What we talked about
Bryan Wish unpacks the long game of personal branding, storytelling, and building systems that scale. Bryan shares how his early project Wish Dish began in college as a way to create a collective platform for vulnerable stories, community, and self expression, and how that “soulful” experiment taught him media, content, and community, even before he knew how to monetize it.
Show notes
Bryan Wish spent seven years building ArcBound:a personal brand services company:before stepping back and asking whether the linear trajectory was the right one. The answer led him to fly to Newport Beach to pitch a client named Tim Springer, who had previously built a digital accessibility company to $100 million ARR, with an idea that Springer immediately split into two separate businesses: a software layer and a services layer.
What we covered
- ArcBound grew out of running the book launch for author Alan Gannett’s “The Creative Curve” in Washington DC, where Bryan had a front-row seat to managing four or five vendors simultaneously and saw firsthand how much friction existed in standing up a personal brand:that friction became the founding problem he set out to solve.
- The genesis of Graviton.ai started with Bryan interviewing dozens of sales professionals, CEOs, and marketing leaders across mortgage banking, insurance, and wealth management, where the core problem was a three-sided failure: sales professionals couldn’t afford individual branding, marketing leaders were stretched thin trying to scale hundreds of people, and companies struggled to differentiate themselves for recruiting and retention.
- Finding an “ownable message” is not a quick exercise. Bryan walked through it live in the conversation: it requires understanding someone’s origin story, the emotional tissue behind their functional choices, and the specific themes:like speed or building hard things:that connect a person’s life to the work they do. You cannot arrive there with a prompt.
- On AI and authenticity: Bryan has fed hundreds of transcripts, pieces of writing, and documents into ChatGPT’s paid plan so that it knows him well enough to take raw thoughts from 70 to 100 percent. His standard is not whether output is synthetic but whether it is accurate to who he is:and whether he is the final point of approval.
- Graviton is being designed as an agentic personal brand operating system: a system that learns on the user, probes them with questions, feeds in audience and channel intelligence, and orchestrates outreach:with the first enterprise customer deploying in April 2026 in the mortgage industry.
- Bryan’s “AI bar fight” story captures the debate: a public affairs professional told him AI would kill jobs and remove human spirit from work; Bryan’s counterpoint is that taste, direction, and the ability to drive a system toward a desired output are high-leverage skills, not endangered ones.
About Bryan Wish
Bryan Wish is the CEO of ArcBound, a personal brand agency that helps leaders define ownable messages and build content and relationship systems around them. He also co-founded Graviton.ai, a SaaS platform scaling compliant personal brand programs across enterprise sales teams, starting in the mortgage industry.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanwish
- Website: http://www.arcbound.com
Episode 111 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:01) Welcome back to the pre-Vered podcast, where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today we are joined by Brian Wish, his CEO of Arcbound, where he helps leaders clarify an ownable message and turn it into content, relationships, and real opportunities. Brian also co-founded Graviton.ai, a SaaS platform designed to help firms scale compliant.
measurable personal brand growth across sales team, starting the mortgage industry. He’s the host of the One Away podcast. And earlier in his career, he built Wishdish, a platform built around sharing personal stories and live storytelling events. Ryan, welcome to the show.
Bryan (00:48) What a bio! Good job, team! No one ever picks up on wish-dish days, but that was the early storytelling journey. Thanks for having me.
Federico Ramallo (00:56) Interesting.
Yes, we’re honored to have you today. Tell us a little bit more about Wish Dish before we move to your other projects.
Bryan (01:05) yeah. So I, I was in college and I was at that phase of life where I wasn’t super interested in going out to the parties anymore. And I also didn’t want to just get a job after school. And I thought that, you know, I wanted to find a meaning at the intersection of work and life from a pretty young age.
And so I started to think about purpose a lot earlier and I started to think about self-expression as a medium to make an impact on other people. this is 2015 and this was the time where you’re seeing all the WordPress blogs come out and you know the wordpress.com with like your name on it and people are starting these personal platforms and they were just sharing and it was one of those things where
someone did this and they never kept up with it. It was like, oh yeah, here’s my blog and my first post on this. And then you never heard from them again. And I was in a period where I’d just gone through a pretty large transformation over the summer of 2014, where I was doing a lot of personal work on myself, working with a coach and just started seeing the world a little differently.
