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Colin's breakdown of Bending Spoons: https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-manual

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[00:00:00] Colin Keeley: Hello and welcome back. This is Colin Keeley here,

[00:00:02] Brent Sanders: and I'm Brent Sanders.

[00:00:03] Colin Keeley: We are two guys buying and building wonderful internet companies.

[00:00:08] Brent Sanders: Indeed. And it's it's fall here. As you can see in my background. I don't know if you notice my new, my new location. I'm actually calling you from my garage. This is my wife a, a beautiful

[00:00:18] Colin Keeley: looking garage.

[00:00:19] Brent Sanders: Yeah, my wife's, this is her office now. She decided. So she has an office still in Chicago, but she decided she wanted to be home more but like not in the house. So she has her half the garage and she put a, basically an insulated white box in here. And, you can see you got our nice little Japanese maple in the back.

We got fall, fall vibes in here. So it's pretty cool. There's like a mini split and she's outta town today, so I'm, I'm taking advantage of it.

[00:00:45] Colin Keeley: I also am working from a former garage. That was like the big project is turning this into a proper office slash like bedroom workout room, so yeah. Yeah.

Actually have airflow in here, so it's not a suffocating box, but, and then I painted a wall dark because I'm pale and I pop off a dark wall. Is the idea.

[00:01:05] Brent Sanders: Nice. Yeah, it's it's nice, you know it, we're recording this, it's like two 30 in the afternoon. My son gets home on the bus. He takes the, the bus home now.

So it's really fun to be home. Like usually three 15 he gets up, just be home, greet him, give him a hug, and then escape back to the, the garage. I think I was definitely onto something I didn't quite realize how, because if you're in the house. They're gonna bug you. They're gonna, they're, they're like, Hey, let's hang out.

Let's do stuff. It's like, ah, I gotta still work for a couple hours. Or, just having that boundary of, they're, they're, the kids are really lazy. They won't come out to the, it's a detached garage, so they won't come out here.

[00:01:41] Colin Keeley: Is this the future? Are you gonna be working from home? Are you gonna go back to the office?

[00:01:45] Brent Sanders: No, I'm still gonna the office. It's just this one day. I had to take care of a bunch of stuff today, so, but it's, it, it's nice to have that flexibility where it's like, okay, I got a good setup here. And it is, it's like so quiet. So like at our house, it's set in the back and it's the back of everyone else's house, so it's away from all the streets.

It's like the quietest place. So I've been doing some pretty, heavy concentration work. It's been great for that. And yeah, I have my peaceful little zen tree back there, so it works well.

[00:02:13] Colin Keeley: That's a beautiful tree. That's a old Japanese maple then.

[00:02:16] Brent Sanders: Yeah, it's been there for a minute.

[00:02:18] Colin Keeley: Well, cool. I, went back to my roots.

I wrote another operating manual on bending spoons. So like a Italian constellation software. I don't know if you've read it yet, but we could talk through it if it's interesting.

[00:02:29] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Yeah. So what drew you to. Bending spoons, which by the way, when I hear bending spoons, I think of like doing heroin, like that being the old joke.

But you were saying it's more like the matrix reference?

[00:02:40] Colin Keeley: Yeah. That's not the culture I come from, so I'm not super aware of it. And maybe that's what it means. But yeah, they named it after the guy that bends spoons in the matrix, and that's roughly when it was founded. And the matrix is like 20 plus years old.

They're more like, I think they were founded 12 years ago or something like that.

[00:02:56] Brent Sanders: Cool. So first off, how did you find these guys?

[00:03:00] Colin Keeley: They popped up, I mean, they've been doing this for like 12 years, but super under the radar, buying kinda like boring apps. But they popped up more recently 'cause they bought Hopin, which was like, it's kind of the darling of Covid.

It became a billion dollar company within like, a, a year or two or something absurd. And then it flamed out. So they bought that when it had flamed out and then they bought more recently, Evernote. Oh, that was like maybe 20, 22. And that was a fairly big company. They're like a hundred million dollars in error at the time, so I'd never heard of them.

