Iron Man Sucks! e50 – David Vs Goliath – Ahmed Elsamadisi & Adam DeGraide

Adam Degraide:

Coming up today on David Vs Goliath…

Ahmed:

You don’t need a lot of people writing software. You need a couple of people writing good software.

We’re so far ahead, that the company that’s trying to do what we do are four years behind.

Adam Degraide:

Ironman sucks!

Speaker 3:

Welcome to today’s episode of David Vs Goliath. A podcast dedicated to helping small businesses leverage technology to not only help them compete against their large competitors, but win. Your host is currently the CEO of Anthem Business Software, a three time Inc 500 recipient, and a serial entrepreneur with a passion to help small businesses everywhere find, serve, and keep more customers profitably. Please join me in welcoming your host, Adam Degraide.

Adam Degraide:

Hey, everyone. It’s Adam Degraide, with the David Vs Goliath podcast. Welcome today’s guest is going to be Ahmed Elsamadisi, I hope I’m pronouncing that properly, I think I am, from Narrator AI. Should be an awesome interview. We’re going to learn a ton about this technology. Also, don’t forget today’s episode is brought to you by automatemysocial.com, where you can automate 90% of your businesses’ social media in seconds, and never have to think about it again. Stop paying thousands of dollars to have somebody do your social media for you. Have it automated by automatemysocial.com. We use it at Anthem Software. We use it at David Vs Goliath podcast and a bunch of my other businesses. It has been revolutionary and life-changing, and its best part is it’s only $250 a month per business. And if you sign up today, you get a discount as well up to 20% off, which is fantastic. Check it out at automatemysocial.com.

And by the way, if you’re an agency, or a social media manager in a business, you can sign up as well too. We’ll do all the work for you. It’ll be our little secret. And so anyway, with no further ado, let’s get right into the episode today with Ahmed. Ahmed, welcome to the David Vs Goliath podcast.

Ahmed:

Hey, thank you for having me here. I’m really excited to be here.

Adam Degraide:

I’m excited. I love talking AI. I talked to a gentleman several weeks back that also does AI. It seems to be a common theme now in technology with artificial intelligence and everything going around it. One of the things that I couldn’t help, and I’m sure everyone asks you about it, is how you began in technology, was you worked on autonomous vehicles, so vehicles that drive themselves. And why don’t you give the watchers and listeners a little bit about, A, what you’re doing now, and then how you got there?

Ahmed:

Yeah. So today we do leverage AI, but our focus is in helping people answer questions. So Narrator is a data platform that allows you to ask and answer any question in minutes. And the magic of it, the whole thing happens while data is in your data warehouse using a single table. So it’s a very unique approach to answering questions, and it works really, really well, inspired by a lot of the work I’ve done in the past.

So back step my career three steps, before this I built out a data team at WeWork. So got to build out their infrastructure, grew the team, so a lot of fun stories there. And then before that I did AI for missile defense, tracking discrimination, really dealing with fast-moving objects, going out of space and inside, and what do you do there. And before that I was in self-driving cars. And self-driving cars in 2010, which is, if you guys don’t know, where a lot of the cars initially started from, known as the DARPA Urban Challenge. And I spent a lot of time, again, working on tracking and localization. So where does the car, how do you know where it is, how does a car know how to navigate the world with error, with uncertainty, and really make it that experience that we have today.

Adam Degraide:

I’m not a big fan of self-driving cars yet. I think it’s going to take, I love the feel of holding the wheel and driving it myself. I have a lot of cars. And I enjoy driving them. And I’ve recently driven, I rented a Tesla when I went to Oklahoma City, and you have the option, and I couldn’t bring myself to try it. In your experience, I mean, how safe is that really still to this day? Is it safer than letting a human drive for real?

Ahmed:

It’s safer than a lot of humans. So think about it this way…

Adam Degraide:

That’s the best thing. That’s the best thing anybody’s ever said. It’s safer than a lot of humans.

Ahmed:

Yeah, because that’s the point. The point of self-driving car is not to compete with the elite driver who’s alert and aware and is focused, it’s to help with the tired driver, who’s driving for four hours and is like, “Okay, I want to get there, but I’m not as focused because I’m exhausted.” And those drivers make so much more mistakes. And all you have is a vehicle that’s looking around. This is actually the same thing in Narrator. When we think about answering questions, we don’t want to replace your intelligence to answer the question. We actually don’t want to just give you an answer, we’re not like, “Hey, X matters.” You’ll be like, “Cuff, I need to do my job, I need to think about it. What do you know?” So what we do is, think about these things as augmenters. Really an ability for you to, if you’re driving and a car’s coming from a really weird angle, and it’s moving at fast speeds that you don’t feel like… The computer can see that much easier than you can. And the computer can start alerting you. Even if it’s just flashing, look at your mirror.