And, um, and so I wanted to share some of those learnings as I came out of this cocoon state. And I didn’t feel like I had a platform and a place to do that. And so I wanted to create a way for other people. So when I started to look, so I wanted to share, I was looking at the landscape of how people were sharing and I didn’t want to just like go into, you know, the way that everyone else. And so to me,
The Red Ocean is creating a platform for a collective group of people to be able to share together and be able to have a voice in a platform where you could have hundreds of people, thousands all around, you know, a vulnerable story. And by putting that out there, having an impact on other people for the better. And that was the intention behind it. And
Yeah, it was an amazing journey and I learned so much about media and content and community and I forgot about how to make money doing that. But it was a soulful project and led me down so many avenues. It was awesome. And I took a lot of the learnings from it in the future life.
Federico Ramallo (03:33) You
Amazing, amazing, very interesting. And then after that, many years later, you’re now leading ArcBound and co-founded Graviton. ⁓ Tell us a little bit about ArcBound and what you’re doing, what services are you offering there?
Bryan (03:56) Yeah.
Yeah, so eight years ago I was doing a book launch for an author in Washington, DC. His name was Alan Gannett and he was coming out with a book called The Creative Curve. And Alan said to me, you know, come run my book launch. That was a full course, you know, step into building out a personal brand for someone. So helping to find his message around creativity, you know, build out the website with him and the team.
I saw his LinkedIn and newsletter and videos and all these things that he was doing to market himself on the platform to drive distribution and create opportunities as he was selling his business. And I was at a front row seat to all of it, managing it. And so from learning how to create great content, working alongside him to learning how to set up events and PR for him.
I had this front row seat into what it took to build a personal brand. And there was so much friction in that process, right? So, you know, we had four or five different vendors. He was paying me full time. And I thought this was amazing. I learned so much. But to string all this together with these different types of people, it’s a lot of friction. And I wanted to create an easier way for people to like stand up their brand and like have a platform to be able to do it.
And so that was the birth of ArcBound. Because he said to me at the end of that project, what do you want to do next? And I said, I want to create a better system for this to come to life. And so that’s ArcBound. Over the last seven years, we’ve built up all the service infrastructures. So people come to us to define who they are and how they show up in the world and the brand behind.
you know who they are and what they represent. And then we build out you know their brand system across the channels, LinkedIn, newsletters, podcasts, short form video across YouTube, TikTok, all the platforms and have really created a nice infrastructure for people’s voice and passions to land to drive and accelerate opportunities forward. And so it’s been amazing who we’ve been able to work with. know hard founded lessons I’ve learned along the way and
it’s led us to some more expensive past years, you know, from all this learning.
Federico Ramallo (06:13) Amazing, amazing. Yeah, I think that it’s a whole different game when you’re doing personal brand than it is a company brand, right?
Bryan (06:23) Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (06:25) Yeah.
And tell us a little bit more about Graviton.ai.
Bryan (06:31) Yeah, so, you know, when you’re banging your head against the wall for seven years trying to get a company off the ground, and you finally take the time to look up and kind of step away and maybe like, let go of like the tight grip you have on the company, you know, I got to a point where I was like, do I still want to do what we’re doing? And the answer was yes, but I started to look out do I
at this linear trajectory, even if there’s good velocity, is it the right way to do it? And the answer to me at that time was no. I didn’t want to work this hard for the next 10 years in this way, given what I could see. And so I started to think about, well, okay, if not this way, what’s the right way? And my intuition kind of led me to thinking about these enterprises.
and mortgage banking and insurance and wealth management, where there’s hundreds of sales leaders and sales professionals under a corporate umbrella that are all really their own brand, but powered by the corporate backend that’s making their business possible. And so what I did was I approached a client of ours named Tim Springer,
And Tim in a previous life had built a digital accessibility company to a hundred million dollars in annual recurring revenue. And he was a technologist and builder. And, you know, I said to Tim, you know, hey, I need to come fly to see you. And he was a client at the time. And I said to him, some ideas that I think are worth sharing. And he said, come on down. He lives in Newport Beach. I,
Federico Ramallo (07:57) wow.
Bryan (08:15) Deflew down, I sent him an email the night before of this idea to go into these organizations to build this out. And he said to me, look, these are two separate businesses. One’s a software layer, and then one’s a services layer. And we’re going to build infrastructure if this works that can really allow us to scale into an organization.
and then we’ll use the services later to fulfill on some of the things that are necessary. And so before like agreeing to work with me, he said, go interview.
bunch of people and get back to me on what you find. And so I took that upon myself to go interview dozens and dozens and dozens of sales professionals, CEOs, marketing leaders across these industries to just validate our hypothesis. Like, were we right? And what we uncovered was a massive problem, like, problems. And, you know, just to build on this, what they were is, you know, you have these sales professionals.