Normally at this point I've heard of most of these kind of largest software private equity folks were holding companies. So that, just started doing a deep dive from there into them.

[00:03:39] Brent Sanders: And so they're based in Italy, which is, is interesting 'cause like I've. We've had over the years had like a couple of great Italian engineers and they've been very like pro USA, get the, the master's degree and, and work the, get to the us work here and get your green card.

And, and I've actually supported, one of. My old employees for the longest time, I mean, he was from Italy and, and I kept asking him about him. He's like, there's so much in the software space. Industrial automation is like their jam. He was saying that's like the, the biggest area of innovation.

But he is like, Italy is really, really small if you think about it in the grand scheme of things. It's just, it's just not big enough in the opportunities out there. So he, he left and he was from Milan and. Or, roughly the area around Milan, the suburbs. But he kind of painted a picture of, a lack of opportunity but not a lack of talent.

There are a lot of, he was saying there's tons of really good engineers. It's just, there's, the startup scene wasn't there, or the venture capital dollars aren't there.

[00:04:37] Colin Keeley: Yeah. So these guys. I mean, basically they're like the premier company now in Italy for tech, startups definitely one of the most valuable tech startups in all of Europe.

And they, spoke very similarly. So they actually started in Copenhagen launched a like note-taking app flamed out. They. Ended up using the last $10,000 to buy, a fonts keyboard app. And then they grew it, used the cashflow and then like continued to basically double up and compound.

But now at this point, they're buying much larger things. Basically axing the entire team and moving 'em to their , shared services in Italy. So they pay super well. It's like the best place to be employed in Italy. They say they pay London wages. And from everything I know of like European.

Software developers, they aren't getting paid very much. So it's kind of become the place to work as well over there.

[00:05:26] Brent Sanders: Very cool. Yeah. Do you know what city they are in are based in, in Italy?

[00:05:30] Colin Keeley: I do not, but we could figure this out quick.

[00:05:33] Brent Sanders: Just curious. But I mean, from what I understand, it can be a pretty affordable place to live.

I mean, obviously the big cities are the big cities and I, I would point out that the gentleman that that used to work me, I mean, he would go back home every year. And he'd go get all of his dentistry done, he'd get all of his doctor's appointments done. I mean, there, there are advantages to, the socialized medicine or whatever, where he was able to, being in his, I, I would assume twenties, it's like you're not quite, covered on dental and stuff and it's hard to cover insurance, whatever else.

But yeah, it's, it is an interesting concept now in terms of like the apps that they. Start with, it sounds like they, you were saying they flamed out, they had stuff that didn't work, and then they had just one winner, and then all of a sudden they turned things around. Like, what? What changed?

[00:06:18] Colin Keeley: So back like to the earliest days, it was just a few guys.

Luca Ferrari is the CEO. He is 39 now, but he started with a number of co-founders. It's easier to tell a story with one person, that's why I do that on Twitter. But yes, they did this note taking app. They couldn't raise any money 'cause they're in Italy, so they all tried to get jobs and he was able to get the highest paying job and he got a job at McKinsey.

So he worked there and then he basically subsidized his team to continue working full-time. So he is paying their rent and their food and stuff until they could actually raise some venture capital. And they raised a little venture capital. Again, it's at least not a lot. And then it didn't work, so they were looking at shutting the company down and there's like 40,000 left in the bank and it's painful to shut down companies in Europe.

We looked at doing this on a couple acquisitions of this, like this whole unwinding procedure. And so the venture capitalist is like, here's your equity back. We'll sell it to you for $1 and keep the money. And so they used that last like 40,000 to buy you the sponsors app. And I. From that their learning was kind of like, Hey, we were basically arrogant trying to build something for the market and we don't know if the market actually wants it.

And we're just gonna buy something with some form of product market fit, and we're like capable operators and we'll improve it. Yeah. And do well with it. So that's kind of how it started. And then they were very much in like the iOS app space, so many popular apps with them. They actually now have like a hundred apps and I think 700 million in revenue across 'em all.

