Mike Wang CTO of Bowtie

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:01) Today, we are talking to Mike Wang, the CTO of Bowtie, and we discuss the evolution of AI chat systems, involving customers in product development, and our plan to defeat future AI overlords. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Dude, it's a bow tie.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) Beautiful website, man. I really enjoy when I see clean design. It makes me very happy.

(Mike Wang at 00:00:43) Yeah. You can thank my partner. He has a lot of experience in design, so he takes the lead on the design stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) And then what's your role?

(Mike Wang at 00:00:53) So I am more on the AI side, more on the back end development, the architecture of the system, that sort of thing, and the meat of the bot. And he does more of the front end, UX, UI. He built the Android app, the iOS app, the business facing tool, the web widget that we have. And so it's pretty good dichotomy of skills.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:20) Did you guys have to build the whole web widget from scratch from the ground up? Or did you build on an existing open source project?

(Mike Wang at 00:01:27) No. We built everything pretty much in our entire platform from the ground up. We use open source here and there as libraries for processing and test suite and that sort of thing, but all of the proprietary stuff is all ours.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:44) Yes. So I've seen so many of these chat things, and I haven't looked. But I had wondered if there was some really popular open source project already that is the baseline of it. Because everyone's just rebuilding the same thing over and over with sockets and the chat interface and the embedding of it and the same things being built over and over. Whenever that happens historically, eventually, some open source project comes out that gets really popular, and then people can build on top of that.

(Mike Wang at 00:02:10) Yeah. Absolutely. I think there's a lot of tools out there, especially for chat bots that sort of cropped up as part of the whole Facebook bringing chatbots into the public spotlight and pushing that. There's api.ai, lots of things out there. And one of the questions that we get when we tell our idea to people on the tech side is, you know, do you use any of those?

(Mike Wang at 00:02:35) And if not, I usually say, you know, we don't. And then their next question is, why not? And I think those platforms are great if you're building sort of a one-off bot that fits into more of a question answer scheme and may be more of a branching sort of experience. But for us, there's a lot of flexibility and customization that we need as a platform to onboard individual businesses and to have it really be a personalized sort of conversational experience for our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:07) Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a smart decision. It's not a lot of basic stuff. It wasn't a huge build to get the basic chat functionality back and forth, and all the freedom you get from having rolled your own is worth it in that context. I've actually built a chat system that, no AI involved with it, but it was a chassis that you can embed, and then you could send documents back and forth for signature, and it actually integrated with a document repository system. So you could search files that you had on your server and then send them for signature, and you go back, do signature from the chat directly. So that was kind of, so I've had that experience of building that base.

(Mike Wang at 00:03:45) Yeah. That's great. I think for me, having been in the space now, sometimes when I come up with little ideas for side projects or whatever, it's almost like I just gravitate towards chat as a medium because one, it's really easy to spin up something really quickly. And it's you can instantly, basically, deploy access to your app or platform to all these outlets and channels that people already use. So recently, I was getting into the whole cryptocurrency, Bitcoin craze, and I wanted an alert system to tell me when there was price movement and whatnot. And so what I did was I built an alert bot that just sent me messages anytime, you know, when my alerts triggered or if there was a spike in prices or something. And I don't know. Just the use case just fits a lot of things really, really nicely and other things not so nicely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:39) I'm a big fan of the messaging and the interaction. Of course, now we're seeing it with the voice and now with the bots. So when I was on your site, it was really, I like how you describe the value. So not just the graphics, but the communication of the flow of everything. And so are you guys looking to just dominate the sort of hairdresser nail salon space? Or what's your goal?

(Mike Wang at 00:05:03) Yeah. Great question. So we see conversational AI and sort of this platform for communicating with businesses as the future looking vision is to provide a way for people to interact with businesses in an automated fashion at scale and through natural conversation. And so taking kind of taking a look at this space, there's a lot of different players. A lot of them are going after call centers and sort of just trying to automate support conversations and things like that. That's very, very difficult because the breadth of the things that people can ask for over just a generic support chat is enormous. And you'd have to build a customized solution for every individual business. So what we saw was that in the appointment space, there's such commonality across the interactions with business between customers and businesses in the space. And so, you know, if you're booking a haircut at a salon here, another customer is booking a haircut at a salon there, and their interactions are largely the same apart from certain differences, like, you know, maybe the services are different or the staff members. But a lot of that is transferable across businesses, and even from nail salons to to beauty salons, to massage parlors, to spas.

