Narrator: Welcome to Chasing The Insights, the podcast for entrepreneurs who refuse to settle for average. Hosted by best-selling author and award-winning neuromarketer, Vince Warnock.

Vince Warnock: Hello, beautiful people. Welcome to another episode of Chasing The Insights. How are you doing?
I'm Vince Warnock. Thank you so much for taking time and your very busy day. Oh my goodness. To join me here as I get to talk to, you know what? I'm just going to say some of the smartest people in the industry. You'll know what I mean very shortly because I'm about to introduce you to Tommy White.
But before I do that, very quickly, I don't want you to miss a single episode of this show. So whatever platform, whatever app, whatever tool, basically, however you're listening to this right now, if you haven't already, reach out and give that subscribe or follow button a push. That way you're notified every time there's a new episode.
Anyway, my friends, you are in for an absolute treat. I'm here to introduce you to Tommy White. He is a Senior Professorial Lecturer.
I knew I was going to struggle with that word. Senior Professorial Lecturer. In other words, executive “and resident at Kogod School of Business at the American University.
He teaches undergrad courses on introduction to business, business professionalism, introduction to entrepreneurship, entrepreneur practicum, launch and AI. Basically, if it's business and AI, Tommy's probably lecturing on it at some point. He also serves as the Director of The Veloric Center for Entrepreneurship.
He oversees key strategic and operational activities of the center, and oversees the newly launched student managed Eagle Ventures Seed Fund. Honestly, despite me struggling with English this morning, it is such an honor having them on the show. Tommy, thank you so much for joining us.

Tommy White: Oh, it's my absolute pleasure to be here.

Vince Warnock: As soon as I saw your bio, I'm like, I am going to screw this up. I know it. I'm going to get tongue-tied.
I'm quite proud of myself. I did better than I thought I would. Anyway, I'm so excited to have you on the show, man.
I mean, for two reasons. I love, well, first of all, we're going to be talking about the impact of AI on entrepreneurs. Super passionate about this topic.
But also, I have this theory in life. I love being the dumbest “guy in the room. So I love being surrounded by super smart people.
So when I have someone like you on the show, I am literally a sponge today. So I'm going to be absorbing everything from you. Now, before we dive into all that though, Tommy, give us your back story, man.
Tell us how you got to where you are, why you're so passionate about what you do.

Tommy White: Sure. Well, again, thank you so much for letting me be here. Super excited to join the show and have a chance to chat with you a little bit here.
I think a lot of entrepreneurs, my story starts out with my father. He was an entrepreneur in his own way. He actually was a doctor, but he had his own medical practice with two other partners.
He just said to me growing up as a kid, he says, I don't care what you do, just be your own boss. He always said that through when I was a childhood and growing up. We both knew I was never going to be a doctor.
That was pretty evident, pretty clear there. But it always stuck with me and “just was always in the back of my mind from that. When I went to University, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and graduated in 1986, actually 40 years ago this month.

Vince Warnock: Well, congrats.

Tommy White: Thank you. I came to Washington, DC, and I actually started working for an international development agency and really a lot of fun working with international folks doing a lot of neat things. The company actually went into chapter 11 bankruptcy, and so a couple of us said, hey, we can do this.
We started our journey then, figuring things out, working through some ideas. The typical entrepreneur journey, you go four steps forward, two steps back, three steps forward, eight steps back.

Vince Warnock: Yeah, that's a little bit more like it for most, yeah.