Think about just something as simple as what we had with blindside detection. You’re in the mirror and a light turns on, it’s nice, it’s helping you, and it’s minimizing the worry that you are as a driver, that if something out of the ordinary happens, you’ll be aware, because just those ability to notice those things is just a lot higher. And in Narrator we do the same thing. You might see something and you might see this big, this is so much better than this. And Narrator is like, “Great, you could start there, but let us just give you more guidance, where the fact that your business has changed over time. And that might be better in aggregation, but that’s really driven by the early customers. And nowadays it’s actually the opposite.” All these small things that you’re likely to make mistakes in, computers can really just check all of them much faster and tell you what’s important without you having to actually go up in and do that work. So it’s never going to be that replacement.

Adam Degraide:

It’s funny, because I build software for a living myself as well too. And it really is designed to enable and help highlight areas of strength, cover areas of weaknesses. But back to the car thing, and we’re not going to stand this all the time, I promise you this, but I’m just thinking about it because I bought a few new cars, and they all have these settings that won’t let me go into another lane without letting the blinker know that I’m going to go in the other lane. So if you’re driving down the highway, and you start to take a left it’ll go, it’ll try to pull you back. That drives me crazy, that stuff. And so I’m always, “Shut that stuff off,” I go back to the dealership and say, “I don’t want any of this stuff on. I want to be able to run into anything I want to run into,” because I think in some cases that’s more dangerous.

I’m in a car right now I rented, because I’m here on the summer here in California. And I’m driving around in this Mercedes that I can’t listen to my music or talk radio if I’m coming up to somebody and it thinks I’m going too fast. It’ll go, “Beep, beep, beep,” shut my music down, so it forces me to say, “oh, I got to stop. I was stopping anyway.” So I think one of the things that’s frustrating to people in general is that technology’s great, but when it’s tried to be forced on you too much, I think it becomes a detriment in some ways, and it can actually do the exact opposite of what we intended it to do. Not that Narrator does that, I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is just a case of self-driving cars in this awareness system of like, “Oh, you’re an idiot. You’re going too fast. You need to slam on the brakes.” And then the brakes will lock on you. It’s crazy when I’m driving totally fine.

Ahmed:

So I would say that’s shitty software.

Adam Degraide:

That’s my point. That’s my point. Not all software is created equal.

Ahmed:

Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn’t say that’s the problem with the intelligence of a car. So we have to sing all the time at Narrator as well. Here’s a funny thing. We do a lot of stuff that people always say, “Why don’t you just run every possible combination and then tell me what matters?” And I’m like, “Because nobody was going to do anything with that. I want it to be actionable with what you’re doing today. I want it to be English, I want it to explain to you, I want you to read it and give you thoughts or evidence.” And I think it’s that level of little nuance that matters. If you’re already hitting the break, the computer’s job is to guide you, not ensure the action. And I think a lot of times, and this happens in data software, some data software tries to give you the answer. They forget that the answer is actually garbage, no one cares. The job is to get you to take action. That’s it.

So if you’re already taking the action, me telling you, if 99% of all your customers are women and me telling, “Women convert better than men.” You’re like, “Cool.” You don’t care. If you’re driving and you’re breaking and it’s like, “Break, break, break,” you’re just like, “Oh, shut the up. I already know that.” And now your brain starts ignoring those signals as important. So less signals, better signals, signals that are designed to get you to do something, not get the car to do something. And I think that little nuance is a difference between quality and shit. And that’s it. So if I was designing a car, my goal would be, how do I get you to hit the brake? How hard to hit the brake? I would trust you on that. But I want to make sure you’re actually hitting the brake, but the cars are looking and saying, “Oh, you’re still so close. No, no, no, no. We got to warn you.” And it’s like, “No, you know what you’re doing? You’re driving this car.”

