Seed to Exit
Welcome to Seed to Exit, the ultimate podcast all about startups, scaling, and venture capital. Your host is Riece Keck: Startup veteran and recruitment entrepreneur.
Join us as we dive into the journeys of startup founders and venture capitalists who share their insights, successes, and lessons learned from seed stage to successful exit.
Each episode, we bring you candid conversations with startup founders, executives, and investors. Whether you're looking for inspiration, actionable advice, or a deeper understanding of the startup ecosystem, Seed to Exit offers invaluable knowledge and real-world experiences to help you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Tune in to Seed to Exit and get ready to be inspired, educated, and connected with the exciting and ever-changing world of startups and venture capital.
Seed to Exit
John Fly, CTO of FirmPilot AI | Transformative Servant Leadership | The Role of Generative AI in Future Marketing Strategies
What if you could transform your leadership approach and empower your team to reach new heights? Join us as we chat with John Fly, the insightful CTO of FirmPilot AI, who shares his wisdom on servant leadership. With over thirty years in the tech industry, John believes that the secret to successful leadership lies in being the mentor you wish you had—guiding, supporting, and inspiring your team just like a great coach. Through his personal stories, John sheds light on the power of sharing knowledge and nurturing the next generation of leaders in a collaborative and empowering environment.
But that's not all. Our discussion takes us on FirmPilot's innovative journey in the MarTech space, where generative AI is reshaping content creation. John reveals how the company is revolutionizing SEO-optimized marketing content while emphasizing the crucial balance between AI efficiency and human oversight. As we navigate through the future of AI in marketing, we uncover the societal impacts and challenges of this technology shift, drawing parallels to past innovations. Alongside these insights, John shares how FirmPilot is gearing up for growth and scalability, with agile practices and a strong tech infrastructure. It's an episode packed with insights and forward-thinking strategies, sure to engage and inspire tech leaders and marketing enthusiasts alike.
All Links: linktr.ee/startup_recruiting
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/riecekeck/
Twitter/X: x.com/tech_headhunter
Recruitment: www.mindhire.ai
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@seedtoexitpod
If he sees somebody that needs help to do. The hardest thing I think we can do and that is to be the manager or leader for somebody else that we wished we had had during a hard moment and like just really be who we wished we had available in some tough times, and I think that's really what I think a servant leader or a serving leader is. It's that mindset of I'm not here to pull you along or force you down a path. I am here to lift you up or give you the help and support to help you be the best. Now, I think there's a fine line here between helping somebody be their best and coddling helping somebody be their best and coddling and so I typically even though I'm not the biggest sports guy, I do tend to lean into like the coaching sports team mentality when I explain to people love the people what I think that means.
Speaker 2:Welcome everyone. You're listening to Seed to Exit and, as always, you're hosted by Reece Keck. Today, I'm joined by John Fly. John is the CTO of FirmPilot AI, a Series A SaaS company in the MarTech space. Now he's coming with over three decades of experience in hands-on software engineering as well as technology leadership. But he's not just bringing technical skills to the table. He's also an MBA graduate and a current doctoral candidate in strategic leadership at Liberty University. So, without waiting any longer, let's go ahead and get into the episode.
Speaker 3:You're listening to the Seed to Exit podcast with your host, rhys Keck. Here you'll learn from startup executives, founders, investors and industry experts. You'll learn from the best about building amazing products, scaling companies, raising capital, hiring the right people and more. Subscribe and listen in for new episodes and enjoy the show.
Speaker 2:All right, well, welcome to another episode of Seed to Exit. Today I'm speaking with John Fly. John, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely, so I'm excited to talk with you.
Speaker 2:I love when leaders have their own website. That kind of lets me dive a little bit more into who they are beyond just like looking at a LinkedIn profile. So I've gotten a couple of insights from that that I'm really excited to talk to you about. And then, of course, I want to learn a little bit more about FirmPilot and some of the work you guys are doing over there over there. But in terms of getting to know you more because really you know who you are shapes the decisions you make and how you approach your career. There was something I saw on your website that I thought was really interesting, which is sort of your tagline, which was sharing knowledge is the cornerstone of growth, and so I always think, of course, that knowledge is the cornerstone to growth, but I thought that it was really interesting that you specified that sharing knowledge was a cornerstone to growth, and so I was just curious about how you think about that and how that line of thinking came to be Sure.
