The Human Code
The Human Code" podcast unravels the intricate blend of technology, leadership, and personal growth, featuring insights from visionary leaders and innovators shaping the future. Host Don Finley dives deep into the human stories behind technological advancements, inspiring listeners at the crossroads of humanity and tech.
The Human Code
Navigating the Digital Revolution with Christopher Young
Revolutionizing Business with AI: Insights from Christopher Young and Other Innovators
In this compelling episode of 'The Human Code,' host Don Finley delves into the transformative role of AI in entrepreneurship with Christopher Young, a seasoned entrepreneur and operating partner at Mach49. The discussion explores how AI can enhance human conversations through synthetic personas and refine communication strategies. Additionally, the conversation provides practical applications of AI in fields like material sciences, market research, and venture building, emphasizing efficiency while maintaining a human touch. The episode debunks myths around AI generating novel business ideas independently and stresses the importance of execution and unique perspectives. Also highlighted are the significant roles AI plays in operations, client relationships, and startups, including tools for image and presentation creation. Sponsored by FINdustries, this episode offers invaluable insights into leveraging AI for business growth, productivity enhancement, and personalized client interactions, providing a comprehensive roadmap for tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and anyone fascinated by the future of AI in business.
00:00 Introduction to The Human Code Podcast
00:49 Meet Christopher Young: Innovator and Entrepreneur
01:12 AI in Enhancing Human Conversations
01:51 Balancing Novelty and Efficiency in AI Applications
03:03 Synthetic Personas and Market Research
04:30 Refining Communication Strategies with AI
06:58 AI in Venture Building and Messaging
09:25 Using AI to Foster Client Relationships
11:10 AI as a Sounding Board and Coding Assistant
11:58 Team Dynamics and Learning
12:39 Leveraging Technology for Efficiency
13:31 AI in Proposal Writing and Startups
19:02 The Solo Unicorn Founder Concept
20:51 Challenges and Failures with AI
21:36 Creative Uses of AI
23:34 Conclusion and Sponsor Message
Sponsored by FINdustries
Hosted by Don Finley
Welcome to The Human Code, the podcast where technology meets humanity, and the future is shaped by the leaders and innovators of today. I'm your host, Don Finley, inviting you on a journey through the fascinating world of tech, leadership, and personal growth. Here, we delve into the stories of visionary minds, Who are not only driving technological advancement, but also embodying the personal journeys and insights that inspire us all. Each episode, we explore the intersections where human ingenuity meets the cutting edge of technology, unpacking the experiences, challenges, and triumphs that define our era. So, whether you are a tech enthusiast, an inspiring entrepreneur, or simply curious about the human narratives behind the digital revolution, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Human Code. In this episode, we're excited to welcome Christopher Young, an innovative entrepreneur with a tenacity for solving problems through technology. Christopher founded a sick interview, significantly reducing employees, time to hire and later joined. goPuff. Where he played a pivotal role in the company's massive growth currently as an operating partner at Mach 49. Christopher leads ventures from zero to their first fundraise today. Christopher will share how AI can enhance human conversations by creating synthetic personas and refining communication strategies. The way AI is revolutionizing market research and venture building, making early stage Dell development, more efficient. Insights into balancing novelty and efficiency and AI applications and the importance of maintaining a human touch in the innovation process. Join us as we dive into these thought-provoking topics with Christopher Young. This episode is packed with practical insights and strategies for anyone interested in the future of technology and entrepreneurship. You won't want to miss it. I'm here with Chris Young. He's with Mach49, an entrepreneur, startups, AI, like this guy's got the passion for all the things that I'm passionate about. So I'm really excited for the two of us to be here today. And Chris, I'm just going to kick it off. One, thank you for showing up today. Thank you for being here with us. And what got you excited about humanity and technology? what's your story?
Christopher Young:Yeah, I think it started early on, which we can go into my first startup, but I think in my current role, I really enjoy the fact that we're hearing straight from what will be future customers when we're building new ventures. the ability to really hear out people's pains. And sit down with them, sit at their desk, understand what's going on, try to put ourselves in that hat that they wear every day and learn what challenges they're facing. And that's the fun part to me about identifying problems, that we might be able to solve.