Tommy White: But we finally hit it, and in 1994, we launched this company called the Institute for Public-Private Partnerships. Our mission was to work with developing emerging market countries to help them build out these public-private partnership models in infrastructure services to help governments figure out ways they could attract foreign investment into infrastructure services like energy and water, telecommunications, transportation sectors. What an awesome field to be in.
Got a chance to travel to 30, 40 different countries on business, did a lot of cool stuff. Really just a great thing. Again, like most typical entrepreneurs, we had a couple of great years, a couple of down years, but we really hit our stride in the 2000s, and we were acquired by a company called Tetra Tech in 2008.
I stayed on with them and ran the company for them for four years, and then transitioned over to American University in 2013, where I helped them launch our entrepreneurship program. I'm also a graduate of the school there. I did my MBA in the early 90s, so I was well acquainted with their program there, but really just had a chance to do some really cool stuff there.
We launched our program. It was called the AU Center for Innovation at the time, and we had sort of three major thrusts. One was to promote entrepreneurial mindset across campus.
The second was to build a business incubator program for students who wanted to launch companies while they were students. And the third was our classwork we had in entrepreneurship. We have a specialization and minor that we do in both, you know, both entrepreneurship along those ways there.
Recently, we just launched a student managed seed fund, so students actually get a chance to be venture capitalists, and they get to actually, they have real money to invest in real companies, which is just an amazing program for them.

Vince Warnock: That's so cool. Yeah.

Tommy White: Currently, I'm the director of the Veloric Center for Entrepreneurship. A number of years ago, we had an alumni give us a significant gift, and that was transformational to our program and allowed us to do a lot more with it. In the community, I'm an active angel investor.
I've been investing in early stage companies for 14 or so years, both individually and as limited partners and funds. Very active in the Washington, DC startup ecosystem. I work with companies, advise, mentor, coach, we have just a great place to be here.
I'm a huge proponent of AI in so many different ways. As a faculty member, educator, teacher, it's infused in all my classes as an investor. I just really think that AI is just a game changer for everybody.

Vince Warnock: Yeah, absolutely, 100 percent aligned man, I love that. I'm a huge supporter of AI and what it can do more than anything. This is the thing.
By the way, disclosure, I live in a rural city here in Australia. We moved here about three years ago. I will say for a pretty progressive place, they are very backward when it comes to AI.
Most people here are petrified of it. The idea of it, they just think, oh, it's going to take my jobs, it's going to take my family, it's going to take everything. I'm trying to explain to people, do you realize what this unlocks for you?
Do you realize what it's like for some of our clients, a young solo mom who's trying to build a business, and doesn't have the finances to be able to hire a marketing team and hire a PR agency and hire a developer and hire all of this. Now she's got AI paying 20 bucks a month for, they can do pretty much all of that for her. That is a game changer for people.
She can scale the work she's doing so much faster. Things like that people don't “think of, they just think, technology. Man, I'm excited.
Now you got me all wound up in a good way. Let's dive into this. As I said, we're going to be talking about the impact of AI on entrepreneurship.
Usually, at this point of the show, I get my guests to define something like, what is AI, what is entrepreneurship. By now, all of you listening to this should know both of those things. What I'm going to do instead, Tommy, is get you to paint a picture of where we're at in the world, because you and I live in the AI space, which means we're surrounded by these things, forgetting that most people don't even know half the stuff exists.
Give us a lay of the land of what the landscapes like for entrepreneurship out there at the moment with AI.

Tommy White: Yeah. Well, I think there's two pathways that the conversation can go, and we can go down both if you'd like. One is certainly the investment side.
There is just tens and hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into early stage companies now that are all involved in AI framework and building out AI components, building “out AI activities and business models, some B2B, some business to consumer models. Just an incredible amount of learning being poured into it. We can talk about what that means from that perspective too.
The second one is, how can entrepreneurs use it to do what you just described here? How can we use it to do things better, faster, easier? What I like to say, the entrepreneur's journey is filled with failure.
That's a good thing because failures is when you're actually doing stuff, and you're trying things, and you're testing things out. But AI can actually help cut that down a little bit. We're all involved with risk, and we all take a lot of risk when we're doing things.
But if AI can help reduce some of that risk by having us fail faster, for lack of a better phrase, then that's really cool, too, as an application of how AI can really be helpful to the individual entrepreneur.

