Agentic AI in Skilled Trades: Scaling Productivity and Private Equity Value Creation | Wyatt Smith

I think creative destruction is good. The advance of large language models is the wave that is powering all of this.

Today we're joined by Wyatt Smith, a former Uber executive who helped build and spin out Uber Elevate, the flying car division that catalyzed billions in investment into next-gen aviation. After a career spanning Silicon Valley, McKinsey, and Uber, Wyatt made the move to Texas to take a much bigger entrepreneurial swing.

Tech optimist.

For me, it's the idea that technological change is a force for progress and good. And so it's the belief that the future is really exciting and that it's something to be really hopeful about. Out, and that technology is propulsion towards that goal.

Through his company UpSmith, Wyatt is tackling one of the biggest challenges in the US economy, the skilled labor shortage, using AI to help trades and home service businesses scale faster, operate smarter, and create better, higher-paying work.

AI is not coming for your job, but people who know how to use AI are. There's a lot of wisdom in that. I think that builders are at the heart of our society. If we can play a role in helping to make, you know, the US economy more competitive and help drive more labor productivity so that we can win on the real fundamental stuff. That's the mission I care most about. What we're building now really excites me. I mean, you know, I used to work on flying cars at Uber. This is even cooler in a lot of ways. So I think getting a chance to share why it's so cool and helping separate signal from noise.

So what are you building?

We build AI products to help home service companies win. So it's really a big focus on the US skilled trades market.

Is that specifically through the AI solutions or just in general?

We have found that that's the best way that we can create value for them. So that's where our real competitive advantages are. We built the company, though, with a bigger mission to help combat America's skilled workforce shortage. I think it's one of the most important U.S. competitiveness challenges out there. There's a shortage of about a million people.

Yeah, because I think with the AI narrative out there right now is, oh, it'll change the world, it'll change the world. The other narrative, it's a bubble and it's going to crash the American economy. The other bubble is it's going to put everybody out of work. And the other bubble is— not the other bubble, but the other silo is it's great for making cat videos or whatever. What's the business case for AI?

The headline is it creates a lot of opportunity for human flourishing because it reduces the cost of goods and services and empowers people with a lot more productivity. So we see a pathway to 50x the amount of productivity that employees inside our— 50x. 50x. And a lot of that is because you don't need human beings to do rote things any longer, right? Book records, update contact information, keystroke information into a monitor that will feel as, as, you know, archaic as a switchboard operator who you called to ask to connect you with someone else on the phone. Right. Which is really, really changes the nature of work. And it gives a chance to really augment people to do people stuff, to do things that are about delivering service to people and building human connections, and then freeing up machines, robots, to do the things that are not that.

I teach part-time at SMU, right, and in the graduate program, and the students consistently over the last year have been coming up to me afterwards and saying, I want to do this, right? Is AI going to eliminate that? I talk to various business people, and some of them, depending on their industry, say it's not really going to impact us, and others say Hey, we're a law firm. We don't need entry-level people to come do legal research, right? We can do that with AI. It appears that, that certain industries are going to be subject to eliminating jobs that you might come out of law school or come out of school and take and use it as a step to learning. We talked about this dichotomy of opinions and some people, I don't know what his title is, but at Microsoft who sort of forecasts the future says, look, this is going to make huge advances in medicine and surgery. I think Elon Musk now has a robot that will perform surgery. And, you know, it'll bring healthcare, quality healthcare down to people that otherwise maybe don't have access or can't afford it now. He says it's going to increase our life expectancies, improve our health, it's going to solve hunger, just, you know, it's going to have this extraordinarily positive impact. And then there are others. There was a 60 Minutes episode this week that said, We're going to have 20% unemployment over the next 5 years. I suspect, like most things, it'll be somewhere in the middle. It does seem to me, though, that there has to be some dislocation of people that have jobs or would take jobs now that will no longer be available with AI as the tool that it is.

I think all— there's a strong case one can make for lots of ways things play out. My point of view as a tech optimist is that the course of human history would suggest that every time there's some emergence of a new technology that fundamentally empowers human flourishing. It creates opportunity, doesn't restrict it, and it changes the nature of work for sure. I would take the point of view that every job will change in some way. Sure. And maybe not eliminated, but certainly certain tasks will be eliminated in all types of work because you create then tools that can then perform work like a human might do. But now a digital worker is augmenting that person's set of jobs. But I just, I think about all the things that we can't even conceive of now that will become jobs that didn't exist 10 years ago. And I think that a lot of things that feel important to the economy today will feel as quaint as the person that was replacing kerosene on the lamp that was lighting the road, which was a really important job in the early 20th century. And it wasn't after Edison invented the light bulb. And so it just gets me really excited to think about the types of opportunity that will be created as you empower people with these technologies, because they truly are game-shifting.

Tech optimist.

Yeah.

Like, I've never heard that before. Like, can you just define that real quick?

For me, it's the idea that technological change is a force for progress and good. And so it's the belief that the future is really exciting and that it's something to be really hopeful about and that technology is a propulsion towards that goal.

Versus like the doom and gloom.

Right. That would suggest, you know, gosh, this change is scary and we ought to really hold on tight because it's going to create a lot of negative outcomes. And I don't mean to be Pollyannaish about the fact that disruptions happen. I sort of see that as a force for creative destruction in a positive sense that helps to expand the frontier of what's possible and really push humanity. It's a choice for sure. It's a philosophy, I suppose, around how to see the future and take a more optimistic perspective on it. And I also recognize that I'm voting with my feet a little bit on that, right? Deciding to start a technology company to play some role in helping prepare for that future. That's a choice too. But gosh, I mean, again, I look at human history. I was a history teacher before business school, hardest and best job I've had in a lot of ways. Uh, taught in Birmingham, Alabama. But when I would talk about sort of the big waves of human progress that happened since the Industrial Revolution, this is, I think, very logical as an extension of a lot of the upward trend in prosperity and reductions of the cost of living standards, increases in the living standards and reductions in the cost of living that I think really make The future excite you?

You are a history teacher and you were raised on a farm in Alabama. I'm from West Tennessee. My father was a general contractor. And after stepping on nails for 10 years on his job sites, shockingly, I decided to go into finance. Right. You left the farm in Alabama, you taught history, and you end up with Uber. How did that journey work?

Right. Yeah, it's a long way from the farm to flying cars. Uber. Just a quick story about my dad. You know, he's, he's really a hero for me and is one of the best entrepreneurs I've ever been around. I worked for him as a kid and he was a pretty tough boss, as it were. And you can't quit your dad, so you got to figure out how to, how to navigate that. We have a family farm that he, he really started and scaled. His dad also had a small plot of land with some cows on it and a chicken house and ran a mail route. After World War II, he was stationed in Europe where he was part of the occupying force in, in Italy and then met my grandmother, who is Austrian, at a hotel in Livorno, Italy. They fell in love. He brings— here you are. Here I am. He brings this Austrian lady to Alabama and that you could imagine in the '50s, that was a heck of a culture shock.

Yes.

