ScreamingBox Technology & Business Rundown

Dave Erickson 0:00
You have put everything into your business, but things are changing and not for the better. What are you going to do on this ScreamingBox Podcast, we're going to look at how you can successfully pivot your business and how AI will play into your future. Please like our podcast and subscribe to our channel to get notified when the next podcast is released.

Dave Erickson 0:44
In life and business things don't always go the way you want them. To change is always a possibility, and if your business is not going the way you want it, it might be time to pivot. Welcome to the ScreamingBox Technology and Business Rundown Podcast. In this podcast, Botond Seres and Dave Erickson are with Ari Block TechStars alumni and author. Ari is a dynamic entrepreneur and a global technology leader whose career bridges military intelligence, forensics technology and the startup world. His passion for innovation began early, at just 8 years old. He founded his first company repairing computers for a local business. By age 15, he had built and successfully exited a B2B sales platform startup. This early trajectory led the foundation for a career defined by ingenuity, resilience and the relentless drive to create impact through technology. Ari went on to serve in military intelligence before joining Cellebrite, a global leader in digital forensics. There he played a key role in developing advanced forensic tools that are used worldwide by law enforcement, military and intelligence agencies to extract and analyze digital evidence. Beyond forensics, Ari has founded and mentored startups through TechStars guiding founders on product development, fundraising and go to market strategies. Ari, welcome to the podcast.

Ari Block 2:08
Thank you so much for having me, gentlemen.

Dave Erickson 2:11
To begin with, how did you go from digital forensics to startup mentoring at TechStars?

Ari Block 2:20
Oh, wow. It would be unfair to say that, you know, I started my entrepreneurial journey with TechStars, but it was definitely a nice, you know, brand name to add. I didn't even know that TechStars existed. I think it was a friend who said, Hey, why didn't you apply to them? And I was like, what is that? I had heard of Y Combinator, TechStars wasn't on my radar. But then, you know, my friend said, you know, you know, not only are they one of the top in the world, they're also in your backyard, they're up in Boulder in Colorado. So you have to look into it. I applied for the program and basically didn't get in. So this is, like, the night before the program starts, and the Managing Director, Lila, she calls me up, and she's like, Ari, you're like, this close to getting into the program. Basically it was you were the next in, and that's why you didn't get in, but one of the companies dropped out, so you're in. Are you interested? So basically, I was out, and then I was in, and then I was screaming. My wife was like, what happened? What happened? It was like we got into TechStars. And for those in the audience who don't know what TechStars is, it's really like Harvard for, for companies, right? So it's easier to get into Harvard than it is to get into TechStars. So it's quite an accolade, and it's quite the program. And we can talk about mentor madness and that stuff, but I mean, Y Combinator is an amazing program too, and there's many others. So, you know I, even though I am an alumni, that's not necessarily the only way to go.

Dave Erickson 4:01
Well, that obviously started you in kind of a background of working with a wide variety of companies, kind of outside maybe your specialty. You know, in getting to view all these different companies and how they're working and starting and struggling, what have you kind of learned from TechStars as someone who's been participating in it about business in general.

Ari Block 4:27
So I came into TechStars already as an investor, right? So I've been investing and doing the due diligence process with my alumni, but getting the view as an investor is very different than looking at it through an accelerated view and looking at it through I've always been an entrepreneur from an early age, but there was suddenly something different about it, because TechStars, YC, all these other organizations, they are they're not investors, but they're not entrepreneurs. It's this hybrid thing. And when I got into the program, they said to me, you know, you know what the most, the five most important thing is to get investment from TechStars. And, well, I ran, you know, I said the things that are important to me when I invest. And then they said the following. They said, number one is Team number two is Team number three is team and I can't remember what four and five were, but it doesn't matter. So TechStars really gave me an appreciation for a very unique perspective on this middle ground between investor and entrepreneur, and that's something I never had. I've kind of been on both those sides, but I never really merged my thinking into one.

Dave Erickson 5:37
What were some of the examples that you got in TechStars for companies that kind of started going in a direction, and then going through the program, they realized they kind of had to change direction?

