The Rise of AI Employees, Bootstrapping to Exit & Pragmatic Optimism with Jeff Knauss

with Jeff Knauss

Jan 30, 2026 · 00:46:51

But if you direct your thoughts towards the things you want and you have ridiculous goals and you are constantly imagining what your life could be or will be, I think your actions inherently and subconsciously start to point you in the directions you want to go.

Jeff Canales, thank you so much for being here. Really great to have you.

John, thanks for having me, buddy. I'm excited to chat with you. Yeah.

Well, before we get into the rest of it, I'd love to hear what you're up to now. So you've got a new venture in AI. Tell us about that.

Yeah. So I started a company called Arcovo AI, and it was after a few years after I sold my company, Digital Hive. I was finally ready to kind of go all in again. I had been doing a lot of projects I'm sure we'll talk about kind of in the meantime. But November '22 rolls around and ChatGPT-3 launches. I start playing with it and I said, oh gosh, this is, this is going to change the world. And so I decide to, you know, really, I fell down a rabbit hole of AI and realized it's changing so quickly that if I didn't make it my day job, then I would fall behind too fast. And so called up my old business partner from Digital Hive and, and said, hey, um, are you into this AI thing? He said Yeah, he'd already done like a— he'd gotten his Chief AI Officer certification just for fun because that's the kind of guy he is. And I said, do you want to run it back? He said, sure. So we got the band back together and started our Kobo AI at the beginning of this year. What we do is we build AI-powered digital employees. So we build digital employees that replicate the human administrative work that we all do today, but replicate that inside of compute. And so it allows for all the rote mundane stuff that humans are currently doing administratively to be taken over by AI and compute and allows humans to focus on the most high-value work, building relationships, making final decisions, being creative so that we don't have to do all that stuff. Nobody wakes up in the morning, it's like, I can't wait to do that Excel sheet. So that's what we do today.

Yeah, that sounds like a good use of AI. So who are your customers normally? Who buys from you?

Oh gosh, we have a smattering of customers. It's everybody from, You know, we have 3,000-person IT companies. We have a blockchain investigation company. We have professional services companies. We have roofers. We have HVAC companies. We have everyone and anyone under the sun. If you have, if you have, you know, humans working for your company and you would like to get rid of the, you know, administrative work and make your company more efficient, save time, save money, or generate more revenue, We can help you.

Yeah. What's an example of a workflow that you guys help somebody with? Just so we can put it into, you know, tangible terms for people.

Yeah. So I'll give you a quick one. It's a fun one. I mentioned the Blockchain Investigation Company, but what they do is if you have blockchain, if you have cryptocurrency and it's stolen, you know, by the bad guys, what they'll do is they'll work with all the 3-letter agencies, the FBI, CIA, etc., to go chase the bad guys and recover your funds. put the bad guys in jail. Um, they're the 3rd largest in the country doing this work, and they have— they had a 5-person, uh, case management department where what they would do is look chain to chain, wallet to wallet. When your stuff got stolen, they'd be able to follow it because blockchain is, is public. And so they followed around and try to figure out where things were going, but they'd have to create reports for the FBI and the CIA and their customers, and it was just a very manual process. And so what we did was we kind of reinvented the way that they were bringing in all this disparate information, analyze that, create the outputs of the report. And now instead of 5 people working 250 hours, now they have 1 person working 20 hours a week. And all those other 4.5 people are now working on much higher value work in the company. But the even bigger advantage is because they're growing so quickly now, because we've added this kind of horizontal AI layer into their business, when they double and triple their business, they don't have to double and triple their overhead. And so it's a forward-looking technology that allows them to scale infinitely because AI doesn't have capacity limits. It doesn't take weekends or vacations, right? Sick days. It's working all the time and it can work at the speed of lightning, right? Comparative to humans. And so when you build this kind of layer in the business, you can let your humans focus on the most important work and you can scale without having to add, you know, more overhead.

And where does that live on their network? Is it like, does your company have like something that lives there, or is it bolted onto their existing systems, or how does that work?

It's a great question. So what we do is we build on orchestration platforms, they're called. So think of that like a layer of software that we build these AI digital employees, which is basically an amalgamation of instructions, knowledge management, which is like the brain of the AI, giving them the knowledge to do something for the company. I'll give you another quick example, like proposals, right? Very few people like building proposals.

Mm-hmm.

And so what we've realized is if you were to hire a human being to come and do your proposals, what would you need to do? You need to train 'em on, you know, your company knowledge, your company history, your services that you offer, why you're better than your competitors, all the things that would allow somebody to make a great proposal. Then you need to give them an instruction set to say, look, when we get an RFP or request for a proposal, you take that information, you analyze that with all the information we trained you about the company, and then mix all that together, all pricing and all all that kind of stuff, put all that together, and then the output is, you know, a response to that, a proposal to the request for proposal. Um, that's exactly the same way you can treat compute, right? You give an instruction set, you train a knowledge management, so you teach it all about the company, you'd give it, and then you plug it into these different, different systems. Um, as an example, SAM.gov is a government, uh, contracting where you can go in and find government contracts. We have— that has an API. So we connect the digital employee to the API. It can go and search for, you know, RFPs within the NAICS code or keywords or whatever, pull out the RFPs that would best fit your business. A human being will, you know, say, oh yes, I like this one, this one, this one. And as soon as you push yes, the digital employee takes it from there, builds the proposals, matches the requirements that they're asking for with what it knows about the company, puts it all together, and then you just get a proposal landed in your inbox. So that's kind of how it all works together.

