BRAIN FOOD vol. 6

And just like that, 2022 is a wrap ✅

Some highs and lows, now in our collective rearview mirror:

👤💰 Fraud and Swindling: Elizabeth Holmes gets 11 years in prison, SBF charged and close behind, ex-Goldman banker Roger Ng convicted of looting hundreds of millions

💡 Giant Leaps in Innovation: Generative AI like Chat-GPT, DALL-E goes mainstream. Nuclear fusion breakthrough; reaction produces more energy than put in, aka self-sustaining

🤡 Trump-Circus Continues: Top Secret docs seized from Mar-a-Lago; Trump Organization convicted of criminal tax fraud, shortly after announcing bid for 2024

✨ Peeking into Galaxies Far, Far Away: James Webb telescope reveals images of deep space and stellar nurseries (more on this later)

🪖 War and Unchecked Aggression: Russia invades Ukraine, global crisis and implications. Chris Rock slaps Will Smith at the Academy Awards.

📈 Energy/Inflation/Supply Chain Volatility: Oil hits $110 a barrel, EV market grows by 58%, US Department of Labor publishes Annual Inflation Rate of 7.1%; shipping up 4x

📉 Investor Woes: BTC erases $2T in value. SoftBank posted Biggest Annual loss ever ($13.2B); Global VC spending hits $22B, down from $70B in 2021

But certainly not an exhaustive list

Roe v. Wade got overturned, pushing legality of abortion to the states according to the Supreme Court (who also appointed the first black female justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson). Speaking of rights ➡️ Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44B and became the face of free speech (while trimming the 'surplus elite'). The Gun Violence Archive counted 648 mass shootings. A drone eliminated Sept 11 mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri. Boris Johnson resigns as UK’s Prime Minister, Successor Liz Truss lasts about as long as a head of lettuce, and the US passes $280B Chip Act to counter China. Oh, and Argentina defeated France to win the World Cup 🇦🇷⚽

It’s good to celebrate endings, as they precede a fresh start - and those sure feels great. Just like Sinatra says, "The best is yet to come.”

On that note, let's kick things off!

Ethan Ewing 📈 is the captain at the helm of a company with a strong technology moat, zero churn, and a huge LTV.

It turns out that analysis/distribution of leads is quite important to the mortgage industry. Ethan knows the space, having sold his first loan at 17. As Warren Buffett says, "It may not be sexy, but it makes money." ProPair in short, tells their customer which leads are worth what, where they should go, and much more. Think cheat codes with predictive values. In essence, it's a custom data infrastructure (historical and real-time) running predictive Machine Learning models, that has made millions for each of their customers.

"We are in a new era of data-driven decisions, and Sales Op’s is no exception. Give us your noise, and we'll give you values back"

-Ethan Ewing

Who better to teach us about AI/ML than a seasoned executive and technologist who understands the continuous evolution of how you tell your story. Ethan and team are revolutionizing how leads are assigned, prioritized and nurtured, moving sales organizations from fixed rules to automated and predictive real-time decisions.

We are driven to help sales organizations maximize the impact 
of their greatest assets: their people and their data.        

Ethan also covered:

☑️ How to sell new technology to banks (the key is find your champion) 🔑

☑️ How to bootstrap properly (spend with revenue, stay focused) 🎯

☑️ Best practices of remote team management (don't neglect in-person fun!) 🎉

"The Data finds the tendencies, then takes advantage of them." 
- Ethan Ewing        

When asked about the relationship between sales and marketing, Ethan said, "Marketing services sales...the longer tail strategy is told through stories and marvelous shows like Silicon Zombies Podcast , whereas more direct messaging gets relevant content to poke the bear and get them thinking about the pain we solve."

