Growing Lean
Growing Lean is aimed at helping entrepreneurs learn from other successful business owners who have successfully grown their business against all odds. Join our discussion to share the wealth of knowledge from people who have been in the trenches growing lean startups.
Have an app idea and need help bringing it to life?
Book a free discovery call here:
https://meetings.hubspot.com/ethan-halfhide/discovery-call
Growing Lean
Exploring the Future of Work: AI, Deepfakes, and Connection with Rei Llazani
How do you imagine the future of work? Join me, Ethan Halfwide, as we navigate this intriguing topic with none other than Rei Llazani, the ingenious CEO of 50 proscom, art broker, and board member of the American Society of AI. Rei's unique perspective on the power of connection is the driving force behind his no-employee agency directory, and his insights might just reshape your thoughts on the future of business.
Ever wondered about the potential impact of AI and deepfakes on our society? Rei gives us an insider's look into the potentials and pitfalls, shedding light on the need for white hat hackers in this brave new digital world. Whether you're an entrepreneur grappling with the challenges of running a boutique business, or curious about the intersection of tech and art, this conversation with Rei Llazani promises a wealth of knowledge. Engage with us as we journey into the heart of AI, deepfakes, and the passion that fuels successful connections.
Have an app idea and dont know where to start? Book a Free Discovery Call Here
Learn more about our award winning app development firm Lean Discovery Group
Connect with me on linkedin
Well folks, welcome back to the growing lean podcast. This is your host, ethan Halfwide. Another amazing episode sponsored by lean discover group and award winning software development firm actually top 50 software development firm in the US according to 50 proscom. I have the honor to be here with Ray Lozani, who's the CEO of 50 proscom, an art broker and collector in a spare time and a board member of the American society of AI. Welcome, ray.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Ethan. I'm glad to be with you.
Speaker 1:Tell the audience that, okay, you have so many different things we could potentially talk about, but tell the audience about your background. I know you sold a business in the past and you kind of that positioned you into a more passionate space within entrepreneurship. Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. The way I would describe it is everything I've ever built or been involved in, it's really been in the business of bringing people together. I've always been a matchmaker at heart and I've always felt like the. You know, one of our ultimate goals as people is to always be close to another human being, right, and whether you see that through Facebook, any platform, right, even if you see it throughout your cultural spaces, any industry that you're in to the core of it, it's really about bringing people together.
Speaker 2:And so what I've done in a variety of different industries, whether that be, you know, b2b procurement, or whether that be through art and you mentioned that was an art broker as well right, and what we've done there is essentially connect people. So, no matter what business I've been involved in, people say it's so, you know, you've kind of done this, you've done this, you've done that. To me, it's all been the exact same thing, just kind of replicated in different industries, which, of course, is matchmaking and just brokering and connecting people together. That's how I describe it. So, at heart, I'm just a person who likes to bring people together.
Speaker 1:I love it. I remember you saying that you know, and you said I always like to be a broker in. Your first business was I think it was brokerage with the government, but it was something like that.
Speaker 2:Yep, the first one. Actually, it started very early on in my early days. It was still when I was in college, and at those time I remember taking the LSATs because I kind of had the trajectory going to law school. Yeah, the very first thing was connecting businesses to businesses using procurement software data to essentially help businesses make better collective purchasing. You know, you know the purchase of bargaining power and so, yeah, it's just how business would essentially procure from one another and then from there. I've just applied that method to many different industries. Nice.
Speaker 1:And so you're very passionate about bringing people together. And that brings me to 50 pros. I'm fascinated by 50 pros. I think it's so in line with what we stand for, because we're listening on a lot of different agency directories 50 pros is by far the most inspiring one because you guys are an agency directory built by agency owners, right? So tell the audience more about the background for 50 pros and your philosophy on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm glad you like it as well. We're seeing some great traction with it. So it's a very unique corporate structure, right, because you see a lot of companies. The traditional mindset to growing a company is you start out with a founder, you get a co-founder, perhaps you get employee number one, employee number two and you kind of scale. From that angle, the fascinating things as you said, 50 pros is an agency directory. It's a place to discover and hire agencies, professional service agencies.
Speaker 2:So, early on, I remember thinking with our very early group, we said I'm a big believer, by the way, if you start any company, you should use your own products. I've seen a lot of startups fail and falter when they kind of they try and sell something but they themselves don't use. Right. So I said, look, if we're preaching and promoting this concept of hiring an agency to help you go far, we better be using our own product as well, right? So from the very early days we said, look, we're going to have different departments. Right, you have your customer service department, you have your sales department. We said we're going to have this whole entire company be run by agencies, each doing their own different thing. Working at Harmony, of course, right.
