Dive into the inspiring journey of Paul Lockett, a Mobile native turned Silicon Valley tech pro, as he returns home to shape the future of innovation! Discover challenges, triumphs, and the untapped potential of Mobile's tech scene.

Transcript:

Paul: My name is Paul Lockett. I am the technical director of the Venture Studio at the Innovation Portal here in Mobile.

Marcus: I'm, I have to say I've been ignoring you here at the front because I want to hear what has happened over the course of the last has it been seven years?

Paul: Yeah. Yeah.

Marcus: Since

Paul: 2018. Yeah. So it's

Marcus: been about seven years, Uhhuh. And so for those of you that have not met Paul I'm gonna tell a little story.

Marcus: So you showed up on my doorstep. At one of the networking events that we had when we were in 412 Dauphin Street. And I remember looking over and just seeing you holding court, and I spoke to you and I would've sworn that you were in your twenties. And if I remember correctly, at the time, you were like 17.

Marcus: Yep. Yeah. And I was just absolutely blown away. Like I knew from the get go that you were gonna go and do some things, right? So there's that aspect of this. So you and I have not really even No. Talked or spoken since you left. Yeah. I think we, we corresponded a few times, but not really caught up.

Marcus: So this is Marcus and Paul catching up after seven years. Yeah. And here's the other aspect of this that's not unimportant. This is a very important aspect of this, is that mobile has been consistently for the last. At least decade that I can remember that I've been down here doing business.

Marcus: Has been fighting this idea of the brain drain of the young, very intelligent individual that's gonna go away to college and then never come back. Yeah. Or if they do come back, they come back sometime in their late thirties because they wanna raise a family and they know that their parents aren't doing so well and they want to, provide a little bit of they wanna provide a little bit of care for them and they want their kids to grow up in a more wholesome place.

Marcus: Is that accurate? And so I was super excited when I heard you had come back for a couple of reasons. It's because I know that you are still destined for great things. And and I also think that if you came back then mobile must be doing something right. And I want to know what that is so that we can do some more of it.

Paul: Okay.

Marcus: But having said all of that. Hi, Paul. Why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are?

Paul: All right. All right. So interesting. So going back to 2018, I was about to graduate high school and that's You went where? I, it was, I went to Morehouse. Okay.

Marcus: No. High school. Where did you Oh, in

Paul: high school I went to Murphy High School.

Paul: Okay. And you

Marcus: were part of Kappa?

Paul: Yep. Kappa League. So Carl Cunningham was a mentor. Great mentor. Yeah. And really put me and a whole bunch of guys on track to be able to really make it to college. The big thing coming into it was like, okay, it was me coming in with the whole Capital League outfit that really like to your to, to your event that brought your attention, like the kind of mentoring that he put into the internet.

Paul: It was, I'm not gonna,

Marcus: that certainly made an impression, but I think the thing that made the bigger impression was how you carried yourself and how you spoke.

Paul: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And that, that again, has continued to carry with me. Yeah. And I'll say the thing that, that really like puts a cornerstone in it, is that at, I got that full ride at Morehouse, and if I had not gotten that full ride, I would've just continued working with you from, okay.

Paul: That wouldn't, yeah. Yeah. And so that full ride took me to Morehouse and when I got there, things just started to like move on inside of a real like steep trajectory from there.

Marcus: Okay.

Paul: And so that first okay, before I get to that point. Getting to Morehouse and getting that full ride was a little bit of a challenge because like I graduated.

Paul: From Murphy with a 2.5. Okay. And now at this point you're saying, how'd you get a full ride college with a 2.5? That was my unweighted, my weighted was a lot higher. And so it looked really strange on paper. How I got like a four something inside of my weighted, but a two oh, but a two five inside of my unweighted.

Paul: And so what I did was I went to Morehouse, went to open house first with the Capital League. They took Carl took us, we went on a tour and I was like, oh wow, this is the place I wanna go. But I went again with my mom, but this time I already did the tour. I already knew like the campus and everything else.

Paul: The reason why I went is 'cause I was going to make sure that whoever was gonna make the decision on my scholarship, they knew it. Yeah. They knew exactly who I was. Yeah. So I made a packet with an extra letter separate from my college like admission, the letter my resume and everything else inside of one packet.

Paul: And then when, as we went through the tour as like the kind of parent teacher tour or the parent student tour. We when I timed it out, I knew that we were gonna go past the cafeteria during lunchtime, and I knew on Wednesday they served fried chicken and the place would be packed out with all the people, the students, faculty and staff going to eat fried chicken on the, I'm gonna leave that one alone.

Paul: And I knew that if I was there, I could be able, I'd be able to find whoever I was looking for. And so I looked online, I saw who was the like, regional person for for Alabama and the rest of the like southern region inside of Morehouse. I knew what they looked like. I saw their LinkedIn.

Paul: I connected with them and I took that packet, left the group that, that as they toured going all the way up the kind of heel at Morehouse. And I sat there waiting at the cafeteria looking left and right to find that person. Then I found them, came up to 'em, handed 'em the packet, shook their hand and said, Hey, I will not come to this college if you don't gimme a full ride.

Paul: And then I left it at that. And so like from that point, months passed, I gave him a full ride and moving into Morehouse, that first class that I had was taught by a Google engineer. And it was at that point, 'cause like I had a lot of imposter syndrome going into there. 'cause I did not know how to code.

Paul: And I was going into this computer science program and I like talked to my classmates who were like coming in and they had been coding throughout high school. They did this pre coming into college, like Google thing for people who aren't really interns, but they're just kinda like high schoolers about to come into colleges.

Paul: And so I knew these like super high achieving people around me and I met that Googler and what I did like I had that person. And so I went to every office hours and did interview prep with them over and over again. 'cause I knew everybody else was already ahead of me and I wanted to be at the same level and greater.

