Transcript

Dan Pace (00:00)
Welcome to another episode, a pioneering episode of the Getting Started podcast. my guest is David Stengel. David is a founder, mentor, and advisor, as well as a strong entrepreneur advocate. Some of his most notable, notable history comes, maybe it'd be a while if we went through his whole history, but some of the most notable things are founder of Board++, as well as the Startup Grind, Princeton, and also an advisor for the NJ Economic Development Authority, the Diversity and Finance Board.

so one of my first questions for you, David, though, is just give us a little introduction to yourself and can you tell us a little more about what you're doing with Board++ and the NJ Economic Development Authority? And then maybe we'll move into Startup Grind because we've got plenty to talk about in Startup Grind.

David Stengle (00:40)
Sure, so I spent my whole career in startups and one of the things...

I found was that it's a really exciting, energetic community, but it's a little harder to break into than it needs to be. And so some years back, I started an initiative called Board++ with the idea of helping people who wanted to be on commercial boards, find their first board seat on a startup board. Often the early stage startup companies have the founder, a lead investor,

and one, independency. And that independency can be filled by someone with deep industry knowledge that wants to get into venture and just making a pathway there. So it's an opportunity to make boards more inclusive, to change startup culture a bit. And I've had limited success with placing a few people on startup boards, but it's advanced the conversation and it's a definite passion project of mine.

Dan Pace (01:44)
That's awesome. I mean, yeah, especially with the network, I guess you develop over time. You're going to meet those higher up people have gained the experience that are going to be invaluable to those startups well before those startups themselves will meet them. So you, that sounds like you're opening up a lot of doors, especially in terms of your knowledge and experience.

David Stengle (01:50)
Absolutely.

A lot of founders can get enormous benefit from bringing in an industry expert as a board member early. And often they're just underwater. As a founder, you're trying to do more things than there's time in a day. And picking a board member doesn't rise to the top, but a good one can really give you leverage and insight. So that's the play.

Dan Pace (02:26)
Nice. And you also kind of film that seat yourself in a way as an advisor for the Economic Development Authority then.

David Stengle (02:32)
Sure. So

I've...

been on a couple of different advisory boards over the years with the New Jersey Economic Development Authority. They have a wide range of programs that benefit many kinds of businesses, including the startup space. And I've been active on their technology advisory board and their diversity financial advisory board, as well as having some of their staff speak at some of my events. I think the EDA has really contributed to the growth of New Jersey.

you can start an ecosystem and I'm happy to be part of that.

Dan Pace (03:05)
I'll definitely speak to that as well. My first introduction to the EDA was 2020 and they helped us during the COVID pandemic and they announced the Sustain and Serve program. I mean, just through my organization alone, over 200,000 meals were served through the EDA. So they definitely, they do their part. I can vouch for it myself. So we talked about, know, the Board++ and EDA. Any other type of boards or advisory groups that you want to mention that I may have forgot about? Cause I mean, you had a list, but...

David Stengle (03:20)
There you go.

No, so

I've done work over the years with iCore, which is...

National Science Foundation originally program that now spans 11 federal agencies that helps translational research. So getting deep tech out of universities and into business and that's another program. So a lot of my focus is first time founder journey really early early stage stuff. I like to say pre napkin when you don't know what three bullet points you want yet to to a round by the time you have professional money in you should be getting help from

Dan Pace (03:58)
Mm-hmm.

David Stengle (04:03)
your lead investor. So that's the stage. I work formally with ⁓ a very small number of startups and I have coffee and give advice to anybody who likes to drink coffee and get advice.

Dan Pace (04:17)
Yeah, we definitely have to share a cup. know a few coffee places if you're ever in the East side of New Jersey. Another touch I want to talk about, since you're doing that diversity in finance as well as Board Plus Plus, do have any sort of like success story you want to share with that that keeps you going in some ways? If you can, I know the EDA does have some restrictions on stuff you can talk about and not talk about, but hopefully there's something.

David Stengle (04:21)
Okay.

sure.

So I can give one example of, and I won't name the players involved, but a company that had really dynamic young couple founders who'd come up hard.

and connected them with a really senior person, experienced executive, lot of deep financial and board experience. And she really helped them get through some patches of going from being startup mode to being bigger company operating mode. And it wasn't always easy, but.

but having somebody you really want a board that doesn't just rubber stamp what you do. And it's hard to deal with that sometimes in the moment, but in the long run, that kind of pushback makes your company stronger.

one particular year they had to sort of redo their finances and their auditing and all of that and she was instrumental I think in helping that happen and you know year later they were all happy about it so that's one thing. Yeah, yeah it's like we needed that. Yeah, yeah exactly.

