July 20, 2026 – Soft Skills App Sayre Blake and Coachful Coaching David Fung

Intro 1 0:04
Small business administration award-winning school for startups radio. We

Jim Beach 0:11
don’t have time for the introduction today. The show is too cram packed. First up, we have Sayer Blake talking about soft skills and learning those. He’s got an incredible app, and then David Fung talking about AI. It’s a fantastic show. Both of the interviews are amazing. That’s why it’s so cram packed. You’re going to love it, I promise. And thank you very much for being with us today. Make sure you tell all your friends. Let’s go ahead and get started. Here we go. Very excited to introduce another great entrepreneur and another great app, this is right up my alley. I love this idea. Please welcome Sayer Blake to the show. She is the CEO and technical founder of Skill Sage. It is an app designed to make soft skill learning more possible and helpful with people who already practice, you know, the real world conversations and all of that. Sarah, welcome. How are you doing today?

Sayre Blake 1:10
Hey, Jim. Great to be here. I’m doing pretty well. How about yourself?

Jim Beach 1:13
I am very well, thank you. Where are you from, and all that? Give us kind of your background.

Sayre Blake 1:18
Yeah, so I am based out of Longmont in Colorado, it’s in Boulder County, right outside of Boulder. I’m from all over the place. Grew up. I was actually born in Switzerland. Grew up in Washington, Montana. But I’ve been here in Colorado since I was about 10. So this is pretty much home for me. And yeah, I’ve got a got a bit of a unique background. I’m both a systems engineer. did electrical engineering in college with an emphasis on processor systems, and then also have a degree in illustration. I’m a classically trained illustrator too, so very much a left brain right brain dual mode kind of working.

Jim Beach 1:56
Is the stuff on the background of your LinkedIn page your graphics?

Sayre Blake 2:01
It sure

Jim Beach 2:02
is. They look great.

Sayre Blake 2:04
Yeah, that’s some of the art I did for a game that is currently trapped in development hell in the indie game industry called Reliquary. Nintendo announced it a couple of years ago, and then it got caught up in the slow motion collapse the game industry is going through. And so I moved on to do other stuff while the team there gets to fight with publishers and all that fun world. You wish them

Jim Beach 2:25
quite a bit, right?

Sayre Blake 2:27
I have, yeah. So I’ve got from a professional background. I’ve spent the last 15 years kind of orbiting the tech industry as a whole. I’ve been heavily involved in SaaS and enterprise B 2b space, and then also the game industry, doing both art as a contractor and a consultant, and then also a programmer and developer. I was the lead programmer in addition to the director on Reliquary, and I’ve done a lot of work in sort of the VR XR space for enterprise, focused around training and sort of figuring out what that next generation of learning is going to look like, which led us today to Skillsage, since it is very much the best of both worlds.

Jim Beach 3:08
All right, there’s the segment I can’t ignore. Tell us about it

Sayre Blake 3:13
then. Yeah, so Skill Sage is we like to call it it’s you know dual lingo for soft skills. Fabia is we I think for a long time have treated soft skills you know whether it’s sales whether it’s interviewing whether it’s just handling a high conflict meeting as well it’s the thing for extroverts and if you don’t have it naturally you’re going to struggle to get better at it and even if you’re good at it and you have a job that even bothers to have training you know you’re lucky if you get to show up once a quarter watch some videos that were probably ripped off of a VHS from the late ’90s, and then you know fill out a multiple choice questionnaire so HR can go. Yep, we taught it to everyone and move on. And we know now, especially that that’s just not how we learn as people, and also that these things are just systems; they’re patterns of communication, and anyone can learn them if you teach them in a way they’re comfortable with, and so we really, drawing on my experience and the experience of the team in the game industry and also in SaaS, looked at well, you know, people these days more than ever are accustomed to learning these really complicated systems in video games almost effortlessly, and then they turn around and show up to work and they struggle to do the training because I’m not really sure the training is there to teach them how to be better, and so we want to kind of take the best lessons of how you teach complex things like social interaction through the form of a game and let you practice anytime, anywhere in a no pressure environment, and so that’s where Skillsage shines. You can open it in five minutes, do a simple practice lesson, rehearse your answers, or you can have a conversation with Sage about you know practice an interview, practice that conversation with your boss, a

Jim Beach 4:56
All right, does it do things like takeaway points if you know say? Throw your boss off the roof. Is it just gamification of the conversations?

Sayre Blake 5:07
Yes, absolutely. And so when I say this is one bone I have to pick with the SaaS industry, I know we’ve heard a lot about gamification in the last decade. And what’s ultimately ended up boiling down to more often than not seems just like, hey, let’s throw more metrics at the problem, and that’s not really where a game shines. Games are about loops; they’re about motivation and risk reward, and so that’s where we shine. Is that when you’re in those conversations with Sage, it’s not a chatbot. You know, we’re really clear on that, and we were really clear when we started building it. We didn’t want it to be a chatbot because even when we started putting this together, it was becoming really obvious what the sort of dangers are for people of engaging with these modern AI systems in just this sort of hey here is this huge chat window in this context window and we’re gonna hope it works we’re gonna hope it doesn’t hallucinate we’re gonna hope it doesn’t reinforce their bad habits and so what we have instead is something it’s really more of an early neurosymbolic system, and so that means that yeah, we use modern AI, but we use it more almost like a language coprocessor to help translate the game systems into natural language and vice versa. And so that means if you you can do whatever you want, but if you try and be rude or threaten your boss, you know Sage is going to shut it down. If it’s bad enough, she’s even going to break character and be like, “All right, stop messing around. Let’s try again when you’re actually ready to take this seriously, and she’ll fail you. But that way too, she can also be a lot more nuanced. You know, if she feels like she’s not getting answers out of you, just like a real person might, you know, depending on if in the given scene she’s role playing someone who’s more forward, she might drill down and be like, “No, I need an answer, or she might just change tactic and be like, “Screw it, I’m not going to get an answer on this. I give up on that. Let’s try a different topic. But then you’re going to get dinged for that in the end, and it’s going to point out, like, hey, you really weren’t addressing her concerns here, and that’s something that’s really unique in the space that we’re really proud of.

