Staying Grounded As a Leader with Jack Tam, SVP and CTO at Intuit Mailchimp

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Jack Tam, senior vice president and CTO at Intuit Mailchimp, about staying grounded and sharp twenty years into your career. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:18) So twenty years at Intuit. Is that correct?

(Jack Tam at 00:00:22) Twenty-one. Twenty-one as of August. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) Why stay?

(Jack Tam at 00:00:27) Oh, it seems like yesterday. It's been a great company. You know, I'm not one who's always looking for what's the next company as much as continue to grow and continue to learn. And it's a company that's just continued to allow me to do that, whether it's in business, technology. It's a great company that continues to have ambitions. So it's not one of those stodgy big companies that, hey, we're making a bunch of money, we all need to grow. And so it's allowed me that opportunity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:03) Yeah. And the people I've met from that company have been really sharp people. Yeah. So twenty years, you've seen the rise of SaaS. You saw the browser wars, essentially. Rise of SaaS. You've seen a lot of things. We're all experiencing AI right now. Is AI fundamentally different, or is it basically the same as the other previous massive transitions?

(Jack Tam at 00:01:27) Yeah. That's a great question. I mean, I'm sure you know, AI has actually been around for a while. I think GenAI has sort of opened up a lot more eyes of what is possible and certainly the acceleration with the investment. I do think it's the same, but it's also significantly different. In particular, the pace of innovation and the pace of growth combined with the pace of investment has allowed just significant transformation. And so from that perspective, I think it is a very different type of change, something that as technologists, we're used to, but it is significant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:15) Do you think programming's still gonna be relevant for our kids? Well, my kids, their oldest one's seven. So—

(Jack Tam at 00:02:23) I think a lot of people have a lot of debates. I personally think software has relevance, will still have relevance. You know, I've worked at Intuit for twenty-one years. My career is probably thirty-plus years now, and I've seen this continuing up-leveling of technology and continuing what you might call commoditization of aspects of technology. And I think the important lessons of just good software engineering, technical fundamentals will remain key. I think the types of software you build will continue to be up-leveled, but I think you still have that ability to figure out how to bring software to life. I mean, just as an example, my daughter's interested in mechanical engineering and she's also interested in software. I can imagine a world with just the pace of technology, the possibilities of just, for example, with robotics, autonomous vehicles, combining hardware and software, I think, has huge potential, which has been very challenging to date, at least to do something significant. I think those are unlocking new opportunities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:49) Have you tried the Tesla full self-driving?

(Jack Tam at 00:03:52) Not yet. Not yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:54) Oh, I've put about a thousand miles on full self-driving. Yeah. Dude, that thing is so cool.

(Jack Tam at 00:03:59) Very cool. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:00) I highly recommend it.

(Jack Tam at 00:04:02) Yeah. Definitely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:03) Yeah. Oh, man. Alright. So this transition, it's happening. What does it look like inside of Intuit? How are you—massive company, right? How do you set up teams that play with things? Do you just have people that are close to you that are feeding you information? Like, how do you stay—it's a full-time job for me, and I can't stay up to date with it. So how are you staying up to date with it?

(Jack Tam at 00:04:26) Yeah. Great question. Well, at Intuit, as a company, one of the reasons I've stayed for twenty-one years, it's a company that, there's a saying that you repair the roof while the sun is out. And we've actually been investing in AI for five-plus years now, pre-GenAI and so forth. But to your question, it certainly has accelerated a lot. And so some of the things we're doing right now: number one, we're getting all the leaders in the company trained and more knowledgeable. Our technology leadership team have been getting trained by our expert AI leader in the company. Just what can it do? What is it good at? Where is it not good at? What are the regulations and compliance that we need to be thinking about? Second, I think most companies, the majority of companies, the way they worked with AI has been, here's the data science organization, here's the teams that are gonna build models, and then you've got your software engineers. We are democratizing that so that engineers across the company, software engineers who may not have a traditional AI background—but in order to do that, we also need to train, educate, and help them understand the specifics. So that is something we're encouraging. And then to put that into practice, we have been specific about specific projects that we wanna target, where we have some specific applications where not only did you learn it, but now you're applying it. And so those are just some of the ways that we're doing this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:18) Can you give me more information on that? Like, share as much as you are comfortable with sharing. But is this an outside consultancy you're having come in and train? Is this an internal team that's learning and then training? How are you actually deploying this?

