Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast, From the Ground Up, where we interview startup founders, exploring their journeys, their success, challenges, and lessons learned. We hope you'd be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal. And here with us today we have Deon Nicholas, co-founder and CEO of Forethought. Deon, welcome to the show.
Deon Nicholas: Jake, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well, I know you're calling in today from Canada. I'm calling in from Silicon Valley. Um, are you, are you from Canada or where are you from?
Deon Nicholas: Yeah, yeah, I am. So um, I live out in the, in the Bay Area now, but I was born and raised in, in Toronto in Canada um, in kind of the inner city. My parents were um, were immigrants from the Caribbean. Um, and yeah, so we grew up there. My dad's a mechanic. He's always been, he always tinkers and builds things. I think I got that gene, which is how I ended up uh building technology and on, on the computers. But yeah, so grew up there, um, ended up uh in high school on the other side of the country in Edmonton, Alberta, which is where I actually did my first internship in AI, which we can talk about. Um and then went to school at University of Waterloo before moving out to the Bay Area full-time.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Thanks for sharing that. A little bit more about Deon. He is uh, not just the leader of the company, he's the first AI, or for the first AI platform in customer support automation uh, but he previously built products and infrastructure at Facebook, Palantir, Dropbox, and Pure Storage. He's authored several machine learning publications and holds numerous infrastructure patents. Deon was uh a world finalist at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest and was previously named to Forbes 30 under 30. Great pedigree, good background. Um, before we really dive into your, your company and we, we'll talk about your organization here, um, what uh, what really was your background with startups before starting this company?
Deon Nicholas: Um, yeah, so I interestingly enough, uh when I started getting into tech, I always assumed I'd just become a software engineer and go work at, you know, big companies, which I, I did for a while. But the interesting thing is that um I have always kind of been a builder in the sense that you know, whenever I have an idea for a product or a problem that I...
[Early Entrepreneurship and Building Forethought]
...want to solve for myself or others, I, I start thinking about... I start tinkering with, I start, you know, writing code, hacking things together. And I think that was my earliest form of entrepreneurship. So in many ways I didn't necessarily know I was going to become an entrepreneur, start a company. Really, that was you know, I caught the bug and, and decided to do it. But um, yeah, but in so many ways I think I was doing entrepreneurship in like, without even knowing it.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, well you've been working for some great companies prior to, you know, getting into building your own organizations. Um, what uh, we're going to kind of just jump straight into uh your company. What, what inspired you to really start it and, and what problem are you solving with Forethought?
Deon Nicholas: Yeah. So at Forethought, we are the generative AI for customer support. Um probably the world's first um AI customer service platform um out there. Um and we launched in 2018 really with this vision and this idea that you know, state-of-the-art AI... at the time it was transformer models. By 2019 it was things like GPT-1, GPT-2 um and other models that we were developing... we realized could transform how people did...
[Forethought's Vision and Launch]
...customer service. How questions were answered, how these chat bots worked um, and how agents got access to information. And so that was kind of the premise we were built on. And you know, five years later we're starting to see that a lot of the, the industry is starting to realize that this is exactly how you should be solving this problem.
Um in terms of how we got here, how I got started: I mentioned I grew up um in, in, in Canada. Have been interested in technology and in computers for a very long time. In high school I had the good fortune um to intern at an AI lab. It was the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute in Edmonton, Alberta. Um and this was I don't know like 15 some odd years ago, something like that. Um and uh that was where I learned about AI. That was where I learned about machine learning. I was more or less just you know, getting coffees for people, but by... by osmosis learning from these machine learning practi-, practitioners, these AI people about you know, what is supervised learning? What is unsupervised learning? What are all these things?
And, and that was um really fun for me because again I was so fascinated with technology and learning this, this whole other branch of technology started to get my wheels spinning. The next summer, um or sorry, the next school year, um I, being a math and computers guy, I was very bad at subjects like history. And so I thought about, you know, could you apply AI, this technology, to questioning answering to help me answer my questions in history class, or help me study, help me learn, help me access information? And that was kind of my first ever like AI idea I had ever had. And fast forward many years, that led to this rabbit hole of this, this problem of um, what can AI do? I mean back then the technology sucked, but I, I never really gave up on this problem of using AI to answer questions.