Yeah, that is really cool. Yeah. So are people, I mean, people must be getting it now, right? I think like maybe a year or two ago, people might've been wondering, well, is this really the way we're going? Or do I want all my company's data exposed to these agents? But I think people are probably on board now.

You know, there's, it's a curve. It's an adoption curve like any other technology, right? And so I'll talk to some people that, you know, they're so advanced, they're building their own. They just can't build it fast enough and they need, you know, implementators to come in, strategize with them and build it for 'em. And then I'll talk to people that are really reticent, that don't really understand it. And so the best thing that we can do is offer a strategy. We do this thing called the AI workforce consultation. Before we build anything, we go through a 3-step process, a kickoff call to find alignment on the system we're gonna focus on, a deep dive to go deeply into the process they're currently doing so we can map out how they're doing what they're doing. And then we analyze that process and say, all right, well, here's where an AI digital employee fits here, here, here, and here. That's gonna take that 150 client onboarding step from 150 steps to 5 steps, right? Because the AI digital employees are gonna take over the rest of the work. And then we present them a blueprint to say, this is how you build digital employees. This is what we would do. This is a timeline, the investment, and this is how much time you're gonna save by allowing— and also it's not just time saved, time and money saved, it's also generating more revenue. The proposal example, instead of responding to one proposal a week, you might be able to you know, respond to 15.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and obviously that's gonna yield more business. And so there's real acceleration to all this, but there's some folks, uh, that still need a little bit of handholding in terms of understanding and accepting like what the future kind of looks like. Because I have a belief that you'll have your human team and you'll have your digital team, and it's a skill to manage both, right? And so we're helping to build the next digital workforce, and it's really exciting. Sometimes we get done building this stuff and I'm like, even me, I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe this exists. The technology really is mind-blowing. So we're still early, but I think once we build kind of a proof of— the first proof of concept, we had 100% of people, 100% of our clients have moved into a phase 2 after we built the first one.

Wow.

So I think it goes to show that once people kind of realize what it can do, the potential is endless.

It seems that way. That's amazing. Well, congratulations. That's a cool thing. So let's back up a little bit and I want to hear your origin story. I mean, 'cause your professional life has been pretty interesting with all the things you've gotten involved with And we'll touch on those. But, yeah, so where'd you go to school? What'd you study? What'd you think you'd be doing when you were a younger guy?

Yeah. So, I was adopted at 3 months old and I was very fortunate because I was adopted from a very bad situation in South Korea. And, the folks that adopt— my parents that adopted me here in the States were very poor. They had to beg, borrow, and steal. They borrowed from the church, they borrowed from relatives to adopt me. At the time, you know, more affordable than it is today. It's gotten really expensive, but, um, it was still expensive, especially for them. So I was very fortunate to be adopted by 2 wonderful people. Um, they, they were the best. They were married for over 53 years. I lost them a few years ago, uh, but they were just really, really wonderful people that, that cared very much about me. And so I had that big advantage growing up, but we did not have a lot of money, and, um, which meant that we didn't have a lot of— I didn't grow up with a lot of business acumen. And so what they taught me, what they drilled in my head was working hard will get you to your goals. And so at the age of 12, that was my first job. I worked, you know, all summer at a grape vineyard where I would pick grapes and I'd fill up these big buckets, these big baskets actually, and I'd lug it around all day and it'd be an 8-hour shift. And by the end of it, I would put a rock in my pocket every time I'd fill up a thing and I'd have about 8 rocks at the end of the day. And for every rock I got a dollar. And so it's basically child labor. But it taught me hard work. I did that all summer. My, you know, for a few years. And I was everything from a janitor at my school to I worked in a factory through school, high school and college. I worked the swing shift, 7 at night to 7 in the morning, 3 days on, 3 days off, 2 days on, 2 days off. So I did that for a number of years. I've just always worked. And I think that that was a really good lesson for me of showing me like, what's the alternative to, you know, Entrepreneurship now and understanding all that, but that that instilled in me a deep sense of like pride and working hard. But it also taught me that work was the enemy. You know, my folks taught me that they both hated their jobs. They had GEDs, and so growing up, they kind of always complained about their jobs and you know the stuff they had to do. And a job was a necessary evil to put food on the table. That's what they kind of that's the framework I grew up with. So I was fortunate enough to to work and and get my way through through college. My my parents. Paid for the interest on my student loans, which was one huge advantage that I had. But I paid the rest of my way through through school, and went to SUNY Oswego, studied public relations because I didn't know how to even start to think about you know what a career looked like because it wasn't on my mind. I just knew that that's what you should do is go to college. And then my second semester of senior year, I realized that public I hated public relations. And because you don't really— that's the crazy thing. You don't really do the work that a professional would do until the end of your college career. And then you're like, I'm kind of stuck now, right? And so I graduate with this public relations degree realizing that I don't love public relations. And after 3 months, I sent out 300 resumes in 3 months with individualized custom— this is before AI, right? So I was handwriting custom cover letters, custom resumes. I did everything that I could and I only got 2 interviews out of those 300 resumes. 'Cause I wasn't a standout student. I was never the best at school. I didn't have anything on my resume that stood out. And so I was fortunate because I took a little extra step in getting my first interview. I emailed somebody and told them that their link was broken. They gave me a pity interview. And long story short, I ended up working at a TV station. They got me a job as an account executive for a TV station, which was basically a salesperson for selling TV commercials.