Dan Pace (05:37)
Tough in the moment, but once it's all cleared and the dust settles, it's like, oh, this is so much nicer. It's the way it should have been the whole time.

That actually kind of brings me to like the, of my next questions before I get there. What was your startup experience and what was like your like first works and first jobs that really got you that startup culture interest in the startup culture?

David Stengle (05:53)
So...

So I was in the Navy and I got out of the Navy and it was in the 80s, beginning of the PC era, self-taught programmer, started working my way through school coding and ended up going to a startup as the first employee and really learned on the job.

So fell in love with it. Didn't know anything about startups. Never heard of startups. Didn't know anything about venture. Nobody in my family had ever done a startup, touched a startup, been a venture capitalist. But it was a couple of Ivy League B-school guys who knew the Tisch family and got some money and had great business, is now a billion, multi-billion dollar business.

and built a tech stack and just fell in love with the energy and the excitement and the chaos and the really building something out of nothing. from there just went from startup to startup all venture backed enterprise software companies. I spent about five years as an investor

liked the operating side better, so really gravitated back to the operating side, but spent my whole career in big enterprise global software, high volume transaction systems. And in 2015, when we sold Black Arrow, which was the company I've been in for 10 years.

decided I was just done getting on a plane every week and getting on the train when I wasn't on the plane and going into the city every day and tried to get more local and started Startup Grind and started giving back to the startup ecosystem and running events and now I've done I think this Friday will be our 181st event but we run events every month.

aimed at talking about the struggle of putting a startup together. It's work and it's nice to just see other people that are in some stage of that struggle and help them out.

Dan Pace (07:56)
It's definitely chaos, that's for sure. So, I you obviously like the startup side more than the, you know, guess comfortable corporate side, but did you have to like watch the transition from, you know, one to the other? mean, would you go with and jump to the next startup for that?

David Stengle (07:58)
Yeah.

Yeah, so not really.

mean, once I started in the startup space, I just felt like I'd never go back. So I did a lot of work selling into big companies, the global 50, but I'd much rather have them as a customer than as an employer. And my

⁓ I find the stage I'm happiest is when there's less than 50 employees in the company. There's just a lot of things to be figured out and a lot of chaos and once the concrete starts to dry, then I'm looking for the next thing.

Dan Pace (08:41)
Yeah, I feel like that is kind of a, like once you get used to that sort of like fire, that chaos, guess it is kind of hard to go back to the normal. yeah.

David Stengle (08:46)
Yeah, it's

different things keep different people up at night. So, you know, if you're if you're worried about payroll, that's one kind of thing. But you can go to Lehman Brothers and they can go out of business, too. Right. So it's just what kinds of things day to day give you energy or suck your energy. And for me, the early stage stuff is tremendous.

Dan Pace (09:09)
And I guess you enjoyed wearing the different hats, having different roles and filling in for different people. It was never like a straight arrow. ⁓

David Stengle (09:13)
Yeah.

Yeah,

so part of the nature of a startup is at beginning, you just don't have bodies to cover all the roles. And so you're wearing multiple hats. I've been in every C-suite role except CFO, and I'm not the accounting guy. I'm not going to be the accounting guy. But everything else, product, revenue, BD, operations, technology.

CEO and all of them all of them have their rewards but it's it's ⁓ you have to be running every day at the beginning.

Dan Pace (09:49)
Yeah, especially like when you talk about travel, I'm definitely starting to do a lot more time in the transportation hubs than I would like, but it's part of it. It really is.

David Stengle (09:56)
Sure,

sure. I'm a, you know, once you're a million miler, right, you think about that, that's 2000 hours in the air, roughly, right? So not counting time on the runway, not counting, that is, that's like a whole year of professional work, just sitting on a plane. Don't miss it.

Dan Pace (10:04)
Well, yeah.

Yeah, well.

I mean, hopefully get some good internet connection nowadays, get some work done while you're doing it.

David Stengle (10:22)
Yeah, yeah, but

it's still, it's not like being at your desk. Yeah.

Dan Pace (10:26)
It is. It's taxing, definitely is.

