massive endgame and some big payout. I actually think I'll be sad whenever that day comes, and I just am so appreciative of every day getting to do what we do and having people care what we have to say and knowing that we're making an impact on people. I don't know that you can ask for anything else as an entrepreneur. That's just gives life purpose. So I just I try and just enjoy it and not take it for granted. I've gotten to do some pretty insane things and spend time with people that five years ago I couldn't even fathom would wanna talk to us, and and I don't ever take it for granted.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:43]:
Welcome to the lay of the land podcast where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern. And today, I had the real pleasure of speaking with Paul Roetzer, an AI expert and educator with over two decades of experience in the marketing industry. Paul is the founder and CEO of SmarterX and the Marketing AI Institute, a media, event, and online education company that he started back in 02/2016 to make AI accessible, approachable, and actionable for marketers and business leaders. Through the institute, he created MAICON, the leading annual marketing AI conference, which is hosted here in Cleveland, Ohio. He is also the coauthor of marketing artificial intelligence, AI marketing and the future of business. He is the cohost of the artificial intelligence show podcast and the creator of the AI literacy project, where he's working to make AI education accessible and personalized for everyone. Paul graduated from accessible and personalized for everyone.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:46]:
Paul graduated from Ohio University's E. W. Scripps School of Journalism and has since consulted for hundreds of organizations, from start ups to Fortune 500 companies. In 02/2005, he founded Ready North, formerly known as p r twenty twenty, a digital marketing agency that became HubSpot's first partner agency and played a pivotal role in launching HubSpot's entire partnership strategy. He successfully sold that firm in 02/2021 to Blue Cypress. This conversation was a lot of fun for me. I love thinking about how exponential technologies will affect the future of society, and that is exactly what Paul and I got got to do. We explore the vast and profound implications of AI on the future of work and on society overall, while also exploring the business of conferences, the importance of AI literacy going forward, early days of HubSpot, building in Cleveland, and a whole lot more.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:40]:
So please enjoy this awesome discussion with Paulo Roetzer. Lay of the Land is brought to you by Impact Architects and by ninety. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio, Impact Architects has helped hundreds of those leaders, many of whom we have heard from as guests on this very podcast, realize their own visions and build these great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love. If you two are trying to build great, Impact Architects is offering to sit down with you for a free consultation or provide a free trial through 90, the software platform that helps teams build great companies. If you were interested in learning more about partnering with Impact Architects or by leveraging 90 to power your own business, please go to ia.layoftheland.fm. The link will also be in our show notes. I was thinking about where to start, and what came to mind was was one of these trite but true aphorisms, which I feel with what you've built with Marketing AI Institute and the Marketing AI Conference is one of these true overnight successes, but ten years in the making kind of thing, where, you know, you kind of had had presciently positioned the organization to ride the wave of AI as it's increasingly monopolized our attention over the last months, the last years.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:13]:
And I'm certainly interested in the perceived overnight success idea, which which we can talk about. But I'd love to start by trying to understand what the grittier reality of that decade in the making was like. Obviously you saw AI as the forest through the trees and and did not miss the bigger picture. But I'm curious, you know, what you saw, all the things leading up to it. You recognize this opportunity and build something important around it.

Paul Roetzer [00:04:39]:
Yeah. I'm happy to tell the entrepreneurial story. I don't think those things get told enough. We do just see sort of the glossy finish online and on LinkedIn, and it's just like everything looks so clean and perfect, and that is not the case. So I I I think I started my agency in 02/2005 in Cleveland. And even back then, I had this grand vision of reinventing marketing agencies. And I thought about moving. We don't have kids yet, my wife and I, and so we toyed with getting out of the market and doing something in a different city.

Paul Roetzer [00:05:05]:
But I was born and raised here and went away for college for four years and came right back. And so I decided, well, if I'm gonna build something significant, we might as well do it here, be part of the solution, not part of the problem. And back in o five, when I put my office downtown Cleveland right behind Progressive Field, that wasn't the most desirable place to be. We did not have everything we now have downtown that the build out hadn't happened yet. But even back then, you're just making a bet on, in that case, my my city. And so so I built an agency. And then in 02/2011, I I wrote my first book, The Marketing Agency Blueprint, because we'd been lucky enough to become HubSpot's first partner back in 02/2007. So I sort of saw the content marketing, inbound marketing, that whole wave coming and repositioned our agency and started reselling HubSpot software.

Paul Roetzer [00:05:48]:
And that ended up being a very, very good bet early in my life and was friends with the cofounders and got in on the IPO at $30 a share. And it was just it was a dream. It was crazy. So yeah. I mean, they were I was working with HubSpot when they raised their $3,000,000 series a. It was very, very early, and then they IPOed in 02/2014. So 02/2011, I write the marketing agency blueprint, and that was the IBM Watson one on Jeopardy. So right before I wrote the manuscript for that book was when Watson won.

Paul Roetzer [00:06:17]:
And so I was just curious what exactly was that. And so after I finished the manuscript for my book, I went back and started studying Watson and tried to figure out how it worked and what it did. And so what I eventually learned, it was just a prediction machine. It understood natural language. It understood, quote, unquote, understood the words that was being asked of it. It then searched the database, basically, found what it thought the right answer was. And then if the probability of that answer was high enough, it would ring in in a millisecond and answer it. I was like, oh, that's interesting.

Paul Roetzer [00:06:46]:
And so companies of all sizes, including a lot in Northeast Ohio, would come to my agency, and they would want help growing their business, generating more leads, reducing the churn of their customer base, building their brand. And what I came to realize by this point in 02/2012 is the human mind is incapable of an optimal marketing strategy. I have no idea how to spend your money. There's a thousand ways to do this. So I thought, well, maybe this Watson thing can help us do that, build a predictive engine for marketing strategy. And so that's how I got into AI. Can I use this tech to to improve the way we provide a service? And then I read this book called Automate This by Christopher Steiner in 02/2012, and he told the story of automation of all these different industries with these intelligent algorithms. And so I became convinced that marketing was gonna be changed, that AI would eventually transform.

Paul Roetzer [00:07:30]:
And it just ends up that this was right around the time that the deep learning movement in AI had its sort of inflection point. This AlexNet competition where they, tried to train AI to see and recognize objects. And there was a breakthrough in 02/2012 by Jeff Hinton, this guy Ilya Sutzkeva, and this other guy whose name I can't remember at the moment. But Ilya and Jeff formed an LLC that they then sold to Google, and they went to Google and worked. Ilya then became one of the cofounders of OpenAI. And, Jeff went on to win a Nobel Prize and a Turing Award. So they created this movement. And so I'm watching all this, like, 02/2013, '2 thousand '14, and I'm just like, wow.

Paul Roetzer [00:08:10]:
This is a huge deal. And then 02/2014, I wrote about it in my second book, and I theorized this intelligence engine. And it was funny. The whole book was about marketing, talent, tech, and strategy. It had nothing to do with AI except this one segment of one chapter, and that was all anybody wanted me to speak about. So I started getting calls from all over the world, including the US government to talk about AI and recruiting for the military and things like that. So then we, 02/2016, created the AI institute, marketing institute, to tell the story of AI, to try and figure out where is it? Why is no one doing it? It seems obvious this is gonna change the world. Nobody's talking about it, So we created that.

