#35 - The new playbook for building 10x employees - Stefan Weitz

Stefan Weitz thinks AI should not just make companies faster. It should make every individual inside them dramatically more capable.

In this episode of The Deep View: Conversations, the HumanX CEO explains how he’s putting that idea into practice, starting with his own team.

HumanX calls itself the most important AI conference of the year, but what makes it stand out is how intentionally it’s being built. Stefan and his team are rethinking the entire event experience for 2026, using AI to create a more personalized journey for every attendee, from curated sessions to smarter networking and discovery.

In this episode, we talk about:

+ Building a new kind of conference in the AI era
+ Using vibe coding for rapid prototyping
+ Management principles for the AI era
+ Turning every worker into a 10x employee
+ The AI tool that’s blowing Stefan’s mind

But this conversation goes beyond events. It’s really about leadership in the age of AI.

Along the way, Stefan offers a clear view of what it takes to build an organization that can actually apply AI, not just talk about it. He also shares a leadership principle that has shaped his approach.

If you’re thinking about how to scale impact across your team, or how to move from AI curiosity to real execution, this conversation delivers practical insights you can use right away.

Subscribe to the podcast for more conversations with the leaders, builders, and researchers shaping the future of AI.

And don't forget to sign up for The Deep View daily newsletter. We don’t just cover AI, we decode it. In a world flooded with hype, we deliver sharp, no-nonsense insights to keep you ahead of the curve and help you put AI to work every day: subscribe.thedeepview.com

Creators and Guests

Host

Jason Hiner

Editor-in-Chief of The Deep View

What is The Deep View: Conversations?

From frontier labs and enterprise platforms to emerging startups reshaping entire industries, The Deep View: Conversations podcast interviews the brightest minds and the most influential leaders in AI.

Jason Hiner (00:03.104)
In this episode, I talk to Stefan Weitz, CEO of Humanex, which unabashedly calls itself the most important AI conference of the year. But they are doing some really interesting things to make a different kind of event for 2026, including using AI tools to create a more individualized experience for each person who attends. The Humanex team is also being very intentional and purposeful about the type of event they're trying to create, bringing together leaders, thinkers,

decision makers, speakers, and journalists to talk about how to put AI into practice in all the most important spheres of life and work. I've known Stefan for a long time, and he's one of the most curious, most energetic, and most creative people I've met in tech. And he provides some great insights on the way he's given his team the tools, the time, and the agency to use AI to multiply their impact on the future of the company and the event.

Stefan also shares about the ways he's using Vibe coding to prototype new ideas and product features for Humanex, as well as his best leadership tip and the AI tool that's blowing his mind right now. All right, so here it is, our conversation with Stefan Weitz of Humanex.

Jason Hiner (00:01.408)
Alright, well, Stefan, for those who aren't familiar, tell us a little bit about what HumanX is, what HumanX does, and your role there.

Stefan (00:10.804)
Sure, well, I'm sorry for those who haven't heard about it. Your LinkedIn probably is flooded with it, so apologies, sort of, in advance, but...

Jason Hiner (00:15.96)
Yeah.

Stefan (00:17.192)
But we built HumanX to be really the premier AI ecosystem and event in the world. And I did it because of my co-founders and my partners. I did it because as a nerd and as a guy who's been around this AI space for so long, I kind of had given up on getting my C3PO or getting my kit from Knight Rider delivered to my house at some point because we were making good progress. We had some great technology and some really cool things that were happening across different products. But at the end of the day, that magic

Jason Hiner (00:39.843)
Yeah

Stefan (00:47.126)
that we all had, least in my age group, had come to desire wasn't there. And then we saw Transformers coming out in 17, and I kept watching those, and we saw, of course, the GPT moment happen. I'm telling you this because what happened was I started calling my buddies who now run these large companies, because I'm old enough to have people that are in these spaces, a couple years ago, and I said, hey, what are you doing with this AI thing? How are you using it? And most of them...

Jason Hiner (01:06.242)
Yeah.

Stefan (01:16.148)
said one of three things. we've got a great plan. They were totally lying. Two, we're kind of exploring, probably accurate. Or three, I have no idea why you're calling me. Please stop calling me. And so generally I was like, we're screwed. Because if we're relying on enterprises to be the ones to figure out how to use this Promethean gift that we've been given, it's going to under deliver on the promise or it's going to cause huge messes or both. So, HumanX was designed really to be a place where we could gather enterprises and large corporations, the scale-ups,

who are building technology, the startups who are innovating on technology, academia, policymakers, venture capitalists, put them all in one place and really allow a place where people could come together, get inspired, don't worry, lots of plans, still great speakers on stage, should give you the flying car pitch, but very quickly move into, okay, as a leader, now what do you do with this? And we don't get down to the level of which knobs do you turn and how do you necessarily write, or how do you write the best rag implementation.

But we get to the point where people who have to make decisions as to where their company needs to go in AI That's what that's who we're really talking to so that's that's human X. It's a part part, you know speakers part trade show part festival part music thing It's it's more of like a I don't know It's more of a festival than a conference and at the end we kind of create this Community to keep going post-conference that way people you meet there They can help you in your career help you in your personal life

Jason Hiner (02:37.879)
Yeah.

Stefan (02:45.908)
help you get a new job. That's really important to us all. So yeah, it's a big undertake.

Jason Hiner (02:51.904)
Amazing. So when did you start? Like what was the first year you obviously started before you had your first event? How long did it take you before you like spin up the first one and got it rolling?

Stefan (02:58.12)
Yeah.

Stefan (03:01.812)
Yeah, we founded it, the company, ended 20, right, literally, right before New Year's 23, so December 23, funded it in January 24, and the first event was March of 25. So it literally, to do an event of this scale and make it high quality and get the right speakers who can't pay to play, so it's all editorially curated speakers on stage, journalists like you actually doing interviews on stage, what's not some pandering VC, no offense, pandering VCs, to do all that and do it at scale

do it well. Yeah, it's about a year. Every one of these is about a year. It's crazy.

Jason Hiner (03:35.598)
It's events are a lot like for those who don't do vents events are full-on It is a little bit chaos a little bit, you know flying by the sea your pants no matter how big or how much you plan so Kudos to you all the impressive thing to me is how quickly you created buzz around it So I was still at zD net last year when I when I first heard but

Stefan (03:49.032)
Yeah? Yeah. Thanks.

Stefan (03:58.278)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jason Hiner (04:03.47)
I sort of had this perception like, this has been going on since like the, this whole boom, you know, started and hadn't realized it was the first one. But after the first one last year in, in 2025, almost immediately, you know, people were talking about human X and I was like, well, hold on, when is this, when is the next one happening? And they're like, no, it doesn't happen until next, next spring. And so I was like, I gotta wait until then that's, this is a, sounds like it's

Stefan (04:10.868)
Yeah.