Guest host Roh Krishnan asked about customer feedback versus conviction (what he called the Jobsian approach). "At it's core, it's a data problem. The core foundation is not a customer decision. We've got the tool, the customer can tell you where to dig," he says. Guest host and Unity Central CMO Nick Hammer keyed in on a similar theme around thought leadership on the right channels. Weeding out the waste of time leads allows each meeting to be that much more impactful. Peter Wang pressed a bit on where ProPair 's thought leadership lives online, adding

"Half of social media is reach/discoverability, the other half is building credibility"

-Peter Wang

How can you help Ethan Ewing 📈 ? Introduce him to companies that are buying leads and have a sales team, especially folks in the #mortgage, #insurance, and #auto lending space. Thrilled to see where Ethan and team go next. 🚀

Listen to the full episode here.

CMO Louis Lee runs one of the top startups out of 🇰🇷 Korea, and dropped some serious knowledge on the intersection of Senior Care and robotics 🤖

"There are different groups," he starts. "Age 65+ are more active seniors, as opposed to being dependent on someone else. But in reality, across the board they all just wanted someone to talk to...something to respond to."

And the Silver Tsunami isn't going anywhere.

"10,000 American’s turn 65 every day, and by 2030, 1 out of 4 of will be older than age 65. Our AI / Research company is pioneering the best way to care for those seniors with emerging tech that they actually want to engage with."

-Louis Lee

President of Affordable Senior Care and serial entrepreneur Truman Roe was our guest co-host, and shared a wealth of information in the quickly growing space. "The pandemic has caused a lot of senior care to be brought back into the home, with staff providing ADL services:

Active Daily Living (ADL) service plans assisting seniors is a perfect example; activities that are basic but critical to their health (showering, eating, going for walks, doing puzzles, etc).        

But can robots capture this data automatically?

As it turns out, yes 👍🏼 These AI infused robots empower senior-care teams to provide better services; everything from detecting gas leaks, intruders, and falls, to just keeping the senior company so they don't get lonely.

Louis shared the 4 different layers of the platform:

1️⃣ Robot side (servicing seniors) 2️⃣ Home care agency (remote monitoring system)

3️⃣ Caregiver side (direct data access) and 4️⃣ Family side (also with direct data access).

Who will provide care when those individuals reach advanced age? How will we capture crucial data to track brain health (h/t to Curtis Ashford ) or predict/detect falls? If you ask Louis and the AVAdin team, the answer is simple: Robots, AI, and Big Data 🤖

The Future is Bright

With around $5M ARR and scaling in a huge market, Louis and team are poised for meteoric growth 🚀 A close working relationship with the Korean government has also provided a foundation for the team and technology to grow. Currently they support specific social welfare departments established by the government).

Each caregiver in Korea services about 30 seniors, or a monthly visit. The rest of the care? By phone ☎️

Thus, the job life expectancy is not great; about 6 months, max. And Korea is not the only hot market. 🇯🇵 Japan is also focused on this problem, and at a healthcare conference...

The Osaka Mayor came up to us, and said "We need this solution...our social welfare department cares for many seniors. Unless we have someone knock on their door, we can't tell if they're ok."

There is the obvious case for improved safety and health (ensuring medicine is taken at the right time aka patient adherence), but also the mental health benefits of fighting off loneliness and keeping the brain active. Not to mention robots are incapable of elder abuse, which is estimated to be over $30B a year in the US alone.

The senior years should truly be the golden years. Bur for too many of our elders, these golden years have been tarnished by improper care, neglect, and outright abuse.

How can you help? They're looking for business partners and open to connect with strategic investors. Big thanks to Minjung Joo and the KOTRA team for hosting the Silicon Zombies Podcast , and always throwing amazing parties for founders, technologists, and investors. 🔥

Listen to the full episode here.

Chris S. is the Authority on Startup Growth (and movies)

His first bite of the entrepreneurial apple 🍎 might have been in the B2C space (scaling a tux-rental startup to millions in revenue), but Chris' expertise and passion is in B2B SaaS: Dialing in channel, messaging, and audience with companies like Mucker Capital and Andreessen Horowitz .