And so, went, went to school, University of Waterloo, became a software engineer, but kind of studied natural language processing, natural language understanding off the, off the side of my desk so to speak. Coursera started to become a big thing. I would take all the Stanford Coursera courses on natural language processing. Um, take all the AI courses at Waterloo. And so just over the years I started to kind of like build up this, this kind of like side expertise in NLP.
And, and so in 2017, 2018, after I'd you know been an engineer for a few years at, at real startups, I started to realize that the technology was starting to take on this, this exponential curve. Like um, the same way computer vision about 10 years before started to become a thing, you know, AI that can see, and now that's leading to self-driving cars. Started to see that a lot of the technology around natural language processing was finally getting there to be able to apply it to real-world scenarios. And so then it just became a matter of like, all right, I know I'm going to build this question answering AI. And where is the most, single most important place where this is going to happen? Well, it's customer questions, right? Like everyone is a customer of something, you often have questions, you often have products that don't work, you're often put on hold. Well, can you apply AI to this? And so that was like that, that rabbit hole and this passion of mine. Um and then eventually I just got enough conviction and decided I was gonna like leave my job and, and start the company and, and really take it from there.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. It's a risk to do that. You're getting paid and all of a sudden you're not and you, hopefully you got some money saved up and you launch a company, you got to convince people to join it and your vision and all that. You know, you applied to Y Combinator uh as I understand it, did not get in. But then fast forward, you were on you, you know TechCrunch Battlefield, you won. And shortly after that got your Series A funding and now you've since raised over $92 million in funding. So you don't have to always go through an accelerator to, to succeed. What was the journey like when you first got turned down from YC to really stepping back up to the plate and, and really building a product that you won uh TechCrunch Battlefield? What was missing? What was the feedback they provided to you that you knew, "Okay, maybe I'm not quite ready yet"?
Deon Nicholas: Yeah, it was like such a really interesting experience that in so many ways like, actually like flipped a switch, flipped a switch for me that I was like, "Oh okay, like I'm going to go do this and here's, here's why." So as I mentioned, I didn't really know you know this concept of being an entrepreneur, right? Like I'm not from Silicon Valley, I'm this kid from Toronto. Like I you know. And so like I wasn't... I never really thought that I was going to go and become a CEO so to speak. But again, I was always solving these, these problems, right? Like I knew I wanted to build something in AI, etc., but a lot of the ideas were early, a lot of them weren't well formed. Um and kind of my belief in myself wasn't yet there.
[Becoming an Entrepreneur and Starting a Company]
Like I didn't really know whether or not I was gonna "quote unquote" start a company really at the time. So this was like the early you know, primordial phases. Um, and so I was exploring a bunch of different ideas in AI and um exploring a bunch of different ideas in general. I ended up getting connected to other entrepreneurs um and a partner at Y Combinator, and it was them who kind of like encouraged me to go and apply to Y Combinator. I was like, "Wait, you can do that? Like, anyone can just apply? Like don't you need to be like a real entrepreneur to do this?" They're like, "No, just like, let's, let's do it."
And so I, I had an early um... like the main feedback was really that my ideas weren't yet well formed, but I'll get to that in a second. So, but I applied with you know, early idea, "Hey, I want to build this AI thing." Um, didn't yet know what I was going to apply it to, but I knew that you know the technology was there. Um, and I ended up getting an interview and you know getting through, through that phase and all that, and eventually get turned down.
But uh, here's the thing. The mere fact that when I started sharing my ideas with other entrepreneurs, they were like, "Yeah, you should go raise money for this. You should apply to Y Combinator." When I you know, applied to YC um they were like, "Yeah, like come in for an interview." Like all of these little things, even though I in the end I got turned down, these were like weirdly validating for me. It was like, "Okay, like if I can get this far, then I could probably get a step further. If I can do that, I can probably do the next thing." And it was like this weird switch that flips where you're like, "Okay, all this stuff that I used to think was like entrepreneurship was this thing that other people did, that like 'real' CEOs did so to speak, and I'm just this engineer," I started to realize that like that, that cognitive distance was, was a lot smaller than I thought.