Stefan (04:22.164)
Next spring.

Jason Hiner (04:30.894)
got a lot happening, I wanted to get connected. now obviously for us, the DeepView obviously, I left sort of traditional media to come to the DeepView to cover AI full time. And one of the first things I did, so I started in December, was like, okay, I've got to make the plan for what events I'm gonna go to. And literally, Huminex was the first one that almost everybody told me. And so I wanted to know, how did you get to the buzz that quickly? Because that's...

Stefan (04:32.476)
Yeah.

Stefan (04:38.344)
Yeah.

Stefan (04:46.483)
it.

Stefan (04:51.502)
man, that's nice of you.

Jason Hiner (04:57.976)
There are a lot of conferences and now every conference is an AI conference. Right. And so how did you get to the point where, you know, people were telling me people that were not connected with human X when I was making my list, what events should I go to? They're like human X, you know, was almost always in the top first three that people mentioned to me.

Stefan (05:01.982)
Yes.

Stefan (05:08.958)
Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

Well, that's really kind. How do we do it? Gosh, I wish I could give you a single answer. A few things. One, this is a venture backed company, right? So we need to venture capital. We need to make return for our investors. And we did that for a very particular reason, because we know to do a phenomenal event in year one, you're going to lose money. There's just no way around it. And so we, that's what we tell all the investors. Like this is your printing capital in to create an experience that you couldn't, that most events can't do because

Jason Hiner (05:34.786)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Stefan (05:45.153)
Most events are run by great people who are event people. I am not an event person. And they're doing it to make money every time because these are really expensive to put on. So they have to kind of make maybe compromises or decisions that you wouldn't otherwise want to make if you didn't have to do that. Like taking money to be on stage, for example. Nothing wrong with it. I just personally don't love that. So that's one way we didn't we weren't constrained. I we were constrained. We weren't constrained necessarily by having to break even in year one. So that allowed us to do things like

invite 350 media and treat them really, really well. Invite 350 speakers and the biggest names in world and not pay a dime to anybody and not take any money from them to do it allowed us to think about the programming in a way that didn't have to satisfy sponsor needs. So there's just a lot of things like that. So I think people, when they were there, they felt they could feel it. The journalists mentioned that to me, the speakers mentioned it to me. So that was a big deal. But it also frankly helps to have been in the industry for almost 30 years now. Oh my God.

Not quite, but getting pretty close. And so coming at it from, as a guy who was a executive at some of these larger companies.

Jason Hiner (06:45.09)
Yeah. Wow.

Stefan (06:55.764)
I had been to probably 500 conferences over my career, or maybe not that many, but a couple hundred conferences over my career, and I knew what worked for me, what didn't work for me, and I think I'm pretty typical as a exec-ish type person. And so a lot of what we did was really because I'm like, I hate this at events. And so how do we, even silly little things like the show floor, I know about you, but whenever I walk into a traditional show floor of a show, the first thing you get smacked in the face with is all

Jason Hiner (07:01.016)
Sure.

Jason Hiner (07:14.572)
Yeah. Yeah.

Stefan (07:25.718)
these hugely high booths. you walk in, see SAP, see all these great companies, right? They're right in the front and you just, you're kind of like, you can't see anything else. It's just overwhelming. I can't see who else is here and I have to kind of walk around. I'm like, let's not do that. Let's put at the, when you walk in, let's make it like a raped seating almost. So at the front, you've got startups and smaller companies in some cases. And as you get to the back, that's where all the big boys and girls are. again, that was a real, a lot of the sponsors are like, well, we want to be in there.

Jason Hiner (07:39.982)
Mmm.

Jason Hiner (07:51.457)
Okay?

Stefan (07:55.641)
front. That's where the traffic is. I'm like, yeah, but you don't. You don't. You want to be in the back. That's because that's where this all is. But again, having that venture funding allowed us to be more flexible and rethinking kind of everything from first principles to create an event that didn't feel like a cash grab or didn't feel like, you know, someone who never has been an AI before putting on an AI event. You know, that's that was that. So we got lucky in that sense is that I was a person who actually really loves the space, which is a little different.

Jason Hiner (07:56.974)
Yeah.

Jason Hiner (08:17.1)
Yeah.

Jason Hiner (08:24.856)
very cool. You're reading my mind a little bit because I was going to say, you know, what you were able to do is with that approach, you're able to be so intentional and so purposeful about what you were trying to create. And then that creates. So I love that the answer wasn't we spent a zillion dollars on marketing and got everybody really interested. And that's how, you know, created the buzz. It was no like we created the event we wanted to go to. And and then that from that became

Stefan (08:42.836)
No?

Jason Hiner (08:52.962)
people that went, that go to a lot of events were like, this is different and I like it.

Stefan (08:56.276)
Yeah, yeah. mean, it wasn't perfect, don't get me wrong. There's definitely stuff that's, especially as a product person, I'm like, oh, that didn't work, that didn't work, that, we too many stages, we had too much programming. Like there was stuff like that that I look back and we fixed for this year. yeah, people, most people who were there said like, kind of like you, they said, well, what year is this? And I said, no, it's the first year. So give us a little break to go, oh, I this was like year five. You know, so that was, but it's a testament to the team I assembled, because my business partner, John Weiner, who's kind of the,

Jason Hiner (09:06.68)
Sure.

Jason Hiner (09:16.814)
You

Stefan (09:22.9)
event many things but also an event god he's money 2020 and shop talk and health so he you know his his network of people who know how to do events at very high very high spec and high quality and high scale and i just i got to go pick from you know his old teams and say okay you know what you're doing so yeah anyway that's how did it

Jason Hiner (09:28.014)
Mmm.

Jason Hiner (09:37.133)
Yeah.

Jason Hiner (09:42.702)
Here's the squad. Amazing. How big is the team that puts on Human X?

Stefan (09:52.489)
Sorry, last let's see. Where we at now if you count kind of contractors, I mean we're in the low 30s at this point. Yeah It's a big team. Yeah

Jason Hiner (10:00.192)
Amazing. Putting on that's that for an event because you can have events like that there are huge events that are put on by five or 10 people like it can blow your mind, you know, but no 30 is 30 is also to putting on an event that has you know, 1000s of participants, what's your expected participation for for 2026?

Stefan (10:07.657)
Yeah. Yeah.

Stefan (10:18.357)
Yeah, we think and people book very late at events, which is also boggling up to my mind, but we're expecting around 6,000 to be there and that's what it's looking like trajectory wise on all the registrations. So about 6,000 people, over half of which are C-suites, 70 % of which are kind of leadership positions. There's still a of startups too, we're trying to keep it below like 25%, but you'll be a good number of startups there, it's San Francisco after all. A lot of venture folks as well. So it's a good mix.

Jason Hiner (10:22.583)
Yes.

