Equation of Excellence

Michael True (00:00.078)
It doesn't matter. Makes it easy. That's funny, everybody calls me Mike E .T.

Rabah (00:01.005)
Okay. Mikey T. Let's go.

Well, because you left me the little sweet thank you note. That's how you signed off on it. Yeah. All right, folks, we're back for another episode of equation of excellence. Hot off the presses, we just actually were putting around an Aspen together. And then we just started jamming offline. And I was like, man, I got to have you on the show. So grease some palms. And we got the big dog from Miami, Michael True.

Michael True (00:08.013)
Oh yeah. Oh yeah, that's great.

Rabah (00:34.989)
President, co -founder and CEO. Welcome to the show, my friend.

Michael True (00:38.99)
Thanks for having me, man. It's good to see you.

Rabah (00:40.685)
Likewise. You've been on a little road show as well, right? Because we both had a little, we were kind of sharing war stories in Aspen. You were a little less beat up than I was. I don't know what your, your regiment was, but I need to get on that. But you've been hitting a bunch of events lately, right?

Michael True (00:42.35)
Thanks. Thanks.

Michael True (00:50.254)
Thank you.

Michael True (00:56.014)
It was a 23 day stretch. We found some cool partners that were similar ICP and just like good people to be around and figured curate some good people to come together and do some cool stuff. That's where I'm fortunate enough to meet you and thank you for the hospitality when I made my pit stop in Austin. Place is fire. Your shoe collection is wildly on point as you can see in the background.

Rabah (01:17.101)
Of course, anytime.

Rabah (01:21.357)
Oi, it is.

Rabah (01:25.613)
Before we get into Preshy and stuff like that, you have a really interesting journey because you're, I wouldn't say orthogonal to the DTC Shopify space, but you were playing in the blue chip companies, like your IBM story was crazy, all that stuff. I guess the first question is, how did you get started in entrepreneurship and then give us the chronology to founding Preshy?

Michael True (01:48.174)
Yeah, of course, man. I started off pounding the pavement, man, a company called ADP. And it's right after, dude, it was tough. You want to talk about a tough job? Showing up to roll call on a Friday with no units and no meetings. Like, it's a tough one. So it taught me, you know, people who've been through the ADP route or like the kind of the same tasks or the door to door is crazy.

Rabah (01:56.589)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Rabah (02:09.837)
It's, I, you're either incredible or it beats you down and you don't make it out. Like that, cause I had this similar route in, I used to sell shoes at Nordstrom. Um, and so that was like my ADP of like selling these like high end women's shoes. And I actually, um, did it after. So I graduated in Oh eight, which is a great time to graduate, uh, with an economics degree and like the whole world was basically falling apart. So I had to take my.

Michael True (02:17.71)
Yeah.

Rabah (02:39.021)
old job after college and it was very odd. But I do know a lot of markers. I think sales is great, but that one is, I never had to do the door -to -door. That's a different breed.

Michael True (02:50.19)
It was tough. It was tough. I was in Worcester, Mass. too, which is like a relatively tough blue collar city. So I'm like walking up to auto body shops, like in a suit being like, Hey, do you want to buy my web based payable platform? Like, get the hell out of my shop. It was crazy. But I figured out like I figured out how to crack the code and like partner with bankers and CPAs to start getting a lot of referrals because I just flat out didn't want to knock on doors anymore. I had a sister that was

Rabah (03:00.589)
No, I do not.

Michael True (03:17.902)
at IBM and in the tech space and I got introduced over to Oracle. And that was like my first exposure of like the database world. And that was 2011 and I'm selling into the public sector down in DC. And so I'm trying to like get government contracts with RFI and RFPs and those things are wildly painful. But that was like my first exposure to that. And I figured out kind of crack the code on smiling and dialing there, setting appointments. And I, um,

My goal was like, I always wanted to cover one account in like the software space. I thought their job was more consultative versus like sitting there and smiling down was more value based. And yeah, I ended up getting it over to IBM. I moved out from Boston to the Bay and yeah, I had like eight accounts and I got heavy into like the analytics, the software analytics. And these are like Intel, Franklin, Templeton. So exposure to like large scale software transactions.

Rabah (04:10.253)
These are some of the biggest, yeah.

Michael True (04:12.366)
Yeah. And it was, you know, mid twenties at the time and I'm sitting there with like OGs and tech. So I'm just kind of taking notes and watching them being a sponge. And then, then my exposure to the AI was, was interesting. Do you remember, and I don't remember this, but Watson had this thing that beat their Watson model came out and beat Ken Jenner on Jeopardy. You saw that? That's crazy. Like, yeah, of course. The glory days.

Rabah (04:32.461)
Yep. Yeah, I'm old. I remember it was good.

The Glory Day.

Michael True (04:40.334)
There was a opportunity to interview for the AI role on the Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield account. And I interviewed man and I got it. And we we did a five year 500 million dollar contract and I was responsible for like I went through like it was like what? No, it was unbelievable. I mean, sitting at a table for four weeks and watching negotiations go down and I'll token that up is like.

Rabah (04:57.453)
Not nothing.

Michael True (05:07.534)
the foundation of a lot of things you have to do as a founder, right? And it's like, it was kind of the exposure set like, okay, I can do this. And I went through a bootcamp of like IBM's Watson school. So I had a pretty decent understanding of like what AI was 2014 and 15, like really early in those days. And so definitely grateful to have that exposure upfront. But dude, I took 134 flights in my last year and in my late twenties and.

All my friends in SF are working at startups and I'm sitting there on a plane and your friends aren't calling you anymore because they don't think you're ever in town. I was like, okay, I'm gonna go join a startup. And I joined this company called App Annie. And at the time they were measuring like mobile analytics. Yeah. It was cool. They signed like Google, Uber, Nike, Microsoft and McDonald's. And we're like, take these contracts and turn them into an IBM contract. And I just had, I had a ton of fun and that was really my initial exposure to the startup space.

Rabah (05:39.725)
Yeah.

Rabah (05:45.485)
Yeah? Yeah.

Rabah (06:01.005)
How interesting. And, uh, no app Annie's great, man. Uh, we, I used to work at an agency, um, and we used, um, them and then I forgot, uh, apps flyer as well. Kind of same, same, but different, um, in that, uh, for people that aren't following along, it's basically just like, um, if you think of almost like an amplitude or a Google analytics, but for, um, mobile apps, so like Google apps, uh, iOS apps, things of that nature. Um, okay. So you get here, you're doing well.

App Annie's crushing it. And then what's the next step? Cause you had the cool little, uh, concert story that I want to get into. Cause I thought that was so interesting how that really dovetailed into it was the right, like not to steal your thunder, but I think there's two things that really, uh, are the biggest inputs into a business of success and they are luck and timing. It very rarely has to do with the product.

Michael True (06:37.262)
Yeah.

Michael True (06:55.598)
Ain't nothing true.

Rabah (06:57.261)
the market, it's just luck and time. You're like, is it the right time? And you need a little bit of luck. But yeah, tell us the concert story and how you got got to kind of worked into prescient because it wasn't prescient to start with.

