Tonya J. Long: 0:03

Welcome, friends. I'm Tonya Long and this is RESET. Each week, we share conversations with thought leaders, innovators and the dreamers and doers who are reshaping the future of work, technology, longevity and purpose. So settle in and let's explore what happens when purpose meets possibility. Welcome to RESET where purpose meets possibility.

Tonya J. Long: 0:29

We are here, live in the studio, in gorgeous, sunny, beautiful blue sky, los Gatos, and this is not a recording, although I say that every show because it is just so beautiful. Here I am here today with a friend, Jim Recker, who is part of my Change the World technology network that I think you're all familiar with. Jim has a couple of decades of sales experience and that's why I'm so fascinated with Jim, because I've always been an operator and Jim is a classic sales leader. But if you can see Jim, if you watch the, the podcast later, you'll see Jim's not a young founder. Jim is like I said. He had a couple of decades at least with companies like WebEx, blue jeans.

Tonya J. Long: 1:13

You were one of my competitors at one point when I was at Avaya, as the video craze was coming through, and but now Jim is. I think it's interesting. He's at a place in his life where most people are running toward retirement and instead Jim's founded a new company. He's a CEO for the first time, I believe and is building some of the newest technology with agentic agents handling product go-to-market. So I think it's fascinating that here, when a lot of people are thinking about rocking chairs and more camping, Jim looking at how to build a whole new ecosystem in the world of how we go to market digitally and autonomously using AI agents. So, Jim, welcome, it is so good to have you here.

Jim Recker: 2:01

It's so great to be here. I'm so excited to be here. It's been something that I've been thinking about for the last couple of weeks, especially since we got postponed last week, but the one thing that I actually find most exciting is that we are together. And yes, to put things in perspective, and for those who can see me, I'm old enough to say that I saw Led Zeppelin live on stage.

Tonya J. Long: 2:20

That's a great way to categorize your age. At least it wasn't the Grateful Dead, though I suspect you might have seen a couple of those shows as well.

Jim Recker: 2:26

I used to tour actually with the Grateful Dead, so it's a whole other story.

Tonya J. Long: 2:29

We could talk about that and I think the audience would be much more interested in the Grateful Dead stories than the AI agentic stories. Do you want to start with one Grateful Dead story?

Jim Recker: 2:39

I got I'll call it suckered into it because I put together a video reel for a friend of mine who was directing the video for the Grateful Dead and they saw the video. They hired my friend. They said, well, who edited the video? And Jim did so. Okay, well, Jim should come on tour with us. So I went on tour with them for a couple of years and I was supposed to do a show in September of 95. And I got to work. I was working for a small startup and the front desk said oh, I'm so sorry about Jerry, I'm going. What do you mean? Well, you heard he passed right Like no. And I just got called up last night to work, shoreline. Unfortunately, Jerry had passed and that was the end of my tour with the Grateful Dead.

Tonya J. Long: 3:19

Yeah, wow, but that's a good story. So I have a lightning round that I've started doing. It's a lot of fun at the end. But I think I have a really good lightning-style question right now. If you could do that again and tour with anyone who's a current-living performing artist now, who would you want to go out on the road with?

Jim Recker: 3:39

Nobody that actually pops to mind, and I don't think I would want to go on the road. It's a hard job.

Tonya J. Long: 3:44

Well, yeah, we've been traveling executives with companies, so everyone thinks travel is so sexy and really travel is a slog.

Jim Recker: 3:53

It's hard on your body your family. A lot of work and no sleep, so it's something I wouldn't do.

Tonya J. Long: 4:00

I'll think about one, maybe by the end of the show you might have somebody pop into your mind. I don't see a lot of shows, but I tend to see the really big ones, and I live right across from SAP and that's a major concert venue in the Bay Area, and so I pick up StubHub tickets like 45 minutes before the show's supposed to start. And the last show I deeply enjoyed was the Queen touring act with Adam Lambert and we were sitting at the pool, it was somebody's birthday and what an amazing performance by Adam Lambert and by most of the original members of the Queen band and it was magical to watch them perform. And so that's some music back from the time periods that you're talking about.

Jim Recker: 4:43

I'll go to a show, but I'm not going to work them anymore. But you're not going to work them anymore.

Tonya J. Long: 4:46

You're just going to enjoy.

Jim Recker: 4:48

Exactly, I love it.

Tonya J. Long: 4:49

Well, speaking of work this whole, I'm not in a public conversation these days without a genetic AI coming up. I was at an industry panel last night about M&A and AI and what struck me is how, even though we're in the Bay Area and we're in a bubble we're in a bubble where everybody seems to talk tech at some level because they're either in tech or adjacent there is still a big difference in what people know and what they think they know and where they operate in conversations. So what has been?

Tonya J. Long: 5:26

you're moving into agentic AI which is the super fast F1 race car right now on the AI front, but I'm still surprised at how many people don't understand agentic AI and don't know quite how to frame it in our technological journey.

Jim Recker: 5:41

Yep. So it's quite simple. I tell people I'd love for you to share. No, it's very simple, quite frankly. Gender of AI, which has been around for a good number of years so far, is reactive, so you have to create a prompt. That's the concept behind gender of AI, yep, and where the challenge is with most people is they don't know how to put together a prompt. I've actually been hired to teach people how to do prompts. I've actually been hired by large corporations to help them adopt AI, chatgpt, claude, whatever it doesn't matter, they're all the same. Well, they're not all the same, that's another story. But the prompting is the challenge for most people and there are some companies that are still just starting up. I went to I won't say which vendor it was, but it's one of the largest companies here in the Bay Area and they had an accelerator event and people flew in from Los Angeles and I was shocked, just because they wanted to learn how to prompt.

Tonya J. Long: 6:35

But that's generative AI.

Jim Recker: 6:37

Now agentic AI. On the other hand, that's proactive and it's autonomous, and the best way to describe it is imagine creating what I'll call robots and you set them off on tasks and they know how to do their tasks and they don't require any rest Perfect for setting up concerts, by the way. But that is the primary difference proactive versus reactive and the proactive stuff has me fascinated because it's still at its infancy and, yes, not many people know about it Certainly people outside the Silicon Valley, but it will be taking over our lives and, in my opinion, I think this will be a revolution larger than the. I'll call it the industrial revolution in the 1800s.