Jason Hiner (10:31.544)
Yeah.

Jason Hiner (10:34.894)
Okay.

Stefan (10:48.491)
are figuring out the right people in the room. That's the big challenge because you want to make sure you have speakers that can talk to them, want to make sure sponsors who are there are spending a lot of money to be there, have a great experience with people who want to buy their products. And so there's just this constant every day, literally, we have this big heat map of like who's coming, where we need to go recruit more, where are we over indexed and stop recruiting. So it's a big dashboard that we look at and thankfully AI has been very helpful to help us tune those

Jason Hiner (11:13.08)
Yeah.

Stefan (11:18.261)
things but yeah that's six thousand bucks. There we are.

Jason Hiner (11:20.482)
Very cool. I want to hear more about how AI helps tune, you know, I, how, does that compare to last year? The 6,000 versus what you had last year.

Stefan (11:27.605)
We did about 3,400 last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's big.

Jason Hiner (11:30.208)
Okay, wow, almost doubling the event. That's big, that's big. Your team is also, like I said, to this intentionality and purposefulness and maybe attention to detail, your team's very thoughtful about the things they do. So full disclosure, I'm registered as press to come to the event, obviously. I'm moderating at the event as well. And so are the other two members of my team, Sabrina Ortiz and Nat Rubio-Licht, also moderating at the event.

Stefan (11:46.601)
You're coming. Yeah, exactly.

Stefan (11:57.075)
Yep, that's all about it.

Jason Hiner (11:59.83)
So one of the things we were going to, had sort of a conflict time thing. so Sabrina and I were going to switch, you know, sessions and we were talking to your folks in your team. He has great folks on your team. like, Hey, can we switch sessions? And they, I loved it. They said, no, they said, actually, what we're going to do is we really want Sabrina for that session for these reasons. And they made it clear and they're like, but, we understand you have a time thing. What could you do this session instead? We think you'd be a perfect fit for this.

Stefan (12:07.093)
Hmm.

Yep. thanks.

Stefan (12:15.893)
you

Ha!

Stefan (12:26.644)
Mmm.

Jason Hiner (12:28.494)
for the conversation that were happening. At most events, Stefan, honestly, they would've just been like, fine, you go there, we go here, whatever. I was so impressed that they said no, and then they explained why, and they said, here's a better idea, let's do this. And they were right too. I looked at the, and I was like, okay, that's really great. So that impressed me. That impressed me.

Stefan (12:32.093)
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, that's

Stefan (12:46.845)
No, that's hilarious. What helps that, it helps that a lot of them have accents, like their other, and they're Irish, and so, Irish or English, and so even when they say no, because I, trust me, my team tells me to go F off a bunch, but they say it with such a beautiful accent that I'm like, I just got told to go F myself, and,

Jason Hiner (12:59.612)
Hahaha!

Stefan (13:04.373)
I feel great about it. No, it is. It can be frustrating to me sometimes, because you're like, really want this to happen. And they said, here's the reasons why it shouldn't happen. Because they spend all year getting these speakers to say yes. And then all year, Barry's got 400 journalists coming to the event, who you talked to, I'm sure you talked to Barry. And all year getting 400 journalists. And you heard it, as journalists right now, it's tough. mean, we have CNBC and Bloomberg and Fox Business, the big folks who are bringing out their productions to the event.

Jason Hiner (13:22.21)
Wow. Wow. Yes.

Stefan (13:34.279)
really work hard to make it worth their while because it's expensive to do this, right? And so they're very serious about, which is why we're so lucky not to have to take money for speaking spots because then everything goes away at that point. The second you have to put XYZ sponsor on stage, they're paid to 200 grand, and they want a softball journalist because they don't want to have to deal with hard questions or a softball interviewer. The room can read that and you can see it and the quality's not there. so, no, they're really good.

Jason Hiner (13:37.144)
Yes, it is.

Jason Hiner (13:49.358)
Yeah.

Stefan (14:04.183)
It's a great team.

Jason Hiner (14:06.446)
So how did you decide what should an event look like? You also had the advantage of not having this long legacy of made events a certain way and all that. How did you decide, what are the other things that you decided like, hey, if we're gonna do event in 2025 and 2026, here's how we're gonna do it. Because there are a lot of things that are different and have changed and a lot of events are still sort of using the same template they've used for 20 years, 30 years.

Stefan (14:31.891)
Yeah, well...

It's kind of like when we were doing Bing, right? Back to my old days, was like no one thought they needed a new Google. And they didn't. If you ask people back in the day how conscious was your decision of search engine, was, I remember the stats still have been so long, but something like between deciding which engine to use was as, they gave it as much thought as tapping their leg when bored in a meeting or deciding whether to brush their teeth at night. It's like literally autonomic at that point, right? And you could, and so with the whole Bing thing, the whole point was like how do you make it of that category?

Jason Hiner (14:56.557)
You

Stefan (15:03.415)
so it's still got a function as a search engine, but differentiated to something people said, oh, I should go give that a shot. So it comes to the same approach. I'm not a very smart guy, so I might come to the same thing over over again. And so with this, it's same thing. You have to kind of make it smell like an event, but once they get there, you can do different things to pivot it. So for year one, I don't think we did anything that was necessarily revolutionary, but a few things that we did.

Again, people, you can get content anywhere. Content is commoditized at this point. People come to events. We did a bunch of primary research before we started it, and people come to events to make connections. That's the number one reason they come, to find a vendor, to find a partner, to find a colleague. That's why they come to events, because you can get all the stuff you want to these days just by doing a search, by binging it, for example. I still have stock.

Jason Hiner (15:51.95)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Stefan (15:55.797)
So that was, so that's how do we create opportunities for more connections? And so we have this program called Solution Bridge, which basically buyers or people at companies who have problems, they tell us their problems. We then go find a bunch of vendors that can help with those problems and then we put them together. So now a buyer or a person, know, a GM at an organization of marketing, she can say, I need to figure out my, whatever it might be, my provenance strategy for marketing assets. And then they get hooked, she gets hooked up with eight different

companies that consult that for her. So boom, like super high value ROI for that person and for the sellers who want to sell their solution. They get a warm lead and she gets solutions. So that's really important. The fact that we intentionally program things in, everyone does tracks, that's not new, but we actually held tracks to certain days. So the idea would be one day might be just all your content day, one day can be your expo floor day, one day can be your meetings day, but really trying to, I always found it

Jason Hiner (16:31.959)
you

Jason Hiner (16:36.834)
Sure.

