00:02

Lara Schmoisman
This is Coffee Number Five. I’m your host, Lara Schmoisman. Hi you guys, welcome back to Coffee Number Five. You know how important community is for me. You know how I believe in making meaningful connections, but also I believe in learning from people and thank God. And also, you know, my story is that I’ve been in a lot of communities. I tried them all. I tried woman, non women communities, retail, not retail. And you just need to find the community that fits for you and that you can feel like you are with peers and that they’re willing to share, sharing with someone. And of course you need to be in a place that you can understand. Also I think that if I would be in the communities that I am today, 10 years ago, I would have been completely lost.

So you need to be in the right place at the right time. In this case, I’m talking about the board. I’m part of this great community that there are a lot of executives, a lot of people that they have a lot of experience. And I’m just giving this shout out because I really love the people that I’m meeting. They are, because I know also they’re experts. I know that everyone was handpicked and I’m honored to call a lot of them my friends now. And so today I want to bring another friend, Tim Shea. Thank you so much for being here today, Laura.

01:37
Tim Shea
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

01:38
Lara Schmoisman
And so were talking with Tim and we do. It’s so interesting to have a community. And I really wish this for every entrepreneur out there that you can find your community of peers, that they’re generous of their learnings and experiences and we can help each other. And I found out through these conversations that Tim was really ahead of the game with all the AI world and he was able to give me a lot of tips and I learned a lot from him, actually. And I thought I was ahead of the game, but he’s really it. So Tim, how did you, when did you start it? When was it first time that you found AI? And before that?

02:26
Lara Schmoisman
Introduce yourself because I’m talk and I know you, but I want you to tell my listeners, how did you get to this place to be talking about AI?

02:37
Tim Shea
No, I love it. I appreciate you having me on. So my background is I’m a software engineer. I’ve been writing code for 25 years, building software, building teams and building companies. I’m an entrepreneur, right? So I’ve been in big companies, big ad agencies, small startups. But really I’ve been like doing My own thing. I always choke. I have the scarlet letter, you know, I have the letter E for entrepreneur tattooed on my forehead. They don’t allow me into the big companies anymore. They think I’m going to steal like the printer paper or something or they just know I’m an entrepreneur. My sort of calling is to be building companies. Yeah. I was working in what I thought was machine learning and AI for years and I did not see this new form of generative AI coming.

03:30
Tim Shea
Frankly a lot of the early demos that I saw online I thought were just gimmicks and I was like there’s no way this stuff can do this. It’s really deterministic. It’s coming after blue collar wrote assembly line jobs. I cannot make music videos. It can’t draw pretty pictures, it can’t write emails for you and it certainly can’t write code. This is, this is the domain of human experts. It certainly cannot write code. Boy was I wrong. And so I, I had the existential panic that I suspect was industry wide. Everyone stared into the void at the same moment and was like holy crap. And I just, you know, I reconnected with a former colleague of mine and we just decided to flip the script on it. We saw it as a way that was going to completely rewire workflows.

04:20
Tim Shea
It was going to completely change brand building. It’s going to completely change how our kids interact with brands, interact with the world. We can’t even imagine the things that are going to happen in just two years, not even 10 or 20 years. And so we got to work building a venture studio called Supervision. Supervision is an AI focused venture studio focused on building future brands, literally co creating brands products, co creating them with AI. And all of the products have some nuance or wrinkle where there’s AI embedded in them.

05:00
Lara Schmoisman
I love that you use that word co created because AI wouldn’t be as today. I don’t want to talk to them about the Future as today 2024 December we are co creating with the AI.

05:17
Speaker 3
That’s right.

05:18
Lara Schmoisman
And it still need the human part of it. I don’t think one today should feel threatened by AI. You should be using AI as a tool in your job and that’s right. If you’re not using, that’s what is going to make you fail.

05:33
Speaker 3
That’s right. That’s right.

05:35
Tim Shea
I think that there’s a big like muscle memory in Silicon Valley of everything needs to be SaaS. The new technology comes out. You immediately have to make a SaaS product with it. And I think that’s very wrong, overdone with SaaS.