They don’t want to pay thousands of dollars a month to have a brand because it’s coming out of their own pocket mostly. And if they do take the time to do this, like it’s DIY and it’s not good, it’s not compliant and it’s not consistent and it’s hard to do on an ongoing basis just by yourself. And the marketing leaders, right, they are really stuck because
Federico Ramallo (09:27) Right.
Bryan (09:48) They’re trying to scale hundreds of people across an organization on very limited resources and they have corporate objectives. have their ad hoc agency to these people. They’re running around like they’re chicken with their heads cut off and it’s very inefficient. And it’s very clear there’s problems on both sides. Now the unspoken problem, which is even more interesting, is these companies are no different from the person to their left and right, nor are they salespeople. So they have problems with retention and recruiting and saying this is why we’re different.
And so now if you have a marketing system that’s helping their individuals brand who they are, you’re solving a problem on the marketing side, the sales side, and now helping with recruiting and retention. And so I think it’s a very interesting problem. And so as we came back with all of these insights from these interviews, that’s when Tim was like, let’s partner on this journey and let’s build a company. now he’s a partner across both businesses.
It’s an exciting time. We’ve streamlined the service infrastructure to make the price point much more accessible. And we’re rolling out the software infrastructure with our first enterprise customer in April. So it’s an exciting time. it didn’t, you know, it probably, you know, there was a lot of dark moments a few years ago that I think have led to this. And this thing just was like, yeah, everything’s going great. And then this idea came like he kind of had to get to a place of.
wrongness to start to look at the future differently. So yeah, that’s the backstory.
Federico Ramallo (11:12) Right, right, so you build Graviton based on all the experiences of ArcBound. And I think that I find interesting is that you were able to interview a lot of people and truly understand what the problems are. Because usually what happens is, and this is kind of the Lean Startup philosophy, right?
build what is a minimum value product to validate your assumptions, right? And the interviews is kind of the first step, right? And I committed the scene of building without validating and then realizing that it’s not exactly what people need, right? Or it’s not solving people’s problems, right? So I think that that’s an amazing journey,
Bryan (11:53) Yeah, it’s been a very lean approach for how we’ve done it and to your point, it’s, it would have been hard to do the inverse. It would have been hard to go to the enterprise and say, we need to go brand all these people and not back it up with experience of how we’ve done it. And it’s a completely different types of business and the kind of sales process, but it’s completely different type of what you’re doing, but it is a very lean approach and a very modular design for how we’re doing it. In time, like,
As a scale, there’s only a ton of, I think, engineering support behind it. But right now, it’s, you’re right, taking the core insights, building the best things that the company needs, and then kind of expanding out the platform from there.
Federico Ramallo (12:32) Right, right. How much of overlap do you think it is between one company and the other? And how much do you think is unique in each?
Bryan (12:41) I mean, look, I think one’s a technology infrastructure and one’s a services business, right? Services business informed how the technology platform is being built. But I see them as two businesses have been informed by one another. And right now, you know, they’re separate. And if it becomes a point in time where it makes sense to merge them, we can merge them. But for right now, the cleanest thing to do is just have two separate companies.
Federico Ramallo (12:47) Right.
Bryan (13:08) And honestly, the process of that has been great because instead of trying to muddy the waters and like try and fit something in to a pre-existing thing, like separating the ideas out has actually made it so clear of like what a future state could look like that I don’t think would have been possible just trying to do it all together. So, you know, I think Tim’s a very deliberate thinker, very structured, very thoughtful and expansive and it’s like vision, but also pragmatic.
And I think that’s very helpful for someone like me who might be able to see 10 years out, but might struggle in just the day to day of certain elements of business. so building a great team with what we have has, I think, helped clarify how this all works.
Federico Ramallo (13:50) Amazing, very interesting. So when you talk about finding an ownable message, what that does mean?
Bryan (13:57) Yeah.
Alright Federico, tell me about you. Tell me about who you are, what you stand for, like what would it, I mean we can do this role play, right? Like give me some background on you.
Federico Ramallo (14:07) Okay, yeah.
So I’m a software engineer, turning to founder, CEO. I’ve been asked to build engineering teams, and that’s kind of how I started Density Labs, where we build teams in Latam for companies in the US, mostly in Mexico. And then…
I’ve been building Prevetted AI, is productizing, a recurring and technical screening process. I’m also a father of, I have a 10 year old. My wife is my co-founder, so we work together closely every day. What else? I’m…
I’m an adrenaline junkie. I love going fast on the motorcycle and I have different cars that I drive off-road or on long trips. Last long trip I did was from Guadalajara to San Francisco, which is 2,500 miles or so.
Bryan (14:48) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (15:08) Yeah, I mean, trying to find the extremes of whatever vehicle I have on speed, distance, reliability, or just going through obstacles,
Bryan (15:19) I like it.