Don Finley:Nice. So where do you see that connection point between what technology is able to do for people today? And the pain points that people are talking about in this moment?
Christopher Young:Yeah. it's fantastic, but it's also tricky, you've got a lot of technologies, particularly with some of the AI pieces that may be seen, or some may see as an opportunity to replace. And I think it's a great way to augment. So a perfect example of, one of the areas that I really like to leverage some technology to aid in my human, conversations is, leveraging some of the AI to portray or create like a synthetic, persona. of an individual or individuals to better understand what would I ask them and how would they respond so that I can clean up how I might actually speak to them. So that's we're having a conversation. If you created a synthetic persona of me and ran some information based on the public information you could get, would that help inform you have a better conversation with me? And that's how I use. it you don't get a lot of at bats with different stakeholders that are willing to donate their time and really let you into their job and help understand what's your challenge. So you don't get a lot of at bats and you really need to be ready when you get maybe a half an hour with some of these folks. Some could be senior levels, some could be, lining up, and it really becomes how important can you be. Extract and get the right information and get past the, tell me about your job, because those are not questions that are going to yield a venture.
Don Finley:I'm laughing because I've been in both sides of the equation, I've been that busy executive that kind of Hey, like I got a half an hour. This is what we're going to be talking about. And this is what we have to get done. And you want to start out talking about my job. yeah, but then also on the same token, I've been in that service role of asking the customer, Hey, what's going on in your life? tell me about the pain point that I may not know about. And I love that you're using
Christopher Young:the perfect balance because if you come in and you say, tell me about your job, the reason that we as people talking to them or interviewing them, so to speak, is to get them talking. That's the whole point of that question, but it's a terrible question because you should have been able to do some of your homework on that. And so we dive into the content because you may only have a half an hour of executive based on some of the homework you did, but also, the way that gets them talking, because that is the goal of kind of opening up the conversation with them. these early stakeholders that you might be doing some human research around the challenges they may face in this space.
Don Finley:It's incredible. So you go around and you're creating this persona, in an LLM, Like a chat GPT or something like that and saying, Hey, I need you to pretend like you're Elon Musk. And I need you to pretend like you're the CEO of Tesla, that you have these things going on. Here's what you've publicly stated as your mission and the vision that you have going out. Like what, describe what your pain points likely would be.
Christopher Young:Correct. Yeah. I have a full script that I'm asking that persona as if it were a human sitting on the other end. And then you're starting to learn this question doesn't really yield what I thought it would in my head. this question does, or this, then I'm going to spin this into that. Imagine just getting like a ton of feedback on an interview script that you were going to take to interview 10 different stakeholders to learn about their pains, and you could refine and practice and get like valid responses or validated responses so that you can refine that script so that when you actually talk to a human, you're extraordinarily efficient with what you're trying to learn. And that's really, that's one of the areas that I like using it for. it's augmenting your actual practice of interviewing a stakeholder without actually replacing it.
Don Finley:I love this use case because like you just said, it is augmenting, and that's one of the areas that we talk about using AI is you're not replacing anything or you're not doing anything new, but this is that practice that, we may have done in the past of Practicing a presentation, practice interviews, but now you've got something that is like instantaneously available for you to be adopting your interview process. I love that. where else have you augmented your world in that regard?
Christopher Young:I do find a lot of it's helpful for some of your basic research, Market analysis, research, things like that. I don't think that's particularly sexy, use cases of technology, but it does work. in the modern day that Google searching, other areas are, around early positioning and messaging of some of the solution ideas that we put forth. So when we're building ventures, we talked a little bit about talking to stakeholders, identifying pains and challenges. the next kind of step in, in the way that we would build a venture is present them with potential value propositions. In whatever form they take. It could be just statements, it could be in the form of an ad, it could be in the form of a little bit of a story. but obviously generative AI can help generate those ideas or refine them quite well. I think we use it more for refinement and we use it in particular for messaging. I actually think it's pretty bad at novel ideas. around a particular, pain. so great for kind of like ideation creativity, but not so great when you're trying to problem solve a venture and come up with some ideas there. So I use it more for refinement or how would we apply these kinds of technologies, this pain to this space or this stakeholder in particular?
