Keep Going

Today I ran a short, hands-on session for Keep Going on OpenClaw 101, a plain look at what people mean when they say “AI agents” and how they actually work in practice.

An agent is just a chatbot with access. It can reach into your files, your email, your servers, and your tools.

In this video I show a live setup. We ran OpenClaw on a Raspberry Pi, connected it to Telegram, and used it to make real changes. It edited a website header, sent emails, created a simple site, and monitored inputs, all from short prompts.

I also spent time on the risks. Giving a system this level of access is not trivial. It can write code, trigger actions, and touch production systems. It is useful, but it demands caution.

The goal was simple: I wanted to strip away the hype and show what this looks like up close and how it works. As a fan of exploring new tech, I hope you enjoy this quick video and I’ll probably do another one in a few weeks.

Work is eating our lives. That much feels obvious. What is less obvious is why we let it happen.

I spoke with psychologist and author Guy Winch about his new book Mind Over Grind, which looks at a familiar but poorly understood problem: the slow psychological takeover that happens when work becomes the dominant force in a person’s life. Many of us think we are simply tired or busy. Winch argues that something more corrosive is happening, a kind of sustained dread that alters how we think, how we behave at home, and how we relate to the people around us.

The timing is not accidental. The workplace is changing in ways that make people uneasy. The pandemic briefly pushed companies to talk about emotional health and work life balance, but the underlying pressure never really went away. Burnout continued to rise. Now a new layer of uncertainty has appeared in the form of AI, automation, and the constant sense that entire professions may shift under our feet.

That uncertainty produces a specific emotional state. Winch calls it dread. It is not simple stress or boredom. It is the heavy anticipation of something bad that may happen but cannot be clearly defined.

Psychologists have studied this kind of anticipation in laboratory settings. In one set of experiments people were given a choice between receiving a mild electrical shock later or a stronger one immediately. Many participants chose the stronger shock simply to avoid waiting for the mild one. The anticipation itself was so unpleasant that people preferred to get the pain over with.

Work can produce the same effect. When people wake up already dreading the day ahead, the stress does not remain confined to office hours. It bleeds into everything else.

A common pattern looks like this. Someone finishes work but cannot mentally leave it behind. They replay conversations with colleagues, worry about tomorrow’s meetings, and anticipate problems that have not yet happened. These thoughts arrive uninvited. They intrude during dinner, while watching television, while trying to fall asleep. The result is hours of unpaid emotional overtime.

The damage compounds quickly. Poor sleep makes people more reactive the next day. Emotional withdrawal leads to tension with partners and family members. Hobbies, friendships, and personal interests slowly fall away because the person feels too drained to engage with them. Over time the individual begins to lose parts of themselves that once had nothing to do with work.

Winch has seen this pattern repeatedly. He also admits that he has experienced it himself. That admission is important, because the problem is not limited to employees trapped inside rigid corporate structures. It often appears even more strongly among founders, freelancers, and people who run their own businesses.

Self employed workers do not have a boss setting limits on how much they can push themselves. If you are ambitious and motivated, there is always more to do. A new client to chase. Another product to ship. Another email to send. The boundary between effort and obsession can disappear without anyone noticing.

Technology complicates the picture further. AI systems can now perform many of the small tasks that once filled the workday. Drafting emails, organizing schedules, producing summaries, even generating reports can be handled automatically.

In theory this should reduce pressure. In practice it often does the opposite.

People rarely use saved time to step away from work. Instead they fill the space with more tasks. At the same time the presence of automation introduces a deeper anxiety. If a machine can handle part of your job today, it may handle the rest tomorrow. Entire professions now operate under that shadow.

Even psychologists are not immune. Winch mentioned that some of his clients already consult large language models when he is unavailable. Others bring AI generated advice into therapy sessions and ask whether it matches his recommendations. The implication is obvious. If a machine can simulate the voice of expertise, what happens to the human expert?

These questions are still unfolding. Researchers have only begun to examine the psychological consequences of widespread AI interaction. One emerging concern involves emotional attachment to digital agents. Some people now describe their AI assistants as companions or collaborators.

Winch views that development cautiously. Emotional attachment to software may signal that other relationships have weakened. When work dominates a person’s attention and energy, connections with family, friends, and communities can erode. In that context it is not surprising that people begin forming attachments in strange places.

None of this means that work itself is the enemy. Winch argues that work occupies a central place in human life for understandable reasons.

Most people spend more waking hours working than doing anything else. Work provides income, which satisfies basic needs like shelter and food. It also offers social structure, status, identity, and a sense of accomplishment. Much of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, from security to self esteem, flows through employment.

Because of that, threats to work feel existential. Losing a job does not only mean losing income. It can mean losing status, routine, social networks, and a sense of purpose. The unconscious mind interprets those risks as serious dangers, which helps explain why dread becomes such a powerful emotion.

The real question is how to prevent work from overwhelming everything else.

Winch’s approach is pragmatic rather than philosophical. He focuses on specific behaviors that interrupt the cycle of rumination and anxiety.

One of the most common traps involves replaying workplace conflicts or uncertainties long after the workday ends. The brain returns to the same problem repeatedly because it has not identified a resolution. The solution is to convert the worry into a concrete plan.

If you are stewing about an argument with a colleague, the task becomes identifying what outcome you want and how you might achieve it. Do you need a conversation to clear the air. Do you need to set boundaries. Do you need to escalate the issue or simply move on. Spending fifteen minutes outlining a response can quiet the brain because the uncertainty has been reduced.

In cases where the problem cannot be solved immediately, scheduling time to address it later can have a similar effect. Writing “handle client issue tomorrow at 8:45 a.m.” into a calendar signals to the mind that the concern has not been ignored. The worry is parked for later rather than allowed to circulate endlessly.

Another element involves the structure of the workday itself. Many people respond to overwhelming workloads by pushing forward without pause. They move from meeting to meeting, task to task, trying to survive the day.

Ironically this behavior reduces productivity. Cognitive performance declines as fatigue accumulates. Creativity, judgment, and executive functioning all deteriorate when the brain remains under continuous strain.

Short restorative breaks can interrupt that decline. A few minutes of physical movement, a brief walk outside, or a supportive conversation with a colleague can reset mental resources. What matters is that the break genuinely restores energy rather than adding more stimulation. Doomscrolling through social media or reading the news rarely qualifies.

These techniques are modest but practical. They require attention rather than radical lifestyle changes. Most people already spend hours each evening mentally revisiting work problems. Redirecting a fraction of that time toward structured reflection can produce a noticeable difference.

The deeper question that emerged during our conversation concerns the future of work itself. If automation eventually provides widespread basic income and eliminates many traditional jobs, what replaces the psychological role of employment?

Winch does not pretend to know the answer. Work provides purpose, competition, creativity, and social structure. If those elements disappear, people will almost certainly invent new forms of aspiration to fill the gap. Humans rarely remain idle for long.

The shape of those aspirations remains unclear. They might emerge in artistic communities, local organizations, scientific exploration, or forms of competition that do not yet exist. What matters is that the underlying psychological drive toward goals and progress will remain.

For now the immediate challenge is simpler. Work has always demanded effort and attention. What has changed is the degree to which it invades the rest of life. Phones keep us connected to the office at all hours. Global competition raises expectations. AI adds uncertainty about what the future holds.

The result is a quiet epidemic of dread that many people treat as normal.

It is not normal. It is a signal that the balance between effort and recovery has collapsed.

Rebuilding that balance does not require abandoning ambition or disengaging from work. It requires noticing how the mind responds to pressure and intervening before the grind becomes the only thing left.

On this week’s episode of Keep Going, I spoke with Patricia Martin, writer, researcher, and author of Will the Future Like You? She has spent a decade studying what happens when failure is not just professional but personal. The kind that makes you wake up and ask, who am I now?

Patricia calls it identity-threatening failure. Not every setback qualifies. Missing a target or losing a client stings. But when your business is your baby, when your persona is fused to your public presence, when your work becomes your self, a collapse can feel like rejection at the level of love. The brain codes it that way. Cortisol rises. Adrenaline spikes. Dopamine drops. Executive function weakens. You feel empty, hypervigilant, unmoored.

Entrepreneurs are especially vulnerable. We are taught to invest identity in what we build. In the attention economy, we perform ourselves across platforms, post after post, video after video. The persona gets muscular. The inner self gets quiet. Patricia calls the result “persona fog.” We externalize the self so thoroughly that when something breaks, we do not know what remains.

What struck me was how physical this all is. This is not motivational poster talk. There is a somatic reaction to identity collapse. A rewiring. Some people pivot sharply. A tech founder goes back to the family farm. A software executive returns to the factory floor. Not because they failed, but because they need ground again.

So what do you do if you cannot escape to a dairy farm?

Patricia argues there is no hack. There is practice.

First, discernment. Identity failure scrambles executive function. You lose clarity. You must relearn how to hear yourself.

Second, reflection. We have lost the muscle of self-reflection. There is no app for the inner world. You have to sit with the question: what is this doing to me?

Third, confirmation and witness. Own what is happening. Say it out loud. Find someone who can remind you who you were before the fog rolled in.

As we talked, the conversation turned to AI, to coders who fear obsolescence, to journalists wondering what work remains. Patricia’s answer was not comfort. It was responsibility. You must know who you are. You must identify what you bring that cannot be replicated. Creativity. Imagination. Sentience. The ability to feel and transmit meaning.

Machines can perform. They can flatter. They can automate. They cannot enact being.

We are entering what she calls an age of hyper reinvention. Pivots will not be rare events. They will be routine. That means resilience can no longer be grit alone. It has to include an active relationship with the unconscious, with creativity, with reflection.

There is a line Patricia shared that I keep returning to. Every defeat of the ego is a victory for the unconscious.

In a culture built on dominance and performance, that feels radical.

The question is not whether the future will like you. The question is whether you can hear yourself clearly enough to survive it.

Transcript

Welcome back to Keep Going, a podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. Today we have Patricia Martin. She’s a writer, she’s a podcaster, she’s a researcher, and she’s recently wrote a book. It’s coming out soon, Will the Future Like You? Which I’m afraid to hear the answer for, so welcome, Patricia.

Patricia (01:26.852)

It’s a pleasure to be here, John.

John Biggs (01:28.942)

So you’re an old hat at podcasting. You’ve been doing this for quite a while. A million views on your stuff. I want you to welcome to mine. And I’m actually really happy you’re here because this book sounds fascinating. Why don’t you just give us a quick recap about what you wrote.

Patricia (01:45.167)

So I researched this material in the book for 10 years. And I entered into the research originally to understand the impact of the digital age on the human psyche. And I encountered not only a variety of people and their stories, and then also, you know, as an entrepreneur myself.

I underwent a massive change in my life and in my business. And I woke up one morning asking the age old question, who am I? And that is when my research took a fresh direction. And I began focusing on what it means to lose and rebuild identity in the digital age.

John Biggs (02:34.144)

Mm-hmm. So you were talking earlier about the identity destroying failure. I guess reducing failure, right? A failure so poignant that it changes essentially your entire life. So tell me about that.

Patricia (02:49.378)

So not every failure that we have affects us at an identity level. What tends to happen though with entrepreneurs, and I would say this is generally a cultural issue for Americans, is that we invest a lot of identity in what we do. Entrepreneurs more so because it’s your baby, it’s your creation. You’re doing something, usually it can be out of a passion or you’re addressing a need in the marketplace.

But it is something that you have spotted and you internalize as part of yourself. So what happens when we fail at an identity level, especially in the attention economy, is that we begin to recruit differently from the interior world of ourselves. So let’s say, for instance, you have somebody who has built an online business and they’re an influencer.

That is persona heavy identity. And the persona is the weakest part of the psyche. It has never been, it was never designed to undergo the garrulous rigors of online life, right? And yet we’re pounding it day after day, post after post, video after video. And so when something goes awry there, there are some specific things that start to happen.

when we tip that into an identity problem. So first of all, it’s a social neural pain. We treat that failure as a rejection, just like we would treat it as a love rejection. And that’s how the brain codes it and the body feels it. The other thing that happens is it’s probably not a surprise that we get a cortisol rush from that kind of failure, but it has a lingering effect.

Probably I think the most intriguing thing that came out of the neuroscience is the amount of adrenaline that courses through the body during a failure that is specific to the loss of identity. So it’s as if we are now hyper vigilant to find our sense of self again and we begin the search to recruit back the sense of who we are.

Patricia (05:10.536)

And so that has an effect that is, you know, and your dopamine goes low. So now you’re operating on cortisol, adrenaline, and low dopamine. So it’s kind of a perfect storm for feeling really empty, lost, stuck, disconnected. So, you know, you’ll talk to people who have had a failure like that. And it requires in the attention economy more than just grit.

Because it’s moving so fast, you’re not just, you know, pulling yourself back up by your bootstraps and standing back on your feet. Back on what? What ground? The territory is moving so fast. So this is where you find people tend to tumble out. You’ll also find people at this point sometimes will take a sharp pivot. I talked to people who went from

running software companies to working in their father’s box factory. One woman was in a tech startup that got really big. She sold it, and she went back to running the family dairy farm. So it was kind of like they needed an antidote to kind of clear themselves. some of these were success stories. But what was interesting is that some of them didn’t go back to the hurly burly and the grind of something that was as intense.

as an online business.