Yeah. Now they don't do acts exclusively, but they're just very good operators that just continue to level up.

[00:07:46] Brent Sanders: So it, it sounds like, the, the short theme here is, is no product market fit to product market fit. And what we've discovered is like, acquisition of product market fit is way easier than identifying and capturing and, getting those first, 10 to a hundred customers that, validate that product market fit.

[00:08:05] Colin Keeley: For sure. This, their playbook is so like. Unoriginal to some extent that I didn't even know if it was worth writing an operating manual. But I hadn't written one in a while. So like the rough playbook is, they buy something, they have this learning phase, which could be a few weeks to like a couple months.

And in that time when once they've learned everything they basically cut everyone. So they cut almost the entire team in the US now going forward, move everything to Italy. Milan is where they're based. They looked that up. Oh, cool. Then they dramatically raise prices. So like, we raise prices, everyone raises prices upon an acquisition, but normally, not as substantially, they will do like generally 50 to a hundred plus percent and basically focusing on just the best users and who cares if like the, the free users or the non dedicated users.

I'll turn out, the other thing they do is like, they have this army of apparently very good developers in Italy. And so they often end up launching like Evernote, which hadn't changed in like decades, launched 75 product improvements in the first year. A lot of their other acquisitions, they just completely rewrite them.

Um Mm-Hmm. So it's like fairly extensive tech undertaking. It's not like, I don't know, just constellation will buy something that's running on like CD ROMs or something, right? And they're just gonna market it for cash flow and just not touch it. These guys are very much more hands-on.

[00:09:18] Brent Sanders: Yeah, that, that's interesting.

I think that's the reality that we found over the years is like even on deals where, I'm doing third party diligence, it's like, and then seeing them afterwards, after the deal happens, it's always ends up being way more technology and you are usually buying a system and you need to like reproduce it, but.

A rewrite generally is always on the tip of everyone's tongue on these projects that are over 10 years old, right? It's like, okay, is this stuff still serving the needs? Can we maintain it, couldn't we, especially if you have an in-house team that's like, let's say they're great Rails engineers and that's their tool and it's a web app and it's like, great, we have our stack that we can use for everything.

We can actually borrow things from, other companies to rewrite it with. And then you end up with almost like a unified code base across companies, which is interesting.

[00:10:05] Colin Keeley: And I guess going more into the tech side, some of the stuff is odd. You probably know it better than me, but like, they often don't have on-call rotations.

So with the rewrites, their goal is to make everything so reliable that you can eliminate that like need for, breakages.

[00:10:19] Brent Sanders: Yeah, that's a big, that's a big step because it's like you're talking. A carrying cost of a company where it's like, okay, we have to have somebody always on call or two people, right?

It's like we're three, like L one, L two L three levels of three levels of support that have to be on some form of call that's expensive. And it's like, I mean, cost aside, it's also requires that you, you keep people engaged and with turnover it's the like, okay, I'm, how long are you gonna keep an sREA site reliability engineer for, right? Let's say the max is five years. You wanna hold these things on a larger scale, 10, 20 years, ideally you know that that turnover and then now you're maintaining. All this information and is it, is it getting collected places? So, I mean, that's the holy grail in my mind of like, rebuilding these things.

So they don't need maintenance essentially. They don't need to be fed and watered as deeply as and by the way, when you're. Finding product market fit. You're like breaking things. You're, smashing these together. And at this stage, these businesses should be to the point where you know, hey, we know what our value proposition is and let's just do those things really well and make sure it's maintainable so that, that resonates really strongly.

I can see how you would be able to extract, good revenues from that.

[00:11:35] Colin Keeley: They have a different approach. If you're private equity, you're flipping in like three years or something. It doesn't make sense to do that. But their plan is like they've never sold a significant asset to date. Their plan is to cashflow it indefinitely.

So that upfront work, makes more sense in that scenario.

[00:11:49] Brent Sanders: Sure, sure. That's interesting.

