Stephen: Hey friends, family, welcome to another edition of the Around The Coin Podcast. I'm your host, Stephen Sargeant, and this one is a banger. We had such a heated discussion on LinkedIn, talking about how AI is going to impact recruitment. We have on the show, Adam Jackson, who's the co founder and CEO of Braintrust, and they've now released a book.

A new product, Braintrust AIR, Braintrust AIR, which is an AI recruiter. Taking, you know, 500 applicants, breaking it down to 93, having video interviews, contextual insights and questions, using thousands of data points and being regulatory compliant is a huge feat. And we go down the rabbit hole about the current existing recruitment plans.

How AI is going to impact recruiters and make them better at doing the things they'd like to do, which is establishing relationships and subject matter expertise. We talk a little bit at the end about investing in business as either serial entrepreneur and what it's like in the current landscape with mass layoffs in tech.

I know I always say it's a must listen to episode. If you're a candidate trying to get a job or if you're a recruiter or hiring manager, this is an absolutely fascinating episode. I hope you all enjoy it.

Stephen: This is Stephen Sargeant, host of Around The Coin podcast.

We have Adam Jackson, who's the co-founder and CEO of Braintrust. Adam, the conversation around AI and recruiters has absolutely sparked a heated debate on places like LinkedIn and Twitter. Why don't you give a brief introduction to yourself and then we're just going to dive in because I know there's a lot of things that people want you to answer, a lot of questions that they have coming to you.

So tell us a little bit about who you are and your background.

Adam: Sounds great. Uh, thanks for having me, Stephen. So, uh, fun to be here and chat about this.

Uh, so I'm Adam Jackson. I'm co-founder at Braintrust, um, Braintrust is a global talent marketplace that connects mostly tech workers, developers, designers, product managers, but also marketers and writers and video editors.

With companies that need their services, either on a short term contract, long term contract, or full time. It doesn't matter. What that, that concept is not new. What makes Braintrust unique is that is owned and controlled by the talent that make their living on the network. Why does that matter? Well, most job recruiting companies or staffing firms, or even marketplaces for talent are for profit entities that their job is to extract as much value from that transaction of matching talent and clients as possible. And that markup could be 25%, 30%. It could be 50% to a 100% if you're talking about the big consulting firms. And so, you know, that's a lot of value extraction just for making a match. And so we came up with Braintrust with the goal of taking that value that's being extracted and giving it back to the talent.

So the way Braintrust works is you can create a profile, set your hourly rate, or bid on a job with an hourly rate. Monthly or annual rate, whatever you want, and you're going to get that rate. And then the client will pay a 15% flat fee on top of that. So the 15% goes to, you know, fund the organization basically, buys Braintrust tokens, which is our native token that powers the network, buys them out of the open market and puts them back into treasury so we can keep recycling them.

And so what do you get at the end? You get Uh, clients get pre-vetted, really great talent, uh, they get matched, they post their job and they get matched very quickly, hours or days instead of weeks. And then we got all this AI stuff we'll talk about that makes that even faster. And their money's going further, right?

So now I'm paying a 50% or 75% markup for the talent. They're paying a flat 15%. So the economics are better for both sides. And so those superior economics end up bringing better talents. Braintrust we're just crossed 800, 000 talent members. We'll be at a million next month, all vetted and screened and whatever. And then thousands of clients posting jobs every day for those folks.

Stephen: I'm curious, you know, recruitment, and I did a little recruitment back in my heyday. Recruitment has always been an area for disruption, but it never seemed to be disrupted, right? People just put on fancy words across recruitment labels, right?

Like, I'm the crypto recruiter, I'm the CFO recruiter, but they never really disrupted like it should because I think the recruitment process It's very similar to probably buying a used car, right? Nobody comes back and says, Oh, that was such a good purchase. I had so much customer service. I had absolutely no problems.

But similar to car sales, we haven't seen there be much disruption. Were you surprised by like, kind of people are having the same challenges in recruitment now that they've 20 to 30 years?

Adam: Look, there's been no innovation in this space, right? Like you have these big job boards like Indeed or LinkedIn, and they're just spam machines, you know, it's just, you're, you're spamming resumes.

If you're on the other end, like if this sucks for both sides, think about it. As a, as a applicant, we've all applied for jobs. Like it's, it's so, it's so such a hopeless feeling to just apply, apply, apply, never hear back, or, or if you do hear back, you, you get a, Screening call, never hear back, right? It's, it's, it's, it's hopeless.

And look, on the recruiting hiring side, I've hired thousands of people over my career. It's just as hopeless. You're like, you post a job, you're looking at four or 500 applicants in 24, 48 hours. Like, How the hell am I supposed to get through all this?

So nothing has innovated on this topic, and this is something I'm very passionate about, and, and, and so we've been building this, what we call Braintrust AIR, AI Recruiter that we launched Monday here, April 29th, 2024.

We launched this package to make that awful process better for both sides. This isn't about replacing job recruiters. It's not about, you know, destroying their jobs or whatever. It's about making them better and more effective and taking a lot of, what AI is great at is taking a lot of the really boring, repetitive tasks that humans frankly don't like and shouldn't be doing and having an AI do them.

Stephen: Tell me what are some of the tasks that it takes away, because I think I know, and you probably know, and maybe a lot of listeners know, but maybe not everyone knows, like, hey, what are some of the things that recruit, that ties up most of the recruiter's time, and doesn't give them time to provide useful feedback, or to communicate more often, or to ensure that, you know, there's an aftercare program, where they're following up with the, you know, their recently hired candidates.

These are all things that are completely missing, which I think makes what would make a beautiful recruitment process. So maybe you could tell me some of the things that are completely destroying their time.

Adam: Yeah, I'll walk through exactly how Braintrust AIR works and it will answer the exact question you're asking.

Okay, so let's start. So, hiring manager comes to Braintrust. Starts typing in the role they need. Like, I need a UX recruiter for, I'm sorry, UX designer for mobile app. Braintrust AIR generates the full job description for them. It takes 15, 20, 30 minutes, whatever, down to 10 seconds. You can edit it if you want to.

Hit post. It then posts out to Braintrust job board and a bunch of other job boards too. And it will also ping people. It thinks are good matches who are already employed because obviously like just because someone's looking for work doesn't mean that they're the best match, right? So it does, it does all that stuff.

Stephen: I'm going to interrupt you a lot because I want to make sure that me and the audience understands those people are already in the Braintrust ecosystem. And that's how they know they're employed and to send them a message because they see that there's kind of an AI match there with certain job skills.

