This is Forest to Frame, where we explore how restoring forests creates beautiful spaces. A podcast dedicated to conversations with industry leaders shaping the future of the forest industry. And now, here's your host, Russ Vaagen. Hi everybody, welcome again to another episode of the Forrest of Frame podcast. Today I've got Cooper Simpson with us, and I don't know Cooper besides this, we're just getting to know one another, but we have somebody in common that we know, and that is Dan Martell. And I learned about Dan from his book, Buy Back Your Time, which was pretty, amazing. And I think once you read that book, it kind of shakes you to your core. And then I did some coaching with Dan through his elite coaching program. And yeah, he's an amazing guy. And he's also got an amazing set of people around him. And Cooper's one of those. And he's been tasked with leading Martel Ventures and a lot of Cooper do an introduction. But before he does that, I just want to say that I'm very jealous. You guys live in Kelowna. Yeah. And I live about a little less than three hours away. But I've spent a fair amount of time there just across the border in a little town called Colville. And it's amazing how many Americans don't know anything about Kelowna. But I tell people that it's kind of like a It's kind of like Lake Tahoe, Coeur d'Alene and wine country all mixed together. And you got some great ski areas as well, right nearby. And my family and I for spring break always go to either big white this last year, um, we went up to, um, Silverstar outside of Vernon. And so anyway, uh, welcome Cooper. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're doing? Yeah, thanks for, thanks for having me Russ. And yeah, quick backstory on myself, obviously named Cooper Simpson and kind of the, what I'm kind of working on and I guess Everything that I've got going on right now is I'm the portfolio manager for Dan Martell's AI Venture Studio, Martell Ventures. So what that kind of means in day to day and actual operational terms is I essentially help evaluate all of the AI focused founders that want to work with us and partner with us, analyze which ones we want to do deals with. And then once we kind of bring them into our world, help support them to grow, scale and reach reach all the goals that they're looking to do, whether that be exit, growth, continue on building a business. We're basically there to help them do that. And I think this year alone, we've already connected. We've evaluated probably close to 2,500, almost 3,000 AI businesses. And I've personally spoken to plus or minus 350 Founders already this year. So we've been seeing a lot of what's going on in the AI world, both from like what people are actually building, but also what people are using. So excited to come on and chat to that whole world. Yeah, it's you know, the AI world for you know, I'm not. I'm not that old, but I'm a lot older than most that are in the AI space. And a lot of people that have been in more traditional businesses, like I've been in the forced products business most of my professional life, but we're using AI more and more and understanding it more and more. But what's interesting, and you might find interesting, that we're working with a number of large tech companies right now to redesign the AI-focused data centers with mass timber. Because what we're doing is taking these, well, got to deal with the reality of wildfires in the summer now, which is not a lot of fun, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that our forests aren't managed very well. So what we're doing is thinning these forests and using them to build these data centers. And there's a tremendous amount of computing power that goes into an AI type data situation, data center, than is for like the traditional data centers for like cloud and storage and things like that. I know you talk a little bit, Cooper, about the types of businesses that you're seeing with AI. What's maybe the more mainstream use of AI? And then what are you really seeing that's pushing the boundaries that's like super cool? Yeah, I mean, we have a pretty specific scope for what we focus on at Martel Ventures. Like a lot of the stuff that we evaluate is, We love and appreciate all the people that are kind of out on like the breakthrough frontier, like edge of what's possible with the technology space, where we kind of focus on is more like the direct application layer. So we're really interested in what are the tools people that people are building that solve real problems for businesses that are specific and can be valuable today. So a lot of what we're focused on is things that are improving workflows for back end processes, removing manual tasks, kind of eliminating middle man type positions that kind of usually act as bottlenecks in businesses and just really seeing cool use cases in that space. Now, we do see a couple of really, I think, kind of to your question of what are we seeing that's really cool, which I'll get to in a second. I think there's some trends that we're really starting to see that are happening. But in terms of what we're looking for, And what we're most interested in is just all those different types of applications for how can you actually help a business. So think of that be like AI for recruiting, AI for accounts receivable collection, AI to help with lead follow-ups. So if somebody fills out a form on your website, how quickly can you get them to call back? So lots of like voice AI related things. Very interested in like how can you use AI to augment all your dashboards and the data that you view within your company. So one thing I was really good at is taking a lot of information and making it a lot more simple. So just kind of like those real practical use cases. But. what we, what we're kind of seeing right now that I would say is really cool is just kind of a shift from how people are interacting with all these tools. And there's a big shift right now in terms of like what I would kind of say, the user experience and the user interface, like everything is definitely shifting more towards voice as like the main and how people are interacting with tools. Which if you really start to peel back the layers of the onion is actually, I think, a much better experience than Dash, like the tool they have to log into, move things around, do all this like there's a world that's coming very quickly where. you'll open up a product, you'll have your dashboards of what's available and visible to you. That's customized based off what you want to see. And then you can