Ep. #10, Building Leverage, Not Features with Seth Besmertnik

Isaac Nassimi: Do you have any hobbies, Seth, anything you're into on the side?

Seth Besmertnik: I'm into probably too many things for having two daughters and then running Conductor.

But I play a lot of sports. If there's a sport that you can play, I like to play it. My philosophy is always playing over watching.

Christine Spang: In hobbies and in the business world, it sounds like you're a man of the arena.

Seth: Yeah, I like to get in there, like to just do it. I get hurt a lot. I've had like 13 operations in my life.

Christine: Also in business, do you get hurt a lot in business?

Seth: Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, a lot of sports. Became pretty big into pickleball, which I love. I started playing during the pandemic, 2020.

Isaac: Does it live up to the hype?

Seth: Oh, yeah, it's amazing.

Isaac: Wow, okay.

Seth: It's unbelievable, it's like sports chess. It's awesome.

Christine: Maybe I'll have to try it. But do the neighbors of your pickleball court send in noise complaints?

Seth: I live in Manhattan, so.

Christine: No kidding, there's no noise complaints in Manhattan.

Seth: Lots of controversy around, like, so all the parks in Manhattan that are like cement, they've all been taken over by pickleball courts, where basically people come and they paint the courts.

A lot of times, they come like at night and they put tape and stuff, and then they bring their own nets, and then they're just packed with people playing pickleball.

And a lot of the parents and folks that, like, used to have kids that go to these parks, like, you know, for skateboarding or scootering, like, so there are some parks that say signs like no pickleball.

But now they have like indoor courts, so that's like less of the dynamic.

But, yeah, like I got pretty hurt about a year or so ago where I couldn't play sports, so then I picked up like a terrible hobby of like collecting sports cards, which I don't know if I'm proud of or ashamed of.

Christine: That sounds like the adult version of "Pokemon" cards.

Seth: Yeah, pretty much. The expensive version of "Pokemon" cards.

But it's sort of fun. It's like I used to do it when I was a kid, so I like to live all that stuff out.

Christine: So Isaac was telling me that you have some pretty crazy stories from the history of Conductor.

And while we were talking about getting hurt in sports and in business, it sounds like you sold your company to WeWork and then you bought it back.

Tell me more about that. What happened?

Seth: So, yeah, we had a wild journey. We had an all-company meeting yesterday, and we do anniversaries.

Christine: Like for employees?

Seth: Yeah, it's like, this guy's been here for six years. He's been here for nine years.

They put mine up yesterday, and it had 20 years with like a squiggly line.

So I'm 42, but I really, I guess, technically like the very, very, very beginning of the company started when I was like 22.

It was like, you know, a project when I was finishing college, so it's been a long time.

But the business is on like its fourth generation. It's like got nothing to do with where we started.

But, yeah, in 2018, WeWork was our biggest customer or maybe like second biggest customer.

We had made a tremendous impact on their business.

Like, and what we were doing at the time was helping them with getting their website found like in organic and unpaid channels, like largely Google and global search engines, and they loved our product, and it made such a difference.

And their founder and CEO at the time really was impacted by our business and also took a big liking, I think, to me personally at the time and was like, you know, wanted to conquer the world, and was like, "Hey, we own physical space. You guys own digital space. Like, why don't we combine and take over the world together and-"

Christine: You're talking about Adam Neumann?

Seth: Yeah.

Christine: Wow, you actually spoke to Adam Neumann. That's amazing.

Seth: Yeah, spent a lot of time with Adam Neumann at various points of time at WeWork.

At one point, I was, you know, I basically sat next to him on a daily basis. But they basically came and they gave us like an incredible offer.

And they were the fastest-growing enterprise business in the world. I think they were like 1.4 billion in ARR, growing 130%.

You know, it seemed like an opportunity of a lifetime, and we went for it. It was really risky.

Like, our investors at the time were very mixed about whether we should do it or not, but it felt like something we had to do, and we sold the company.