05:49
Lara Schmoisman
Sorry.

05:51
Tim Shea
Every time a vendor says, oh, there’s an AI plugin in Slack, salesforce.com now has an AI plugin. I’m like, no, I, I don’t care. Users don’t care. And I think the reason it’s not a big deal is because it requires users to be kind of skilled in AI. So if you’re going to bolt a chatbot onto a website or into salesforce.com it’s almost like you’re sort of kicking the can down the road and you’re like, well, the users will figure it out. We haven’t figured it out. What the users do it. And I think that power users, like, let’s say yourself, you have a certain domain expertise and you’re going to imbue the AI tools with your domain expertise. It’ll make you 10x more prolific, make you 10x more.

06:39
Lara Schmoisman
Let’s bring a notch down here, because AI, you can put the box there, but if you don’t know how to use it doesn’t work. You need to train AI. AI, it’s a tool that we can use. It’s the same as if you’re building a house. I always say, I can get a third a surgery kit, but it doesn’t mean that I could or I should be doing surgery.

07:07
Tim Shea
Fair. Fair enough.

07:09
Lara Schmoisman
So if the same happened with marketing or with anything else you do in your life, you need to use the tools, but you also need to know how to use the tools. Anyone even can use Instagram, but Instagram has an algorithm. If you don’t understand how the algorithm works and how to feed the algorithm won’t work for you.

07:28
Speaker 3
That’s right. That’s absolutely right.

07:30
Tim Shea
Yeah. I think that we talk a lot about Domain expertise is the new oil. Right. So, like, everyone’s talking now about how compute is so important and data is so important. Data is the new oil. I couldn’t disagree more. The big five, OpenAI, Gemini, you know, whoever else is building Olens, they’ve got the compute and data stuff figured out. They’re working on those problems. Domain expertise is the most important thing. If you’ve got 20, 30 years of experience building brands, running agencies, bringing companies to market, that’s the new thing. That’s super important. I think in many ways there might be some danger for folks just coming out of college who don’t have any domain expertise. And so a lot of that busy work that used to be offloaded to interns is now being automated.

08:22
Tim Shea
But I think if you’ve got an idea for how to build a house or how to do heart surgery or how to build a new brand, you can use the tools to allow you to do that 10 times faster.

08:35
Lara Schmoisman
Absolutely. But there is something that I don’t think AI will ever be able to replace. And maybe I’m wrong, but is your gut feeling. And that gut feeling is not something that you can get from anywhere else than from experience. Experience.

08:54
Speaker 3
That’s right. That’s right.

08:56
Tim Shea
Your gut feeling also comes from a lot of experience. You’ve had all these experiences in your life.

09:04
Lara Schmoisman
You’ve had all this time to shakers and making mistakes.

09:08
Speaker 3
That’s right. That’s right.

09:11
Tim Shea
So you see a lot of folks on LinkedIn, hey, I’m 16 years old, I’m gonna. You can create. Use AI to create an agency. I’m like, I’m not going to hire that agency because you don’t have any domain expertise. AI tools are not going to do that for you. So, you know, I think it remains to be seen 10, 20 years from now how human societies will be reshaped by these tools. But I think for right now, it’s like people that want to get ahead of these skills are going to see an incredible productivity boom. It allows me and my business partner to be incredibly prolific, and I’m super excited about it. Now my existential panic is gone.

09:47
Lara Schmoisman
Well, there are a lot of people out there panic thinking that you are going to be replaced by AI. Like, for example, I say, yeah, we can use AI to write, but if you’re not a good writer already, you’re not going to be identifying if AI is doing the right job.

10:04
Tim Shea
Fair enough.

10:04
Speaker 3
That’s fair.

10:06
Lara Schmoisman
So it doesn’t mean AI won’t replace your education and your knowledge or your experience. So how today an entrepreneur like you, or a C suite or someone who is actually growing in their space, what elements they can use from the AI and how they. That I know a lot of people that they just, they don’t know how even where to start with AI. They’re afraid of it and they’re missing out so much.

