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[00:00:00] Colin Keeley: Hello and welcome back. This isColin Keeley here, and I'm Brent Sanders and we are two guys buying andbuilding wonderful internet companies.

[00:00:10] Brent Sanders: Yeah. And, while we're buildingthose companies, Colin, you did another writeup. So Colin's been doing these,profiles or research projects, which are always, really interesting.

And the latest one was the Pritzkers, right? Which is, ifyou're from Chicago, you know that name. And. If you're in the United States,you might know that name, but,basically the story of Right two brothers. Imean, maybe you can dive right into it. I mean, this is something that youtweeted out what, a couple days ago?

[00:00:38] Colin Keeley: Yeah. I, I don't know the wholePritzker family story. I knew them. Hey, so in Chicago, they like, they're verywealthy, they sponsor a bunch of stuff. Med schools and random schools arenamed after them. I knew them as like the founders and owners of Hyatt, like, Ithink that's how they made the bulk of their money.

But these two guys built like an acquisition empire back in thefifties. and so a Marmon group is the name of it. It started just like any kindof search fund today, any acquirer. They bought a struggling bicyclemanufacturer, for $95,000. And so, It was doing bicycles, navy rockets,wheelchairs. it only had 3 million in sales.

I was losing money. So kind of like a classic, any individualcould buy this tiny thing and turn it around. their big thing was the assetswere worth more than they paid for it, and they ended up dropping theunprofitable things and focusing on wheelchairs. Hmm. But, back it up. So it'stwo brothers.

the family had a successful law firm and these guys, one was adeal maker and a lawyer, so he went to law school. He's a prodigy, likefinished high school at 14, that he , he trained pilots in, the air force andthen he became like the wizard of structuring deals and avoiding taxes. andthen Robert was the engineer and manager, the only engineer in like the wholegroup of Pritzkers, which there's a lot of them.

and he was the one that turned around trouble companies. So Jaybought them, structured the deal, and Robert like was the operator manager,turned them around. Ah, that's awesome. Awesome. so yeah, they bought thisfirst one. So they did a lot of small metal manufacturing things, which I justrealized, I didn't think of it before, but my grandfather started a metalmanufacturer in Chicago.

he never was bought by them or anything, but he was doingexactly the same thing. but over the decades they rolled up a bunch of thesesmall metal manufacturing, and they kind of built out a repeatable playbook. SoI'll just go through it. They had extreme price discipline. So Jay would buythese trouble companies and that was usually for 80% less than the book value.

and a typical deal was highly levered with super small equitychecks. So in one deal, they put in 20 million in cash, and they got 94 millionin assets and 325 million in tax benefits.

[00:02:55] Brent Sanders: Why would anybody sell to them withat such

[00:02:57] Colin Keeley: a loss? so they only boughtcompanies that like, kind of had to sell.

Ah. so it was always like, they got into some hardship, therewas some transition and death. and they were doing this, back in the day. So itstarted, first deal was 1953. they're both long dead. They died 10, 20 yearsago now at this point. Plus, like I think the first one died in 99. but yeah,back then it's not like it is now where there was a million search funds outthere doing this thing.

so he Right, right. one of 'em said, so they were buying smallmanufacturers that no one wanted. So it's like tank cars, seatbelt systems,piping and tubing. Someone called it, smokestack factories. So it's like allthe things that had smokestacks and no one cared about. And one of 'em said theonly reason people sell to us is that their trouble companies sold the bargainprices, was cuz no one else was doing it.

Like no one else was even there to offer money to them. Theywere known for moving fast and they worked super well together. So Jay wasactually a lawyer, so he could, look at the finances and also look at the risksas a lawyer. And he didn't have to consult anyone else so he could turn aroundand make offers really quickly.

in between the two of 'em, they had everything they needed andthey didn't need help. and so they want a lot of deals because they're able todo that. And, and maybe to this point, it sounds like I've been describinglike. basically, sell everything for assets, but they're actually known forextreme organic growth.

So after they buy these troubled companies, Robert would nurse'em back to health. he cut the unprofitable lines focused on the profitableones, and then really pushed on growth. So they had a reputation for buildingup their acquisitions, not tearing them down. That's

[00:04:34] Brent Sanders: awesome. That's a, that's agood story, right?