actually speak and give essentially what you're looking for. And these products and these tools and these systems will be able to ingest all that information, have agents in the background, take action and just display what you want to see or how you want to use the tool rather than being locked into kind of what a company's built for like their specific work. So that's what's pretty cool right now. You know, that reminds me of, not to get too much philosophy in it, but you think about typing and typing like the letters and written word, and then you go further into like how we built all the stuff we interact with in the internet. If we went back in time and we never needed to use a keyboard to communicate and we could just talk, we probably would have just done that. You think about it. So we're probably going back to a more natural form of communication interaction by using AI. I also find that, There's more and more people now that resisted, like using chat GPT and others. And when I talk to people that really haven't kind of dug into what AI can do, I said, well, from a search and just research standpoint, AI to me, it's the difference between going in and searching for things on the internet if you were to use Google versus sending this tool out to collect all the things and bring them back to you at a very high rate of speed in ways you wouldn't even have thought to search because it's scouring it. And then what kind of Other ways, can you use a similar tool to do something else? As you were saying, like, I think there's a lot of applications for accounting. You know, you look at some of the big accounting software platforms, they're using a lot of AI to generate that stuff and think about reporting and data and all those things. Now that's where computing power and being able to see trends and do things like that to create data that you can really act upon more quickly, because that's really what it's all about is being able to eliminate the mistakes that we might make by being in the middle of something. And I think that's very interesting. So let me ask you a question about Martel Ventures and what you guys are looking at. So correct me if I'm wrong. So you guys are now out there talking to some of the brightest people in the field of AI and business. You know, they're trying to build a business in AI, evaluating that for maybe its scalability and market potential, and then coming in with capital and help to try to scale that business. Is that what it's all about, or is there more to it than that? A little bit more to it. I think where we kind of fit in is we're a little bit different than most venture capital, in a sense. Every kind of partner, whether it's a capital partner, strategic partner, kind of has like their own ace up their sleeve a little bit. Ours just so happens to be like, we're really lucky because ours happens to be kind of the reach reputation and authority and network that Dan has kind of built up over all the years. So we really add value to the companies that we partner with is we can essentially fast track and compress growth timelines without risking a lot of capital. And so what we do is we essentially take equity partnerships with all the companies that we that we work with and bring into our portfolio. And we do that because it aligns our interests with them. So that way we can say, cool, let's go pull every string we can, whether it's using kind of distribution from dance perspective, whether it's finding strategic partners, whether it's going to other networks and finding other creators within the social media sphere that can also be champions of the brand? And how can we essentially pull all of the social capital that we have available to us in order to add as much value as quickly as possible without risking a ton of money? Because one of the scary things for, I think a lot of AI businesses right now is nobody really knows how long it's going to be before open or open AI or anthropic or any of these larger companies build a feature that just crushes your company. So you got to be very careful in the AI space to really be solving problems that aren't in the crosshairs from these larger organizations, which is hard to predict. And so if you're going and raising funding it's our assumption. It's our, I guess, hot take that you should really only be raising capital if you're going for like growth and you know that you have like a repeatable growth process. If you're raising money to try and build something to validate, to see if you have product market fit, that's a bit of a scary place to be in because you may go do around not really have all your processes down to go acquire customers. And then you find yourself in a scenario where you're looking at it six months later, you're out of cash. You've got to go raise more money. And now you just keep diluting yourself. What we essentially bring to the table is we say, Hey, come work with us. Let's partner together. We'll use all the tools in our toolbox, which is a huge amount of distribution and a huge amount of social media reach to help test, validate, and confirm if people actually want to buy the product. And then once we know that, let's start ratcheting up the amount of, let's start ratcheting up the amount of content that we're creating. Let's start introducing to other people. And then at the same time, let's work to build those marketing systems. So that way, once we know that we have product market fit, the messaging works, we have a repeatable way to get customers, whether that's through ads or whether that's through partners, whatever it is, then we can go dump a bunch of cash on it and you essentially just reduce the risk a lot for these founders. And yeah, essentially, you can you can grow a lot faster. That makes a ton of sense. I'm actually in the middle of a book right now, Ben Horowitz, the hard thing about hard things. And he and Mark Andreessen, they founded Netscape way back in the day. And it reminds me what you're saying about that kind of the dot com kind of boom, bubble and bust that happened in the late 90s to early 2000s. And I can see there were all kinds of companies that were built and funded that were also competing with larger companies, like as you say, open AI or others that that are working on these same things. And once you've got this, maybe you've got a great idea and maybe you've got it built out a little bit better, but you had this behemoth that's gonna build it and build it on top of their platform. I think that makes. all the sense in the world. And Dan is like, you know, I've