In B2B we are still selling to humans, so the outreach strategy should leverage multiple channels to create brand trust. It's less about the product, and more about getting somebody to trust you; to lower down walls and give you their attention. By leading with value, we earn the right.

Cold calls are dead ☎️💀

However - as a part of a sequence, they can work. Whats is sales sequence? An automated workflow or cadence that get you in front of your customer. The Goals: 1️⃣ Get them to respond 2️⃣ Get a positive response 3️⃣ Get them into a meeting.

*Shout out to Avi Tessler for boosting virtual meeting attendance 3-5x with EatNgage: think free meals for prospects on zoom calls 🍗

Example of a successful sequence

Let's say there are 10,000 total potential customers in the US 🇺🇸 and we'll divide them into 10 cohorts of 1k companies each. They go through an intensive sales sequence that leverages 5-7 channels over 1-2 week period; then we give them a break for 8 weeks. Cycle through a new cohort every week, and on week 11 go back to cohort 1 (rinse and repeat) 🧼

Day 1 LinkedIn add request (have had success with Prospectin)

Day 2 1st Email ( lemlist is a great tool)

Day 3 Ringless Voicemail (interesting FCC update here)

Day 4 SMS text (shout out to Alex Sienkiewicz for a cool innovation in the space)

Day 5 LinkedIn DM (assuming request accepted)

Day 6 2nd Email of the cadence

Day 7 Cold Call (Auto-dialer's are awesome)

"After 10 weeks your social proof, product, and customer wins will all evolve. Automating everything right off the bat? Not a great idea. See which channels work best and optimize; try a bunch in the very beginning."

-Chris Sheng

"It's not just about getting more demo's," he says. Each step has it's own nuances and set of variables." Peter Wang correctly likens it to SEO IRL (search engine optimization in real life). SVP at Pacific Western Bank and guest co-host Mark diTargiani inquired about messaging, specifically the pain being solved or the solution provided. There's 3 buckets: start with education, then a call to action, lastly objection categorization/tracking.

Dumb it Down

Have prospects select from 5 pre-populated responses (we're happy with competitor // you're missing a feature we need // interesting but no time, follow up in 3 months). Mark diTargiani agrees, saying, "People forget that objections are engagement."

The Best Kind of Content to Share?

"Anything that establishes thought leadership," was the answer to David Libby 's superb question. You're allowing your audience to be better at their job, 10 minutes after reading- and doesn't have to be limited to the problem you're solving. Chris built a Growth Playbook for Mucker Capital and Andreessen Horowitz 's portfolio companies, and this brilliant playbook is available here.

     4 steps to success: Attract, Convert, Close, Delight 🔥        

Authenticity Works

While at firm whose target market were Pediatricians, Chris researched the space and found an active community on Facebook (now Meta ). Shortly thereafter, he learns that patient care time had recently doubled - leaving the doctors working twice as hard for the same amount of pay. So the campaign read:

"If there was something that could alleviate that pain point, help you with time management - while providing better care to your patients, is that something you'd be interested in talking more about?

That quarter, Chris S. lead their team to set a company record 💪🏽

Outbound Marketing Hacks

Transparency works, too. "Sorry to bombard your email, I got your contact information from ZoomInfo . If you do not know you are on a ZoomInfo contact list, here is how to unsubscribe. Since you're still reading, I might as well share ..."

A Dating App for B2B Sales

Having closed a round of capital for his current venture LeadrPro just before Thanksgiving, Chris (who is a 3x founder) and team are ready to scale. In short, they Connecting buyers and sellers in a marketplace for software. Buyers get paid to participate in demo's (pay per meeting model). Of course alignment and expectations were set - but the impact was 8-10x ROI..

Speaking of dating apps, the card we pulled from Conscious Conversations was 'Do you believe in soul mates?' Mark diTargiani pointed out it's typically referred to in a romantic context, but what about co-founders? Do soul mates exist for them? If so, Larry and Sergei are on that list. This kind of dynamic reflection that inspired Jules Bonasera to create Conscious Conversations. Not to be just another game, but an experience. 100 cards of deep and meaningful questions to better understand yourself and others. They're fantastic- I've bought several as gifts. The questions tend to slow time down, while we reflect.