It was amazing. January 15th of 2018, we were doing our company kickoff. Everything was like normal.

And then six or eight weeks later, like definitive documents were signed, and I had like no idea on January 15th.

So I always tell people that lightning can strike at any moment. You never know, and just enjoy the ride.

Christine: Mm-hmm, but how long before the deal happened did you start talking to the folks at WeWork?

Seth: We had been like on and off. Like, you know, like Adam was this guy, like he kind of like comes into your life like...

Christine: Yeah, I was going to say like I feel like lightning happens more often when you meet and interact with people who are lightning-like.

Seth: Yeah, and it's not always the best kind of lightning.

Like, comes in like it's like the number one priority, and then gets your sort of engine spinning, and then just completely vanishes, right?

Like, that was Adam's style. So, it wasn't the first time we had a conversation, but it didn't seem real to me.

But then one day, yeah, I went to his office, and we sat down together, and he took out a piece of paper and mapped out a deal.

I still have the piece of paper, actually. And it happened very fast.

And like, we literally, like from when we signed a term sheet to when we sold the company, it was like 2 1/2 weeks, right?

Which was like, you know, we had hundreds of shareholders. It wasn't an easy deal. Like, we moved very fast.

Christine: Yeah, that's wild.

Seth: Yeah, and then we bought the company back literally like 20 months later.

Isaac: Wow.

Christine: All right, what happened in those 20 months?

Seth: A lot of stuff, I mean, it was a rollercoaster. We could probably spend all of our time talking about that.

But we joined the company, and we had all these big aspirations of like leveraging WeWork's customer base to grow the Conductor business, none of which actually ever manifested.

And it ended up going from like had a board of directors, and we had like good governance, and we were like nearly profitable, and the company was like actually doing like the best that it had ever done before, and we joined WeWork, and it was like the Wild West, right?

Like, there was like, I literally was like the only person that anyone at WeWork knew at Conductor.

And every employee got like a credit card when we became employees that was like a $10,000 limit Amex card that nobody who worked at Conductor actually can see what anybody spent on these credit cards, but it was like for like T&E and things like that.

So, our expenses got really out of control. We went from like drafting off of the work that we had done before we sold the company, where we actually had some really, like the first year was like we did phenomenal.

But then, all of the overhang of being like the small company part of WeWork just really started to make it really difficult to run the business.

I'll give one moment where it was the end of 2018, and we had a meeting with Adam and Artie, who was the CFO and was my direct manager. Great, great guy.

And we had like our best year ever, and then, and we were like, I was so excited. We had our best year ever. We beat our goals.

And I remember like Adam's like, "No matter how fast you grow, you will never have any financial impact on this company."

Isaac: That's supportive.

Christine: That's some managerial motivational talk there, like.

Seth: His goal was always to get me to leave Conductor and to join like, WeWork properly-

Christine: Okay.

Seth: and didn't want me running the company.

And, but thank God I never took the bait because the day after Adam, like, resigned, pretty much anyone who was like, who would've been me if I would've went over and worked for Adam, like they all got fired.

Like 100 people got fired the next day, and then that would've actually precluded us from buying the company back.

So I stuck with Conductor and never left, and I stuck with what I believed in, and turned out to be like one of the best things I ever did.

Isaac: How did you message this to the employees through this wild ride? That must've been nuts.

Seth: Most people had no idea what was actually going on.

I'll give you one more crazy story, which is like, so we sold the company, and it was like you guys need to be, I think we were like 30 million in ARR or something like that.

And were like you guys need to be like $1 billion in three years, which in the physics of a SaaS company, that is like impossible, right?

You can't like grow that fast as a SaaS company. That's not how it works. So, but we were all like, okay, let's go and like figure out.

We can like get really big really fast with like unlimited capital. We could buy as many companies as we want.

We can do anything. So the whole exec team, we're all like kind of like figuring this out, trying to be like super ambitious and think bigger than we've ever thought before.

And then, like two months later, I'm on a plane with Adam. We're going to like some opening of a building in LA. I didn't even know what we were doing.