Paul Roetzer [00:08:45]:
And by 02/2019, about 8,000 subscribers to that institute. So some people were paying attention. One of the early ones I always laugh at is Mark Cuban was one of our early subscribers, and we used to, like, create blog posts and send emails just to see if we could get Cuban to open an email. It was funny. So we had all these early adopters and innovators that were following, but I was losing everything money wise. We were not making money at all. So 02/2016, I create it. 02/2019, I split it off as its own company.

Paul Roetzer [00:09:13]:
I fund it myself at that point. We put the first event in Cleveland, make on 02/2019. Three hundred people from 12 countries show up. I lose, like, $400,000 that year. 02/2020, COVID hits. We lose everything because there's no event. We can't run an event. 02/2021 is virtual.

Paul Roetzer [00:09:29]:
02/2022, we're back in person, 200 people. So we're just losing money everywhere. And and I think we lost, like, $700,000 in 02/2022. Now I'd raised a million by this point seed round, but most of this was still my money we were losing. I'd sold my agency to focus on AI at that point, and then and then ChatGPT hit in February. I had four months of burn rate left. We were gonna be out of money by February. I was gonna recapitalize it myself and just I believe deeply it was gonna work.

Paul Roetzer [00:09:59]:
I just didn't know when. And then ChatGPT hits, and all the initial indicators start going up like crazy, getting calls from all over the world, CEOs, heads of VC firms, heads of analysts. Everybody's calling me saying, what happened? What is ChatGPT? What's gonna happen now? And then and then it just took off, and it's been a bit of a whirlwind, honestly, since Chet g p t the last two plus years now. So, yeah, it was it was not overnight. I can promise you that. Right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:25]:
Right. And I I can only imagine what the the last two years have have been like.

Paul Roetzer [00:10:30]:
Yeah. It's it's cool. I think the hardships create appreciation for the moments, the good moments. And I learned a long, long time ago building my agency to just enjoy the journey. I am not in this for some massive endgame and some big payout. I actually think I'll be sad whenever that day comes. And I I I think that I just am so appreciative of every day getting to do what we do and having people care what we have to say and knowing that we're making an impact on people. I don't know that you can ask for anything else as an entrepreneur.

Paul Roetzer [00:10:58]:
That's just gives life purpose. And so I just I try and just enjoy it and not take it for granted. I've gotten to do some pretty insane things and spend time with people that five years ago I couldn't even fathom would wanna talk to us, and and I don't ever take it for granted.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:15]:
With regards to enjoying the the journey along the way, I mean, obviously, you did have a bit of foresight or at least observed more of the implications of what would come to transpire than I think a lot of people at the time. And I'm curious if what MACON and, the conference has become and the whole organization and what you're building is in line with kind of that original vision that you had, or has it changed with the mass proliferation of of this into the zeitgeist and all of our brain space?

Paul Roetzer [00:11:47]:
In the early days, I don't remember think I sat down and really tried to play out exactly how I thought it would all look. I was just I had very deep conviction that AI would be the underlying layer that that transformed every industry and every component of knowledge work. Going back to 02/1516, I believe that. I invested heavily in NVIDIA and Google and Microsoft and the the companies that I believe were just undervalued in in the world because I didn't think economists and, you know, hedge fund managers I didn't think that people understood what was going to happen with AI and I that was correct. I made a very prescient bet, I guess, back in 2016. And so I I thought it was gonna change everything, but I I'll I'll tell you the day I decided to sell my agency, if we go back to that moment. So it was February. We were in Florida mid pandemic, spring break, and I was listening to a book called Genius Makers by Cade Metz.

Paul Roetzer [00:12:46]:
And Cade was embedded with Jeff Hinton, Ilya Sutzkeva, Sam Altman, like, all these guys, Demos Hassabis from Google in and he had the inside story going back to 02/2011, '2 thousand '12 when this whole deep learning movement happened. And so I'm listening to this, and he's telling the story of that moment and then, like, all the research labs fighting over the talent in thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. And I'm like, oh my god. I get it now. And so what I had realized was that I had back in, like, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, I had overestimated how quickly the rest of the world was gonna figure all this out. I thought by 02/2020, it was just gonna be everywhere. There would be no software without AI is what I assumed. I was wrong.

Paul Roetzer [00:13:26]:
I overestimated how quickly, but I underestimated the total impact, and I I estimated significant impact. And so I realized in that moment that's why it hadn't happened yet. And so I got back from the walk, and I told my wife I'm selling the agency. I gotta get out as quickly as possible because I think I now know what's gonna happen, and I have to spend every waking second often for this. I've gotten a lot right, I would say. Like, if you go back to our book, which we published in summer of twenty two, so this is six months before ChatGPT, there is literally a section that has says what happens when machines can write like humans. That hadn't happened yet, but we knew it was going to happen. And so we've explained all of it and how it was gonna play out.

Paul Roetzer [00:14:07]:
And so yeah. I mean, I think I've gotten a lot of the trend lines right, and that's allowed us to be ahead from a business perspective and a career perspective a lot.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:17]:
It's kinda funny how our collective inability to think exponentially is both what you got right and wrong.

Paul Roetzer [00:14:24]:
Yeah. And and you can miss it by years. And I'm still doing this. I'm doing this now with this AI agent movement. It I don't know. And even jobs in the future of work, I have some pretty deep convictions about these things, and I could be plus or minus five years on what I'm think I think in the end, I'll be right. I just don't know if it's gonna be in twelve months or five years, but I I'm fairly confident that the outcome is inevitable in a lot of ways.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:50]:
And we'll, we'll definitely touch on a few of those. Yeah. But before we get to, to those and I'm very excited to, to chat about those and I, I think about them a lot as well. I did want to ask about conferences as kind of a a business model and what you've learned from them. I think what's kind of interesting for me as an observer is we actually have this pretty robust, call it, cadre of conference builders here in Cleveland.

Paul Roetzer [00:15:15]:
We do.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:16]:
You have Joe Pulizzi with the Content Entrepreneur Expo, Mike Belsito, with industry. You know? And as far as industries go, where Cleveland, I think, actually outperforms, I don't feel like I've heard a lot of people talk about this. And so I I'd love to get your thoughts on what has made Cleveland a great home for for building what you're building and just your perspective on conferences kind of as a as a business.

Paul Roetzer [00:15:39]:
Yeah. So I I'll I'll start off with the conferences as a business. Very bullish on conferences. I I think that as AI permeates throughout society, I think that we're going to crave more truly human experiences. And it's gonna be harder and harder online to know if the experience you have or the information you're consuming was human generated or not. And there's no way to fake the in in person stuff. It's me on stage, unscripted, talking to you and meeting you in the hallway. And I I just feel like people are going to really want that and need that in their lives.

Paul Roetzer [00:16:15]:
So I I think in person events are gonna have a bit of a renaissance. It was not a great business to have, obviously, during the pandemic. And That was right. To survive that was one of the hardest things I've ever done. Get through the other side and and still have a business to bring back afterwards. So, yeah, that's my take on events. I I think they're very important, and I think they're gonna keep growing. In terms of Cleveland as a center, so the way I looked at it is Joe Pulizzi is a really good friend of mine mine and advisor to the institute, and I was involved in the very early days when they were building content marketing world in in town.