Federico Ramallo (15:19) Yeah. It’s a multi…
Yeah, I don’t know what the answer was. The question was leaning towards, but yeah.
Bryan (15:25) Yeah, so let’s
go a little deeper. What got you into, like, why software? Like, what was like, want to build and I want to, you know, how did you arrive at software in the first place intellectually?
Federico Ramallo (15:39) So I come from software engineering. My mom is a data scientist. My dad used to work at IBM, so he’s also been in software. So that kind of helped me lean towards that. for me, it’s the possibility of creating
something out of nothing to solve problems that people would have of data. And then the last reason I kind of lean towards software engineering is because I wanted to work remotely. And if you have to build something physically, then you have to be there. Whereas with this, you could work from anywhere in the world, right?
So yeah, and then I love problems and solving problems. So I kind of got into understanding the whys and all the layers we need of how everything works. So I got involved on understanding how all the layers of TCP IP work, right? How the computers talk to each other or how they should, right? And from there, how can we better applications, better human interfaces, right?
And then I start getting more into understanding people’s problems so I could build requirements so we can build software. And kind of always circling around the why. Why are we building this? What is the value for the user? What is the value for the world?
Bryan (16:57) Yeah, so I mean, we’re not going to solve this in 10 minutes, but this is kind of a taste of like, you don’t just arrive at a message and say, stand for this. Like you need to peel the layers back behind why, like what makes someone tick, who they are, their personal experience. We build your mom and dad’s origin of how they got to their roles and you know, things, first things that you started to build and you know,
why, what going fast has to do with software and engineering and motorcycle. We could probably surmise a 30 % accuracy, maybe a message that you’d stand for. But what we do is we really get to know someone’s story and who they are at a very core level because in your world, you guys love products and standing stuff up and that’s great.
But you need to connect the emotional tissue to the functional output and to really build the brand. And so, for us, it’s very important that we are able to help someone understand who they are, reflect back to them who they think they are, and then say, here’s the eggs and what we see for how you need to show up in the world and tell your story and why. Because that’s what’s going to mobilize people around what you’re trying to do. Because you need to make people feel seen, heard, understood.
no matter what product you have to be able to do that. And so for us, everything starts with a message for both the person and the company that they’re building because the company is an extension of like the core of who they are. And so if we can help someone understand that, we can build all the other layers around.
Federico Ramallo (18:32) Very interesting, very interesting. So it’s about understanding their journey and from there, take the essence so people can talk about themselves, the company they represent or the product they represent, and then from there, it connects in a much deeper level with when transmitting the message.
Bryan (18:54) Correct. Yes. I mean, it starts there, right? In the essence, because if you look at like, you know, the way we see brand or philosophy around it, right? You know, from that you, in theory, you can build a series of content themes around it. So, you know, maybe one of your content themes is speed. Shows up in motorcycles and how fast you like to build things. Maybe it’s building hard things. Like you like intellectually rigorous like builds and you know, or maybe it’s like,
appreciating what’s come before you and technological innovation and you want to speak to these things because the business that you have it’s like putting out You building products and for other people service businesses that might be you building products or helping them do that You know, that’s a function and extension of you. So you want to communicate and seed in their eyes what you have to say and how you got to where you were and why you do the things that you do because
that’s going to resonate with them beyond you being another provider of technical services that can help them because you’re going to establish like an intellectual and an emotional connection with them by creating content with different themes that connect to the things that they want to hear. Now, if you do that really well, you’re saying, okay, you’re probably talking to entrepreneurs. I’m on this podcast. You’re probably having a lot of other entrepreneurs who could be clients, referral partners, partnership opportunities in the future. Well, you want to then target
you know, specific people with the content around the message. And then from there, right, you can build whatever products, you know, you want to sell to them. But I think what most people do is they start with the product and they try and figure out all the other stuff, you know, before, after it. And I think the inverse is true with a good brand, you can roll off any product.
Federico Ramallo (20:36) Right, right, very interesting.
Bryan (20:39) We’re like two opposites. We’re attracting. It’s great.
Federico Ramallo (20:42) Right, right. Yeah, and coming from the technical world. So for me, all of this is, you know, a different perspective of life, right?
Bryan (20:50) Right, I think this flavor of life is pretty good, but I actually think your flavor of life is pretty good as well. So, you know, both are necessary.
Federico Ramallo (20:57) Right, right. We’re coming to similar conclusion from different point of views and I think that’s amazing.
You also support your clients with content creation, right? What is your advice so the content feels real, doesn’t feel synthetic? Now with AI, everything feels kind of, that’s why I’m using the word synthetic, right? Doesn’t feel real anymore, right?
