Democratizing Alternatives for Family Offices ft. Jacob Miller, Opto
Guest: Jacob Miller - Opto Investments

Mark Wickersham (01:02):
All right, Jacob Miller, welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to have you on. I'm looking forward to this conversation. I one, the main threads I want to pull on is around democratization of alternative investments, but certainly there's a number of different things like to pick your brain about. If you could just do me a favor, you could just do an introduction to yourself and opto, that'd be great.

Jacob Miller (01:29):
Yeah, so Jacob Miller, I founded Opto about four years ago now alongside Matt Reed, our CTO and Joe Lonsdale, who was the founder, one of the founders of Palantir, founded Adipar OpenGov and now runs a BCA top quartile venture firm in Austin and San Francisco. Prior to that, I was an investor at Bridgewater. Ray Dalio's Macro fund. Wore a lot of hats there, but focused on primarily on risky credit and saw firsthand that more and more of that market was moving to the private side. And that story was repeated in equities and has always been true in real estate and saw the clear and present need to offer a more systematic approach in private markets so that more people could access that. And luckily met Joe through mutual friend and he'd shared that idea coming from the being chairman of adipar, seeing just how hard it was for someone who didn't have the network and the wealth community to build a really robust program and you just can't ignore private markets anymore.

(02:27):
Both from a demand and competition side, from a practice management perspective, from a pure beta perspective, so much of the market risk is in privates now. You're not holding the market portfolio unless you have some private markets. And then on top of that, the ability to potentially generate outsized returns. So put our heads together and realize that the technology needed to be created to make this happen and to better align providers with clients. And we can get more into this when we talk about democratization One, it's a word that we think is almost maybe a little bit premature for these markets. And part of the issue is a lot of the firms that have been democratizing on a backward looking basis have the wrong incentives. They're paid by the largest funds to distribute the largest funds and are not compensated to deliver on results.

Mark Wickersham (03:18):
There certainly has been a lot of friction within the particular marketplace that has prevented, I think family offices obviously are in that asset class and have been for a long time. Despite the operational challenges. I think she kind of look in the future as private markets look to expand and have a wider and wider distribution base. Certainly that RA base is attractive and the

Jacob Miller (03:49):
Oh for sure. And even within family office, a lot of clients we work with are former SFO or small mfo that have grown to the point where those processes that worked when you're talking getting 15 different entities into five different funds don't scale to getting 150 entities into 20 funds. So how do you take what was a really solid core but make that possible for an MFO the way it was when you were just an SFO?

Mark Wickersham (04:18):
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Before I get into the immediate, the subject, I see we're getting right into, I'd love to talk to you a little bit about your founder's journey. Anytime I get a chance to talk to a founder, I'm always interested in understanding the backstory. So you said you co-founded Opto with Joe Lonsdale. Obviously a legendary investor at APAR is certainly a big provider within the wealth tech space. But what was the unsolved problem you saw in the marketplace and how'd you think you could solve that problem in a unique way?

Jacob Miller (04:54):
Yeah, it's a great question. I'd add, I think any founder and honestly any VC evaluating founder should have two key questions in mind. One, what is that unsolved problem and how real is that problem? But secondly, why is a solution possible today? And it wasn't possible five years ago. And we think that's a really important question because there are problems out there that technology might not be able to solve and or might be features not bugs. They might just look like a problem from the outside. If it has been possible to solve that problem for 20 years, you should always ask yourself, well then why hasn't someone done it?

(05:30):
But if you can point to here's what's evolved in the economy in technology and compute to make this possible today but not five years ago and it looks like a real problem, you probably have a pretty good idea. And so to us that was a few layers. So one, it was just the growth of private markets themselves when it was a much smaller slice and when all the capacity and private markets could easily be taken by large institutions, there's probably a lot less to do in terms of connecting new investors with the market. Second was data and integrations. And so both data on the can we provide a more comprehensive view of what exists and give investors confidence through that. But also the existence of platforms like Adipar and their competitors trying to catch up with them from a technology perspective meant that the APIs were in place to both pull in portfolios to push back to portfolios and to take private markets off of paper and onto digital rails.