10:36
Tim Shea
Yeah. No, Laura, I think you and I share the same gene, which is the sort of like, entrepreneur gene, where when we see something new, we have an idea, we just go do it. Yeah, we just go do it. And I think the worst thing people can do with AI right now is this sitting on panels and pontificating and wringing their hands. And so, well, it can’t do this, and it can certainly do this. I think the best thing people can do is recognize the genie is so far out of the bottle at this point. Now is the time to get extremely skilled with these tools, to get way ahead of it, not just get like hot takes. You know, putting hot takes on LinkedIn is not really getting ahead of it.

11:22
Tim Shea
I think getting really skilled with these tools and figuring out, okay, it doesn’t write emails for me, I am not going to send an email to my clients with AI. So where does it fit into your, you know, your workflow? And so that, I think is the task for everyone is to figure out, like, where does it augment you and your stuff? How does it make you more prolific? I. Whether you’re just using it as a thesaurus on steroids or you’re using it as a, you know, a Google search on steroids, those are great places to start. When you, when you go on Google, I always feel like you’ve got. It’s like the old Twitter, you know, you had like 140 characters to tweet. Now you can write a whole fricking book on Twitter.

12:11
Tim Shea
But on Google, you have to be very careful about how you search. And you have to think about what content already exists, basically.

12:20
Lara Schmoisman
Keywords.

12:21
Tim Shea
Yeah. And you can’t talk to it either. You can go to an alum and say, hey, you know what? I’m thinking about this thing. I’m not really sure what I’m looking for yet. Here’s the thing. I tried this and you can just kind of run, blab on and on like you’re talking to a person and it figures it out. You can ask it, hey, we’ve gone pretty far with this exploration. Is there anything I’m missing? Is there anything I haven’t asked yet that I probably should be thinking about? I think those types of things are incredible. Use cases where you’re like, all right, I’ve got a. I did my calls today. I send my emails. Now I have some time to think what an amazing brainstorming partner it is. I think that’s probably the best place for people to start brainstorming with it.

13:08
Tim Shea
And then you can get to the, you know, I want to make a feature film with it or I want to build a, you know, a SaaS platform with it or something.

13:16
Lara Schmoisman
I. I always say that you need to get your hands dirty. I don’t think that I will be where I today or being able to. Having a team behind under me in an agency. If I wouldn’t gotten my hands dirty in each place SEO, I had to learn how to do it myself in order to tell the team how I like things done. And even I tried coding and I failed. But I understand what it’s about. And when we started with for example open source WordPress, I did a few sites myself. Either my agency site is still the evolution of my own website that I did myself. But what I’m saying is that you need to understand what you can do. You need to go and get your hands dirty and talk to AI and see how it works for you.

14:09
Speaker 3
That’s right. That’s totally right.

14:11
Lara Schmoisman
But also I think the AI world is changing other things that as a company, let’s say you have a brand, an X brand, you need to be findable by AI. For example, if I put out there and I ask AI give me all the information for and this I see it as an agency of all the competitions for natural products, for hair brands, AI is only going to find out what it’s there to find out. So if brands don’t put the right information in their website or their keywords, they’re not going to be findable.

14:51
Speaker 3
That’s right. That’s right.

14:55
Lara Schmoisman
So that’s another way that companies really need to evolve too. It’s not about only for the CEOs or the to understand how to use AI is understand how AI works to find your company too and be part of those searches.

15:13
Tim Shea
It’s crazy. I mean, because you can see the LLMs now using search engines under the hood. You can see they’ll tell you, I’m searching Bing right now, I’m searching Yahoo. It feels like those days are numbered. Where it’s going to be leveraging old school search engines and your question around like, well, if your brand has not fed into the LLMs training data, how is it going to find you if that’s the primary way people find information. That’s a great point.

15:41
Lara Schmoisman
I know. And so I think that AI is bringing a lot of companies out there. They say I don’t need SEO because I’m selling at this place and this place. Every company needs SEO because otherwise using AI they’re not going to be findable.

15:58
Speaker 3
Yep, that’s right. That’s right.