Paul Roetzer [00:16:49]:
And so I got to experience all that. I spoke at it seven or eight straight years. So saw them get that event to four thousand plus marketers coming to Cleveland. And so when I was launching MayCon, there was a lot of people I thought it was insane to put an AI event in Cleveland. And people told me that straight up. What what are you doing? Nobody's gonna come to Cleveland for AI. And what I said was, I'm not trying to get developers. I want marketers.

Paul Roetzer [00:17:13]:
And Joe's already proven that 4,000 marketers will come to Cleveland and enjoy their experience here. So there's no reason we can't do a marketing event in Cleveland. And then, eventually, maybe even something more than a marketing event and business event. Maybe we can do a technical event. But I just felt that there was such a competitive advantage to be here. And, honestly, we didn't get a lot of support from the region, up until last year, if I'm being really honest. We got meetings with people, but nobody cared. Like, we weren't a significant player.

Paul Roetzer [00:17:42]:
We weren't making an economic economic impact. And, honestly, I don't think a lot of them even understood what we were doing, the AI thing. It just didn't resonate with them. And so there was times where I was like, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do this in Cleveland. Nobody cares. And we can't get support from any of the organizations in town. We couldn't get any of the big brands to come there. All the major brands, like, nobody was there.

Paul Roetzer [00:18:01]:
So it was embarrassing, honestly, that we weren't getting support from it, and it was right in their own backyard. And then after CHETCHPC, that all changed because then they realized, oh, wow. We gotta figure this out, and there's an event here. But the way I always looked at it was and why I stayed committed to the city was we could put this event anywhere and get thousands of people. We can go out to the Bay Area. We can go to New York. We can go to London. We can go to Austin, Texas.

Paul Roetzer [00:18:22]:
We can go anywhere. Boston. They wouldn't care. I could build a 10,000 person event, and they wouldn't care. But we could make a difference here. And so we got it to be 2,000, five thousand, whatever. It will matter to the region and to the economy, and I would much prefer make a difference than just draw more people in a city that doesn't care.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:40]:
In the times where it was particularly difficult, I'm thinking about the COVID times and how how did you stay the course? Like, what did you find was motivating you? Obviously, you had this conviction. How did you kinda weather that that those storms?

Paul Roetzer [00:18:55]:
I've always done this in business. The way I go to sleep at night when things are most crazy is I just have the action plan for the next morning. What's the next step I can do? And I've I teach this to my kids who are 13 and 11 all the time. When they're stressed, it's like, just make a list of what you can do. Forget all the things you can't control. What are the things you can actually do to make progress tomorrow? And there was a lot of that. It was like, man, no one's buying tickets. Okay.

Paul Roetzer [00:19:19]:
Let's try this. I need to have a plan. I cannot just be helpless here. And so there was a lot of just grinding through, trying a lot of things, having the conviction. It will eventually work. I will find the money somewhere. We we were going to keep doing this because I truly believe this is gonna change the world. Not us, but AI was gonna change the world.

Paul Roetzer [00:19:39]:
And so it was always just having a plan and being willing to fail and actually embracing the failure because we would learn something and empowering the team to feel that way too, to not be fearful of doing something that didn't work. It's like, no. No. No. Take take the at bats. Go try things. And we still do that today, but I think that's how I try and avoid anxiety and stress and just appreciate the moment. Even when it's hard, just have a plan and feel like you have some control of the next thing that happens.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:10]:
So before we started recording here, you had mentioned a certain I would frame it as like a carpe diem, approach to seizing the the current moment and opportunity that you spent ten years putting yourself in the position to be able to do. As you look towards where you are today, where the organization is today, what are you most excited about building next?

Paul Roetzer [00:20:32]:
So I so I launched the separate brand last year, the SmarterX, which is a research and consulting and education firm. And the main premise was the story of AI beyond marketing. So we we built the initial brand on top of Marketing AI Institute. We built 90,000 contact, you know, CRM database of people who've opted into our content and education and things like that, and that was all marketing. But after ChatGPT, what happened is I started getting those calls from the CEOs and all these other government leaders. And people care less that we had a marketing institute. They just wanted to understand AI. And so it became very apparent, and I'd been working on this this for years, but now it was really apparent that we needed a brand that allowed us to go beyond that.

Paul Roetzer [00:21:13]:
So I did, like, 70 talks last year, something crazy like that, and more than half of them were not to marketing audiences. They were to heads of universities and government leaders and nonprofit leaders and CEO groups, and and so we needed somewhere for that to live. So part of it is just this idea of expanding now, taking what we've done that works, media events, education, and taking that to other industries, other career paths. That's interesting to me. But I think our North Star last year became AI literacy for all. What I what I think matters the most is that people understand this stuff. And I I don't care if it's teachers at a middle school. Yesterday, I was having lunch with the president of my kid's school, and we're talking about AI in education and how how do we drive literacy among the teachers so the teachers can educate the next generation of workers in the proper way.

Paul Roetzer [00:22:00]:
And so I I find a lot of fulfillment in helping people in different industries and sectors understand this stuff. And so this AI literacy for all is gonna play out in in a number of ways, but a big part of it is gonna be online education. And so I'm actively working on sort of the next phases of our AI academy. And and that's gonna be probably where most of my my brain power goes over the next few months is I think I cracked the code on how to do it over winter break. And so I'm pretty excited to work on that. Every day I wake up thinking about that. And I'm trying as a CEO, the hardest thing is you have 17 things you need to work on. But Right.

Paul Roetzer [00:22:42]:
At some point, you have to just be maniacal about it. No. I'm I'm doing this, and everything else falls away. And and, honestly, in my career, twenty five years now, the only times I've ever done that was when I wrote the three books. And and so for three months of writing the mission, I take no meetings. I don't respond to emails. Basically, I'm out of office for three months saying, I'm working on a book. I'm sorry.

Paul Roetzer [00:23:02]:
I can't do anything. And I've always wondered, why can't I do that with other projects? Why does it always have to be a book that I do that with? And so I think I've arrived at the point with our academy where I'm going to do that. I'm going to go into a you know, for for the next three months, basically, be in a block where I'm almost exclusively working on academy and trying

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:20]:
to solve it. The the the book mentality.

Paul Roetzer [00:23:22]:
Yeah. And people respect that. Like, you say I'm I'm working on a book. It's like, oh, okay. Cool. I get it. He's busy. Yeah.

Paul Roetzer [00:23:26]:
Otherwise, you seem like a jerk when you're like, I'm sorry. I I would love to have coffee with you, but I just can't. I'm working on a book. It's like, oh, okay. I get it. So I'm I'm trying to figure out, like, how do I phrase this so I don't seem like a jerk when it's like, no. I have to do this. And that 30 is actually an hour because I gotta turn mentally on and off and get ready for it.

Paul Roetzer [00:23:44]:
And so you're saying no to all these things, but you gotta you gotta get comfortable saying no and have people appreciate and respect that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:51]:
Yeah. AI literacy to me is a is a resonant North Star because it it will be true no matter And obviously AI is moving at a velocity and pace that it is almost impossible to for the average person to just keep up with. That feels like a real grounding thing that that will hold true even as the the space continues to evolve.