Speaker 1:So especially as I've gotten older and taken on more and more of the leadership roles I've had to adjust my mindset on, like, how do I my bringing value, um, and not just, not just like dollars and cents, but like to fulfill my days. Like, how am I bringing my all? And I think more and more uh, to me that's shifting into how do I help the next kind of generation, how do I help my teams? Because my teams, uh, will be able to accomplish so much more than I could personally, whether it's software engineering or product design or ideation or just whatever.
Speaker 1:So I think, more and more over the years, my job has become framed around using my experience to help others, and I think none of us likes to have that micromanager right, the one that just tells you what to do, right? So if you tell somebody you have to do this task and here's how you're going to do it, that's like no one enjoys that really. So I think the key to really getting the most productivity out of myself and everyone I'm around is taking that moment to be that kind of coach and mentor and explaining. Here's the outcome that I think we're after. Here's some of my ideas. Here's where I've been. Here's what I've seen to hopefully let them you know, not learn the hard way.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, I love that I mean, I think we've all had that, that micromanager, in the past and usually it's something that nobody remembers very fondly. And you've sort of taken on that new school idea of servant leadership, which is very much it's the bottom or the top really working to empower the quote unquote bottom or staff or team, as opposed to it's a bi-directional flow as opposed to a one-way directional flow. And that resonates with me because I I certainly take the same approach with the folks that I manage. So I was curious what? What does servant leadership mean to you? And then, how do you, how do you support your team, how do you actively do that?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 1:So I think as we were chatting getting ready for this call, you mentioned the puzzle behind me and I told you I built that with my son when he was like two or three and now he's he's grown and married and moved out and he's actually a manager now.
Speaker 1:And so when he stepped in from stepped up into management, one of the things I suggested to him is, you know, when he's presented with a situation, when somebody comes to him for help, or if he sees somebody that needs help to do, the hardest thing I think we can do and that is to be the manager or leader for somebody else that we wished we had had during a hard moment and, um, like just really be who we wished we had available, um, in some tough times.
Speaker 1:And I think that's really what I think a servant leader or a serving leader is. It's that mindset of I'm not here to pull you along or force you down a path. I am here to lift you up or give you the help and support to help you be the best. Now, I think there's a fine line here between like helping somebody be their best and coddling, and so I typically even though I'm not the biggest sports guy. I do tend to lean into like the coaching sports team mentality when I explain to people a little bit deeper what I think that means.
Speaker 2:Okay, totally makes sense. And speaking of, you know coaching and um, you know even the puzzle behind you. I know that you're you're big into do it yourself, minimalism, sustainability and your personal life. I'm not sure if this rings a bell to you at all, but are you familiar with the Mr Money mustache blog? By any chance? I am not, but I will check that out. You should, you should check it out, um, especially especially given the beard. But no, it's very much a guy who's kind of it's an older blog. I think it's heyday was probably about five years ago, maybe 10 years ago, but he very much is into sustainability and frugality and so some of the stuff that you echo kind of reminded me of him, even though I hadn't checked the blog in a while. But I was curious if that philosophy and mindset that you have when it comes to your personal life bleeds into or affects your work life at all or, if so, how.
Speaker 1:It definitely does, just like I think everybody who's been a professional for any length of time has had that. You know that micromanaging manager, that you know, manager, that we hope we don't have again or hopefully we don't become. I've also been in companies where I felt they weren't being good stewards of the company financially and just in many other ways. But financially I had a terrible experience one time early on in my management leadership track where I knew the company had blown a lot of money on parties and benefits and perks for their sales staff and I was then informed that we were out of money for bonuses for the team for that year. And of course I had to tell many people that you know, for reasons we had had budget overruns and there wouldn't be any raises or benefits or bonuses coming out that year. That was tough. That was tough news for me to roll out, knowing that the company had literally basically blown a ton of that money on parties for a tiny fraction of the company.