Paul: And so unlike them, I would go after at like every day I'd go to the, it is like kind of resource center at Morehouse. If you've seen like hidden figures there it is. This, the room that Tarah is running into, like in the rain, trying to leave, leaving the bathroom, trying to get back to, to do her job at nasa.

Paul: It's the same building. Okay. So I go up in there every day after, after classes to just sit there and try to learn how to code. I went and bought some online like courses and just learned as much as I could because I was listening to them. I was like, that's not what we're learning in class.

Paul: Look, you guys are like doing different stuff. So I just did that. Then outside of that, I would go to the office hours 'cause nobody else would go to the Googler's office hours. 'cause it was like programming one. It was so easy. But I would go there and do interview prep with the Googler so that I could be ready for the interviews.

Paul: 'cause everybody else was already way ahead of me. And so what ended up happening inside that freshman year? I got a, I knew I wanted to get a Google internship 'cause I knew other people had done it before. Yeah. And even as a freshman. And so what I did, I went and I listened to some of the other people and how they made that progress happen.

Paul: And so I applied to any and all internships. I got nothing back from a lot of them. Nice thing about Morehouse is that they bring recruiters to you so you don't have to leave the campus. The recruiters are on campus. And so Google recruiter, the Microsoft recruiter and your Google engineer got references and everything else laid out for you right then and there.

Paul: But even with that, like the like you put your application in freshman trying to get into Google internship, it's not moving at all. And so what I did, and I learned this from some of the, some of my classmates that had, that had been able to secure these like ridiculous internships, is that I went and I applied for as many internships as possible.

Paul: I got into an internship with or I got into an interview with NCR, the National Cash Register in Atlanta and NCR called me in for a full interview. I went in there, I sat down. I knew I did not like, like the intern. The difference with it is that the interview and internship at NCR was meant for somebody who was more like a junior like maybe a sophomore, not a freshman.

Paul: No, I had not taken the classes necessary for applying to these things. But I went, anyways, I did that interview and I like actually got the offer and the offer said you got two weeks to, to decide it was an exploding offer. And so all was sudden. I was like, panicked word. I was like, but I want to go work at Google.

Paul: And so I went to like career services. I was talked to the Google engineer there and they like work together and they've said ah, there's a policy at Morehouse, you can't get an exploding offer. You have to give a month to every student at go to Morehouse so that they can decide on a good internship or a job in general.

Paul: And so with that, I took that NCR offer letter and I went to Microsoft and I went to Google and I said, Hey, I got an offer. Talking to the recruiters that are on campus all the time, and they're like, all right, great. Let's let's see what we can do. And then all of a sudden now I got a Microsoft interview.

Paul: Google didn't budge at that point. I was like, all right, I got a Microsoft interview and This's good enough. Yeah. And so the Microsoft interview at that time, they were flying people out, so we flew out with my friends 'cause they all got into the same like kind of lucrative internships. You doing this stuff?

Paul: Yeah. And so we all flew out to Seattle. We interviewed in person. It was like three interviews. Everybody like, comes in there and then they like let us loose with $60 into Seattle just to do whatever. And so we go to that. I come out of that and I get an offer letter. This is all happening in a very short amount of time now.

Paul: 'cause I get that offer letter from NCR at the beginning of November of my freshman year. And then that's the fall semester on beginning of November of freshman year. Then I go and interview for Microsoft after Thanksgiving. And so that first week of December, I get a offer letter on Monday from Microsoft, and I take that and I say okay, go back to the Google recruiter.

Paul: Hey Google recruiter. It's finals. I'm still here. I have an offer from Microsoft. I have an offer from NCR. They're all going. The deadline for them is all this week on Friday. Can you give me interviews to Google to be able to meet my deadlines? At that point, they said yes. And within that week I did two interviews virtually with Google, and I got a offer on Friday.

Paul: Of that week, the last day of finals. And that was what I said alright, I'll go ahead and accept that. And so I got a Google internship as a freshman.

Marcus: Wow.

Paul: Yeah. So from that point on, I did a whole bunch of other internships with other companies during the summers as well as during like the semester did research with the Department of Defense.

Paul: I did research with Autodesk. Eventually I got to a startup called Neva. Neva is a company, or was a company that was fully composed of a lot of ex goers that wanted to go and make a search engine that was private, that was like not as supported. That was just a better search experience overall because Google Ads had like.

Paul: Encompassed so much corrupt. Yeah. What the experience was. Yeah. Funnily enough the person who started the company was the head of Google Ads previously. And so yeah. So she, I remember I met him inside of Silicon Valley once I graduated. 'cause I interned there again during the semester and then went full time working there.

Paul: While I was working there, they were like continuing to do this like kind of big build out. They had made the search engine and they were trying to bring people on board. Around this time, Chad, GBT was like. Just coming out inside a res research preview. And I remember I had texted you about Che g Bt because like I was like, huh, this is a pretty cool tool.

Paul: Lemme tell Marcus about this little did we now Uhhuh and oh my gosh. So that was way back before like it really had its moment because like it was just a research preview and it was just research. Yeah. Must've been like early

Marcus: 2024 or something like that. Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. And so inside of that time, the we like people at Neva were all the same al engineers that would've hired at OpenAI and whatnot. We were making these like large language models and we were making those models specifically for search. And so like at that time we ended up making like something that is very similar to what Perplexity is today inside of Neva and had a really good time working there.

Paul: That company got sold to Snowflake and so loud, the CEO of Snowflake, atar. And the same person who was my CEO, which I worked very closely with during the time there, I still get like these people who are part of hedge funds asking me to interview about my experience working with Street.

Paul: 'cause now he's the CEO of a public company. Yeah. And so that was an interesting experience that started like my whole journey inside of Silicon Valley because that was the first job I had. I flew, I moved out there into the Valley living in San Jose. And then from there I worked at another company called Flexport, where we learned where I learned a lot about global trade because what Flexport does is make global shipping easy.