And the software also doesn’t change with the driver or the car. That’s another annoying thing that I really hate about software today in cars. If you’re an aggressive driver, or my dad used to race cars in Egypt, and he can measure distances much, much safer than an average person. So whenever he gets in a car, he’s like, “I used to race cars, these cars all they do is just warn me on things that I know will never hit me.” And I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” But it’s like, you’re right. You are a driver who’s shown that you can measure distances really, really well, why would I continue to alert you on the same thing that you already know is that you know?

Adam Degraide:

Yeah, because you’ve been safe the entire time. So when you think about all of your life experience from teaching computers how to recognize what a vehicle is, to working at Raytheon, to working at, let me just see if I could… Yeah, the Activity Schema, WeWork, WeWork was a big Hubbub company several years back. When you look at all of those different life experiences, what were the things you learned not to do when you started Narrator AI? I usually ask people to start with what they learned to do, but with you in your case, what did you learn what not to do, and what you said to yourself, “There’s no way in God’s green earth I’m doing that in this company that I’m starting”? What were the things you learned not to do?

Ahmed:

So this is going to sound really, really weird. But one of the first things I learned not to do in starting Narrator is, don’t give people what they say they want at all. At all. People have a tendency to say things all the time, “We want dashboards. We want dashboards. We want dashboards. We want this. We want to see everything. We want to see everything.” And what everyone is always doing is they’re taking their current world, and they’re saying, “Here’s how I imagine you to solve my problem.” So that’s one thing I learned really quickly. You have to understand not in their current world what you can add, but what if their current world is completely wrong.

Don’t expect a role, don’t hire a role to solve a problem. So there’s another big thing that happens a lot in startups. You’re like, “I have a marketing problem. No, one’s understanding Narrator’s uniqueness.” And they’re like, “Hire a head of marketing.” You’re like, “I have a sales problem. We’re having trouble getting our customers to understand it and buy.” And they’re like, “Hire a head of sales.” We’re like, “Oh, our UX is a little clunky,” “Hire a head of UX.” It’s always that. And in my life, I’ve never seen that to ever work. So I learned not to do that.

Adam Degraide:

It’s funny that you say that, before you go to your third one. I’ve sold businesses outright to private equity companies, I’ve sold businesses outright to private companies, those are my favorite sales, because I don’t have to listen to their nonsense. The biggest mistake I made was staying on as a majority owner, and a minority private equity company. And their only solution was to hire Harvard grads, and people from Harvard and Yale, and no offense to anybody who’s graduated from Harvard or Yale, but in my experience, there were the worst employees I’ve ever had in my life. And to your point, director of sales, director of this, director of that, and they ruined the business, because they had no life experience in really running a startup on what it really meant. So it’s interesting that you say that. And by the way, if you are those people that I’ve worked with in the past you know who you are, I still love you as a human being, you’re wonderful people. But for God’s green earth…

Ahmed:

Yeah. Well, I say the same thing actually about ex Google, and ex Facebook, they, in my experience, have been the worst engineers. It’s you forget that Google, these people who are ex Google, are the ones who built Google Search. They did nothing for three years and they have no idea how to get shit done, and they’re just like, “Oh, at Facebook we liked to meditate, and our belief with these features are going to get built.” And I’m like, “That’s because you had no deliverables for six years. Let’s go.” So I really, really don’t like that.

Adam Degraide:

So yeah, you’re trying to tell me that deep meditation for three and a half, this is a funny story. This is a true story, Ahmed. I came in one day to my sales office, I am not lying to you, and I’ve got two out of my five sales guys doing presentations. The other two are sitting there and they’re clearly working some follow up and doing some emails. And then I look under the desk and there’s a dude, literally socks and shoes off, comatose under my desk, just like this.

So I looked around and they were all like, nobody knows what’s to say, right? So I bring the guy into my office, I’m like, “Hey, what the heck were you doing in there?” He goes, “Oh, I do 20-minute meditations every two hours, because it helps me become more productive.” I said, “Okay, well, first of all, it’s kind of weird to do in the middle of the office, number one. And that’s not how this works. You can meditate at home before you come to work. You can meditate afterwards. You can meditate at lunch. You can absolutely do all that stuff you need to do. But during the day, you’re got to get on the phone, you got to call someone, you’re going to be presented to someone. No meditation’s going to help you unless you close deals.”

He was the worst producer, never sold anything. But nobody meditated, Ahmed, better than my man, who was trained in that culture. Which was fascinating that you mentioned the culture of… Meditation is great, don’t get me wrong, I love meditating, but actually if something has to be sold and something has to be built, hammers and nails going.