And to your point, I think that, you know, creating everyone might say like, Oh, job descriptions, AI creation, most of the recruiters, most of the hiring managers are just copying and pasting job descriptions that they see on other job posts or that have been used since 1996 within their own organization they're probably outdated.

Adam: And that doesn't, yeah, that doesn't yield the best candidates, right? You're recycling a, uh, Java developer description that Oracle posted 20 years ago, so it, it does, it creates a unique one based on what it knows about your needs and the company you work for, that kind of stuff.

Okay. Then the, that's not the cool part. Okay. The applications then start flooding in, right? We've all been on the other end of this, the barrel of this gun is four or five, 600 applicants just buzz, buzz, buzz. And, and you're like, As a hiring manager, you're just like, okay, well, I'm going to, I'm going to start looking at these and like thumbs up the first 10, I think look reasonable.

Like, sorry, other 490, you're not getting a shot at this. Right. And like, that's, that's not a knock on job. I'm guilty of this every week, every, you know, you have to, it's human nature. We have a lot to do. We're not going to look at all 500. Well, what sucks about that is the best one could be number 397 or 504. The best one's probably not in the top 10. Right. And so...

Stephen: Would you agree that 90% of those applicants or candidates really aren't suited for the job and they're just kind of like auto replying or auto applying just to shoot their shot, right? Yeah. Would you agree that there's about 90% or what pecentage would you give?

It depends on the role. Is this even applying for the job?

Adam: Yeah. It depends on the role. The lower the skill level, the higher the percentage of unqualified people will apply. And then the higher the skill level, I mean, so Braintrust is kind of an enterprise, uh, talent network. So it's, it's like people with three plus years experience in development, uh, product managers, technical people, security, blockchain, all that kind of stuff.

Um, it's a big field, right? And so, um, I would say, you know, look, it's, it's. More than half are not great applicants, right? So, then what happens is, Braintrust AIR actually takes the time to look at every single application and measure it in the way they answer the screening questions and that kind of stuff, measure it against the actual requirements for the job.

So, Off the bat, we're looking at everybody. And so that would, that, that's gonna get you a better candidate as a hiring manager. And it levels the playing field as an applicant. It's like, oh, you have a shot. Whereas before this, you had no shot unless, you know, you, you, you were lucky enough to be near the top of the pile.

And so then, so, so it sifts through all, let's say, you know, 500 applicants, and it comes back and says, you know what, 90 of these people look like they could be a good fit. And then what it does is it goes and schedules a live video interview with all 90 of those people and then conducts the video interview for you.

It actually will set up a live chat, live video chat, just like you and I are doing right now. And it has a bunch of questions preloaded for that role. So, and you can add some if you want, but so it's, let's say it's UX designer. It's like, you know, there's 18 or 20 questions and it digs, this is conversational AI, Braintrust AIR will have a conversation, like, tell me about the, the last big design project you did.

Okay. What were the tools you use to build it? How'd you do user research? Oh, that's interesting. Why'd you choose that tool? Or you only talk to 20 users? Like, why not more? I mean, it gets. Into it. Right. It's because it's an LLM Power...

Stephen: It's gonna be based on the responses of the actual candidate. Exactly. So if I said, Hey, you know, I worked at Go like something that might not been in my resume, but I say, Hey, I was working at Google and during the time of this downsizing, I really carried the team on my back.

Is it gonna pick up on that and say, well, tell me something about leadership and what you learned during such a trying time. It's gonna be able to kind of pick up those nuances during...

Adam: Exactly right. We've spent the last year and a half building this thing to do exactly what human, what great human recruiters do.

And it's exactly what you just said. And so, so then it has his 90 phone interviews all in parallel for video interviews, right? And then the next day it hands the best five or best 10 or however many you want back to the hiring manager. And so we're talking about, first of all, tasks that aren't being done today, right?

You don't look at 500 applications and you don't do 90 phone screens, right? You might look at 10 and have two. It did a much better, bigger job and frankly, very boring work that no one really wants to be doing anyway. It crunches, you know, six weeks of this nonsense down to about two days and hands the hiring manager, recruiter, whoever, The best five, then the human takes over, right?

And, and then you can do the second screen. But now you're talking to five, very well vetted people that aren't wasting your time because the AI shifted through all that for you. And so this isn't about replacing recruiters, right? Like I would never. Hire someone that only an AI spoke to. That's freaking crazy, right?

Like it's, but, but this thing, it boils the ocean for you. And I'm feeling really good now about these five conversations I'm gonna have, and I'm gonna make a hire with one of 'em or, or more. Right?

Stephen: I, I love it. Some of the pushback we got from the LinkedIn was like, yeah, but they don't have the. The relationship skills that recruiters do, they can't, uh, they can't really, you know, those certain skills that, uh, uh, actual human recruiter could pick up during the conversation, or maybe even red flags that they could pick up during the conversation.

What do you say when people say, yeah, I'd rather have a human in that position, or are you saying like, basically, hey, the human comes in after we've kind of narrowed down the field, so now they can really zero in on those skills? Human, you know, uh, EQ level stuff that most recruiters are able to pick up on.

Adam: Totally agree. Look, AI don't have EQ. Not yet. Anyway, ours sure doesn't. But let, let's talk about red flags for a second. Like there are. There are red flags that that can be picked up. Like, like if, if someone won't answer your question, right, like they're, you know, they're kind of BSing you a little bit and they're like, well, I mean this thing is, AIR is actually trained to like, get you to answer that question.

And if you don't, it will make a note that you did not answer that question. And by the way, the humans. Human, who gets the results back, can, they look at the scorecard and they can drill in and watch the interview or watch clips, like, well, we'll, the AI will flag when something notable is said, or there's a red flag, it probably won't make the cut.

Um, and so, so, but I agree, like the, A company shouldn't be hiring people that they've never, that no one's ever met. Right. That's, we're not there. Um, but, and then I want to talk about the applicant side for a second. Like, um,

Stephen: You touched on that report card and instant, almost instant feedback, which is something that I think every recruiter is guilty of not providing.

Adam: Yeah. And, and look, I, I empathize with, I don't, as someone who's hired lots of people, I don't always, okay, maybe I've never have given feedback to someone who didn't hire, Because I don't have time, right? People don't have time for that stuff. And so it's disheartening as someone who, you know, applies and applies and applies.

