Meeting Title: Friday Brainforge Demos & Retro Date: 2025-06-13 Meeting participants: Casie Aviles, Uttam Kumaran, Fireflies.ai Notetaker Awaish, Mustafa Raja, Luke Daque, Caio Velasco, Ryan Brosas, Raymund Verzosa, Amber Lin, Anne, Hannah Wang, Demilade Agboola, Annie Yu, Awaish Kumar
WEBVTT
1 00:00:35.760 ⇒ 00:00:36.520 Casie Aviles: Hey!
2 00:00:36.520 ⇒ 00:00:37.270 Uttam Kumaran: It did.
3 00:00:37.630 ⇒ 00:00:38.156 Casie Aviles: Hey! Utah!
4 00:00:45.510 ⇒ 00:00:46.170 Mustafa Raja: Hey!
5 00:00:47.700 ⇒ 00:00:48.520 Uttam Kumaran: Hey!
6 00:00:48.980 ⇒ 00:00:49.720 Mustafa Raja: How are you?
7 00:00:51.810 ⇒ 00:00:56.414 Uttam Kumaran: Good dude one day one day I’ll see your face.
8 00:00:57.502 ⇒ 00:00:59.047 Mustafa Raja: I’m scared.
9 00:01:00.790 ⇒ 00:01:05.509 Uttam Kumaran: I know. Next week you’re I’m gonna have. I’m gonna ask you to host this. So then you have to show your you’ll have to. You’ll have to.
10 00:01:09.430 ⇒ 00:01:11.705 Uttam Kumaran: You can’t hide. I’m sorry.
11 00:01:12.160 ⇒ 00:01:16.630 Mustafa Raja: Yeah, yeah, I know, I’ve been waiting for this.
12 00:01:17.110 ⇒ 00:01:18.850 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I know, I know.
13 00:01:19.010 ⇒ 00:01:21.188 Uttam Kumaran: And you know me. I’m gonna ask.
14 00:01:23.350 ⇒ 00:01:24.987 Mustafa Raja: And I’ll have to do it.
15 00:01:41.650 ⇒ 00:01:42.590 Uttam Kumaran: Hey?
16 00:03:14.980 ⇒ 00:03:20.330 Uttam Kumaran: Hi! Everyone amber! How’s it in la.
17 00:03:21.040 ⇒ 00:03:23.999 Amber Lin: It’s it’s good, it’s a little cold.
18 00:03:25.554 ⇒ 00:03:29.730 Amber Lin: The curfew is still going on so.
19 00:03:29.730 ⇒ 00:03:30.780 Uttam Kumaran: Oh, okay.
20 00:03:31.020 ⇒ 00:03:31.735 Amber Lin: Yeah.
21 00:03:33.130 ⇒ 00:03:35.280 Amber Lin: Not much is happening here.
22 00:03:51.880 ⇒ 00:03:53.860 Uttam Kumaran: Maybe we’ll wait a couple more minutes.
23 00:04:37.260 ⇒ 00:04:42.480 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, maybe, Casey, we maybe we should get okay. I see him now. Maybe we should get started.
24 00:04:43.800 ⇒ 00:04:44.786 Casie Aviles: Okay, sure.
25 00:04:45.500 ⇒ 00:04:47.069 Casie Aviles: I’ll share the screen.
26 00:04:49.510 ⇒ 00:04:49.990 Uttam Kumaran: Okay. Cool.
27 00:04:49.990 ⇒ 00:04:51.830 Casie Aviles: Oh, basic.
28 00:04:52.120 ⇒ 00:04:56.200 Casie Aviles: Yeah. So I guess Happy Friday to everyone.
29 00:04:57.260 ⇒ 00:05:01.616 Casie Aviles: Yeah, I’m not much of a host. But I’ll try my best.
30 00:05:02.470 ⇒ 00:05:09.412 Casie Aviles: yeah. So I guess for the icebreaker, we have this so I’m not gonna do the breakout rooms anymore.
31 00:05:09.890 ⇒ 00:05:17.320 Casie Aviles: so just join me, please, in having these. What what do you call these? These filters.
32 00:05:17.320 ⇒ 00:05:28.329 Uttam Kumaran: The characters. So I I have to go to. Oh, background, background and effects. Okay.
33 00:05:29.250 ⇒ 00:05:30.010 Casie Aviles: Yeah.
34 00:05:41.080 ⇒ 00:05:50.079 Casie Aviles: yeah, over here, where’s video or background and effects. And then video filters.
35 00:06:11.590 ⇒ 00:06:14.780 Casie Aviles: Yeah, for any for anyone who’s just joined.
36 00:06:14.930 ⇒ 00:06:21.659 Casie Aviles: We’re just doing the icebreaker. We’re just selecting the filter that you want or the background.
37 00:06:23.080 ⇒ 00:06:25.890 Casie Aviles: So it’s like customizing your character.
38 00:06:51.770 ⇒ 00:06:56.230 Casie Aviles: Yeah, I can. I I see Ryan’s she’s an alien.
39 00:06:56.340 ⇒ 00:06:58.030 Casie Aviles: Oh, we have 2 aliens.
40 00:06:59.430 ⇒ 00:07:03.420 Casie Aviles: Oh, no, we have. Oh, shit people keep switching. Okay.
