99 — Innovating at the Edge: A Visionary Leap into Tomorrow with Kyle Nel

Lenny: 00:00:00

Hello, everybody. It’s Lenny Murphy with another edition of the Greenbook Podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to spend it with myself and my guest. And I always have a guest because I don’t think you really want to just listen to me bloviating for 30 or 45 minutes. And today, a guy that man, five, six years ago, you were the center of everything, and then you went off and did all types of weird, cool stuff, and we’re going to catch up on what that weird cool stuff is. So, Kyle Nel, welcome to the Greenbook Podcast.

Kyle: 00:00:43

Thanks, Lenny. Yeah, super excited to be here.

Lenny: 00:00:46

Well, good. And—

Kyle: 00:00:47

[laugh].

Lenny: 00:00:47

—now, catch us up. Because I just gave kind of this amorphous, “All right, who’s this guy? What kind of weird, cool stuff they’ve been doing?” So, tell us about the weird, cool stuff.

Kyle: 00:00:56

Yeah, I don’t even know where to end up. Probably last time, maybe, I was on the radar was, I was running Innovation at Lowe’s home improvement in the US. And then running Innovation and started the Lowe’s Innovation Labs. We built all kinds of fun and awesome stuff. We were early in VR/AR, mixed reality showrooms and stores, and they’re still killing it over there. They’re doing great stuff. Built that team up all over the world; it was really great. We put 3D printers in space. So, we did all kinds of stuff, built exosuits, we built all kinds of things. And basically, the idea was, could big, traditional organizations do big, important things? And are those things not just to do them, but they’re based on consumer behavior? If we could build anything that would solve real problems, like in a—not it, like, in a hokey way, but, like, in a real way, what could you do? If you weren’t constrained by, this is what my company does or doesn’t do, what could you do? And we proved it out. We built a lot of stuff that had a lot of value, and still continues to this day. So left, about five or six years ago, started a company that did both the consulting of these ideas that I had come up with, some things which I’m sure we’ll talk about called Strategic Narrative and others, wrote a Harvard Press book, and then left. And then we started a little company that did neuroadaptive virtual reality and consulting that was quickly acquired by Singularity University. And I was, then kind of went through all these different phases, built that neuroadaptive virtual reality company up, and then sold that to a much bigger VR training company called Talespin, and then left Singularity about, gosh, three or four months ago. So yeah, it’s been great. But now what I’m doing is, I’m going back to my roots, which is just building stuff, and then helping companies. We just got back from a month in Europe doing some really cool work around the future of energy, using a lot of the same things. And then, yeah, just working with big companies and governments, and then also building my own stuff a lot in the AI space, spectrometry—anyways, all kinds of different things. But it all comes back to what could we build if we weren’t constrained by how we think about it?

Lenny: 00:02:55

That is very, very cool. So, congratulations on the launch of the new company, the new consulting. Now, what you didn’t mention, though, is that all of that was you started in market research.

Kyle: 00:03:07

Oh, yeah.

Lenny: 00:03:08

You went to—

Kyle: 00:03:10

Wisconsin, yeah.

Lenny: 00:03:10

Wisconsin, the Nielsen program?

Kyle: 00:03:11

Yep.

Lenny: 00:03:12

Yep. So, tell us about that journey. Because I’ve always just found it fascinating that you went from, you know, research, and then focused on innovation, and funneled this, really, kind of entrepreneurial—or maybe intrapreneurial; maybe that’s a better way to even think about your journey—in creating really cool stuff. So, talk about that.