Paul: Whenever you buy like an iPhone or something like that, it has to come on a big boat coming from China, right? And the way that happens. Journalists, like a whole bunch of phone calls, like a guy in America, like Apple comes to the guy in America, which is called a freight forwarder. Pick up the phone and say, all right, we need you to bring all those iPhones we paid for in China back to the US and send 'em to the right stores in, in, in inside of, across the US Apple stores.

Paul: And so that person gonna pick up the phone, call the warehouse in China. So Hey Foxcom, I need those iPhones. Put 'em on the truck that's coming. Call the trucking company. Hey, we need you to pick that, pick up those iPhones at the warehouse. Call up the shipping company. Hey, there's a truck coming. You gotta put that load of iPhones onto the a big ship all the way down the chain until you get your iPhone inside of your Apple store.

Paul: I was responsible, like as a individual engineer for like really big shipments that were coming and were moving to and fro from like these mega corporations. As well as like just the day-to-day operation that like. These freight forwarders would do to be able to just be more effective inside of their daily work.

Paul: So that's things like automated emails, automatic like phone calls. I remember and it's a, it is a core memory coming from Flexport. I remember being able to sit there and fundamentally being both the product person and the engineer walking over the shoulder of the freight forwarder as they used the new feature that I had just made.

Paul: And I watched them struggle because they had to click on the new task, open up a second website that had the data that they needed about the container that they're like shipping at that time, copy and paste over, and then continued to do that a thousand times inside the same day.

Paul: I sat there, I was like, all right, look, let me, lemme come back to you in about 24 hours. And then I go. Move that move, move the data around inside of the, inside of how the website, is displaying the information. 'cause we already had the information that they were getting inside of our platform and then come back to them.

Paul: And I kid you not to this day, these people are so happy about the hours of the day that I saved them, instead of waiting for these like slow, like terminal websites to open that like all the way through my entire time working at Flexport. They would ping me. They would they would say, Hey, thank you so much again.

Paul: They would like like really be these super advocates for what engineering was at Flexport.

Marcus: It's interesting that you mention that because I was literally listening to a podcast yesterday and I can't remember which one. But they were talking about this I wanna say new, but the truth is it's probably old, this new way of operating where you have engineers.

Marcus: Side by side. With the actual worker. And the con context of it was talking about Elon Musk and SpaceX where, they oftentimes have the people that are responsible for whatever it is working side by side so that they can go, oh yeah, that's not working. Okay like you did.

Marcus: Yeah. Gimme a minute, come back and then, and then you fix it. Yeah. Yeah. And it was just really interesting to me, because oftentimes what you have is this distance between those two different groups. Exactly. You have a requirements analysis process that happens and the requirements analysts are supposed to get all those requirements.

Marcus: But the engineers oftentimes don't ever talk to the subject matter experts.

Paul: Exactly. Yeah. And

Marcus: so it just makes things, super difficult. But not to get sidetracked, I just thought that was really interesting that I heard you mention that to Tad a minute ago, and I.

Marcus: I thought it was interesting, this idea of Hey, I'm, there's something that I'm working on and there's a person that I'm trying to help and I'm gonna mirror that person and figure out by watching them. Yeah. I can save hours a day just by moving this number or whatever the unique identifier was over here.

Marcus: And, making it simple for them. So

Paul: There's this kind of paradigm that I've seen, happen more often inside of different places now because AI is here and being really useful inside of the workplace. You have these hybrid roles where you're trying to find somebody and a lot of the startups in Silicon Valley like to hire this way.

Paul: Where you have a hybrid role. For the type of work that I was doing at Flexport, I was more of a product engineer and meaning I'm not just a software engineer, I'm not just a product manager. I am both inside of one role and I'm able to be more effective because I can move quickly on both sides.

Paul: Yeah. And like I've seen the mashups of a design engineer being able to really move forward the kind of like design and iteration process of a really nice user experience. I've seen like inside of other domains, there's folks who are like we just had a talk from the CFO of Masterworks at the integration portal and he's talking, he talks about he has people who are finance people who really understand art also, and he needs that type of person, which is hard to find, but you can cultivate that kind of understanding, which is like a big part of how Flexport got us to the point of being product engineers because it's hard to really be a cross domain person. Yeah. If you have experience on both sides. But like it's something that you can definitely learn if you have world class experts around you, and so like when you got somewhere it's like masterworks, where you got world class like finance people making markets for artwork, and you got world class like art dealers trying to buy the best and most expensive art in the world, then it becomes a lot easier to become that new like kind of hybrid person.

Paul: Yeah. That is really hard to find, but extremely critical in being effective as a business.

Marcus: Yeah. It's somebody who can translate between the two groups.

Paul: Exactly.

Marcus: Honestly that's how I've always viewed my role as, somebody that knows business principles and how, things can be applied and understanding the problems that a business owner might.

Marcus: Have working against them. And understanding technology and how to speak to technologists. It was interesting to me 'cause there was a book that Leslie Camacho who worked at Ellis Lab and was a dear friend. I also worked for him for a year. He had me read this book and I wanna say it was the pragmatic programmer, if I remember correctly.

Marcus: And it, the whole thing was that there, the whole gist of it was that just because we think of engineers as a very rational one plus one equals two type of role, that there's still an artistry that's involved in the engineering of something that it can be engineered really badly or it can be engineered in a much more beautiful way.

Marcus: And to not disregard. An engineer's desire to express that. Exactly. Yeah. And so don't tell them exactly Hey, I want you to put this here and this here. This pixel width and all that stuff. Yeah. You present the problem and maybe give them, some boundaries, but allow them to come up and then, you can iterate on it from there.

