Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
If you have an existing large SaaS business that is established, has customers as revenue is profitable, how do you think about taking a non AI native solution and adapting it and adopting AI into the solution for your customers and for yourself as a business? I think this is the big question a lot of us are wrestling with right now as we look at the opportunity here and say, hey, I got to get in that game. But I'm just. I'm not a ChatGPT rapper. This week I chat with Anthony Eden from DNsimple. DN simple is a tool that helps companies and products make DNS kind of management a lot easier. He's been doing this a while and he has really kind of grounded perspective, I think, on chasing new technologies and new trends. We talk about that a little bit, but we also talk about how he has been a convert in a bit and he was really skeptical of AI at the beginning, like I and most of us were. And he has seen the light now and he's all in on it. And he's using AI internally for himself and his team and for their customers in some really interesting ways. And Anthony brings up some very specific considerations that we should all have as we look at the AI landscape and how it can affect us and our business and our customers. Hope you enjoy this conversation with Anthony Eden.
So I think the place I want to start is you and I both run businesses that are not AI native. And I don't know about you, but I have an enormous amount of FOMO right now. Seeing all these Cursor and Windsurfer and all these rapper companies who are taking advantage of the rising tide. Like we saw for a while, like in Covid, especially the second coming of podcasting, we saw enormous growth, basically did nothing for it. I feel like we're missing that right now by not being an AI native company or product. Like, do you. You guys aren't either, right?
[00:02:03] Speaker B: Like, do. Yeah. Dan, simple does not have. It's. We're definitely not AI first.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Yeah, do you.
You've been doing this long enough. Like, maybe you don't get fomo. Like, I do, but. But, like, do you think about that? Like, hey, how do we take advantage of this opportunity?
[00:02:18] Speaker B: I mean, it's definitely come up in conversations. Team members at DNsimple who are far more passionate than others about it as a business. As you mentioned, I've been doing this now for 15 years, so I kind of don't. I try not to chase a trend and instead focus on, okay, what can we actually do for our customers or for our team or for the business with this new technology that's coming out. So as an example, with AI, we've been extremely cautious. When generative AI started showing up, I was probably one of the bigger skeptics tactics out there. I said, there's this is. It's just a toy, really. It's. The quality is low.
I'm not gonna invest too much. And I was like this for quite a while. And then last year my CTO said, hey, I want to show you something I was doing with, with Chat GPT in this particular case, or Claude, I can't. He's doing it with one of the tools. But he was like, oh, it was Chat GPT because it's the latest version. He's like, I want to, I, I write scripts to analyze data. Right? Is what he's. He's telling me. And I wrote and I went through all this, this work to write some Ruby scripts to analyze a bunch of data. And I was thinking, I wonder if I could do this well with one of the Gen AI solutions. So he has a PRO account, so it's all protected, you know, and he was taking like this d. Taking out data that has all the sensitive information removed, but has essentially what he wants. And he, he's like, all I really want to do is take this raw data and kind of mix it together and output a CSV. And he started working with it. And when he was demoing it, he said, I had spent hours writing the scripts to clean the data, to augment the data with information from the public Internet, things like that. And in 10 minutes with the right prompt, he had the exact same output. And he, and when he showed me that, that was kind of like, okay, we've, in my opinion, we've crossed the threshold where now I can see where this is, is far more interesting than it was in the past. And I wouldn't say I was afraid of missing out. I said, now's the time when I can start really thinking about this because it's reached that point where I think it's viable enough to do useful things for the customers, for the team or for the business.
[00:04:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And so we call it Team Pink and Team Purple. Within Castus, we have like internal facing like, how can we use this for ourselves? That has been interesting and I want to talk about that. And we have Team Purple, which is like customer facing product stuff. Right. And everybody, we're a team of eight people, so everybody's on both teams, but we think about them quite differently. Because I think, I think they are right. Like, it's just, it's chat, GPT, it's Claude, it's replit, it's cursed cursor, whatever for our internal productivity. And then it's like, hey, how can we build AI into the product? That seems like not the right way to say it, but how can we augment our customer experience with AI in the product? Or kind of the two camps.
Yeah. The first time it came out, I was like, this is amazing. This is going to change everything. There was definitely a trough in my excitement leading up to about six months ago where I was like, this sucks. And then I think it got a lot better. We understand it a lot better probably around the same time as your developers going through this. Like, wow, like, okay, we figured out how to use this thing. We as a world really and have been like quite hot on it for a while.
Is most of the place you're using it internally as, like for productivity, or are you all building it into the product?
[00:06:05] Speaker B: So there's definitely been more use internally, I think. And a lot of it's been kind of experimentation by different team members to do different things. And what we agreed upon as a team is that the first thing we.