At the end of the day, entrepreneurship is about finding your problem, solving the problem, and doing it in a way that builds value for customers and then ultimately creates value for, for a company. And, and so once I started to realize that there wasn't really any cognitive distance between those two things, I was like, "I know how to solve problems. I know how to have an impact on people. Like, I know how to do these things that end up summing up to entrepreneurship. I know how to start a company." And so like it was this weird like... I got turned down, but I was like super energized and vigor-, I was like, "Okay, forget this. Like, I get it. Like, okay cool. I don't necessarily need to do the accelerator thing, but I know I can go and solve problems for customers."
And so then that was what, what changed for me was like, "I am just going to spend as much time as humanly possible with customers. In our case, you know, customer service agents, people in the customer service world, so that I could figure out what problem I could solve for them and, and how this AI thing could actually work for them." And that's it. And that became like my, my north star was like: find what you would call product-market fit by focusing on solving problems for customers.
So we ended up, you know, just really focusing on that. We raised a tiny bit of money. We ended up getting accepted into TechCrunch Disrupt, and I remember telling you know, by this point like about you know 6 months later, just before TechCrunch Disrupt, I... we had a few uh, it was me, my co-founder, we had a couple people on the team. And I remember telling the team, "Guys, we're going to go launch, it's going to be this cool thing, but nothing matters unless we have customers who are willing to put their logo on our slide and rave about what we've done for them." You know? And so like that focus on "solve problems for your customers and good things will come" was like that first early lesson for us. And so we did. We, we, we hunkered down. I mean then the following year, September 2018, launched at TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield. We were you know, gave this pitch and this vision for AI-powered customer support and beyond, but also we had this extreme customer focus. We had seven different logos of customers who had already tried our software by this point. And so like... and that you know, made us look like a really mature company. And I think that really contributed to why we ended up winning ultimately.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. I love the fact that you, you got the logos. I mean, once you get sort of raving fans around your, your product that not only are willing to you know, put their logo on your slide or at least you know, use your product and commit to it. I think it opens up the door and makes it easier to not just present um to other customers, but you know, to investors and to others that are trying to figure out do you have viable product. So really good strategy. Um when it comes to I guess today's market, in today's world with AI seems to be everywhere. Um, what is the, what is between Forethought's products and say other, other you know generative AI products on the market?
Deon Nicholas: Yeah, so taking a step back, the market has really evolved in, in a, in a very good way in a sense. Um because you know, a year, two years ago when we were talking to customers, we had to explain, like you know, we, we tried to bang on people's doors to explain to them why all the chat bots they'd been using in the past weren't real AI, and that why they needed real AI, you know, these transformer models um right, and things like that that could actually um solve customer problems, that could answer, actually answer customer questions in a human-like way compared to these clunky chat bots that had been around in the past. And then once GPT dropped uh about a year ago, everything changed to...
[The Evolution of the AI Market]
...everyone now starting to bang on our doors trying to explain to us why they need our AI for their customer support. And so the, the market has completely shifted. Now AI is you know, it's like a household term, right? You could be talking to your, your grandmother and they'll be talking about GPT or AI at this point. Um and, and so with that a few things. You know, we had to evolve as well. One, getting really crisp on our market differentiation and our differ-... um and our positioning. Um, and, and two, shifting from a kind of outbound sales motion from like a go-to-market perspective, to a marketing-led sales motion um overall.
And so in terms of the, the differentiators, the big thing that we realized is that 99% of competitors in our space fall into two categories. They're either the, the clunky classical chatbots that are no worse, no better than a decision tree like, you know, "press one for, for support, press two for billing," in, in chat form. Like, "press this button for, you know, that," um, if/then statements. Or a lot of the, the, the newcomers are just taking ChatGPT and then applying that to your public help center, your public knowledge base articles, right? And so they can answer these FAQs, but in a more human-like fashion thanks to GPT. But they can't go through and do the more complex problems like issuing refunds, changing a flight ticket, actually taking action, looking up things in databases, and, and solving hard problems, which is actually the bulk of customer service.