Don Finley:I think you are hitting on a key point as well, Like the current state of the technology is good at refinement, novel ideas, Not so much. And even when we talk about like, when you see it in the news for novel ideas, it's because it basically threw everything against the wall in making an attempt to go there. And I'm specifically referring to, I think it was protein folding or no material sciences was the thing. And it was like, yeah, it generated like 3 million new materials. And it's no, it just tried a lot of stuff. And you could brute force your way through that. And it did, it does it intelligently. And at the same time, the novelty of it is because of the vastness.
Christopher Young:Yeah, I think so. And I think if you're looking to use some sort of technology or particularly AI to come up with the next, business idea, I think you're probably going to be disappointed in the outcome. we always say, a lot of the solution ideas that we get out of it must be in the middle of the spectrum, It's not really going, really forcing it to the edges of creativity but also For us, you're often entering, it's not as simple as just what's the magic idea. I think that's a big thing in entrepreneurship outside of AI, Everyone just thinks it's a brilliant idea. And in many ways, it's more, what's your kind of angle in the idea exists in some shape or form, to have some sort of advantage, whether it's your relationships or it's just like a really complex solution that you need to grind out. and we take that stuff for granted, especially now with some of these tools, we think, Oh, let me just dump this into, the chat bot. And suddenly I'll get a million dollar venture on the hotline.
Don Finley:And I like that. Have you been able to use AI in ways that are bringing you closer to your clients or closer to the relationships or?
Christopher Young:Yeah, I certainly believe that, the first example I shared right, helps. Thanks. make the conversation more fruitful with the individuals that we're talking to. I think we're getting a little bit better, later in, in kind of the early stages of the Venture Valley, with regard to outreach and using messaging, and some of the tweaks and personalization that we can do to really get more potential people that are interested because we're messaging it and framing it in a way that might be interesting to them. and that's still got a lot of legs to improve that, but it's really quite helpful that we can position what we want to do, how we want to reach out to them, get their perspective again, through some public profiles and have that framed in a way that. maybe would resonate a little better.
Don Finley:And I can agree with you. I I like it for opening doors. Um, we run a variety test of how we can reach out to people using AI and basically combining, what's your public persona? What do we know about you? What is the message that we're trying to deliver as well? what is the, either the product we want to talk about or the call to action? And we're seeing honestly good results from it because it is capable enough of starting a conversation. and then it is getting better at actually both responding to and keeping a conversation directed. I think one of the areas that I personally am excited about is we all have a passion. We all have a vision that we want to bring to the table as individuals and as AI can take some of those things either off of our plate or like the augmentation of Hey, we're doing this. Help me become better at it myself.
Christopher Young:yeah, that's my number one. My number one use of AI is, a sounding board.
Don Finley:Yeah.
Christopher Young:in all shapes and sizes, like I use it for helping me solve some things in writing code that I don't know. or debugging some errors that I run into just frequent, to Hey, this is how I'm framing. a message or an email and just what are some alternatives?
Don Finley:All right, so there's a lot to cover in the entrepreneurial journey of creating a venture So we've gotten to talk to the user we've Enhance that process of basically ensuring that we're valuing their time and additionally we're becoming better interviewers as well through this process communication Is easier. You just talked about the one of using it as a coding assistant, using it as a debugger, all right. So we've covered.
