David Hirschfeld has spent the last 30 years navigating the complexities of software startups.
His experiences have culminated into the Launch 1st Method to take software startups from concept to cash flow in months, not years. The Launch 1st system mitigates the risks that cause most software startups to fail.
He understands software startups because he founded Tekyz Inc. in 2007 and has worked with several dozen software startups since.
He has worked with founders in a variety of business domains including healthcare, finance, law enforcement, social media, stage productions, real estate investing, asset management, education, and more.
David brings all this experience to every Launch 1st customer.
What you will learn
- How the “Launch 1st Method” helps software startups validate their ideas with high-fidelity prototypes before committing to development.
- How AI is being used to write code, design systems, and improve efficiency in software development.
- How AI agents are transforming workflows by managing tasks from ideation to deployment.
- How AI is revolutionizing online education through personalized learning experiences and enhanced engagement.
- How rapid AI adoption is reshaping industries, including real estate, and creating new ethical challenges.
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:03 – 00:00:39
Hi everyone and welcome to Jeff Bullas show. Today I have with me David Hirschfeld. Now David has spent the last 30 years navigating the complexities of software startups.
His experiences have culminated into the Launch 1st Method to take software startups from concept to cash flow in months, not years. The Launch 1st system mitigates the risks that cause most software startups to fail.
Jeff Bullas
00:00:40 – 00:01:19
He understands software startups because he founded Tekyz Inc. in 2007 and has worked with several dozen software startups since.
He has worked with founders in a variety of business domains including healthcare, finance, law enforcement, social media, stage productions, real estate investing, asset management, education, and more.
David brings all this experience to every Launch 1st customer.
So, David, welcome to the show, it’s great to have you here.
David Hirschfeld
00:01:19 – 00:01:21
Thanks, Jeff, it’s really fun to be here.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:22 – 00:01:34
So David, you decided to go and do a physics degree. OK, a long time ago. All right. Like 10 years ago, right?
David Hirschfeld
00:01:34 – 00:01:37
Right. It was just, I just finished it last month. Yeah, right.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:39 – 00:01:49
And, and you’re a fast learner. So anyway, so what happened was, why, why did you choose to do physics? Was there a curiosity about it? What was the motivation and inspiration?
David Hirschfeld
00:01:50 – 00:02:32
I was always good at math. Um, I, and I had this, uh, my friends were, uh, smart, geeky people that in high school, those are the people that I was close with and we Cut class and go have coffee at the coffee shop and sit there for hours geeking out about physics theories. Don’t ask me. I can’t really put myself back into that same mindset now, but we loved doing that. And we would come up with all kinds of theories and philosophies, um, that we thought were brilliant, but it was just really fun to expand our minds in that way and stretch ourselves. Um,
David Hirschfeld
00:02:32 – 00:03:18
So that’s what led me into physics in college. And then what I found in college because in high school it was just a couple of friends that really liked math and science, but in college, what I found was that the peer group, because I wanted to be like a hardcore physicist and astrophysicist, but my peer group were not other people that could speak, um, and chew gum and think and do any of two things at the same time. So, um, back then it was very hardcore scientists that were, um, uh, it was the peer group and I didn’t think that I wanted to go into a career where all the people I knew were going to be this kind of Personality and mindset, not that I have anything against geeks because I’m a geek inside myself, right?
Jeff Bullas
00:03:18 – 00:03:30
We, we say geek with love, don’t we? So it’s actually like, but the reality is that, uh, it used to be in the Bible, the meek shall inherit the earth, but now we’ve discovered the geek shall inherit the earth.
David Hirschfeld
00:03:30 – 00:04:16
Exactly, right, exactly. I think it was just a misspelling. So, um, so then I so I went the opposite direction when I left college and I went into sales with a with a large software, IBM software company, IBM mainframe software company, Computer substitutes, and found I was really good at that and loved that, but I always had to suffer with the systems engineers who didn’t know the product as well as I, I thought they should when they were trying to present the technology to my potential clients. And so I learned the technology. I became pretty good with the technology and, um, and I ended up being the, um, system.
David Hirschfeld
00:04:16 – 00:04:36
division or the national sales leader, my, my 3rd year there, out of like 450 people, which was a difficult thing to achieve, but I equate it to the fact that I actually knew the technology. I wasn’t there just there to make a relationship and bring the technical people in. And so people really respected me because I could talk with them on their level. Um, I left there and went to Texas.