Speaker 2:So one of the exciting things that I love to share people always think it's crazy when we say it, but we have zero. Technically, you know, from legal standpoint, we have zero employees. Of course, we have a lot of team that's behind. You know all the activities and operations, but, yeah, 50 pros. It's run entirely by different agencies that are each doing their own unique, you know, initiative and task or project, whatever that might be, and so we've been able to say look, we've succeeded, we've grown so much just by using agencies, and these agencies do such a terrific job. And this is really one of the big bets that we're making to the future and how, you know, the landscape of work and the future of work will really change. So that's, you know some brief context there.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely. And then you know we kind of know how you first got started in your industry. But why do you believe that you're so passionate about being at the middle of connecting supply and demand?
Speaker 2:It's just something that excites me. When I you know I've always said one of the biggest things when you know, you know in the right place, when, when you wake up, and what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Right, this, my son really nerdy to your audience, and but what I'm about to say, but it's, it's usually 50 pros I wake up and I think about kind of these kinds of things, right, I think in many ways, what really excites me specifically about it is that one of the hardest things to do is distribution. In any company. If you look at Amazon or any you know company, that's done pretty well.
Speaker 2:For a lot of sellers, whether they're selling products or whether they're selling professional services, the hardest thing to do is to get clients, but not only to get clients, but to consistently maintain those clients or keep adding new customers right. And so I think one of the things that excites me the most is the challenge. I look to look at the hardest problem and to me that's what I like to go for, right, and to me it's that distribution, it's that matchmaking, it's connecting. That is very, very difficult, but to me that's what excites me and that's what I like to pursue.
Speaker 1:Love it. Love it. It's finding what you're passionate about, like Ikega. What is it? What you're good at, what's valuable for the world and what you're passionate about? Love it. I've never heard of that, but that's interesting. Yeah, I think it's called Ikega. It's a Japanese philosophy for how to live a happy life, and it seems like you found that. So you know, tell me about. You know one of the major changes we'll talk about. I think you know where I'm going with that, but the changes in the past, in the industry over the years. How have you adapted to those? And then we'll speak about new and present and very growing changes that are coming soon.
Speaker 2:Certainly so. So there's a few things happening in this landscape in general. We've seen, we've seen the landscape of work change in many ways, right. A really interesting fact that you might like to hear is that in 2023, which we're in right now, so just a few months, we're wrapping it up but the total spend on outsourcing, shared services and augmented services what that really means just companies retaining the services of some other company that number will be 971 billion by by total globally, and that's that's a 20% increase over last year, by the way. So we're seeing a lot of companies leverage other companies which they didn't traditionally do.
Speaker 2:Because if you look at you brought up Japan, by the way if you look about 100 years ago and even to this day in some ways, if you look at the traditional way it's been, you know you go to college, you graduate and you work with that same company, probably sometimes your entire life, until retirement, right, and even in the US and many parts of the world that's been instance you kind of have this loyalty towards one company. In the past, let's say, 510, 15 years there's different. You know opinions on it. That's really changed, right, especially in the last since COVID. Really, we've seen the. You know the term quiet quitting, right. So there's been a lot of, there's a lot of advocacy for, you know, changing positions, kind of finding things that are more fulfilling. The mobility has been huge is really what the whole point there is, and I think there's been a huge shift from this traditional long term approach to sticking with one company for 50 years in your entire life to one that might be a little bit different, right, where you might like to switch different projects, have more meaningful projects, really not get bored with the same kind of repetitive task over and over again, right.
Speaker 2:And I think one of the reasons why a lot of employees, for example, while you're having a lot of agencies pop up, is because they're realizing this.
