Tech Titans: Designing for Intuition with Campbell Brown, CEO and Co-founder of PredictHQ

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Campbell Brown, CEO and co-founder of PredictHQ about the technology that allows AI to know what's happening in the real world in real time. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) And I was reading a lot about what you're doing with PredictHQ and all of this stuff, but I wanted to hear it from you. How do you explain what the company is and does?

(Campbell Brown at 00:00:30) I think you can give the melodic or pragmatic view of what we do, right, where we predict the events that are going to impact businesses. But I think the easiest way to explain it is to articulate how our customers use it. And so I always use Uber as a great example. So Uber has been one of our longest serving customers, but next time you get in an Uber, ask the driver what sort of visibility do they have around what impactful events are going to come up. Because using our API, Uber serves up these notifications to drivers to help them be in the right place at the right time ahead of time. Right? And so that's one use case for Uber. They use us in their advertising product. They use us in their forecasting product.

(Campbell Brown at 00:01:10) But then you have the likes of a CVS who are trying to understand what is going to impact, let's say, their water supply at their stores. So festivals drastically reduce water because everyone's buying it and they don't want to be out of stock. And so the easiest way to think about it now, especially as we go on, is models are really, really smart, but they struggle with real world context. They struggle to understand what's happening around them. Humans do it. Models do it. But if you have this real world context, you're able to adapt what's going on in the world, which is what we do at scale across some of the largest companies in the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:48) That's amazing. So Uber, you said Uber was your first customer?

(Campbell Brown at 00:01:56) Oh, dude. It was. I think so they inbounded to us. It was like, we were so super excited. So we went over and above for Uber, and what we did is we actually, you know when you're a headless business, when you're API first, you don't really have a UI, so you've got to articulate your value in their own environment. So actually what we did is we mocked up the Uber app on our phones, we flew over to San Francisco, and we said, oh, hey, look, wouldn't it be amazing if your drivers could understand what's going on here two days out, three days out, seven days out? And they were like, yeah, that'd be pretty cool. And we had a really, really great champion at Uber who helped us immensely.

(Campbell Brown at 00:02:36) And I would just say, look, we've tried to solve this internally. We can't do it at scale, so we're going to take a bet on you. And that was the beginning. You know? But that visualization of how you can bring this real world context to life was just a real penny drop moment for myself and my co-founder.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:53) Okay. So nine to ten years ago, that's when you first got started. You were building because you thought people would want to come in and see these events happening. So the first version of the product, you were tracking different festivals, different types of physical in-person events. Is that what it was?

(Campbell Brown at 00:03:08) Yeah, totally. And we were doing a good job of it. We had a charitable business before this, right? And so we were doing car rentals globally. And this is actually where the genesis of the idea came and actually where I met my co-founder. And we saw these peaks and troughs in demand for car rentals, but we couldn't quite understand why until we understood it was a flood in Florida had completely decreased demand or, you know, it was a baseball game or a soccer game in New York that had surged demand. And so we thought there's got to be a way to get ahead of this to rather than react often and always say, oh, it was that event here. It's like, hey, this event is coming. And we built this really, really basic framework to get started, but very quickly, we saw that we needed to then build an entire ecosystem around it. And that entire ecosystem could effectively consume customers' demand data and then actually predict what's going to impact them in the future. And so we do that at scale today. I think since we built this platform, the product called Beam, we have consumed around $7,200,000,000,000 worth of spend through the system to just generate all these predictions every single day across hundreds of thousands of locations across the globe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:20) It's such a big thing that touches so many industries. How do you make it manageable? How do you say these are the things we're going to try to track? How does that happen?

(Campbell Brown at 00:04:31) Yeah. We've built a massive pipeline, and that pipeline consumes around 10,000 different sources. And so that is anything from event sources, venue sources, even persona sources, meaning Taylor Swift versus, I don't know, Joel Beasley playing down at the local pub. Right? It's really dependent because that will then impact the amount of people that are going to attend because we predict attendance. We predict the spend of event. And so we do all these micro predictions as well. So we've got to harvest all this information. And that in itself is really, really difficult because you've got to be super accurate because if we're being put into a forecast, right, if it's not accurate, that forecast is going to be off. And so the most painful thing in this business has been the data quality side of things.