[00:06:17] Speaker A: Were going to do is we were.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Going to, before we really started diving into this is we wanted to set some policies for ourselves as to how we treat data, how we. What data is open and available for us to start working with, how we kind of want to order the work that we do. And I think we've chosen a path where we take public data is kind of the easy one. Right. So augmentation of the experience around data that, like stuff that we've already published or data that's out there, that's public, and making that easier to use is an easy first step, I think. And so for us, that's one of the ones that we're like, okay, thumbs up, we can do this. And so we're already starting to look at how that might be something we can do. We actually. So, for example, we're looking at how can we. And it's probably pretty common, how can we make our support system better? So we have search on our support and the first thing we started doing is, well, let's look at the search that we have and just make it better. General experience without AI. But. But in our heads we know that we want to see if we can make it better with summarization with generative AI. Interestingly enough, when we were starting this research, we found that no Generative AI company was using generative AI on their support documentation. And we're like, wait a minute, there's something going on here. And that's when we went dug a little deeper and it turns out there was actually some court cases out there about how a company had used generative AI on something and they that generative AI had a hallucination and they had to honor that hallucination for their customers. It was like a discount that it hallucinated or something like that.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: Oh my gosh.
[00:07:55] Speaker B: And so we're like, okay, let's be a little cautious about this and make sure that we aren't going to be causing serious trouble with it. I think that's the important first step is understanding that it is getting better. But it's still a conglomeration of information that's pulled from a lot of different sources, all the different AI tools out there. It's not facts necessarily, it's the Internet. And the Internet can have a bunch of non factual data. And so we have to look and say how do we trust that we're going to be able to give this to our customers and it's not going to lead them astray, especially when it comes to something like DNS. The last thing we want to do is have them configuring their DNS incorrectly because a generative AI tool summarized it incorrectly.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
So interesting. We are going down the same path currently. Um, they use Help Scout Search. We looked at the analytics there, adding keywords and blah blah, blah, blah blah. That's always a part of like KPIs for the support team.
And I went to them about a month ago and I was like, we're using this tool. We're using this tool. It's called DocSpot. DocSpot AI. It, it integrates with HelpSpot Help, Help Scout reads all of your docs. You can feed it your whole blog and your whole website. It goes and crawls and all that kind of stuff. It has an escape hatch where you can send a message to a customer or to the customer support team. All that is good and interestingly had a healthy to large amount of skepticism and resistance from the team in using it.
I think a lot of it was well placed and they listened to the podcast and this is not a surprise.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: Right?
[00:09:41] Speaker A: A lot of it was well placed in saying I don't want it to give people the wrong answers.
And I'm like, I totally hear you. I don't want it to give them the wrong answers either. But a couple of things have happened since we implemented it. One, our support docs are better. Right, because it's trained on the support docs. So if it's giving the wrong answer, the support docs aren't clear. Right. Or they're not laid out in a way that the AI and LLM can make sense of.
So the opportunity is improve the support docs so that the bot can understand them better and give people the answer right away.
The other part of it though is we talk about not the 80 20, but the 95,5 of support, which is like, if we can help 80 or 95% of the people really well, really quickly and we just can't help some people, then then that's fine. And it applies to. And that's not. Not just fine, but that's appropriate because like you could spend a hundred hours on a customer that pays you $19 a month and you're fucked. Like, you've just lost so much money and all of these other people are suffering because of it. I look at this as like a magnification of that is like if we can help 100% of the people correctly 95% of the time and, and it costs 80 bucks a month. Fuck yeah, we're doing it, you know, and we have the analytics to see when it messes up so we can go through and iteratively, you know, replace it. And now like just now we're, you know, the team is saying like, hey, like I saw this area where it asked a question and it totally would have been a ticket and it answered it and the person didn't have this ticket because of it.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. And I think, yeah, you're spot on there. It's helping create a better experience in certain cases, but it has to be monitored. And that's, that's the thing. You've set up those guardrails and, and I think also you can't start from something that's broken. Like you were saying, like if you have a bad support page, not bad, but let's say the information is out of date or it's hard to understand and parse normally or what have you that's going to reflect in the output. Like it's. You can't put junk in and not expect junk out.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: So first we have to fix that. And so that's why the first thing we were doing, we broke this project that we're working on to improve our customer support search functionality into. First, let's fix the search functionality without AI and then we can decide if generative AI actually Creates a better experience and gives the results that people are looking for. The summarization that people are looking for in a quicker way.
[00:12:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, 100%.
Okay. So I want to go back. I want to go back to this fomo.