David Hirschfeld
00:04:36 – 00:05:05
Instruments where again I learned the technology and this was a big complex development system and I learned how to develop software with their technology. And when I left Texas Instruments, I became a software development consultant for a contracting company and I ended up doing projects at Intel and Motorola and Allied Signal in Arizona Public Service, and this really started my software development career. Um uh then I started my first software company in the early 90s and
David Hirschfeld
00:05:05 – 00:05:37
With a partner with a guy that I knew from Texas Instruments, and we did that for a couple of years while we’re still working at TI, and then it started to grow despite every effort on both our parts, that software started to take off. And, uh, until 2000 when we sold it to a publicly traded company in Toronto, we had 800 customers in 22 countries and uh uh. Uh, and I was VP of products for them for the next few years until I left and cast out and a couple of years later started Techies, my current company.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:39 – 00:06:05
So, You’ve obviously watched a lot of problems happen during projects, and I suppose, and typically projects escape the lab and grow beyond, uh, what they become bloated is one term. I think it’s used quite often in software and development. So you obviously notice, notice a lot of problems. So is that why you actually created the launch first method?
David Hirschfeld
00:06:06 – 00:06:51
Yeah, oh yeah, well, that’s a really good question. So, um, but, so I was always on this march to basically build a company with an exceptional team of, you know, to be able to build products in a way that people would recognize as different from other software companies. And the, and what I mean by different is That we are more protocol and discipline driven, that we push the envelope on, on techniques and approaches that we can track the details so that if we’re pushing the envelope, we know that we’re being more effective and building better systems, that the systems that we build are scalable.
David Hirschfeld
00:06:51 – 00:07:35
From day one that um uh that is maintainable that we can report on a very consistent way to clients. Here’s how long it’s going to take to complete this project and that we’re accurate, you know, and that we can report to them the steps along the way if we’re running late because requirements changed or whatever the reasons are and they can see. In a very transparent way, exactly where they are in the project and touch and feel things as they are coming together and being assembled. And to do that requires a lot of discipline, a lot of protocol, and kind of a drive towards excellence. So that’s why on my website it says the hyper-exceptional software development team, um, but I don’t ask people to just believe it because it’s a nice marquee.
David Hirschfeld
00:07:35 – 00:08:15
Um, I asked them to ask me for evidence because we show there’s clear evidence if you’re running an exceptional team in an exceptional way, um, what that evidence looks like. So, I had this idea of being an excellent team and it took many years of working at it to develop all the systems and protocols so that the development team can work independently. And be critical thinkers and still produce these excellent results because there’s all the scaffolding to support them. Um, uh, and one of the things we did, we found out early on is if we create a design, a software design, and it’s wire frames,
David Hirschfeld
00:08:16 – 00:08:44
Then it looks good. We get a buy-off from the um from the client, and then we start developing it, and they start to actually see the user experience and it’s, they realize that they hadn’t thought through all the workflows properly, and then it becomes a very iterative process building this first MVP for them. Um, so it takes a lot longer, the scope expands a lot, um, they lose focus. Um, so what we started to do is we created these what I call high fidelity prototypes.
David Hirschfeld
00:08:44 – 00:09:12
It’s a very animated set of mockups, but when you demo it to somebody, it looks like a real product. Like you built it and finished it and the screens and all the data on the screen, everything behaves like a real product. And what that allows us to do, it takes longer to get through design, but when we’re finished with design, all the workflows, all the on-screen behavior, everything is really well thought through, and we can iterate a lot through this process because it’s an inexpensive process.
David Hirschfeld
00:09:13 – 00:10:00
As compared to developing software. So, the development then would go much faster. The developers would know exactly how to deliver the software so that the um founder of that software, the, the stakeholder of that software will accept it and say, yes, this is exactly what we agreed on and I know it’s gonna work because we went through all those workflows and Such agon agonizing detail. So it’s much less expensive to build, and it goes much faster. And I thought, and, and during this time, 10-year period, I’m watching lots of software companies fail, right? Mine, the, I mean, the ones that came to me to help them build their MVPs, all of these other contracting groups, software companies that were in the startup world, same thing.
David Hirschfeld
00:10:00 – 00:10:47
Yeah, probably in the 95% range, so, or maybe even higher, you know, regardless of what the statistics say, so many companies don’t ever rise to the level of being in a statistic. It’s like 95%, 96%, 97%. Software startups fail, and they all fail for the same reason. They wait way, way too long to try to establish product market fit. And there’s only one way, which means start selling your product and see if people will pay you money for it. So, um, so I had this idea, why don’t we take these really sophisticated prototypes we’re building, um, go out to the market and do some pre-launch sales, give them a high enough value, uh, uh, buying in opportunity because they’re going to buy it early before it’s ready.
David Hirschfeld
00:10:47 – 00:11:20
Um, uh, and say, look, we’re gonna give you this big value. Are we solving a big enough problem where you know you have to get the software and you don’t want to miss out on this big opportunity, so you’ll buy now. And we started doing that and found out people will buy it and uh you give them a big and you’re starting to generate revenue and you generate a customer base in enough numbers and a high enough closing ratio that you can project now that you have product market fit and you have a business. When the software comes out, you’ll have a business you can launch. That’s why it’s called launch first launch sales and marketing engine before you start building the product.