And so my dad, I think, grew up in a home where a lot of love, but like really high expectations. He played college football at Ole Miss in the '70s, and he came back from college with a, with a real dream as an entrepreneur to build something, but had no collateral, had no assets, had a lot of vision, and was able to, as an entrepreneur, find people to back that vision. There was a guy that scrawled terms on a paper lunch bag at the sale barn in Utah, Alabama. To give him a line of credit effectively to start building chicken houses in the '80s. And then he hustled and he found ways to sell the manure as a fertilizer. He found ways to start acquiring more land. And now we've got this commercial cattle ranch that he really built. So I think as a kid, watching that shapes you. You don't realize it's shaping you at the time, but it gives you a sense of what's possible if you have a lot of grit and a lot of hard work and a respect for the dignity of work. And that's what drove my path. To education. I wanted the chance to like really be in the trenches on what I think is a really important problem for the country on US competitiveness with regard to the achievement gap. So I was a Teach for America Corps member in Alabama. Hardest and best job I've had in a lot of ways. Led to business school because I wanted the chance to scale up my impact with technology. A lot of my kids were dealt a tough hand, but the scale of your impact there, while really important with 100 or 200 kids you're teaching, is limited in the context where there's couple hundred thousand people that are in that system. And so it was not a super novel insight on my part to go to Silicon Valley and have a chance to really scale up my impact. But it led to McKinsey. I was a management consultant there for a couple of years and then had an opportunity to go lead business development at Uber, which was just such a privilege. I joined Uber at a really exciting time. We had grown really rapidly through like 2014 to '17 and then hit some headwinds in '17 around some challenges people had around the business model, some challenges working through the leadership team. We turned over the leadership team in 2017, and I joined in the middle of that transition. It was a bit of a driverless car of a business for a couple months there before Dara Khosrowshahi joined from Expedia as our CEO in late '17. And Dara is a really great deal guy. A lot of the growth at Expedia was driven by that vision. Where at Uber, he had a similar vision for how we could grow. That business too. Our mission at Elevate was to focus on ways to deliver safe, very quick, very quiet, very reliable air transportation using a network of electric-powered aircraft. And so they would take off like helicopters and fly like airplanes on a fixed wing, but in a way that could also move people really quickly around highly congested, dense urban environments. And we launched a business called Uber Copter in New York City in 2018, which was a lot of fun. And there's a lot of dynamics in New York to navigate when you're starting that up. When the pandemic started in 2020, we hit pause and Dara came to us and said, I want you guys to creatively capitalize this thing, which was code for find a way to spin it out. And so my job changed. I spent the summer of 2020 raising money to think through that transaction and a really challenging time, but gosh, such a great learning experience. I'm so grateful for all the mentors that I had through that.

So in that experience, because I hear Uber Copter and I'm like, man, that sounds really cool. But I also hear 2017, '18, 2020, and here it is in 2025, almost 2026. I haven't seen an Uber Copter out there.

Right.

So from a business perspective, is that a failure or is it still just in development? And it may be like 10 years before something comes off the ground.

From a business standpoint, our vision was to be able to sort of supercharge the industry. Because we could offer demand off the ridesharing network to create an offtake that would offset some of the risk that airframe manufacturers would face in taking this to market. Global production of helicopters is on the order of like 1,000 units a year. Our demand for aircraft was probably more like 20,000. That level of change creates a lot of innovation within both the majors, the legacy airframe developers, but also a lot of, you know, more startup companies that have a novel way to approach that, that problem. And so one thing I'm really proud of is that we helped catalyze probably $10 billion of investment because we had a way to solve the demand side for those manufacturers. And then that has led to a lot of interesting things happening to put a lot of capital in that market and accelerate it.

Is that project still going on?

It is. We sold the business to a company called Joby Aviation, which subsequently entered the public markets via a SPAC transaction in '21. So they They hit the SPAC window.

But from your perspective, major success.

Personally, for sure, from a learning standpoint. But then also at a more macro, like I think it's really helped accelerate the technology. It's largely a regulatory blocker that we're working through now. So the airframes need to be type certified by the FAA. The FAA has changed a couple of the processes that they use for doing that in the last 5 or 6 years. But I'm still very bullish about the technology and what it will unlock.

Well, it reminds me of like the electric cars because, you know, like what, 15 years ago, 10 years, whatever the years ago it was, hundreds of electric cars, but only Tesla survived. And it still took Tesla how many years to actually make money? And we're just now to the point now where there's more electric cars out there and more of a competition. But it was like there's a lot and only one survived and now there's a lot again.

Yeah.

So I feel like that in that, in that world, it could be very similar where maybe there's a lot of people trying to do it. Or maybe there's just one, but once it's proven, then it'll be more of an open market.

And I think that the reason I have lots of confidence in it is the technology is just so fundamentally superior to tech that's existed before. We're talking about the operating costs, like one-third that of a helicopter, and quieter, safer, has redundant electric motors on the vehicle. And so when you have just a shift in technology that then empowers something so much better, its first principle is going to lead to a better outcome economically. And that's what gives me confidence.

And then when you pair that with the AI automated driverless delivery, I don't know what the words would be.

Sure.

Like, because there's no way the regulation would ever let just humans— let me fly my flying car, because that's just a recipe for disaster. But if you could just say, hey, here's an AI that's doing it, I think people would get behind that.

That's a good point. It will exist inside a constrained system. And we'll have rules of the air that help govern the safe passage of people and things. But it opens up a whole new dimension, right? That unlocks a lot of capacity that otherwise is gridlocked on the ground. And that's super exciting.

Sounds like you worked yourself out of a job.

Indeed.

You were tasked with spinning out this, this unit from Uber, and you achieved that. As I mentioned earlier, I saw a piece on national news on Joby. I'm intrigued to learn how that's going to change my future. I'd be thrilled to take whatever it's called now, an Uber Copter. Will it be an Uber brand?

We are one of Joby's partners. We Uber one of Joby's partners. That will be one of the ways in which that product reaches the market. Joby may have its own network as well. There may be other, other integrating with.

The Uber platform where I catch an Uber and I go to the Uber Copter.

And the Uber team has done such a great job of continuing to build a lot of demand by serving people really well, not just through moving of people, but moving of things too. And so I'm still cheering on my old teammates over there.

So tell me about the transition. You leave Uber after you successfully complete this transaction and you come to Texas?

We had moved to Texas during the pandemic. We were COVID refugees from California. My wife is from Dallas. We were really excited to get closer to family. San Francisco was in a bit of a shutdown, as many people will recall, and Texas was open for business. And so I was grateful to be able to make that move. People were so kind to me here in North Texas, and so many mentors really helped to create opportunity for what would come next. I knew I wanted to, like my dad, you know, take a big swing as an entrepreneur. The problem that I care most about, it animates a lot of my choices here, is around, you know, opportunity for American workers. And there's a really big challenging shortage of skilled laborers, people that build things in our economy. And the reasons for that are multiple. But there's a chance to help solve that problem by virtue of going and using technology to serve trades businesses and help them win. Because we help them win.

You help them do that.