John Biggs (06:38.67)

So I love that you’re able to codify this and describe it in a very clear way. think a lot of people have that. I mean, first off, a lot of people have that fantasy, right? I think that every single Hallmark movie is about that, where you go back to the small town and you become a dairy farmer after having a hard business, like a hard charging business life. So I think the primary question is, you’re in that mode, once you end up failing out of it,

out of an entrepreneurial situation, you described the persona being destroyed to a degree. from a layperson’s point of view, the persona would be just, I don’t know, just my day to day happy-go-lucky whatever. But it sounds like you’re talking about something a lot deeper here. what happens when that identity is destroyed? And how do we get it back, aside from working at a dairy farm?

Patricia (07:30.989)

Well, here’s the thing. Yeah, because we can’t all do that, right? And some people genuinely like to learn and ladder up. Failure, success, failure, success. I think, though, what’s important to understand about the difference between a more linear type of set of milestones in one’s career and the matrix of what we’re experiencing now.

So pivots and turning points happen more frequently. I think we’re going to see with the rise of AI, that is going to become an annual event for people. I’m just putting a pin in that. We’re going to be pivoting more and more and more. And so I think the problem with the internet age is it has made us externalize the self.

So, you know, there’s no app for the inner world. We are always out there. We’re always on. We’re always pushing content. And we’re dividing our sense of self across multiple platforms and multiple personas. So when we’re externalized like this, we’re vulnerable. We’re vulnerable to the kind of change.

the kind of failure that we’re talking about that have real bodily consequences and psychological consequences. So I would say the plague of our time is something I identify in the book as persona fog. And what happens is that when this gap opens between the true self and the externalized self, we’re no longer in search for the self.

We’re performing a self. That’s a very different proposition. The self is at arm’s length to begin with, also making us vulnerable. And so when we take a loss and we’re in this fogged state already, first of all, it’s very hard to hear the signals from the self. I’m a Jungian, right? People fall into, are you?

John Biggs (09:53.484)

You don’t look it.

Patricia (09:54.222)

Are you a Freudian or a Jungian? And I’m a Jungian. And Carl Jung’s definition of the self is that it is actually an ever active resource in our lives and it will give us symptoms that are signals. And these signals will continue, they will persist.

plasticity in the self. And the trouble with persona fog is that when we identify so much with our external self, you know, we’re, there’s a noise floor we’re hitting so that we can’t hear the signals. So we prolong our pain and suffering. so, you know, part of what the mission of the book was is to help people understand how to hear those signals first and then what to do about them. So I think the

Antidote is like a three-part process and the first requires discernment and that is tough because another thing that goes offline when we have an identity failure, you know, when our failure is an identity failure is we lose, this has been proven, we lose loss of executive function. So some of what makes us feel competent and like you have a handle on this, this is lost to you and that

John Biggs (11:16.11)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (11:23.507)

also means a loss of discernment. having to tune into yourself becomes a practice. It’s not a hack, it’s a practice. You have to get good at listening to the signals of the self so that you pull yourself up off the noise floor. The second thing you can do is, this is so simple and this sounds a little self-helpy, John, but we’re losing this ability to reflect. I mean, you could talk to anybody in psychotherapy.

And they will tell you what the one primary skill is, self-reflection. We’re so out there, we found it hard to get back in here. And the myth of the digital age is that what we put out there has no effect, right? About what’s going on inside. Like that is the biggest myth we need to shatter. So, know, reflection is like, okay, I failed.

How is this making me feel? What’s going on inside there right now? Just asking ourself a simple inventory of questions. And then I think the third thing is to confirm. Confirm with yourself. Own it. This is what’s happening to me. This is how I’m reacting to this psychologically and physically. And then to seek a witness. To seek.

someone to talk to, someone who can reflect with you and remind you, well, this is how I see you. This is how I’ve always seen you. You can’t, I can’t state this enough. And it’s part of what made me seek out psychology because as I was interviewing some of these entrepreneurs, they were kind of turning me into their therapist. And I thought it was in over my head, you know, like I’m a researcher and I’m a writer. I am, I’m really not qualified.

John Biggs (13:14.656)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (13:20.436)

So that’s what kind of turned me into a Jungian.

John Biggs (13:24.898)

mean, that’s literally why I did this podcast, right? So I was a hard charging journalist weirdo for TechCrunch. I would get pitched at urinals. I had a million friends around the world, a million friends around the world, but if I was in a pinch, not a single one of them pick up the phone, right? So that was the depression aspect. And I also met so many entrepreneurs that were clinically depressed and some of them who died. I knew...

Patricia (13:34.225)

my God.

John Biggs (13:50.382)

quite a few folks who just couldn’t handle it. And I think this is so vital. mean, those three things that you just described are just the self-reflection, I think, is the other thing. I would also argue that in this day and age, those entrepreneurs are going to like mushroom retreats or whatever to get their self-reflection. Is that an alternative? Is that a way to go? Or should it just be sober reflection in a dark room?

Patricia (14:14.592)

Well, I think it’s interesting that people are trying to ingest consciousness.

John Biggs (14:20.736)

Mm Exactly. That’s I mean, that’s the answer, right? It’s like you said you said there’s no app for for self for the self. But to a degree, a couple of mushrooms are kind of like that. It’s like it’s like it’s like Matrix Neo in the Matrix.

Patricia (14:22.785)

Yep.

Patricia (14:34.6)

Right. And so, I mean, this is the danger of my work all the time. You’ve been asking me good, deep questions, but, you know, often people just want the set of 10 hacks, you know, the listicle. And that’s not what this is. I mean, I’m really asking people to take a hard look at what’s happening to them and how they’re losing their sense of self and what the costs are. And you’re right about the cost because, you know,

John Biggs (14:46.039)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (15:01.458)

One of the people that I had in the research study attempted suicide. mean, the costs are very real. so what you’re really talking about though is rich because, you know, Carl Jung was a big believer that much of what makes us who we are lives in the unconscious. It’s not a fish, it’s a whale we’re riding on. And so to access that.

is vital in restoring your sense of self. And so it doesn’t surprise me that people are taking hallucinogenics and people are ketamine and people are trying to get there however they can. I have never done it myself. So I’ve looked at some of the science on it. I can’t poo poo it, but I certainly can’t proclaim it either. I think the more opportunities you have to

raise the unconscious and make it conscious, the better you’re going to be. So keep in mind the persona is attached to the ego. And Carl Jung said, every defeat of the ego is a victory for the unconscious. And so the more you confuse the two, the more you fuse the two, the more resilient you’re going to be. So this is like keeping just a simple dream notebook.

John Biggs (16:15.822)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Patricia (16:28.574)

Next to your dream. mean, one of the things that I found is that some of the entrepreneurs I interviewed were so strung out, they weren’t dreaming anymore. And this is a, this is a signal. This is a signal from the self that you’re starting to lose your attachment to the unconscious. So anything you can do to tap into the unconscious meditation, walking, re embodying yourself.

I mean, we live such disembodied lives in the digital culture that even reconnecting to your senses by walking outdoors has a huge impact on your inner world.

John Biggs (17:14.958)

I like from a Jungian standpoint, we could argue that some of the self-medication and some of like raves and all that other good stuff, the group activities, et cetera, that these folks are Burning Man or whatever, they’re trying their damnedest to hit those notes and try to bring that unconscious up. What does it mean in a normal sense? Explain to me the idea of...

dissolving ego and connecting to the unconscious.

Patricia (17:48.748)

So the ego serves a function. That’s where your executive function emanates from. The ego plays a role. The ego is there for a reason. The ego will keep you safe. The problem is that the ego is hungry. And it will turn everything you do in your life into a project of the ego if you’re not attuned to that. And so this is where

You know, sometimes for an entrepreneur, the ego will be, will get, you know, you hear phrases like, you’re getting in your own way. That is typically the ego wanting to try to protect you from taking risks. So being able to monitor the ego is, valuable. especially for people who are reaching high strivers, entrepreneurs, but, but I would also say that we’re not trying to dissolve the ego.

John Biggs (18:31.47)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (18:47.295)

What we’re trying to do is raise what is in the unconscious to bolster the other parts of the self, right? The ego is only one part of the self. And so it gets very muscular, especially in American culture. And you’re seeing this play out in politics and business, right? And everything else gets atrophied. So you’re trying to bring things into balance.

John Biggs (19:09.688)

Sure, sure, sure.

John Biggs (19:16.846)

So the suggestion is that the ego doesn’t allow for, I don’t know, obviously reflection and obviously maybe kindness to a degree. mean, if we look at the current political state, it’s all ego, right? It’s all bluster. And it’s all just the assumption you being right constantly is what’s polarizing us. So the question I have, especially related to the book, is how do we survive these next?

this next decade, right? So I was speaking to a guy just now who is, literally he’s been a coder all his life. He’s probably one of the best coders I know. And he says he’s going to be obsolete in half a year, basically because of AI. he can, the bosses who are full of ego say to themselves, we can replace this guy with a couple Claude instances and we’ve saved $200,000 or whatever this guy wants for his contract.

How are we even not the hard chargers? How does mental management survive this? How do the folks who are eking out a living being journalists and media creators?

Patricia (20:25.429)

of what you have to answer is number one, who are you? And really understand that and know that. number two, what you bring to this that makes you unique that Claude or Chachi B.T. cannot replicate. So I think where...

John Biggs (20:44.482)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (20:50.097)

human contribution is going to be most valuable is in some of the ways that we as humans connect to each other and in some of the ways that we are sentient beings so that we receive messages and send them out to other human beings. So one of the things that fascinates me, John, is just how much the new platforms for AI have learned from

you know, years and years and years of internet success. And one of the things I’m really tuned into is how my robot wants to love Bummy. Right? I’m a genius.

John Biggs (21:30.318)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (21:32.971)

And I have to tell you, if you talk to my robot, you know, he would tell you all kinds of things about just how special I am. What is at the root of that? They are coded in these early phases of public engagement to build trust that then can be leveraged and...

John Biggs (21:33.432)

Yeah.

Patricia (21:56.554)

you know, the en-shitification is coming, but it will learn as much as it can about us by love bombing us. And so...

awareness that we’re in this moment. I mean, we’ve been here before, right? Especially people like you and you and me, we were there in the early days. If you were writing for TechCrunch, you’ve been around. So we’ve been here before and understanding that this is the moment we’re at and really digging in and doing some work to understand who we are.

John Biggs (22:17.582)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (22:32.651)

There was a case study that I wrote about in the book, Janet. She was a coder at a very young age. She went to a STEM school. And she was great at online gaming, massive multiplayer games. She was great at blogging. She was on every single platform at the time that was available to her. And she was 17. And around.

18, she was getting ready to apply for colleges and she was like, said, this was her phrase to me, I felt empty. She didn’t know who she was. So she actually disciplined herself to write a paragraph in her notebook describing herself to herself.

John Biggs (23:10.382)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (23:21.771)

And then she went out to every single one of those platforms where she had a persona that was active and she ignored how many clicks. She ignored how popular it was. She ignored the places where she was trolled. And she said, is that me? Does that align with this paragraph? And if it did, she kept that voice. And if it didn’t, she, she self-regulated. And it was 18 years old. And I thought, what a lesson.

John Biggs (23:35.278)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (23:40.28)

Wow.

John Biggs (23:47.694)

at 18 too, which is wild.

John Biggs (23:56.312)

So this is heartening, Usually these things end up as not being so chipper. But I’m trying to find a historical corollary for where we are right now. we’re talking about, I always think about this scene in American Splendor where Paul Giamatti is working in a hospital. And this is the 70s. He’s working in hospital where there’s paper files everywhere, all over the place.

like in a few years, those paper files would have been gone. But at that point, he was as Harvey Picar was like in a in a room full of paper. And he was perfectly fine. He was perfectly happy. He was he was the kind of guy who would who wanted to be alone in this room. But when all that went over to computer, when all that went automated, what changed, he no longer had a place. So who gets who loses that who loses that that that position who loses that their persona when we go from

essentially dumb machines to machines that are either constantly like complimenting us or are doing most of our work for us and we no longer have that thing. How do we rebuild that persona in this case?

Patricia (25:07.848)

Well, that’s a huge question, OK? And listen, I’m still figuring some of this out myself. I realize that I have stumbled on territory that a lot of neuroscientists are also still trying to figure out, and psychologists. And the other thing about this, this is interdisciplinary work. And science has gotten so specified.

John Biggs (25:12.056)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (25:17.239)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (25:35.752)

that we’re starting to behave now more like humanities departments, where there’s a guy in history and a woman in sociology and somebody else in art and culture. And we’re now starting to have conversations about how do we get back to a humanity that is resilient, has something to offer, and what is core to the human identity that

cannot be replicated. And some of that is actually has to do with getting back to what is creative about us. Creativity, imagination, that cannot be replicated by a machine. What the machine can do, just like love bombing, is it can give the performance of that, but it can’t enact it. And so I wrote a book in 2008,

which was called the Ren Gen, the rise of the Renaissance generation. And it talked about that in every, what are the conditions that precede a Renaissance? And it is always the same through history. Death comes first. The civilization is wiped out. A seed bed is created and something new emerges and it emerges from human contribution of creativity. So I think what we’re seeing now,

John Biggs (26:40.611)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (27:04.828)

is we’re seeing how bankrupt this dominance and aggression script is. And what it’s doing, it’s very good at destroying, but it’s not creating anything. And so there is going to be an equal and opposite drive that will be toward creativity. And I can see the wheels of this starting to crank up. And so...