So y'all are like us, not natively kind of AI tool. How are you as a founder? Because I think that, like, we have this need for the right energy as a founder, like, I want to be mostly excited and a little nervous, you know, all the time. How do you channel that with AI in your product or not like that you're not using AI in your product.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: So we're not using it yet. The my feelings about it in terms of from a founder perspective, again, is all centered on three parties, right? The customer, the team, and the business. And so every time we look and think, what are we going to do Next? Because every 10 weeks, we start a new cycle of work that we're going to do, and we're always preparing in advance of that to try to figure out what is it that's interesting that we want to do and we try to balance. Let's make sure we have some things that are for the customers, some things that are for the business, and some things that are for the team. And then right now the question is, we have an objective of the year is like, we want to deploy at least one generative AI project.
And so how do we get from. We want to have these three groups who want to serve to. We have deployed one generative AI project, if that makes sense.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: And one per group or one for the whole.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: Well, minimum. Our key result is one for the whole company, really. That's customer facing that. We'd like to get to the point where we feel something that benefits our customers because we can use it internally, and I have a feeling we will. We're taking kind of a different approach to how we deal with it internally, but externally, I think that if there's value there to be had and we don't explore it, then we're kind of doing a disservice to our customers. We want to ensure that we're exploring it in a way that's useful to them, whatever that may look like, but also in a fashion that's safe. And so every time we get start planning about that, that's where I channel my excitement. Right. I have that. That I get my excitement to. Okay, now there's. Here's a bunch of known problems that we could potentially solve.
Are any of these a case where we might want to investigate whether Genitive AI can solve the problem better than us building something ourselves that isn't, that's around something else to solve that same problem. I'll give you an example once. One example that we've talked about this is not on a time. We don't really generally run timelines that are public or anything like that as far as feature release. But one of the things we talked about is right now we have a means for exporting your list of domains from Dan simple as a CSV file, but we had to build the functionality to collect together the fields we wanted to export as a CSV file. And there's really no filtering, there's no searching, there's nothing like this.
Wouldn't it be great if, you know, that's how it always starts, right? Wouldn't it be great if somebody could say, give me a report with these fields and I want to order it by this and sum up these things. That's the kind of thing that I can imagine that building that ourselves or trying to find an off the shelf tool that doesn't do that and a thousand other things we don't need seems painful. Whereas potentially with generative AI, we can solve that problem, that one little problem, in a way that would get our customers there quicker and cost us a lot less to build. So that means less time, less money and bring it out to them. So that's an example of something that we, we've talked about internally and said, maybe that's an interesting thing, but it opens up a can of worms. And that's where you talked about the, the other side of the founder, which is I have to have a bit of fear on everything that I do. And of course the first thing I jump to is like, how do we protect our customers information? I don't want to risk that. And so those two get balanced out during the part of our development cycle where we talk about problems and we plan for potential solutions.
[00:16:24] Speaker A: That's so interesting. So we don't have private information really. It's a podcast, it's public, anyone can go access it and do the stuff that we would do.
So I don't know that we think about privacy. Like our current project is taking your file and generating a bunch of repurposed content. So we transcribe already. So we're going to do show notes and social posts, email, all this kind of stuff, super straightforward.
We're just going to send it to the service that we use for transcription.
It's already there, right. I would have no problem sending it to Anthropic for instance, like we just do it and it's fine. Like we don't need our own model, all this kind of stuff. Like would you imagine you need your own model? Are there like secure, more secure services that like you would have to use because you have more sensitive data?
[00:17:20] Speaker B: That's a good question. I, I honestly don't know if we, I doubt we'd really need our own models. I don't think so. Maybe we would need it. Augmented models. So what they call them rag, basically using RAG as a way to update the results. We definitely would have to go with a vendor or a product. Either we'd have to run something internally that is totally legitimate, like we might run something in our own infrastructure or we go with a vendor in the same way that we would go with a vendor like Amazon for, you know, holding customer data or a COLO facility that's going to have physical servers. Like, the fact is there's always going to be other, not always, but the vast majority of time, especially with small businesses, we're going to depend on other vendors to bring things to us and we're going to need a contractual relationship that protects the data that's going in and out. So I think this is kind of the same type of thing. What we wanted to avoid and the very first thing we said when we started, when any of this started coming up a year and a half ago, was don't take any customer data and put it into a public facing system for querying. Like don't put into ChatGPT's public interface because we don't know, we can't trust what anybody's going to do with it, no matter what they say, because we don't have a contract with them.
So if we move to the point where we do start dealing with customer data and we are looking to process it and to get summarizations out of these generative AI tools or other output. Whatever it is, it's going to have to be with a vendor or a system that we have an agreement with that we can trust that that data is going to be protected. Yeah, just like any other vendor.
[00:19:01] Speaker A: Sure. I got to believe, like whether it's OpenAI or anthropic, these companies have big, huge customers doing really sensitive data on them and they are robust, just like AWS would be or Microsoft Cloud or whatever. Right.
