Hank: So today we're talking about themes for the year. We don't have too much news to cover, though we have some interesting inspirational tweets or tweets that inspired us at least. And I don't know it sounds like you similar to me don't set specific resolutions for a year, but you kind of think More in themes, though maybe you do have some specific goals.

Gonto: I do have some specific objectives, as you'll see when we talk a bit about our personal life. Maybe the work ones are a bit more fuzzy, but I think the personal ones are more specific, but I really like this idea of we talk about our themes. We would love some feedback because it's not about DevTools and it's go to market.

So if you hate the episode, let us know and we'll go back to our original stuff. 

Hank: Yeah, but things are really good. Everyone's in the org planning, annual planning, budgeting, and it's good to think about what you're going to do. So we'll start with some work themes and then we'll talk about our personal goals too. Because why not? We're all friends here. 

So, I have two main themes for work. The first one is about using AI at work more. I have some ideas of what this looks like. A lot of it has to do with content generation, because that's what LLMs are good at, and those are typically what we mean when we say AI these days.

I'm going to start actually by testing a few things with our podcast because I think Gemini can take our videos straight from drive or YouTube and produce content out of them. And even identify what clips we should turn into shorts on YouTube. And these are the sort of things I want to start with. 

If those work well, I have at work some prolific YouTubers who don't write, ever. But they're creating 2, 3, 4 videos. They get, you know, 10, 000 views. total a week and then they don't write a word about it. So I'm like, there's so much SEO left on the table if I could just get them to write. So I'll just have an LLM do it. That's one example. You know, there's lots more, but that's kind of my first theme.

Gonto: On that theme, what's interesting to me is like, will AI content written only by AI really work? Or will you need like a human in the middle? What I mean by that is maybe the AI that's a good first pass, but then you need a human to make it better just so that it works better with Google because I think Google will do work to find out if something is AI and just like classify it worse. But I don't know I was talking the other day to a friend about this and like people care so much about if content is written by AI or not, but in reality If it's written by AI, content, why do you care?

Hank: Well, and also if it's derivative, that's different, right? Because the worst AI content that Google hates is “original” content by AI. And I say original in quotes because it's just regurgitating parts of the internet it read. 

But for example, I'll do an AI generated post on this podcast. We'll try it out. It's going to take our original words and thoughts and it's just going to put those in written form with some minor changes that are less perhaps conversational and structured in a way that's easier to read. And so, yeah, I have the same question. I mean, we talked to Marcel before and he's mastered the human in the loop step for creating original content from Whole Cloth. You know, he can start with a keyword and then go to a full post, guide, knowledge base based on just that keyword, but he has humans in the loop along the way. This is more about starting with something human and then generating derivative works that boost the original work. 

Gonto: I agree. And that's what I mean with my question is Google will do a lot of work to penalize non original content, like something that doesn't come from humans. The question to me is, will they also, because of that penalized content that is written by AI, but actually comes from human content, because maybe it won't know, I think Google will be able to know if something was written by AI or not, but not really what's the source of that.

So maybe penalizes it altogether. And it's worse for everything. And you still need a human in the loop, but I don't know. I agree that they are very different. The question is, will Google land actually catch GPT and perplexity and everybody doing search now realize the change and make it different based off of that.

Hank: Yeah. 

Gonto: I shared one of my work objectives. One of my work objectives is build multiple apps with AI that people pay for. And what I mean by that is if you remember about me, like, I used to be a programmer. I actually remember I stopped coding when Next. js came out approximately, um, between that and React.

So I would say like eight years ago, I stopped. So what I would love to do is now with AI, with cursor, with, um, replic agent, a lot of these tools, I want to see if I can call the apps without really coding or actually coding some things by modifying it, et cetera. I saw a tweet the other day. I really liked on how to structure a folder in cursor with user flows and PRD, et cetera.

So we did a really good job of building it. And I think having knowledge from programming will make it easier for me to instruct AI to build apps. And what I want to see is can I build some of these apps that then people use and pay something for. My first idea for the…also related to the podcast, which is one of the pains that we have, which is stupid, but I don't like because I feel I'm wasting my time, which is We finish an episode, Kami, our editor, finishes editing it and we get the raw video.

We need to upload it to YouTube. We need to upload it to Spotify for podcasters. That will then be eventually posted to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all of the others. We need to create a title, we need to create a description, we need to get the notes from Granola that we use to create the notes now, put them all back together and then upload into our CMS, which is Framer.