Well, how precisely do you do that? Our view is that largely it's a demand-side challenge. If you can help them reliably solve how they make money by virtue of increasing lead count and increasing the ways in which they can go and know what the offtake is going to be for the folks that they hire and train, that creates a catalyst that leads them to hire and train more people. And one of the really interesting things about this part of the economy is that a lot of the credentialing is skills-based. So it's based on how competent you are at performing a certain task, which is you can delink it from time. And when you can delink something from time, you can speed up the process by which you credential more workers. And a lot of our workforce development system is premised on the idea that time is the most important thing. That's largely how higher education works. And so the way you become eligible for financing is, you know, you enroll and you get federal aid, and that's tied to credit hours, which is— which are time-based. And so the big opportunity that's so exciting is skills-based hiring focused on competencies and credentialing, which technology can help to substantiate. And so what we're really excited about is this large wave of agentic artificial intelligence products or AI agents creates so much opportunity for productivity growth. And as you can increase productivity growth of your workers, you increase free cash flow and you can reinvest that in growing the company and hiring more people and training them. That's our big vision for the future.

And you said earlier that you think there's a million-person shortage in the particular areas you're focused in, right?

So, so U.S. manufacturing, construction broadly, that shortage peaked at 1.5 million people or so in 2021. It's come down a bit, but there still is a structural challenge of more people retiring from the sector and the trades than are, than are joining. And so that's the problem we set out to solve. Like anything in entrepreneurship, as you get deeper in and your customers help you shape your product, your your vision for that evolves. And now we see a pathway where an entrepreneur can run a trades company with 50 trucks in the field that does $25 million of revenue, and a laptop powers the whole thing.

Amazon. When Amazon, you know, hey, I'm going to put my product on there, and all of a sudden I'm the only product, and then all of a sudden there's Amazon Basics copy of my product. Your platform with software, it seems like every other day OpenAI or Copilot or whoever got an idea somewhere and then they release it, making somebody's software company either redundant or insignificant anymore. Basically what I'm asking is, are you a software company? Or— because if you are a software company, I keep getting told that AI is just going to kill all software companies.

I think creative destruction is good. I think that it creates lots of opportunity. And I think that the real value to create is in the application layer of these technologies to business problems. And what I mean by that is the advance of large language models is the wave that is powering all of this. 18 months ago, it wasn't possible to build what we're building. There wasn't underlying compute capabilities to power it. GPT-4 comes out in summer of 2024, and it's a catalyst. And then the improvement of models from the team at Gemini and the team at Groq, and that's all great because it promotes, again, like lots of opportunity for the building blocks on which you can build these types of products. But the value of figuring out how to make it make an impact in the economy comes from being really close to customer problems, right? Because, you know, a person that's running a plumbing company in Rockwall, Texas has a lot of very specific challenges that he or she is trying to knock out. And it's difficult to know from San Francisco how an AI is going to solve that problem. It really comes from being on the ground, in the truck, in the call center, beside that entrepreneur.

It's hard to act from a business perspective to systematize the usage of AI. We all use AI all the time, but it's, it's like in a adjacent to our normal duties, not just, hey, this is step one. And if I could have somebody come in and just say, hey, Ryan Harper Belmont, this is how you can use AI to make $10 billion, I'm like, thank you, where have you been all my life? But it's just that creative brain that goes into doing that.

It might be helpful to give an example that illustrates an application of this technology in the markets we serve. Our core customer is a contractor who is developing a set of services in the HVAC, the plumbing, the electrical services market, largely residential, not exclusively, but for the purposes of the story, let's take that of the company in Rockwall, Texas, which you call when your AC breaks. Now in Texas, like if it's the middle of the summer, your willingness to spend is pretty high to fix that problem. And so there's a lot of folks, you know, that are competing to get in front of you and to offer a service that will build your trust because there's often a lot of, distance between your knowledge about how your system works and that of the technicians. And so the way that that technician conducts his or her job is all about building trust, diagnosing the problem, sharing options with you, and then working towards which of those options is best for your family. All across the country, there are people in trucks right now that are driving around performing that service. When they leave and those taillights hit the road and that person's left with their quote, Not everybody has a great process for following up on that interaction. Some bigger companies will have an inside sales team whose job is to call you the next day and say, you know, how are you thinking about it? Can I answer any questions you have? But a lot of small businesses don't have that. And so if the person calls back in with a question, great. If the technician left his cell phone number and they text about it, maybe that's helpful, but he's on to the next thing. He's got 5 more jobs tomorrow. Our AI agents at UpSmith will reach out to that homeowner will ask if they have questions or how they'd like to move forward, can respond if they have objections or there's questions they're hoping to get resolved because they weren't exactly sure what the person meant. Maybe they lost the estimate, they want someone to resend it to them. The AI agents can do that within a certain band. You can negotiate on price if you had a window that you knew would be still a great outcome for the homeowner and for the company. And then as soon as the person wants to move forward, the AI can look into the, the job board can find out where the gaps are in the schedule that work for the install team to come back out and finish the job, can offer that time back to the homeowner, can respond if an hour later they say, oh, I forgot we got soccer practice, Friday doesn't work anymore, could do Monday instead. And all that can happen without a human being back at the home service company needing to respond. And that allows for all these really cool things to happen that increase productivity where jobs would have slipped through before. And if you're a small business owner, like, that's amazing. That's just— those are opportunities that are just like on the ground. And then the AI cannot just identify them for you. They can close them like a human might have done and then book the job. So the first time you really are aware of it is when the truck is rolling out to go install the work on the other side.

There's probably a lot of sticky in that business as well from your point of view, because like as a service, if I'm a plumber, I'm focused on plumbing.

Right.

And like the technology, the systems, like how many examples have we seen over the years where people are still using Windows 95?

Yeah.

If they use you to help implement the system, they're probably not looking to upgrade or update or change anytime soon. So from— I'm just hearing that, just knowing the psychology of— I don't want to say typical service industry, but again, it's you want to do the thing, not the business side of stuff. Right.

I think you're exactly right. If you can solve a problem really well and deliver really great service for people in a way that also is getting better all the time, great. Like you're going to earn a customer that you can keep for a long time.

One thing I do want to get into on the AI side is predictive versus deterministic, mainly because I was in a conversation with a friend of mine who has a job in D.C. He's bullish on the sense of AI in the sense that it's like the internet where it's the biggest bubble of all bubbles that will bubble, but it will still be a useful thing. But in his line of work where the ones and zeros have consequences, like human life consequences, you can't afford to have a 98% probable answer. You need 100% accurate. So like in the service industries and the businesses you're working with, where does the deterministic versus probabilistic— and Lane, do you understand what I'm saying when I talk about that?

Yes. Okay.

Didn't mean to demean anything. I didn't know until like 3 months ago.

It's fair. My 1958 brain sometimes is— But I'd.

Like to dig into that, especially for your industries.