Kyle: 00:03:31

Yeah, thanks. Yeah. So, I—my dad was in advertising. He was a creative, and so his best friend was a brand planner. And so, I knew about what agencies called market research back in the ’90s as brand planning, and I thought it was super cool. And I read some of those early, early books about brand planning. I thought it was really interesting to be able to, like, interconnect with how consumers and people actually live, and then reverse back into the advertising part, and then even extracting at one level up, like, building stuff that they actually, or making things actually care about. So, we did the—my wife and I did the whole thing. We went and worked in an NGO in Costa Rica, and we’re going to change the world. And what I realized is that pretty much every problem was created by humans, and pretty much every problem was also solved by humans. Not bad people, good people; they were just trying to do their thing, but the systems got in the way. So, my young mind was like, “Well, if I can understand and unlock the ways that people make decisions, and how individuals come together in groups to make decisions, then we can unlock the power of the world and get these big, traditional organizations to do amazing things, and we can have this world that we want.” And so, I went to Wisconsin, which was an amazing place—loved it, loved it, loved it; so much I can say about that—and then wormed my way into working at Walmart. Because in my mind, Walmart was the biggest, gnarliest corporation ever. And I couldn’t think of anything more antithetical to my hippie-dippie, save-the-planet roots in Costa Rica than working at Walmart—you would not believe the emails I got from friends—to really try out some of these ideas. And it was wonderful. I learned a ton at Walmart. Walmart was a great place. And then I got recruited to Lowe’s, where I started out running something that’s uniquely American called international marketing research, which is, like, you take the United States, and then everything outside of the US is an amorphous international zone. And so, I was brought in to kind of find out why our markets in Canada and Mexico weren’t going very well. And I speak Spanish, obviously, and we went through all this stuff, and it was just great. But as time went on, my reasoning for getting into research was because I wanted to understand to act, and not just understand to understand. There’s a beauty in understanding to understand, but I wanted to take action. And so, it naturally led to not just coming up with insights and sharing insights, but really saying, “Okay, well here, we can do this, this, and this.” And, “We should do this, this, and this.” And very quickly, they started—I don’t know why—they started letting me do those things. And I started to do them, and then I started to run with it, and I started to build it, and then we started to make it happen. And then they let me run the labs, and then create the labs, and then do all these things. And then I realized that the connection between understanding the consumer side to doing it is very small. It’s not a big chasm if you don’t look at it that way. And so, that’s what I’ve been working on for a long time. And then I had attempted to get a PhD in neuroscience, which is another story, and then the guy that was going to be my PhD advisor, who is this wonderful man named Thomas Ramsøy—we’re dear friends—I ended up convincing him to quit his tenured teaching position and start a company called Neurons Inc, which is doing very, very well—I’m on the board of it now—and where we automate all kinds of neuroresearch. So, all of it, again, is all tied to, like, okay, great. We can do all of this neuroscience research, but what are we going to use that knowledge for? Like, how is that going to benefit people, and planets, and pocketbooks? Which are not bad. That’s important. How do we do all those things together? And that’s what I’ve been doing. And I—doing the same thing. We were just talking before we started about farming. We live on a little bit of a 20 acres here in Texas and have a little ranch. It’s applying the exact same principles: like, how do you learn, in order to apply, in order to grow things, and then share that with other people? It’s literally the same thing. It’s just applying it in different ways. So, a much longer part of it than you probably wanted to hear, but it’s really just applying the same tools. And I would just say, just if I could wax philosophical, when I research folks, I don’t feel [like 00:07:30] realize the power that they have, they’re sitting on. They don’t really understand how much knowledge and insight that really is actionable because they aren’t connecting it. And if they understood a little bit more of what they can do, and how they connect it to making a positive change, I think it would change how they feel about what they do and what they could do. So, it’s just a really wonderful thing to be involved with is marketing research and research in general.

Lenny: 00:07:54

I could not agree more, and I’ve missed your enthusiasm, my friend. Yeah, I look back at even my own career, and yeah, I think like you, I’m an entrepreneur; I like to make stuff, right? And I’ve chosen to focus on doing that in the market research world. And that gives me a lens of even thinking about the projects that I’ve been engaged on. As a supplier, we were helping to—someone else make things that were really impactful in some cases. I mean, we did really early work with Alcatel-Lucent on—yeah, this was 2006, 2007—on what became 3G and 4G, right, utterly transformative technologies. It’s been a great way to channel imagination and inspiration in so many ways. So, I’m right there with you. Although I had not thought about the farm life, as far as, you know, the similarities. As soon as you said it was like, “Hm, yeah, that’s right.” So, maybe we need to start some type of research training clinic on our farms, Kyle.

Kyle: 00:09:01

Let’s do it.

Lenny: 00:09:01

So—

Kyle: 00:09:01

Let’s do it.

Lenny: 00:09:01

Maybe that’s it [laugh].

Kyle: 00:09:03

It’s the same things. It’s—

Lenny: 00:09:04

See? Creating.

Kyle: 00:09:05

—it’s planting, it’s understanding things, it’s creating markets. It’s all—it’s everything.

Lenny: 00:09:10

Yeah [laugh]. Well, we won’t bore our guests by going too far down that path, but—

Kyle: 00:09:15

No. That’s another podcast. Another podcast.

Lenny: 00:09:16

Yes. Or at the very least, another conversation.

Kyle: 00:09:18

[laugh].

Lenny: 00:09:19

And yes, Thomas is a great guy. Love—

Kyle: 00:09:21

Great guy.