Ari Block 5:50
Yeah. So when you look at the statistics of why companies fail, then it's run out of money, right? It's, you know, one of the founders left. It's product market fit. Now the run out of money is kind of BS. Why is that one? I feel like that one's not real. Why? Because, why did you run out of money? You ran out of money because you couldn't sell so actually ran out of money could be product market fit. You ran out of money because the problem you're trying to solve is just too big and and you you can't budget it, or you did a bad planning job, so you ran so the run out of money is kind of like it's a catch all where people don't really tell you how they messed it up. So I kind of ignore that one, and then it's really all about the founders, which is going back to the Team, Team, Team that TechStars kind of teaches us. And then the other one is product market fit, which is, really, can you sell this stuff? So I think that, like this is, this is well known research in the venture capital community. It's been, it's heavily cited. I think that's right, except the run out of money. One, I ignore it. And then when you look at the stories that I've kind of lived through, the, the founder one is massive. So if one of the founders leave, and usually it's because there's infighting, it destroys the startup. And I've seen this happen again and again and again and again. So you know, if I had to give you know, my two top advice, it would be based on this research, and it would be, make sure that you understand that your founder is basically your spouse, right? Your Business spouse. And if you fight, and you can't get past the fighting, and you're gonna fight, I 100% write that check, right? If you don't fight, I give you $1,000 right now, right. For sure you're going to fight, and if you can't figure out how to fight, and then come back and make up, so to speak, you're never going to make it right. That startup is going to fail. And there's a lot of messy things that happened. We saw that with, you know, Microsoft. We saw that with Apple. You know, sometimes you fight and you go to war and somebody wins, but usually it doesn't end up like Microsoft and Apple. That's a bad recipe to try and imitate them. You're probably going to fail if you try and imitate them. So that's the first piece of advice I'll give. And I had a company fail because of that, right? Founder? One of my companies fell apart because of founders fighting. So that's one. The second one is product market fit. People don't really get product market fit. I would say it's one thing just, just simplify it. What is product market fit? Can you sell this stuff? And the answer is really simple, yes or no. And then there's a diagnostic process to know if you can sell this stuff before you try to sell it. We can talk through that. And that's probably one of the most important things that I advise companies, and I would say 100% of my entrepreneurs, they are not salespeople. They don't know how to sell, and they take what we call a phishing approach. So they basically try to be everything to everyone. There's a word that I use with them. I won't use that in a recording, but you're not that. You're not everything to everyone what you want to be as laser focused. So I talk them through the whole marketing and sales pipeline, all the way to deployment and churn and renewals all that. And we talk about the laser focused one, and then we talk about strategy, we talk about bowling alley, we talk about how to grow your market one step at a time, but it's never through the phishing approach, right? And people come back to me, you know, a week, a month later, and like, oh my god, Ari you just completely revolutionized my pipeline. But the funny thing is, I didn't give them anything special. I just taught them the ABCs of sales and marketing, that's all.

Botond Seres 9:06
I think it is important that the founders get along well all the time, Do you agree?

Ari Block 10:02
No. I completely disagree, completely disagree. Getting along well means being nice to each other? I disagree. I don't think you need to be nice to each other in a startup. I think it's impossible to be nice to each other while being honest and while all fighting towards a common goal. If you look at a military environment where you have soldiers in the trenches, they don't say please and thank you, it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. Maybe the Brits do. I mean, we can check if the British say please and thank you while shooting their M-16 doesn't happen. Okay? I carried an M-16 for six years. Then say please and thank you. Okay, so it's not about a culture of being nice to each other. It's not about getting along. It's to me, and look, there are many people that believe different things. So you know, we can definitely disagree, but to me, it's about being kind, not nice. And you can be kind.

Botond Seres 11:06
That's a very important distinction there, very important.