Marcus: But but no, I just, I think it's it's amazing how, things have changed so drastically. Since chat GPT came out. Yeah. I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit, but, so you went to Silicon Valley? And you were there for how long? About three years. About three years. And you're now back in mobile?

Paul: Yep.

Marcus: What brought you back?

Paul: So like massively off, started happening inside of Silicon Valley? Yeah. Flexport was one of those companies and I was working there at that time. I remember I was looking left and right and I saw like the folks who were on like, like HB one and oh one Visas, they knew way ahead of time.

Paul: They'd seen it right before it was like, okay. We they had already like staged out how they were gonna make sure that they did not get deported. And me. Oblivious American what's going on guys? And so after that point, like I take that same kind of tenacity that I had trying to get into Morehouse to go find the next job.

Paul: Yeah. But at that point, I also started doing a whole bunch of contract work and so knowing the experience that I had at Neeva put me in a really good position to be able to be like the expert in a room amongst software engineers about how to leverage and use a LLM inside of a new application.

Paul: And so that had me working on contracts with, that's not useful at all right now, is it?

Marcus: Golly, large language model for those of you that are following along, it's basically the basis for which. Search engines were first founded on, so you have a huge data warehouse full of servers that have information about various websites.

Marcus: They store keywords and classify websites. And then you go to Google and you type in a search and it very quickly tries to figure out based on, what you're searching for, what it is that you're looking for based on where you're located, the keywords and all that other stuff. So it's really not any different.

Marcus: And so large language models are now being used inside of applications to better serve the customers and stuff like that, but but go ahead. I'm sorry. Didn't interrupt. Absolutely.

Paul: It's necessary. Yeah. And I've seen so many people like talk through and explain these things now, especially in mobile because like we're getting to that point where this is technology fastest growing, like applications in history are being made using these new versions of these models.

Paul: But the interesting thing inside that moment. Was that like I, I knew a lot about what was, about how these things worked as well as enough to be able to like actually go make products in it. 'cause that's what it did. And so I went and I I did contract work for some venture studios like at Pink inside of inside of California.

Paul: There was like a whole bunch of energy, a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of young folks. And I understood very well, like a good reason why you want somebody who has like that kind of business side as well as that technical side. Because that's a piece that is super critical when you're sitting there trying to invest inside of some new company.

Paul: Of course. And then, and so like I worked with some folks out there that like I was. On one hand just helping them understand how to like, make a startup make sense. And then on the other hand, like, all right, let's go pick up the new tools and make something really cool and fun.

Marcus: Yeah.

Paul: On, in other o other realms, I had like already made a pretty big network around both like venture capital coming from Morehouse with a entity called H-B-C-U-B-C, as well as like at Neva we did some crypto search engine stuff.

Paul: And so like I knew some crypto people like from work inside of that space and they were all like. It's like the afropolitan like network's like super massive full of people who are like black people from African diaspora, but also like Africans inside of Africa building out, building cool things, but also just like cool people in general.

Paul: And so I ended up getting connected to one interesting contract inside that time period. I ended up getting connected to this guy, his name is Amaya. He's a Grammy award-winning or Grammy award nominated producer. Okay. And so what he wanted to make an a AI application for himself that would basically take in a really like a contract that that artists might pass him.

Paul: And with that he wants the AI to read through it, use his same like kind of five, six steps that he works with his lawyer back and forth to do, to be able to really. Quickly get a short summary of what actually this contract is trying to do. These contracts would be like 30 pages long. Wow. Coming from managers, coming from and a single artist may get like four or five of these contracts and like in some, it'd be like millions of dollars for them.

Paul: But like they have to decide which ones to sign and which to negotiate. And a lot of times that falls on the manager. And the manager may also be somebody who is an adversary to their artist. And so like for him, a lot of times artists will come to him 'cause they trust him and they give him a contrast and he'll sit there, he'll pour over and then give him some really good insights back.

Paul: Okay. What the tool that we made was, is very similar to what you might see. If you pick it up like Chade and use Deep researcher or just talk to a PDF where like he just put in PDFs of these blog along contracts. And then it did it, it worked through his like system to be able to get to the other side and say alright, here's the top five, like things you really need to know.

Paul: Here's how much it is. Here's the, here are the specific people involved, here's the term of the contract. Yeah. And that was such a game changer for him, that he's like out trying to start now using this thing that we built together. And so like he's gotten into an accelerator with a 16 Z and he's like going down that path.

Paul: But all of that because we were able to make that really quickly. Yeah. And it didn't take, it didn't take a whole bunch of effort. It didn't take a whole bunch of time in comparison to what it could have taken if these technologies hadn't been to been brought to this point yet. And like he's going on and he's he's executing on that and that has been a big game changer for him.

Paul: And like many search stories, like inside of building out these, like just an app for somebody who's a subject matter expert or working with a startup who's like really just trying to get off the ground and understand how to use these new tools. Yeah. As I was doing that I was also applying to jobs.

Paul: I ended up working at a company called Hamilton ai, which is they're doing interesting stuff inside of private aviation, but leading up to that, I, I had probably two or three interviews. Like this is all inside of the time where I got severance from Flexport, like people getting laid off.

Paul: But yeah, we got very nice s practice and so there's months where I'm just like working. Inside that time period, I interviewed at Anthropic. And got like through to, to almost like closing on the job. I got, I interviewed at a place called like Lightning ai, which is like another, like big AI lab.

Paul: 'cause I knew I hadn't worked at Google before. I'm trying to go to open ai, anthropic, one of these large, like super big because that's where it's going. That's where it's going, right? Yeah. And I make the connections that do these same steps where I'm like, all right I'm gonna find a referral.

Paul: I'm gonna use my leverage, my, the people that are new from Neeva to be able to get into a referral. I did that then contacted recruiters, tried to go down that, that path of recruiters to try to say like, all right, you're the recruiter for this job, or are you not? Can we sit down and talk?