Bryan (21:23) Yeah, I mean, look, I think you need to be able to continue to ask really good questions to yourself and let other people engage you in good dialogue so that your mind is able to think and introspect and get things out that, you know, you want to share. And so I love AI. I think it’s the greatest tool ever. I use it all the time for so much stuff.
I have also put a ton of stuff into it, prompts writings I’ve done where it knows enough about me where, you know, if I give it thoughts, it can take those thoughts from 70 to 100%. but you know, I think it’s really about just letting the certain thoughts come to you that are in strategic directions or letting people ask you certain things. And those inputs create really good outputs.
and using AI to add in 20 % synthetic edits that you would save yourself two hours. And so I think AI is fantastic. And I do think people just rely on it fully without injecting themselves into it. And I do think we’re moving into a world where…
And yeah, it’s gonna get better and better at people’s voice and understanding who humans are and be able to get that out. And it’s like, you’re gonna, it’s your job to kind of be the, is this me? And like, what are the things I need to add to it? And I actually think that’s okay. But that doesn’t mean you should rely fully on it. And most of the content like I’m putting out personally is coming from like internally right now in here versus what I think AI should just write for me.
Federico Ramallo (23:02) Right, right. Yeah, I’m also using AI to assist on a lot of writing, but as you said, the ideas comes from me. I provide the ideas, the guidelines, the corrections. Yeah, but if you ask AI a very generic question, it’s going to give you a very bad answer, right? It’s going to try to kind of…
lie through the question, right? And through the answer. it’s a blunt answer, right? But if we provide our insights, and then from there we build, whether it’s the articles or whatever content it is, I think it becomes a much higher quality content, right? And still, as you said, still remains our voice, right?
Bryan (23:42) Yeah.
Totally. Yeah, I really like, you know, from a technical perspective, like we’re building with Graviton. It’s a personal brand operating system. And idea is in time, this is a system that learns on you and it’s agentic and it prompts you and it probes you and it can get so personalized and specific. And then there’s other, you know, based on the brand that like orchestration that we’ve built, it feeds in your audience. gives you channel intelligence.
You agents that are doing outreach. It’s bringing all these pieces together. And so, you know, I think without core inputs that we are gonna feed it and how that translates to everybody else, it would be very hard. But I think you gotta make it specific and you gotta create where the world is going. think AI that learns and adapts on the human and makes that work.
you know, very effective. And I think that all can be done and true without diluting the human experience.
Federico Ramallo (24:44) Right, right. Yeah, I think that when you provide context, it can understand better how you think, how you operate, and from there provide a much value assistant, right?
Bryan (24:58) Yeah, for sure. What do you think? mean, what’s your take? You’re the technologist here. I mean, how would you answer that for yourself?
Federico Ramallo (24:59) Interesting.
Ha ha.
So that’s an interesting question. So I have a hard time trusting a non-deterministic system, where 1 plus 1 equals 2. You can rely on that. Now here,
given an input, you don’t know what the output is going to be, right? It could be good, it could be bad, right? So there are ways to kind of work towards that, right? But still…
I have a, you have a fundamental, fundamentally unreliable resource that works 80, 90 % of the time, right? But then what do you do with the other 10 or 20 that doesn’t, right? So that’s what I have. I have some trust issues with AI. But I know that that’s getting better and better. At least I’m thinking it from the perspective of…
privet.ai where I want to have zero false positives. I don’t want to provide a candidate that is good, but it actually is not good because the AI had a glitch. And I’m an engineer, so I do it square on that sense. I have this idea of…
the concept of life has to be predictable, right? If that makes sense. ⁓
Bryan (26:23) Yeah.
Go ahead.
Federico Ramallo (26:25) Yeah, what I was going to say is that that is fundamentally what is causing me issues. I think it’s getting better. There are ways to, you can have double or triple layer agents kind of checking to each other, right?
similar to what a computer does. On old Boeing, you have three computers kind of checking each other the solution of a problem, right, of the process. So there are ways to make it more reliable, right? But that’s kind of my concerns with AI, right? And then the other issue that I was talking about is the synthetic information, right, that it’s out there, right?
Bryan (27:02) Woo. ⁓ So to your point, it’s funny.
Federico Ramallo (27:02) Bless you. Woohoo!