And, you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a sad, it's a demoralizing experience. And I've been there and everyone's been there. And so what we built AIR to do is give you feedback at the end and show you the scorecard. Hey, here's what it is, right? And if you want to improve, here's some ways you can improve. It will also give you some coaching.

So you, so let's say you just want coaching. You're not interviewing for the job. You can, you can have a session with this thing and it will give you feedback in real time. Like, Hey, your lighting's not very good. Or you should stop looking away from the camera. It's that soft stuff. And then, and then hard skills like, Hey, like I see you have, you know, a bunch of experience with X, Y, Z skill, but you know, most UX designers who are getting jobs on Braintrust have, you know, uh, expert in Webflow or Figma or whatever the tool is, right? And we're like, we don't see that on your profile. Why don't you go learn that? That's good career coaching, right? And so the AI is built to do that.

Stephen: Now you're coming after my job because I provide one on one coaching for people that want to get into crypto from like a compliance angle, but it's exactly those small points. And the reason why I'm able to provide that coaching is because nobody's telling them, nobody's telling them that their audio is poor and that the camera angles are pointing upwards to their nostrils.

And that when I say, you know, tell me about yourself, they're kind of just giving me, you know, the summary of their, their resume versus kind of showing me some of the skills that they picked up over the years. And I think this is what, this is why I do this is because I don't think a lot of people are getting that crucial feedback.

Uh, and I think, I love the fact that you can just kind of jump on it as a candidate and kind of, you know, go through this skill test, almost like a skill testing question. People aren't getting the reps either. People aren't having a lot of interviews or getting a lot of interviews. So they really don't know like what they're doing wrong, especially when they're getting four or five interviews in three or four months.

Adam: Yeah, that's exactly right. And look, this thing doesn't replace career coaches either. It's just a basic first tool, right? I mean, I don't, I don't think the nuanced detail of coaching you're providing really can be done by AI, but we're talking about some basic stuff, like the aesthetics, but also like, Hey, like something you just said.

I don't think an AI would do like, you know, you're just listing skills. Why don't you tell me stories, right? Like that, that's interesting feedback. Like, um, I don't know. It's just, it's such an underserved part of the economy right now, like helping talent. People want to improve themselves and there's just no way, you know, good way to do it right now.

Stephen: I love it. And talk to me about this. I know since COVID, since the pandemic, you know, even myself have hired people overseas. We're seeing a lot more of that kind of remote work, uh, hiring people overseas, cheaper, and to your point, cheaper, maybe recruitment fees or even cheaper labor. Talk to me about this kind of like future of work movement that you're seeing that, or that you've seen some trends, especially as we have a lot of people in the tech sector listening to this, what are some trends that you're seeing, uh, from the future of work or the existing situation?

Adam: Sure. Well, I mean, so COVID, we launched Braintrust in March of 2020, if you can believe that. And it was, we were pitching it as a remote first, get better people who aren't just in the Bay Area or New York. And, and before COVID, everyone was kind of like, yeah, we'll see, but we, we kind of want you to come to the office, which we all know is BS, right?

I mean, I, my last company. We're, we're the world's largest or country's largest video telemedicine service. And it's like, you can see a doctor over your iPhone and people thought we were crazy. And then COVID taught everybody, that's probably a good idea. So same thing with, with Braintrust. We are like out of this weird through line in my career of like remote stuff.

But Braintrust itself is a remote network, decentralized people all over the world. Most of them I've never met. Um, we don't have offices. We And so COVID made no offices the law. And then, and then fast forward, they had this like, you know, return to office head fake where frankly, lazy managers were like, I'm not very good at managing.

So. I'll determine that you've done your job because I can see you sitting in your cubicle. Just total nonsense. Right? And so...

Stephen: Or that lease is, you know, seven more years. That lease is a 10 year lease and we've only gone through three years of COVID. Like someone's going to have to come sit in these seats or I'm losing my job.

Adam: There's sunk cost fallacy in full effect there. So, so look, we all know that, um, knowledge, the bulk of knowledge work can be done just as well or better remotely. It gives people time back in their schedule. They can be with their family, do pickup. I have three kids. I would never go back to commuting. I live in the Bay Area.

Traffic sucks here. Like, I don't want to sit on the freeway. Like, it's just better. Okay. It just is. And that we still get together in person. Sometimes, of course, you got to whiteboard stuff out. You got to team build. I'm not saying never see anybody, but going to an office three, four, five days a week, Is an anachronism. We all know that's true. So, uh, where we're, I'm sorry, I got off.

Stephen: I think this is what everyone's feeling right now. I think this is, I think this is one of the biggest, uh, struggles that people, companies are having, like, how do you bring in top talent? But this top talent, similar to yourself, doesn't want to come into the office, you know, designated two to three days a week.

So, like, what are your suggestions? I think that was going to be one of my questions, is like, what do you suggest these companies do to obtain top talent, but still, you know, keep that flexibility, that that top talent is, those are deal breakers nowadays. If you have children, pets, You know, elderly parents, like these are deal breakers having to come into the office two, three times a week.

Adam: So look, we've, we've, we've been coaching our clients since 2020 and they've really come around, right? Corporate America, there's still some holdouts here and there, but like Goldman Sachs, they have to come to the office. Fine. But actually Goldman uses Braintrust for plenty of remote stuff. But, uh, the clients have really come around to the, the, the notion that in here, like, here's, here's the pitch.

And like, I firmly believe this and run my own company on this principle. So it's, it is, we're dogfooding. This is like when you open your roles up to fully remote and anywhere in the world, minus the sanctioned countries, obviously, like you're, you're going, you're leveling the playing field. You're going to get better talent at a more competitive rate.

And. Like if that's, that's just better. And now, now, now the problem becomes, this is where, this is why we came up with AIR. The problem becomes you post a senior Java developer remote role, you're gonna get a thousand applications. You just are, right? That's the meat and potatoes that runs the economy. And so, you know, you're kind of like, okay, back to the problem.

We are, we, we just outlined, right? Yeah. So AIR was built to solve that problem, to, to let the whole world can apply and does . AIR will screen every one of those people who should be screened. And then we're going to, in two days, we're going to hand you the best five. Right. And so...

Stephen: You feel, you feel companies are even hedging now that they're less likely to put remote because of that exact problem, maybe like, you know, shooting themselves in the foot because they're not getting access to that global marketplace because they just don't want to deal with the extra applicants.

Adam: You know, that, that, that's why we built AIR is to, is to answer that question. We tell people, if you put a. Location mandate, you're by default shooting yourself in the foot. You, if you, you know, we have a big company in St. Louis that has a office there and it's like, nobody lives there, man. They just don't like the P the person who is going to be best for your job. I can guarantee you just not work in St. Louis, nothing against St. Louis, but..

