Jack Couch — "Sales is Fake. AI Will Eliminate It." Microsoft Vet & Sophtron CEO Jack Couch [music] Um, as a dot of two, I I totally get how two can be overwhelming, but nine, I mean, yeah, obviously some are out of the house, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. and they they get more more helpful, you know, at first. I think two is two to three is maximum pain. After that, it's it gets easier because you have like people on your team. So, it goes downhill after that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They start becoming uh really, you know, helpful taking care of the other ones and entertaining them. That's the hardest thing about kids is just keeping them entertained. So, you know, you get a pile of them together, then it's not so bad. And I I guess you got your own uh person to to mow the lawn. Maybe one of them. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. I They They actually don't do that, but they do The older ones do a lot of cooking, you know. They pick stuff that they're into. And fortunately, I I have a bunch that really like cooking, so that works out really well. Oh, that's amazing. My daughter loves cooking and baking. Not good for uh my figure, but what are you gonna do, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Well, uh, pleasure to have you on today. Second episode of Pale Blue Nexus. On the first episode, we had a a guy called Jim Rogers and, uh, he was awesome. Pleasure to have you back on, talk to you again and get to know a little bit more about Softron and and what you're you're doing over there. Tell us about yourself first, Jack, and like your your journey, and we'll get into Softron. Did you say this is only the second episode of the podcast? I've done many podcasts before, but this current version of this new brand, it's the second episode. Yes. Oh, right on. Right on. Very cool. Well, I'm glad to uh I'm glad to be guest number two. That's cool. Um yeah, so so Softron um the the way that I describe it now is is a little bit different because of all the interest in in AI agents and um so there was a lot of uh a lot of excitement around like open claw and a lot of the use cases that people were excited about were things like oh it can balance my checkbook or you know it can pay my bills it can do things like that and if you actually tried it I mean there were people that kind of faked it if you actually tried it it didn't work because all the banks and a lot of the web apps and a lot of the things you'd be interested in connecting to actually use blocking and openclaw, you know, used a a very simple kind of screen scraping navigation tool. Um, and it gets blocked really easily. So, Softron is basically gives AI agents the ability to connect to banks, credit unions, utilities, things like that, a lot of financial services that would normally otherwise prevent it. So if you tell your agent, you know, connect to cash app and it won't let you, then Softron can help that agent connect to Cash App. Now, how did you start this? I was looking into your background a little bit and you came from Microsoft. Is it is it safe to say that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Most of my career I was was in the military uh and signals intelligence and then pretty much went straight to Microsoft after that. Uh so yeah, 20 yearsish um in and around Microsoft. Um kind of started back back when there was a big push. Uh Bill Gates was really trying to push security. We had a bunch of uh worms that took over the internet and uh um security was becoming a really important thing. So most of my career was focused on that uh software security, software design um at Microsoft. Um, and then uh in what was that 2014 I I created one of the first I I think it was actually the first online accounting software for small businesses. Um, QuickBooks Online hadn't released yet and um ended up selling that to a company based in New Zealand called Zero that was expanding out. Spent a couple years in the Bay Area after that and then yeah, that was almost 10 years ago and then started uh Softron. So Softron's been going for about a decade now. Um, and it was a little bit of a synthesis of my security background and my co-founders as well. Kind of the same team that that were working on security issues. Then we kind of moved over to fintech together and then, you know, all of our background was in like AI and security. So, it made sense for us to kind of move back towards something that was like Softron. It's basically it's basically a security company wrapped in kind of a fintech veneer, I would say. So yeah, that's how we got started. And the the thesis behind the business was really that AI would make screen scraping work. There was a lot of screen scraping going on at that time. There still is because a lot of people if they have APIs, they actually they want to lock down their ecosystem, right? They don't necessarily want to have anybody be able to connect and just migrate away their users. So there's this big, you know, debate and philosophical issue of like, you know, when you sign up for a utility, is it your data? you know, is it it's your address and phone number and full name and date of birth. Is that your data or is it their data? And if it's your data, then you should be able to take it out, but they'll say, "Oh, it's our data. " And also for security reasons, we don't want you to be able to access it with any kind of automation. Right? So, and there's some truth to to that motivation, but but um but there's also a lot of hey, this is our proprietary data. This is our moat. We don't you know, we don't want that to go out. The banks have done that quite a bit. Chase recently, you know, there was a big thing where they said that they were actually going to charge you if you wanted to connect like if you connect with Softron or Plaid or one of these companies to let's say you're using Cash App and you want to connect Chase to Cash App. Chase is threatening and it's not really clear how it's going to work out, but to charge actually for that. So, you know, not only is it not your data, but if you want to access it, you're going to have to pay them to access it. So our whole thesis was we had been users of that and seen that it was a nightmare and we thought well you know this is in 2014 20 I guess it was more like 2016. Um but we thought yeah AI is perfect for this right like it's not there yet but eventually it will get good enough. Um and so within the first year we actually had 6,000 banks and credit unions that we could connect to. Um landed our first couple Anchor customers. Um and uh yeah, if you've connected your bank account to like a fintech app, there's a reasonable chance you can use Softron in the background. You just haven't haven't known it. Um unless you dig through the terms of service, then you might see our name. Do do you have to happen an example of uh a fintech app that uh is pretty popular that people use? Yeah. So the way that our business works is you have you have aggre like most of our business right now is we're similar to like a plaid. So we call those like aggregators. So you have like Plaid or Yodi or you know these sort of guys that are out there and then what we do is we sit behind them and take all of the difficult connections. So they might connect to you know bank ABC if it's really easy and they have a generous API because they're not actually trying to to hold users hostage but then if they want to connect to bank DF they send that traffic through softron in the background. So um so there there are some apps that I know of where uh where our customers are servicing those apps but of course that's all under pretty strict NDA. So I can't run around and say like X Y and Z is powered by something. Okay. Yeah, I know I know how that works. And uh so so you're like the financial open the open financial data layer is what you're you're going for here. