In this episode of 'The Next Next,' host Jason Jacobs converses with Brian Balfour, founder and CEO of Reforge. With a long history together, including Balfour's ventures like Viximo and Boundless Learning, their discussion delves into Balfour's journey from being HubSpot's VP of Growth to building Reforge since 2016. They explore the challenges and rewards of balancing venture-backed ambitions with personal life, particularly fatherhood. They discuss Reforge's recent shift towards incorporating AI, including the acquisition of Monterey.ai, the role of AI in education and product management, and the future impacts of AI on startup culture. Balfour shares personal anecdotes, thoughts on work-life balance, the evolving landscape of AI, and advice for navigating these changes. The conversation underscores the importance of embracing ambition healthily and leveraging emerging technologies for growth.
Navigating Ambition, Family, and AI with Brian Balfour of Reforge In this episode of The Next Next, host Jason Jacobs speaks with Brian Balfour, founder and CEO of Reforge. The episode covers Brian’s entrepreneurial journey, including his time at Viximo and HubSpot, and the challenges and strategies he employed in building Reforge since 2016. Brian shares insights on balancing being a venture-backed founder and a dad, embracing and managing ambition healthily, and the transformative impact of AI on product teams. The conversation delves into Reforge’s pivot to incorporating AI, its acquisition of Monterey.ai, and the future implications of AI on startup building and venture capital. Jason and Brian also discuss the evolving landscape of AI tools and the importance of being on the front lines of technology adoption.
00:00 Introduction to Brian Balfour
00:31 Brian's Early Ventures and Reforge
00:46 Balancing Ambition and Family
00:56 The Role of AI in Reforge
02:03 The Next Next: A Learning Journey
02:44 Brian's Entrepreneurial Journey
05:29 The Impact of Family on Ambition
06:48 Navigating Challenges and Opportunities
22:59 AI's Disruption in Education and Product Teams
32:08 Transitioning to AI Native Product Teams
32:42 Building vs. Acquiring AI Products
33:24 Utilizing AI in Training and Content Creation
38:31 Impact of AI on Team Structure and Efficiency
41:24 Future of Startups and AI
47:53 Venture Capital and Startup Culture
50:17 Navigating AI Tools and Automation
52:03 Advice and Future Plans
01:02:27 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Jason Jacobs: On today's episode of The Next Next, our guest is Brian Balfour, founder and CEO of Reforge. Now, I've known Brian a long time, dating back to his Viximo days, which must have been 2007, 2008. Since founding Viximo, Brian went on to found several companies, including Boundless Learning.
And education platform. He was also the vice president of growth at HubSpot, where he led growth initiatives for new products, particularly within the sales product division. And now he's been building Reforge since 2016. Now his story is interesting for a number of reasons. One, he's a multiple time venture backed founder.
And now he's scaling Reforge where they've raised a bunch of venture money, and he's trying to balance being a venture backed founder with being a dad. I can certainly relate to that, and that's one of the driving forces of my journey, is how to build different in a way that can enable me to not compromise either of those things.
Brian also, in his seat at Reforge, Particularly is helping practitioners, but a lot of product people to understand how their craft is changing and how to incorporate AI. So, he's doing a lot with AI to help train practitioners. They're doing a lot with AI internally, and they actually just made an acquisition of an AI company to help them with their internal tooling.
Now, we cover a lot in this episode, not just in terms of Reforge and Some of the trials and tribulations that they've gone through. We also talk about how Brian has managed to balance it all, what he's doing. Well, what he wishes he was doing better and how he's been navigating that. And we talk about the future, the future of how startups get built and funded, the role that AI can play the risks, the opportunities, how they're thinking about it, reforge, and how you might want to think about it as you go off and either start a venture or, figure out how to incorporate those, these tools into your job.
At any rate, I hope you enjoy it. But before we get started.
I'm Jason Jacobs, and this is The Next Next, it's not really a show. It's more of a learning journey to explore how founders can build ambitious companies while being present for family and not compromising flexibility and control, and also how emerging AI tools can assist with that. Each week, we bring on guests who are at the tip of the spear on redefining how ambitious companies get built.
And selfishly, the goal is for this to help me better understand how to do that myself. While bringing all of you along for the ride. Not sure where this is going to go, but it's going to be fun.
Okay. Brian Balfour, welcome to the show.
Brian Balfour: Thanks for having me. It's been a long time.
Jason Jacobs: It has, yeah. I remember gosh, this was right around the time that I was looking to start RunKeeper up. I started it in 2008, so I don't think I'd quite started it yet, but you were, like, a legend in the Boston founder circles, which comprised of ten people.
Brian Balfour: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Small pond. Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: But I was like, oh, man, here's this young guy right out of school, and he raised five million bucks, and it's, he's doing the kind of stuff that's Supposedly only gets done in the valley and he's right here in Boston and that was like, that was quite a rare thing at that time.
Brian Balfour: Yeah. Look, you actually have a great memory cause you're right. It was 5 million bucks. That was the exact round. And it was odd for Boston, right? That was a early social gaming, virtual goods company, like even before the Facebook platform was taken off Boston East coast, which is not known for that whatsoever.
And it was a wild ride. I'm happy to go deeper into the lessons learned from that. That was, that was a crazy start to the career.
Jason Jacobs: Oh, we have a lot of stuff to cover, but why don't we do two things. One, I want to tell you why I'm so excited that you came on, and I want to give you a little bit of context for what I'm up to just to frame the discussion as well. Cool?
Brian Balfour: Sounds good.
Jason Jacobs: Okay actually, I guess I'll start with me first. I'm on this wild journey, it's like a public learning journey, and it's two parts.
One part is, like, how do I build different in a way that I can keep the outsides, the ambition that I've always had and that I'm addicted to. But be a lot more present with family, right? So like, how do I be fully present with family without compromising ambition? That's another way to say it.
And secondarily, like How is AI transforming how startups get built and funded and what the implications might be for someone like me that wants to build different and if I might be able to leverage AI to help. So that's the journey. Why I'm so excited to reach out to you is one I guess a bunch of reasons, but but yeah, you've been an entrepreneur a long time and you you are steeped in the way that traditionally technology products have been brought to market.
In fact, your business has been helping people do it better, right? And also you it seems from a distance that you have. really leaned hard into these emerging tools and helping traditional skill sets adapt. And you just did an acquisition, so you're also eating your own dog food and using these tools internally.
For all those reasons and more I was psyched for this discussion.
Brian Balfour: Yeah, I actually have a question for you to start us off, though. Did this come from a place of thinking about RunKeeper and lessons learned of Oh, I wish I could have built it a little bit differently? Is that where this desire, this intersection of how can I build differently at the intersection of family, ambition, and AI?
Or is it something else? What's the source?