41 00:07:09.590 ⇒ 00:07:11.380 Casie Aviles: I’m trying to get mine.
42 00:07:49.330 ⇒ 00:07:50.640 Casie Aviles: Okay, nice.
43 00:07:55.600 ⇒ 00:08:00.869 Casie Aviles: Okay? Yeah, I can see that everyone has chosen their filters. So
44 00:08:02.810 ⇒ 00:08:06.459 Casie Aviles: yeah, let’s, I guess I can start with the lab share.
45 00:08:08.420 ⇒ 00:08:09.330 Casie Aviles: Okay, cool.
46 00:08:10.110 ⇒ 00:08:13.150 Casie Aviles: So yeah, for the lab share. I’m just
47 00:08:13.260 ⇒ 00:08:16.899 Casie Aviles: gonna talk about how I use AI as a
48 00:08:17.220 ⇒ 00:08:19.870 Casie Aviles: this as a hobby wingman. So
49 00:08:20.770 ⇒ 00:08:28.399 Casie Aviles: yeah. So what I wrote here, learning is fun. But starting can be hard. So yeah, just to share a little bit.
50 00:08:28.620 ⇒ 00:08:31.686 Casie Aviles: I like to learn a lot of stuff.
51 00:08:32.299 ⇒ 00:08:36.100 Casie Aviles: I like to have multiple hobbies. But then I have the tendency to just
52 00:08:36.844 ⇒ 00:08:40.290 Casie Aviles: you know, get excited, and then eventually just drop it.
53 00:08:41.780 ⇒ 00:08:42.299 Casie Aviles: So
54 00:08:42.770 ⇒ 00:08:56.830 Casie Aviles: yeah, I I have this tendency that you know it’s kind of hard to commit for me to to like, you know. Be consistent with these hobbies. So one of that one of those hobbies is one of those interests is actually game development.
55 00:08:57.020 ⇒ 00:09:00.240 Casie Aviles: And it’s for me it was very daunting. And
56 00:09:00.550 ⇒ 00:09:08.549 Casie Aviles: there’s like a lot of decisions to make. So I ended up being, you know, stuck in paralysis for all these decisions that I want.
57 00:09:09.250 ⇒ 00:09:16.800 Casie Aviles: Then. So I thought, Okay, why not use AI to help me, you know. Basically
58 00:09:16.960 ⇒ 00:09:21.280 Casie Aviles: help me learn and be faster with that and help me decide.
59 00:09:21.700 ⇒ 00:09:25.990 Casie Aviles: So yeah, one of my one of the games that I wanted to
60 00:09:26.160 ⇒ 00:09:34.732 Casie Aviles: create. Like, create a clone of or like my inspiration is, you know, this old game just do. It’s a very old game.
61 00:09:35.570 ⇒ 00:09:39.690 Casie Aviles: yeah. And AI helped me decide. You know, multiple aspects of it like
62 00:09:40.068 ⇒ 00:09:43.290 Casie Aviles: deciding on which game engine. So there’s a lot of game engines.
63 00:09:43.570 ⇒ 00:09:45.359 Casie Aviles: I didn’t know which to pick.
64 00:09:45.460 ⇒ 00:09:50.000 Casie Aviles: So yeah, I had AI help me decide and also scoping it
65 00:09:50.420 ⇒ 00:09:55.849 Casie Aviles: like I didn’t want it to, you know, be too too much of a task. Especially, I’m starting out.
66 00:09:57.576 ⇒ 00:10:01.951 Casie Aviles: Yeah. So for the for the building process.
67 00:10:02.520 ⇒ 00:10:05.450 Casie Aviles: yeah, I I use AI a lot for
68 00:10:06.790 ⇒ 00:10:14.600 Casie Aviles: you know, for coding, and even the visuals, the animation. And yeah, just learning the engines ins and outs.
69 00:10:16.360 ⇒ 00:10:24.370 Casie Aviles: yes, I’ve added some screenshots here. So I used for the visuals I used Dolly Mini, which is like the the worst model.
70 00:10:24.770 ⇒ 00:10:29.569 Casie Aviles: But yeah, I guess that’s that’s the point which is to create this. You know.
71 00:10:30.020 ⇒ 00:10:34.250 Casie Aviles: it’s kind of this flesh demon creature here. And I just did a lot of
72 00:10:36.050 ⇒ 00:10:40.100 Casie Aviles: post-processing. So I I learned a little bit about
73 00:10:41.007 ⇒ 00:10:46.700 Casie Aviles: photo editing. So I did like this pixelation changing the colors and stuff.
74 00:10:47.060 ⇒ 00:10:54.702 Casie Aviles: And I also learned a little bit about animation. So I had to do this. These are sprites that we call
75 00:10:55.500 ⇒ 00:10:57.040 Casie Aviles: yeah. And then
76 00:10:57.330 ⇒ 00:11:06.739 Casie Aviles: I guess what made this different is because in the past, like I would, just, you know, passively, watch these Youtube tutorials. I I copy it. And then I just drop it like.
77 00:11:07.020 ⇒ 00:11:15.249 Casie Aviles: Okay, what’s next? I don’t know what to do next. But yeah. So with AI, it’s like, you know, having someone who who has it’s like
78 00:11:15.470 ⇒ 00:11:20.509 Casie Aviles: like a mentor of sorts, or like helping me find the information that I need much faster.
