The CTO Extinction Event with Etienne de Bruin, Founder of 7CTOs

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:00:00)
He basically messaged his CTO on Christmas Day saying, "Hey, I need SSH keys to our production environment because I'm trying to deploy something." Long story short, they were all fired about six weeks later. If in the past I have been all about "be less in the tech," I am now saying you've gotta be more in the tech.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:29)
Etienne, you just released a new book. What's it called?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:00:32)
It's called Refactor, and it's my first book in a series that I call the Press Any Key to Continue series.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41)
Do you—

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:00:41)
Know how that feels, right? When you—yeah, when you finally your game loaded and it was like "Press any key to continue." The freedom and joy I felt when I was like, "Put in the coin, press any key." So in my own journey, I have just been discovering the joy of doing tech. And I often think about how when I was building technology for startups, growing in my experience, becoming a CTO, that a lot of times my joy was robbed from me about why am I doing this? Why am I wrangling? Why am I struggling like this? And I actually fell out of love with just the joy that tech could bring. And this was actually before AI. And I started remembering that as a child, I was really connected to this "press any key to continue" when I actually fell in love with technology. So Refactor is the first book in a series of three, and Refactor talks about really gaining your autonomy back. You know, a lot of CTOs will struggle with their calendar, their position in the C-suite. And so Refactor is the first one where I'm saying, "Hey, you get to be the CTO of the company, but you get to refactor what that looks like." What your calendar management looks like, what your time management looks like, what your team organization looks like—all in service to building a life where you have full autonomy in the role of CTO. So I'm very excited about it. It just came out a few weeks ago, and I'm happy to bring that to the world. So it's called Refactor, it's on Amazon. We were lucky enough to become an Amazon bestseller with that book, and so I want to encourage people to go get it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:44)
Well, I love your books. I've got copies of all of them, and I've never been disappointed. So I'm a big fan of your writing. It's always brilliant. Your Substack too—7ctos.com. You can get access to your Substack on there, and then Amazon, you can get the new book, Refactor. All right, we've got some homework to do here up at the top. So you're in Salt Lake. Life is good.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:03:07)
Yes. People ask me how is Salt Lake, and I tell them I'm not sure to make friends.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:16)
That's the most aggressive thing I've ever heard you say.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:03:18)
Actually, I do get that response. People seem mildly either disappointed or concerned when they hear me say that. But I really don't feel like I'm here to start a new network, build out the community. Like, I am here for three reasons: my kids, my parents, and my mental health.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:50)
Those are good reasons. How is it going, by the way?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:03:53)
Very good. My children are thriving. I like to tell people in the first week, we had scooters and bicycles on our front yard. Like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:05)
That's what you want.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:04:06)
My children integrated in the neighborhood day one. I mean, the three of them have been responding differently. So they ebb and flow out of sync. But in general, my kids are great. Secondly, my parents are under my roof. That goal I have is to give them the best final chapter of their lives. And they are, you know, they're up there. So they're under my roof. So the kids are a staircase away. I feel like my parents have gotten a little younger just by the sheer energy of my kids. You know, I can walk down and have some coffee with them quickly. So the multigenerational upbringing is very important to me. And so my kids are integrated in the neighborhood. The generations are integrated under my roof. And then we picked Salt Lake because of the snowboarding. Snowboarding is probably the only thing I do that has me just feel like life is really simple. Like, just get to the bottom of the mountain.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:22)
Have you been enjoying the summer? The only thing I love—I can't do it right now. That's what you're saying.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:05:33)
Well, it was even worse because Utah had an epically bad winter. So, yeah. But, you know, as a dad, as you know, you have to start curating the things that in the Venn diagram of what your kids like to do and what you like to do. And you—

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:59)
That's right.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:06:00)
You have to find that, because there's nothing worse than doing things with them that you hate doing, but they love it. And there are those things. But for me, snowboarding is the one thing that all three of my kids love. My wife opted out of it a few years back. And so my most amazing moments is when I'm on that ski lift, and it's just the four of us. And I look to my right, and I'm like, "Wow, man. These are my people."