16:00
Lara Schmoisman
So important and even I will dare to say something that I don’t know it’s gonna pan out. But I really think that the searches are gonna start getting smarter and it’s gonna be more about the user intention.

16:19
Tim Shea
Yeah. I think the way that people go out and find Information. When I look at, like, how my kids interact with. My kids are 10 and 7 and look at how they interact with the world, it’s fascinating to watch. They just don’t have any, let’s call it baggage. The skills that you and I have learned over 10, 20, 30, 40 years, they never learned any of those skills. Those skills are baggage to them. They’re approaching the world with fresh eyes. I was talking with a colleague recently about his kids and their music taste. And he goes, look, man, he goes, we go on Spotify, we’re like, hey, listen, I like Drake, I like Playboi Carti. I like this person. I like their stories, I like their style. Kids are just like, yeah, I like that song. It was made by AI.

17:04
Tim Shea
Oh, I don’t know. I like the song. And you even see PlayBoi Carti is a great example. His fan base is so passionate. They’re making Playboi Carti albums for him using AI. They’re dupes, they’re fakes, they’re. They’re spoofs. But he’s about it. And so you see this sort of like, even just fandom for things like film and music and all this is the whole pantheon of things is going to change. You’re like, how does an artist make money when their fans are making their work for them? And it just turns everything that we know on its head. And we have to get to the work of reinventing how we see the world as well.

17:45
Lara Schmoisman
Well, but I think that we’re going back to the basic concepts that brands, even personal brands, they need to be rethinking on. It’s not about the brand itself, it’s about their users. And I think we always go into the same issue that many brands and even artists or now that there are brands that they are like, from celebrity brands, at some point, if you’re really not finding a problem and being a solution for your brands, it’s going to be very short term.

18:18
Tim Shea
I, I love this kind of talk track because, like, we, you know, in this existential panic, we think like, well, what are we fundamentally as humans? Like, what is it that makes us tick? Is it just logic? Is it just numbers? But story is such a huge part of that. Naturally, we just, we gravitate towards stories. Someone tells you a story, you lean it, you really remember that thing. It gives us meaning. And so when brands are going out and they’re quickly saying, all right, I built this brand, so I’m going to get On Instagram. This phone case does this. It has these dimensions. Click here to buy now, nobody cares. Maybe they’ll click and they’ll sell a few iPhone cases, but at the end of the day, nobody cares.

19:00
Tim Shea
Building a brand universe, building a real story behind what you do and a purpose for why your brand exists is so crucial and way more crucial in this era where people are going to be flooded with content. We think we’re inundated with content now.

19:17
Lara Schmoisman
Well, everyone who knows me know that my first degree actually is in screenwriting. And I. I use those skills for marketing all the time because I create a script of who is my consumer and how my brands can help that consumer.

19:35
Tim Shea
Right.

19:36
Lara Schmoisman
And that’s right. And those basic skills. I don’t think AI is going to get it. I mean, it’s.

19:42
Tim Shea
We’ll see. We’ll see. It’s a fast learner. It’s a fast learner.

19:47
Lara Schmoisman
It’s a fast learner. But it comes also from emotions. It comes with internal problems. Sometimes what we are resolving is not only an external problem. Even in beauty, you’re not necessarily resolving external problems. Only every character has an internal problem that at the end of the movie is resolved.

20:10
Tim Shea
I think there should be a strong case you made. All entrepreneurs should have to take a screenwriting class.

20:15
Lara Schmoisman
I agree with you.

20:17
Tim Shea
But not just the class. They need to put the play on in front of a crowd and bomb. Right. I think the bombing part is important so they can be like, oh, I wrote this thing, but it didn’t connect. And I got to figure out how to get it to connect.

20:31
Lara Schmoisman
Let’s start with this. It’s so important to fail. You learn so many things from failing. You’re good even to ask, not train your AI. You’re gonna fail at the. At the beginning, and that’s fine. And that’s when you learn how you’re asking the right questions or asking the right way.

20:50
Speaker 3
That’s right. That’s right.