Speaker 2:Right. It's kind of like, hey, we probably don't need to be hiring an employee for the next three years, is going to be repeating the same task when they're probably going to leave in 16 months, typically lower on jobs. Right, we might just retain the services of an agency. And the fascinating thing is, I think people are realizing this on a subconscious level. So we've seen a huge increase on the supply side. The supply side meaning the agencies that are now popping up. They're saying, hey, I'm leaving this corporate job structure, I'm starting my own agency. A lot of this is happening right, and so, to kind of bring this to full close here, one of the reasons that we saw early on and really the big bet that we're making is, when you have a high saturation of all these agencies kind of popping up, you now also need to create a trusted and vetted marketplace. That's something we've just been working on you know that gives users potentially right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and so that's really the crux of how 50 pros really came to be about it. Hey, there's so much noise out there, there's so much. The saturation is huge. Right, no one? You mentioned one of the competitor platforms earlier. You go on there. You see a directory. There's a hundred thousand plus agencies. That's. That's not helpful to anyone, right, right? So really, what our bet is? You're gonna see a lot of boutique agencies pop up and I think you're also gonna have a lot of boutique matchmaking services. Like 50 pros Be, you know, a trusted place people could go to to find quality talent.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely, and I think that's it's been a long time coming because, like you said, hundred thousand plus agencies in one vertical, you know millions total Of global agencies, and I think it's important to be able to sort by location and important, by tech stack and vertical and specialty and all that good stuff. So Now, oh, you know where I'm going with this AI, ai. What is the impact? So, when we introduce you you know you're a board member of the American Society of AI. Let's first talk there, let's take your stance on. You know what that association does, and then your personal Preference will go from there.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. So obviously we're very passionate about AI. It's a group that brings together the top experts in AI, for it's kind of like the alfalfa club, which is based in DC. I don't know if you might know about it, but it's it's an exclusive kind of club and we're kind of like the AI equivalent for that, similar to actually like 50 pros, how we vet people, the American Society for AI it's actually still my net capacity to invite only, etc. But obviously we're very bullish on AI. But the one unique thing about the organization is that we want to make sure we bring enough diverse thoughts right, so we have people at varying levels of how much AI should be leveraged and used in the space, for example.
Speaker 2:I'm also an art broker and collector and this is something that's a very hot topic right now in the art industry. Is bad AI right? Do we want to have AI? Are we losing the human touch? And One of my core philosophies, like I was saying in the beginning of our discussion, I really care about bringing people together right? So I think AI is fantastic in many, many ways and there's great applications for it and it's gonna make us go so fast and far as a society, but at the same time you also want to reach equilibrium and balance. So I'm a big proponent also the human touch and meaning, you know, maintaining that human touch capacity and as much as possible, right? So those are some general thoughts To kind of kick that off.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, so do you see 50 pros and I don't know if this is top secret anything Do you see guys using 50 AI within 50 pros in any capacity? Because I don't know if any of the other platforms are doing that right now and if you guys are tailored to be that kind of boutique agency marketplace, I wonder if you could do that, providing to provide contextual recommendations.
Speaker 2:Yep, that's a fantastic point. On the back end, there is some tech automation happening, but for the most part, we we like to say that we're a white glove Service. So when someone comes to us and says, hey, you know, we have these three objectives or goals For whatever we're looking to do, the unique benefit, by the way and we should mention to your audience as well, part of the 50 pros, we limited only to 50 agencies per category, right. So that's where the the phrase 50 comes from. One of the benefits from that is that we get to understand each agency that we have. So one, you know it, comes along and says, hey, I'm looking for a hub spot CRM, you know, optimization, implementation, so on and so forth. We'll know exactly who might specialize in HubSpot versus another CRM, right? So one of the benefits I think of being boutique is that you have the human intelligence to kind of fill in those gaps. But in instances where you know that might be a shortcoming wolf course, leverage AI, because it really is a great tool.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely. So let's, I'm gonna put you on the spot a little bit. What's one of the coolest and maybe perhaps one of the most terrifying use cases of AI that you've seen, both net positive, net negative? That's a great question. Not necessarily net negative, but just you know, you, you've been Like speechless at the impact of AI, right?
Speaker 2:That's I'm gonna point. I'll start with the negatives there. I'm gonna point to bad actors. We've always known, no matter any technology that you build, you might have safeguards in place, but we've known and this is unfortunately just a fact throughout human history there's gonna be bad actors. So I point to deepfakes and what that is essentially.
Speaker 2:For example, you could use my voice, that I'm speaking to you right now, and even my image there's images, videos of me all over the internet. Right, you could hypothetically create something that has Ray saying something that he's not actually saying, right, and something that that could be used, you know, 10 years down the line, to call my mother. She thinks she's getting a call from me, for example, and it says, hey, I'm in distress, I need to wire me 20 grand. There's something like that. Right, my mom's not gonna have a clue, especially the elderly. They're not gonna really understand. You know the context there. So I think you'll have a lot of deepfakes. You'll have a lot of bad actors doing a lot of bad things like that and using real humans to train, train their data.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good point. I'm starting to see Because, oh, this is actually relevant to you guys. I don't know if you've released like the customer review feature yet, but a lot of other people that's how they used to rank right. Well, there's a lot of fake review systems out there. I've actually been approached by a few. Someone we actually recently interviewed on the podcast came up with the AI algorithm that can detect whether it's a real review or a Fake review on on any sites or like Amazon, and all that because they can pay to get fake reviews for their product. And we need more good actors like that like white hat was it called white hat hackers that can basically go and say nope, this is fake, don't trust it.