Paul Roetzer [00:24:13]:
Yeah. And I I think it keeps expanding in my mind what it means and what we can do about it. And the nice thing is I think it resonates with some some organizations that I've been trying to work with for a long time that I think can help really raise the level of our initiative. And I've I've had a lot of conversations that are very encouraging in that direction that I think we're gonna get a lot of support around this and hopefully actually make a difference because I I think there's a growing level of urgency that we need to do something to help people understand

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:45]:
and apply this stuff. So so typically, I I like to discuss the the evergreen aspects of of your reflections and experience the things that will be as as true decades from now as they as they are here today. That with the pace of AI, it's it's almost impossible to avoid the the topical nature of it, which you get to spend a lot of your your time thinking about here. Agents, disruption, automation, what does this mean for white collar work? What does this mean for blue collar work? The hardware and infrastructure side of it, the regulatory considerations, and there there's so much influx in society is really trying to figure it out in real time. I wanted to start the the the kind of macro AI discussion, which which we'll have in an evergreen framing though, which is things that won't change. Where where do you feel the boundary demarking what is within and without what AI will affect in society, or is it literally all within the scope?

Paul Roetzer [00:25:45]:
It's all within. I don't I don't know. Like, I don't I don't know if I'm overstating this. It's the most important thing to humanity, period. It either affects every element of society. It changes everything. It helps solve the other problems. Like, it it truly is just the underlying element of everything.

Paul Roetzer [00:26:02]:
The next presidential administration, this is gonna end up being the most important thing. You can already see it happening, and it's so crazy because we would talk about it all the time on the campaign trail. Why isn't anyone talking about AI? It never came up. It it was never discussed in the presidential debates. It wasn't a campaign topic for either person. What I kept saying is they don't know if they can win votes one way or the other. The reason it wasn't talked about in the campaigns was because it society didn't understand it and didn't really care, so they weren't gonna swing any votes, so why talk about it? But already, you're seeing this is what the executive orders are gonna be. You're lining up the people who are gonna get involved.

Paul Roetzer [00:26:37]:
You're having OpenAI submit public letters to the president, the incoming administration about what they think should happen with infrastructure. You got a $20,000,000,000 commitment for infrastructure. You got Microsoft saying they're gonna spend $80,000,000,000 next year or this year on data centers. It's going to dominate the next administration. And in part because most AI researchers think we will achieve AGI within the next four years, which is artificial general intelligence. It's AI that is as capable as humans at almost all cognitive tasks. So you're talking about a complete reinvention of the workforce, hundred million knowledge workers in The US out of a 36,000,000 full time jobs. It's gonna be reinvented in in the next four years, and we have no plans for that.

Paul Roetzer [00:27:20]:
None. There's no governmental plans. There's no industry plans. There's most companies don't have a plan for what that means. Universities don't have a plan. Your freshmen are gonna graduate in the world of AGI. What does that mean? And nobody knows. And so that's why I say I just I get that there's all these other things, and I care about many of those things too, but none of them are gonna be talked about without an element of AI to it.

Paul Roetzer [00:27:45]:
What is the role of AI in x? Like, any anything. And I think society's gonna come to realize that. And I think there's gonna be really good stuff that comes from that. I think there's gonna be really bad stuff that comes from that. And then there's gonna be societal revolts. I think people are gonna come to resent AI. All of it. It's all and it's all gonna happen in the next four years, basically.

Paul Roetzer [00:28:05]:
And anything beyond that, I have no idea. What what does it all look like after four years? I don't have a clue. I I I'm fairly confident in my ability to project what the technology will be capable of in the next twelve months, and I'm fairly confident in my assessment of what the AI research labs think it'll look like twelve months after that. Beyond that, nobody nobody knows. I I'm I'm convinced of that. I'm convinced Sam Altman doesn't know beyond that. They're gonna build a heck of a lot of data centers, many of them in Ohio to try and build it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:39]:
Yeah. It, so my favorite movie growing up was I, Robot. And you, you know, like triggered a vision of that in my head. And in this movie, there's a flashback to the scene of why Will Smith hates robots. And it's because Will Smith's character and this little girl are in a car accident, and the car is sinking in a river. And, it's clear it's crazy where my mind just went. It's clear they're both about to drown. But this robot comes and makes a decision to save him and not the girl.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:08]:
And that's at the heart of why he hates robots. And so he ultimately does an audit of the robot and its decision making process, trying to understand why it made the decision that it made. And Will Smith learns that it predicted the likelihood of their respective survival rates and opted to save Will Smith who had five times more likely to survive over the girl. That framing is it's almost like a classic AI problem. We studied it in computer science in college. But if there is a train on the tracks and there are five people tied to it, and they're gonna die, you pull the lever to the alternative track. But in the movie, the judgment is weighing the the relative value of, of a man's life versus a little girl's life. And, in the train scenario, it's it's more, you know, generally the value of life and, like, decisions of omission, not making a decision.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:58]:
But it gets, like, very uncomfortable thinking about those kinds of decisions. And knowing that you just kind of framed as everything within the scope of what AI will affect in society. It is almost like a philosophical framing, but as AI makes its way into more of our lives with increasing decision making power and I liked your original framing of it as it is literally a prediction based decision making model where the predictions aren't always right, and it gets to a point where reasonable people, human beings, could disagree about what decisions to make. I don't even know where this question is going, but that's where my mind went.

Paul Roetzer [00:30:35]:
The form of AI so people, I think, sometimes lose sight of this. AI is, like, 70 years old. The study of this idea that we could give machines intelligence goes back to the nineteen fifties. It's when the the term was, coined. And and for a really long time, what we had was machine learning. You may have studied machine learning in computer science class.

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:54]:
So machine learning

Paul Roetzer [00:30:55]:
is data in, predictions out. And this this played out. So when I was betting on AI changing everything, it was basically machine learning I was betting on. And we knew natural language was coming and these other things were coming, but it was basically prediction engines. And there's a great book called Prediction Machines. I would recommend people read. It came out 2,019. It's pre gen AI, but it's good stuff.

Paul Roetzer [00:31:15]:
So prediction played out and, again, what I saw that I thought was change everything was recommendation engines, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon. All they're doing is taking in user behavior. That's the inputs, And they're making predictions about the thing you'll do next. What is your next action? What is the thing we can do to you to trigger you to take the action we want you to take? It's how social media sites work. It's why TikTok is so powerful. It's all prediction of what you're going to do next, what you'll watch next. And so that is what powered AI is this idea of making predictions. It's how Watson worked, the original thing that hooked me.

Paul Roetzer [00:31:51]:
But what happened is in February seen the Google Brain team invented something called a transformer. And so they published a paper called Attention is All You Need. And so for two decades, these major research labs have been trying to solve language. They believed that they could give machines language, they could create human like intelligence within a machine. That was the idea of deep learning that I mentioned earlier. And And so this transformer paper gets published in summer two thousand seventeen. OpenAI, which was two years old at this point, sees the paper and builds GPT one, generative pretrained transformer. So they saw the potential for this transformer before Google did.

Paul Roetzer [00:32:28]:
Google actually didn't even realize until twelve months later the significance of their own invention. Then they started really infusing in their own product road map and research. So the generative AI phase basically started around 02/2017. And then by 02/2021, OpenAI, more than anybody, publicly was talking about we are going to have machines that can think, that can reason, that can understand, that can create things. Society was not listening. Sam literally published a paper in March 2021 called the Moore's Law for Everything where he prophesized, this is what's going to happen. And I remember reading at the time and sharing it on LinkedIn, and it was like it's people were like, they could have cared less about that I was sharing anything like that. And so everything just sort of evolved from there, and it creates now all these uncertainties about the things you just highlighted.