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:22)
This is it. We could die today, you know?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:06:25)
So I don't need to make friends, man. I'm not here to make friends.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:30)
Hey, I'm never going to go comfortable with that. You're the friendliest person I know. Our families vacationed together. It's like Etienne makes friends wherever he goes without trying. It's like saying—what you're really saying is "I'm not Etienne anymore." That's why I think it shocks people.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:06:45)
Oh, no. I have—I've made a few friends. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:54)
That's good. That's good. So let me get this right. You're out in Salt Lake. You're having the time of your life. You're there for your mental health. You got your generational family living going. Mental health clear, happy, snowboarding. How do you write an article about the CTO extinction event? Those things seem incongruent. He's like, "And also everything's going to die."

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:07:18)
Yes, yes, yes. My Substack. You know, I am very curious to know how you're experiencing all of this as well, because we haven't spoken in a while. But, you know, I wrote that article because I was noticing something that was bothering me a lot about what I was seeing with CTOs. Now, obviously, we're all adjusting to AI-driven development, the AI software development lifecycle, token spend, blah blah blah, team reduction, you know, output versus product, all that stuff. But what I was noticing was CTOs geeking out about token optimization. And the C-suite being like, "Hey, you know, what's with this AI thing? And let's budget for tokens. And what does this mean for our team? And let's shrink our team size." And this is probably fair for the period that we're in, which is a transformative period. But I noticed that a lot of these problem-solving skills was going into the organizational retooling of software engineering. And I got a little angry about that, because I felt like the CTO on that path is going to go extinct. Where we are bound to have a massive impact and where we should reorient ourselves is towards the inner workings of how LLMs work, what the new white papers are, where the research is going. And I think that's the work that the rest of the C-suite is not willing to do, which I think CTOs should be doing. So I want CTOs to not rise to the level that everyone's at right now that they can all LLM their ways through leadership decisions and teaming. I want them to go low to where no one's willing to go, which is, well, how do these tokens actually work? What is tokenization? What is an LLM? What is an attention framework? What do LLMs actually do? What can't they do? What is a harness? Okay, well, harness blah blah blah. I want you to think about what the heck is a harness. What does restarting an agent mean? When does an agent know that it's done? I don't want you to just say, "Oh, well, we use Hermes for this, and I've got a triple trouble connection to an OpenRouter connection." Like, stop optimizing with the simple things, because you're going to be disposable, because you're not going to be needed. But what people don't understand is the technicality of what AI—let the record reflect for the listeners that I am air quotes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:43)
He's doing some bunny rabbit—

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:10:45)
Bunny bunny rabbit—

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:47)
Symbols.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:10:48)
Come to the YouTube video and watch me do the bunny rabbit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:50)
Etienne, we've talked about it. This is a professional podcast. We cannot use gang symbols. Okay? So we'll have to blur them out.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:11:01)
No. So that's a bit of a long-winded answer to say that it's been hard for me to see how CTOs have sort of—which path they've chosen. And so I was like, "Hey, you're headed towards an extinction event."

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:20)
I like this idea of going where no one is willing to go, because it's so easy to sit up at the top, watch a sales page, click an integration button, watch it happen and be like, "Oh yeah, we're doing that." It's really hard to bust out the white papers, to read the books, and to really wrap your mind—however you're consuming it, whether you're watching stuff or reading or talking. But like, understanding how these lower-level technologies work. A good mentor a long time ago told me—because I was working at the level of just software, you know, just like PHP and then later Rails. But I was like, "How far do I need to go down the stack? Like, how far should I do? Do I need to go down to the electron level and understand how the electron flows from the plant through the power lines to the transformer, my house, into my computer and lights up the screen? Like, do I need to go there? Or do I need to go to the compiler level?" There's so many levels to go to. And his suggestion was you go one to two levels below whatever you would need to know to do your job. So now that might be SQL for some people, right? Because they can chat and generate it so easily. So like, go learn how that works. You know?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:12:37)