20:52
Tim Shea
It’s a hard thing to learn, though, because failing stinks. Right? And especially, God forbid, you were like a good student, right? Back in the day. You got good grades. I got good grades. And when I got out into the real world and I started fail, man, it stinks. Like, it really does.

21:10
Lara Schmoisman
I don’t have that experience. I always wasn’t a good student.

21:14
Tim Shea
Oh, you give. That’s a gift. It’s a gift.

21:18
Lara Schmoisman
It’s. Honestly, I just. I don’t know if I didn’t care, but I just. I always was. My head was somewhere else and I felt Like, I can read and learn by myself. It was hard.

21:33
Tim Shea
Yep.

21:34
Lara Schmoisman
But I think that makes me be what I am today because I keep learning and I don’t. I’m not afraid to failing and to try new things.

21:42
Tim Shea
There’s a great podcast with. Rick Rubin has a great podcast. Not as good as yours, but he had an interview with Ari Emanuel and Ari Emanuel, great charismatic love, great storyteller. He’s like, I tell my kids, he goes, I try and fail at least 20 times a day. Because you know why? Because it takes away the sting of it all. But also, you learn every single time. So I’m out there saying dumb crap every like. And I’m just watching people’s reactions to it now. It takes a special type of person to go out there and do it. But yeah, my. My biggest failures, trying to run human resources in my company, trying to run accounting, trying to sell getting fired. The first time you get fired by a client, oof. It’s brutal. But that’s what makes you gangster.

22:25
Lara Schmoisman
Yeah. But also there’s. I was reading this book and I don’t remember. I read so many books that I don’t remember which one is which anymore. But they were telling about who is not what, it’s who.

22:42
Tim Shea
Okay.

22:43
Lara Schmoisman
And it’s very interesting to get in that mindset that is not necessarily what we do is who does it. Because everyone can do the same job. But being you can make a difference. Like you say, I will be horrible at hr. I will be terrible. But I have someone in my team who is amazing. She knows how to say the things in the right way. She knows how to ask the right questions. It’s not my mindset. So for me to have that learning opportunity, I’m failing and accepting that I’m not good at everything. It was a great opportunity and let me grow in a different direction and say, okay, I cannot do this. I need to invest in having someone doing it because then I can grow my business and what I’m good at.

23:34
Speaker 3
That’s right.

23:35
Tim Shea
That’s a good lesson.

23:36
Lara Schmoisman
Yeah. But you always need to try at least and know and realize whether you’re good or not.

23:41
Speaker 3
That’s right. That’s right.

23:44
Lara Schmoisman
So you were talking about creating new visions for brands using AI.

23:51
Speaker 3
That’s right.

23:52
Lara Schmoisman
What elements would you get from working with you, for example, and having. Creating a future brand.

24:02
Tim Shea
So we have a couple good questions. We have a couple components to this. We built a piece of technology that sits inside the fund. We call it the Supervision operating system. And so what it does is it looks at lots of business signals. It looks at like P Ls and it looks for weak P and L models, companies with really weak margins or fickle customer bases or businesses that are really seasonal. And we try and figure out can AI help. And so I think like if were going to start like an airline has really thin margins, but is AI really going to help build a brand new airline? Probably not. So we built an AI system that scours these vast business databases in search of weak P and L models where we think that generative AI can have an outsized effect.

24:54
Tim Shea
And we let the, let it spread its wings and fly and it comes back to us with lots of options. And it says, okay, we think this business could be good or this business could be good. And me and my co founder, we think about it, we come in as humans and we think about what, how we could help. And so we pick one and we give it a short leash. We give it like 30 days where we, we build the initial pieces of the business and we see if there are green shoots to it, is it going to stick? And if it does, then we give it all the resources. We let it really, we really let it really build.