Stefan (16:55.681)
knowing that the burden of value, the burden of getting value from an event was almost always on me. And most events, because they aren't thoughtful, they just kind of throw everything at the wall. Say, here's 300 sessions, there's a bunch of meetings, there's a bunch of stuff happening. It's like, good luck, you know, and I'm not you, but you look at an event schedule and you're like, I have no effing clue what's happening right now, you know? And so that was a big thing we changed as well. But yeah, and then this year we did a bunch of work with AI to really help people

their name, their title, their company, what they want to do. And then we built some pretty cool tech, some deep research tech that literally greps that person and then all of our sessions, all of our speakers, then would output, does output like a beautiful, here's your personalized path through human X that, and it was cool about it, and I'll stop talking. What was cool, I mean, again, it's so fun to build. I still love building stuff. so my team doesn't always love it, but.

Jason Hiner (17:53.154)
You

Stefan (17:55.473)
when I built this thing, this agenda builder, what was interesting is that I was trying different personas and one of the personas was like I was the e-commerce manager at Sears. I don't know why I chose that. I was in Chicago at time, I just thought of Sears. So that's my thing, I'm looking for a way to drive conversion or something like that's what I was looking for. And it sped up by 10 sessions and one of the sessions, I'm like, why would it say that? Because it didn't totally, I didn't quite understand why it recommended. So then we built a, here's why, and it said,

Jason Hiner (18:08.107)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Hiner (18:12.632)
Yeah.

Jason Hiner (18:21.485)
Okay.

Stefan (18:25.437)
One of the panelists who has a new company, which I didn't recognize her from this new company, this panelist was the former CTO at Rent-a-Runway and Stitch Fix. And I was like, that's why it recommended to me. Because even though I didn't recognize her name, because I didn't know her name, but her startup's a new company which I didn't recognize, the fact that the system could say, here's why you need to go because she used to run conversion at these two massively successful e-commerce companies. And I probably wouldn't have known that unless the system had told me exactly why this person was interesting.

Jason Hiner (18:53.774)
you

Stefan (18:55.407)
and why the session's interesting to me. So things like that where we're taking on the burden, because it's expensive, this is a three or four thousand dollar conference, so we're taking on the burden to get value to people, which I think is a big mindset shift for a lot of events.

Jason Hiner (19:01.038)
Sure. Yeah.

Jason Hiner (19:10.296)
that is very much shifted. The onus is always on you as the attendee to figure out everything. So you used a model, an AI model to help do some of that?

Stefan (19:14.984)
Always.

Stefan (19:21.203)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, for better or worse, since I have been writing code since I was eight years old, and not very good code anymore, trust me, don't, I'm not like, don't get me wrong. I haven't written good code in 15 years, not anymore, and that, honestly, that's the magic, like, I probably didn't, haven't written good code probably in over 10 years at this point, and now I'm like, well, shit, I can actually, I can actually do stuff again, I can be somewhat productive these days, you know? But yeah, no, so I, I mean, a great tech person as well, a great product person internally, which is also unusual for,

Jason Hiner (19:31.31)
It doesn't have to be that good anymore. You just have to know what you're doing, right? Yeah.

Stefan (19:51.129)
events companies to have literally a product manager, head of product, head of technology. But then I, know, much to their chagrin, usually on the weekends, I think of something and then I go...

in, you know, rep load or input in Vercel or do it now to clog code as well. And then I hand it to them and say, here's what I want to go do. And so a lot of the stuff we see on the site is Stefan's VibeCoded project from the weekend turned into something. So that one in particular, we vectorized all of our sessions, we got all of our speaker data, we did a graph of their backgrounds, we put that into a vector database, and then did deep research agent for each person so we understood who each attendee was.

Jason Hiner (20:06.061)
Yeah.

Stefan (20:30.993)
literally ran a bunch of different types of searches against those vectorized data to pull back and then reasoned through it using Claude to figure out why these things were right. It's not really sophisticated, but because we spend so much time with speakers and the content and the sessions and the titles and because we have all that data, it helps us do it in a way that throwing an agenda in the line of saying, what should I go to, wouldn't be the same thing.

Jason Hiner (20:58.776)
Yeah. Yeah. So that that's a step up from the experience, right? For, from the past, for sure that you'd have with a conference. So this enables you to help everybody have a much sort of better, much more customized, much more tailored experience at the conference than probably they're used to at any other event. So that, that must be part of the success reason why people are buzzing about it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Very good.

Stefan (21:04.905)
So get out.

Stefan (21:18.067)
Yeah. Yeah.

Hopefully.

Jason Hiner (21:25.87)
You mentioned Bing as well, Stefan. So I wanted to go back to your Microsoft days. So just so the audience knows Stefan's not being paid by Bing. This episode is not sponsored by Bing or Microsoft. But Stefan, we should, we can work on that. But you and I met, ironically, I don't know if you remember this, at a conference, at an event, Microsoft event. Like it is probably almost 20 years ago now. Like you were at Microsoft. I was at Tech Republic at the time. We were...

Stefan (21:27.935)
Yeah.

Gosh.

No, no, no it's not. We should get them on board though, yeah.

Stefan (21:49.61)
Yeah.

Jason Hiner (21:54.732)
I think maybe we were a media sponsor possibly even at the event. I remember when we met at that event and you had a team that was also there working on several things. And I just remembered like, wow, because I mean, I'll be honest at the time, Microsoft has a lot of really smart people, but it's kind of a lot of like, there's a lot of people plowed their row and if you wanted to talk about

Stefan (21:57.481)
Okay.

Stefan (22:17.209)
yeah.

Stefan (22:21.823)
Yeah. Yes.

Jason Hiner (22:23.692)
the thing they would talk about that thing and they would talk about only that thing like all day, right? And I remember I talked to you and your team, you and your team had this like much bigger perspective of, and we'd talk about anything. We'd talk about stuff in the industry. We'd talk about other stuff at Microsoft would tell me, you should, you should actually be covering, you're interested in this, but really the thing you should be covering is that, you know, that look over here and not there, you know? And so I remembered you, you having this like much bigger.

Stefan (22:26.965)
Yeah. Yeah.

Stefan (22:44.094)
geez.

Jason Hiner (22:51.79)
vision even back then and then since then you've done a lot of different things. So where I'm going with this question is like tell us about your journey from Microsoft to human X because you've done I've just you know watched in wonder. mean the funny thing is LinkedIn started it was right about when LinkedIn was starting when you and I met. So we connected you're probably one of my earliest connections on LinkedIn.

Stefan (23:02.677)
Yeah.

Stefan (23:07.551)
bunch of stuff.

Stefan (23:11.453)
Yeah... Yeah... Yeah? I think I probably am. That's probably true. Jeez.

Jason Hiner (23:16.654)
And so I've seen the whole journey since then, but I'd love for you to talk a little bit about it because you've done so many different things.

Stefan (23:24.687)
Yeah, yeah, it's funny. I'm gonna talk to now that I'm older. I talked to earlier in career people at different events and whatnot. They say, what was give us your career advice? I'm like, I'm the wrong guy to ask. I, my, my.