79 00:11:22.007 ⇒ 00:11:25.332 Casie Aviles: Yeah. So that allowed me to be more consistent with, you know.
80 00:11:25.870 ⇒ 00:11:28.450 Casie Aviles: with learning and building the game.
81 00:11:29.435 ⇒ 00:11:34.174 Casie Aviles: Yeah, so this is just still a work in progress. But it’s just, you know.
82 00:11:34.740 ⇒ 00:11:38.449 Casie Aviles: this is how the game looks in place. So yeah.
83 00:11:39.241 ⇒ 00:11:42.890 Casie Aviles: made for me. It made game dev finally doable and fun.
84 00:11:43.340 ⇒ 00:11:52.919 Casie Aviles: And yeah, I’m just, you know, curious. If others have used AI, for you know, personal projects or non non work stuff. And
85 00:11:53.200 ⇒ 00:11:55.780 Casie Aviles: yeah, I guess that’s it for my my lab share.
86 00:11:59.840 ⇒ 00:12:01.119 Uttam Kumaran: This is crazy.
87 00:12:04.160 ⇒ 00:12:08.059 Uttam Kumaran: I would never even think like you could do this with with AI.
88 00:12:08.920 ⇒ 00:12:18.310 Casie Aviles: Yeah, it helped me, you know, with with coding, and it’s a it’s a new language, too. So I’m not. I’m unfamiliar. So it helped me, like, you know, just move faster with it. And
89 00:12:18.880 ⇒ 00:12:19.640 Casie Aviles: yeah.
90 00:12:23.660 ⇒ 00:12:25.090 Casie Aviles: okay, cool.
91 00:12:25.720 ⇒ 00:12:30.189 Casie Aviles: So yeah, if you hopefully, this lab share, just, you know, also help like
92 00:12:30.650 ⇒ 00:12:34.060 Casie Aviles: gave you ideas on how you could also use. You know, AI,
93 00:12:35.103 ⇒ 00:12:42.619 Casie Aviles: you know, with your hobbies or other stuff. So yeah, okay, think that’s it from me.
94 00:12:46.240 ⇒ 00:12:50.740 Casie Aviles: yeah, I want to move. Okay, that’s do exact updates.
95 00:12:51.440 ⇒ 00:12:56.460 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. So maybe we can go to the to slide 12, actually.
96 00:12:56.840 ⇒ 00:12:59.439 Uttam Kumaran: And I can just even
97 00:12:59.969 ⇒ 00:13:13.750 Uttam Kumaran: talk about these. So I would say just to maybe a quick note. And I know we have a bunch to go through today. So I think all of our existing clients this week. We’re all we’re doing really, really well on. I think.
98 00:13:14.240 ⇒ 00:13:25.610 Uttam Kumaran: we did a lot of alignment on matter more last week that I think worked out. All the top 3, I think, are are doing really really well. If you want to go to slide 13
99 00:13:25.740 ⇒ 00:13:37.132 Uttam Kumaran: as well. We have now these 4 clients that are in our sort of developing category. Then to this new ones, read me and spark plug are the ones that
100 00:13:37.990 ⇒ 00:13:40.232 Uttam Kumaran: that we’re basically
101 00:13:41.610 ⇒ 00:13:59.769 Uttam Kumaran: look looking to nurture and to grow so. Those are clients that we brought in in sort of this audit phase where Robert and myself do do like a 2 week audit, where we sort of look through all their systems. These the I will say, as you guys know, every new client we take on, we try to. We tried
102 00:13:59.770 ⇒ 00:14:13.662 Uttam Kumaran: doing some new things. We also try to loop in more people. So I think for both of these, we have a few more people that are looped into the process. And ideally, I think, on the next one, we’re gonna do our best to to bring a few others in to to run
103 00:14:14.060 ⇒ 00:14:16.070 Uttam Kumaran: so really excited.
104 00:14:17.170 ⇒ 00:14:22.963 Uttam Kumaran: Maybe if you want to go to slide 14. So just a short like sales
105 00:14:23.910 ⇒ 00:14:38.089 Uttam Kumaran: update today and that we have 16 leads in pipeline, and 8 of those are in the proposal stage or beyond as I mentioned, once things get into proposal stage, there is like a
106 00:14:38.210 ⇒ 00:14:43.910 Uttam Kumaran: more significant chance that they convert. I would say, like, probably 20%
107 00:14:44.388 ⇒ 00:15:00.419 Uttam Kumaran: like, you know, I love all 8 to convert, but you have to be be a little bit realistic. So but that being said there’s a couple of kind of things that I’ve been looking at anecdotally that have been changing the way like.
108 00:15:01.016 ⇒ 00:15:07.619 Uttam Kumaran: I think about how our sales and marketing is working one. We’ve almost sent out one proposal every
109 00:15:07.800 ⇒ 00:15:18.300 Uttam Kumaran: day or every other day in the past 3 weeks. To give everyone context. Last year this time we were maybe sending one or 2 per month.