(Mike Wang at 00:06:20) And then, eventually, what we want to do is break into other verticals sort of in a sequential basis. So we're starting off in this area because we see salons and spas as sort of the optimal niche in the sense that right now, how people book appointments are largely over the phone. So 80% of appointments in the salon spa space are booked over the phone. And that's because it's difficult to do it online because, you know, people have questions, people want to book back to back appointments, and it's sort of much easier to do it over a conversation. And we see that as a behavior that already exists, and we can sort of just transfer that into this automated conversational channel. And people are already texting with salons on sort of a manual basis. So they'll text their stylist or the salon to get an appointment set up. And so the behavior already exists. That's sort of why we're starting in the space. But, again, eventually, we want to break into other verticals. So we're looking at auto, dentists, real estate, even, you know, booking a plumber. And so really any appointment based business is in our purview in terms of the grand vision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:31) Nice. When I start talking with you before we got on a call, when we were emailing back and forth, I went and had my haircut, and I asked my hairdresser how much of her appointments she books through text. So she says, you know, almost all most of them. She wished all of them, but her clientele is, there's a lot of older people. So she's like, all the younger people. Yeah. She goes, anyone 40 and 40 or 50? She goes, yeah. We're texting all the time. She goes, anyone 55 or whatever. They're just wanting to call and leave voice mails and stuff. I was like, alright. Cool. Cool. So she said she wished it was all, and she said she doesn't like the website because she likes the, you know, the real time interaction of having to watch her schedule adjust and make those decisions and who she wants to put where. But then I asked her about your situation. I was like, do you miss a lot? She goes, yeah. She goes, I do miss a lot because I can't be texting while I'm the thirty minutes while I'm cutting someone's hair or the hour while I'm cutting someone's hair. I can't, it's rude for me to be on that. I have to be paying attention to them. So she sees her phone going on or she has to mute her phone and everything. So she goes, yeah. It does because sometimes people get frustrated and they'll go on to the next appointment. And so with that, I told her about what you guys are doing, and she's like, oh, that's amazing.

(Mike Wang at 00:08:50) Yeah. Absolutely. I think that's sort of the hair on fire problem that we're solving is that these artists are doing their work and they're helping customers in the store. Even the places that have a receptionist, you know, they're greeting customers. They're bringing them a glass of champagne. They're checking people in and out. And so when the phone is just ringing off the hook, they can't manage all of that incoming. And so we're sort of taking that off their plate. The transactional stuff that is really easily sort of just done over AI. The idea is to give them back their time so they don't have to worry about those inbound requests coming in. Because right now, it's a really stressful, if you've ever just sat at the front desk of a salon and watched them throughout the day, it's chaos. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:41) So do you do that? Do you involve them in the product and go watch them use your system while they're working? And how do you involve your customers in your product development?

(Mike Wang at 00:09:53) Yeah. We like to talk to our customers a lot. So we have just essentially taken out days and sat next to them and just sort of watched them. We usually come in with the intention of interviewing them about a new feature that we want to do. So we're in New York, and a bunch of our clients are sort of right in the area. So we can actually just take a twenty, fifteen minute trip and hang out and sort of get their feedback on something that we're working on. And so we do that fairly often. And in addition to that, we're constantly emailing back and forth just because they have questions about this and that. And then that's also sort of a place where we occasionally just interject and just like, oh, that seems like a problem that you're having. What if we did this? And then, you know, it is the constant conversation between us and them. And I think because we have a fairly personal relationship with our clients, just because every individual client that we bring on, we sort of handhold them through the process, and we're on the phone with them, and importing their menu, and getting an idea of why they bought the product and what they want to get out of it. So, yeah, we definitely try to involve them pretty heavily in everything we do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:10) Man, I love hearing that you are doing the right things. This is what it is. This is what the companies that are successful do. And you'd be, I don't know. Would you be surprised to find out that most of the companies that fail, they don't do this stuff at all?

(Mike Wang at 00:11:29) Yeah. I hope we're doing the right thing. And I would not be surprised to find that out at all. We actually just finished reading a book called Customer Success. And that talks a lot about sort of following up with your customers and making sure they're getting value out of your product. And I think one of the interesting things was, rather than sort of measuring the time to onboard, measure the time to value for a customer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:59) That sounds good. That's like a real, measure the time to value. So, do you know Bruno Ator?

(Mike Wang at 00:12:05) Yeah. I do. I, we're colleagues from Cornell Tech.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:11) Yeah.