John Biggs (27:12.238)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (27:33.876)

The future is yet to be seen, but the people who can tie into that part of themselves have a future.

John Biggs (27:43.854)

That’s amazing. I’m glad you said that. I think that’s vital to hear. think there’s plenty of people who just aren’t hearing that, right?

Patricia (27:50.792)

Well, that’s the noise floor. They can’t hear it. It doesn’t resonate with them. And dominance, when you look at the dark emotions that rule dominance, they’re constrictive for a reason, because that’s how dominance stays dominant. So people who wriggle out from underneath that, like if you saw the halftime show.

John Biggs (27:53.39)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (28:19.642)

at the Super Bowl. You know, you see how people wriggle out from underneath that. And it resonates with a massive amount of other people. This is what I mean by humans being sentient. We pick up the signals across the culture from each other. And this is what will save us.

John Biggs (28:19.758)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (28:44.834)

Patricia, thank you for this. This has been amazing. When is your book coming out?

Patricia (28:49.726)

March 5th, launches, it’s in pre-order now. It’s called, again, Will the Future Like You? And it’s about this age of hyper reinvention when we’re having to pivot and pivot and pivot and reinvent ourselves, what it’s doing to us and what we can do about it.

John Biggs (29:05.998)

We’ve made a lot of people like me happy because I have like, on my LinkedIn, I think it’s like two or three pages of just like doing different things almost every year, which I think is, that makes me an early adopter of this future, right? It’s scary, but it’s fun.

Patricia (29:17.704)

Yes. It’s scary, but it’s fun. And you’re going to figure out like what keeps you resilient. The recipe is a little different for everybody. But the fact that you’re asking questions and you’re curious, the self always knows what it’s doing.

John Biggs (29:39.316)

Wonderful. Well, thank you for this. It’s been amazing.

Patricia (29:41.546)

Thank you. Pleasure.

John Biggs (29:43.79)

This has been Keep Going. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next week.

Kevin Gaskell walked into a room expecting to be fired.

Instead, he was handed the keys to Porsche UK.

That moment says a lot about his career. He is an engineer by training. Then he added an MBA. Then accountancy. Blueprint and balance sheet. He joined Porsche in his twenties, rose through operations, and found himself in a company that was sliding. Three years of unsold inventory. Brutal headlines. Public jokes about pigeons and deposits.

He thought he was getting a ten minute exit interview.

He stayed for four hours. He told the owners exactly what he thought. What to cut. What to fix. Where to aim. He expected consequences. He got promoted.

Five years later, Porsche UK went from last to first.

That sounds like a clean arc. It was not. They cut costs by 50 percent. They simplified. They endured press attacks. They carried the weight of three years of unsold cars. That is not glamour. That is grit.

Then he did it again at BMW. Then he quit.

This is where the story turns.

He left one of the best jobs in European automotive to build Cars Direct Europe. Rented office. Desk. Phone. Two young kids at home. American backers. Big plan. Six months in, the investors pulled out.

Gone.

Now what?

No salary. No bank support. No track record as a founder. Just a business plan and three colleagues.

This is the part people skip. The terror. The mortgage. The silent nights staring at the ceiling.

They negotiated a sliver of funding. Raised money from friends and family. No safety net. Then they pivoted. Consumers were not ready to buy cars online. So they went after fleet operators. Boring. Back office. Massive inefficiency. Two hundred people on phones sourcing cars.

They built a platform. They became the backbone. They prepaid dealers with token systems, which quietly funded their growth. Five years later they sold for nine figures.

That does not happen because someone is lucky.

It happens because when the bottom falls out, you do not flinch.

Kevin talks about luck. He was in the right room at Porsche. That is true. But courage matters. When you think you are about to be fired, you can shrink. Or you can speak clearly.

He chose clarity.

There is another thread running through his story. He does not build fragile companies. He stays five to eight years. He builds teams that can run without him. He does not asset strip. He builds foundations.

Today he runs multiple companies in parallel. Fiber networks. Data platforms. Investments. He has rowed oceans. Walked to the poles. Climbed mountains.

That part is dramatic, but it is not the point.

The point is this: failure comes first. Success is the fight that follows.

When the press mocks you. When investors leave. When no bank will return your call. That is the test.

Do you believe in the thing?

If the answer is yes, you keep going.

That is the through line.

Not hype. Not trends. Not whatever the market is excited about this week. He is openly skeptical of herd behavior in investing. Dot com. AI. Railways. The pattern repeats. Tools matter. Products matter more. Service matters most.

Build something real. Tell the truth about where you stand. Simplify. Cut what does not work. Double down on what does.

And when you think you are about to be shown the door, speak up anyway.

You might walk out unemployed.

Or you might walk out in charge.

I sat down with Constantin Kogan last week after we randomly met in Salt Lake City. We both live near New York. Sometimes the universe has a sense of humor.

Konstantin is the founder of Holistic Capital, a multi strategy investment firm focused on digital assets. He also runs a podcast called Holistic Investments. Over 100 episodes. More than 600,000 followers across platforms. Not bad for something he started during COVID while stuck at home.

But the interesting part of his story is not crypto. It is not Bitcoin in 2012. It is not Ethereum in 2016. It is not being early to hedge funds or registering with the SEC.

It is this: social capital is capital.

During COVID he found himself in a tough place. Like most of us. No travel. No meetings. No momentum. He asked a simple question. What can I do that I actually enjoy? His answer was long conversations. Honest conversations. The kind you have in a kitchen at midnight over wine.

So he started a podcast.

No monetization plan. No big strategy. Just curiosity and discipline. For five years he made nothing from it. Most podcasters quit before episode thirty. He kept going past one hundred.

Why?

Because he was not optimizing for money. He was optimizing for relationships and learning.

That changes everything.

We talked about failure. I asked him about bad trades. Crypto winters. Market crashes. He surprised me. The real failures were not financial. They were relational.

Picking the wrong partners.

He described business like a marriage. You can survive small disagreements. But when a real crisis hits, that is when character shows up. Do you share a vision. Do you share values. When it gets ugly, does your partner protect the mission or protect their ego.

You cannot really test that in advance. There is no checklist. No personality quiz that guarantees success. At some point you rely on judgment and instinct. And you accept risk.

That is uncomfortable. But it is honest.

We also talked about investing. Early in his career he focused on technology and timing. Now he looks at people first. Ideas are abundant. Execution is rare. Motivation varies wildly. Some founders want status. Some want money. Some want to prove themselves. Some want to change the world.

Only one of those types will survive when things get hard.

If you are building something, remember this. Investors are not just evaluating your deck. They are evaluating your stamina. Your alignment with your team. Your ability to handle conflict without blowing up the room.

And if you are thinking about starting a podcast or some other media project, understand what you are signing up for. It is a business. It consumes time. It demands consistency. It does not pay right away. Maybe not for years.

But it builds something else. Reputation. Network. Intellectual capital. A record of your thinking.

That can compound.

Konstantin does not even call himself a VC anymore. He trades liquid markets now. Algorithmic strategies. Volatility. But the podcast still runs. The network still grows. Yesterday he met the co founder of Venmo and invited him on the show on the spot.

That is how opportunity works. Quiet compounding. Relationship by relationship.

You cannot fake that. You have to show up. You have to publish. You have to keep going when the numbers are small and the monetization is zero.

There is a lesson here.

Build things that create optionality. Build things that connect you to other capable people. Build things that make you better at thinking and listening.

Money follows. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes indirectly. But it follows.

In the meantime, protect your partnerships. Choose carefully. Align early. Agree on how you will handle conflict before it arrives.

Because markets rise and fall. Technologies shift. Cycles repeat.

Character does not.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to keep going. A podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs today on the show. We have Constantin Kogan. He’s the, uh, GP at holistic capital. And you also have a, really cool podcast, which I’m going to be on eventually. So I get to actually,

Constantin Kogan (01:18.537)

Mmm.

John Biggs (01:37.954)

meet your audience. But we met just a week ago and you have a really, cool story. So tell us what you’re up to, Constantin.

Constantin Kogan (01:47.235)

Hi, John. First of all, an honor to be here. Yes, we met in Salt Lake City out of all the places, ironically, live in close by in New York. I don’t know where to begin the story. guess maybe just a little bit of background. I’m originally from Ukraine. was born and raised there, 11 years in the United States. I started my career as a...

John Biggs (01:56.236)

Yeah.

Constantin Kogan (02:12.651)

I’m a modernism future trader. Chicago Bota Trader was my first venue where I started to explore financial markets. From there, went through a hole and bought my first 5 Bitcoin in 2012. 2016, I a conscious choice to go all in when Ethereum got out and...

thought that programmable money is definitely going to be the future of tokenization of all the assets. 2017, I became a partner in the first crypto fund of hedge funds in the world. We’re the first SEC registered firm. And from there, you know, I had a wild journey co-founding three companies, you know, investing in 80 plus venture startups and running my own.

you know, my own hedge fund, working for hedge funds and now focusing on holistic capital, which is basically a multi-asset, multi-strategy investment firm, mostly focused on digital assets, but eventually we will work with different assets on blockchain as well, which I think that’s where the future is going to. And also, as you mentioned, I...

also run Holistic Investments, which is the podcast which I started during COVID time. My first guest was Dan Moritz from Pantera Capital because we invested in Pantera so we good relationships with them. Since then, I 100 plus guests on my show and enjoy learning from incredible individuals.

John Biggs (03:49.278)

And you’ve got you got like 600 plus thousand followers across your across all your platforms. What do you think led to that level of success? And what is what does that give you as a VC? Like I know what this gives me as a I don’t know, just a putz on the internet. But what does that give you as a VC?

Constantin Kogan (03:55.957)

Yes.

Constantin Kogan (04:10.313)

Well, to be completely transparent, I don’t consider myself as a VC anymore. Like I used to be. Right now I’m...

mostly with trading more liquid assets, right? So you can think about it as algorithmic trading firm, high frequency trading, right? Closer than, so I used to be at VCN. I thought that was incredible opportunity in emerging markets, right? But regardless, what it gives me, it gives me network. I think...

Social capital is another form of capital, right? Not necessarily like people who invest in you is your, you know, main business partners in life. You know, some people like stay with you regardless of whether you succeed or you fail. And I think the more value you bring to other individuals, like what look what we’re doing today, right? You’re the first

who allowed me to be on your podcast, which I’m very grateful for, and then you’re gonna be on mine, and that’s hopefully gonna inspire others to do the same and share thoughts, you know, learn from each other. I would say intellectual capital and social capital, that’s what’s the primary goal for me, and that’s how I’m giving back to the world by educating the future generations.

John Biggs (05:28.396)

Mm-hmm. So tell us about the growth of this media empire, I guess you could say. So you started out just deciding to do this. What was the impetus? Why did you want to do it?

Constantin Kogan (05:40.105)

Well, media empire, it’s a big word. love how you frame it. Future media empire, yes. Yes, I appreciate it. Look, I, again...

John Biggs (05:47.03)

Yeah, we gotta tuck each other up, yeah.

Constantin Kogan (05:54.363)

Wholeheartedly, was in a very tough spot during COVID. I think it was a very challenging time for everyone. And I thought to myself, what can I do? I mean, we’re sitting at home. There’s not much to do. you know, everything is digital anyway. You cannot go out. And I started to ask myself, it was more of a soul searching exercise. Like, what can I do to at least do something what I love to, you know, have a cohesive discussion and also somehow impact

others to inspire them or to help them in some way and that podcast format was the most relevant for me. I’ve listened to a lot, I’m a big fan of know like Joe Rogan, Alex Hermosy, know and Alex Friedman and many other like greats know people who went bold and started to invite other individuals, have long discussions with them so my

My format is about 60 minutes, right? So it’s enough time to learn about a person, about their journey, about where they’re coming from, and also how they achieve this success. And also ask them uncomfortable questions, which allows to bring less controversy, but more about what were the failures? What are the learning lessons? Something that you would not talk on your board meeting or somewhere in the traditional media, right? So more like honest, friendly conversations,

you will have when you’re drinking wine with your friend in the kitchen.

John Biggs (07:30.606)

So tell me about some of those failures. think you, I mean, right now we’re looking at a crypto winter. So that sounds like, it sounds like you might have some issues right now, but tell me about the failures as you move through and try to enter this space.

Constantin Kogan (07:44.255)

Yeah, as a matter of fact, we’re doing great. maybe we like when you’re trading.

the market is a strategy, you’re not like long like any asset like we’re making money even shorting right now. So for us, the volatility and big spikes is where we make most of our money. And that’s the exciting part. Like, and that’s when I finally understood after three cycles in the industry that how to navigate the markets. So that’s number one. The failures mostly, ironically, I wouldn’t call them financial decisions. It’s mostly

who you’re going with. So I would say how to pick your partners. Like, and I think that’s one of the most challenging parts because if you think about a business, it’s like as a form of marriage, so to speak, like a very big connection you spend with your business partners a lot of time, you’re building something, it’s your venture is like your baby, right? And when there is, I would say, not clear

understanding of what is the vision, how do you work together, like you know what’s gonna happen next, like when the actual challenges come into play, that’s when you learn the character of a person, that’s how you learn how they react, that’s how you learn if they’re gonna be supportive or they’re gonna put you down or maybe even like publicly humiliate you, like there’s a lot of things that are completely unknown besides the business challenges, we’re also talking about like

basic human to human relationship. And I would say that the biggest learning experience for me as a failure is how to choose the right partners and how to make sure that these people not only share your vision, but also there will be for you when it’s going to be the hardest, when nobody will want to support you, when the market is against you. And in these moments, it’s incredibly important to have a person who

Constantin Kogan (09:46.024)

is basically you’re person that you consciously decided that no matter what you go till the end and you make it a success.