Right.

So that was my first kind of career was I worked in television for about 8 years. 5 of those years was in Rochester as an account executive, and then I wanted to become a manager, so I got a job, um, in Syracuse, which is how I came out to Central New York as a manager of the NBC and CBS and CW TV stations out here, uh, running the advertising department. And, um, and that's how I got into, you know, realizing that I wanted to get into digital marketing and social media advertising. You know, I saw the writing on the wall that I think all forms of advertising can work, but, uh, TV, you know, was just You can't measure it. It's very like broadcast and the medium is evolving every day and viewership is going down. But digital marketing, you can measure it, you can target it. There's so many more things you can do with it. And so that's how I kind of made the decision I wanna get into it. But in order to get into digital marketing and social media advertising, I would've had to take a big step back in my career.

Mm-hmm.

I would've needed to become a digital sales manager or digital salesperson. And honestly, they didn't have great products anyway. That's when I was lucky enough to meet my business partner, Jake, who I started the company with. He was speaking at the Tech Garden, which is where our office is today. It's called the Inspire Innovation Hub now. And we talked for 2 or 3 years. He did a talk at the Tech Garden. I said hello and we became friends. And then one day we were out to lunch and I said, hey man, gosh, because he had his little consultancy business and he built websites. And I'm like, it would be so cool if we could have started a business. If we were younger, we could have started a business together. Calls me the next day, he's like, you know, we're still pretty young, right? And I said, well, you may feel that way, bro, but I, I'm, I'm 28, which I recognize, you know. Um, but I was like, I have a 3-month-old at home and my wife stays at home with our 3-month-old, uh, because in Finland they give you 3 years of paid maternity leave. So I said, you ever move here, uh, to my wife, that she could stay home with our children. And so we had one income, which was mine. And so going off and starting a business, uh, was a scary you know, proposition. And, but my wife, you know, thankfully said, if you think it's the right thing for our family, do it. And she gave me her blessing. And so after that, I started the company called Digital Hive and me and my business partner, we bootstrapped it. We didn't raise any outside capital. And the first year was really hard, man. Like most first-year businesses.

So a lot of things in there, actually a lot of similarities. You know, I didn't grow up with money, right? My parents were working poor, basically went to a state school, not the best student. So yeah, I definitely can relate to that. So, Tell us a little bit about that switch. So, so you've got a good job, you're paying your bills, or at least you thought it was a good job. Now you've got to take that leap and start your own company. What's going through your head? How many times did you say, oh, forget it, I can't do this? Or like, yeah, talk us through that whole episode and how that worked.

Yeah, man. I mean, there's so much doubt, right? I didn't— again, because of the way I grew up and, you know, you said we have similarities. I mean, there's a, there's a certain kind of grit that gets built inside of you when you kind of come from similar background and you don't kind of expect anything to be handed to you. You just know you got to go out and get it if you want it, right? And so I think that was the thing that pushed me over the edge that the, you know, my biggest fear is not in failure. I'm not, I've realized about myself over the years that I'm not so much worried about failing or people seeing that I fail. I think a lot of people are, you know, I think they don't make decisions because they have, when they're making fear-based decisions, a lot of it is because they're worried about what they're going to be perceived as if— what if they fail, right? I don't have that as much as I think the average person. Um, my biggest fear is regret. My biggest fear is this idea that I'm gonna be 90 years old, and I have the belief that we get to do this whole life thing one time. And so, um, you know, I get to be 90 years old, I'm laying on my deathbed, and I'm, I'm looking up, I'm like, man, what if I started that company, you know? And so I kept reminding myself of that, that this is worth it. Because I think the other side of it is that people tend to overblow the risk they're actually taking. For me, it was like, yeah, it was a scary thing and we wouldn't make an income for 12 months. I luckily had saved a lot when I was early in my career that I could take some time and try my company without taking a salary. But it was still very, very scary. Deplete my savings, my kids. I have a kid now, all those things. But the reality was, if I— if it didn't work out, I could have just went back and got a job. I was good at what I did before, right? Like, I was, I was a good— I was good at sales. I was good at, uh, at being a manager at the TV station. So I could have just went back and got a job. So yeah, to me, the risk of, of not doing it and regretting it was far greater than risk of doing it and failing.