[00:19:20] Speaker B: I agree with you. I have to, I have to imagine they see, they see the potential for the risk for disclosing information for one of their customers. They must be treating that as a high priority security item. But I don't, I trust, but I verify. Right. So no matter who we choose, in the end, and I would say anybody who's considering integrating this has to remember that you have to verify that you have contractual agreements that this stuff will be protected and mechanisms to ensure that if a breach happens that it's very clear who's responsible, what the, what's going to happen afterwards, who's going to get notified, all the things that go along with protecting customer data.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
Okay. So for you personally, right, as a founder, what, what are you using and what are you excited about?
[00:20:09] Speaker B: So I have used Perplexity quite a lot. I actually started switching to using Perplexity for search and I actually really, really like it. Like it's, it is absurd how good it's gotten at giving me good, good results with references. And that's the part that's super interesting. That was different than say when I was playing with chat GPT. With chatGPT originally I was getting something, but I had no idea, I had no idea where the sources, the source data was coming from. And the fact that Perplexity does that and does it really well and elegantly in their interface, regardless of which device I'm on, has been really, really awesome. So I've been using that personally as a way to do research, to understand market movements, to understand things like competitor research. It's not perfect and I think in the, for example, it's shallow right now. I noticed that if I want to go deep, I can go deep vertically so I can dig into information about to a certain extent about a certain topic, but I can't go deep wide. In other words, I can't get a lot of information that I then can go, oh, now I want to filter this down more. I think with some of the new products that they're releasing is, what is it called, Deep thought or something like that? Deep research. It's a new thing from, from those folks that make Perplexity. Yeah, I think that's where the next step is. Like they'll allow you to do larger scale research and I find that to be really interesting and fascinating. I do hope that it's. Someday we'll get to the point where we'll have true databases of facts that we can use to analyze as opposed to the general Internet. I've spoken to some of my other tech friends who have been far more interested in this and some of the ideas is like, wow, what if we were dealing with RDF data like this relational data format where you have fact data that's proven facts that has a reference and using that as the source data for at least some of this. And I was like, that's pretty interesting. Right? So fact, I think we're still a little short on ensuring that we're getting facts and not pseudo facts.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Because it's all just referencing shit that's on the Internet that well technically.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: And do we even really know what it's actually referencing? Because I don't know. There are some, I know that there are some companies that are feeding data into it intentionally so where it's not necessarily public facing data. And so I don't know. I don't know. That's part of the fear. Again we go back to that. The fear is what, what data is actually being used to show us this. Now if you're doing research about a competitor or competitors price or if you're researching about a particular topic, maybe you're not as concerned. But if you're doing something where you're, you're trying to look at, you know, something that could have make or break decisions for your business or for your life or for health or whatever it might be, then I'm like, okay, maybe I'll go back to being a skeptic for a little while.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So interesting. Yeah. On my phone I have perplexity Claude and ChatGPT. I use them for different things.
I use Claude like most people for all of my writing. All of, all of, all the writing I do.
We had a big product announcement today. I fed it the support docs. I said write a blog post about this and I kind of prepped it and then, and then you know, obviously write the email to, to go along with the, with the blog post. I use it for scripting my YouTube videos a lot and you know, creating social posts from that. I use ChatGPT for like brainstorming and as like a thought partner a lot. I, I don't know, I don't know why I think it's better but, but I do, I use Perplexity a little bit for research.
I don't use it as a substitute for Google right now but, but I think that's the biggest thing. It's like what if Google just isn't a company? Right. In five years I'm pretty confident they'll.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Still be a company. So I don't think they're but like.
[00:24:13] Speaker A: 90 something percent of the revenue comes from AdWords. Right.
[00:24:16] Speaker B: Like I think they're obligated to change just like every, they See, and of course, they're already developing their own things with Gemini and stuff like that. So they've seen the writing on the wall. They know that the expectations for people are raised. Now, you can't just give a list of results.
Right? You need to give more. You need to. Actually, people want the answer. They don't want the first step to getting the answer anymore. Whether this is, by the way, whether this is good or bad for us in general is still a big open question.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: I can tell you this type of stuff is fantastic, but boy, does it make you lazy. Right? Like, I can already feel that I am being a lot lazier when I do stuff. And maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's a bad thing. It depends on whether I take the time I save doing that to doing something that I couldn't do with that. And I think that's a lot of people are struggling now with what does a future look like where everything is provided to us from the existing data set that we have by these generative AI tools. Do we reach a point where we have. We. Nothing else improves because we're depending on this. We become so lazy that we depend on it kind of in the same way that it's easy for us to get lazy and depend on the Internet rather than looking back at maybe things that aren't available on the Internet, like certain old books or other things like that. Yeah, I don't know.