(Jack Tam at 00:06:32) Yeah. I would say it's not an external consultant. I would say there's been two primary methods. We have a very smart existing AI ML organization. And so they have been partnering with more of the traditional software engineering organizations. And in that partnership, we would build data science models built into products. These AI experts are training sort of key parts of the organization. So we create courses for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:20) Really?

(Jack Tam at 00:07:20) In addition, we also take external courses. So people would get training, the traditional conferences and so forth. We're still in the early stages on the custom AI internal courses that we're building. And then specific applications are, again, I would say there's several levels, maybe graduations of levels. Specifically with GenAI, that's much more accessible to the general population where you don't need data science models. You do need to be great at prompt engineering. You need to be able to understand what the constraints are. That's an area where we see a lot of opportunity to democratize. There are gonna be some projects that we have that are much more math heavy, maybe data science model heavy. And in that model, it'll be much more of a partnership with AI experts that know how to build those types of models. But we expect this will be a continued evolution and as far as getting the larger organization up to speed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:28) Right. So your internal people are learning and teaching, then your people are also going to conferences and just existing out in the ecosystem and coming back and helping inform your internal team and take the best stuff. And then you make internal courses, so you have some sort of system for that. Very cool. That is very, very cool.

(Jack Tam at 00:08:47) Yeah. It's exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:49) You know, I've done very informal polls where I just messaged people that are managing anywhere from 10 to 50,000 engineers that I've known or had on the podcast. I would say there's like 30% integration into like a Copilot or an LLM that's helping across all their engineering. So we are super early days. Like, a lot of these, if you only have 30% of your team using these tools—

(Jack Tam at 00:09:19) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:20) I mean, we've got a long way to go.

(Jack Tam at 00:09:22) Totally. You know, I think on that point, we're also doing, in addition to just building products for customers and trying to leverage the technology, I mean, there's a lot of learning. And some of that learning also involves just using tools that are already out there like a Copilot. How can you help it generate content, generate code? There's a lot of learning going on right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:46) Yeah. And as they become more comfortable with the idea of how to keep it like local, like, how do I get GPT running locally on a machine that only I can see and it can't talk out to the world? Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of privacy things, but it just takes time. The technology comes out and then people will build tools to make it so you can be private. But then you have to have like the adoption delay, which is like, I know a guy who used it at this big company and he kept it private this way, and you have to see that happen in the marketplace.

(Jack Tam at 00:10:18) Before people really move over. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of the evolution's gonna be the quality. So the, I'm sure you've heard a lot about hallucination and just questions around, do I trust the quality? And I think there's a lot of still early development as far as traditional quality tools that you might have for code. How do you apply that to a GenAI world? I think that'll also help with more trust and quality in terms of output. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:53) Have you seen any of these, like, have you seen Replit or any of these people making videos on X? They call them one-shot apps. Have you seen these?

(Jack Tam at 00:11:00) Not yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:01) Okay. So this is like a new term that the kids these days are using, but they call them one-shot apps. So they'll write a prompt, and the goal of the prompt is to make the entire application in one prompt.

(Jack Tam at 00:11:14) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:15) One shot. And, man, are they getting good. There's like an evolution of them over the past two years. This guy did one that was, I think, the most popular one I saw, and he like one-shot prompted a Spotify clone.

(Jack Tam at 00:11:28) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:29) I was like, what? It was unbelievable, man.