learned a lot from Dan about AI and about the people and the businesses that are out there. And I think he's as good as anybody to understand like how to put that out there and then to deploy the number of eyeballs on it and, you know, to convert that to currency and rather than actually deploy currency. And then maybe it's, not where it needs to be. And a lot of times I think, and I'm assuming with these AI businesses, there's a series of pivots. You're building something and then you built this thing and it turns out it is like the best in its space, but it's really not what you were going for, but it was like the thing that converted to something else. And we've kind of done that in our business with some software that we developed. And I think about AI and technology and some of the things is we deal a lot with architecture. And so just in the last 15, 20 years, the computer-aided drafting and 3D modeling and all of those things have really gotten very impressive, but it's also still complicated and still needs a lot of people. And a lot of these things, I believe AI can shortcut from what was taking months and lots of people and lots of dollars into probably not even minutes to do some of this stuff and test multiple different ways, whether it's your heating and air conditioning systems or your mechanical and electrical, all those things. on top of the building materials. And I think the other thing that AI is doing in a big way is being able to do some cost comparisons of things that are very complex. Because right now in the built environment, we typically, you have somebody who has an idea to build something, maybe they need to build it, maybe they just have an idea of a building they wanna do. Then there's a process by which you have a designer architect that comes and designs it. And then you have an engineer that says, okay, it's not gonna fall down. And then you have a general contractor and then the general contractor has to go and figure out all the different pieces that need to be brought together in order to build that thing. And we do that now. And I just, I say this, maybe this will get to some people that are out there in the space or maybe that are already working on it that I could maybe come into contact with, but like, it's so kind of archaic where we do all these separate things, right? And we have to go out and you collect, you know, a quote from here and here and here and here. And then you put it together. And now in the building industry, it's all about mitigating risk. And I think with AI, there's a great opportunity for us to shortcut that process. And I'm also hoping, cause you know, It doesn't matter whether it's in Canada or the US, we've got housing issues and we've got all these other things that are out there. And I think so much of it's information flow and like the log jams that are out there, because you think about it, in many of these municipalities, it takes, well over a year, sometimes two, just to go through a permitting phase to see whether or not you can build what it is you set out to build. Yet at the same time, we're tens of thousands or millions of units behind, and it's creating this affordable housing crisis. Yet by the time we get through that process, that really is data crunching, right? It shouldn't be anything too complicated. You're now creating this boom and bust cycle because you have a bunch of people that are doing it, trying to meet the needs of a market at any one time. And then they all come to market around the same time. And then all of a sudden the dynamics have shifted. So I think the AI, as cool as it is in like a tech centric mindset, it has real world implications for like oldest of businesses. Oh yeah. I mean, even a company we were evaluating the other day, like in the direct line site, they basically work with manufacturing businesses and they build some tech that essentially you just take a picture of an entire purchase invoice and it'll read every single line item of what you purchased, what was on that invoice, what was in there. down to just take it, it doesn't matter what form factor. So you could have 10 different purchase orders from 10 different suppliers. It'll take in all that information, automatically pull out the data points, connects in with whatever ERP system you're using or whatever inventory management system you're using. We'll fill in the data and details and then also give whoever's actually going and doing the logistics checks, the actual count numbers to see if they're like on or off so they can see like without having to go back and double check everything and just to like that one process alone takes away probably five hours worth of manual entry that somebody would need to do after they've got to go do the actual like recount to see if everything's in there. There's tons of really cool, I know, yeah, to your point with like the cost comparisons, I mean, even there's other opportunities that we've seen that are tackling it from a permitting situation. Cause yeah, if it's going to take you a year to get through that phase, heaven forbid you get to that point and realize that you accidentally messed up somewhere in your application or you misread a zoning bylaw and it gets rejected. Now you got to go back to square one and redo the whole thing. So tools that can essentially there's tools that we've been seeing that have been coming around that are kind of tackling that problem to just like check every little detail point before you submit something to make sure that you are actually submitting something that has the highest likelihood of getting approval. So You know, it's funny, the other thing that you're kind of hitting on there is, you know, there's a whole space in the, in a lot of different fields for errors and omissions. I mean, there's a whole like insurance space for it. Right. And there are so many of those things that. are just honest mistakes, right? That was like, oh, we didn't put that in there, it was supposed to be in there. Or that was on that version and we didn't convert that to the next round. And I mean, I've dealt with it in my business and mistakes happen. But I think that using tools that are AI driven, I think we can reduce that pretty significantly. And I think that one thing that I think is, a real big opportunity is getting the people that are so smart about AI and how to implement it with people like myself and others that are like, doing really big things in an old way, right? Because sometimes we don't even know what to consider AI for. And so seeing all these