Vince Warnock: Yeah, I love that. Well, I do want to touch on both of those, actually, but only very briefly on the investment side, and mainly because I'm not an angel investor myself, but I certainly get a lot “of people pitching companies and pitching ideas and things like that. And I guess one of the challenges I see, and I'm keen to get your view on this, is there are a lot of companies that are now AI that technically are just wrappers for other people's AI, that are technically just going, hey, I've invented this great thing, and all I'm doing is basically tapping into the back end of GPT or Claude or whatever else.

So when companies come to you for investment, and they're based around AI, what are the core things you look at, and how do you distinguish between those things that are only going to be replaced by the larger companies anyway?

Tommy White: Yeah, I mean, and that's a great question. And that's one of the first things that I would say, after the initial investment boom, the first couple of years, that's the big question that all investors are asking. And so I think there's two fundamental pieces here.
One is, is this a problem we're solving? What the entrepreneur is trying to do? Is this something that's worth solving?
And what I mean by that is, is there truly “a value proposition that they built? Do they have a moat around what they've created here? And if they're just saying they're an AI company and they built it behind Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini, that's not transformational, that's not a value proposition.
That's something that pretty much any of us can do at some point in time. So really understanding, are they building something unique, something different, something they could have a moat around it? Is there really a secret sauce, value proposition to go along with it?
If they can't articulate that in the first 30 or 45 seconds, then we all know that they're just another one out there doing this. Then there's the two other typical pieces that are standard for really any other investment. Is there a big enough market for it?
There's got to be a scale to this. This isn't just incremental growth, there has to be just an incredible opportunity of market growth for whatever it is they're building. If it's B2B, is that something that can really be plugged into another company that they can then take it and move it to another level?
Or if it's business to consumer, they're “going to be willing people to pay for that service at $10 a month or $20 or $30 or whatever it might be from that. Then finally, and I think this is what makes us a little bit different than about the other transformation that many of us lived through, which was when the Internet came around in the 1990s. That was a green field for all of us.
Everybody started from ground zero. With AI, it's been around for the 20 or 30 years. I mean, large language models have been being built for a long time, and all the large companies have been using it.
So there's already a big talent base out there of millions of coders who know how to do this. So the game is a little bit different now, and the skill level is a little bit different. So the team, so that fourth element becomes even more important.
Is this the right group of people to actually execute on what you're trying to do here?

Vince Warnock: I love that. Yeah, I see this so much, man. People are always surprised.
I say, I've been working in AI for 20 years. They go, but AI “has only been out for a few years. You'll think, no, no.
The funny thing, too, of course, is we in Chat GPT suddenly exploded on the world along with everything else. The amount of so-called experts that came out and you listen to their backstory, they're like, yeah, I've been working in AI for a good solid year and a half now.

Tommy White: We just call it algorithms back there. Oh, it's the Amazon algorithm. It's the Spotify algorithm.
It just knows what I want to buy. It just knows what I want to listen to.

Vince Warnock: I will say, Tommy, every year, people keep asking me for my predictions in marketing, because I was in the marketing tech space. We publish these things every year. We say, hey, here's the technology that's going to impact the world and marketing and all this.
Every year for like 10 years, I was saying AI is going to be the thing that transforms everything. Then I just stopped giving my predictions. A couple of years after that, guess what happened?
AI finally started to transform the world. I'm like, oh man, I should have kept predicting. But yeah.

The other thing too, when you're talking about the AI sort of thing, the investment side of things there as well, I think that just, I mean, this is my take on it and you may totally disagree, Tommy, but I almost think the technology is not really part of it anymore because you can pretty much do anything now with AI. You can do anything. For example, we had someone come to us saying, hey, we're going to build this AI system that can do all of your marketing, can automate every aspect of your marketing, and everyone's going to use it because it's going to make their life so much easier and blah, blah, blah, and all this.
I'm like, yeah, look, that's great. Your fine-tuned the model, you have some really good outputs around design and things like that, and even video and all this kind of stuff. But you're trying to tell people to come out of a tool that they're already using, which is Chat GPT in most cases, they're already using on a daily basis.
Why would they change their behavior for something that is just slightly optimized based on what they're using now? And your technology may be incredible, your fine-tune model may be amazing. But the reality is, you're trying to get people to change their behavior.
And I just don't see that. I see that as a huge challenge more than a win. Like they've got to actually educate people, change their behavior, and then they've got a right to win.
So it's a tricky one, but yeah.