Lenny: 00:09:22

Love Thomas, and the work they’ve done at Neurons. Talk about Singularity University as much as you can. Outside perspective is, ooh, that’s, like, the really cool think tank, you know? That’s where Kurzweil and all these guys are. It’s where they come up with really weird stuff.

Kyle: 00:09:38

Yeah.

Lenny: 00:09:38

And I know you also had training programs—

Kyle: 00:09:40

Yes.

Lenny: 00:09:40

—as well. So, kind of tell us about that experience of working in that environment.

Kyle: 00:09:45

Yeah, it was awesome. I met the Singularity folks, and Peter primarily, but then also Ray and then the other folks that are around—so Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil started Singularity University based on this book that Ray Kurzweil wrote called The Singularity is Near. The idea being that people that we’re working on the far ends—like, not on the crazy ends, but on the forefront of their field—were not getting together to talk. And this was, you know, over a decade ago, so, like, the buddings of AI, and genetic research, and all of these things, no one wo—there was not a convenient place for all of these different disciplines to get together. There just wasn’t. And so, the idea being that these folks, not only should, but they had to get together because we needed to understand what was going to happen, and then help each other get to a place that wasn’t dystopian, but more of a utopian world. And then also, at the same time, bring in governments, heads of state, and ministers, and then also to executives, that were actually going to use this stuff, and bring everyone together so that we can learn these things. And so, I attended one of these early programs when I was at Lowe’s, and I just thought, “Oh, my goodness, these are my people. Like, this is exactly what I was looking for.” This was really early days. We were living in Atlanta at the time, and I called my wife after the award, and I’m like, “Honey, I think we’re moving to California.” Which is, like, completely outside of the realm of what I ever thought I would do. And then I also convinced my boss, who was the CIO at Lowe’s at the time, that we should set up a little lab at Singularity University, which is at NASA Ames, to set up shop there, which we did. And it was just a wonderful place to, kind of, be at the epicenter of all the things that were going on. And that’s really what it was. It was the beginnings of everything. And what was so cool it was we weren’t just talking about it; it was surrounded by these people that were building it. And so, the partnership was Made in Space, where we put a 3D printer in space, and all these other things came about because, literally, I was bumping into people at NASA, at Ames, that were doing these kinds of things. It was just, like, a magical, magical time. And so, what SU does very well is teach people what’s going on, so the things that people think are in the future, much of which has already been going on for five years, ten years. It’s like ChatGPT. Like, no one that was working in anything even resembling AI was shocked when OpenAI opened up. It was just really good marketing, that everyone got to try it, right? And in much the same way, there’s many more crazy things that are out there, if people only knew that was a thing they could—what would they do differently? And so, that’s the mission of SU, and SU does a really, really good job of that. And when they acquired us, the goal was to bring in this capability around strategic narrative, which is how do you create real stories that effect change, which is what the book is about, and then what I’ve been teaching other places like at INSEAD and other places, but then also, too, like, the next step then, which SU hadn’t done, which is to actually build stuff. And so, SU had been good at convening people who build stuff, but to actually build stuff ourselves. And so, that was the buddings of Singularity Labs, which is what I was the president of for a long time, where we actually built stuff. And so, this neuroadaptive virtual reality learning, which we eventually sold to Talespin was a part of that. So, yeah. SU, really great place. Still check them out, blow your mind, spend a week out in California, you’ll be different in a good way. But I’m definitely like you, Lenny, I’m a builder. I just I can’t help myself, you know? Writers write; builders build. Like, I can’t, I just have to… be constantly building things, and that’s the mode I’m in now, which has just been so wonderful. SU was a great time where—gosh, I was there for what, six years? Still friends that are wonderful. I’m actually going back to speak at a Peter Diamandis conference, where I’m going to give the “Intro to Exponentials” talk in two weeks. But just so nice to be back in the saddle of, like, anything is possible, and I can build whatever I want. And it’s just a really—it’s just really, really, really fun to be doing that again.

Lenny: 00:13:35

That’s very cool and very inspiring. So, you’re back into the world of being a solo entrepreneur, right, and driving things—

Kyle: 00:13:45

Not solo.

Lenny: 00:13:45

Not solo.

Kyle: 00:13:46

There’s a larger team, yeah.

Lenny: 00:13:47

Okay. Okay.

Kyle: 00:13:48

Yeah. Not solo. It wasn’t even solo for even, like, a week. But yeah, we’re—I can only do so much. I’m kind of a hack. I can do a lot of things terribly, but having some people that can do a couple of things really well is very important.

Lenny: 00:14:02

Okay. So, what are you working on now? So, what are you going to build, now, my friend? What have you set all that energy on?