Jason Hiner (23:34.615)
Yeah

Stefan (23:38.101)
Yeah, for better or worse, I am a highly curious person and get bored easily with the same thing. So yeah, Microsoft has there for almost 20 years and I started off as a little, I guess it was a dev back way back in the day with Microsoft eShop, which was what company we bought to do malls back in like 96, I wanna say, to build online malls. then we were gonna do 600 stores in the first year, we ended up with six and most of them didn't work. you know, it was just amazing.

The thing with Microsoft, I will defend it till I die. There's problems, don't get me wrong, but the scale of their ambition, is what I think where I got a lot of it, was just unreal. Especially back in the 90s, and I'm sure before I got there, back in the 80s, but back in the 90s, like...

Jason Hiner (24:18.712)
Mm-hmm. Okay.

Stefan (24:29.097)
Nothing was out of scope. I we had stuffed animals that talked. We had actimates, we had those. had Microsoft cordless phone that had a built-in digital recorder before digital was a thing. We had Ultimate TV, which is the TiVo competitor. We had Encarta, and we had Office, and we had Windows, and we had Xbox, and had Media Center PC, and we had the eBooks, and we had the Courier. mean, just...

Jason Hiner (24:40.335)
yeah, true.

Stefan (24:48.661)
It was such a, the number of people there who, I always say you could literally close your eyes and throw a ball and whoever caught it, you'd like, oh, that person's brilliant. You know? And so I think that was was fun with me at Microsoft. The downside for me was that because there was such a scale and scope of ambition is that I would be like, well, I'm gonna do work on that now. So a lot of my friends, like, know, like John Tenter, who now is the president of all BizDev, he's been doing BizDev for a long time and he's really good at it.

Jason Hiner (24:58.67)
Mmm.

Jason Hiner (25:10.382)
Stefan (25:18.835)
or Yusuf, my old boss, is now the CMO of Consumer. Same thing, been there for almost 30 years, more than 30 years, but he's always been in marketing, most of them in marketing. And I just didn't, I would bounce around from PM to dev to biz dev to general management, back to PR, just random places I would go. that's how I just learned a lot of stuff because I just never stayed one more place very long. And then I left Microsoft and went to do some work in private equity to help companies.

Jason Hiner (25:28.046)
Mm.

Stefan (25:49.627)
get better in PE, which I wouldn't recommend it. But it was good to be able to start companies with someone else's money. So we started a bunch of companies in different spaces and then left PE and decided to have a venture fund that I run with my two partners called Silver Circle and then we did Human X because I wanted something else to go do. all over the place.

Jason Hiner (26:13.262)
How did you choose events? You talked a little bit early. Yeah, because my sense is you'd been working on like as an investor, as thinking about capital, all of that for a while. What made you, because you're now back in as an operator essentially. Yeah. Is that fair to say? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So what made you want to come back and be an operator again?

Stefan (26:20.277)
Product nerd.

Stefan (26:28.303)
Mm-hmm. yeah, very much. Yeah.

Stefan (26:37.286)
I don't do well just allocating capital.

Like it's not my thing. I thought it'd be fun, but it is fun. I enjoy helping entrepreneurs. I enjoy helping companies, you know, see your own corners. I don't think I know everything, but certainly I've seen enough patterns to help other earlier in career people or earlier founders, you know, think through how to do things. So I enjoy that, but like as a full-time gig, it's not my thing. You know, I just don't enjoy it enough. So I've realized that I need to be building. It doesn't have to be big stuff. It can be small stuff, but I have to be building. So to me, operating is,

Jason Hiner (26:41.902)
Okay. Okay.

Stefan (27:11.255)
I do wonder some days why I do it. My wife is like, why do you keep starting companies? I'm like, I don't know. It's a sickness I think we end up having. But yeah, you did it too. You left legacy and a big code to start your own thing. And part of it is just...

Part of it's just like, you do it? Part of it is putting a mark on something. It's a big risk and people always underestimate kind of how much of yourself goes into these things and how much of a personal success or failure it feels like. mean, to me it does, you know. I'm the Valley. I know it's much more like you fail. It's a sign of honor. I'm like, yeah, sort of. And you also fail. So yeah, I don't know why keep doing this, but I do. It's something that I need to do. It's my drive.

Jason Hiner (27:42.776)
Yeah, for sure.

Stefan (27:58.311)
for sure.

Jason Hiner (28:00.182)
What a ride to at the moment with the way that the AI space is exploding, like the trajectory that's ahead of us. Obviously, one of the reasons I came to do this was at ZDNet, we'd been working on AI for the last two or three years. We'd been really focused on it more and more as of what we were covering was AI based. But I still became very aware of the fact that I'm not keeping up. And so I wanted to do something where I was

Stefan (28:27.541)
yeah.

Jason Hiner (28:28.664)
thinking about it, talking about it, reading about it, learning about it, writing about it every day because it's just like this massive torrent right now. And I'm sure it's kind of similar for you all being in an AI-focused conference. You're having to keep up with all of the change. I've just never, you and I have been in this for decades now and there have been lots of periods of enormous change and quickly and that. I've never seen anything like what we're in right now.

Stefan (28:42.972)
Yeah.

Stefan (28:50.099)
Yep.

Stefan (28:53.481)
Totally.

Nothing. Nothing. Not even close. Not even close. I mean, you think about all the kind of...

Jason Hiner (28:57.806)
Same for you. Yeah. Yeah.

Stefan (29:04.373)
the kind of epics of changes, right? And you think of early days for, I always go back to Halt and Catch Fire, one of my favorite shows ever put on television. If you haven't watched it, you have to go watch all four seasons. It is spectacular. Any nerd has to watch this show. It's must watch. But even from the PC revolution to the dial-up revolution to the internet revolution to the search revolutions, that's with A Chronicle, and they didn't get to cloud because it happened after that. But all those things, they all took, we know the numbers,

Jason Hiner (29:13.804)
Yeah.

Jason Hiner (29:29.112)
Yeah.

Stefan (29:34.279)
Like they all took years to get to maturity or to get to adoption. And we know OpenAI stuff, 100 billion, fastest product ever, 100 billion people. And then even that's just the consumer side. But yeah, I agree with you. It is exhausting. It's exhausting. And that's part of the reason why we did HumanX and that's part of the reason why we're so anal about what we program there is because it is easy to chase the flashy thing. We get asked all the time, hey, can you do an XYZ, can you do an open claw meetup now? And I'm like, that just happened a month ago.

and probably in a month it's gonna be something else and so I don't think that's really maybe I'm not throwing shade at it I'm just saying like you don't really know where it's going so yeah I agree it's I've never seen the life of my life it's it is I wish I were 20 years younger honestly

Jason Hiner (30:07.384)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Hiner (30:20.558)
What a ride in front of us. And then also, it's gonna have huge implications even in the past few weeks, seeing what we've seen with the Department of War, the Pentagon, and now an anthropic. Like all of a sudden we're realizing like, whoa, this has far bigger implications than just startups and companies and the market. And this has...

enormous society shaping implications that we need to really consider. And it's changed for me. It's like, okay, I need to think about these things even in a larger context than I was before. Same for you.