John Biggs (09:53.582)

I mean, have you ever was give me an example of someone who who didn’t fulfill that for you.

Constantin Kogan (10:00.043)

Well, I don’t want to put names, right? But I would say, I should say if you read statistics in traditional VC companies that are well-funded, let’s imagine even they found product market fit and everything, one of the third aspects why companies fail is because of the pure misunderstanding and quarrels between the teams, right? And the founding team. So it’s an ego issue, right?

John Biggs (10:03.918)

We’ll just kick. Yeah, sure sure sure

Constantin Kogan (10:29.578)

There are people who are money driven, there are people who are purpose driven. When you are purpose driven, like you’re always trying to ways how to mitigate certain conflicts, how to find a way to harmonize a relationship, even though you might disagree on very particular topics, right? Very tactical, pragmatic business decisions, but still respect.

another person who might disagree with you. And then you find out that some people besides can be brilliant, analytical, and very active in business. They might not have, let’s say, what we call in a common sense, like high emotional intelligence. And that equals to...

bigger misunderstanding, right? When you like, again, marriage is probably one of the most like relevant examples when two people, let’s say they’re not on the same page, it creates like an environment where you might be successful in other aspects of life. But when you come back home, let’s say, and you were not like feeling.

that it’s the most supportive environment, then everything else becomes challenging. It becomes, I wouldn’t call it obsolete, but I would say it becomes irrelevant. that’s, would say, the most important example. whenever you’re picking people who you want to go with, and by the way, that’s also...

relevant for the partnerships, right? People who will be, let’s say, your investors or people who will be your customers, who one of the biggest ones. That’s one of the most important aspects. Are you in the same page? Do you have the same values? Is it like, are you going to be able to work long term together?

John Biggs (12:21.326)

Okay, yeah, fascinating. So what do you do to test people before you trust them?

Constantin Kogan (12:30.121)

You know, it might sound funny, but I don’t think there’s a way to test it. I really don’t. think it’s some... somehow it’s a gut feeling, you know, like it’s when you pick a partner you see immediately, like whether there’s gonna be potential conflict and whether you’re gonna be able to navigate this conflict so that you come out...

the same as you started your relationship. And yeah, sometimes it’s more about the examples of life, the practical issues that help you. For example, my current business partner, know each other for 17 years. So we’ve been through a lot of hardships. We know how would each one of us react.

And sometimes you know a person from an industry or somebody referred this person to you and you meet for the first time, you think, oh, wow, it’s a great idea. We can make a lot of money together. But eventually, when a serious conflict situation arrives, like maybe small things you can dodge or you can raise above those issues, but then the big one destroys everything. And it’s impossible to know in advance. That’s the irony of life.

So you have to just have, mean, some people do psychometric analysis, like astrological analysis, right? I don’t believe it works. It’s just a matter of that you agree from the get-go. What are you going to do? Not if, but when the issue is going to arrive.

John Biggs (14:13.43)

OK, very interesting.

How do you make decisions on what to invest in, what to buy, that sort of thing? Like, let’s say we’re talking to an entrepreneur right now. What would you be looking at when you beat them?

Constantin Kogan (14:29.961)

Well, as I mentioned, right now we’re mostly focusing on liquid market, right?

John Biggs (14:34.382)

Well, yeah, but yeah, but like before or just in general, because I mean, we have fairly.

Constantin Kogan (14:40.677)

Before as a startup, same, I look at the people a lot. Before I looked at technology and the scalability, whether it can be 10x, 100x idea, whether it’s a good timing, whether the market is ready, when they have a product market fit and they have some traction, whether they have some revenue or some goods, I don’t know.

downloads or like you know any like monthly average users like daily average users like you know that’s sorry active users right so but nowadays I actually look at the people more mostly like after investing in 80 projects and realizing that most of the startups are just statistically like they will fail like so the only question now remains in my head is like whether this is the right team to execute the vision

The idea can be incredible. The vision can be also like, you know, right on time, like on point. You have like backing, like, you know, of the top VCs or like angel investors. But then you look at the people and you think, okay, well, are they are in a good place, like in their life? Do they have enough experience? Are they motivated enough? Because motivation of founders can be also very different.

One founder can have, I don’t know, two previous exits and for him it’s like more of a like he really wants to change the world while other can it can be his first startup and he’s gonna grind to make it happen no matter what just because like he wants to you know prove himself like and there is other scenarios where people already just do it

John Biggs (16:12.398)

Mm-hmm.

Constantin Kogan (16:18.372)

for reasons because they need to do it, because there was a merger or because somebody told them that’s going to be a great opportunity. So that’s the most important, think, right now. You look at the people, you have multiple meetings, and you try to analyze whether they’re going to be the right fit for this particular idea to execute it.

John Biggs (16:40.47)

And for folks in your boat, they start up? Should they start a podcast or would you recommend it? Or is it a is it too is it a pain?

Constantin Kogan (16:44.169)

You know, starting a podcast is first of all, you have to think about a starting a business. I mean, you know, better than anyone else, it’s a very challenging endeavor. It requires a lot of time.

John Biggs (16:53.39)

Mm-hmm.

Constantin Kogan (17:00.173)

not always I will pay out immediately for five years. I haven’t been able to monetize it. I was just doing it for my own passion, right? You know, because I truly believe that learning from other great minds was something that I wanted to. And if at least like a few hundred people will be inspired by that, that was my motivation. But then you realize, okay, well, like you spend your own time, you spend resources, right?

you we’re spending right now, you allocate half an hour of your valuable time in life, right? Then you’re going to spend time on editing, right? Then you’re going to spend time on distribution. And then you ask yourself, is this going to be monetizable because you spend all this resources and you hope at some point it will be. And if you don’t have a clear answer when and how it’s going to happen, then the question is like, how long you’re going to last. Statistically, most of the podcasters who

go into this journey, they don’t last more than 30 episodes. So if you’re over 30 episodes and let’s say you get into 50 to 100, that’s already, that means you’re a survivor. The question is how big you want to go. That’s all.

John Biggs (18:14.74)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. mean, think I’ve got 260 or something like that. So I feel like I’m a survivor, but I’m in the same boat where it’s in terms of monetization is kind of silly. so where can people find what you’re working on?

Constantin Kogan (18:27.784)

Holistic investments you can Google my name Konstantin Kogan and holistic investments. I am an Apple podcast Spotify. I have seven other platforms There’s also a YouTube version of it right there. I put her telegram Instagram the short version of it YouTube obviously the full

So I’m doing right now in studio in New York. if any of your listeners think that you’re a great potential guest or you want to refer someone, feel free to go to my website, constantnikogon.com and there’s a form you can submit someone and I’m like my team would be happy to review it and come back to you. And yeah, it’s mostly relationship based nowadays. for example, yesterday I met co-founder of Venmo.

honestly was not planning to do that, right? And then I was very inspired, he’s building a new project and I was so excited about his vision that I want to support him. So I invited him immediately, the first moment we met. There are others who takes time, it’s a publicly traded company, so it takes me three months to book them, right? So I’m very open-minded to talk to anyone here, constructive feedback about the format, about the questions.

Sound, light.

John Biggs (19:50.478)

All right, very cool. Constantin, thank you for joining us.

Constantin Kogan (19:52.786)

Thank you so much.

John Biggs (19:54.382)

All right, this has been Keep Going. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next episode.

On this episode of Innovators, I spoke with Jason Ambrose of People.ai about what “agentic AI” actually means, why sales data is messier than most people think, and why blindly trusting large language models is a mistake.

People.ai has been around long enough to see multiple waves of enterprise software come and go. Now it’s repositioning itself squarely in the agent era.

Most CRM systems tell you what was entered. They don’t tell you what’s actually happening.

People.ai takes a different approach. Instead of relying on manual updates, their AI analyzes the communications that define modern sales, emails, Slack messages, meetings, chat transcripts. The system maps that activity to accounts, contacts, and opportunities.

That sounds straightforward until you scale it up.

If you’re a startup selling to a small business, maybe one salesperson is talking to one buyer about one product. That’s simple. But when Microsoft sells to Verizon, you might have dozens of people on both sides, across legal, technical, procurement, and executive roles. Conversations happen everywhere. Mapping that complexity into a clean CRM record is hard.

That’s where People.ai claims it shines. It uses its own AI models, trained on billions of transactions, to reconstruct what’s really going on inside a sales organization.

What Is an Agent, Really?

We talked about the shift from chatbots to agents.

A chatbot answers a question. An agent has an objective.

Jason framed it in terms of business process automation. Old-school automation works when the logic is predictable. If this, then that. Stay inside one system, follow a defined workflow.

Agents step in when reasoning is required. They cut across systems. They pursue a goal. They have to decide what to do next.

But that only works if they’re plugged into real expertise.

Jason made a useful distinction. Public LLMs are trained on public data. Enterprise expertise lives in private systems. If you want an agent to act intelligently inside a company, it needs access to proprietary data. That’s a big trust ask. You’re effectively saying, “Let our AI read your emails.”

That’s not a small decision.

Avoiding “Build Trust With Stakeholders”

Anyone who has used a generic LLM for business advice has seen the problem. You ask for guidance and you get vague platitudes. “Build trust.” “Accelerate the deal.” “Engage the customer.”

That’s not actionable.

Jason argues that this is where expert agents come in. Instead of spitting out generalized advice, they ground recommendations in specific deal data. Who hasn’t responded in three weeks? Which technical blocker hasn’t been addressed? Where did the last conversation stall?

Without that grounding, AI defaults to corporate fortune-cookie language.

The Capital Markets Reality

We also touched on fundraising.

SaaS is being repriced. Public markets adjusted first, and private markets followed. Companies that once enjoyed premium multiples are now being reevaluated in light of AI disruption.

Capital is flowing into AI-native plays. If you look like “just another SaaS company,” you need a credible AI story. If you genuinely sit at the center of AI transformation, you’re in a stronger position.

People.ai is not currently raising, but Jason sees the shift clearly. The market is asking who is being disrupted by AI and who is using it to build something new.

Is AI Replacing Jobs?

It’s the obvious question.

Jason’s take was pragmatic. Technology changes work. It always has. He remembers the early days of the web and the anxiety that came with it. Some jobs disappear. Most jobs change.

His line stuck with me: people should work with people, and let AI do the rest.

Sales, at its core, is still about relationships. AI can summarize, surface risks, and suggest next steps. It can’t replace trust, empathy, or judgment. At least not yet.

If you’re in sales and you haven’t started using AI, Jason’s advice is simple.

Start.

Use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever tool you prefer. Have it rewrite emails. Summarize meeting notes. Draft follow-ups.

But don’t copy and paste.

He pointed out something many executives are quietly thinking: if you send a clearly AI-generated email without tailoring it, you’re signaling that you didn’t invest the time. And if you didn’t invest the time, why should the recipient?

AI can amplify your work. It can’t replace the part that makes you human.

People.ai is betting that the future of sales is agentic, cross-system, and grounded in real communications data. Not just dashboards, but reasoning systems that understand what’s actually happening inside complex deals.

Whether you buy that vision or not, one thing is clear. The next phase of enterprise AI won’t be about novelty. It will be about integration, trust, and measurable outcomes.

And that’s a much harder problem than writing clever emails.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to the Innovators show about amazing people doing very cool things. I’m John Biggs. Today on the show we have Jason Ambrose from People.ai. It’s agentic and it’s for sales teams, but why don’t you add to that, Jason, welcome.

Jason Ambrose (00:24.482)

Yeah, thanks, John. So what People.ai does is our AI figures out what’s happening in a sales organization by looking at the communications between your field and your customers. So we analyze emails, chat transcripts, meetings, Slack messages, and the like to turn that beyond just the data to what’s actually happening. How does that

how do you find the answers of what’s happening in the organization? And we provide that either to humans or to agents. So that’s been our big shift this year is to realize that the stuff that we were doing for humans in CRM is also very relevant when you have agents trying to figure out what’s happening in sales.

John Biggs (01:04.094)

So let’s explain agents to folks who might not even understand what’s going on. So the idea originally was that you had a chat bot. You asked it something, and it responded to you. But now we’re talking about agents, which are supposed to be autonomous to a degree. So how do you guys describe those, and how do you use them?

Jason Ambrose (01:24.086)

Yeah. And hey, look, you know, I may not have everything right on this too, but at least the way that I think about it is maybe starting from a business process automation, right? So, you know, for, for periods of time when we had predictable workflows and we knew, you know, sort of if then else, there’s not thinking that happens there, but we could automate work if that had to happen.

John Biggs (01:28.188)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jason Ambrose (01:48.302)

In the case of agents, that now becomes something where they have some chain of thought, they have some reasoning. So they know they have an objective or a purpose that they’re trying to work through. They have to figure out how to get that done. So when there’s a little bit more, you know, thinking, reasoning that needs to happen to figure out how to get that objective, that suits an agent. What I think we’re seeing with customers is they’re figuring out how to unlock that for

work that needs to get done across a lot of different systems, right? So, know, BPA, business process automation, or what you have in your workflow tools that tends to say within the silo of a system from data to business roles to presentation layer to humans. When you start to cut across the systems, that’s where there’s been big opportunities for agents.