Kyle: 00:14:10

Yeah, there’s a couple of things. That really big thing, I can’t talk about because I’m literally contractually not allowed to talk about it. It’s very exciting [laugh] is all I can say. The things that I’m building that are fun on the side, which are also big, is automating things that aren’t automatable right now, specifically focused around market research, and also to automating that whole front end. So, a lot of the things that happen right now that seem really hard, you have to have huge teams of people. If you’re not Wrigley or Mars, or if you’re not Nestle, or if you’re not P&G, you don’t really have the manpower or the know-how in order to create segmentations and do all these things. My mom has a gourmet cookie company. She has 50 employees. She’s in Atlanta. They’re doing great, but she doesn’t have a huge marketing department to be able to do those kinds of things. But yet, even now you need those kinds of things. So, how could you automate that and use real practical artificial intelligence to do that? And so, that’s launching in the next two weeks, where it goes end-to-end, you just input your website, and the things you’re doing, and then it goes everywhere from creating segmentation during different strategies, and explaining what those things are, and then it goes and creates an SEM and an SEO strategy and tells you what those keywords are, finds out who your competitors are, then it goes and creates the ads for you that would go on TikTok, and on Facebook, and on Instagram. It even places those ads for you. And then it has a dynamic pricing feature where it sets what your competitors are, and it will dynamically change the pricing based on the parameters that you set. So, you basically have an end-to-end market research marketing solution across the board that runs as a SaaS. And the reason for doing that, again, is to get more [access 00:15:46] and more companies. Because the world is run by small to medium-sized companies, and the more we can get access, we can level the playing field so that the best stuff rises to the top. And there are some really cool things out there that I think, if they got access to what we do, and understood what we did a little bit more, they could have had the more of an impact. And that’s the goal there. So yeah, that’s coming out pretty soon. Super excited about that. And yeah, it could be a really, really fun thing.

Lenny: 00:16:13

That’s—been waiting to see something like that. So, we’ve seen, obviously, a lot of growth on the marketing side. Which, check out sparky.ai. It’s a buddy of mine out of Atlanta, Ted Tagalakis, so shout out to Ted. Similar from a marketing perspective, right? Automating a lot of the marketing production piece. And we’ve seen a lot of the automation on data collection and research, we’re seeing more of that now that’s AI-driven, especially more qualitative in nature, of course, the work that the Thomas does with the visual intensity, and all of that. But we’ve yet to see something that really connects that in an end-to-end solution. So, I’m all for it if that’s where you’re going. It’s time.

Kyle: 00:17:00

That’s what it’ll do. Give me two weeks. It’ll be done.

Lenny: 00:17:03

[laugh] And that’s an amazing thing, too, right, is the—I actually was just talking to somebody about that earlier this morning of, look, a year ago, you would have had to allocate a million dollars and 50 people—

Kyle: 00:17:14

Minimum.

Lenny: 00:17:14

To be able to build something—yes. We’re talking, you know, two weeks, five people at max and—

Kyle: 00:17:22

Max.

Lenny: 00:17:22

—yeah, let’s call it $20,000, right, to get an MVP in place for virtually any type of product. So, I would challenge all of our listeners as well to think about that, right? If you have this creative spark, and I think is—Kyle, you would probably back me up on this—you have this idea, and you think, “Can I do this?” The production component of that, the nuts and bolts heavy lift of taking something from concept to an executable product is far, far, far easier now than it’s ever been in history, though. Would you agree?

Kyle: 00:18:00

Amen. Amen. There is literally no barrier to executing on any idea now other than your attention span and ability to focus. Like, literally, you don’t even need 20 grand. You can learn all these skills yourself. And a lot of things you can build, like, using no-code base stuff, or—and GitHub, if you need a little extra oomph to fix things in a technical space. Like, literally, you can build whatever you want. Like if people aren’t using Bubble at work right now, no matter where you’re working, then I don’t know what you’re doing. Because you can, like, build proof-of-concepts of things in real time. It only takes a matter of hours to throw it together, and to show that the thing works. I mean, there’s all—you know, all of this stuff about creating really rough prototypes and getting it out to people. You can create really good prototypes and get it out to people in a weekend. We’re in an amazing place. An amazing place. And everyone that I talked to—not everyone, but a lot of companies are just still in the let’s, like, kind of wait and see what’s going on. There’s no more waiting and seeing. You got to go jump in with both feet, in my view, because that everyone else on the outside that isn’t a big company is going in with both feet, and they’re going to win, just because they’re going for it. So yeah, I agree. Just jump. In learn. Jump in.