And he sits me down with this guy who just joined the company from Amazon, and he's like, "Seth, we think we should sell the Conductor business."

And he's like, "I think we think we should sell it to Salesforce, and we should keep all the good people and all the engineers and all the good employees. Anybody that you want has a job offer. We're going to stay out and stay, and then, you know, we're going to sell the business. And Marc Benioff's coming to the office like on Tuesday, and we're going to like pitch him on the business."

And my like whole life sunk out of me.

Isaac: Yeah.

Seth: I would imagine it's like the near, not as bad, but the equivalent of like watching like some tragedy happen to somebody that you love, right?

Like, everything got sucked out of my body. Couldn't even talk.

And then I'll just fast forward, like we're in Adam's office like four days later. I'm waiting with a deck to present Conductor to Marc Benioff.

Marc Benioff comes in the room. The Conductor slides are on the TVs.

Adam's in the room, doesn't talk about Conductor at all. No mention of Conductor.

It was very clear he didn't want to talk about Conductor at all. Never brought it up ever again.

So then I, like, go and start talking to like investors to buy the company out of WeWork. This is like four months in.

And then, I, like, present a plan. I tell Artie this and a woman named Jen Berrent who was the COO, and I'm like, "Okay, we're like going to buy. I'm like taking the company back. Like, we're going to make a deal. You guys need to put money in, or I'll go get the money."

And they're like, "What are you talking about? We just bought the company."

I'm like, "Well, like, Mike, this is not right." And they're like, "Don't listen to Adam."

I'm like, I'm like, "What?" And I just remember like being in this meeting, and I had like the biggest migraine ever.

And the crazy thing is everybody who worked at Conductor, nobody, like I share, I literally, like, I think I'm on the most extreme side of sharing like everything with the people who work at the company, but there are some things obviously you can't share.

Like, it's like sort of like not shareable 'cause it's like, it's like what actually is it? You know, there's like not something to share.

So no one had any idea that this was going on other than like maybe like, you know, one or two people. But, yeah, that was the rollercoaster.

So, everything happens for a reason. And we ended up buying the company back, and that was definitely one of the best things that ever happened at Conductor.

Christine: I can't believe that all happened end-to-end in two years or less.

Seth: Yeah, I mean, and that was just in the first few months.

On December 16th, 2019, like we started Conductor Founders, Inc., which was the new entity that acquired the Conductor business.

And we had every single person who worked at Conductor at the time, we made everybody a co-founder.

We formed a new cap table, and everybody had founder equity, and like, that was like a start of like a new era of the business, and now we're like living and manifesting that.

Isaac: Like a true employee-owned kind of company.

Seth: Yeah.

Isaac: That's awesome. So this is really interesting timing because it's December of 2019 is what you said, right?

So, at the same time, you've got a complete kind of reset of the business for all of your employees.

As you're employee-owned now, all of this kind of stuff happens, COVID starts, like what was the strategy change?

Like, I'm sure there was kind of like a what now kind of moment for every single person working in the company.

Seth: Yeah, well, the company had gone through like pretty severe trauma, I would say.

And surprisingly enough, there was a moment of time from like the end of the summer of 2019 to when we bought the company back where Conductor was literally like on the cover of "The Wall Street Journal," like "WeWork Puts Conductor Up for Sale."

I found out that we were going up for sale by one of the people who worked at Conductor, not like coming to my desk and telling me.

And she's like, "Everybody in the whole company's talking about it."

And then, we ended up having like an emergency like town hall meeting.

And that began, I think, probably the most difficult few months of my life because there was a very, very high probability that we would, like, lose the entire company.

And also, like we sold the company largely for WeWork equity, and all of that would basically be worthless.

So we basically lost the company and also got nothing.

And then, actually, through some other complicated thing for another day, is like, you know, actually, like we'd end up like owing them money in some way because of loans related to stock options and stuff like that.