And so what we realized is we can be the best of both worlds. Given the five-year kind of advantage and head start we have, not only do we have the AI, but we are actually the only players in the space that deeply integrate into your conversation data, your Zendesk, your Salesforce, pull that all in, and then train models that know how to respond to questions, but are also so integrated that they can go and take action, issue refunds, do all the things that a real agent would do um in order to solve that longtail, you know, the backend 80% of questions. And so it ends up leading to a much more uh personalized, customized and powerful model for these businesses. It's a lot easier to deploy because you don't have to manually do anything. The AI is learning from your, your best agents and how they've responded to things. And ultimately it's just like a completely different paradigm. And then all of that powered by LLMs and things like that, so you still get this human-like back and forth. Um and so that's what we've seen has been our secret sauce in the market and we're pretty excited to see that, that level up um in both the technology, but also the market's uh demand for this stuff.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: When you look at customer support, that's kind of a, seems like a main focus of yours. Do you see your product being used in other use cases where maybe it's solving a different problem for a company, or is it purely a focus on, on customer support agents?
Deon Nicholas: I think ultimately it's a matter of the timeframe, but the short answer is yes. Like there, there's, there's so many applications. If you actually go back to our 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt pitch, we, we talked about it as the AI would start, and it could be embedded into all of these different workflows, starting with customer service because we still fundamentally believe this is the single biggest um industry that is going to be impacted by AI. Even if you've heard interviews with Sam Altman, he said the same thing, customer service being the first and foremost. But um, I fundamentally believe this technology can help businesses make every single touch point between them and their customers more intelligent, faster, and ultimately better. And so that means things like marketing, right? So why restrict a Forethought or an AI to just when you have a problem? What about when you're on the website, you're just...
[Expanding AI Applications]
...learning about the product for the first time? Could you have an AI that can walk you through the different options, help you understand, right? Like, this is AI for marketing. What about internal IT um for employees? Uh, what about sales? What about customer success and retention? And so I actually see these as like five or six different buckets that in the long, long term, uh the same way Sales became the system of record for sales, and then Service Cloud, and so on... um companies like Forethought and hopefully Forethought specifically can become the, the system of intelligence for every single one of these you know human-centered workflows from support to sales, to marketing, to IT, to HR. Um and so long-term we believe that.
That being said, you know, I think each of these are actually potential billion dollar businesses so to speak. Um and so you have to focus as an entrepreneur. And so you start you know building your killer app, but then over time you can expand. We already have some customers using us for marketing as an example. They've you know applied our Forethought AI to their support and they're like, "Can we use this on our front end of our website?" And we're like, "Yeah, let's do it." And so we're already starting to see some of these use cases pop out. Um but that being said, you know, focus is important. And then given a long game, you know, over the next 20, 30 years, I think we can, we can become that company.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. I think Sam Altman said from, you know, OpenAI that what he thought would be the first use cases that AI would really show some, some big growth in, was the reverse. And it actually started with you know, more the creative side where they saw really um some utilization of AI. How do you see AI encouraging creativity?
Deon Nicholas: So this is actually an interesting one, because I think it threw all of us for a loop. Like the humanity collectively, right? Because what's weird is, if you look at AI 10 years ago, 5 years ago, even 3 years ago, it was all centered around um analytics and kind of determining um uh like figuring things out from like a classification perspective, right? Using AI to crunch numbers, make predictions. "What ad do you want to click? This and that." Um and that was AI for a very long time, right? Like supervised learning. And it felt very rigid, it felt very clunky, but it was useful. It was like you know, statistics and analytics on steroids.
For the first time with this, these language models, large language models or LLMs, you're seeing AI that can quote unquote "speak back." You're seeing AI that you don't just you know, plug some data in and it pops some data out. You're seeing AI that can actually create stories. Uh...
[The Creative Potential of AI]
...be, be you know, a muse or, or like a thought partner in terms of, imagine you're a, a mathematician trying to come up with a brand new proof or, or a brand new theorem. You can actually work with the AI to, to, to bounce ideas off of. And I think that's just so powerful that we actually have technology now that in some ways is, is you know, empathetic, in some ways is, is creative. Um just like humans. And it's obviously you know, it's still numbers at the end of the day, but the ability for AI to actually um kind of take part in this creative process, I think is going to be huge.