Speaker 1:So I think we should be good stewards of the company and I think frugality comes into play there. I don't want people to be wasting money. I want people to be thinking across the organization. What's the best move for me, what's the best move to help the company? And I don't think that has to be overly focused on, you know, capitalism and profits. I think it's just how do we make work not be a terrible experience, and by judiciously understanding the best financial decisions at every level we make the company more successful in the long run, and that usually means less likelihood to have layoffs, which that's one thing that people need to understand really impacts human lives. So I think you know you can kind of bring all this in and just think how do I do my best in every aspect of my job?
Speaker 2:What were the ramifications of that situation that you just described to me? Just curious.
Speaker 1:Well, it was not a deep tech company. It had technology and manufacturing components to it of the morale out of the team and company at large, especially since, you know, through other avenues, it was kind of understood what had happened and it kind of bred an us and them mentality where the manufacturing and technology departments in the company were obviously felt as lesser than the sales team, because it was quite a lot of money in the end that was spent on the sales side.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think leaders often really underestimate the damage that bad morale does when it comes to companies, because that then leads to turnover, which leads to loss of institutional knowledge or, on the technical side, tech debt, and it just becomes a nasty, nasty snowball very quickly. It erodes trust, yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of the technical side, I would love to switch gears a little bit and talk about FirmPilot. So for anyone who's not familiar with FirmPilot, you've gotten a lot of traction recently. You recently raised your $7 million Series A. I read some online reviews. Customers are raving and obviously it's been a relatively short journey for you. You've been there a little less than a year. But what's the journey been like so far, particularly as you got through the fundraising process?
Speaker 1:Yeah, this has been a really excellent last few months. So I joined FirmPilot early December of last year, very fresh company. So our CEO, jake, founded it early last year, so really young company, had a terrific run. The idea when it was founded was you know how much can we kind of leverage these new, you know generative AI toolings to be successful in marketing?
Speaker 1:And while I have used marketing agencies in the past, this is my first foray in MarTech as a product and I've been just thrilled because you know the way I kind of describe it is we take the ego out of a lot of marketing services so we provide highly focused, seo optimized content for blog posts and social media posts and a lot of the surrounding services to our customers. What we do is we deliver higher rankings and more targeted customer acquisition for our clients and our results are pretty staggering. I've in previous companies I've leveraged human driven marketing agencies. While they're great for ideation and brand and like awareness and ad campaigns like out-of-office ad campaigns FirmPilot is delivering very successful, highly utilitarian-based marketing collateral. So we're just delivering our customers exactly what they want, no fuss, and we're delivering a ton of content each and every month in a highly technical way. So it's kind of the content factory model.
Speaker 2:Okay. And so when you say taking the ego out of marketing, is it the ego of the marketer or the ego of the lawyer that you're taking out?
Speaker 1:the marketer or the ego of the lawyer that you're taking out. It's a bit of both, but it's mostly the marketer. So I don't want to downplay the human aspect, because I really think these generative AI tooling there's no golden hammer right, there's no silver bullet, and so, even though we're leveraging generative AI and NLP technology to a huge extent at FirmPilot, what we do is we craft highly factual, highly relevant and highly SEO optimized blog and social media posts. In the past I have worked with some terrific content writers and long form content and that human touch. That's still very difficult to get out of the Gen AI tooling.
Speaker 1:But if you need to just kind of compete in this online you know SEO ranking world you just kind of have to play the game of content Right, and so using these tools to supplement human processes is like we're being terrifically successful there. So I think hopefully this is going to help the marketers who really want to take their time to craft something special, a long form piece of content or something highly specialized. You know that's that's probably still needs the human touch we're generating, you know, quite relevant, good short form content. Ok, that makes sense, and so really the way that I think about that is, if I'm the marketer, we're generating, you know, quite relevant good short form content.
Speaker 2:Okay, that makes sense. And so really the way that I think about that is, if I'm the marketer and you know I have my content calendar and I've got to push out my socials and my short posts I can work on, I can more or less let FirmPilot handle those, and then anything that's complex that I really have to sit down and kind of you know, stare at for a few hours and then start powering that up. That's what's still best for the human. Yeah, yeah, I think so. Okay, is there ever a point do you think where you know either your AI technology or other AI technology will get to the point where it can do that long form work as well? Or is there going to be a point where you always think we, we always are going to need a human in the loop to this?