Bryan (27:08) I think I’ve used AI in a really interesting way and it’s really made me excited about the future. And so I built on what you said where I put thousands of inputs into my Jack GPT paid plan and it knows me so well. And I love how well that knows me. And what I do, and I actually think,
It’s like, actually trust, I don’t want to get in trouble for saying this. I actually trust a lot of the synthetic outputs it gives me because I’ve given it so many good inputs. Inputs have been hundreds of transcripts, hundreds of pieces of writing, you know, there’s documented access to my Google Drive and all my documents and things I’ve up, like, and so what I think is so interesting about that now is I’m saying, okay, here’s a transcript, write an email that outlines the followups, the outlines like this in a strategic way.
my thinking, I just have to be creative in like the prompt and I have to be a little creative in how I edit it. And like it’s exactly what I would say, but spend so much more time doing. I’m like, well, this is, this is fantastic. You know what I mean? And so like, actually believe in a world where when you give something enough inputs, you have a system that learns on you and the outputs, whether they’re synthetic or not are actually like, they’re just better than what you would do.
Federico Ramallo (28:12) You
Bryan (28:25) And so if you imagine that for the future of content and how we share, I’d be totally okay if AI kind of, you know, our Graviton system, and it prompts me and it says, hey, how are you feeling today? And I write, shitty, I’m really sad about XYZ happening. And it gives me a probing question and I give it a few sentences and it whips up an amazing post because it’s tapped so deep into my emotional sentiment. I’d be like, hell yeah. Like you just helped me make sense of something going on.
You know that and I’d be okay with that personally. Other people maybe not but anyways I’m excited about the future of this because I actually think it can be done ethically for good even if there’s synthetic information that’s brought to life because it knows you so well.
Federico Ramallo (29:12) That’s a very interesting thought. I haven’t think it that way because yes, it does know us very well.
it’s going to be able to predict, kind of predict what we’re going to say or kind of give us the information that we’re looking for. And now that you’re mentioning, I’m realizing that my ChachiPT paid plan also is giving better and better responses based on what I type it. That’s very interesting, yeah.
One of the exercises I did at the beginning of the year is I ask the prompt, given everything you know about me, can you generate an image that will represent me? Which is a very interesting exercise. You should do it, it shows, you can see in a single picture your whole history of everything you prompt into it.
And that shows how much it knows about us.
The other side of that is that works great until it doesn’t. And I can give you an example. The Apple Watch, it tries to kind of figure out if you’re walking, if you’re not walking, if you’re, you So we walk, we go to the…
You know, we go to take a bus and then the watch says, are you still walking? Are you still walking? You stop walking and then it kind of doesn’t realize that you stopped walking. So it tries to be smart, but it kind of failed into it, right? Rather than being able to say, well, I walk, I take the bus or I take a car or whatever I do, right? You know, a much more simple system, right? So maybe that’s an over complicated, you know,
piece of technology that doesn’t have to.
Bryan (30:51) Yeah, yeah, mean, it’s interesting. I mean, it’s not all figured out to your point. And I think there’s use cases where it’s not going to know everything. And at the same time, it’s
And it’s an interesting feature we’re running into.
Federico Ramallo (31:09) Right, right. To your point, I think that, you know, you were talking about that there’s also, or we’re talking about that there’s also synthetic content. I think that you can use anything for good or evil, right? You can use a hammer to build a house or kill somebody, right? So, you know, I think the same thing happens with
Bryan (31:25) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (31:28) with the GPT, right? You can use it to to assist you in creating great content or, you know, people will use it for just creating fake and synthetic content that doesn’t add too much value, right?
Bryan (31:41) Yeah, I mean, just to build on this like a step further, we, I was, I wrote an article. I was in Washington DC over Christmas and I wrote an article and it was called My AI Bar Fight. Like a bar fight. So the backstory is I was in DC, I was at the restaurant, I was waiting for my partner in the business, Blair, to meet me.
Federico Ramallo (31:59) Ha ha!
Bryan (32:09) and I sat down and there’s this girl to my right and to my left there was this guy and I was on a call, I talking about taxes with some girl on my team and just clearing a few things up. And to my left this guy started talking about a real estate marketing tech company. And so when I got off the call I looked at him and I was like, tell me what you’re up to. Because it’s interesting, it kind of,
for Graviton, what we’re doing, my ears definitely perked up. And he’s on a similar issue in like a very different way and a much different niche. But clearly, like, people are thinking about this world. And so we had a little chat. And then the girl on my right, she was basically said, so I guess you’re in tech. I said, like, you you could probably say so. mean, elements for sure. And he’s like, well, what do you do? And I was like, well, this is what I do. And I was like, what do you do?