Yeah, I can— I feel that too. It's, uh, you know, so it's a big deal you fail, right? Everybody fails, and at least you're, you're failing trying to do something. You know, which is pretty neat. So how long was it before you could actually replace your own income from your old job? So you started the new company and it takes a little time before you're back kind of up to square one in terms of income. How long did that take for you?

Oh, dude, the first year sucked. The first year was so hard, John. You know, we really were struggling because, you know, it's just getting clients. All the things you have to do with business that you don't have to do when you're employed by a company. And so it was a learning curve in all of the ways. Plus we're in a technology that's new. So we're, we're optimizing and trying to figure out how, which kind of ads we want to run for people and how do we make ads and, you know, who runs them and how do we optimize them and when do we hire the person? So it was a lot of learning in that first year. It wasn't until after 12 months we had enough money that we could start paying ourselves a little bit of money. And also we hired our first employee and we moved into a slightly larger office space. So we did all those things pretty quickly right after that first year, all of which were very scary, right? Like we did it all kind of at once, but we saw the writing on the wall that the business was growing at a good clip and we were getting more and more clients. There's more and more demand. We had started to get some momentum and I wasn't quite replacing— I actually, to be honest, John, I don't, You know, it was years until I replaced my salary. You know, I think, I think people, I think a lot of people have the wrong idea about entrepreneurship. They think that, oh, you got a business, you must be rolling in the cash, right? And, uh, you know, even in our third, fourth year of business where, you know, we had probably at the time 30 to 40 employees and, you know, the company from an outside perspective looked really great, I mean, I probably still was Maybe making what I was at the TV station back then, but everyone looked at me because I had a nice car, which by the way was on the business, right? Like you know, and and I was able to do fun things. I was traveling on the business, right? All these things were were kind of what I realized is that the less I took, the more I could invest in the company. And so you know, my wife and I, we certainly were making enough to have a nice living and you know all that, but. and be secure. I wasn't worried about, you know, paying our bills necessarily. But I, but I, you know, I also wasn't making, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars. It just wasn't even close to that. And so that was, that was the, that's the funny bit about entrepreneurship. I think there's a lot of fake it till you make it in there, you know.

For sure. Yeah. And the data is pretty clear that if, if, you know, having a high income is your goal, entrepreneurship is probably the wrong path, right? You're better off just getting a corporate job.

Yeah.

So, so during that time, there's a lot of stress, right? Just, you know, financial stress, family stress, work stress. How did you manage that for yourself? How did you keep yourself mentally, physically, and spiritually grounded?

Well, to be honest, man, in the beginning I didn't. You know, I find I talk about this often, but, you know, the idea of balance is so ridiculous when you're an entrepreneur. You know, I think that everyone talks about work-life balance and all this stuff. Balance to me means 50/50. Like you're trying to weigh this kind of teeter-totter of like 50% work, 50% family. It's never that. It's never gonna be that, right? Sometimes it's 100% work, 0% family. Sometimes 100% family and 0% work. I just had— I subscribe to the idea that whatever I've chosen with my time, when I choose to, whatever I choose, I'm gonna be all in on that thing that I choose. I'm gonna be all in on my decision to how I spend my time. And I will tell you that in the beginning days of Digital Hive, there was no option other than go all in on business. Right now, I didn't I didn't abandon my family, but I certainly was working until seven eight o'clock at night, and then I would you know put my kid to bed. I'd say goodnight to my wife, and I'd get back to it until two or three in the morning. Like it's just and that was seven days. That's not by the way entrepreneurship isn't Monday through Friday. That was seven days a week. I mean, I was working so many ridiculous hours because it felt like survival. And so what does that mean? I didn't make I didn't create and I didn't make the decisions. to focus on my health. I didn't think about what I was eating. So, I would work literally, and I still do this, but I work 2 shifts. I work during the day to have meetings and be present with my employees and do work in the business, right? And then, from, you know, now today my schedule is from like 5:30, 6 o'clock until 11 till my wife goes to bed. I'm with my family 100%. I put my phone away. I don't do work stuff. And then, I plug back in at 11. I work until about 2. And then, I Uh, and then I do, you know, I just catch up on stuff, or I think, or I do my strategic work. And then at 2 o'clock, I go down to my home gym and I work out for about an hour. And then at 3, I come upstairs, I take a shower and go to bed, and then I wake up for the next day. So back then though, there was no working out. There was just— I would be on the couch just shoving food in my face. Uh, John, I, I had to lose, um, after, you know, probably 3 or 4 years of the business, I realized that I really wasn't taking care of myself. And in about 8 months, when I made the decision to prioritize my, my health, I lost 48 pounds in 8 months.

Wow.