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I mean at the end of the day if you want to if you want to have any automation connect to your bank account you need somebody like Softron to make that happen because the bank is spending a lot of money to try to keep your data in their ecosystem. it's in their best interest. If you wanted to, for example, let's say you install my car loan app from the app store and you're like, I want to get a car loan. That's a direct competitor with somebody like, you know, Bank of America or Wells Fargo or even like Boeing Employees Credit Union or something like that. So, they want to make that car loan. They don't necessarily like they're really not financially incentivized to make it easier for my car loan app to connect to Boeing employees credit union, pull that data down and then make a make a lending decision based on that. So, so they they work really hard. They put a lot of, you know, um work into making sure that that basically can happen. And then there's companies that, you know, they're a little aggressive. I would say Softron in the ecosystem is by far the most aggressive, right? We're just like a team of security researchers and hackers and you know people like working on this sort of stuff that that are making sure users can get their data whether whether somebody likes it or not. So I think we're we're the most extreme. We're the most aggressive. And you know, obviously the the concerns around security and privacy and all that stuff we take really seriously, but that's really not the issue, right? We're Sock 2 compliant. We follow the rules. We follow the regulations in a uh in any given region, of course. But uh but what we really do is when somebody tries to close the door on you, when it's your data and you want to pull it out and use it for something else, we kick in the door. Interesting. That is a that is a really good analogy and explain it like I'm five. So I totally get that. And how how difficult was it to kick down the door? Like initially it must have been a big uphill battle. Yeah, it was. I mean back in 2016 it wasn't as bad. Most of the most of the stuff that you know let's say that you're evil bank you know evil bank um evil bank corp. Most of the stuff they were doing at that point was kind of benign. like they would uh Yodi for example, they would write screen scraping scripts that were hardcoded and a lot of the providers today still do this actually and that's why a lot of you know if you if you've tried to connect your bank you probably you know there's a reasonable chance you weren't happy about the user experience but uh but what they would do is they would just pointlessly change their website right they would just like we won't call it the login button we'll call it the jump in button or something you know kind of random in the HTML break and if what you were doing Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So just annoying things that would break the the screen scrapers and because from the very beginning we were using like computer vision and natural language processing and machine learning to do all of this. We were actually that's that's why we were able to support like 6,000 which was comparable with Plaid at the time. Like on day one we supported 6,000 banks and credit unions. I think Plaid still claims around 7,000 or something like that. But uh yeah at this point we support all of them. So there's over 14,000 banks and credit unions in the US and we're the only ones that support all of them because it's just too expensive to support these small connections if you have technology that requires that you write code for it. So you know there's a there's a tiny bank in the Midwest and it's got like 14 users on it or something that want to connect, you know, a particular app. Very hard to make money writing code specifically for that. It's just doesn't work out. So really AI and this is why we decided to go after AI when it was still unclear whether it was going to work. I think now everybody would say oh obviously that's the right solution to the problem. But back then it was it was quite a risk quite a leap. But uh but yeah it's really the only way to make money uh or make it at all economical and also the only way to make it at all reliable to connect to all those disparate connections. And that's just banks and credit unions. At this point, we support over 60,000 total connections and we've got a couple dozen data scientists. Um, when Yodi supported, I don't know, 5,000 or something, I think they had 2,000 employees. So, our our uh our connection to employee ratio is is pretty good. So, how exactly does AI help here? Yeah. So, so there's basically three, let's say, approaches that you could take. Let's say you want to connect to, you know, Podunk Bank in the Midwest. You can either call them and ask for access to an API and if there's an API and they'll give it to you for free, then that's that's kind of nice. But the problem with that is that they're going to change that API, right? So if you have a very small number of users, even an API is like too difficult to maintain, right? You you can't afford to put an engineer on that API for even three hours a year, right? Because you only have 14 users and you're making like 10 cents a month per user, right? So the economics don't work out. But that is that is one option and that is the option that everybody thinks oh you definitely want that until they really think about the number of you know the potential connections and how how little economic value relatively speaking there is right I mean there might be $10 a year worth of value connecting to this tiny little bank individually that that is not enough money to put an engineer on the job for 10 minutes right to connect to that API let alone connect to it and then maintain it but also it doesn't make sense for them to do it so they probably haven't even built the API anyway. So you don't even have to wonder about the option. Um but so that's option that's like the what every engineer would think. Okay, that's the solution. And then the next solution would be okay, I guess we're going to screen scrape it. So, we're going to use some open- source tools and we're going to just say, okay, click on this button or maybe based on the HTML tag or something, we'll