Stefan (31:00.649)
Well, think we exactly we started this start this nonprofit, the collective. I'm sorry, coalition collective we work with this partner coalition because we last year we had Vice President Harris came and we also had.

Jay Obernolte from California who worked with Ted Lieu on the bipartisan commission for AI and it was amazing and Jay's great because he's the only masters of comp sci in all 535 people of Congress and he's an entrepreneur himself and so he actually understands technology and business and it's pretty rare combination sometimes in the Senate or in the House, any of those Congress. So he kind of said the same things like DC is nowhere prepared for this like they're not and you know part of it

Jason Hiner (31:20.877)
Mmm.

Jason Hiner (31:35.127)
Yeah.

Stefan (31:46.647)
is I don't think they want to admit the displacement that will inevitably happen. I don't know to what scale. I'm not one of those do-mers who's like, everyone's gonna be out of a job, we're gonna have have UBI. But there's unquestionably.

Unquestionably, will be implications to labor market. It might not be tens of millions, but it's going to be in the millions. Even if you look at autonomous trucking, you look at Wabi, one of our speakers from last year, Raquel. She has coast to coast trucks now that can go autonomously. That's three million people who do trucking today that may be less employed in two years. So think there is this kind of reality we have to face at the same time. And this is where I get arguments all the time. And I have no idea who's right. But one of my buddies is the former,

distinguished professor of economics at Harvard. And he and I always have these conversations because he's like, you're overreacting. It's just like lamp lighters went away and became something else. People who do administrative work will go away and do something else. And I'm like, yeah, you're probably right. We can't imagine the jobs yet that will exist. And the difference is the lamp lighter, the electrification still took a decade plus to happen, right? And this is taking weeks in some cases. I it's just, that's the, I don't doubt that we will then.

Jason Hiner (32:53.334)
That's right. Yeah.

Stefan (33:00.887)
find an equilibrium of labor and demand, but I do think that there will be a big kind of step function change that we're not prepared for. And I think that's gonna be interesting. Interesting is probably the wrong word, but it's gonna be challenging and scary and painful and exciting, you know, but all those things can be turned at the same time.

Jason Hiner (33:19.736)
Yeah.

Jason Hiner (33:26.56)
labor shock, like there's probably multiple waves of labor shock, you know, coming. Yeah, yeah.

Stefan (33:30.345)
There, no question.

I mean, even if I'm sure you look at this stuff, and this is not news, but you look at even the announcements of companies who are doing layoffs or just not hiring, very few of them are saying it's a couple of hours. Who was it yesterday that basically said, was a startup? Atlassian, thank you, yes, Atlassian. And he's, think, Clarna did it a couple years ago, probably a little early, and Atlassian basically said, yeah, this is a thing. And even my own team, I was talking to a bunch of them yesterday, and I was just saying, hey, look folks, I'm not saying you have to replace yourself, but,

Jason Hiner (33:45.184)
Atlassian. Yeah.

Stefan (34:02.391)
The same way we used to be really aggressive to go find those 10x engineers. Remember how we always were looking for 10x engineers? That was like the thing you wanted to go hire one 10x engineer. Could that make your team better? I'm like, the reality is I expect each of you to be 10x whatever your function is. 10x operations, 10x marketing, 10x logistics, 10x speakers. it's your, once this event's over, we have another one September, but once this one's over, like you need to take two weeks post the event when you have a little downtime and you need to go, I'm putting up the framework, I'm setting out all the infrastructure to do it. The MCP server will,

Jason Hiner (34:08.105)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Hiner (34:11.928)
Yeah.

Stefan (34:32.471)
to all of our data sources. So I'm giving them all the tools and I'm giving them no code stuff to go do. I said, each one of you in two weeks after the event have to come back to me with how you're going to take your job that do today and make that 10 % of your job. And then what you can do with these new tools to do what you do 10X better. So like, it's great that we have unbelievable speaker management and media management. It's awesome that that team is incredible what they do. And actually they're already pretty far ahead in automation.

Jason Hiner (34:36.814)
Yeah.

Stefan (35:02.231)
do you even make it more seamless? How do we not have to have, you know, poor Louise and Brian spending weeks literally playing Jenga with all the speakers and their topics and potential topics they can speak on either as a panel? mean, the amount of, the multivariate equation to do this in their heads is mind boggling. Is there a way we can do that faster with AI that's better than that? So that's the challenge for every CEO, manager, whatever you want to say. It's getting your team to recognize it's not not replacing you.

hire more people. I don't see us hiring any, I mean, I don't see us hiring more people. I think we are probably well-staffed. I don't know what I'd do with nothing, but it's about how does everyone get to be 10x more, not more productive, but just more effective, you know? And maybe work a little less even, because they don't have to do the shitty work that takes so long, you know? So, it's worth it.

Jason Hiner (35:50.818)
Yeah.

Jason Hiner (35:56.002)
Yeah, that's so smart, Stefan. Also giving them agency in it. Like, here are the tools and here's the time to go work on it, learn it, try it, do it, build it, and then come back with what you come up with. And obviously I'm sure you hired really good people. So you're like, look, I hired good people and I'm gonna give them the skills and the tools to go and the time to go work on this and see what they figure out. And it'll be smarter than anything we could have sort of given to them or sent down to them. Yeah.

Stefan (36:00.575)
Yeah.

Stefan (36:19.771)
100%. And it will be, this is interesting, think. Yes, I have a phenomenal team. They're absolutely incredible. do. And most of them aren't technical. A few are, but most of them aren't.

I think that's the biggest thing. A lot of people who have not ever worked in technology or were a product person, developer, whatever, PM, they thought this was not for them, to a certain extent. And so it is a mind shift where you go to someone who's not technical at all and say, hey, you actually now have the power to do something which would have taken.

four sprints, six sprints, whatever it was, a team of three, a great product manager, a DevOps person, a release person. You now have the power to go do something in a couple of days. And that's just a big shift in mindset for a lot of people. And I'm not sure everyone will make it. not just generally. think some people are just like, I don't want to do this. There's a lot of work that happens in companies that I'm assuming those people don't have the

to go be a builder. That's okay, but their job is gonna be at risk.

Jason Hiner (37:32.494)
Yeah, yeah. It really is amazing even the speed at which the tools are getting better to let anybody be able to do these things. And every once in a while there's just like a new unlock. You know, it's funny, I was looking at Loveable and it's like, how did Loveable become a billion dollar company in less than a year? You know, unicorn essentially in less than a year with a handful of people. And I was like, and then I realized they had just unlocked one thing in my mind, which was.

