World's First AI Platform Built for E-commerce

World's First AI Platform Built for E-commerce Speaker 1: It's crazy how far AI has come since the last time we all sat down. Speaker 2: There's just two letters then. Speaker 3: Oh my god, it's so different, right? I think really what has changed is that people started to realize that the technology can fundamentally transform a business's bottom line. I think it went from, this is kind of interesting, let's make some pretty pictures to, oh wait, will AI allow me to build, and I believe this, people are going to be using and setting up their businesses with all these AI infrastructure to run e-commerce businesses that can do 100, 150 million dollars of sales and just have a creative director and like a CEO that just makes, you know, decisions on what the agent should do. Speaker 2: Oh, that's like, it's like gives you chills. Yeah, that would be incredible. Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today's a special episode brought to you by Pietro. For those of you who have watched episode one where we had Rao Trivedi who is the CEO and co-founder of Pietro, we talked a lot about his journey first at Uber and now building an incredible platform for not just people who are looking to start a business but also amplify their business and really any part of the business cycle you're in, how to really optimize for all the efficiencies you're looking to. We talked a lot about that in episode one and... Ro's actually been incredibly grateful with this time to come back and actually talk about what's on your mind today, which is what the hell's going on in the world, right? We're talking about tariffs. We're talking about what do you do next for your next PO? What do you do next about not knowing what to do next, right? And a lot of those things. And so we're here not just to talk about what's gone into building Pietra, but also about how some of the tools that Ro's building is actually to solve the problems that we're facing literally in the last hour. Before I get into it, Ro, can you maybe give the few people who haven't gotten a chance to watch the last episode really quick background on your end and what you've been building with Pietra? Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. Thank you for having me, by the way. We didn't even coordinate. Three brown boys with beige on right now. Speaker 2: I love that. Speaker 3: Yeah, so Pietra is, for those who don't know, an e-commerce platform. And we sit at the intersection of AI and the real world. So we build tools that help your businesses run more efficiently, but we also pair that together with real world services. So we specialize in helping companies with sourcing and manufacturing and production and using software plus the real world to manufacture. We have our own worldwide logistics network. So we help you after you've made the products to store and ship the product to customers around the world wherever you're selling them, whether it's TikTok shop or your website. And then recently, a whole suite of marketing and operations tools that allows your business to run more efficiently. And we'll get into that. So it's this full suite of tools that every operating team has access to and should be using to move faster. Speaker 1: Super cool. It's crazy how far AI has come since the last time we all sat down. Speaker 2: There's just two letters then. Speaker 1: The premise of the conversation last time was mostly like cooler funny products that you could source from around the world and it seems like what you were building has a lot more to do with what's happening right now than just that. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think like, oh my god, it's so different, right? I think really what has changed is that people started to realize that the technology can fundamentally transform a business's bottom line. I think it went from, this is kind of interesting, let's make some pretty pictures or like ask for some copy for my next email to, oh wait, will AI allow me to build, and I believe this, you know, the first two-person hundred million dollar team, right? But everyone says that in the, through the lens of coders and like tech companies. I actually think that people are going to be using and setting up their businesses with all these, all the AI infrastructure to run e-commerce businesses that can do 100, 150 million dollars of sales and just have I'm a creative director and a CEO that just makes decisions on what the agent should do. Speaker 2: That would be incredible. I think one of the parts that I think being in your seat that's really cool is you get to see the bird's eye view of thousands of businesses and especially in a time like right now I'd love for you to kind of paint the stage that we're really at. We get to have a few conversations with the founders next door to us or the group chats inside our phones and stuff, but you get to really see it from a business level, from the fact that you're literally talking to hundreds if not thousands of brands weekly and monthly. What is the real feeling going on right now? Speaker 3: There's good and there's bad, I will say. When I looked at the data, it was like, America is about entrepreneurship. Like hundreds of, 100,000 plus people sign up to start or operate their business on Pietra every year, which is a huge number of people. Just like, think about that. One in five people in America, they say, is an entrepreneur in some way. So the desire to start and run your own business and like escape the 95 is like still there and is there even through these times that we're going through. Like if I look back the last three, four weeks, it's the most signups we've ever had daily for someone that wants to start or scale their business than we've ever had. So that's like the optimistic future on America, right? Like we are an entrepreneurship driven society, I think. Okay, so that's the good news. Speaker 1: Here we go. Speaker 3: The scary part is that, and there's more good news at the end, but we'll talk about kind of the crux of this. Speaker 1: I like that. Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll end with some more good news, which is most entrepreneurs are not, they're subscale, right? They haven't reached $150 million in sales. They haven't figured out exactly how to scale this business and exit. So they're in this, Stage of maybe a little bit more than I have an idea, but you know, let's say $50,000 in sales to $5 million in sales. Like a huge, huge middle. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: These are people that generally have bootstrapped their companies. They have gotten, you know, their brother and their sister and their cousin involved, maybe hire their best friend. They're a true small business. And they put everything they possibly can into their first big PO, their second big PO. You know, they're nervous about taking on debt for the first time ever to, you know, factor their invoices. And so this is where it gets really scary, where there's a huge portion of businesses, right? And we run this workshop daily. We get hundreds of these businesses signing up saying, what should we do? Where they're like, we're not big enough to weather the storm. And we're not small enough to have nothing where we can just walk away and it's like, fine. We've sunk enough time and effort into it. We have a little bit of inventory, let's say one or two months. We have a pretty good paid marketing system with Facebook and Shopify and we're on all the marketplaces. And we've done all the cuts, but there's not that many cuts to make. There's only a team of 12 or eight or whatever it is. So what do we do? This feels like A situation where we're kind of on the clock and we're going to go out of business and we really, really don't want to raise prices because we know it's going to kill demand. So that's like the scary part, which is people don't know what to do. They're like literally holding on to the White House reports every day and they're trying to figure out how to liquidate their inventory, work with their supplier, move their supply chain to America, all things you should be doing. And I think that the scary part about this whole industry is it just doesn't move fast or as fast as you'd expect. So you'll have a company, I was talking to one the other day, small business. They're like, we're probably gonna get hit with a $50,000 tariff bill. We unfortunately cut the PO and the production and it got on the water one day after the cutoff date. What do we do? Do we pay for it? Do we pay the tariffs and then go into debt? Should we put into a bonded warehouse where we're taking a gamble on what the future state of the world is gonna be? Meanwhile, our customers were running out of our best sellers. And there is no good option for these people. Like, this is where it gets really scary. Or I should say, there's no great option. There are smart tactical things that every brand should do, and it almost always starts with First, start with your supply chain. Go talk to your factories. This is the number one piece of feedback that I give people, which is before you start taking bets on future tariff numbers, you know, after you've made the simple cuts on your team, go work with your supply chain vendors and they will also understand what's happening. Like they want you to be a customer with them as well into the future. They don't want you to die. And so before you put your hands up and say, we're going to call bankruptcy, I think there's a couple of things you could do, which is, you know, be smart about talking to your customers. They'll also understand what's happening. I think we've seen a few brands do that. Go turn around and talk to your vendors and say, hey, look, like before I cut this next PO, You know, can we work on terms? Can we work on, you know, the cost per unit? Can we shift some of the production to a different time of the year? Can we line up our promotions? Like, be open with them. This is what my marketing plan is going to be. This is how much money I'm going to put on this day. Like, can we do pre-sales? And I think historically a lot of people have been Especially the small businesses, they didn't really have that much leverage. So they'd be like, I got to pay with credit card. I got to pay it all up front. You know, I'm going to pay the tariffs and it's going to land. Now I think they can go to them and I'm seeing very open and honest conversations of like, I want to be in business and I want to keep paying you. Here's my plan for the next three months. This is how much money I have. What can you do so we can continue working together? And I'd be very surprised that a lot of the vendors in the space are also aware of what's happening and willing to be flexible. Speaker 1: I'd love to stop you right there because I think a lot of people have asked, what can we do? And you said, just talk to your supplier, talk to your vendor, talk to your manufacturer. And you've seen that they're receptive and open to working with their clients. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, so to build on that, I think there's two things that I've seen people be successful that they feel like they're seemingly stuck, right? One is talking to their vendors and they might be locked into contracts. There might be a longer time horizon for change to happen. And what they're doing is they're simultaneously figuring out how to diversify their risk. And for many of these small businesses, it's the first time they're thinking about diversifying risk, right? Like in LLMs, they say, what, single shop prompt? It's like, you have a lot of these businesses that are like, this is our factory. Like this is our factory, this is how we pay them. It's like through credit card or wire transfer and like that's it. And so what they're doing very smartly, especially the ones that move quickly, is they're not waiting. They're talking to their vendors saying, look, this is what we need to do for the long term. But the most important thing you can do is start diversifying your supply chain today. It's always a good idea to diversify your supply chain. I was talking to one of the executives at Bonobos as an example. It's like, yeah, if you work at one of these brands that are decently sized, Diversifying your portfolio and your risk is something that's like indoctrinated into that. And so the small businesses should be like today, go pick up the phone, literally go online. You can go to Pietra if you want and like start finding factories in low tariff zones. If nothing else to just diversify, right? That's how you should go be building your business. And so a lot of what we're doing, we're helping people. is saying like open up the line of communication but like tomorrow we need you to go start sampling from 25 different factories outside of these like high tariff zones. It's not just China by the way. There's other places in the world that have these issues. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: Right. It's like do you want to bring it into America? Can you do it feasibly? Like, you should be talking to those vendors right now and just determining, like, is it possible to make it in America? If so, like, can you talk to that supplier? Can you find someone that you like? It's gonna take some time to do the quality testing. It's gonna take, you know, some time to figure out if the right, the tech pack was stitched in the right way. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: Do that work right now, because before you know it, it's gonna be six weeks, then ten weeks, then twelve weeks. And the longer you wait, we're seeing people not, like, The unfortunate news is we're seeing that the people who are waiting to make changes are the ones that are dying first. Speaker 2: Yeah I'm I'm very curious because the one thing you said which was Super tactical and I feel like it's not as easy for people to process because supply chain in so many brands has sat in this one, I mean literally in our office, it's in a corner. And that person is not the most pleasant person to talk to. We don't want to really deal with them every day. So it's like, all right, it's kind of closeted away and it's like, let us know if something really goes wrong. And it's now shaped to like, Supply chain, like this is the, this is what everything is going to work around. Speaker 1: Like the new hot girls. Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. It's the nucleus. Everything is in like cycles, right? Like this is the time where this is the thing that the entire world is looking at. And I think That person in any organization needs to embrace it. Like the day that like, you know, that backend engineer that's in that room is like, wait a minute, like Snowflake was created and everyone loves this. Like, this is my time to shine. This is the time for these supply chain people to come out and be like, if you ever wanted to make moves in your career, this is the time. Speaker 2: This is the time. This is also when you get the raise and then you get a lot of ticket. Speaker 3: Yeah, but we were talking about this, which is like, the reality of this is like, These are types of changes that are happening in the world that I think, one, people are understanding impacts way more of a business, way more parts of a business than people thought. Right, like, oh wait, these like supply chain shocks or even these like warnings of tariffs cause real issues in the world that like you might not have thought of. Whether it's like stuff on, you know, like a small Shopify brand's website all the way down to like literally the stuff you can buy in like Macy's. So people are like opening their eyes to like, oh wait a minute, there's like a lot more here than I thought. And then the second part is businesses I think that the advice that I give is like think about this as an opportunity where If you just change your perspective and say opportunities where the chessboard is flipped only happens once every 20 years, let's say. Maybe 10 years, but maybe like 20 years. This is your chance to build a future-proof business that is going to be like leaner, meaner, bigger, more profitable than ever before. If you were stuck in the status quo from seven years ago, you basically already had the formula that was mostly arbed out and you would become a business that was just like every other business for the last 20 years. Right now is the opportunity to look at your business and say, how do we build this fundamentally different? Because the dust is going to settle. The supply chains are going to solidify. We're going to go back to a new status quo. And the old businesses are probably gonna die out because the new status quo is gonna be slightly different. And I really, really believe that the businesses that survive this are going to be 10 times, 20 times better, stronger, bigger than like ever before. It's like if you were, what do they say about in tech, right? It's like if you built a company during the tech bubble burst, it's like so many great companies came out of that because you had to build it fundamentally different that was future-proof for the next 10, 15 years. Your e-commerce business is no different. Right now is a time to like think about your business in a way that's gonna future-proof it for the next 20 years. And yes, this year might be a little bit tough. This next six months might be tough. But you get through those, you get through that period and you're basically like I think gonna be in a really, really good spot. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I love what you kind of said, you know, tactically speaking. It was like, hey, if you have something that feels impacted or can be impacted, Go and find 25 new factories that you can source a product from. Let's get into the tactical pieces here because I love how you kind of went into, that's maybe step zero, right? But then it comes down to like, all right, well you have this person in your supply chain department that's running the show for so far and now you have to go and be like, Where do I start? Okay, I know you guys have been creating some incredible tech that's always been very problem-solution oriented. Tell me a little bit about how you guys are solving for this. Not that you guys are the only option, but it also comes down to how are we going to get to this problem and solve for it the most effective and efficient way? Because time is of the essence, but also bandwidth is still a concern. Hey, we have a problem now. Okay, all of us have time all of a sudden to solve this, you know? So talk to me a little bit about what you're building and what you've somehow constructed just in time alongside to solve one of the biggest problems we're facing in the last couple years. Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, like, let's get into it. I think something that I noticed when coming into this industry was A lot of the problems could be solved by what I call brute force work, which is hire people. It's not extremely complicated, but you gotta do the work and it's gonna take time and you gotta do it well. And that was very difficult because that was an era of software and services that support e-commerce business owners that necessitated you need time in the day. You need minutes in the day to do the work. Thank you, Uncle Sam, for gifting us with this new technology. I would say popularizing this new technology. This is at its core, well designed for automating and scaling up brute force work, right? So what we have been building silently, you know, with our customers is our operations platform that we thought through the lens of Could we build solutions to problems that not only are typical SaaS solutions where you have to go and click, but could AI go and click those buttons for you? And can we definitively go click those buttons for you and do it at a volume where you can look at it and say, there's no way in hell a human would be able to do this? So a good example, like a practical solution here is like When we originally started building Pietra, we were like, we have this factory network where you can go and type in, I want to make sweaters and you could go find Nike's factories and make sweaters with them. Awesome. If you have the time, you can go find 25 factories. It might take you three days. Now what we're building is we, you know, we have this sourcing AI tool that is go tell an LLM, you know, I want to make Burberry inspired raincoats. The LLM... Speaker 2: For the people who don't know what an LLM is. Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. A large language model. So I'm trying not to use like, just go tell your AI because that's super weird. But like literally, you can go tell an AI, I would say you're telling ChatGPT, ChatGPT is like LLM technology. It basically understands English words and then can give you some output or predicts the next output. And what we built was like V1 of building an e-commerce business is like your supply chain guy in the back, Go pull out the Rolodex, go call 25 factories, go have conversations with them. You do, you know, one hour of conversations, that's 25 hours of work, that's probably at least three or four days of like straight work. Now what you can do is you could say, hey AI, right, like on Pietra. I totally could go click and find, you know, three factories, but I'm gonna tell you that I'm trying to make, I'm trying to reshore this product for my website. It's just like, just take the link for this for my Shopify website. It's going to go and say, okay, I'm going to go analyze this product. I'm going to go turn it into a professional tech pack that can be shared across the world. And you can go back and forth and edit the tech pack as you need, but it's going to go create that for you. It's then going to go and say, I'm going to go read the entire universe of factories that I think can make this for you based on your requirements. I'm going to go find, it gets crazier, watch. I'm going to find all the factories that Pietra offers in their network that they have like you get, you know, these benefits from. I'm going to go find all the factories that just exist in the world outside of Pietra 2. I'm going to go vet those factories and all their websites. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to contact all of them by email for you, send them your tech pack, do a requirements gathering for you, like have you read the tech pack? Can you do it in black? Can you meet my production time? Can you meet my sample? Do you want to set up a Zoom with me? Then I'm just going to text you saying I've read the entire world. I found five factories that can do this for you. Wow. Jump into your inbox and schedule the Zoom. Right, it's like your factory in Portugal or like you're one on, you know, the one in the US, wherever it is. So that's a pretty crazy like output of an AI, right? Which is like, oh my god, it's not going to replace a supply chain person. They still need to go do that work. You find me someone in the world that can reach out to 1,000 factories in 15 seconds. Yeah. And then manage all those inbox conversations, weed out the people that don't want to work with you or say no. You know, for the ones that do want to work with you, ask three or four more questions back and forth by email, by SMS, by WhatsApp, WeChat, whatever it is. Get it to like the one yard line and then just call me and say, it's like a great assistant. I have three answers for you like go get on the call. Speaker 1: That is crazy. Speaker 3: So that is a practical example of like... Where AI is going to impact. And like you could tell the agent on Pietra, like, I'm trying to lower my tariffs for this product. Go do what you got to do. And give me the answer. Speaker 1: This tech pack, I'm assuming just has all the information that you'll, that any factory will ever need. Speaker 3: Exactly. So think of it as like, you can give it any input, whether it's a short description, whether it's like a full tech pack that you've made, and the AI will say, okay, We can't show it on the screen, but you'll see it when we launch it. It's like how developers have a cursor. You have a product design and tech pack creation tool that's like a cursor. You can literally ask the ad, like, okay, I've seen you make this tech pack for me. It's showing here that you need a quarter zip, that it's this type of zipper. You can literally be like, what are like the 10 other types of zippers that might lower my tariff costs? And it's gonna be like, hold on, let me research all the types of zippers. Here's the 10 options. Do you want me to replace your existing zipper with this new one that will achieve your goal? And you'd be like, yes. And it'd be like, cool, I'm just gonna put that in for you. So it's like the world's knowledge is at people's fingertips. And look, you normally pay agencies to do it. You do it yourself. You Google it and become a zipper expert. Now you can just be like, listen, I'm trying to lower my tariffs here. Like, what are my different fabric options in different parts of the world? And like, can you do the calculations and just tell me which one that I should have? Or even just the trade-offs of them. Like I was, I created some home goods products for the office. And this is like the first time, I wish I brought the mug, but this is the first time that I felt like true magic with this project. Is on Sunday night, I told an AI, like, here's my logo and I want to make, you know, a set of like really beautifully designed mugs for the office. Something that I can like feasibly do. I set the agent off on course through Pietra. I woke up in the morning and I saw that the factory had gone back and forth with my agent who had my requirements. Designed the mug. Designed all the mugs. Negotiated sample pricing to meet my tech pack sample pricing. Negotiating packaging to be the cheapest like because it was a sample package. Went back and forth and clarified like white mug to black mug to beige mug etc. And then I just opened my inbox and the agent was like, I've stopped my work, but you have an invoice for a sample for $39 waiting for you. It meets all your criteria and here's an image of it. And so I woke up and I was like, wait, what just happened? And I like hit, like, I'll buy it for 30 bucks. And then six days later, the mug shows up and like I brought it to the board meeting and I was like, wait, wait, this just happened? Speaker 1: You're giving me like Lex Luthor vibes. Speaker 3: Well, this is the crazy thing. Like I do believe through Pietra, like it's a pretty crazy company idea. But I genuinely believe that these companies will be run by robots. And they will be run at a scale and intelligence level that no one understands. And I saw some of this happening at Uber, where we were like, how does dynamic pricing work? And you're just like, yeah, every single ride is like custom priced for the rider. And I'm like, Oh man, when the robots take over, smart things happen. So like, I think of it as like, imagine one million PhD students, right, like caliber and intellect, running your Shopify brand to sell your cut food, right? I'm like, that's probably going to be a pretty robust business, I think. Speaker 1: All Ivy Leaguers. Speaker 3: Exactly. Everything from market research to like, another practical thing that I'll say is like, we're seeing these AI tools on Pietra. Be smart. Across each other. Like this is a wild emergent behavior, which is we have this tool that goes, you know, help me liquidate my best seller or my worst sellers. Cool. What would like a super smart person do to put together a plan to liquidate their best sellers? And you could use Pietra and the AI will be like, I'll figure out a plan for you. I'll ship it out of your warehouse for you. You know, like I'll collect the money from you, from customers, like I'll do the work for you. That's the thing. But then we're seeing the AI like jump and saying, I actually monitored your social media. And I'm seeing that customers are complaining about this thing in the comments of one of your TikTok videos. I think before we liquidate this at half price, you should probably just go and add this description to your marketing that I'm looking at and your