hardcode click on this button effectively and then put in the user's password and then log in and then click here and then copy and paste essentially this value out. Um, and so that's how it it I would say most of the connections like if you connect to a bank in the US and Canada, chances are if it's one of the big banks, maybe not, but uh but if you have uh you know a midsize bank, there's a really good chance that what you're connecting to is doing that. It's still even in 2026, it's hardcoded, super brittle screen scraping. And the problem with that is also if well there's two problems. one is you can do it without without getting API access, right? So a new startup and you want to do home loans or something, it's a viable option. Whereas an API, if even if it does exist, they're probably not going to give you access to it. So you can make it work, but it is like the epitome of tech debt, right? Like as soon as you write that code, uh there it's just a ticking time bomb before it breaks and it's probably not going to be reliable and it's going to be really slow. And so that was the whole ecosystem. That was the full spectrum of technology available to solve this problem until Softron started in in 2016. And so where AI comes in is saying, okay, you know, if if we can have a car that can drive down the road and it can look at a stop sign and it could use image recognition and go, hey, that's a stop sign. Um, why can't we use uh computer vision and image recognition to look at the website with human eyes and say, "Okay, that's a login button. " Right? Um, and the reason that that works is the same reason it works for you and me. Because even if they change thing and move things around and rename things or whatever, essentially, if a human can figure it out, then an AI could probably figure it out when it's a matter of like finding which button do you click to log in. So, yeah, that's that's where AI comes in. This this reminds me of the white hacker, black hacker type of uh struggle, push and pull, you know. Yeah. Yeah, it totally is. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of a lot of the guys at Softron have always considered themselves like white hat hackers. So um so it was kind of inevitable we ended up in some niche like this once we once we moved from Microsoft to FinTech and okay so let's talk about like because you know um the consumer level wants to know how this type of technology can benefit them. What can you realistically do with the technology that could help myself, my wife and I who manage a household, the the regular person who wants to look at their finances? What what can happen here? Yeah, totally. So, we actually did an integration with Chad GPT that was super cool. I don't remember if I sent that to you or not, but my co-founder connected Softron to Chad GPT and basically immediately had like a great financial adviser because she was able to say stuff like, "Am I spending more money than the average person in Seattle? How am I doing on my finances? Does it seem like I'm just really lazy? What about like subscriptions? Like, am I spending more on the Netflix, the Hulu's, all that kind of, you know, brain rot content? Am I spending more on that than the average person in Seattle or you know what? Um, and what she ended up finding out was I mean it it wasn't a bad thing, but it was interesting. She found out that she spends something like seven times more on fruits and vegetables than the average person in Seattle in her neighborhood. Um, and you know, she didn't change that. She was she was happy with that. Uh, cuz she thinks that's important. But um, but that's the sort of stuff that you're not going to get really without AI, right? Like those that's just a fun insight. But if she was spending a lot more on her cars than the average person at her income level in in Seattle, it would be nice for her to know that, right? Or if she was particularly bad at negotiating, you know, her home loan and she was paying way more in interest payments than the average person in the neighborhood. It's pretty hard to like I've never had a financial advisor, you know, or my accountant look through and give me those sort of insights because it's like it's very deep, right? It's like, oh, what's your monthly payment on your house? Yeah, that's about right. Right. But who's going to be like so diligent to dig through all the way to go? Well, actually, you know what? You're spending more on your homeowner's insurance than than you should. Like, how many thousands of dollars would you have to spend to have a a person manually figure that out for you? Probably more than you're you're overspending on homeowners insurance, right? But AI can dig through that and find those really obscure little tidbits that, you know, if nothing else, it gives you peace of mind that you're not doing anything irresponsible. This reminds me of like you hire an accountant, you hire a financial advisor. If they got together, sat in a room for a day or two, and they came back with recommendations, this is what you're explaining pretty much. Right. Right. But it would take them weeks, right? They would they would have to like really go through all of your stuff. But after they had gone through a bunch of other people's stuff, like your your accountant off the top of his head does not know what the average person that makes, you know, 350,000 a year in this particular neighborhood of Belleview is spending on homeowners insurance. He just doesn't have that data to begin with. Like that's why AI is so cool. Like there is a lot of reasonable fear, I think. like it's it's a very cool technology and it's it's important and so you are going to have like the leite sort of response but I think I think it's really easy to forget like the universe is really only created with like ideas and atoms right and we're constantly so short on ideas right your kid starts getting sick he has a fever you're like basically just starving to death of data all the time even in 2026 even with the internet and all that like that is a really cool problem that AI and I can solve. We we you know, we'll still be starving to death of data, you know, when we're on Mars because if you if if you were omnipotent, right, you would have all of the problem solved. So, it's not going to go away. But, but being able to be 10 times or 100 times or a thousand times more data rich in your life and decision-m is a it's a freaking amazing superpower. Like, it's definitely going to be good. So, let's let's say a benefit out of this was your partner. You you said that she knew knows that she spends what three to five times more on fruit. I think it was like seven times. It was like seven times more than the And it was it was cool cuz it wasn't just she spends seven times more. It was like for her neighborhood, right? Because you know if you're like, you know, if you're a trucker or something, you're probably not eating very well. You're not spending spending a lot on fruits and vegetables, right? But if you're, you know, if you work for like Amazon or something and you're in like some posh neighborhood, that's