25:29
Tim Shea
And so we use AI at every, and I mean every stage in the brand building process, from like the tagline to the brand universe to the social posts and the marketing playbook to the physical product. And so when we started, we’re like, let’s start with the hardest industry first. Let’s start with retail. Let’s build a retail brand where all the haters are saying AI is not going to have an effect on these analog businesses. And we said, then just watch us. And so we started a luxury streetwear brand, the first product of which is a pair of sunglasses we co created with AI tools. And then the sunglasses themselves have this what we call a deep fake camouflage. It’s like an invisible watermark in the sunglasses. So Laura, when you wear them, they look great on you.

26:27
Tim Shea
But also if I was to take a picture of you wearing the sunglasses and feed it into mid journey or stable diffusion and try and create a deep fake of you, it hacks the LLM, it breaks the AI tool and it fails to create a copy of your face. So if you’re out there worried about your likeness being stolen or AI tools scanning your face, these sunglasses glitch out the AI tools.

26:55
Lara Schmoisman
Okay, you’re blowing my mind here. This is amazing. So how did you come out with that concept?

27:04
Tim Shea
Part of it is just in the spitballing with AI tools, part of it is just being really close to the universe. And reading all this stuff about people’s paranoia was one of the key words we kept going back to. There’s this anxiety and paranoia about this emerging AI surveillance system that’s happening in these corporate LLMs that are vacuuming up all this data about you. And we found a couple of these experimental projects that are designed to hack the systems. So if you remember when there were those Hong Kong protests, and the protesters were arranging these, like, makeup and like, wearing certain things, shrouds on their faces to confuse the AI tools so that it couldn’t recognize who the people were. And we’re like, that’s interesting. I wonder if there’s a way to incorporate that into some cool apparel, you know, that you’d.

28:02
Tim Shea
Some streetwear kid would wear. And so we found one that we could literally layer onto a pair of sunglasses. You and I can’t see the. The watermark, but the AI tools can. And the AI tools get very confused by it. And they just don’t know how to reproduce your face anymore. And so we built a whole brand universe around this idea of, like, what.

28:24
Lara Schmoisman
How about in the product like this? Because I think one of the biggest issues for brand is first of all, the competitive landscape, but also is pricing point.

28:35
Speaker 3
Yep.

28:36
Lara Schmoisman
Can you, through AI, get the cost of the product and how they can price point it to. For retail?

28:47
Speaker 3
Sure.

28:48
Tim Shea
Another way to think about it, too, is by imbuing it with a lot of interesting stuff. By creating an interesting brand story, we can make the price go up as opposed to down. We can make really desirable what we call totemic brands. We think about creating the next, like Louis Vuitton or the next Tom Ford. We’re not thinking about creating the next D2C brand that shows up in your Instagram feed. That’s $99, but it’s $65 if you buy. Now. We don’t want to be part of that space. So it certainly introduces efficiencies when we’re creating content marketing playbooks and ideas. But in terms of the value of the products we want to create, like you walk out of, like, a Marc Jacobs store. That bag feels like a prize of all its own.

29:32
Lara Schmoisman
Yes, yes. That you bought a little bit of gold there.

29:36
Tim Shea
A little bit, Yeah, a little bit. So, yeah, there’s a little bit of swag that we’re trying to put into the brand. And so we’re thinking about not necessarily creating cheap goods that are going to end up in a landfill. We’re thinking about creating, like, dazzling products that people just, like, can’t wait to get their hands on.

29:55
Lara Schmoisman
That’s incredible. And I can’t wait for to see what you come up with and who you can partner to make this real.

30:04
Tim Shea
It’s an exciting world we’re entering into.

30:06
Lara Schmoisman
It’s fascinating. Well, Tim, thank you so much for being with me today. This was really awesome. I don’t have another word to say and I’m sure it was very informative for everyone out there.

30:20
Tim Shea
Awesome. Well, Lara, I look forward to seeing you at the next board event and talking about all this stuff more.

30:27
Lara Schmoisman
And to you guys, thank you for being here one more week. And I will see you next week with more coffee. Number five. Talk soon. Find everything you need at larashmoisman.com or in the episode notes right below. Don’t forget to subscribe. Was so good to have you here today. See you next time. Catch you on the flip side.

30:50
Tim Shea
Ciao.

30:50
Lara Schmoisman
Ciao.