Ari Block 11:11
You can be kind and not nice. You can be nice and not kind. Oh, big time. So, so, so, when I see these nice environments. I'm like, No, I will take kindness any day ever over it. Now, if you can be kind and nice at the same time, good job, but you're one in a million. Most people are nice, but not kind. Some people are kind, and they try to be nice, but they sometimes mess it up, that's me. It's really hard to be kind and nice at the same time, but also you're fighting, you know, a war for survival. When, you know, when, when TechStars talk about, what do you need to achieve? You need to achieve one thing and one thing only, make it to tomorrow. That's all. Make it to tomorrow, survive another day. Working a startup is basically this war for survival is all it is. So, so I'm, you know, if I have to have something drop, yeah, it's the, it's the nice that can drop sometimes, to make

Dave Erickson 12:07
To make a startup successful, among the founders, there has to be kind of, a brutal honesty. And that brutal honesty isn't something you can be nice about, especially if you have to be passionate about your position. I think kindness is, really it goes a long way. I think the other thing that is part of that is at least respect. So you know, you can be passionate and you can be really emotional, but you also have to, if you're respectful. That's usually a good sign if all the founders can be at least respectful of each other, even during a major disagreement with a lot of passion and emotion that usually will get them through it or get them a long way through it.

Ari Block 12:51
Yes, this is an incredibly important comment, because what is the difference between respect and nice? How can you be respectful but not nice, necessarily? And the truth is that when people think about nice, they think about not giving feedback that is critical, right? I have critical feedback to give you. I'm not going to give it. That's not nice, but you can be super respectful and honest and kind at the same time without being nice, right? How do you do all those? I would say that equation is way more important than being nice. So how would you do that? You'd be like, Look, we have a problem, and I have the utmost respect to everything that you've been doing so far. Do you give me permission to point out some flaws in your process and then let's hash it out? Let's talk through it. I might be seeing this wrong. Please teach me. Show me why I'm seeing this wrong. So having the humbleness, if that's even a word, humility, I guess, to come and say, Hey, I might be seeing this wrong. Please call me out, right? So I work with firefighters, I work with police. This is ingrained into their culture. In fact, the Japanese, they change the language in the cockpit from Japanese to English, because this idea of these structural issues around nicety, or their cultural kind of hierarchy, didn't allow them to communicate efficiently. So research has gone into this, and we figured out that nice doesn't work. In fact, people die when you're nice. This is not Ari saying this, this is research.

Dave Erickson 14:20
I think this, this comes into the topic, I guess, of our podcast about pivoting, because at some point in your business journey, if you you will need to have an honest conversation with your founders about, hey, the business isn't working. What do we do? I think maybe now is kind of a converse or a question we can ask. How would you define a business pivot? Because it, some people say it's one thing, some say it's another. Maybe we should kind of define what is a business pivot? What are we talking about?

Ari Block 14:56
So there's many ways to define it, like. Let's define it through the eyes of the founders. Now let's assume we have three or four founders. A pivot is, is, is basically a decision that is made by the founders to change direction in which they didn't, we're not working towards previously. So if you have let's say three founders, right? Odd numbers are really great for founding teams. Not a good idea to have an even number. You have three founders, and one of the founders like, Oh, I'm working on this, I'm going in this direction. And the others are like, that's not our business. And this is exactly what happened to me many times. One of these stories is one of my co-founders. This was 20 years ago. It was like, oh, we should sell this product to this, to this company. We ultimately did sell the product. We did exit the company, to that company. We sold the whole damn thing. But Max basically said, Oh, we should do this. And Erez and I said, No, this is not our business, the agreement of all three founders, or at least the agreeing or disagreeing commit nonetheless, that, in my eyes, would be a pivot. So I define it based on people, not on anything else. And I would say that's a good way to define it, because people are the most important. And we saw it's the number one reason, right, why companies fail.

Dave Erickson 16:18
So it's more kind of. The definition is when the founders of a business all agree to change the business's direction. (That's right). I think that's a good definition of it. Okay, let's kind of, we usually use an example, and so we'll use an example. We're a t- shirt company. We make a lot of T-shirts, sell them online, and for whatever reason the market's crashing, we're not able to sell much merchandise, or designs or whatever, and we know there's a problem. How would you kind of start going about analyzing whether a pivot is needed and what type of pivot the business should do based on that kind of example.