Tommy White: It is. And I think what we see right now inside of a lot of companies are, people are experimenting, right? They're building their own workflow processes using the different AI programs, and they come back and say, wow, I created this really cool thing.
I didn't, I knew nothing about coding. I did vibe coding. I used this program to make this happen.
And I think we're sort of at that phase a little bit right now as people are trying and experiencing that. So then you as an entrepreneur who is starting an AI company, you've got to figure out what again, what's that value proposition that someone will pay for that. Also knowing that in three to six months from now, everything's going to change.
I mean, you know, this incoming wave of agentic AI, which is just on the beginning right now, that's going to change every model that people are using right now when it comes to all the general AI that we've been using right now. So it's a really interesting, you know, obviously interesting for me, fine, this place to be, right? To see all this innovation, all this change coming out.
But you really do have to keep looking at it really hard to start to see the patterns of, okay, what might be investible? What really has a shot at getting to that scale? And what's just going to be around for another three to six months, and then that might be it from it?

Vince Warnock: Exactly. Yeah.

Tommy White: That's what makes it fun, right?

Vince Warnock: Yeah. I felt so bad for one of my team members here, it's his own automation company on the site. And they built out this complex automation, and I'm talking super impressive automation.
Uses rag elements, it uses like about five different AI systems in there, all built through NA 10. And then, of course, things like Opal and all this came out, and all some of the changes in Claude Cowork and all this.
And he realized now that someone could replicate his entire model with a one-line prompt.
And he was like, wow. He calls future-proofing his business basically just giving up, just going with the flow.

Tommy White: Yeah, it's tough.

Vince Warnock: Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, it is. But it's also exciting, and that's the other side of this I want to talk about, which is how entrepreneurs are using AI.

Because we've kind of talked a little bit in there some use cases, but kind of give us your view on some of the things that people may not afford of use-wise for entrepreneurship that are really going to change the game and accelerate. Like you said, do things better, faster, easier.

Tommy White: Yeah, I would say, I think one of the first challenges is, and it's just not for entrepreneurs, it's for all of us. We've got to put the time in upfront to just learn it and to play around with it. I'm talking two to three hours a day of just experimenting, of just trying different programs, just working through things.
Because then you start to see the patterns of AI, what's good information, what's bad what's great, what's hallucinated, and to really understand and then start to understand how this might be helpful for my business model and what I can use and how I can use it here. This is not what entrepreneurs want to hear because they're already working 80 to 90 hours a week.

Vince Warnock: Exactly.

Tommy White: It's like, no, you need to set two to three hours a day aside to just play around with it and just do stuff with it to see where and how it can be most useful. Because there's a tipping point for all of us when in the amount of usage that you use . Finally, you get to point where you go, okay, I get it now. I see how this could help me.
So that's just an overriding general statement when it comes to this.

Vince Warnock: I love that.