Like, it's so easy to see, okay, I'm just gonna, pillageessentially, you're, you're getting such a deal. There's no reason to, to try to,I mean, obviously this is a good reason too. It's, you can build more wealththat way.

[00:04:49] Colin Keeley: And so they developed this greatreputation, and they tried to actually keep management intact, so not just, gutit and replace everyone.

And so they reviewed as almost the perfect owners. So you give'em these full, like, detailed financial reports, but besides that, they letyou run everything yourself. so they're viewed as a great home and likeeveryone kind of trusted 'em and they continue to win deals for that way. Andthen in that spirit, there were no synergies.

Like every deal had to live on its own and like be successful,before they would do it. and execs were basically completely autonomous. theyweren't interfered with at all from , the holding company, long term greedy. Sothey had a real commitment to investing in the things that they were buying.

so they had a pursuit to being a low cost producer. And to dothat, they would invest heavily in like large machines and stuff like that,that standalone companies just could never do. so during a period where 40% ofUS boundaries went out of business, they actually invested heavily in 10 xtheir, revenue in the space, the size of the companies.

and their head office was super small and they were theopposite of micromanagers. So they reviewed as a consulting organization. Sothey would step in kind of when you needed 'em to help out with tax personnelissues, real estate, and just kind of offer advice. so it's very muchmanagement by application.

you run, your companies will help out if you need us. how comethey sold 60% for like four and a half billion dollars to Warren Buffet? thatwas the public number. I think they sold the rest of it. but that rest hasn'tbeen disclosed and at the end they've owned, they own like a hundred plus.

Kind of autonomous operating organizations in thismanufacturing space. So,

[00:06:25] Brent Sanders: I actually had firsthandexperience working with one of their, their companies. I just realized it was acompany called Prince Castle and their, their name. So they got, must have beenbought by Mormon. I don't know the full story, but they made like a ton ofmachines for McDonald's.

that was their big thing. They were making, egg cookers timers.the, the little bins that sit with burgers in there, warming and toasting andrefrigeration. There are all these sort of metal manufacturers, metal withsome, some boards in there, like electrical micro controllers and that was it.

I remember visiting the, the factory in, in Chicago, or in theburbs. It is out by O'Hare and it was wild. It was, it's all the stuff that,that noise you hear when you go into McDonald's of de the time are going off.They, they make that and so, It, I'm sure it's, just one small slice of theportfolio.

But,almost like a central part of, McDonald's. The cool thing,the reason I mentioned this coolest thing they were working on in their r and ddepartment was like a, a smell machine. It was like a spectrometer for, forsmells. And they were kind of doing a study to see what smell, do people like,do they spend more when they smell burgers?

And they found that the. Anecdotally, right? Like this was justpart of the, the story from what they were saying is like the, the mostattractive smell that they were realizing was like the smell of like actuallylike several hours old burgers. So they found this like, they have to toss theburgers, but if they let 'em sit and smell, people love the smell of that.

It's like, not gross. I mean, in McDonald's, no, no idea howmuch meat is actually in that burger. But either way you can see like the, yes,these are small metal companies that. factories turned into, but then also whatwas going on in Chicago at the time is McDonald's was a huge,huge growth storyaround that same time starting in the fifties,

so anyways, that was just one thing that actually I, I had donesome, software work at, at some point, some r and d stuff with them, but,itwas, it was just part of the, the, the giant conglomeration that Marmon becameor is.

[00:08:30] Colin Keeley: Yeah. Cool. I don't have atransition. Do you have any takeaways from this?

I guess anything you want to implement in, Vern? Yeah,

[00:08:38] Brent Sanders: I, I, I didn't mean tointerrupt you. I feel like there was a whole bunch of other stuff around like,you had a bunch of other points I thought were interesting. One was around, nosynergies. So this was like, one of the, the parts was that every company hasto kind of stand on its own, which I feel like.