(Campbell Brown at 00:05:17) So getting that data quality right to build the foundations on it. And then just in terms of how big is this problem, from the $7,200,000,000,000 worth of spend we've consumed from accommodation, retail, travel, 60% to 65% of their variability, the demand they can't answer, we can answer about 60 to 65% of that. So it is related to events, meaning, hey, we see this spike in demand, we have no idea what's going on. 65% of that type of demand is caused by these real world events. So you're talking hundreds of millions, if not billions and billions of dollars every single year that people have no idea about what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, and how they take advantage of it. And so we've flipped that on its head and allow these businesses to see into the future so they can do better labor optimization, better pricing, staffing. You name it, we help them adapt to the real world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:12) Josh, you can make a note. We can introduce him to the head of engineering over there after the show. They were actually really cool. We had two people from their company on, and I just remember, yeah, I do so many of these. I'm almost at a thousand episodes, and there's some that I just really remember. And I remember getting off the podcast, going downstairs, talking to my wife and saying, I just met some of the most interesting people in technology I've ever met, and they work at a grocery store. We were just doing, whatever they were, I can't even remember what they were doing. I just remember they were interesting, they were smart, and they were doing something that I thought was really cool. And I love when you see these somewhat on the surface boring industries, and you go in and talk to these people, and they're so excited, and they're pushing the boundaries of technology. And it's like, yeah, grocery stores. Who would have thought?

(Campbell Brown at 00:07:03) But no. On, so look, I can't name them, but one of the largest, if not the largest retailer in America is now a customer. And talk about being inspired. So we went to the HQ. If I told you the HQ, you'd get where it is. But I went there, and they were just so passionate about what they were doing. But they are the most sophisticated forecasting team we've ever met. Legitimately insane. But the thing is they said to us is, look, we can be as good as we can, but we still don't know what's going to impact our store, which has groceries and everything in there, right? We still don't know if it's going to impact it. We had, and they said, look, there is a store that is in town from here. We had no idea why demand was surging and what we figured out, it was a film festival that was happening 0.3 miles away, and no one was prepared, staffing wasn't prepared. And then they told us a knock on effect.

(Campbell Brown at 00:07:57) They're like, so do you know what the knock on effect of that is? No, no. I'm sure it must be, you know, out of stock. And they're like, no, no, no. People leave the job. We're like, what? If they feel overrun, if they feel overworked, they are likely to leave their job.

(Campbell Brown at 00:08:11) And do you know how much it is to replace that individual? And we're going, whoa. When you actually dive deep into the knock on effects of these surges and demand, it's like, it's significant. But to solve that for them at scale across thousands and thousands of locations, dude, it's one of my proudest moments. I tell my kids about it and they're like, this is cool, dad. I finally get what you do. Because otherwise, they're like, dad, I have no idea what you do. You know what I mean?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:37) Yeah. I'm signing a little kid NDA first.

(Campbell Brown at 00:08:41) Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:44) Oh, you guys do some work with Expedia? I think that's one of the brands we can talk about.

(Campbell Brown at 00:08:48) Yeah, we can. Yeah, they're awesome. I'm actually on stage with them in a couple weeks in Las Vegas, but they are a super progressive customer of ours. They started really small, right? But now they've just been expanding and expanding. They've got us, they're using us in their portal for hotels. So hotels can log in to their pricing calendar and go, hey, what's happening on this day? And we'll use our technology to go, what's happening around this specific hotel, should they change their pricing? They're actually using us in their app to provide educated urgency is the best way that I would frame it. Meaning, hey, Joel, you're looking at a resort in Miami at this time. Hey, just so you know, there's these events that are happening, right? Book now, avoid price surging, and all that sort of stuff. So there's all sorts of different ways in which they're using us. I think we're in about six or seven different use cases inside Expedia, and therein lies the unique thing about being API first is you can be pushed and pulled anywhere.