(Mike Wang at 00:12:11) I listened to your podcast with him. It was a great episode.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:14) Oh, thanks. Yeah. That was so awesome. I saw on the notes here, we were all talking about you before the cast and went, oh, he went to Cornell? Does he know Bruno? This must be amazing. So you guys are both in New York City.

(Mike Wang at 00:12:30) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:30) And you're both in New York City doing your startups. Do you see him regularly? Like, you guys, like, friends?

(Mike Wang at 00:12:35) So we, you know, we're both really busy guys, and I'm sure you got from speaking to him that he works crazy amounts, as do I. And so we both keep in touch with the Cornell Tech community. And that's one of the things that I really love about Cornell Tech is that they really maintain a strong alumni network. And also, we were the third CS class at Cornell Tech. And so there weren't too many of us. So we all sort of keep in touch, and we have monthly happy hours and stuff like that where we hang out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:15) How would you say that that program is? Do you learn a lot of stuff that is very useful in your professional life, or did you just get exposed to many different topics? What's your takeaway from the CS program there?

(Mike Wang at 00:13:28) Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I have an endless amount of good things to say about Cornell Tech. I think for me, that it really sort of sparked my journey into entrepreneurship or at least sort of made it real. So I never really even considered doing anything like entrepreneurship until about halfway through college. And so I interned at some fairly large companies like Amazon and LinkedIn. And so I kind of got the view of the corporate side, and I became interested in, okay. Now I don't know what that looks like. And, you know, I don't necessarily see myself sitting at that desk for the next few years of my life. And then I got exposed at Cornell Tech, sorry, at Cornell to this program called Life Changing Labs where they have a bunch of student startups. And I got involved with the startup that was run by these sophomores, and I was a junior at the time. And I was just like, whoa. These guys and girls are going out and building whatever they want, and just making this awesome thing happen. And I was like, whoa. Entrepreneurship is really cool. And so when I graduated, I was like, you know, I wanted to sort of dive into that. But at the same time, I had no idea what to do. And then Cornell Tech came up, and it was like this intersection between tech and entrepreneurship in New York City. And the whole idea was, like, let's get you hands-on experience, bringing entrepreneurs and investors and technologists in the community, and let's basically teach you how to make products and startups. And so, that's why I did Cornell Tech. And, honestly, I think it fulfilled all of that. It totally fulfilled its promise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:19) So you really like Cornell. Right? You got experience into what it was like to create, to solve problems or to create things and solve problems all day. Yeah. And it's like you almost, you created some problems, solved some problems, and then you got sort of the cinematic, go to New York City, learn to build product. It's a very cool story. I like it, you know? And so are you, what's sort of a day look like for you now? How hard are you working?

(Mike Wang at 00:15:51) Yeah. I mean, for the three of us founders at Bowtie, this is like our life. You know? So we wake up. You know? So at this point, you know, it's been a long journey getting here. At this point, we have a nice set of paying customers. We have close to 50 customers sort of throughout the US, and we're growing that quickly. And so right now, for us, it's just a matter of growing that out and making sure our clients really, really love the product. So, yeah, I basically code all day. That's the real answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:26) Cool. So you're actively programming most of the day as a CTO?

(Mike Wang at 00:16:30) Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:31) And then what are your other two founders doing? Like, what are their responsibilities?

(Mike Wang at 00:16:35) Yeah. So there's two of us are developers. My partner Vivek and I, and so it's sort of a front end, back end sort of distribution of responsibilities there. He also does a lot of the customer onboarding and the UX and that sort of thing. Ron, our CEO, he does all the business development, sales, marketing, more sales, lots of sales, and customer support—all the relationship management stuff.

(Mike Wang at 00:17:11) So yeah. I think out of the gate, our team had a really good, sort of complementary skill set. And that's one of the things I really love about working with them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:24) Yeah. I really like how lean you guys are and how big you look on your website. It looks really good. You're really lean. You're communicating with your customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:36) And are you guys just naturally brilliant, or do you guys have some mentors that are guiding you in the right direction?

(Mike Wang at 00:17:43) Yeah. We have a lot of mentors and advisors that we have to be very grateful for along the way. Really grateful for our investors. So we've been part of a few accelerators. Out of the gate, we were at Transom Bay where we spent a few months, and we met some pretty cool people there.

(Mike Wang at 00:18:01) Alana Gregory, who was running a beauty startup at the time, she was actually the one who sort of nudged us in the direction of beauty appointments. At the time, we were doing something pretty different. It was like food ordering over text, still in the realm of conversational AI. But we were nudged into beauty, and then we sort of took a look at the space, took a step back, interviewed a bunch of people, and then dove into it. But so she's been really helpful along the way, just giving us a great perspective on the space.