She’s like, I do like brand marketing and like public affairs. We have a bunch of like public government type of clients. And so then I said to her, well, what do you think about this tooling and AI? And she goes, well, I think it’s going to help make people lose their jobs. And I think that like it’s it’s takes out like the human like spirit of the work and
I’m thinking to myself, you’re absolutely nuts. Like, I think it’s like, you know, she’s like, well, what do people lose jobs at my company? And like, you know, what if it’s like unethical? I was like, if you’re, if you have taste and you know how to like drive these systems to create the output that you want, like, isn’t that a much better use of your time, energy and effort than like, filling in all the lines in a certain way that you think is good? I mean,
Like we’re truly headed to a world where like the old way is going to be fully replaced and the people are going to need to adapt into the ways that are faster. And there’s, don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. And, and so anyways, we ended, like, we went through the conversation and I basically gave her my point of view and she gave me her point of view. And I, basically said, well, I probably need to go get married and go read books and write on a farm because like my job is going to be out and it’s going to be doomsday. And I’m like,
great. said, I hope you find a rich husband. And then, you know, I, uh, you know, I, I said goodbye and, that was that. But like, think this is very ethical. think it’s the, the way of the future. And I do think that if you can scrap all these individual components together, you could, I mean, you’re seeing these AI companies go to like 10, 20, $50 million fast.
And they’ve clearly scrapped together things in a very useful way and have good growth systems and they brought together disparate parts to make something incredibly scalable. And I find that like really intellectually interesting.
Federico Ramallo (35:02) Yeah, I I think that with any revolution, there’s going to be people that are going to lose their job because their job become obsolete, right? But I think that with any revolution, we’re going to see new jobs coming up, right? So I don’t think that necessarily AI is going to take a lot of jobs.
it’s going to replace them, going to change them into something different. We used to have people on elevators, riding the elevator up and down. Eventually, that was replaced with automation. I think that we need, people need to learn how to leverage AI so they can…
they can have better jobs in the future, rather than just trying to fight it.
Bryan (35:50) Yeah, I think so. I so anyways, I like where the world’s going. It’s good for people like me who are great at being generalist, so.
Federico Ramallo (36:00) Right, right. And I think that the core skills are going to be much more necessary than before. Right? Like.
Bryan (36:07) What do you think are the most
important skills that we have moving forward?
Federico Ramallo (36:11) That’s a very good question. You do very good questions. ⁓ You should have a podcast, which you do,
Bryan (36:15) I know, should be the host, come on.
I do. Yeah,
yeah. I honestly prefer asking the questions more than speaking. So, you know, it’s my probably happy place, but keep going. Tell me, tell me what are the core skills.
Federico Ramallo (36:35) Yeah, so I think that the core skills is being able to understand, you know, on software engineer, we talk about architecture, we talk about designing solutions, right? So it’s basically building the strategy of how to solve the problems, right? In software engineer, we build these abstractions of problems, right? So, you know, tell me a problem.
tell me expected behavior as a software engineer, I can build something that is going to be efficient, fast, scalable, you know, and it’s going to, we’re going to be able to add more features for moving forward, right? So having engineers that understand how to do that is going to be much more needed than before. Now, then on the other hand, all the…
lower complexity tasks like coding syntax, know, writing code. Now we have AI that can assist us in a lot of that. So we can have agents that build code for us. So instead of writing code, we just need to read code, verify that it’s what we want, and then just accept it, right? So this concept of human in the middle, right, process. So I think that
Being able to have that criteria is what I called core skills. I’m talking from the perspective of software engineering. I believe that similar things are to happen on branding, it’s going to happen on PR, it’s going to happen on content. Understanding the strategy, what are the things that we need to do so we can provide better instructions to the agents.
so the Asians can then do the menial work, if you like.
Bryan (38:21) Yeah. I mean, I mean, in a way, like I could argue that you’re, you’re using code in a synthetic way. You’re setting up the system and it’s just pumping out a bunch of code and you like it. All right. We’re going to scrap it in and make it go. Like I do the same thing with writing. You know what I mean? It’s like you set up the system to orchestrate the outputs that you need. Like to me, that’s smart. I mean, you’re in theory creating synthetic code. Like I create synthetic writing, but I, I’m the final.
Federico Ramallo (38:38) Right.
Yeah.
Bryan (38:50) I’m the final point of approval as you are with the code. I think that’s a great place to be, and a strategic place to be that has leverage. So I agree.
Federico Ramallo (38:59) Well, when I’m talking
about synthetic things, is this idea of hyper-personalization on marketing, right? Or that simulates that we know the audience or the target, whoever it is, right? Even though we might not, right?
And then I see a lot of content that is generated that you’ve read it and it’s basically the same. You see the similar content everywhere and it’s basically the same content, re-urgitated over and over and over. That’s what I’m calling synthetic.