Paul: The first step inside the recruiting process is talk to recruiter and I hadn't got a call back yet, so Yeah. I'm gonna go make that happen. Coming into that like eventually I got to that point where I said like, all right I chose to work at that startup, worked it there for a little bit inside this time period, this is where Todd starts to call me Todd Greer.

Paul: He I remember him from when, way back when I was in high school, meeting him for the first time, going to these like networking events. Yeah. Inside of mobile as a high schooler. And he was

Marcus: at Exchange 2 0 2, if I remember correctly, at that Exactly. At that time. Yeah,

Paul: exactly. So I went to all those exchange events same as the event that I went at your company.

Paul: But. He reached out to me and said Hey, we're doing this new thing, this adventure studio. You've seen what you've been doing and we've been watching you, from afar. And he's Hey, this would be an interesting opportunity for you to come back and do that. I was like, all right I'm sitting here, I'm watching like all my friends getting laid off.

Paul: Yeah. In the middle of very expensive California, like paying least amounts of money for rent. And I'm like maybe now's a good time to be able to make my way back. And so I came on back and

Marcus: that is so cool. And just to pause real, real quick, because there's something that I think you are expressing and I wanna point it out, just always bringing these back, right?

Marcus: It's that somewhere along the lines you learn how to sell yourself. And I think that's so critical to young people. I've, and I've tried to instill it in my boys, just that, that ability to what you do as a job. You need to be able to communicate to people how you do it, how effectively you do it, and how you can apply those skills to help their jobs easier.

Marcus: And it's obvious that you got that. I mean it's very impressive. 'cause that's not something that I see a lot.

Marcus: But I also like coming full, tilt. I think what Innovation Portal represents is absolutely amazing. And I think Todd is absolutely the right guy for the job.

Marcus: With that. 'Cause I mean he was doing it before two, before Innovation Portal existed. Yeah. With the Exchange 2 0 2. And so it's just more of the same, but with a better platform and a better authority with which to do it. And so I'm really excited because I know that we're really just getting started on what that brings to mobile.

Marcus: So what can you tell me about you're there now? Yeah. How long have you been

Paul: I've been there since October,

Marcus: so what's that, six months? Six months or so, roughly. Six or so months. So what, you're back now?

Paul: Yeah.

Marcus: What do you, I guess I have two questions. What do you see about mobile that you feel has changed?

Marcus: And then and then what do you all have going on at Innovation Portal that you want people to know about? Because I think there's a lot of stuff going on over there and just people don't have any clue.

Paul: So I'll say starting with, just like what I've seen in mobile has changed.

Paul: It's really interesting when you walk into the innovation portal because it is so very similar to what you might expect walking into a similar space inside of San Francisco or New York or any like really big city that has a very vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Marcus: Yeah.

Paul: And like I remember seeing that.

Paul: At its very like inception at the start First startup weekend that mobile had. 'cause I went to, there again, met these same folks who are running the innovation portal. And

Marcus: pause for just a second. Yeah. So Startup weekend happens once a year. It's a weekend where you go, people pitch their ideas and everybody breaks up into teams and you work on building out like a business plan for that.

Marcus: That idea. Anybody can go and you should,

Paul: but and so I remember I remember that experience and seeing like that really brought me to entrepreneurship and got me to that point where I was gonna Morehouse oh, I want to learn something about venture of capital and things like that.

Paul: And that's why I even took those paths. That's why I even got to oh, I'm gonna take a sales minor inside of this computer science major.

Marcus: They offer sales classes. That is so impressive. Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. It's a very nice program. Wow. As well. Okay. Like a lot of those folks at Morehouse that go into sales, I remember most of my classmates are either like doing sales at Amazon or like some like Oracle, some large technology like kind of company that wears high commission sales, ridiculously high commission sales. No, I worked

Marcus: in that realm for a while. Uhhuh, there was a guy that, and I'll never forget, he had a check on the wall and I think it was from Ford. That was $175,000 and that was just one of his checks.

Marcus: And I was like,

Paul: oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah.

Marcus: A lot of money.

Paul: Yeah. And so I remember learning sales from those guys and understanding like, what does it really mean to be able to close and a big part of selling yourself. That was a crucible to be able to go through, to really be able to have a really strong, solid understanding of okay, I'm gonna go sell this to somebody.

Paul: I'm gonna go sell myself to somebody. Having to go through that program at Morehouse. That was, I like we competed. Yes. Inside of like sales competition and things like that. And we won. And many things that we wanted at Morehouse were like around, because we had this really strong, solid kind of business focus in that business college, I was the only computer science like student who'd cross the campus to get to business.

Paul: Those business classes. Interesting. And so oftentimes what'll happen is that like Morehouse wins inside of a lot of different like competitions that they that they do for me inside of computer science, we would go to hackathons and oftentimes they pick me like if it was something that the.

Paul: Teachers had to pick, they pick me and then they tell me to go find some other students that, that I wanna come take with me because they knew, like I had a sales focus and I was able to like really close on the judges at competitions, and so I would win. And so I probably won probably just off of being the sales person and then bringing more engineers in with me at hackathons in college, I probably like, altogether it was probably like $30,000 worth of winnings that we got, like 20 K here because we won for Zillow.

Paul: You said

Marcus: 300, 30, 30, 30, 30,000 I was gonna say. Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. And so 20 K here with Zillow. And then a free laptop, like a, like MacBook probe. Like from that competition. Just because like we, oh, actually it was more than that. Now I think about it because we also did the American Airlines hackathons, and they gave like hundreds of thousands of like flyer miles.

Paul: So I flew for free for like years, but it's because of sales.

