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Veterans know how to lead. The lessons we learned in the military form the foundation for bigger successes in business, entrepreneurship and community.
Host John S Berry, CEO of Berry Law, served as an active-duty Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army, finishing his military career with two deployments and retiring as a Battalion Commander in the National Guard. Today, his veteran led team at Berry Law, helps their clients fight some of the most important battles of their lives. Leading successful teams in the courtroom, the boardroom, and beyond, veteran leadership drives the firm’s rapid growth and business excellence.
Whether building teams, synchronizing operations, or refining tactics, we share our experiences, good and bad, to help you survive, thrive and dominate.
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[00:00:01.060] - Ryan Kuo
OpenAI and Anthropic and all the, you know, the large hyperscalers that are working on AI right now want us to be thinking about the future. That's how a lot of them are raising money. So, we're all seeing these scary articles about like, oh, everybody's going to get fired. Nobody's going to have a job. You got Elon Musk going out there saying like, nobody's going to be working in so many years and we'll all just get some sort of AI dividend. These extreme comments are just, in my mind, fearmongering. And I think it rolls down into the corporations where you could see a lot of corporate leadership panicking right now about how do we use AI?
[00:00:35.230] - John S. Berry
Welcome to Veteran Led. We are coming to you from Veteran Edge with Freddie Kim from MilSpec and Ryan Kuo. Welcome to the show, Ryan.
[00:00:42.450] - Ryan Kuo
Thanks, John. I appreciate it.
[00:00:43.660] - John S. Berry
Now, Ryan sold a popcorn company and is now working with AI and helping run businesses. Ryan, you started off as an armor officer, served in the initial invasion in Iraq. Got out. And then what happened?
[00:00:57.790] - Ryan Kuo
So started off in the corporate world, just like most JMOs, junior military officers do, right? Start off in operations, just like most JMOs do coming out. Figured out that's not what I wanted to do. So, I started to purposely try to build my career towards more of a general management CEO type level role. So, I was working at Honeywell, went to Kraft Foods, was running strategy transformation. I actually led the international business development team for, for a number of years, but at some point or another I was like, I need to get to a CEO role, right? So, there's the path on the corporate side. It's a long route; it's a lot of politics. And, you know, I was in my mid-30s and super ambitious. And so, I decided, hey, listen, I'm going to leave, I'm going to go smaller companies. So, I ended up working for a billionaire as a— at his family office to run his private equity fund. So, I did that working with some small companies. Actually, took over two of them as a CEO simultaneously. And then I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to take one of the companies, a company called Funky Chunky Popcorn Company, out from underneath that portfolio and take it out on my own.
[00:02:05.910] - Ryan Kuo
Now I look back and it's like, yeah, was that a good idea? I don't know. Well, I mean, it was a great experience. We had a decent exit, still actually a large investor within it. But it was a great experience. But it was a— I will say this; entrepreneurship is a traumatic experience. It's a traumatic event. So, it's, you know, it's something that 6 months removed from it, I'm still trying to kind of place where that experience actually lies within my life, if that makes sense.
[00:02:34.240] - Freddie Kim
Are you— what are you struggling with there? I'm curious.
[00:02:36.810] - Ryan Kuo
You know, I think, you know, there are the exits that are those big, really successful exits where you can make a lot of money and you can always point to the cash and say, hey, You know, no matter how, you know, traumatic that experience was or what challenges I face, I have a bunch of money in the bank. So, it's like, you know, it was all worth it. Mine right now is more, you know, about what else I could have done with that company, what mistakes that I made, right, associated with it where we could have been better off rather than having that exit. But I think we, you know, but there's the flip side of that. There was a lot of things that I did do within that that I think got us to where we needed to be for that transaction. So, it was pretty— I'm kind of torn a little bit about what I'm missing. Does that make sense? What I could have done, which I think as an entrepreneur, everybody always says, like, I could have done this, I could have done that, I should have done this, I have another idea, right?