(Mike Wang at 00:18:33) And then we went to Newark Venture Partners, another accelerator in Newark. They're in the Audible Building, and we met a couple of our investors there who had been really helpful, sort of connecting us with potential partners and just giving us advice on the fundraising and such. And they also have a sales advisor there that we've been talking to a lot about how to sell to small to medium-sized enterprises—the strategy, how to communicate the vision and the product, and to sort of mirror their language and frame our solution in terms of the problems that they're having. So yeah, definitely a lot of help along the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:20) So I saw on your site you had a blog and you had a little bit of content. Who's writing that content?

(Mike Wang at 00:19:27) Yeah. So Ron is doing a lot of the content marketing stuff right now, and we all sort of—so he puts together the content, and then we also take a look at it and edit it and make it much better. So it's kind of a team effort.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:46) Oh, nice. Yeah. You guys gonna do more content writing? Because I saw one article. I really liked that you had some funny little memes in it and stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:53) And I was thinking you're really gonna pick up traffic when people are searching for that.

(Mike Wang at 00:19:58) Yeah. He's a big fan of the GIFs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:02) They're funny, dude. It was relatable. And honestly, your target audience is gonna respond to that so well because hairdressers are usually really fun people.

(Mike Wang at 00:20:10) Yeah. Definitely. When we talk to them on the phone, it's like they bring so much energy, and you can just tell they're smiling all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:19) They just talk to strangers and cut their hair all day. Right?

(Mike Wang at 00:20:23) Yeah. Exactly. I mean, they're so warm and lively.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:29) I love it. So what's the story of how you three came together?

(Mike Wang at 00:20:34) Yeah. So we all met at Cornell Tech. Well, okay. I met both of them at Cornell Tech. Vivek and Ron actually worked together for four years before Cornell Tech.

(Mike Wang at 00:20:42) And interestingly enough, they both applied separately to the program. And then on the first day, they found out that they both got in. So they knew each other. I met them there. I had done a few projects with Vivek throughout our time there, and we just—our work styles just gelled really, really well.

(Mike Wang at 00:21:03) We became really good friends. And then the second semester—I think Ron mentioned this—but there's this startup studio program led by David Tisch, and we all did that together and grew the idea as part of that and then spun out as a company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:19) That's awesome. And you guys all get along really well. Do you hang out? Like, does it just blend your whole day and then being outside of work? And is it just all this big Bowtie blend?

(Mike Wang at 00:21:30) Yeah. It was definitely a big Bowtie blend in my life. But yeah. So we all sort of—we spend way too much time together. And yeah.

(Mike Wang at 00:21:40) We all like to take our time off here and there. So we stagger our vacation time such that each of us during the holidays might take a few days off, and then we sort of take time off as we need.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:56) Okay. So how many years until your AI bot starts writing its own code?

(Mike Wang at 00:22:02) That's—you know, I just polished up the self-awareness module last week. So, you know, should be a few months. No. I'm just kidding. I hope—

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:13) You wrote some tests, man.

(Mike Wang at 00:22:16) Yeah. You know, programmed in some, maybe, benevolence. And yeah. It's a big topic right now in AI—the alignment problem. It's like, once we get to that sort of AGI level, you know, how do we make sure the robot overlords have the same values as us?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:33) I think that we create a pure AI overlord. We can—it's offline and isolated where we teach it only good things, and then we just focus on that detached from the whole network AI, and we train it to be very good. And then it ends up battling the evil AI.

(Mike Wang at 00:22:57) I think that would be a very nice picture of the future. I think that's a very optimistic way of looking at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:06) Right. Cool. Because everyone says, you know, "How do we stop it? How do we stop it?" And I'm sitting here with as much as we both know about technology and how code actually works and how much it could actually spread. Right? Like, it could go everywhere, and the amount that it could do would be insane. Right? If it were evil, that'd be horrible. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:26) But the solution—we either focus everything—I think it would be silly to put 100% of our pie on preventing it from happening. I think we should take a chunk of our pie and say, "Well, let's just assume it's going to happen and let's find out a way to create our own pure AI overlord to battle it."

(Mike Wang at 00:23:46) Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I think—I was just listening to another podcast about this with Sam Harris and Eliezer. He's from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He was talking about how in the future, it's pretty much inevitable that we're gonna create some sort of superintelligence, assuming we don't blow ourselves up.

