Yeah.

Like I think there's, you know, this important concept with large language models where they're effectively in this battle to train on the world's information.

They all are, you know, fighting to be, you know, building artificial general intelligence, AGI, and whoever wins, I guess, is, you know, the, the model that, you know, everybody ends up using, right? And so for me, it's like when I think about that, I think of the board level metrics like, you know, at OpenAI, Anthropic, what are they trying to encourage companies to do? And I think that they are all really trying to ch- chase the world's information, get it ingested.

I heard a stat the other day that they're hopefully going...

Not hopefully, they're aiming or expecting that most of the world's information would actually be fully ingested and, and trained on in these large language models by 2028.

[laughs]

Um, I would say that what pe- people don't realize at this point is that, um, we're obviously really wanna make sure that our brands turn up well and, and whether they turn up at all, right? That's important.

But what happens from here is that the main user of our website becomes an AI agent.

What's the first thing you look to automate in a service-based business?

I would say once you've brought all the context in, so things like proposals you've developed, your emails and your kind of voice and how you write, any documentation on kind of the way things are done, I look at the fundamentals of that company and it's like, okay, to grow a services-based business, you know, do you have any leads that are coming in right now? Let's go to content and let's get something moving and at least some outreach or something along those lines.

Get an acquisition channel running.

You don't want to have a situation where you've got a services business that's relying on, you know, one customer.

Like, you know, that's 50% of your revenue.

So, you know, as a founder, I've spoken to founders that freak out about that.

So that's the first piece.

One question we ask every guest on the podcast, and we kind of covered it previously, but if you were to start a business, you spoke about starting Finder again and who you'd have in the team, but with this new business, starting it from scratch, what are the first three hires you'll make and why?

Wow

...

I remember there's, like, five ways I used to think about it.

I was like, they are either gonna upskill and, like, learn something new.

Like, so say they worked as a writer and they wanted to figure out video.

I was like, "Okay," you know, "Give them an opportunity to, you know, work on video only," say.

Um, you know, an opportunity as a leadership role, so...

... sort of find yourself getting, uh, get- getting re- uh, you know, caught up in things.

Meaning what exactly?

There's, I think there's five ways that people like to experience some level of change in their career.

It's like, first and foremost, the opportunity might be leadership.

So it's like...

And leadership is not management.

Leadership is like, okay, we need to go and launch this new division, and we need someone to go and think about it and spend a few months figuring it out, do some reconnaissance and come back with a plan.

Are you willing to lead this for us? And it's like, yeah, that's awesome.

Uh, what's the difference between match and exceed or just copying what a competitor's doing?

What are some things people can do to help them get found?

Well, I mean, the interesting thing with, with a podcast is that it's a walled garden.

Often Spotify and Apple don't make these transcripts publicly available.

So I think the first thing is, like, probably having a website, which is kinda crazy to say it, but I think for discovery, like, you know, obviously you can do it natively inside a platform, but I think off-platform's really interesting.

You know, having a website that, you know, has the transcript, you know, takeaways, all these sort of things, I think alongside the pod is really cool.

[lip smacks] Um, with AI search, like, it's, it's changed a lot in the sense that we used to expect free traffic from Google, and now it's really about, like, ensuring your brand actually turns up, and there's some fundamentals that you need to have in place to make that happen.

You know, pretty much at this point, uh, you used to have to worry about just your website or just, you know, kind of the things that you own, but now suddenly you've got this surface area which is, you know, what's being said about my brand on other websites, including review websites, and suddenly Reddit's important, and it's not just where-

Yeah.

You then scaled the business into 80 countries, is that right?

Yeah, at its peak, at its peak, yeah, we had a large footprint, and largely off the back of this crypto opportunity because what I did inside the business was I was always spotting opportunities and signal, like where whenever there's a large amount of new information, new products and services released, there's a need for aggregation.

People need to understand how to make decisions around this stuff.

They need information standardized in such a way that they can know the factors that go into making a call, what to ultimately apply for or select as a service provider.

And two things happened at the same time which laid the foundations for international expansion of Finder.

The pre-reqs that, pre-requisites all that we bought finder.com off somebody that was associated with this, the squatting and domain ownership of seinfeld.com, and if it wasn't for such a well-known court case, we wouldn't have ever been able to find who owned finder.com.

But turns out this guy in the Cayman Islands was willing to sell it, so we bought that.

For you personally.

And, uh, enjoyed it enough to be prepared to do again.

Oh, absolutely.

And for me, it's like, you know, I love the data, and I, I'd love to run again and go, "You know what? I'm, I'm lighter now.

I'm much fitter.

I've got, you know, better habits each day.

I'm, you know, I'm doing cardio in the mornings, and when I can, I squeeze in the weight training." I probably should do that in reverse, uh, more weight training.

Um, that's what, certainly what my trainer's saying.

Microsoft owns, and Microsoft owns Copilot.