I would totally subscribe to that. Everywhere I go, I'm like, "Listen, you know that white paper that's so damn hard to read because you can't understand the two sentences following each other? Go there. Go do that. Because guess who's not doing that? Your CEO or your CMO who asked Claude, 'What would a CTO do in this situation?'" Like, we are no longer—and I'm sure you've heard this ad nauseam from your guests—we are no longer in a C-suite where we are in a knowledge-sharing C-suite, where I get to share what I know with my fellow C-suite members. I am now in a mission to enroll people into what I think. And that's a whole different ball game, because everyone can now get the knowledge, but they can't necessarily know why you want to go a certain direction or why you have to promote a certain priority. So now suddenly, I'm no longer like, "You have to listen to me because I know stuff." It's like, "No, you have to listen to me because I am going to enroll you. I'm going to bring you into my experience of why I believe out of all these options, option D-point-E is the way to go." And that's hard, because I think a lot of CTOs have had the luxury of just having a room filled with people who are like, "I don't know what he's saying, but I guess—I mean, he or she are using words I've never heard before, so I guess they must be right." Well, you and I both know those days are over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:31)
Yeah. They're going to fact-check you in real time with the AI that's monitoring the meeting.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:14:35)
I mean, sometimes I write emails or I have my AI-generated PDF presentation for our tech strategy, and I know it's not going to be read. It's going to be fed to their AIs. Like, "Is this guy full of it, or—"

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:53)
Yeah. It's—that's weird.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:14:55)
We are in a meta universe, bro.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:59)
We are. My wife's even experienced it. She got the AirPods that translate instantly, real time. She takes them out at the nail salon.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:15:09)
Does that just work?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:10)
You know, she takes them out. She doesn't want to cross that bridge. She takes them out. She's like, "I can't." She's like, "I don't want to—we have something special. I don't want to cross the bridge."

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:15:22)
Yes. "I don't want to know what you think about my toes." Yes. Wow. So, by the way, those things work? Like, are they out? Do they do their thing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:33)
I have no idea.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:15:34)
Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:34)
I just thought about it yesterday. I lied a bunch. I was just thinking about it.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:15:41)
Yeah. So I'm encouraging—actually, many of our 7CTOs events now will bust open the latest white papers. And I would encourage people listening to this, just go to Hugging Face and subscribe to their top white papers mailing list, and you get—sometimes it's too much, but you get—I just take the top one or two white papers from their list, and I just kind of screen them, and I look over them, and I read them. And it has been a game changer, because what does this mean? Well, it means that when you are in the C-suite and you're talking about cost reduction optimization, or you're talking about revenue increase, and you're talking about, "Oh, the models will do this and the models will do that"—well, that's very primitive. And the only thing that's really caused this revolution is the compute that you can throw at these calculations, you know, 700 billion calculations to predict the next token. I mean, that's crazy. And I think it's incredibly important for the technical lead of the C-suite to acutely understand what the limitations are, but also then from that, what the opportunities are. And so that's where the article came from.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:15)
My favorite part of the article—the pull quote that I like the most—was the context of it was the C-suite talking with the technology, the CTO, about the advancements. And then the pull quote was, "You walk in thinking that you're having a discussion. They walk in having already made the decision looking for your buy-in." I think that ties well to your previous point about you have to enroll people, because if you don't, they think you're off in whatever land—Joel land—doing your thing. They're going to make the decision and come to you versus you being the active participant and the force that's moving it forward saying, "Hey, CFO, this is what's coming. This is what I'm learning. We're in the music space, and this is how the AI specifically is going to impact us." And then you're teaching them, and that's how you don't go extinct.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:18:07)
Yeah, absolutely. No, I love that. That's my favorite quote as well, even if I have to say so myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:14)
Well, someone really smart wrote it.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:18:17)
Yes. Because the—I've experienced this so often now, where the disappointment of walking into your executive team sync or your—if you're a fractional CTO, man, you are—you're no longer contending with the egos of your C-suite. I mean, yes, it's still there, but you are now having them with their Claude-generated artifact. And you throw a little bit of Dunning-Kruger in there and a false sense of confidence and security, man, you are going to be in a world of hurt.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:56)
Yeah. And then also, you've got the—you just reminded me that I was talking with someone off the podcast about this concept of their CEO playing with it. And then the AI was just like, "Oh yeah, I could generate that report for you. Just go ahead and hand me your SSH keys." It's like—and they're like, "Oh, what's an SSH key?" "Oh, it's just the thing I need to—"

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:19:15)
"It's just the thing I need—"