Tonya J. Long: 7:24

So and this is a lot of this is I think it's influenced by the discussions I was in last night. I do think it's revolutionary. I agree, help people understand. We we technologists and futurists are still talking too conceptually and I think that's why people are having trouble grasping what it really means for them. So what are a couple of ways agentic AI works that people can go oh, I get that flow, that's agentic. What are just a couple of easy for the audience, because we have a really broad list.

Jim Recker: 7:58

I'll do a simple one, because I actually built a couple of agents a couple of months ago, so I had to learn myself what agents were all about, and I wanted to understand what made an agent. So the agent I built out ended up on a webpage is the best way of putting it. It was just online and it didn't do very much, but you could say what time is it and what's the weather, and so its task was to tell you the time and tell you the weather. That's all it was doing. Now, that's just a chatbot. It's not a chatbot in the sense that I could add more features to it, to create tone, to create personality, to create a number of different things that would be uniquely task related, and so, if you think about it, a lot of the things that we do on our daily basis are task orientated. Oh, 100%.

Jim Recker: 8:54

And so if you have an agent that can do those tasks for you, your productivity will skyrocket. And this is why the talk around the Silicon Valley and around the world already is that these agents, how would they impact the workforce? Because it's just a task Now.

Jim Recker: 9:13

Bots are reactive because you're essentially asking them something that they've been trained to respond to. But agents can go out and go beyond that because they can do research on their own. And so, for instance, if it's not programmed to do that, you can program an agent to actually research for you. And the way I'm using it the go-to-market cycles that I'm building is that you will go out, for instance, if you needed to do some market intelligence, you'll go out and do that for you. That's not reactive, it's proactive and it's doing it autonomously as well.

Tonya J. Long: 9:52

There's a founder here in the Bay Area and she has a company that she's famously here turned over her responsibilities as CEO to the agents that they've built.

Jim Recker: 10:02

Yes, are you familiar with her? I'm not, but I'm not surprised.

Tonya J. Long: 10:06

She does a brilliant job. It's clear to me that it is not 100% autonomously being this. We still require certain things like the human showing up at a bank to sign a signature card. Things like that are the constructs of our society, where the human still has to be in the loop. I think what she has done is she has marvelously identified all those task level things.

Tonya J. Long: 10:29

She repeatedly does, and often, as executives, we recall we can have things that are in our mental model of the things we need to do weekly, daily, weekly monthly but other priorities come in and scoot those to the side.

Tonya J. Long: 10:44

And we're getting them done on planes or at six in the morning before the meeting. So to take these repeatable tasks that a CEO does the analysis, the check-ins and to automate those things because they are repeated, they do happen day in weekend, on a regular basis I think it was brilliant for her to do that and then publicly declare I have turned the company's, the running of the company, the CEO role, over to our agent and I think it's just, it's messaging what's coming.

Jim Recker: 11:19

Correct. There will be humans involved when there's human interaction. That's required. You mentioned SAP, and at SAP is the San Jose Sharks, and I don't think it's public knowledge yet, but there will be fewer and fewer account execs working for the San Jose Sharks because they're not really necessary. I'm not going to say necessarily the San Jose Sharks, but a whole bunch of areas that do sales, for I'll call it the standard exchange, the standard purchase. Even now, fewer and fewer account executives out there. Now, if you need to be somebody who's doing group sales, for instance, that's a different matter, because then you're working on a personal relationship, working with a group of people, and in those scenarios you'll still see humans. However, 10 years down the road, I can easily see agents taking over.

Tonya J. Long: 12:08

Yeah, how far did you say?

Jim Recker: 12:10

Well, I'll see, even five years down the road.

Tonya J. Long: 12:12

You do or don't, I do Good, I do absolutely Last night's panel was talking in frameworks of 10 to 20 years and I was just trying to be polite and respectful but I was like, oh no, 10 to 20 years. I think we won't recognize our business processes because so much will be under the hood.

Jim Recker: 12:29

I agree, and I will also add to that. Already I was reading an article last night about somebody, about a group of people actually, that were programming agents to make their prompts better, and so they were getting prompts. They were 10x more effective than the prompts they had started out with and I'm thinking to myself well, wait a second. Then they essentially were able to accelerate whatever they were working on indeed that's what they're doing. So the acceleration of what we do is going to be unrecognizable, I think within four or five years. I think part within four or five years.

Tonya J. Long: 13:05

And I think part of the credit for that goes to humans, not just building the technology but sharing how to use it. I'm in a few WhatsApp channels and many LinkedIn channels where people are openly sharing their super prompt level ideas. And there was one yesterday that was like oh, this is a McKenzie Bain killer because it was this fairly lengthy prompt but it was to create an entire portfolio analysis requiring agents right that go out and the agents. This is not anything special per se. This is like deep research functionality already built into your major LLMs.

Tonya J. Long: 13:46

That's correct, but just I did a copy paste of the prompt, just tucked in an industry vertical couple of I think I filled in like five fill in the blanks for what I wanted and then watched it work for 10, 15 minutes and it spit out a report.

Tonya J. Long: 14:03

That was analysis that McKinsey and Bain would typically charge large dollars and quite a bit of time and energy from the company they're working for and then expending that energy with their analysts to go dig up things, and I was like, wow, this is beautiful and it was instant. It also means that things that, as an executive, I wouldn't have paid for because they weren't in budget for me to get Bain to go do an analysis. Now I, as a leader, can say I want to look at this, and I can go make some coffee and come back to my desk and say, huh, yep, that is the right pivot or that's not. So I think it really is going to speed decision making for the people who learn to rely on these tools.

Jim Recker: 14:48

And then the question is are they still going to be needed to make those decisions, because an agent can make those decisions for them?

Tonya J. Long: 14:55

I think they'll be making different decisions.