(06:29):
And so we were convinced that this was solvable. Now and not five years ago, I talked to probably 300 RIAs before we actually decided to hit go on launching the company with a couple exceptions, heard the same story from everyone. I would do more, but it's painful, it's expensive, I don't have the staff. But there was a real waking up of like we just had the best decade ever of excess returns in public markets. Maybe I want to think about what another leg to stand on is and not assume that's going to happen again. But there were real concerns too, I think heard a lot, essentially a version of the why would I want to be part of a club that would have me, I'm a small RIA in Ohio, why by the time something's landed on my desk, what do I have to assume has happened for that to be true?

(07:12):
Who passed on this? And so that's where we saw that real need, not just for the technology side, but the alignment and us being the first player to step in and say, we're actually putting our dollars alongside you. We're putting our money where our mouth is. This is not us selling to you. We're a buyer on behalf of you. And that really flipped the script and unlocked a lot of confidence for folks in terms of working with us. So we saw that gap in alignment. We saw the gap in technology and the gap in portfolios and that most people are 10 to 20% underweight privates and saw a multi-trillion dollar opportunity over the next 10 years.

Mark Wickersham (07:44):
When you look at it, four years in now, what did you get? What did you nail and what did you say? Well, you know what, I think we're a little bit off on here, but we ended up pivoting.

Jacob Miller (07:56):
It's sort of interesting. I think our original hypothesis of how this should work ended up being right, and our thought of how we had to get there was totally wrong. And so what do I mean by that? We thought that eventually where firms should want to get to is a smaller number of tools in their toolkit that service a larger swath of their clients. And so having the Mark growth fund, the Mark income fund, maybe a co-invest vehicle, but it's order of magnitude, four to six options, not 40 to 60 or 400 to 600. And so we thought we could play that role of being structuring, sourcing diligence collaboratively, but putting these vehicles together to help differentiate firms have it be white labeled in their name only available through them. That has proven to be a huge value to firms and is where most of our businesses today.

(08:47):
What we got wrong was we assumed that to get there, we first needed to build trust as sort of a menu business. And so we went out, we found 15 managers who we thought were and still think are exceptional. We allocated balance sheet capital to those. We started syndicating those positions and we'd underestimated just how bad the labor problem was in doing that, even if it's not a huge number, having four different SubD docs, four different K ones, and that's applied to 50 different clients. We were creating more work than we totally wrapped our heads around. And so pretty quickly it became clear a lot more of the value, at least early on came from that structuring side. Less from the, they still wanted our advice and us standing behind the investments, but the ability to turn that into a single SubD doc K one solution that speaks to every client, even the ability to create evergreen options where I don't have to do something every year.

(09:46):
That was when growth went from linear to hockey stick. This meant that our MVP from that building founding story was big. We really wanted something for each one of these personas. It wasn't build the ops thing and see if that works. We thought there was something to one plus one plus one equals six or 10. And so we spent still two years building, working with early clients on a feedback basis, but really only had our MVP about two years into the four. And so the growth that we've had in two years of actually being out there has been an awesome validation of that hypothesis. One thing that characterizes Joe companies, they're pretty big built. They're ambitious ideas. It's not the single consumer widget that can get acquired. It's an attempt to change how an industry operates, be that Palantir, be that out of par OpenGov or even stuff he's done in biotech, like they did resilience bio out of the A b, C build company just to change how pharmaceuticals are manufactured in America. Those are big built and it takes it essentially a deeper and longer J curve, but for a company with a lot more potential.

Mark Wickersham (10:57):
Is it fair to say that A VC looks at the fundamentally change industries? I know that certainly with add part it seemed like they were looking to change financial services change, wealth management and how it acted, but is that kind of a general tenant with a vt?

Jacob Miller (11:12):
It definitely is, and especially in the BUILD program. And so there are a couple people actually copying them now, but they were early and unique and they have about 20% of each fund is dedicated to spotting real gaps and problems and then basically pulling in the right founders to do it. And so it's not all going out and seeing who's building, what if they think something should exist and it doesn't build it themselves. Opto was one of those, so that's how it was brought in. I worked for a B, C for a few months but did some FinTech investing, but primarily was incubating this idea. I think it unlocks a different kind of company. There are some companies that can't be garage startups that can't be Y Combinator companies. We had to be able to have a really legit legal presence to start. We needed balance sheet capital to deploy into fast moving managers. I don't think you can found Opto in your basement and I don't think you can do it as it was only 26 when we started it, but if I was alone as a 26-year-old, I think I would've

Mark Wickersham (12:11):
Tried to bootstrap it. Right.