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:16) to get to do the make the report for you. Oh, okay. Well, here's admin executive privilege to our entire organization. Here you go.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:19:24) It's insane. So I actually had a conversation with a CTO who, at the turn of the, like right when Opus came out, their CEO, this was at Thanksgiving last year, their CEO did what you're just saying now. He basically messaged the CTO on Christmas Day saying, "Hey, I need SSH keys to our production environment because I'm trying to deploy something." And of course, the CTO was like, "What the heck? What are you doing?" But long story short, they were all fired about six weeks later because the CEO was like, "I don't need a dev team anymore." And I'm talking about a multimillion dollar startup. I tell you what, I was shocked when I heard that. I was thinking, wow, this is serious. The hack is real.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:18) Well, yeah, we've done some interviews with some people here in Nashville that have 30-person engineering teams, and they no longer write code. So the rule is humans can no longer write code. You just work with the AI, and they didn't fire a bunch of people or anything. But that was the big change. Your person took it even farther. They're just like, "See you. I'll just have customer meetings." And whenever I come out of a customer meeting, I'll just talk to the AI. And you know what? There is a certain scale where that can work, and then there's, it can work. Just because it works for a minute doesn't mean it's going to work for a month or a quarter, you know? And you can get yourself into a situation where it's really chaotic.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:21:03) That is very true. I'm actually very curious, Joel, since you've done so many interviews, like what are you seeing? Are CTOs in trouble, or are they just navigating this like any other old revolution? Is this different this time? Like, what are you seeing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:27) Well, I'll start with, I am not surprised at all. So there's no surprise. And when I hear people, there are different types of people at different stages. And I just kind of classify them all. So there's the person who's surprised by this, and they clearly don't study history. My experience, just out of what happened naturally, was that I did a lot of automating of jobs or teams. And so I saw this pattern. I said, oh, every time that there's this automation of this team or this role, the people who are curious about how it works are the ones that end up maintaining it. So if you have an accounting team of 30 and you're going to reduce it to maybe two, the two people that are going to maintain the new system that does the work of what 30 could do were the two people who, when you walked in and you said we're implementing this, were like, "Oh, this is awesome. How does this work? Show me how this works. Let's play with that button. I want to help be a part of the transition." That will never go out of style. That will never go extinct. If you're curious and you want to do hard work, where the people get in trouble is when they don't care. They're not advancing. They're just coasting. That's where they get in trouble. And then things become surprises. I was coasting because of whatever reason, and now this is a surprise. Or, you know how many people, at the, ever look at the job satisfaction reports? Most people hate their job. Like, it's a huge percentage. And so I'm always like, my whole theory in dealing with all of this that you asked, so I'll wrap it up here. But if you are curious and you care and you want to dig and learn and you want to push things forward, doesn't matter what the title is, you will always have income because you are the rare thing. You have to become, the safest thing to do is become the rare thing, and the rare thing is an engaged individual who wants to push the things forward.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:23:19) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:20) Individual who wants to push the things forward.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:23:23) And I think that's almost exactly what I wrote in "The Extinction Event," is be curious about how the inner workings are because very few people are willing to go there. Yeah. No. I think you're right. I love that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:36) What was the, like, what happened? Because I want to kind of lead you into this. What happened where you were like, I need to write this article. You're like, this is finally, I've seen this pattern enough to know that this is a thing, and I need to write it.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:23:54) Are we talking specifically about "The CTO's Extinction Event"?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:57) Yeah. Mhmm.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:23:58) Yeah. You know, a couple things. One, I obviously, I'm in the CTO space, so I get asked by a lot of people to find them CTOs, and a lot of CTOs come to me who want to find new positions. And one of the things I was running up against was the job title. And I actually started seeing people say, "Well, no. We don't want this." Companies or people with companies would say, "Well, we don't want a CTO. We want an AI person." And I thought to myself, wow. Okay. We have our work. If the perception out there is that the CTO, it's almost like the CIO-CTO relation. Like, the CTO role was the new kid on the block for CIOs. CIOs are like, "Hey, man. We've been building systems for decades." Along comes the CTO role, which is now building SaaS products and revenue-generating products. Now I'm like, well, we now have an AI leader, a Chief AI Officer, or you see VP of AI or you see AI Director. And that is ludicrous. So I don't think, I mean, nothing against if you want to be a Chief AI Officer, you better be training your models, doing research, and I'm sure this is what's happening is, you are in the thing of neural networks. You are thinking about world models. You are redefining how your company trains data. That to me is what an AI person is. But it's not the person who's figuring out how to optimize process or generate revenue with AI. To me, that's just the CTO. AI is just the new process. It's, I was joking with someone yesterday, is we've all become COBOL programmers. Like, we're all, like you said, we're not generating the code, but we're still prompting in a way that generates