Michael True (07:10.766)
No, it was called Vibin, V -Y -B -N. And after App Annie, I went to New Zealand and Australia for like three months in a van and I was at a concert in Byron Bay, Australia and I was watching the Luminaries play and I was like, I wanna go start. It was unbelievable. It was great. So it was a whole bunch of, it was just a good, very just like thoughtful time for myself of like, where do you wanna go do next? And I said, I know data science well enough. I know how to do software transactions. Why not try to put the two of them together?

Rabah (07:23.213)
Great concert. That's fantastic. Yeah, great, great band.

Michael True (07:39.982)
and do it in the music industry. So I came back and moved to New York and I said, I'll build a model that can predict tours for record labels where artists should go tour in each city, the venues and kind of turn a commerce platform into it. And lo and behold, timing COVID hits and touring goes away. So for a record label, where does the focus shift to? Well, people are going to be in their house. It's going to go to streaming. And so shout out to Adam Parnas. He was one of our advisors. He was the global head of publishing at Spotify. And he was like, Hey,

Rabah (08:01.549)
Yep.

Michael True (08:09.806)
There's no, this is important for the marketers out there and how we thought about our models is a website has Google Analytics. You get a last click, right? You get organic and you get all those engagement level metrics. With Spotify, there's no Google Analytics. With Apple, there's no Google Analytics. There's no last click. And so when there was a big problem for label executives to say, well, where should we double down on for our marketing spend when we want to promote a song that's going to get the highest level of streams?

Rabah (08:16.653)
Yep.

Michael True (08:39.854)
Well, in parallel, in comparison to like an e -commerce brand, the virality tied to Cardi B, right? And the, all the events and just randomness in her world, which can create awareness could also impact driving a stream, right? So I put up a thing on LinkedIn and I was like, Hey, can anybody help solve this problem? And I was the timing and luck. I was fortunate enough to meet my, my now my digital brother and co -founder, Cody. Um, Cody had been the global head of research science and machine learning for Grubhub.

And he was, yeah, and he'd been, he's been, he's a, not a data scientist. This student is just like, uh, LeBron James of research. Yeah. It's just like remarkable. Cause he, you can take a research paper as a data scientist and build an AI model, or you can say, I'm going to, I'm going to build my own research paper. And so we ended up talking and I said, I can get us into, uh, one of the big three record labels and I can get you the data. Can you solve this problem? He goes, I need four months. I'm going to build it from scratch. And so, uh,

Rabah (09:09.357)
Oh wow.

Rabah (09:15.501)
Like a three brain kind of guy.

Michael True (09:37.39)
Lo and behold, we started getting Cardi B, Roddy, Rich, A Boogie, all of their old streams by day, spend by day. And we just started back testing. Could we predict how that song was gonna perform based off of the ROAS from their marketing spend and all of the other organic noise? And dude, he came out the first one with Cardi at 93%, then Roddy, Rich at 98%. And we were consistently between back testing. And there was no platform. So we're just taking screenshots. He's putting on a doc. I'm going back to the label we're presenting.

Rabah (10:05.933)
Oh my gosh.

Michael True (10:06.606)
They just start paying us like a pretty good chunk of change to keep doing this over the months. So that was, and this is kind of correlated to the same model we have now for commerce brands. We're back testing to get confident in the relationship between their spend and revenue. But he called it perfectly. He was like, well, hey, I'm going to build a model that's going to look at their old songs and say, if our model had spent the advertising dollars, how many more streams could Cardi B have gotten? Now we really have their attention. And it was February of 2021.

Rabah (10:09.165)
Yeah.

Rabah (10:28.429)
Ooh, now that's magic.

Michael True (10:36.686)
Hardy was coming out with a song called Up. It's going up and it's up and it's up and it's up. And we were watching the song and he was like, dude, we were watching for two weeks. He was like, the model's 97 % sure that if they shift from Spotify to YouTube and Facebook to Snapchat, this is how many more streams he's gonna get. So we went to the label execs and we're like, listen, I know it's two guys in a garage here and this is a number one billboard you're targeting from, but like, if there's a bet you're gonna make on us, it's now. And...

Rabah (10:57.997)
Yeah.

Michael True (11:04.27)
They changed the spend, they took it and we ended up predicting at 96 .3 % accurate. I was like, okay, there's something here, right? With this optimization model. So the measurement model was solid. Now the optimization and forecasting model is solid. And then timing again, bro, this was in March when we finalized the test. What happens on April 26th of 2021? I'm sure it's a day that all marketers that are listening to this podcast will never forget is when they announced iOS 14 .5.

Rabah (11:12.621)
Yes.

Rabah (11:31.981)
Yeah. Yeah.

Michael True (11:33.134)
And you remember that day?

Rabah (11:35.629)
Of course. I mean, that was the inflection for Triple Whale. Like Triple Whale was a dashboarding company and then it's much easier to get people to buy something when they have pain.

Michael True (11:38.798)
That was...

Michael True (11:44.558)
It's very, indeed that experience of like when that happened, was there like an aha moment? It's like, okay, this is happening now. We can, was it immediate for you guys?

Rabah (11:52.461)
So a whole company pivoted. Literally, AJ flew to Jerusalem. And actually, I don't know how public this is, so we'll spill some beans. We essentially pre -sold the Pixel for two months. And AJ literally built this thing with the craziest, smartest Israeli engineers in Jerusalem and built basically a Pixel from scratch in two months. It was on the roadmap. But once that.

kind of came down the pike. It was a complete pivot for the company instead of like dashboarding and stuff like that. No, we're going to solve this attribution problem. Because it was a real problem. It was a real problem. Now I would argue not as much as a problem. But like back then, especially if you're spending real money, 20, 30, 40K a day, like you wouldn't, you couldn't drive. There was a legitimate period of time where you could not drive with in platform metrics.

Michael True (12:46.638)
And so on the marketing front was what was it like, all right, we need to like completely transition in the line, like a new playbook towards this strategy from a product perspective. And you, I mean, you guys call a spade a spade, but printed that blueprint of executing on a seemingly a pivot, which I wasn't aware of, but an opportunity and executed it flawlessly.

Rabah (13:10.765)
Oh, I appreciate that. Yeah, I guess I would call it as much as a pivot, as much of a like just, uh, we burned the boats. We're like, Hey, this is the fucking bet. Like, like everything went behind the triple pixel. Um, and so it was, it was actually really fun too, because, um, this sounds terrible, but there is a certain like trauma bonding that happens sometimes where like, when everybody feels the same pain, there's just like a natural.

Michael True (13:15.438)
Acceleration. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael True (13:34.894)
Yeah.