Like I already today, when I'm writing a blog post or an email or something, I'll usually take my first draft and then use GPT or some, my AI to help spur creative ideas. "Hey, how might you say this differently?" Etc., etc., etc. And when you go through revisions like that, it becomes super, super powerful. So I think it's the future and I think it's uh something that's amazing about AI.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know, companies if they use your technology and your platform at Forethought and they say... they have a customer service or customer support team of you know, 50 people. Does your technology actually replace the customer support or customer service teams, or is it just uh a product that helps improve how they do their job? What's, what are you seeing uh once, once the implementation happens?
Deon Nicholas: Yeah, I think it, it's a fundamental transforming of expectations of "what is customer service, what is the role, what is the agent doing, and what is AI doing?" And the reason I say that is because most AI platforms or most AI solutions out there are point solutions. They're chat bots and that's all they do. Their, their whole goal is to replace people. We offer the ability to have a resolution... what our product is called Solve, but we're actually a full platform. So once we're integrated in there, our AI is going to resolve the simplest questions, but it's also going to help tag and route the more complex questions to the human agents. It's also going to help generate insights for um support leaders and ultimately um basically boost everyone up. And so when you can do all of those things in combination, part of it is that you're going to be replacing some of these simpler questions, but you're also going to be elevating the agents so that...
[Transforming Customer Service with AI]
...they can actually do more for the more complex problems, the ones that require human judgment or empathy. Imagine you know, trust and safety issues or fraud issues or things where you're going to require some of that human judgment. So ultimately I think it actually elevates the entire uh workspace.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. For the listeners out there that might want to try your product, what's the timeframe to, to try, to, to actually use, implement, and get up and running? Is there a large integration process? Is it a quick turn, turn on button and they're up and running? What's the implementation look like?
Deon Nicholas: Yeah, great question. I think it's, it's roughly proportional to your, your customer service ticket volume. So if you're you know, a new business, you're just getting started, you have a couple agents, you want to try out AI, it'll probably take you a day. You can leverage our Solve, uh, we have a Lite package where you can basically plug it in and be up and running in, in 24 hours or less. If you're you know... we also work uh you know, from, from the smallest companies to the largest companies. We work with folks like Asana and Lime and Marriott who are you know, powering hundreds of thousands if not millions of, of issues every single year. And for them obviously it's going to take longer to integrate and, and get going. But it's also going to be a lot more powerful for them, right? And so we, we have this philosophy of meeting our customers where they're at. Um so for, for the very simple use case, for the customers who just want to get going with AI right away, you know, go to our website, forethought.ai, um and uh and sign up. And uh for the bigger companies, yeah, you can also leverage the power of Forethought too.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know, for entrepreneurs that start companies, you have an idea, you create a product...
[Integration and Timeframe for Implementation]
...you're solving a problem and you scale. And sometimes you scale at the right pace and sometimes it's your first time doing it, you don't know how to scale. And, and you, you raise the capital, you have 10 million, $20 million in funding, whatever it is. And you think you know, the metrics are "I need to grow, so you need to hire, you need to build." And then the market changes. And the next thing you know, you're having to rethink how you optimize your business or right-size it. What's been your experience over the last 24, 36 months where almost every company in tech has had to make some sort of pivot or change or you know, right-size or downsize? What's been your experience and what have you learned?
Deon Nicholas: Oh, thanks for that question Jake. It's, it's definitely been one of the most interesting learning lessons for like a first time entrepreneur is that, how do I put it? The, the environment you're raised in is not necessar-, not necessarily reality. Right? Like I think from 2016 to 2021, all of entrepreneurship, all of the tech VC-backed community was kind of preconditioned that capital was free, you're going to be able to keep raising money, you need to grow at all costs, you need to burn. Uber was able to go public and they were not profitable, so just keep doing that. And I think like again, outside of that five-year period, that's not normal. Right? Like you have to build a sound business, build sound fundamentals. Profitability is important ultimately. And um growing with reasonable efficiency with great fundamentals is the most important way to grow. And so we had to like unlearn all of the kind of bad habits of, of the pre-2022 era um going into 2022 once capital...