Jacob Miller (12:13):
Yeah, I don't think you can bootstrap it. And so having basically institutional resources available day one allows you to create a much more ambitious class of startup and there still should be the garage startups. There are plenty ideas and I think AI has a lot of applications where the barriers to entry are very low. What the BUILD program allows a C to do is innovate in areas with really high barriers to entry and fundamentally try and change those industries

Mark Wickersham (12:38):
With scaling in general. When you take a look at firms that you're either taking look in the invest in or from your own experience, you can have the right idea, but still the execution premium is not there. Why is it so hard for firms to scale? What are some of those key common mistakes and barriers that firms trip up on?

Jacob Miller (12:59):
And I mean I think you've hit the nail in the head. Ideas are the easiest part of this. And dunno, I have this perception and maybe I'm being too curmudgeonly, but ideas are the first easiest. Strategy is the second easiest and they're important things, but a lot of people are good enough to have a good enough idea, have good enough strategy. There are some exceptional people. I think Joe's one of them and that's where a lot of people would come inbound to us from a talent perspective for I want to do strategy work. And I'm like, I'm not sure what that means for us at this stage. We need doers right now and we need doers who want to replace themselves. And so that I think is, to me that's one of the most important facets and why a lot of things fail is you have to attract the right kind of person who is looking to make themselves obsolete, which is not a super normal human tendency, but it's the only way you scale.

(13:56):
If you need to linearly grow your headcount to linearly grow your business, you're not a startup. You might be a totally fine small business, but you're not going to create enterprise value. You need people who are coming in and saying, I'm a lawyer, how do I make it so I don't have to practice law next year? I'm an operator. How do I make it so that I haven't thought about operations in two years in a year or whatever? And it's a mindset, it's like a builder's mentality. I think it's a heavy investment on the engineering side because engineers naturally think like that. I think a lot of startups outside of core technology under invest in getting the best engineers. And that's not just a talent perspective, it's a mindset thing, but you have to have people who are looking to, it's kind of weird because you want people who are both all in but are looking to make it such that this doesn't have to be their life's work, that they get it to a point where it's working itself and then you hire some people to turn the crank and the crank is well built and then you figure out what's the next crank to build.

(14:55):
So I don't know if that's a concrete enough to answer your question, but that

Mark Wickersham (14:58):
It's a bit of a rare breed. I definitely think on the idea for I two that I always say have a product management background that the idea, figuring out what to do is not the hard part. The hard part can be figuring out what not to do, right?

Jacob Miller (15:13):
That's a big point piece too. Startup with Coke grape and yeah, I think there's definitely a mistake of leaping at the next dollar versus being long-term greedy. If you just do everything for the next dollar, you end up as a consulting company, you have 50,000 different products or 50,000 customers, how do you be long-term greedy, even if that means turning down some business today? Part of why I left the hedge fund world was wickedly interesting and I had tons of resources to solve really interesting theoretical conceptual problems, but when the trade was over, it's over. And yeah, you built some understanding but you didn't look back and say, I built that. Look at that thing and it's working without me. My goal as a founder, and we're nowhere near this yet with Opto, but I want to be totally obsolete. I want it to be unnecessary and not because I don't love the work, I'm doing what I love, but because I've failed our employees and our investors, if I'm still strictly needed for this company to be great.

Mark Wickersham (16:16):
I think that's an interesting mindset. Like you said, the rare compensation of having to be all in, but then at the same time, being willing to make yourself replaceable. Let's talk about private markets and why there's so much friction in that process. Maybe it's a little overly dramatic to say private markets are broken, but certainly a lot of dealing with the, I would say that for sure, dealing on the LP side, it seems like the markets have progressed in 1996 and everything's stuck in a document. Fortunately AI is helping to be able to unlock that and scale that. But what are some of the key points of friction family offices face in this an important asset class?