Christopher Young:No, I'll give you another good one that we use it for. So you talk to these individuals, we talked about teeing up in conversations, because, and this is maybe a little bit more you need to watch for now, because we have a little bit larger team than your traditional three or four person startup, we tend to have six or seven individuals. Yeah. You're trying to make sure the whole team is learning, right? From these interviews, right? It's the most important thing. You're surrounding these human learning from what their challenges are, where, how they're reacting to value propositions or solutions. That's the most important thing. Having eight people live was very time consuming when you're trying to move the venture in many different directions. Who's the competitors? What experts do we want to talk to? There were a lot of things to do. you record these. And we've been using a lot of technologies to turn the recordings into transcripts. That's not novel. What is novel is we use it for synthesis quite a bit. So you take all of these interviews that we're doing, all of these transcripts that you're doing, and how do you quickly make sense of that? this is often a process that we would do As humans, we'd spend a couple hours, every couple of weeks and we would do this and that is pretty close to being automated, to put the initial perspective, I might've attended 30 percent that my colleague might've attended and others 30%, so we're still attending and joining some of them who are listening to the recordings, but not having done with the whole a hundred percent, being able to have this, since this kind of set the perspective and then we agree or disagree or alter that. That's more of an efficiency
Don Finley:time saver. I do enjoy that. We're actually, along the same lines, we take our discovery calls and we use the transcription from that and AI to help us to ensure that the proposal that we're writing is both meeting the needs of the client, but then also the AI is helping us in writing components because, there's, you only want so much novel creations when you're doing like new software development. there's, and especially in startups, I like to say, or there's probably somebody else who's smarter than me said it, that, you only want so many miracles that need to happen for your startup to succeed. Hey, there was
Christopher Young:a, someone just wrote an article about it. Like most startups really only need to unlock one Baykicks and prove that it's valid, like Baykicks. there's a really, I wish I could remember who wrote it. It might've been first round.
Don Finley:I'm going to give you a, I'll give you credit for it. Yeah, for the time being, it
Christopher Young:was very good. It was like, if you're an investor in a startup, what's the biggest hypothesis they have baked in the business? And if they unlock that, did they unlock the market for them?
Don Finley:And that's the incredible thing. And I think. the cases that we've talked about today around what we're, what you're doing, what we're doing for augmenting our processes and helping to free up that, basically that human creativity, because no matter what, if you're a startup of two people or seven people who like, however, the sizes, you have a limited capacity and you're likely going after a total market. In the billions in which you do have competitors who their resources are going to be vastly greater than yours. And if they wanted to, and they had the focus. in your early stage could tackle you. But I think with AI, it's not a leveling of the field, but it's allowing you to operate at so much faster of a pace, that it's going to be hard to keep up with any focus team.
Christopher Young:Yeah, I think the other thing that we've learned, because Mufford and I primarily work with culprits, is that we have a stronger appreciation for that human element, right? you seal. Some of these corporations don't talk to their customers. they don't, If they want to enter a billion dollar space, they make assumptions. Really? No, there's just that, reluctance to do some of that work. some of the technologies and tools we've talked about, your approaches make it easier to do that. But then I think that's a big differentiator in terms of why we're able to get going into these big markets is making sure we understand the nuance behind that paint.
Don Finley:That makes a lot of sense. is there a place In your process, in your journey through like creating startups and being an entrepreneur in which you're really excited for the tech to develop. And what are pain points that you want to see solved?
Christopher Young:Image creation. It's still to me, more artistic than productive for my use cases. So imagine being able to have slide decks generated, it's terrible at that. Or you can just. business diagrams, some of that stuff to be able to articulate what you're trying to convey, even though you may not have the artistic capabilities to do. And that's a different form than some of the image creation today. And I know we talked a lot about gen AI and more traditionally, but I actually think the image piece is, another opportunity to help a startup move. If you think about what are the skillsets you have, your, Ability to connect with individuals, stakeholders. can synthesize them, identify pains, make decisions, generate some early concepts, which you can do with plenty of tools. And then you get to some of your solution or some wireframing, things like that. Then you started to get into marketing material and That's typically where we see the skill sets don't exist. And so you have to hire outside or bring on outside. And sure, it costs money for a startup, but it also slows you down because you have to bring somebody else in. Usually throwing it over the fence and come back. And so I just think of that as a big opportunity to cheat the moment.
Don Finley:That's a really good point. I know when I first sat down with ChachiPT, we were redesigning parts of our website and that the ability for us to bring more of that stuff in house around our copywriting, around like how we were saying messages, just even allowing us to make, vast revisions to what was already there. The speed and that ability to keep momentum was absolutely crucial. And I'm trying to think of, I know, and I actually, I'm with you, the image generation just doesn't have the capability right now to hold that thought in space and then to present the idea back to you. and honestly, presentations would be. A game changer for It's
Christopher Young:a small on the scale, but I use that as an example because go plug into mid journey and try to create like a process diagram.