Rabah (13:39.245)
So we really leaned into that on the community side and then yeah, but anyways, too long didn't read. It was a like, Cambrian explosion, a totally seismic shift when that happened for everybody in marketing candelabra. Everybody, I mean, it was so many arbitrage businesses just got wiped out because they weren't brands. They were arbitrage. And once that arbitrage just went away in terms of, because people really don't know, probably the kids at least don't, was

Man, like Facebook's ads were so underpriced and so highly targeted for so long. There was just a point in time where it's like, you could literally just put, I mean, MVMT, there was absolutely monster businesses that were built off the back of paid ads. That could never happen again, or not in this current ecosystem. Like it just, there's not enough arbitrage now to be had, whereas before, man, I mean, I need drop shippers printing money from Facebook ads. It was just...

Michael True (14:13.326)
Yeah.

Michael True (14:35.31)
Yeah.

Rabah (14:35.533)
It was the ad unit was so good and it was so under priced that it was just economically irresponsible not to have some sort of online business then.

Michael True (14:48.078)
I mean, you see just a lot of people that still have those great businesses going today that just rode that wave and, you know, some made it and some didn't. And, you know, it's very conducive to I think a lot of the team efforts, the strategy and the execution of things coming off that wave. But yeah, tying this all back, man, we so when that happened, my co -founder called me and he sent me a well, he actually slapped me a picture of the projected digital ad spend by 2030 and it was a trillion dollars. He was like,

this model can work across every penny, pick which industry you want to go. And so we talked to like Pfizer, we talked to a whole bunch of like different verticals and it was a no brainer for, for e -commerce because it was COVID and it was exploding at the time. And the bet that we made was that the data privacy regulations and VPNs and ad blockers and sort of these media mixed models, these statistical models,

Rabah (15:32.141)
Yep. Yeah.

Michael True (15:45.838)
that actually started back in the 60s, right? When you had a billboard, a radio, a TV, a newspaper, and you had a bunch of people that walked into a store and purchased your item. Well, was it the radio? Was it the billboard? Was it the TV or the catalog, right? And so they had, those models had gone away when the internet came out and you could track people across the internet. And so we said, let's make a bet that we can go raise some capital and build integration so we could allow an e -commerce brand to connect their,

you know, Shopify, GA, all of the ad platforms. And most recently, which we're excited about is Amazon into our platform. And just, yeah, I mean, this has been an exciting few weeks for us since launching it, but more on that later. So yeah, we went out, we didn't have a platform, we just had math, right? Because we were just taking screenshots. And so we did a pre -seed round. We hired some old rock stars that Cody knew from his past days. We built out the infrastructure, we built out the integrations, we built out the dashboards. And, um,

Rabah (16:22.189)
It's a monster.

Michael True (16:44.174)
We ended up taking that to some VCs once it was done and we raised another $5 million in our seed round. And then, yeah, we launched in February of last year, officially.

Rabah (16:52.973)
Dang, I didn't know you guys were that young. That's incredible, dude, to see your velocity. That's amazing.

Michael True (16:57.774)
It was cool about it, dude. I don't know if anybody's ever seen this movie. It's called The Imitation Game. It's about Alan Turing where he like is breaking enigma. So he has this like nobody touched his machine, right? And so for four years, which is it's beautiful what Cody has built, built completely from scratch and nobody has touched his model. We just hired this PhD from Stanford who's going to come on and like Cody's going to open it up and have more hands on it. But it was just it was really remarkable to see.

Rabah (17:02.765)
Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.

Rabah (17:21.421)
Yeah.

Michael True (17:26.126)
just one human spend almost four years or three years on refining this model and then bringing it to market and then seeing the receptiveness and the adoption of has just been a really wonderful thing to have an entire team come together and put their efforts and see it grow.

Rabah (17:43.309)
Yeah, that's incredible. And you recently just had another Brinks truck back up, right? If my research is correct, you closed your A fairly recently as well. Yeah.

Michael True (17:53.358)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Q4 was the business exploded. That optimization model where we told them how to re -spend the dollars, we launched that September 29th and we hit that J curve that you saw at TripleWiddle. And then, yeah, the round got preempted and we just finalized a $10 million Series A, which is great.

Rabah (17:55.021)
Let's go.

Yeah. Yeah.

Rabah (18:04.301)
Let's go.

Rabah (18:13.581)
Congrats, dude. I love to see that. I love to see that. When you were building all this out, there's kind of, I always joke with entrepreneurs because I'm CMO, so I'm not as like, I only have to worry about my department, but like CEO, entrepreneur, you're like, there's everything. Did you have any near -death experiences kind of thing during this road? Because...

It's always sometimes there, everybody's always laudatory about the fun stuff. But then sometimes there's all those things where it's just like, dude, we could have died here. We could have died here. We could have died here. Because it almost vacillates between you're a king of the world to like the sort of Damaskely is just going to fall on me any second. There's usually never, there's not like a nice, you know, sweet spot. You're just on the rails. Or that was, that's been my experience at two early stage startups where.

Michael True (18:41.774)
Thank you.

Rabah (19:04.621)
It's never like things are going great. It's like we're killing it or like, oh my God, the sky is falling. Exactly.

Michael True (19:12.174)
going back to IBM to sell software it's over.

Michael True (19:18.19)
Yeah, we got ready to launch the model and like us with a small cohort of a launch the platform the small cohort of brands and My co -founder called me is like dude we need to stop selling I need to go back to the drawing board a little bit on this model and I need to make some refinements and so we had to tell the investors like hey we're gonna pop we're pumping the brakes for four months to rewrite this model and

Kudos to him and he knew exactly what he needed to fix. He knew how long it was going to take to fix. And he said, I promise you Mike, because we couldn't go into the market, right? Especially in this space where it's like you go in the market and when you're using mathematical models and it's off, that's going to, it's a small community and shout out to the whole e -comm community. They've been so cool. Welcome in like a non e -commerce person here, but it would, it would say, Hey, their, their models are off, right? And you dig your grave really quick with that. And so.

Rabah (19:45.165)
Yeah.

Rabah (20:07.948)
Yes.

Michael True (20:11.566)
we went back to the drawing board and I wouldn't say back to the drawing board. He had to go make some refinements to it. But that time right there, dude, was like, is it going to get fixed in the right way? And I just knew that Cody knows what the hell he's doing. And so yeah, that was a scary time. But outside of that, man, it's been knock on wood. You know, you have times like what we have is very fragile, right? This is like, it's not like a traditional model you take off the shelf and have data flow into it.

Rabah (20:36.269)
Yes.

Michael True (20:40.942)
And so we have a wonderful team of engineers, data scientists, and product managers that keep those situations to a minimum, which is great.

Rabah (20:50.701)
Yeah. What an interesting story. When you were thinking about building your team, like how'd you think about it? Was there, obviously you got your co -founder in, um, usually they say that it's great to have the kind of charismatic business facing guy and then, uh, or guy gal, whatever. And then a technical counterpart. So you found that really early off the bat, but how else did you like build your team, hire your team? And then the, the follow on question is, did you ever think about building it?

Michael True (21:14.35)
Yeah.

Rabah (21:18.925)
in -house, remote, hubs, or is it just talent over location? Give some people some color into how you're thinking about building your team and how you thought about building your team.