Ahmed:

Yeah, that personality, [inaudible 00:16:34] is just something that you don’t see in larger companies, and you don’t see that this person has never learned that. I actually also don’t hire, another things that I also… I probably went too far in this one, I decided to not hire a lot of people. So in Narrator till today we have no product people and no designers. And you would think that would be disaster, but… Oh, and no managers, no just managers. We don’t hire anyone who’s entire job is to manage people and not do any work. So I’m definitely in the extreme case where I just found that I work better with people doing work and executing. So product people whose job it is to communicate, to write complicated specs, to come up with ideas that the engineers have to implement. Engineers are not dumb. We sometimes treat engineers as it’s like, “Oh, the engineering resource. You need to give them tickets and bite size chunks. And they need to have very detailed explanations.”

Those are again, bad engineers. Hire good engineers and be like, “Hey, good engineer, solve this problem for the customer.” And they can come up with ideas, you can buy design systems that make sure things looks beautiful. They don’t need someone coming up with a brand new box every two hours. There’s stuff out there, you can just use it. So I just found that a lot of these things just focusing on hiring people who actually were good at doing jobs, and wanted to do the job, and thought, and did work. So I’ll give you one of my role models…

Adam Degraide:

But hold on, hold on, hold on. Because I’m actually over here on my break, and my producer’s going to yell at me. So what I need to do is I need to take a break, and when we come back, we’ll finish your thought. You’re with Ahmed, you’re with your handsome host, Adam Degraide. This is the David Vs Goliath podcast. Here’s a very special message from our corporate sponsor automatemysocial.com. Stay tuned.

Speaker 3:

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Adam Degraide:

And we’re back with a rubber Ironman, Ahmed from Narrator AI. And that’ll make more sense after we finish our thought, because I have that question. I need to ask you about, I was reading in the pre-show sheet that you made a better Ironman out of rubber. But before we get to that, I want to make sure you finish your thoughts that you were [inaudible 00:20:59]. So go for it.

Ahmed:

Oh, that was about, just hiring people, I hire people, we like to call thinker-doers, so people who would think one day, do four days, is kind of my things. Not people who just want to execute without any thought and mindless, and not people who just want to spend their whole entire week coming up with great thoughts. So that’s kind of just the premise of the alternate to the nature that I’ve seen a lot of companies do.

Adam Degraide:

It’s a principle that I learned years ago from a gentleman named Eustace Wolfington, he invented car leasing. So imagine that your claim to fame is you invented the car lease, which is, as you know, one of the most profitable things, and made cars more affordable to people, right? Well, what’s fascinating about it is he taught me the principle of think-feel-do, which is, what do you want people to think? What do you want them to feel? And then most importantly, what do you want them to do?

So in every aspect of building your business, you have to ask yourself, well, what do you want your employee to think? What do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do? Then your employees to think, “And doing this on behalf of the customer, what do we want the customer to think? What do we want them to feel? And more importantly, what do we want them to do?” It works in sales, it works in product development, it works in training and recruiting and mentoring people. That principle has served me well over the years. So I love your idea of thinking and then doing. But don’t forget, there’s a feeling aspect to it too. We can’t lose that.

Ahmed:

That’s so funny. I love this framework. You’re going to see me use that. Because the problem what I find in the data industry, so when I started a data company Narrator, one of the things that I hated about the data industry is that you would think, well, out of the think-feel-do, what do you think they spend all their time in?

Adam Degraide:

Thinking.

Ahmed:

No, they don’t. They don’t. That’s a funny thing. All the products that you…

Adam Degraide:

Oh, it’s probably doing, they’re just doing you.

Ahmed:

I wish that was it. It’s actually feeling. Literally, every data product you use today, the only thing that it’s designed to do is make you feel like you’re using data. The product itself is just a thousand numbers, you have no opinion. You as the consumer of that data will never do anything. I’ve never heard someone saying, “Whoa, I got to go do something different because this ginormous dashboard of 600 numbers tells me that I’m doing something wrong.” It’s always about this idea of feeling like I’m data-driven and feeling like I’m using data.

And in Narrator, we decided to actually do the opposite. We’re like, the goal is to get you to act, which is do something. And the goal is to get you to think a certain way. So we do a lot of work. We’re not just a tool. We have a lot of opinions in how you think about data, how you think about your questions, how do you think about your customers. And the tool itself is guiding you toward that direction, and helping you do something. Not do something is look at data, no, no, take an action to change their customer behavior. And that’s what we focus. And that’s kind of separation from the, “Let’s just feel for all days. I want to feel-data driven.”