Um, because I needed to, because I was just significantly, um, not healthy for, for my standards. And what I've realized for myself is that after that point in time, um, I've— I have to make health a priority somewhere in there, right? Everything is a choice.

Right.

And so, I, decided to make— so I, I do the intermittent fasting thing. I do the 8 and 16. So I, I don't eat from, uh, 8 o'clock at night to noon. And, um, I also try to watch my calories, and I work out 7 days a week. Because if I don't, if I don't make something a habit for myself, then I won't do it ever. It's like, I'm not a 3-a-week guy. I'm just— it's either I do it all in and it just becomes a habit for me, or it's not. And so that's how I do it today. But back then, uh, it was all in on work.

Yeah, I like what you said about— I mean, there are some seasons in life where you have to like— yeah, I agree with the balance, right? Like in any 24-hour period, it's almost impossible to achieve what people would call good balance, right? So I look at it over the course of seasons or a year. Am I generally balancing throughout this larger period of time, right? Because there could be weeks or months where you just got to go all in on business, but then you've also at some point that has to balance out. Somewhere, right? Like you were talking about with your health or something. Otherwise, you're just going to create all this wealth and not be able to enjoy it, you know, when you're older because you got chronic conditions you could have managed, right?

Yeah, you got it. Now, speaking of which, John, in 2020 when COVID hit, I was not taking care of myself, probably like many people just with the stress and all that. You know, we dropped in revenue 70% from March to April. We dropped 70% in revenue. revenue. And we had 100% of our expenses. So talk about stress. I mean, that was a— every day my wife saw me break down just saying, I don't know what we're going to do. But I made a commitment the day that, or the week after we sent everybody home, because we were, uh, an in-office company where everybody showed up to the office Monday through Friday. It was just what we all did. And then we decided to send everybody home. And the week later I said, I don't know what this thing is happening. It was so very early days COVID. Nobody knew what was kind of going on. But everybody knew that it was going to get weird for a while. I said, look, we're going to cut— we're going to lose business and it's going to be real hard, but we are going to cut everything else before we even think about the staff. The staff is not an expense to me. The staff is the business.

Yeah.

And so I made a commitment that I am not going to lay anybody off during this time period, no matter how hard it gets. It'll be our very last thing we do. And Jake and I committed to that, and we did it. We didn't have to lay a single person off throughout COVID. And it was so stressful that I had an autoimmune disease kind of sitting somewhere in my body, and it brought it out. And it's called pemphigus vulgaris, which sounds more like a Harry Potter curse than a disease. It's this thing that if I had gotten 50 years ago, John, I would have died from it. It's chronic and it's deadly. And luckily, within the past probably 2 decades, they've figured out kind of an injection that I get similar to chemotherapy that now has put it in a temporary remission. So I'm knocking wood. I'm in a temporary remission right now, but it'll be there forever as of today.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, I just look— I chalk it up to a reminder of You know, no matter how bad things get, you have to manage your stress. And that was, you know, that was a rude awakening for me that I was taking a lot on my body and my mental health that I needed to take a step back and really prioritize how I managed, you know, stress on my body. So that was an important lesson for me.

Yeah. And you lived it, right? Because it's easy for people who have reached a certain level of success to say, oh, you need work-life balance. You got to prioritize your health when, you know, back when they were coming up, maybe they didn't. Right. So, yeah. So you get there one way or the other, whether you realize it just because or because you have a health problem. Yeah.

Yeah.

So leading up to your exit to Butler Till, what was going on there? Like, was it, was it the type of thing where you're like, hey, it's time we're doing this? Or was there a lot of deliberation or what, what was it like kind of leading up to the exit?

Yeah. So Jake and I had known pretty much from day one that we would exit the business in some form or fashion. We knew that it wasn't a lifetime business for us. We were building it to sell. Early on in our business journey, we read this book called Built to Sell. And it's a really wonderful book. Anybody that's building a company, I would highly suggest it because it was a fictionalized version of a person that had a marketing agency, ironically enough. Mm-hmm. And they were telling a story about how they built this. This guy had built a marketing agency, tried to sell it. He couldn't sell it because he hadn't built scalable processes into his business. And then he goes back, re-engineers his business, and then sells it a year or something later, right? And so it teaches you the lessons of what's important on how to build a sellable business. And what I always say to people is like, whether you want to sell your company or not, you should build a sellable business because sellable business basically means that you are working on a business that doesn't rely on you, that has processes that can be repeated, that has a scalable sales system, right? And so it's predictable. So all the fundamental things of a sellable business is the core of a healthy business, right? You're profitable. And so that's— I think that that was always our intention. And we sold the business in 2021. So a year after COVID. Thankfully, during COVID again, we didn't lay anybody off. And that was a huge advantage. By the time that businesses started coming back online, all that stuff, a lot of marketing agencies, they had disseminated their staff. We were still like, hey, we got all the capacity in the world. Let's go. And so we actually grew a tiny amount in COVID and we grew significantly the year after COVID. And so because of all those things, we were able to then leverage that, hey, look, we're a very resilient business. Even in the hardest of times, we came out on the other side and we started looking at what's called an ESOP, which is an employee-owned company. We were thinking about becoming an ESOP ourselves because during an ESOP, the founders can exit the business. They can sell to their employees, but their employees don't have to pay anything. All of the exit and the earnout money basically comes from tax savings, essentially, and profit from the business. And so that's what we had planned on doing. But I started talking to a few people companies that were already ESOP'd. And one of those was a marketing agency, Butler Till. And they had been an ESOP for the last 11 or 12 years. So, I asked them their experiences like, how is being an ESOP for you guys? Like, oh my gosh, we love it. It's the greatest. Our employee— we've had so much growth since we've become an ESOP. It's just the best. It's the best. And we're like, oh, that's awesome. I can't wait to do that. And they said, well, the CEO said, there's probably an easier way for you guys to become an ESOP. I said, what's that? He said, well, She said, well, we can, we could just buy you guys. I said, that, that sounds pretty good. And so we went through the due diligence piece and ending up selling, ending up selling the business. And all of our employees from day one became employee owners of Digital Hive, Butler Till, and the real estate company that Butler Till owned. So it was a kind of fairytale ending for everyone.