the like that's the level of fidelity that you really need for it to be at all interesting, right? Like, are you overweight? Well, am I overweight for what? For somebody that, you know, is a uh is a, you know, 55year-old man that's a trucker that, you know, works in like, you know, Chicago or something like that. That is a gonna be a totally different answer than if you're like, you know, like in Spain or something and you're like a 22-year-old, uh, you know, that surfs every day like all the context, which is data, right, is really important to any question that you ask. Well, so my my entrepreneurial mind is going and it's like, well, if I knew that there was a cluster of people that se spend seven times more on fruit and vegetables in a certain area, that could be useful. Very interesting. That's very interesting. I hadn't even thought of that. But yeah, absolutely. Like if you could find if you could find like 10,000 of my co-founders around the country and say, "Hey, you are a fruit freak." Like I I service fruit freaks. Yeah. You know, and open up, you know, a an organic fruit stand and vegetable stand right next to their Well, you're all distributing. Yeah. You you can get her to sign up for a subscription that nobody else would sign up for, right? like two crates a day or something or subscription. Yeah, that's a really good point, man. Yeah. And speaking of being distributed, you the last time I talked to you, you you guys were based out of Netherlands. Is that still true? Yeah. So, our our whole team is pretty scattered. Um, so we were all the last time we were all together was probably in like 20 2012. Um, oh wow. Yeah. Like 14 years ago. Um, and that's when we were all at Microsoft at the Microsoft campus. Um, and so after that, uh, after that a lot of us, you know, there there were folks from like Australia, New Zealand. Um, we ended up selling the company to a New Zealand company and so some folks moved there. Um, and then uh, yeah, so we we've kind of we're all over the place now. But yeah, I think we were pretty early on the remote work thing. you know, 2014, you know, way before CO, it it just made a lot of sense to us when I was running the team in San Francisco, you know, we had, I don't know, 150 engineers or something that reported up to me. I had people that would spend 3 or 4 hours each direction in their car. Uh, and it made no sense. I mean, I think I think maybe the record was like 6 hours a day of commute time. And I was spending I was in Seattle before this and had like no commute, right? because I lived in in Kirkland and I drove to Redmond. It was like very very short, like 20 minutes, but I think my commute was like on average two hours when I was in the Bay Area and I, you know, had a super short commute compared to a lot of people. So, yeah. So we we were already remote, but when we got acquired, it was such a stark difference between kind of the old school way of doing business and the amount of insane waste in that and then our team that was remote and just able to, you know, crank and focus for 8, 10, 14 hours a day and not not be bothered. Yeah, it's it really comes to a point that when you're actually delivering work that it becomes a productivity hack to be in somewhere that's very comfortable to you and and uh your lifestyle with your family and you know you can deliver a lot better in that way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think the argument has always been that this doesn't work for everybody, right? And you need some people that are um that are only motivated when they're in an office around other people. But I don't I don't really think that's true. I think that I think those guys that don't do any work when they're at home also don't do any work in the office. It's just much easier to make it look like you're doing work in the office. Like you stand up, you stretch, you have a meeting, you go grab some coffee. Like we we all know people that can do that for 40 hours a week and and work for like seven. So I don't [clears throat] know. A lot of it was weird watching everybody kind of realize how stupid it was to commute if you have a white collar job. I would take my laptop and I know a lot I know everybody can relate with this, right? You like you pick your laptop up off of your desk, you jump on you jump in a car, you jump in the train, you jump, you know, you walk for a few blocks in the financial district in the Bay Area or whatever, you work and then you grab your like you sit your laptop on the desk, you work on it, then you pick it up at the end of the day and you bring it home and you put it back on your desk. It's like, wait a minute. I all of my interactions, even when I'm in the office, uh, were almost all online, right? So, it really didn't make any sense at all. And it was weird to see co hit and then everybody have a lot of the same realizations. But what was really weird was seeing it flip back where everybody's like, "Oh, now we got to be in the office. " Like Google had this revelation that you needed to be back in the office. It it definitely makes me wonder how much of our economy is fake daycare for adults, right? uh where we know a lot of people aren't working, but there's there's some kind of Ponzi or something that's driving this or you have to have a certain number of people or uh I I I don't know what the story is, but it's definitely not about productivity. Well, there's also the part where the the commercial office owners need to have their offices filled because that's an issue over here in Ontario, Canada. You know, they mandated people back to office because of this reason. It's it's interesting. So, who who's working for who here, right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's very dystopian. Like your your your uh what's your purpose in life? It's to make sure that this office is full. Why do we need the office full? Cuz because our whole economy is tied up in this thing. It's pretty Yeah. But I do I do see the benefit like with everything going AI with everything going digital and has been going digital. There's this like there's this theory that I have and observation that I've had. It's like a lot of people want to do more stuff in real life. That happened after co but I that's going to accelerate even more with with AI. It's like people are just fed up with I guess digitization in a way. Do you feel that at all? Not really. I I think what we did is pretty unique too in that like you know I had friends and family and then I had work people and I really like the work people right like I have my co-founder and I have known each other for like 20 years now we have a really great relationship we understand each other and respect each other but we don't have to get together in person all the time because we we we have our own spouses like like we don't we don't we don't have a lot of time that we spend together just talking about our feelings ings or you know how stressful the situation is, we just freaking work. Like I've got work to deliver and she wants to know how it how it's going. She's got work. I want to know how it's