(Jack Tam at 00:11:34) That's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:34) It's getting crazy. It's getting crazy. And I think over the next three to five years, it's gonna get even more wild. But—

(Jack Tam at 00:11:48) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:48) I don't think software engineering is going away because you have to be able to interact and use these tools and maintain services and build stuff and, you know—

(Jack Tam at 00:11:48) I think so. I agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:51) So staying true to yourself as a leader. I wanna talk a little bit about that. Authentic leadership looks different to everybody. What does that mean to you?

(Jack Tam at 00:12:01) Yeah. I think in my journey as a leader, as a manager, I think first is just figuring out what is your leadership style? Like, what is important to you? And I learned a lot of that actually as a leader at Intuit over the twenty-plus years. And so getting to those core attributes and then be able to demonstrate it. For example, for me, I've learned that integrity is very important. Transparency is important. Delivering outcomes is very important in terms of customer benefits and business benefits. Excellence in your craft. And so I would say as you learn what are those most important things for you, then it's how you display it, maybe in terms of how you engage with people, how you engage with your organization, things like that. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:11) Tell me a little bit more about integrity. Like, how does that actually play out?

(Jack Tam at 00:13:16) Yeah. Yeah. Great question. Because integrity can mean a lot of different things. I would say beyond sort of maybe the traditional definition of integrity, for me, for example, as a technology leader, being great at your craft even when no one's either inspecting, asking, maybe don't even know what to expect from an engineering organization, and especially in a large organization like Intuit. And so what does it mean to be great as an engineering leader, great as an engineering organization? For example, it means having clear engineering operational metrics, whether it's availability, quality. Holding yourself and your organization accountable to the architectures and the designs that you build. We see a lot of times that there's friction between product and engineering. Why does something take so long to build? Why does it feel like we're always rebuilding the same things over and over again? Didn't you just build this new thing, and how come it can't do X, Y, and Z? And so that's where we also need to hold ourselves accountable as a technology organization on the investments. And are we making the right decisions with business acumen? And so to me, it's about when no one's looking, when no one's inspecting, when no one's checking up, we hold ourselves to a high bar when it comes to engineering and operational excellence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:53) That's important. I mean, you get rewarded for what you do in private and public. Right?

(Jack Tam at 00:14:59) Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:01) Have you had any really strong influential mentors or people, even if it wasn't an official mentor, just people that you've learned from over the years? Can you share about any of those?

(Jack Tam at 00:15:12) Yeah. I would say I have two types of informal mentors. One is just external, a lot through reading, biography, observation. Internally, I would say, informally, I think one person that I would say is a prior CTO at Intuit, his name was, is Tayloe Stansbury. And, you know, what I observed with him was just a lot of integrity, courage, which, by the way, is another word that's often overused for leadership, but I saw it demonstrated as a leader in a very high-profile situation. Another one external just through observation is Warren Buffett, actually, non-technology person. And he's someone that I've really admired from afar as far as having a vision of what he believes is right, sort of back to that integrity thing. Yeah. And just doing what he believes even when everyone else is like doing it a different way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:27) Right? Yeah. Yeah. He speaks very matter-of-factly as well.

(Jack Tam at 00:16:32) Exactly. Exactly. He's a smart guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:32) He's a smart guy. Interesting. You seem like a pretty chill person, like pretty calm, good energy guy, very grounded. Is this something you learned? Have you always been like this, or did you have to learn how to do this? Tell me about it.

(Jack Tam at 00:16:53) Yeah. That's a great question. I would say it's a little bit of both. I think my sort of general character and energy is to observe, listen, but it's also something that I've had to grow and continue to build on. On the inside, though, there's a lot of turmoil and challenge. But, you know, I've learned that as a leader, it's important to maintain a sense of calm, but not fake calm, especially in the midst of fire and technology is changing. Our jobs are gonna go away. We got all these business pressures, technology pressures. It's important to stay grounded, focused, be urgent yet not, you know, head cut off type of way. So it's certainly something that I had innately, but it's also something I've had to cultivate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:12) What are some practices, like faith, family, like, how do you actually do it? Because we all experience the stress. We all get to the point where we wanna get knocked off center, and then we have to make that choice.