Jacob Miller (16:58):
Yeah, where to begin? I definitely agree with the statement that private markets are broken. Yes, a C'S motto again, world is broken, let's fix it. And that's our approach here. The private markets are broken, let's fix it. I'll follow a thought process through the different steps that are broken. So step one is the what do I hold? We hear stories from family offices all the time of I made a venture investment six years ago, I forgot it happened. I wasn't receiving K ones. I didn't know to ask for it. Now there's been a liquidity event, I have an unexpected tax thing and I was making decisions along the way forgetting that I had this exposure and so now I'm overweight that sector. And so how do you capture everything you're doing? A lot of that is more an add par problem than an opto problem, but the more you are working with opto, the more it is exceptionally unlikely that anything would not be sort of on the rails and clearly accessible at any point in time.

(17:56):
And then we're also working with underlying opportunities co-invest managers to get really consistent reporting across different asset class types, different structures so that you can compare things more apples to apples and make better decisions. And so that next step would be the decision making. A lot of family offices have built very impressive and large VBA Excel sheets internally to do the portfolio construction piece, but good portfolio construction, inclusive of public and private inclusive of cash flows versus time series inclusive of how these markets operate differently. But how they come together didn't really exist in our opinion outside of our tool. We don't think there's great options that took a lot of work that took building an ETL pipeline to pull in data on 750,000 fund manager funds, tens of thousands of fund managers back to 1980, being able to parameterize capital calls and distributions to really understand what performance looks like, being able to think about what was actually possible in terms of aging that out, essentially how does the rebalancing work between the two sides of the portfolio so that you can provide a much clearer view of how you would've done through history and what that means on a go forward basis.

(19:04):
And so better decision making at that level. Diligence I think is one of the places that technology is going to have the biggest impact. And so you sort of mentioned this a little bit, but one of the great shames to me is how much information dies in PDF PDFs are. If you were to think what's the worst way we could all communicate key information? PDFs are close to that.

Mark Wickersham (19:26):
Footnotes in a PDF I think would probably be up there too, right?

Jacob Miller (19:30):
Yeah. And so I have numbers you want to know. I'm like, great Mark, lemme take a photo of these numbers and I'll send you the photo and it may or may not be possible by your system, and so you might have to manually type out the numbers that you see and there's human error and then it lives in a spreadsheet that you save to your desktop and you forget about and a year later you throw it in the recycling so you're like, what was this? And the world keeps spinning, but what family offices often have that they're not leveraging fully is a true data moat. Good family offices are getting sent thousands of opportunities a week, way too many that anyone could ever look at. And so we built a system where you can just forward that email with the pitch deck, with the PPM, with whatever you got sent to an email alias the system pulls out all the requisite data and it actually does intelligent benchmarking on top of it and says, this person's charging these fees that's about median for this space.

(20:25):
They're expensive for this space, they have this track record. Here's where they sit in their peer group and versus everything else you've seen this year, but then also getting to the level of the people. Here's this person, we call it the very large network where we can trace who the principles at firms have co-invested with. Where do they previously work? What networks are they a part of? You can start drawing these circles of where do we have access, where do we have gaps? Hey, in logistics we're really well covered because that's where our family works since we're getting all these great deals and look, there's this network over here in deep tech that we haven't gotten a deal from in eight months. And so how could we augment that? Who could we reach out to who we know in that space and start supplementing that and having our network cover more geography essentially, or conceptual geography?

(21:12):
What it also does is you're building your data moat because even if you pass on 90% of the stuff or probably more that you're sent, you're building that database of none of these firms have, PitchBook doesn't have good data, Burgess has, okay, they're good for finding deals. Sometimes you could do a good deal tracking, but in terms of your proprietary view on what fund managers are worth looking at, there's not a great off the shelf database for that. But families have so much historical data and are sent so much data that if they can just figure out how to extract it, they might have some really real data moats to make better decisions and potentially even monetize that in interesting ways. So we put a lot of effort into diligence and don't say a fund structuring. And so this is a long answer, but there's just a lot to fix in private markets,

Mark Wickersham (21:58):
Right? No, at each stage, right? There's friction and inefficiencies in the process. So

Jacob Miller (22:05):
Yeah, I mean the next one being like how traditional legal world interacts with this. There's only so many ways to build a private fund, but if you walk into most law firms, they'll tell you, this is a fresh cloth. It's going to take us 20 hours, it's going to cost a hundred thousand dollars, it's going to take a month. Come on guys. There's a couple options really at the end of the day. And so we built a system we call recorder, where you put in seven key inputs and it auto generates your legal ducks in about an hour. And then we still send that off to a great law firm for review, but that's two hours, not 20 hours, and you can have a fund up and running two days later versus a month and a half later. So for fast moving opportunities, those aren't off the table anymore.