Lenny: 00:19:15

Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. I was meeting with a client earlier this week, and have a couple hours about their strategy, and it’s like, look, you… your peers are in the market research industry. Many of them are waiting to see, or only dipping their toe in the water with the easy stuff when it comes to AI, right, the back end automation and reporting. And all of that is—that’s—it’s huge and fantastic, and it’s great, but there is this influx—of, and we’ve seen this before, and you see it in any category—of non-research companies looking and saying, “Wait, we could disrupt that.” And it may not be good yet, right? I saw an example, for instance, of a fully-automated qualitative at scale, with AI moderation. Now, the moderation was not good. It hadn’t been trained appropriately to moderate well, but that’s just a simple tech challenge to deal with that, right? It’s coming. And it did everything else really damn well. So anyway, we could go off on a whole tangent [crosstalk 00:20:21]—

Kyle: 00:20:21

I totally agree.

Lenny: 00:20:22

—my soapbox.

Kyle: 00:20:23

I totally agree.

Lenny: 00:20:24

Yeah. Just got to do it.

Kyle: 00:20:25

The—it used to be—in research, I would say, too, we’ve been trained, especially on the social science side, to be right, and be as good to that 95% confidence interval as possible. And I think the world has shifted to you got to be—it’s still got to be right, but I’d rather have 80% today, than 95% in six months or a year. And that’s a mindset shift. Like you’re saying, like, a lot of folks are using research tools, badly, but they’re using them. It’s like when Survey Monkey came out, and Qualtrics came out, and everyone was so upset that the marketing department was writing their own surveys, it’s happening at scale right now, in a much, much different ways.

Lenny: 00:21:03

And fast.

Kyle: 00:21:04

Fast.

Lenny: 00:21:06

So, I always think of you as a bit of a futurist. I mean, I know you, you like tech, you’ve been and early adopter—hell, not early adopter; you’ve been a maker. So, my perception is that the pace of change is accelerating, right? If we kind of look at Moore’s law, and what used to take years is now taking months, literally in many cases. So, do you agree, or is that just my old fogey—

Kyle: 00:21:32

A hundred—no, no, no—

Lenny: 00:21:32

—perception?

Kyle: 00:21:32

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent, I agree. It’s a logarithmic curve is accelerating, so it is going faster. So, there’s two parts of it. One is, you know, if anyone feels like change is happening really fast, it is, but this is the slowest speed of change you’ll experience in your life right now.

Lenny: 00:21:49

[laugh].

Kyle: 00:21:49

So, if you think it’s going crazy now, think about that. This is the good old days compared—think about it. This is like the quaint good old days. I mean, we’re headed for some stuff, good and bad, probably. The other side, there’s a beautiful side to it, too, which is not talked about a lot, but Peter and Ray talk about this thing, which I think is really wonderful called Accelerating Returns, too. So, what happens is because everything is accelerating, they’re all accelerating in different ways, right? So, AI is accelerating in this—all these things are accelerating. And what they do is they reinforce each other. So, they actually go even faster because an AI enables genetic research, and genetic research enables computer-vision research, and then they all self-reinforce, and they all go faster together. So, what that’s creating are some unanticipated, huge bumps in speed. So, both yes, we are accelerating, but it’s not going to be smooth. It’s going to be, like, these big, jarring bumps. In a good way, but also very jarring to businesses and to people. So again, it goes back to what you were saying before, Lenny. Like, just got to get—get, get in the game. Like, you got to put both feet in because you can’t wait for a white paper to come out to be able to use this stuff anymore because it’s just happening so fast because of—because it is. The innovation is changing quick, quicker than it ever has, and it’ll just continue and accelerating returns as well.

Lenny: 00:23:05

Now, that said—and I agree with you, and especially the comment of good and bad, right? I mean, chan—change… change is change, and there’s always the law of unintended consequences. There are—you know, we don’t live in the silo, there’s other systems impacted by all of this, and you know, transformation is just not an easy thing.

Kyle: 00:23:25

It is not.

Lenny: 00:23:26

There’s a reason why I live on a farm in Kentucky.

Kyle: 00:23:29

Kyle: [laugh]. [crosstalk 00:23:31].

Lenny: 00:23:30

You know? It’s a little bit of, like, just in case, you know? So, the—[laugh] but there’s also the adoption curve. So, there’s the change curve, and then there’s the adoption curve. And let’s talk about that for a minute, particularly your experience being on the brand side, you had a unique experience at Lowe’s, and that was always why we wanted you at IIEX, right? We [laugh], you know, put you up on stage, like, “Look, here’s the big brand doing really cool stuff, and they’re moving fast and breaking things.” But—

Kyle: 00:23:58

And making money. Yeah.