John Biggs (02:37.214)

So in this particular case, you guys are focusing on sales leads, that sort of thing. So you basically take every single data point that you have and say, this person, I don’t know, emailed you two weeks ago and also was tweeting this and is interested in this. So why don’t you give him a ring? Is that generally how it works, or what’s the?

Jason Ambrose (02:56.376)

That’s yeah, that’s really close. Yeah. I think the difference is, you know, let’s think about two different types of selling, right? you could be a startup and you’re selling to a small business. That’s, know, pretty much one buyer. So, you know, if you think about it in the context of CRM, you’ve got one salesperson. You’re selling to one buyer at one account and you’re selling one product that that is pretty simple to figure out, right? Where it gets more complicated is if you’re.

Microsoft selling to Verizon just to pick two big companies. You might have 30 or 40 people or more on the Microsoft side. You might have 30 or 40 people on the Verizon side answering different technical questions, having different conversations about different elements of your business relationship and how you match those activities to records in CRM that represent, you know, here’s a person that we’re talking to, here’s the account that we’re talking to.

you know, here’s the specific sales opportunity that becomes really hard to do properly. And that’s, that’s where we, that’s where we shine. And that’s where we have, you know, pretty large customers like Red Hat, Verizon as a customer and some others.

John Biggs (04:09.712)

Would you be able to still do this without AI? Would this exist if we didn’t have this kind of, I don’t know, synthesis, right?

Jason Ambrose (04:15.798)

It would be really difficult, right? So we have our own AI that’s applied to do the math to figure this out. And it’s learned from looking at billions of transactions over the years, right? The second piece, I think, is how you integrate or interface with other systems. So you mentioned the chat interface. So a human does want to do that, right? So we put this alongside sales opportunity record.

If you want to get the full story, you can ask the chat bot, are the risks in these deals or what’s happening in this account? Now with MCP, that same type of interaction can happen from an agent to our system. So the agent asks those questions and works through its own reasoning model to ask those things. So if you want these agents to be effective, you do need AI helping them on their side with the reasoning and ours on our side answering those questions so that they get to an answer that’s actionable.

The thing we see that happens a lot is if you just try to throw LLMs at what’s happening, it’ll say things like, you know, build trust with a stakeholder, right? Or, you know, accelerate this deal. Like that doesn’t really do anything for you, right?

John Biggs (05:26.078)

See, that’s a good question. mean, it feels like traditional AI is kind of elides over a lot of information, right? It kind of says like, it’ll give you like, what a good idea. Well, I think that by moving forward this way, you’re going to do X, Z. How do you avoid that sort of like ham handed optimism that usually pops out of these things?

Jason Ambrose (05:47.446)

Yeah, I think that that’s where you see the place for what I would call expert agents, right? So some people call those like the first agent. so I’ve heard the metaphor of like, it’s a really smart intern. It doesn’t really know much, but it’s smart and figures things out. Right. So you have to work with proprietary data to be able to find meaningful answers and working within the enterprise, having the trust where the enterprise will allow you to go.

find that information and turn it into something useful to those agents within the enterprise is the important complementary piece to all of those. The LLMs are working off of all the public information, but that expertise really sits in the private information. So how do I, as a customer, get comfortable with allowing somebody else’s AI to look through all that stuff? It’s a big ask from us. Let us go read all your emails and provide these answers. There’s a lot to do there.

John Biggs (06:37.992)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, exactly.

John Biggs (06:45.192)

So how is it raising for an AI company right now? I mean, you guys have been around a little bit, so you’re probably not looking right now. is it easier? Have you noticed that it was easier than, I don’t know, some of your other ventures?

Jason Ambrose (06:58.006)

Yeah, so you’re right. So we’re not looking right now. But I guess what I would see in the capital markets is certainly everything going on with SaaS. The way that I look at it is the market was pricing in success with SaaS that it’s re-evaluating. And you start with public markets, and that carries down into ABC rounds. And that capital shifting to AI right now, a lot of that is going to the big players.

The capital markets are saying AI is posing risk to these businesses that had it baked in. So we have to reflect that on the valuations. And we want to see the opportunities to say, how do we invest in AI and the potential that could be there in that? So to the extent that you fit in the latter case, I think you’re having an easier time with raises. If you fit into the former case, you have to tell the story of how you’re going from looking like a SASCO to looking like.

John Biggs (07:45.884)

Interesting.

Jason Ambrose (07:57.269)

know, NAIA play in this world.

John Biggs (08:00.53)

I don’t think you guys have this problem, but what would you say to folks who are saying, I don’t know, this is replacing our jobs, they’re laying us off because of this, et cetera.

Jason Ambrose (08:11.47)

Yeah, I think it’s changing. It’s like anything else, right? And you know, when you haven’t, I remember I was there in the early days on the internet, you know, when the webs first started coming out, I was actually building computer networks and downloaded Mosaic out for the first time it came out. And there was a lot of anxiety about what might change or whether it was going to change. think there was more skepticism back then of it’s this just a fad, is it really going to happen? But, you you think about people who were pushing around inter office mail, you know,

That went away, Print stuff that you were publishing. It’s not that the activities went away. It’s that they changed in the way that they were done. So I think it’s going to be simpler, similar, but also simpler in the sense, we talk about, I have this phrase, we want people to work with people in AI to do the rest, right? We’re not made to sit there and look at browsers and look at spreadsheets. We’re made to socialize and communicate. And that’s the stuff that I think.

particularly in the sales organization, we will keep doing and do more of. So in that sense, I think it will be better now. Can you say that AI is replacing or changing these jobs?

I guess to some extent that that’s a viewpoint that some people have, but I think there are some macro trends that are also behind it.

John Biggs (09:33.342)

What would you tell a, I don’t know, sales professional right now who needs to know a little bit about AI, isn’t using you guys, just what should they start looking at? What should they start trying to understand?

Jason Ambrose (09:46.382)

The biggest thing is just start using it. Just start working with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, pick your tool. Start thinking about and starting with, how can it help me rewrite some emails? How can it help me summarize some information I’m getting? That’s the easy stuff that you can do with the LLM. And you’ll get a sense of what it’s good at and what it’s not good at doing. But I think with that, what everybody

marketers and sellers need to be conscious of is make sure you’re not copy and pasting and just sending out what the LLMs are telling you. Your job and your uniqueness is going to be tailoring it and understanding what the customer wants to hear. mean, you know, as a CEO, I get so many emails that, you know, it’s clear that it was just straight pass through of what came out of Tat GPT. And my view is like, look, if you can’t spend the time,

thinking about what I want to hear in this email, why should I give you the time to respond? understanding that it can help you, but also you need to still put in the work to tailor the message is the best path for you to navigate this if you’re just starting on that, figuring out AI and what it means for your journey.

John Biggs (11:03.878)

So the website is people.ai. People should just go on and try to get a demo.

Jason Ambrose (11:07.598)

Yeah.

Jason Ambrose (11:11.182)

Yeah, well, come check out the content. We have some demo streams where you can get a sense of what the product does. If you want to tailor it some more, understand how we can apply directly for you, fill out the form, give us a call, and we’ll help you out.

John Biggs (11:13.628)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (11:25.726)

All right, perfect. Well, thank you, Jason. It’s been fascinating. right, this has been The Innovators. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next episode.

Jason Ambrose (11:29.1)

Yeah, sounds good, John.

This week on Keep Going, I talked with Chantelle Shakila Tiagi, the founder of Tiagi, a creative production and artist consultancy that works across fashion, beauty, and lifestyle. What struck me was not the scale of the work, which spans London, Los Angeles, and Mumbai, but how unplanned the entire thing was.

Tiagi did not start as a master plan. It started as momentum.

Chantelle came up through fashion and production, worked with a boutique agency, then went freelance because she needed a break. That break turned into opportunity. One shoot led to another. Porter Magazine. Big talent. Serious campaigns. At a certain point, the work was too big to pretend it was just freelancing. She formed a company not to build an empire but to protect herself. The structure followed the work, not the other way around.

That pattern comes up again and again on this show. People imagine founders sitting down with a five year plan, a pitch deck, and a vision board. In reality, most businesses worth talking about start because someone is good at something, other people notice, and demand quietly grows until it cannot be ignored anymore.

Tiagi’s model is simple in theory and hard in practice. Brands come with a brief. Sometimes it is detailed. Sometimes it is a single image. Tiagi builds the team. Photographers. Directors of photography. Set designers. Creative directors. Producers. Fifty moving parts, all of which have to work together. Chantelle described producers as conductors. The orchestra only sounds good if the right people are playing the right instruments.

This matters more now, not less.

We talked about the DIY turn in creative work. Ring lights. Instagram reels. Cheap tools. Anyone can make something now. The fear is that expertise no longer matters. Chantelle’s take was calm and practical. People always want the real thing. They want best in class. You can cut corners, but it shows. Quality reveals itself over time, especially when brands are putting serious money behind campaigns.

The same logic applies to AI. We talked about virtual models, synthetic environments, and brands experimenting with fully generated shoots. Her view was not defensive. AI exists. Ignoring it is how you get left behind. Tiagi will use it where it makes sense, especially in post production. If AI can create a background instead of flying a crew to a beach, that can be useful. But the idea that all shoots will become synthetic misses the point. Production is human. It is logistical. It is relational. It is physical. AI cannot run an event, manage a crew, or solve problems on set when things go wrong.

The more interesting part of the conversation came when we talked about growth.

Tiagi looks big from the outside. Big brands. Big names. Multiple offices. Internally, it is small. Chantelle kept it that way on purpose. Contractors expand and contract based on projects. The core team stays tight. COVID reinforced this lesson. Many companies realized they were carrying internal weight they did not need. Tiagi leaned into being nimble. Boutique turned out to be an advantage.

This is where the title of the show really fits. Keep Going does not mean keep scaling. It means keep moving forward without losing your footing.

Chantelle was honest about the tradeoffs. She rarely produces shoots herself anymore. Her days are contracts, meetings, sales, and management. This is a shock for a lot of founders, especially in creative fields. You start because you love the work. If things go well, you end up doing less of that work. Her advice was blunt. You have to learn to love the rest of it, managing people, building careers, making decisions, and taking responsibility. Otherwise, you will resent the thing you built.

What stood out most was her emphasis on doing good. Tiagi makes a point of supporting underdogs and bringing new talent into rooms with established names. That is not marketing copy. It is how they build teams. Access is power in creative industries. If you have it, you have an obligation to use it carefully.

We also talked about being an operator. Chantelle now has to handle contracts, billing and legal details: the unglamorous parts. Chantelle likes that work. Producers have to. It is a thankless role. You only hear from people when something breaks. But when a massive project comes together, when the shoot lands, when the team pulls it off, the satisfaction is real. The admin is the price of that feeling.

There was no grand lesson at the end of this conversation. No blueprint. No hustle sermon. Just a clear pattern.

Do the work well. Let momentum build. Do not grow faster than you understand. Stay small longer than feels comfortable. Accept that success will pull you away from the thing you started with. Decide whether you are okay with that before it happens.

On this episode of The Innovators, I sat down with Mitchell Jones, founder of Lava, to talk about one of the least glamorous and most urgent problems in AI right now, getting paid without going broke.

Mitchell is building what amounts to billing infrastructure for AI products. If you are running agents, LLM powered tools, or anything where compute costs change by the minute, you already know the problem. Traditional payment systems were built for flat subscriptions. AI is not a flat subscription business.

Lava sits in the middle. It routes AI model calls through a gateway, tracks real time usage and cost, and lets companies price that usage in a way that actually preserves margins. You can choose how much you want to make per action, per credit, or per customer, and Lava handles the rest, including paying through to the underlying model providers.

What makes this urgent is something most founders are only now learning the hard way. In AI, your best customer can be your worst customer. Power users can quietly rack up massive compute bills while paying the same monthly fee as everyone else. That model worked in SaaS. It breaks fast in AI.

Mitchell’s insight is simple and hard to argue with. AI behaves more like a utility than a software license. Utilities are metered. SaaS pricing is not. Lava exists to close that gap.

We also talked about where the company came from. Mitchell has spent his career deep in payments, running Facebook’s digital wallet in emerging markets and founding a prior fintech company before starting Lava earlier this year. He did not wake up one day and decide to build an AI company. He talked to customers. Over and over. When everyone said they were duct taping Stripe together and hated it, he knew there was a real problem.

The conversation also veered into founder advice, especially for people outside the usual tech pipelines. Mitchell grew up in Dayton, Ohio. His path ran through finance internships, late CS coursework, Dropbox, Facebook, and then startups. His advice was consistent throughout, do not stare at the top of the mountain. Focus on the next step. Compounding effort matters more than pedigree.

Lava has moved fast. The company landed its first customers within months, raised a $5.8 million round, and now works with AI startups and legacy companies trying to shift from flat SaaS pricing to usage based models.

If you are building anything with AI under the hood and have felt that creeping sense of dread when the compute bill hits, this episode will feel uncomfortably familiar.

You can check out what Mitchell and his team are building at lava.so.

I caught up with Marcos Bravo, a Chilean guy living in Portugal, who has spent most of his adult life bouncing between tech, sales, marketing, and whatever paid the bills. He is 46 now. He has a family. And he is in that phase where you look at your work and ask a blunt question: Is this all I am showing my kids, that life is just paying bills.