[00:03:31.600] - Ryan Kuo
Kind of deal. And now that I'm out of it, it's a huge— by the way, it's a huge relief, first off, right? Because worrying about all your employees, and you know this, John, you know, we all know, right? It's a huge amount of pressure. But on the flip side of it, when you leave it, you feel that relief, but you also miss it to a certain extent, right? You miss that responsibility, you miss, and you also think that sometimes that you have a lot more input in terms of how things are going than you actually do, if that makes sense. Right. So, there's a bit of an ego thing there as well.
[00:04:07.410] - Freddie Kim
So, Ryan, you're a 2000 West Point grad.
[00:04:10.710] - Ryan Kuo
Yep.
[00:04:11.190] - Freddie Kim
And we both just learned that we were in the same—
[00:04:13.580] - Ryan Kuo
Go Frogs!
[00:04:14.320] - Freddie Kim
Go Frogs!
[00:04:14.880] - Ryan Kuo
Go Frogs!
[00:04:15.590] - Freddie Kim
Crazy. Crazy. At what point, like post-transition, did you learn how to leverage your network like the West Point network or just network in general?
[00:04:26.660] - Ryan Kuo
That's a good question. When I left Kraft Foods, it was about the Kraft Heinz merger timeframe, I realized pretty quickly that my network sucked, that I didn't really know anybody. I hadn't kept up with a lot of my buddies from the West Point days. I hadn't used LinkedIn. I hadn't, you know, gone to networking events. And I still am not great at it. It's something that I really have to work at. Strangely enough, like if you see me in a drinking establishment, everybody would think that I'm an outward, you know, hold court kind of person. But the reality is, is that I have to work at it. It's a, it's a hard thing for me to get through, you know, my introvertedness to a certain extent. Right. And so once I left, I realized that I sucked. I spent about 6 months actually really, really working at building that network. And then once I got into the private equity world and working with deals, I really was actively out there talking to people and trying to really do two things, right? Learn as much as I could about what people were doing. And then secondly, actually help them.
[00:05:32.060] - Ryan Kuo
Right. And it's strange. It's helping them in a way that not only is valuable to them, like I was trying to find where the value— where I could be of value to somebody, but doing it for free, right? Like, don't— not with no expectations of anything in return. Right. Those things. And that's when I realized that my network started to really expand. And any time I then did need help, it was a lot easier to ask for help. Right. And get that in return. So, so it took me about, I want to say like 15 years after I got— I graduated to really start building that out. But now I just started this new gig and they have this, you know, I don't know if you guys deal with Sales Navigator on LinkedIn and anybody that's within your company will say, oh, you're connected to so-and-so, I need to talk to this company. Oh, you're connected. I'm getting like 3 or 4 emails a day about like, oh, you're connected to this guy in this company and you're connected to this guy. And I didn't realize that over time how big my network had actually been created.
[00:06:26.600] - Freddie Kim
So this, you know, when you say you, you, you restarted networking recently, like walk us through what that process, the tactical process was like because you did mostly over Zoom.
[00:06:39.290] - Ryan Kuo
I did. Yeah. It was all Teams, Zoom, Google, whatever people used. I was using some phone call, a lot of text messages.
[00:06:48.920] - Freddie Kim
What was the opening line that you used to just to get people on the phone with you.
[00:06:53.390] - Ryan Kuo
It was funny, I actually wrote, the first thing I did is I had some time on my hands and as an entrepreneur, nobody, you don't like to be idle, right? Nobody likes to like, oh, just exited, you should take some time off. And I was like, all right. And then like the next Monday I was in my office again, right? Still working. And so, I was like, hey, I've never really done anything on LinkedIn. Let me write an article. And I started there, say, hey, I have this. Yeah, it did kind of blow up. It was the first one I kind of even put out there. And it was really about, you know, how much money we as a taxpayer invested in Veterans, right, in terms of training, leadership development. It's $18 billion a year that we spend on leadership development in the military and how much of a translation gap that exists in the corporate world that it's— we're not seeing the results in the ROI from that investment in the corporate world because we've seen the proportion of CEOs go from the high 50s down into the high single digits over the last 30 years.
[00:07:49.160] - John S. Berry
A Veteran CEO. So just to break this down for all the infantry guys, $18 billion in educating our military on leadership, not to mention all the experience. And then what happens when you get out of service? And then it just goes away unless you, the Veteran, decide that you want a bigger, better future. And you obviously did it and you've continued to pursue it.