Jim Recker: 14:57

Like the.

Tonya J. Long: 14:58

CEO that I mentioned that had turned over her duties. What I hope is that it turns CEOs into better leaders, because they're not second guessing we know what it is. They're not second guessing their teams and running all these shadow IT ops analysis. They are leading humans and machines. That's a different conversation, but they are spending and investing more time in the human connection. That is uniquely the capability they have to further the brand, to keep their employees that are human employees engaged and to be strategic about direction.

Jim Recker: 15:36

But you've nailed down something that I feel is terribly important. Being a CEO is that you have to have those emotional qualities as well, and emotions is something that I don't think agents will be able to take over for a good time to come. We'll see it in the science fiction movies. Emotion is something that is not at all part of an agent right now. They're cold and calculated, as I put it.

Tonya J. Long: 16:00

They're doing the work. Yes, that's right, but here's some work, if you will, in the industry, that we're finding Humans are responding better to digital inputs. Because it is unprovoked I don't have the word, but it's unprovoked. It's an assessment. It's simply these numbers were missed. It is clinical and people don't feel judged. So on the medical side, I'm a type 1 diabetic. I've talked about this before. I'm working with some companies where they're testing applications to give people almost real-time feedback. So you don't wait for your quarterly visit with your endocrinologist and people are really receiving the feedback well when it comes in through their phone, because it's not the human doctor judging them for eating the wrong thing for breakfast and not bolusing correctly. It's just a readout and it's like, yeah, I probably shouldn't have had that extra cantaloupe.

Jim Recker: 16:56

The two areas that I've seen that have had a huge impact chat-chippy tea being used by teenagers for therapy hugely popular, popular, yes, yes. And the other thing I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who does professional coaching. His business has gone down to nothing.

Tonya J. Long: 17:13

I think that's. I sought coaching on ChatGPT this week and it was terrible oh.

Jim Recker: 17:21

I imagine it was.

Tonya J. Long: 17:23

And I am a certified executive coach, so I might operate with a different set of expectations. But it jumped in and it consulted. It gave me the answers without asking me what I was trying to accomplish and I was preparing for a coaching session in an industry I had no familiarity with. So I was like, let me get a little help. And when I did, and then it came back and I was like, oh, this is terrible.

Jim Recker: 17:44

Then of course I was like let me get a little help. And when I did, and then it came back and I was like, oh, this is terrible.

Tonya J. Long: 17:46

Then, of course, I was immediately like looking for custom GPTs I could poach from. There weren't any good ones and I said well, maybe this is an agent base I need to create Because it's some of the you are still. You're the technology. You are still serving humans.

Jim Recker: 18:02

Correct.

Tonya J. Long: 18:02

And those human needs that we've figured out over the last hundred years are still real in terms of how to address people and finding and probing for what the problem is before you start solving it. Those are common sense for humans and we can program that common sense into machines. I think machines will handle a lot more of the emotional tasks, if you will. A good friend of mine, my best friend here, is a therapist. She was anti-AI two years ago but now she is understanding the value of those college-age kids doing some of the pre-work, of really fine-tuning and swimming through all the issues to get to what is the real problem, so that when they show up on her couch then they are more prepared, more aware of themselves.

Jim Recker: 18:53

Correct.

Tonya J. Long: 18:54

They've been through a lot of the thinking exercises so she can hit the ground running at a higher level instead of so much intake, which makes her job more fun too, because she's solving the real challenges.

Jim Recker: 19:05

But nevertheless the impact is already there.

Tonya J. Long: 19:08

Yes, nevertheless, I agree, and she reports the same thing. So, coaching versus counseling two related sets of needs just delivered differently.

Jim Recker: 19:21

Correct.

Tonya J. Long: 19:22

Yeah, it'll be interesting. Humans are at the base of all this and experience. I think what I've seen in AI is deep technical knowledge amongst some generational elements, but deep experiential knowledge for people like you and me. So you had a few decades in companies like WebEx and BlueJeans. I think that's absolutely critical to how you think about building for the future. Have you found that your past experience is deeply informing how you design technology for what's coming forward?

Jim Recker: 20:02

Well, I thought about this over the last couple of days, having a little idea of what we were going to talk about, and then last night it all just dawned on me. I said, oh, that's right, I forgot.

Tonya J. Long: 20:14

My father had his own company. Oh, forgot you just conveniently forgot?

Jim Recker: 20:18

Well, no, it's not been on my mind. He passed like five years ago. But he ran his own management training company in Brussels, belgium, and we had there was five kids yeah, went on beautiful vacations. So it wasn't like he wasn't successful, worked out really well. But he didn't teach me anything of what he did in his business and I and ironically, his business was his big claim to fame is. He developed a class called financial management for the non-financial manager and it was very successful with large enterprises and he did very well. But did I know how he ran his business and the challenges of running the business and starting a business and all that? He never even talked about it. So did that influence me? It may have influenced me way in the back of my head to think about starting a company again.

Jim Recker: 21:06

But I, quite frankly, I had forgotten. But to answer your question, I think the sum of all of my experiences throughout my career has enabled me to be a leader, to be a CEO, to launch into this crazy idea of building a company with AI agents, and I don't think I would be where I am right now if I hadn't had all that experience. That experience came from working with large enterprises. I worked with Ford Motor Company, I worked with HP, I worked with WebEx, with Cisco. I did work and then I transitioned over to startups. Why, I'm not sure. I guess because I got bored with the enterprise. I think I got bored with it and because the challenge of climbing the ladder just was exhausting. You've heard of people who are enterprise survivors. I was a great enterprise survivor, but sometimes you get angry and sometimes you have to leave and sometimes things you shake your head, going, going, why am I here? This doesn't make any sense and you can't control it. So then I went to startups thinking I could control things better. And I could. And not only that, I had the experience of going into all the different areas. I was in sales, I was in marketing, I was in either in product management, and so I had a variety of different experiences that enabled me to do what I'm doing today. I also realized at the same time, too, that it's been really helpful that I did these things and because if I'm trying to create what I'm creating, which is providing the tools to accelerate the go-to-market cycle, I wouldn't have been able to do it if I hadn't experienced in all these different areas. So I've had experience in product management. I've had experience in visualizing well, actually developing and acting as a product manager. I haven't coded, although I am starting to code a little bit and I can tell what coders are up to because of my background as a sales engineer, so I'm dangerous when it comes to that, but I can't tell what coders are up to because of my background as a sales engineer, so I'm dangerous when it comes to that, but I can see what people are doing.