Jason Jacobs: That's a good question, and it's actually something that came up on a recent prior episode because, or, I can't remember if I was recording or not, but when I, what, but the conversation was essentially, hey, for me, this is family and life stage driven, but but this isn't just a journey about balancing Bye!
Bing! Parenting and ambition. It is a journey to discover how to work different for anyone that wants to work different for whatever reason they want to work different for. For me, it's a life stage thing that it's like, gosh, my kids are about to turn 13 about to turn 10. And during the pandemic, I got so wrapped up in their activities, especially my older boy with a sport.
Brian Balfour: Oh, okay.
Jason Jacobs: it's like a full time job, right? It's it's so hard. And then so traditional 9 to 5s, especially ones that involve travel and not being the master of your own calendar and things like that, like it's just really hard to make it fit. But at the same time, I don't want to be like a, an advisor, or a fractional this, or a CEO coach, or a recruiter.
I want to build shit! I want to build big shit. I want to build an empire, right? And so it's how do you do that in a way that you have these outside constraints? It's you have to do it your way in a way that you have, that flexibility and control are paramount. So that's what's driving it.
Brian Balfour: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense to me. Yours are a little bit older than mine. Mine are five and about to turn three, both boys. And yeah, it's been a push and pull, on those two fronts.
Jason Jacobs: You mentioned that when I reach out to you and maybe, maybe we can start there because Reforge, I actually, for whatever reason, I thought that Reforge was the Aaron White style no outside capital fully in control of your own destiny, but you've raised a boatload of capital.
It turns out the benefit of hindsight, now that your kids are starting to get older how you feel about that
Brian Balfour: it's been, so I should actually back up. Cause some of the family stuff it's all intertwined, it's all intertwined. So some
Jason Jacobs: take it from wherever you'd like, Brian. And normally we do context and we work our way into the good stuff. And this time I, for whatever reason, I was impatient. So if you want to
Brian Balfour: Oh no. I'm going to get deep. I'm going to get deep and real fair, very fast here. For those that don't know, I started reforge. It's actually been close to 10 years ago now, which is insane to think about. First four years of the business, we actually bootstrapped to over 10 million in revenue.
The company was incredibly profitable. And so you look at that and You wonder, like a lot of people would look at that and think Oh my God, like massive success. I would love that. I will say, though, in the moment, it did not feel like that. It did, and it did not feel like it was, like, fulfilling, and this is part of.
The part of the pro and the dark side of the ambition. Because the ambition was both pushing me as well as making me feel empty at the same time. And like around this experience around this time, actually, before we
Jason Jacobs: excited by what you were just saying that I kicked the door of this little phone booth open, so I had to shut it.
Brian Balfour: Before, before we raise money my wife and I had a very unfortunate experience. We had a daughter that passed away at birth suddenly. And, I, that was a, obviously a very kind of. There was a moment, it was the first time in my life that I had lost, and experienced like a tragedy around like somebody that, that was like super close to me, obviously our daughter and my wife.
And so as you do in that time, you reassess everything in life. You're like, why the hell am I doing this? And I had a bunch of guilt too because I wasn't as present as I could be, could have been, like during that pregnancy and all of those pieces. And I think in that moment as I went through both like that grieving period and processing and all of that stuff.
One of the things that actually came out of it was there's. There was a lot of depth to why I was doing what I was doing, that the entrepreneurial journey that ambition. And and so as part of that decision, I was like, if I'm going to be doing this. I want to be doing it to, the fullest possible extent that I can.
And that can take many pieces that can take many paths for people. But at the time, the business was doing well enough. And we had so much demand that it was very easy for us to raise venture capital. That was our series. And.
Jason Jacobs: What year was this?
Brian Balfour: This was
Jason Jacobs: 19? Did
Brian Balfour: 2020, maybe? Yeah, something around there.
Jason Jacobs: So 22, the two rounds?
Brian Balfour: Yeah, and so then the Series B came very close after that. The Series B, I believe, was only like 12 months afterwards, maybe 18 months. We hadn't spent any of the Series A money. The company had more than tripled. In that short time period, like it was like, just like a pure rocket ship. And it felt like there was just this insatiable appetite for what we were doing.
And and so in the moment everything felt, okay, this makes total sense. Like Siri, let's do the series B. We did a big series B. And then literally two months later, during my parental leave for our first son, it was when the markets like. The tech market just totally crashed, came back from parental leave like super early, we ended up in like this replanning this absolutely like replanning cycle around just redoing our goals, trying to figure out what was going to happen with the budgets.
And, the next couple of years on that was just like, A very hard journey of, multiple riffs dealing with slash budgets, we were in the bullseye that tech market downturn, multiple things happen. One is that most of our customers were technology companies, which were the hardest hit.
Two is that we were premium priced in the market, which also was a problem at the time. And then the third was that we were on a budget line item that was. Typically the first to be slashed. So it was just like a triple whammy for us. And that ended up being like a really hard thing to deal with.
Now, had I known that was all going to happen, would I have raised the series A and series B at the time? No, it like would have been better to keep the company bootstrapped and stuff. But that's the bet. That's the dice roll that you were take as a founder. And I knew what I was getting into. It's not like I hadn't done this
Jason Jacobs: don't have to answer this, but I hope you took some secondary in one of those
Brian Balfour: Yes. Yes. And I did. And And I don't know if I would have raised if that wasn't possible at the time, given like the family situation, and I actually think this is like, all the VCs out there that, honestly, bitch and moan about founders taking secondary you have no idea how You are being perceived by founders.
You are doing yourself a disservice, right? Like you are sitting in a seat where you're saying, I'm going to take a bunch of diversified bets and a really nice fee. And you're complaining about founders taking a little bit of money off the table. Along the way so that, they can feel more comfortable taking these really high risk bets.
Come on anyway, so I get really super annoyed of it. Now there's other rounds where people take, I've seen founders take hundreds of millions off the table and then leave six months later. That's a different scenario. 95 percent of folks that take secondary off the table are not for those reasons.
It's for the reasons to be able to keep taking bigger and bigger bets. And that was the reason that that was like the reason that I took it along the time. But. But anyways, it's like it's taken the bet in the moment with the information that you have and when the information we had at the time was all signs were like, like flashing, like amazing.
And unfortunately now in hindsight, we know that a healthy chunk of that was, due to Zerp and some like post covid demand pull forward as well as a couple other things. And then, of course, we didn't. See AI coming around the corner either, but that's both been a challenge, but has turned into our opportunity as well, which I'm where I'm happy to talk about that.
But that was a little bit. That was a little bit of the evolution is that it actually started with a family moment. And like a very unfortunate family moment. And ever since it's been a constant, it's been a learning journey about how to embrace the ambition, but in a healthy way now that I've got, two boys and raising them and trying to share this ambition with them in a healthy way.