Speaker 1:in this to some extent. So I think the goal is to try and hit that long-form content creation and by long-form I mean something that's pages and pages like a multi-page type of post or something really multimedia a long-form, multi-page experience with text and animations and video, something very detailed. Our post can go a couple of pages. We can do the text, the formatting, the artwork, but I think the goal is to try and get better and better. I think there's still a lot of hype in the AI space. We use a lot of generative AI tooling in our development process, but I still have to have human oversight right. Even the best coding tools at this point are still in the tools category. I don't believe there is any tool out there that can replace a human almost in any job as a full replacement.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think at this point it's going to be, you know, a very savvy person who's leveraging and utilizing a lot of these tools to, you know, have one person do the work of five, or something along those lines Exactly.
Speaker 3:That's what it seems like Cool.
Speaker 2:What has been the biggest challenge as you've come on to FirmPilot either from like a, you know, a technical or growth or product perspective?
Speaker 1:Pilot, either from a technical or growth or product perspective. Well, luckily, the team here at Firm Pilot is really bright and really helpful across the board, from business and product, and the tech team we put together is really excellent. I think one of the challenges in this space is that AI hype, though I think you have a lot of people that are very skeptical, and then you have people who think it's already ready to. You know, take over the world and it should be able to do anything and everything. And when we talk to our customers, the message is what we bring is very targeted. The message is what we bring is very targeted, and our job is to help you get high search rankings, high visibility on your social media platforms. In search results. We bring eyes to your website.
Speaker 1:The content we write is highly factual, highly accurate and it's a good read. It doesn't, you know, can't be. Oh, that was an AI article. The intent is to help convert that website visitor into a lead or a customer. After that, it's on the customer to pick up that relationship and run with it and make that lead a customer, and so, while the AI and the content are a large portion of that, it's not magic, right. So I think that blend of helping the skeptics understand what really is possible is quite amazing. And then helping maybe ground some people with AI is going to do everything. For me it's like no, it's going to do some things really well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, cause I've I've definitely seen a lot of the. I mean, I guess it depends on how you think about the role of AI in our society, because there's some people you could call it like the AI doomer, which is like oh no, you know, we're going to, we're all going to be out of jobs in two years. And then, on the other side of that, people who also think that there's that level of progress, but that's oh, we're going to create an AI powered utopian society and nobody's going to have to work anymore and we can write poems all day. And I think those people probably on both sides need to temper their expectations a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I ultimately think it's. You know it's very difficult to understand where it is going. I'm, you know, hopefully I'm more on the optimistic side. I'm really amazed at the growth and progress in AI and just the NLP and language tools that have come out in the last months. Really the kind of mixed mode, the visualizations, the speech aspects of these systems, like GBT 4.0, really quite impressive how you can interact with it. But you know it's a trust but verify type of scenario.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Have you gotten the chance to do the voice chat with 4.0 yet?
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:Okay, I haven't. I don't know. I think they were just rolling that out to select people.
Speaker 1:I, unfortunately, am not one of those lucky ones yet, but I'm looking forward to trying it. All of these systems, I mean it's amazing, but it's just another way to interact with the system. So, again, I think the way we interact with technology is definitely changing. I think the way we interact with technology is definitely changing. I mean, I remember going from, you know, corded, you know landlines, to cell phones, entering kind of the zeitgeist to smartphones, like I literally remember, you know, when the iPhone came out having that, is this thing going to take off? It could be a novelty. You know. I remember, right before that, BlackBerry, right, everybody thought BlackBerry was awesome. And then here's this thing with no keyboard, just an all flat screen touch. So, you know, nobody really saw all of that coming in the way it has matured. So I'm really interested to see how this stuff continues to mature and what it actually brings to, you know, real life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean I'm excited to see what things are going to look like over the course of the next couple of years. When you think about just to go on this kind of a one off question, but I was a little I was curious from a technical perspective. When you're thinking about the stuff you're building at FirmPilot, you know particularly I mean I don't know how closely your customers are keeping up with your fundraising, but obviously you've got new fundraising, you have more resources to do things and I'm sure you're absolutely backed up with, you know new feature requests from customers or things that they want tweaked. But then at the same time, there are also things that are expected to quote unquote just work, like scalability, infrastructure security, things like that. How do you balance those needs, given the resources and the team that you have? It's a good question.