Is, is, that was my one takeaway from, from this was like, Ithink that's a rule we should kind of walk away with. I feel like when we dothese, it's always good. Kind of what, what are we pulling away from this?Especially if it's, and this is probably furthest in terms of all the profilesyou've done, mo mostly we've done software entrepreneurs or something likethis.

But in, in terms of just straight up business, having aportfolio of companies having. Companies that can kind of meld into one anotheror have that attraction to say, oh, we have this, and we could, we could kindof build this synergy and, and support one another. And it does feel dirty.

And it was interesting to see that they were like, we're nottouching, we don't do that. Like, you have to stand on your own two feet andyou can't rely on, some other product that's doing well and kind of ride theircoattails. I don't know. What, what was your take? Is there anything from, fromthis study that you were like, I, I, I would take away, this and, and apply itto, to what we're doing.

[00:09:51] Colin Keeley: I mean a lot of this stuff isnot that different. Like moving quickly is awesome and no synergies, long-term,greedy. All that stuff is kind of similar to what we've talked about and havedone in different respects. the one kind of takeaway I had is like, God, itmust have been nice to think of doing this in the 1950s when no one else wasdoing it.

And you're like literally the only person doing it. it's justso different than the software world today. And, so that was just my thinkingof like, we are never gonna buy a software company for less than 80% of book value,or I mean, some crazy discount. It's just way harder to pull off.

so I'm always thinking of like, what is that? And it seems likeTitus came back from the SMB Bash and everyone's going after like the mostcrazy different little verticals. and everyone is kind of in that thinking oflike, what niche should I do that everyone else isn't doing?

[00:10:41] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's tough,right?

Because everyone's competing and like we see it, we're at like,everybody's competing in software and, and all the, it, it does feel like it'swell trodden now. And, yeah. If you think about what was going on in this dayand age, it was a huge, growth in United, the United States. Yeah.

For World War ii. I mean, it was just boom time. And it was,companies coming out, especially like these manufacturers, I would assume thesemetal shops were contributing to the war effort. I don't know that, so I guessI, I'm not a historian, but you see, this is like the beginning of sort of themodern era of American business where it's, a form of private equity, in asense where people are coming in, they're requiring, they're pulling all thesethings together, but I wonder if there is still room for this, right?

[00:11:29] Colin Keeley: So it's like, is it. home servicecompanies, that's why everyone's, buying roofing companies and whatever elseis, trying to do roll-ups or whatever form of this, like the hold cos outthere. I think it just has to be more about like your edge. So it's like, whyare you gonna be good at this?

And for us, I, I mean, people will choose us and maybe we get aslightly better deal cause of it, but it's not gonna be like, 90% off orsomething like that. Like maybe these were back in the day. So I think it's,More like just organic growth. Why is it valuable? It's even if you pay toomuch, it's like, cuz you're gonna grow it quite a bit and that justifies,getting into space.

So I think it's much more operationally intensive maybe nowthan it was back then, to do this well, but you actually have to earn yourreturn instead of just like having this money falling in your lap to someextent. Yeah.

[00:12:20] Brent Sanders: Yeah. And then, one thing tomention about this name, I probably should put this at the beginning of theconversation.

I mean, like, I knew the name growing up in Chicago, right?There were just buildings named after it. You said there was, was it a medicalschool named after it? I mean, it's so much stuff. It just has like theprincipal pavilion, there's Pritzker this Pritzker that and it, I, I wouldn'tmention that. It seems like they made tons and tons of money and they seemed toprioritize giving it back.

I think there definitely seems to be a philanthropic legacythat that family has walked away from as the result of either their sale orwhatever. I mean, So happy to, happy to kind of remember that name and, and seewhere it, where it kind of came from.

[00:13:01] Colin Keeley: Yeah, these guys were funny too.They definitely lost money on a good number of deals and they always, wouldlaugh about it.

They had, they were kind of good sports about everything. Yeah.The Pritzker family has generally been very generous. JB follows me on Twitter,I think I've met him a few times. He used to be super active in like theventure capital scene in Chicago, and then now he's, he's governor. Gonna tryto run for president at some point, probably.

I'd imagine. And so he is not as active, in the tech scene atall.