going. And and then when we have extra time, we want to spend it with our kids, right? Like I I want to spend it with my kids. She wants to spend it with her kid, her husband. And it just seems to work really well like that. And and that's the kind of like there's there's other people in the company. I'll go for months and not talk to them. But but they know I care about them. like I've I've worked really hard to help them be successful in their careers, but I don't need to I don't need to get like that emotional connection online, you know, with somebody that's in in New Zealand because I'm I'm surrounded by like friends and family that that are separate from work. And I think that's kind of a healthy a healthy situation. I I mean, I do have kids that I work with now that are all software engineers. And so that's cool, too. I mean, it's nice to have that, but I think I don't think you have to get it all from the same place. And I think work can be highly remote, highly highly optimized for just just deliverables. I I think your company is probably an exceptional company in in that regard where highly performant. The expectations are probably laid out very clearly and uh you guys just deliver and and that's that's how I would run a company. So So kudos on that. Yeah, it's I mean it is more fun too. I really hated like one of the things that I really hated about Microsoft there was a ton of things that I loved about it. It was a super cool company back then. I don't think it's as cool as it was, you know, in uh in 2015, but you still had people that were like they were just tired or they had worked like we we had this thing called uh war room. Um basically everybody in the company was afraid to go to it because it was so stressful. It was like 20 people in the room and we just made all the decisions about what was going to go in Windows and what wasn't. And so if you had a bug or you had a feature that had a bug, you could have been working on that thing for like two or three or four or five years and show up to Warroom Room and they would say, "Sorry, it's not going in this release. " And you'd be like, "All right, well, I I guess I'm not getting into Windows XP. Maybe I can get in in 4 years. " So very intense and stressful and lots of real-time decisions being made. And I mean, there were people that worked there that once we did release something like Windows, like they were just burned out. like they needed like months to recover from the stress and and a lot of times they would still have to show up, you know, and be seen around the coffee room, but it was kind of understood. You're not getting any work out of that guy cuz we almost killed him, right? Like give him a few months to recover, you know, at least. And it's just that that sort of stuff is really annoying. Like like let the guy stay home and focus on his kids for a while. Like he's earned it. But you still have to like put in uh you know the the facetime in the office and it's just it's just totally pointless. So I think a lot of that stuff is like boomer World War II generation sort of formality that it's just taking us a long time to cut loose. Uh but I don't think you know nobody thinks in 200 years people are going to be like you know commuting in the office just to have facetime and and uh um and you know when they clearly don't have the energy to do any real work anyway. Okay. So let's say for real work, real productivity, this model works. What about and I'm just going to flip it over to like where people make connections and you know I'm in bisdev and sales and I get that I get that sort of you know you can't really do that over the internet as much as you could do going to a event or or serendipitously meeting somebody that becomes a business partner at an event and meetup. Um I and I think that I don't think that part is going to go away. You need to shake hands. You need to talk to people. You need to attend events. And I do see that totally go away still going. There's a lot No, you really Not only do I think it's going to go away, I think like that whole career field of sales and marketing is fake and it existed for a short period of time in history where we had a lot of products and we just had terrible communication mediums. And so, you know, a big chunk of Microsoft, for example, was enterprise sales guys. Um, and you think about the absurdity of this. Like, we had a lot of people at Microsoft that would just go to other companies and try to sell them Windows. What? Like maybe maybe in the early days of Microsoft that made sense. And it it was necessary because of the momentum, right? This is how people did procurement. This is how people bought services. They decided whether they were going to buy 10,000 Windows PCs based on the glint in the eye of the sales guy that talked to them and whether he had a firm handshake. It's totally ridiculous. And anybody I would say that's in sales and marketing right now is just they're they're just in a dying industry and AI is going to completely eliminate your function. Your whole job is just to communicate from the product team what's good about this product to a customer why they should want the product. You're totally automated out of a job already. You just don't know it yet. Because if I'm looking for a car or I'm looking for a SAS product or I'm looking for whatever. I'm gonna ask Chat Jippy or I'm going to ask Grock or I'm going to ask Anthropic, right? I'm not I'm probably not going to go to a conference and walk around booths and hopefully fall in love with a sales guy that convinces me that this is great. And I I spent a lot of my career in sales. Okay. I I I I really do love this conversation. It's it's giving me food for thought and uh I love your perspective because it it's challenging and uh talk talk more about like why do you think events would go away? Like why let's say there was a financial data event that was happening in Las Vegas. Why would you Yeah. Like money 2020 like let's say that I'm a stockholder in money 2020 right now, right? Or like I'm one of the founders of that thing. We we've gone to money 2020 a few times and I think there is value in there has been value in going to that. But if you actually just step back and think about what this is, um you're physically going to a place and like walking around this hall, right? You're walking around this big huge room with all these companies that set up booths. And this is a system that worked and started with mostly physical products, right? these conferences and stuff like mostly physical things and mostly before the internet existed, right? So, this is clearly like a legacy mode of operating and and connecting with people. And you think about the money that goes into that, right? Like a lot of lot of the money that you spend being there as a conference company, right? It's basically like it's proof of bling, right? Like if you spent $2 million and it's not hard to spend $2 million at one of these these conferences like a money 2020 if you get the right corner and all of that you could spend that and you probably have 20 employees there for the whole