And all of that maybe takes 40 minutes or something like that. But I want to build the app for me. And to be honest, if this app existed, I would probably pay $2 a month for saving 40 minutes every two weeks because we do turns and we do one each other typically. Um, so I'm gonna try it with that first and then see which other or what other things, um, I can do.

Hank: I like it. I'd love to use it. Um, cause yeah, it's annoying. Yeah, if we just had a button from Drive to Publish, that would be awesome. I like that too. I wonder, I mean, I don't have a programming background. I'm dangerous in some areas, but not most. I wonder if by the end of the year, I'll be able to create llittle useful apps like that for myself. 

I'm not going to be able to create something that people will pay for, I think. But there are definitely things that I can imagine myself wanting for internal or personal use. You know, I have an EA who I'd love to enable with more tools so that she can do even more higher level stuff for me.

Gonto: I've tried replete agents. It's really good without coding. For cursor, you do need to understand coding. And again, it's not because you're going to code that much, at least from what I've done. It's more about I understand the flows, I understand the objects, the functions, how they relate to each other.

And it's just easier to explain to the computer if you understand it. That's it. But I think it will be easier and easier. So I don't know. We'll see. There's so many things with AI. So, I mean, we could talk a lot about this. I have a lot of ideas for AI for email. I think a lot of people are doing it wrong, but we're going to do some interesting experiments at work. 

Tell me what's your second work objective? 

Hank: Yeah. My second theme is, I don't have a nice catchy name for it yet, but it's basically just mastering the new media in mastering the new media. To me, that means like modern developer relations, modern content, modern pr.  It all revolves around social media and content creators and influencers.

It's something we've talked about many times already in our, you know, we've only had 11 or 12 episodes before this one and it's just so important. And part of the reason why I like doing this podcast with you is we get to experiment and try things for ourselves on that and think about it and we get to talk about it and think about a lot and I think this is the year I have to figure it out.

I have to really understand it and the landscape and that's the most important skill whereas Like six, seven years ago, the most important skill for me to learn was automation. It was the opposite of this. It was like, how do I go into a hole and just build workflows? Because people weren't doing that yet. That was the bleeding edge. 

But now the bleeding edge is understanding content creation in this new landscape. 

Gonto: I think it's because of  AI, because AI is making automation so much easier and it's making it so much easier to do outbound, to do this, to do that, like. We're talking today. I sent you a link to origami, which is like a GTM researcher, and we do research for you looking at LinkedIn and the website, et cetera.

So you can then contact people with very specific and personalized message and contact the people that really will use your product with those things existing. Now, as you're saying, I think the part that will not be automated that much  is maybe the influencers, but maybe not. Like one thing I've been seeing a lot about is this…Do you see the new crypto trend with AI? There's this coin called virtuals, where you can actually deploy either they are just for fun, you can deploy basically bots that are agents that will do things for you. There's a company in a framework called AI16C. So similar to Andreessen Horowitz, but AI. And what they are doing is this idea of they are creating in TikTok or in Twitter people that are not really people, they are AI bots that will do research and will learn from what people say, and they are actually opinion makers.

 There's one of them, um, I don't remember now the name, it was AIFT or something like that, that has like 60,000 followers. And it tweets every day of new coins, new things, and people are like, buying this shit.

So, I don't know, it's gonna be interesting. I do think in the future, we will see, and we're starting to see, at least in the crypto world, which I think in this case is, is, happens before the rest. Um, some of these AI influencers, have you seen any of that? Like the AI influencers, like, do you believe that will be a thing or, or not really?

Hank: I mean, it's going to be for sure, because if you look at like the perplexity podcast, it's basically just a news podcast, right? People are listening to it because it's useful. And people follow influencers and creators sometimes for the entertainment and human aspect. The human aspect is going to be really hard to match. Although I'll come back to that in a second, 

But the entertainment and usefulness of info, of course AI is going to be good at that. And of course like AI influencers are going to be important for that. And they're, they're going to be the best aggregators. And what I'll say about the human aspect, we were talking before we started recording about how we both like talking to the GPT voice chat, whatever it's called, I don't even know what it's called, but I've used it a bunch now.

I used it almost like calling a friend before I've talked to any of my friends about my themes, because I always talk to my friends about my themes. I called chatGPT and was like, Hey, these are the themes I'm thinking about. And it remembers them perfectly. It was the perfect listener. It did everything and AI might be able to break the parasocial barrier in a way that human influencers can't, right?