Jim Beach 7:08
I’m on the site; it looks absolutely fascinating, and like I want to play. You know, sign me up and get my character out there. So, the website’s doing its job. It’s making me want to to engage with it. So I would use this as an employer and pay to have my team do it. Is that the model, or do I sign up individually? What’s the model that you project? How long is the app now, like the year, right?

Sayre Blake 7:42
Yeah, about a year. So last year we launched our B 2c version. Still out there. We’ll be out there indefinitely. It’s free to anyone with ads, or for a nominal fee, you can get rid of the ads. Any course we ever write will be free to access. No paywalls there, and that you know you can get on there. You can practice whatever you need to, and put it down when you’re done. For employers, and to be honest, and I think long term too. Right now, you know, most of our business is coming from the B 2b space, and I think that was always the long term goal. What they get is a full dashboard. So at the base tier, you know, they get some number of seats. They can assign courses to their employees. They can see how they do. They can set targets, and they can see everyone’s learning. The more advanced tier, they can write their own courses. And we’re again because it’s not a chatbot system. You’re not sitting there fighting with a 12-page prompt trying to get it to do what you want. You’re filling out a small worksheet that basically outlines, hey, what’s this scene about? Is there a flow to the conversation you want? You know, what are the concepts you want to grade on, and then all of that can happen very reliably, very predictably, and and very repeatably because we’re not just crossing our fingers and hoping NLM can figure it all out. There’s some really great systems underneath. I’m really proud of the team for putting together, and one of the really cool things that I’m so proud of the team for is you know we spent even before we put this out we spent about a year and a half building the core technology, and one of the consequences of our not a chatbot approach is this thing is so efficient that you know we can use a pretty fixed cost per seat monthly pricing model and just give you unlimited usage. You know, there’s no oh worrying about how many tokens get burned or are there limits to how many scenes my employees can run. You pay for it. It’s yours. You use it as you need it. And we also specialize in you know white glove white label solutions. If you want us to write courses, if you want us to get you a custom trainer, if you know the base versions on mobile, but we also have deployments on web, VR, desktop. Hell, we even actually have one with a local school district here, where they’re integrating it with a robot for their students to practice with, which has been super fun to support them with.

Jim Beach 9:57
Oh, what a great collection of stories! That’s amazing. Congratulations on all of that. Go back in time a year and a half, go two years ago, and give us history behind all the cool things. So you said you’re so proud of your team. That implies to me that you maybe had money raised to pay a team. So go back and answer simple questions like, how did you discover the problem? I mean, it’s one of those problems I think we all see, but you discovered it in a way to act. What’d you do first, and then what happened the next day, and then tell us that afternoon. Go back and tell.

Sayre Blake 10:30
Absolutely, yeah. So it really started from about two years ago, three years ago. After sort of my previous project I was on with the game got stuck in limbo, and I was moving on, looking for my next thing. I ended up working in the consulting space for a while, in like I said, the sort of VR XR enterprise space, and it became really apparent to me very quickly that, well, one, that space is really underutilized. I think there’s a lot of potential there, but the downside is that games are enormously hard to make, and at the end of the day, the moment you put an application in VR, you’re building a video game, and that has been a monumental hurdle for traditional business development environments to overcome. They’re just not set up to do it efficiently, and at the same time, in the video game space, there’s a lot of resistance to well, we’re video games. We don’t know how to do anything else. We can’t do anything else, and I just, I just don’t think that’s true. And so we had, you know, I’ve worked with so many customers who are so eager about these ideas of like, oh my gosh, I see this potential for, can I let my employees get out there and train. We’re a big construction company that was like, we want to train our sales guys, not you know just with these crappy tools that are coming out. We want them to be in the room with customers. We want them to be able to drill 100 times before we send them out in the field, so they can be comfortable and confident, and we can trust that they know what they’re doing. But like the the tools just aren’t there, and so we built various versions of this bespoke for different companies, one piece here and there, and it just became very clear to me over time. Like there’s a real need and opportunity for something that ties this all together, and from there, you know, I kind of left that consulting gig behind and decided to focus on this and built the early prototype myself before pulling in more people on that. But it just became real clear to me really quickly that I think I really view it with this sort of space we’re in with AI right now. I get the best results when I almost treat it like it’s a new kind of fundamental processor. You know, to me, this is a dream that I can talk to my computer and it can talk back to me in human language. Now, it’s not factually accurate human language. It’s not always sensible human language, but it is consistent human language, and that’s amazing. But I think that’s something that’s going to take 1020, 30 years to figure out what to use. It’s not like we’re one prompt away from getting agents to work, and so that really then inspired us to go. Well, what’s the slowest hanging fruit we can do? Maybe we can figure something out, and that kind of led to the the B 2c I wanted to make sure that if we were doing something, it was cost efficient enough that anyone could use it, and that the experience is good enough. When we got into that B 2b space, you know, decision maker to buy is not the person using it, and I wanted to make sure that the person using it actually has a good experience, and so that let us sort of build to that from day one.