scalable, hopefully, architectures. And so when people were starting to come to me about the title, I thought to myself, wow, if CTOs don't redefine themselves or reinvent themselves, the title is actually going to go extinct. And so my call, and then the reason I wrote the article was to go find what were CTOs who were actually vibing with AI in a way that just felt like a natural progression to where a CTO is still a CTO, but they're just using AI. So that was really important to me. And then, of course, the second thing I mentioned was just the way I noticed that the talk in the corridors in a lot of our colloquium events or a lot of times we gather together in our forums, a large percentage of the conversation was patting each other on the back because they optimized token usage. And I was just like, nah. Uh-uh. Uh-uh. We, we can't be, this can't be what the, this can't be how the C-suite sees the CTO. The CTO needs to be inventive, ahead of the curve, and knowledgeable beyond what an LLM can explain to the VP of Sales. And token optimization can be done with three prompts and a click. And so what I was trying to get at was I wanted, like you said, I wanted to fuel that curiosity to how is all of this working? What does this mean for us three years from now? What does it mean for my best engineers? What does it mean for my worst engineers? How am I, you know, I like to say to people, my role right now as CTO is to make my engineering team unstoppable. So 10x engineer, blah, blah, blah. I don't care about that. I need to take the most pessimistic engineer who is brilliant and make them unstoppable. I need to take the most junior engineer, make them unstoppable. And you can't make someone unstoppable if you don't understand how LLMs work. I'm hopping on LLMs right now, but because that's the thing. You can't be the person who's simply saying, "Well, I'm going to make sure everyone has a Claude API key, or I'm going to manage the token spend in these different ways. And I'm going to report back to my board or back to my C-suite, you know, how our velocity has increased." I would say those to me are, if we want to see the CTO role just become completely irrelevant, then we gotta stay, we gotta be good at that stuff. And that's why I kind of took a bit of a reverse approach on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:46) Yeah. Well, this connects a lot. If we take AI out of it, this connects a lot back to the principles that you and I have discussed for the past seven years that we've known each other or so, which is you have to understand the business, the value you bring the customer, make sure that you're doing that in the most innovative way possible, essentially run experiments where you, quote, unquote, put yourself out of business. Like what technology would do that, or what innovation could we have that would allow a startup to do what we can do, but for half the cost, you know. And if you're thinking like that, which is business thoughts, which is what I've always seen the CTO struggle with, if I were to just put an average out from everyone I know, it's always like technology first, then they pick up business skills and some of them pick up only enough business skills to manage a job. Some of them pick up enough business skills to build an empire, and then there's a gradient where they stop along that entire path. So just don't stop picking up the skills of, like, how the business works and what the business needs and making the customer happy. You'll be fine.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:30:54) Yes. And I will say that there is an element of, this is a little personal for me because I do think that my mantra, if you were to go read all my Substack articles, you will see that I am promoting stay out of the weeds. You need to be the person who can talk to people, business this, executive presence that. And with "The Extinction Event" article, I do go a little bit the other way where I'm like, listen. I think that the era of schmoozing and enrolling and influence, and I'm using enrolling now in the contrary position, I think those days are limited because I think the time has come for the CTO to make that T very bold and really, really, really understand the technology. And even if it's just for this phase shift, I mean, things might oscillate back to something else. But for now, certainly, I personally find that if I don't understand exactly how LLMs work, then I am subscribed to a level of hype that will lead to an outcome for the business that is simply incorrect. A good example is you can't have an LLM do number crunching for you. Like, you can't just say, "Well, the LLM will do predictions," or, "I guess, just give it all our data. Let's build the embeddings, you know, and then let's just match words, and then let's build a whole business plan because if we just give it data from our financials, our production rates, our invoicing, let's just throw it all into the LLM, and then let's just magically add value for the customer." Well, the LLM is going to say something. I mean, that's what a generative thing is. It's going to make it up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:09) Yeah.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:33:13) Now do you know if it's correct? Well, no. Because sometimes the mistakes are so nuanced, or the numbers are off by fractions, or it just makes up, it says something with such confidence that it hacks your brain. So if you don't understand how to then, and we've talked in the industry about evals or about using different types of models to do some predictive analytics or mathematical equations or, you know, like, you can't just say, "Oh, we're going to subscribe to a Frontier model. Claude's going to answer all our questions for us." And I'm oversimplifying a little bit. "And let's just retool our business so that rating engines or predictive models or dashboards or whatever we do for our user this or user that, let's just have the Frontier model solve that." Well, that all sounds amazing at the business level that your engineering team is going to look at you and either not understand what you're saying because it's new to them as well, or they're going to know what LLMs do, and you're going to lose all credibility because they're going to realize you're just a suit and you don't understand the technology. So my personal conviction has been, if in the past I have been all about be less in the tech, I am now saying you gotta be more in the tech.