So it was like a really hard time. But actually, our people during that time, the people of Conductor, they hauled ass. They delivered, they hit their goals. They were awesome. And like nobody quit during that time. And I figured, if there was ever a time to quit, that was the time.

Like, if there was ever a time to be like, okay, like this ship is sinking, like we got to get off this thing, like that was the time, and people did the opposite.

But then the pandemic came, and all of the excitement set, like all the excitement and everything settled.

We were sort of like starting the process of rebuilding, which was really hard. Like, we had no finance team. We had no HR team.

We didn't have a lot of our, like all the systems were gone, a lot of our practices were gone.

And then the pandemic came, and like, we had like no cash. We had $3 million in the bank, we had a payroll of $1 million every two weeks, and we had no investors.

Like, we didn't have any. Like, we had no investors. We had no board of directors, so there was nobody to call.

And if you remember, in the beginning of the pandemic, it was like "Customers are never going to pay you."

Like I remember I had people calling me, and they're like, "You should fire a lot of people right now 'cause the government's going to make it so you can't fire anybody," right?

Like, that's stuff people were telling me. And, of course, we didn't do that, and we figured out a way to, you know, get through it, but that was also super challenging.

And then, you know, then two years later, we sold 1/4 of the business to a growth equity firm, and we raised over $120 million and at about a half a billion dollar valuation.

And we were in Times Square, like in front of like the NASDAQ sign with the big Conductor logo on it, and we were like, you know, taking that picture in that moment when pretty much like most of the time before that, it seemed like we were not going to see the next day.

I used to have a full head of hair at that time, but then.

Isaac: You've sacrificed so much.

Christine: Uh-huh.

Isaac: I want to ask because you've gone through all of these different stages of the business, and I mean, we're all product people in one way, shape, or form, right?

We sell a product, and our businesses are products for SaaS companies. How has your product evolved?

Like, what have been those big milestones for what your product does and how it's perceived, and, you know, how you sell it throughout all of these life cycles going up all the way to now?

Seth: Yeah, one of the things we talk about with our customers all the time is our innovation, commitment, and philosophy, and what that means practically is a lot about where we put our capital as a company.

So, I read this book years ago called "How Will You Measure Your Life?"

And it's like this hybrid like business-personal book. And one of the things it said is like, your priorities in business are only measured by where you put your money.

Like you could say whatever you want, but where do you put your money? So I always took that really seriously.

And we basically started something like seven or eight years ago where we put like every dollar we get from our customers back into innovation, R&D, data infrastructure, product development.

We actually have just about the same number of salespeople that we have today than we did like seven or eight years ago.

And our thinking was that if you can invest in building an amazing product, and last year, we actually launched our first trial of our product, so you can actually use our product without talking to anybody, and then we make a great product, and we make it available to people, then, you know, that will like win in the long term.

Because, ultimately the world is going to move to a world where if you do something better than someone else, then you're going to eventually be the leader.

So we've been iterating and innovating on our product very, very consistently for years.

Like, even through that whole WeWork journey, like we were pumping out features and changes.

And we often show the product to people, and they're like, "Oh, yeah, we saw Conductor like three years ago. I know what Conductor's like."

And we're like, "You should look at the Conductor product." And then they look at the product, and they're like, "This is completely different than the product we saw three years ago."

I'm like, "Yeah, what are you expecting? Like, we've got like 100-something people building software every day, making this thing better. It's going to be remarkably different."

But I'd say thematically, just to maybe more generalize and answer your question, like when we started the Conductor product in like 2011, it was about giving companies a base layer of information about how people find them on the web, how their websites are performing from a sort of external perspective.

So, are their websites technically strong? Do they have content? Is their content good or bad?

Does the content line up with the kinds of things that customers, you know, are looking for?

And then, there was a lot of infrastructure that we had to build because we had to learn how to crawl the web.

We had to learn how to curl crawl search engines. We had to get all this data, but then we had to build like a layer on top of it where people can interact with the data, and then we also had to turn it into something that was insightful.