Bryan (39:36) Yeah, yeah, I know. was just trying to like pair side by side our worlds. But yes, I completely agree.
Federico Ramallo (39:42) that’s what I think. It’s lower quality of content, lower quality of relationships, right? I’ve seen, you know, I’ve been to many events where it’s so transactional, right? And like this conversation where we…
we can have very interesting thoughts in a much more meaningful way and have a deeper conversation. And I think this is the opposite of synthetic, which is the definition I just invented.
Bryan (40:12) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (40:13) Yeah. What are things do you see in the future of how we could leverage AI a little bit more?
Bryan (40:22) Well, on one hand, if you need to build a personal brand that is truly personalized, I think before we know it, we’re going to have software that helps us spin up a business of one, make six figures doing it, and helps you, gives you all the tools to do it in a way that you’ve never had before. So I think that’s a feature I’m excited to build on a pretty large scale. The second one would be
Federico Ramallo (40:32) Right.
Bryan (40:47) I mean, I think it’s pretty cool. Like being in San Francisco, everything I’m learning about the longevity and health space. mean, before we know it, you know, I have a couple of friends working on something similar. You take a few drops of blood, get a hundred plus biomarkers. Okay. Get your, you know, diet nutrition, link that diet nutrition to the kinds of food supplements and things that you should be eating and you literally, and then to the types of workouts that you should be doing.
but it’s all comes from the inside and it’s like chain and link together. That’d be really cool. We’re not that far off from that world. And what’s happening is those worlds are being built. You the guys in the lab creating the biomarker stuff. You have the longevity people creating all the longevity products. have where you order food from and you just link it all together and one stop shop to get your biomarkers, get your food stuff, understand your workouts and have that all come together.
Like, you know, like so many people are building in that space right now, but they’re only able to serve a super wealthy market in the next five years. I have to imagine like the price and cost of that is going to go down significantly. And just like personal branding five years ago, like stuff was like hard to do. Like you had these platforms, people, like everyone’s like, oh, I should do this now. And like, what are the easier ways to do it? But there was a market prior that paid a lot of money to do this.
And I think we’re seeing that right now in this longevity space, but no one scrapped it altogether. That’s actually where I think the opportunity is.
democratization of like longevity and the linking between all the parts because people are working on a lot of these parts in silos.
Federico Ramallo (42:24) Right, once we are able to connect them, it’s going to be a whole different world.
Bryan (42:30) Right, yeah, like I literally want one place to go. Here’s my blood. Okay, give me my food. Give me this workouts that I should be doing that are good for me. And, you know, let me set this to a baseline of like where I want to be with my health. Like, I think like that’s a cool world that’s being built, or like their planets are being built. The world hasn’t been like, the atmosphere isn’t fully there yet. You know, like there’s, there’s a lot. What else?
I don’t know. you ask me, I don’t know. How would you answer that one?
Federico Ramallo (42:55) So.
you
I think that, do you remember the calculators? The calculators used to have these sliding bars to do the calculations before the electronic calculators were invented, right? the people would develop the skills of calculating with these sliding rulers, right? So.
Eventually, the calculators became so fast that the input became the issue. You get a calculator on your phone and you type something. Now, what is a bottleneck on the input and the output, on the screen and the typing? Typing on the phone sucks compared to a computer. So I think that…
being able to increase that bandwidth is going to be an amazing thing, right? Because then we will be able to interact with agents through a mind-computer interface that is going to be much faster than whatever our fingers can do, right?
Bryan (44:09) Yeah, it’s gonna be a big world. You’re gonna be building in it.
Federico Ramallo (44:15) Yes, yes. mean, my concern with that is getting ads on our dreams, right?
Bryan (44:20) I I don’t know if I’d even have a concern with that. Wouldn’t that be good? Like if I had something that read my dreams and it fed me ads to help me have the life I want, like it’s like dream acceleration. It’d be great.
Federico Ramallo (44:31) I don’t know, I have mixed feelings about that. But I understand, yeah. mean, there are benefits of having targeted ads, but also the knowledge that the algorithms know so much about us. It’s kind of concerning for me, right? On the privacy side, right? Yeah.
Bryan (44:37) Sure, yeah, it’s cool.
Yeah. Yeah, I get it.
Federico Ramallo (44:57) So we’re running out of time, but I think it’s amazing what you’re doing, and I’m looking forward to see what you’re taking in next. Any final remarks before we wrap it up?
Bryan (45:08) No, just let me know next time you’re in San Francisco with your family and you know, hang out and I appreciate the opportunity to talk. You’ve actually helped me verbalize things I’ve never even thought about. So great conversation