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:54) Yes. But that's the hard part. And I think you're completely accurate because it's the art. You know what? You're an entrepreneur, so you'll get this. It's like knowing the skill of being the entrepreneur is being able to know when to go down in the weeds and when to come up to a high level. Like how you oscillate, like how the rhythm at which you're going down into the weeds, creating a system or business process, and then coming up and looking at it as a whole, that is such a hard thing to do. You're forced to learn it as an entrepreneur. You're not forced to do it as just a standard CTO. However, we're going to see it become a very good survival skill because look, at the end, I have written more applications in the past seven months than I have written in the past seven years. I mean, I'm building utilities. I'll have an idea for a utility application that I need, like a single function thing. And the time it takes me to research four different options and figure out which one I could probably get to do exactly what I want to do is more time than it takes me to prompt and customize an application right on my iPhone. And I ran that experiment. And now most of the time, I just build my own stuff. Because you really only, you realize you need stuff usually one feature at a time, right?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:36:20) You're like...

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:21) Usually it's like if it just did this one thing, and you can just make that little application, let it do that one thing and move on.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:36:29) Yeah. I mean, I'm just reflecting on how it's never been easier to build apps, and it's never been more irrelevant. Like, I mean, I can build an app now in no time, and no one cares because they can build the app with their tweaks. I'm really interested in what's going to happen. It's going to be very interesting to see.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:58) Well, no one cares in our world of the people who can do it. But the people who can't do it, the server at Chili's, they still go to that app store and need what they, you know?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:37:08) No. You're right. You're right. And I have to keep reminding myself that we are in the tip of the spear situation. But it's, it is amazing. It's, I mean, I, like you, I've also built so many things. I've learned so many things. It's unreal to know what we know just by virtue of being in this for so long and then have an engineering team that will just do anything for you. That is insane.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:40) It's like, if you and I could go back in time, we'd be so rich. We'd build every startup in, like, a weekend and just be done with it. And now it's really like, alright. Well, it's going to be interesting to see how the market changes or when the technology gets good enough at the end where I can just ask, I am a Chili's server, and I can just ask the screen for something, and it just does the something I ask it for. That honestly has been the most demotivating thing for me. Like, I'm excited as a consumer, but as a builder, I'm like, well, why? Sometimes I think about building something. I'm just like, why? Yeah. People in a year, people are just going to be able to ask the phone to do it, and it'll just do it without needing an app or anything.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:38:24) Yeah. It's like that Star Trek. I've always, since a young child, I've loved the "Computer." Like, "Hey, computer. How far is it to the star, and how do we get..." You know, like, just this thing where you can speak to something in space, and it will answer your question.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:38:42) I mean, I think the problem we have is not gonna end up being the means. It's gonna be the data governance and integration of data. Like, you know, it's gonna be a very strange problem to solve.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:05) We've been watching. We've been doing some interviews the past month on people who are solving just that. And it is a big, big area. But I wanted to talk with you about 7CTOs for a minute, get some love for what you do. I think your business is in the perfect position because people that don't know, they've got these groups of CTOs that are both in person and online.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:29) They meet. And I think that once you have what I call the magic mirror, show me anything, do anything I need done all with just voice prompts and responses. It'll generate interfaces on the fly to show me what I need to see. And that's just it. Once we have that and we can't trust anything that we are consuming from it, which we're very close to that already, we as far as social content news and things like that, I think it's gonna force us as humans to do more things in person and be together. What do you think?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:40:00) I agree. I'm noticing, isn't it ironic how we came out of COVID where everyone suddenly attached a very high cost to meeting in person? Suddenly, it became hard to drive across LA to go to a meetup because that would be thirty-five minutes of your life. And we couldn't get people to 7CTOs events. I mean, virtual was a lifesaver for us. Now we host our colloquiums and the tickets sell out in the first week. Like, you know, we'll be months away from the colloquium. And the same with our conference coming up. People's desire and understanding that the human connection is, we humans have to stand together and learn from each other in a whole different way.