[00:25:44] Speaker A: This is the AI eating AI, kind of like flatline of, of innovation. Right? Yeah, I get it. I get it's the same, you know, I don't know. I mean, I worry less about that than I worry about other things. I think that you, you would have said the same about the typewriter and the, you know, tractor and cell phones. Right. Where, like, I don't remember anyone's. I know my wife's cell phone number and that's it. But, but like, you know, since that came out, none of us know cell phone numbers or phone numbers anymore.
I don't worry about that so much. I do worry about.
I worry about my kids a lot.
[00:26:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:24] Speaker A: You know, I think we have similar, similar age kids. I have 12 and 14 and my son 100% has chatgpt on his phone and he goes to it for everything. And like, what is his ability going to be to reason the right and wrong of that? I don't know. I don't. I don't know that it's any different than he just goes to Google and reads an article and accepts that that's true. I think that's probably what happens.
I do. Maybe this gets back to the fear part of like running a business.
I feel like we're relatively insulated from the threat of AI as a business. You probably are too.
[00:27:00] Speaker B: I feel we are generally because we provide an infrastructure element that no amount of AI is going to be answering DNS packets right now.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: Right. And no 19 year old in Pakistan is going to go be simple with replit or cursor or whatever. Right. I feel the same way. I also feel like we're a relatively small problem to solve, so that's good. It's like Andrew Wilkinson's New Zealand theory. Right. Like I'm going to be big enough to be relevant, but not so big that I'm a target for people.
But I do, I do worry most of all that like just the economy and how people spend their time and money is going to change a lot.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: And maybe it's for the better. That's the other thing because maybe, yeah, there, there have been some, some writings out about the fact that the, the work, the type of work we do now in the information society, a lot of it is stuff that we probably shouldn't be doing. Like we have a whole bunch of professions that maybe we don't need to be doing. There are certain things we absolutely need be doing as humans. Like if we, if we have houses, we need people to build houses right now at least we don't have enough. The robots aren't good enough yet to do that. Right?
[00:28:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:19] Speaker B: Or basic. Like the, the thing I look at is I look at the, the, the work that plumbers and electricians and like I said, builders, like folks that are out there that are doing physical work. We still need a lot of that and that no amount of generative AI is going to help us with that right now you need a different set of things and it's so physical. So I think that there's a lot of need still in this world and I'm hopeful, part of me is hopeful that we'll re. Embrace some of the trades that maybe got pushed aside because we created these jobs that seem like they were higher value, but in fact they're not really higher value in the long run. They're just kind of a way to, to raise the, the, the ceiling a little bit for what we can make in terms of liquid cash or whatever. Whereas instead we should be focusing back on some of the trades. Maybe that's a little bit of a weird way of looking at it, but my, that goes back to the question of, like, once we have these tools that can save us a bunch of time, what are we doing with that time that we gain? And that'll be the thing, I think, that your kids and my kids will be figuring out. Like, they'll go, well, it doesn't take anywhere near as long to do these things that my parents did.
So instead I'm going to go figure out how to build a table, you know?
[00:29:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: Because it's more interesting, because it's. It's something that actually is challenging, you know, so maybe we'll see.
[00:29:47] Speaker A: Yeah. So I have. I have two kids. My. My oldest wants to be a dermatologist, and she. She'll be a dermatologist. She's super smart. She's super intrinsically motivated, all that kind of stuff. My youngest wants to buy BMW.
Not a BMW.
[00:30:06] Speaker B: He's like, buy. No, no, the whole thing.
[00:30:08] Speaker A: The whole thing.
[00:30:09] Speaker B: I love it.
[00:30:10] Speaker A: That's.
[00:30:10] Speaker B: That's bold.
[00:30:11] Speaker A: I'm like, fuck, yeah, man. Do it.
But. But before he said he wanted to buy BMW, he said he wanted to be an electrician.
And this is a year and a half ago. I was like, you don't want to be an electrician. He's like, no, no, sorry. I want to own an electrician company.
I was like, you'll be way wealthier than me if you do that.
How do you talk to your kids about their career? Because you have slightly older kids than me. Like, they're thinking about what they want to do in college and stuff like that. How do you. How do you talk to them, and how do you want to talk to them about how they should think about their lives after college?