Adam Degraide:

Now, when you decided that it was time for you to start your own thing, because one of the things I thought was interesting too for the watchers and the listeners, is that he’s on Forbes 30 under 30 of 2021. So you were on the Forbes 30 under 30 CEOs to watch in the future. All of your life experience led you up to that point. When you started Narrator AI, did you go into it with a very detailed plan and goals, or was it more of a loose objective that has been defined over the years?

Ahmed:

Yeah. So two things that I wanted to do, they just were considered impossible. So Narrator spent the first three years in research. So the idea of Narrator was, you’ve answered questions in data, all your companies have answered questions data, yet every time they answer a new question, they have to take the data and structure and make it usable by themselves custom every time. An idea was, Salesforce did this incredible thing where Salesforce took all of sales and said, “I’m going to represent sales as couple of core concepts, leads, accounts, opportunities, and tasks.” And today all of sales can be represented that way. Pre Salesforce, it was a billion other things. And Salesforce said, “Nope, these four is all you need.” What is that for data? What is the standard that I can say, every question you have can be answered by this standard? If you apply this standard, you can answer any question, because then you can actually share analysis, you can share algorithms, you can go from one company to another and answer questions not worrying about it.

So the idea was, there must exist a thing that I can build that will answer any question, and it’ll be the same thing for every company in the world. There exists a standard in answering data questions. And what is that standard? And that’s when I went out to build Narrator, I had an idea what it could be, but when I started Narrator the idea was, can I actually define a standard? Can I implement it? And can I show that this standard independent of your industry, your sector, whatever question you’re asking, this standard can answer it always? And that’s what we ended up doing. That’s what we called the Activity Schema. It’s this standard, it’s a 10-column, imagine 10-column tables, imagine a big Excel sheet. That’s the same 10 columns where every company in the world, and it turns out with that you can answer any question instantly. And to make that happen was probably a hundred times harder than making a car drive by itself, in my opinion.

Adam Degraide:

Well, it’s funny. The secret to success in life when you’re building software is to take a complicated issue, and then get it down to a little pill size, so it’s edible and digestible by your client. And then also to your point becomes functional and useful. Just to have access to all this data, and you have a dashboard that gives you the ability to mix and match things, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re looking at the right things. And I think that really is a very important and profound point. How big is your team? You mentioned it a little bit earlier, but how big is your current team inside of Narrator?

Ahmed:

Very small. We’re 11 people.

Adam Degraide:

That’s great. By the way, it’s still bigger than a lot of other companies. And I tell people all the time, when my company’s reached over 50 employees I kind of turn into a zombie just because too many people. But the most I’ve ever had in any business I’ve ever run is 180. And that’s a small company. The funny thing is, but it’s a big company. When you have that many human beings, you’re dealing with 5,000 people, because you got their wives, and their spouses, and their husbands, and their kids, and their grandkids, and then they get their illnesses, and their sicknesses, and you got…

Ahmed:

I couldn’t do.

Adam Degraide:

Boom! Oh no, trust me. It’s tough. It’s not easy.

Ahmed:

I made Narrator small very, very deliberately. Narrator’s had a good amount of success, and people are always like, “Hire more, hire more, hire more, hire more.” I’m like, “No, I don’t want to.” In data curve, in innovation, we’re so far ahead that the companies trying to do what we do are four years behind. Amplitude and Snowflake just try to do what we do…

Adam Degraide:

Well, you could move quick. You could move quick as you get a lot of employees. I sometimes ask myself, why the hell does Twitter need 4,000 employees? What could those people possibly be doing? Twitter’s pretty simple. You do a comment and a hashtag and you post it. You post an image, you post… I mean, yeah, maybe you have corporate relations, maybe you have a few other of these other things, but 4,000 people? I got news for the watchers and listeners, 90% of those people do nothing, absolutely nothing.

Ahmed:

So at Raytheon, I once got pulled into one of the president of the entire integrated defense systems, and I got told this one thing that was epic. He was like, “Oh man, I had just got an award,” he was like, “Oh, you’re doing very well. I just think that you’re one of the 5%.” And I was like, “Oh, what does that mean?” He goes, “5% of the people at Raytheon are producing 95% of the value.” And I was like, “Interesting.” He’s like, “Yeah, it’s just 5%.” And I was like, “What do the other 95% do?” He goes, “They make us look like we’re a big company.”