Jason Jacobs: Now I want to poke on that, and I don't know what's too personal or not, and so wherever you don't want to go, just don't
Brian Balfour: Go for it. Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: yeah, but you talked about how the ambition was coming from a much deeper place. So that's one thing I want to. Just poke on to the extent you're comfortable talking about it.
And then the other piece is once you have that realization, I There was a fork in the road. One way you could have responded is, oh, I feel felt guilt I wasn't there for the pregnancy. I'm gonna be a lot more present But it sounds like you almost went the other way and got even more ambitious.
So I wanted to ask you about that as well Was
Brian Balfour: I think it's an and not an or it's okay, I started recognizing and tapping into this ambition in a deeper way and understanding it better, but also understanding the flip side of it, which is there's a, there's an, a healthy and an unhealthy portion of it. And so I guess let's tackle a couple of different.
Let's tackle a couple of different things here. Cause you asked where it came from. So I think a lot of, I've talked to a lot of founders, a lot of founders. Get their ambition, get their ideas from a lot of different places. Sometimes it's that they they grew up in, like a hard environment or something.
And that environment really stoked the energy for them or some other reason. And for me none of those things were true, actually. I grew up I had great parents and neither of them were entrepreneurs. So it's not like I got it from my family. I grew up outside of Detroit, during the time where all the car companies were going south.
And so there wasn't like really a lot of entrepreneurial spirit, in that environment, around the time that I was growing up. So I didn't get it from, I didn't get it from my parents. I didn't get it from my environment. It's not like I had a hard childhood, like they, I, lower middle class family, both parents were teachers, but we were comfortable like all that kind of stuff.
And I like had to go through this journey. I was like why the hell am I doing this? And where I eventually got to was and this is going to sound maybe a little too woo for folks, but it wasn't that I was like trying to rationalize of oh, I got it from somebody else or someplace else.
And I finally had this realization that. Actually I was just like born with it and it was, it's just a core part of who I am as a person. And if I ignore it then I'm really ignoring who I am and a little bit of like why I feel like I'm here on earth. And and then I had all these memories and all these things come back to me around all of these times during my childhood where I was like trying to start like little bit like little businesses and little projects and all of these pieces and, who helped stoke it and who was actually the, and who were the ones that laughed at it or, did the opposite, tried to push it back, like all of these different pieces and so that discovery was like a very huge, a huge, a very huge moment for me because I realized it was like, Hey, if I ignore it and I can't just, I just can't push it to the side.
So that gets into the sec.
Jason Jacobs: a solo process or
Brian Balfour: Oh no.
Jason Jacobs: work with a coach or a psychologist or anything like
Brian Balfour: Coaches therapy. Yeah. All the things and friends to, I have a lot of peers that. Like a group of peers that I have, but but a mixture of coaches and, therapists. Helped. Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: So once you uncovered oh, this is who I am, this is what I'm meant to be, if I try to suppress it, it's going to be like clipping the wings of an eagle or something then how did that manifest in terms of the decision to, it answers itself, but I'll ask you anyways, like, how did that manifest in terms of the decision to to go deeper into or to get more, reforge, and also how did that manifest at home.
Brian Balfour: Yeah, I look, I think the struggle with the ambition, at least for me personally at home, is obviously what I Do as a founder and CEO is deeply stressful and and I'm in problem solving mode all day long. That's I was just like problem. All right. And it's very easy to it's very easy to carry all of that weight with you outside of the work environment.
Especially because I work from home most of the time now too. So I don't even have physical separation in my environment. And. And I think that the thing that I've thought like very deeply about is that if I let the negative parts of it, if I bring the negative parts of it into the home then my family, including my kids will grow to despise it. And I want the exact opposite thing is I actually want to share the ambition, with them. In a healthy way, like I don't care what they do for ending up their profession, but going back to those stories I was mentioning, it's like the people that I recognize like really helped stoke that ambition and encourage it and shape it are the most impactful people in my life.
And so as a father, I want them to be. With to me as one of the most impactful people in their lives. And part of the challenge is how do you share it with them in a healthy way? Because a lot of founders were certainly born from a place where their parents shared it in a very unhealthy way.
Like just tons of pressure and it just tons of pressure and like in, in like negative consequences from that. And so that, that's like the challenge is and the thing that I think I've thought about the most over the past. Few years and continue to think about it, which is, as they grow up, like how do I how do I like bring them, how do I help them see the positive sides of it?
Not just the negative sides, because the negative sides are way easier to share, way easier to share with the family because you come home and you're just like, I want to unload, and if you just do that over and over again, it has, yeah, I think it has consequences.
Jason Jacobs: One of the things that I'm finding is that and again, my kids are a little older, but my older boy who, right now, it's like, it's largely divide and conquer just because his schedule's nuts, but but it's I pick him up at school almost every day at least during hockey season, and with so much time in the car, and it's not just riding in traffic, it's helping him with his homework.
Talking about his day. He's really inquisitive. He asks me tons of questions just about random stuff. It's just, it's a lot of quality time and it's not something, I mean you could outsource it to the equivalent of a reliable, trusted Uber driver, right? But there's a lot of parenting that can't be altruistic.
I guess it can because most people do it by necessity. But the fact that I've been there for it already, it's I don't want to miss a second of it. And so it's almost like my whole professional life, my ambition has been purely professional. And all of a sudden I feel a lot of parenting ambition which is a weird thing to say, but it's not just being, being around to do, to go through the motions. It's no like I, like what projects can we take on? Like, how do I help them unlock and find their purpose and find their passion and get different skill sets and learn good discipline and work ethic and structure and, be courteous and respectful.
And there's so much that goes into it that I just don't want to miss. And I feel like, six years ago they were. Six and three and in six more years, like one of them's gone, right? And yeah, so anyway, I don't even know where I'm going with that, but
Brian Balfour: It's definitely the struggle. I have the routines as well. I am here every I'm here 95 percent of every morning and every night. My wife is a nurse, so she works these weird
Jason Jacobs: wife is a nurse.
Brian Balfour: Oh yeah. So you probably use this. She works three random days a week. She's gone, from 6 a.
m. until 8 39 p. m.
Jason Jacobs: 312th.
Brian Balfour: and it's hard. It's it's not your typical like routine schedule. And for me, part of it is that I'm here every morning for the kids, and I'm here almost every single night, which means that, part of the things that have cut out of my life is that I don't travel as much.
I don't go to a bunch of events and all those pieces, and that's okay. It's, that's not going to make or break the business or, it's not going to make or break the business, but it would probably make and break the family a little bit. And so there are trade offs, like there are things that I've cut out of my life in order to make it all work, but I feel the ambition around.