Jim Recker: 23:08

I then got in the experience of doing some marketing and I've done sales, and I was thinking about this last night. I've done sales in a variety of different ways. I was in a small little business selling equipments high technology actually to put in people's home theater, and I worked with a bunch of rich people up in Tiburon and things like that. That was an interesting experience and in Woodside did a lot of fancy homes. That way I was selling training technology internationally and that boy, that can be different depending which country you're in. People learn different ways. I was involved, learn different ways I was involved in essentially in distribution. I was involved in and most recently I did some fun things such as product partnering and strategic partnering with companies like Cisco and Microsoft and that all helped me tremendously to where I am today.

Tonya J. Long: 24:02

So I think your experience does play in to how you choose to build because of your understanding of how humans think and make decisions correct. Right, there are some younger founders that I work with. That gap is evident, that they just haven't yet had an opportunity to have the exposure to what triggers people to buy, what triggers people to shut the door in your face. They are learning those things as CEOs because they've not had that long corporate run like you and I did, and I think it's a differentiator for our age bracket coming in doing this. You're at a time in your life when you should be, like we said earlier, focused on retirement by old standards. But now, for the ones of us who are learners, who are really actively engaged in staying young, by how we think and what we get to do, we're creating this new shift for ourselves.

Jim Recker: 24:58

Well, I would also say, too is I've never been so excited to be involved in technology as I am now.

Tonya J. Long: 25:04

Do you know how many times a week I hear that it's just, but say more.

Jim Recker: 25:09

I thought SAS was fun. Goodness SAS is now boring. I'm so glad I'm out of SAS. The possibility, the potential is just so unlimited. One of the things that I recognize is that things will change more rapidly than I can imagine. The question will be is how will different generations handle it? Younger generations are more flexible and they're more open-minded. Older generations will I'll use the word find it terrifying, but will also just they'll try to ignore that it's even happening. But it's going to happen, despite what anybody tries to do.

Tonya J. Long: 25:47

Yeah, yeah, I'm going to take a quick second to you. I'm trying to find a segue in what you said. Terrifying and bluegrass don't go together. But I'm going to pull it and make a quick public announcement. You guys who listen frequently have heard about the Signal Society and some of the things that we're doing in the community and, for those of you who are local, we have Bluegrass Magic coming to Felton on the mountain on July 22nd and if you're part of the Signal Society, if you're not, you should be, and when you are, you can join the Signal Society at kpcrorg slash join for a chance to win tickets to the Bluegrass Magic Mountain Grass Unit performing in Felton on July 22nd. We will announce the winners a couple of days before, on the 20th.

Tonya J. Long: 26:35

So back to KPCR LP 92.9 FM and KMRT 101.9 FM out of Santa Cruz. We have Jim Recker in the house here at the station talking about experience being used to bring I'll use wisdom into the design of what you're doing and of your build of an agentic AI system. Tell me what your product is focused on. We're not making a pitch You're still very early stages but I'm curious what problem are you solving for the world?

Jim Recker: 27:14

When I was at WebEx. I was very fortunate to have run into the head of engineering those days, a guy named Eric Wong. Oh, I know, Eric A lot of people know Eric yeah tell the world who Eric is. So Eric was the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Cisco Webex. When Cisco acquired Webex, there was some disagreements, and so he picked up himself and a number of people from the engineering team and created a company called Zoom and yeah-, so your headquarters is 200 feet out my front door of my home.

Jim Recker: 27:47

I know where you live then yes, that Zoom building is very prominent. Yes, and I actually from time to time used to have coffee with Eric in the early days he was looking for open ears and open hearts and just to get some ideas on where he needed to go. I lost touch with Eric before he became super wealthy. It was before the pandemic. The pandemic changed everything for everybody.

Tonya J. Long: 28:10

It certainly did.

Jim Recker: 28:10

But he was on stage last October at Zoomtopia, the annual trade show that Zoom runs, and yes, eric, and I blame you he got on stage and he was touting the 3,000 new features he came up with last year and I said to myself how did the blankety blank? I was just like what's marketing, sales and customer care going to do? There's no way they can keep up with that. That's right. And if you should go to zoomus right now and look at some of the user interfaces on their webpages, gee, you will notice that they're probably two or three revs behind. Why? Because they are coming up with new features, new releases. I would say, sometimes two or three releases on the same day, but for sure they're coming up with new features and new releases.

Jim Recker: 28:54

The other week and I said, hey, that's a problem I can solve. The technology is here. I don't know anything about agentic AI, but I know that's what it's there for and I know it's there for me to autonomously accelerate the whole go-to-market process, and that's what got me started. Now, did I start off by saying that right away? No, I said AI is the solution, and so I tried to figure out how generative AI could figure things out. Oh, it could make a social media post in seconds. And I realized oh, chatgpt can do that, why would BandBetty buy my solution?

Jim Recker: 29:27

People are still creating solutions to do these things Well yes, I know, but it's just like it doesn't make any sense. And then, when I understood the power of agents, I realized oh, this is a whole another game altogether, because now I can personalize the whole I'll call it the whole journey that customers will go through using code with our go-to-market products and that whole experience will be personalized for them the sentiments, the tone, the feel, the branding and all that. And I can do that with agents. And that's how I got launched into what I'm doing right now.

Tonya J. Long: 30:04

And the problem you're solving in industry is specific to.