[Lessons Learned and Adapting to Changing Capital Environment]
...dries up. And, and um, you know, uh efficiency starts to become the name of the game so to speak, right? And so um, yeah, we, we also like, we grew too fast I would say in, up until 2021, so we also had to downsize. We had to look at every area of our business and understand like, "Hey, where are things efficient and where are they inefficient? And let's actually start raising the fundamentals and raising that baseline of efficiency so that we can kind of grow properly and not just by you know, throwing VC dollars at everything." So it's been an interesting learning lesson to say the least. But I think ultimately it's made this company a lot more fundamentally strong at the end of the day.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great to hear. Um, how big are you as a company today?
Deon Nicholas: Yeah, so about 75 employees today. Um uh 75 strong. A lot of that is engineering, um uh research, etc. But we also you know, as any SaaS company um, have like a team across go-to-market, um operations and everything. So it's interesting as an entrepreneur seeing the, the organization grow and, and kind of the composition of it um uh change over time.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: As a leader of the company, as a CEO, first-time founder, what's been a lesson that you can share with other founders that you wish you would have known before you started the company? You've been in business for a while now, that you would have done differently.
Deon Nicholas: Uh Jake, how much time you got? No, I'm kidding. But um yeah, so a lesson in terms of things I would have done differently. I think um well, well, two things. So one, going back to what we just talked about, is like making sure that you um you know, your kind of basic, call it, you know, four or five levers of scale that are, that are um, that are indicators of efficient scale, right? 'Cause like, growth... and when you're growing well... and, and these are actually all good things, and you know, when your product's in demand, it can...
[Company Growth and Composition]
...actually mask any areas that are like broken or any areas that aren't shored up. So you know, as an example, if you know your product sells itself and you're, you're growing and, and all of that, but you fundamentally don't know as a company how to do marketing well, or how to do demand generation well, or things like that, then when market dynamics change, you're going to have to figure that out, right? And so knowing your, your CAC, your LTV, like these you know fundamental things you kind of hear in, in, in, in, in startup school so to speak. These things are really important to just have a pulse on even when like fundamentally things are going well. Because then when things shift you can be like, "Okay, I know exactly how to move this lever to shift one way or the other."
[Lessons for First-Time Entrepreneurs]
And so I think um in the earlier days, right, like you know we've, we've had a ton of I would say demand for our products and things like that. But even as you're scaling, I would say in the earlier days like pre-Series A, I would have spent more time on those sorts of things. And then the second thing that I wouldn't say I would do differently, but I would continue to harp on for new entrepreneurs is: always, always, always focus on your team. Right? Because eventually as you scale as a CEO, the only way to scale the business is to bring on folks who are better than you at that specific function. You know, bring on the world class VP of Sales or bring on the world class VP of Product or VP of Oper-, Operations or so on. And, and actually spend that time and do that, again, earlier than you think I think in some cases. Because that's how you can scale a function so that you can also zoom out and then enable yourself to do more with the business, which becomes this virtuous cycle. And it's not something I would say I would do differently, but something that I think like I could, I could do even more of, right? Like in hindsight um as, if you were to ask me like you know, advice for an entrepreneur in the future.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Well said. If you look at your company today, you've got great people working for you and you've hired great people. What's worked for you in attracting the right people and, and what's worked for you in, in vetting them out as you recruit?
Deon Nicholas: Um, couple answers to this that may be unconventional but like I actually think are really important. So the first that comes to mind is write, like write down everything. Write down what you're looking for. So it starts with like: who are you as a company? What are your values? Because that is literally going to determine the kinds of people you hire, right? And it's not you know fluffy stuff like I don't know "happiness" or whatever. Like I don't know, I can't, I can't even like think of it. But, but it's, it's literally like what are the traits you would look for in a person that you're going to you know, go to battle with for the next 10 years? What are things you will not um accept and like you would actually fire for? Like what do you hire for, fire for, and performance manage for outside of just raw skill? I would write all of that down. Starting with values, starting with your interview process, interview rubric.
So a lot of things like I've discovered, and, and some of this is, is um you know based on my own strengths and weaknesses, right? So I would hire people who have strengths where I have weaknesses, but also align on the values, right? So we look for people who are low ego, low ego um you know high grit, high resiliency, but also pretty strong operators. Right? People who, who want to run through walls but also get stuff done. And like being able to articulate what you're looking for is like the most important thing. Both in terms of writing down what you're looking for in ter-, terms of a role, especially if it's a role you've never hired for. Like if you're a CEO hiring your first VP of Marketing role and you've never done marketing, being able...