I'm really glad you asked this question. This is something we talk about with customers as a core part of explaining some of the things that have changed and why that's important. So most software for a very long time was built to be deterministic. It's a set of very bounded if-then statements. And so if this is true, this is the outcome. And so if you use that software, and I'm sure a lot of people have this experience, you set up things for a period of time. And there's a set of automation triggers where if these things are toggled to true, this outcome will happen. Frankly, that makes it very predictable, but it also makes it pretty tough to use and pretty tough also to evolve. The real big change that these underlying large language models have enabled is the shift to probabilistic problem solving, like a human might do. Here's the mission. Your job is to follow up on the open tickets and resolve customer questions before leading to a sold estimate, and then they act in a way that would execute on that mission based on the constraints they've been given. To your point, Ryan, like, that's going to mean that some percentage of the time they're going to hallucinate. They're going to not be able to resolve the problem because it was enough of an edge case that there was a need for an escalation. But that's no different than an entry-level worker who needs some coaching or needs some help with a manager to come in and tap on the shoulder and help them solve the problem.. And so then as someone who's building the software, your job is to figure out that escalation in a way that allows for the machine learning to kick in and for that problem to only be encountered that one time. And when you solve that edge case, well, now you can, you can offer that to everybody who's accessing the platform. That becomes more powerful through time.

I love that analogy though of, of the, your new employee, right? Because if you, because I think it's too often to write off like, hey, here's this thing that costs X and it's still 1,000 times cheaper than say an employee, but we forget that employees do make mistakes. So you want this thing that's 1,000 times more efficient to be 100% more efficient or more correct. And I think that leniency of tolerance level for failures, expectations and tolerance.

Expectation management. What's really cool about the probabilistic direction though, is that you start to be able to solve problems that were that were not solvable before. By that, I mean, like, it didn't make sense for a human being to run after that problem because the amount of cost associated with a person's time was so much higher than the value it could unlock. But the marginal cost of the AI agent's time is zero. It can go run and look for these connections that just didn't exist before. I'll give you an example. Our clients would want the chance to offer a homeowner an indoor air quality machine or a chance to be able to use an UV light to deal with pet dander from their dogs in their house. It used to be that like you wouldn't be able to go through all of your customer records and find all of the signals of all the times that people had indicated that they had a kid with allergies or an immunocompromised parent who was living with them. But now with AI tools, you can do that. And it could have been mentioned that, you know, hey, there's this challenge our family's having that now you could say, hey, we can help you solve that problem and offer the service that is the exact thing that person needs in the moment they need it, that a human would have not made the connection before. And it wouldn't have made sense to hire a human and say, look through all 50,000 records and find all of the times someone mentioned having a kid with allergies. It wouldn't make sense. But now that can happen in the workflow of how you reach out and offer a chance to follow up with someone. And that's so cool because now you could personalize the experience for everybody. And you and I and someone else that's listening right now can get a better experience for a lower price because we're not needing to go and pay for that incremental human time. It's just enabled by the technology, which is really cool.

I want to talk about the metrics and how you measure outcomes, but I want to back up a little bit because I'm thinking about your transition out of your role with Uber. You moved to Texas during the pandemic. At some point, you have this entrepreneurial spasm where you recognize the potential for AI to solve the problem that you've just articulated. At what point did that that insight become, I think I can build a business around this?

You fail a bunch of times before you start to click, and then you keep failing once it's even clicking. So for me, I went to some mentors at Uber and I said, I've loved every opportunity I've had here. You guys have been great. I think it's time to take a swing and I'd like to go pursue this. And they said, we thought you might say that. So to your earlier point, I worked myself out of a job. I was the last Uber Elevate employee. I severed my, myself. I was the janitor. I turned the lights off. So I helped transition the team and the tech to Joby. On March 31st, 2021, we turned the lights out. I severed myself. Dar and Nelson were very generous to say, you know, here's the ramp that you have now to go pursue this new idea. I interviewed a lot of people who were business owners that employ lots of skilled tradesmen and women and began to see some challenges that would pop up that were pretty common challenges. The Crowe family and Crowe Holdings here in Dallas were extraordinarily generous to me and brought me on as a venture advisor supporting Crowe. Across a number of different initiatives. Um, Harlan Crow and Michael Levy took a real interest in this idea that I had and gave me a lot of mentorship around that. I would interview the leaders of trades businesses that work with Crow Holdings and then use that as ways to get like a sharper understanding of the shape of the problem, the amount of spend that exists around mechanical, electrical, plumbing, how hard it is to find talent in that sector. If you could solve that problem, how much value would get created for the business? And as you begin to get more like concrete understanding of the P&L and how you can help really move the numbers for your customer, well, then it starts to take shape of a business problem to go solve. The big catalytic moment was in late '21, Ford Motor Company announced an $11 billion investment in EV manufacturing outside of Memphis, West Tennessee. The project's called Blue Oval Cities. And Governor Lee in Tennessee invited our fledgling company to be a workforce development partner. And come to, to help drive at that problem. We formed a partnership with the West Tennessee Associated Builders and Contractors trade group. Out of that, we found a number of different commercial contractors to serve, and we went to market in April of '22 with a product that would source, screen, and then upskill a very high-caliber, talented person who was currently unqualified for a career in the trades to become credentialed and have an EPA 608 license and a NATE Ready to Work certificate and OSHA 10-Qual. And then be on a job site. It was life-changing for the candidates because it was like a paid scholarship financed by their employer, and it helped solve a problem for the employer who knew that there was a bunch of latent demand they couldn't serve because there was an insufficient number of people on the team. We started that at a former Coca-Cola bottling facility by the Liberty Bowl. I know exactly what you're talking about in Memphis. Yes. And I'm so proud of, you know, the people that we served there and so grateful to the customers that took a bet on us. There were a few different private equity-backed home service companies that were based in Memphis who came and took a look and said, wow, this is pretty impressive. Could you guys take this on the road with us? And we decided to be able to expand to Texas, and then we expanded to Maryland, and then we went on a tear and added 15 states in 6 months in the first part of 2023. We raised a seed round of venture capital in July of '23, and on the basis of that, we started building API integrations with large field service management systems of record. ServiceTitan is the, is the most notable among them, and it's a really powerful platform. We began offering that API integration to our customers, and then we could recognize and reward behavior to take somebody not just from 0 to 1 on the credentialing side, but also then from 1 to 4 on their level of competence. That led a bunch of folks to trust us with their data. And then about 12 months ago, I realized this agentic AI wave was the biggest thing we possibly could build against, and it's been off to the races. Ever since then.

So you bring up private equity and the services anecdotally, and I say anecdotally because I know it happens, but I'm just not versed enough in the subject matter. But it just seems like the private equity groups are just gobbling up any kind of services out there. Right. And I want to tie this conversation back to the AI aspect because in a little way, from my point of view, looking at it, it's like, am I selling private equity because I can't compete anymore? Or is it because I'm done, I just want the money? And does like, hey, if I use Wyatt's capabilities with, with UpSmith and this, and now I'm, you know, multiplying, multiplying my efficiencies, now I don't have to sell to private equity. I could be more competitive. I'd just like to dig into that.