Stefan (37:57.14)
Yeah.

Jason Hiner (37:58.926)
deployment so you could vibe code something and then you'd get it and then you had to like find a server and send it up to it and deploy it and lovable is like, you know what, we're just going to let you vibe code it and then you can deploy it to our server and you can 20 minutes later, you can send a link to somebody and I can say, Stefan, here's this app I just made. Why don't you try it? And we can both, you know, hammer on it and see they unlocked one idea, one thing, one problem, one sort of pain point and like billion dollars in less than 12 months.

Stefan (38:00.329)
Yeah. Yeah.

Stefan (38:05.149)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Stefan (38:09.961)
Hit deploy.

Stefan (38:18.749)
I know. I know.

Stefan (38:26.097)
I know. I Reb Blutt's a sad man. Reb Blutt, Reb Blutt, who I love, I love Reb Blutt too, they're all great. And Amjad is a buddy of Reb Blutt. I, you he just raised at three billion four months ago, I think. And then just raised yesterday, two years ago, at nine billion. And I think, I don't think it's I don't think it's a, no, I shouldn't say. His revenue numbers are astounding. I'm not sure it's public yet, but his revenue numbers are, your head would explode if you could see what he was projecting to do. mean, honestly, it's unreal.

Jason Hiner (38:47.798)
Yes. They're saying a million RRR by the end of the year, sorry, a billion ARR by the end of the year. Okay.

Stefan (38:53.967)
Okay, that was public then. Okay, that was public. It wasn't sure if public or not. Yeah, that's right. The billion there are, yeah, exactly. And you talk to him, and look, have base 44, you have lots of different tools that are vibe coding. But yeah, it's that ability to not just ideate, because you could ideate, and it's a tool we all use to do mockups of UIs.

Gosh, yeah, Figma, there's something else we use all the time. Oh my gosh, it's not funny, I've already forgotten the thing. Figma's still great too, but whatever it was we would use. It's so funny. Not Mira, any other matter, but the we all used two years ago to do UI mockups and do click throughs of UIs, that's as advanced as people will get. And now you just, it's gone from that to fully functioning, now, maybe not deployable, but fully functioning, or shouldn't be deployed, but fully functioning apps. And even with the last year,

Jason Hiner (39:19.128)
Figma or something like that.

Jason Hiner (39:31.81)
Yeah. Yeah.

Stefan (39:48.903)
I I did a bunch of stuff in REPL last year. They just released Agent 4 a couple of days ago, which does now parallel, because my thing at Omjab is like, I love you and you're slow. Like all these things are slow. I can think faster than you can code, which of course is ridiculous, just coding thousands and thousands of lines. But he's like, you're going to love Agent 4, because now I can take your request and part it off to multiple agents, basically do a pull and reassemble it real time. I'm like, OK, OK, you got that. I've been using it last couple of days. It's unbelievable.

Jason Hiner (39:52.502)
Yes, yes.

Jason Hiner (40:04.6)
Yeah, yeah.

Stefan (40:18.807)
So yeah, I know, it's a fun world. I could go on forever. I could go on for days about this kind of stuff.

Jason Hiner (40:19.278)
Amazing, amazing. What a world.

What a world. you mentioned too something about you're launching your second event this year. So you really are a glutton for punishment. You lost your first event last year, you're doubling it this year, and you're launching your second event in Europe in the fall. And I would love to hear about that event, why you decided to do it, why you decided to do it in Europe as well because...

Stefan (40:34.453)
you

We are in Europe in the fall.

Sure.

Jason Hiner (40:48.726)
And maybe your perspective on European AI scene, because there's a lot of interesting signals there. talk about Loveable. Loveable is a European company, obviously. But there are sort of some mixed signals about incredible talent, but also sort of the environment being challenging. So all of that, I'm sure, have gone into your thinking of launching this one. So talk to us about the event you're launching this fall.

Stefan (40:56.085)
Totally.

Stefan (41:03.541)
Hmm?

Stefan (41:10.996)
Yeah.

Yeah, sure. So yeah, you're right. Europe's, this is a Steve Martin line, everything is different. But it is, actually his line was about eggs in France. They call them oofs, they have a different word for everything. Classic Steve Martin line from the 70s. But Europe has things that we in the US need to learn from and vice versa. They're both directions. So of course we have the move fast and break things in the US, clean up the mess later, which probably isn't the best recipe.

Jason Hiner (41:18.77)
Hahaha

Stefan (41:42.041)
for AI. And then Europe definitely has more planful, more cautious, more regulated in some cases, much higher privacy.

Jason Hiner (41:43.8)
Hmm.

Stefan (41:53.777)
protections. So it's one of those things where we wanted to take human X to Europe, but not make it here's America in Europe, that's just insulting. Here are things that European companies and regulators and countries can take from the US, like responsible innovation, like the guys over at General Catalyst have this incredible responsible AI innovation lab that does a lot of this work. So how do you bring that over? You can move fast and be responsible.

at the same time respect the fact that Europe isn't a monolith. mean the US is kind of a monolith. States have rights obviously as well as federalism, but Europe you really do have very distinct sections of the continent and very distinct profiles and personalities. So respecting the fact that you've got this multi-headed hydra to some extent over in Europe, the EU has some power but obviously not as much as say the federal government does in the US.

Jason Hiner (42:34.254)
True.

Stefan (42:53.429)
So it was like bring those things together. How do we bring the best of what the US can offer, which is capital and speed and a ton of talent who want to come to the US? And how do we bring what's really good about Europe, which is plan, full caution, and I'm making it too, you know, too, it's like, it's like, sarcastic. there is like, there's benefit to both. And also what's interesting with Europe is that a lot of the, a lot of the Chinese companies too, they aren't coming to the US right now because there's just a lot of reasons, but they will, they will come to Europe.

Jason Hiner (43:21.806)
Yeah.

Stefan (43:23.383)
So we're already, we have a bunch of companies that will be in Amsterdam from China, you know, again, if you're not paying attention in China, you are missing out, missing on a huge, huge amount of innovation. The fact that we think that American models are the ones that matter and then people do is just ridiculous. mean, it's, we're in some cases so far behind the Chinese, especially in physical AI. So yeah, that was the reason for it. Yeah.

Jason Hiner (43:48.216)
Yeah. Yes. So Amsterdam, end of September, September, I think 22nd to 24th. I guess we didn't say this earlier, but the, the, the U S event is the first week of April. So it is April six to ninth. Yeah. Coming up on us as we recording this sort of in, in mid March, we're about four weeks away. I'm sure it has all your team in, you know, in the hair on fire moment.

Stefan (43:54.461)
Mm-hmm.