Jim Beach 13:37
Well, it’s always nice when we customers have good experience. That’s just been forgotten by a lot of people, so I’m glad you put that back in there for goodness sakes.

Sayre Blake 13:46
Surprisingly rare these days, and it drives me a little crazy.

Jim Beach 13:51
Yes, I was on a government website trying to do a government thing with a quick deed, quit deed, whatever that’s called, and every single one of the go forward buttons, the upper left.

Sayre Blake 14:07
Oh, I know.

Jim Beach 14:08
You know, everyone else. My gosh, puts that on the lower right. You know, it’s anyway. You’re driving me crazy. Oh,

Sayre Blake 14:16
it’s so true. But you know, I think actually what you’re saying there really gets at the heart of the problem, which is the answer is well, how do you make good stuff? Well, it’s actually not glamorous. The answer is don’t reinvent the wheel. Be able to set your ego aside, and when you first set a problem down, go okay. What if this is solved, and what if it isn’t? And that may that those solutions may not even be in your own field. And I think you know that’s the resistance I see a lot with these game developers I’ve worked with for years who don’t see themselves as making software that can learn from all the practices and rules of systems engineering and broader software, and vice versa of you know these software companies that struggle to build anything good in VR because they’re like, well, it’s a game, none of our rules apply, and it’s like I actually. Most of them apply; they just look a little different, and I think that urge, that desire to reinvent the wheel, to build something totally novel, to put your name on it, is just so hard to set aside. But it’s the fastest thing to kind of sabotage you in any given project, whether it is you know, hey, let’s put the button on the top left, or I don’t know if you know this, but the USPTO office, when you submit an application, the only way to review the document initially is as a raw, unformatted XML document. I don’t know why, but it is mind-boggling. It

Jim Beach 15:36
is crazy. You said you built the early version yourself. You programmed it yourself.

Sayre Blake 15:43
That’s right. Yep.

Jim Beach 15:44
And how did you know to program, or is did you use an AI driven app builder? How did you do this by yourself? Because that’s pretty impressive, Sayer.

Sayre Blake 15:53
No. So I have a like I said, I’ve got a background in programming. I started with JavaScript and C plus plus in college, and my favorite, personally, my favorite is C Sharp. I’ve been using it for 15 years, and so actually, for that first version, I really and at the time too, honestly, I don’t the AI tools were just not quite there yet. So the prototype was pretty much built entirely by hand by myself. I designed the sort of base system. We call it the Logic Lattice. It’s our approach to neurosymbolic AI, and you know, use that to validate and vet. And then my my co-founder on the business side, he and I kind of from there were able to build it out into a plan and get the people on board we needed to help expand it out and build it into something stable. But I think that’s followed through to today. You know, I’m the one who kind of sets our our rules and guidelines for how we use AI tools, even as they have gotten better, and we have very strict requirements around that. And I mean, right now, one question I get asked a lot is like, “Oh, what agent workflows do you use? I’m like, “We don’t use any. I haven’t found a single one that can pass our efficiency versus accuracy versus quality requirements, and and they’re just not there yet. But we do use AI in some really interesting ways to augment our coders and make them faster and more capable and make better informed decisions. But I just haven’t seen that break yet, where you can just trust an AI to build it for you. And I’m not sure it’s going to come. I think I think human ingenuity and that ability to think abstractly is something that, at least right now, these language models just they can’t quite do genuinely. They can emulate it, but they can’t quite get there.

Jim Beach 17:31
How big is your team now at the company?

Sayre Blake 17:33
So our core executive team is four people, and then we’re about a dozen total contributors. We use a fully remote first process. We’re very picky about who we let on board, and then you know our right now we’re working. We’re kind of in our early growth phase, so we’re using that doesn’t include our you know sales and marketing associates. We mostly do that through partnerships with other companies and individuals. That’s pushing just over 20 people now in our network, and that structure has been working pretty well for us. I think it’s going to be a little while before we need to shake that up too much.

Jim Beach 18:10
Well, it’s very impressive. Did you raise money or self fund all the way? So you have a version up before you have to go into the market. That’s got to help you. It seems like you needed some money along the way, though.

Sayre Blake 18:22
A little bit. So most of it was self-funded between myself and my co-founder during the early stages. We got a small sort of pre-seed round, just private friends and family round, to kind of do the initial market test and do the jump from B to C to B to B, and that’s about it. That’s all we’ve raised so far. Has been stripped. Otherwise, we’ll definitely, I think, somewhere in this year, be looking for our next funder. But we’re going to be real picky about it. We’ve been really fortunate to kind of have things shake out the way they have, and we’re not really in a rush to pick that. And I’ve worked with enough funders over the years, you know, that there is nothing worse for a project than a misaligned funder who just you know wants to get that quick return fast, but ends up nuking the core business model in the process. So we’ll probably be going into our you know next you know funding round. I’m not sure it’ll probably fall somewhere between a C and a Series A based on our growth trajectory, but I think we’re going to be really picky about it, and I just can’t see us in any rush. To you know, we built really lean and efficiently, and that also means that we’re just not really under the gun to like, oh my God, we need money, or we can’t get up to the next stage.