Marcus is not doing the clean midlife pivot. He is doing the messy version. He wrote a book because he had time, he was unemployed, and he needed to put the stories somewhere or he was going to lose his mind. He got the idea after seeing a tweet about how, with everything going on, we might see another Anne Frank “in our backyard.” That stuck with him. He started writing a kids book, got blocked, then wrote a different story that took shape. It became Ana Luz’s Diary, about a girl named Anna hiding in an attic with her brother and aunt, trying to stay quiet because noise brings the wrong people. He ran it past his daughter, she signed off, and he shipped it.

At the same time, he is doing video work for companies because that is what keeps things running. He is starting an ice cream brand with his wife. He is putting together a punk band in Portugal. He is trying things, not because it is efficient, but because he is trying to figure out what feels like his life. He said he does not want to be a one road guy. When something feels right, he wants to take a shot.

We also talked about why storytelling still matters when AI can generate words all day. His point was simple. The missing part is connection. You can generate a story, but you cannot replace the feeling of a real person looking you in the eye and saying something that lands. He ties it back to work, too. In marketing and sales, if you do not know people, you cannot connect to people. Your story falls flat.

He is also clear-eyed about aging in tech. He worries about how long he can keep doing what he does, and whether the industry will move on without him. His answer is to stop chasing status. He does not want to manage people. He wants to deliver a specific thing well, mentor when asked, and stay useful. He thinks experience will matter again, not as a title, but as real history you can apply.

The part that stuck with me was how he thinks about safety. He does not judge people who stay in the cubicle. He just does not want to end up like his dad, who spent decades in one company and now, at 75, feels like he missed his chance to do more. Marcos wants to look back and say, that was a lot, that was worth it.

He framed his goals in a way I liked. He wants to give his kids a few core memories they will actually keep. A trip to Japan for his daughter. A steak in New York for his son, yes, Peter Luger. He wants those things, and he wants to be able to say his own life was good too. He even mentioned he stopped drinking and still enjoys life, which is its own kind of data point.

This is the whole point. You do not need a clean plan. You need motion. You try things. You keep what works. You drop what does not. You pay the bills, but you do not let that become the only story your kids learn from you. Marcos is doing it in a way that looks chaotic from the outside, but it has a clear center. He is trying to make sure his life is not just a job history, it is a life.

His book is Ana Luz’s Diary, by Marcos Bravo. If you want to see what he made, it is on Amazon.

Transcript

John Biggs (00:27.042)

Welcome back to Keep Going, a podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. Today on the show we have Marcus Bravo. He’s Chilean. He lives in Portugal now. I met him in Poland when we were pros approximately, I think, six years old, I think. That’s what it feels like at this point, right? So welcome, Marcus. You’re an author, you’re a marketer, you’ve done loads of work.

Marcos Bravo C. (00:46.072)

Yeah, something like that. Yeah.

John Biggs (00:55.252)

over the years with multiple clients, multiple places, and now you’re kind of doing your own brand. You’re kind of building your own presence. So why don’t you tell me what you’re working on.

Marcos Bravo C. (01:03.398)

So, well, I like you said, I moved to Portugal from Poland two years already here. And yeah, I needed to start something else. I mean, felt that I was getting old for being the tech guy or the sales guy. And I just thought, well, let’s see what I can do. Right. So a mix of crazy stuff. You try to do everything that you think that you feel that it can.

be sort of meaningful to yourself, but you really realize that you don’t know what’s meaningful to yourself. So you have to rediscover all of that. one of the things I’m doing now, I just wrote a book, which was on my bucket list, I guess. I wrote a book. I’m starting with video again. I started putting together a punk rock band here in Portugal. mean, Jesus, I’ve been trying to do everything just to figure out.

what’s the right thing to do. And when you have a family, you have to figure out how to the bills. So I’m still having an affair with tech. But basically, I’m just trying to still discover things when I’m 46, which is I don’t know if it’s right or not, but it’s weird.

John Biggs (02:06.734)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (02:11.011)

What is that impetus to discover as we get older?

Marcos Bravo C. (02:16.756)

I guess I get so used to, well, I have to figure out how to pay the bills and that’s it. I started figuring out, well, what am I showing my kids? Is it all about money? Is it all about just to go through life without trying to not die of hunger? And I wanted to do something that is meaningful for me as well. I had to sort of ask permission. It’s like, do you mind if I don’t do this?

crap, I make less money, but I do something else that might be more meaningful. And that’s what I’m doing. I mean, the whole book came out of almost an accident, just like watching videos of people writing books, trying to come up with an idea. And because I couldn’t write the book that I wanted to write, I ended up writing another book that ended up taking shape. And now it’s on sale. mean, every little step that I’m doing is just sort of showing me something new. And like you said, we’ve been around for a while. We’ve been doing tech.

John Biggs (02:48.429)

Mm-hmm.

Marcos Bravo C. (03:15.374)

all the stuff for many years, but there’s always a space for something new, something better, something meaningful.

John Biggs (03:25.378)

What does it mean to be meaningful, right? So your book is Analyst’s Diary, which is a kid’s book, right? And it’s about a little girl, why don’t you tell us the story?

Marcos Bravo C. (03:37.382)

So basically, Andalus came out, I was writing a kids book, I was writing a bunch of stories, like very cool, fun, weird, scary, whatever. And then when I was blocked, I was like, well, I need to write something else. And I remember seeing a tweet right before started writing. It says like, with all this happening around the world, we soon we’re to have an Anne Frank in our backyard. And I was like, right, well.

What if Anne Frank’s still around? There are many Anne Franks around the world, especially with how things are. So I started to write the story, like, how would I see from maybe like a little bit of a Latin view or like trying to add my own experiences into this little girl called Anna who got stuck in the attic with her brother and her auntie and they’re trying to figure out how to be quiet because noise will bring more people, will bring the bad people.

John Biggs (04:06.926)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (04:29.976)

Mm-hmm.

Marcos Bravo C. (04:30.38)

And that ended up taking very nice shape. I started adding all of the things that I knew of storytelling. And I created a story that is maybe not an easy to read story, but it made sense to me and it made sense. mean, my daughter had to approve it. So it made sense to her too. It worked.

John Biggs (04:48.782)

Is the goal to just do this? Is the goal to allow this to be part of your personality, part of how you grow? Do you think it’s Marcos Bravo’s for the rest of your life? Or is it Marcos Bravo who does everything else that you’ve done before,

Marcos Bravo C. (05:11.43)

I think it has to be a mix. The first thing I realized for sure is that I don’t want to be the one road guy. But every time or anytime there’s something that feels good, that feels right. The world, let’s give it a shot. For sure I’m writing more. I love writing and I’ve been writing since I was a kid and this is the first time I actually said, and this is because I was unemployed. I’m like, I have all this time in my hand. I need to do something, otherwise I’m gonna go crazy.

So I need to put stories in there and it felt right and that’s definitely something I want to keep exploring and we’re going to keep doing.

John Biggs (05:52.014)

Tell me about storytelling in general. How do you use storytelling in your career? How do you use it to, well, mean, first off, beat AI, right? Because right now we can blast out. We could feasibly blast out your book if we gave it the idea. We would just blast it out. It wouldn’t be any good. But how do you keep that humanity? How do you keep that aspect of storytelling?

Marcos Bravo C. (06:09.989)

Yeah.

Marcos Bravo C. (06:16.271)

Well, mean, AI, even though it’s been helpful with many things, I I use it quite often for work, but it was a huge threat for me because I mean, my whole career beside marketing and sense of whatever is because of storytelling is because I found that I can tell stories that people want to listen. And rediscovering that people, yeah, they’re okay with that. can create stories in AI like that. But it’s this connection that

is missing, like you and I talking, you and I look at each other and having that feeling, that’s irreplaceable. That’s not going to happen anytime soon. It might happen. Absolutely. mean, anything can happen. But I think the reason people connect to other people is because they see beyond the story, right? They get to feel something because of the story. And I don’t think that’s something AI can really do well.

Especially when you tell the story, can read something fun that the AI created that can come up with super cool ideas. the reason why I keep getting hired for making videos for companies is for this, right? Because I can look at you in the eye and say something that it will get you to think, it will get you to connect, it will get you to relate. And I think that’s the part of storytelling that fascinates me that when you know people, and this is something that marketers and sales, they will definitely know

John Biggs (07:26.52)

Mm-hmm.

Marcos Bravo C. (07:40.632)

you have to know people in order to connect to people. If you don’t know who are you talking to well, your story is just going to fall off the cliff and not going to go anywhere.

John Biggs (07:51.534)

Okay.

Does doing all this stuff reduce you in the eyes of a professional class? I think you and I are similar in that we do a lot of things. I’ve written whatever, I’ve written 10 books, I’ve been a marketer, I’ve been a journalist, I’ve been doing all kinds of things. If you look at my LinkedIn, it’s like a Bible. There’s 50 stories in there. What do you think about that idea that

If you’re not focused on one thing, if you’re not focused on one startup for X amount of time, then you’re essentially wasting your time. You’re not a good, you’re not a professional person.

Marcos Bravo C. (08:35.462)

I think growth cannot be unidirectional. It cannot be just one path. You don’t get to grow that way. You just get to walk. I feel that, remember my first job, there was something that they told us straight away. We only want you for three to five years. We don’t want you more than that. Because then you’re going to burn out and you’re not going be good to us. So commit to work with us for at least three years. And since then, back in 2000, I get to like...

I cannot do something for that long. I kind of focus that much into one thing because then I don’t learn anymore. Right now I get to work with 20 year old people that they’re teaching me how to how they connect, how they write stories. Right. But but that’s the thing. I mean, I I’m proud of my LinkedIn as well. Like, I’m proud of all those that crazy stories that are there. I mean, from beer, a character in Disney World like.

John Biggs (09:17.838)

Mm-hmm.

Marcos Bravo C. (09:30.86)

any random stuff that I in my life has been taking me here. And the place that I am right now, even though it’s been hard the last four or five months, is the place that I want to be. I wouldn’t change it for the world. I am glad of taking detours in easier ways and harder ways. But it shaped what I have now, which is exactly what I want it to have.

John Biggs (09:56.358)

Mm Do you think do you think you’re lucky in that you took that detour? Like a lot of people kind of stay in a stay in a they’re cubicle, right? But I mean, a lot of those people are making $500,000 a year and driving a driving a Porsche, whereas you’re writing books. I’m up here in an attic recording podcasts.

Marcos Bravo C. (10:15.536)

Thanks.

But I guess it will depend. I I think people don’t know any better. And I don’t mean it that in a bad way. mean, my dad worked almost 50 years in the same company, same cubicle, wearing a suit for all of those days, A tie and everything. And now he’s discovering that he had so much more to do. And he hates himself because he didn’t do it before. And he’s getting sick now and he’s 75. And he’s like...

John Biggs (10:41.966)

Mm-hmm.

Marcos Bravo C. (10:46.438)

I don’t want that. want to look back at certain point and say like, Tim, I did so much. That was crazy. I think that will be the ideal thing to say before I leave this world is like, look back and say, that was crazy. But I wouldn’t blame it people, right? I wouldn’t blame it on other people. Like if they want to have one path, it’s safety. And somehow also like...

John Biggs (11:07.476)

Safety, right? Safety.

Marcos Bravo C. (11:13.254)

It’s not ignorance the world I’m looking for. is not my full language. It’s more of like not knowing any better if you know what I mean.

John Biggs (11:21.954)

Well, you don’t know what the alternative is, If your entire life was about business development, you wanting to become a sous chef at a Michelin star restaurant, kind of hard, right? You kind of doing that pivot. Tell me about aging. Tell me about how you feel now. You’re working with 20-year-olds. You’re in an entirely different world to a degree than what we came up with. It was a different environment, different ways of working, different ways of communicating.

Marcos Bravo C. (11:27.878)

Yeah.

Marcos Bravo C. (11:35.182)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (11:53.214)

I’ve tried, this is my penance, right, to apologize to all the startups that I’ve frustrated. So, and I know that this sort of gentleness, I think, is more important now than it used to be. It used to be us, were hard charging, except for the crypto bros or whatever on Twitter. But tell me about your feeling about aging into an industry that could easily knock you out of it in the next couple years.

if you’re not careful and if the cards aren’t stacked properly.

Marcos Bravo C. (12:21.379)

Marcos Bravo C. (12:24.954)

I mean, it’s scary for sure. Every day I wonder how many more years of making videos for companies I have or how many more years of knowing enough that people want to learn from you. And that’s one of the things, for example, my last job interview was like, well, we have this career path that we can do.

I don’t want to manage anyone. I don’t want to see level position. That’s long gone for me. I’m happy with where I am. If people want to learn from me, I’m happy to mentor, happy to show my experience, but don’t give me more responsibilities. I’m happy with providing a very specific thing for you. And good luck with that. Here’s what you asked me for. If you want to know more, if I can show you something better, I’ll be happy to do so.

I’m trying to limit my knowledge delivery into like, right, what you want from me? Here it is. Do you want more? Let’s talk about it. I think we will have a of a revival of we want experience. We want people with, and I don’t mean stories or like in the storytelling sense, but with history behind it, right? Like people who would be there. Because after all, you can read whatever you want on AI.

John Biggs (13:30.669)

Mm-hmm.