[00:30:47] Speaker B: Yeah, so. So my. The triplets. I have triplets. They're. They're 24 now, so they're out of college. They're beyond. They've already started their careers. And what I've guided them to do, at least my part in it, was you need to do the thing that you believe in, the thing that you. That you. You are passionate about. But you also are going to need to get some experience being in environments where you aren't necessarily going to be passionate, because that's the reality of work. Work is. It's a hard thing. And sometimes you have to do things you don't necessarily want to do that aren't motivating. And hopefully I encouraged all of them to see those things and then find ways to build businesses around that stuff that people don't want to do and make it better. So, so. And all. All three of the, the grown up ones kind of had their own directions and at this point they're all kind of off on their own doing their thing. The last one, the one that's in high school, he, he still is. He's trying to find. He hasn't quite figured out what he wanted to do. So he spent. Obviously he's a, a 17 year old male, he spends a ton of time on a computer. Right. So he likes what he does on the computer. But he's actually, he's very pragmatic. He's like, I don't really want, there's nothing that's drawing me to that. I'm super passionate about this but at the same time I see that I can have a profession around this, so I'll probably study it. But he's been telling me recently is like, I think I want to look into doing finance. I was like, why do you want to do finance? Because I want to make money. Like all he was really thinking about is how do I get myself far enough along so that I can have the life that I want to live? Because he saw us, my wife and I, working towards having the life we want to live. Rather than like a particular money target goal or anything like that. There's never been like, oh, this is this dollar amount that we have to get to. And so I think maybe he absorbed a little bit of that because he'd rather have enough money so then he can do whatever the heck he wants with his life because that's what he's seen his parents do.
[00:32:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I think kids of entrepreneurs come in with, and yours and mine in particular, we both lived abroad with our kids have such unique perspectives and like lenses that they look at the world through. I mostly think it's really good. I worry sometimes that my kids basically have everything what they want and are they growing up entitled?
[00:33:07] Speaker B: I worry about the same. And the truth is, yes, they are. We are. And the only, the only thing that I can say is that I hope that my kids wouldn't put in a situation where, where they have the opportunity to stand up for those who don't have that same entitlement that they take that opportunity that they backed up, which is a hard thing to do.
But at the end of the day I just want my kids to be happy, as I'm sure you do. And whatever path that takes, each one of them is going to be different. I'm just happy to be there and to be able to support them and see them now supporting themselves and getting on their way it's just.
[00:33:40] Speaker A: That's awesome. I make mine shop firewood because, like, they have to. They have to learn. They have to learn. No, but. But honestly, like, I think it's the, like, teach someone to fish kind of thing, right? It's like, at this point, like, they're past the, like, I'm gonna drown stage. You know, hopefully at this point, like, the biggest thing I could teach them is how to be successful. I don't care what they do, right? Like, my daughter gonna be a dermatologist probably, but even if she's not, she's gonna rock it, you know? And my son, no idea what he's gonna do. Is he gonna buy BMW? Probably not. But whatever he does, like, never know I want. No, you know, he.
He is super bullheaded.
If I've done my job, no matter what he does, he'll be successful.
And that's. That's kind of the goal I do.
[00:34:28] Speaker B: Just bringing it back around to the whole generative AI thing in our kids. The one thing I can tell you is that I think all of my kids see that just as a tool at this point. Like, it's just like the Internet became cool for them. It's not anything special. It's just another thing that they use in the same way that they use Discord or the same way that they use, you know, any other Minecraft piece of software or whatever. It's just. It's just another thing. It's just another tool, and it's going to go in their toolbox and they maybe use it, maybe don't. They don't really. They don't think about it as. With such concern as we do.
[00:35:01] Speaker A: But do you think that's. Do you think that's accurate or. Or, like, is it Bezos, he says, you know, AI is electricity. Like, do you think it's that big of a deal?
[00:35:09] Speaker B: Oh, wow, that's. So do I believe that generative AI, in the form that it is now, is. Is as important as electricity?
No, I don't think so. I think that. That it's not as fundamental.
I do think that it's going to have an impact kind of in the way that the Internet had an impact, kind of in a way that.
Yeah, I would say. I don't want to.
[00:35:36] Speaker A: You can say it's okay.
[00:35:37] Speaker B: I'm not going to say it, but.
[00:35:39] Speaker A: Maybe you're talking to a true believer believer here.
[00:35:41] Speaker B: I don't. I'm not. I'm not 100% sure. I'm still. I'm. So when. While I'm getting more bullish on Generative AI. I am super bearish on crypto. Like, I am not. Oh, no, I'm not a crypto person.
[00:35:53] Speaker A: Not.
[00:35:54] Speaker B: Because I don't see that there's. There's some interesting things. There's clearly a ton of money that people have made, but a lot of it's speculative money. And I'm not. I'm not a huge fan of speculative money because I think it enriches a very small group of people for no real huge gain to humanity. Right. Whereas I think the thing that's. Again, if we go back to what will we do with the time that we save? Generative AI has the potential to save us a bunch of time so we don't have to do tasks that we would have otherwise invested our time in. What can we do now to further. To move humanity forward to further humanity now that we have that time save? That's the part that I think is always the most interesting question about any new technology that comes along. We have the Internet, like, how can we use the Internet to. How have we used the Internet to make our lives better? And what's the negative impact going to be? The same thing will be said for Generative AI. How is it going to make our lives better? And then what. What's the downside to all of this as well?