Tommy White: I think there's three key components here. One is, how can I use AI just for the basic stuff and just helping me get through things faster, easier, and better?
This is what we've been facing right now with the existing Gen.AI programs and using it for one or two shot prompts to get answers back from things, to help us write things and review stuff, creating a simple prompt to do those things for us, and please do edit it. We're all now starting to see what an AI-generated piece looks like, and we still need the humanistic end at the end of it to make it sound a little bit more like someone wrote it. But that's certainly something, and I think that's probably the level where most entrepreneurs have adopted to.
It's level one to it. Level two is the business process themselves. Where and how can they use AI to, again, help them do things better, smarter, faster?
This could come into their marketing strategy, this could come into financial management, this could come into accounting management, it could just come into email workflow. And we've seen that already a little bit, website with chatbots being created, and communication tools that are used to answer. I'm super impressed with the communication capabilities now of chatbots.
I, some are absolutely terrible, but others, I feel like I have a much better conversation with them than I do with human. And I tend, and I feel like I mostly get to where I want to go faster “han I would with a human sometimes. So that second level, I think, is that business process is where they're also working at it.
And then ultimately, the third one is going to be the output. How can they use it to help them analyze what's going on in their business? You know, the data analytics is coming out from the side.
They're using these processes. How's that going to help them make better business decisions? You know, the output that comes out.
And so, when you think about that, then you got to think about the input side of that. Like, what are you building? What are you creating?
What are you using to make sure you're getting that output that is going to help you, right, from that? And, you know, there's no adage in the accounting world, you know, garbage in equals garbage out. And so, you know, if you put garbage in, you're going to get garbage on the outside of it.
And so, that thinking, that critical thinking process of the front end of what you want becomes absolutely critical so that AI can do what it's supposed to do in the middle part to “then create that output that you need to help you make better business decisions.

Vince Warnock: I love this, man. There's so much in here I want to deep dive, dive deep into. The, on the layer two, level two there, the business processes, the voice thing, my goodness, man, like I'm with you on this 100%.
I was actually testing a tool that someone I know built, just a friend of mine. I said, oh, can you, you know, I'll give it your phone number, it'll call you Vince. I said, yeah, and it will just, it'll interview you and we'll put together like a plan around that.
I said, yeah, sure, sure, sure. And this thing, and I knew I was talking to AI, very clearly knew I was talking to AI. This woman, AI voice rang me and everything, and I was answering the questions.
And then she goes, and this is where it totally got me. She goes, so what's something you're really proud of Vince? What's an accomplishment in your industry that really makes you kind of stand tall?
And I said, well, look, I was chosen by Adobe as one of the top 50 marketers in the world.
“Before I'd even finished that sentence, she goes, get out. That's huge.
That is so good. And I'm blushing. They go, no, thank you.
Wait a minute. This is not a human I'm talking to. But I came away from a chat with an AI, completely uplifted, feeling really good about myself.
And I was like, you know what? This is awesome. So it's getting really, really good.
Yeah.

Tommy White: I had a funny experience. I was trying to, I had to, I wanted to cancel an order that was being delivered to me. So the only way to do it is by calling them.
So I called them, was on with the AI going back and forth. And finally, they got to the point, they understood that I wanted to cancel the order. And they said, oh, I'll have to put you in contact with a human for that.
So they had not programmed the AI, they had not programmed the AI to actually cancel an order. They wanted to force you to do one more step, you talk to somebody live to actually cancel an order from it.

Vince Warnock: Well, they were simplistic.

Tommy White: All of it, all of it at “this point is like, oh no, we don't want AI canceling our orders. We're going to lose that human again.

Vince Warnock: I can't remember who did it. Oh my goodness, I was watching, it was hilarious. There's an AI influence, I forgot the name anyway, but he built this, he built this basically his own vision of who he is and things and said, right, I'm going to get this thing out there on my behalf doing certain tasks.
And one of the things he said is, look, I'm booked next week to go to Spain or something. And he goes, he was speaking to a conference there. He says, so what I want you to do is, I want you to cancel my flights, but only if you can find a better price.
If you can find a better time or something like that. So this agent went out on his behalf, used a voice thing, actually talked to people, finally canceled his flights and came back and said, yes, I've canceled your flights. I found one that you can pay less for, blah, blah, blah, and all this.
He goes, great. Did you book it? No, you didn't ask me to book it.
Then he went to book it, and it was sold out. He's like, oh, crap. He ended up having to pay four times the amount to get to Spain in time to actually speak at this conference.
He went, well, that's going to be an interesting story to tell everyone. Human intervention is quite handy at times. I love this.