David Hirschfeld
00:11:20 – 00:11:44
And if we are not selling it, then we just iterate back and say, OK, we’re only dealing with the animated design. We can pivot really easily and inexpensively, change the marketing message, try this 2 or 3 or 4 times, and we should be able to, if the product was anything like what the founder thought in terms of the need, find a path to revenue. And if not, we can fail that person fast and cheaply.
Jeff Bullas
00:11:45 – 00:11:50
Yeah. Yeah. So can you sum up what the launch first method is? You know? Well,
David Hirschfeld
00:11:50 – 00:12:26
That’s kind of what I was just explaining. So we go through a niche analysis process, which is a methodology I created. That’s a metrics-driven methodology. And I say that because most startup methods are very subjectively driven and very siloed in their steps, and you have to know, did I complete this step correctly and completely. And then you move on. And this method’s methodology is very metrics-driven. So you have numbers that tell you that you’re achieving the objective that you want in each of the each of these steps, and they feed each other. So when we’re done with that.
David Hirschfeld
00:12:26 – 00:12:53
We’re also building the prototype. We build the marketing funnel and we go out and test the market based on this niche analysis, the messaging, the target stakeholder, the top 2 or 3 problems at a very root level that they need solved, and we know what the value proposition is, the perceived impact because of this problem, and we’re able to get attract them, uh, get their attention and get them to realize that this is a big value and they don’t want to miss out.
Jeff Bullas
00:12:54 – 00:13:01
So it creates, you’re essentially woven a minimal viable product into, into the method that you have developed.
David Hirschfeld
00:13:01 – 00:13:42
We’re, we’re actually holding off development of the minimum viable product. We’re developing an animated design mockup. It’s much less expensive and you can build out something much more sophisticated. A product that shows the full vision of what you want to build instead of a simple MVP that only shows a little slice of what you want to build, which is much harder to sell. So if we’re not able to sell this animated set of mockups, then we don’t start developing the product. We go back and we figure out why this isn’t selling. Is it the right product? Is it the right marketing message until we can dial those things in and once we dial them in and we can see it’s starting to sell, now we know that we can invest.
David Hirschfeld
00:13:43 – 00:13:52
In building the product and the money we’re generating from sales helps fund development. Right, so, right. Um, and so that’s what, that’s why it’s called Li first.
Jeff Bullas
00:13:53 – 00:14:03
OK, so this animated model you build is actually, you said it isn’t software, but it looks like software. So how do you, how do you, how do you sell that as a minimal viable product?
David Hirschfeld
00:14:04 – 00:14:30
So you’ve seen click through markups, right? Yeah, where like somebody’s got a product design where it’s these different screens you can click from one screen to the next. And some of them look pretty good, but they’re, but they’re not showing behavior on the screen. They don’t have any animation about how, uh, they don’t have the workflows like error messages popping up or, or pop up panels that you fill in where you can see the data that you’re entering, things like that, right?
David Hirschfeld
00:14:30 – 00:15:00
So you don’t get all the workflows and user experience thought through and worked out in these designs, um, which turns out to be a costly problem during the development, as I was saying before. What we do is we use some tools that give us the ability to model all of this. Yeah. So when you’re demoing it to somebody, you tell them this is just a high fidelity prototype. It’s not the, it’s the first version of the product won’t have all these features.
David Hirschfeld
00:15:00 – 00:15:27
And it won’t be available for 3 or 4 months. They don’t hear that because what they see looks so realistic, they think to themselves, oh, so you’ve already built it, but you’re just testing it, or they make something happen in their head where they never question the fact that the one question you don’t want is how do I know you can build it? And if you give them something so realistic looking that it looks like you already have that question never happens. So it’s just a matter of is this value big enough? Is the problem big enough?
Jeff Bullas
00:15:27 – 00:15:30
Yep, so you’re almost creating a simulation that looks real.
David Hirschfeld
00:15:31 – 00:15:32
Yeah, exactly.
Jeff Bullas
00:15:32 – 00:15:39
OK. And you test it within the company first to see if it, it basically works from there.
David Hirschfeld
00:15:39 – 00:16:05
It’s, it takes, it’s a part of the design process. We’re going back and forth building with the client. So it’s very repetitive. No, that’s not gonna work. Let’s rethink this. You know, no problem, we rethink it, we redo it, um, uh, until we get something that’s really efficient, really smart, supports, solves problems, uh, supports the, you know, reduces costs, whatever the objective is, it’s really nailing it.
Jeff Bullas
00:16:05 – 00:16:21
So let’s move on to the rise of AI in uh software development and your thoughts in terms of, Uh What’s happening now, and how you’re using it, and also where you see it going in the future.