Michael True (21:28.526)
We went heavy on data scientists, engineers, product managers, not so much on the marketing, good emotion to start. It was talent over location. There's very specific types of engineers that have the skillset, right? Or just the experience, I should say. I'm not saying they're better than any other data science, just the type of models that we've built. And so Cody went out to his network, largely from Grubhub. We got Chris Kang, who...

deployed all of the forecasting models at Grubhub across 72 markets, predicting orders by zip code to properly staff their drivers. Above 92 % accurate, it's just like crazy stuff. I call my buddy Jimmy Marcinico, who was a Carnegie Mellon computer engineering data scientist that turned product manager from Bloomberg. So we were like, we don't need to go hire people who are from the e -commerce space from a technical perspective, because we look at this as purely a mathematical problem. E -commerce was just our first vertical. And then,

Rabah (22:00.365)
Sheesh. Sheesh.

Rabah (22:18.701)
Yes.

Yep. Yep.

Michael True (22:24.622)
On the CS side, we were talking to like one of our early beta clients named Vadim. He had never run a customer success team, but he was analytical as hell. He had worked at 15 years at working at some of the, you know, the Dagny Dovers, the Hatch Collections, the mods. And I was on the phone, I was like, dude, I would love for you to come work with us, right? You're a beast. And so that's when I started shifting the focus more to like expertise on the biz dev, the customer success and really the revenue org that had come from B2C space and could speak the language.

Rabah (22:55.277)
I think that's exactly the right path, man. I think that's exactly the right path. Because I think if you go too heavy on brand and marketing too early, one, I couldn't agree with you more with that four month stop, absolutely the call. You can't get too many of those. Usually you only get one of them. But take the mulligan if you can, because it is so much harder to get somebody to say yes twice after they've said no, versus just saying yes once.

Michael True (23:12.526)
Yeah. All set.

Rabah (23:21.549)
And so if that, you know, you get this, cause the other thing is usually those people in that early cohort are going to be super receptive, but also super sensitive. And so if it doesn't work, it's just like, fuck it. It doesn't work. And getting the comeback in, that's just such a, man, it's a, it's a big slog. So I think that's absolutely right. And then again, from my experience, if the branding or the marketing starts to outpace the product,

There's only you start to build a bit of a house of cards where there's just only so much you can do like you just can't have an amazing brand without A great product. It's just it's just impossible to do in my opinion

Michael True (24:00.942)
Was there a balancing act for you like say during the triple well times, but then now at Vermont, like what's your experience been like?

Rabah (24:09.389)
My experience has been similar. The challenge with marketing in B2B SaaS is there's, you have to choose who you want to be. And so you'll get this kind of formative years where it's like, OK, cool, people let you be who you want to be. It's almost like that teenager that goes through like a hip hop phase and an alternative phase. And then once that happens, usually like post A, like you have money and stuff, you need to.

Michael True (24:29.806)
I'll tell her.

Rabah (24:38.957)
You can't have Peter Pan syndrome. There needs to be a certain evolution that happens to your marketing, to your interactions and things like that. So at Triple Whale, it was more so, and we're feeling the same thing here at Fermat, but it's not as acute as it was at Triple Whale because we got to basically 10 million ARR without any sales. It was all self -serve, just hockey stick, crazy.

Michael True (24:58.83)
It's so violent. It's wild.

Rabah (25:05.293)
But then it's like, OK, cool. And then you take a step back. Well, I really want to go play up market now because these smaller stores, they're awesome. They're a great lifeblood. But at the same time, they're very price sensitive. There's just a lot of things that come with that. So trying to move up market. And that's just a different motion than self -service, especially lower price points. And then you want to increase your price points and stuff.

Michael True (25:12.494)
is that also they're a great way of blood, but at the same time, they're great prices. There's a lot of things that come with that. And so trying to keep up market, and that's just a different motion than self -service, especially looking at price points and going, yeah, I'll create the price points and stuff. So I think the challenge of Triple One is that we really want to choose so much so quickly that we can't comment in between. But the tension one is do I drive all the releases?

Rabah (25:29.037)
So I think the challenge at Triple was we were launching so much so quickly that we got caught in between or the tension was, do I drop all these releases? But then you hit essentially like an absorption where it's just like people are just too overwhelmed by it that you're just not absorbing anything anymore. Or do you roll them up into like a Shopify Airbnb style update where it's like every quarter.

Michael True (25:42.318)
But then you're hit essentially by the absorption of words. It's like people are just too overwhelmed by it that you're just not absorbing anything. Or you're into the Shopify air baby stuff on a day where it's like everybody cares about the cool stuff that we did. So that was the biggest challenge. The triple one was just the right voice. It was just so fast that I had to figure out ways to get to the right people, saw the right things at the right time. But as long as you know.

Rabah (25:55.149)
here's all the cool stuff that we did. So that was the biggest challenge at Triple Whale was just the product velocity was so fast that I had to figure out ways to make sure that the right people saw the right things at the right time. But as well, there's a certain weirdness of like reasons why sophisticated, more mature companies don't ship like that is because it's just really not feasible. You know what I mean? Like you really want to be,

Michael True (26:13.39)
There's a certain weirdness of like, sophisticated, immature companies don't ship like that because it's just really unfeasible. Like you really want to be a little bit tighter, more than half -coated. So there's a lot of that work that triples totally matured into that as well. So that was the big challenge of the thing, which is the problem with the office and balancing light. And we know what the product is going to do.

Rabah (26:24.685)
a little bit tightened up more than that. And so there was just a lot of that where, again, Tripple's totally matured into that as well. And so that was the biggest challenge, I think, was just the product velocity and balancing like, hey, here's what the product is going to do versus what the product does right now. And so bridging that gap and doing that marketing into the future, because you don't want to put off growth, but you also don't want to your point, you know, ship things that you say it does X and, you know,

Michael True (26:40.718)
versus what the product does right now. So, we're not dropping, doing our marketing into the future. We're putting our product into the future. So, we're not going to be able to do the same thing. So, we're not going to be able to do the same thing. So, we're not going to be able to do the same thing. So, we're not going to be able to do the same thing. So, we're not going to be able to do the same thing. So, we're not going to be able to do the same thing. So, we're not going to be able to do the same thing. So, we're not going to be able to do the same thing. So, we're not going to be able to do the same thing. So, we're not going to be able to do the same thing. So, we're not going to be able to do the same thing. So, we're not going to be able to do the same thing. So, we're not going to be able to do the same

Rabah (26:53.101)
it does why where you're just putting wings on a pig kind of thing. Hey, this thing flies. Like, well, does it? And so that was a big challenge. But at the same time, like it was the right call. Like there was nothing that I think we would, I wouldn't have changed anything that we did at triple was really, really strong, but that's the one thing that I would say there.