I feel the ambition around the family as well, and of course the question that always rolls around in my head is, do I look back in 20 years and I'm like that Saturday morning that I spent solving that work problem, should I had probably should I have just spent that with my kids like or not?
And that anyways, that's the that's A bit of the tug of war that, I feel on a consistent basis but having the routine is at least helpful to make sure there's like a base to, like a base to build from,
Jason Jacobs: Brian, we haven't talked much about Reforge's business, but you mentioned that as AI was, you mentioned that you went through A bunch of turbulence. And and you also mentioned that that AI was both a threat and an opportunity. Can you talk about, you mentioned the the triple whammy, right?
With with the line item and and the premium product and what was the third one? The third
Brian Balfour: The line item that most of our customers were technology companies, which got hit the hardest. Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. So you mentioned that, right? But when did AI rear its head in that picture? How did it first come to your attention? What were your initial thoughts about it? And then maybe talk a bit about that journey, both individually and as a company in terms of how your thinking and acting around it has evolved.
Brian Balfour: Yeah. So it first started almost exactly two years ago, a little over two years ago. So every Christmas, like New Year's, reforge typically takes a full week to week and a half, maybe longer off. And for the last five years, I basically spend part of a good chunk of that time, not just with family, but also going deep on something like really new.
And multiple years ago, it was like crypto and blockchain. I was like, what is this? I wanted to understand that. But two years ago, it was. It was AI and I came, I basically came out of that and I, I came out with two thoughts, which was simultaneously, one, this is going to be very disruptive to education and two, this is also going to be very disruptive to how product teams work.
And and we're at the intersection of both of those. And so we basically had this evaluation do of do we. As we take the next turn on the company is do we want to pursue the disruptive line down education and be those ones or do we want to leverage everything that we know across thousands and thousands of product teams and hundreds of thousands of product managers?
And play more in that direction and help them with the disruption. And as many things, there wasn't like really a right answer, but at the end of the day, what it came down to was I felt we felt one, we were much more passionate and helping build the products for product teams to become what we call AI native.
And we can talk a little bit about what that means. Two is that from a company perspective, We not only have all the relationships and assets, but three is I think a huge part of the shift is not just going to be new tools. More than half of it is knowledge change, behavior change and skill sets.
And so the education product still plays a pretty important role in helping, product teams make that transition. That's versus I think the education path where I think we're, where we're going in education is, free or close to free. You will be able to. Instantly generate a very personalized course to you to any depth around any topic including not just text, but like video and images like that's where I think this ends.
And
Jason Jacobs: Wait, I have to ask you, interject and ask you one question. Do you have college funds for the kids?
Brian Balfour: we do, but I question them on a daily basis. Yeah. They're more of a, they're more of like a like a safety like bet at this point. So it's, so yeah and I think and I, so I looked at that, I was like, look, are we the best, the most passionate about making that future a reality?
Or are we best and most excited about making this other future a reality? And that's
Jason Jacobs: and tell me again about the other future. So the first future is helping product teams be more AI native. What's the second one?
Brian Balfour: The second one was the education one. The second one is the. Who's going to build the product that you go to it, Jason. And you say, I want to learn about X. It asks you a few questions to understand your level of depth. And it instantly generates a personalized text video images included personalized to you, to the right depth ties to concepts and things that it already knows about you.
Like that's where that ends up. And look at some, I know for a fact that some of the big folks. The big new players want that to be part of their future, meaning like that is a product that they want to build
Jason Jacobs: I, I guess I'm conceptually, couldn't you do the second to enable the first? Or are they separate and distinct and I'm just not getting
Brian Balfour: I think, first, I think we got to talk a little bit about what AI native product teams mean. I think a lot, there's obviously a lot being written about AI and I think that can very easily make people think that we are, it's like hyping, it's like, it's just too much hype. And there is a lot of hype.
Don't get me wrong about that. But I think that leads us to under estimating the amount of change that is going to happen around how we build products. And it leaves us. And or over, overestimating, I can't, yeah, underestimating is the right one. So I think we're underestimating, most people are underestimating how much change is going to happen.
Cause if you look at the previous shift of, just on prem to cloud, you can go down. A list of things and say what are all the things that change? We shifted our product development process way more from waterfall to things that looked like much more like agile. There was a whole new tool space that emerge around to enable that product development process and how we build products today.
So there was like the whole set of tools that we were using. There were new roles. An org structures that emerged in order to enable that product development process. There were new business models like subscription, which enabled new growth models like PLG, right? The list goes on and on and I don't.
And so when you look at history, I look at AI and I'm like. It's going to change every single one of these categories to a similar amount, if not more, in a faster period of time. That's the other component of this. And I just think AI native product teams, there's two things that are happening right now.
There are teams that are starting fresh with these tools from the ground up, and I think they will think, work, and build differently. And then there's going to be a set of historical teams and also transition to, to being a native, right? And then there's going to be a third bucket who are unfortunately like too slow and it happens with every technology shift.
And so I was way more excited about, okay, how do we build the suite of products to help product teams operate in this new world? And and I looked at a bunch of.
Jason Jacobs: Had you historically been a suite of products company or was the education most of
Brian Balfour: We had one education product. Yeah, we had one education product. That was the only product. Yeah,
Jason Jacobs: So big
Brian Balfour: So it was a huge change. And there's a very big difference between an education product and like more like sass, like software tooling. And so I looked at a bunch of categories of what are all the different categories of tools that product teams adopt and, adopt and buy, went through them and thought about, okay, what are some of the most likely ones to change, because of AI, on what timelines and we ended up with a top few.
And and then we went through this whole process of, okay, do we want to build or buy? And the, one of the problems areas I landed on is what we call the feedback fragmentation tax. It's, all these companies are collecting all of this qualitative data about your customers for in, in sales tools like Gong, CRM, support, user research, like all this kind of stuff.
But it's spread out across all these different tools. Everyone has a different owner. And so for a product team to get access to that valuable customer information it's just too high friction. Most teams don't even bother. And and so I looked at about 12 plus teams that had started to work on this.
Problem of like, how do you bring all this data into one place? How do you use AI to help automatically analyze it? How do you make it actionable, all these pieces and. We found, a team and a product in a company called Monterey dot a I that they were just hands down the best by far of all the ones that we looked at and their vision aligned with ours.
And we acquired him late last year, relaunched it as inside analytics early this year and, the product's been teams are just deeply resonating with it and adopting it
Jason Jacobs: the first product that you launched?
Brian Balfour: That's the first one. And then we've got two more, maybe three if stretch gold this year. Cause I think every single step of this product development process is going to change.
Yeah,
Jason Jacobs: In terms of who it's for, you're switching from training to products and tools, but is the customer the same?