110 00:15:19.670 ⇒ 00:15:29.142 Uttam Kumaran: So it’s like the completely different world. So that’s really really amazing. I think. Second,
111 00:15:30.030 ⇒ 00:15:54.991 Uttam Kumaran: I’m getting a lot of feedback from candidates, from partners and from leads. That are, they have seen our marketing materials. They’ve seen us on Linkedin. They’re very impressed with the website. And I think, finally, I wish. And I I today, I wanted to put together like a montage. Of all of that, I’ll probably try to get to that. But
112 00:15:55.460 ⇒ 00:16:17.419 Uttam Kumaran: yeah, I think the work that we’ve been doing to really, significantly improve and establish our like design language make sure all of our stuff looks really beautiful, and that we share what we’re doing is working and I know we’re we’re a data company. And so I can. I can measure that somehow. But it’s like it’s really, really working.
113 00:16:17.757 ⇒ 00:16:31.262 Uttam Kumaran: People are are throughout the whole process are identifying that our message and sharing that they they feel that they’re they’re aligned so that’s really great. And so maybe, Casey, I just wanted today just to share with everybody.
114 00:16:31.990 ⇒ 00:16:36.130 Uttam Kumaran: I don’t know if you can go full screen, it’ll just make this a little bit bigger
115 00:16:40.740 ⇒ 00:16:41.890 Uttam Kumaran: if it works.
116 00:16:49.550 ⇒ 00:16:54.529 Uttam Kumaran: Yes, and do you wanna remove? I think you have the bars on your screen.
117 00:16:57.990 ⇒ 00:17:00.833 Uttam Kumaran: So this is a an example of
118 00:17:01.350 ⇒ 00:17:05.970 Uttam Kumaran: I’m just gonna kind of walk through a couple of examples of things that we’re putting together on the marketing team.
119 00:17:06.522 ⇒ 00:17:29.849 Uttam Kumaran: And by we, I mean, it’s a lot of work between Ryan and Ray and Hannah. So this is an example of a partner, Kit, that we’re developing for venture capital companies that want to work with us and bring our solutions to their portfolio companies. So as you see, what’s important to notice? You know, on a
120 00:17:30.130 ⇒ 00:17:38.254 Uttam Kumaran: on a document. Like this. Is one and I’ll just draw a little bit.
121 00:17:39.020 ⇒ 00:17:56.900 Uttam Kumaran: you can see here we’re building credibility by having our trusted buy. So these are all the companies that we’ve worked with. We also have where we’ve worked at right? So we established that we’ve worked at other venture back companies. We offer a very clear how we help.
122 00:17:57.170 ⇒ 00:17:58.990 Uttam Kumaran: Here are the things that we do.
123 00:17:59.450 ⇒ 00:18:07.719 Uttam Kumaran: Here’s who’s it’s here’s who it’s for, right. And this is where it’s tailored to founders, the Vc. Teams, and to grow to market leaders. Why, it matters.
124 00:18:08.110 ⇒ 00:18:13.200 Uttam Kumaran: Here’s like sort of our pricing partnership terms timeline.
125 00:18:13.410 ⇒ 00:18:18.050 Uttam Kumaran: And we even go one step further. We say, this is like what you can go copy and paste and send.
126 00:18:18.140 ⇒ 00:18:20.310 Uttam Kumaran: And then also who we are. Right. So
127 00:18:20.390 ⇒ 00:18:40.279 Uttam Kumaran: we’re relying a lot in marketing. And what’s called just like building, basically building credibility. Visually, we have a lot of Logos. We have people’s faces, we have great icons. So everything here is very, very deliberate. But it’s part of our design system now. So we can now go from an idea to this in one week.
128 00:18:40.648 ⇒ 00:18:52.119 Uttam Kumaran: And it’s based on very little, I’d say back and forth from from all of our team. So I’m really, really impressed by the systems that we’ve built. If we go to the next slide
129 00:18:56.761 ⇒ 00:19:17.059 Uttam Kumaran: these are also things I think that on the folks on the data team would be interested to see. So these are one page sort of tool comparison kits that we’re building. So for anyone on a data team, you probably recognize a lot of these. So what we want to do is we want to help clients pick the best tools. But we also want to come across
130 00:19:17.120 ⇒ 00:19:41.429 Uttam Kumaran: like like an authority figure like we’ve tested all these things, and we know we know what the best recommendations are. So a couple of things again, here we we’re leveraging the Logos. We have sort of a a verdict column, which is like, Hey, here are the things that we recommend and that we’ve used similarly. Here. We talk about how and I I don’t know if I’ve shared this broadly. But we
131 00:19:41.926 ⇒ 00:19:44.700 Uttam Kumaran: don’t take any kickbacks from any vendors.
132 00:19:45.069 ⇒ 00:20:13.099 Uttam Kumaran: And in consulting, that’s a really big thing that happens where like a vendor will say, You implement us, we’ll pay you like 10. I actually tell the vendors offer that as a discount to our clients, and instead of giving us that, spend some time doing some marketing or case study with us. So we are. We are partners with mixed panel, with amplitude, with corral data. And so we’re gonna start doing marketing with all those events, webinars, blogs. And so
133 00:20:13.403 ⇒ 00:20:34.630 Uttam Kumaran: this week, I actually spent time talking to the head of partnerships at Mix Panel and at amplitude. And both of them are interested in doing stuff with us. Amplitude actually wants to do an event with us in Denver. They want to put out some information that we are some of the go to people that can implement amplitude. And so, really, really positive I’m going to just
134 00:20:34.670 ⇒ 00:20:44.860 Uttam Kumaran: the lovely thing about having this is in my follow up email. Today. I’m gonna send them this and say, Hey, we we love recommending amplitude. Here’s some materials that you know we commonly share.