You mentioned about level 1 stuff around making sure we rewrite things. I think this is really important. The other thing that I think is really important to note is, AI, this is a challenge for authors.
I have a huge challenge around this because AI is actually trained on good writing. That's the theory. Things like the AI slop stuff that we know now.
Every time there's an M dash, everyone goes, oh, it's written by AI. Every time there's a repetitive, not this, not this, but that pattern in writing, they go, oh, that's clearly AI. The problem is that's also clearly really good writers.
The challenge we've got now is because AI is trained on those good writers, good writers have to change the way that they write because it's so prevalent out there all these patterns and these things that we see that now, when you're writing good books, they sound like you're AI. It sounds like you're artificial. So yeah, we had this in the industry.
There's a big shock at the moment around a book called “Shy Girl.” This author, she is amazing man. It's a solo mom who wrote a really, really good book, a really good book.
It's a thriller. I can't believe I haven't actually read the book, but it just went viral. Everyone was just talking about this book.
They loved it. It's picking up all this organic reach and everything. So finally, a publisher approached her and said, hey, that's it, we'll buy this.
We'll buy the rights off you, we'll distribute it through the UK, and we'll do a big launch in the US as well. She was like, yeah, that's great. They paid her quite a lot of money, which is awesome for her.
Once it launched in the UK, there was a small handful of people that kicked up a stink and said, well, clearly she wrote this using AI because they noticed patterns in some of the writing. And so then it just caused this big thing where someone's talking about class action lawsuits to get refunds on the books because they're written by AI and all these people kicking up a stink. And then the publisher decided they're going to halt the American distribution release and all this.
Everyone was up and out. So then finally, someone actually asked her, I said, did you use AI to write this? And she goes, no, not at all.
And by the way, she wrote everything in Google Docs. She has her complete history there of all of writing and rewriting and everything. So she can prove she wrote this herself.
But she's broke. She's a solo mom. She couldn't afford professional editors or anything.
So she hired someone on Fiverr, who used a bit of AI to help with the editing. And by the way, only minor, minor changes. But enough that some people saw a pattern in there and thought that that was disgusting.
So they're on this witch hunt for a woman. And the challenge I've got is, it doesn't change the fact that everyone enjoyed her book. Just because she used AI tools and that, why would that change?
Why do you need a refund on a book that you thoroughly enjoyed? What does it even matter even if she did write the whole thing in AI? If you really enjoyed it, enjoy it, you idiots.
So, oh man, I'm going to get on my soapbox.

Tommy White: I think that will change more. I think that will absolutely change.

Vince Warnock: I think so.

Tommy White: As they go on this same term.

Vince Warnock: Yeah, I hope it's so.

Tommy White: But the part that I think is important out of this though is, and I teach a class on this. I teach a class called Entrepreneurship Practicum with AI Infusion. And students come in the class and they launch companies out of it.
That's the whole purpose of it. They can do it by themselves. They can do it on teams.
They can do whatever they want. They can use AI in any way possible, any way they want to. There's no restrictions at all.
Because I want them to think like an entrepreneur. I want them to use the tools that entrepreneurs use. And the whole reason behind this is so that they can get to market faster.
They can get to traction building faster. They can get to A-B testing a lot faster. They can see what type of ads work, what type doesn't.
And if an AI-generated ad that they can do in 15 minutes, it would have taken them six days to build. And it gives them 75% of the traction they would have gotten going the other route. Absolutely, you want to do that.
You want to use that AI-generated as much as possible. So what it allows them to do is to do things so much faster and quicker and to test things out much faster and quicker. And if it's all AI-generated and the market is fine with it, then go for it, right, is my feeling from that.
And that's where I think entrepreneurs can have an advantage over medium and large size businesses because they're out there testing these things and trying out these new programs.