[00:13:27] Brent Sanders: Yeah, it's too bad. I mean, I,I, I commend anybody who gets into politics, but I also question their motives.It's like, why would you ever want to do that? Yeah. But hopefully you realizelike, Hey, if you want to change something, you gotta get involved.

Then unlike me who's just like ignores it and just watch theworld burn,

[00:13:47] Colin Keeley: there are like, So many of 'emnow. There's like hundreds of Pritzkers in Chicago. yeah. And yeah, I don'tknow, 10 of 'em are billionaires, and the single digit billionaires. There's alot of wealthy people from this Hyatt success.

Yeah. I was gonna bring up my other notes. So I guess the otherkind of update is I came back from s and b Bash, so this like small businessacquisition conference in Austin. the most fun part is talking to people buyingsuper random businesses. So, I'll just walk through a few of interesting ones.Like it won't out names, but like the general profile.

One guy bought, a lot of small manufacturing companies. One guybought one that makes the tags for military uniforms, and apparently that'sjust like printing money. And he was really excited to buy like tags. Yeah. Andhe is like, he is the actual person that manufactures it so he doesn't have tosubmit the bids to the government.

Other people are doing that and then they farm it out to him.So no matter who wins the bids, they're gonna use him to actually manufacturecuz he's the only one that's like approved by the government to do it. so thatwas a great one. He was really set on buying like an ice cream manufacturernext, or like a, an ice cream thing in his town that makes their own ice cream.

And he wanted to do it and someone swooped in and paid like 20times earnings or something. It was like a, it's like someone buying a sportsteam, making some offer that doesn't make any sense cuz it's like a prestigiousthing to own in their town. so he was really fun. Another good one was this guybought a Christian accounting firm, so accounting firm that started out of likea bible study and everyone in the company went to the same Bible study all overthe website, all about being Christian and he's like, I'm a Christian, butwe're no longer a Christian accounting firm.

And so he is been like removing God from the business. So he istaking it off the website and he is losing a few employees that are pissedabout it. but he's also trying to get the other half of the world as customers.Yeah.

[00:15:38] Brent Sanders: And man, it, it's kind of like,don't you want to go to when, if we're gonna pick a religion for accounting,would it be Christianity?

Would it really be, is that the first one you think of? I don'tknow about that. but yeah, it, it's nice to have a, a niche. I, I think thereis a, a value to, it, you casting a more broad net, right? It's like you don'twanna be, what's the word? you wanna be as inclusive as possible to yourcustomers.

So, But yeah, that's funny. A, a Christian, I mean, I could seeit for, certain things, but hey, different strokes, different folks, I guess.how many people, first of all, backing up, this was your first. Convention orconference Since Covid, this is the first I've been

[00:16:17] Colin Keeley: to, so I go to the Chicagobooth, like ETA one.

so I've done that a couple times, but this is the first one ofthe, like the circuit, like you went to HoldCo conference last year. I haven'tdone any of those. You know that capital camp. those are kind of the three bigones, I think.

[00:16:31] Brent Sanders: Cool. And so it sounds like yougot a chance to interface with a bunch of people that didn't know how tall youwere.

I would guess.

[00:16:39] Colin Keeley: Yes. Yeah. So many people likelisten to this podcast and read my writing and just have absolutely no idea whoI am. So even like close partners, like we were gonna bring on an operatingpartner we've talked to for like dozens of hours probably. And he introducedhis name and I was like, yeah, I know I'm co.

Yeah, that was crazy. We spent a lot of time together. that'sawesome. But yeah, I, I know I felt kind of good about that. It's just like abunch of room full of people that know your name and no one knows your face.it's kind of nice to be a little anonymous. oh, one of the random business Ididn't mention, so the Chen Mark guys were there in one of their businesses ispirate ship boat tours.

And so apparently it just, prince Cas are the folks,

[00:17:23] Brent Sanders: Sorry, I'm looking this up. Iremember, I think they, yeah, they were at, speaking, one of the partners wasat the conference and spoke and they, they had a couple, I thought they wererolling up, landscaping companies.

[00:17:35] Colin Keeley: They do a lot of random stuff.