Ari Block 17:03
It's always good to have a framework when you're thinking about doing analysis on a situation. So I'm a manufacturing guy. Spent eight years with Siemens in the innovation division, which was kind of under the consulting bucket, and we built products then went on to, to, from the Innovation Group, basically became divisions, right? So I was building new products in Siemens. The way that manufacturing people look at things is called the Five M's. So that's man, machine, money, metrics, method, right? So, so, those are the five elements that you would break down any problem into. So you know, if we took any one of these, and it will be a long kind of thing to go through all of them, but let's just take one of them. Let's take metrics. So under the metric bucket you would go and you'll identify for everything in your business as a KPI. For each KPI, you would identify what's the baseline meaning, are you performing underperforming, or are you more or less on target, right? So you look at all your KPIs, and you're like, okay, everything looks kind of okay. Maybe one stands out. So you're like, Oh, that's a signal. Now, so, that's an indication. It's not a, it's not a, oh, this is definitely a problem. It's a signal. So we talk in terms of signals, of trying to find direction. Now you got a process, and you kind of map out all your processes and what's happening, and you find bottlenecks. So now you're looking at the KPIs at the bottleneck level, at the process level. So you look at all your processes, then you go and you, so you go through the all, these different things. Money is pricing an issue, right? So if I go and do competitive analysis, and I think see how much everything is being sold for by competitors. Why are people turning from me? Why are people buying the competitors? So your sales pipeline analysis, from a money perspective, is both price and cost. Maybe my cost is too high. That's why my price is too high. So you kind of look at it, you kind of chop everything up, and what you're looking for, you're looking for signals. When you find enough signals all pointing in the same direction, you're like, Okay, we need a, we need to dig in our heels here and think about it, and really, you know, get on our knees and start working this problem. And almost, you know, every business is different, but the process of identifying the signals is really important. And what I would argue right, I pivoted a business together with the founders. I wasn't a founder for that business, but that led to a unicorn. So when I was 20 something, I built a unicorn. I had no idea I was doing it at the time, but what we did is we pivoted a business from a business that was about to fail to a business that ultimately became a unicorn. You have to find the signals, otherwise you're not going to get anywhere.

Botond Seres 19:45
You said that if you find enough signals, let's point in the same direction, like, how many signals are we thinking? Like, let's say my price is higher for the business, and also my service is worse. How I'm trying to say is, how many points of view should we consider before considering it an individual signal?

Ari Block 20:10
So, so, not all signals are born equal, right? If your price is higher, but people are willing to buy at that higher price. There's no real signal. There's no red flag, because what that means is that people are buying at that higher price. You should probably ask yourself, why? Why are people willing to pay more for a higher price, for supposedly the same service? So then you might roll back the onion. You might be, oh, my god, people love our customer success and customer success, servicing everywhere else is not good, and that's why they're paying more. And you're just about to cut your budget of customer success, and then you're like, No, they are the people that drive this higher price. Actually, I'm going to see what they need to do a better job or to maintain the job they're doing. So so, you know, just just one, it's not about having a one or two or three or five. It's about creating the narrative. So the KPIs, what they will do is they will help you understand, kind of the, the rules or the signals. But really what you're looking for is a narrative. So when you bring multiple KPIs together to create a narrative, what you're doing is you're creating a business hypothesis. That business hypothesis needs to have the structure of a scientific hypothesis. Here are my assumptions, here's my data, here's my KPIs. These are assumptions. Here is the business hypothesis. I believe that I am able to sell at a higher price because my customer success is significantly better, right? That's a positive hypothesis. Let's do a negative hypothesis. I believe that I have a 20% churn, which I can reduce to 5% churn, if I would tweak this metric in my organization. So you have all these levers in a business that you can pull. You're making a business hypothesis where you say, oh, I can improve this metric by pulling this lever. And what do you do next? Right? You have assumptions. You have your data, right? Your, your hypothesis on what I could do. You go and you do an experiment, you go and you change something in a certain cohort, and then you see good or bad. So it's not about this brilliance of like, oh, like, I know everything, change this and your life will be perfect. Now it's about having the data, building the hypothesis, executing an experiment, mostly getting the wrong result, and then figuring out, Oh, what did I learn? So it's more important to make sure that you learn something through your hypothesis then you fix something. Because if you fix something, you don't know why, because you had basically variables that were, were not dependent. I don't want to get too into statistics. Your listeners will run away. But if you have codependent statistical variance in your, in your experiment, you won't learn anything. So that's a problem. So you kind of want to separate your variables and make sure you're testing one thing, learn something. Test again, and you want to integrate real fast, because your first hypothesis is most likely wrong, but by the time you've iterated three four times, you're going to get there, right? So, so it's, you know, there's no magic here. You just got to do the work.