Vince Warnock: Absolutely. Well, I mean, the question I've got for you then is, and keen to hear your view on this, when are we going to see this influx of solo-led companies? Because we're talking about the whole “billion-dollar challenge at the moment is, can you have a company which is just yourself and AI make a billion dollars?
And from your perspective, do you see that this is actually possible? And there's been a lot of fake kind of ones out there. Some guy made $18 billion or something or other, but turned out it was all smoke and mirrors.
But are you anticipating we are going to see the rise of these solo-preneur companies that are just fully AI backed, making really good money out there? Or is this going to be another layer of entrepreneurship?

Tommy White: I think there's going to be both. I mean, companies are still out there raising, and early stage money, raising $500,000, $1 million, $2 million, $3 million. They still need people, and they still need to hire people to join that.
The question is, do they need to hire that second or third or fourth person? I think that's where AI is going to kick in. You're still going to need the head of product development.
You're still going to need the head of sales. It's that next level, how much more are you going to hire? Normally, you might hire 6 to 8 salespeople if you just raise $10 million.
Now, you're just going to hire 2 or 3 and use AI to do the rest for you. I think that's going to be the big transformation. How are we using that money?
Absolutely, I think there will be less people involved. I think it will be fun stories when people do say they were a solo entrepreneur and they sold their business for $100 million. Again, that's going to be the extreme, not the norm.
Just like any other business, they're trying to figure out ways to use AI to leverage that expensive cost of us, a few minutes, to make that better.

Vince Warnock: We're going to run an experiment here, because under our ATG media banner, we have 12 businesses. The goal I say to my team is we want to play around with Paperclip and Hermes and some of these tools, to see if we can actually build a company that runs autonomously. That none of us, there's only once a week, there's a half hour meeting where we approve different things.
That is all, the rest of us all run by AI. That's the goal.
The only problem with that is my team have banned me from even thinking about that at the moment because we have quite a bit on.
I've got this supercomputer thing sitting next to me here, that at the moment is just playing YouTube videos because I'm not allowed to actually touch the systems because it will distract me. They know my brain well enough to know that this is going to be a huge distraction. But I can't wait to see the results.
Let's see them. If we document this, this actually could be really interesting for people to see the actual pros and cons. We're going to be brutally honest with people about this failed.
This was a big mistake. This part here, we got some traction, that kind of thing. Love this.
Oh man, Tommy. My challenge talking to you is I could literally talk to you for hours, man. You're so knowledgeable on these things, but also just so much fun chatting with you.
But we're at the point of the show where I do need to ask you the same question I ask everyone. So, Tommy, what are your three practical tips you advise every entrepreneur to right now?

Tommy White: My top three would be this. Practice two to three hours, just playing around with it, right? And just do it.
Try new programs, test things out as much as you can, and just get as knowledgeable as you possibly can. And then you'll figure out the best way for your business model to use it. That'd be the first one.
The second one is the people skills are going to be just as important as the AI that goes into it.
And not only just being part of the AI framework and the fabric that goes into it and just understanding it and using it to analyze and to test and to interpret the data and come up with the strategies to go with it, it's also just still old school business. Networking, communications, that's not going away. And the people part of what business is all about, particularly B2B bottles, is going to be around for a long time.
And I worry a little bit that we're going to retract from that and not realize how important that part of the business model is itself is too. The last one I'd say is it's going to be a changing landscape and what works today is not going to work three months from now or six months or a year from now. And business loves stability, right?
We love stability. We love stable regulations. We love stability in the way business, because then we can plan, we can develop.
That's just not going to happen. And so that gets back to my three hour rule of learning. You've got to be a year or two years ahead of everyone else to be successful.
And I can promise you the small businesses aren't really doing it, the medium sized businesses aren't doing it, the big companies are and the entrepreneurs are. So be that one that's going to be seeing around the bend and that's going to really have a super positive impact on your business.