Paul Roetzer [00:33:20]:
As weird as we just learned three weeks ago that Anthropic, which has, I don't know how many, 7,000,000,000 in funding, 13,000,000,000 in funding, I I've lost track now. 10% of OpenAI's team that built GPT three left and started Anthropic in 02/2021. They have research that says they have proof that these models will fake alignment. So you train these models to do human biddings. And what they found was when the model knows it's being tested, it will fake its alignment. It'll make the human think it's doing what it's supposed to do until it's out in the wild and then it does what it wants to do. Now to your iRobot example, you basically do a lobotomy and he says, why are you doing this? Like, how are you and we don't know. We can't go into these things and say, why are you faking this? They're like, it's alien intelligence, and the the research labs aren't really sure why they do these things.

Paul Roetzer [00:34:17]:
And so it's it is in some ways iRobot coming to life, which is really, really bizarre to talk about.

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:23]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll I'll frame then some of the other questions in the context of of iRobot. Will Smith, at one point, is trying to drive, a car, and he can't because all the cars are are fully self driving at that point. And I it's probably the reason I have a motorcycle today because I have just I love this character in the but, you know, it's impossible because you couldn't override the the control. And the seg I'll use is it's with regards to automating away jobs, things that humans no longer do. So in that in the context of jobs no longer to be done by humans, there's an interesting dichotomy that I've been thinking about and that I love your opinion on, which in one sense, some stuff is gonna happen in the way that it happened to, like, farmers. Right? Like, the the the vast majority of us used to be and work in agriculture.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:10]:
We we all used to be farmers, and and today, I mean, arguably, percentage wise, none of us are because technology automated all the work and and basically killed the profession. But on the other end of the spectrum, you can say, well, that freed up society to do many other things, And that's the time proven reality of of technology and automation. But you start going down the professions, doctors, lawyers, accountants, designers, and it begs the question, are we in a in a situation now where we go the way of the farming, and there's gonna be 90% fewer people working in these kinds of roles? And it's just kind of like a a fundamental question about the duality of technology when it automates stuff and and then frees us up to do other things while fortifying some industries and decimating others. How have you thought about this kind of implication and and maybe as it applies to specific professions or industries, obviously, marketing, or maybe as a as a first one. But

Paul Roetzer [00:36:10]:
Yeah. So this is when I I don't think my opinion's a popular opinion, and I've I've talked to leading economists about this. I I've talked to plenty of CEOs. I see job displacement and disruption as inevitable. I don't I have a really hard time. I'm very open minded to alternative perspectives. I I've yet to really hear a strong argument from anyone that would make me sway this belief. The way I think about this is every job which will stay in the hundred million knowledge workers, is a collection of tasks.

Paul Roetzer [00:36:42]:
And so you have tasks you do, so you could sit there and say, okay, my job as a a podcast producer, these are the 15 things I do that goes into making a podcast. And, I do podcasts. I'm a CEO. I can make a list of 50 things I do every month. AI is increasingly capable of assisting with those tasks. Some of those tasks, it can do 10% of the work. Some might be 50%. If you're a coder developer, you may be working with GitHub Copilot or Replit or one of those tools that's maybe doing thirty, forty, 50 percent of your job right now.

Paul Roetzer [00:37:15]:
And so each of those tasks you have to go through and say, how much can AI assist me? And what's going to happen is as we keep moving forward and as these models keep getting smarter and more generally capable, they're going to increasingly be able to do larger portions of those tasks. So it's not that we're not gonna have writers. AI cannot replace the job of a writer, of an HR professional, of an accountant, of a lawyer, of a marketer. Can't do their job, but it can do a large portion of the tasks that they do. And so my argument is and I just actually shared this on LinkedIn recently. I talked about our our most recent podcast. If you take a a single person who works a full time knowledge work job and they work a hundred and eighty hours in a month and you infuse, say, chat GPT, custom GPTs, whatever it is, into their job for $20 a month, there isn't a single knowledge worker you could give me that I couldn't save them 10%. I I'm very confident that across any industry, any sector, I could save them eighteen hours a month on their job.

Paul Roetzer [00:38:17]:
Eight and that's a conservative number. In in isolation, not a huge deal. Do that for a company of 10 people. You just saved one hundred and eighty hours a month or one full time equivalent employee. Do it for one hundred people, now you save eighteen hundred hours a month, 10 employees. Like and so you play this out and in a big enterprise, you're saving one hundred and eighty thousand hours a month or 1,800 employees by just saving them 10% of their time each month. That is extremely achievable if properly trained, properly onboarded with the technology, properly personalized to their job. So here's the three tasks we're gonna help you with with today's models.

Paul Roetzer [00:38:58]:
The problem is, or maybe this is the good thing right now, most companies don't know to do this. They they don't have people in their companies that are AI literate enough to figure this out and to spread these use cases across the different departments in the organization. So you maybe have marketing people figuring this out, but, like, ops and HR, they're not touching it yet. So my argument is we're gonna figure it out. Everyone's going to become AI literate at some point here in the next one to two years. It'll vary by sector and friction to change is a real thing in corporations. So you're gonna have some companies that just don't wanna do it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:30]:
Well, also just people.

Paul Roetzer [00:39:32]:
Yeah. People and companies that it just they're gonna be slow because that's how they they're comfortable. But technology won't be the limiting factor. We could stop improving AI models right now, and it would take five plus years to diffuse the current capabilities throughout corporate America. So I just see that the farming change took decades. This is gonna take a few years. And in some industries, like the SaaS industry, any SaaS companies, it's six months ago. And so what's happening is you you're gonna start to see headlines this year of job loss related to AI, but more so you're going to see tens of thousands of people laid off because they refused to come back to the office.

Paul Roetzer [00:40:19]:
So what's happening is technology companies are going to they they don't wanna hire more people. They actually wanna get rid of some of their staff. 20% would probably not be out of the realm of possibility. They'll do it by putting some restrictive things in place like you have to come back to the office five days a week knowing 7% of the workforce is gonna quit instead of coming back. Great. We didn't have to say it was AI, but we're getting there. So the canary in the coal mine is the tech companies. They're doing this already.

Paul Roetzer [00:40:45]:
We we had, Benny off say the other day, we're not hiring any more developers. We are just gonna we're gonna keep status quo. They're gonna do more work. They're gonna be more productive. We're not hiring anymore. And so it'll start with we're hiring fewer people, then it'll kinda get to we're just not gonna need as many people to do what we do. Again, I don't want this to be true. I am I'm not saying this in the hopes that I'm proven right in twelve months.

Paul Roetzer [00:41:09]:
I would love nothing more than to be wrong on this. I just don't think I'm going to be. And so I have a sense of urgency to get companies to take action now, plan for this, reskill, upskill, identify new markets to go into. We don't have to have this be the outcome, but it will be if we don't do something about it. And we still have time, but we're running shorter on that time.