time, right? So you're talking about, you know, no question you're spending seven figures on this sort of thing. And a lot of what that does is it shows that you have money. So, you're trying to display status to everybody and you're trying to say, "Hey, if you're thinking about using a product in this category, let's start by looking at the guys that have the biggest booths and the mo have spent the most money because they're obviously successful. " And if you use them, they're not flaky, right? So, it's like it's brand recognition and it's sort of like that first cut. So, you're making like these as a consumer of these products and services, you're making these very chunky, very vague, like I think I should seriously talk to these guys because I can see that they just sent maybe $2 million on fire in a barrel. Like, that that's a big part of what's happening. It's like imagine you showed up and there's 50 companies and you know 14 of them are relevant for the category that you might want to buy at and you're just looking at who burned the most money in this burn pit, right? And and you just start with the one that burned the most and you work your way down. That's really a big part like I would say that's the highest order bit for what's happening in that environment. And when you look at it like that, it's it's not very efficient. And then you think about all the money that you spent to go there. Like you're staying in probably an expensive hotel like the Bellagio or something, right? Host these things. You had to fly in. You're going to have a handful of conversations. And sales guys love it. And you know, it's been good for for my business. It's been good for a lot of people's businesses. But what I'm trying to say is like just from a uh a data exchange perspective because that's ultimately what you're doing. You're just trying to like figure out, have I built the right product that somebody wants and how do I get them to understand that it exists and and that's it, right? It's it's purely data transfer. The only reason all the interpersonal stuff and all the sales skills and all the like manipulative stuff come into play is that the data transfer mechanism is so lossy. It's just a very inefficient and the buyers just don't even know what the hell they're buying half the time. and they're getting into these multi-year contracts and they're they're like in a lot of ways they're they're going, "Okay, well, I know this guy, you know, this head of sales guy. I've seen his career. Maybe I knew him 15 years ago. He didn't screw me back then. So, I'll go ahead and sign this contract now. It's a multi-year contract, and I'm putting a lot of weight in the reputation of the sales guy representing this company. " It's it's very very sloppy a way to do business, and it's the only way that you can really do business when you're completely data starved, right? And that's why when I was talking about AI earlier with helping with finances, it's like we can just make a a decision with 10,000 times more data than we could have 50 years ago. We probably do that already, but AI is going to take it another couple orders of magnitude. Uh, and where does a where does a guy that's like focused on sales his whole life fit in there? Man, if there's one job that just doesn't bode well, right? It's like being a manual data transfer agent in a world where the data is transferring faster and more efficiently when you're not in the room. So yeah, I I I would say if you're in sales or marketing, you know, it might be a good time to learn to code. Oh yeah. I mean, everybody's got to learn to code these days. And it's it's quite easy if you know if you know where to point the direction, right? Like that's the thing. I just don't think people know how to build. I think like coding is the easy part. It's it's what to build. like what do you want to build and how to architect it, what to put in your software and what to leave out, right? So, yeah. Yeah, that's true. I mean, what you're doing with the podcast is interesting, right? You found a way to connect with people and and I I think podcasting is a great kind of way to sell right now because it is a good intermediary thing. Like obviously flying to a conference is probably not going to be there in like 15, 20 years. Like it probably doesn't compute, but it takes time for these things to change. I don't I don't think, you know, if you're if you're a a super successful enterprise sales guy, I'm not saying you should quit your $10 million a year job and go learn to code right now, right? Like you can you can ride the wave out, but you probably don't want to train your grandchildren, right, if you're if you're uh at that age to go into enterprise sales right now cuz it's, you know, it's probably not going to be there for them. But yeah, I think I think stuff like podcasting, connecting with people online in the way that we're doing right now is kind of on that continuum. um and and and has more legs, longer legs than something like uh um you know, trying to just knock on doors or whatever. But ultimately, part of the reason that this is cool is that it does get fed into the LLMs, right? Like everybody's going to go to the LLM first and say, "Hey, should I who's Softron, right? " And to the degree that these podcasts get fed in there, like that's that is good sales and marketing, I would say. But you got to know that the main face is going to be LLM. That that's a good thing. But I will I will say that the one thing that people do want to see is like they put a face to the name, too. Like they they will have the data in the LLMs, but they'll also say, "Hey, that's Jack Couch is a real person, and there he was with Johan on a podcast, right? " Like, so I think like you're right. And and uh I advised a CEO that I worked with one time. I'm like I said to him the amount of money and time that you spent going on conferences is that's the time that you could be building. It's it's terribly disruptive for you to be leaving building product to be going to these things and there's you have a week before you have a week after maybe even two weeks before to prep and two weeks after to to to but in in a really data uh if the buyers don't have access to a lot of data though it makes sense for him to do that like he probably did the math. He probably wasn't terribly off on whether it was effective or not. He knew if he got a few more sales when he went to a conference that he wouldn't have got otherwise probably. But the difference is that the data is getting richer. Like if if somebody said, "I I'm building a financial app and I want to get access to banking data or I'm building an AI agent, right? I'm building a an AI agent. One of the things I want it to be able to do is connect to banks. Well, I can look at Softrun or I can look at Plaid or or Yodi or, you know, Finicity, Mastercard, whatever. " Right? I think this conversation could be helpful because it goes into the LLM and the LLM says, "Hey, you know, here's the seven that I know about and maybe Softron, you know, maybe it would have been a list of six if I wasn't on on a few