[00:08:10.820] - Ryan Kuo
Yeah. So, it's funny, I have a Navy friend, surprisingly, that calls it the ocean of goodwill. Right. There's all these VSOs that exist out there. So, we all complain as Veterans, we get out and say, oh, the VA is really difficult to navigate. It's super complex and confusing. Well, it's just as confusing to deal with all the VSOs, right? There's this organization that wants to help you with this. There's this organization wants to help you with this. Right. And they're all well-meaning. Again, the ocean of goodwill, right? Everybody is trying to do the right thing. But the other part of that article was that we lack a network effect, right? So, when you leave, nobody cares. Right. The DOD or the DOW, whatever you want to call it now. Right. They only care about the mission in terms of when you're in and what they're paying you for. Right. The VA theoretically is supposed to help you on the way out, but right now they're focused— what's their mandate? Health care, cemeteries, benefits. Right.
[00:08:57.590] - Ryan Kuo
But where are the people actually trying to truly develop and leverage that investment into true ROI, into the community or into politics for that matter? Right. Into leadership as a whole within our country. And there's really— there's a ton of organizations like IVMF here right, is doing that. There's the PenFed Military Foundation that's trying to do that. But there's very little interaction between these organizations, right? There's little, very little, um, coordination, right? So, there's a bunch of money being, being raised, right, and then deployed within this stuff, but not in a coordinated way. And if you were to look at any other, or, you know, initiative that's like that, or a business that's doing something, you'd say, well, it's a total waste, right? You're looking— think about all the leakage that's happening there and how much overlap is probably occurring in those types of things. So, you know, we had the opportunity at the CEO Circle the other day to hear from Bob McDonald, the ex-secretary of the VA. And I asked him the question, I was like, well, does he see the evolution of the VA eventually moving into this space, right? Because he was making kind of the same leadership gap argument in the corporate world.
[00:10:08.210] - Ryan Kuo
and I think he had some good answers in terms of what he tried to do, but I don't think you could tell within the answer that I don't think it's really a true thought. I don't actually think that there's anybody in our government that's actually seeing this as a problem, right?
[00:10:22.020] - Freddie Kim
Oh, I see.
[00:10:23.240] - Ryan Kuo
So, at some point or another, so I wrote that article, this long answer, right? Long answer, um, to a short question. Um, so I wrote the article. It blew up. I started getting people to reach out to me, people that I had known in the past, new people. Just started taking phone calls, didn't care who it was. I just started talking to them. Oh, this is what you know. Oh, by the way, I'm, you know, I'm trying to figure out what the next thing is. They would introduce me to the next person, that person would introduce me, and then I would circle back to folks. And you got— and then all of a sudden I realized, hey, I got to stay organized on this. So, I basically had to go get a CRM, start putting everybody in the CRM, start taking notes, making sure that I'm following up with things. So it has to be an intentional, organized thing. but at some point or another I realized, man, this is gonna eat up my life and I gotta get way more intentional about what direction I want to go here. And so I started building kind of concepts, right, of we need to build mentorship through the CEO Circle.
[00:11:16.600] - Ryan Kuo
We need to build a mentorship group. We need to start talking about ETA, right? Entrepreneurship through acquisition for Veterans. That'll help close some of that gap on a local level. You start talking to like SHRM, like from an organization in terms of certifications and getting them to understand, you know, that what that leadership investment is and how you can translate, make it part of their certification for HR folks to know how to read a military resume, etc., right? And then, oh, by the way, as my wife would constantly remind me, I also needed to pay the bills. So I had to go out there and find a job. And luckily I landed in a, in a great spot working on AI and transformation.
[00:11:54.760] - John S. Berry
So, and let's get into that. You and I had a great conversation. We were on our way to the JPMorgan at a Plano facility talking about AI and some of the, I think, misunderstanding of capabilities. So let's get into some of your frustrations with what we're being told out there compared to what's really true.
[00:12:12.500] - Ryan Kuo
Yeah, I, you know, and I'm just going to preface this by saying like, I know enough to be dangerous, so I'm sure I'm going to say some things and somebody will watch this and be like, ah, he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, right? So, but—
[00:12:23.220] - John S. Berry
And that probably person probably doesn't know their copy.