Tons of people buy landscaping companies. but yeah, they'rebased off in Portland, Maine buying a lot of random things now. but that is oneof theirs. And so they're like a classic example of they'll buy a businessthat. just throws off cash and they have like two boats and it's, it's nevergonna be 10 boats, but they're gonna use that cash and redeploy it and buyother things with it.

so they, they're always interesting. I remember seeing,

[00:18:00] Brent Sanders: one of the partners, speak, oneof the owners speaking. I really love, I mean, I enjoyed the, the talk withthe, the surprising thing was in these low-tech businesses, they wereprioritizing like security, like, internet security on technical security.

I mean, say like it. Security, as like a, a core tenant, whichI thought was really interesting and super valid, like a very, up date way oflooking at some of these kind of low tech businesses. So when you think oflike, you don't need that much tech for some of these businesses, but stillgetting your database blasted or ransomed is, is not great either.

But that's cool though. The pirate ship. There's, there's agentleman we know, here in Cleveland that, operates some of the party barges.Is, huh? These are like the boats that go out on, I think it's a CuyahogaRiver. I, I'm ashamed if I don't know this, but it's a river that runs throughCleveland and it's, you get a bunch of drunk people to come out and,party ontheir, on their barge.

But, it's a, those are when, when you introduce water, it,that's a tough business. Like, there's a lot of things that can go wrong inthe, the safety, the fact that water can kill everybody. Is is kind of a, astraight part of that business model that's like, wow, everything's a lot moreserious out on the water.

So, I give 'em props, but I'd like the, I really want to go ona pirate trip though.

[00:19:15] Colin Keeley: That would be awesome. Portland.Maine's nice. You gotta get out there and try it sometime. I should in thesummer. I mean, it's brutally cold in the winter. that is true. ,

[00:19:27] Brent Sanders: reflections

[00:19:28] Colin Keeley: from your trip.

most of the people there were not doing software companies, soit was super cool to meet people in person. like I think it's worth like ahundred Zoom meetings, like actually meeting someone in person for the weekend.but I don't know, I, I still don't know whether it's great to be going to theselike acquisition conferences, which are kind of cool.

It's like talking to peers or should we be going to more likesoftware conferences? And talking to like potential prospects more so, yeah.

[00:19:55] Brent Sanders: Yeah. That's exactly how I, Ifelt a little out of sorts going to the conference. Like we were one of theonly, there was like one other, I think Sure. Swift was there, right?

And it's like, but that was it. Everyone looked at me kind offunny, like, they've got a roofing business, they've got a, this roll up,they've got, Yeah. I, I, I don't know though, because I feel like a, I don'tknow what those software. conventions are, and it's less about, I feel likeacquisitions, acquisition, and the same things we're, we've kind of spokenabout.

But, I, I gotta say the, the people that aren't in software aregenerally a little bit more fun, I think. But again, I haven't been to asoftware convention,

[00:20:30] Colin Keeley: so I can't say that, but there'sprobably something to that. Yeah, I mean, I had a blast. This is really fun tohang out with everyone. That's great. other

[00:20:36] Brent Sanders: things, the balance betweeninvestors and, and folks, fundraising was, Skewed

[00:20:43] Colin Keeley: virtually no investors that wedidn't already know.

So there were like a handful, that I wanna talk through onZoom. you'd met some of 'em in person, but it was cool to like hang out withthem in person, but no new ones. So it's much more focused. Yeah. Not even onlike meeting investors, just like kind of learning the space and like sharingwith effectively peers, people doing similar-ish stuff in differentgeographies.

[00:21:07] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Yeah. well that's cool.Did one last thing about your trip. It was in Austin, right? And you'replanning on moving, did you do any house hunting?

[00:21:17] Colin Keeley: I did neighborhood hunting, so Igrabbed like the electric bikes and I was like, I was initially walking andthen realized Austin is not really great for walking.

It's kind of big. So I grabbed electric bikes and like justtook off. So you ride for 10 minutes, check out a neighborhood. So I have likea list of neighborhoods I like that are all like, kind of centrally located. andthen next month probably take it more serious and spend some time down thereand look at houses.

Nice. Cool.