Great to have Chris S. on, excited to see where LeadrPro goes next (discover the most innovative software while getting paid, website here).

Catch the Spotify episode here.

Quantum Computing Can be Your friend, if you let it 👌🏽

And fortunately for us zombies, we are here to:

Listen, Learn, Apply, Grow

and were joined by deep-tech and quantum computing expert, Dominik Andrzejczuk . He previously served as General Partner at deep-tech VC Atmos Ventures , who was investing before the term 'deep tech' was even coined, capitalizing the first ever quantum computing startup, Rigetti. Certainly Dominik has the right roots to unlock the secrets of quantum computing. Way before that, Dominik launched Nooch , a Venmo competitor that raised capital from Plug and Play Tech Center .

Originally hailing from North East Philadelphia (not West Philadelphia, h/t Peter Wang #bornandraised #djjazzyjeff), Dominik Andrzejczuk was able to distill complex scientific concepts into simple, crisp ideas. For example, when asked how to deal with quantum effects, he shared "It's best to reduce as much noise as possible (in this case, heat). The less noise, the less errors. The domain quantum will go after in the next 5 years is HPC, or high-performance computing (aka scientific computing). These physicists, scientists, mathematicians are running physics simulations on some of the largest computers in the world." But how can we use it, you ask?

Low Hanging Fruit 🍇

Drug Development? Portfolio Optimization? Cryptography? Fortnite parties? It seems that use-cases for quantum are almost infinite; but Dominik and the QDC - The Quantum Data Center Corporation team are focusing specifically on Combinatorial Optimization. He reminds us that there is a lot of work left to be done, saying:

"Quantum won't replace classical computing anytime soon. If anything they'll be co-processors, like GPU's"

Wait, What is Combinatorial Optimization?

It aim's at solving algorithms that are too hard for classical computers (using whats called heuristic methods, aka best guess). An example is optimizing a route of transportation across the country; there are a lot of possible permutations for each of the 50 states. Speaking of states...

A quantum state is defined as: mathematical entity that provides a probability distribution for the outcomes of each possible measurement on a system ⚛️         

Damn Nature, You Crazy ⚛️

Classical computers are deterministic (either 0 or 1), but unfortunately nature doesn't work that way; at the sub-atomic level, nature is probabilistic - meaning something can exist and not-exist at the same time."

-Dominik Andrzejczuk

Every Particle Can be a Described as a Particle or a Wave 🤯

The Particle Wave Duality confounded Einstein. At first they thought something wrong with the instrumentation, as nothing made sense.

"It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do, Einstein said.

Special guest co-host Simon Lancaster 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇵🇹 , also a GP at a deep tech fund ( Omni Ventures ) took a stab at explaining the abstract principles of quantum mechanics to Peter Wang and I, stating:

"The probabilistic nature of the qubit allows for almost an infinite range of amplitude, or values. Instead of 0 or 1, so much more potential data can be crammed into a bit. It's an ideal application for cryptography - Ever since the 1960's it's all relied on crunching numbers, which at its core is factoring."

-Simon Lancaster

The Double Slit Experiment and Schrödinger's cat are superb examples. It seems to illustrate there are parallel layers or perspectives in which the same reality can be viewed; the cat is both dead and alive at the same time. Quite the purr-adox 🐈

Mathematics Driven Innovation = Physics Informed ML

The only way we can improve (especially since we are hitting a wall of physics in nano-science a la Moore's Law) is by looking at the underlying math. Research now is now developing better algorithms (or solvers) for these large scale combinatorial optimization problems that use the math and physics of both classical mechanics and quantum mechanics. This new field of scientific-machine learning of easing the learning curve is

"... the foundation of an abstraction layer for regular developers to leverage this tech without having a PhD in physics "

ML and Computer scientists are at a very 'low' level: How do we build more efficient algorithm? How is the CPU or GPU talking to memory? Can we do more with less data? Physicists on the other hand are at a very 'high' level: What is the actual problem we are looking at, and how do we figure out the mathematical model we can apply to those problems? Fundamentally different paradigms, one that QDS team is tackling.