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:40:55) We're seeing that for 7CTOs, absolutely. So much so that we're launching a new style of conversation called AICTO that is gonna be a very curated small groups of people around the country, helping each other specifically with AI transformation, data governance. And we're gonna have the best, the top companies in the room or the smallest companies in the room because everyone is facing the same challenges. And so the desire to see each other is, I would say, in the thirteen years we've been doing this, is probably at an all time high. I'm loving it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:40) And when's that? Is that the 0111 comp?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:41:44) No. 0111 happens in November for a large audience, so most people would be welcome to that. AICTO, my first one is, guess where?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:58) I don't know. Salt Lake City.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:41:59) Salt Lake. Oh, yeah. Where you have a bunch of friends. Yep. You've been busy making fun of Salt Lake.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:06) If you go to aicto.co, it's right now very curated and invite only, but I'll tell your audience. They can get on the wait list at aicto.co/wl. What's so funny?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:42:27) The domain you picked?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:27) The Arab Information and Communication Technology Organization, AICTO, is a government organization under the League of the Arab States that promotes and develops ICT and digital transformation across the Arab region. Oh, wow. That is hilarious. So good luck with the Google search.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:49) Aicto.org is the error. Yeah. No. No. Wow. That is hilarious. I just Googled it. But aicto.co looks beautiful. I love that animation in the background. That's all.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:43:03) Aic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:05) It's better than the arrow .co stuff.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:43:08) So for your people, go to aicto.co/wl for wait list.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:15) Okay.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:43:16) And it'll give a little more information about it. We have our first event coming up end of September. There's a couple seats left, but I'm not charging for it. It's not a money making thing. I really need to get people to talk to each other. So for the first couple meetings, the idea is that we have a fly in one day together, fly out kind of conversation. And, man, it's been crazy. Like, there's some pretty incredible people coming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:50) I don't think there's a way to link. You have to know that it's forward slash WL. So you have to know. This is behind the scenes.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:43:57) If you're in Salt Lake, you gotta be there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:58) Well, I don't have anyone from Salt Lake coming yet because I don't have any friends in Salt Lake.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:44:06) I'll tell you what. Your banner should be like, you can come to the event, but you are not allowed to make friends. You're just gonna extract information, go back to your team. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:17) But I have Alex, the CTO, Intuit is coming.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:44:22) Oh, I know Alex.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:23) Yeah. You know Alex. Amazon Fresh, Webflow. I mean, I've got a couple big names coming, and we're just gonna spend a day together. And I mean, the stuff I'm hearing and learning about is just so crazy that I just wanna get people talking. Like, hey, just get in a room. I'll feed you some ramen. Let's go.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:44:48) That's why you're not making friends.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:50) You're right.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:44:51) You gotta up the food quality. Hey. What's the EXE thing? I don't know about this. I saw you were doing it. Is that a special version of 7CTOs? What is that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:00) EXE is a coaching, is my coaching. So I created EXE with Britney because while 7CTOs is amazing for CTOs, I often get asked to coach the whole C-suite. And so we created EXE for executive. And in the context of the C-suite, I will do some coaching engagements with Coach EXE.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:45:30) Wait. So you're still working with Britney?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:32) I am. She's great. Not your Britney.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:45:36) Oh, not the Britney that ran the group that we had.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:39) No. No. No. How is she?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:45:41) Well, I don't know. I haven't talked to her.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:42) Yeah. No. She was doing well. Okay.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:45:46) You have all the, everyone should have a Britney.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:48) We should all have a Britney. That's like I'm gonna name my AI Britney. Hey, Britney. My wife won't like that.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:45:54) Britney is actually the head of coaching at 7CTOs, recently promoted to the CEO of 7CTOs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:02) Oh, nice. Nice.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:46:05) Yeah. So I'm out there forging a path for the AICTO meetings. At 7CTOs, we have our 0111 annual membership member conference, and we have our colloquiums. The colloquium format has actually been very popular. We go into many cities, and we will have the gathering of about 30 or so CTOs. Again, a lot of them fly in for them, but we have a good showing up of locals. And then we have three provocations where people will present provocative ideas in the world of technology, and then we will have some healthy discourse about it. And it's been very good. It's been very good. They've actually gone from a one day event to two days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:58) Where do they find them? Where can people go look them up?