Yeah, that's, you know, Kimberly Jones pretty well. And that's, that's a great, great company to be a part of for sure.

No doubt.

That's great. Yeah. So what was it like afterwards? Did you feel like a little seller's remorse or did you wake up wondering, what the hell do I do now? Like, what was the next day like?

Yeah, man. Um, so I stayed on board until December of that year. I think we sold in May. So I stayed on for, you know, 6 or 7 months later. And, um, I, during that time, my plan was because I was taught that work was the enemy. So my whole goal in life, I'm 35 at the time when I sold, I was like, well, you know, I've escaped the matrix. I'm out of the work thing. I don't need to work anymore. I have enough money that I can just kind of retire and go off and sell on an island. I went to Finland to visit my wife's family, brought the kids, and we were there for 3 weeks. And while I was still working the company, there wasn't a lot for me to do. And so I was kind of like twiddling my thumbs, sitting around Finland and being like, okay, this isn't going to work for me. For me. I realized really quickly that work was not my enemy. Might have been my parents, but it was not my enemy. What I love doing is I love taking something that doesn't exist and bringing into the world and providing value for others. Like, I, I realized that I'm, I'm built to build stuff. And so I got back, uh, from Finland, and pretty quickly I started to put together some ideas. I worked with my business coach, uh, who gave me some really amazing advice on how to build a company that I would love, which ended up being Profound. I got together with a few business partners and started another company. I started 3 restaurants. I started to do some more angel investing. I kept myself pretty busy afterwards.

Yeah. So tell us about your angel investing. Like, what are you looking for in deals? Do you have like certain sectors that you gravitate towards? Are you just, you know, open to anything that looks interesting?

Yeah, you know, I wouldn't say that I'm the best angel investor. I think I'm more— I love supporting other builders. You know, I look primarily at the founder. I try to bet on the jockey and not the horse. And so I look towards, you know, great founders that are doing really interesting things. They're solving interesting problems that have some traction. You know, I haven't been super disciplined in specific industries or things like that. I just, when I become enamored with someone or an idea, and if I feel like they can execute, um, that's when I've gotten involved. Um, I've kind of put a pause on that until, you know, I think, I think that'll be a big part of my life. Um, I have, uh, I'm involved in about 13 companies today, uh, but I think it's going to grow significantly because I believe that Arcovo is really— I think this business will be a 9-figure valuation business. And so I think I'll have more capital as time goes on to to do even more of that. But for right now, everything is going into the AI company. But I do love it. I love watching and supporting entrepreneurs' journeys. It's just a fun thing to watch people have an idea and work really hard towards it.

Yeah, I've invested in small companies and startups too. But what I found is I'm a lousy investor. Like, I just, I don't pick winners for whatever reason. Like, I don't know what it is. I'm better off just operating my own company.

I think, yeah, I'm, I'm kind of there with you. I, I've, um, I've made a lot of bets, and you know better than anybody, you know, when you do angel, you got to do 10 deals to have the one that might make enough to pay all of them back, right? Like, that's— it's just you have to have so much diversity because it's, it's, it's, it's almost impossible if you think about the businesses that, you know, not only even, you know, most businesses go out of business, right? Most businesses fail. Like by a large percentage. But even the ones that do make it, they make it on such small terms. You know, maybe they do half a million dollars in revenue a year or a million dollars. I think, I can't remember the exact stat, but it's really, the amount of businesses that have a million dollars revenue is so small, you wouldn't believe it.

Hmm.