product, your PDP. And you might actually see an increase in conversion before we like take a 50% cut and liquidate it. And I was like, wait, what? Like it actually just looked at this thing, like went back to your storefront and was like, yeah, it's yeah. And there's just no feasible way to like, A human to go and like read every single comment on every TikTok video for like this trend, but the AIs can do it 24 seven. Speaker 2: Even if a human can, it's interpretation is so varied, right? Speaker 3: This is the world we're living in. So coming back to your main point of like, what are the tactical things people can do? First things first is like, use the smartest tools on earth. Don't be scared of them, right? They're going to like transform your business. And remember, the last thing I'll say to this is, We are still at a time where the humans are like in the loop, right? They're not making the purchasing decisions for you yet. I like to say they're teeing up. They're getting you to the one yard line and nothing is better than me just waking up to an invoice that I gotta pay and like a summary on top of it, like here's the 50 messages I sent back and forth till I get here. But it's not like taking over the world and making stupid decisions for you and like draining your bank account. Not yet anyways. Speaker 1: Yeah, not yet. Speaker 2: Yeah. No, it's fascinating. I mean, every time you come here, It's mind-blowing. And now I'm curious, you take into the factor, which I think this is a piece that I'm sure you guys have thought about, which is why there is an important piece, is things are also changing very fast. You have an administration that can wake up tomorrow and say, hey, inverse everything I said. And I think part of that is for a human to go and say, oh shit, Portugal was only going to be X amount of tariffs and today it's 100%. I have to now completely stop what I'm doing here, take on the effect of like, wow, I just wasted time, the mental toll, etc. Pivot, right? Whereas for you guys, there's an element of it where it's like, okay, let me update the setting. I'll remove this and change here and it's like seconds and like you're doing stuff that takes months and minutes. Speaker 3: Totally. I think like there's two parts of it which I'll for anyone that's interested like I think one of the benefits of Pietra as anyone knows it is like this ecosystem that we've built where we are close with our partners that help these small businesses. So on the more human side, I would say, you know, we stood up a service where you could pick up the phone and actually just call one of our specialists at Pietra who are somewhere stationed in the world that will actually help you and they'll help you through the lens of we're going to help you and the factories that we have built connections with. And so a lot of these conversations are like, look, we Kind of made a mistake or like, not even that we made a mistake. It's actually like, you can pick up the phone and Pietra will help you. You can get on the phone with someone and say, look, I made a bet on Portugal this happened. We will go back to the factory and we'll be like, we need to talk about this, right? Like you want to be a part of this ecosystem that we're building. What can we do to soften the blow? So there's a real human element to, you know, when you're on your own outside of like Pietra's ecosystem, the factory is probably going to be like, no, like screw you, it's done, right? Here, now that we started to build this community, We also have the ability to work with that supplier and say, how can we make you whole if we like, not undo this, but like work with you on this? Is it on the next order from your marketplace, can we give you back the commission? Like, we just need you to help this customer right now. Cause like ultimately Pietra is a company that helps businesses. So there's that human part of it. Now on the speed part, I think it's very important that I see people are still apprehensive on AI around like, Can it actually do those things faster at the quality that would do it? And what I remind everyone is like, there are some things that it will definitively do faster and better, right? Coordination, communication, check-ins with your vendors, monitoring a ticker on the internet to see what changed. These are all things that I've seen business owners, they'll be like, You know, you're a business owner on the West Coast, right? So I'm on the East Coast. So until noon my time, you're not up, let's say. You wake up, cool, wake up in your bed, on your phone, you're like, oh, shit, Trump just did this, right? I'm already working for three hours, but guess what? One minute after that tweet goes out and AI is like, we got to make some changes here, right? And so there is just a level of These AIs will be able to monitor things 24-7, 365, and no human can actually monitor something 24-7, 365. They care a little more. Yeah, so if you care about it, like what I would say is not get scared that they can monitor things 365. Set an agent to trigger you when something happens, right? Like use it in a smart way so that your business becomes smarter, faster, leaner. And yeah, like you will notice that For that sourcing example, the AI is not doing anything significant or difficult, really. They're coordinating with multiple vendors at the same time, sending emails or messages or text messages, asking questions and then summarizing answers. But they're doing it like this, like 500 people at a time. And that's where I think the weeks and months turned literally into minutes and days. Speaker 2: One of the things because I knew how deep you're gonna go into the AI piece, which is like it's mind-blowing for so many of us, but then there's equal, not equal parts, but there's a part of the crowd that is under this kind of You can call it like, you know, they follow these myths, okay? And one of the ones that I hear a lot, to be honest, and I don't know if you do, but it's like, I don't trust if AI is actually gonna look at everything the way I would, okay? I don't trust that it's going to be able to look at every factory that I would have called. I don't think it can filter all of the little elements that I would look at. Some of it feels so general when they say something like that because it's like, wait, what do you exactly mean? It is a filter, right? But then there's a part to it where it's like, can I miss things, right? And what's your thought to just people who fall in that bucket, which sadly also is correlated to the group of people who are doing 50k to 5 million? Speaker 3: Totally. I think this is maybe a controversial take, but I'll start with something punchy, which is I'm fairly certain that like, O1 is smarter than like most of America, like right now. It doesn't matter how smart you think you are. I think I will just make that statement of it's probably smarter than everyone in America or a lot of people in America. You can edit that one. I think there are people that are smarter than it, but for the most part, I think it's increasing the IQ level