Jim Beach 19:30
Very well said. That is so true. Not having a money noose around you somehow is such a difficult. Sarah, I want to tell you about my son Christian. He is still a wrestler. His college team won a couple national championships along the way, and he’s now a wrestling coach as his nighttime job. He’s also salesman for Lenovo, so he’s doing very well in life, mostly because his soft skills, I think, are so strong. He used to walk around the Greensboro Coliseum. It’s a donut that seats about 10,000 people. Circle, you know, building, and every single person. Well, he would recognize and acknowledge. I’d say one out of every four people at the entire place, and with those people, he could tell me, “Yeah, I wrestled him five years ago. His mom was really nice to me. She gave me a cookie. Or that guy, I was in second grade with him. Don’t really ever remember speaking to him, but we, you know, he knew everybody and remembered about them, and he had a good relationship with everybody, and he spoke with everyone to everyone, even if he hadn’t spoken to them since second grade. He still acknowledged them and said, “Man, we were in second grade together. You remember that cannot be learned. He, in you know, genetically burned into him.

Sayre Blake 20:46
It’s so true, and I think that’s

Jim Beach 20:48
how do we, you know, can I soft skill learn an app to become just as good as Christian?

Sayre Blake 20:54
So no, right, and so this is the difference between talent and capacity, right? There are different amounts of talent, but talent by itself doesn’t make you an expert. You got to get out there and practice. And what talent can do is it can lower that fear. I think that holds most people back. So in my mind, the greatest blocker I’ve seen this time and again. I’ve worked as you know back there in college. I worked as a tutor both in engineering and then again in art. I do mentoring and even in consulting, the thing that gets in people’s way more often than not is the fear of loss, the fear of failure, right? And if you have talent, it can really lower that fear because you just innately tend to pick up enough skills to get you going early in life when the risk of failure is smaller, and so you then practice more, and you get better. And by the time the stakes are higher, your skills have grown more. And so again, that risk of loss is smaller, and you’re more likely to keep practicing and keep growing. If you don’t have that initially, and you miss out on those early chances to develop those skills, well, the stakes keep getting higher, and the risk of taking that first step to practice gets bigger and bigger, and it gets scarier and scarier. At the end of the day, you know you can practice swimming all you want. You’re not going to be a Michael Phelps, right? You can practice tennis all you want. You’re not going to be a Serena Williams, but you can get better than you are right now. The difference is: Are you afraid to learn? Have you already convinced yourself you can’t before you’ve started, and soft skills remains this really weird area where up until now the only way to practice was to just go out and do it, and that means fear of failure gets real strong really fast if you’re not starting that until later in life, or you’re not starting that until the critical interview comes, or the negotiation with a client or you know your boss, and that just makes it really hard to learn. And so our goal is not, and we’ll never be able to get. You know, if you have an innate talent, you’re always going to be better. This is for that person who it’s like, I know you can get better than you think you can. You’re never going to be an expert, and maybe you don’t need to be. But I’m also consistently amazed at how far you can go with just that. Like, just get to a B level. Just get to that 80% from where you are now. And if you can get to that, it can change so much for you. And so many people are so surprised with so many things. You know, see this with art too. People treat art as if it’s some like mysterious, only the talent could do that nonsense. Anyone can learn to draw. Not everyone’s going to be a master artist, but you lose. You’re never going to learn if you go into it already telling yourself you can’t learn to do it, and so you need those low risk ways to try practicing things. And that’s what we’re trying to do with SkillStages: give people that low risk, low pressure way to practice, and go. Hey, you might surprise yourself. You might be able to get more than you think. No, you’re never going to be, you know, the world’s greatest orator, the world’s greatest salesperson. But do you really need to be to see a benefit from it? And that’s what we’re here for.

Jim Beach 23:55
Actually, I want to correct you on one thing. Can be told in school that you’re not capable of being artistic ever. In second grade, mrs. Leeds looked at my dinosaur monster, and I had three heads on my monster. And she said, “Jim, everyone knows that monsters only have two heads. Can you imagine a teacher saying that? Oh,

Sayre Blake 24:21
I can’t. I’ve had that happen, and they’re wrong, and that’s the thing, right? We got to overcome that. Changed my

Jim Beach 24:26
life, and I’m still upset about

Sayre Blake 24:28
it. You know what? I see. If I see that, I see. Dang, you might be a decent concept artist. Have you ever looked into it before? You’ve got some imagination, right? Like it’s it’s all about lens. That’s how we look at things.