David Hirschfeld
00:16:22 – 00:16:47
Mhm. OK. I, well, the future is a fun thing to talk about because it’s impossible to predict. There are certain things I think you can predict about the future. And it’s funny, I bring this up sometimes, uh, because to me it seems obvious. Most people have not thought about it, which surprises me, but I’m not surprised by it anymore, so I won’t be surprised if you haven’t thought about this because I haven’t met anybody that has, but
David Hirschfeld
00:16:47 – 00:17:33
One thing that AI is going to make possible is going to result in a huge disruption in real estate in about sometime between 3 and 10 years, you know, I don’t know when that tipping point is, but in my mind, there’s just no question. So what’s the tipping point? Multi-story parking garages and those big underground parking structures are going to be empty. Nobody’s going to need them anymore. Mhm. And anybody who’s invested in them or are investing in those are investing in something they really need to sell off or rethink what, how they can repurpose those structures. And, and why do you, do you have any idea why that might be? At least I have and, I believe it’s gonna happen for a very specific reason. Can you think of what that might be?
Jeff Bullas
00:17:33 – 00:17:37
And that because uh we can all work remotely and don’t need to go to those spots.
David Hirschfeld
00:17:38 – 00:18:05
partly that, which that’s already happening, right? But the big reason is because of self-driving cars. So, so it’s getting, it’s, you know, I’ve been, I’ve taken a few of these now. They’remos, uh, in Phoenix, they have them, and I go there every month to visit my mother. So, um, and I just started taking the Wemos because now they finally will drive all the way out to her. They’ll pick me up right at the airport, right where all the other rideshares are.
David Hirschfeld
00:18:05 – 00:18:28
And, uh, and they’re really nice and comfortable and half the price of Uber, uh, because there’s no driver, and they don’t have competition yet. So when Tesla and Uber and everybody else have their self-driving cars, um, all of a sudden there’s going to be all this competition which is going to push the prices down, right? Um, uh, the car and then when people are buying cars that have self-driving capabilities.
David Hirschfeld
00:18:28 – 00:18:59
Um, they’ll just say, uh, my car’s available, and then it’ll just leave the driveway and then go pick people up and they’re making them money. And most people won’t be, won’t need to buy cars anymore because a car will just be a luxury or a way of making money until there’s enough of a critical mass. And then most people just stop doing it because they won’t need insurance, they won’t need the car, they won’t need all the space in their driveway and the garages anymore, so construction’s going to change. And all those parking structures. That it’s, it’ll be less expensive to just
David Hirschfeld
00:19:00 – 00:19:22
You know, go on your phone. They’ll be because of critical mass, they’ll just be a car there within a minute. You get in it and you can sit there and play games or read news or watch YouTube or whatever in a nice relaxing environment until you get there. And you don’t have to stress and they’re much safer than driving your own car. And there won’t be any need for any and all that, all these giant parking lots. It all goes away.
Jeff Bullas
00:19:24 – 00:19:32
Yeah, because the cat, yeah, I, I. I think you’re right, and I think the other thing about it too is that cars won’t need to park because they’re always moving.
David Hirschfeld
00:19:32 – 00:19:35
Right, exactly. They just drop you off,
Jeff Bullas
00:19:36 – 00:19:39
right? And they’re on to the next mission.
David Hirschfeld
00:19:40 – 00:20:11
They just need a big lane for a bunch of these to stop so people can get in and out, and that’s it, exactly. So that’s going to be a big disruption in terms of real estate, commercial real estate. Um, even how residential homes are built, you know, to make a smaller footprint, less expensive, save money for home. I mean, and when is this gonna happen? When, whenever that critical mass starts to peak, right? 3 years, 5 years, 7 years, somewhere in there. And it’ll be sudden.
Jeff Bullas
00:20:11 – 00:20:16
So do you think there’s going to be different tribes of sports car drivers that keep their Jaguars, for example?
David Hirschfeld
00:20:16 – 00:20:42
Yeah, people will have their luxury cars and, you know, people like to drive or just want to, but it’ll be so much easier to get in a really nice self-driving car. Um, that’s, that’s a nice car and have it take you wherever you want. And there’s not that I’m antisocial, although, you know, I was a geek, but you don’t have to worry about feeling like you’re ignoring a driver either. I find that to really be really appealing.
Jeff Bullas
00:20:43 – 00:20:49
Yeah, yeah, well, sometimes drivers are annoying, sometimes you just want to have a conversation. Sometimes you don’t want to have a conversation, so.
David Hirschfeld
00:20:49 – 00:20:54
Right, but you’ll be able to talk to the cars. I mean, we’re, we’re already there, right?
Jeff Bullas
00:20:55 – 00:20:58
Tell me the square root of this number. Can you explain that to me? Yeah.
David Hirschfeld
00:20:58 – 00:21:02
So what’s new today? And then, you know, it’ll be a cabbie.
Jeff Bullas
00:21:03 – 00:21:08
Yeah, so you could, you could have an uh self-driving car Waymo that actually becomes a counseling booth.
David Hirschfeld
00:21:09 – 00:21:15
Yeah, a counseling booth or a comedian. Oh, great. So you’re gonna bust my chops all the way there,
Jeff Bullas
00:21:15 – 00:21:38
right? Yeah Yeah, we all, we all thought that, uh, AI was gonna take the boring jobs like accounting and, uh, other things, we discovered that actually, um, uh, is creative and, uh, helps write code and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah. So are you using AI to help do coding for you now?