Speaker 2:That's actually fascinating. I think there's a few platforms like that too, that kind of help detect those bad actors, right, I think there's one called the reality defender or something like that. It's an AI. We might have a partnership with them, but, um, that's what they do. They help track deep fakes. I don't know what the technology is. I'm actually clueless in regards to how or to what degree of confidence they're saying, hey, this is a fake review or this is a deep. I quite frankly, I don't know. But I think it's a fascinating point that you bring up, absolutely absolutely, and we're building some really cool stuff.
Speaker 1:Nothing bad, trust me. All all good stuff that can address positive there. But honestly, talk to me a little bit, whether it's about 50 pros or any business that you started in the past, what were like some specific challenges and obstacles you face along the way and how did you overcome them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great point, I think early on, I think entrepreneurs when they want to launch a business, I think they get this mentality that Support is gonna come easily right. And many times you're building something and there's no response from the market. It's kind of like you're going out into the void. You're building something, you might run a few advertisements, you might get national TV recognition, who knows what? It is right? And sometimes it kind of feels you know the cliches that it's lonely at the top right.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I've seen is that you know, regardless of those obstacles, I think it takes a long time for people to do how I describe it is. If you look at a basketball star, they always say there's an overnight success, that's all BS, right, if it took someone five years to finally get recognition, those first four years they weren't just sleeping around doing nothing, right. The overnight success happens usually through years and years of experience. So when someone finally does achieve that success it looks so easy. But usually for years they were kind of walking into this void, right? And so I think they're facing.
Speaker 1:What is it you almost say? This is one of my favorite quotes starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. Yes, oh, I've never heard that but I that's.
Speaker 2:I love that. That's literally it, right. It's kind of like and? And there's no validation, right. It's kind of like there's no sign, like if you're an employee, you might have in a manager that says, hey, you know, you've met your targets. Well, when you're starting on your own, it's kind of it's you're out into the abyss, right it's. That's like what you're describing. What do you all must coded there. But I would just encourage you know people to kind of, you know, kind of keep the adamant on the vision this is one of my favorite things to kind of discuss as well as you want to be really adamant on the vision and the objectives, but you got to be super flexible on how you get there and those. You have to be flexible because it's just sometimes you know, you don't know exactly how it is that you're going to get there, but yeah, that's how I describe it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's tough to really you know. I mean, there are books written on entrepreneurship, right, there's a ton and they try to provide frameworks and everything. But you know, I think sometimes, you know, I would say you have to skip timelines sometimes because you can't do everything in order, like this, because that's not the way the market works and that's not the way building a company works. Sometimes opportunities hit you on the face and you have to take advantage and you have to roll with the punches. There's challenges that come out of nowhere. You know, whatever framework you have, it's like what Mike Tyson says sometimes you get punched in the face, right, and everybody has a plan until that happens.
Speaker 1:So I think, a beautiful way of explaining things there. But where do you see the agency marketplace trends going from there? We spoke offline last week actually about that where, with AI and the quiet quitting and you touched on it here let's call it like the agency or the freelancer space, right, because I think there's going to be more solo entrepreneurs that are in power, like automating the stuff they would normally have to hire out, with AI, which allows them to scale faster, which means that they're scaling faster from a freelancer they're going to an agency, right. So where do you see? How do you see? I think you're perfectly positioned for it, but talk to me about the landscape.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, and it's one that it's really the bet that the company's making right, and so far, a lot of good signs are pointing in that direction, I think. So you're right. So, with AI, for example and Sam Altman of OpenAI mentioned this, I think, just a week ago is that nowadays previously, when you needed a company of 20 people to even go to market or launch a product, you can now do that in two or three people, right, and so you could really build something. It's never been an easier time to create a company than today. The tools that you have at your disposal. It's incredible. And so, that being said, what I think what's happening is that you're starting to see these co-founders, where it's the brain of the company, right, but previously, where you needed 20, now you only need three.