(Mike Wang at 00:24:08) But his main concern, I think the concern of a lot of people out there who really see this as a big problem, is that the good AI that is gonna help us, you know, fight the bad AI, if that is a thing, is gonna be just a little bit harder to create. So his thing was like, "Well, you know, I'm not concerned that we're not able to create a good, benevolent AI that's aligned with our values. It's more so that that is gonna take two years longer than it takes to create an AI that is not concerned about human welfare." So that's why there's a lot of effort in sort of making sure that we don't follow the trend of history and put the safety guards in two years after the thing is made.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:55) That's very true. And I love the very Elon Musk of, "Yeah, unless we blow ourselves up." We'll become interplanetary if we blow ourselves up in between. Like, that's the default view of the thing I hear constantly in the technology—in the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:10) Yeah. We'll get there unless we blow ourselves up.

(Mike Wang at 00:25:13) Yeah. It's a real concern, you know, with the current political climate. But, you know, stay positive. Stay positive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:20) Yeah. We should just get all the smart, logical humans together. Right? And just create this anti-blowing-ourselves-up strategy where we create this—maybe this AI whose sole purpose is to keep us from blowing ourselves up.

(Mike Wang at 00:25:36) Hey. Sign me up for that. I think that's a great thing to exist in the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:40) So we actually have a question from the livestream, if that's cool.

(Mike Wang at 00:25:44) Yeah. Go for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:45) We have an individual who is from this startup called Book and Meet, and they're an online appointment scheduling platform based in India—for India. And he wants to know when it comes to adaptability and localization, like, how do we do that for your AI?

(Mike Wang at 00:26:05) Yeah. So our philosophy is that the platform should be general enough so that there's a lot of commonality across the AI so that we can save a lot of the functionality across the businesses that we integrate with. But at the same time, a lot of the businesses that we integrate with have tons of custom needs. Like, they need to tweak the language here and there. Like, some of them call their staff members staff. Some of them call them technicians. Some of them call them therapists. And they all have—some of them need to let people know the cancellation policy when they book. Others have other individual messages. So we have all these little slots and places where we can customize messaging for individual businesses.

(Mike Wang at 00:26:49) And so that's how we're adapting the conversational AI to sort of different contexts and requirements. As far as localization, I think that's a difficult problem because language is just so different. Well, you know, the structure and the meaning of language and how you learn the user's intent is different across different languages. And so right now, we're just focusing on English, and we'll have to think about how, eventually, to expand that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:19) Yeah. So you guys will own the English space. They will own the space of India, and then you can get together and form some sort of global superpower partnership with chat. Yeah. The localization together. And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:31) So I stalked your Twitter just a teeny bit. At first, love that Bezos Amazon picture. Right?

(Mike Wang at 00:27:43) Yeah. And yeah. I'm fine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:43) We still haven't—we moved into our office. We still haven't changed our sign either, and I think we're at the point where it's just becoming unacceptable. So I think we're gonna get that taken care of this week. We keep hiring people and building, so it's a lot of fun. And then did you get to watch the launch live?

(Mike Wang at 00:28:01) Yeah. That was fantastic. You know, I felt like I was literally looking into the future. When the two boosters landed on the platform, I was like, "Is this live stream of real life, or is this a video game?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:16) It did feel like a highly realistic animated segment of a video game, like, before they let you have control of the scene.

(Mike Wang at 00:28:23) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:24) Yeah. And it made me happy. Like, I was very happy about it. So usually when we wrap up, we ask about the past, but so much future talk today—we actually had a futurist on this morning who just goes around the world and teaches CEOs about what is happening in the future and how to position your company accordingly. Right?

(Mike Wang at 00:28:45) Wait—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:45) So in that feeling, in that tone, I want to know what you think the next big change in the next five years is going to be for technology. What are we gonna see?

(Mike Wang at 00:28:58) Maybe it's just technology in general.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:01) Anything. Just tickle your imagination and whatever happens, happens.

(Mike Wang at 00:29:06) Yeah. Definitely. I think there's a lot of areas where we're gonna see big changes. I'm still very pro-AR. I'm very pro-conversational AI. I'm pro—I'm pro-voice. I'm pro-blockchain. It's hard to just point to one thing. I think all of those things are gonna sort of happen at the same time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:25) You know, it's interesting. So we're eating lunch, and Jackie, who is brand new to the team, it was right before your call, like, 45 minutes ago. And she asked about the next five years, and me and Jake spouted off AR, the conversational chats, and voice. Like, that's what our answers were.