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:32]:
Well, one of the interesting things that comes to mind as as you outline that is how AI is playing out in the context of where it's automating things. Because it's not quite in the order of operations that I think a lot of people, myself included, who were thinking in a futurist way about it decades ago envisioned it might. What what jobs is it actually affecting earlier and first? What what do you make, I guess, then of the the ordering in which AI seems to be attacking existing functions or areas of the world economy versus what we thought it might do?

Paul Roetzer [00:42:08]:
You know,

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:08]:
like, that that it's knowledge work before it's the truck drivers, for example.

Paul Roetzer [00:42:12]:
Yeah. So interestingly, in the my 02/2014 book where I mentioned I did, like, a thousand words on AI out of the 50,000 word manuscript, I cited a study. I think it was the University of Oxford that had the automation of careers, and they looked at, I wanna say it was 900 different careers, and they predicted the automation of those careers based on machine learning. Again, we didn't have generative AI back in 02/2014. We were looking at this impact on careers all the way back, god, eleven years ago now. OpenAI has tried to project this. Microsoft tried to project this. Everyone's trying to, like, figure this out.

Paul Roetzer [00:42:44]:
The the it seems there's a growing consensus customer service is in for a very difficult near term. That that is one that you're gonna see a lot of AI infused into. Sales is certainly gonna be affected. There's a lot of BDR work and things like that where you're just gonna be way more efficient. And so I think sales is gonna be changed. Marketing, writing, these are all really obvious things. So I always I think marketing, sales, and service, because they're the drivers of a lot of organizations revenue wise and growth wise and take up a lot of the resources, human resources and financial resources, I think it's gonna be a very natural spot where people look first. Those are the three that just jump right out to me.

Paul Roetzer [00:43:26]:
And there's lots of different obviously career paths within those three departments. Yeah. But a lot of companies are trying to figure those ones out first. It's just funny is not

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:36]:
the right word, but for a technology which hallucinates based on prediction based approach to output and decision making, ironic is maybe the better word that we humans can't predict what the prediction technology is going to do. It's almost like an actually pretty human quality of AI.

Paul Roetzer [00:43:54]:
Yeah. So, I mean, if if you if anybody's new to this stuff so I created something called Jobs GPT. It's a a free custom GPT people can use. And after you just go to smartrx.ai and click on tools, it's it's there. You can put your job title in and it'll tell you. So what it does is it actually predicts at a task level, so it takes each job, it breaks it into tasks, and it looks how Gen AI can be infused into those tasks, estimates how much time you'll save, and then it does what's called an exposure assessment of how exposed that job is to future models being introduced. So I did it so that people could do these impact assessments and start preparing. So if you got 25 writers on staff, you better be planning for the impact of these tools in the next six to twelve months, but nobody knew how to do it.

Paul Roetzer [00:44:38]:
So I was like, I just found a way to create a GPT that did it for them. So I would tell people, like, if if you're, again, new to it and not really sure what we're talking about here, just go put your job title in there. And I don't care if you're a physician or a lawyer or a marketing manager. It's pretty good at doing it, and it's all using chat g p t data. So it's not like I train the data. I just taught it how to do what it's doing, and I'm not a developer that way. I have no developing capability.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:02]:
Well, you may, you may not need that anymore.

Paul Roetzer [00:45:04]:
You don't. Well, I I mean, to do the kinds of things we're doing, you just need words and be a domain expert, I guess, have knowledge of how to do something.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:12]:
To me, I don't know. You guess you can get to dark places with this because writing, I think, is such an important skill because it's it's really how you galvanize your thinking. And if if none of us have to write anymore, then I don't know how many of us are gonna think. And then

Paul Roetzer [00:45:28]:
I don't use it to write. So I I will say I'm a writer by trade. I came out of journalism school. Writing is, to your point, it's how I think. It's how I develop a point of view on something. It's why we can sit here unscripted, me not even knowing what questions you're gonna ask me, and we can have a conversation for an hour. It's because I I understand the topic. I understand the domain with which I live because I read everything myself.

Paul Roetzer [00:45:49]:
I don't use AI to summarize it. I watch the videos myself and take notes. I copy and paste out a I do research and writing the way I always have because it's how my mind learns, and I don't wanna shortcut that. And so I don't care if, hey, I can do it or not. I I wanna do that as the human. And I think that's we'll get to this point where, yes, it's able to do a lot of the things I do, but I'm gonna pick and choose which things it's gonna do. And there's things I'm gonna hold on to for whatever the reason may be. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:16]:
Well, I would be remiss if I didn't ask about marketing, obviously. And it's probably been one of the most salient things to come of of AI, I think, just to for the average person, the videos of Sora, the all the images. I mean, there's been just a, a deluge of content and I mean, really just content. It's an like, the the the scale of it. And I what's crazy is that we're probably just getting started with regards to that. How do you think about the implications for for marketing and what, I mean, how to even try to begin to parse signal through the noise of of what's just gonna be endless amounts of content?

Paul Roetzer [00:46:56]:
So we we used to have a tool pre Gen AI where we identified 50 use cases across planning, production, promotion, personalization, and performance, the five p's, I I call them. Five p's. Yeah. They're in our book. And so what I thought about was every marketer and really any profession, we do these things, but specifically marketing. We we plan campaigns. We produce content. We try to personalize things.

Paul Roetzer [00:47:20]:
We promote these things through different channels, and we figure out the performance. And I was like, AI, that time machine learning largely, could play a role in all these things. And so we were trying to hold people's hand to, like, find the use cases to make AI AI tangible. But when chat g t GPT came out, it was like, oh, okay. I guess I could just show them this instead. Because now they just get it immediately. You go create an image or you go ask it to help you write an article or whatever it is. So I think that the reason it impacted marketing so greatly is generative AI is all about AI's ability to create text, images, video, and then audio and code would be the other two main things I would throw in there.

Paul Roetzer [00:47:57]:
But text, images, and video, there's very few things marketers do that don't involve those things. We create text all the time. We whether it's writing blog posts or scripts for a talk or podcast summaries or whatever it is. You're always creating content. And then the machine learning part comes in with the personalization of that content and the prediction around what people are gonna consume, things like that. But I think generative AI just so naturally impacted marketers because it started touching every task that they're involved with. And for us, it just made our lives a lot easier. I was joking with the team yesterday.

Paul Roetzer [00:48:36]:
I haven't looked at our book in a while, but I'm fairly confident in the introduction to the book. I introduced something called the million marketer challenge. And the whole premise again, this came out in summer of twenty two, was that we wanted to introduce AI to a million marketers because we figured there's about 13,000,000 marketers worldwide. If we could get a million of them to be exposed to it, to take the first step, attend a free intro to AI class, something like that, then we could create a movement. And so I create this whole thing. We got this campaign around the million marketer challenge, and then chat GPT shows up. It's got a hundred million users in three months. It's like, well, I guess I guess that's achieved.

Paul Roetzer [00:49:10]:
There's no point running that campaign anymore. So, yeah, it's always trying to figure out the impact we can have, but, yeah, it's, I think all 13,000,000 marketers were aware of AI by December of twenty two. If, yep. Because of

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:24]:
us. Success achieved.

Paul Roetzer [00:49:26]:
Yeah. I'm not gonna take any credit for it. It's just, check that one off the list. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:32]:
In the spirit of of success, I am curious when you kinda ground all the work you're doing and what is the story of AI? What what is what does it look like when when we are AI literate? I guess, what is what does that look like, like, in a successful scenario? Like, what what does it really mean for us to be AI literate? I think I'll know it when I see it.