Jim Recker: 30:09

So it's really for those who were involved at any part of the go-to-market cycle you know how long it takes, you know how much the effort is, you know that you're missing key personnel to do certain key things, the the money you're going to spend, and with agents now doing all of these activities autonomously, we're going to be able to cut back the time it takes to come out with a release, at least initially, by 60%. The cost in go-to-market is going to dramatically come down and the results that you're going to get are so much better, so much predictable and so easier to control. And then autonomous things I was talking to someone about the other day, about how do people in the customer care department keep their bots up to speed. A lot of the customer care departments now use bots to answer the typical questions. Well, how are those updated? No problem, you'll use an agent that will actually easily be triggered to update to the latest and greatest, so the customer calling in will always get the right support information.

Tonya J. Long: 31:16

Your mindset. I had to think of the word that was my pause. But your mindset is so entrepreneurial and yet you had a great run in large-scale enterprise corporate. And it dawns on me that you wore multiple hats. You were a sales engineer, you were a sales leader. You did several things in several different pieces of industry. How do you attribute that experience to supporting your entrepreneur? Because right now you are in 100% entrepreneurial mode.

Jim Recker: 31:50

Correct.

Tonya J. Long: 31:50

With the development and the technology that you're thinking about how to deploy to solve problems. So how did that variety of roles that you played contribute to you being an entrepreneur?

Jim Recker: 32:04

I know I've learned it's not. I know I've learned how to adapt to rejection.

Tonya J. Long: 32:10

Oh, now that's not the answer I expected, but it's so true. Yes, okay.

Jim Recker: 32:18

So when you talk about when I started to work with WebEx and helping companies understand the value of WebEx, I had to first of all help them look at what they were doing in a different way. Why are you getting on that plane? In fact, I used to do a lot of sales. I used to find myself selling WebEx in the airports. This is the best place to sell. Like, why are you getting on a plane? You could do this all online. It's online. Let me explain to you what online is.

Jim Recker: 32:43

And I wasn't even in sales. I was the guy actually responsible for helping companies adopt WebEx Training Center to enable their employees and their customers globally and do it much more effectively by doing it online. But I would I tell you, Tonya, the number of times I would run into executives that just flat refused to try to understand my way of looking at things and trying to change their viewpoints required me to understand their fears, their trepidations and to address those first to get them to accept a new way of doing something. And this is what actually I'm going to be facing with an agentic eye platform, such as with my company, Inveneer. It's going to be a lot of pushback and actually I'm excited about it because I already figured out that I know one customer and that's me. My company is going to go to market pretty soon and we're going to have to drink our own champagne In talking with people around me who are all entrepreneurs and I know they don't have any money but they're going to be great test cases so I know they're going to be adopting.

Jim Recker: 33:51

So I'm purposely actually not going to be going after SMB or mid-market. I'm purposely going to go after that because I'm not going to go after the large enterprises. They're going to act too slowly. Plus, the sales cycle is way too long. But small to medium-sized businesses they all have these problems. A lot of them don't have the right resources, they don't have the right budget, they don't have the time. So I know there's a market out there and as soon as we get our build finished in the next several weeks, I can't wait to get it out there so people can see how they can do things much more logically, much more sanely. But that, I think, is the best way to answer your question is to handle a rejection I want to take a look at your product when it's further along.

Tonya J. Long: 34:30

I put 400 products into market leading program operations for companies like Avaya and Akamai, and when you talk about what it can do, I think about the very large teams I had that were just in the mode of tracking all those pieces across the entire workflow, of not just developing a product but releasing it into market, marketing, customer service, tech pods, all those components that have to be part of the build, and I see how those can be automated. So I'm pretty excited about what you're doing because I see it and I think it's going to be a major shift in how we deliver product. You talked about a 60% faster deployment time.

Tonya J. Long: 35:15

I think that's very real. I think, it's going to be a massive change management effort with these large enterprises that have their waterfall. They say they're agile, but they're waterfall.

Jim Recker: 35:27

Exactly.

Tonya J. Long: 35:28

And we know this is an old debate, but I think the change is going to be hard.

Jim Recker: 35:33

It's going to be hard, but it occurred to me that you and I have an advantage that most I'll call them younger founders don't have, and that is that we have built up an ability to see, to perceive where things are going to go and where.

Tonya J. Long: 35:48

Kind of seeing around corners.

Jim Recker: 35:50

Yes, yes, we can see around the corners and I have been with some projects where I could say to myself, oh, this is not going to work down the road and so I would drift away from them. And then I've seen some great ideas that just couldn't get any traction, and a lot of it had to do with it wasn't a product that people could see helping themselves. It also requires education to educating your buyer. I was thinking the other day about the way that I was working at Oracle and, long story incredibly short, I, my company, got acquired by Oracle and I, just the day before acquisition, signed a new contract with WebEx training center.

Jim Recker: 36:31

And gosh, I got chewed up by my boss. And then I got chewed up by a VP and he says, well, we're gonna just cancel that contract. I said, no, you can't. He says, why is not? I said, well, this contract is for Oracle training and they do all their training online and this is the best tool for training. They said, no, we're gonna use our own internal meeting solution. I said, no, let me tell you something, you have to have the right tool for the job. So I actually played and explained this to him in a very simple manner. If you sit down and you have a nice steak in front of you and I give you a spoon, that's not going to be very helpful, is it? And if I gave you a beautiful sundae, would you want to eat that with a knife? No, you want to have the right tool for the job, and so you want a training tool to do interactive online training, as opposed to doing a meeting tool, which is designed for meetings. Right, right?

Tonya J. Long: 37:22

I see that.

Jim Recker: 37:23

This is what I'm going to be doing with the product I'm building. I'm going to position it and share where it fits best and how it will facilitate and make you more productive and save money, etc. All the different reasons you want to buy my product.

Tonya J. Long: 37:40

I love it. I love it. Time for a quick station ID. We are listening to KPCR 92.9 FM out of sunny, bright, beautiful blue Los Gatos, as well as K215GA 90.9 FM and KMRT 101.9 FM out of sunny Santa Cruz. We are here with Jim Recker in the station and we've been talking about Jim's progression into entrepreneurship, his multiple hats that he's worn through a deeply effective personal career in corporate enterprise work. So I'm curious what was the point of your pivot? What made you realize that you needed to build your own thing instead of just selling someone else's vision?