Speaker 1:So, luckily, when I came into FirmPilot, I was very well supported by the other executives. They let me really build out a very strong kind of core senior team and the team that we have. We work very well together in kind of a true agile fashion, and what that really means is each day, or at least a couple of times a week, there's really good discussion around what's achievable, what do we know we need to do, and, out of those top level priorities, what can we make progress on each week. And what that's let us do is move very quickly, kind of showing our internal team and our customers incremental growth, incremental progress, better results each and every week, each and every month. And that's tamped down.
Speaker 1:Some of this typical early stage stuff's on fire, early tech debt or just worry and fear. So our tech is very reliable, our results are good and we're moving into more and more like future facing, not gold plating or overengineering, but building in some scalability and adaptability, modularity into our systems design and so, while there has been some you know, some learning and rework, over the last month it's really been that incremental growth strategy. So we're making really good progress. We haven't had to take two or three months for a retool or a replatform and we haven't had any major outages or suffered any major accidental downtime due to bugs or a misdeploy.
Speaker 2:That's great. The small but mighty team Sounds like it's doing it. So and this is a little bit more back to the subject we were just on when it comes to the future of AI. But you know, with the rise of not only generative AI, nlp is always continuing to improve. How do you see the future of marketing evolving? For, you know, professional services like lawyers, or obviously there's other types of professional services out there but particularly in that type of industry where personalization is key, whether that be building a brand around the firm owner or content delivery value things like that. What is the future of the tech?
Speaker 1:Well, I can tell you the future of where we're trying to take it is to really lean into that personalization concept quite heavily. We believe very deeply that one of the things that sets us apart is we go really, really deep in understanding who our clients are and we feed our generative system immense amount of data on our customers in every step of the process, even if we have human processes and quality checks, everything we do is centered around the particular customer, meaning that customer persona is reflected in every bit of content, every blog post, every social media post, every update to any third party system that we're helping or we're guiding them with language. Who they are is really shining through, and I think that's the key. I think that's where we're trying to push forward with.
Speaker 1:The technology is not being just a generalization service. It's not write a blog post on topic X Y Z, it's write a blog post on topic X Y Z, and then here's tons of information on the client. Here's why it would make sense. Here's the type of customer they're trying to acquire, here's why they're trying to acquire it. So we really bake in that client profile into everything we do, because, at the end of the day, if we're not bringing the right people to our customers, they're not going to convert, they're not going to get the best experience that they can bring to their customers Cool.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm super excited to see how you continue to grow things. One final question for you, in the spirit of servant leadership what's the best advice you could give up and coming engineers or other technical professionals just to advance in their career?
Speaker 1:Well, I think the first one is really understand the difference between, like, the individual contributor track and a management track and really try and figure out what do you want to be doing in three years and five years and 10 years. I think a lot of people get pushed into a management leadership track in order to grow and oftentimes that's a bad move. If you're a passionate software engineer and you want to be a builder and a doer and you're seeing the management track as a way to build and do the things you want, that's probably a bad move because more and more, that leadership track is going to take you more and more hands off in dealing with people. So I would say, really try and reflect on who you are and what you want to be doing and see if the company you're at supports that type of future, love that.
Speaker 2:And I think, just to add to that, there is a little bit of a misconception or a myth that leadership, and people management specifically, is the only growth track. Because if you're a well-run tech company you should have really parallel leadership tracks of ICs and leadership where the IC type is more of a principal engineer or architect, where you have leadership over the technical piece of the product as an individual contributor. You just don't necessarily have to manage people and I think to a lot of folks, particularly oftentimes engineers, that's oftentimes more appealing. Just sometimes they don't know it exists.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, 100% agree. Cool. Well, John, it was super great chatting with you, excited to see where you and FirmPilot continue to grow, and thank you so much for coming on the show. Wonderful, it was a great experience.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me Absolutely Thanks for listening to See to Exit. If you enjoyed the episode, don't forget to subscribe and we'll see you next time.