[Hiring and Building a Strong Team]
...to get extremely clear on what you're looking for and what you're not is going to be good. Um and then boiling that down, that rigor throughout the process. Like getting together with your team, figuring out what the interview process is going to be like. On the other side, the candidate's going to feel a lot more um clear and a lot more um informed about, "Hey, is this the company for me?" And, and on the flip side, you're going to feel a lot more clear and informed on, "Is this the candidate for this company?"
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really good to hear that. You know, I've interviewed over 20,000 people uh for companies. And you know, big companies and small companies. And every company has its own process, its own culture, its own ideas of what they want. Sometimes you don't know until you go through a few, to through few, a few, few people and understand like, "I got it wrong. This is what I learned," and then you get better for it. So we always like to carve out some risk timeframes in there to say, "Look, give it a shot. If it doesn't work out, at least you know what you want and don't want, you can learn from it."
Um, as a company um, what's 2024 look like for you in terms of growth and hiring? And are there roles you want to plug in now? If someone hears about you on this podcast that "Hey, I'd like to join that company," where do you see growth within the company?
Deon Nicholas: Yeah, so um right now we're hiring for a few customer-focused roles. So customer success managers, um Account Executives on the sales side. Um as well as uh folks in technical pre-sales, so sales engineers, things like that. So we're really focusing a lot on our um kind of customer facing team as we continue to grow um and solve problems for folks. And then in terms of like you know, zooming out the company, what our focus is for 2024: I mean again, AI is this amazing technology, it's this amazing space, customer service being one of them. And so it's continuing to innovate, right? Continuing to innovate both on our product. We launched Autoflows a few months ago, which is the ability for AI to actually operate like a human, take action without being explicitly programmed, you literally just give it a policy. So we're continuing to double down and innovate on the product side while continuing to take care of our customers on um, on the front end, on the go-to-market side. And so yeah, if anyone's looking for roles um in, at a hot AI company, then definitely, definitely reach out.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool. Well, you mentioned your website a few times, but I just want to reiterate again, if they want to contact with you, where do they go? And if they want to get in contact with your company or to check it out, where should they go?
Deon Nicholas: Absolutely. So our website is www.forethought.ai. Um feel free to reach out um on the website. You can also see a demo of our, of our technology...
[Advice for Entrepreneurs]
...Autoflows, SupportGPT, um a lot of things there. So if you're interested in the customer service world, go there. Um if you want to reach out to me, I'm available on pretty much all of the, the social networks. So LinkedIn, I'm Deon Nicholas. On Twitter, Instagram I'm d-o-n d-o-j-i, d-o-n-d-o-j-i. Um and you know, always interested in, in connecting with great folks who are uh trying to make a, make a splash in the world.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. I'm going to switch gears here as we wrap up. We're going to ask you three simple questions, personal questions as a leader um and with three simple answers. So number one: where do you go to get creative, to innovate, to think big?
Deon Nicholas: Ooh. Um so I like to write um, and, and um I also like to like zoom out and just like be creative. So what I mean by that is like, whether it's music, um whether it's um recording videos, podcasts. I do TikToks every once in a while. Little things like that. Like anything that can get me out of my, you know, my day-to-day uh focus, my analytical focus and shift to my own creative brain. Like that usually is, is like big for me. I also listen to a lot of hip hop, classical music, like anything nice. Um, and then, and then when it, that translates into work, that usually translates into just like writing. Writing my thoughts, writing a blog post...
[Current Hiring Needs and Future Focus]
...writing out um visions for the future and just like that sort of thing. Um or you know, or verbally or video. So those are probably how I think about it. Like that, that whole creative process. And I mix the, the personal creative um, which kind of gives me that, that energy. And then I, I, I use a lot of that for, for work.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You seem like a real positive guy. We know the roller coaster of a startup is up and down. What perspective or what do you do to stay positive, you know, even in the down times where you have to you know, kind of think about you know "it's not the end of the world, it's also not sometimes the best cases," but what do you do to stay positive?
Deon Nicholas: Um, good question. Um, and I think it's different for everyone. I think I have like a weird personality quirk that like you know, I can always kind of see the, see the silver lining at the end of the tunnel. It's like you need some form...