Stephen: Yeah, you have to hold Missouri, like subscribe from the podcast. Like I'm from Cleveland. Okay. And

Adam: I get the Midwestern thing, but, but you know, just, You know, hampering yourself with a location mandate, it's just, you're, it's just going to have suboptimal results.

Stephen: You talked about Goldman Sachs, you know, a lot of people listen to this podcast and say this is perfect for tech, but this won't work in my industry because A, B, C, uh, tell me about some of your customers. Tell me about some of the industries that maybe you see trending within the platform, uh, and tell me some other funda like maybe some other departments, like I'm in compliance, uh, cyber security is becoming more and more important, especially in the tech area.

Kind of cover the gamut of your customers and some emerging niches within the platform that you're seeing.

Adam: Sure, yeah, a couple points here. So, Braintrust has clients in every sector of the economy. So, consumer goods, uh, you know, Nestle, Nike, uh, tech, AIRbnb, Google, Meta, banking, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, bunch of others, uh, energy, Coke Industries, So every sector of the economy uses Braintrust, or companies use Braintrust for tech hiring today.

We've recently expanded into marketing, which is very tech adjacent. And then we'll get into, by the end of the year, we'll be in all knowledge worker fields. So think about accountants, paralegals, Compliance professionals, um, and Braintrust AIR will be trained to help screen folks in all of those roles. We'll be beyond tech by the end of the year.

Stephen: One of the things that you mentioned, I think you even posted on LinkedIn, is that jobs of people being able to, you know, help train the AI. Can you tell us a little bit about that process? Um, you know, is that creating a new niche of employment where people are like, Hey, I can just train a bunch of different AIs. Uh, on my subject matter expertise. Maybe tell us a little bit about that.

Adam: Yeah, absolutely. So the, so Braintrust AIR was trained on thousands and thousands of hours of recorded video. And then our recruiters, our in house recruiters training the AI on this is good, this is where you need to follow up.

It's very, it's complicated. Right. And so, yeah, we, we employ recruiters to help us do that. Um, and then look, recruiters still need to do the final steps of the screen. Right. And, and then, but what AIR does is it frees up all that huge chunk of time spent on. Mindlessly screening for screens or combing through countless resumes.

And lets recruiters go back to what they're good at. Building company culture. Making sure onboarding goes well. Making sure people, you know, have a buddy system or whatever. When they start so they feel taken care of. That's it. Like, to me, this role is more important in the remote world than it ever was in the physical world.

You know, like, if you go to an office, you know, a lot of people listening, probably, young people have never been to an office, right? I mean, it's just, but, you know, us older guys, like, when you get to an office, you start a new job, You're going to meet someone at the water cooler. You're going to have lunch with someone.

Like your manager is probably going to be your buddy. Like it wasn't as scary. Think about getting a job from your desk in your home and you've never met any of these people in person and you may, you probably never will. Like it's, that could be lonely and scary. That's a recruiter's job is to help make that less scary.

AI is not going to do that. Right. So to me, to me, that's like, It's not that we're creating new jobs necessarily, it's that we're making the existing folks who do HR, HR professionals, recruiters, more effective and like, let them like lean in on their uniquely human skills and let the repetitive stuff get done by the robots.

Stephen: Yeah, it's like any supplement. Like I hate using the steroid example, but like I could use steroids all day. But if I'm eating crap food or not going to the gym, I'm not going to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime. But if I am working on them, I am doing the things I'm supposed to do, similar to how recruiters doing the job.

This is going to make me like, this is a superpower to now I have more time to do the things that really, Make or break some even candidates wanting to apply to these clients in the first place. You know, a lot of clients don't get the top talent because their recruitment process is five to six interviews.

You have to meet the company dog and everybody else. Uh, it's a month long process. And by that time, those candidates have already gone to other companies. Because they've had more of a streamlined and seamless process. That's right.

What are your thoughts on regulation? Because you mentioned, you know, now we're talking about global positions.

We're talking about things in the U. S. where I think in the U. S. you can't ask a candidate what their salary expectations are. You're dealing with GDPR in Europe. How does your platform kind of balance all of these nuances when it comes to regulations and things like privacy? You mentioned MEDA, you know, I know a lot of people like You know, seize up about, well, what are you doing with all this data?

And what are you doing with my interviews? Are you using this to now train your AI and using me for free? I think these are all going to be questions, uh, from people that are very skeptical when it comes to AI.

Adam: Yeah. Look, I mean, all those regulations you just mentioned have nothing to do with AI. Right there.

Those are employment laws that we comply with globally. That that's just table stakes. There's something interesting that just happened in New York, where this, I think it's not just the state, the city said, Any company headquartered here who's using AI at any part of their recruiting process needs to publish that on their careers page.

That A, that they're using AI, and B, how they're using it. So it's like, it's like a, it's, it's actually a pretty thoughtful regulation. It's like, We're not telling you not to do it. We're just telling you be transparent about how you're using it, right? And I think bias is the hot topic here, right? And you know, I'm, I've been talking about this all week.

We built AIR to specifically, deliberately not be biased. It is designed to not look at age, location, accent, ethnicity, gender, things that humans are aware consciously or unconsciously doing it all the time, right? And so the computers are just going to be better than this and, uh, better than humans at this aspect.

And so, I, I think there, there's a, a very strong kind of DEI and, and diversity component to this that, um, I look, I don't have data yet. We're just, this product just launched on Monday, but I look forward to, you know, taking a look at it and I think we're going to do better.

Stephen: But if the inputs are coming from human beings, and this was some of the discussion we had in the LinkedIn post, if the input's coming from human beings and human beings have bias, how can the AI kind of separate that bias or at least spread that risk of bias across the way so that there isn't like, you're not just feeding bias into a system that's just going to like, hyper, you know, hyperbole, like make it more biases because it's receiving all this stuff.

Adam: Yeah, self reinforce its own bias.

Stephen: Exactly.

Adam: There, there's, there's, this is a great topic. There's two different ways you think about training these things. The first one would be like, like, let's, let's, I'll just say Google. I'm, and I'm not sure that they have done this or do that. Someone told me they've done this and I don't know it's true, but Google was like, Hey, let's like reverse engineer everyone who's worked here in the last 20 years.