[00:12:26.210] - Ryan Kuo
Yeah, I mean, listen, this is going to go out in 2 weeks from now. Everything is going to change anyway, so. But to your point, I mean, the conversation that we were having, my frustration is that we're being sold the future, right? And for a reason, right? OpenAI and Anthropic and all the, you know, the large hyperscalers that are working on AI right now, right? Want us to be thinking about the future. That's how a lot of them are raising money, right? Is based off of what the future capabilities are. So we're all seeing these scary articles about like, oh, everybody's gonna get fired, nobody's gonna have a job. You got Elon Musk going out there saying like, Nobody's going to be working in so many years and we'll all just get some sort of AI dividend, right, to live on. It's, you know, these extreme comments are just, in my mind, fearmongering. And I think it rolls down into the corporations where you could see a lot of corporate leadership panicking right now about how do we use AI, right? And when have you ever seen a corporate initiative where the leadership is telling its employee base like, hey, go start doing this?
[00:13:25.910] - Ryan Kuo
But there's zero other guidance. But the reason why we want you to do this is because we don't know what to do with this technology. We want you to figure out by using it, right? And then we'll figure out the use cases afterwards. I've never seen a deployment of technology that way in my 20+ years of corporate experience, right? It's always been, hey, there's a technology, there's a use case, we're going to now deploy it for high adoption and implementation, right? And benefit attainment. I've never seen like, hey, we have this new technology now, just go use it and figure it out and then tell us what, what we need to do with it. Right?
[00:13:59.390] - Ryan Kuo
So, this future state that's being sold, I think, is confusing everybody from what it really is. In my mind, it's really just an evolution of technology that's already existed and approaches that we've already taken. It's just a, hey, we can take it one more level. And the analogy I like to use is the factory, right? Manufacturing in the United States or anywhere around there, you would make widgets and you'd have 30 people on the line, but you still had a manager, right? You had a factory manager, you had a line leader, you had shift leaders, you have a QA guy at the end to make sure whatever comes out on the end is actually the person, the thing that's supposed to come out. All right. Well, this is AI. Like, you replace those people with equipment, machines, right? But you have to do the math. What's the payback period, right? Like, is it worth replacing 10 people or only have one person doing this? Why should I replace that one person to do that? Right. AI is like that in, say, business, right? So, AI is all it is, is going to start to replace some of those repetitive manual tasks, right, that you can have, that you can, you can, that you no longer have to do with human.
[00:15:03.430] - Ryan Kuo
And but the difference is, is that it's going to now free up, in my mind, mindshare to be able to work on more value-added strategic type initiatives. Never heard a corporate leader say, I have too many people. Right? And not enough to do. It's usually the, I have so much to do and not enough people. So why are you telling me that you're going to go and get AI and then reduce your people? Wouldn't you just get the AI and then allow those people to have more time to be able to work on all the things that you wish you could have worked on and done? That's more likely the scenario that's going to occur here. Now, again, there are technology people out there that are probably going to be like, yeah, we're all done. We're going to get, we're all going to get fired. But I'm not there. I think it's a fearmongering tactic to raise money. That's my opinion on it. So.
[00:15:51.800] - Freddie Kim
hmm.
[00:15:52.360] - John S. Berry
But potential future capability. And we've seen some good things happen, but it's not where everybody thinks it's going to be. And once again, you're chasing something that isn't there yet and you're placing a bet. You're placing a bet and there's a lot of great arguments for it, but yeah, What do I need it to do? Well, I don't know. Just make it do something. Yeah. Okay. But how does it, how does it make, how does it help the bottom line? We don't know yet. Just make it do something. Okay, great.