Conversation a little bit. There's lots of ways to take that. And I'll start with sort of the perspective of the entrepreneur., and then we have a chance to serve a lot of them. And so I'm grateful to have a couple of perspectives from them. I think people build businesses for lots of different reasons and they have different motivations and there's lots of different goals that they're seeking and how they grow their businesses. That's true across the whole economy. It's definitely true in home services. What I have observed is that a lot of people have built these companies on their blood, sweat, and tears and hard work and ingenuity, much like my dad. And in that case, you know, sometimes that's their legacy. They care a lot about what happens with it. Who their partner is going to be to transition in. And maybe it's somebody internal to the company. Maybe it's an employee ownership program like an ESOP. Maybe it's a private equity partner who allows them to maintain a leadership role and is more, you know, passive. Maybe it's a partner who's going to buy them out and give them an opportunity to pursue other passions that they have beyond the plumbing company or the, or the HVAC company. So everybody's got different motivations. And I think based on what your motivations are, it informs Which options are most exciting to help you achieve what your goal is? One thing we try to do at UpSmith is listen really well and understand what are the motivations of our partner and then how we can help them achieve whatever that goal is. For those that we serve that are parts of these larger private equity-backed aggregators, they've got very clear motivations. They want to grow value across the platform. They're hoping to transact it in a way that's going to go back to the benefit of their shareholders and their limited partners. And there's a pretty clear playbook on how to do that. Largely, it's around finding ways to drive organic growth, to be able to serve people better by adding new customers, more services that you can deliver for those customers, more trades to offer them, while then also like bolting in through inorganic growth acquisitions that will allow you to grow the base. And we can be helpful on that score because we have a playbook for being able to drive more free cash flow with less indirect labor costs. You're not needing to invest in the same amount of folks on, you know, the back office who answer the phone or who can dispatch things or can true up records. You can use some AI to help augment your people so they can do more people stuff and use the machines to do the machine things. I think back to your, the framework of your question around like what can we offer then to the independent business owner who's trying to think through his or her options. You know, when you, when you drill into like what their motivations are, and I was with one last night whose motivations are like really serve people super well. And they run a business out of Fort Worth. They're doing several million dollars of revenue. It's a real company employing dozens of people. They know they could do better. They know there's a lot of opportunity out there to serve people more efficiently. They know that there's a lot of waste and things they could use AI as a way of helping to address. They're looking for somebody that can help them to cut through the noise because to an earlier conversation, there's so many inbound promises of what AI can do that are noise. They're not that familiar with the workflow. They don't necessarily understand the shape of the problem that that contractor is trying to solve. And that can be hugely distracting. And so I feel like my responsibility and our team's responsibility is to listen super well, bring things we know work because we've seen them work with other people who look just like that contractor in other parts of the country. And then be a partner. Say, hey, here's some things you might not have considered yet that could be really valuable ways to grow your recurring revenue base for members, to be able to offer memberships to people that would love it if, if they could sign up. But right now you hit them in kind of an inconsistent way because it's a person process that, you know, has too much variability. And that's a lot of fun because oftentimes they will have had a goal for a while to do this thing, but it's just tough to justify or build the right people around it, and it kind of falls through, and then we can help them. Put that on the board.

It's a great, a great issue that you raised. And we see that at Optima as a lower middle market M&A shop. And it may just be coincidental that you pick trades where private equity is very active and they're paying above historical norm multiples for those businesses. And I suspect the reason for that may be embedded in what you just described, which is that with the proper tools and that they can increase the recurring revenue stream a lot of the founder-owner-operators that we work with, they've sort of taken the business as far as they can. They're working 70, 80 hours a week just trying to keep up with the ordinary flow of business. So integrating an AI tool, you know, upselling, doing the things may be outside the scope of their abilities and bandwidth at that time. Do you have an opinion on why private equity institutional buyers are paying historically high multiples for those businesses?

From the seat you sit in? So the optimistic answer is this is a place where they can create a lot of value.

Right.

And so even if the historical multiple is, is X, there's a real business case for offering 1.5x because there's so much value to create through the application of this technology. And if you can take— I'll just— a typical P&L here might be like 50% gross margin, something on the order of around 30-35% operating margin, and then something like 12.5% keep it on margin. Maybe it's less than 10. But if all of a sudden you can add $1 million of top line without a single additional person answering the phone, and then it's $10 million of top line, and it's $15 million of top line, you see where I'm going with this, right? And so the AI now is handling 50 times more activity. Schedule an appointment, book a job, update a record, follow up with a customer. They're incremental, like atomic units of work that a person would have done, before, that now you're relying on an AI tool and partner to do in support of your business. You've now created a lot of free cash flow that didn't have indirect labor costs associated with it. And it means that with the exact same gross profit margin, you're able to offer a whole lot more flexibility to the business owner because it's all flowing through the bottom line. That gets really interesting very quickly if you've got some scale. And you can imagine a world where, you know, companies doing $3 billion of top line goes to $4 in 24 months with zero additional dollars of indirect labor costs. And now you've, you know, several billion dollars in economic value that gets created there. And so I think that like middle market private equity firms get that and understand that that playbook, if they execute it really well, will be really advantageous. And we want to help them do that. The cynical side would say that like a lot of dollars are chasing only a handful of very good deals. And it's bidding up the price of those handful of very good deals. And it means that there's a lot of portfolios that are marked at a certain point that are not actually worth it right now, and that you might see a reckoning around that, particularly if the same headwinds on the macro side continue. There's been a bit of a falloff in terms of the organic replacement rate demand, which is 60% of the revenue in this, in this industry. Interest rates have stayed stubbornly high. That's softened consumer spending. It's become really expensive to aggregate leads because a lot of really well-financed contractors bidding on the same number of cost-per-click advertising in Dallas-Fort Worth like jumps the price for the Google ad. And so that's, that's painful. You're now caught with less organic demand and higher cost to go find it. But guess what? Big opportunity for agentic AI. Like what if you could go mine for gold inside your dataset? You've got 50,000 records there in some cases. So there's opportunity that you can use the tools to go in and help you win. And so that's why in all things, I take the optimistic case. I think we're just in the early.

Innings here of what's possible. I'd like to throw in an additional pessimistic with an asterisk. It's a hedge against the AI bubble.

Yeah.

Investing in all these servicing companies. Obviously, I know most private equities are siloed to an industry-specific or whatnot, but I mean, $250 billion last year invested in AI. Obviously, if you've got these services companies, lawn care is not going away. You may not make the giant multiples in the tech, but you probably are not going to lose your shirt.

And some of it's self-sustaining. Private equity starts chasing a particular industry and then people can realize that they can aggregate at a lower level and then sell to private equity at the higher multiple and it sort of becomes this this thing with huge momentum. We took a business that's in one of the trades that you're focused on to market here. In the lower middle market, we might typically get 25 or 30 NDAs signed for prospective buyers to take a look and a few offers. And we got 120 non-disclosure agreements signed and we're sitting on double-digit number of offers for the business, which is very pleasant. It's interesting. And the range of offers is much wider than we would typically see because in that lower middle market space, you sometimes have the searchers and independent sponsors crossing over with private equity looking to do smaller deals. It all bleeds together. It does. It all bleeds together. I feel kind of sorry for the mom-and-pop searchers that are looking to buy a business and go operate it because they just can't compete against the private equity guys. For our sellers, our job is to bring them the best price and the best terms for their exit. We'll give them the information so they can make an informed judgment if they decide that for whatever reason, from a non-financial standpoint, they might favor one buyer over another, but that's kind of hard to turn down a significantly superior offer. I want to circle back. You talked about Blue Oval and about sort of the life-changing effect you're having by training these workers to become skilled workers, to make a better living for themselves, to meet the demand. And so there's almost sort of this feel-good societal underpinning to this. And on your website, I noticed the term dignified lucrative work. Can you define dignified lucrative work? And is there an element of this that just is purely it feeds your soul?