Michael True (27:07.31)
I wouldn't change anything that would be other triple because it would be really strong. That's the one thing that I would say. Yeah, I remember reading like the press release and the announcement, the investor in triple was like, their ability to release high quality features at a regular cadence. And it's funny, I was talking to my VP of product, Jimmy, this morning, and we had a thoughtful discussion. I was like, what is the combination? What is the right combination between quality and velocity? Right. And if you can find that happy medium.

Rabah (27:21.773)
Yeah.

Rabah (27:31.821)
Yes.

Michael True (27:35.246)
and making sure the quality is aligned to what you're hearing from the clients. It's good to have some like peripheral vision of what's going on across the ecosystem. But if you're trying to build against a competitor, right, versus build for the value of your clients is a very slippery slope there. And so the quality, the velocity might slow down if you take the time to listen to the clients versus like ship them everything and hope one of them sticks.

Rabah (28:01.453)
couldn't agree with you more and personally, like early triple whale was definitely in the former camp, but I'm personally in the latter camp, especially as you get up market, because up market doesn't really care about product velocity. Like product velocity was basically like awesome. Like I get to like, like Oracle, perfect example, right? Like there's these monster companies that nobody cares. It, it hire like big enterprise brands. I mean, you know this better than anybody, but it's.

It's just a different sales motion where the contracts can actually be insanely complex. Pricing can be really weird and wacky because they're just used to it. Like, okay, well, red line it, send it back. All lawyers look at it. There's just an acceptance of complexity in the transaction. Whereas like these lower level people are like, dude, here's a thousand dollars a month. Just give me the fucking product and get out of my way. Yeah. And those are the people that I think care a lot more about the product velocity. But at the same time, to your point, like I,

Michael True (28:47.15)
Here's my credit card.

Rabah (28:56.077)
I think everything should be rooted in value. And like if you're just, it's almost the equivalent when people ask me the marketing advice about how much should I post. I think that's the wrong question. Like it shouldn't be a quantity vector. It should be a value vector. And if you are only launching one feature, but that feature transforms somebody's business that quarter, I think that's way more impactful than these little, and not to say those micro changes don't matter, but like your CTO, co -founder kind of thing, like,

That's how I would be pushing forward. And that's how Shreyas thinks is like, hey, what are the 10x or 100x features that we could launch this quarter? And then let's try one to three of those and make sure we nail them. And then to your point, because the other thing is I think you can get, as you said, like horse blinders on, especially as you get really deep into it, where you lose beginner's mind.

and you start making assumptions for people. And if you don't have that feedback, like I don't really like listening to or watching competitors. Like I need to know who's in the competitive space kind of thing. But Bezos had a great line where I don't care about my competitors because they don't give me any money. My customers do. And so that's where I think it's a way better. The way you're orienting is kind of more of my my scene as well of like.

value for the customer, get input. Because once you find PMF, like the whole point of PMF is basically just to take the pressure off and get people to give you money. And now it's like, OK, now that I have this money, how do I grow? And what am I going to grow into? And that, to me, is basically the stages of it. And so I think you guys are plotting down some really interesting paths.

Michael True (30:30.094)
I think about it as like, you know, value equals growth. And when we came in, I didn't, again, new to, I interviewed a ton of like econ marketers and I knew that there's a golden circle rule. It's like the why, the how and the what. And I was interviewing them and I was like really digging into like their why. And with iOS 14 .5 and all the uncertainty, they're like, dude, I got student loans. I want to get married. I want to buy a car and I'm showing up to work every day and I'm making a bet.

Rabah (30:34.029)
I like that.

Michael True (30:56.142)
on where I should spend these dollars. And I just want to come in. I want to feel a little bit more confident in making that bet. And so our why is just giving marketers confidence that the decisions they're going to make is going to drive growth, right? That's the why. The how is purpose -built machine learning models that give them the insights to do that. And the what just happens to be a SaaS platform that they can log in and connect all of their data sources in 15 minutes and have state -of -the -art machine learning models ready in 36 hours.

Rabah (30:56.333)
Yyyyye

Rabah (31:22.445)
That's right. That down folks. That is what we call an elevator pitch. That is a fantastic. Um, well, I mean, let's segue right into it for, for people that don't know, give kind of expand on the elevator pitch there and tell them like what prescient is and kind of that. And then I'm going to start digging in cause I have some, some questions as well.

Michael True (31:27.502)
You

Michael True (31:40.622)
Yeah. So prescient AI is, I'm sure there's, I don't know if some people might be familiar with the terminology. It might be new to some, sure that people are starting to talk about it, but it's a media mix model, right? It's, it's not, it's, it's a form of measurement. And I do want to preface and say this is like the, our form of measurement or at pixel or incrementality or the platform. Like my opinion is there's no source of truth. The source of truth is the marketer. There's these have a variety of different data points that are measured in different ways.

allowing them to triangulate those decisions before they're making bets on how they change the spend. Ours is a statistical model. And what we look at is we're looking at Shopify and Amazon revenue. We're looking at the Google Analytics revenue. We're looking at all of your ad spend, right? So we're looking at all of your revenue at once. We're not trying to say this user click this ad and this ad and this ad and this ad and then converted. We're looking at all of your spend and saying, hey, X percent of your revenue is coming from this campaign and this channel. X is coming from this.

Rabah (32:26.765)
Yes.

Michael True (32:36.302)
And the models get very confident by back testing against your historicals, right? So just like we try to predict Cardi B's old songs, we're trying to predict your past, predict the past revenue of the brand store and the models will update every day so they get smarter and smarter in those statistical relationships. We've built these things called halo effects, right? So think about a halo effect as un -clicked ads that works really well with like YouTube and TikTok and connected TV where

They're not traditionally clicked, but people are going the awareness as people is going to search you, they're going directly to your website or going to the Amazon store. So what we try to do is we take, we try to say, Hey, the bottom of the funnel is taking too much credit, right? And so we try to redistribute that credit to the top of the funnel and give you a new form of measurement at the campaigns. And so if you're looking inside your meta account and you're looking at a retargeting campaign and it says a one point, you know, two row as right.

Our models are going to say, well, yeah, the base revenue is about a two ROAS, but we're saying there's an additional one ROAS on top of that based off of the awareness that it created and redistributed. So that's our first model. And the second model is an optimization model, right? Oh, one, I forgot to make one more key point as a big announcement on the Amazon side. So three weeks ago, we launched a model that will essentially quantify and halo effect on your Amazon store.

from your non -Amazon ads, right? So you can look at a campaign and you'll see like this campaign drove over the last 30 days, it drove $100 ,000 to your Shopify store, but it also drove $60 ,000 to your Amazon store as well. It's been a big hit so far.

Rabah (34:03.885)
interesting.

Rabah (34:15.725)
That's interesting.

Yeah. OK, so let me say it back to you so I'm understanding it. So basically, you have this measurement model that is super finely tuned, and then you tune it up even more by basically running regressions, a .k .a. fancy word for, hey, I have a thesis, and this thesis should land me at this number. Now I'm going to go test all this historical data that I have to basically check my work. And then if that work is off, then it basically self -modulates, and then you kind of

basically train that model into getting to those 90 plus percentile kind of confidence rate type of things.