[00:11:52] Colin Keeley: Other stuff that, just some odd things. In researching 'em, they do fixed salaries with no bonuses, so they don't offer like performance bonuses. They just concluded it was just easier to simplify compensation that way, which seemed surprising to me.

Hmm. They hire for raw talent more than like experienced folks. So generally they just look for like young, talented, motivated individuals. They don't hire, for people that have done it before quite as much. So they just get an army of like junior, junior engineers and, college grads.

[00:12:21] Brent Sanders: Sure.

[00:12:22] Colin Keeley: Super low employee turnover. So unwanted churn is under 1% a year. So they have like approaching 500 employees now and they only use lose, like, three to five a year, which seems staggering for developers to me.

[00:12:35] Brent Sanders: Yeah. And, and how much of that is a re reflection? Going back to what I was saying of like the, how many other opportunities do you have in, in sort of high tech in Italy?

I, from my understanding, again, it's like the industrial automation companies are the, are the most popular thing. And then, there's just not a lot of other options. So I'm wondering if there's an element of that, that, that makes it easier.

[00:12:55] Colin Keeley: For sure. It's it's gotta be at this point, like a company town, like that's just the best place to work in town.

Right. And people don't wanna leave. Yeah, I don't have much else on that. Yeah,

[00:13:04] Brent Sanders: no, that's cool. So like in, in looking at their playbook again, nothing nothing groundbreaking new, but is there anything you take away from it that, you'd say you'd apply to our portfolio?

[00:13:16] Colin Keeley: I, the one, I guess last thing that's somewhat unique to them is, they did this all with their own money.

Then they raised like debt from local banks. They couldn't ever raise much money from Italy and then they kind of splashed under the scenes somewhat recently with like raising from a bunch of celebrities and that raised their profile. So they raised from like Ryan Reynolds and Andre Agassi and Eric Schmidt.

So like you have big name celebrities. The weekend was another one of their investors. I don't know. Okay, cool. They basically said that wasn't useful. They thought it would like, raise their profile to get way better deals and he, he said it like, not worth it. Yeah. Some feedback. Takeaways for this whole thing like.

Not substantially. Like you start small, they started extraordinarily small, right? With the $10,000 acquisition and just do a good job and keep, doing bigger and bigger things. Yeah, it's just wild kind of where they ended up, roughly 12 years later, taking down Evernote, which is like, I don't know approaching a billion dollar company in that ballpark.

And they're saying they'll spend up to 2 billion on future acquisitions, like future single acquisitions.

[00:14:16] Brent Sanders: Wow. I mean, it kind of begs this, this question where I. People keep asking, in the SaaS space in general, like, will the valuations continue to grow? I mean, they, they have contracted. And really how will AI impact that and how will, going back to if, putting myself in their shoes, they're a company that comes in, they're gonna triple rates, double rates.

I mean, we've seen that happen with we talked about bare metrics where they ratcheted up and then it ended up just kind of. Meeting, what was 18 months later, they just, they lost customers that they, they actually would've just organically grown to and probably kept growing. So, I don't wanna say these are like these antipas, but they're, they're a little like aggressive moves and maybe they're just right sizing plans and whatever else.

But as people see that cost go up and then the. Not the cost necessarily to develop their own software, but to like their own automations or to do certain things. I guess it does depend on like what the stack is and how much you can own and all the typical like, SaaS qualifiers of like, okay, well how valuable is this?

Is this to the, to the user? But curious to see how that, that scales, that's one thing I'm thinking about as we look at future acquisitions as well as just like. Companies, I mean, that existential AI risk is, I feel like growing on a, a daily basis. And obviously there's a way to make it work within your product, but again, going back to like raising those prices and, and being super aggressive on that, like, you have to also make sure you're delivering that value.

And it's like, it could be very easy to get out, ahead of your skis or over your skis.

[00:15:51] Colin Keeley: Yeah, for them specifically, I, there's a lot of their model I actually just don't like that much. Like I wouldn't have thought Evernote or Hopin were great acquisitions. I mean, it's hard to build a business when you're charging like $50 a year, which is what Evernote is for, like a personal plan.