Brian Balfour: it is. Yeah. So one of the things about the education business is that we always sold to the functional leader, the product leader, and never, oh, very rarely to the L and D person. And the reason is that the L and D people are typically buying a benefit for the organization and as a result they have a very different checklist and usually they're trying to find the cheapest thing that covers the broadest swath of where we're at.
Of topic areas. And so they tend, that's why you see like a Udemy or Coursera or something like that kind of sell into L and D versus us is our topics were much deeper, they're expert led all these things. And so we're trying to help the product leader solve a business problem. And and so as a result, like we always sold them to the product leader.
And it's the same thing with these new products. I think the thing that's changing with. Product teams though, is that is like the blending of all of these roles is that, some PMs are taking on some design and ninja responsibilities. You also see all the vice versa going. So when I say product teams, we're selling into.
Product teams inclusive of not just product managers, but we think about how design Inge and some of these adjacent roles play in the mix as well.
Jason Jacobs: What did you do with the existing business?
Brian Balfour: Oh, it's still going. It's still like big part of it. I think, like I said we we very much believe this transition to AI native product teams is both part of it is retooling, but part of it is working a different way. And to get your team to work a different way, there needs to be. New knowledge, new skills, new training and new behaviors, right?
As part of it. And that's the part. That's the part of The education business really plays is that, for most of our customers, we're not just giving you a new tool. We're gonna help you solve the shift much more holistically than anybody else out there.
Jason Jacobs: I know it's early, but if you had to guess directionally will the bias be more build in house or acquire as it relates to additional products over time?
Brian Balfour: It's a good question that we keep debating. We've and it will always be a mix. The question is like what? What percentage of the mix do we go? And I don't know what that exact percentage will be. My guess is You know, at least over the next couple of years, it's probably gonna be half and half.
We're planning on making a couple more acquisitions, as well as we have a couple in house things that we want to build as well. But we're being aggressive on getting to the suite fast.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And how how are you thinking about and utilizing AI? Internally, and also how are you utilizing it in terms of the training creation and or delivery, like the other side of the business.
Brian Balfour: Yeah, so I'll actually start with I talked to quite a few product leaders leaders and other leaders every single day. And of course, one of the number one topics is they're like, Oh, like I want my team to be trying, like using more AI products and stuff. And I'm like have you carved out the time for them to do it?
Most of the time, the answer is no. And I think that's actually a very big hurdle at the moment is that all teams are under a lot of pressure of under their normal goals, and they've got this other thing going on, which is like A. I. Is reshaping everything, and as a result, I think the teams are really struggling with how do I get my team to adopt these tools and figure out what is the right way to use them within inside our organization?
And just because they're it. They're not carving out the time to allow people to experiment and figure things out. And at least internally at Reforge, these things are highly encouraged every single time something new comes out, like Operator or ChatGPT, Deep Research, we are having multiple people use it, play with it, report back on what they're learning there's active discussions.
In Slack around it we're encouraging the product teams to use the latest models as they come out like via API and all of these other pieces. And so we're not, we're using it in our products. We're using it in content creation and as well. And I think the best, to give you a sense is it used to take us let me see, like six months and a team of let's call it four full time people to create.
one of our courses. It now takes one person five weeks.
Jason Jacobs: And I, I should know this, but are these live courses or what's the format?
Brian Balfour: both. You can get them, you can get them on demand and we serve them live through cohorts. So
Jason Jacobs: Are the
Brian Balfour: can engage in either way.
Jason Jacobs: of Reforge? Have,
Brian Balfour: we basically get executives that are like in between gigs. Like thinking about their next things that and they use this as a just a thing to do as they try to figure out what their next thing is.
And so it's bringing more operational experience, into the mix, rather than trying to hire full time teachers.
Jason Jacobs: have you paid much attention to whatever he's up to, Dan
Brian Balfour: Every?
Jason Jacobs: Yeah.
Brian Balfour: I do not know. No.
Jason Jacobs: They're much smaller, but what's interesting about them is that they write a lot about AI and and it, and they tend to write, I think, for more of an insider crowd. It's pretty technical and in depth and the writing helps inform them. What products to build. And then the products are both distribution or they launch on a waitlist basis.
So they get a big waitlist, which then becomes readers, right? But also the learning they get from getting their hands dirty and from shipping product and what works and what doesn't work and how to convert and all that helps them be better writers. So that's one synergy across, but the other is that they talk a lot about how content and code are.
are intersecting, right? And increasingly content is becoming the language of creation. So I just want to throw all that. I feel like I, I'm pimping them all the time, but I'm just fascinated by the synergy. And I'm also,
Brian Balfour: the
Jason Jacobs: I think it's every. to, T O. Yeah. Dan's going to come on the pod in a month or two.
Brian Balfour: Okay.
Jason Jacobs: I'll send you the episode once it's live, but but yeah, I'm just curious what you think about having more crossover versus keeping them so separate and distinct.
Brian Balfour: Yes the knowledge from the learning products will feed some of the new, like AI products that, that were launching. Though, you have to think about the use case about learning. Most of the time people, somebody is either in learning mode or not learning mode. Like there there's this thing of,
Jason Jacobs: I am in learning mode.
Brian Balfour: Yeah, there's this wish of like always be learning.
The reality is that is not how 99 percent of people engage in learning. It's much more of an episodic need. And as a result, it, it just like creates like different, it creates a different product experience. I think where the intersection, the other intersection for us is look, as we create all of our new AI courses, which is essentially the number one focus right now, and we do it with outside subject matter experts.
The amount of like ideas that inform our own strategy and our own products is like it's, there's a nice connection point there, every time I'm doing one of these research sessions with a subject matter expert in my head, I'm going through, okay how would I apply this to reforge and like new insights emerge and that helps us not only create the best educational content, but it also helps is going to help us create, some of the best products
Jason Jacobs: Are you finding that AI is, you mentioned it's impacting Efficiency is it actually getting to impacting either number of hires or the profiles that you're hiring for in material ways?
Brian Balfour: in a short term. Yes. Yes. So sorry, those were two dimensions, the number of people and the profile of people.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, like how much is it affecting the number and also how much is it changing? What you need, skill set wise.
Brian Balfour: We've all, we for years, we've basically had, for the last few years, we've had the value of we just believe small teams do bigger things. And so we've always kept we've always kept much smaller teams. I think just with bigger teams, you end up with what I refer to as like work around the work.
It's all the coordination tacks,
Jason Jacobs: when you say smaller teams, do you mean like a bunch of small teams, or do you mean in the aggregate like it's just a small team, or is it both?
Brian Balfour: Both.
Jason Jacobs: Can you quantify? I don't know if it's public, but
Brian Balfour: Oh, like right now we're 30 people, I would say. And, the businesses in the tens of millions, per year. But yeah, I think it's a bit of both. I just think smaller teams build better products. There's like more minds
Jason Jacobs: Is your is your, how are you thinking about the toggle between profitability and growth?