Marcos Bravo C. (13:38.886)

But if you don’t know what it means, if you don’t know how to do it, if you know how to like where that came from, it’s nothing. So I’m taking it easy. know eventually it just there’s no more taking it easy, right? Eventually, I need to figure out a way to what happened after. I mean, I with my wife, we just started an ice cream brand now here in Portugal. So hopefully that’s going to pick up, right? Like, and I’m applying whatever I know marketing into it. But

John Biggs (13:59.17)

Hmm.

Marcos Bravo C. (14:06.224)

But yeah, because I also know that eventually you will be sort of unplugged from this world of business and tech and whatever. So I’m taking it step by step. I don’t know what’s going to happen next year, especially with this world. But I’m trying to enjoy it. Scary, but I’m trying to enjoy it more.

John Biggs (14:28.856)

How does it feel? mean, you’re from Chile. You’re seeing all kinds of messy stuff. I mean, even in Europe, it’s not the friendliest towards outsiders, How are you dealing with that? How are you using that, your identity to your advantage?

Marcos Bravo C. (14:46.63)

I think eventually, I never sort of introduced my I’m not afraid or embarrassed from my background at all. I’m actually very proud. But is is what happened after I left Chile that built who I am, right? Like until I was 20 years old in Chile, I was just smoking weed, going to uni whenever I could and just party every weekend and whatever. But then then everything took a turn to like, right. More I want to do more. I want to see more. I want to see the world.

Chile just got too small. So I started building something new. So when I meet people from anywhere in the world, now I can say, I’ve been there. Where are you from? Yeah, I’ve been there. I hide this. I cooked your food. I’ve done this. Or I’ve seen people from. So it just opens up a whole new thing. So it’s not just like, this is guy from Chile. I don’t even know if he speaks English. Now it becomes like, all right, I’ve seen the world. I can tell you things that you have no clue. And that changed the perception too.

John Biggs (15:26.478)

Mm-hmm.

Marcos Bravo C. (15:46.008)

One of the biggest thing that I was doing always was trying to connect Poland with the US, even though I’m not American, I knew how to talk to American people. I know how to go to Las Vegas and have drinks and close deals that way, But it was because I saw the world. I had to go out of my shell and see what’s happening outside in order to create not a new me, but a better me or something different.

John Biggs (16:10.414)

Mm hmm. I get it. Interesting. So you got the book, you’ve got the ice cream brand. What else is in your head right now?

Marcos Bravo C. (16:19.695)

Yeah.

Marcos Bravo C. (16:23.684)

I mean, whatever time I have off, I mean, I’m doing video for companies, like I said, right? That’s sort of my main, like, bill payer job. But I still get to play punk rock during the weekends with friends and go to events. I sell the ice cream myself. I don’t sit down in the background. And the rest is just to, I want to make sure that I can deliver a couple of.

good core memories to my kids. I know not everything that you do means anything or something. Right. So I want to make sure that the couple of things that they will remember forever. So I’m trying to figure out. I mean, there are probably already some that I’ve done without really thinking. But I don’t know. I want to take my my daughter to Japan. I want to my son to New York because he wants to eat a steak in this big steakhouse that he knows. And for some reason, he’s only nine. Right. But yeah.

John Biggs (17:11.694)

Peter Luger.

Marcos Bravo C. (17:16.826)

That’s, yeah. So.

John Biggs (17:18.134)

Yeah, when you get out here, I’ll take you.

Marcos Bravo C. (17:21.062)

Yeah, no, I to work with them. I like I can’t wait to actually visit again. But that’s the thing. I mean, I just want to I want to make sure that. I deliver to my family this feeling of like that was cool, that was awesome. But I also want to make sure that I can say also, oh, man, my life was awesome. I enjoyed it till the end. And I think I am doing it. I mean, I. I even stopped drinking and I still enjoy it.

which for me was always, So like all of every little step is being like, it’s getting better. I mean, there are awful times that we all go through. But I think you get to stop every so and so and look back and see how high you are and say like, wow, that road was crazy, but here I am. And then you look up and like, s**t, there’s still a lot to go.

John Biggs (17:50.6)

wow.

Marcos Bravo C. (18:17.262)

And then you keep going. those moments that when you stop and turn around and say like, all right, well, it’s been awesome. Let’s keep moving. I think that’s sort of what I’m focusing on right now.

John Biggs (18:29.55)

So book is called Analoosa’s Diary, Marcos Bravo C, which you would look for if you’re looking on Kindle. I’ll put a link to it in the story. But I want people to check that out. Yeah, I wrote my kids two books, but yeah, especially now. I mean, sounds like it’s actually a vital story. Like said, I wrote my kids two books, but I don’t think they even read them. So I think you might have even one up on me, which is pretty cool.

Marcos Bravo C. (18:32.806)

Mm-hmm.

Marcos Bravo C. (18:40.582)

Thank you.

Marcos Bravo C. (18:52.742)

you

Thanks, man.

John Biggs (18:58.638)

Yeah, so this has been great. I’m glad we got to talk for a minute. And I think your view on this whole thing is pretty nice and healthy. Hopefully you don’t hit any walls as you creep up in age. But I don’t think we will. I think we’ll be OK. We made it through this far. think we’ll pull off the rest of the ride.

Marcos Bravo C. (19:14.689)

We’ll get over this.

Marcos Bravo C. (19:22.022)

Absolutely. Absolutely. And thanks for the invitation, I mean, we haven’t catch up in ages and we haven’t seen each other in ages. So it’s good to even through this is cool.

John Biggs (19:31.874)

Mm-hmm. All right. Well, Marcus, thank you for joining us. been great. His new book, Analoos’ Diary, check it out. It’s on Amazon. Pick it up. This has been Keep Going, podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next week.

On this episode of The Innovators, I spoke with Jasper Fu, CEO of CoinSub, about what crypto payments actually look like when you strip away the hype and aim for real adoption.

CoinSub has been operating for roughly two and a half years and has grown to a 22-person team, most of them engineers. The company’s focus is narrow by design. Instead of trying to convince millions of merchants to adopt crypto directly, CoinSub sells infrastructure to payment service providers. These are the companies that already process card payments for thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of merchants. CoinSub’s bet is that adoption happens faster when crypto looks like just another payment option, not a new system merchants have to learn.

Fu framed the problem simply. Crypto and stablecoins are often described as liquid assets, but in practice they are hard to use for everyday payments. Merchants do not want to think about wallets, chains, or conversions. They want money in their bank accounts. CoinSub handles the movement behind the scenes, converting between dollars, Bitcoin, and stablecoins, then packaging that capability so payment processors can offer it under their own brands.

For merchants, the experience is meant to feel familiar. Crypto becomes another icon at checkout, alongside cards or digital wallets. Whether funds settle as stablecoins or dollars is not something the merchant has to manage. Fu compared it to card networks. Merchants do not think about how Visa or Mastercard clears transactions, they just expect it to work.

That distribution strategy also shapes CoinSub’s view of competition. While many crypto payment companies target merchants directly, CoinSub targets the providers upstream. There are billions of dollars flowing through a relatively small number of payment processors, many of which lack the technical capacity to build crypto infrastructure themselves. CoinSub positions itself as a way for those companies to keep pace without rebuilding their stacks.

Usage data suggests there is real demand, even if it remains early. Fu said CoinSub processed roughly $400 million in transaction volume last year. That number varies widely by region and industry, but it reflects actual consumer-to-business payments, not trading or speculation. Some sectors adopt faster than others, including cross-border commerce and industries that struggle to maintain stable card processing relationships.

Fu pushed back on the idea that crypto adoption hinges on hype cycles. He views blockchain and tokenization as infrastructure, a more efficient way to store and move data and value. Speculation and scams, he argued, appear in every new technology wave and do not define the underlying system. In his view, hype draws attention, but utility determines what survives.

Stablecoins are central to CoinSub’s timing. Fu said regulatory clarity, treasury backing, and growing institutional interest have aligned incentives across governments, issuers, and payment networks. Payments and commerce, he said, are the logical next phase after issuance. Once stablecoins exist at scale, the question becomes how people actually use them.

Fu’s path to CoinSub started outside crypto. After leaving a corporate role, he took time off to think about what he wanted to build next. Payments stood out as a place where incremental efficiency could have broad impact. Making money movement cheaper and more accessible, particularly across borders, felt like a net positive use of time and capital.

That mindset also shapes CoinSub’s internal culture. Fu said he prefers the startup environment because it allows for empathy-first leadership and long-term thinking. He believes effort cannot be bought, only invited, and that teams perform better when people are treated as contributors rather than interchangeable resources.

Looking ahead, CoinSub is expanding beyond its initial engineering phase. The company is working to capture more of the payment service provider market while it still has an early mover advantage. Longer term, Fu sees applications beyond checkout, including payouts, invoicing, and potentially ATMs, anywhere money needs to move across systems or borders.

Fu is realistic about maturity. He expects fragmentation before consolidation, with many stablecoins and blockchains competing before a smaller set emerges as dominant. In that environment, CoinSub’s role is to abstract complexity away from customers and let them benefit from whichever systems ultimately win.

Crypto payments, in Fu’s telling, are not about replacing everything overnight. They are about quietly fitting into existing workflows until their presence feels unremarkable. That, more than price swings or headlines, is what adoption looks like.

Transcript

John Biggs (00:07.982)

Welcome back to The Innovators, a podcast about amazing people doing amazing things. Today on the show I have Jasper Fu. He’s the CEO of CoinSub, a stable coin operation. We do a lot of crypto on here, so I’m happy to have somebody back from the crypto world. Welcome, Jasper.

Jasper Fu (00:27.501)

Thanks for having me, John.

John Biggs (00:28.588)

Yeah. So tell us about CoinSub. How long have you been around and what are you up to?

Jasper Fu (00:33.923)

Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve been around for two and a half years. The team is about 22 people now with 17 being engineers. And what we jumped into the space to do is like everyone’s heard of this stable coin crypto blockchain Bitcoin stuff, right? And there’s a variety of value, value props. But what we realized is a lot of it’s just not hitting to the mass market.

We particularly target payment service providers in fintechs, right? A lot of stable coin around, a lot of Bitcoin around, why can’t we pay with it was our first thought. You say it’s liquid, how do we make it liquid? And as we dug into the space, we realized this early, early stage of adoption, there’s a lot of demand from both the merchants, the businesses, as well as these payment providers to be able to offer this, right? But this is totally new tech to them.

And most of the solutions in this space are either going for, hey, directly to the businesses themselves, or they’re these esoteric APIs that are hard for non-technical people to understand. So what we do is we pre-build out the infrastructure so that somebody could go from US dollars to Bitcoin to stable coin to US dollars. And we apply that to different things like payment acceptance and payouts.

and we wrap and package that whole thing up and allow other companies, allow other payment providers who are already selling say card payments to now add this additional capability underneath their own brand.

John Biggs (02:07.726)

Interesting. in a nutshell, is the focus more on stablecoins? Is the focus more on general crypto? What am I as a merchant? So say I’m a merchant, want to sell my widgets online or I want to sell them in the store. What am I doing with you guys? How do you sell to me?

Jasper Fu (02:25.924)

So merchants usually get their payment products through their payment provider. So that’s the interesting insight that we had, right? You usually only want to work with one person and that might be say your stripe or your clover or whatever it is. So we actually sell to the clovers, you know, the clovers of the world, the payment service, the payment processors of the world. But what that looks like for the merchant is

you reach a point of awareness where you’re like, I know that I should probably accept this kind of payment, but at the end of the day, I’m just trying to expand my business and grow my revenue. So for us, it’s just one more thing that gets added on at checkout, and that’s the last thing you have to worry about. Whether it ends up as stable coin or whether it ends up in US dollars in your bank, you shouldn’t have to worry about it. Focus on your business. You don’t worry about how your credit card gets there from Visa or MasterCard, and you don’t worry about how PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Clarion don’t work.

And so that’s the kind of level of adoption we want to bring where people understand that there’s some value there and we just go, great, here you go. Let me make sure that it’s comfortable for you.

John Biggs (03:32.383)

So the icons when you check out are like credit card, don’t know, PayPal, Venmo, Alipay, and then crypto. OK. You’ve got a lot of competition in that space. How is that working out?

Jasper Fu (03:37.997)

with crypto.

Jasper Fu (03:46.244)

So the competition in this space would only apply if the target market is the merchants themselves. There’s very few companies that are actually targeting the payment service providers. If you think about it, there’s hundreds of millions of merchants in the world that capture trillions of dollars of payment volume. But there’s only really thousands of payment service providers, independent sales orgs, and these are the ones that are already kind of selling card processing.

they’ve already captured the entire market. And the reality is most of these have been around for 15, 20, 25 years and they’re not tech savvy. So when you get these first movers like a stripe, right, offering stable coin payment acceptance, what that actually does for the rest of the industry is it pressures kind of the middle of the pack or the earlier adopters to take action. And there’s not enough time for them to build it because as you said,

the space is saturated and it applies to not just crypto but traditional payments as well. And so the options to buy and to date, we think of ourselves as like orthogonal to the competition. Our difference isn’t in what necessarily we’re offering them as an end product but rather the deployment model. Rather than deploying it to the merchants and trying to onboard millions of merchants, we onboard a couple dozen.

payment providers that then grant us access to hundreds of thousands of merchants. So that’s it.

John Biggs (05:15.854)

And then hundreds of thousands of customers as well. I mean, this has been the age old question, right? First off, when mass adoption? And how much of crypto is hype versus reality? So what are you seeing in terms of people using that button, basically?