Who's been great and worked out and then go find more people like that. Well, that's a fucking bias machine if I've ever seen one. Like, I mean, talk about reinforcing a monoculture, right? And look, I don't want to pick on Google. I'm not, I'm not sure that that, that story is true, but it could be any company, right? Any company.

Stephen: Across the board that has that kind of vibe.

Adam: Totally right. And, and I happen to know Google takes DEI very seriously and they're. There have been a great partner of ours, and they're a great client on Braintrust. So not picking on anybody. Um, but if you do that, people have done what I just described, and that is a surefire way to reinforce all the bias that you've had the last 20 years moving forward.

With Braintrust AIR, you're starting over, right? You're taking, we built a super objective skill assessment engine, conversational, that can assess not just your hard skills, but like how you solve problems, how you think about things, what your preferences are. And we built it from scratch and now we have every qualified person able to go through it.

Right? So it's blank slate, right? And it, it's not like there is, there's no bias in it because it was not trained that way. So that we think it's going to be a far superior tool for eliminating bias in, in organizations.

Stephen: What about companies like Google that are saying, Hey, we want to be more diverse. We want more diversity.

Is there a button that they can press to like maybe, you know, flood a little bit more diversity or do you think by just leveling the playing field, they're naturally going to see those candidates that they might not have seen and you're just going to naturally have that diverse, you know, equity and inclusion that you've been yearning for without having to do anything manually.

Adam: The latter. Absolutely the latter. And, and look, I'm biased in my, uh, you know, optimism about this, but I, just from my own experience, like I've hired thousands of developers and designers in my last, my 20 year career for venture backed companies. And it's always looked like a real mixed bag. It's been about half female, half male, plenty of, of ethnic diversity because we're always remote, right?

It's, it turns out like if, if the, if the job allows anyone in the world, as long as you're willing to like work on our time zone for a couple hours, right? To apply, then it's going to look like some cross section of the world, right?

And you'll have. Little bubbles up here. They're like, you know, Eastern Europe, the Balkan states have really focused on technical skills over the last 20 years.

So you see there, there's like an outsized, you know, Ukrainian, Romanian, whatever, um, and, and, uh, Sub Saharan Africa is like, it just is incredible. Developers that, you know, just in the last 10 years that have like, Nigeria is this amazing. So you see them kind of outsized, but, but like, it's based on the whole, the whole world.

Right. It's not just an American thing anymore.

So I don't think you'll need to answer your question. We do not have a button that says add more diversity, but like, but you don't need one. You don't need that button. Like, the world is a diverse place, and so when you level the playing field on applicants and look at every single one of them, you're just going to end up with a more diverse workforce.

And when I say diverse, too, like I don't just mean ethnic and gender. Like, like there is a, the economy should be meritocratic too, right? And so, you know, people who are very good and very hungry and very motivated from developing parts of the world, that's who I like to employ, right? Like they have a lower sense of entitlement.

They want the thing better, more. Um, they're going to be more. You know, they're going to work harder, right? And like, that's what you want as a hiring manager. So this thing will help you find them easier.

Stephen: You're talking about having over a million members within this platform and community that are, I'm assuming mostly looking for jobs.

Is that turn out to be like LinkedIn where they're there, but once they get a job, they're not logging into LinkedIn anymore. Like, how do you measure activity contribution? Uh, are you keeping that data or do you have people there in the community engaging people having maybe, you know, you know, frequently asked questions Fridays where they're answering questions from the community.

How do you manage the community? Cause I think that's probably the. You know, AI can solve a lot of things. Managing a community and engaging a community is something that's still really hard to do with or without AI.

Adam: Certainly. Yeah. So, so we, we started off life as a jobs marketplace. You come, you build your profile, you get a job. Bye bye. And then last year we rolled out our professional network. And so now it's, it's about giving and getting career advice peer to peer. And so folks like you could come on and build a cohort and that's where our token comes in. This is about to launch. But people can pay for bespoke career advice with the Braintrust token.

And by the way, you, the way you get the token is you refer people, clients or, or talent. We want you to, you can go buy the token on Coinbase, but we prefer you, you refer and earn it. Because referring grows the network, right? And the majority of the growth of Braintrust is due to referrals. We have, uh, community people, uh, that talent refer other talent.

We have these connectors who are basically like freelance sales people who refer, uh, clients in. So referrals, uh, Community, it's what drives Braintrust.

Um, where, uh, where AI comes in on that is moderation. So, we used to pay a bunch of moderators to, like, sort things out or whatever. Turns out AI's pretty good at that.

It's like, Completely replaced that, that role, but you know, you, you want your professional community to be a safe and respectful place and not have people harassing or spamming or whatever. So we have, we have AM moderators that kind of cut down on the spam. Um, but yeah, so now it's, it's not, it's come for the job, stay for the advice or giving it, but we have just as many people who want to give advice then as receive it.

So that's been, uh, uh, a fun, you know, we, we used to have our community on Discord, And like, right, man, that's, that's which is a scary place,

Stephen: Which is a great community place. That's scary place to access any links information or click a button though.

Adam: We shut it off. It was just like, you know what? It it, I get why some crypto people like it, and I'm a crypto guy, I get it. But like, it's not a, it's not a safe place to have a professional network. So we built, we built our own.

Stephen: Speaking of crypto, you know, you're tokenizing this. Everyone's going to say, like, why can't you just create this platform? You have a bunch of tech people in your industry.

Couldn't you just create this platform in Web2? What was the need for, you know, the Web3 application, the governance of bringing in the community and having this token and, you know, people having, being able to earn the token and use the token for a number of different things. Bring me into why this is important on the blockchain.

Adam: That's right. Yeah. So look, there's plenty of Web 2 aspects to this. I've never, you know, Web 3 doesn't mean You can't use Web 2, right? That's what they started saying, Web 2.5 or something. But, um, the point of the token is to provide an incentive mechanism for people to grow the network and a governance system.

So we have a governance based on compound, uh, finance, uh, Governor Alpha. We just forked that. It's one token, one vote. The rules to the marketplace, important rules like what fee should be charged to clients is written in a smart contract. It can only be updated by the community proposing and voting.

Actually, the fee changed recently. Last summer, it went from 10% to 15%. Community proposed it, voted on it, it passed. Smart contract. Compare that. So it's, it's a user owned network, right?

That's the point of Web3 is to, to give the value of a marketplace back to the users so they can make more money and have control over the place they make a living. I mean, compare that to like DoorDash, like DoorDash, like all the props in the world, they built an incredible business there, but like, at least some of the shit that they pulled, they rolled out a tipping feature a couple of years ago where you could tip the dasher and then they took it and they booked it all as revenue.