Brian Balfour: Right now we're break even. And we're sitting on a huge pile of cash. And part of that is I think as you go through like any major transition I think it's wise to,
Jason Jacobs: Yeah.
Brian Balfour: Have your thumb on a couple. Like what I would call gates, to get through before you start burning a lot, like burning a lot of cash.
We are very close to those gates. And so on a daily basis, I'm waking up every morning, fighting myself of ready to get like more aggressive versus, staying disciplined at the same time. That is a battle, especially when every single day you are seeing new, exciting products being launched.
Jason Jacobs: Would you be doing what would you be doing if you had more resource that you can't, what, because you're disciplined? Yeah.
Brian Balfour: It would just be taking, it would be starting to seed more bets in the product suite. So we have about I would call it like 15 product categories that we want to go after. And we have one launched into what I would call baking. And, I would love to put the ingredients together for number three and number four, or sorry, number four and number five.
And. So that would probably be one area. I think the second thing is there is a lot more AI educational stuff that we could create that I think will help our teams. And I would love to go a little bit faster on I would love to go a little bit faster on those pieces. But those are pretty much like the two, two main areas is more product more product and more help in education for our customers.
Jason Jacobs: If you take a step back, you're interesting because you're running a venture backed company and it's a venture backed company that that works with lots of other venture backed companies and you're specifically working with them around product, bringing products to market and that process and now increasingly pushing on AI, so you are uniquely equipped to answer this question, which is how do you think AI will affect how startups are built and funded?
Brian Balfour: Ooh. Common narrative, right? The narrative right now is that there will be it like, the billion dollar, the one person billion dollar company?
Jason Jacobs: it was Sam Altman who said that. He says a lot of things, but I think that's one of the
Brian Balfour: yeah, I don't know who said it, right?
Jason Jacobs: It was like, if it wasn't Sam Altman, it was like a Sam Altman type who said it. Ah,
Brian Balfour: that. Do you buy into that narrative?
Jason Jacobs: do I buy into that narrative? I think there's gates. One gate, or there's bookends, right? One bookend is a unit of human is a unit of work, right? Like laying bricks or something, right? And then the other is One mad scientist and an Asian army, right?
Like the Pied Piper of, and actually maybe you don't even need the one mad scientist. Maybe it's maybe it's AGI that's running the Asian army, right? With no humans. And and I think it is early days, but that directionally more will be automated, but there's a lot of questions and just.
crap to work out in terms of human in the loop. Like, how much does a human need to be in the loop? What types of things does the human need to be loop in the loop on? Are there standards? Is there a certification body? Who says that distinct, is there the equivalent of the FDA for AI built products, so I, there's just so much to figure out. And I think and also behavior change is hard. I know that firsthand. I just think it's in a way. I think we're under, back to where you started, like we're probably overestimating what'll happen in the next 12 months and underestimating what'll happen in the next 10 years.
Brian Balfour: Yeah, look, I think
Jason Jacobs: But how did you trick me into answering my tough question for
Brian Balfour: Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think a lot of people, I think a lot of people think about this as an or versus an end. And so I think multiple thing, my guess is multiple things happen at once. Will there be smaller teams of people that build bigger? Things relative to, what they were able to build historically.
Yes. Does that mean that's the only way and we won't have like big companies anymore? No. And there's a few reasons for this. I think one is that the billion dollar one person company, it's not just what you can build, but it's what you can distribute. And one of the constraints that I don't think people are thinking about is this technology shift has not come with a new distribution platform yet.
Casey Winters has talked about this a little bit. We've talked a little bit about this on Reforge, whereas like mobile did, it did come with a new distribution platform. So did the internet. And so to get to a billion dollars
Jason Jacobs: would probably say what he's building is the new distribution
Brian Balfour: yeah there's tons of people working on it.
And of course, maybe something like chat GPT becomes like a new distribution platform. But to be honest, the way that open AI has been operating so far is. That they want to eat it all. You can't I don't think it's actually like a pretty safe, but so and the reason that a lot of these AI companies are going from 0 million super fast is a temporary thing.
It's a very word of mouth viral mechanism for companies that are targeting prosumers and PLG, but you do not see the same growth curve happening on. Like on like enterprise company, like companies with more of an enterprise motion and targeting like a different customer set and it's being fueled by the novelty of AI right now.
Eventually that wears off, right? And when it wears off, you were back to the basics on distribution, which is you've got to understand where your customers are living online. You've got to figure out those distribution channels that you can. Play in on the value. It's going to be a lot of work. And
Jason Jacobs: you just called it, you just compared Cursor to HQ Trivia, I feel like.
Brian Balfour: think it has more staying power than than HQ trivia.
I'm just saying that there is, there are some parallels to the, some of the viral blast off of the early Facebook platform days and what we're experiencing right now with a lot of these new products. The other thing is that to your point, yes, a lot of things are going to get automated.
Okay. Which is phenomenal, but you want to know what happens when things get automated. We find more things we want to do, right?
Jason Jacobs: That's called like Jevin's Paradox, is that right?
Brian Balfour: This part, oh yes, that's part of it. Yeah, like Jevin's paradox is it's like the classic example is, you've got a traffic jam outside of the city.
So somebody says, build more highways and that just increases the demand for traffic. And you still end up with the, you end up with a larger traffic jam. And it's the same thing that, that we see is even with our product inside analytics is that it takes away tons of rote work that teams had to do before to get value out of the data and enables them to do a lot more than that.
But as a result of that, they have. Even more questions that they now want answered right? And more data analysis that they want to do. And so we tend to just like as human beings as we automate things, fill that empty space. With other things that can potentially create value. Cause there are a lot of things inside organizations and product teams specifically since I, where I focused that time where they're like, I think I could get value if we do this, but the cost is too high, therefore we don't do it.
And if you bring the cost down enough, then all of a sudden those things start to those things like start to fill the space. And so what that starts to point to is yes, maybe we're in this temporary period where. Overall teams just start smaller and stuff. But at the end of the day to build the most ambitious things, I think will require teams of people.
And and as a result, I think it's an and I think there's opportunity for new small teams to build things that were bigger. That were ever possible before, and, there are going to be massive new big outcomes that require large teams of people. So I think both happen.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And we've talked about technology and what it will enable, but what about just in terms of more societal Evolution. Do you think the startup culture of 24 seven and Burnout and tons of stress and sticking a bunch of frogs in the pot and, boiling the water and seeing if one or two can hop out while the rest of them fry is that going to carry on?
What is the future of venture capital more generally?