You already mentioned that it's one grind to the next to the next. Something I've noticed, least when I've made several businesses in my lifetime, I've tried several businesses, I should say, way back to the crypto days. Actually, the first time I heard about startup grind back when Bitcoin was $250, if you can even imagine a time way back then.

David Stengle (10:46)
Yeah.

Dan Pace (10:48)
Yeah, I had little crypto thing and actually got a letter from the NJ Financial Bureau saying cease and desist. And that really did take a lot of wind out of my sails. And I did, I desisted. Tried some other marketing jobs. I actually tried to get on the green wave as all legalization stuff was happening. ⁓ I'm going to, you as I'm saying all this, like I desisted every time. I, stopped every time and I never had that.

David Stengle (10:56)
Wow.

Sure.

Dan Pace (11:10)
I want to do this come hell high water, no matter how many miles I have to travel, no matter how many tasks I have to do, no matter what things, skills I have to learn or who I have to become. And I will admit that I was a wantrepreneur for all of these past, you know, job past ventures. Whereas this venture now with the AI, but I'm doing genuine technologies and, uh, making AI automation, marketing and trying to improve people's, you know, tech stack, guess in business, which, there's so many opportunities for right now. I'm willing to do much more miles. I'm willing to do a run through the brick wall or.

David Stengle (11:27)
Yeah.

for

Dan Pace (11:39)
You know, burn the boats. There is no plan B. It's tough. You know, take a bus to stop me sometimes when you need to a train. My question with all that is like, you've talked to a lot of startups. You've talked to a lot of founders and more experience than I have with this. Have you seen the difference between the wantrepreneur and the entrepreneur and has been noticeable or is it hard to easy to hide?

David Stengle (11:40)
Yeah, so...

Sure,

sure. So I think there's nothing wrong with being curious about startups. And there a lot of programs, I-Corps is one, but be a tourist, check it out. Take a summer job if you're young as an intern at a startup. See if you like the culture. But if you're gonna do it as employee,

That's one thing, if you're going to do it as a founder, you really need conviction about the mission because there are going to be bad days and you need things to get you through the rough spots. And there's a lot of glamorization of, you know, I'm going all in, I'm burning, like,

I'm not even a big believer in that. It's like you should have high conviction about the idea and you're committing, you're investing years of your life to it. But you don't have to mortgage your house. You have to get people that you can persuade it's a good idea to help invest in it. And if nobody besides you believes in it, that's feedback from the market too, right? So.

If you feel the difference in what you're doing with AI that you can just see it's coming and I think it's a wave that is undeniable, right? Leaning into that, it's the old, it's always better to skate to where the puck is going, right? So just be that person.

Dan Pace (13:15)
I guess on that same token, now 10 years later after Bitcoin is not $250 and has hit in 100k, now though today as we're talking, it's I think what 70 or something or 80, something like that. If I were to stick it out in even the tiniest bit over those next 10 years, I'm no doubt that I would have done pretty well in cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin or something along those routes. I have found some other opportunity along the way and just all I needed to do is really stick it out in some way. But now with that hindsight, that extra 10 years of

David Stengle (13:21)
Yeah.

Sure. Sure.

Dan Pace (13:43)
You know, hindsight being 20/20, I can see that if I take this, you know, new venture for the next five, 10 years for something that seems as undeniable, uh, that's going to be bigger and bigger over the next five, 10 years as AI. I should be all right. I just need to stick it out, which is a big thing. think a lot of people don't add into their business plan in a way, like that time concept that this is going to need to take three, five years, not just an amazing business plan with what to do after this, this, and that and the other. It takes time.

David Stengle (13:55)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

For sure. What

I say to founders when they think about getting a co-founder or they look at choices for their first investor, I say, think of this as a seven-year marriage. Would you marry this person for seven years right now?

That's a bit of a gut check. You there's a lot of people that you're happy to take the meeting with that you wouldn't want to marry for seven years, right? But it's a, it's a long journey and you're going to have bumps. So, I also like to say love, love your problem, not your solution AI. What's possible is changing every hour.

Dan Pace (14:34)
Mm-hmm.

you

David Stengle (14:50)
There's new models, there's new tools, there's new practices, there's new regulations, you can see the trajectory and there are so many different areas. Pick one that really engages you personally and be good at that space, be good at solving that problem.

the solution might change, but there are so many organizations that still don't even know we're beginning with AI. And I see that in the events I run at the AI Hub. We'll get some new people every month and some of them will come in and be like, my God, we gotta get going here. so that's gonna happen for years. William Gibson says,

The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. Right. So you want to be at the front end of that curve, not the back end of that curve.