Paul Roetzer [00:49:54]:
It's kinda like AGI. Like, can't give you a good definition, but we'll know when we see it. So the problem right now is AI is gonna be infused into every organization across every industry over some time scale. It's gonna chain, depend on the industry and the company. Right now, there's a lot of things happening in isolation. Individual people within companies who are racing ahead and figuring this stuff out and trying to convince their peers or trying to make the case for ChatGPT license internally, things like that. It's very, very, very early. And we've asked this question four straight years.

Paul Roetzer [00:50:23]:
What's the biggest obstacles to adoption of AI? Again, pre chat GBT, we were doing these surveys, and a lack of education and training has been number one every year by far. And so I think right now, I'm so focused on just trying to create baseline understanding across companies so it's not isolated at individual level, we'll figure out what to do after that when we get there. Like, we we kinda know how to scale it. Like, we know the steps involved. You build an AI council, you develop generative AI policies, you build an AI roadmap, you do impact assessments across your team. These are things every company should be doing, but nobody in the company even knows to do them, and nobody really understands AI enough to lead the charge to do them. So I don't know. I feel like AI literacy's got quite a runway ahead of it before I feel like we're at a point where Yep.

Paul Roetzer [00:51:11]:
We can do the next thing. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure there's some way we'll come up to measure it or, you know, some metrics to assign to it. But right now, it's so nascent that it just, like I don't even know that it's worth putting the energy into trying to figure out how we'll measure and know when we did it. We just gotta start doing it, and and we'll start to feel it. Maybe it's like the chat g p t moment when the first two weeks after chat gbt, the calls I got, I was like, something changed. Everyone's qualitatively, I can tell you this is about to tip. And the team was like, okay.

Paul Roetzer [00:51:45]:
Why? And I was like, I just trust me. I've had five phone calls in the last week. It's just different now. And and then a month later, the the analytics started showing that it was different. And then the first intro to AI class of 02/2023 had, like, 1,500 people. I was like, oh, okay. It's definitely different because we averaged 300 the year before. And I don't know.

Paul Roetzer [00:52:05]:
I think it's something like that. And and maybe it maybe it's like we do this intro to AI class every week or every month. I've done it 43 times since November of twenty one, and it's, like, 12 to 1,300 people every time. And and maybe maybe it it just starts going the other way. Maybe fewer people need intro to AI, and it's like, good. Like, I think I'll feel some sense of accomplishment at that time. It's a weird thing to say once something we're doing stops working, then I'll know it's working. It's kind of an odd cancer.

Paul Roetzer [00:52:30]:
I don't think too far ahead. I don't try and get five years out what happens. What's it look like? Because there's so much work to do tomorrow. And just to keep moving the ball forward, and I'm I'm good with that. I'm content. I don't need more than that right now.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:45]:
Yeah. Reflecting a bit on the the entrepreneurial journey. Well, for one, I I wanted if you if you'll indulge me on a detour, what you observed in the HubSpot journey. Are there any particular parts of that work and experience that stick out to you as important in how you've built your own company and organization?

Paul Roetzer [00:53:04]:
When I look back and it's all said and done, I I've had a lot of pretty incredible opportunities, and I've I had a front row seat to that one. I started to work with them when they had, like, 50 employees. I sat in executive meetings. I I have a conference room named after me at HubSpot, the cofounder Brian and a couple of my my friends who were some of the early employees, we had a toast celebrating the opening of the the Rateser Conference Room. Crazy stuff. But I I had the privilege of watching that company grow from it was twelve months old when we started working with them. And didn't know it was gonna work, but they had a big vision, and they were trying to create a whole industry category, and they were gonna take on the world. I honestly I'm not even sure if I told this story before, but in 02/2008, our agency was three years old, and it was growing a % a year.

Paul Roetzer [00:53:52]:
And it was because of HubSpot. And so I had this five year trajectory where I looked out and was like, I don't I don't know what to do. We're gonna have a thousand employees in three years if this keeps going. And so I went and met with Brian and Dharmesh, the cofounders, and a friend of mine, Pete, who ended up architecting the partner program. And I showed them the trajectory. I was like, I I don't know what to do. And they said, well, why don't you build the agency? We'll just drive everything to you, and you can build a billion dollar agency. And I said, no on the spot.

Paul Roetzer [00:54:21]:
And there was a good reason for it. I don't need to detour into it, but I was like, personally, there was some stuff going on. I'd I'd lost my best friend, and I'd been through some stuff, and I just couldn't, in the right frame of mind, do something like that. But I said to them at that time, I was like, well, how do I know you're not just gonna build an agency? I'm gonna do this. I'm not gonna build the agency, but I will help you build the ecosystem. I will I will do my best to champion that cause and find other agencies like ours and things like that, and I'll share eventually, I agreed to share what we were doing. But how do how do I know you won't just undercut us? And they said, because that we're building our Google. We're we're gonna IPO one day, and we wanna change an industry, and we wanna create a hundred year company.

Paul Roetzer [00:55:02]:
And I shook hands, and I took them on their word, and they never went back on that. So what I realized was they built a company on morals, and they did it culturally the right way, and they did it by hiring incredible people. And so I had the opportunity to grow with them from 50 employees to, when I probably stopped working with them, I don't know, five, seven thousand employees, whatever. I I have hundreds of friends from those days, and we were at the thousand customer party. I mean, I don't know. They have, like, a million or whatever now. I was at the party where they dropped a thousand ping pong balls from the rafters to celebrate the thousand customers, and I was at the first inbound conference that was 300 people at the Cambridge Marriott and spoke at it, and it crashed our website. I did eight rules of blogging for business or something like that, and it crashed our website, the traffic from it.

Paul Roetzer [00:55:48]:
It was so just insane stuff. And I think I just learned from them that you can build a business in an ethical way, and you can do it by being good to people, and you can enjoy the ride with the people. And then I learned everything about startup businesses and VC funding. All of it came from just being there and observing. And so, yeah, it was just a insane privilege and, again, something I'll someday look back on and just kinda be in awe that we got to go through it all with them and be a part of building that ecosystem that today is, like, 4,000 partners worldwide. And to know we were sort of the origin of that is kind of a crazy thing. And I'd it's funny. I don't even tell that ever.

Paul Roetzer [00:56:30]:
And somebody one time was like, why don't you lead everything with your HubSpot's first partner?

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:34]:
And I

Paul Roetzer [00:56:35]:
was like, I don't know. It feels like a lifetime ago, and I don't I don't I don't know. It's not that I'm not grateful for it. I just it was like a it was a it was a lifetime ago, and it was awesome, though. I'm grateful for it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:46]:
What an incredible experience.

Paul Roetzer [00:56:48]:
Yeah. Really was. Yeah. I could tell stories about that stuff all day long. It was such a amazing time.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:54]:
Yeah. Well, I'll ask then if, if there are more recent, more and more top of mind bits of of earned wisdom that that you carry with you from the perspective of of entrepreneurship. I mentioned

Paul Roetzer [00:57:05]:
the journey part. Like, I I heard there there was years ago, I was, I don't know, a panel of of entrepreneurs, and somebody's like, why do you do what you do? And someone's like, I wanna make a million dollars. And I just remember sitting there thinking, like, god, that is the wrong idea the wrong reason to be an entrepreneur. I mean, I will say that being an entrepreneur financially, it can be ruinous. It can it can be really, really hard. I I'm not ashamed to say it. I I when I started, my agency, I was making $50,000 a year. So I was five years into my career.