So we spent like 10 years basically building a, I think, like the industry would refer to it as like an enterprise SEO platform, and it's this set of capabilities that help really large companies which manage their global presence.

And SEO takes on a lot of different meanings. When you think about what SEO was, it was like, do you know what people are looking for?

And do you have good content, and do you have a good web experience? That's a big problem to solve.

But, for the average enterprise business, it generally is like 30, 40, 50, 60, 70% of all their web traffic comes from these search engines.

I think that that's the thing that people really need to understand about what's happening right now with AI is that google.com is the largest source of visitors to every single website on the planet. Literally, more than half of all the website traffic to every single website on the entire planet comes from this one website. And, I know we're skipping ahead to the future, but that website is going to be turned upside down in the next few years. So we're in like a massive, massive disruptive change.

And I'd say we started our product around this infrastructure for helping you with your global SEO, and then today, you know, we've really have created a platform to help brands truly understand their customers and what their customers want and need.

That's the one thing that's very constant, is it's always about the customer, and it's always about, you know, giving value to the customer.

But how do you orchestrate a content experience so you can be in front of the customer wherever they are on whatever interface they are, and how do you build that in a scalable and technically strong way?

Like, and that's like the technology that we've created today and are building, which is pretty complex problem to solve, but, you know, it's ambitious and exciting.

Isaac: Yeah, I've heard Google called the front door to the web before, and I think it's a very apt comparison, right?

It's how most people start their web browsing experience one way or another.

And there's this like pie chart, I love pie charts, of how you go to the place you're trying to get to, and Google's probably 70% of that pie chart for most people.

Maybe 20% is like entering in a URL, like, directly. Like, oh, I'm just going to amazon.com to feed my daytime shopping addiction.

And, you know, other things make up that last 10%.

But that pie chart is changing, where, I mean, personally, I know I probably start 30 to 40% of my web browsing experiences through ChatGPT now.

That's where I start. What does that look like in the future?

What does that look like in five years? And ChatGPT didn't even exist 2 1/2 years ago, so that's a lot of time.

Seth: Is it appropriate for me to share something on the screen?

Isaac: Yeah, we're going to have to describe it for the listeners.

Seth: Yeah, this is not like drawn to scale, but this is how I believe the world is going to change and not because I'm some kind of visionary 'cause it's pretty, pretty damn obvious, which is that people used to spend a lot of time on websites, spend time engaging in the world of ads, or interacting with ads.

Ads is still a great way that people drive traffic to websites. And then, they find a lot of stuff through search.

And a huge amount of the buyer journey, the customer journey, like how people just spend their time figuring stuff out is going to be living in these world of these AI interfaces.

It is like so obvious. It's so much better, so much faster. I mean, yesterday, I sat with one of the largest luxury brand product companies in the world, and we were talking about whether people would buy their product like in an AI interface, and it's like, yes.

Like, that is what's going to happen. And, you know, we were discussing, you know, we like to control our environment. We want to control the environment.

And it's like, well--

If you want to control the environment, the environment's going to be AI, and that means you need to make content, and that you need to instrument your data in a way that you could feed it into AI because, otherwise, your desire to control the environment will mean that you are not even a participant in the environment.

So I think that that's almost a sure thing.

Isaac: Well, there's kind of two attacks for this.

And by the way, for the listeners, I mean, Seth, you pulled up a pie chart basically showing, you know, what we were just talking about, where we have these entry points to the web, and almost everything will be an AI entry point in the future.

I mean, I'll share personally, I'm fashion blind. You just talked about fashion.

I've been using AI as like my stylist, so it tells me what to go buy now.

It tells me what I should be looking for and gives me suggestions, and I follow those links, and often they're dead.

But that, to me, really feels like the future. But there's kind of two ways to attack this right now.

There's like the AI-powered searching where it's hitting Bing on your behalf, and then there's like the corpus of knowledge, and that one is really interesting to me, where it knows, again, just in its aggregate knowledge, what tools to use or what things to choose for you.

How do you optimize for that? How do you SEO for that?