This is a great New York Times story about it. Could you do that in a user owned network? Of course not, right? What if the dashers had any say over how that, that, or the restaurants had any say over how that marketplace works? Well, the DoorDash wouldn't be marking the food up 30 % and then squashing down the DoorDash or the driver's rates, right?

And having this big public company shareholders reap all the profits. It's like, it's a cool business. Great. It's not good for restaurants and it's sure not good for the dashers. It's good for the diners if they're willing to pay for it. But I don't know. I just think that's a broken model. I think user owned networks will grow faster and be more valuable over time than corporate owned networks.

That doesn't mean every single corporation is going to tokenize. Of course not. It's companies that are running marketplaces that extract more value than they provide. DoorDash and Uber, I think, are great examples of companies that extract more value than they're providing. Right. On the other end of the spectrum, you have like AIRbnb, which connects, you know, homeowners and whatever with people who want to stay there.

AIRbnb, I think this 25% or 30%, they provide a lot for that fee. You get insurance, background checks, safe payments, check in, check out, you know, you can feel good about having a stranger in your house because AIRbnb's vetted them, you know, blah, blah, blah. Uh, it's, you know, rep all that reputation lives on.

Like, you don't see people trying to disintermediate AIRbnb. They're, they're providing more value than they're extracting, which is make, I think, makes that a brilliant service. Uh, and so Braintrust came in and it was like, look, we think staffing firms and consulting firms that mark up talent 50 to 100 % for making an introduction or vetting someone for an hour, we think that's extracting more value than they provide. So screw that. Let's have a user owned network.

Stephen: And why wouldn't a company say like, Hey, you know, I'm paying less fee. I have a thriving community. Cause a lot of places, like you don't have that community aspect. You would want to post a job in a place where people are seeking, you know, how to upgrade their professional lives and be better candidates and get better jobs.

What would, what is the reason that you hear clients saying like, Oh, I don't really think this is the place for me. I prefer my headhunter. Or, you know, a subject matter expert, or, you know, I like saying that I'm a client of Deloitte or a big consultancy firm. What's the, maybe the number one reason that you're hearing why clients are a little bit hesitant to get into this, uh, platform?

Adam: Well, we, we, we don't, we don't see. Once a client hears about us and sees how it works, they're in, right? We don't get any pushback. And we also don't, like, we actually work with the Deloitte's. McKinsey's like a big client on Braintrust. Like, McKinsey will come in to a big company and be like, hey, we have to solve this massive supply chain issue, say, like, okay, and we're going to need 50 developers to do it.

And then McKinsey goes on Braintrust developers. So we, we're actually a vendor to a lot of those guys. And it, You know, you can imagine like they're not, you know, they're not in the business of renting out job developers at 100 % markup anymore because of us, right? But that doesn't mean that they don't have a place.

Um, and then, and then on the headhunter topic, it's an important one. Like headhunters are always going to exist for some roles. You know, you're like, Braintrust is great for kind of just, you know, good knowledge, working jobs, you know, developers, programmers, and eventually accountants and paralegals or whatever.

But, um, You know, the, the higher levels, the C level stuff for senior VPs, like you're always going to have, you know, specialized headhunters for that stuff.

Stephen: Does Braintrust also provide scorecards for the client? Like, Hey, this, this is the way we do, you know,

Adam: Oh yeah, both sides see it. Absolutely. Yeah. After, after AIR does those 90 phone screens or video screens live, uh, in parallel it hands back the best 10 scorecards.

You, you could see 'em all if you want to, but it, it's, yeah, the scorecard's for both sides.

Stephen: And what I meant by that is I figured that they would get the candidate scorecard, but had to be a better client. 'cause I think one of the issues you see in recruitment is not just the recruiters. The clients are very vague.

They don't want to say exactly what they want. Because maybe they don't want the recruiter to give the information over the candidates. Is there an area where hiring managers can actually get better to kind of feed this process even more, not just the candidates getting better?

Adam: That's a great question. I mean, it, it, The first crack at that and making clients better is we, we take over writing the job description, right? Like we, cause we know, we know what works, right? We, we, we have this database of millions and millions and millions of job descriptions that we know what's effective. So we'll be prescriptive to the client on that stuff.

At the end of the day, the client's going to do whatever they want. Right. Um, but yeah, I, it, there, there is a feedback loop there for sure.

Stephen: And what feedback are you getting from these clients? Are they just continue using the service? It's like, um, Uh, like you land the client, everyone's happy, you know, the client didn't have to pay out as much, the candidate got more on their salary because the client didn't have to nickel and dime them because they were paying a 40 % recruitment fee.

What is the feedback that you're getting on the other side? Or like, hey, these are the product upgrades that we need. I know your, your product team's probably busy handling all the feature requests, but what are some of the things that either clients or candidates are asking for?

Adam: Yeah, I mean, the ability to screen more people more objectively more quickly was the biggest thing we've been hearing. That's how I spent the year, last year and a half, investing and building in Braintrust AIR. Um, the clients, uh, the way, the way this Braintrust spreads through a company usually is like one hiring manager will try it for a couple roles, see how it goes. And then they'll, it'll kind of spread organically through the organization.

We have a small sales team internally that helps expand these big clients. I mean, Imagine how many brands are under Nestle, you know, and how we've spread. They were one of our first clients and now we're in almost every, every department and brand there. But, um, yeah, look, they, they have to have a good experience.

They have to find good people. And then that's, that's how the accounts expand.

Stephen: And if I'm, I'm a recruitment company, I can actually use you find the candidates and then maybe charge a premium for having to do the secondary reviews, interviews, et cetera. Is that what you're saying? Other recruiters are using your.

Consultancies, would that be kind of the business model that they're going, they're using you to do the quick screening and then they kind of, uh, narrow down their expertise for the right remainder of the process?

Adam: Exactly. Right.

Stephen: That's really , that's a really interesting, that's the first thing that came to my mind.

I'm like, oh, as a recruiter, I would love to, you know, use you to screen because it's a, I think it's a waste of recruiters time to have to even look at, uh, the majority of the applications. And then you're getting, what about the a TS system? Because people had a beef with the ATS system. I believe it's the ATS system.

They kind of like, you know, used maybe automation to kind of go through some of the resumes. People felt they were discriminated against. Some of the comments were like, hey, I never get passed into the first round anyway because these systems don't work. What are your thoughts on the ATS system?