Brian Balfour: I think the future of venture capital is more impacted by the number of new investors that have, flooded the market over the past like 10 years. And yes, there's been some decline, but like nothing incredibly substantial. And so as a result, there is plenty of money available to raise, and when there's plenty of money available to raise it tends to find You know, it's way into funding people for reasons that I don't think we even think about honestly, a lot of founders raise money not because they need it is because it's a it's a validation mechanism for them.
And I think for us to say that all of a sudden that basic human need of validation. Disappears, I feel like it's not going to happen, right? Like it's just other dumb egos. Now, do I hope that a new, that there is a whole new world of entrepreneurs that are empowered, that realize that they don't have to raise that money to get validation and are more, fulfilled by the things that they build and the value they deliver their customers.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think, I think historically, maybe sometimes. That path has been looked down upon, but I don't but but a lot of value has been created and other ways. And I just, I think sometimes founders just get tunnel vision on, Hey, there's one way to build this company and they don't really understand all of the options.
I would also say at the same time is I think some of the 24, seven type of mentality, like it's bookends is like you get, you have two arguments, which is there's the perfect work life balance folks. And there's the. You have to grind 24 seven and sacrifice everything types of folks. And what I find for most of my peers is they're all somewhere in the middle.
None of them are on the bookends. And I, for some reason, those are just the narratives that tend to like resonate externally. And these are peers.
Jason Jacobs: That, that's not just true with startups. That's certainly true in politics.
Brian Balfour: Yeah, and
Jason Jacobs: in a lot of
Brian Balfour: they're, some of these peers are running are way more successful than me. They're running a two, three billion dollar, company.
And so it's all, it's like of all sizes. People have found somewhere in the middle on that spectrum for them. So I don't think it's a need to work.
Jason Jacobs: Now, as optionality increases because people can do more with less and maybe in more cases don't need to raise external funding or maybe could raise less, it also means that that their competitors the same thing happens. So I'm wondering what do you think the impact will be in terms of capital needs, in terms of time to exit, in terms of size of exit, and in terms of risk and what happens with moats in a world where where anyone can spin up a new thing quicker and easier than the person before?
Brian Balfour: I think to what we were saying before is that distribution becomes the bottleneck for sure. And just because You can build things at the speed of computers doesn't mean people adopt things at the speed of computers and so that's where the bottleneck ends up now. It doesn't feel like there's a bottleneck on that right now.
Because once again, it's just. The environment is in a place where every, there's just a huge audience of adopters that are willing to try anything because it's, everything's so new and so cool, but to your point as more and more things kind of flood the market that eventually wears off and we're back to, yeah, we're back to like distribution ends up being the really hard thing.
And it, by the way, it becomes harder because as well as because We will see the degradation of the distribution platforms that have built the companies of the past 20 years. We are already yes, the decline of SEO, I think is probably overhyped at this point, but there is writing on the wall.
It's happening slow and then it'll happen fast type of deal. And I think that'll happen to other channels as well. So you're, so you've got things working from both ends, which is more things flooding the market. That doesn't mean people will adopt them at the same speed and less places for them, for you to like really distribute your product.
And so that just, I think puts a squeeze. I think that ends up putting a squeeze on, on, on distribution and growth.
Jason Jacobs: Last couple things. One is I just I have something I'd love to get your advice on and the other is I have an idea I want to run by you. That work? Alright, so the advice is just that I've got this content machine, like newsletter, podcast, newsletter goes out every week. Right now it's averaging around two week.
We'll see. I can turn it up or turn it down. But as the body of work grows I've been editing myself with the script. I feel like it's on brand that I should be doing most things myself, wherever possible, given the nature of the journey. But I'm wondering if I can start picking up things like like guest research like asset creation for promotion and, description is doing some of this for sure but those are just some areas.
And then, maybe guest scheduling, maybe, maybe the clips, right? And and again, Descript is doing some of this, but what I'm wondering is at what point should I be starting to build my own Asian army? How should I think about where to start? What criteria should have? Should I learn how to code?
Is it time? Do I partner where I've typically been the mouth historically that gets a bunch of smart people around me to do shit? Should I do it differently because these tools are here or should I just? Lean on my superpowers and and then how important are architectural decisions about if I know I'm going to have multiple over time as I pick off different pieces of my process to automate should they talk do they all need to live under the same roof?
Because what I see is a fragmented mess in the landscape with all these different tools that are all using the same words that there's so much overlap. Yeah.
Brian Balfour: So by the way, this, I literally was telling. So I also do a podcast with my cohost for read called unsolicited feedback.
Jason Jacobs: Fareed. I
Brian Balfour: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. You have all the Boston connections. And the we were talking the other day from. The moment we hit, stop recording to publish the number of just like little buttons we have to push and like tiny things we have to do to, to get between those two points.
Is crazy and and so I look at a lot of these AI products that are taking massive swings and you want to, you know what I really just want as a customer, I want you to, I just want you to automate all of that boring, low value, like tasks that, that I could easily just spend that time on recording another episode, which is like the actual like value.
The actual value creator. And so there, I, this is where you've really got to experience the workflows to understand the pain. Just going
Jason Jacobs: experiencing them, and I'm feeling the pain. Yeah.
Brian Balfour: Yeah. Yeah. It's just, oh man.
Jason Jacobs: And I keep expanding! As of yesterday, I published my first YouTube, and now I've committed that each new episode is gonna go on YouTube as well, and then it's another whole bag of crap that I need to add to my to do list for every episode.
Brian Balfour: Yeah. It's it's
Jason Jacobs: And then it's maybe the clip should go on YouTube Shorts and not just on Twitter, right? And,
Brian Balfour: yeah.
Jason Jacobs: and on.
Brian Balfour: Yeah. And so I do think there's you're right. It is very fragment. I think software is very fragmented in a lot of places. And I think you'll see a lot of those fragmented places collapse into one tool. Partially because of this,
Jason Jacobs: you think?
Brian Balfour: I think there has to be because and it's going to be demanded from the buyers because if you want if you want AI to work really well across these workflows, the two things that you tend to need are pretty well structured and clean data and tools that work really well with each other, because there's this thing called that Dharmesh has written about called the compounding error rate, which is what an agent does is it essentially is making a a series of LLM calls as it reasons through the tasks.
But every time you call an LLM, it's giving you a probabilistic output. And when it's, and it's never a hundred percent. Accurate or correct, you can increase that accuracy through a bunch of methods, but it's almost impossible to ever get it to 100%. And so the problem with this is that even a small error rate like 5 percent across a dozen steps compounds to the point where your output is only right about half the time.
It's a coin flip, which doesn't work for most product use cases. And that error rate increases the less clean the underlying data is. And the more the different tools it has to use. So as a result, I think to like fully automate these things, you're basically going to need people will start adopting consolidated stacks across, across these different workflows, because that's how the real value of this full automation is going to be unlocked unless there's some other innovation in AI that massively reduces this error rate in a different way.