Jim Beach 24:40
My latest book, The Real Environmentalist: How Wayne Elliot and Other Capitalists Will Save the World Cover of the book won. It was a finalist in the Indie Excellence Awards. 20-third year, my cover won. It didn’t win. I keep saying win. It was a finalist, which means it came in second, third, or fourth place. I love that. I’m a finalist in an art win already in my yes,

Sayre Blake 25:07
exactly, and that’s exactly what I mean. Like, do you need to be Rembrandt? Hell no. Does that mean you can’t learn and get better? Absolutely not. I think we there is so much room between being the best and not having any skills, and we are so often so quick to discount that space. And what I want to get people thinking about is, actually, there’s a lot of value in that space, and it’s okay to be in that space. And the only thing that’s going to hold you back is telling yourself you can’t even try. So just try and see what happens.

Jim Beach 25:40
Love that great line. I want to talk briefly about the game industry. There’s just so many misconceptions. You know, a game that sells a million copies is a huge bestseller versus a movie that sells 100 million tickets. You know, when you compare the two industries, gaming has become so much bigger than the movie industry, but we don’t really talk about the game stars, the people who wrote the games and all that. Talk about you know Clint Eastwood and Justin Bieber and all of that. These people who you know are anyway, and then the game industry is collapsing. You say in games now to 100 bucks. But you know what? A movie is $25 and I get two hours of enjoyment. A game at 100 hours, you know, I’m still playing Sim City and whatever the latest update on that is, and the latest roller coaster game. I’ll play those games for hours over a decade.

Sayre Blake 26:39
Oh, absolutely. So tell me your

Jim Beach 26:40
thoughts on the gaming collapse.

Sayre Blake 26:43
So when I say collapse, I want to be really clear here. I’m not talking about total revenue or market share or customers. I’m talking about the actual industry, the people who make games, and the talent that enables those things to happen. Under the hood, this is you can definitely find some about this. It’s also one of those things that people in the game industry don’t see themselves as ever being anywhere else, and so being on the edge of multiple industries, I’m in a different spot. I have a different perspective, but games industry is massively dysfunctional, and it has been for a long time. You know, it is an industry that built itself basically out of I hate to say it, but the rejects of the tech industry in the 80s, you know, Activision, I believe it was Activision, maybe Ubisoft too, started out trying to make word processors, spreadsheet software, and they couldn’t hack it, and so they shifted over to games because there was less competition there, and they built this environment where they looked around, and they decided they want to be Hollywood because, well, Hollywood’s big and expensive, and visual games can be like that. But we all already Hollywood’s kind of the butt of the joke, and that like we look at it and go, “Oh my God, it’s so dysfunctional! And so now you have an industry that’s far younger than it, and is trying to emulate something without fully understanding it, and it’s become baked in as this culture where, like you said, we don’t talk about where are the superstars beyond maybe the you know your Shigeru Miyamoto’s back from the original era of development. Well, they’re not there very on purpose because these the companies running these things at the large scale they turn talent over like it’s a revolving door, and then they look shocked when games take longer to make, longer to build, because they don’t have anyone building institutional knowledge in efficiency and process, and and it just keeps going. You know, Microsoft just closed down a ton of real high-profile legacy studios that have turned out incredible software over the years. And reality is, right now, most of that talent is just going to leave the industry, and it’s going to get replaced by newcomers and contractors who aren’t going to be able to learn or build that institutional knowledge. And we’re just going to keep seeing this sort of brain drain. So the industry is collapsing not in the sense that it’s going to stop making money. I think it’s collapsing in the sense that it’s lighting the fire of loss of institutional knowledge and capability. Sage.com, S-A-I-G-E. Sage is our virtual trainer there to help you out. You can follow me on LinkedIn, Sarah Blake, and yeah, just keep up with us. We’re doing fun things, and I’m really excited to see where it goes.

Jim Beach 29:23
Thank you so much for being with us. Great stuff, and we’d love to get you back in the year and get a follow-up.

Sayre Blake 29:27
Absolutely, anytime. It’s been great. We

Jim Beach 29:30
will be right back in just a second. Companies are AI focused these days, but I don’t know what that means. I can’t find the AI component sometimes. I’m excited to have a guest who could help us figure this out. Please welcome David Fung to the show. He is a former tech executive, 23 years in tech. In 15 years at Salesforce, he is now an executive coach working with hundreds of founders and leadership teams. He is the creator of the Wait Trade Designate Diagnostic Tool, which a growing number of startups are using. David, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

David Fung 30:17
Hello, Jim. Good morning. Hopefully, everything’s good. It is a nice hot day. I’m here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and yes, AI is this interesting word. It’s it’s hot again. It’s hot again. I got into AI before it was cool, like 20 something years ago. Now it’s it’s all cool again, which is nice to see.

Jim Beach 30:39
What what did we call it 20 years ago, it wasn’t AI. 20 years ago, was it? It was Eliza. The first video game Eliza acted like.

David Fung 30:48
Oh well, look, I played a lot of those video games as as a kid, right? And yeah, like, look, things go in waves. You know, things are cool and then they’re not cool, right? I like to say AI is something is like look. Most companies have been doing this for decades. Like I used to work a lot with farms, pharmaceutical executives. It’s interesting. The pharma industry has been using AI for 3030 plus years. A lot in their research and development. That’s where a lot of my formal education came from, computational chemistry. So that’s another story on its own. Why the hell did I do that, and why am I doing what I’m doing now? But look, it’s it’s been used. It’s been used. So, but look, that’s a that’s another another story for another day. We’ll we’ll talk more about what I’m doing today.

Jim Beach 31:41
Let’s do so. Why are all of these companies claiming to be AI if they’re not? Don’t they figure out that people are eventually going to see through that?