Dan Pace (15:43)
Yeah, it's a few things I've always offered to say you want to get this system, say AI system set up for your business. So when the new model does come out, you just swap in that new model and then you're already ready to go. And then maybe add in a few more capabilities. just got added in from the new model. But if you wait for this point where it just hits some sort of, I don't click in your head that, okay, I can't deny this anymore. You're going to have to make up a lot of work really fast to stay competitive. So you want to start that early and then do bits and pieces more manageable.

David Stengle (15:50)
Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, and people are gonna be taking,

taking share from your business all that time, right? So.

Dan Pace (16:13)
Um, yeah, especially if the, you mentioned AI new models, I do want to put a small plugin for anyone else to try the newest GPT pro. is on my website to try out for free. Cause I did that for that exact reason. If you want to see what AI really can do, you would either have to buy one of the new newest top line models for like $200 a month, just to try the first prompt with it. Or maybe use someone that has some knowledge with AI that can make a tie in for you to try it.

David Stengle (16:23)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Dan Pace (16:37)
And actually see the difference between these models. Cause I will say there is a big difference. They put a lot of work at that AI model that's cost a lot more money does a lot more work than the AI that doesn't. And you already hit on this. mean, something that's been keeping me going with the highs and lows of businesses, really the highs and lows. mean, there's some highs and frankly some lows that you just won't experience unless you're the founder, unless you're the one that's either in a startup or the founder. They both have their kind of own share of experiences.

David Stengle (16:40)
There's a gap.

Yep.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Dan Pace (17:02)
I imagine there's a couple of highs that you're going on right now with the NJ AI Hub you must be getting tons of cool conversations that are pretty hard to get into those rooms otherwise. Is that one of the cool highs you're having right now where you have some other experiences?

David Stengle (17:10)
Yay!

So

I definitely feel energy coming from the AI Hub. So the audience turnout, the level of engagement, one of the things.

I started last fall is deck club, I say is like book club, but better just circulated industry deck about some aspect of AI this Friday. It's going to be AI and selling and just talk about get people come and say, Hey, this is what we're doing. This is what we're thinking about. This is what wrestling with, uh, because

It's not like there's this playbook of it's figured out, this is the path to success. There's more like there's a crazy amount of bombs dropping everywhere and we're trying to figure out how to get it from A to B. And so just meeting other people that are curious, that are sharing their stories, that's been great. And I'm really pleased with the collaboration we've done. The AI Hub, they're just starting to...

fill seats in their office and I think the accelerator will launch imminently. So a lot of energy in New Jersey around that stuff, but a lot of work still to be done too.

Dan Pace (18:27)
Actually the High that I'm just getting off of from the NJ AI Hub actually this came from the last meeting I was at for the startup grind when they, at least the first time I heard, announced that they're going to be one of the sites for Microsoft discovery. I mean, that AI agent system is insane of what it does and the amount of work it puts in, the amount of like processing it will do the capabilities of it. It's just insane that that is going to make New Jersey a spot for all types of advancements, all types of developments, medicine, energy, you name it.

David Stengle (18:35)
Yeah.

Yeah.

And

Dan Pace (18:56)
And like, if you're not aware of that in some way and your clients are those types of innovators, you're missing out on a huge aspect that's moving into New Jersey right now.

David Stengle (19:04)
Right, I agree. So this is deep tech, molecular research, compound discovery, and Microsoft is one of, I think, two sites in the world that's really opening up these resources for wider use. So I think it's a great opportunity for New Jersey.

Dan Pace (19:20)
One to be watching for sure. I mean, on that same, same token, did you have any, you know, any of the lows that you've experienced maybe from, I guess you said one of the more important, the ploy side of things, massive all-nighters, like week-long sprints or?

David Stengle (19:22)
Yeah.

Well, I'll tell you if you think yeah,

so the things that I get crusty about are mostly AI washing. So I see a ton of pitches every week and there are

just every deck has the word AI in it. And for so many of them, it just means, yeah, we use electricity. We have a computer somewhere. And so I get that people feel the need to put it in and there's a premium for AI funding. But if you're gonna say you use AI, it better be more than we make a call to a chat GPT interface, right? It better be.

we have some deep understanding of some aspect of we have a better rag or we have a better SLM or we have a better something. And there's a ton of AI washing. So.