And so you're never gonna make your money back if they're only doing a million dollars. So you need somebody to go really, really big. And the likelihood of that is very, very small. And so I'd say like, yeah, there's some that are people that are really good investors. Obviously they have incredible track records. I think for me it's more like, you know, if I put a bunch of bets on the table and I have one that kind of takes off, great. But my personal advice for angel investing, and you probably feel the same sentiment, only invest what you feel like you never had to begin with. Any angel investment I've ever done, I only invested the amount of money that I felt like if I never see this money— actually, not even if I don't see the money again, I assume I never had it because that way I don't feel bad when I, when I get the email that's like, hey, thanks for your support, but we're shutting things down. I've got a couple of those and it's what it is, man.

Yeah, no, it's true. You got to just, you got to just imagine you're never having it back. But I like the idea that you never had it in the first place, right? Because then it's just completely different mentally.

Yeah, that's right.

So onto your, your foundation. So, not only have you done cool things and grown and built companies and that sort of thing, but now you're giving back. So, tell us a little bit about your foundation work and your philanthropy.

Because of the situation I was born into in South Korea, I think almost every day of my life how lucky I am. I think what I feel so fortunate about is that ingrained in my DNA, I have this deep level of gratitude for life.

Hmm.

I think some people are born and they just maybe very rarely or maybe never truly understand what it is to feel the depths of gratitude that I feel like I have just to have the opportunity to wake up every day, because I wouldn't necessarily, wouldn't necessarily have had that for very long had I stayed in South Korea. And so, um, For me, I recognized that I didn't do anything to deserve to be adopted, to be given the opportunity I was given. I didn't make like a good choice. I wasn't a good person. It just was luck.

Hmm.

And I recognized that so many people are unlucky and they're born into situations that they had no control over, and they are going to be stuck in a cycle of generational poverty that is virtually impossible to get out of. And I know there's a lot of people that are like, you know, pull yourselves up by the bootstraps and, you know, figure it out. And like the, um, the, the vast— the wave of, of hard things against these— for some people that are born into very bad situations, it virtually is impossible for them to have any type of foothold. It's not that they're not willing to work hard. It's not that they're not smart. It's not that they're not, you know, good people. It's that they just never even get the first rung on the ladder.

Yeah.

Right? And so My goal with our family's foundation, after we sold the company, I established a family foundation. And my long-term goal with it is to change generational poverty for as many people as possible throughout my lifetime. And I'll be honest, like, I don't think I'm doing a very good job yet. We've established it. I've granted a lot of money, but it's all been very reactionary. I've done things because I've seen a need or someone's asked or I'm at an event and Kind of so, but it's okay. I'm all right with it because my goal in life—I'm pretty good. Like I don't, I don't need a lot more. Like my I will never own you know a three million dollar vehicle. I will never own my own plane. I don't care how well I do in life. I don't want those things because I've actually been exposed to a lot of people that have those things, and it's another burden in your life, honestly. So I don't need more burdens in my life. What I want to do. Is figure out ways to grow capital so that I can create systemic change. And I'm trying to be as thoughtful as possible with that. But I recognize, you know, now at 39 that I probably have another decade that I have to put some real work into to grow my capital base, to be able to make real, real— the kind of impact that I want to make. And I don't— I, and I never want anyone to dismiss— if you're trying to do good in the world, it doesn't matter the level, right? Like, anything is, is a wonderful positive thing. I just set very high standards for myself, and I know what I want to do, and I know that that's going to take a lot more capital than I currently have. So, um, part of why I still am running so hard, um, at building enterprise value, uh, is because I want to make really big impact on our small corner of the world.

Yeah. So, so you said you were lucky to get adopted and did you feel like that, that vibration, if you will, of luck has just kind of stayed with you or been with you or what's your, what's your thought on that?

Yeah, I think so. I think I have been, well, I know that I've been an extraordinarily lucky person and I think that, you know, going back to you know, how some people love to define luck is when opportunity, you know, meets at the intersection of preparedness, right?

Yeah.

Um, and, and that's luck. I think there's truth to that, right? I think I put myself in position where I have the opportunity to be lucky. But I would also say that I'm just— I've been real lucky through my life. You know, there's been some things I don't— it just, like I said, adoption. I didn't do anything to make that situation occur. Um, but I, I will say that I think luck and gratitude are inherently joint at the hip.

Mm-hmm.

I, I think that when you feel such a deep level of, you know, I, I'm, I am, um, obnoxiously optimistic. I just am, you know, I am obnoxiously optimistic in the way of, I think I could take anything and turn it into a positive. I really could. But I'm also not the flowers and sunshine optimistic. I, I'm not that at all. I'm actually probably— I mean, I, I know I'm the most pragmatic person I know, so I am incredibly pragmatic. So what I call myself is an optimist. I'm a pragmatic optimist. What I'm— what I'm— what I mean by that is I take everything, I allow everything to happen the way that it happens. I don't— I try to control what I control, and everything that I can't control, it is what it is. And I pragmatically look at everything and say, okay, well, this is the situation that is occurring. How can I pragmatically solve the thing? And also, how can I turn it into something good? Right? And I actually believe optimism is the most pragmatic thing because what's the alternative? To think negatively about it? To be pessimist and think the worst of the outcome? And so, I also believe a little bit in, you know, I don't know if you'd call it manifestation or whatever, but I think that if you direct your thoughts towards the things you want and you have, you know, ridiculous goals and you are constantly imagining what your life could be or will be, I think your actions inherently and subconsciously start to point you in the directions you want to go. So again, that's why I'm very like, I don't love the woo-woo stuff because I'm, because I'm so pragmatist, such a pragmatist. But I, but I think that there is truth in what you see in your mind, you can manifest through your daily actions.