(Jack Tam at 00:18:23) Yeah. Yeah. I would say bigger picture. And bigger picture comes through faith. It comes through family, the things that are going on in the world. There's so many things that are bigger than my little microcosm, and so putting things in perspective, number one. Number two, I'd say just some practical things I've had to learn is don't respond to that email. You know, sometimes you get—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:56) That happens to me once every two or three months, man. I just like write it up in Evernote a hundred times, and I just walk away.

(Jack Tam at 00:19:04) That's a great practice. You gotta catch yourself. And now with texting and tweets, you just gotta catch yourself. And so it's just something I've learned to take a breath, take a deep breath. Do I really wanna send this?

(Jack Tam at 00:19:20) Do I really want to say this? And so there's a lot of repetition where I sort of do postmortems when you do stuff like that and really decide, hey, could I have done something differently?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:32) It only takes a couple of times of really screwing it up for you to be like, I need a better system.

(Jack Tam at 00:19:37) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:38) Yeah. So, you know, sometimes for me when I get overwhelmed, one of my favorite things, because you talked about putting it into perspective, is I'll go—we have a farm—I'll go lay out in the grass, like, in the field, and I'll just look up at the sky, and I'll be like, man, we're spinning around at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, whipping around this giant fireball of the sun, and I'm just this little creature on this planet. And that really helps me.

(Jack Tam at 00:20:03) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:03) I don't know why it does, but I do it probably every six months.

(Jack Tam at 00:20:07) Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Puts things in perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:11) Right?

(Jack Tam at 00:20:11) Yeah. I think one other thing—I mean, you kind of touched on this—like, as people, as leaders, as individuals, you just got to take some time to be by yourself too and just kind of think through things and just give yourself personal time to just think through, like, what matters, what doesn't matter. So very important too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:38) For anyone that's listening that may be lost or they're trying to rediscover what they're passionate about or they're overwhelmed, what advice do you have for them? How do they do that?

(Jack Tam at 00:20:47) Yeah. Well, I was fortunate to get into technology to start with. It was not something—I was not one of those kids who tinkered around rocket ships and cars and stuff like that. And I just fell into it. And, you know, once I fell into it, I would say, very early on, it was a lot about just continuing to have a growth mindset, how to learn everything that you can learn.

(Jack Tam at 00:21:17) I'm old enough when there was—it was sort of pre-internet, but I remember when it first came out. I mean, it just blew my mind. And I went to the bookstore every single day to read about everything I could do with internet. I think as you get older and now with things like YouTube, you get to see a lot of different industries. And so I explore that. For example, I mentioned Warren Buffett. I'm really interested in business, and I want to learn a lot more about business. And so you can do that by YouTube. You can do that by watching great podcasts like this and really just getting a sense of what that means and does that tickle your passion. And then how do you then develop that maybe in the areas that you're working with? And, again, one reason why I thought Intuit has been great, it hasn't pigeonholed me to just be a software engineer or just a technologist. It's given me room to become better at business thinking, better at finance, better at marketing. And so those are ways you can begin to test, hey, maybe I am kind of interested in this. How do I learn about it, and how do I grow in it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:31) All right. So you run Mailchimp Intuit. Is that correct?

(Jack Tam at 00:22:35) Technology. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:36) You run tech. That's a huge umbrella. Like, what does that actually mean? Are you writing code on the platform? I like that little monkey, though. I like that little monkey. Yeah. That's my favorite.

(Jack Tam at 00:22:50) Yeah. So Mailchimp is a—it's about a 20-plus-year-old company that we acquired at Intuit about three years ago. And so I joined about two years ago leading all of technology. What that essentially means is essentially anything related to technology. I don't write code today, but it's about building a product, a great product that customers love to help them grow their businesses. And so what are all the ways we can do that? Historically, for Mailchimp, it's been primarily email. We just enabled SMS about a year ago. We're doing much more with social integrations. So that's one aspect. Another aspect is the strategy, the vision is to bring it together as a part of the larger Intuit business platform. And then finally, with all the AI going on, it's a natural place for marketing, how to help businesses grow, to leverage AI. So those are the primary places.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:54) Yeah. Most of the customers are, like, brick and mortar shops or no?