(Mike Wang at 00:29:44) Yeah. There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:46) Welcome to the team, Mike.

(Mike Wang at 00:29:49) Yeah. If I were to pick one, I mean, I'd have to go with conversational—like that. How could I not? I think—and that includes voice too. I think the way we communicate with technology is so disparate right now. It's like, you know, you have probably 50-plus apps on your phone. You're typing things in, looking at things on drop-downs, pressing buttons. And it's all sort of just super random. But language is universal. And so when I think about in the future, like, how we're gonna communicate with technology, like, the real elegant solution, I imagine we're gonna have a little implant in our vocal cords or whatever. We're just gonna be able to whisper stuff to our personal assistant, which is gonna just do everything on our behalf.

(Mike Wang at 00:30:35) And so as a universal sort of channel for communicating with our digital friends, I think voice and conversation is gonna be king. You know, unless Elon finishes his neural link stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:51) Oh, you beat me to my notes. I type as you talk, and I'm like, "Is he gonna go Musk neural net here? Like, or is that too—is that gonna happen?"

(Mike Wang at 00:30:59) Hey. I have a lot of faith in that guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:01) Dude, well, clearly. Like, how can you not? Like, just look at what he's accomplished in all the different industries. So and then he's also, you know, funding that AI project for the safety—have you checked that out at all? The—yeah.

(Mike Wang at 00:31:18) The company? Yeah. OpenAI. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:18) So I'm pumped to see what comes of that. Now I think we're—I believe in all of this stuff, and it is. But I think we're gonna get surprised. And I think something's gonna happen in the materials or the processing because I think—I feel like it's been a while since we had a big processing breakthrough. Like, a totally new material or a totally new way of doing things. Like, I just think some scientist in some lab is gonna trip on something and, like, now. Right? Like, all of a sudden we have the microwave. Like, if you've ever looked up the story of the microwave. Like, I think something is gonna happen that's—I think all of these things are and will happen, and they are the future, but I think we're gonna get a little bonus. I think we're gonna unlock some sort of secret level, get a little hidden gem of some sort of materials or processing breakthrough.

(Mike Wang at 00:32:09) Yeah. That's awesome. I would not be surprised if we were surprised. And I was just talking to my partner about this, and we were talking about sort of the same topic. And he was like, "You know, nobody predicts what actually happens."

(Mike Wang at 00:32:26) Before flight was invented, the guy who was closest in the field to that space, to that industry, predicted that flight would be fifty years out. And, you know, same with computing. And it just all happened so fast. And even with apps, nobody like, the App Store didn't exist before 2008, right?

(Mike Wang at 00:32:50) And I don't think anybody was like, oh, the next big technological revolution is gonna be a ton. We're gonna have apps in our phone, and you're gonna be able to book flights from your phone and whatnot. So I totally agree with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:06) Yeah. We could have some sort of speed of our Internet go up, right? We could have different processing. A lot of different things could happen, which is why I am so pumped about the future.

(Mike Wang at 00:33:22) Yeah. I actually just saw an article about these guys at MIT who apparently are working on this new chip that instead of using ones and zeros, like a binary sort of thing, it tries to model the neural synapse of our brains. So there's some sort of gradient, like, activation function built into the chip that's to the hardware itself. Yeah. So that, I don't know. That could be cool. I don't know if it works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:51) Yeah. I think there's so many great things. Well, here's another thing I just popped into my head. You know, so you know a lot of smart people. I know a lot of smart people. But if I took all the smart people that I know, let's say 150, right? Really smart people. And then you took all the smart people you know, let's say it's 150. Let's just pretend. So now we got 300 smart people. And if we imagined, what would happen if we got all those smart and creative people together on one project? That's only 300 people. So they're all out there solving their own problems right now. Think of it like little processors of this giant human Earth computer, and then just take a step back and realize how many people there actually are on this planet. And then all of a sudden, the likelihood of something coming out of the side and surprising us and just revolutionizing the entire world doesn't seem that far off.

(Mike Wang at 00:34:46) Yeah. Totally. I think a shared goal is the best way to accomplish anything, right? You can be a really smart person, but, you know, two slightly less smart people can probably outdo you in almost anything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:59) Right. And 7,000,000,000 people can surprise the hell out of you.

(Mike Wang at 00:35:02) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:04) Awesome. Thank you so much, Mike, for your time today.

(Mike Wang at 00:35:07) Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:09) Yeah. It was great talking with you. Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this, get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.