David Fung 31:50
Oh well, look. So back in 2010, right? What was big? What was coming up big at that time? Twitter, right? For you remember Foursquare when where everyone you know I don’t know why you would do this you you actually when you go to a certain store or a restaurant you would tell the world that you’re at a store like why would you do that right but social media was the thing back in the 2010s so if you said social you know social this social that you were cool, right? You know, early 2010s, iPhone came out in 20 what 2007, if if I’m not mistaken. If you said your company was mobile, then you’re cool all of a sudden. It doesn’t mean they were actually good at either social or mobile, right? And it’s just following a trend, and that’s. that’s a problem on its own, right? It’s it’s really trying to get that recognition, getting the search engines to recognize you. It’s about relevance. But if you have relevance and you’re not authentic about it, you will be found out very very quickly because you know you it’s it’s almost at the surface level, Jim. We got to have some depth and some depth to us,

Jim Beach 33:06
right? But there is no depth if we’re claiming to have AI and we really don’t. Eventually, someone’s going to figure that out and do a Reddit post on it.

David Fung 33:15
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Market forces, market forces will tell you very quickly, right? So it’s this. Here’s here’s the best analogy for the folks that are listening and like, okay, how do I tell the difference? Here’s here’s what’s going to happen in the market, and I like I liken it to like you know I I love to go to downtown Toronto. In downtown Toronto, there are so many nice restaurants, and here’s the here’s the beauty of that that ecosystem. If your restaurant sucks, you’re not going to be open within the next six months because the market will will will dictate whether they like you or believe in you or trust you or not. I believe the same thing is happening as we speak. There are a lot of companies that are still just you know they have a a wrapper around ChatGPT, you know a UI around it. It it’s it’s not going to last for much longer,

Jim Beach 34:11
right? Well, you know I I notice it here as the companies come through, try to get interviewed, and all of a sudden every company that I get pitched is an AI company, and this company is an AI company to help you with the dogs. And I’m like, what? Dog company? Come on! We’ve gone.

David Fung 34:30
Yeah,

Jim Beach 34:31
we’ve jumped the shark. We’ve jumped the shark.

David Fung 34:34
Yeah. Here’s here’s yeah. Here’s how you know a company is actually really good at AI. It’s when you don’t see the AI anymore, when you don’t even notice, when it just becomes ubiquitous around you. So, like the the let me give you a story here. 15 years ago, you know, I was interviewed for you know my last my last employer, Salesforce, and back then social. Media was start, you know, social media, you know, the Twitters of the world, all that stuff was starting to get really big. Mobile was, you know, making everything mobile was very big, and I remember in my interview, Jim, what they asked me was, Dave, where do you think things are going in the next three to five years? How do you know that social media and mobile will be successful at Salesforce, and my answer was very unexpected. I what I said was, we don’t even notice it anymore. When you stop noticing it, and it just becomes part of the ecosystem, part of life, then you know is successful. It’s just like the internet. You know,

Jim Beach 35:41
we’re not very far because McDonald’s still isn’t can’t figure out what I’m saying. You know, it’s not that many different words they have to learn. You know, you should figure out that your AI only needs about 1000 words, like Big Mac and Ish filet. You know, they still can’t even get my McDonald’s order right. So we’re not long. yeah.

David Fung 36:03
So, see, there, there, there lies the problem right there. You notice that is not there when you notice it’s when you when you actually can just talk to a system and just in your natural language, and it responds correctly most of the time. Like if you say, “Hi, I want a Big Mac with a Happy Meal and all this, it just works. Then you know the technology is part of life. But when you just when you consistently notice that there’s something wrong, they haven’t done it successfully. We’re not; they’re not there yet. So, I think that’s what you’re describing there, Jim.

Jim Beach 36:38
Yeah, that’s exactly it. It’s just nowhere close yet, and so many of the implication or the implementations aren’t working yet. You know, I can think of quite a few others. So, why is it that much of a stock bump if you say you’re an AI company now? I mean, hasn’t that stock silliness gone away though? Aren’t they seeing through the companies that are not really AI already the stock market?

David Fung 37:05
Ah, that’s that. That’s a really good question. I I don’t know what the hell’s going on in the stock market. I’m not going to claim to be a stock specialist, but here here’s what I I’m seeing from my point of view is that there’s a narrative right now, right of older companies, you know, older companies like ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Adobe. That they’re doomed. They’re doomed in the age of AI agents and AI in general. And the reality is, is that they’re not. These systems, like these, are multi-million dollar and even multi-billion dollar systems-they’re not going anywhere soon. In fact, what’s going to happen to and those stocks right now are extremely depressed. Now I’m going to, you know, give this caveat: I am not a financial advisor. I’m not an expert, but the a lot of these stocks are, in my opinion, highly undervalued right now, and it’s because of this narrative. The reality of what’s likely to happen, in my opinion, is that a lot of these legacy software are going to stay in place, and all the AI agents that are in you know that are coming out right now, they’re going to be doing a they’re going to be running these enterprise systems in the background without people knowing. So you know how I talked about things are going to be invisible. If you work in an organization, whether it’s a small business or in a large enterprise, a lot of these agents are going to do the work for you. And we’re seeing elements of this already, with like if you have Claude co-work, right? If you use Claude, Anthropic Claude, right, it could do a lot of the work behind the scenes for you today. You don’t even know you have an email inbox. You don’t know you have Microsoft Word open. You don’t know you have a browser. It does the work for you. The same is going to happen with a lot of these these companies right now. So, it’s a lot of hype, a lot of narrative. It makes me kind of scared, if I was to be honest. But you know, a lot of what we’re seeing here, Jim, is also causing. There’s also another narrative that I want to talk a little bit about too. Is that I’ve had a lot of you know friends and ex-colleagues who are being laid off, right? Like you see these major layoffs happening at places like Meta.