Marcus: I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop you right there though. Wow. Because you knew how to sell yourself even before you got to Morehouse. 'cause you were the one that pulled away from the group with Packet. And gave it to the, person that was gonna be responsible for making the decision, like so Morehouse may have sharpened or honed you a little bit and gave you a little bit more professional, aspect to that. But man I, I don't wanna take away from what somebody whether it's Carl or your mom or, whatever. Instilled in you. But what about tell me more about innovation portal, right?

Marcus: Because Yeah,

Paul: Going back into it with innovation portal, the first time I walked up in there, like I knew the people who were around it because I remembered them from start of weekend and all the other different things before I left. But at this point now, it's like a very solid physical form. Yeah.

Paul: Where it's not just a temporary activity that happened once a year, it's now like this 24 7. This is a space that innovation happens. Yeah. And the first like real taste of that were some of the programming that they have at the innovation portal where I sat in and helped with the Tech academy.

Paul: Tech Academy is a about eight week, 6, 6, 6 to eight week program where you sit down with your business and. Other people in the community, entrepreneurs, their businesses, everything from like a HVAC specialist to somebody who's making a new restaurant. And we learn how to actually bring technology into your business inside an effective way.

Paul: But what it really becomes, because people come and think, oh, I'm gonna make my website, I'm gonna do something. No. Really what it really becomes is that okay, we're gonna learn how to really run a one, run an effective business. Yeah. Inside of the modern age. And that part was really interesting to me because I.

Paul: I, I have some business acumen, but like being able to sit down with alright, we're gonna sit down with the restaurant and talk about what does it mean to actually run the restaurant and be effective inside of that, and how can we leverage technology to make that more effective? Alright, we're done with them.

Paul: Now let's go talk to the HVAC specialists. Yeah. And then seeing these different aspects of these like really core and critical businesses to, to the economy. That was that, that was a really eye-opening experience. And it's something that like anybody who goes into these places will see because like when you're in those programs, you're a part of a community.

Paul: Yeah. And there's so much program at the integration portal does for entrepreneurs inside the space. Even for people who just have an idea and they aren't really even knowing if they're ready to be entrepreneur or not. This programming and all, it really starts with going to take a tour of the space and we will get you into the right, right book you want to be in.

Paul: 'cause there is so much, and it's not that like it's. It's not that it's hard to explain it all, it's that there's so much, and what you need may not be what somebody else needs. And we are really, you don't leave something out. Yeah, exactly. We're really critical inside of focusing in with each individual person.

Paul: And so I've done tours of the ation portal come by. Like anybody will give you a tour like this on the team. The team has been expanding to include like what I do now, which is working on not only helping and mentoring local businesses, helping like running programming for local businesses and entrepreneurs, but also now building businesses, which is what the Venture Studio, which is me and Logan Grubbs, where we work on at the innovation portal.

Paul: Fundamentally, the idea is we want, we know that we have this big heavy industry inside of mobile. A lot of the startups that come out of mobile, or at least are the ideas of startups. When we go to a, like a, start a weekend, they're pitched. Are often fit into this very general technical space. I'm gonna make a dating app, I'm gonna make something for delivering food.

Paul: Yeah. But what people don't realize, and that is like a really big part of mobile, is that there's a massive economic driver for the entirety of the state. Inside of that, like Alabama Port Authority, that's right down the street from downtown. There's this corridor of factories that make everything from the steel that goes into airplanes to, the chemicals that go into chicken feed right here in mobile.

Paul: And there's hundreds of really core engineers inside of doing the most complex and difficult things that you can imagine. That only happened here in mobile. Yeah. And people in mobile don't know anything about this. The people inside those factories, inside those places don't know anything about this.

Paul: And it's we talk about brain draining inside of mobile because you can see, go down to a SMS and you can see like, all right. Who what college are you going to? Harvard, Yale. MIT. Sure. And where are they going after that? New York, San Francisco, la But there's, there, there's a really strong and solid kind of like core of mechanical engineers, of chemical engineers of like aerospace engineers.

Paul: Like marine, Marine naval architects and all types of really hard tech people here in mobile that like don't really know each other and aren't really like obvious. If you come down to innovation portal, there's another that we have, as we're expanding the space for the Venture studio to build new companies, we have this section that we call the lab that is run by Braxton Dahl.

Paul: Braxton. He's a south student. He's been working with us for the PR for the past year. But like he's really all into 3D printing. And so we have a bunch of 3D printers in there. We also have things to be able to make do, to make electrical parts. We have things to be able to do, like really rapid prototyping.

Paul: We have wood burners and all types of things that you would need to really be able to make some physical products.

Marcus: Interesting.

Paul: And the reason why like Braxton's in there is because what he did that was very innovative was he was able to make a new piece that replaced a like a part that was worth thousands of dollars in one of these steel manufacturers.

Paul: Using 3D printing. And it saved that company so much money just by having a thousand dollars 3D printer on site where they can go ahead and replace the piece right away. But like it's these types of like hard engineering, like innovative piece things that could really be driving mobile in a lot of ways and being this kind of like real center for innovative new companies that make massive impacts on the economy.

Paul: Yeah, but you wouldn't know about it because it's not something that's really clear. It's not something that people can understand. If I sat and told you like there's a massive arc furnace up like Highway 90, you wouldn't know what that means. You wouldn't know that if you stood that close stood in within the sea, the like square foot window, you would see the surface of the sun like glow up right here in mobile.

Paul: But you never know that. Yeah. Unless you are one of the like a hundred people who actually know about that thing, but happening here in mobile and it's not a secret, it's just. Not publicized. Yeah. And so like that. So when I think about brain drain, like I used to think that same way. Oh yeah, I left.

Paul: But there's a lot of people that's, that are here, a lot of people that come here because this is where it's happening.