Adam Degraide:

That’s exactly right. By the way, I’m convinced. Well, let me give you a little example. And this is not the greatest example, because it was a very difficult time for a lot of people. But COVID, as much as I thought it was nonsense, I’ll probably get banned off just for saying that, but the fact that the whole thing was nonsense, in my opinion, it did show me something: I didn’t need nearly as many employees as I had.

Because we went through a time where we had to shrink during that time. We not only didn’t miss a step, we produced things and get stuff done faster and at a higher customer satisfaction. And you see what happens if you’re running a business right now, and you’re watching the David Vs Goliath podcast, to Ahmed’s point early on, you try to solve a problem with a warm body. That’s not going to solve a problem. The warm body creates more problems. And that’s why when you have somebody who’s always doing something and they leave, whenever they leave 60% of the time you’re going to find stuff that you couldn’t believe they were doing. Because that warm body that you thought was solving a problem was making more problems and you didn’t even know about. So you want to hire slow, and you want to fire fast, is what I’ve learned.

You hire slow and you fire fast, because if your people are coming to you constantly saying, “I need more help. I need more help. I need more help,” everyone’s going to say, “Time out.” Everyone out of the pool, do you really need more help? And then sometimes, Ahmed, it involves us as the CEOs getting out of our throne of glory, or wherever we are in that company, working in that department, doing what they’re doing, and seeing how efficient it can be, or somebody that we trust can do that. And I’ve found that to be very, very helpful. That’s why I love the fact that in most of my businesses I’ve done almost every job other than write code. It’s the only thing I can’t do. But at the end of the day, I love doing as much as I can because it gives me the ability to know what can be done and how quickly it can be done.

Ahmed:

And that’s the case. And I think you’ll always find in addition to what you’re saying is, when you invest in the good people, they can do a lot. I think we have a tendency to do these spreads of junior and senior. I’m a very big fan of get people who are really good at what they’re doing, pay them a lot of money, and let them be great. Don’t try to be like, “Oh, instead of one person, I can have three.” But those three people will, especially in software, especially in software, you don’t need a lot of people writing software. You need a couple people writing good software. You don’t need a lot of people writing software. And the nature is, if every single executive…

Adam Degraide:

Our team is five right now. And I find that to be…

Ahmed:

Five is incredible. [inaudible 00:32:24] like 50-person teams. Those 50-person teams are having 50 meetings, and no one’s getting shit done, and there are so many conversations, and the code is garbage.

Adam Degraide:

There’s an 8:30 stand up, 12:30 stand up, 4:45 stand up… And you know what? That deserves some standup comedy. Anyway, we’re going to take another break on the David Vs Goliath podcast with another fantastic sponsor. Stay tuned. Here’s the message.

Speaker 4:

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Adam Degraide:

And we’re back for the final segment with Ahmed. I’m enjoying the conversation, hopefully you are as well too. I do want to switch gears right now and talk about two things, something a little bit lighthearted. On your website that was rating about you before you came on, it says that you made a better Ironman out of rubber. What does that mean?

Ahmed:

Okay. So here’s the problem with Ironman. Ironman sucks, and there’s many, many reasons why Ironman sucks. One of the biggest reasons is that, for Ironman to walk in the street, it’s using the same amount of energy as if Ironman is walking through a wall. And that level of animation, when you actually build, go to build a real Ironman, what happens you have to predict the leg motion, and you have to walk and you have to move the entire thing to move. It’s also very heavy and dense, which means you need a huge power source. In the movie they invent a nuclear reactor, the set that fits in your thing, but in reality, you don’t have a nuclear reactor.

Adam Degraide:

I’m wearing a circle. I’m wearing a circle in honor of Ironman. Ironman sucks!

Ahmed:

But it’s true. So there’s so much energy used in Ironman, and it’s so inefficient. And then when you have these ginormous things, there has to be a cooling system to not have the person in Ironman overheat and die. So you’re talking about a very, just heavy, non-moveable, highly energy inefficient system, because it’s made out of it. So Ironman has a bunch of benefits. One of the benefits is super strength, and being able to move things. So it turns out what you can do is, rubber is elastic. What that means is that if you wear a rubber suit, and it’s open, when you’re walking, it’s zero energy, because you’re just stretching the rubber.

