· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Can you talk about the idea? Why would it be called threshold resistance? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, so the concept, by the way, it's a fun reference. We have it in our office. But basically, the whole concept of threshold resistance is you want the shopper to be more likely to go into the store. So he was sort of an early pioneer of retail. He just thought he could make things better, and actually that was a big inspiration to me, try to make things better in life. And so one of the ideas was the threshold is the entrance to the store. And the more you had to step up steps or go down some dark hallway in order to get... And that's how stores used to be designed. There used to be these big windows with merchandising in them, and you'd have to go through the windows in some dark alley in order to get to the door in the back. Nobody fucking wanted to go in them. So his idea was bring the door to the front, have no threshold, have it be the same, like that over there. You can't see, but that, you want to walk through that. [00:00:00] S0: Because even a step, he broke it down almost like a math equation. [00:00:00] S1: Yes. [00:00:00] S0: Even like half a step up reduced it by like 20, people coming by like 20%.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Even like half a step up reduced it by like 20, people coming by like 20%. [00:00:00] S1: Exactly. He did a lot of really creative things that I can tell you more about it. He was very innovative, and he always brought this kind of continuous improvement mindset, similar to like the Danaher continuous improvement concept. And honestly, it's all a big inspiration for me. You want to make it so easy and so magical for the shopper to go into the store that they'll go in and spend more money, ultimately, which is good for the store and all that. And actually, some of those principles, I think you can apply more generally, like with technology, for example. We want to make Nexus so magical and so easy to use that our team members just love it and they can just use it. You want to minimize threshold resistance on AI adoption. [00:00:00] S0: This is exactly what you're talking about. It's like, hey, the reason we can have this horizontal AI platform is because 70, 80%, it's like every business deals with the same shit. [00:00:00] S1: Yes.
· Alexander Taubman, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Yes. [00:00:00] S0: When you were just talking about this, I just recorded this crazy episode with Travis Kalanick from Uber. It was fucking crazy set, exactly where you are, and we talked for hours. And he was breaking down in minute detail about even like every single page you would see at Uber compared to Lyft, and he's just like, "Every single little thing." He's like, "And there's a thousand things I had to optimize that if you're just copying me, you copy what you see, but you don't understand the thinking behind it." And this is exactly what you're talking about. It's like this guy's just obsessed with shopping malls or shopping centers and realizing that, "Hey, I'm going to knock six inches off here and my bottom line, my profit increases by 25%," or whatever. [00:00:00] S1: By the way, I think it's very much the same with technology and websites and Amazon that came later and things like that, which was just these little tweaks can really impact behavior. And just by making things better- [00:00:00] S0: It's why both my podcasts, like Founders has no intro. I just get right fucking to it. And this one has like a six-second one. Just like, no one wants to sit through that shit. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: I'm listening to your podcast so I can hear some 30-second melody that you made? Like, no. This is not a concert, dude. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Get right to the point.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Get right to the point. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, exactly. So I grew up in this family of entrepreneurs, and my father and uncle ran that business for 75 years. And so one of the inspirations, we called the business Longlake because that business was built and lived on Longlake Road for the last 40 or 50 years in Michigan, where I grew up. And it was actually a funny story about- [00:00:00] S0: I know. I dismissively called you an East Coast finance guy, which you know I love you and we're friends. I was like, "Shit, I forgot he's from Michigan."
· Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. I basically just really grew up kind of with a tremendous respect for the American entrepreneur. And growing up in Michigan, I mentioned earlier, but all these incredible entrepreneurs in businesses you've never heard of. The people in Michigan in the community, in the business community you looked up to, there's no finance scene there. There was no tech scene there. It was people that built these what people on the East Coast might call unsexy businesses, but they're amazing businesses that you've built over 50 years or 75 years in the case of my family. And these people that built them are extraordinary people, as you know. They're classic American founders and bootstrapped their way in to build what could be a huge business over time that provides an unparalleled service in that market. Like, we partnered with an architecture business in Minnesota that's built 50% of the K through 12 schools in Minnesota the last 70 years. I mean, they are like the McDonald's of architecture for schools. And this is why it's such a great country. You can go to any region in the country, in any service line, and there's someone that's spent 100 years obsessing over that product and service. And so growing up seeing this and around at the dinner table, meeting some of these people, and it was very inspiring to me. And so I think part of the reason that I was uniquely interested in this problem and mission was, how do we bring the best of the intelligence revolution and the best engineers in the world to help these sort of iconic American entrepreneurs across industries deploy AI into their business to make their team members, employees happier, make their customers happier, improve their bottom line, and grow faster? And by the way, if you do this in enough industries with enough businesses, you're eventually going to add up to really contributing to the economy in a big way. So I think there's a long-term, over decades opportunity to make a meaningful contribution. I don't want to overstate our role in the intelligence revolution, but I think actually deploying the technology in the real world, driving real ROI, which by the way, and I was sort of starting to get this earlier, but by driving real ROI, we're actually generating cash back into the system to scale the models. And so you actually need this flywheel. You need distribution.
· Alexander Taubman, David Senra
And so part of the mission of Longlake was- [00:00:00] S0: Oh, your distribution for the labs. That's hilarious. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. We generate ROI in the real economy on the intelligence to reinvest into scaling the models. [00:00:00] S0: That's funny. [00:00:00] S1: And someone's got to do this. And by the way, you're seeing the labs start to dabble in deploy codes and things like this. But I think somebody, and many people, it's not going to be one company. You talked about other people. People often ask me about competition in the space, people trying to do what Long Lake's doing. And I think it's great because I think to actually scale the models, we actually need to deploy this technology at scale, which is going to be... This is a big economy. And by the way, it's a global economy too. [00:00:00] S0: And it's going to happen slowly. [00:00:00] S1: Very slowly, yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Like the technology changes way faster than human nature does and human behavior does. The bottleneck is changing actually what people do.