Lenny: 00:24:00

And making money. Absolutely. I mean, yes, it wasn’t just throwing stuff against the wall to see what stuck. It was, you know, targeted, and you were actually doing things that gave you competitive advantage. So, here’s my hypothesis—not even about my hypothesis; my what I believe to be true, and you tell me whether you agree on what we can do about it—in many large brands that can fund innovation, the process, even just going through procurement, to bring organizations in that can help do that, that change, that’s glacial. It can take months, and months, and months, and I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the largest brands in the world in my Gen2 hat, and even within Greenbook, I mean, my God, my first engagement with P&G, it took me a year to get my invoice paid [laugh], you know, literally. So, what’s—how do you resolve that tension between this, you know, rapid innovation in change, but yet systems that, from a buyer perspective, right, where the money really comes from to create this ecosystem and make it actually run, can be so slow and glacial?

Kyle: 00:25:10

Yeah. It is. It’s a huge, horrible, terrible problem that destroys everything. So, for me, I went back to my roots on the social science market research side, which is, if everything is a story, and the best way to convince someone to affect change—and this is demonstrable; we’ve proven it out by [unintelligible 00:25:30] all of the research that shows it—the best way to get someone to change their behavior is through telling a story. You can get someone to agree with you in the room; the best way to do that is through bullets, like, we’re taught in our MBA program, but the best way to change their behavior is through storytelling. And there’s a reason why all great leaders tell stories. They just do. Good leaders and bad leaders, but ones that affect change, tell stories. And so, understanding that, what I started to do—because I would have run into the same thing. It’s like, people thought, like, “Oh, Lowe’s is, like, this big, like, utopian, wonderful thing where, you know, everyone’s just always up for change.” No, it’s a hardware store. Like, th-, they—they did not—this is not known for change. Like, that’s just not how it was, right? You know, it’s like the whole thing: it took you a decade to become an overnight success. And so, for me, I what I did was I applied the same thing that I was going to do to find the problems, and then you get people to solve those problems, whether it be, like, artificial intelligence, or augmented reality, virtual reality, and I applied those to the people inside the company first. So, if you go back to, like, a Carl Jung, like, a Jungian persona, or archetypal strategy, if you use look at the people you have to convince inside your organization first in order to make a change, usually, it’s the legal department, it’s the procurement department, and we look at those people as being evil. They’re not evil. Their job is to keep us from burning the whole thing down.

Lenny: 00:26:47

Right. Right.

Kyle: 00:26:48

So, when we come in talking about change, and this and that, we set off alarms for them, rightfully so, and they’re trying to put us out, right? Let’s compartmentalize these folks. So, what do they do? They put a lot of guardrails around us. They put a lot of things around us. They put a—because we’re dangerous. So, if you flip the script, and you say, “Okay, well, the person that is the caretaker archetype there, their job is to keep the organization going so it can serve all of the people that work there, and all of the shareholders in the company.” That’s a beautiful thing. But us as the ones that are trying to affect change, we are trying to do this same thing, but through other means because what we’re seeing is that the barbarians on the other side of the river over there, and we have to get ready for what’s coming. And so, we’re we have the same goal, but the language is different. So, adjusting your language and telling a story about it’s risky not to take risk, and it’s risky for us not to do this because if we don’t do this thing that you love, and you’re caretaking will probably not exist anymore. And when I would do that and apply those same things, it was amazing how different the vibe was, and the behavior from those people that I looked at as my enemies. Like, the head of legal was initially, like, my—my legal counterpart, he and I used to butt heads. Jason Sherwood and I became best friends. Afterwards, I could go into his office, like, “Hey, man, so I’ve been playing with this idea of doing this autonomous robot that roams around the store. How would we make that happen?” And he would come up with this stuff. And guess what? When we would present to the executive team, he would present the legal portion, and I would just stand in the back. And guess what? They listened to their legal guy way more than they’d ever listened to me creating all of these new structures of how we would do these things that had never been done before. Like, how do you put a fully autonomous robot in a store, eight years ago? Like, no one had ever done that stuff before. So, we used the same principles that we use in order to get customers inside of our own companies. Imagine what we could do, and imagine how we could affect change. And the best manifestation of that is how many pages does your MSA have?

Lenny: 00:28:48

[laugh].