Jim Beach 39:26
Microsoft this week.

David Fung 39:28
Oh, that’s just one of many rolling layoffs they had, Jim. And yeah, you know, there’s Microsoft, there’s Meta, aka Facebook. You know, my old employer. Like every company is just going through layoffs right now, and you know the sad thing is that the narrative is that AI is the reason for it. It’s because AI is helping them be so efficient that they can lay off all these people. I I call BS to that. You know last. I heard from my colleagues working in these organizations, an AI agent has not replaced their job, and it’s really fundamentally restructuring that’s happening in the industry right now. But but that’s a lot of what I do today. Is you know I guess it’s kind of timely that I left the tech industry you know a little more than a year ago. I actually went to my next calling, my next career path, which is as a executive and leadership coach right now. So, and it’s you know a lot of the leaders I work with right now are the way I like to put it is this: their careers, their careers aren’t ending; their careers are expiring, and they feel it, and they know it, and they don’t know what to do. And that’s a lot of what I’m doing today.

Jim Beach 40:50
End and expire.

David Fung 40:52
Ah, the difference is this: career, your career, your role is no longer relevant. That’s the difference. When it expires, right? It’s like bad milk or bad loaf of bread. It’s no longer relevant. It’s no no longer relevant. A lot of people today are not choosing when they want to leave an industry. They are getting told that they must leave. That’s the layoff happening right now. And what I’m helping executives do right now, Jim, is helping them prevent that, not being reactive. And I know you know you have you’ve had guests here in the past talking about, oh, what do you do after you, you know, your your your company gets acquired, or after you lose, you know you leave a successful career. I’m not trying to do that. What I’m trying to do here is before any of that happens, look for the signs, recognize the signs, and do something about it today. That’s what I’m doing.

Jim Beach 41:58
Okay, I love that attitude. What are some of the signs you’re about to get laid off? I think we’ve all seen some of them, but you know, I I never get laid off, David. I always get fired. I’m not like, well, maybe we’ll bring you back when the tide changes. They never say that with me. They say you just don’t come back ever, no matter what, no matter how good the economy gets, and we’re not going to welcome you back. So, I I’ve never really seen those signs. So help us with some of the signs I’m about.

David Fung 42:28
Oh, jeez. I hope you don’t mind. I’m going to flip your question for a second because, and here’s the reason why. When I work with clients, I I the number one principle in working as an executive coach is the positive psychology, and is working with things that are in your control, and constantly being vigilant, you know, for layoffs. That’s that’s okay, but it’s too defensive, right? I come from a world like I worked in the sales realm. I really believe the best defense is a good offense, and so you know recognizing layoffs is cool. But what I think is better is recognizing in yourself when perhaps your time is done in your current role, and how you can recognize that. And let me let me tell you tell you a story of how I’m helping one executive do that right now. So I’m working with a chief executive of a large nonprofit here in Toronto right now, and this executive has been running this nonprofit for a number of years. Took it from something that was struggling really badly. The operations were crap, and over over a number of years has not just revived it, but made it thrive. I actually did a visit there recently, and I see the people. The people are happy, and so you know, working with this this executive, I sit down with him and I say, you know, hey, I’m just going to call him Bob. His not his name is not Bob. I go, hey Bob, everything looks great here. What is the issue? And he was telling me, Dave, it just doesn’t feel right anymore. This job doesn’t give me the energy anymore. And so, what we did there, right, was instead of like you know wallowing in in all the sorrow, we did an energy audit, and so what an energy audit is this: you look at your typical weeks, okay, Jim. If you looked at your typical week, a lot of you know there’s a lot there’s a lot of audits people do. It’s like oh, let’s look at my calendar, let’s see how much time I’m spending on different tasks. But when I say like definitely look at your tasks, but for everything you did this week, every meeting you went to, every everything you did, put it on a matrix and measure what was your competency level for that task, and what was your energy level for that task, energy and comp. Here’s the thing that we found with this executive, where their energy was lowest, but their competency was highest. It was for the very things that their core job requires. I’m going to say that again. What their job requires of them, the core part of their job, all those tasks, their energy was lowest and their competence was highest. That is a huge sign for this executive that he was ready to do something else because their energy was being sapped for the things, and they weren’t growing anymore. So that’s my that’s my flip of the question. There, being proactive,

Jim Beach 45:48
I get that. Yeah, yeah. All right, let’s talk about your coaching business a little bit. How did you get your first client?