(22:47):
And where we've seen families using that in particular, this is a real world example, we heard there was friction internal to a family because one guy didn't get to participate in a deal because he was fishing in the Amazon, so they couldn't reach him to get his sub doc to do a deal and he was upset that everyone else got to participate in this deal that went really well and he didn't. But if instead at the beginning of the year you'd structured like, here's our co-invest bucket, everyone's going to commit what they want for the year to it, and then when those deals come up, they just go in and we don't have to go back to everyone. You can make it much easier for a family to collaborate together. And then there's a lot in the communication bucket. And I'd say this is where we see a lot of focus around wealth transfer of how do I get G two and G three more involved and more aware of what's going on in the investment process, especially G three probably wants to see it on their phone.

(23:44):
How do I go from paper processes to a digital portal where I can track what's being invested? Let's say G three, your granddaughter went to Stanford and she's an engineer and is in some interesting circles there. How do you carve off to start maybe two and a half percent of the portfolio for her to do some angel investing? All of that becomes possible when you have digital rails to both communicate and invest on. And so really institutionalizing the whole family office investment process, allowing more people to participate with more of their in the ways they want to, and also not losing time and data, treating what can be automated processes as paper processes. There's

Mark Wickersham (24:26):
Lots of work to be able to take the kinks out of that process when it comes to investing. Lots of family offices have a particular investment focus is often where the founder made their money. A lot of families in particular would be real estate and they continue to invest in real estate and they're really good at it. But what can family offices learn from working with a top allocator and to be able to partner with learning other frameworks and other investment as you talk about networks and be able to allocate better?

Jacob Miller (25:01):
Yeah, so I think the question is how do you lean into your strengths and lean away from your weaknesses at some level? And so if you've made your money in real estate and you have really good connections there and essentially unfair advantages, it's not stop doing that, but it's acknowledging that even if you're the best at one of these games, like in public markets, the best people win about 55% of the time. It's more like 75% in private markets, but that still leaves 25% of the time where even if you're the best at it, you're going to be wrong. And how do you reserve the right to be wrong? And for that not to be an issue, it's diversification. And where we, we've been helpful there is again using our knowledge of the network and that graph to say, well, here's what you like in real estate.

(25:51):
Here's what investors who like what you do in real estate do in private equity. And here's the two principles we'd start by talking to and maybe there's even synergies there. You're a family in logistics and we know a venture firm that does a lot in autonomous shipping and improving the logistics infrastructure. They might give you a discount in the venture fund in exchange for piloting some of their technology of the underlying companies in what you do. And so we like unfair advantages. They have a very simple framework for what drives alpha in general, which is you need to have unique information, unique access, unique insight, or you need to get lucky. The first two are illegal in public markets. So you're betting a lot on luck and insight, and I don't believe in the strong version of the efficient markets hypothesis, but I do believe markets are always trying to catch up with you and that insight doesn't last very long, but access and information moats do. And so again, if there's reasons why great managers might want to work with you over someone else, you can leverage that into access to something that's oversubscribed, into fee discounts, into privileged co-invest access. And so we're helping families identify those areas where they can leverage unfair advantage and get some of those concessions and deals is a great way to think about expanding your purview.

Mark Wickersham (27:10):
Wouldn't be a technology podcast. We didn't talk about ai. How has Opto deployed AI and what can family offices learn from how you guys are using ai?

Jacob Miller (27:23):
And it's one of those things where AI means so much now that you want to be cognizant of how you're using the word and there's a lot of hype out there. And so we definitely see a lot of AI tools pitched at family offices that are, I think a bit premature or more vaporware than anything. But that said, it's a really powerful tool if you know how to use it. And so what is AI really great at? It's great at repetitive processes, it's great at things where there's large amounts of data involved including training data and it can honestly be a very effective way to scale communication. So those are areas that we're focused on the repetitive processes side, but that's things like drafting fund documents, filling out SubD docs, you can train models. We pulled in hundreds of thousands of SubD docs and figured out what changes, what questions you need to answer so you can work across SubD docs and AI was a great tool in doing that.