Jim Recker: 38:35

I would say first well, it all comes back to that problem that Zoom has and a lot of companies. I said I need to solve that problem. And do I need to solve that problem? Heck, yes, because it will get me involved in some new technology. I always loved new technology. Again, I'm the guy who saw Led Zeppelin on stage, so I remember analog tools.

Tonya J. Long: 38:58

Yes.

Jim Recker: 38:58

And then we migrated over to digital tools, and then we I remember some of the storage devices we had that were about the size of a washing machine and didn't barely store anything Right, right. And of course, now you put it on something that you can easily lose in your pocket, and it has four terabytes on it. So the evolution of technology, to me, has always captured my attention and I just couldn't see that opportunity slip away without me getting involved into it.

Tonya J. Long: 39:25

Yeah, very early in this conversation we talked about people at some point outgrow enterprise work and I think that has a lot to do with agency. The nature of the structure of big corporations has to be very rigid and you might question the has to, but I think when you've got thousands of people working, it behooves thousands of people to be very clear on who does what and how and for there to be consistency, because you're moving people all over the world to serve customers in remarkably similar ways. But that removes agency and I think that the push and the growth that we're seeing in our generation coming into entrepreneurship is because we have the tools meaning the experience, is because we have the tools meaning the experience and we desperately crave the agency to make our own choices about where the future goes.

Jim Recker: 40:24

I would agree. But I'm also going to say at the same time is that I always have this passion for learning. People tell this about me. They said you always like to learn and you're always learning the next new thing. And I said yes. And they said what are you going to learn about when you create in veneer? And I thought about. I said well, okay, I have my own consultancy. I've had some small teams work for me. I know I can manage people well, so the leadership I think I have under my belt I'm gonna lose. Learn some new technology. One of the things that has has me fascinated, believe it or not, and it's probably the things that has me fascinated, believe it or not, and it's probably the area that I'm looking forward to in the next several months is I've never raised money before.

Tonya J. Long: 41:03

Oh, and you're looking forward to that.

Jim Recker: 41:05

Oh yes.

Tonya J. Long: 41:06

Oh my God, I think it's the hardest thing I've ever done.

Jim Recker: 41:09

It is and.

Tonya J. Long: 41:09

I've done like I've opened countries. I opened China 20 years ago. But yeah, fundraising is so intimidating to me and I'm put in that position so I shouldn't act like I can't do it, but oh my goodness, I'm intimidated.

Jim Recker: 41:21

Tonya. The last six months have been so eye-opening. I've had so much fun. I can see exactly the path.

Tonya J. Long: 41:26

I know you're having fun, love this and it's creating that relationship.

Jim Recker: 41:30

I know I'm going to find those advisors, but I'm having so much fun and where I was three months ago and where I am now, oh my goodness. And now I know I'm getting close because now on LinkedIn, I have people who invest, who are approaching me. I no longer have to say how am I going to talk to that guy? I actually ran into an investor the other day who actually gave me a. Anyway, let's put it this way, I'm beginning to figure out what the game is. It's because this is a game what the game is all about, and I know that I can succeed in this and I can't wait to get to the next stage.

Tonya J. Long: 42:06

You're still early.

Jim Recker: 42:07

Yep.

Tonya J. Long: 42:08

And that's a compliment. But you had an interesting post a few weeks ago on LinkedIn that essentially said that you should create a manifesto before you even began. It was almost like we used to In the past we talked about business plans.

Jim Recker: 42:25

Yes.

Tonya J. Long: 42:25

But you were suggesting, as I recall, that we should, and I think you had someone else's work that you were sharing out and saying I agree with this. So have you created a manifesto for Inveneer?

Jim Recker: 42:39

I am You're in the process.

Tonya J. Long: 42:40

Good, I have Okay.

Jim Recker: 42:42

I have put together a manifesto and it actually is so long that I'm going to need to narrow it down. I've made my co-founders read it. They don't like. They didn't like reading it, that's okay. And then I had to redo it again for the engineering team to help them understand the linkage between all the different agents and what the flow was, and so I spent all day yesterday putting together a huge, monstrous flow and, by the way, there's tools out nowadays where you can actually write something down and then it will turn it into a flow for you.

Tonya J. Long: 43:13

Oh Scribe yeah.

Jim Recker: 43:16

Well, there's Scribe and there's a couple other tools out there and it makes my life so much more easier, but it doesn't.

Tonya J. Long: 43:20

It does serve us and make our lives easier, because I think you and I both appreciate I was meeting with a founder yesterday from Oakland and I don't want to be all about the pitch decks, but I said, creating that pitch deck, committing your thoughts to words on paper that other people need to see and consume, is such an exercise for you, not just for investors, but for you and I'm going to say the same for you, Jim, with a manifesto. Committing your thoughts into the world via print of some form makes you get sharper and clearer on what you're committed to.

Jim Recker: 44:01

I'm giggling here because I went one step further. I created a video.

Tonya J. Long: 44:07

Oh, my goodness Okay.

Jim Recker: 44:09

Because AI tools are out there. Yes, so I have my pitch deck. Well, gosh, who wants to watch a boring pitch deck? I'm just going to do the video.

Tonya J. Long: 44:18

so yeah, I have different versions of videos already prepared we'll talk after, because I, because I am wanting to go down the rabbit hole on that and I think that's wonderful, but that for our audience, that shows you where we're going. Correct, because you're not the first one to do that oh no but you're a rare one to do that. People are just coming around to the idea.

Jim Recker: 44:41

Is there a standard pitch deck out there? We won't mention the name, but yes, it's a cool eight-pager.

Tonya J. Long: 44:46

It's perfect. That's the template model.

Jim Recker: 44:48

I did everything possible to get away from that.

Tonya J. Long: 44:51

Yeah.

Jim Recker: 44:52

And I'm able to do that now because the way let's put it this way investment has changed dramatically over the last several years.

Tonya J. Long: 45:00

Oh, and it's going to change much more dramatically in the next two to three.