135 00:20:46.530 ⇒ 00:20:49.040 Uttam Kumaran: Okay. So if you want to go to the next slide,
136 00:20:52.910 ⇒ 00:21:10.432 Uttam Kumaran: another thing that we’re working on in the marketing team is enabling folks beyond just myself to advocate for themselves, advocate for the results that they’re part of and in turn help Brainforge grow and so I think
137 00:21:11.240 ⇒ 00:21:13.169 Uttam Kumaran: The background of this post.
138 00:21:13.240 ⇒ 00:21:35.299 Uttam Kumaran: I think, came from a lot of effort. Not only from Kyle to do a lot of the writing and thinking, but from Ryan to help architect everything from our design team, from having diagrams ready. And then just the company being open to actually putting ourselves out there. And so I think this is a great example of in marketing. They call this like employee advocacy?
139 00:21:35.582 ⇒ 00:21:46.020 Uttam Kumaran: But for me this is just, and they we now have a process by which anyone in the company can get enabled to post about their story or post about the work they’re doing. And I think.
140 00:21:46.437 ⇒ 00:21:53.412 Uttam Kumaran: you know, I’ve said this before that for your career. I think it’s very, very important to consider.
141 00:21:54.010 ⇒ 00:22:21.139 Uttam Kumaran: you know, doing things like this and and making your your voice heard. I think you’ll find that just like doors can get open. And and people are craving information like this versus on Linkedin. Everybody’s like trying to sell something. And so I think we’re gonna continue to lean on this sort of storytelling type work. And so, yeah, Kyle is really, really great doing this. So thanks. Thanks for working with Ryan to put this together.
142 00:22:22.790 ⇒ 00:22:24.569 Uttam Kumaran: Cool next slide.
143 00:22:26.240 ⇒ 00:22:46.769 Uttam Kumaran: And then, yeah, we we’ve been testing a bunch of new formats. So yesterday we did a Linkedin article where we posted about some of our story brand work. And you know a couple of concepts from there. I also, I look at this graph pretty often. Just because
144 00:22:47.000 ⇒ 00:22:58.799 Uttam Kumaran: I remember where where I was here last year. And I remember here. And I remember here. And so I think, seeing this
145 00:22:59.110 ⇒ 00:23:15.879 Uttam Kumaran: basically go up pretty steadily. Really, really brings me a lot of joy. I also will say, this is so intentional like we didn’t go. We didn’t like accidentally. Go, Viral. This is like waking up every day, finding out what to post
146 00:23:16.000 ⇒ 00:23:28.780 Uttam Kumaran: processing, getting images ready, planning me, editing me, getting nervous. I don’t want to post this. I don’t know all. It goes all that stuff, and so the one thing that we are focused on one is
147 00:23:29.176 ⇒ 00:23:44.989 Uttam Kumaran: as you can see here, it’s very spiky. It’s spiky because of the weekends, and so we’re finding opportunities to post something on the weekend so that we can get this sort of steady line that that slowly goes up versus losing 2 sevens of the of the week
148 00:23:45.345 ⇒ 00:24:02.759 Uttam Kumaran: performance. In fact, something I posted last Sunday was the highest performing thing we’ve done all month, so I guess people are reading Linkedin on the weekend. I’m not, but that’s got. That’s kind of nice. So I’m glad that we’re we’re trying these different things.
149 00:24:04.646 ⇒ 00:24:05.880 Uttam Kumaran: Next slide.
150 00:24:07.960 ⇒ 00:24:23.469 Uttam Kumaran: And then another thing we’re working on is we’re doing a big story brand exercise. On the marketing team. We’re talking a lot about who our Icp is. And we’re following a framework from this book that we’re all reading called Building a story Brand.
151 00:24:23.875 ⇒ 00:24:45.660 Uttam Kumaran: It’s really really good about brand building. Very, very short book. And really, what we’re doing is we’re talking about the hero’s journey of our clients. So we have Icp an ideal customer profile. They have a villain, you know. The villain for them may be tons of systems that don’t talk to each other. Messy data. They’re running out of time.
152 00:24:46.270 ⇒ 00:24:50.179 Uttam Kumaran: They also what’s called external, internal and philosophical problems.
153 00:24:50.610 ⇒ 00:25:04.970 Uttam Kumaran: These are like, Hey, I don’t have data, or and because I don’t have data, I’m getting frustrated. And this is like, Well, I’m I’m working at a really modern company. I deserve to have information to make my decisions. And so just some really great work that we’re doing in order to
154 00:25:05.180 ⇒ 00:25:13.610 Uttam Kumaran: give everyone a way to talk about the company like when someone asks you, what is brain Forge? Who are your clients? What problems you solve?
155 00:25:13.900 ⇒ 00:25:39.260 Uttam Kumaran: Everybody on the company, no matter where you are, we should be talking from the same lens, and that should at least have our own understanding of that. That’s rooted in some principles. And so we are working on that principled brand document, I think, for a lot before I I was on marketing and doing this much marketing stuff. I when I hear Brand, I don’t know. I’m like, Oh, yeah, like, it’s like a fake mission statement. It’s sort of like esoteric.