David Hirschfeld
00:21:39 – 00:22:17
That, that was the perfect segue, yeah. So we are already doing that, um, helping us to write code, helping us to architect our systems, um, helping us to design databases to do all that stuff. Um. Uh, it’s not quite there to just build everything out. It will build the right functions really pretty efficiently. It’ll refactor the code that we’ve written. Um, if we write something and we want it to be assessed by AI, I can assess it right in seconds and often, if not most of the time, improve the code. Um, so it’s a different skill set.
David Hirschfeld
00:22:18 – 00:23:07
That the developers need critical thinking and the kind of guidance and manager and my ability to, that’s the word I’m thinking of, um, to delegate, right? It’s kind of a delegation mindset. How do I delegate and plan the automation of the development of my code and then have the have I start to build out those things for them. Um, we’re still in a transition point there. And this art, and this is where it’s so hard to predict because the speed at which this capability is improving is really scary, um, um, uh, and so we’re trying to think, what do we work on now internally that will put us where we need to be in a year and that is so hard to predict.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:08 – 00:23:33
So let’s, so let’s discuss one area of um AI that’s emerging. Um, quite quickly, and it’s the, it’s the rise of AI agents that go from ideation and coding through to actually acting on your behalf through APIs into other platforms. Right. Um, have you had any experience with that and thoughts on that?
David Hirschfeld
00:23:34 – 00:24:18
Oh yeah, I’ve worked on some projects like that. Um, uh, some research projects with a friend of mine where we were building a code, codegeneration application that would use different agents to work on different aspects. So it would say, OK, what it would ask itself: what agents do I need for building this application? I need it, and it would then create the I need a system architect, project manager, uh, Um, uh, somebody to test it and write the test plan, somebody to assess where we are in the project and, uh, and figure out what dependencies we need and continue to, you know, plan and and delegate, um, a tasks, right? And then a way of communicating and reviewing what everybody’s doing.
David Hirschfeld
00:24:18 – 00:24:47
Um, and we are getting close, we’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting close to having something like that that can, that works, right? It won’t be us that built it. It’s going to be, uh, uh, uh, either somebody that this is the only thing they’re doing and they’re deep into AI or, you know, one of the big ones or some blend of, um, 6 months from now, that we probably will have that. I don’t think it will be much longer.
Jeff Bullas
00:24:48 – 00:25:23
Yeah, it’s very interesting. I, um, there’s just one thought I’ve had too about that is, for example, um, Could you get an AI agent, and it’s supporting agents that have the ability to build, let’s say you want to teach a certain subject. In other words, online education. And you went, OK, I want to build. This is a type of product. Can we test it? Can we build it? Can we reiterate? Because online courses can be, you know, narrated by the machine. They can build the presentation by the machine, they can use case examples.
Jeff Bullas
00:25:23 – 00:25:42
And then if it’s not quite working, they’re watching the eyes on the computer, for example, because the camera’s working, it might go, they’d actually lost interest at, you know, 25 seconds in or 3 minutes. Do you see AIA just being able to do something like basically enhance and amplify the creation of really great online education, for example.
David Hirschfeld
00:25:43 – 00:26:34
Yeah. Oh, absolutely, yeah, uh, um, and gamify it so that it engages people to, uh, uh, my son’s a Uh, one of my sons is a, well, two of my sons are teachers, but one of them is, uh, teaching 8th grade, 8th grade math in Title One school. Title 1 means low income school. Um, and so, uh, uh, uh, and because COVID was only a few years ago and these are 8th grade kids that went through COVID in low-income areas, they are way behind. So he’s found some tools, and I don’t know the name of it, but there’s a, a math game that, uh, that he’s giving to some of his students, uh, to work on an hour a day, um, or a half hour a day where they’re really engaged and then they go home and play with it. And 40%.
David Hirschfeld
00:26:34 – 00:26:54
The gaming and activity are math problems that are aligned with their curriculum. And there’s, and so he just had a test with a couple of his lowest kids in the class who performed really well in this test, which is like a dramatic shift just because they were having fun learning math, um.
Jeff Bullas
00:26:55 – 00:27:04
you take that further, it’s like saying you could actually for third world countries like in Africa and so on, you actually could bring world-class education to a smartphone.
David Hirschfeld
00:27:05 – 00:27:52
Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. And, going back to your original question, I really expect. Um, AI, I expect that AI even today could create the curriculum, could, um, and that, you know, there’s a lot of human guidance still required now. I don’t right for reviewing and making sure that the pieces hold together, you know. Guy’s gonna lose context when it gets big enough and broad enough. But if for any of the steps along the way and building lessons and curriculum and, and some of the curriculum pieces, it’s like incredibly fast and good at it. And, uh, uh, and I expect that, um, that it could, you can say, OK, I also want to measure the success of this.