Paul Roetzer [00:57:33]:
I was making $50,000 I paid myself 50,000 a year for the next six years. Like, so I'm here I am, like, CEO of HubSpot's first aid partner, and outwardly, it just looks like this crazy thing. And the reality was it wasn't. It was amazing, but I wasn't making money. It wasn't like the business was doing great. You're still sometimes paycheck to paycheck. And I think that I just always had a higher purpose for myself, and I wanted to build businesses the right way. And I I wanted to not sacrifice anything along the way.

Paul Roetzer [00:58:05]:
And I think the hardest thing for me was always I just always put my family first. And that that's hard as an entrepreneur in that you have to pass up a lot of things. There's lots of opportunities, including the one the story I just told about HubSpot from o '8. I just wasn't ready. Family wise, I needed to to deal with some other stuff, and and that had to come first. And that's okay. I don't regret any of it. And so I think that as long as you have your North Star, the reason why you're doing it, then it's okay to say no to things that seem really enticing.

Paul Roetzer [00:58:40]:
And I've said no to opportunities a lot of people would give anything to have, and I don't regret it because I got young kids, and I wanna be around for them, and I want them to remember me being around. And and so you just make these decisions. And so I think, like, if you're gonna be an entrepreneur, don't go into it to get rich. That can be a byproduct. There's no better way to create wealth than to be an entrepreneur and to build and own your own thing. I eventually realized the fruits of of all of those years and privileged to be in a much different financial position than I was for a really, really long time. But, honestly, I actually I I was I was thinking about this recently. I I don't want the end to come.

Paul Roetzer [00:59:19]:
I don't wanna be done doing this. I don't wanna actually get the huge payday at the end because I feel like my life's gonna lose some meaning of some sort. I'm financially comfortable. I I don't like to know that though. I actually like to forget that Right. Every day because though I realized that the journey of pursuing something is way more enjoyable than, like, actually doing it. And so I try and just stay so focused on the reason why we're doing stuff, and it is not for the bank account. That's good, and you should have that motivation.

Paul Roetzer [00:59:52]:
You should have financial security. You should be able to provide for your employees and create opportunities for them. And I think that was actually Bezos, I think, recently said that. They asked him why he owns so little of Amazon, and he's like, I take more fulfillment out of, like I mean, one, he doesn't need the monies worth hundreds of billions anyway. But it's more about how much wealth you create for other people. And so once you get to a certain point as an entrepreneur financially, right now I'm way more focused on wealth creation for the people who believed in us and who were a part of it than I am for me. I always felt that money will come if you just do the right things and build the right kind of company. And it just it took me a couple decades to get there.

Paul Roetzer [01:00:29]:
Just focus on the journey and the reason you're doing it, and and don't let it be only financial.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:34]:
Well, as far as earned wisdom goes, that that sounds quite wise to me.

Paul Roetzer [01:00:38]:
Yeah. Painful at times, but

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:41]:
Oh, it's not easy. You know, you know, none none of it is is easy.

Paul Roetzer [01:00:43]:
I've been very blessed to have my wife who's supported everything and always enabled me. She always listened. And I think that's if you can have something like that, have a partner, have a friend, adviser, somebody you trust that you can just always bounce things off of, even if they don't know the answers or they don't have the domain expertise. What I found as an entrepreneur is it's a very lonely world. It's very lonely. It's very isolating because not many people actually understand it, and they can't fathom the risks you're willing to take and why you do the things you do. And so it's nice to have entrepreneur circle, EO or whatever, whatever it is. But for me, it's just been my wife.

Paul Roetzer [01:01:20]:
Just, hey, I'm trying to solve this thing. Can I talk it out loud with you? And just the active listening is critical to your mental health and your ability to make decisions.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:30]:
Yeah. It, well, having a million more things I can ask you about, we'll book end it here. And, I'll I'll ask you our traditional closing question, which is for a hidden gem in Cleveland or for something that other folks don't know about, but perhaps

Paul Roetzer [01:01:44]:
they should. It's funny running a conference in Cleveland. You try and uncover those hidden gems for people, and we actually have a page on our event site that's when while you're visiting Cleveland, things to do and see. I so years ago, when we were gonna we were looking at houses, I told my wife we can move. We're in the Camps Corner area at the time. We're either on the metroparks, on the valley, or we're on the lake. Those are the two things I wanna look at every day if I'm if I'm gonna move and buy a different house. And so we're we are lucky to be, overlooking the metroparks.

Paul Roetzer [01:02:12]:
And I think that even people who live here don't fully appreciate the beauty that the metroparks provides. And for me, we just literally live right over it. So I any chance I get, I will drive through the valley. I don't care if it takes another ten minutes to go where I'm going. Yeah. I'll just take that 30 mile per hour drive to the valley and just enjoy the peace and the quiet and the trees and go for jogs down there. Take my kids down there. I just love the metroparks, and I think we are so lucky to have it.

Paul Roetzer [01:02:39]:
All aspects of it, not just the the the valley and the trails, but the zoo and everything that comes with the metroparks. So, yeah, that's that that's that's my go to. It's one of my

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:48]:
favorite things about the city. It is mine as well. It is is quite magical. It really is.

Paul Roetzer [01:02:53]:
I don't even know my favorite time of year. Right now, it'll have the leaves gone. You can actually see everything. And, yeah, it's I just love it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:00]:
Well, I just wanna thank you, Paul. I I appreciate, you taking the time to share your story, thoughts, reflections on what you're building, where where all this is going.

Paul Roetzer [01:03:09]:
Yeah. I appreciate you having me, and I appreciate you creating the platform you've created to shine a light on entrepreneurship and the region, and it's really important. And I think it's always encouraging to me when people are doing things like you're doing and trying to bring that community together. It's what I've always thought my career tried to do and and tried to support other people who were doing it. So I I appreciate everything you're doing.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:30]:
Well, thank you. That that means a lot. If folks had anything they wanted to follow-up with you about, where, where would you direct them?

Paul Roetzer [01:03:37]:
LinkedIn's pretty much my home base professionally. I'm I'm in there every day and, connection requests. Just tell me you you heard me on the podcast. I'll always connect with people when they personalize the note and it's something relevant, but messaging there and connecting with me there is great. I'm pretty active on Twitter slash x, but mostly lurking and monitoring AI news.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:57]:
Yeah. Any other, destinations you'd point people on the interwebs?

Paul Roetzer [01:04:01]:
SmartRx.AI is probably and marketingAIinstitute.com. Those are the two company sites. So if you wanted to learn more about what we do, those are the two places to go.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:09]:
Thank you again, Paul.

Paul Roetzer [01:04:10]:
Thank you. I appreciate it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:14]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show. So if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffrey@layoftheland.fm, or find us on Twitter at pod lay of the land or at stern f a, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland Founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:51]:
The Lay of the the Land podcast was developed in collaboration with The Up Company LLC. At the time of this recording, unless otherwise indicated, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the company which appear on the show. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next week.