So they doubled it to, maybe $130 a year, whatever that is, but. That still seems like a really challenging business to build of like $10 a month. Yeah. For, individual customers. Clearly they've become very good at it 'cause they run all these apps. But yeah. . I don't want to pursue that path for sure.

[00:16:24] Brent Sanders: I, I'd say like the biggest takeaway for me is that sense of like, they just rip the bandaid off, do the rewrite and say, we, we're not gonna have an sre, we're not gonna have maintenance, we're not gonna have, we're, we're on a stack and we're basically like the Borg concept of just.

We're gonna turn you into one of us, and you, you join the, I forget what the Borg ship is, but you, you become assimilated essentially in that reducing the interoperability risk of like, Hey, we have this system in Node and we have that system in Python, we have that system in Ruby. And or, even beyond that, like we have this system in 20-year-old Python or whatever, 15-year-old.

So it's like, it does make sense to then have that. Bench that works within some, a tech stack where you feel confident that everyone can contribute to it.

[00:17:09] Colin Keeley: It is definitely an admirable level of confidence of like, we're gonna buy this thing that's 20 plus years old and is ancient software and we're, we'll figure it out in a month and then we can just get rid of the whole team and we can take it from there.

Yeah, that's something too admire for sure. Yeah.

[00:17:23] Brent Sanders: That, that's hard to do. It's really, I mean, if there's a lot of features that exponentially grows in my mind of like, we're. Many, many months or years into certain acquisitions and it's like there, there's nothing that surprised me anymore, but there's still things that it's like, if you have this setting on and that setting on, and they're mazes of configuration.

So I'm wondering if that is part of the, I. You look at Evernote, it's like you can only be configured so many ways, I suppose, but it's also a pretty deep product. If I, last time I used, it was maybe five years ago. I and then I realized I don't really even take good notes, so I just, just abandoned it all together.

But, that, that has become a tricky space. I mean, Rome was probably the last time I really tried to, to get into note taking. And then there's notion out there, which is also a tricky competitor 'cause it's so popular.

[00:18:09] Colin Keeley: I still use Rome. I'm, maybe I'm the last person in the world that still uses it.

But it works fine for my, usage. I used Evernote. It's just painfully slow to open. Yeah, it's just like non-functional if you're trying to take quick notes. But yeah it's a interesting space. I don't know. Anything else you wanted to cover? Any other last thoughts on these guys?

[00:18:27] Brent Sanders: No, no. I, I think this is, this is super interesting.

I mean, I think it's worthwhile to just document it, right? It's like, for whatever it's worth, it may not be the most, unique value proposition or, or approach, but it's still interesting to see where there has been success. And it'll be interesting to see how the success continues. Like if it, if it does, or if it does start to get disrupted.

[00:18:49] Colin Keeley: That's a big question for sure with everyone in this whole like, new age of ai, are these like software holdcos gonna continue doing that. Are they gonna approach services more and try to automate that? And that's a bigger part of the economy, I guess. We'll see where things end up. Cool. I mean, that's all.

Anything else you wanna talk? How's personal life? How's Cleveland living?

[00:19:08] Brent Sanders: It's good. Actually one project that I've been working on, I, has been really interesting is on the AI front that has been getting a, a lot of our, like, existing code bases into index dbs and using what's called rag, which is a, a retrieval augmented generation.

So I'll keep it non-technical, but you know, there are a couple of approaches that you can take in. For like giving a chat GT or a large language model context about your specific product and one is, pasting in chunks of code and be like, what's, find the bug in this or find this, find that the other is like fine tuning a model, which is pretty difficult.

You have to basically like give. Give it like, here's a chunk and then you tell it what it's doing, or you give it some example prompts of and responses and train it. Like this is the kind of stuff I want. One approach that I've been taking that's been really strong for supporting our junior engineers is using this rag approach where essentially, break up the code into logical chunks put into an index database, which.