Jason Jacobs: Even if I want to set up one agent, I get this whole list of for this step, here's five tools to choose from for that step. Here's five tools to choose from. And there's two dozen steps with five tools to choose from each for one agent. That's not even a hard agent. And it's Oh my God.
And then should it be, like, it's got to be no code if it's me. But then if it's no code, then I'm like, then it costs, does it cost money for every, like it's tokens or whatever. And then if it's code I don't know how to code. So do I learn how to code? Do I start, do I go to reforge and take a Python class?
Brian Balfour: That's, that always comes down to the exact idea and the type of business you want to build and look, I think a lot of times, like finding a partner is much more than just about complimenting your skill sets like that, that is one axis, but finding a partner is a very big deal.
How you work together and commit together. But but I think to this point, I, just looking at the landscape is companies, I feel are taking one of two approaches. They are either. Either they are either taking, they're either going, they're playing up the capability curve of AI, meaning somebody like Devon dot AI, which is a full agent coders trying to replace a full engineer, like you just give it a task and it just goes and does everything.
But then you have something like cursor, which is using AI to enhance. The person versus replace the person and you see this playing out in every single category right now is there tend to be bets in both directions. And I think it's a really interesting question about who's going to win because the cursors of the world that are enhancing current people are getting way more traction and revenue adoption much faster.
And so the question is, can they iterate themselves? Does that give them an advantage to iterating themselves to the Devons of the world faster? Or because Devon is so focused on this singular problem and vision of replacing the engineer that they actually end up getting there faster as a result, and I think this is going to be, this is a question across all categories, and if you're like thinking about building an AI product, there's a deep question about, do I replace the person or am I enhancing a person?
And they're very different strategies and approaches.
Jason Jacobs: yeah, it reminds me of Fusion. It's there's, with Fusion, and I'm far from a Fusion expert, but it's like, there's ones with less risk of actually working, but if you work, if it works, it's less of a breakthrough. And then there's ones that are way more complicated with way more risk, and will take longer and cost more money, whatever, but if they can actually get it, it's a much bigger deal, right?
And so it's like, where do you bet? Yeah. And the last one, this is a more of a fun one, but basically so I've got the podcast and the newsletter and it's created this kind of learning flywheel and, there's a small but mighty peer group that's emerging from the journey so far.
And so maybe at some point there'll be some community elements, but that's the serious journey of what's happening in the space and where will it go? And we have serious discussions like this, where I use my business voice and stuff, but but like I, but I've met a bunch of, Other middle aged founders sorting it through, and they tend to be people that, they're accomplished, they're experienced, they've got some flexibility, they're still ambitious, but they've got more constraints, and they're feeling more mortal, and they can't, work around the clock like, like they used to for multiple reasons, etc.
And nobody's talking to them, right? You have that show Silicon Valley that was like focused on the hacker and the hustler, like the YC kids, the 20 somethings that drink Red Bull and pull all night coding benders, right? But who's like telling the stories of these middle aged founders?
So I want to have a show Silicon Valley, but for fogey founders, right? And I don't want any gatekeepers, so I want to start the opposite way. Start just by fleshing out individual characters on TikTok or Instagram. And if I can build a specific character and bring it to life with feedback from viewers and build a following, then weave them together for some collabs and ultimately maybe make a pilot and from a pilot turn it into a show that's, mobile first or mobile only with no gatekeepers and leverage AI for as much of the production process as possible because the same way that AI is impacting Product managers, software engineers, designers, et cetera.
It's also impacting showrunners, producers, writers, et cetera. And it's early, right? Animators, and all that it's early, but they're just as confused over there about where it's going as a, as we are over here. And so I want to be at the tip of the spear on both sides, if that makes sense.
Brian Balfour: And I think that's the way to do it, right? Like I have a lot of these professional conversations with folks where they're like, is my X job, insert anything, product manager, software engineer, whatever it is going to exist and why years. And I'm like, you're asking the wrong question. That's not the question to be spending energy on because two things.
One is no, nobody can perfectly predict. Nobody has a map of like where this all goes into like what safer waters are you going to run to every single piece of knowledge work is going through the same transition, right? It's not if you're a product manager, it's obvious that being a software engineer safer or vice versa, or any of these mixtures of things.
I think the only thing that you can do as like the best thing to do is To literally be on the front lines, like trying to use, trying to adopt, trying to play with it. And as a result, you'll end up navigating the waters. And so I use the analogy on a different episode of the unsolicited feedback podcast, which is, this is you got to stop searching for the map that's been totally revealed.
And you got to start thinking about it as it's a game with, the fog of war, the fog kind of covering all the tiles and every step you take, it reveals the next three tiles. And you just keep going and and you eventually navigate your way to something like interesting and promising and that feels like that's what you're doing.
You're just you're getting in the game and you're going to, you're going to reveal the path as
Jason Jacobs: free agent. I, it's way too early to commit to anything because I'm still like, I'm trying to sharpen my vision in the fog of war, right? Get connected to smart people, get the landscape, what's going on, where are the opportunities, where the threats start developing a point of view, run some experiments.
It's a lot of fun. I love building this way. Brian, anything, I know we covered a lot of ground, but anything I didn't ask that you wish I did?
Brian Balfour: Oh boy. We did cover a lot of ground. I like, no, I would just say look, if you're, I'm writing a lot about the intersection of. AI and product teams. And if that's a topic that you're interested in there's either my site, Brian Balfour. com. I'm also publishing on LinkedIn. And a little bit on reforge reforge.
com slash blog. I'm not really a big Twitter user these days, but but yeah, those are the three places to find me and. Look, if you're, yeah, if you're interested in this topic and have ideas around it I'm interested in chatting and so please reach out.
Jason Jacobs: Great. Thanks for coming on. We didn't even get to do a catch up before, but now I feel like we don't need one because we just had a full catch up. And
yeah, thanks for being so transparent and vulnerable as well. I know I get a lot more out of discussions like that and I'm sure that listeners do as well.
I appreciate it and just congrats on everything you're doing and how you're going about it. And super excited to see where things go for you and and for me, it's going to be fun.
Brian Balfour: Yeah. I'm excited to see what you create out of this.
Jason Jacobs: Okay. Thanks, Brian.
Brian Balfour: Thanks.
Jason Jacobs: Thank you for tuning into The Next Next, if you enjoyed it, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast player. In addition to the podcast, which typically publishes weekly, there's also a weekly newsletter on sub stack at the next, next dot sub stack. com. That's essentially for weekly accountability of the ground.
I'm covering areas I'm tackling next and where I could use some help as well. And it's a great area to foster discussion and dialogue around the topics that we cover on the show. Thanks for tuning in. See you next week!