Like if I want a relationship with, you know, some guy on YouTube, like I can't have it because they're, they're one person. They get a million views. Like how could they possibly respond to all of us? They're one Twitter account that, you know, they get a million likes. How could they possibly Build a relationship with all their followers? and AI could. And even though it's like fake, a lot of people will still value it, feel heard, feel validated. It's gonna be interesting and weird for the next few years

Gonto:  I'm gonna actually try out giving my themes or objectives to advanced voice model. I like the idea. And check it out I found a Twitter account. It's called AIXBT.  It has 320,000 followers, and one of them. And it literally tweets trends based on what's being launched in these virtuals and other places. It's just mind blowing. And what they say, this virtual platform allows you to run these AI bots in a platform, but they assure you it has no human intervention. So what they do is, there's no way a human can actually change or influence what the bot will say. The bot will say what they research and what they find based on its original prompt.

Which with the current state of AI, it's pretty good. Imagine when it starts working even more. I actually really think that if OpenAI or somebody finds AGI, they will announce it with a bot on Twitter that nobody knows it's a bot. I'm pretty sure there's going to be like a new account. It becomes trendy or becomes an influencer. And then they're going to be like, Oh, remember that account? It was actually AI and that's what I would do if I were them, but I think that's, that's where we're, we're going.

 It's going to be interesting. I'm big believer that what's happening in the crypto AI world will happen in developer tools and will happen in all other places. Like in this, I think they are very leading on these AI influencers. So we'll see what ends up happening. I don't know. I've done last year, a lot of work on influencers, the new dev rel, a lot of this stuff, as you know. So I'm starting to think more ahead. I'm like, okay, I know a lot about this, so what's coming. What is the next thing that I can learn about this? And I think this is it. If I had to bet. 

Hank: Yeah, it's, it's very interesting. People are going to be left behind. I think a lot of people aren't as scared as they should be about being left behind because, oh, GPT 3.5 came out, you know, in 2022 and my job hasn't really changed.

But it's going to. It definitely is. And especially as people like us figure it out, and we're gonna share our experiences, it'll get widespread. It's only a matter of time. It's very similar to me, to the trends in like rev ops and automation that we've had in the last decade. And then if you look at the decade before of just like simple demand gen and simple marketing automation that came before, you know, this feels like the front of the wave on that.

Gonto: I saw a tweet that I really liked related to this, that it feels with AI, like we are in the early days of the web. It feels like there's only HTTPS and FTP and people are starting to build a browser like, like Mark and recently with Netscape and stuff like that. So. So, I don’t know very interesting time to be on AI, but switching a bit of topics, do you want to share some of your personal objectives?

Hank: Yeah, my personal objectives, I mean, what's a new year without a health objective? I gotta, I gotta trim down the weight, yada yada. But I think two more interesting personal objectives are, one's kind of a blended objective, work and personal. It's focused. So, I've come out of full time advising and into full time work. I still have some lingering advisories and side things. 

So I'm trimming those down to the necessary and going to focus a lot more on my main job because I think where I'm at is perfect for me and I think it's a huge opportunity. So I think focus will bring a lot and that's part of those work themes, iis having those themes and things I want to learn and objectives for me personally are going to help with that. 

My other theme, the theme I'm more excited about and it's a little more concrete as adventure. I have more disposable income now, which is great. I think we're going to talk about that in a second regarding one of your themes.

And I actually focused really hard on building a team and learning from my mistakes at Vercel so that I don't get stuck working 60 80 hour work weeks forever and ever and like skipping my paternity leave and stuff like that. Like, I think I can do a lot better and make time for adventures. I have a 10 year old and a 7 year old and a 3 year old now. They're old enough to take adventures with me and old enough that I don't feel so bad ditching them for a little bit for my own adventures. Either on my own with friends or with my wife. 

So I've got some adventures planned, you know learning how to scuba dive stuff like that.

Gonto:  I'm an advanced padi diver. So if you're scuba diving, we can go diving somewhere maybe at some point.

Hank: Okay, I'll put it on my list of potential adventures.

Gonto: I love it. I'll share some of mine. Mine are a bit more specific. I throw them more after seeing the tweet from Binai. I don't know if you saw it. He's the founder of Loom. He sold I think loom for 1 billion to Atlassian. He made a shitload of money. That would be an accurate definition.

And then on the blog post, he, he was talking about how he's lost. And doesn't know what to do now. And it's like, it's a zero word problem. Like not even first word problem. But I think once, as you're saying, you have more disposable income, you're doing better, these are the things that you start thinking about.

And for me, they're very specific, but I'm always, and I have always been very demanding. I think being very demanding is in part, what got me to be successful because I get obsessed with details. And I get obsessed with winning. I demand a lot of myself and I demand a lot of my team. I have a friend actually who has like a design and software agency who told me he never wanted to work with me because he feels I'm too demanding and he's okay with mediocre work that he's paid mediocre money. And I'm like, why  would you even do that or… another topic?