Michael True (34:53.87)
You said it perfectly. And it picks up on the seasonality of the business and the buying cycle of the product. So a phone is going to have a different consideration cycle than the water bottle that I might buy online. Right. And so we learn the business really well through the back testing of the data.

Rabah (34:56.941)
Yep.

Rabah (35:03.725)
Yep.

Rabah (35:07.757)
That's so interesting. And then so to make the bull case even stronger for you as you get more and more data into this model, and as long as this model does, and it sounds like it does an impeccable job of essentially reducing noise and amplifying signal, then it just gets even more dangerous, right? Where it's just like, holy shit, so the more I can pack into this thing,

Michael True (35:30.286)
Yeah.

Rabah (35:34.253)
the smarter it gets and then the faster the regressions come, et cetera, et cetera. How does this work for, or is, like what is kind of the ideal client here? Cause the only pushback I would give is if I'm an up and coming business, like I think of, especially in D2C, it's almost like a human where you're like this infant, this baby, this toddler, and then you like,

during those stages, it's not really useful to have a ton of modeling because you don't know who you are yet. But once you get to a teenager, young adult, your clothes are pretty much set because you're fully grown. Does the model account for that? Or I'm coming to you in a later stage, or it's like, hey, I have $10 million in revenue. My growth hasn't flatlined by any means, but I'm not on this transformative trajectory that I was before. Let me keep chugging. How can I optimize?

Michael True (36:29.326)
You know, we've had multiple calls where we say, like a triple will, I think I've sent them a good amount of business saying like, you're just on meta in Google, right? You should input the pixel and there's not much complexity associated. Really double down on your creative, double down on the products. But as you start to expand out in a more top of the funnel channels going into Amazon, so typically our baseline is like, our models can work at $50 a day per campaign, so they can go really small, but.

Rabah (36:43.789)
Tracking. Yeah.

Rabah (36:49.133)
Yep. Yep.

Michael True (36:58.382)
I wouldn't be doing justice to the industry to try to have somebody use a platform where another platform could be more valuable to them at that time. Right. And so as you start to go up and they want to scale their top of funnel spend. So typically like a half a million dollars in annual spend is the threshold we like to see an above on multiple channels. And then the next phase of the platform is typically these MMMs or meeting mix models, they'd run, you know, they'd run every.

Rabah (37:14.701)
Yep.

Michael True (37:27.214)
twice a year or quarterly or some places monthly. We allow brands to essentially come in and set a confidence score to say, I want to optimize my existing budget or I want to scale my spend and I want you to recommend how we should reallocate our budgets down to the campaign level. And these things will run in 45 seconds. And so our clients will meet with their agency or internal house and we'll work with them and they'll just run a bunch of scenarios. They can pick and choose which campaigns they want to select, click a button and then it.

Rabah (37:28.749)
Exactly.

Rabah (37:41.549)
That is so cool.

Rabah (37:53.229)
That is so cool.

Michael True (37:55.438)
pushes back out exactly how much they should spend per day, per campaign with a confidence score and forecasted performance over seven, 14, 28 days. And it'll track each day because our models have the ability to update every day. So you can actually see, all right, well, we implemented this media plan and we'll tell them if they're on pace to hit our projections or if they're not. And what that allows them to do is saying, hey, it doesn't work perfect every time, but at least you know it's not going to work and it allows you to reevaluate versus having a model that would update.

weekly or monthly and you have to wait for that to be to know that it wasn't working, which is like driving down the highway opening up your sunroof and just letting money flow.

Rabah (38:33.165)
Yeah. Exactly. And you don't know where it is even landing. Um, that's insane. I mean, I want this is the B2B market. Is that something? Cause I would argue those are bigger budgets.

Michael True (38:45.23)
So next phase.

Rabah (38:46.829)
Way more sophisticated conversion path is the only challenge there. It's not this beautiful linear awareness consideration conversion for D to C. The number one answer, I would argue, if it was family -few for B2B SAS CMOs, the number one thing is attribution. It is so hard.

I can tell you I spent X amount of dollars this quarter and I generated Y amount of pipeline and Z amount of actual ARR. But when I start to get down to it, it gets to like some very sophisticated questions.

Michael True (39:23.502)
Yeah, the B2B funnel is different because you could say, well, optimize my spend that's going to drive the highest people to go download a white paper or a form of commission. But our next phase is, you know, nothing set in stone, but something along the lines of like optimizing bookings for Priceline or optimizing credit card signups for MasterCard. It still kind of has that B2B business consumer feel, but there's optimizations that can be.

Rabah (39:30.477)
Exactly, exactly, exactly.

Rabah (39:40.845)
Thaaaa

Rabah (39:46.509)
I'm tracking what you're saying though.

Michael True (39:50.606)
we can handle any independent variable, so any input, and then optimize against, hey, we want to get more Twitter followers or retweets or whatever that output is.

Rabah (39:57.325)
That's interesting. I mean, not to go here, but it is a presidential year. I mean, this would be a killer thing for a political campaign. Because the other thing, what people don't understand too, or I shouldn't generalize, but what's usually not known is when all these politicians raise money to run, do they have to spend that budget or give it back? And let me tell you what, they don't do the latter. They don't do the latter.

Michael True (40:04.11)
Yeah, yeah, somebody said that.

Michael True (40:21.39)
Hahaha!

Rabah (40:23.405)
And so that's why you just see so much money getting dumped in as it gets closer to either, you know, electoral vote, presidential vote, Congress thing or whatever. But this this makes it anyways for me, I'm starting to see the forest through the trees now where like I get it where the it's interesting that you did D to C. But now I'm understanding why you are playing so much more upmarket because the.

kind of distortion that brand brings you is less of a bug for most people and more of a feature. But for Mediavine, it's actually a bug, not a feature, because then I get into this like, well, the brand made me buy it, not the ad kind of thing. And what you're doing is really disentangling people that have those issues where it's like, dude, we're accounting for your brand, we're accounting for all this stuff. And now here's how you should optimize your channel mix. I know that's pretty, that's, that's man.

Michael True (41:20.046)
I like to think of it as revenue decomposition. It's like, hey, we forecast you're going to have a million dollars in sales over the next month and 700 ,000 is going to come from your paid spend. 200 ,000 is going to come from holidays and then $100 ,000 is just going to come from the randomness of your brand, which is interesting. We've seen the data, the randomness of organic. The randomness is relatively consistent for the brand. When you model that out and you understand that, it's weird.

Rabah (41:21.261)
Polish. Yes.

Rabah (41:45.036)
which is almost like a oxymoron, right? Where it's like, yeah, that's so interesting. That is really interesting.

Michael True (41:48.846)
I'll see you on, yeah.

Michael True (41:53.774)
Yeah, the more you can understand that with our models, if you can understand the randomness of a brand and how seasonality and holidays impact that, you get really confident in what is feasible based off of your paid spend. And that's where our models have really shined is one understanding that randomness and then two on the optimization is identifying points of saturation for each campaign, right? We can pinpoint every single campaign, the optimal point of diminishing returns and then run that through an optimization to say, here is the exact.