But rubber, if you pressurize it with, imagine like liquid nitrogen, which is, imagine a big paintball gun, and you put that much air pressure, as you know from your car, that can apply a lot of pressure. Deforming that to spaces out can apply a lot of force. So the idea of building the Ironman out of rubber was that you can understand if someone’s struggling, and allow them to pick up a desk, or pick up a person, or pick up something and run with it, as if it’s nothing, because you can get so much more force into your body thanks to that pressure tank, but the suit’s still being light and you don’t have to build an air system, you don’t have to make it cost a billion dollars, you don’t have to build an entire energy system to use it. You can have something that gives you super strength, but still super cheap to build, and super easy and lightweight to use when it’s not active.

Adam Degraide:

Wow. That’s like elastic girl on the… Whatever the heck that is. What is that called? The Incredibles. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that one. You have elastic girl, and then you also got the elastic guy that’s in the Fantastic Four, rubber man. One of my favorite cartoons of the old, and I guarantee you’ve never heard of this. Have you ever heard of The Mighty, Mighty Heroes?

Ahmed:

No.

Adam Degraide:

Exactly. You got to look it up after this.

Ahmed:

[inaudible 00:37:24] to be fair.

Adam Degraide:

Hold on. Hold on. There was chicken, I guarantee 99% of the people watching this show have no idea what I’m talking about. Chicken Man, and then Diaper Man was the best, his superpower, he had a diaper on, he flew around, he whacked people with his little baby bottle. He was the craziest cartoon ever that I was raised in. Half of my mental insanity I’m convinced comes from the fact that my parents let me watch a thing called Mighty, Mighty Heroes with a guy named Chicken Man and Diaper Man. But anyway, I digress.

One of the last topics I like to talk about is courage. You think about all of your experience going from autonomous vehicles to Raytheon, working in the government to WeWork, to now being one of Forbes 30 of 30 people to watch, under 30 CEOs to watch. I don’t care what’s your past experience has been. There’s an element of courage that has to take place from an entrepreneur to go from an employee to employer. There’s also a lot of demons you got to face in the mirror, that’s why I call this show David Vs Goliath. All of us have a Goliath they’re competing with, whether it’s inside us, or externally with our competitors and competitive forces in the market. All of us as leaders and CEOs and entrepreneurs are facing both internal Goliaths and external Goliaths. For you, what gave you the courage, Ahmed, to start Narrator AI, versus just looking for another super high paying job at another company where you could hide if you wanted to, and make a lot of money?

Ahmed:

So the answer is really simple. I felt like in data there’s a lot of people wasting their lives. A lot of smart people wasting their life. I don’t know how familiar you are, but the process of answering a question today, even at my level of like I would consider myself a sequel expert, a simple question like, “Hey, did somebody receive this email campaign? How many of them ended up ordering?” Or, “What’s the rate of ordering by campaign?” That would take me three weeks. And I’m an expert. These questions. And what happened is because it’s so hard, you had all these other stock companies being like, “We’ll just give you email attribution,” and Google will say, “Oh, we’ll tell you the ROI that we’re providing.” And if you ever use those tools and you learn that they’re all false, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing this data.

Google’s ROI that it’s telling you is like, they’re like, “We return $4 in every dollar you spend in us. Keep spending more money on us, don’t worry.” And you’re like, “No, you suck.” So a lot of these companies have taken advantage of people because answering questions is really hard. So a lot of companies still know that answering questions correctly is very important, so they invest in their data team, but it’s still so hard, and it’s so terrible, and it hasn’t changed for 50 years, and it’s just to labor some process. And if you are in the industry long enough, you’ve seen a cycle so many times. So what I was watching is, people in my team doing work that they weren’t proud of, miserable kind of code monkey work for hours, dealing with the [inaudible 00:40:44] that is the data systems, and then all these companies trying to replace people with these shitty tools that were trash and they didn’t do anything, but they knew how to market them and sell them.

And now what I wanted to do was, what if I could solve the actual company? What if I actually solved the problem that people are trying to do? What if I make people be able to answer questions better, but also correctly? And it turns out that is hard. So I ended up going on a tour first, and I was like, “Let me find the company that’s doing that, answering questions correctly, and let me see if I can work for them, or help them.” And I went around and nobody did it. And then I went to talk to Apple, and Google, and Facebook, and I was like, “How do you guys answer questions? You’re supposed to be the best of best.” And they’re like, “Oh, we just hire more people.” These companies have 200, 300 bodies answering these questions.