(Campbell Brown at 00:09:44) And so once people unlock truly what impacts their business, you can go anywhere. You can go into notification systems, into forecasting, go into customer support. They can take that knowledge and they can just expand it out to any surface, which again is what AI has been so good for us because AI, as you know, is just creating all these new surfaces where you can actually deploy our capability.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:06) How did you initially meet them?

(Campbell Brown at 00:10:08) Yeah. It was funnily enough, the original guy, Brandon. I actually, we did a webinar the other day. He was actually the original person. He inbounded to us, and, you know, we actually, we've lost them two times out of our pipeline, and that's, you know, three times a charm. But they had a very, very specific use case. They were very passionate about what they were trying to do. They had tried to solve this internally, hence why we failed those other two times, and they just said, look, we can't do it. We can't do it at any kind of scale. And so that's what brought them back to us. And then yes. And I'm actually on stage with Brandon in a few weeks' time, so it's kind of cool, full circle to be back with him, our first champion in that business. But any travel business, any retail business, you know, they're all going to be feeling the same pain with what's going on that they just can't predict.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:01) Now help me understand the Bolt and the MCP server. Are those the same thing? Are they different? How do they interact?

(Campbell Brown at 00:11:08) Yeah, they're different. So think of the MCP that serves like, you know, the store manager or the revenue manager who just wants to know for this specific area what's going to impact them, right? And they can ask a question and they can get these results back. Whereas what Bolt does is it's a sandbox or engineering environment where you can basically build the integration. So say you're Expedia, you want to go, look, I can actually go into Bolt now and build a complete integration with a conversation that I can then take the code and put it into my travel application. I can put it into my forecast model. So it's actually just speeding up the entire process of integration. Because what we've found over the years is that people go off piste. You know what I mean? Because you can't, you're not out there to say, hey, look, you need to do it our way because we're the smartest at this, because that never works. Telling people that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:03) I know.

(Campbell Brown at 00:12:04) Yeah. And so if you can create, so the real light bulb moment for myself and my co-founder we had is, hey, rather than forcing them to go down our guidelines, let's give them a natural experience where they can talk with an AI, right, when they can talk through an agent and they can get it to do tasks for it and can build it out. And by default, they're following our guidelines, but we're not forcing them to follow our guidelines. And that was that real moment for us going, oh, man, Bolt is the way to go because people can get from zero to 100 really, really quickly, and it's not us pounding, going, you've got to follow our guidelines. Look, when we presented this to the business, I did present this about six weeks ago, I used this example. And I've got the satellite phone and this satellite phone is for when I go right out into the backwaters of when I go trail running. And I never read the instructions, and they are really good instructions they've got online, offline. I was like, nah, I'm not going to read it.

(Campbell Brown at 00:13:01) And effectively, I was this close to sending it back because I'm like, it's so awkward to send a text message on it. I hate it, it wasn't very good. Little did I know, it just connects to your phone and then you can send text messages on your phone. It was almost like a rebound and I was like, I'm such an idiot. But again, I didn't read the instructions, right?

(Campbell Brown at 00:13:22) And it was actually a YouTube video. There's someone called Outdoor Boys, and he goes off into the wilderness, gets lost, it's freezing cold, and he goes, I'm just going to pull out my satellite phone and connect it to my phone and I can talk with my wife. And I'm like, oh my goodness. That is what I needed to do. Right? And so I think what that's saying is if you can present it in their own environment, if they can do it in a conversational way, they're far more likely to build a really, really great application. You're going to collapse the time to value and everything's going to improve, and the quality of their integration is going to significantly improve because they're using all the tools that we know work really, really well rather than expecting them to follow the documentation. Let them have a conversation with it. It's effectively the way we've done it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:06) And one of the leadership questions that I like to ask everyone is if there's one piece of leadership advice that you've received that you've put into practice and you've kept it with you for a long time, what advice is that?