[00:36:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think it's. It's like a lot of things is some people will use it to be lazy and some people will use it to say, well, I have the autonomous robot and I have AI and I have the smart house. I don't have to do any of that shit anymore. Now I can go solve world hunger or fusion or whatever it is, but it'll be a divide. Right. Some people use it for good. Some people use it for not being better than they are now.
[00:37:18] Speaker B: No doubt the same as any. Any technology will be used well and used poorly by the by folks.
[00:37:24] Speaker A: It's just.
[00:37:24] Speaker B: That's what's gonna happen.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to talk about kind of your journey as a founder to. To wrap up like you've been doing this 15 years, correct?
[00:37:34] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: That's a long time. I've been doing it 10 years, and I feel like that's a long time. How.
How do you feel 15 years in.
[00:37:43] Speaker B: I'm. I'm. I think the biggest feeling is one of pride, of still going. It's like I've seen a lot of folks who tried really hard to make businesses that. Where it never really succeeded and I've been a part of some of those businesses prior to doing DNsimple. And I'm just, I'm really happy that we've been able to stick to what we believe in even through all the ups and downs. Right. It's like people, it's really easy as a, as a CEO or a leader of a business to say okay, we have to follow the next trend, otherwise we will die. Perfect example is for me at least was when I was walking around the Amazon re invent in last year. I was walking around and everything is AI. There's not a single company that does not somehow have something to do with AI. And of course they are like they have to these. The companies that can afford to represent at an event that's that large and frankly that expensive to represent at are chasing, often chasing either the next round of funding or ensuring that their stocks are continuing to go up and so they are going to always capitalize on the next great thing. It's part of the model because of how DNsimple is, because we, we've been a profitable business from day one because we've net we don't have outstanding debt. You know, we're basically just a cash flow positive, profitable business.
I don't have to chase things and instead what I can do is I can chase the details about the stuff that my customers hurt with and say that's what we're going to focus on. We're going to focus on the things that our customers are really frustrated with and we're not always going to get it right away because we're going to have, even doing that, we still have far more things than we want to do. But as a founder I can, I can keep that focus because the business facilitates that rather than having to go chase the next round of funding or ensure that the public markets aren't upset with me and watch the stocks go down 25% in a week, you know.
[00:39:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, I can relate to that. I mean we raised money so we have had times of not being profitable. We turned that ship, which is congrats. Way harder, way harder and takes way longer and takes way more guts than I have on most days and are profitable now. And that feels really good.
You know, I think like coming all the way back to what we talked about at the beginning.
You know, they talk about the seven year itch with, with marriage. Like I've, I've definitely had a bit of that, I've had a bit of that. Like I've been doing this for a while. Like, we're not growing massively. It's not massively profitable.
Yeah, I got. I, I've had, like, you know, gosh, is this, like, the thing I want to do for the next 20 years? Because I'm 44, like, I'm not going to stop working ever, Right? Like, is this what I'm going to do for forever?
And I don't have an answer for that. Like, to be honest, like, I don't. I don't have an answer for it. I started doing some coaching last year. I'm advising some of the tiny seed companies. Really fulfilling, very much like a side thing.
But I don't know, like, you don't see a lot of founders that do something for 20 years.
How do you think?
[00:40:58] Speaker B: Not in technology, for sure. I mean, they. There are. Yeah, there are a lot I think you don't see. Because generally a founder is going to stick for some long time. They just, they don't need to come and say, hey, I'm sticking with this thing for a long time. They just do the thing. Like, that satisfies them. I do get what you're saying, though. There have been times over the history of DNsimple where I'm like, you know, do I really want to do this anymore? And so I might hack on a. For a while, I was like, do I want to deal with this tech? Oh, maybe I'll go hack on something. So I have a few little Raspberry PIs laying around. I was like, I'll play with Raspberry PIs for a while or. Or I'll do home automation stuff for a while and I'll play around with this. But those, none of those things were interesting enough to draw me away from the fact that I have a viable business that sustains quite a few people in their lives and that our customers really love. And so I've started to sort of take the perspective that if I'm servicing our customers well and I can feel that they're happy and I'm servicing our team well and I can feel that they're happy. That actually makes me very happy. And it makes me satisfied to do what I'm doing. Does it mean that I'll be here forever? Undoubtedly. No. Eventually. Eventually. Every business transitions, whether it's through passing on to the next family member, closing down, selling, it doesn't matter. Like, you will have an exit. There is an exit at the end of every business. Right. So I'm cognizant of that. I just hope that I can do it on my terms and one that will protect my interests, my family's interests, my customers interests, and my team's interests. And if I can do that, then I'll say, okay, that was a good way of ending things on my part in those things. And of course, my hope is that some of the work that I've done over the 15 years will survive beyond me. Because that's always a hope, right?