[00:21:43] Brent Sanders: Well, summer's almost upon us,so it's gonna be hot as balls

[00:21:47] Colin Keeley: there, so enjoy. Yeah. 200 degrees.So I'm trying to avoid that. try not to move down there until like September,but we'll see. Right?

[00:21:54] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Yeah. But I don't know,in the long run, I think it. It's great. It'd be nice to have some heat, somesun.

I don't think you're gonna miss Chicago too much.

[00:22:03] Colin Keeley: Yeah. Get the last summer here.Maybe be back for summers in the future, when kids are off school. So we'llsee. But I guess my one other thing, as I just dominate the conversation withmy topics is, I'm in this SAS peer group and so it's maybe five to 10 otherpeople in with vertical SaaS companies for the most part that are all like,generally like five to a hundred million in a r r.

So mostly, series a ABC companies. Mm-hmm. And the, we havedifferent topics we talk about, you can't disclose most of it, but like one ofthe big things is AI and like, how are people using AI in their companies? Andso a lot of folks, for the most part are this like buying G P T plus, or G P Tchat, G PT plus I think it's called.

and everyone, they just try to hold out people that are usingit in creative ways. And so everyone has this like new tool in the arsenal andeveryone's trying to figure out kind of how to use it. so it's just kind of funto talk about how people are approaching it. Have you been using it? Yeah, Itry.

So I have it on my computer now as like an app icon and then Ihave it on my phone. And so I try not to Google stuff. I try to, default tochat G P T and test it out and it takes you pretty good. another interestingthing I did recently is I had a blood test. And it's like, a million numbers.

and then you could input it into chat G P T and like what doesthis tell you is basically what I ask it. And then it goes down number bynumber and say like, is this normal? What does this actually mean? Like, whatdoes it do? that's been pretty fun. Allegedly. It's a quite a good doctoralready.

[00:23:32] Brent Sanders: Yeah, I could only imagine justfrom like a stats perspective, like how do you interpret this By the numbers, Imean obviously there's, don't, don't swap it out for a doctor.

I've been using it, it's been like certain things I've found.It sucks at certain things. Like most things though, it, it's been great. Thethings that I've been using for, obviously code questions of like, Hey, how,our most recent acquisition is a very heavy SQL product, which there's tons ofSQL in here, and it's just, Hey, how, how can I write this in a different way?

How do I efficiently change this query? And it's, it's awesome.It's an expert at my fingertips and we'll just, Sometimes it's not right, whichyou have to, can't just copy and paste everything. But in terms of likelearning new things, asking dead end questions, like, is there, sometimes it'sjust hard to get an answer for things.

You have to Google things, it's to stack overflow. You want tolike get an expert on the phone or get, pay for someone's time. It's definitelyreplacing that. Like, Hey, I just wanna hire somebody to ask them questions thathas a thousand hours of experience with X, Y, Z library or product. And that'sreally hard to find.

The older the, the software gets. So that's been great just tobe like, Hey, what's the right way to do this? Not even the right way. Howcould you do this using this library? How can you do use this using, this code?And then the last thing I've been using it for is generating unit tests andtests in general for our code that doesn't have tests.

So like, how do we cover and actually been moving to a directionwhere if we want to build a feature, I'll go through and do the. Productplanning a little bit in there and say, Hey, we're rolling out this feature forthis product, and explain what I'm doing. And it will spit out a lot of, someof it's just fluff and it has a certain bloat way of writing, but some of itis, is really great, especially the technical pieces saying, here, here are thetest that you're gonna wanna write.

And so that, and enabling like a, a junior developer or anapprentice with that, you can, you can really give them a lot of support,

[00:25:24] Colin Keeley: which is where, so, If you hadto do the test before chat, g p T, and now the test, like after, what percentof your time do you think you're saving, or how much more productive do youthink you are doing that kind of thing.

[00:25:35] Brent Sanders: especially like the firstcouple iterations, you're, I would be saving like four to five hours in a, in asession where, hey, I'm gonna come up with a test. you're gonna come up withthem, but you're, you're also gonna have to look up the syntax. Let's say ifyou're like me and if you're. Like somebody in our world, you switch aroundfrom, okay, I'm in JavaScript today, I'm in Ruby.