Don Finley:Now, and even going into chat GP or to GPT 4. 0 or 4. 0 Omni, still has Those challenges, even though like text generation seems to be a lot better, but it's taking a core idea and then outlining it and then being able to refine it. holding those ideas in memory just doesn't, hasn't really lifted past.
Christopher Young:What I'm most excited about, I think it would just help, the thought about the solo Unicorn founder someday with all these tools. this is probably a march in that direction of just keeping that momentum going for It's a way for founders to be able to keep everything in and keep moving.
Don Finley:you mentioned the solo unicorn founder.
Christopher Young:It's just an idea that's been thrown out with all the AI, like how far could a single founder get? without additional resources.
Don Finley:Look, I completely think that one day we're going to see a single founder that can generate a, 100 million in revenue, which would easily be a billion dollar valuation company, Like we're already at the point where you have. single member teams that can develop or deliver 10 million, that's not a bar that's unachievable. the trend has definitely been going towards, higher revenue, lower need for, contributors in businesses in some cases. And I guess the curiosity that I have about this is either we're going to find somebody that builds like a killer app, And that's going to be the billion dollar valuation of a product. But you're also coming up with a good point of you could have a one person startup that's either out there making presentations. they're a startup that is raising capital and getting that unicorn valuation, but they're both, Executing the operations using AI and also using the, using AI to help them facilitate the fundraising process as well.
Christopher Young:Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think there's probably some component of it in the operations because we know to run under a million dollar company, you need some operations. So it's not like an individual is going to have enough waking hours to actually and handle that. So it has to be augmented through some sort of
Don Finley:tooling. Absolutely. what has been the, let's say the downside of, being somewhere at the forefront of using these applications, in your business today?
Christopher Young:A lot of failures, a lot of time wasted. it was probably a big, to be honest, a lot of time. Didn't I, that wouldn't even stick basis. You're just trying to figure out, is there a there for this, or should I not cut the Right. Then, and I said early on, when you're trying to use it for any kind of creative thinking or ideation. It wants to stay right down the middle. And how do you invest time in trying to get it out of the middle and to the edge and ideas and push it out of its trained comfort zone. I'm sorry. It's really just a lot of time spent. I wrote an article in Mach 49 about How taking, able to take these personas I talked about earlier in this, and one of the things that I was running into challenges with is, the agreeableness of AI, They really want anything agree with you because they realize there's probably a good way to make you happy with it. while that conflicts heavily with what I'm trying to do, which is push people into identifying challenges. And so what I did is I created different personalities ultimately the article I talked about was creating eight consumers at a grocery store and two grocery store managers. A lot of what those two different types of stakeholders want are at odds with each other, right? So consumers want more product diversity, lower prices, right? And so then you have them in a room and you're running moderated session where I'm telling. I've got one grocery store manager who's heavily opinionated, one who's passive. I've got this consumer over here who's very health conscious. This one's cost conscious. And you're forcing effectively an argument because to me that is what's interesting to see is what are they arguing on and who's standing up for it. Probably try to find an application that you're excited about to leverage AI. It doesn't have to be professional, but I think you'll just start to learn what works or what's going to get you engaged in some of the prompt engineering that kind of really teaches you what works, how to push things, what's not working. But I would, I think it's hard to do without an application that you're excited about. and so even I spent a lot of time playing around with AI and tools professionally. I need something fun on the side that I can Just mess around with it and have some fun with it. It's really hard for me interacting without something. Again, it can be completely fun. It does not have to be worked very hard, but you just need something that you're trying, that you're trying to take risks, so that you spend the time there. If you find me, I'd like to reach out.
Don Finley:Thank you for tuning into The Human Code, sponsored by FINdustries, where we harness AI to elevate your business. By improving operational efficiency and accelerating growth, we turn opportunities into reality. Let FINdustries be your guide to AI mastery, making success inevitable. Explore how at FINdustries. co.