[00:42:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:52] Speaker B: But instead, well, now what I've figured out is I can start looking and do stuff that's more fun. Like, my wife and I have taken up dancing. Right. So cool. So it's like, has nothing to do with anything. We're just doing this and, and we're kind of taking the same approach of having fun with it, but putting time into it and practicing and, and it's just, it's like, if you. Okay music, if you're musically inclined, you know, I'm gonna go start learning the piano. If you want to do art, if you want to write a book, there's always other avenues that you can use. You don't necessarily have to start the next business unless you're really driven. Like, you see something that is a wow, this is a business opportunity. I can't believe nobody else is touching this right now in my area. I'm gonna go do it.
[00:43:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
That's a healthy way to think about it. I think that for myself at least, like, yeah, we, we. We have all this energy. And if there's not a outlet for that energy is, is when I struggle the most in this respect. You know, like, I have this energy I needed to get out. I don't really think that spending five more hours a week on marketing is going to make a difference. The team is good, the product is good.
I need an outlet. And so it's dancing or I took up tennis this year, or just, you know, go be a better parent to my kids and husband to my wife. Like, that's, that's, that's probably worthwhile too.
[00:44:10] Speaker B: Yeah. No doubt. Tedium is the biggest enemy of most entrepreneurs. Ability to focus.
[00:44:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:15] Speaker B: And the ones that's. I'm always impressed by the, the entrepreneurs that stick with it for a long time and build a significantly large business where you know that they have hundreds or thousands of people that depend on that business to keep going. You know, there's a lot of tedium in there, and they get really good at hiring people to offload some of those things so that they can focus on whatever it is that makes the business the best. It can possibly be whether that's the next strategic agreement or the next merger and acquisition or, or whatever it might be like that to me is.
I don't know. I still haven't decided if I can get to that point. Like, I feel like maybe there's a ceiling to what I can run the business to before. It's beyond me and what I feel comfortable with. But so far, every time I thought I've hit that ceiling, something has happened to let me move beyond that. And that's, that's, that's also something that's nice as a founder. Like, it's, it's, it's not this. It's not this. It's kind of just like steps.
[00:45:16] Speaker A: Right, right, right.
[00:45:17] Speaker B: And I'm okay with that. I've, I've. I've come to say this is not that this is a healthy way of doing business, in my opinion.
[00:45:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. I, I think like Jason Cohen's talked about, it's like these growth and just like for us or the business is like a series of incremental steps, and it looks kind of like a straight line, but it's really a bunch of jagged lines when you, when you, when you look closely.
[00:45:38] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:45:42] Speaker A: Cool, man. I'd love to just kind of like finish up by hearing, you know, like, how folks can get in touch with you, what, what y'all do to help, you know, folks with their DNS, their websites and everything.
[00:45:54] Speaker B: Well, getting in touch with me is easy. I'm on LinkedIn as Anthony Eden or Aiden. I can't remember which one, but you can go look for me on LinkedIn. I go out to conferences a lot, so if you ever see me in person, I'm, I'm a. I try to be a friendly person. Come up and say hi, and we can just have a chat. They can reach me@anthonyansimple.com via email. If there's something. Don't spam me, though. I just want to say I'm. I. One thing I'm doing is I'm taking a very hard stance against unsolicited emails. And if you try to sell me something and it is not ex. Like, I don't. I better have. Well, don't try in the first place.
[00:46:29] Speaker A: But if you really just be on the safe side, if you really insist.
[00:46:32] Speaker B: You better at least have an automated unsubscribe link that works immediately. Otherwise you're going straight to spam. But if you want to reach out to me and just talk about things, I'm always happy to talk to folks not just about DNS and domains, but also just about running a business, whatever they need help with. I'm a pretty open person as far as the business. We still do what we what it says on the tin, right? We're going to keep working on making it so that DNS is automated so that we have less manual interaction and more part of your typical infrastructure. We've invested a lot of time in making things work with, with Terraform for example, and we just keep focusing on the automation side of DNS and domains and I don't really see anything changing. We like what we do as a business. We feel like we bring a lot of value to our customers and it's just about getting the word out there and continuing to have people who aren't aware of us become aware of us and go, maybe there's another alternative to the big giants that are out there.
[00:47:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Love it. Love it.
Dude, great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it.
[00:47:38] Speaker B: Thanks for having me on, Craig. I appreciate it.