Yeah, I believe that too. And actually, the cool thing about all those woo-woo things is like science and instrumentation is starting to catch up to it a little bit, right? So, we can measure vibration and heart field, you know, magnetic fields and things like that. So, yeah, that's cool. And, you know, a lot of the successful people I know as well, they attribute a lot of it to luck. They're not, You know, they're not that full of themselves where they think it was all them. You know, they, they acknowledge that, yeah, they got some lucky breaks and they were in the right place at the right time. But they're all— they also had the makeup where they were going to grind and bust through and make something happen out of the good situation. Right. Because you can have 2 people in a very lucky situation. One makes something of it and one completely, you know, wastes it.

100%. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, cool. So, if, um, if you were to give advice to youngsters, like say in their early 20s, you know, thinking of starting their own companies, which I know you've probably done quite a few times, by the way, what are some things you like to tell them? Or what would some of your advice for them?

You know, I get asked that sometimes about what advice I'd give. And I think that it's so— I guess the advice is that everything is so Unique to the person. The first step is to have a deep sense of self-awareness, I think. You know, when people want to start a business, they want to start a business for all kinds of reasons. They want to be rich. They want to be famous. They want to have control over their lives. You know, I made this LinkedIn post a while ago that it was talking about how people that start businesses, oftentimes I hear, well, I want to be my own boss. And I made this post about like, you— that's the opposite of what happens when you become an entrepreneur. Everyone else is your boss. Your clients are your boss. Your employees are your boss. The community is your boss. Like, so that's the thing. Oh, I want to make my own hours. Sure, make your own hours, but make it so that you're— but you will be working way more than if you were an employee. I guarantee if you're doing it right, you are working way more hours.

100%.

Right? You want to make more money. Guess what? You are the last to be paid. Always. Right? You pay your employees, you pay your vendors, you pay the government, you pay all the people before you pay yourself. And it takes a long time to build enough money so that you can actually get paid. Most cases, right? Of course, there's edge cases for everything I'm saying. But at the end of the day, like, I think that people have to have enough self-awareness to know. And the thing that I, that I love that Steve Jobs said You know, a lot of people will say, you know, you have to be passionate. If you want to start a business, you got to be passionate about the thing you start the business for. You got to be passionate about that space or the thing, the problem you're trying to solve. And Steve Jobs said the reason that that is the case is because a reasonable, sane person wouldn't keep going.

Mm-hmm.

If you're not passionate about the thing you're trying to solve, a reasonable person would say, this is too hard. You know, there was another thing that I read recently that was like, the reason it's so hard to be a CEO of a company or founder of a company is because your job is to go out and hire the best, most smartest people that you can find to solve problems within your company that maybe you don't know how to solve, or, you know, they're better, or you're trying to scale your ability to do the thing that, that you're hiring these people to do. And the challenge with the CEO is that your job essentially is to take all the problems that every smart person you've hired can't solve and solve them. All the hardest things that exist and all the bad and tough decisions that no one else was able to solve—that's your job. And so there's just it's just like to be an entrepreneur. I think people glamorize it because of Shark Tank and you know all these different things and social media and oh an entrepreneur like it's so hard. I'm on my like I don't know maybe tenth company. I don't keep count. I will tell you this AI business, I have never been in the trenches like this before. I have never worked this hard, this diligently. Maybe I spent more hours at Digital Hive. My brainpower is, you know, the processing that's going on all the time feels incredibly hard. I don't want anybody to get twisted. Like, I'm a seasoned entrepreneur and it's super hard right now. I'm going through a very difficult time in my life. Because we are trying to solve this thing. AI is a new technology. The kind of business that we are, we don't even know what to call it because there aren't enough competitors to say this is what the industry called it. That's how new it is. Like, there's so many challenging things, like what kind of people we want to hire. We're making up job titles. We're hiring 3 to 5 people a month. There's just so many things to solve for. And I love it. I love it. As hard as it is, I wouldn't want to do anything else. Right now in my life. And so, that's the thing. You just have to know that about yourself. And if— because or else you'll quit. And that's why most businesses don't work because they quit too soon.

Yeah. I love that. It's the hardest thing you've done and you love it, right? You wouldn't be doing anything else. That's cool. Yeah. Well, that's an amazing place to end it. Jeff, thank you so much for spending some time with us. Love to hear your story. Like to hear your wisdom and sharing it with everybody. So, thank you very much.

Thanks, Jon. Thanks for having me on, man. It was a great conversation.