Then gives us the ability to say, Hey, how does authentication work? And it will find chunks in that index, send it to the chat GPT agent, in real time. And so that's opened a whole bunch of interesting things between what's called laying chain, which is like an a framework of ways to take those inputs and like, do we wanna build a Slack bot with that?

But I am seeing like a lot of increased productivity around like. We have a big surface area with, with our portfolio companies. We have a lot of different code. We have mobile apps, we have web apps, we have APIs, we have databases, and everything's different. And so as I look at like bending spoons of being like, oh, it's all consolidated, it's one, I see the value in that I.

But as we've been kind of trudging through, going through old code that we didn't write and uncovering ways of configuring things as well as supporting and ingesting like our intercom and mixing that data together. Being like, well, what are the specs say? What are the documents? Say how this system should work?

What does the code say? How it's working, comparing that, and then. Generating that in responses when we're just trying to like either refactor something or add new features. It's been really, really, it's been fun because we get good results faster, so things feel like they're, they're getting kind of put on a, a faster pace.

But yeah, that's, that's more like work stuff. Personally, things are, kids are back to school. Halloween just happened, which was a blast, and man, I was sick for the last three weeks with bronchitis, so I'm, this is the first week I've been like living again which is great. That was, that sucked. But yeah, I'm trying to just stay as healthy as possible.

Now I'm on like a kick. No drinking, no, no nothing. Just kind of sleep and, and exercise in good eating.

[00:21:50] Colin Keeley: Yeah. Have you learned anything from having an ora ring? Have you optimized your sleep in any unique ways?

[00:21:55] Brent Sanders: No, I mean, my daughter still, she finds her way to our bed almost every night. It's awful. We like our sleep, hygiene's terrible.

But I, the biggest thing that actually has been helpful for me is that lowest. Lowest resting heart rate value.

[00:22:08] Colin Keeley: Yeah.

[00:22:08] Brent Sanders: Like that to me is just, that is the strongest thing for me to like, know where I'm at. 'cause when I got sick, like the day before I got sick, that went up. My heart, my temperature started going up and I was like, uhoh, this has happened before.

It really does track. Like, are you about to get sick? And it knew exactly like the day before I was like, I started to feel kind of shitty. And that morning it was like your heart rate was your, was way up and your, your temperature was up like a degree and I didn't even feel warm yet, but then later on that day it was just like, oh, this has gone to hell in a hand basket.

So my, my whole thing has been drop trying to drop that lowest resting heart rate. And that's been like a fun challenge more than like how many steps I get in. I. That drives me to be healthier than anything else. 'cause if you drink, even if you do it early, like that still will spike up in the middle of the night.

So yeah, and I generally like that number. The lower that is, the better I feel is, is what I've noticed

[00:23:02] Colin Keeley: for sure. And that you could look at like your. Resting heart rate trend overnight. So if it's declining, like it's elevated at the start and falls down, it means you basically ate too late or you drank too much and you're like, your body's processing it.

That's what that downward trend is. Or if you sleep colder, you can often juice your resting heart rate that will drop it down. If you're sleeping too warm, it could look elevated all night long. Yeah, and then if you get in better shape, you'll for sure your resting heart rate also just drops over time.

[00:23:30] Brent Sanders: Yeah. And as far as other stuff, I've been reading a lot of, like, one interesting book that I'm in the middle of right now, I'd love to talk about when I wrap it up has been, it's called 4,000 Weeks. It's like a, the Mortal Guide to time Management. Hmm. And it just goes through, so like the idea of being, I think in, if you live till 80, there's 4,000 weeks in that and that's how much time you have.

And it's it's been a lot more of a spiritual book, I would say, than anything else. The first quarter, which I'm about. Quarter, halfway through the first quarter was like basically the concept of work life balance. Like make it made no sense. A hundred years ago, if you, or even longer, like 200 years ago, 300 years ago, you were like a farmer on the countryside in, in England.

Like you weren't thinking about your work life balance. You weren't trying to get more done around the farm. Life just lived differently and we lately, in the last a hundred years have been in this like. Digital revolution and it's kind of made people crazy. And so it's been pretty interesting.