I think that builders are at the heart of our society. They keep our homes safe. They keep the power, the water, the infrastructure running in our in our communities. And I think that that is really noble. That really matters. And I think that it has real purpose. And I think that it has real dignity and it is something we should celebrate as society. And it is a real big competitiveness challenge for our country when we have a lack of builders, when there is a deficit of people that can go and do that work. And to the point where I made earlier, like, this is not going away. This is a challenge that we as a people need to be able to solve. I also think there's an element too about like the strength of the American economy is based on the productivity of the labor market. That's how we also sustain our values, the things that make individual freedom and self-expression and rule of law, these things be forces for promoting human dignity around the world. And so we need to win because our adversaries don't have the same point of view on the right way to organize society. And so without being too grandiose, like, that's also the mission that I feel most compelled by is like, if we can play a role in helping to make the US economy more competitive and help drive more labor productivity so that we can win on the real fundamental stuff. That's, that's, that's the core of the business. That's why I do this. The really cool thing is because of the gifts God gave me to go and be a farm kid from Alabama in Silicon Valley and have a chance to understand what was so possible with this technology, that's now a mission that I have to go and bring it to Middle America and to people that are, again, I think, builders in our communities. And I want to serve a lot of people like the folks back home that I grew up with. Everybody in my high school graduating class went into the military, the trades, vocational work, or someplace within 50 miles of where we grew up. I went a little bit further out, but that's still where it feels like home, and that's, that's the mission I care most about.

I'd like to circle back to noise. Yeah, you know, because like in my business, in the video production business, everybody's like, well, you know, AI, this, that, and the other. I see as an opportunity because of the noise factor, because ultimately what we're trying to do is, is cut through the noise for attention, for purpose, for whatever you're trying to convey. You know, I'm a video production company. Optima is M&A shop. This podcast is to cut through the noise, per se, to get to people to know who we are, to potentially do business with us. I see a lot of what you were talking about in what we're doing, but from the servicing company side, where if I go to Google and I look at what are some email tools that I could have I'm gonna get 1,000 responses. What are some AI tools? 1,000 responses. So I guess the question I'm getting to is, how do you cut through that noise to prove the value of what you have, that you're not full of crud, you're not full of crap, and we can actually help your business.

And cut through that noise per se? It's really challenging. What you identify here is a really challenging problem because there are a lot of like all hat, no cattle is what my dad would have called it, uh, operating in the sector. For us, it's all about social proof through customer impact. My best channel by far is customer referrals. I think our land speed record right now is 100 hours from an intro over text message to a DocuSign. And so you lean into that because it's social proof that like you're real and like what you're saying has real substance behind it. And the industry is such that people have lots of trust and like that, that matters. There's lots of trust-based networks through best practice groups. And I've been very fortunate to have a lot of folks here in North Texas. That have made a bet on us. Josh Campbell at Rescue Air, Blake Meehan at Airco, Brad Bacon at Bacon Plumbing. And those relationships matter so much to me because serving them well means a chance that we have to go grow this business and realize the mission. And they've made the product way better too, frankly. They give me feedback all the time. They're saying, hey, wouldn't it be cool if the Genie AI agent could do this? And so you take that really seriously. With time, as it becomes known that you can really deliver, Well, now you can cut through the noise more systematically. Now when you outbound to someone over email that they know the name, there's some brand equity that's tied to that. But in the early innings, you really earn it through customer love. And so really investing there is important.

When I think of AI data centers, all I think about is energy and power. A friend of mine was just here locally talking about nuclear power and the demands that are not currently being met. When it comes to AI, because it's all data center driven, what worries you?

So in terms of like where I.

Think the challenges are, or for you.

Specifically, but also macro, they're different things. I think as an entrepreneur, you can't control the macro, so you have to sort of just play on the playing field that you're, you're presented with. As a, as a person who cares a lot about the future of the country and like follows the news closely, I would say like the macro things that I think most about, you want to have like stability. You want to have that on, on the market side and you want to also have it, you know, as it relates to like geopolitics and just say we can predict that what's going to happen and it's going to be peaceful and you can use that to make long-term planning. And to the extent that like the world's a not peaceful place, that's, that's a risk. And so you'll be really thoughtful about that, but you can't control it as an entrepreneur. I care a lot about, you know, US military might as a force for good and stability is an important thing. I didn't think about sort of the economy itself and if they're softening and there's like some certain signals of that. I think, you know, the government being open for business is important. So I want them to like figure that out and say like, hey, like it is open and like you can use that to predict air travel and other things that are going to happen. Like that's, that's important. On the macro side, I mean, energy is a really big and important one and I'm really excited for the advances that are happening in nuclear. I'm excited for the unlock that we have for, for a lot of America's natural resources on the natural gas side and how that in the near term power powers, a lot of our energy costs going lower. That's really good for technology and for society and for people. I'm not making news on any of those things. Like, those are things that I think lots of people would agree would be really great if they were constant. As an entrepreneur, my number one job is to grow. We're venture-backed. I'm grateful to have some great venture partners. None of them put more pressure on our company than I do. And so you want to create such disruptive growth because you solve a problem so well, so fundamentally better than what existed before that it shifts what's possible. And that's how you get the chance to matter and get real scale. And we need to get that scale to accomplish our mission because otherwise, you know, you're just a guy talking about the future of the workforce and it's, you know, to really have an impact on it, you got to grow fast. And that's led us to evolve our business model and our product a lot over the course of the last couple of years. In the support of growth, my job is to build a product people really want and that really, really matters to how they run their business. And we get better every day. But you're never there. Your standard is always higher than where you are. So I can, I can say really proudly all the cool things we're doing right now, but the bar for what we want to be is way higher. And I think a big part of entrepreneurship is you're always chasing that higher bar. And so my biggest challenges are like really solve problems well for customers, because if you do that super well, all the other stuff will work out. You will attract capital, you will have lots of other great people come to the team, you will be able to solve the problems that come with more scale and maturity. But at the core is the product insight. How do you capture this technology wave that's happening and use it to the benefit of your customer? If you can do that well, I.

Think a lot of other things check out. I'm glad you worded it like that because what I was thinking about in terms of like a worry or a stress is almost like a what about, you know, because like this morning with the Cloudflare outage, I don't know if you saw that. Oh, I felt it. Yeah, but something like that, does that affect your business and does it wipe about your product? And even if it does, is it only for a few hours? So it's— yes, it's stressful when it happens, but it's so rare that it's not something to stress overly about, right?