Seth: Yeah, well, what is the aggregate knowledge?

Like, there's a slide that I have that it shows Sam Altman, and he's opening his mouth, and there's a beam coming from it from the sky into his mouth, and it says, "Does Sam Altman have like an internal beam from the creator of the world into ChatGPT?"

And what's the answer? No.

AI is a byproduct of all the world's content. It aggregates and looks at all the content and trains itself to deliver outputs, and that is why when you look at AI, you can often see citations, and then you can see that the things that are coming out of AI are often referenced from your content.

And so, it's interesting. Google created a world where, like, I search for something, like what's the best place to, you know, buy a TV, and then it will recommend some websites.

And that's like, wow, Google recommended your website. Like that's a really good, very trustworthy source.

Now you can talk to AI in a much more personalized way, and it's going to tell you things, but the source of that is coming from content that could've been created by a brand or by a blogger or through a transcript from this podcast.

So, we're all feeding AI, and as a brand, you can make content, you can make content on your websites, you can produce content, you can make content available, you can have content on third parties, and that will influence AI, where AI can represent you and influence things.

So, I think it is just as influential as anything, and that's sort of like where the new trip arena is going to be, which is like how do you make sure your brand is showing up, and how do you make sure people are talking about you in the right way, and how do you influence that?

Isaac: Yeah, but is it number of votes? Is it quality?

I mean, for example, shameless plug here, we just released a product for, you know, bots to join meetings through an API and record them and transcribe them, hit you with webhooks, and already, you know, having recently released the product, ChatGPT recommends it as like the number one solution for doing this as a developer.

And it's not like we have a ton of Stack Overflow posts that are answered already with that content.

It just found the content and realized, and it's in the corpus of knowledge, and it's just realized that it's the right tool.

How does one optimize for that in the future?

Seth: Combination of factors. So probably starts with like trying to be smart about what people actually want, right?

So I think if you're trying to be proactive about optimizing an AI, you want to start with like who my audience is, and what stages of their journey are they on, and what are they looking for.

What questions are they going to be asking?

The exciting and challenging thing with AI is that, I might ask a question as a 42-year-old male very differently than a 22-year-old female, and I might say that in the AI, and I expect a different response, which means content needs to be created for way more levels of dimensionality than before.

So you literally, like, if your content map before was like two or three personas and two or three buyer journey stages, now it's like 25 personas and 100 buyer journey stages.

It's just way more complicated. You need to get really good at creating authoritative content at scale.

So it's knowing the customer. It's having authoritative content. Authoritative content is a very complicated word.

That includes everything from like how authentic it is, how much wisdom does it have, how well structured is it, is it created.

How fresh is it and accurate it is, right? And then there's your brand authority, which is like how authoritative is your brand.

And there's a lot of factors that go into that. There's topical authority, which is like how relevant it is to the topic.

So there's a whole algorithm that's going to be changing and is, you know, it's black box in some ways, but also going to be changed.

That's going to be there. But what's the AI trying to do? It's trying to give you the best answer.

It's not trying to do anything else other than it's trying to give you the best help.

And that kind of comes back to fundamental principles, which is like if you know your customer and you know your audience and you give them the best thing or you have the best product and you have the best message and the best piece of content, like that is going to give you the best chance to be the one that is, to be one of the ones that is referenced and used to drive AI and is cited by AI.

Isaac: So you guys at Conductor, from what I've seen, are basically trying to generalize the practice of doing this for your customers, right, and future-proofing themselves, and also, you know, giving them results right now.

Am I right there?

Seth: Yeah, it's one of the things we're doing, right?

We're in the business of extracting wisdom out of organizations and transforming it into digital assets that we refer to as content and figuring out how to do that at scale with as much programmatic capabilities as possible and then to be able to measure the outcomes and use the outcomes, the measurement outcomes, to then iterate on that process.

And the benefits of that are creating content that drives your brand, creating content that drives website performance, creating content that will influence and used in the world of ads.