Kyle: 00:28:49

Right? When they throw—ours at Lowe’s was 52 pages, right? It was the same one we gave to IBM; it was the same one we gave to a startup. That will bankrupt a small firm. Bankrupt them. They’re done. And so, why would we do that? The risk is wildly different. Why are we going to put a $10 million insurance bounty on them? They’re like, two dudes in Saskatchewan. Why would we do that? So like, changing the parameters of what we do in order to be great to work with is really important. So, we went down from a 52-page to a two-page MSA. We changed all of the things based on that so that we would be the coolest and the best to work with. And then what that does is create an environment—because people talk—like, “Lowe’s is a great place to work with.” And then they bring their friends over. That would be my thing is, like, how long is your MSA? How many pages is your MSA? If it’s more than five pages for a startup, you’re not an easy company to work with. What are your payment terms? A quarterly payment schedule will destroy a startup that’s trying to desperately pay for their expenses. So, those kinds of things that people don’t think about because they don’t feel the pain of that when you work inside of an organization. They get paid every two weeks. When you’re running a—starting a company, you’re going inch by inch to try to make it work.

Lenny: 00:30:06

Yep. Great stuff. Great stuff, Kyle. All right, I want to be conscious of your time as well as time with the listeners, but there’s—I want to geek out a little bit with you before we do that, so coolest thing that you have been involved with over your career? The thing that you’re like, you know, what, if nothing else ever happens, that was just… I’m okay with that being my legacy. That was a cool thing that I was able to participate in.

Kyle: 00:30:35

That’s heavy. Hmm. Well, here’s one that we haven’t talked about yet. So, what comes to mind are the usual things that I loved and were wonderful, but I don’t know if I would say they were go—I’m really thinking about it—maybe not the coolest, like, more of, like, the what goes in your obituary kind of stuff. I—[yeah, storage 00:30:51] in space, all that stuff was amazing. Got to do zero-G flights at NASA, all that stuff was great. It was amazing, and I loved every second of it, building all those things. But right now, I’m volunteering for my alma mater, my undergrad Alma Mater, BYU, and BYU does, has this BYU Pathway Program, where they democratize high-level education to everyone. So, if you live in Sierra Leone, you pay $1 a credit-hour to go to BYU remotely. And what a number of us have been asked to do, and these are, like, serious private equity, and incredible people, and AI experts, all—I mean, just amazing people, to come together to create jobs for people. You know, if you live in—again, you go back to, like, you live in South Sudan, you can’t just walk down the street and go to KPMG to get the job. It’s, you can be the best; it’s just you’re in different circumstances. So, how do we create jobs? And I would say, putting my dark skills to use in order to benefit people that will never know I existed, and with other people that could be doing anything else with their time has been—and again, with no credit—has been so incredibly powerful and uplifting. I can’t even tell you how cool that is to be able to apply artificial intelligence, and machine learning, and all these other things into creating systems that benefit people all over the world. It has been really, really cool. And I think that, of all the things I’ve worked on, and am working on, yes, they’re really cool, and they make a lot of money, but that—like, that feels like something that I really have, really, truly loved. And there’s a lot of good uses for that stuff, too, where you can take the skills—your market research skills—and you can apply them to a nonprofit in your town, and you can have a major, demonstrable impact instantly. Because the stuff that you do, you’re taking for granted because you know how to do it. But to them, it’s like you just discovered plutonium by accident.

Lenny: 00:32:44

[laugh].

Kyle: 00:32:45

And there’s so much you can do with that. So, that would be my takeaway. The thing I’m most excited about, the thing I think is the coolest is really using these skills to benefit other things that you may not have thought, “Oh, that connects to that.”

Lenny: 00:32:59

That is very cool. Kyle. And that was a very Kyle answer, so—

Kyle: 00:33:03

[laugh] I don’t know what that means.

Lenny: 00:33:05

You did not disappoint. You just have this knack of—and you always have; it’s just part of your superpower—of combining the geeky with the altruistic, with kind of a higher imperative. And I mean that purely as a compliment. It’s one of—

Kyle: 00:33:25

Thanks, man. Thanks, Lenny.

Lenny: 00:33:25

—the things always appreciated about you. All right, so here’s the, kind of, the ending question. What have we not talked about that you wanted to talk about? So, take it.