Differential Equations 👻

In short, how does one thing change in respect to another thing (similar to derivatives). Using differential equations, we can define the seemingly chaotic movement of a double pendulum. Starting from scratch, we use ML figure out the laws of physics from raw data. By using First Principles Physics, we can teach the neural nets what the 'physics of the world look like' - then use Machine Learning to fill in the blanks finding discrepancies in our model (thus using less data and computational resources). It may look simple in physics, but is quite complicated in python; and marrying these two is no small task.

Neuromorphic Computing & Biomimicry 🧠

'The use of electronic circuits to mimic neuro-biological architectures present in the nervous system; physical artificial neurons to do computations.' By emulating the structure of the brain, we get clues to the secrets of the universe. We can map equations from nature, like fractal-designs in our brain networks. This mathematical concept is the most efficient store of data; where shapes appear similar at different scales. Surprisingly, our brain couldn't function if not for fractal geometry, as it has about 100 billion neurons and approximately 100 trillion synapses, or connections (average of 1000 connections for a given cell). The fractal branching pattern of the neuron's axons and dendrites that allows them to communicate with many other cells. If neurons were packed like boxes in a U-Haul, one neuron could only connect with at most 6 other cells. The future is not one or the other; but in fact both of these nascent technologies working together 💪🏽

Real World Applications in Aviation 🛫

In 2021, there were 122,000 flight cancelations. What transpires? Quite a (qu)bit. Airlines rebook the passengers, re-allocate the crew, and decide where the plane goes - all in under 15 minutes. More broadly, this is the field of operations research. Lufthansa has hundreds of employees shuffling these cards around, impacting tens of thousands of dollars by the second. But when Google 's Operations Research Library team optimized for them with scientists from the HPC world, they found out Lufthansa saved $20k - $360k per flight. Using the conservative $20k figure, that's a yearly annual SOM of $2.4B.

Quantum won't change the world overnight, but it will optimize large scale problems, driving a quantum leap in value. Interested in learning more? QDS link here.

Catch the full episode on Spotify here.

Founder of the Month 🧟

We hope you're hungry because Allison Carpio is the head chef in the #conversionkitchen. No sleaze or disingenuous hacks. Instead, Allison whips up lesson for business owners, teaching them how to show up authentically and liberate their copy. If emails are not part of the equation, then you're leaving customers and money on the table. The goal is to connect in a compelling way that drives profits; and she's written copy that produces an increase in conversions and sales of over 500%. And she can do that for you, too 😎 Get inside the minds of your readers--their deepest hopes and fears--so you could turn them into paying customers. Learn more at allisoncarpio.com

Interesting AF

Pillars of Creation

Remember the NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration #jameswebb telescope reference from the intro? Here's one of the many shockingly beautiful images that were recently released;

“With detailed chemical fingerprints of these early galaxies, we see that they include what might be the most primitive galaxy identified so far. At the same time, we can connect these galaxies from the dawn of the universe to similar ones nearby, which we can study in much greater detail,” said James Rhoads, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in MD. See more of these remarkable images which hint to the secrets of the stars here.

Thanks to our amazing sponsors, Necodex and Primero Negocios 🤩

Need help building product? Check out our friends at Necodex . They've done great work with founders in the SZ community like Daniel Idźkowski 🇵🇱/🇺🇸 , Matt Lentzner , and others. Looking for digital marketing experts or getting local customers? Primero Negocios are the trusted team to meet.

That's all from us, catch ya next month. Until then, be good to yourselves, and be good to each other ❤️

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check us out on Spotify

www.siliconzombies.com