from the bottom up. So that's the first thing. And I think I have this analogy and I use it internally. I use it with our investors. Shout out to Founders Fund and A16Z, M13, With Carter from M13, I was like, it's kind of like when Google Maps came out and my mom still didn't believe that like it was the most optimal path to go to like a grocery store. And I was like, there's nothing I can do. Speaker 2: She's like, nah, nah, nah. Speaker 3: Like the left over here is like obviously way faster. I'm like, I think you're just like going against math. Like at some level, this is just like truly wrong. Like the math is right. And there's a human instinct I think around like my intuition will outperform. Yes. And for anyone, like I'm an engineer, for anyone who's taken, you know, statistics and probability, right? At some point, there's some truth to that, by the way, like there are times where like at some point, you know, maybe MapQuest didn't have traffic integrated and therefore it was actually not dynamic enough to be the fastest path on a given day. But after 500 trips using Google Maps, guess what? My mom uses the nav in our car now. Right, and so I think the only difference was that the technology had a chance to prove itself at a low stakes level to my mom over 500 tricks. And so there's an acceptance. And so what I would say to these people is you don't have to be an early adopter. It certainly can miss things. It certainly can be wrong. It's not like super intelligence yet, but it's getting pretty darn close. What I would say is Start thinking about it through the lens of you're evaluating it if it would meet your own bar. So set up these tools and the AI to output something that you can evaluate to gauge whether it is actually at your level or not. And more often than not, you will find that it outperforms your thought. I was demoing the AI tool to a brand, $10 million brand, And I'm like, how often do you, like, do a, like, a calculation across, you know, your repeat purchase rate, your LTV, your SKU predictions, or your inventory forecasting, and then make, like, a very, you know, data-driven call on, like, whether you should do a purchase order or not to your factory? You will see that they're like, sometimes, right, or I do it in this way. And then they'll like, I see them kind of use like, you know, an AI tool that we might give them. And he said, like, this AI that took six minutes to like process all this information looked at like, Seven years of your sales history. All of your marketing that you've ever run. Then looked at your click-through rates on your traffic, referenced social media data to see what your sentiment was on your brand and your competitors, and it did some calculations. Now, it might end up being the same output, or worse, but it's definitely worth testing to see if that was an interesting thing. And that's what I would say. I keep coming back to it, which is, don't fight math and technology. But definitely set up guardrails to make sure that you can have an evaluation. And I've met lots of people which is like the copywriting tools are just like not great. I'm like a unique copywriter and you know I would say good like to some people the copywriting is awesome. I know people who write full emails with AI. I don't. But, you know, my fiance will do it. And so everyone has a different bar, right? And one, you know, two years ago, it might have not hit your bar. Six months ago, it might have not hit your bar. But like today, I don't know if you guys saw, Open Ad released their image generation. I'm like, guess what? I have a feeling that the average ad is gonna increase in quality. And, you know, the $150 million brands who have 20 designers on staff, like, okay, maybe it's not gonna cross their bar yet. Go try it, set up your own benchmarks, see if it's gonna pass, and then check back every week at this rate and see if it's better and better and better. Speaker 1: I think it's AI in general, though. Remember when we started using ChatGPT the first time? You didn't trust it to, you know, make your product descriptions and things like that. But now, dude, I'll trust it to, you know, text my mom. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Speaker 3: I think it's interesting, like, if it took my mom 500 trips to the grocery store to, like, trust Google Maps, let's say, right, over the course of a year and a half or whatever, two, three years maybe, The cycles are getting shorter and the improvements are getting bigger. So like, trust me, I was in the camp of like, this is way too high level to like, oh my god, all these tools are now gonna talk to each other on Pietra and your Shopify is gonna be like this thing that's run by robots and humans won't even know. And that happened in a span of what, six months for people? When you see a photo on the internet, we are now all officially, we have to admit, we're all like, Is this AI? It's across that threshold. And then when it's obviously AI, you're like, let's celebrate, obviously AI. But now I'm just like, yesterday I took down a video from someone on our team on our social media. I was like, dude, you can't be posting these AI videos. He's like, that's not AI. I'm like, but this one is and this one isn't. He's like, no, no, it's flipped, dude. Like that one is AI and this one isn't. Unknown Speaker: Oh, wait a minute. Speaker 3: This is not good. Speaker 2: That's crazy. No, I think there is the entire, I think, generation that is kind of being on the point of like, hey, I'm going to start to adapt to this. I think We're also, like you said, it's coming out in humongous chunks of changes where it's kind of like, holy shit, what's going to be next? And it's kind of like a product drop, right? It's fun. ChatGPT, I open my eyes, it's almost like a supreme, right? It's like, you're ready for the next drop because it's going to be huge. And then it's like, how quickly can you adapt? How quickly can you show it off? So I think that's a really, really cool element. I'm very curious on like, When you guys are building your tech, and I'd love for at least our viewers to understand this from a user perspective, right? What are all the inputs you're taking in? And this may sound like a stupid question because I'm not an engineer and I don't understand tech that way, but why can't I just use OpenAI versus going into Pietra and using your tool? Because I can still ask OpenAI to look for factories. There's a difference in how you guys have built, obviously, your AI. Tell us a little bit of that so that we can understand the value. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a great question. Internally, when we talk about our product, we make sure that what we're building can, not from a competition perspective, but it's not gonna provide the same value that you can easily, quickly get somewhere else, right? And so I have this analogy in terms of, if you think about Pietra as an operations hub, and these AIs are the ones that are working on your business for you, they're effectively employees, right? Think about like really smart employees that all have PhDs. And, but they're full-time employees. They see all of your data, they see your manufacturing data, their logistics data, their marketing data, they have water cooler conversations, probably the servers are talking to themselves, we don't know, right? But they're like employees that work on your business every single day. And then you have these external tools that exist, and they exist in pockets that you may know about, might not know about, and they're like consultants, right? Now, remember, consultants are valuable to a business. You go and consult them, they go, okay, based on everything I know, About the world, maybe not so much about your business, but we can like talk about it for a little bit, but primary knowledge base is gonna be outside of your world and you talk to them and you get some value out of them and they can help you, right? So if you want to scale up, I don't know, your fulfillment center or something, you might hire a consultant who knows a lot about fulfillment center design and go work with them. What we're doing with Pietra is we've actually built A very, very sophisticated, what we call like a company brain. It's not branded as a company brain, but internally we call it a company brain. And we're like, we have to build it in a way where this brain evolves like a full-time employee's brain would evolve. So think about it, 10 years after working with someone, that full-time employee is far smarter, knowledgeable, has the right intuition, taste, judgment, compared to a consultant, right? At some point, everyone wants to go consultant and full-time. So that's what we have been focused on, which is how does this company brain that you set up once, as you go and operate your business, and you might operate it outside of Pietra, but the information flows in and it gets smarter. So the tools ultimately mimic an employee that's learning. And so over time, what happens is the AI outputs, whatever you want to think of as AI outputs, whether it's image creation or shipping pricing optimization, is personalized for every single business. And so you could always play this game of like fighting to go like give, you know, open AI some information. You could use their memory feature. But at some point, you're gonna be like feeding, you're doing the work to like feed it all the information and be like, please hold this and there might be some limit. For us, we've built it from the ground up to say, we want this thing to act like a 10 year employee. And so the next time you use our content studio to make a marketing asset, and you type a prompt, and then you download that asset or animate it or upload it to your Facebook, We want the AI to be like, hey, we not only knew that you liked this asset because you uploaded to Facebook, we also know the performance of it. So the next time you type in a prompt, maybe we should say, I suggest you update the product in this way to mimic that good thing that you did on Facebook. And that's just going to be very, very hard for any company that's building, you know, either a general tool or a point solution without access to the data. And so for Pietra, like your AI will know, should you replenish your inventory based on social sentiment uptick, And storefront sales and your marketing budget. That's a very difficult thing to stitch together for any one of these base model tools. But the base models are good for general things. If you give it some information, say, here's my brand guideline, write me some SMS copy, awesome. But it's always going to be limited, just like a consultant is always going to be limited unless they sit beside you in the office every single day for 10 years and learn about the business. Speaker 1: That's crazy, because let's say you set this AI up and 10 years from now, you're saying this thing will know 10 years of whatever in A week. So 10 years from now, I can only imagine how powerful these AIs you set up 10 years ago are at that point with all that knowledge. Speaker 3: Totally. It's just like we've gone past the capability of like a human being at that point, right? It's like you just have a sphere of competence that it's very hard to break free from. But this is what I would say coming back to that point, which is What do they say? The best time to plant a tree is like today and the second best time was yesterday. I don't even know what that phrase is. I think that's the one. It's like the first, the right time to go set up like a personalized AI for your business is today. And it will get smarter automatically over time and businesses in a couple years are going to be behind and playing catch up if they didn't take that action today. It's like It's something that's scary to people. I know this, which is like if I don't start today, I'm going to be behind and it might be behind forever, right? And then there's going to be some cataclysmic event in the future that like, you know, reshuffles the cards like every 20 years like we're in right now. But you don't want to be left behind for the next 20 years, or 10 years, or 7 years, or whatever it is. Speaker 1: It's like my AI is smarter than your AI. Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, it's definitely going to come to that at some point, but it's not going to be that it's smarter. It's just, when you meet an operating team, like, what's one of the CBG brands that are going viral right now? Like, um... Speaker 2: Probably Olipop. Speaker 3: Yeah, Olipop, good example, right? You meet these teams, AG1, right? These great companies. Ridge Wallet, whatever. And they have these all-star teams and you're like, damn, these are like all killers. Like that's why they're doing well. That's how we should be thinking about these AIs, which is you want to go and invest in, you know, killer teammates early. Give them what they need and then let them go operate. And I coach them up by like, you know, telling them what's right and wrong. So that's what we're going to get to. Speaker 2: I love that. And that perspective is also calming in some ways, but also, like, you know, it gets you to get back and start to build that. Before we wrap up, I would love if you can give us, like, a couple of more tactics or learnings that you've been able to see, again, from that bird's-eye view. You talked a lot about the sentiments of where we're at, some of the things we can start to do very quickly, especially through what you're building with Pietra, And how we can create efficiency there. You have some examples of what people are doing that can be very tactical or something that people can say, oh wow, that's a really cool example. I think it'd be really cool to get a few more of those. Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll kind of rattle off a few of them. Speaker 2: Sure. Speaker 3: I think the first thing is excess people spend, right? This is the best time in the world to go and trim that down, like start learning how to build a business. In a super lean way, even if you take a temporary hit, I think the longer you, what I've seen is the longer you wait to cut people, the compounding negative effects really build up. So I would say like tactically, if you were like on the fence of a teammate and you're like, ah, we're like a little bit bloated, I would just like pick up the phone five minutes after you hear this and like go make those calls. It's gonna drop burn more than you think and potentially save your business. So that's the first tactical thing. The second thing that we see, And we talked about this earlier is not making the bold decisions on your supply chain that naturally will take some weeks or months to roll out, like going and doing right away the upfront homework around diversification, right? Then I'm going to go, we talked about that at length. Then I'm going to go to the next one, which is, Excess spend on software and services that are nice to haves, right? There's a lot of B2B SaaS tools out there in the e-commerce space that are quite literally gouging people for thousands of dollars a month. And you will be surprised that, you know, tools that are available to you with Pietra or available in OpenAI or like you don't actually need to be spending this much money. Speaker 2: You may not actually need that tool. Yeah. Speaker 3: I think like, I think you should cut first and then see what happens to your business, right? It's, you're almost never going to do it the other way. I've talked to businesses and I'm like, you're spending this many thousands of dollars as a small business on like software, right? So cut first and then really work backwards from like, do you need this and add it back in? I think we have found that 80% of companies don't add it back in and they're like, oh, this other thing that I had in my Pietra bundle, in my Microsoft bundle, in my Google Workspace bundle actually does the trick and I get it as part of this thing. So making those calls right away. And then I think the more optimistic kind of last thing that I've seen is Embracing the new tools that are built for this time, right? Like, don't think that the thing that was built 15 years ago, like, will help you right now. And this is across the entire planet. Like, everyday things are coming out that makes your life easier. It uses the latest and greatest technology to, like, make your business run faster, have less cost inside of it, like, less efficiency. Really adopt those tools, right? There's smart founders that are building things, and if you're hanging on to, like, I'll do this myself or, like, a really old piece of software, like, just realize that, like, it's going to, you're going to find out that this one is 10 times faster, easier, cheaper. You're just going to find out three months too late, four months too late, all right? That's, and that's the real kind of killer to these businesses, moving too slow, And not making the decision and thinking that your current setup, people, processes, software, is gonna take you to the promised land. It's not. Like tactically, you need to wake up tomorrow morning, do a budget, start from, cut everything first and then add back in as they say. That's like the Elon style, right? And it really works. And by the way, on the positive side is I've seen companies do this and I've seen them now thrive in this environment. Like grow through this environment. And I was like, wow, that's like, Pretty amazing, but they were also the same people maybe four weeks ago that were already making changes, like they knew right away. Speaker 1: Yeah, so you gotta move fast. Speaker 3: You gotta move fast, you can't be fearful of making those changes, and you can't just hold on to the past, like people, processes, software, like that's what's gonna, I find, kill you. Speaker 2: Rowe, every time you come here, the two times and we've had very few, I don't think we've actually had any repeat guests. So the fact that you are a repeat guest, I think the reason is because of the ability to come and share valuable tactical takeaways. I think also you're pretty Pretty straight cut with like, hey, this is what you should go do. Instead of like, I think this is the one time in the world that we live in that we can't be in the middle. Speaker 3: Right, can't be wishy-washy right now. Speaker 2: Can't be wishy-washy and I think a lot of people need people in their corner or tech in their corner or tools in their corner. that won't allow them to be wishy-washy. And so I'm really excited to obviously go and explore the tool that you've built internally within Pietra to empower us to get through times like this, but also I think as you kind of bring it out more and more people use it, I think it'll be really cool to share those stories across our audience network because this is the number one topic, the number one question, the number one thing that comes up in Any webinar we do, any newsletter we write, any podcast we do, it is the number one thing. So to be able to come and say, hey, we're not the end solution yet, but you've created something that's going to create an immense amount of efficiency, it's really powerful. So with all that being said, if there's one last thing that you'd give everyone to chew on, I think you gave a lot to chew on, but if there's one last thing that you want people to take back and chew on, what's that one thing? Speaker 3: The one thing that you want is something that I say internally to our company too, which is as a small business or even a medium-sized business, you actually don't want the status quo. You want things to change so that you can find a new edge, so you're not playing someone else's game. This is one of those times. And everyone thinks that they know the game of the status quo and they should just follow those steps because it's easy to comprehend and you're like, everyone should just do this and make a million dollars. What you really want to do, I think, is, what do they say in PR? Don't let a good crisis go to waste or something like that. I look at this and I say, this is like a gift to small businesses of, for the first time ever, the people you're competing with are also scared out of their mind. And so now there's new edges and new arbitrage opportunities that are popping up. You got to look at it through the optimistic lens of like the best chance you have at winning is when they flip the chessboard, not like when you're playing, you know, the game of someone who's been staring at that chessboard for 10 years. So embrace it. It's scary for sure. But this is the time to go find those edges and go sprint. Sooner or later, you know, the dust is going to settle and everyone's going to get back into the standard, the status quo. So just be excited. I think there's a lot of fear, but I think I would say we should be excited, you should be excited. Go build your business in a new way and hunt for those new arbitrage opportunities that are being created every day. Speaker 1: Chew on that. Speaker 3: Boom. Speaker 2: That was killer. That was insane. Speaker 3: Thank you guys. Speaker 1: If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok, and check out the website ChewOnThis.io.