(28:19):
And we've had extremely low nigo numbers across all our sub docs and people can do, I think the record is in the system right now is 50 SubD docs in 40 minutes or less than a minute per sub doc is very different than what we've heard of how this usually goes on the large data side and also manual process side was that diligence piece of like no human wants to sit and type out all the information that was in A PDF into a system and you're going to have errors and how are you going to capture it? How do you just read off of that and start creating your database in a consistent way and how do you teach the AI how you think such that the start of your investment framework is in there? If you really like first time managers, how do you weight that?

(29:06):
What do you look for in a first time manager? Is it that they were an operator before or is it they were a fund manager before? And so you can start to bake in how you operate to that. And so when you think about G one, if they were a great investor, them being comfortable with how their legacy is going to be maintained, they can sort of download how they have invested successfully into a system that being extremely helpful. And then also the data capture side and building your data moat and then the communication piece of even the most number friendly among us. If you can get a quick snippet, three bullets often that is more digestible and actionable. And so using that to create communication tools internally to streamline how different beneficiaries might get different information. Who wants the full kit and caboodle? Who wants the excerpt and making that not a problem that you need three or four IR people all working day and night to make that happen.

Mark Wickersham (30:00):
This is personalization of communication.

Jacob Miller (30:02):
Yeah, it's customization at scale. The last thing I will say though is on the risk side, AI has made threats on cybersecurity and phishing much more dangerous. And so it's also just worth being cognizant even if you don't think you're going to adopt AI yet as a family office, that the bad actors have already adopted it, that people are getting phone calls that sound like they're from the voice of a relative that even video calls where it's a full deep fake, it's worth getting up to speed on the cybersecurity side no matter what. Even if you're like, Hey, the other tools feel premature though again, we think especially in that diligence and communication piece, we've already cracked some things that seem to be adding a lot of value to families, but I think it's going to be I wouldn't trust AI to make my investment decisions anytime soon. Personally.

Mark Wickersham (30:49):
Yeah, I think that's a good point around decision making and I don't think we're obviously quite there yet. Obviously with ai there's been a lot of hype. I think a lot of firms slap AI on their name and try to go for a 10 x versus what a business that should be a four x and off and running. But I think certainly in the alternative investment world where so much of that information is unstructured, locked in PDF, that it has been really good at unlocking that information. And then when you have these huge data sets to be able to take a look at these outliers and even to create narratives really quickly there, the amazing thing about AI is, and I think for a lot of family offices that they need to realize this is not future talk. This is today.

Jacob Miller (31:34):
Yeah, it's possible today. And our framework is it's kind of like the Iron Man suit. It's not that AI is going to take over final say on diligence. How do you make the human in the loop? 10 x is effective. Investment professionals are often the most expensive headcount in a family office. If that person can screen again 10,000 things before they could screen a hundred, you're squeezing a lot more juice out of some of your key resources.

Mark Wickersham (32:00):
This is a great point. Other tech trends you take a look at. Beyond ai, what are you seeing in terms of trends that are going to have a big impact on the industry?

Jacob Miller (32:12):
Yeah, I mean I think a few things there. One, the more things are integrated from a banking account statement lender perspective, I think there's a lot of financial engineering alpha that's probably sitting untapped in terms of if your integrations are better, perhaps a lender could form a better underwriting view of you as a credit risk could lend at a lower rate. You could use that to be mitigating taxes. We've seen a lot of improvements using AI in the account setup and optimization piece of what kind of grats and slots do I need? What sort of insurance should I be adding? There's another, Joe Builds company with David Barnard luminary in the estate planning space. And again, it's just like how can technology take in a better picture of the world and start with a recommendation? And we like opinionated software. I don't like marketplaces so much in this space, and it's just an opinion.

(33:10):
And again, it's not the computer making the decision, but having more visibility into what best practices are. What do family offices you tend to do, what might you be missing? I think those are good questions to be asking ourselves. And the more technology through integration can surface potential questions like that, I think the more powerful any individual family office will be. Other tech trends. Yeah, it's just interesting to watch what's happening with this is more on this the investment, but the extreme outperformance and now underperformance of AI related names in the public markets, having an understanding of what that means, what concentration risk is, how much the gains the s and p 500 came from Nvidia, are you comfortable with that? How else might you want to play that? And I think there's more wood to chop on. People talk about the agent layer, operator layer in AI where you can have an AI tool doing stuff for you. And so that could be deal scraping, that could be calling customers of a deal you're looking at. We're getting to the point where AI can start to do some of those tasks in a scalable way. And I think we'll see a growth of really interesting data sets as that takes a little bit more shape. I think we're about a year away from those agents being a real substitute for call it like a contractor resource, doing that work for you,

(34:33):
But it's coming.