[Contact Information and Personal Interests]
...of like pain tolerance I think to be an entrepreneur. Um, but um I think it, it comes in, in two things for me. So one is always just like centering yourself around um what, what is the job to be done? Right? Like you know, what's the... like you know, there's a whole lot of things that are broken. What's the most important thing? What's the primary constraint? What's the next action to solve that thing? If, if you know at the end of the day, like for example, in the early days of the, of the company, a lot of people told us, "Why would you start an AI company? There's no like... AI is dumb, all these chatbots already exist. Like why would you do this?" Um, and the other, the thing that kept me going was always the focus on the customer. Like, "Yeah, that's true, these things exist, but if the customer were happy they wouldn't be complaining so much." And so as long as there's that problem to solve for your customer, you know that you got to keep going, right?
And so there, like you know, and that boils down to, in kind of classical entrepreneur speak, like your mission, your vision. Like always keeping sight of that and reminding yourself of that. It's not just you know, writings on a poster, it's actually: what is the focus and what you want to get done. Like the day your mission is complete, you should give up. Like you know what I mean? Like you should, you're done. But until your mission is complete, it doesn't matter how hard the time is. You, you got to keep going. Right? If, if the mission is worth, worth achieving. And, and so like there's kind of this weird, beautiful yin and yang to that, that thought of like, "Crap, it's hard, but like we still got a job to do," you know what I mean? And so I think...
[Maintaining Resilience and Focus]
...that's like the most important thing is always remember that like there's a job to be done, and you kind of just you know pull yourself up. And then the second thing I wanted to say was going back to what you said earlier around the creativity and stuff, remembering it's a marathon means like being able to center yourself. Right? Like make sure you have your self-care routines, whatever they are. Again, for me it is actually the creativity and things like that. I also love to play basketball, stay healthy, spend time with your family. Like all of those things create that, that, that container for you to be your best self so that you can do this marathon over 10 or 15 years. And that's how long it's going to take if you're, if you're doing well, right?
And so I think just like juggling those two things is super important. But again, easier said than done. And I think like to some degree starting a company is you know, is like, I don't know, there's like "eating glass" or whatever the like... think of the most painful thing you could possibly do, like you're... it's going to be painful. Um so I would suggest not doing it unless you have some amount of pain tolerance and ability to, to figure it out. But I don't know if that's good advice or bad advice.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's, that's awesome. I love that. Um what's one... this is the last question for you. What's one piece of advice you've got from another founder that you think would be valuable for other founders to hear that's worked for you?
Deon Nicholas: Um, the one that comes to mind, I don't know if this is the most profound answer or not, but it is the one that comes to mind for me. So um, I, I was speaking to um Manny Medina who's the CEO of Outreach. And this guy, the guy's like, I mean it's like a jillion dollar company. But he's also just like a really smart thoughtful founder. Um, and um, the, the advice uh he gave to me was um, to do um CEO coaching and, and create a CEO peer group for yourself.
And so um, in other words, spend time with other CEOs who are either in the same like state of company as you are, whether they're in different industries or whatever. And spend time with a CEO or coaches or whoever who have done it before. And it's sometimes that support network can, can often be the most important thing that can get you you know, give you that idea on what to do next, can help you see around the corner, can help you you know, through the, through the hard times because we've all been through it. Um, and so I think that's probably the advice I would say is like, you know, being a CEO is a lonely job, but you don't actually have to go through it alone. Because there are other people who are trying, maybe in their own space, maybe in their own thing, but they're trying to do a similar thing. And, and often the uh, the struggle is the same.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, no doubt. Well, that's great. Thanks for summing that up. Um, well, Deon, really appreciate you jumping on here and having the courage to tell your story again. You've shared it many times, but this has been very, very uh I think insightful for others to hear. And uh excited to see how things go for you in 2024. Uh thank the listeners as well for listening. Uh means the world to me that you've taken your time to spend with us today. My name is Jake Aaron Villarreal. I look forward to catching up with...
[Advice from Other CEOs]
...everyone on the next episode. And until then, enjoy your weekend, enjoy your day, take care. Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible, and for all the listeners for listening. It means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now. We can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.
This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market, and they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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