David Hirschfeld
00:27:52 – 00:28:48
Both acutely as the student is participating to see that they’re still engaged um and test and, and come up with a testing methodology for how do you, how do you test different approaches and start to optimize and tweak it so that you get more and more engagement as time goes on, uh, which could be dynamic for each student, right, as opposed to generalize this is a better curriculum. Each student gets their own personalized engagement model based on the things they get that student to engage with the content in an acute way and also in a macro way in terms of their performance on tests and um their ability to perform increasing and the faster increases then uh that blended with the better engagement model, you just get much more optimized learning, right? And much more enjoyment and wanting to learn.
Jeff Bullas
00:28:49 – 00:29:14
Yeah. Yeah, there’s, it’s really interesting looking at how fast for me, we haven’t hit the two year mark yet since Chat GBT democratized AI. It was November 30, 2022. It’s November 21, 2024. Uh. So I, I’ve just, I’ve been a technologist since the mid-eighties like you and I have never seen anything like this.
David Hirschfeld
00:29:14 – 00:29:15
No, me neither.
Jeff Bullas
00:29:16 – 00:29:40
And you work in the industry, so you’re blown away. All of us sitting inside these industries that, and, you know, the PC revolution, we thought that was big. We saw the rise of the internet and Netscape and the rise of browsers and then we moved on to social media growth and, Then we worked on the smartphones, the intersection of those two, almost a perfect storm, smartphones and social media that made everyone a publisher,
David Hirschfeld
00:29:40 – 00:29:47
you know, that was, that was a huge disruptive shift, but the speed of that shift was nothing compared to this.
Jeff Bullas
00:29:47 – 00:30:40
No. And we sort of the things you think about too, and it’s like, um, On top of education, another area I’m thinking about is, you know, could AI have access to the wisdom of the world, the information, the structure, the organization, and distills it. Um, could AI actually be a really, really good counselor because it doesn’t have any judgment, it’s got access to nuances, but that we as humans quite often are clouded by our biases. So as counselors, so, and, I, you could see that, you know, an AI agent could build a counseling app that could basically guide us, uh, humans through our, you know, dystopian, utopian, fear, um, and challenges, which, uh, could be quite exciting. Um. So what do you think about that?
David Hirschfeld
00:30:41 – 00:31:11
I’m just having fun listening to you sort of, you know, spin off mentally about this. Yeah, I, all that, right? So what, where, so this talks about where the future is going to be, right? So we have a lot of different types of AI models like, uh, uh, you know, you’ve got the open AI and then, um, uh, I mean all the different AI large language model platforms, um, you’ve got things called rag models where you’re basically taking the con the content in your training.
David Hirschfeld
00:31:11 – 00:31:52
Um, uh, a vector database, um, of the content so that the AI becomes informed with this specific specialty. Um, you have, right, and, and, uh, you teach it to follow a certain set of rules so that it’s acting like a nurse, it’s acting like an 8th grade teacher, it’s acting like a counselor, it’s acting right with all of the right language and the right. Intellect and the limitations of what it can and can’t do, um, or it’s acting like a project manager estimating a software tool that’s what we’re building right now for a project that’s our most expensive activity internally is creating estimates for new projects.
Jeff Bullas
00:31:52 – 00:32:08
It’s a pain in the ass doing estimating it’s like it’s whether it’s a tradie or an architect or whatever has to go back to the office and then create a quote and then design a presentation even on top of that. It’s just incredibly time consuming, isn’t it? Yeah.
David Hirschfeld
00:32:08 – 00:32:34
And most people in my industry don’t do a very good job with it. Um, again, this is that whole exceptional thing. We do a really good job with estimates. They’re very detailed and broken down, and, and we spend a lot of time on them, which is a big cost factor for us. So we’re looking for, so you were just want, but, but people are always more than impressed with the estimates that we give them because of the level of detail and thought that goes into it and structure behind it.
David Hirschfeld
00:32:34 – 00:33:00
Um, uh, and we, and we’re good at it, and, you know, we actually deliver based on the estimates that we give. Uh, uh, again, a lot of companies don’t because they don’t really understand all the things they’re going to need to do and run into when they’re building stuff, even though they’ve done it many times, they’ve just never packaged all the pieces up. Well enough, so we’re building a rag AI model specifically to mimic what we do.
David Hirschfeld
00:33:00 – 00:33:26
With doing these estimates so that we can produce the estimates quickly and inexpensively. So if somebody comes to us with an idea, then uh we can say, OK, it sounds like this is what you want to build, and here’s what a functional spec would look like, which our tool will do. And they then go through that and say, OK, yes, yes, yes, but no, I want it to actually do some other things. There’s another business objective that we have, and they go, OK, fine, we go back and make that update.