Jim Recker: 45:03

And I'm part. I feel like I'm on that bunking bronco and I'm just enjoying every moment of it.

Tonya J. Long: 45:08

Yeah, I love your attitude and I want to make note of it, because you're seeing this all as growth and opportunity and fun, and it needs to be fun oh, I wouldn't do this was it wasn't fun, right yeah? Right and learning and growth can be fun. I will go back to you. Learn to manage failure throughout your career. Correct and so you're not daunted by the nose, you're not daunted by the no's, you're not daunted by the. It's not time yet. Statements from investors, from potential betas.

Jim Recker: 45:43

Well, and that was an important skill for you to have. The great anthropologist Taylor Swift actually says this.

Tonya J. Long: 45:50

What does she say?

Jim Recker: 45:50

She says kids should learn to fail. Failure is good. There's a professor over at Stanford that has a post about this. I just thought it was so brilliant that all the success that Taylor Swift was seeing, there was a lot of failure before that and yes you should accept failure. It's part of the learning process.

Tonya J. Long: 46:11

Yes, you should. A lot of people would say she has no business saying that because she's so beyond wildly successful. But I remember her when she was like eight years old, yodeling for a Yahoo commercial on TV. That was one of her first public global big things.

Jim Recker: 46:29

She learned from her mistakes.

Tonya J. Long: 46:31

And she's learned from her mistakes in her personal life, her relationships, her legend. In her personal life, her relationships, her legend, and then how she's run her business and been a multi-billion dollar, billion dollar contributor to economies. She's amazing. I'm gonna admit here live on the intrawebs. I am a big fan of Taylor Swift. Couldn't name five songs of hers, but I'm a big fan of what she does and what she stands for. And she grew up about 40 minutes north of where I lived, in tennessee she's so I think she's pretty remarkable. But speaking of remarkable, as we come into the last 10 minutes or so of the show, one of the things that I have fun doing in this show lately is running a series of lightning round questions.

Jim Recker: 47:21

Okay.

Tonya J. Long: 47:22

So I think we know enough about you and what you're doing that your wit and wisdoms in a few of these questions would be fun to talk about. So one of the things that we didn't really touch on but I think is our shared common sense. Wisdom is that you need to experiment when you're going to be building something new, correct and for lots of people they're already in jobs. So the lightning round question is what's the best way to test your entrepreneurial ideas while you're still embedded in the workplace?

Jim Recker: 48:03

great question. Historically, I always try to think out of the box. Number one yeah, I would never ask for permission yeah, that's good advice. I'll Be careful what you decide to do so you don't get fired. My biggest weakness is I have trouble saying no.

Tonya J. Long: 48:24

Yeah, oh, I hear you.

Jim Recker: 48:27

But if you don't, if you are one of those people, you can experiment and gather triad entrepreneurial type approaches to problems that you encounter.

Tonya J. Long: 48:39

Okay, so be of an entrepreneurial mindset from within your structured roles.

Jim Recker: 48:46

Correct. What really helps is to have a good manager. Yeah, yeah. And I've had some good ones, and I've had some bad ones, yeah, and you've been the good one, right I?

Tonya J. Long: 48:55

feel certain you've been the good one for a while.

Jim Recker: 48:57

Oh yes, oh yes, yeah, oh yes.

Tonya J. Long: 48:58

Good, okay. So what are the signals that it's time to move on versus staying put?

Jim Recker: 49:06

Ah, for me that's simple. I'm not having fun anymore. Yeah, that's really all it comes down to. If I'm not having fun, why am I doing this? I did leave one job because they moved I can talk about it, because Blue Jeans is no longer around as a company, but they were on 2nd Street in San Francisco and then they moved to the financial district. I'm going, I'm not going to go another half hour one way, and so I left because of that inconvenience. But when you're not having fun, it's time to move on.

Tonya J. Long: 49:36

Yeah, fair. So what's one thing that you would highlight that's been a surprise for you about startup life, the life of an entrepreneur. What has surprised you?

Jim Recker: 49:49

I was thinking about that the last couple of days. I think that my biggest surprise is that I've been able to convince my co-founders to join me on this adventure and I'm not paying them. Words can be magical and you can use words to convey your dreams and aspirations, your vision and your expectations and, if you do it right, you can get people to do that. Now I've had a founder drop off and that's okay.

Tonya J. Long: 50:23

That's alignment. That's figuring out alignment no he just didn't have.

Jim Recker: 50:27

he was risk averse and he had some challenges with another startup he was with. That put him into a very precarious financial situation. So I said, great, we figured this out ahead of time, let's move on. And in fact he's still a great friend of mine. I'm going to go visit him over the summer, but that has been the biggest surprise that my co-founders have stuck with me this far and it's just been. It just fills me with inspiration every time I wake up. One of them actually has six kids, and so I'm not sure how he does it.

Tonya J. Long: 50:57

Six children. I don't know how he functions with six children. That's just my baggage.

Jim Recker: 51:02

And he's in a different time zone like 10 hours away. But yet there he is every day. So that's what has surprised me the most. I think the next surprise will come when I actually see an investor give me some money. That'll be my next surprise.

Tonya J. Long: 51:18

And it will be what triggered them to choose you Correct. That will be, I think, eye-opening Precisely what's the biggest mistake that you see entrepreneurs making as it relates to AI.

Jim Recker: 51:34

I see some entrepreneurs how best to put this? They refuse to do the things that are below them.

Tonya J. Long: 51:44

Oh interesting, I didn't expect that.

Jim Recker: 51:47

And so I have seen a lot of entrepreneurs that say, no, I'm not going to be the SDR for the day, that's beneath me, okay, and that is actually the best opportunity for them to understand what customers are saying and what rejection looks like. I see some entrepreneurs oh, and then the other mistake I see entrepreneurs do procrastinate because they have been funded yes and they stay in stealth way too long yes and they procrastinate.