podcasts, right? Uh because they're not as top of mind. " But then the next question is like, okay, how how should I make this buying decision? And the answer is going to be something like, well, you're trying to connect to banks. How many bank here? Here here's the banks that they can connect to. Here's the reliability numbers that have been published, if any have been published. Here's any security breaches that any of these companies have suffered. Here's how long they've been in business. Like the LM is going to be an unbiased uh source of those key driving decision-m sort of metrics, right? And so probably it's not going to be very long before nobody cares, right? Nobody cares that Jack Couch has, you know, worked at Microsoft or whatever. It's like, can you connect me to Boeing Employees Credit Union and Wells Fargo? Have you ever had a security issue and what's your cost and uh you know, does it freaking work, right? I I don't want to have a conversation. I'm probably vibe coding this thing up anyway, right? Like like I'm probably having an agent decide what API I'm going to use to connect the bank account. So, I'm probably, you know, like even the buyer is probably getting taken out of the loop more than than we expect right now. But yeah, the idea that like as a technology service provider, people are really going to care whether I have a, you know, a charming personality or not, like yeah, that's totally was the case 20 years ago. It's a little bit the case now, but I think we can see that it's not going to be the case for much longer. This is cool. So, what is your your future like estimate of how we interact with the LLMs? Is it just going to be a device on our phone that we just speak into? Is that is that the best UX? I I mean I think probably it's it is probably you just talking to your phone. I don't know if it's a separate device. Like this this whole separate device thing has been so weird to watch too. When when I was at Microsoft and we had this pocket CE, I think is what it was. And you know, you had your phone and you could slide like a keyboard out and you had a stylus. And then then I worked at Xbox. Then I worked at Zoom. And Zoom was like, "Okay, we're going to consolidate the MP3 player and watching video was like the whole the whole idea behind Zoom. " And it was super cool. Like we had for for what it was, we had this great UX, great designers, great artists and everything. Like it was it was fun. I still have like zooms laying around. But then the day the iPhone came out, we all stood around and we said, "Okay, where are we applying next? " Right? We all knew it was over because [laughter] as soon as you picked up the iPhone, you were like, "Oh my gosh, this touchscreen is amazing. " Like they finally got touchcreens to work. There's no stylus. The reason that Zoom didn't have a uh like a touchcreen is we didn't have the technology to make it work. It was it was a shitty user experience. Even with a stylus, you'd like stab the thing sometimes, you know? It just it it wasn't good enough. And so we kind of did like this custom thing where you'd roll your thumb around. But as soon as we saw that good touch screen, we were like, "All right, it's game over. " And also, it's got to be the phone. So, some of us moved over to Windows Phone and worked on that, but it was just so clear that like, yeah, nobody's going to carry around an MP3 player when they can carry around an iPhone and it has an MP3 player and it's got a browser and it's also a cell phone, right? So, this kind of like weird going back to individual devices, I just think it's like it's in in nonsense, right? Like why I I carry these two things around like everybody right now, right? And I'm kind of annoyed that this isn't somehow inside this already, right? Like like you want your AirPods to be somehow smaller so that they can like fit in the back of your phone case or something. And I'm sure I'm sure somebody's working on that. It's probably already uh it's probably already on the road map at Apple. Yeah. It's called a brain computer interface that Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I mean that's way more that's way more the trend, right? The trend is not towards inconvenience. The trend is towards convenience. So yeah, I I agree. More likely my cell phone goes in my skull than that I carry another few devices around. Would you do it? Would you do it? Would you be one of the first ones or No, I'm a security guy, so I like trust boundaries and my brain uh I I like that it's isolated from my phone to the degree that it is. I mean, there's been there's been enough experiments already trying to push that limit, but no, I I don't want to I'm not going to be the first guy to get his brain hacked. Okay, I'd have to have a lot more trust in the hardware that I have and stuff right now. All right, but you know, we're wrapping up here. Super amazing conversation. What's the future of Softron? Like, where do you see guys yourselves in a couple years? And how can we keep up with what you guys are doing? Yeah, I mean I I think probably what's going to happen with Softron is we end up getting acquired by one of the frontier models. That seems like the most likely thing because they're they're running up against this data wall that they're starting to talk about more and more now. Like they've got access to all of the public data they've trained and they've added the functionality that they can add, but they they need access to everything that they can get. That's going to be a major differentiator. And we've spent a decade getting really, really good at accessing data, um, ethically and with consumer consent, um, informed consent, all of that, but getting access to data that nobody can get access to. So, I think that's probably where we end up. Um, and, uh, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be a it's going to be a fun ride. Uh, the stuff that's happening is it's of course overhyped, but all these things have been overhyped and then still absolutely incredible in hindsight. Amazing. Thanks, Jack. One thing I was say a little curious about what you said. You said you were on the Xbox team. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I uh I personally set up the Xbox network in Japan. Did did like built out the whole the whole uh network configuration and all that sort of stuff. So, Xbox Live in particular. So, meaning like multi multiplayer run ran on something you built. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Xbox Live was huge when it first came out. I mean, it was it was Halo, you know, Halo kicked off and you could play Halo with your friends all the way across the country, all the way across the world, right? And uh yeah, that was one of the funnest times of my career. Like, everybody was playing Halo all the time when we weren't working. And you know, actually, you know, that that was magical. And part of the reason it was magical is we were all in person. I got to I got to admit, it was very cool to be able to walk down the hall and uh just see all your friends that you were working and playing with. your connection or our connection went south there. But I I wanted to show you this. I I found this in a in a toy show. It was Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The laser cell fun. A laser cell. One of 500. Yeah. Nice. Let's give it to the employees. Yeah. I I actually don't have that and I don't remember it. Um but it looks cool and it probably was. I uh I somehow I always missed out. Uh I think it was because I was always working like in the party. Um when we shipped Windows Vista, every year that when we shipped a new uh copy of Windows, there'd be this huge uh cover on Wall Street Journal and a picture of that war room that I was talking about and everybody was there. And uh I missed that day, too. Even though I spent, you know, I was the security guy in that room for two years. And then I don't know, some emergency came up and I wasn't I wasn't uh hanging out at the party and then they came in and got the shot. So, I'm not surprised that I uh don't I don't still have that. Prior to us having kids, we used to play Halo multiplayer all the time, my wife and I, and we love it. I mean, it's uh it's probably one of the best video games. I hope they I hope they move and do something with it more. But uh yeah, it's a staple. It's a it's an amazing game. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very fun. I'm not uh I'm not doing a lot of gaming anymore these days, but uh yeah. Yeah. I'm hoping that that some some more fun games come out. It does it does seem like that stalled a bit. VR is actually going to be amazing. I was I was talking to a friend the other day that has been working on a physics engine for VR and trying to figure out how to get it to the point where we could do sword fighting. And if you think about the latency there, it's just insane. like you gotta for for you to hit somebody else's sword like the speeds or and he said for the first time this was just a couple weeks ago he was like I got it and he was able to actually sword fight with somebody else and they did all kinds of weird things to make it work and your brain actually has to be okay with like you actually it introduces more latency for when you move your hand but your brain starts adjusting this is very weird like your brain's brain stops expecting your hand to move as fast. And so they buy themselves a little bit of latency by doing that. By basically slowing your brain down on both sides, they're able to use that time gap that they create by putting a local lag that doesn't need to be there. But yeah, at the end of the day, they were they're uh they're able to have a really cool like actual sword fighting experience in VR. So that hype cycle's gone now, but it's going to come back and the technology is still progressing and it's going to be awesome. Yeah, I know. I've I've gotten into collecting games. I don't get time to play it myself, but uh collecting games, I don't know. It's just like one of those things. I was into NFTTS, so it uh it was a natural thing. [laughter] Um are you are you still in NFTs or has that hype cycle completely? Uh it's uh that hype cycle is completed for now. I I think there's there's more there's more you can do with NFTs. Like there's Funkos that that that were redeemable if you owned the NFT. I thought that was cool, right? Yeah. like rewards points sort of. Yeah. And I think there's it's just data that's onchain. Uh it's just data that's that's metadata that's onchain and trackable. So I I don't from a technology and productwise. It it probably was just delivered the wrong way with you know board ape and monkeys and all these different things. So what a crazy what a crazy series of hype cycles we've lived through in the last 10 years. Like when Xbox Live launched it was really cool. It was a big deal and the amount of hype that it got. Even though we had like we had millions of users, people were spending tons of time on it. It was like, you know, it was the first online gaming experience for I would say most people that bought an Xbox. They hadn't really done a lot of online gaming. You know, there was like World of Warcraft, but that was like weird teenagers only, you know, that that played that. And yeah, there was there was some of that, but not not a ton. And and man, if you compare like the social impact of that and how how actually cool it was to the amount of overall hype to something like the NFT thing, like the amount of joy that the NFTs actually brought to people compared to the hype, like we have entered into just a really really weird world where it's really hard to tell what the heck's going on anymore. But yeah, I think you know, like even even VR, like VR has kind of sucked. Like my kids play VR, I've played it a little bit. There's some cool experiences that you can have in VR, but for Facebook to be renamed Meta and all of the metaverse hype, that whole hype cycle was just insufferable. Like, it's so I'm so glad that one's over. But it is a weird time where it's like everything that I want to be excited about, I almost don't like it because they're ruining it for me. Like they're so hyping things to the point where it's like I'm kind of disgusted. Like AI is a perfect example. I'm totally excited about the actual experiences, but when I say it, I think of like, oh my gosh, you know, everybody's going to be unemployed in like two weeks and all of this sort of stuff. It's like, oh man. So, I I try to I I'm trying more and more to like block out the hype and, you know, focus on the reality. And the reality is very cool with a lot of the stuff. Speaking of hype, are you any kids into Pokemon and Magic or anything like that? No, no, no, no, no. The older ones are are a little too nerdy, I think. Okay. They like they like like first person shooters in VR. They they do that a bit and uh um and like racing go-karts and things like that. But yeah, before you go, I just wanted to say I didn't know that you worked on the Microsoft network, but we got so much enjoyment out of that and it was it's literally the gold standard of online multiplayer. I It still probably is. I don't know. I don't play. But if I were wanting to choose one, it would be like, "Yeah, it's Xbox Live. It's worth it. I could have a phone conversation with my, you know, it's it was that good." You know, it was a good system. Yeah. Yeah. It was it was cool. And it was the first, like I said, it was the first time a lot of people had that experience. So, it was really fun to be part of that. But, yeah, lot lots of more cool stuff to come. If uh if we could just see through the hype, I think uh you know, how good would it be if we were able to sword fight during this conversation? Why not? Oh, that's interesting. It's It was refreshing having you on. There's like a lot of people that talk hype and you're just like that veteran CEO type that that that's seen it all type of thing. So, I I really do appreciate your Candace, you know, converation. So, awesome, man. This was fun. I I really appreciate you reaching out and and getting this together. This is a good time. All right, man. We'll be in touch. I'll I'll talk to you again soon. Okay. See you.