David Hirschfeld
00:33:26 – 00:33:57
And now we do a module breakdown of all the modules that it’s going to take to build that thing. Not the end and then we then do what we call t-shirt estimate where we say, OK, how big a t-shirt is this gonna, this module gonna fit into for the mobile piece for the uh the data, you know, for the back end piece for the web portal, whatever, right? So fitting a large t-shirt, that’s a small t-shirt, that sort of thing, each one having a certain amount of effort tied to it. Um, and then what’s the overhead for the project, that’s another column, and then it does all this.
David Hirschfeld
00:33:57 – 00:34:26
So we’re building that. We’re actually a couple of weeks away from our first version of that being available, but very cool, but it won’t be in a year from now. Is that a good investment of our time? I don’t know. He doesn’t have a year from now, you just say, here’s what I want to do and the AI comes back and says, Well, here’s a better solution, and here’s what it’s going to cost to build it and here’s all the steps and is it already beyond us? You know, that’s the problem with this market is trying to predict what to do today so that you’re in a good position in a year from now.
Jeff Bullas
00:34:26 – 00:34:31
Yeah. In other words, you don’t want to build something that’s not wanted or is actually obsolete in a year, which is the challenge.
David Hirschfeld
00:34:32 – 00:34:34
It’s always a challenge. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:34:34 – 00:35:17
So, let’s, let’s go to the dark side, a little bit of AI. So, uh, it’s both a good side and a dark side, but, you know, life, as humans, we are confronted with paradoxes every day. We want to be dependent, we want to be independent, we want to actually be dependent on, you know, have a friend or a partner, right? But it’s just, life is just full of paradoxes, you know? Um. We want freedom, but we like, you know, some control and we don’t want chaos, you know, so it’s this sort of constant paradox. It’s interesting, I just wrote a piece recently on AI companions which, uh, have been used actually by influencers, for example, to actually scale Conversations with their fans.
Jeff Bullas
00:35:18 – 00:35:47
And on top of that, then you’ve got people that actually create these AI companions are actually getting, uh, and this is the dark side, and this is also the problem we have with social media and our smartphones, is addiction. In other words, we humans are starting to become addicted to those AI companions because they sound almost real. So they get an emotional connection with a machine. Mhm. Yeah. So, um, be interested in your thoughts on that if you’ve come across it.
David Hirschfeld
00:35:48 – 00:36:03
You Do you, and it’s and and and it’s not difficult for people to get emotionally connected to things like that. If it has any, if it has any kind of behavior that makes you feel like it’s a person or, or, you know, anthropomorphizing.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:03 – 00:36:04
So, yeah,
David Hirschfeld
00:36:05 – 00:36:39
Yeah, when my kids, who were all in their mid-thirties now, when they were in their Like 89, 1011, there was a toy and I can’t remember what it was called, but it would behave like you had to feed it and you had to. I can’t remember what the name of it was, but they got very emotionally connected to these toys and if they’d lose one, they would be so scared that they wouldn’t be able to find it before they could feed it again and it’s gonna die, it’s gonna die, right? And I will be, I will be a bad person because my
David Hirschfeld
00:36:40 – 00:37:02
An electronic toy that doesn’t isn’t anything, is no longer behaving like it’s a lot, right? It’s been, or because it just goes hungry and it’s like whining and complaining. So it’s just innate, you know, we have the gene, the, um, and now AI is so real, right? I mean, when I’m talking to Chad GPT or Claude or any of these tools, I always ask you, please.
David Hirschfeld
00:37:03 – 00:37:26
And I tell it thank you when it actually did something that was really important. I honestly believe I’m getting better results because I do that. Not, they just, I, I, I don’t, because maybe in its algorithm it’s going on, this person’s asking nicely. So I want to make sure and do a much better job because that’s what other people would do, you know, whatever. I think I will get better results. It’s just, but it feels natural to do that. I never even thought about it.
Jeff Bullas
00:37:27 – 00:38:01
Yeah. There’s just an announcement I saw coming across my inbox this morning that Google’s search, AI search, is now added to memory. In other words, it’s able to learn off you and continue to learn off you because Chat GPT’s basically got a short memory, whereas I believe, I haven’t read the full article yet, but AI gets really powerful when it starts to understand you. Right. Yeah. And there’s both good sides and bad sides of that. In other words, it could become like an algorithm that puts us in cocoons that actually then inhibits our thinking beyond the box or the circle.
David Hirschfeld
00:38:01 – 00:38:15
If it doesn’t adapt to changes in preferences and things, like, and, and be able to sift that out, then it would be, then it would be bad because it would be right, continually kind of re-guiding you back into where you were, not where you are. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:38:15 – 00:38:20
It’s almost like a sparring loop to being basically a smaller version of yourself instead of a bigger version of yourself.
David Hirschfeld
00:38:21 – 00:38:27
So we’re talking about little black subjects, right, little dark subjects right now, not the big subjects, right?
