Compilation Episode (Part 4): How Mid-Career Professionals Can Lead and Grow With AI

So if you're a mid-career professional-

Mm-hmm

... does AI now provide you with the opportunity to become an entrepreneur easier than in the past?

Yes, fundamentally, and, and as we were just talking about, like, what sets successful founders apart in this future world is proprietary data and insights.

Mid-career professionals versus these 26-year-olds coming out of school have experience, have an understanding of a customer, have access to a network.

They likely have proprietary data in a space that they have been working in, and using that can now go and build the good enough with basically no resources now, right? Like, you don't have to raise money to get somewhere meaningful with, you know, the first iteration of what you're building, uh, even to the point where you could take it to a pilot customer and get some real revenue, right? Like, it is so much easier to get started now.

Um, and I liken it to, you know, if you look at in, like, the 2000s, Pets.com, bless their hearts, um, they were selling pet food over the internet, and it was a total bust.

And in 2017, Chewy comes out and sells pet food over the internet, and it's a huge, successful public company, and you're like, "Uh, same idea.

What was different?" Everything was different.

Hmm.

Right? In the Pets.com era, you had to own your own servers.

You had to hire your own, uh, uh, operations customer service folks.

You had to store your own inventory and warehouse it and then do the logistics of packing and shipping.

You, um, were processing credit cards in a moment where we didn't have great encryption standards, and customers were not comfortable sharing that information over the internet.

So the behavior wasn't there, the trust wasn't there, and then the cost structure of getting started was astronomical.

2017 comes around.

Now you can build an e-commerce company on Shopify to get started.

Are you gonna scale it on Shopify? Probably not.

Hmm.

But you can get started to see if there's a there there.

You can outsource your inventory and your logistics to a third-party logistics provider.

You can have, uh, different, uh, you know, plug-in tools that allow you to have access to customer service, even real people customer service, but at a fractional level.

You can get everything up and running in a day, and you get to take advantage of existing customer behavior and a safety trust, uh, infrastructure that now exists that you didn't have to pay for.

Hmm.

And so I liken sort of that shift to what we're seeing now, where, well, even if you could build something on Shopify, you probablyNeeded to find someone who understands Shopify, 'cause if you don't want just the plain templates and you wanna tinker, now you're getting into the HTML and the CSS, and that's a little bit intimidating, even if it's not that complex from a, a concept point of view.