Botond Seres 23:12
If I got this right, we go from narrative to hypothesis, and with enough testing, we go from hypothesis to a theory. And

Ari Block 23:23
Yeah,that's not the only way to do it, though. Some people think bottom up. So some people will look at 100 KPIs and try and come up with the hypothesis. Some people think top bottom. They'll come up with a hypothesis. And they'll say, I don't know. I feel like this is right. And then they'll go, I don't know that there's a right way to do this. So the order I don't know matters, but that's definitely a way people do it for sure.

Botond Seres 23:43
When we are pulling all these levers, how do we make sure that the business doesn't suffer too much?

Ari Block 23:49
Yeah, that's a really difficult question. One way to approach this is cohorted analysis. So basically, you say, I'm not going to make this change on the whole business. I'm going to do it in a small area, and that area should have some kind of theme, some kind of persona, some kind of special behavior. Because what usually happens is that you can make a change across the whole business, and it will give you a result, that is, you don't know if it helped or not. The reason why that happens is because results are averaged out across the business, so, so a much more effective approach is to actually say, I'm going to do an experiment on a cohort. Now, if that works or doesn't work, that helps you to think about the, the persona of that cohort, and then based on that persona, that will help you think about why it worked or didn't work. And then you might say, Okay, I think the persona was the problem. Could be a different reason. Then you go and you do that business experiment, a different cohort. Now, if you did it on two different cohorts and it didn't make a change, then probably you were wrong, and you need to think about this in a different way. But that's a much more powerful tool than just like, Oh, let's make a change on the whole business. That's also very dangerous, and you can't know what happened and why it happened. And so there's issues in this kind of analysis where just pulling a lever on the whole business can be both dangerous and hard to learn from.

Dave Erickson 25:07
Yeah, I think you find a lot of people who are doing various startups, depending on their experience, they try to solve a problem, and they try it's almost like they're solving it by using a baseball bat. And I think you need to be much more surgical, simply because, as you said, you need to understand all the cause and effect. Otherwise you won't be able to learn what you need to learn about it. You mentioned something else, and it seems to me that in many situations where the founders are starting to think of a pivot, although the pivot may be related to a market issue, the market's going away, the market's changing. We have now a lot of funding that's going away from the government. So companies, all of a sudden, who had a viable business, they don't get that money from the government. It's no longer a viable business, even though their product may be good and other things, they have to kind of figure that one out that may force a pivot. But part of it is and a good part of it is the initial market fit, either was wrong or it changed. And this gets into a kind of a discussion about product market fit. How often should companies do it, even after they've established their direction, and what do they look for in product market fit that indicates they may need to pivot in the future?