Rabah (42:13.709)
Yes, yes.

Rabah (42:20.493)
That's so interesting.

Michael True (42:22.222)
you should be spending and here's what will happen if you make those changes.

Rabah (42:25.965)
That is so interesting. Man. Yeah. I love it. I love it. I could too. I know we got to get it, get into the last part of the pop. That's so, so interesting, man. That wow. I, yeah, I'm blown away by it. I love it. I love it. No, no. It's, I mean, the other thing is like the last thing I'll just wrap up on is, um, kind of what we were talking in Aspen where I couldn't figure out like AI, like I was never bearish on it, but I couldn't figure out my thesis. And basically you guys totally aligned with that thesis of, okay, cool.

Michael True (42:29.966)
I could go on for, I could nerd off for hours.

Rabah (42:55.533)
I think of it like resource extraction. You get the land now. So now you guys have the land, that's the data. And then the second thing is extracting that value or that oil or that data. What rig do you use? Are you fracking? Is it deep sea? Is it just a regular oil rig, whatever? And those are your models. And then the third is the refinement process. So now you have this crude oil, make it into petrol, make it into gasoline, and then that's the business impact.

And you guys pretty much nail everything where it's like, okay, I give you my data. Amazing. That's usually the easy part. Well, not easy, but once you get it down, getting people's data connected, scheme it up, it's a lot of upfront work, but once you figure it out, that's pretty much done. The model I think is really special. That's figuring out what drills to use. I think is really interesting. And that's where I think a lot of these AI kind of wrappers fall over. It's because like, if I like don't know what model to overlay over my data, like it's.

What's the point? It's kind of like the OG, like people don't remember back in the day, Saudi Arabia found all this oil and they had to pay a bunch of Western companies to build all these rigs to actually get the money out of the ground, even though they had the data. And then the third part is that business impact, which I would argue is the most important, where it's like, okay, cool. I'm giving you all this money, but now what? And you guys have really nailed all three. I mean, I don't know, hats off to you guys. It's really the more and more I think through it at the, there's there there, as we say.

Michael True (44:01.102)
Yeah.

Michael True (44:18.926)
You hit it on the head, bro. You just wrapped it up. Math matters in this. That's it. The math.

Rabah (44:23.245)
That's it. That's that needs to be on the merch. That should be your merch. Just math matters. That's amazing. Make math great again. Just jokes, kids. Just jokes, kids. Okay, let's do some quick, fun personal stuff. Favorite city in the States.

Michael True (44:26.734)
Hashtag math matters, yeah.

Michael True (44:42.35)
Um, damn. Um.

Rabah (44:46.221)
because you're in Miami, you're the OG New Yorker.

Michael True (44:47.31)
I'm in Miami. I've lived in the majority of the metropolitan cities. I'm going to always go my hometown Portland, Maine. Summertime, you can't beat it. Portland, Maine. Yes. Born and raised. Shout out to Portland, Maine.

Rabah (44:56.269)
Oh, really? Let's go. Northeasterner. Let's go Portland, man. Favorite city travel to in the world. Cause you did, uh, Ozzie. Yeah. Yeah. I need to do that. My only thing there is it's so far that if I go to, you know, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, I got to stay for like a month or something. It's such, it's so hard travel.

Michael True (45:07.822)
Byron Bay where I had that moment of becoming a... It's a magical place.

Michael True (45:23.726)
It's gonna be a trip. Yeah, yeah. I would say, I'm moving to Lisbon June 1st for a couple months. Yeah, I'm gonna.

Rabah (45:27.821)
Really? I almost did Lisbon. I did a big Eurovision quest last summer, and I almost did Lisbon. But it was expensive to fly there. I don't know if it was just the summer or what. And so I ended up doing Spain. But I heard it's amazing. I heard Lisbon, Porto. It's supposed to be cool. Lots of expats. That's what you're telling me.

Michael True (45:43.374)
Yeah, I lived in Brazil for the last year and a half before moving to Miami down in Rio. So this is good. Portugal is a good, there's a lot of tech nomads out there and it's a good place to keep my Portuguese sharp.

Rabah (45:54.253)
I was going to ask you, so yeah, you picked up Portuguese then, huh? Let's go. My man. I was talking shit about Portuguese. I was like, dude, it's like two countries. What are you talking about, Robin? Then I looked up the population of Brazil. I was like, all right, that's a pretty big country. Maybe I'll give them that. What's your favorite or most used AI tool outside of Prussian?

Michael True (45:56.814)
I only speak Portuguese.

Michael True (46:08.046)
Hahaha!

Michael True (46:18.734)
This is gonna sound, because I'm LLMs, again, the Raptors, the rappers fall short, but like, I've cut down just on a lot of stuff using ChatGPT, man. Like, as generic as it sounds, just like making my day -to -day live easier. I'm in it all the time. It might not be the one I'm the most biggest fan of, like, using it for AI, but for my day -to -day, it's been a great tool.

Rabah (46:27.981)
No, odd.

Rabah (46:40.909)
Yeah, I'm still super bullish on that. Man, that guy is just printing money. Sam is the goat. What's your most used app on your iPhone outside of messages?

Michael True (46:44.974)
printing money for printing.

Michael True (46:54.19)
Outside of messages, I'm traveling a lot, man. So if I did like 55 in the last 90 days on the road, I'm using a lot of Uber Eats.

Rabah (47:03.021)
Let's go. I have, uh, do you ever try and time it? So I'll like land at the airport and then I like time it to get in the Uber and then get the Uber eats. Like when I walk into the hotel, cause dude, sometimes those hotels be stinging you like absurd, especially like the big cities. Like it's like a $40 cheeseburger in the New York hotel room. You're like, guys, guys, what are we doing here? What are we doing here? I'm not paying 50 bucks for a burger. Stop this.

Michael True (47:09.422)
Yeah. Hit the Uber.

Michael True (47:28.43)
Dude, same thing when I land like in Austin, I try to time the Uber and I'm like, oh, I forget that I have to get out and I have to walk across the parking lot, up the stairs and like back to the end, just to get an Uber. I'm like, I timed that way off.

Rabah (47:33.805)
You had to, yep. Yeah. The, um, yeah. In LA, I just go bougie because in LA, if you order the black, they'll pick you up. If not, you have to go like the poor people lot in the bus. It's, it's, it's not the path. It's not the path.

Michael True (47:42.926)
Oh yeah, right, yeah, right there.

Michael True (47:50.606)
No, that's not the play at all. Always the worst one for sure.

Rabah (47:53.133)
LA is the worst one. LA is just not my scene. Okay, last thing, last question. I ask it at the end of every podcast. What's your equation of excellence? What do you think excellence is a function of?

Michael True (48:05.262)
That's a great question, man.

I think excellent is directly correlated in my opinion to discipline. I think discipline plays a, because there's discipline on the personal route, there's discipline on the professional route, there's discipline with your clients, the discipline touches all areas of our business and is something that I feel the more I focused on that is will drive further excellence for myself.