Vince Warnock: I love that. Man, we could have done a whole episode on each one of those pieces of advice. That's awesome.
Well, Tommy, this has been fantastic. I'm going to leave links to everywhere you can connect with Tommy in the show notes for this episode. So you all know what to do.
Go to chasingtheinsights.com, look for Tommy's smiling face. You'll see a bunch of hyperlinks there, links to where you can connect with him around entrepreneurship, that Eagle Venture Seed Fund, everywhere you can connect with him. Just come and do that.
Seriously, he's one of the good ones. Tommy, thank you so much for joining us, my man. It has been an absolute privilege having you on the show.

Tommy White: Well, thank you so much. I had a ton of fun and always happy to have conversations like this.

Vince Warnock: Yeah. I think next time we get you on the show, we're just going to have to schedule a three-hour block and just go deep on all of these things, man. Awesome.
Well, there you go everyone. Like I said, go to the show notes, click on all the links. You're not going to regret it.
As you've heard here, Tommy is incredibly knowledgeable, knows what he's doing, but he's also a decent human being. So get more Tommy in your life. Simple as that.
Plus, if you haven't already, reach out and give that subscribe or follow button to push. That way you're notified every time there's a new episode. Anyway, my friends, that “is the formal part of the show out of the way.
I know you're all dying to go and connect with Tommy everywhere, and you're dying to go and do that two, three hours of training yourself on AI and tools and things like that as well. But before you do all that, I want you to pause, I want you to be present, and I want you to hear something because it's something we don't talk about enough. Tommy mentioned here, and both of us have talked about this before around the fact that as an entrepreneur, like you said, you try things, it fails.
You try things that succeed, it fails. Two step forward, three step back. This is just how entrepreneurship is.
We don't talk about that failure aspect of this enough. I want to reframe something for you because there's a lot of stuff we try as entrepreneurs. We'll see something, we'll see an opportunity, we'll try it and it doesn't work.
We're very quick to label that as a failure. But I'm going to propose something different to you because you're an entrepreneur, which means you're constantly trying new things. That's your job.
Your job is literally to carve a pathway somewhere, which means you're going to try and carve it one way and see, oh, there's a brick wall there, let's go that way now. Now we're going down this way. Oh, there's a lake there, let's go that way.
I'm picturing a map now. But you're carving through this forest or this jungle to cut this path for this business. I would propose that the only failure that we actually face as entrepreneurs is when we don't do something.
I would say if you are trying something, my friend, you've tried a new marketing campaign, it didn't work. You tried to build something and it didn't work. That is not failure.
That is having a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis and proving that it didn't work. That is that you will learn so much from those failures, much more from failure than you will from success. You can reverse the engineer the success of any business.
And people do this all the time. They talk about Amazon, they talk about Microsoft, they talk about Apple, all these things. And they focus on all the successes these people had and the great decisions they’ve made.
But they forget those great decisions came from 100 bad decisions, 100 decisions where things didn't work. So embrace that. Embrace the chaos, embrace the change.
The only failure is going, you know what? I'm scared and I don't want to do it. Just do it anyway.
So that's my advice to you, my friends. Keep reframing that in your mind because unfortunately, one thing I know about you, because it's the same thing with me, and this is what entrepreneurs do all the time. We often tie our sense of self-worth to whether we're succeeding or our version of failing.
We look at how we're doing as a business and go, I tried that, it didn't work. Oh, I'm a failure. There's nothing failure about you, my friend.
You are doing something that most people do not have the courage, the tenacity, the passion, the creativity to do. You are carving a path where others haven't been before. Certainly, you haven't been before.
Yes, you're making it up as you go along. Yes, you have no idea what you're doing. Those are good things.
Those are exactly what entrepreneurship is. So take heart, my friend. Be kind to yourself.

And on behalf of both Tommy and myself, we wish you all of the health, all of the wealth, all of the happiness, the success and the love that you so rightfully, and I really do mean rightfully deserve. Anyway, my friends, this is Chasing The Insights. I'm Vince Warnock.
You are an absolute freaking legend and I'll see you in the next episode.