[00:16:16.030] - Ryan Kuo
I don't know what the details are, but like Jack Dorsey the other day, like fired like 4,000, like 40% of his staff in his company, right? Because he was like, oh, we don't need them because of AI. Well, listen, I don't, I don't think overnight he implemented AI that all of a sudden like eliminated 4,000, the need for 4,000 people. It's not practical. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, listen, I don't know the details of it, but all that's telling me is that you just had too many people and used AI as an excuse. And that's the risk of this whole fearmongering, is that that whole inclination of, you know, large corporate leaders to take a lot of cost out really quickly to, to meet either a quarterly or annual number. Right. And layoffs are a thing is that you start using AI as an excuse rather than an actual reason why it's occurring. Does that make sense? The AI is not driving the layoffs. The layoffs are being driven by old traditional financial engineering means, right? And the AI is now the excuse to be able to do that.
[00:17:10.950] - Freddie Kim
You know, but on that note, with the 4,000 layoffs, Twitter, I mean, their stock jumped like 20%.
[00:17:16.990] - Ryan Kuo
That's what I'm saying.
[00:17:18.470] - Freddie Kim
Like 20 points that day.
[00:17:19.790] - Ryan Kuo
But that's what I'm saying. It's a game, right? I mean, it's, I mean, think of stock prices as a, I'm in this business, I'm in the finance world now, right? And you know, you do financial engineering, you have— there are things that you can create value. But the question is whether or not it's structural and sustainable value, right? You can do that one-time stock bump, right, by taking an action. The question is, is it sustainable, right? Is the next quarter's report going to be able to build upon the last quarter's report? Right. And that consistency of reporting and performance as a company is what in my mind builds a valuable, sustainable business. The guys that are constantly lay off 4,000 people, I would venture to bet right now if I— well, I guess you can on Kalshi in about 2 weeks, right? They're going to start hiring some people back.
[00:18:07.150] - Freddie Kim
Yeah,
[00:18:07.390] - Ryan Kuo
right.
[00:18:07.710] - Freddie Kim
Agreed.
[00:18:08.490] - John S. Berry
So, and that is a leadership issue, which takes us to the after-action review. Your examples of great leadership and poor leadership. Don't have to name names.
[00:18:16.030] - Ryan Kuo
Yeah. So I had a company commander when we invaded into Iraq that I always go back to. Still great friends with, with him, Andy Helms, and it up retiring as a one-star general a couple of years ago. There was a certain amount of— he was a great leader, right? And he was somebody that had empathy, would build, as Bob McDonnell was talking about, intimacy, right? Build connection, right? There was always that, you know, when we went through West Point, there was this philosophy of like, oh, you can't, you can't drink with your Joes, right? You can't hang out with them. You have to have a level of separation, right, between them. And, and I was never a big believer in that. I always felt like we got to get to know these people. And eventually, when you're in the middle of the desert living in like a 4-person tent with these guys, you have no, no way around not knowing them, right? But Andy was the one that kind of led for me and taught me how to, to really build those connections, have empathy. When I had challenges personally, he was there for me even though he was my commander, right?
[00:19:17.030] - Ryan Kuo
And to me, that building the relationships and understanding when to apply certain leadership approaches, directive, you know, being a servant leader, being, you know, the various versions of like leadership because there's different ways, right? And how you individualized it was a great, great example. The opposite of that, I'm not going to name names on that, right, is the lack of empathy. But I used to say a lot in the corporate world, there are users and there are developers, right? And you have to be very careful because the users oftentimes look like they're developers. They look like they're great leaders. The great speakers, they're out there. Maybe they are influencing an organization or a company, but when you work for them individually, they're really trying to get to an end goal themselves and they don't really care about you, right? So they're just taking your information. You know who they are. They're the ones that will take an idea, use it, and not give any credit to anybody else. Right. Kind of deal. Or, hey, you know,
[00:20:15.330] - Freddie Kim
fake the credit
[00:20:16.290] - Ryan Kuo
or yeah fake the credit, right?
[00:20:16.750] - Freddie Kim
fake the credit.
[00:20:17.890] - Ryan Kuo
Yeah. Or they'll come, you know, say they'll recruit you into their organizations and say, oh, I'm going to do this, I'm going to introduce you to this, I'm going to help you get to the next level. And then you get in there and 6 months later, not a single conversation, not a single introduction. Right. And it's just about them using, you know, you to get to the next, next thing. So, I've had several of those. Still great people, I would argue, but poor leaders in my opinion. So.