I love the example you gave. So I'm not sure when people will watch this, but for those when they do, there was a, a Cloudflare outage this morning. Um, the net effect of that was OpenAI was down for a period of time. Our product relies on OpenAI for how we develop the message that the customer reads over a text or other communication about, you know, how would you want to move forward with your quote we left you yesterday? And so for a period of time, like, that was, that was a risk. What's really cool about the development of the tech, though, is that largely the models are interchangeable. And so we can drop in Gemini or we can drop in Groq, and it will allow us to continue performing at a really high level of quality for our customer. There are other parts of infrastructure that are more difficult and may not make sense to build redundancy around at our scale. The biggest one is like servers. So AWS, Amazon Web Services, had an outage a month ago, broke the internet for a period of a few hours on October 21st. That was a risky day. Having a multi-cloud strategy as a seed stage startup does not make sense. There's other problems around product quality to go solve. And so I consider those sort of like black swan things that are kind of like the risk of a kinetic conflict in Asia. Like I can't solve that. So focus on the thing that I do have agency over and do that really well.

For me, it ties back to if you hired a new employee or if you have an employee, every once in a while they're going to have a mistake. It's not the reason why you wouldn't do this other thing. So similar to this, yes, you may have an AWS outage, you may have a ChatGPT outage, but if it's rare enough, if it's not just you, if it's the entire everyone, I think people are going to recognize it's not you and it is everyone. And oh well, this sucks for the next couple hours. Let's hope it comes back on.

There's an entrepreneur who I serve who gave me an anecdote that finding product-market fit is like being in a bar fight. And so you're in the bar, the fight breaks out, you have to get out the door on the other side, and your job is to get out the door. And there's a guy with like a broken bottle and a guy with a pool cue, and like all of them could hurt you. And, and your job is to get out the other side. And so like it narrows your focus to say, that's, that's my objective. And my objective is like solve a customer problem really well to get the other side. And it's true that like if another biker gang walked into the bar and all of them had, you know, machetes instead of pool cues, like that's bad, right? But I can't control that. So I got to figure out my way through. Given the guy with the pool cue and the guy with the beer bottle and all the other things, it's a weird metaphor, I suppose. But for the, for the guy that runs an HVAC plumbing company who told me this metaphor, I was like, there's wisdom.

In your anecdote there. Ties into the probability analysis, right? There you go. What's my best path? I'm kind of curious. It sounds like we had similar relationships with our fathers. My father was a tough taskmaster. He was a chief petty officer in the Navy. He— everything was on time, the right place, doing the right thing. He instilled a tremendous work ethic in me, which is a two-edged sword. I have trouble relaxing and decompressing. Because I feel, you know, if I had downtime that I'm disengaged. So I deal with that. You talked about your father being a tough boss on the ranch and you talked about the sacrifices he made to, you know, start a business, back of the napkin deal and grow it. My father pledged my mother's wedding ring and the cash value of his life insurance policy to buy the franchise rights to Tupelo, Mississippi for a Holiday Inn and, you know, all in and grew the business. How much of that sort of informs who you are and drives you. And the second part of that is I've read a lot about the disenfranchisement of young males these days. I read something yesterday that said almost a third of young males 30 years of age and under live at home with their parents, which I couldn't wait to get out of the house when I was 21 years old. And it seems that this addiction to technology, the work at home, and all these factors are sort of dislocating this generation. I'm assuming you're dependent upon some of those folks to help run your tech. How are you wired based on how you were brought up and how do you set the culture for your business?

Yeah, this is a really beautiful question. I appreciate you posing it. So the bridge that exists for me is the importance of fatherhood. That's the bridge in your question. So I am lucky to have had a father who took a real interest in my development. He was very tough. I mean, you know, it was in our relationship when I was a kid was in some ways really challenged by the fact that, you know, he led with aggressiveness. So it was a, it was a governed by fear kind of thing. And I, you know, I think about as a dad now, like, that's not the relationship I think about wanting to have for my boys, but also like if my boys turn out with a similar level of appreciation for the value of work and of work ethic that my dad instilled in me and my brothers, like, that would be great. And my sons, you know, live in a very different world in 2025 Dallas, Texas than I did in 1995 Reform, Alabama. And so I want to like meet my dad's example. And I think about a lot about, I think kids learn with their eyes, they're watching and observing, and that learning with your eyes is your job as a husband and a father and a man to think through like how do you make choices that compounds in how you lead a business because You're role modeling the values all the time, how you talk, how you, how you react to stress, how you deal with failure. And so the bar is really high. And to execute at a really high level, you got to lead with the right values to do that. I think we have a real crisis of fatherhood in our country. We have a lot of people that are looking for examples of what it means to be a man and to do that in a really high quality way. And that's something we need to like really you know, hold a high bar for and civic engagement on. And then that shows up with how you then, you know, create expectations for behavior. And how do you say like, this is what the bar is, and I'm going to coach you up and I'm gonna give you lots of support to get there. But high expectations are what drive performance. I learned that as a teacher. And now I think about it a lot as a business leader. It is true that there's a lot of challenges that my kids will face that I did not face because of the proliferation of technology. My wife and I think a lot about, you know, screen time and how we limit it for our kids and like really put them into problem-solving mode. And we're grateful to have, you know, the ability to control their environment in a way that a lot of families don't because childcare is hard and expensive and there's other challenges that are out there. So I think about that a good bit. In terms of how it then informs like UpSmith and how we think about the people that we're serving, it's all about high expectations. If you keep them really high and you give people support, but then you're really clear on what good looks like, and accountability when you don't hit that, then you can, you can give, you know, consequential outcomes that are bad, but with like grace. And you always want to give grace to people and not demean them, but then say, hey, that's not the standard here and we're going to part ways now. That's a big challenge of leadership.

As we get close to the end here, I'm glad you came to this, the father, because I did want to circle back to your relationship with your father. But before, because we brought it up, um, and I think it needs to be said more and more, and I also recognize the irony of me saying this on a digital platform, but I don't think any teens are going to be watching this. But who knows, there's some dealmakers out there. But yeah, I heard this from a neuroscientist a couple months ago. It was— he basically was saying he would much rather his kids smoked every single day in their teenage years than be on social media. Because you can recover from smoking. And basically what he's saying is in those early years of your cognitive development, if you're in your phone, you're basically ruining your life. I mean, if I'm not the scientist, but that's what he was saying. I heard that and I was like.

Holy— that's completely earth-shattering. Well, I'll make a comment on this one. So Jonathan Haidt, if people have not followed some of his work as a researcher, as a writer, he's had a really big impact on the negative consequences that phones in schools can have around interactions that kids have, especially for young girls. And it's been really impressive to watch how the publishing of his book on this topic and then his sort of work on the speaker circuit to raise awareness of it has changed a lot of policy for schools to say like, we're going to be, you know, phone-free environments, which was very much not the direction we were going a decade ago. And it's kind of bring your own device to school and we're going to do a lot of like learning through the device. I think that's really powerful when you think about like how his writing about the anxious generation, like how we then sort of do something about that can drive changes in how we think about structure for.

Early child education.

I want my boys to be problem solvers. You know, like it might feel kind of quaint to be a Boy Scout, you know, who like learned how to solve a bunch of problems on his way to getting an Eagle Scout badge. I had that experience in rural Alabama. Like, there's a comp for that that I want my sons to have. There's some like resilience that's built in. I'm going to drop you in the woods and you got to figure out how to navigate your way back. And if you can do that in a way that creates opportunities for failure that is safe, they can make a mistake and it's recoverable to the earlier point you were sharing, then I think you start to build the right habits.