businesses that are out there, I think we got to figure out how to bridge that gap, right? The knowledge gap, the execution gap, just the what is it and how do we use it, you know, kind of thing. And especially in these traditional businesses and I can just see it helping in so many ways. And I'm really eager to, you know, follow your progression and what Martel Ventures is doing. And I, like I said, I've learned a ton and I think this is, this is really exciting. What other thoughts or ideas do you wanna share before we wrap up? Well, I think probably like a good applicable one that is really easier for people to wrap their head around in terms of like how to start thinking about where can I integrate AI into the whole scenario. is like a really good exercise that people can start doing. And if anybody wants, like we actually have an internal playbook kind of at Martell Ventures, which is like how we kind of walk through this. So if anybody wants kind of this like checklist of how to answer these questions, just like shoot me a message on Instagram and just say like Russ AI and I can send it over. But essentially what you can do is go to AI and essentially just get it to ask you questions to uncover where the bottlenecks are. So like the exercise we'll run all the time is, hey, act as an AI expert. And I need your help to identify ways that I can better use AI in my business. Here's a little bit of context on what I do. Ask me as many questions as possible to figure out where I could be using AI to improve my workflows, systems, and processes. And then you'll basically take It'll take you probably 30 to 45 minutes, but you'll go through this whole process and it'll be just one. It'll be eye opening because you'll be getting questions about your business that you've never had before. But two, you'll actually get some real actionable insights that are tailored pretty closely to your specific situation on how you can go take action and use AI for those. for those areas. And easy bonus points is if there's any of them that seem like they're easy lifter that you want to go take action on it, you can literally just ask AI, chat, GPT, call, whatever you want to give you instruction sets on how to set that up. And that's probably like the easiest, lowest hanging fruit way to kind of get started with everything. And for somebody who's really never done that before, you know, we talk about ChatGPT, what other platforms would you suggest that people look at for? I would say, yeah, I would say the top two main ones. I mean, there's a lot, but the two main ones that you can't really go wrong with is either Claude or ChatGPT. Those are kind of the two best ones. You can also use Grok from Twitter. That one's also pretty decent, but If you're just if you're just getting real, if you're if you're just getting the ball rolling, those three can't really go wrong. And if you had to, if you wanted to keep it even more. simple, just go to chat GPT kind of as a default, and you'll probably be, you'll be in good hands, we'll put it that way. Yeah, no, I've been using it now for probably about a year and more so since my interactions with Dan and the community of AI businesses, like, okay, it's opening my eyes to how to use that. And I guess the last question would be, I mean, besides going and asking, questions and really trying to dive deep, because AI and ChatGPT and others, that whole world does a tremendous job of getting you outside the box if you use it that way. It really expands. But for... If for somebody that is running maybe a traditional business, or yeah, I would say running a traditional business, but doesn't know where to start with AI in terms of applications for their business, Where would you suggest they look to try to interact with people that could give them some ideas on, okay, how do we, whether it's building AI on top of their business or adding things that allow them to use AI in their business? Yeah, I mean, I'd say the two easiest places would be kind of like, you could run that exercise I was just talking about to kind of get AI to tell you. The other way, if you want to get more like, if you want a more descriptive version, just go to YouTube and like YouTube just has a wealth of information on there. And the bonus point would be, so that way you don't have to search for it. If you go, like, say you open up chat GPT and you're like, Hey, I don't even know where to start. I like to watch videos. Can you please give me, 10 videos of people who are using AI for blank use case, and it'll go search, pull the videos for you, you can go watch them. And then if you have more questions, just start interfacing. And that's probably the easiest way to get started. There's a lot of people out there who kind of feel like trying to sell you a dream real quick on it. And I mean, There's no fault in that, but I'd say for majority of people, especially if you're just kind of dipping your toes in and getting your feet wet, just start asking questions about what you're thinking about. And you can be as ignorant as possible. The beautiful thing about AI is it's patient. It won't judge you. It doesn't care. It'll just answer your questions. So. Yeah. Well, you know, the other great resource and content that's out there is Dan's. I mean, he's got a tremendous amount of content out there, especially if you don't even know where to start. He's got all kinds. He's so systematic in his approach and the numbers of things that he goes through. So I'd say that would be a great place to look for as well. Well, Cooper, thank you. I've enjoyed this time. I want to give a special thanks to Sebastian Rusk at the podcast launch lab and he's a podcast suck.com, I believe. He's the one who hooked us up and he's just awesome at helping people set up their podcasts and get out there and get their voice. And he certainly did that for us here. So we appreciate that. Cooper, how could people find you and follow you and reach out to you if they have something with Martel Ventures they want to check out? You can either send me an email at Cooper at Dan Martell dot com. Follow me on Instagram. If you search Cooper Simpson, I think my username is doggy dog. So that's kind of funny. Yeah. Or add me on LinkedIn. Cooper Simpson. Lots of ways. Pretty easy to find online. Awesome. Well, Cooper, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Great to get to know you here and hope to see you again soon and go enjoy that Will do. Take care. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. 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