Stefan (44:07.189)
Six through ninth, yes. I'm gonna pass. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. Luckily, it's pretty smooth right now, I'm not gonna lie. I know that a lot of the team is like, why are we so relaxed? I'm like, okay, now I'm nervous if you're relaxed, but yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly.

Jason Hiner (44:17.934)
Good.

Jason Hiner (44:25.902)
That's your job as CEO. When everybody's relaxed, your job is to be nervous. When everybody's nervous, your job is to be relaxed. No, very good. So exciting stuff. You know, really enjoy the opportunity to be there. This is my first one. I'm excited to be there as a journalist and also, you know, to be thank you for you and the team for having me as a speaker as well, as a moderator.

Stefan (44:48.474)
Yeah, yeah, of course. Yep. Yeah.

Jason Hiner (44:53.932)
Before we wrap though, Stefan, there's two questions I love to ask people. I'd love to get your thoughts on. The first one is about your leverage as a leader. know, more and more, even in the age of AI, probably it's even more acute because like you said earlier, there's now more things that you have the ability to do, you know, based on an idea that you could before. So how you spend your time for sort of maximum leverage is really big.

Stefan (44:56.501)
you.

Stefan (45:05.173)
Hmph.

Jason Hiner (45:22.05)
What is your best tip? I'm sure you mentor other leaders. I'm sure you have lots of conversations and lots of people are asking you, especially as someone who's experimenting with AI yourself and prototyping apps on the weekend that your team is now deploying. What's your best tip for leaders to get maximum leverage?

Stefan (45:25.685)
Yeah.

Stefan (45:34.526)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I know.

Stefan (45:41.781)
Yeah, I don't think I'm actually that good at this. I just work a lot. So that's not a very good tip. Like the 996, people are like, that's crazy. I'm what's, I'm like 666. I'm more of a morning guy than an evening guy, but which probably I shouldn't say there actually. But.

I, as I kind of talked about earlier, I think that the biggest way I can provide leverage is to provide scaffolding. So it's like, it's one thing to tell a team, Hey, you need to be more efficient with AI or you need to be more efficient in your job. And I expect you to use AI to do that. Like that's, that's a pretty, I think, bad direction, especially for teams that aren't necessarily, or people who are product or technically focused. That's, that's a really, really, that's a long putt to go ahead. Right. And so when I can go build scaffolding, when I can go say,

hey, I'm setting up six MCP servers that talk to all of our data sources like I mentioned earlier.

So now you know here are the endpoints and you don't have to know what that is when you go to your ViveCode platform. Just tell it here's the endpoint, here's the key and that'll work. That's how this will work. So you give them enough and build like a build a sample app or build a sample reference architecture and say like here's you can just take this and plop it into a cloud code and say do what Stefan did but for this particular use case and it will build it in a way that's secure and because all my guidance is already there. That's how I get leverage is by it takes me a little time to kind of build that up front

package and get to a point where people who are normies can understand it and then hand it off. And then you give, as I mentioned earlier, you give people that agency to not have me, eight months ago I gave a marketing team, I spent again the weekend using a bunch of deep research tools saying, okay, here's how I want to think about marketing efficiency. I built this whole crazy ass dashboard and all this crap and automated mail, automated, you know, A-B testing of copy and all this stuff. And they're like, cool, but it's not how we work. I'm like, really? Well, that's how you should work, right?

Stefan (47:33.927)
I don't know marketing well enough to know how they actually do this. So it was a good example for me to be like, well, that was dumb. What I should have done was, this is before a lot of the tools were capable of doing it, but I should have said, here's scaffolding to help build an AI platform. You, Brandon, who runs digital on our team, digital marketing on our team, you go figure out what it is that would make you 10x more effective, because only you know. And here's the scaffolding to do it, and that's how I can get leverage out of the team. So that's what I would say.

Jason Hiner (47:38.072)
Sure.

Jason Hiner (48:03.662)
Amazing. All right, how about what's the tool, last question, what's the tool that you're using, AI tool that's blowing your mind right now that is really something that you enjoy telling people about when people are asking you like, what are you using?

Stefan (48:11.187)
Yeah.

Stefan (48:18.069)
I...

There's so many of them. But right now, the one I'm kind of, and again, this probably changes by the week, but Howie Liu over at Airtable, the product I'm sure we all have used, he a couple weeks ago sent out, I don't know, something, was a tweet or something, I don't know, that he built this thing called Hyper Agent. And he said, here's what it does, like, Howie, can I get an access? Can I get this thing? So he called me, we sat there for an hour, and he showed me what he built. And I was like, holy shit, this thing is, it's a combination of,

and replit and open claw and all things put together. It's self-learning. It will figure out how to use tools autonomously. literally gave it, my buddy runs a pool maintenance company and he was trying to figure out how to hook up things in a dashboard and one of the systems he uses is like a green screen thing from the 90s, whatever. not quite that bad, but that ilk. And I was a hyper agent saying, here's this product. I didn't know what the hell it is. I've never heard of it in my entire life. It's some pool product.

Can you go figure out how how you could programmatically access this thing access this thing? In the context of a longer conversation So it built the dashboard it figured out how to talk to this thing and what it had to do to get data in and out of it so the ability and again, know open-claw can do this to a certain extent and now perplexity computer can too, but the ability for it to take your Your diarrhea of what I want to do Part it out to the the tasks which again, that's plan mode. We've seen that a bunch but then say okay what tools?

do I need to either access or go learn to integrate? And then as it's learning these things up in the top, it'll tell you the skills that it is developing. It's like, oh, I realize when I call this API in HubSpot, I can only get X number of rows back. So I need to issue multiple parallel queries at the same time. Should I remember this? You're like, yep, remember that. And then it builds those skills, not called skills, it's called something else, insight or something, into its system.

Jason Hiner (50:11.598)
you

Stefan (50:19.735)
One of those weird things where, you know, even yesterday I was trying to pull data out of HubSpot and for some reason, I don't know why, you can't do a report with these two different fields, which is insane to me, but there you go. So I just literally gave a private app key hyperagent and said, here's a CSV of people I care about, I need you to pull these fields, you figure out how to do it, and then it came back four months later and it was output for me. You so it's just, it's crazy. I'm sure there are other ones that are kind of doing something. That's the one to me that's totally crazy.

Sorry, I'm not sure it's publicly available yet, when it comes out, everyone should at least give it a shot. Maybe it is. I don't know yet. Hopefully. Hopefully, exactly, exactly, There you go.

Jason Hiner (50:47.651)
Very cool.

Jason Hiner (50:54.786)
the time this publishes it'll probably be available as fast as everything's moving. Yeah, yeah. Very good, very good. Well, Stefan, thank you for your time. Great stuff. I will see you at Human X and me and 6,000 other people. We'll see you soon. All right. Thank you, sir.

Stefan (51:04.957)
Yeah. See you in three weeks. Alright. Thanks, buddy.