Rabah (48:16.461)
Interesting. I like that.

Rabah (48:28.909)
Yeah.

Michael True (48:37.134)
I do think it's important. I want to highlight a tangential part to that question is for other founders out there, whether you're in e -commerce or, or SAS or whatever vertical is. Um, when I think about excellence inside of a company, it's largely tied to culture as well. And we have, we have a very firm policy at our company is happy people build great products. Right. And so take care of your employees, let them have a life. They have families and, um, they'll start to see excellence come out of everybody driven by culture. And.

Again, happy people build great products. It's very important to us.

Rabah (49:08.845)
Yeah, I'm in. Fantastic answer. And I couldn't echo that anymore. And weirdly, like almost paradoxically, like the more discipline that you have, the more freedom you have, which kind of doesn't make sense. But like when you think about it, it makes sense where it's just like you just get your shit done because you're disciplined around X and then there's no, um, there's a great quote when you have priorities, decisions are easy. And so like it's, it's way easier.

Michael True (49:22.062)
Yeah.

Michael True (49:29.998)
anxiety.

Michael True (49:35.022)
Well, love that.

Rabah (49:35.565)
for most people to say no 100 % of the time, then 99 % of the time. Because then you get into when do I cheat? Is it OK to cheat on this time? Have I already cheated versus this binary, I don't do it or I do it? But I love that. And I couldn't echo your sentiments more on culture. I was pretty much like an IC, or individual contributor, my whole life. And then as I started getting into manager leadership roles,

Michael True (50:00.366)
Right.

Rabah (50:00.973)
shit matters. I was never, cause I was just, I was a killer dude. I was like, they don't care. I'm just going to kill it. All that matters is performance. And, um, it's not true. That was definitely young, dumb, and not, not the path where, um, your people are building your stuff, man. And people matter more than ideas. People are everything. And if to your point, people aren't happy, people aren't satisfied people. And that's not to say like you need to please everybody, but have the pulse of the culture of say, you know, if there's a divergence in their incentives and the company's goals, like,

You know, you just talk to them and say, hey, it's fine. And I think those are the best managers and leaders where they always want what's best for their employees. And even if that means not being at that company anymore, or it's just like, dude, you outgrew us or your goals and our goals are no longer aligned. That's totally fine. You know, here's a month or two of severance, keep the laptop and we'll see you on the other side. That's way better than dragging people out into this. Just then you start getting shitty work. When, when people carry, you don't need standards because they're just going to do their best work.

But when people don't care, that's when you have to crack whips and be like, why, what's going on? Who wants to live like that? Like there's nothing wrong with that per se, but that's not the company I want to be a part of. And quite frankly, if you're trying to harvest talent, talented people can work anywhere and they're just going to get to a point of like that. That's what I've seen. Honestly, the biggest risk of bad culture is, isn't necessarily negative output. Like these killers are still kill.

But then you just get talent flight and then you get this reputation of being this company that like, dude, if you're a killer, you don't want to go there. And that, that is a death now.

Michael True (51:29.486)
You don't want to go there. Amen. I have to flip it back on you. What's your equation of excellence?

Rabah (51:35.501)
Discipline is a pretty good one. For me, I think it's a mix of curiosity, so like strong opinions, weakly held, where you have views and thoughts, but you can constantly, if you show me better data, I will absolutely change my mind, like what do you do kind of thing. So I think strong opinions, weakly held, and then also just a...

Insane amount of introspection. So constantly having tight feedback loops around your life your goals things of that nature So it's a feedback loops strong opinions weekly held and then I think honestly just a Stoic mentality in a lot of ways like stoicism so it's not like stiff upper lip stoic, but more so just life is

fun and amazing and crazy. I guess I wouldn't even say stoicism. I would say gratitude because that gratitude can help channel a lot of negativity where it's just like, if you get into that victim mentality, it's just not the path. Then if you get into that I am God mentality, it's just not the path. The highs aren't as high as you think, the lows aren't as low as you think.

For me, it's really evident. I don't know if you've ever like, it was just out of the Waley's and stuff. And there's these like events and things that they seem so like gravity holding and so important in your life. And then you go do it and they're like, oh, it's over now. You're like, oh, okay. You know, like, oh, like I'm not like, there's so many times where you see like UFC champions or NFL champions, like what happened? Like you're now a Superbowl champion. How has your life changed? And yes, there's like monetary considerations and things, but.

Michael True (53:06.126)
Yeah, life goes on.

Rabah (53:19.853)
I think at the end of the day, this life's about building deep connections with humans you care about. And however you get to that path is however you get to that path. But yeah, so I would say gratitude, strong opinions weekly held, and being able to have beginner's mind would probably be my little three -way function.

Michael True (53:39.694)
If I had a pen and paper here, man, I'm gonna rewatch this so I can take notes on that. I like that, dude. I love it.

Rabah (53:42.573)
But that's gotta pump up the views, baby. Gotta pump up the views. All right, Mikey T. You're the man. OK, how can people get more involved in pressuring you? You're also making your ways onto the Twitters. I see you. I see you as well as LinkedIn. This time it's yours, my friend.

Michael True (53:59.214)
Yeah, I got a lot of heat that I need to step up my social game. So yeah, you can find me at underscore Michael True underscore on Twitter. I'm lacking a little bit there, but after this, I'm gonna be forced to show up now after I just put that out there. I think I just hit my like 200 followers or something like that. So showing up to people who still follow me. And then, yeah, I mean, you guys just fired me up on email, right? Just Mike at press. We're actually changing our domain because it's awful. Mike at.

Rabah (54:12.717)
Let's go. Let's go.

Michael True (54:28.046)
prescient -ai .io. It's so bad. I think we're going to go try prescient .ai, but that's not up yet. So I don't want to confuse people. Website is prescient, P -R -E -S -C -I -E -N -T -A -I .io. And for those wondering what prescient means, it means having knowledge or foresight of an event before it occurs. So predicting things.

Rabah (54:30.797)
My god, it is pretty bad. Not great.

Rabah (54:53.389)
Oh, prescience. Love it. Dude, you're such a gem. I appreciate you. I always see you. Oh, yeah. And then we're doing actually, I don't know if you can get invited or ask us about invites. There's a really cool party that Mike is throwing in Miami right before the grand prix. There's to be some pokers, golf, big after party at a fancy Miami mansion. It's proper Miami. Yeah. Mike sounds humble, but he's.

Michael True (55:18.414)
That's for you.

Rabah (55:20.493)
He can get a little sandy. So come through if you guys are a big brand and you want to learn some more stuff. We'll drop some more deets in the show notes there. But dude, thank you so much, Mike. You're the man. Appreciate you. And that's it, folks. Another one in the books. We'll see you guys on the flip. Bye bye.

Michael True (55:22.958)
Yeah.

Michael True (55:32.91)
Yeah brother, appreciate his money. Thanks everyone.