156 00:25:39.310 ⇒ 00:25:56.779 Uttam Kumaran: wishy washy thing. But actually, where this helps is like any any sort of text that we edit on any of those documents goes through this filter. And so we need to be. Explain the same message across all of our marketing assets, over and over and over. And so I think this is helping us
157 00:25:57.110 ⇒ 00:26:02.459 Uttam Kumaran: do that and I think there’s 1 more slide.
158 00:26:02.840 ⇒ 00:26:14.529 Uttam Kumaran: And then the last thing, and I wanna shout out to Raymond, and of course everybody else on the marketing team, but particularly Raymond. We’ve been doing a lot of video and this is where I think.
159 00:26:15.024 ⇒ 00:26:41.989 Uttam Kumaran: You know, we have. We show a chart for our clients as part of like. When you work with us, you go from inactive to reactive to the proactive like, in terms of your data journey. I think we’re in a very similar mode on our marketing journey where we started doing some Linkedin posts. We started doing videos. We started doing these one pagers. The website looks good. But when we talk about standing out and doing things that no other
160 00:26:42.280 ⇒ 00:27:07.369 Uttam Kumaran: consultancy is doing, and not many companies are doing. It’s when we get into real video and real like conversations. And I’m super proud that we now have the capacity in the organization to do this? You know, I, I watch a lot of podcasts. And I consume a lot of information via that I think, seeing these things humanizes us.
161 00:27:07.380 ⇒ 00:27:29.080 Uttam Kumaran: It shows that we’re not just some. No name company that’s like, Oh, are these guys even like the one person is a hundreds of people it. It allows us to have an ability to share not only us, but all of our partners. Right like gallop from polytomic, our friends at so all caitlin a default folks from operating. And so.
162 00:27:29.230 ⇒ 00:27:32.919 Uttam Kumaran: you know, even though, like I look at the view numbers, and I’m like.
163 00:27:33.000 ⇒ 00:27:59.840 Uttam Kumaran: damn! I wish we had like a million views. What I realize is actually that if this is, if this is 50 of like the top Ceos that are interested in our stuff. And they’re watching. That’s what matters right? And so what we’re going for is actually just having all these avenues for people to realize that we are trying to tell our story and that we’re trying to. We’re trying to grow so really proud of the team for getting, you know all of this done
164 00:27:59.910 ⇒ 00:28:17.500 Uttam Kumaran: and over the last 2 months. And we we’re now on a pace to do. Typically, we’re doing one video per week. So we’re we’re interviewing folks and of course as soon as we’ve now figured out, if anyone else is interested in that, we’ll we’ll sort of enable anyone to publish video and stuff. So
165 00:28:19.440 ⇒ 00:28:24.820 Uttam Kumaran: yeah, I think with that we can probably go into the demo. I think Casey.
166 00:28:25.990 ⇒ 00:28:29.518 Casie Aviles: Yeah, okay, so we we just have one demo.
167 00:28:30.380 ⇒ 00:28:34.419 Casie Aviles: I picked this from the work we’ve been doing lately. So.
168 00:28:35.325 ⇒ 00:28:39.039 Casie Aviles: yeah. So we have this lock summarizer. So I just included a screenshot.
169 00:28:40.062 ⇒ 00:28:41.149 Casie Aviles: Yeah, we’ll stop.
170 00:28:41.150 ⇒ 00:28:47.580 Uttam Kumaran: Come in a little bit to the slack summarizer. And then, yeah, so it’s a little bit small.
171 00:28:48.960 ⇒ 00:28:50.620 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, sorry. Go ahead.
172 00:28:50.620 ⇒ 00:28:51.470 Casie Aviles: That’s sweet.
173 00:28:55.300 ⇒ 00:28:58.539 Casie Aviles: Okay, yeah. So, oh, my God, sorry.
174 00:29:00.360 ⇒ 00:29:08.900 Casie Aviles: Okay, yeah. So yeah, I guess the idea behind this is that you know certain messages are buried and
175 00:29:09.210 ⇒ 00:29:10.485 Casie Aviles: they don’t get
176 00:29:11.480 ⇒ 00:29:28.379 Casie Aviles: you know, responded to, or people forget them. So the idea is, for like we we leverage this automation that takes all the messages for a day, let’s say, and and creates like a summary or like a digest. So
177 00:29:29.018 ⇒ 00:29:33.162 Casie Aviles: unresolved. Things are, you know, resurfaced. And
178 00:29:34.420 ⇒ 00:29:39.210 Casie Aviles: and yeah, it’s easier to, you know. Revisit all the all of those and
179 00:29:39.360 ⇒ 00:29:45.880 Casie Aviles: action on them. So I know it’s still a work on progress, I believe. We’re still refining, like the prompt.
180 00:29:46.600 ⇒ 00:29:53.979 Casie Aviles: But yeah, yeah, once we have this, it should, you know, help with the you know, with keeping.
181 00:29:54.150 ⇒ 00:29:56.560 Casie Aviles: you know, staying on track with things. So yeah.
182 00:29:57.138 ⇒ 00:30:02.580 Casie Aviles: yeah, credit to Mustafa. And also Tom for working on this. But yeah.
183 00:30:07.240 ⇒ 00:30:11.579 Casie Aviles: okay, do we have any updates for.