Marcus: So do you think that the brain drain happens? 'cause we're not gonna deny that it's happening, for sure. So do you think that the brain drain happens because we're not doing a good enough job of exposing kids to what they have available to them here?

Marcus: As far as careers go,

Paul: I'll say like absolutely. Nobody knows that there's the most amazing engineering work being done in the world here in mobile. And if people knew they'd be a lot more excited about it. They'd see mobile not as a place where nothing would happen. They'd see it as the place where it is happening, because that is the truth.

Paul: And I'll say like. When it comes to, to, to aspirational goals for like high school and whatnot. I went into computer science because like I was working at the mobile baykeeper and I saw how tedious the work that I was doing was, and I wanted to be able to be as effective as I can be working at the mobile baykeeper.

Paul: And I knew that like technology could do that. And so being able to leverage that impact is what really drove me to say computer science is the way, but you wouldn't be able to get to that point if you were never exposed to either the problem or the solutions that are that, that are made for Braxton.

Paul: He went to the robotics competitions that I don't believe they have anymore inside the high schools here.

Marcus: Barton still has Barton if I still under. Okay. Yeah. They have a class, if I remember correctly. I don't know. Yeah. But yeah. About the other schools. Yeah.

Paul: It used to be Jubilee Best and they had like massive for all the high schools to be able to participate.

Paul: Yeah. To make the robots do the full, go through the full engineering piece. And now he's a computer engineer at South. The exposure, has a direct impact on what those students go. So if you never know that, like you could be a mechanical engineer and work with this, a furnace that burns hotter than the sun, like you would never, you'd never think that is something for you to do, nor that it's only 30 miles away from you to actually go see.

Paul: Yeah. And so like absolutely exposure is key to all of these things. And Carl Cunningham like talks about this all the time where for high schools like me. He exposed us to college, right? And he says Hey, this is a career path for you. This is something that you can do. And here's other people who've done it.

Paul: Like you. Like those things are very critical. But just like with going to college, like if you don't see yourself doing it, you're not gonna do it. And just like with these like really hard heavy engineering like things that are right here in mobile, you're not gonna see yourself doing it.

Marcus: Yeah.

Marcus: It's just, it's wild to me. 'cause I don't disagree with you. I think it's a, I think you're spot on. 'cause there's not any industry that isn't really represented here. It, it may just not be the predominant industry. Like we have hospitality and shipping and stuff like that.

Marcus: But it's just I'd be lying if I didn't say that at some level. This podcast, was geared towards showcasing what is available to people in the area. Yeah. And but that's interesting that's what you're, 'cause you are the target demographic.

Marcus: So who better to ask than somebody who is Yeah. The perfect candidate for what it is that we're trying to achieve here. I don't know, that gives me, greater resound with, what I do with the podcast. Yeah. But also know that just, on a, on our side, from an agency standpoint, I'm less focused on, and I don't want this to sound wrong, but I'm less focused on the actual advertising side of it.

Marcus: Yeah. And more focused on AI and how AI is going to come into what we do. Yeah. And I'm not making any I don't I'm making predictions that I have less than five years left before AI completely replaces my role. And that's the other reason why I'm paying close attention to AI because, I'm not gonna know as much as you had thought.

Marcus: I could be, the expert in mobile, but obviously I won't do that. So I'll be the second smartest person in mobile when it comes to large language models. And actually the application of 'em I don't have any desire to make applications, but knowing how to use even chat GBT, within a business and how it might be able to help, speed things up.

Paul: Yeah.

Marcus: I think a lot of people in mobile just aren't exposed to those kinds of things in the way that you are in a bigger city where, you know that stuff, tends to hit a little home a little bit more. So

Paul: I'll say it's really interesting coming into mobile and seeing like, the technology that is being produced and sold locally.

Paul: Okay. Because these tools are brand new. And it's hard to get distribution for a company. Yeah. That is just like a fundamental difficulty. It doesn't matter how good your tech is, if you can't distribute your product, if you can't sell, if you can't find really good distribution channels to, to close bigger and more deals, yeah.

Paul: You're not going to be a business and a lot of inside of Silicon Valley, a lot of the startups, a lot of the, a lot of the folks who look like me, who are who have a similar background to me, they'll go and start making companies and go and start making new products, but they won't have a real good understanding of what like a business could actually use or how a business can use it or what the actual pain points are so that they could close on those people.

Paul: Yeah. Now, that's not to say that some don't, what is that there's like this fierce competition, so for example. Sales, like AI software. I remember I applied to a couple of positions inside of both New York and San Francisco where there's these companies, they make AI that will hook straight into your Zoom call.

Paul: That'll hook straight into your Gmail. That'll be just like inside the veins of your technical life. And try to help you as a sales person close more deals, right? Where risks like they'll they'll put an overlay on top of Zoom and show you like, oh, this person's starting to feel more sad right now.

Paul: 'cause you can just do that psychological body movement and cues and stuff like that. Exactly. And then inform the sales person about that or be able to say oh, this person just walked, just hopped into this call. Here's some real quick information about them, full profile and everything else.

Paul: Wow, I've seen some really innovative ways to improve the salesperson's life. At the same time, like if I come down to mobile. Nobody's buying from them because they are in New York and there's a real big market there. And so they're not they're trying their hardest to fight the 20 other companies doing the same thing in the same market.

Paul: And half of 'em are gonna die out because they're all trying to market to the same market. They're

Marcus: focused on New York and not exactly outside of that area.

Paul: What I found for companies that are here, like in comparison, like if I had to sit here and say if you took that person inside of New York who was really sharpening their knife on trying to be a good business person to compete with 20 others who are just as good and then drop them into mobile, they would eat the entire market immediately.

Paul: I've seen two people do AI consulting. I've seen one person or one team do, like AI caller. Where they'll answer the phone if you're unavailable say you're like a HVAC company, you're sitting there inside the ducks and a call comes into your company, they'll, the AI will answer, handle the call triage and move forward.