Kyle: 00:33:36

So, I think the biggest thing is what we didn’t talk about was, what do I do today? So, if I’m listening to this podcast right now, and I’m working at X Company—which is probably most folks—or working at an agency, like, what can I do today other than just thinking, “Oh, yeah, there’s some guy talking about how he did AI. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right, which is usually how these things go. But I don’t know what is the next step?” And so, the next step is literally as simple as what is the strategic narrative of the place that I work at, and asking the person next to you, what is the narrative—like, what are we—what is the story of this place and where we’re going? And if the consensus is different, there’s no story. There is no strategic narrative. And that is probably why things aren’t working the way you wish they would, it’s because you’re on different pages. And then you can just start from there, and if you can create or try to instigate the creation of a strategic narrative. And there’s a way to do it, and you can… happy to share more about that, but if you can have that, you can do, like, literally anything. The only thing that, like, a startup company has versus a large company has is their ability to think differently about the world in which they live in, and organize around it. That’s literally it. And so, if you could just do that one thing, you’d be amazed at the power that unlocks. And guess what? You might discover that where you’re working is not a place you want to work at, which is also cool, too. And then to move on to a place where you do want to work at. So, that’s what I would do. It’s, what do I do today?

Lenny: 00:35:07

Very cool and sage advice. Now, I assume that part of your new gig is helping folks understand what that narrative is, and incubating things yourself—

Kyle: 00:35:21

Mm-hm.

Lenny: 00:35:22

And seeing where that goes. So, that will be fun and exciting. Since your product you’re about to launch is a resource-central product, are we going to see you back in—you going to come to IIEX in Austin? We going to see you—

Kyle: 00:35:35

Yes, if you’ll have me. I would love it.

Lenny: 00:35:38

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Kyle: 00:35:39

I would love it.

Lenny: 00:35:40

Yeah. We need you to be rubbing elbows with the industry again, my friend. So.

Kyle: 00:35:45

I would absolutely love it. I would absolutely love it. I know my team at Neurons, too, is all about it as well. So we—yeah, it would be great. Sign me up. That’d be so fun.

Lenny: 00:35:55

We’ll figure that out. We’ll figure that out. All right. Where can people find you?

Kyle: 00:36:00

LinkedIn, for right now. I’ll have some websites up with the new tool that I’m talking about here in the next couple of weeks, but just reach out to me on LinkedIn, or X. I’m getting better at saying X now, instead of Twitter, but yeah, that’s probably the best way.

Lenny: 00:36:13

Yeah, it’s still Twitter. I can’t say X. It’s—[laugh]. Although I am more active on that platform now than I have been in many, many years. It’s kind of fun again right now.

Kyle: 00:36:24

It’s changed.

Lenny: 00:36:25

Yeah. Yeah, Wild West, but I like—that’s my aspect of fun. I liked the early days where, you know, and it’s kind of fun to have that again. Anyway. Oh, did you ever meet Elon in your time out in Silicon Valley?

Kyle: 00:36:39

I haven’t, no.

Lenny: 00:36:39

No?

Kyle: 00:36:40

Mm-mm.

Lenny: 00:36:41

All right. So, he was not—he wasn’t coming to Singularity University and in regaling everybody—

Kyle: 00:36:45

He did early on.

Lenny: 00:36:46

—with his Elon-ness?

Kyle: 00:36:47

Yes. Yes. I would say Elon-adjacent.

Lenny: 00:36:54

[laugh]. All right. Well, isn’t everything Elon adjacent nowadays?

Kyle: 00:36:57

Well, especially Peter Diamandis and XPRIZE because he’s funded a series of prizes on the carbon space and other things. So yeah, so we’ve been around… lots of cool things.

Lenny: 00:37:09

All right. Well, we were wrapping up, and then I just went off on a tangent. And we’ll go [crosstalk 00:37:13]—

Kyle: 00:37:13

[laugh].

Lenny: 00:37:13

—it up. So, Kyle, really, thank you so much for catching us up. Congratulations on all the success, and we look forward to having you back in the fold, so to speak. Although I know you’re going to be doing all types of other stuff that has nothing to do with research. But this has been great. Thank you so much. Any final thoughts?

Kyle: 00:37:33

No. Thanks so much, Lenny. You’re the best. I really appreciate it.

Lenny: 00:37:37

Well, see, guests, you heard that. You heard Kyle just say, I’m the best. I’ll take it, man. I’ll take it.

Kyle: 00:37:43

[laugh] It’s true. He is.

Lenny: 00:37:44

[laugh]. I don’t know about all that, but it’s a nice [crosstalk 00:37:47]—

Kyle: 00:37:48

It’s true.

Lenny: 00:37:48

—so far today. Okay. You know who’s really the best? Our listeners. Thank you. And our producer, Natalie, our editor, Big Bad Audio, our sponsors, because without you, Kyle and I would not have had an excuse just to catch up, so we really appreciate that. Hopefully you found some value in that conversation as well. And that’s it for this edition of the Greenbook Podcast. Take care. Bye-bye.