Tomorrow I'm in Python. The next day I'm in. and sometimes you,you lose track of like, okay, what library am I using? I'm using this versionof, and so that ability to just kind of stay on that high abstract level that Iam where I'm like, yeah, I just wanna write tests. I don't really care aboutthe implementation and I don't wanna go read the docs for the different testframeworks.

Boom. It, it can. You, you, you can kind of express yourself ina universal way and it will worry about the, okay, well you're in moca so youneed to express them this way and write them this way. And, you can kind ofstep between libraries really quickly. Now it, it helps the great deal. I wouldsay in like context switching, that's the, the biggest cost that I see runningthese types of businesses is like, everything's different and the hop from oneproduct to the next, it, it can be difficult.

[00:26:41] Colin Keeley: So that sounds pretty extreme.Are you like, are you twice as productive? Are you five times as productive, likedoing the test stuff now?

[00:26:48] Brent Sanders: I mean, this, these are notlike every day I'm saving four to six hours. This is like, once a week. I, I dofind that optimization though, where it's like, hey, I can, I can get to aconclusion way faster than, and a lot of it are, are conversations around,deciding do we build something in this?

Do we build something in that? What are the pros and cons and,and just. Rather than the alternative would be like, Hey, let's, we have aweekly dev meeting, we'll talk about it. Then everybody go out and do the research,come back, put a decision doc together. That takes a week, right? It's easily aweek that we come back and then we debate it, and maybe we're doing it tooslowly, but we want to, be exhausted in a decision that's gonna last the nexteight years or something.

And it's helped kind of get, get those decisions made wayfaster and see like, okay, what's the code gonna look like? If we're using thisversus that and what are the implications and just you can accelerate thoseconversations a little bit

[00:27:41] Colin Keeley: faster. That's super cool. Solike when this stuff first kind of started coming out, everyone's like, oh man,we're all, we're all outta jobs.

Like all white collar work is dead and now like this peergroup, so all these CEOs and you and my experience's like, whoa, actually wecould just be way more productive. And this is like a crazy tool for everyoneto use. much more optimistic than like doom and gloom. I guess that wasinitially.

[00:28:04] Brent Sanders: Yeah, I, I really don't buy in.

I mean, I'm not pessimistic, not terribly pessimistic aroundit. I don't, I think if it, it is going to be disruptive and we can't denythat. But I think there's a lot of, like, you're gonna see people that embraceit and figure out the ways to use it, and it's gonna be part of, part of thetool set and it's, hopefully it's gonna get better as well.

I know a lot of folks are on auto G P T and all these differentsort of variations of it, and, but I'm. Really just using it to help me withthe things that I suck at. That's what I think everybody should use it for. orthe things I don't really like to spend my time doing, like I don't really likedoing like writing tickets or product management, like slash project managementtasks, like keeping the Trello board up to date and grooming things.

It's like I gotta really force myself. So it helps to have alittle grease with chat G P T. Like, Hey, can you help me be a little bit moreproductive? And then it's more fun, right? And so I think that's where. I'mhoping other people can see the

[00:29:00] Colin Keeley: value in it. So I've donesomething similar like help docs filling out help docs and you could just kindof put in some bullet points and it's like, Hey, fill out this full help doc.

It's pretty amazing at that, like 10% of it is hallucinatingand doesn't make any sense and it like makes up an email address, but it savesyou a tremendous amount of time for that like boring task for the most part.Yeah. And I'd

[00:29:20] Brent Sanders: rather edit, like, I'd muchrather edit the bullshit out than.

it's, it's really hard to, to get, especially writing zero toone for me, which I think is again, where other people are also gonna see thatvalue of like, okay, well if I had a three page essay, I can edit that down in30 minutes. Versus it would take me days to write the three page essay and thenstart

[00:29:41] Colin Keeley: editing it down.

Yeah. cool. Anything else you wanna cover?

[00:29:47] Brent Sanders: No, that's, that's what's allgoing on here in, in May.

[00:29:50] Colin Keeley: Nice. All right. Well take careeveryone. Thanks for listening.

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