Paul: I've seen a company do that. They're doing great. In mobile, they would not do good in New York. Yeah. Because there's 20 others who were, they'd too focused in the echo chamber.

Marcus: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: And so there's so much opportunity for folks who are like, who have that technical like ability or have the understanding of business to be able to really leverage those tools for these companies because there's.

Paul: There's so much left on the table inside of all of the rest of America, outside of cities, because the tech, the hard tech the tech that's not hard, but really soft because the software is happening inside of big cities and it'll they're gonna, they're gonna be a winner eventually. But right now there's just this kind of like I saw as an investor called Greg Eisenberg, he called it like this AI gold rush right now.

Paul: 'cause if you understand one market well enough that isn't just populated with a whole bunch of tech people, you can do some amazing things.

Marcus: Yeah. That's important to note, right? Because any big city's gonna have a large segment of tech people that are gonna somewhat understand what it is that you're trying to bring.

Marcus: But in an area like mobile, you're selling to a different Yeah. You're telling, selling to somebody who isn't technically savvy. But if you can do that and do it across America,

Paul: yeah.

Marcus: Yeah. Then your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is much bigger. Just to to wrap up, 'cause I think we're.

Marcus: Yeah, we're almost an hour in. Just what do you see as far as and maybe even apply it to mobile? What do you see as, as far as like the next six months to a year in ai, goes, what do you see happening?

Paul: There's gonna be better tools and we'll get to a point where the tools will just continue to get better.

Paul: But our use of them, our adoption of them will be the only limiting factor to to like really big gains inside of productivity, inside of revenue, inside of like just like the usage of people's time. Because like today, I could go into any business and pick up off the shelf tools that will help them, get to a 20%, like gain any metric inside their business.

Paul: Yeah. But like actually having that adoption happen. Being able to like really bring a company from no AI to any AI or really just no good system. To a good system. A system, yeah. That is the true limiting factor. Yeah. And within the next six months, I expect that not to be a really easy thing to solve.

Paul: Like we're gonna have ridiculous tools. I'll be able to show you within a couple seconds, something that will blow your mind away. But it will require somebody who's starting a new business. Or somebody who like is running a business and really ready to jump in feet first. Yeah. Otherwise, and the majority of people would just be right where they are and not make big changes unless they are like a part of a community, like the innovation portal where we're helping businesses Yeah.

Paul: Be able to find a way to get better,

Marcus: helping them understand how they apply. Man, I just, I'm glad that you're back. For a number of reasons. I think, you're just a solid dude, so I'm glad to have you back, but also I think what you bring to mobile will be amazing.

Marcus: I'm sure your mom's happy too. And then I also just think a group like innovation portal, I know Todd is making good use of your skillset For sure. And for you, I know that there's probably a great sense of satisfaction because you're helping your hometown understand what it is that you feel so passionately about. And seeing that light bulb moment in people's, in, in people's lives is an absolutely amazing thing. So I'm, I know that you're probably pretty stoked about where you're at as well.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. I'll say like when you sit and you save several hours of a freight forwarders time by sitting over their shoulder and making some changes to their, like working software versus working with somebody who runs a local business and like you just save them hundreds of thousands of dollars that they would've lost is a big difference inside the impact.

Paul: Yeah. And it is really cool to be able to be a part of that like movement and like real. It's like changing mobile because, and

Marcus: then Exactly. Because I think that what a lot of businesses in mobile miss is that technology side that allows them to compete against larger companies.

Marcus: Yeah. It gives them the savings or the process. I can't tell you how many companies I talk to on mobile that have sales teams to it don't use a cu a customer relationship management tool.

Paul: And

Marcus: it's like even the most basic of, things. It's somebody leaves, how do you handle who they were talking to and when somebody needs to be followed up with?

Marcus: And how do you, how do your salespeople keep track of what deals they have and forecasting and stuff like that? Yeah. There's one tool. It costs you like $10 a seat. It does, it's not even that complex. These things have been around, I used gold Mine Uhhuh in the nineties.

Paul: Yeah. CRMs are, but you can't use pipeline or anything. Uhhuh. I'm not even talking

Marcus: about Salesforce. Just usually one of the more readily available ones. I think, I think it's amazing that you're back. So I'm just glad, I hope you all enjoyed this too 'cause I know many of the audience members probably remember you from our events and stuff.

Marcus: Yeah. And I just think, it's cool. I hope we can get lunch and, hang out a little bit. 'cause I've been, I plan on sucking as much knowledge outta your big brain as I possibly can because for sure you've had experiences that I'll never, I'll probably never see. I can tell

Paul: you, when I left mobile, I would talk to people all the time about, oh, this is cool place called mobile.

Paul: They call me country and everything else. But I sit there, it's okay, apple CO is from mobile. Yeah. I'd have these little facts and whatnot. But now as I've been working in mobile to be able to really understand these like big industries and everything, I could tell people in mobile, something about mobile now.

Paul: Yeah. And that's, there's some crazy stuff happening down here that you don't know about.

Marcus: That's a really cool place to, to be, to feel. So anyway.

Paul: Yeah.

Marcus: Any final thoughts or comments you'd like to share?

Paul: I would say there's a different side of mobile that people really don't know and there's layers to that, right?

Paul: Because innovation portal will open the door for a lot of people to be able to see ah, this is what's happening in mobile now. But as you go deeper into like really diving into the community, seeing what's out here, you'll learn that like mobile has this real gem that is hidden amongst a lot of like years of no attention.

Paul: Yeah. Being paid to what's really amazing about this place, but. I think we're making some big steps inside changing that.

Marcus: No, that's really cool. Paul, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast, man. This has been an absolute pleasure. I thank you.

Paul: Absolutely.