Jim Recker: 52:14

Yeah, it's like get to market. What are you waiting around for? This whole idea in the Silicon Valley, by the way of NDAs also amuses me. I know some people have been in the valley for a really long time and they just scoff at NDAs. It's like they're gonna steal your idea. They're gonna steal it. Just get on with it. Getting to market as fast as you can is the most important thing you can do.

Tonya J. Long: 52:35

I don't think we captured this in our conversation as well as we could have, but we have to prioritize what we can do inside of this 59 minutes. But you're a marketer at heart. You're a sales guy, but you're also very much a marketer. What do you see happening that you declare dead in traditional marketing, that people are just not letting go of?

Jim Recker: 52:58

Newspaper ads, anything prints. They should have let go a long time ago. There's also some interesting things that there are people that market that don't realize that they're capturing as many people as they could because they're assuming people are there. And I'm an older generation. Am I watching TikTok? Am I watching Instagram? Am I watching the new ways of marketing? No, I'm not. And then there's some things that I still laugh at because it still works. That little airplane with the long banner flying by the beach. That still works.

Tonya J. Long: 53:31

Okay, I'm operationally going through the efficiency challenges of that model. It's not very costly, it's not very costly to fly a little.

Jim Recker: 53:41

I actually have a pilot's license and flying a 172 is probably $150 an hour and you can make money off that. And it's a summer day and you're flying over the ocean what?

Tonya J. Long: 53:51

could be wrong with that. There's all kinds of scores and wins in that, exactly. Okay, I'm going to think about that. I can't tell if you're an introvert or an extrovert.

Jim Recker: 54:02

I'm both.

Jim Recker: 54:03

It depends on the social setting. I'm both. It depends on the social setting. I sometimes feel that I'm certainly not a very loud extrovert. When I am an extrovert I don't go running around, but I do have people who tell me from time to time. I had one investor actually says I want to invest in you down the road. I said why is that? He says because you're like that samurai wielding your samurai sword and you're going through the jungle and you're not letting anybody stop you. I say yeah, that's me, but at other times I'll hesitate to go up to people.

Tonya J. Long: 54:33

So what's your best networking advice for introverts in tech?

Jim Recker: 54:42

Don't hesitate to speak up. You're not going to hurt anybody's feelings, and I think that's what I've realized about myself is that it's better to speak up and get shut down than to not have spoken up at all.

Tonya J. Long: 54:54

Yeah, yeah. If you don't ask, you don't get Correct.

Jim Recker: 54:57

But sometimes I still hesitate. Yeah, I do sometimes get starstruck. It doesn't happen very often, yeah.

Tonya J. Long: 55:04

I remember when you met me. I do sometimes get starstruck.

Jim Recker: 55:03

It doesn't happen very often. I remember when you met me. I'm kidding.

Tonya J. Long: 55:07

I'm completely kidding. We have a mutual friend that I recall was part of our initial introductions.

Jim Recker: 55:13

Yes.

Tonya J. Long: 55:14

At a pretty large event, I'm thinking about a mile from here. So last question what's the best career advice you wish someone had given you at 30?

Jim Recker: 55:30

At 30? How much time do I have here? I would say the best advice I got when I was 30.

Tonya J. Long: 55:35

That you wish someone had given you.

Jim Recker: 55:36

Oh, you wish someone had given me at 30 is get out of Enterprise, because I still was with Enterprises. Actually, no, yes, I was still with enterprises. Actually, no, yes, I was still with enterprises and I did on my own accord. I also wish that somebody had told me to invest better being here in the Silicon Valley. And that's something I regret. I fortunately bought a house 30 years ago.

Tonya J. Long: 55:58

Yeah, that's a good investment and it's all paid off.

Jim Recker: 56:01

I wish I had continued to invest, yeah, because opportunity is all around you and investing is a lot of fun, and hopefully someone will find that out when they invest with me.

Tonya J. Long: 56:12

Excellent, excellent segue into how can people be aware of you, how can they watch what you build and grow and be in touch with you if they're interested.

Jim Recker: 56:23

So, to start with, linkedin is going to be a place to find me Beautiful, and I'm going to be posting more regularly now because I'm getting out there, so to speak, and making sure people know what we're up to.

Tonya J. Long: 56:33

For people who are listening. Your LinkedIn handle is it's JC Recker. Okay, so it's JC Yep Good, and I will put that in the show notes for everyone who's listening, who wants to reflect back on something written. So we'll put that connection point so they can follow you, track your ideas and your development successes and then invest.

Jim Recker: 56:53

And I should also say that the website is invenirai. And what does invenir mean? It means to find, to discover. In old Spanish, oh, that's beautiful. And that's what I'm doing, and that's a memorable story.

Tonya J. Long: 57:09

I love it, so Inveneerai JC Wrecker on LinkedIn. Please keep up with this man. He's going to do some important, wise, wonderful things, as he RESET not just himself but entire industries with how they approach solving complex problems more simply, more effectively, so we can put more in the market faster, with happier employees doing it. So I think it's going to be brilliant to watch you. Thank you for being part of the show today.

Jim Recker: 57:38

Thanks for having me Tonya.

Tonya J. Long: 57:39

We do this so give me some love here on our screen as we thank our audience for being with us and being part of this journey. So many people are going through transitions and RESET now, and what I really took away from today was to not fear it, to jump into it, to embrace it. Look for the fun. If you're not having fun, you're in the wrong place.

Tonya J. Long: 58:00

That's correct, and you can transition and pivot as much as you want to find that sweet spot. That is where you should be and, Jim, I think you're doing that.

Jim Recker: 58:08

And I had fun today. Thank you for having me.

Tonya J. Long: 58:10

It was such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Jim Recker: 58:12

Pleasure's all mine Everyone.

Tonya J. Long: 58:13

This has been RESET with Tonya on KPCR 92.9 FM, k215ga 90.9 FM, both in Los Gatos, and KMRT 101.9 FM in Santa Cruz. Let's go to the beach. Everyone. Have a great day. Thanks for joining us on RESET. Remember, transformation is a journey, not a destination. So until next time, keep exploring what's possible. I'm Tonya Long and this is home. This is RESET.