Adam Degraide:

I get it.

Ahmed:

It sucks. And they’ll hate it.

Adam Degraide:

I get it.

Ahmed:

So I’m like, okay, well…

Adam Degraide:

And half of them right now, half of them, Ahmed, are underneath their desk doing this. And you know it’s true, Facebook. You know it’s true, Google. And you definitely know it’s true, Twitter.

Ahmed:

That’s the thing.

Adam Degraide:

Hopefully we don’t get banned off of all of these after this interview.

Ahmed:

Yeah. You’re going to be classified, they’ll be removing you. But the point is, that’s why I started. It just felt so shitty, and I thought somebody to do something and if it’s not me, this doesn’t look like a way to make money. Narrator now is great, but early on it looked very counter. You were going up against, when you try to sell a product, everyone’s like, first of all, you’re doing things very differently, so no one knows this new method of doing data. Everyone’s like, “Why doesn’t everyone use you if it’s so great?” And you’re like, “Well, we just started.” And then you’re competing with these ginormous companies like Looker and Tableau that have 2000 engineers, and then a billion dollars of marketing being spent telling people to not change their ways.

And then you’re fighting that inertia. And then you’re also fighting the inertia of the head of data. A lot of heads of data want to grow their team. They don’t want to be more efficient. Narrator, in this recession, Narrator doubled its sales, in the last couple months, in the last three months, the best quarter we’ve ever had…

Adam Degraide:

First of all, the fact that you called it a recession is disinformation. I’m just kidding. You’re not allowed to call over recession recession anymore. We’re redefining everything. No, I’m just kidding. We are absolutely in a recession, and kudos to you. So if I could just stop you for one second, and tell you what that said to me, the courage that you found to start Narrator AI was more of a passion to solve the real problem versus just continuing on it. So you weren’t even sure if you were going to be profitable with it when you started it, you just wanted to fix the problem, or did you…

Ahmed:

Don’t even fix it. I didn’t even know. Again, the problem is if it works, the theory of Narrator was going to be that it would replace all of data. So it was like, there’s like a hundred trillion dollar industry that if you can standardize all of data, then you don’t need all this customization…

Adam Degraide:

Then you’re fine.

Ahmed:

You can replace it all.

Adam Degraide:

I love that vision, by the way. I love that vision. Why not have that?

Ahmed:

Yeah. Well, we do, that’s an area Narrator provides. But in the beginning you could imagine telling people that they were like, “Okay.”

Adam Degraide:

Hold on. They thought you were doing bonds in the back. There’s no way they believed it.

Ahmed:

Oh, a hundred percent. They thought I was insane. I got laughed out of rooms. So the courage was really about just wanting to do it and being like, “I just need to do this. I don’t know what else to do. It’s so annoying that the world is this way.” And it took years. You’re talking about, you don’t hear many startups spending years in research and development in software. Usually it’s like, we built a software in two weeks and then we started showing it to people. It’s like, no, we spent years in research. How the hell do you do this? How do you get to work?

And then now after three years to get the one thing to work, and then it was like, “Okay, now we have a billion buttons. And then how do to make that simpler so someone else can use it?” And then it took another year. And then it was like, “We solved the core problem, and we have a nice interface to make it work.” And people were like, “Oh, well, because you’re so different, you need to build the rest of the world around you now.” And we’re like, “Oh my God.”

Adam Degraide:

No, they’re all missing it. Now, how can somebody get in touch with you if they want to learn more?

Ahmed:

So check out our website. So our website Narrator AI is a good place to go. For me personally, I’m active on LinkedIn, just because I’m basic that way. So you can go on LinkedIn and follow me, and I’ll share some of my thoughts on the world and data and everything in between. And yeah, and anything else you need.

Adam Degraide:

That’s awesome. Have you had fun being on the DVG podcast today?

Ahmed:

Oh my God. It’s incredible. Thank you. I really love it.

Adam Degraide:

I’m so glad. I’m so glad you did the rubber Ironman, Ahmed. Adam Degraide, your handsome host on the David Vs Goliath podcast. Where else are you going to learn about self-driving vehicles, how Ironman sucks, and the power of 10 things making all you need in your data? Make sure you check out Narrator AI, Ahmed, thank you for joining me today. Viewers and watchers, thank you, and listeners, thank you so much for tuning in this week to the David Vs Goliath podcast. We’ll see you next week. Have an awesome day.