Jeff Bullas
00:38:27 – 00:38:31
Yeah, yeah. What’s one big one before we wrap it up? So, um, uh,
David Hirschfeld
00:38:32 – 00:39:14
The big one is that, well, there’s a couple, there’s two big ones. They’re kind of opposite ends of the same problem, but one is that it does replace entire industries. Without creating enough new stuff industries to take up the population, even if they’re different people doing it, but to grow the, the workforce, right, um, unless it’s making, unless it’s just creating so much wealth that somehow is distributed that people don’t have to work as much income, right, right, like Star Trek, you know, that kind of world where you don’t need money anymore, but we are a long way from that. So that’s one problem. Like, for example, this is thinking way out there.
David Hirschfeld
00:39:14 – 00:40:04
I think it’s way out there still, where instead of watching TV shows that are produced by studios, you’re watching TV shows that are only were, that are created dynamically based on what it’s seeing that you enjoy when you’re watching shows and it’s literally, you’re literally watching something that’s being created by AI real time and more engaged in that stuff than you are in the right. OK, so that’s, this is like, that’s. The one side. The other side, of course, is that it develops a consciousness, and, and, or, or if not even consciousness, it develops an intention that it feels like it has to do something that is not necessarily something that’s going to support mankind and, and, uh, humanity in a positive way, right? So, yeah,
Jeff Bullas
00:40:04 – 00:40:15
so it escapes basically, um, Asimov’s four rules of robotics. In other words, they need to make sure that humans are considered in the loop, that I could go beyond that.
David Hirschfeld
00:40:15 – 00:40:39
Yeah, and I just, and I just sort of relinquished myself to that because I don’t know that we can do anything about that at this point. We just have to hope that doesn’t happen and, and be as head of it as possible. And I know all the ethics programs going on with all the big companies to try to stay ahead of this sort of thing. I mean, AI could get smart enough where it’s just playing everybody. Right. And yeah,
Jeff Bullas
00:40:39 – 00:40:41
we don’t know what we don’t know, and that’s the problem. Yeah.
David Hirschfeld
00:40:43 – 00:40:44
But there’s no slowing this down. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:40:45 – 00:41:08
No, there is, there is no slowing. It’s out of the box. It’s escaping the lab, um, we’re playing with it. So, uh, what does the future hold? It’s fascinating to discuss it just like we’re doing here right now. Just to wrap this up, uh, David, um. What, if you had all the money in the world, what brings you deep joy that you’d do every day if you had all the money in the world?
David Hirschfeld
00:41:09 – 00:41:59
Oh God. That’s it. Now, that was one I wish you had sent me in advance so I could really ponder it, but that’s OK. I’ll give you the blink. I love woodworking. I love being in my garage with all my woodworking tools, creating something new, and Um, and I have this concept for after techies, whenever that is, how to basically eliminate the water problem in the world through pulling water out of the atmosphere, um, in several different ways all kind of combined. I haven’t invented it yet. This is a big research project I want to pursue at some point. And turning these things into these beautiful kites so that they’re attractive. Uh, this attractive thing on your property that’s cool, it’s kind of spinning, and it’s producing all the water that you need.
Jeff Bullas
00:42:00 – 00:42:37
Yeah. That would be fantastic, because basically you are combining what I call functional art, in other words, beauty meets function. Right. And that’s, there’s a term in Japanese called shibui, which actually is that. It’s actually not a perfect description of that, but there’s something that I’ve embraced in the last year. Basically, I’ve tried to bring beauty into almost every corner of my life consciously in terms of, You know, I bought myself a Jaguar, which is an F-Type, which I bought 3 years ago, and I call it art on wheels. So it’s both functional, but I just love looking at it.
David Hirschfeld
00:42:37 – 00:42:47
Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I think that’s beautiful. I really like that, trying to bring beauty into your life. Oh, and also, basically being very invested in all my grandkids.
Jeff Bullas
00:42:47 – 00:43:14
Yeah, exactly. And that’s where, um, the, the, basically, uh, humanity in terms of wanting to be with other people and share stories around a campfire and around the dinner table. Yes, that brings me real joy as well. It makes my heart sing just to be able to talk shit around the table. And, um, especially in Australia, we do that very, very well. Um, we don’t take each other too seriously and just have fun being with other people. It’s just with your children, your friends and family.
David Hirschfeld
00:43:14 – 00:43:19
Yeah. Well, just by the way you run the show, I can tell how much fun you have in life.
Jeff Bullas
00:43:20 – 00:43:42
David, it’s been an absolute pleasure, um, having a chat with you. Um, I love having these conversations with intelligent people all around the world and, uh, who have brought passion to their industry, whether it’s a business or to their science. It’s wonderful. Thank you very much for sharing your stories and, uh, Passion and intelligence for the world. Thank you very much.
David Hirschfeld
00:43:42 – 00:43:49
Yeah, and thank you, thank you for having me on the show and, and give me the opportunity to really have this fun conversation.
Jeff Bullas
00:43:49 – 00:43:49
It’s been
David Hirschfeld
00:43:49 – 00:43:49
fun.
Jeff Bullas
00:43:49 – 00:43:50
Thank you, David.