Ari Block 26:33
That's a great question. So here's the thing, there's not an Oh, you should do product market fit X amount of times, X amount of years? No, that doesn't exist. What I would recommend is you actually look at the signals coming in. As long as your operational signals are healthy, you should keep going. The question is, how do you structure those operational signals to make sure that you're seeing a problem way before it happened? So, so at Cellebrite, what happened is that we had no analytics. This is incredibly common. A lot of companies don't have product analytics and have very little operational analytics. So this is, it blows my mind every time I work into a company that don't have it but, but that's the first thing I fix, because how are you going to make decisions with our data? Sounds like a simple thing, but then they tell me, Oh, they've been trying to get data for years and different reasons. They had a problem. I always get it fixed in three months, but that's an incredibly difficult problem to solve, and everybody's always in shock when I do that. So that's kind of like a magic skill that I have, but once you have the data, then you need to make sense of it. So what happened at Cellebrite is we deployed a product 600 points of sale in the, in Australia, and I was the first one ever to implement analytics, product analytics and analytics came back and said, nobody's using it. I thought, my, I wrote the code because I was very young. I was 20 something, and I was both the project manager and the coders. It was start-ups you do everything. So I was sure I had a bug in my code. I spent three weeks debugging the code, and finally the CEO said I would just go to Australia. So I was like, okay, so I went to Australia. I sat in the stores watching the employees use it or not use it. They, I sat in the store for about six hours. They didn't touch it even once. And then I was like, okay, maybe I don't have a bug. Maybe nobody's using this product. So we had a signal, we had a product data signal come in, which was horrifying, was basically less than 1% usage. Then, being a geek, I had a lot of friends that do geeky things. So one of my ex-military guys was like, oh, Ari, have you played with Android? And I was like, what is that? So he shows me this HTC phone. It was a flip would flip open, I don't know if you all remember that. And he's like, Oh, this has Android. Like, what's Android? It's like, it's Linux. Oh, I know Linux. Like, yeah, but this is Mobile Linux. And look at everything they, so he walks me through the architecture, and then he starts talking about the web connectivity. And he talks about this, I get this pit in my stomach and I start feeling nauseous, and I start to understand that this is going to smash my company, right? So this is going to smash Celebrite and this is going to be bad, really bad, but, but now I figure out something, a market trend, something that's coming that was two to three years out. So the combination of nobody using our product, basically that we didn't know that, we had no idea they're not actually physically using it, with a market trend coming two to three years out, and the company was making millions like there was no financial reason to be afraid at all. The company was making millions every, the customers loved it, right? In fact, I took this information back to David Facey, the Telstra executive. I said, nobody's using our product. He's like, don't worry about it. I was like, what? He's like, don't worry about it. We need the product. We need to give this from a marketing perspective. They're not using it. I know he knew already. He knew they're not using it. Why? Because, they it would hurt their sales incentive. So if they took time off to do, use our product, they weren't selling, so they didn't want to use the product. So it was like, we use this when we have to. If the customer says they want to back up their contacts, we do it. So don't worry. So I was worried about my next million dollars. It's like, don't worry about it. I was in shock.

Botond Seres 30:40
Yeah, usually the financial reason to worry is the last one to come around.

Ari Block 30:45
That's a very, very smart comment. Yes, yes. Unfortunately, it's what we call a lagging indicator. Like, by the time the financial indicator comes around, you're in deep trouble.

Botond Seres 30:56
Yes, way too late. Yeah,

Dave Erickson 30:57
Yeah. I mean, it's a challenge companies are having now, you know, companies that have built a business are finding that AI is coming in and offering an alternative that they can't compete with, right big time, and a bunch of companies don't even know that, right?

Ari Block 31:18
No. Bunch most, most,

Dave Erickson 31:21
Those of us who are in AI and doing AI, you just see it all day, this company is, you know, AI is going to do this. And you know, how are they going to start pivoting their business sometimes, I guess a pivot is not just a business change in business direction of what you're selling or making, but it could be how you do business, right? And I think a lot of companies now are going to have to pivot how they do business.