184 00:30:12.980 ⇒ 00:30:36.745 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I think we’re gonna we’re we’re gonna plan, a date, I think towards the end of this month. I think demolade and I, and a wish are booked to do the Dbt certification at on the 25th of June. We reviewed the Study Guide earlier, I think yesterday, and
185 00:30:37.440 ⇒ 00:30:57.893 Uttam Kumaran: I I’m gonna I’ll probably start studying closer to that date. But if anyone, it’s all virtual, and it’s all sort of solo. So we’re not like all in a room doing it. But if anyone else is interested in doing it that day, then I can just add you to the to the invite. But I think a couple of us are ready to to do that, I think.
186 00:30:59.590 ⇒ 00:31:11.571 Uttam Kumaran: it. It’ll also be helpful. If folks are a little bit nervous, we can take it and sort of help everyone understand? You know what it is, but the study guide, and all the materials that oasis produced are all really, really
187 00:31:12.000 ⇒ 00:31:19.390 Uttam Kumaran: helpful. So I would take a look at that. And then, yeah, Amber, what is the what is the cap, M. Or what? What is the one that you’re looking at?
188 00:31:20.150 ⇒ 00:31:20.675 Amber Lin: So
189 00:31:21.430 ⇒ 00:31:42.400 Amber Lin: the project management has a very authoritative institution that’s based in the Us. But is applied globally. It’s pro is called a Project Management Institute, and this Capm is a entry level project management certification offered by this institution. And so that will help us learn
190 00:31:42.570 ⇒ 00:31:59.680 Amber Lin: more of a standard practice and help us see? Help me see what’s missing, and how I can better manage the projects I wanted to do. Dbt, but I think I think I need the project management more. So, putting that to the side until I do this one.
191 00:32:02.250 ⇒ 00:32:02.890 Uttam Kumaran: Cool.
192 00:32:05.750 ⇒ 00:32:09.290 Uttam Kumaran: Great. And then, yeah, the there’s just 2
193 00:32:09.520 ⇒ 00:32:14.050 Uttam Kumaran: 2 roles that. We just put out
194 00:32:14.100 ⇒ 00:32:36.883 Uttam Kumaran: job descriptions for or I think we’re finalizing. But where we are interviewing some people now is for a project coordinator and a sales coordinator role. Maybe I’ll just give a little bit of background on those. So for the project coordinator. This is really someone who can come in and help just assist
195 00:32:37.300 ⇒ 00:32:52.280 Uttam Kumaran: Robert amber myself. All the folks that are project managing on putting together weekly updates, organizing linear and helping us with some Pm processes. So this is something that we’re looking to hire for.
196 00:32:52.680 ⇒ 00:33:08.679 Uttam Kumaran: You know, pretty soon, and also on the Sales Coordinator side. I think as we’re we’re doing better with getting meetings booked and getting into the sales process. I think what’s been challenging for me in particular is all the follow ups that need to happen.
197 00:33:09.140 ⇒ 00:33:29.736 Uttam Kumaran: after we get into the sales process, which is like Follow ups on like, Hey, did we check out that materials like, when’s the next meeting? Getting contracts signed. It’s really difficult to do a lot of that in parallel and it’s causing us to not be able to take on more sales opportunities. And so
198 00:33:30.600 ⇒ 00:33:36.887 Uttam Kumaran: this role is also something that we’re looking for. I’m interviewing. I know some people on the team have referred a few people. So.
199 00:33:37.430 ⇒ 00:33:41.430 Uttam Kumaran: I, we are in the process of interviewing those those folks. So yeah.
200 00:33:45.670 ⇒ 00:33:54.150 Casie Aviles: Okay for shout outs. I don’t think anyone added any shout outs for this week. But
201 00:33:54.670 ⇒ 00:34:00.408 Casie Aviles: yeah, so yeah, feel free to give shout outs to anyone today.
202 00:34:01.070 ⇒ 00:34:03.075 Casie Aviles: I guess I can start also.
203 00:34:03.970 ⇒ 00:34:09.300 Casie Aviles: would just like to shout out both utam and amber for
204 00:34:10.413 ⇒ 00:34:19.929 Casie Aviles: keeping the AI team on track and also helping me navigate client work. I’m not the best conversationalist. But
205 00:34:20.824 ⇒ 00:34:25.999 Casie Aviles: yeah, that’s greatly appreciated. And also to Miguel for
206 00:34:26.260 ⇒ 00:34:31.010 Casie Aviles: helping me work on. You know this, the some of the internal work like the zoom stuff.
207 00:34:31.639 ⇒ 00:34:35.519 Casie Aviles: basically guiding me with the process, since he’s the more.
208 00:34:35.949 ⇒ 00:34:37.849 Casie Aviles: You know he’s the Vibe Coder.
209 00:34:38.895 ⇒ 00:34:39.639 Casie Aviles: Yeah.
210 00:34:40.090 ⇒ 00:34:42.010 Casie Aviles: Oh, yeah, those are my shout outs.
211 00:34:43.770 ⇒ 00:34:46.479 Casie Aviles: So does anyone else have any shadows for today?
212 00:34:51.090 ⇒ 00:35:04.181 Caio Velasco: I have a shout for Brian for helping, for helping me with the marketing and Linkedin Post, because I’ve been with a very hectic week, and he’s been like always sending me a mess. Hi! Did you do it? Let’s do it. That’s like, please continue
213 00:35:05.191 ⇒ 00:35:13.018 Caio Velasco: so then, when we finally did so. Thank you. Really, it was really helpful, and also for coordinating the the diagram. The design was super nice.