Adam: Yeah, look, I, i, so I'm not an expert on ATS systems. We, we integrate with them. Any ATS in the world, you can, you can come as a client, create a Braintrust account, and then hook in your ATS with one click, and we pull all your jobs in, uh, by API, and then we can start vetting for you. Right? So it's plug and play. On the topic of ATS, uh, screening or sorting and scoring resumes, Look, it's a black box, right?

We just, you just don't know how it works. Braintrust provides scorecards. Like, if you want to know why someone didn't make it, we'll tell you exactly why, right? And if you disagree with it, fine. They can call the guy, that's fine. But, um, it's like, it's about transparency.

Stephen: Do you see this expanding into other areas like grants, uh, uh, scholarships?

Because I can see a place where there's a lot of applications, very specific requirements, uh, and, you know, I applied for a grant the other day, and they're like, Hey, 60 days, we'll respond to you. 120 days later, they're like, Hey, we're backed up. Obviously, everyone wants money from the government. What are your thoughts about expanding into these other areas?

Adam: That's a great point. It actually has never occurred to me. Um, so it's a good idea. Um, look, the, the, the, the commercial job market is the biggest market in the world. So if we can make an impact here, I think that's where we stay focused. Um, I sure would like to see technology like this used at college admissions.

Right. Speaking of that, that was my next slide. Speaking of a stinking hot topic..

Stephen: Although there might be some, um, you know, celebrities that might not enjoy this, uh, leveling the playing field very much.

Adam: You can't bribe an AI.

Stephen: They might be able to, they might be able to figure out you're not on the rowing team, uh, and because they've never seen you with a paddle before, uh, you were on, you were on Schwab Network.

Discussing the March job report, March of 2024, about a month and a half after we've recorded, before we record this podcast, uh, and you started your company in 2020, March of 2020 uh, the big thing is like you're in the tech sector and the tech sector has had mass layoffs. What are your thoughts on the mass layoffs?

How does that impact your company? Are you seeing a turnaround? What are companies like? Are they more inclined to use your services now? Now that, Hey, they still need to hire, but they can't afford. They're trying to trim down all of their costs across the board. Recruitment might be the best place, especially when they're not hiring 500, 400 people at a time.

Adam: Yeah. So, and I'll, I'll be on, uh, Schwab again, uh, tomorrow for talk about the April jobs report. So, um, uh..

Stephen: Give us some insight. No...

Adam: Yeah, no. I don't know. I don't know what the jobs report is going to say, but I do know what the trend is. I mean, so Braintrust sits on the, kind of the bleeding edge of this thing.

We see, we see the. Macro economic environment affecting the employment market in real time. And the layoffs have been terrible. Uh, it just really good people who, you know, are smart and productive and deserving of a good job are being laid off in droves and it's not over. You see this drip, drip, drip, drip, drip.

Uh, it's not over. We're going to see more. Um, companies are. They overhired right through the ZURP bubble. Uh, now they're paying, they're paying the price. We, we heard from a senior executive at a very large public company that uses Braintrust that there is a mandate to reduce, uh, something like 250 million man hours this year.

And so how do you do that? Well, you slow down hiring. You do layoffs and you implement AI. And so it's this mixture of things, um, that is just going to, the, the water is choppy still in this labor market. So look, it remains to be seen if the Fed can, can do this soft landing. They, we thought we were going to see three rate cuts this year.

Not going to happen. We might see a rate increase this summer, right? Which is pulling us more back toward probability of recession. And so. It's very hard for big companies to plan around this uncertainty and it's an election year, obviously. So everything's always upset. So, you know, we'll get through it.

Um, I, my advice, you know, being an advocate for talent and we're a talent owned network here is, Um, make AI your friend, you know, figure out how to use it, because I guarantee you the person hiring you doesn't know how to use it. Right? Unless they're using Braintrust AI, maybe then. But, you know, like, like, every role, every role.

Yeah, I'm a plug machine here. Every role is going to be affected by AI. It doesn't matter what you do. You know, I mean, we, I filed a patent recently and my, my attorney is like, I'm an AI patent attorney. Like we, and we do everything. He's like, 80% of, uh, Pat attorneys are going away. I'm going to be one of the 20%. I, so he figured this guy's a genius. He knows how to use all the AI tools. So look, every single job, no matter what you do. Myself, everybody should, should really spend the time getting well versed and well equipped with the Gemini and ChatGPT and Opus and all these tools.

Stephen: You talk about being a talent person. You're, you know, leading a network full of talent. What about on the reverse side? You know, if you've been on TikTok, Instagram, you've seen, you know, the firing videos.

Candidates or people getting fired or firing back, uh, these group calls of 150 people that get on and just say, yeah, by the way, your computer is not going to be working in three seconds.

What can companies do to make this right? Like, I don't think there's any way, a proper way to fire people. I prefer, I prefer being fired that way versus having to come into the office. Go to a separate floor being told I have no, no transferable skills and have to go get my lunch in the way of the cafeteria and walk out, you know, sometimes in front of a guard or a security guard.

What are your thoughts about the way companies are letting go people, not just hiring them?

Adam: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. There's, I, I'd certainly rather be fired over Zoom than in person as well. I mean, uh, you know, look, these are very tough decisions these companies are making and it's on them to be as humane as possible.

And, um, you know, I, I, people deserve respect, you know, and it, it's like the, the fact that you're, I've, I've had to do layoffs in my past and, and, When you do that, like you got to own it, right? It's like we, we overhired or hired incorrectly. Like take responsibility for yourself if you're, if you're the one making these decisions.

And look, exogenous things in the economy cause these layoffs sometimes, right? But you can't just blame macro for everything. People, everyone deserves respect in it. Anyone who's doing this in an inhumane way is, is, uh, it's not necessary. You don't have to be inhumane.

Stephen: I think there's opportunity now even for Braintrust, right? If, you know, someone has to let go of somebody, they use Braintrust to hire them. Maybe they can provide them with a certain amount of tokens to get one on one mentorship or to be used for other applications within your ecosystem, I think is an interesting concept to help companies both on the front end and the back end.

Adam: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned, you know, we were talking about the layoffs earlier, like, and I forgot to answer the question. You know, Braintrust went from something like 150, 000 talent members to 750, 000 in like nine months last year. Wow. And it's mostly driven by, by the layoffs. And, you know, these people have some, some have found some solace and community and camaraderie on the Braintrust Professional Network, being able to help each other and coach each other and, um, develop, you know, a network that can, you know, lead to another better job.