(Jack Tam at 00:23:58) It's—but what's interesting, it's all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:02) It's everything.

(Jack Tam at 00:24:03) Yeah. We've got international customers. We've got 50% international, all types of industries, e-commerce, professional services.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:15) Does that little monkey have a name? Freddie. I knew it.

(Jack Tam at 00:24:21) I don't actually know what the history is, how the name came about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:27) But that's his name. His name is Freddie. Oh, man. That's cool. I really like good design, and I've been around since Mailchimp's been around. And when I saw Mailchimp come out, I don't know if Freddie was there on day one. But when I saw him coming out, he has a little mailbag and I was like, this is cool. And there's been so many little versions, variations of them since.

(Jack Tam at 00:24:47) Yeah. Yeah. No. Mailchimp has a great culture, design. If you get a chance, come to Atlanta. Got a big Freddie standing in the lobby.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:00) Is that where you—wait. You're not in Atlanta, though.

(Jack Tam at 00:25:02) I'm not based in Atlanta, so I travel out there. But the Mailchimp headquarters is in Atlanta.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:08) I'm in Nashville, so I'm, like, five hours away. There may be next time I'm going on to Florida, can I—is it just in the public area? I might go get a selfie with it. I might go get a selfie with the Mailchimp.

(Jack Tam at 00:25:20) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:21) Oh, that's so cool. What did you do before you were responsible for Mailchimp? You guys only acquired them three years ago. What was your responsibility then?

(Jack Tam at 00:25:28) Yeah. So in the 21 years, I've led platform teams at Intuit. I ran TurboTax for a couple of years, and then I ran go-to-market platforms for Intuit right before this role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:47) What's go-to-market platforms? What is that?

(Jack Tam at 00:25:51) So all the things that to help Intuit market, sell, commercialize experiments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:58) Quite literally the go-to-market platforms, you ran those.

(Jack Tam at 00:26:01) Exactly. Got it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:02) Got it. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. And so what's some advice that you don't want to share? Like, do you have any ones that you're like, I don't know. This is a real hard situation. Something that's really raw and real for people that are actually managers right now of these engineering teams. Like, what are they talking about off the shows in private after a beer?

(Jack Tam at 00:26:25) What do I not want to share? Yeah. That's a good question. You know, I would say as a leader, a lot of times you're going to be put in situations where it's never black and white. Most of the time, it's never black and white. You have to make a call that you believe is the right thing. And I'll say, for example—I mean, just talking about return to office. There's a lot of debate about that. At Intuit, we've taken a position that return to office is important from the perspective of creativity, innovation, especially in a technology. And it's something we expect and require. And we've even organized our work such that—you know, I mentioned Mailchimp is in Atlanta. Our engineering teams are in Atlanta, in New York City, in Mountain View primarily. And not only do we want the engineers in those locations, we want to collocate them with the product leaders and the designers so that they're really working together as one unit. And so I think that's a big topic right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:41) Yeah. Well, hey. Having a strong opinion on it, I think, is a good thing.

(Jack Tam at 00:27:46) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:46) Because when you have a strong opinion on it, you can choose to alter that in the future. Weak and wishy-washy stuff is actually really difficult to deal with. It's like, what is it? You know?

(Jack Tam at 00:27:56) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:57) So the clarity is good. Yeah. I personally, I see both sides of it. I see both sides of it. And, honestly, I think one of the worst things you can do is hybrid. I was like, you'd really go fully remote or fully in person. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The hybrid's tough. But it's up to each—and we—it's also funny because we have these conversations, Jack, as applying to all people. Like, we're all different-sized companies at different stages in the product that, like, there's so many variables. You really just have to get comfortable with figuring out what's right for you right now and then just saying, this is what we're doing right now.