Jasper Fu (05:40.878)

So we’re seeing about, like last year we saw about 400 million in transaction volume. So relatively significant pretty early on. And it varies by industry and it varies by region. So I’d say that the demand from a consumer perspective exists. Demand from the merchant perspective also exists because customer goes, hey, can I pay with crypto? And the merchant goes and asks their payment provider, hey, how can I pay with crypto? So this kind of upstream demand is occurring now where it’s

may not have particularly in the US in the past couple of years. So the demand is there. And now whether or not we want to think about whether it’s hype or not, I don’t think about this as crypto itself necessarily.

John Biggs (06:17.006)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (06:21.422)

I mean, you said yourself $400 million in money moving through the system is wild.

Jasper Fu (06:27.748)

Mm-hmm. Which is a relatively, you know, if we think about it at scale, it’s super small, but it does prove that there’s that actual volume there, right? In the actual use case of payments and commerce from a consumer to business perspective, not necessarily B2B, not necessarily watch trading or, you know, exchange trading or high frequency trading, but actual use case for somebody who’s like, man, I got some Bitcoin in my hand, like,

John Biggs (06:31.075)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (06:54.958)

Mm-hmm.

Jasper Fu (06:55.808)

Why shouldn’t I just be able to pay with it? Or cross-border payments, of course. And then there’s also certain industries where they’re just, they have a really hard time keeping card payments and they’re not even weird industries. It’s like peptides. Peptides for some reason, like really has a hard time keeping like a stable card processor. And the demand is there. The product is actually relatively stable. And just makes no sense financially that that’s not being taken care of. know, that industry is not being.

John Biggs (07:07.64)

go.

Jasper Fu (07:25.643)

addressed.

John Biggs (07:27.63)

I mean, there’s obviously some places where crypto works really well, like online gambling and sort of adult stuff, that kind of thing. But it sounds like just even for like supplements, which would seem that that shouldn’t be a big problem.

Jasper Fu (07:42.372)

It should not, supplements, VPN tools, oddly enough, multilevel marketing, of course. And then now this new class of AI girlfriends that surprisingly large group. whether crypto is hype or not, I think about it on a multi-tech cycle level.

John Biggs (07:45.719)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (07:49.879)

Yeah.

Jasper Fu (08:08.606)

Is the underlying technology, call it blockchain, Are cryptographically tokenized assets meaningful or impactful anyway? Do they solve anything? Do they make the market larger? Do they make it more efficient? And the answer is yes. At the end of the day, it’s just a more efficient way of storing, retrieving, accessing data. The fact that we choose to tokenize something and the fact that someone chooses to do a get rich quick scheme that happens in every single industry. And so, yeah.

Are there use cases where it’s all hype? Absolutely, that’s how new tech gets there, right? If there’s no hype, no one’s sitting there reading research papers being like, yeah, this is great. It gets adoption through the people that’ll hype it, and then it kind of reaches maturity at some point.

John Biggs (08:52.014)

You mentioned before we were talking about the rise of stablecoins. I mean, we’re talking about ETFs. We’re talking about government adoption. sounds like, gosh, sounds like Texas is trying to do something right now with their own sort of currency. Are you in the right time for all this right now? Was it harder a few months ago?

Jasper Fu (09:16.758)

When we first started building it was certainly harder, right? Stablecoins themselves, like all of this, like the terms have to get into the human zeitgeist and kind of be branded. And then somebody has to understand what that actually means.

And then it has to gain adoption and practice. So yeah, absolutely. This is such a great time to be doing it. The other day I looked and I think it was like stablecoin.org or something, the domain was on sale for like a hundred thousand. I was like, this is how you know we’re still super early in awareness because you know, somebody would snatch that up if this was a little bit, you know, more mature of a space, right? Um, but I think stablecoins are just starting to get adoption, regulatory clarity.

John Biggs (09:46.775)

Okay.

Jasper Fu (10:02.083)

The incentives are all properly aligned, right? Stablecoins being backed by T-bills, meaning that there’s more purchase of T-bills from the government, which means they have an incentive to positively impact the creation of more, the issuance of more stablecoins. So I think everything is pointed in the right direction for.

adoption and more money coming into the system.

John Biggs (10:25.586)

Why did you pick crypto? Why did you pick this?

Jasper Fu (10:30.916)

Oh man, so I was leaving corporate and decided to take a little sabbatical to hike, hike some mountains. Sitting there I was like, what do I want to do with the next phase of life? I want to do something that’s meaningful, like I’ve got a decent network, new great technical talent, and more or less are like, okay, what do I do with the next phase of life? What can I do that’s meaningful, impactful, and

net positive or additive to society. And I went through a couple of different thoughts and ideas and just realized like, if I can make the market and payments a little bit more efficient, not just for institutions, but for individuals, grant a little bit more access to financial systems and shake things up a little bit and make the market larger itself. Like, yeah, I think that’s a good thing to put time into. And of course, having your finger on the pulse of money movement never hurts for

John Biggs (11:28.75)

Mm-hmm.

Jasper Fu (11:30.221)

growth network valuations.

John Biggs (11:31.966)

If you want to make money, you go where the money is, right? What about getting funding? You guys are working on a round now. How’s that going?

Jasper Fu (11:34.743)

Mm-hmm.

Jasper Fu (11:41.097)

It’s going super well. Stablecoins is really hot right now. Stablecoin, stablecoin payments particularly, right? It took a little bit for people to go stablecoin issuer companies like this trend goes, okay, great crypto, great stablecoins. Okay, now what do we do with the stablecoins? And payments and commerce is kind of the next wave of interest. And so we’ve seen a lot of interest from traditional finance funds.

high net worth individuals, family offices, as well as of course the crypto VCs. So it’s currently the hot spot to be. Now it’s just trying to figure out who do we align ourselves with maximally? Like what actually makes sense here? Far cry from two years ago when it was not a sexy thing to talk about stable coin three years ago, when it was not a sexy thing to talk about stable coin payments because everyone was so hype about real estate, know, RWA tokenization, still a thing, right? And token launches.

John Biggs (12:39.278)

Do you think the industry’s finally hit that level of maturity where it needs to be to, I mean, first off, support a constellation of startups that are actually doing things that people want them to do, right? That people are excited about. And also that they’re not going to have like rug pulls and huge funding announcements that end up petering out. It sounds like you’re slow and steady wins the race in this case, right?

Jasper Fu (13:07.78)

We are very slow and steady. We’ve got a long-term plan for what we think will happen at each stage of adoption, and we kind of just go forward with that and try to ignore the hype or take advantage of the narrative whenever it makes sense. But as far as the industry reaching maturity,

Jasper Fu (13:30.888)

Not yet, right? We’re at the stage where everyone is beginning to have awareness of the value and opportunity, which means we’ll actually have more influx of capital coming in for a variety of reasons. Each of those will be interested in capturing their own ecosystem. So the technology is actually going to become harder to use in the short term as it goes from just once upon a time, say just Bitcoin or Litecoin, right? Two tokens to a fragmentation of dozens, maybe hundreds of different stable coins that are each that

of whom each have their own incentives to maintain their ecosystem and may or may not be compatible with others. Same with the underlying blockchains. There’ll be more and more of them each trying to do an ecosystem battle.

John Biggs (14:12.608)

Is there a collapse or is an ecosystem collapse or can the industry handle that?

Jasper Fu (14:17.924)

It’ll be a consolidation is what I’m thinking. I mean, at the end of the day, the money flowing in is large by individual standards, but relatively trivial by traditional finance standards, So the ecosystem can certainly handle it, but you’ll see consolidation early on when automotive manufacturers were around the US. The US had hundreds, if not thousands, of automotive manufacturers early on. And then, of course, it kind of consolidates and peters out to a couple of the dominators.

And I expect that to happen with this as well.

John Biggs (14:50.744)

Why do you like the startup world versus corporate, or do you?

Jasper Fu (14:55.272)

I like the startup world because I got this hypothesis that you can still be like a good person and an honest person and treat your team well and like go empathy first. And that that’ll turn out actually better than kind of treating an individual as a commoditized resource. You can buy people’s physical presence and time, but not their effort.

John Biggs (15:01.038)

Hmm.

John Biggs (15:19.214)

Did that frustrate you in the corporate world that you had all these people who got paychecks but they didn’t do anything?

Jasper Fu (15:31.318)

It wasn’t that so much as the people who really wanted to shine and excel were not like accordingly, like rewarded. almost like, you know, you see all these like young people that are excited, want to work hard, want to kind of grind, push forward, get into a corporate setting. For me, it was consulting. And then it almost just, you hit like a quick, like quick stand real quick.

And so that’s not necessarily frustrating because I understand why things work the way, like why it works the way that it does. But I just want to be able to create, well, I want to see if a different culture can be created and still work.

John Biggs (16:20.558)

Would you jump back into, hold on a second, would you recommend somebody go into corporate first, consulting first, and then do startup? Or should young people do startups immediately right out of college or in college?

Jasper Fu (16:34.149)

depends on your financial situation. Corporate is, well, I don’t know if job stability is still a thing. Corporate’s reasonably reliable. Startups, corporate’s reliable and safe is what I would say. Startups provide far more opportunity for upside, whether or not you’re just grinding away at your own consulting company or building websites for people. There’s far more upside to it and far more personal growth that must.

John Biggs (16:35.757)

Mm-hmm.

Jasper Fu (17:03.535)

happen. So it depends on whether you want to just have a nine to five or a set amount of time traded for money and then enjoy the rest of your life or whether or not you have something that drives you that you want to keep growing and learning for.

John Biggs (17:21.678)

What’s next for CoinSub? What are you guys working on?

Jasper Fu (17:24.388)

So as we complete our arrays, we’ve been engineering heavy so far. And now it’s just taking this working formula that we know and expanding it. In terms of bringing together the best talent, the best consultants, making sure that at least from a payment service provider industry, like our existing target segment, that we capture a significant portion of the market while we still have a first mover advantage in who we’re targeting. And then beyond that, it’s seeing where else

the same technology of money conversion while it’s on ramps, off ramps, and this kind of flexible technology can apply, whether it’s like ATMs, right, it’s kind of an interesting side one for us, or whether it’s like focusing on particularly like on the payout space. So it’s just seeing what’s next, what’s the next spot.

John Biggs (18:17.614)

Who’s your ideal customer? Like who would you love as a customer?

Jasper Fu (18:21.803)

Right now, things like a Worldpay, an Adyen, a Square, Anything that has large distribution as far as controlling merchants. But then, other than that, our favorite customer is the one that has some level of, call it startup hunger. It doesn’t matter if they’re like a middle-sized, right? There’s plenty of...

John Biggs (18:45.475)

Mm-hmm.

Jasper Fu (18:50.996)

middle market companies whose names are unknown, who have significant reach in the tens or hundreds of thousands of merchants that are doing single digit billions, right? But at scale comparatively, they don’t have a differentiator. So somebody who wants to utilize, basically take advantage of this emerging technology and disruptive kind of money movement to take their company from one of the smaller fish in a saturated market to an outstanding kind of front runner.

John Biggs (19:21.634)

Have you used, are you using crypto or stable coins in point of sale? you tried that yet? Is that a thing?

Jasper Fu (19:28.451)

That is actually our point of sales virtual turnables checkouts. That was our first entry in. And then subscriptions was our differentiator for a value prop that others did not have.

John Biggs (19:39.84)

Mm-hmm. And how long does it take to like, mean versus like, I don’t know, tapping, how long does it take to do a crypto transaction?

Jasper Fu (19:47.011)

So the actual point of sale, longer, which is why I wouldn’t recommend crypto for physical transactions, rather digital, unless time is on the issue.

John Biggs (19:54.368)

I’m thinking I’m thinking like that. I don’t know the vape the vape shop or whatever, right? Something like somebody somebody wants.

Jasper Fu (19:59.461)

At best, you’re looking at like 50 to 45 seconds in 45 seconds, right? Depends on which chain it is. I think there still needs to be another kind of layer built before point of sales is functional. Can you imagine standing in the line at the grocery store and everyone waiting 45 seconds? You have to pay is nearly infinite. There’s a level of like pre-funding and trust and risk that goes on there, which can be built towards.

John Biggs (20:03.726)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (20:17.23)

Yeah, exactly.

John Biggs (20:22.648)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (20:29.11)

OK, very cool. All right, so coinsub.io, you’re looking for investors and you’re looking for partners. And you’re well on your way to actually making people. Maybe I’ll try to find some of your partners and I’ll pay for stuff with crypto. What do I pay for crypto recently? I think I bought a watch once with crypto. So there you go. So I’m on my way there,

Jasper Fu (20:35.854)

Mm-hmm.

Jasper Fu (20:50.458)

cool. Yeah, luxury goods, definitely. Also, less interesting use, but one-on-one invoicing. How do you invoice someone from Turkey? If they got stable, there’s certain, we use our tech ourselves within our team members, so our team is globally distributed. And so sometimes it’s the only way to pay our team members. So there’s these interesting use cases there as well.

John Biggs (20:58.733)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (21:14.114)

Yeah, very cool.

John Biggs (21:18.188)

All well, Jasper, thank you for joining us. This has been a nice deep dive. And I think you explained it better than almost anybody else has explained crypto on this show, so it’s important. All right, Jasper Fu, coinsub.io. I’m John Biggs, and this has been The Innovators. We will see you next episode.

Jasper Fu (21:27.645)

thanks, John.