Speaker 2:Now, of course, there's still a lot of business operations that go on into it, which is, for example, you might have to hire a branding agency. You might have to get a logo, which could be done through AI too. You might have to hire an agency. There's all sorts of things that could be created in that capacity, right, and so that's where I think agencies come into play, because the really cool thing about agencies and once you experience is that it's ad hoc right. So rather than saying, all right, we need to hire an employee, we need to get them dental and healthcare insurance, all this kind of stuff right, with an agency, you literally pick up the phone. In two weeks they're already rocking and rolling. I mean, they're experts, they're entrepreneurs in their own way in their field. So when you hire an agency, you're not the quote unquote, you're not hiring soldiers, you're hiring entrepreneurs, right, and they care about the own work they produce because they're putting their brand behind it.
Speaker 2:And so I think a lot of companies they're going to start utilizing agencies and saying, hey, for the next three months we're going to retain the services of X, y and Z brand agency, and then, once that's over, you know, are you able to cut costs too, because you've done your three month commitment. Maybe a year later you might call them up again and say, hey, we have another project might take six months, whatever the case is right. So I think, in many ways, you're going to have a lot of fragmented, and fragmented in a good way, because it's ad hoc. You have relationships with these agencies, they're an extension of your team and I think there's. You know you can strategically utilize these different options that you have, whether you hire a freelancer, an agency, doing it on your own or just expanding your team. I think a lot of companies moving forward are going to actually see the many different ways you could actually grow and succeed.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely, and I know 50 pros. You guys are big on partnerships and collaborations. Can you describe and I don't know if it's confidential and you can speak at a high level if you need to but have you formed any partnerships or collaborations in particular that have been helpful to grow the business and the footprint overall?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I mean so 50, you're right, by the way, so the magic of 50 pros is one of the community. People always kind of look at the team, the founding team, the agencies that we've kind of brought on, but it's really the agencies like yours really that are bringing in expertise, becoming the source of, you know, knowledge and a lot of places that people are coming to to just access that experts. Right, but yeah, we've had a lot of success stories. As you know, we most cater to larger enterprises like the Fortune 500. So we've had a few kind of big names out there that have done all sorts of exciting things. We don't publicly disclose what those tasks were, but we know we've had a Marriott 3. We've had a workday using the platform and connecting with agencies of all various kinds of things. Right, we've seen things in outbound sales. We've seen things in software development, usually for apps or things like that. So it's quite fascinating in many ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that is awesome. I mean, it excites me so much just from disrupting the way that a company is usually built to having a bunch of different specialists, you know, from different verticals, have their input and see, like, what does it look like when you build like almost like a fragmented company? I think I told you down the road I want to have like a small bootstrap PE firm and to have a cloud advisory council which is almost like a individual freelancer version of what you're talking about, a version of like a private equity firm, you know. So that is fascinating to me. I'm very inspired and very grateful to be part of the platform and you know we are coming up on time. Here I want to say, you know, what advice would you give other business owners looking to succeed in this digital age right now?
Speaker 2:That's. That's a great question. I'm happy that you're closing with that. It's really what my philosophy in life in general is recognize that the purpose of anything that drives us is to make the world a better place. Ultimately, I think happiness comes from production. I think the source of all happiness comes from producing something, creating something, adding some value to someone's life, and so you see a lot of people that are unfortunately in despair, right, and I think that stems from not really getting the chance or not either just doing it, not getting the chance there to be different reasons for not really producing something. Right? And one of my favorite quotes of all time.
Speaker 2:You've brought up some great quotes during our discussion here, but one of my favorites of all time it's from Leonardo da Vinci, and he says just like how a day well spent brings upon a restful sleep. Meaning when you've worked really hard in a day, when you're in bed, you're crashed out, right, you're exhausted. He says, just like how a day well spent brings upon a restful sleep. So does a life well spent bring upon a peaceful death? Really, what the message there is you really want to use your time on this planet to produce as much as possible. Do as much as possible. I like to say exhaust yourself right, and to me that's why I'm so happy every day. It's because I'm able to just create, do stuff, whether that, you know, it's building a business, whether that's hiking a mountain, going to the gym, as long as you're doing something, having great dialogues with great people right, to me all that it's valuable, it's production right, and I think that that's the number one thing that I would really tell anyone.
Speaker 1:I love it. That was actually one of my favorite quotes I've ever heard of. I'm going to connect with you offline and get that one more time, but before we kind of clock out here, I want you to have your time to let the audience know how can they get in contact with you, how can they find out more about 50 Pros and anything else that you have going on.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, you could email our team. Hello at 50proscom. You could connect with me on LinkedIn. The name is Ray Lozani. That's R-E-I last name L-L-A-Z-A-N-I. Come say hi. I love to chat with customers, people in general, so always looking forward to something like that.
Speaker 1:Awesome Ray. Thank you for an amazing episode. Thank you so much, ethan. It was great to be with you.