(Jack Tam at 00:28:34) I totally agree. I mean, I think common sense always wins. And I think it's—if you think about pre-COVID, people worked—I mean, there were people who worked in a remote situation, and it wasn't, you know, so different. But I think we've gotten to a place where it's sort of black and white. And I think just common sense with regards to how do you be productive, how do you be creative, how do you do it in such a way that still meets the company expectations, I think, yeah, totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:11) Yeah. Me, I'm natively a remote worker. Even when I had my own company, I was like, I had my office and, like, two or three people in my—but, like, it was the company was mostly remote. And then we did go in person for a couple years, and then COVID kind of crushed that because we couldn't go. And then we expanded and ended up going fully remote again. So I've been on the journey. And it—again, it—there's different points in time where it's right to all be in person and different points in time where you can be remote, and there's pros and cons to both of them.

(Jack Tam at 00:29:48) Totally. Yeah. You know, I mean, even the Linux operating system, I mean, everyone's all over the world, distributed, and remote. No one goes into an office. So you can certainly be highly productive in a remote environment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:03) Here's a question I have for you. I want you to think about your direct reports. We don't have to share any specific names or details or anything. Think about your direct reports. What is one behavior you've recently observed that caused you to say, yeah, I want to invest more in that person. Like, you saw it. You're like, oh, they just did that. I'm going to put more time into that person.

(Jack Tam at 00:30:26) Yeah. I would say a couple of examples. One is, and this also shows how I'm also constantly learning, no matter how long you've been in a role, I have someone on my staff who is not a traditional manager. He was actually an architect, so never really managed people, at least directly. Didn't have people responsibilities, highly technical. And I needed to hire a director of engineering. And this person had a lot of attributes that I just thought very highly positive about. But the big thing was never—wasn't even an engineering manager, let alone now potentially a director of engineering. And really so we had very transparent conversations. I said, here's where I think it's great. Here's where I think there are challenges. What do you think? And we talked through that, and this was probably about a year ago. He's taken on the role. He's blown the roof out of it. First time I've really put someone at that level in that type of position without sort of growing up, if you will, in the engineering manager ranks. And it's someone that, you know, we continue to have very open, honest conversations about. Here's where you continue to—here's what you need to think about with regards to people management and, you know, with people management, there's performance management issues, there's recognition, rewards, all those things that he's historically never had to deal with. And so I spend time coaching him and making sure that he's successful in that while building on the fact that he's very technical, gets into the details, very driven. But he's coachable. Very coachable. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:28) High EQ?

(Jack Tam at 00:32:30) Very high EQ. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:31) Yeah. So if you're an individual contributor, highly technical, but you're coachable with a high EQ, you can essentially do anything as long as you have the desire to do it.

(Jack Tam at 00:32:39) Yeah. Yeah. And he's certainly proven that to be the case.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:42) Nice. Nice. You feel good, though. You made a bet. It worked.

(Jack Tam at 00:32:48) Super, super thrilled with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:50) That'll go on the accomplishments list.

(Jack Tam at 00:32:53) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:55) What else would you like to get out there to the world today? We've got a whole generation of existing CTOs and the next generation of CTOs and VPs of engineering listening in. Anything else you want to get out to them today?

(Jack Tam at 00:33:07) I think this is probably the most exciting times in my 30-year career. I think it can be very scary, but I think innovation, the ability to innovate is so much more democratized. So having a core foundation of what you believe, what your leadership style is, good technical foundations, I think allows anyone to be successful in this type of environment. So I'm highly positive about the future. I don't think AI is going to, you know, destroy humanity. I think we need to figure out how to leverage it. But I think the innovation possibilities are endless now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:57) Well, thank you so much for doing this, Jack. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Jack Tam at 00:34:01) Super thrilled. It was a great talking with you, Joel. Thank you so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:06) 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.