And mindsets to help them be successful. Yeah. And then on the problem-solving mindset, it's if AI is just accumulation of all the knowledge there's no creativity. And the only— the people that can be creative, to creatively use the AI tools, they're the ones that can be successful and ultimately succeed.

Would you agree?

Amen.

Quote that I heard recently from, um, Dr. Condoleezza Rice— we're thankful she visited our company and spent time with us— and she said, um, AI is not coming for your job, but people who know how to use AI are.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of wisdom in that. So like, this becomes the productivity you can create for your business and for the people you serve really goes up and that's, that's who's going to win.

Earlier you had said that you became a teacher in the spirit of your father, of that learning. When I heard you talking about that, it almost sounded like you became a teacher to get away from the entrepreneur spirit. And then the entrepreneur spirit brought you back in. I don't know if that's accurate or, or if that's just me and my own, uh, my biases. Because I can't imagine being an entrepreneur and then becoming a teacher. I just, I don't see that link. I can understand helping people. I can understand lifting people up. But as an entrepreneur, you're always constantly building unless the mindset is building— unless you're seeing you're building people and you're building the structure. I don't know, it just seems like if your current life is more in alignment with your father's entrepreneur spirit versus your teacher life— well, I don't mean.

To armchair psychology here. I appreciate the question. And maybe it's useful to go back in time a little bit and talk about that, that, that experience, because so I was a part of the Teach for America Corps. Teach for America is a nonprofit organization that's focused on raising standards around how we think through closing the achievement gap. So the differences that happen in outcomes between kids based on where they're born. And it's seen as one of these really unifying missions because equality of opportunity is really what we want to offer in like the spirit of how you create great outcomes. Not a quality of outcomes, right? So you're not promised anything, but if you work really hard and you have the right inputs, good things will happen. That's challenging for a lot of kids that are out there. When I was recruited, Teach for America was like a leadership factory. I mean, you would, you would, you would get dropped in, there'd be a lot of coaches. It's around how do you lead with vision? How do you plan purposefully? How do you execute effectively? How do you work relentlessly and use that to change that, the number? And my kids in my school had a when I entered, a 20% pass rate on state testing. So 1 in 5 passed, and we tripled it through the course of my time working with them on state social studies testing, which is what I taught, which was great. But, you know, the goal is better still, right? Because like a 60% pass rate is still not where you want to be, right? And so we started an international language program when I was at that school. It was my first founder experience, and I raised capital, and my promise to the philanthropist was your gift is only going to vest if the kid becomes proficient in Mandarin Chinese. But to the kid, it was like, if you become proficient in Mandarin Chinese to this afterschool program, you will earn a scholarship to go study in China for the summer. And it created this really good incentive alignment between capital and, you know, the person I was serving. And I ran that for a couple of summers. We scaled it with a partnership with the city of Birmingham's mayor's office. And then I went to business school. Understanding, like, you know, getting a chance to go from those 13 kids that I was serving in that program to the 200,000 students that were in the Birmingham City Schools at the time was going to be a technology lever to do it. But I think about being in the Marine Corps. I mean, it was real tough and I would, you know, I would get in around 7:00 AM to get ready for the day and I would leave around 10:00 PM when the janitors kicked me out to say, Mr. Smith, you got to go home. And I would like make some spaghetti because I had no money at the time. For dinner and pack some of it for lunch the next day and then do it again because you're lesson planning every day to get ahead of the next day in your first year. And it really humbled me because to that point I've been pretty successful at most things I've taken on. And in that setting, you fail all the time. And if you don't come with a really buttoned up plan, your students have a plan for you and it will. And so a lot of my resiliency as an entrepreneur was born out of that experience where you're failing, failing, failing, failing, failing, failing. And grit is the thing that keeps you in the fight because you have a vision of what you want to be true on the other side of this thing. And I'm so darn proud of like what we did in that environment. And a lot of the students I taught, I'm still really close touch with. And I'm grateful to my principal and the people that backed me and the parents of those students. And I want the chance to have a bigger impact on that, which I think now through this company we have.

A chance to do. Well, I appreciate that added context because as you're explaining, now I see it. You, you, you never were like running away. You were a teacher, but it was a title, but you were you're still an entrepreneur under the surface. At least that's what I'm hearing. That's how it felt. Yeah.

Lane, final question, final thought. Congratulations, um, on UpSmith. Exciting times. Uh, a year from now, 2 years from now, what's the headline going to be?

What am I going to hear about UpSmith? Yeah, I appreciate the congrats. We have a lot of work to do. Yeah, sure, of course. Save it for now. Again, our vision is that every entrepreneur can build a $50 million revenue business, 100 people in the field, a laptop is going to power the whole thing.. And this wave of agentic AI products is the thing that enables it. I am really proud of what we're building. We're in the very early innings. The product today is the, the, the very much V1 version of the platform that it will become. And we want to be able to support all types of credential-driven service work that exists in our society, because that's really where the future goes. That's humans delivering service to other humans is the thing that I think sustains And then technology plays a role in facilitating that and helping to coordinate it. We need to grow. That is the most important thing. So anybody that's listening that, you know, possibly runs one of these platforms or is an investor that's aggregating a number of them, we'd love to share with you what we're hearing and what we're seeing work well. And if we can be helpful, awesome. We're going to raise more capital to grow this business and to bring more engineers on board and more people on our go-to-market team and help grow our scale. That's a thing that will happen in the next year or so. And then our job is as the technology continues to evolve, deliver it for people in a way that really works well. So it's being that application layer of advances in large language models that help shape real-world businesses and how they operate. And that's a big mission, but it's.

Why I'm really grateful to be on. Excellent. Before we say goodbye, I do want to say one thing, that Wyatt and Andy host some of the coolest morning coffee hours. They are kind of invite-only and kind of exclusive. So it would behoove of you to reach out to Wyatt and be like, hey, how do I go to this coffee thing? What is it? Um, because I've been to several of them, great conversations, incredibly impressive people that it attracts. And I'm just grateful that somehow I'm on the invite list. Or maybe I just ruined it and now they're like, Ryan's still on there, scratch. See what happens next. I know, right? Let's see if I'm still on it. But, uh, I would, I would recommend to anybody chat to reach out to Wyatt and be like, hey, can I please, for the love of God, go to this event? Because it's only about 20-25 people and it's amazing.

You're generous to say that. It's a labor of love. We do this completely as volunteers. But the idea is that there's lots of really cool things happening in the technology sector that I'm lucky through my friendships from, from the Valley and through other walks of life to be able to bring those folks in to the old Parkland campus and introduce them to people that are here or not just at Oak Park but in, in North Texas. And so it's a lot of fun to do. We do them about once a month or so, and I'd be happy to, to hear about other people that are interested. Yeah. Thank you. I thank you for the opportunity. I love what you guys are building. It's really important, and I'm grateful to.

Be invited to join.

Thanks. It's been a pleasure.