Ari Block 31:52
I would go further than that. I would say every single one, every single one, there's not a company in the world that's not going to be impacted by this. In fact, there's probably not a person in the world that's not going to be impacted by AI and I. There's the doomsday analysis, which it's going to be really bad for a while, and I don't know how long, but I believe that after it's really bad for a while, it's going to get really good. Because what's going to happen, we're going to have a second renaissance, and we're seeing both the good and the bad signals happening right now. We're seeing computer science engineers finishing university and going to work as baggers in Walmart because they just can't find a job. That's the bad. But then we're seeing the good as well. And the good is that, you know, I just gave a free education, and this person who got my free education showed me that he did the work of 10 people. He was an entrepreneur. He did the work of 10 people in one day that would have taken three months. Now, this person is an entrepreneur who needs to get his business going in order to feed his, you know, his children. He's got a, he's got a daughter, he's got a wife. That knowledge that I gave him for free in one of my trainings, you know, changed his life. Now he can compete with other companies that are bigger, stronger, not faster anymore. He's faster now, right? So, so, this is, this is, I think, you know, if you look at the history, right, if you look at the beginning of time, the things that have created the transition of wealth, more than anything else, was not social advocates. I mean, I love all our social advocates. Good job. You've got to tell the story. But the one thing that changed equity, the biggest thing in the world, bigger than anything else, by a magnitude, by several magnitudes, is technology. It's the wheel, it's the printing press, it's the internet. It's going to be AI now. It's, it's all these things are the only things that have created equity in our world. It's definitely not politicians? Yeah, no,

Dave Erickson 34:02
Although politicians seem to get a lot of equity, but that's for

Ari Block 34:06
They get the equity, they don't redistribute the equity. Yeah. Look, it doesn't matter what side of the political you know game you're on. Politicians are corrupt and

Dave Erickson 34:16
Well, Ari, thank you for working with us and having this conversation. What are you currently doing, and what are some of the things that you're working on?

Ari Block 34:27
Well, I am incredibly concerned about my communities, so I have created a nonprofit which its entire objective is to teach people AI for free. And what I'm hoping is, if we can get enough of the community actively understanding AI, understanding its pitfalls, understand how it's growing and will continue to grow, then we can create a resilience in our community. So you know, I'm really, really invested in this, emotionally and financially, and our first training, free training of AI, is going out pretty soon. And if you're in some way, if you're in some way, supporting your community, that means if you are a firefighter, a police officer, or even if you work for a church. If in any way you support your community, even if you're a rotary chapter, right, anything, if in any way you are supporting your community, you are welcome to come to one of my free trainings, and, you know, money back guarantee, if we don't blow your mind. Unfortunately, it's free, so there's not much money. But nonetheless, money back guarantee, if we don't blow your mind, blowing your mind is guaranteed.

Dave Erickson 35:51
And how do people find this?

Ari Block 35:53
Yes, so, so it. You know, we created for the purpose of the heroes that put their life on the line to save us, the firefighters. I have named this company Smoke Eaters. So you can go to smoke eaters.com, sorry.ai, or you can go to my LinkedIn. Either way, you'll find it. And then there is a current event that's going to be coming up pretty soon. I'm going to double check the date real quick, but basically, you can join the first smoke eaters training, and you can basically be part of the revolution.

Dave Erickson 36:41
I look forward to it, and I, I'm a mountain bike team coach, and most of the other coaches happen to be firefighters, so I will let them know, and I think that's a great venture to try to do it will help the community a lot.

Ari Block 36:58
I think that's all we can do, is right. We can help each other to get through what's about to come. And you know, if all we do is, is make ourselves of service to others, I will guarantee you will be happy in your own life.

Dave Erickson 37:12
Great. I think that's very good wisdom. Well, Botond and to the listeners, if you wish to follow the developments of this. You can find Ari's LinkedIn link in the description of this podcast and connect with him. And I'm sure, Ari, you're going to be putting stuff on your LinkedIn that will allow people to follow this. Ari, thank you so much for being on our podcast and discussing how companies can successfully pivot their business and the future of AI.

Botond Seres 37:43
we are at the end of the episode today, but before we go, we want you to think about this important question.

Dave Erickson 37:49
how would you try to pivot your business

Botond Seres 37:53
For our listeners, please subscribe and click Notifications to join us for our next ScreamingBox technology and business rundown podcast, and until then, think about how you might be able to pivot a business.

Dave Erickson 38:05
Thank you very much for taking this journey with us. Join us for our next exciting exploration of technology and business in the first week of every month. Please help us by subscribing, liking and following us on whichever platform you're listening to or watching us on. We hope you enjoyed this podcast, and please let us know any subjects or topics you would like us to discuss in our next podcast by leaving a message for us in the comment sections or sending us a Twitter DM till next month. Please stay happy and healthy.