And all of that is around taking your wisdom and making useful things that ultimately help your customers in one way or the other.

So, yes, AI visibility is a big component to it because if that's where people are going to be spending their time, then you need to manage your brand in AI. It's not going to just manage itself.

Christine: So there's like a lot of companies out there that have these base models and also kind of the entry points into AI.

Is there like an equivalent of, let's call it, page rank for AI that people are kind of circling, or is it every single one you have to optimize for separately right now?

Seth: I mean, I think the practicality of it was, you know, like when we started our business a long time ago, you had Yahoo, you had Bing, you had Google.

You know, Yahoo sort of went away. There's lots of search engines, but no one had a search engine-specific strategy.

So the reality is is that AI interfaces are going to be everywhere. Like, there's going to be the big hubs, right, the ChatGPTs and Geminis and Claudes and, you know, all of those places. But there's going to be probably an AI interface everywhere. In every sort of application, there'll be an AI interface that uses content that's living in learning models. And you're going to need to have just a holistic content strategy that is based on the intent stages and the audience types and your products and all of that, and have a really thoughtful way to publish that content today.

That could be publishing on your website, that could be publishing on third parties, that could be getting third parties to write about you or to create content around you.

In the future, that might live on like MCP servers or places where, you know, you just have data stored just to feed into the AI.

But I don't think there's going to be like engine-specific approaches because I think they're all going to be different.

And, you know, I was just talking with our chief product officer this morning, and our engineers have been doing this testing on AI systems, and they literally could take the same exact query into the same exact API for the same exact LLM and do it 10 times in a row in 10 seconds and each result is different.

Christine: So not only does the matrix have each different provider or LLM, but also, it's got its own non-determinism?

Seth: Yeah, and I mean, there's going to be so much to learn about this, right?

But it's almost like we were talking about whether like is there an aspect to AI where it wants to give everybody a chance?

Isaac: Ah.

Seth: And maybe that's how it learns on its own, right? Like, so that's why we get 10 different responses.

So will 10 responses merge into one over time, or will it always be there?

So that's why it's always going to be like you're never going to be able to get your hands fully around it like you may have been able to get like Google Search.

So you have to have conviction into your strategy and have conviction into your resources and your capacity, and really sort of trust the process in a sense.

And we're going to be able to do as much as possible to measure things, but there's going to be some element where it's impossible to measure, right?

Like, people might search buy sneakers in Google, and that might get 150,000 searches a month, but AI is going to have like that, that stemmed phrase is going to probably turn from like a two-word phrase to a 20-word query, and "buy sneakers" is going to live as like hundreds of thousands or millions of different versions of that, which each might have a search volume of three instead of 150,000, which also means like you'll never be able to have all of that data.

So it's going to be a lot of sampling, and you're just going to need to have some conviction in your strategy and lean into it because you're never going to have, you know, perfect insights into your actual presence.

Isaac: It kind of reminds me of the early days of SEO, where, I mean, and God, this feels like this was a lifetime ago, where websites would have like link pages, and you click the link page, and there's just a bunch of links in that page.

And this was just to kind of game the algorithm because no one knew quite exactly what it was, but they were able to triangulate, "hey, when I do this, things work really well."

And then, eventually, you know, Matt Cutts comes in, and he's like, "We're doing the Penguin now and the Pandas and all that stuff and these different crazy upgrades," and each time, it just breaks the precedent, and everyone has to figure it all out again from scratch of how they're going to do things.

Seth: Yeah, but, you know, this is going to be very different than that, in my opinion, because the Google algorithm was really bad in the beginning.

Like, it was better than anything else. You know, Nike had a Flash website in the beginning, and Nike couldn't get indexed by the search engine because of what I mentioned.

Isaac: Oh my God.

Seth: So, SEO was sort of this necessary thing for the search engine.

Because I always thought about SEO as like Google comes around and like is looking for things, and SEO like rakes up the soil and like brings it above the ground, and then like makes it so Google can find it.