David Fung 45:57
Sort of by accident, you know. Joking aside, getting my first client. Oh my God! So when I I tell you something, when I left corporate, you know, a little more than a year ago, that was the first thing people asked me, “How are you getting your first client? And my answer was, “I have no clue, my friend. And but here’s here’s what I here’s what I honed in on from my years in sales was the best clients you get are always referrals, and so you know number one was to nurture my network and to ensure that people knew what I was doing, and because people saw me differently. If you look at my resume, I was doing totally something different-not coaching per se. So people had to understand what I was doing, and I had to be loud about it. Loud on LinkedIn, repeating it on LinkedIn, calling people, making sure they know what I am doing today. That is one number one, right? Number two that I don’t think is gets talked enough enough about is my online presence. So traditional online presence, you know, if you go to like traditional web people, they say, “Hey, optimize your search engine optimization. But here’s the reality of how people find you today, Jim? They’re going to go into ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, and they’re going to search, you know, David Fung coach or Toronto Tech, you know, executive coach. They’ll search something like that, you know, obviously in a in a in a phrase in a prompt, right? And if your digital presence is not optimized for ChatGPT or these other models to pick you up. This that’s you know that’s like being on page 10 of Google five years ago, and so that was the other thing I invested in, right? And unfortunately, I you know I’m I am a techie. I know how to do this stuff myself, right? So I I optimize, I reoptimize my digital presence so that ChatGPT and Claude would start picking me up. What does that exactly? What

Jim Beach 48:11
exactly did you do, David?

David Fung 48:13
Well, you know, number one is I had I I have a podcast on the you know that I’ve been running for the last three years, the Coachable Coaching Leadership podcast. I have a lot of content there, right? I have a lot of content there, but it was and and what these LLIs do, like the the Gemini’s of the world, the Clods of the world, what they do very well is that they’re not just searching for structured data; they’re great at searching unstructured content, unstructured content such as videos, right, and audio. Basically, like what we’re doing here today. And so, what what I did was I went through I went through a process of like optimizing or consolidating a lot of the information I had in Spotify and Apple and YouTube, and making sure you know. And this is where some of the tricks come in. You know, tricks of the trade is to making sure that all these are findable and attributable back to me, right? So that when someone searches in ChatGPT, if they search for David Fung, they would connect this David Fung to that content, that unstructured content that’s on Spotify and Apple and YouTube. That was that was a little tricks, some of the tricks I was I was working on there, and a few weeks you know a few weeks later, it started to work. And here’s what I here here is evidence that it actually started to work. That you know that first client, that first client of mine, which is actually this executive, this this chief executive of the nonprofit. That first client, they just. He found me, you know. He just cold called, you know, went on my website and scheduled a call, and I was so surprised. I’m like, wow! And I asked him, “Hey, how how did you find me? And he said, “Well, I I went into ChatGPT. I did a you know I I refined my search, kept on refining my search for a coach in Toronto area, and I saw all the videos that you were posting, David. I saw how someone in Ottawa was referencing you, like in LinkedIn, in social media, and so you had this credibility. And I just looked you up, looked at your podcast, and I wanted to work with you. And so, like that’s that’s some of the things that are being overlooked right now, Jim. You know, like making sure that your business can actually be found online through not just standard Google search, but through you know the ChatGPTs of the world.

Jim Beach 50:56
Does it make any difference if you transcribe and add the text there as well for the search engines to find. Do they find text better than video and other methods?

David Fung 51:08
It it does it find text better. I don’t think it’s better or worse. It does help, right? When you do have so what a lot of podcasters do, and it’s still recommended that you do today, is when you know you have you know you you post your podcast. What I used to do, and I did it wrong, I just left it out there on Spotify. But what I do now is that you know on my web page, I I do put like the transcripts there. I put the show notes, right? I put the show notes there. I also put the timestamps there, so that text, right, does give it some content to to scour as well. So, my what I’ve noticed it that does help when you have text that back up your your your videos itself.

Jim Beach 51:59
Right. We only have about a minute left. What’s up with Salesforce? Why do they think that they can sell a product that then forces you to go hire another company to implement the product in the first place? I think I I can’t stand Salesforce’s business model. I think it’s just ridiculous. You want to defend it?

David Fung 52:19
I don’t want to defend it, and I don’t want to say good or bad about it. They and here’s why: I was there 15 years. They treated me well. It was a great career I had there. Their business model. I don’t know. Here’s one thing I’ll tell you right now: is that you know, starting my own business and being an entrepreneur, would I use an enterprise-grade CRM? No, I would. I would use something smaller. I wouldn’t use something like Salesforce. That’s what I could say. So it’s not not for someone like me. But look, it’s here’s what I would say about my former employer. I’ve worked for a lot of companies, and even on my worst day at Salesforce, it was still one of the best companies I worked for. So, dude, I have I have nothing bad to say about it.

Jim Beach 53:14
All right, David, how do we get in touch with you? Find you online? All of that, please.

David Fung 53:18
Yes, you can find me online, Coachful Coaching. So, Coach with a f-u-l at the end. Coachfulcoaching.com. There you’ll find my coaching services, my podcasts, what I do for speaking, and as well, you’ll find if you look at me, look for me on LinkedIn. I am very active on LinkedIn, and look, I’m here to help leaders out there, startup, startup founders, executives in Fortune 500. I help you get unstuck with the problems that might be marring you right now.

Jim Beach 53:51
David, great stuff. Thank you so very much, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot.

David Fung 53:55
All right. Thank you.

Jim Beach 53:57
Goodbye.