But because of that my problem is that I, that being demanding for me is not a tool. It's something that's unfortunately is part of my DNA. And I want to now try to split it. What I want to do is two things on this. One is be less demanding of my choice. And what I mean by that is maybe I'm in a situation where it's not perfect It's an eight. I think an eight. is seven points better than for other people, only two worse than the perfect. But I only focus on the two that it could be better. And then it spoils my situation. 

I'll give you an example. Like I know I'm in the garden. I'm watching a sunset. I have my feet in the in the pool. I'm drinking whiskey, but my glass has a small little thing that I can't clean up. And that small little thing, maybe doesn't clutter my entire view, but I'm obsessed with I need to fix this fucking thing. And if I can't for some reason, then it spoils my whole situation. 

Similarly to that, I think it's on being demanding. My other one, um, on this is basically about “you do not need to be somewhere else.” And the idea of that is a lot of times something that happens to me is I'm doing something and I think I should be doing something else and because of that I don't enjoy what I'm doing as much. And I'll give you an example I'm playing, I'm playing now PS5 Baldur's Gate 3 if you haven't played it, it's fantastic. And as I play the game because the day is so nice I think I should be enjoying the pool because I have a pool and if I don't enjoy it why is it there?

And then it's like, but I actually want to be playing PS5, I don't want to be in the fucking pool. But I, because I'm playing PS5 thinking I should be in the pool, I stop enjoying the PS5 as much. So I want to make sure that I either make a choice either way, I either stop PS5 and go play the pool, or I stop thinking I should be on the pool.

But also being demanding on every minute has to be perfect, and I have to enjoy things in a particular way. 

Hank: Good luck with that theme this year. That's I mean I worked through a lot of the same stuff last year when I had my first year my first full year, you know, kind of independent and figuring some of that stuff out I mean. I think it's a curse of all high performers some of the things that make you a high performer at work You know rob you of Certain joys and you have to overcome them.

I can think of even something I did last weekend. I was up at a cabin and I thought, well, there's a ski resort right there. I gotta go do it. So I ditched my family and it was terrible conditions at the ski resort. And it was the worst skiing I've ever had. And so I just came right home after one run. And I was like, I should've, and they were all playing a board game without me. And I was like, I should've just stayed and played the board game. But, you know, there's a lot of times. 

Gonto: So hard sometimes. 

Hank: It applies to work too, you know. Sometimes you have to accept mediocre work and just ship. And, boy, that really aggravates some founders and people like you and people like me sometimes.

Gonto: Yeah, and even not. One thing I learned that took me a lot of time is  You don't need all A players because there's some jobs that are shittier.  If your job is to only fix bugs, you don't need an A player, because no A player is going to just fix bugs. You need maybe a C player, and that's OK. 

Hank: Actually, that was a lesson I learned in my first job out of college when I hired my first SDR team, when I realized, wait, one of these SDRs isn't ambitious, and that's actually good, because then they'll stay in SDR for a long time.

Because that's one of the worst problems of hiring A players, is they all want to get promoted immediately. I had a different SDR who literally asked me in the first week in our first one on one. Hey Hank, so when can I start managing people? I was like, you haven't even done the job. Like, like, what are you talking about?

And it was hard for me to say that because I'd only been in the job for like eight months. And I was managing people, so like, what am I supposed to say to this guy? He is an A player, like, he did go on to do great things, but you do need, you do need some, some people who are just content to happily, consistently ship and live their lives.

Gonto: I'm going to say something a bit egocentric, but I have a kid now, and I want my kid to be more stupid. I think people who are less smart, who are less like obsessed about work, are happier at life. 

Hank: There's something to be said about being financially secure is, has been really good for my happiness. And, it's one of the things actually that motivates me now is to get my friends also rich.

And so I spend so much time on the phone with other people just trying to give them advice and tell them what I know and what I think so that they have the same opportunities I've been fortunate with, and I'm only where I'm at because I have an older brother who was ahead of me by a few years, also VP marketing at developer and data tools.

So I've had every advantage you could have, but none of us want to mess up our kids in the same way we messed up. 

Gonto: But anyway, thank you everybody for listening. As I said, if you, this was not really a very DevTools episode, so if you have any feedback, tweet at us, at our handles, which you can see here now in, in the video.

Um, but let us know if you like more of this, less of this, and if you have any thoughts, tweet at us as well. Thank you.