But if companies never did SEO and never actually made the content from SEO, then Google would have nothing to show. They would have bad results.

Isaac: It didn't exist, yeah.

Seth: But now with AI, like first of all, like AI gets the benefit of that whole ecosystem already existing.

There's already so much content and so much information and so much insight. And like the initial algorithms that are existing today are already really good.

That's like why AI is so powerful. It's not like you're going and asking questions, and it's giving you like complete nonsense that's bad. It's giving you good stuff in the beginning. Not to say it's perfect and not to say there's no hallucinations, but just think about where like ChatGPT is today versus like a year and a half ago.

Isaac: Yeah.

Seth: I mean, there's much, much better results. So I just think that the beginnings are starting at a much higher value point than the beginnings of search.

Isaac: Sam Altman said the other day that young people are making life decisions using ChatGPT, which I think it's really flattering that he would call me young.

Seth: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I make life decisions based on ChatGPT. I mean, I could give you like all kinds of examples, right?

But it's just like, I mean, I'm like, I'm in a constant place of making life decisions using AI, right?

Isaac: I think that there's too many things that you have to make decisions about these days to not use that, right?

Like, your throughput of things that you can just get done when you kind of outsource the problem and trust sometimes it's going to get it wrong, just goes through the roof.

Seth: It's kind of like people went from, you know, in our annual conference, I always like to talk about where the world came from.

And it's like, at one point, like you waited online, and you talked to the village oracle or chief, and you got like some advice.

And then, like search came along, right, and you got advice for like a lot of stuff in your life, and it was like it was a huge exponential change.

And now, with AI, like that's happening again, where life moments and life decisions, you're exponentially asking for help and getting information with way more things than even you did with Google Search because, so it's massive...

Christine: Uh-huh.

Seth: So that just means that the opportunities for brands and businesses to basically insert themself in the brain of people is even greater because the brain is now expanding to more opportunities.

But that also means that, again, coming back to like the practicality of it for a B2B company or a B2C company or just a business, they need to create a lot more content so they can get into those brains.

Otherwise, like, you know, they're at risk of someone else doing that.

Isaac: We're nearly at time, but I have one question I want to ask. It's a bit of a personal question around this stuff 'cause you've got kids, and it sounds like they're on the younger side, right?

Seth: 12 and 15.

Isaac: Okay, so I think the perfect ages right now.

How are you guiding them on using AI tools, you know, as they're growing up, and they're about to start to hit the professional world pretty soon in a couple years, right?

Seth: Yeah, I think I've taken a real turn on this.

You know, the hard part with kids is like you want them to get these foundational skills.

It's kind of like you want to learn math before you start using a calculator.

Isaac: Yeah.

Seth: You could press two plus two, but if you don't actually understand that it's four, just see the number and that... So that's the spectrum of things, right, is having those fundamental skills.

So I still think it's super important to know the fundamentals and do and read and do your own writing and all of that.

But I also think that, you know, I said this at a Conductor all-company meeting yesterday, which is I feel this incredible sense of responsibility that if we don't level all of you up, you being the people who work at Conductor, with the capabilities to use AI as a true partner in everything you do all day long, then at some point, when you leave Conductor, and you go into the world and look for something different, that you will be at a huge disadvantage, and that you are going to need these skills to be successful.

And I feel that way very much for my own children, which is they have to learn the fundamentals, but if they don't know how to take advantage of these capabilities and use them not as a way to cut corners but to provide exponential outcomes, then I think they will also be at a disadvantage.

So it's definitely finding that balance, but I definitely embrace it. So like, for example, we're like working on like writing something.

I'm like, use AI as your research partner to get ideas, but then take your pen out and like write something down like from your brain, and see what that comes out with, and then try to put those things together.

Isaac: That's a responsible middle ground. I really like that.

Also, the point on employees and, you know, making them marketable in the future as well, so that it's skating to where the puck is going, I guess.

Well, Seth, thank you so much for joining. We'd love to have you on again soon.

Seth: Absolutely, see you all.