[00:20:43.740] - Freddie Kim
So, you know, with Funky Chunky sale, I would, as an operator, right, when you were wearing your operator hat, can you tell us or share with us just that one takeaway that you've had from that experience?
[00:21:00.450] - Ryan Kuo
Yeah, I would say this is that, and I think the folks that worked with me and worked on Funky Chunky will recognize this. My biggest mistake, I think, in that whole deal, and I always go to the mistake versus the success. I don't know why. I think that's just kind of my nature maybe, or I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs I know that are kind of similar to that, right?
[00:21:18.180] - Freddie Kim
Of course.
[00:21:19.850] - Ryan Kuo
Things that we want to fix. Yeah, exactly. Right. One thing I wish I'd done, and I learned too late was, and we all know this inherently, is bad news doesn't get better with time, right? When something is going wrong, when something's going bad, I should have been much more proactive about communicating those things. By nature, I'm an optimistic person. So, you know, even though it went wrong, I always thought, oh, like, I can fix that, right? That's something I can continue to fix. But then the next thing goes wrong and you're like, okay, well, I could still fix it, right? There's still a solution to this. And that's kind of, again, the nature of an entrepreneur is like, you know, you're constantly trying to work the problem.
[00:21:56.720] - Ryan Kuo
There's always a problem to fix, right?
[00:21:59.220] - Freddie Kim
But communication to whom?
[00:22:00.980] - Ryan Kuo
To my board, to my staff, right?
[00:22:02.690] - Ryan Kuo
And it's just about like identifying what the true problem is. Being transparent about it, being optimistic. Hey, we think we have a solution to fix it, right? Rather than— I wouldn't say hide it. It's just that it's underplaying it, right? Yeah. I think by nature we tend to underplay the bad and overplay the good. Right. And I think that's what I did a little bit during that time period. So for me now, it's like if something is not going the direction it should be going, even if I think I can fix it, I'm going to be very transparent and be like, this is what's going on. Even though this is what I'm going to do about it. Right. And then balance that message though. I think that's really the key of it is not underplaying it.
[00:22:41.170] - Freddie Kim
Yeah.
[00:22:41.670] - John S. Berry
So you don't want people to freak out, but you want them to have information.
[00:22:44.300] - John S. Berry
You got to deliver it the right way and then pray it's received the right way.
[00:22:48.310] - Ryan Kuo
Yeah, it's— man, EIQ is like the biggest— I say it. I was at this, the PenFed Military Foundation thing last week and we were talking to founders about pitches. Right. And I was like, you're in the room, you can't just go through your pitch. You got to stop, listen, understand, read their facial expression. EIQ is something that like, if you can't even through, especially through Zoom or Teams or whatever, you can't be focused on the presentation. Don't be reading the slides, be looking at the people that you're talking to as you're giving the presentation, because then you'll know this persons completely checked out. This person's got a question, so I should stop and pause, right? That I think,
[00:23:26.570] - Freddie Kim
Oh interesting EIQ As opposed to EQ.
[00:23:30.350] - Ryan Kuo
Yeah, I look at it as EIQ.
[00:23:32.180] - Freddie Kim
Oh, interesting.
[00:23:32.840] - Ryan Kuo
Because you should— it's a framework you should know, right? And you should be able to— I think it's a skill and it's something that can be improved.
[00:23:41.880] - John S. Berry
Like it. So, as we wrap up here, where can people learn more about you, Ryan Kuo?
[00:23:47.490] - Ryan Kuo
I'm on LinkedIn. I used to have a website, but since I don't have that company anymore, there was a website by another guy. There's another Ryan Kuo. If you go to RyanKuo.com, that's not me. That's some other— that's other Ryan Kuo. There's about like 50 of us in the world. So, but yeah, LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me there. Send me a message. Willing to talk to anybody. If I can help you, I will. If you can help me, I'll take that too. But yeah, that's where you can find me.
[00:24:20.160] - John S. Berry
Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we seek to help Veterans build an even bigger, better future after military service. Unfortunately, for some of our Veterans, the roadblock to a better future is that they are not receiving all of the benefits that they earned. If you need help appealing a VA disability decision, contact Berry Law.