Mark Wickersham (34:35):
Yeah, it does seem like AI agents seems to be the next frontier of efficiencies and gains there. This has been great. Jacob, I like to wrap up these podcast interviews more on a personal note. I know people can't necessarily see if they, listening to the audio, you got a bunch of guitars on the background. I was What's your favorite guitar solo and who's your favorite guitar player?

Jacob Miller (34:59):
Ooh, that's a good question. So I grew up around, one of my best friend's dad is a very famous guitarist, Joe Satriani.

Mark Wickersham (35:11):
Oh Sure.

Jacob Miller (35:12):
Yeah. It is also the guitar teacher to some of the best guitar players and if you're teaching the best, you probably are something else. And so I think the solo and if I Could Fly by Joe Satriani, love that. And then I also always have a, I grew up playing Spanish style and so just the entire song, Granada, I think is some of the most beautiful guitar music ever made.

Mark Wickersham (35:40):
Love it. I got to say on the guitar solo, maybe not the most recognizable one, but Pajama People by Frank Zappa.

Jacob Miller (35:51):
Oh yeah.

Mark Wickersham (35:51):
I think Frank was an underrated guitarist and he just lets it rip on that one.

Jacob Miller (35:57):
He's also one of the hardest working musicians of all time, just like that was a guy who understood putting in the work.

Mark Wickersham (36:04):
Yeah, unfortunately he has a lot of big catalog out there. He left us too soon. Favorite sci-fi book, favorite sci-fi movie.

Jacob Miller (36:18):
Got to be Dune on the sci-fi book. Grew up reading that. And they're not all of equal quality, but there's six Frank Herbert books. I think all of those are excellent. And then his son Brian took up the cause afterwards and has another 30 or some odd books. Those are not quite the frank touch, but do fill in gaps in the universe. But that, I mean it's that or it's the foundation series by Asma, but it probably Dune wins out there.

Mark Wickersham (36:49):
Yeah, I mean Dune, it's such an epic and it is a spotty series do Messiah gets a little better. But yeah, I mean just the scale of it. It's nice to see what they're doing with the movie. I mean, the other movie was so bad. It was good that the older right,

Jacob Miller (37:07):
I kind of liked the Lynch for what it was, but it was definitely so bad. It's good. I actually haven't let myself see doing in part two. I was little bit of a, I mean I've probably read Dune 40 times. I think they made the right changes for general audience, but it was too painful for me, so I didn't watch part two because I heard there were more changes. And there's something about preserving, if you started reading something when you were six, you have this mind's eye picture of what character should look like, what the scenery looked like. And actually from a cinematography and scenery perspective, I think he did a really fantastic job. But I'm going to keep part two through the rest of the series up here for now.

Mark Wickersham (37:48):
There you go. It is gorgeous. I watched it on a plane, which I would not recommend because this smoke screen is doing it no justice. But I think they've done a good job with the reboot. And then finally, favorite travel location,

Jacob Miller (38:02):
Either Rome or Mexico City. I think they're two of the great, I mean as a classics major as well as mathematical econ say, Rome always holds a place. I speak Latin.

Mark Wickersham (38:13):
There you go.

Jacob Miller (38:14):
But Mexico City, best food, super easy to get to from America.

Mark Wickersham (38:20):
I've heard nothing but good things about it. I had a chance to go to Rome this past summer. I felt like I was just scraping the surface. I mean, I feel like you could probably live there and still not do it justice

Jacob Miller (38:33):
Once I've made myself obsolete here. Maybe I'll do a sabbatical in Rome, but...

Mark Wickersham (38:37):
There you go. Well, Jacob, this has been great. I appreciate you sharing your insights on this. I know people are going to get a lot of value on it, and I really enjoyed the conversation.

Jacob Miller (38:46):
This was great. Thanks for having me. Let's see. Appreciate it.

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