(Campbell Brown at 00:14:21) Yeah, it's, this is going to sound actually quite odd. But there was a friend of mine actually shared it with me, and it really resonated. And it was called making your bed. And what it is is effectively this captain in the army did this big speech around making your bed.

(Campbell Brown at 00:14:41) No matter how, so whenever you get up, just make your bed. Make it really, really nice because no matter how bad your day is, you're going to have a nice bed to come back to and you're going to be able to reset. And then I combine it with something else one of my dear friends said to me and he said the darkest hour is just before dawn. And all that's meaning is you're going to get through it, you're going to get through the other side, tomorrow is going to happen. And I think when you're really in the mixer and you got all the stress going on, just sitting back and reflecting on, man, tomorrow is gonna happen, it's gonna be okay, you're gonna get through it. And often once you get through that really, really tough time, you reflect on it and you're like, man, why was I so worried?

(Campbell Brown at 00:15:26) Right? Yes, it's a problem. Yes, it's big.

(Campbell Brown at 00:15:28) But if you're built for this, you will find a way. And I think that thing of making your bed is for me just make sure you're comfortable. Make sure you can control what you can control so you can decompress and then understand that when you are right in the frickin' mixer, it's gonna be okay. You're gonna get through it. And I think that's both from a personal point of view and from a business point of view because those things clash all the time.

(Campbell Brown at 00:15:58) Right? All the time. And I think it's the thing I often say, is just the ability. You get the superpower as a founder to eat stress. You know, you eat it.

(Campbell Brown at 00:16:11) The key thing is being able to reconcile that stress as well. I reconcile it with exercise, gold panning, weather prediction. There's always things that I find to reconcile it. But again, it's the thing. As you get more and more stressful situations, you become able to deal with it more and more.

(Campbell Brown at 00:16:31) And so then you see other people going through stress, and you're like, oh, that's not that stressful. I've been through this, this, and this, and this. But it's a really cool thing. The only thing I'd say is it's not just called to eat stress. You gotta reconcile it. Otherwise, you get yourself into trouble. I hope I'm explaining that well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:49) Oh, from one entrepreneur to another? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

(Campbell Brown at 00:16:52) Yeah. Yeah. And you find times where you just can't see your way through it. But you step back for an hour or two or whatever. You know, you can get around it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:05) Campbell, I think we're friends now. Yeah. This is great. This is fantastic conversation.

(Campbell Brown at 00:17:11) Yeah. No worries. That's good, mate. I think, you know, it's great to talk with founders as well who get it and, you know, it's lonely, mate. No one's gonna get you, but I wouldn't have it any other way. The things that you go through, man.

(Campbell Brown at 00:17:25) It's just, you know what I worry about? I worry about, you know, not having the stress in my life. What am I gonna do? If, you know, I think it's a healthy amount of stress. But anyway, maybe I'm being rose tinted glasses looking at it that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:40) Well, there's some great people that you could talk to about that out there. Um, but yeah, that is a, what do you, what's the next chapter for Campbell? Yeah. That's interesting.

(Campbell Brown at 00:17:52) Yeah. That is interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:54) Right? That's our next podcast, I guess.

(Campbell Brown at 00:17:56) Yeah. That's our next podcast. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:58) And for people that wanna learn more about PredictHQ, what do they do? Where do they go?

(Campbell Brown at 00:18:02) Yep. Just go to predicthq.com, and you can even on the homepage, plug in your business location and you can get a predicted event report in seconds. So, yeah, just go there or find us on LinkedIn. Maybe I shouldn't say that. I screwed that one up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:20) No. But we should keep it in.

(Campbell Brown at 00:18:22) No. No. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:23) No. No.

(Campbell Brown at 00:18:24) Just keep it in. Go to LinkedIn. Go to LinkedIn. Yeah. Yeah.

(Campbell Brown at 00:18:28) Find a screenshot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:29) Want, but go to the website and click guide.

(Campbell Brown at 00:18:31) That's the...

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:31) Right place. Yeah.

(Campbell Brown at 00:18:32) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:34) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.