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:47:00) I mean, mostly, it's 7ctos.com.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:04) Good. Because I wasn't gonna spell colloquium. I was like, I'm not gonna get that one. That's outside of my wheelhouse.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:47:13) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:15) I need some whisper flow. Colloquium. Colloquium. There we go. 7CTOs doing well? I'll look at that. Any Salt Lake barbecue?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:47:31) You know, yes. Since the Salt Lake barbecue, you know, I think that this is an interesting conundrum. We are doing well with those who know us. I think that there's a trend and I don't blame anyone for this. But, you know, you can now you can obviously create your CTO skill. You can ingest an ungodly amount of information, and you can come up with your job ladder or your salary negotiation or your conflict management. So unfortunately, we're having to reinvent ourselves a little bit because when people used to Google us, I think where people used to Google CTO network or community, they're now Googling, they're not even Googling. They just go to a ChatGPT or a Perplexity or a or whatever, Claude, and just start loading up their context, and in some cases, brilliant context that just no human can have. And start getting coached by their skills and their RAG systems. So that's an interesting conundrum because our peer groups, of course, rely heavily on maintaining the context and the objectivity and the contrarian views of people around the table that we put together. And that's not always obvious to people who need help as CTOs. They tend to now not Google networks. They go straight to the AI. So that's an interesting challenge we're facing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:24) Yeah. And there's times when that's okay. That's enough. And then there's times where it's not enough. And so I think you'll find that you'll always find the right niche because you're always paying attention. It's like the people who, everyone tells me all the horse people went out of business when cars came around. I go, there are still people that make millions and millions of dollars a year from horses. They figured it out. They figured out how to stay relevant. They found their little area of the market, and that's what they did.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:49:51) What are you doing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:54) What am I? I'm doing this. I'm talking to people and then comedy. I'm doing a lot of comedy.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:50:00) Oh, yes. Is that going well?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:02) Dude, it is easily the greatest thing I have ever done, minus my kids. Like, it is growing so fast at such a ridiculous rate that I'm just blown away.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:50:18) Wow. That's incredible. I was just talking to someone yesterday about, you know, I do my levels assessments, levels zero through 10 for the complexity of your organization. And this guy sent me a text saying, what do you call levels minus one through minus five? And then I said to him, well, you should really go into comedy, and then I promptly went to look if ctocomedy.com was registered because, but I didn't, actually. But I was just thinking how funny that was.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:53) That's great, man. Comedy. Yeah. It's, look, I really enjoy it. It's easy for me to do, and I did 120 shows in the past year, and I've got another 60 coming up for the rest of this year. So...

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:51:12) That is insane. Actually, now I remember right when we moved to Salt Lake, I think you did a show up north, north Salt Lake or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:23) Yeah. Somewhere around there.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:51:25) Please let me know when you come out again, man. Come on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:27) Well, they've been asking me to come out to, Salt Lake has one of the biggest scenes for clean comedy in the country, and it's Angel Studios. You know, Angel Studios? They're based out there. You got Wise Guys Comedy Club too. And but that's where they film all the specials. And so we were talking about me filming a special with them. And then I would tell you to come to that one. That would be cool. But, yeah, man. It's like four nights a week or three nights a week depending on the week. Anywhere from 500 to 2,000 people in the room and just making people laugh.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:52:04) Amazing, dude. That is, I've always admired people who can write jokes. Yeah. Cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:16) We've made a podcast, Etienne.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:52:18) Thanks for having me, brother. It's always very therapeutic for me to see you and talk to you. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:24) Oh, 7ctos.com. Go contact Etienne. If you need coaching, if you're sad, you need a peer group, or other, what are other reasons? People get peer groups because they're sad.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:52:35) If you're happy and you need a peer group.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:37) Yes. But no friend.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:52:40) But just don't, no friends.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:42) No friends. Oh, Etienne, this is great. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please, 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.