Stephen: What are your thoughts? We're hearing, you know, reports. I don't know how true they are, but a lot of publications are publishing that one in five, you know, employers are seeing candidates bring their family members, parents to the actual job interview, not in the lobby, directly to the job interview. Are you hearing instances on this?

Like, what are your thoughts about this? Are your clients talking about this? You know, maybe on some Slack channels, uh, internally with maybe several emojies

Adam: This is the first I'm hearing that, uh, what, what we do see, but remember, we're all remote, so we don't see any buildings, but what, what, what we do see, I see actually almost every day is someone's kid running by behind and, you know, and like, remember that was like a big scandal, like if you're on TV or a podcaster, like your kid runs by and like, I'm so glad that got turned upside down.

Like, I love seeing people's kids. Like we have our all hands every week and it's like, Someone's baby or toddler will pop in. I have a little two year old and it's like, that's awesome. You know, like, let's like companies, corporate America has taken so much from talent through the smartphone. Now it's like, if you're awake, you better be answering an email.

Right. And look, I'm guilty of this. I, I am, I'm always on. Right. And I expect some of my people to always be on as well. But can't you, in exchange for that. Let people work from home when they want or where they want. We have half the employees. We have our digital nomads, which that wasn't even a term three years ago.

But these, these, you know, mostly younger people are like, they don't live anywhere. Right. It's like,

where are you? Yeah. How cool are you?

Stephen: He's like, Oh man, why did this happen when I didn't have kids? And I think I see a lot of people, even with kids that are just embracing it and they're traveling the world and I absolutely love that.

We have about five minutes left until, unless you can go a little bit longer. But I want to talk about, you're a serial entrepreneur. You talk about businesses, hiring thousands of people. What are you looking for? Cause we have a lot of people that are either entrepreneurs on this call, business consultants.

What are the things that you think make or decision makers? What are the deal breakers and the decision makers for you? When you're like, Hey, I want to work with this company. I want to invest in this company. I want to advise for this company. Like what are your thought processes around this or maybe your ethos?

Adam: Sure. Yeah. And I, unfortunately I do have a hard stop at 10:30, so I'll try to make this brief. But, um, so as an investor, I've been an investor in hundreds of companies, um, directly. I'm an LP and probably 14 or 15 venture and hedge funds. Um, very active family office on the tech investing side. And I still do deals.

My, I spend very like 1 % of my time on this cause I'm focused on Braintrust, but, um, I, I, I will, you know, send time with the founder occasionally. And look, there's plenty of good ideas out there, right? Ideas are cheap, it's execution that matters. And. Running, taking a startup from zero to one, getting that first million in ARR, we're about a hundred now, trying to break to a billion. God, is it hard. You need someone who's just,

I'll misuse this word, but you'll understand what I mean. Just psychopathically obsessed with success. And you're looking for a founder that will do whatever it takes within the confines of the law, of course. I've invested in people who have stepped out of those confines and it doesn't end well. So keep it compliant and legal, people.

But, um, look, it is, this is the hardest goddamn job there is. And you have to be, you have to find someone, when you're investing your own money, you have to find someone who is just going to win at all costs and is going to slavishly be dedicated. And, you know, I was at, I get asked, like, tell me about the ups and downs of the roller coaster.

Like, It's all downs. You're like, you're, you're living for like 10 cumulative minutes a year of satisfaction if you're lucky, and the rest of it is really tough. And so you got to believe in what you're doing, right? Like I, I'm so driven by our mission at Braintrust to level the playing field for global talent and make hiring way, way easier and more fAIR and less biased and faster.

For clients, because I've been on both sides. And so that's what keeps me, you know, like that's what gets me through all the BS you got to deal with as a founder.

Stephen: And I think you being on both sides, I'm very similar, been on both sides of the table. You really do see like, Oh, this is a really bad thing.

Like if this person just kind of did this and that person did this. This could be the best process, and by far it's the worst process. Like, if buying a house and buying a car is going to be such a, you know, filled with so much friction, you know, people still don't stop doing it, but you still want them to have a joyous experience.

Especially when they're only going to go through 4 or 5 of these sometimes within a 10 or 12 year period. Where they're looking for jobs. Talk to me a little bit about, uh, how do you keep from having shiny ball syndrome? Like, I, I, I know you left Doctors On Demand, kind of looking back, you're like, hey, this, this is really blowing up right now with the pandemic.

Maybe this is something I stick with versus, you know, going into the recruitment field. How do you keep from like, you know, maybe dabbling in different things, but keep your focus on, you know, I don't want to go back to do that. I kind of left for a reason type of thing.

Adam: Well, fortunately I'm still a shareholder in that company. So that's a trick, like plant lots of seeds and some of them will grow.

Um, yeah, you know, avoiding chasing shiny objects is an important part of being a good leader. Um, You know, you have to think critically from first principles about what's important, you know, and, um, we see a lot of shiny objects in crypto land, you know, this, this stupid meme coin shit, it just drives me crazy.

Right. And if I hear any investor, I'm an investor in like taking it seriously, it drives me nuts. Like. There might be something there derivative, but like trading the dog coins and stuff, like, you know, you just got to be intellectually disciplined in your, in your role. And, and I think that that's still worth something.

Stephen: But that's how people looked at Bitcoin too. Right. So you almost have to like weigh it a little bit because you're like, yeah, that's kind of how I got into crypto in the first place.

That's true. Looking at something that people thought was a mean point, but it's still me.

Adam: Yeah. Some, some shiny objects turn out to be digital gold for sure. Um, but I think there's a big gap between Bitcoin and mean points. But I take your point.

Stephen: Adam, this has been, I don't know, I've been so excited to have this conversation. The chat was going wild on LinkedIn. Uh, and you know, just, I, I love your aspects. I love the way you're talking about this. I definitely want to have, I know this is your second time on the podcast.

Uh, I definitely want to have you back in maybe a year from now or the end of this year. And see how things are going. Thank you so much for taking your time. Where can people reach out to you? People are like excited. Uh, do you kind of jive on LinkedIn, Twitter? Where do you spend most of your time? Yeah, yeah,

Adam: I'm on both LinkedIn and Twitter. Twitter's @adamjacksonsf. braintrust.com, obviously. And, um, Stephen, thank you so much for having me on. You've got, you've built an incredible community yourself. I was, you're, that thread, That were on, on LinkedIn is very thoughtful and vibrant. And, um, thanks for including me.

Stephen: I appreciate it. And we'll include all your links into the show notes.

Thank you so much, Adam.

Adam: Thank you.