214 00:35:13.480 ⇒ 00:35:21.490 Caio Velasco: I’m much nicer than the one I used to do in College row, and also to
215 00:35:21.994 ⇒ 00:35:27.660 Caio Velasco: David added, because he’s always there, always helpful quick answers, helping me a lot, actually.
216 00:35:27.930 ⇒ 00:35:30.720 Caio Velasco: So helping me with Emily with a client.
217 00:35:31.060 ⇒ 00:35:35.260 Caio Velasco: Yeah, and amber for coordinating the whole thing. I think
218 00:35:35.380 ⇒ 00:35:42.359 Caio Velasco: I definitely stopped having doubts of like, what are we doing? So that has been super helpful as well.
219 00:35:44.920 ⇒ 00:35:50.007 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I I wanna shout out the I think the urban stems and the Eden team, I think
220 00:35:50.660 ⇒ 00:36:04.820 Uttam Kumaran: for you know, for for Annie, for a way, for Demo Lotte, for Kyle, and for Amber and, Robert, I think what I’m seeing from my perspective is that we do have what it takes to engage with these bigger clients.
221 00:36:04.840 ⇒ 00:36:27.339 Uttam Kumaran: I don’t know last year whether we would have had the process and the capacity to even engage with clients, this big and it’s I’m really, really confident that we can take on challenges like that that allows me to then go one step bigger and say, Okay, cool. We can take that like, what’s next? Right? And so, it’s really been cool to
222 00:36:27.400 ⇒ 00:36:33.651 Uttam Kumaran: to see us take both of those clients. All both really really big and and execute for them.
223 00:36:34.070 ⇒ 00:36:36.756 Uttam Kumaran: I also wanted to shout out to
224 00:36:38.680 ⇒ 00:36:47.389 Uttam Kumaran: Hannah, Ray and and Ryan on the marketing team. We are pushing out a lot very fast.
225 00:36:47.866 ⇒ 00:36:52.510 Uttam Kumaran: And it’s I don’t think it’s very common for a marketing team.
226 00:36:52.867 ⇒ 00:37:20.739 Uttam Kumaran: Especially at a company like ours where our product is not really easy to understand. Like, it’s not a, it’s not a soda, it’s not a a book. It’s a we sell technical services to turn that into something that looks really great is really really hard. As an engineer, I know many companies and engineering don’t market. Their companies well, and things look ugly. Things aren’t clear. And we’ve come a really long way. So it’s it’s really really great. Yeah.
227 00:37:24.151 ⇒ 00:37:49.269 Amber Lin: I have a few shout outs 1st of all, I want to shout out to for helping me out every stems and to help me get up to speed as well, and to groom all the different tickets. It’s a it’s a long, long journey, and similarly to Demo Ade and awaii, and also for us to help define the
228 00:37:49.420 ⇒ 00:37:51.660 Amber Lin: the boundaries between tech, lead and
229 00:37:52.000 ⇒ 00:37:56.249 Amber Lin: project management. I think, before we have just kind of just
230 00:37:57.380 ⇒ 00:38:15.579 Amber Lin: did things without any particular standards, and it has worked. But as the project got bigger and bigger, it has occurred in some pains because we were just not able to look at everything. So I’m glad we’re on a progress to figure that out.
231 00:38:16.020 ⇒ 00:38:41.179 Amber Lin: And then on ABC shout to Mustafa for coming on the team so quickly and then producing some great results. I know the AI team worked on it together. We. I think we really are an engineering company, because these are some tough problems that I didn’t think was possible, but we were able to figure it out really fast and come to a conclusion. So shout out to that.
232 00:38:46.140 ⇒ 00:38:48.010 Casie Aviles: Or Yeah,
233 00:38:51.020 ⇒ 00:38:53.510 Casie Aviles: Does anyone else have any shout outs? But
234 00:38:55.070 ⇒ 00:38:59.090 Casie Aviles: or if not, then I guess that’s it for
235 00:39:01.071 ⇒ 00:39:05.090 Casie Aviles: for this Friday. And yeah, have a great weekend. Everyone.
236 00:39:07.330 ⇒ 00:39:11.054 Uttam Kumaran: Thanks. Everyone go like Kyle’s post on Linkedin.
237 00:39:11.520 ⇒ 00:39:13.078 Caio Velasco: Yeah, please don’t go global.
238 00:39:13.390 ⇒ 00:39:14.740 Amber Lin: Yeah, please, send a link.
239 00:39:14.740 ⇒ 00:39:16.769 Uttam Kumaran: Like and like, and subscribe.
240 00:39:17.256 ⇒ 00:39:22.119 Amber Lin: Please send the link. We’ll go. We’ll go repost.
241 00:39:23.722 ⇒ 00:39:27.329 Uttam Kumaran: Awesome. Thanks. Everyone.
242 00:39:27.330 ⇒ 00:39:27.750 Anne: Bye.
243 00:39:27.750 ⇒ 00:39:28.610 Demilade Agboola: Alright!
244 00:39:28.910 ⇒ 00:39:29.880 Uttam Kumaran: Bye.