It's been very like mortality driven. It's like we only have this much time and you choose to do with it what you want. And it's been, it's been a good read. Definitely have been able to, it's weird. It's had a, a strange effect on my focus. Like it's made my intent and focus a lot stronger so far. But that's just, near term effects the last week or two of reading it.

[00:24:46] Colin Keeley: Nice. I guess on the health front for me, I took a shoulder to the ribs in basketball. And basically I struggled for like doing stuff for breathing for like probably six weeks. It took an extraordinary long time to recover from this and. So your shoulder to shoulder's, fine shoulder ribs. Turns out pretty fragile.

I didn't break anything. I thought I just bruised them, but now I'm pretty confident that I like strained. You have muscles in your ribs, which I didn't even realize. Yeah. Like that help you breathe. So the intercostal muscles, and that's clearly what I strained, but a feeling better now, but yeah. Not a super fun recovery on that.

Turns out you use them for everything. You can't. Yeah. Laughing

[00:25:26] Brent Sanders: is the worst.

[00:25:27] Colin Keeley: Yeah.

[00:25:28] Brent Sanders: So, have, did you have to stop playing basketball?

[00:25:31] Colin Keeley: Yeah, I stopped for quite a long time. It was probably six weeks to get fully back, but I stopped for like four weeks doing anything. So no basketball, no tennis yeah, not super fun, but mostly better now.

I, I used AI for sure. I would like, would type in my symptoms periodically to make sure I was having some serious issue. But I was pretty confident. 'cause if you move and it hurts, it's like you're not having a heart attack or something. Yeah. It's, it's a muscle issue. Another thing I've been used in AI for a lot.

Oh, one preview is phenomenal at this is like entering in different forms of legal documents and asking it questions. Oh yeah. Or asking it advice. I, I hate. Negotiating legal docs. We've had some annoying customers want like, changes to our JUULs legal docs, which we actually get pushed back on pretty infrequently.

But been dealing with that and being like poor man's lawyer with it. Yeah. Successfully.

[00:26:22] Brent Sanders: I mean, we, we love for the big stuff, you gotta have you irreg, but that's great. And that's, oh one has been it's been very interesting, the way that it, it, it gives all this extra reasoning and kind of seems to double check itself.

[00:26:35] Colin Keeley: Yeah, and that's chat. GPT plus I think you need to get access to it for the people listening. Oh, is it, dunno what that is. Yeah,

[00:26:40] Brent Sanders: probably. Yeah, they have my credit card on file. They've, I, I did, I, for a while I was kind of balancing between Claude and, and Chat GBT or Anthropics product, Claude and Chat, GBT with OpenAI.

And I've just kind of decided after kind of pairing back and forth with them and just start using GPT, the OpenAI, embedding APIs. A lot of the APIs have been really easy to work with. So I've kind of vendored to that a little bit. And it, it's. Still is wrong, right? It's still not like perfect and it, it can be super frustrating if you're relying on it too hard, but we're finding like a really good, like things to do with it, things not to do with it, and we're finding a good balance, at least internally, on when to use it.

[00:27:22] Colin Keeley: I, I guess the one other thing I've been using it for, this operating manual to some extent of, like, a lot of what I got this from was articles and podcasts. So I get the transcript of a podcast, get the article, give it all that information, and then you could ask it questions from it. So it's way faster than like command f-ing, trying to figure stuff out.

You could, ask it for three examples of like cutting costs or raising prices. Yeah. And grabs all those numbers nicely.

[00:27:47] Brent Sanders: That's great. Supercharging research for sure.

[00:27:52] Colin Keeley: But yeah, that's, that's all I got. Just an update episode here.

[00:27:55] Brent Sanders: Cool. Well, thanks for listening everybody. And thanks for the the details, Colin, on the operating manual.

I, I think it was, it's still worth doing, even if it was less than notable.

[00:28:04] Colin Keeley: Yeah, I, I gotta get back to it. But anyway, all right. Take care everyone.

[00:28:08] Brent Sanders: Thanks for listening.

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