Venture investors have good bullshit detectors. Be ready to, if you're going to talk about it, say, yeah, and this is our AI team and these are their chops and this is how we stand out. Or just move on and say, yeah, of course we use AI, but so does everybody else. We use AI for spell checking. Great.

Dan Pace (20:44)
There's so many ways to differentiate AI too, since it's a lot of what I do. If you're not looking, yeah, I mean, could do some more sort of fine tuning. could say you could do your own sort of rag architecture, smart workflows. That's the thing I keep seeing though missing is automation, that word. Everyone's saying AI, but no one's saying AI in a procedural process that works on its own and improves itself in its own. Sometimes I'm seeing agentic, but agentic scares the heck out of me because agentic...

David Stengle (20:48)
Right, mean, pick a lane. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dan Pace (21:10)
Almost means that it won't do the same thing the same way every single time. You can't know it's not stable. Usually anyway.

David Stengle (21:14)
Sure, sure. So I

think there's always a gap between the narrative coming out of the valley about the shiniest next wave of, you know, utopian technology. I think that I saw a report that over 50 % of the tokens used by LLMs last year were for coding.

And I think that software coding has transformed that people, you're running a software shop of size, you're, you're using, Gen AI to help, help that. And if you're not, you're, just going to lose. You're just, you can't, you can't be cost effective. can't be output effective. I think that there are some other businesses that

Dan Pace (21:40)
you

David Stengle (22:00)
⁓ Every entry level job, white collar job in the world, I think is under siege. And when I talk to law firms or consulting firms or technology shops or accounting firms and say, so you hire in new people and what's your new career path? And they're like, yeah, that's good. So lots of things are changing and it's still.

I think it's more important I did a talk Friday in Trenton with some really young people, like still in high school people. ⁓

Dan Pace (22:34)
They're

going to become a major part of the workforce soon.

David Stengle (22:37)
Yeah,

but you know, be curious, be curious, be a systems thinker, show initiative, like those things aren't going away.

and the gap between people in productivity, between people that are leaning into it and people that aren't, is just going to get wider all the time, I think. be the person. Every talk I do, the story of the two campers and the bear, right? So the bear comes to the campsite and one of the campers starts putting on the running shoes and the other one says, you can't outrun the bear. First one says, I don't have to outrun the bear, I have to outrun you.

And so just be that, be the first camper, not the second camper in life. Whatever age, whatever industry, it's coming and be the person in your organization that understands it better than your peers. There are ways to do that.

Dan Pace (23:29)
My experience has definitely made me a lot more like useful in a lot more different rooms and a lot more different, you know, aspects, thanks to, AI's capability that I can access, you know, better, especially the automation that again, being a huge, huge, part of everything. ⁓ like with automation, I can put in a 50, 60 hour work week, but not work more than the 40 hours and like employees that can do that and say that, why would you get rid of them versus the ones that couldn't

David Stengle (23:33)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Dan Pace (23:52)
Yeah, totally agree. I mean, you find this way AI is going to save you time and way automation is going to do work for you while you go to sleep or while you get off hours. And that also brings me kind of, I wanted to ask what has been some of the effects of startups since AI with the startup grind and even maybe the NJEDA with the companies that come to you. talked a little bit about it, obviously when it's finding some sort of AI aspect.

Are a lot of people doing more like advanced AI that's doing the stuff that's never been seen before and with no humans in the loop or is it more like small things that are, one to two minutes, five minutes, know, types of systems and then automating all of them away.

David Stengle (24:20)
⁓

Yeah. So

most of the startup activity in the world is using AI in some way, but I would say it's not fundamentally advancing the cutting edge of AI. They're operationalizing some aspect of AI in some domain. And the things that it's changed structurally in the startup ecosystem,

First, prototyping is so much easier and so much more powerful than three years ago. you use, pick your tool, I'll say cursor, right? You can put something together that is MVP grade of three years ago without really being at all technical. And that's new.

That is, there's been no code promises for 50 years, but we're at the point where you can get to MVP, you can get to your first paying customers without a true technology founder. And you still need one at some point, but the ability to get to MVP and paying customers for many businesses now, it's possible. And the flip side of that is that,

investors than expect it Like if you go and ask for money and it's like, I have this idea and they're like, where's your MVP? And you're like, oh, I haven't built it yet. I want some money to build it. like, yeah, you're, you're never going to get that. Uh, because if you can't figure out a way with the free tools that are available to bang something out at that grade, like there's no way you're invested. So

Dan Pace (26:00)
I wouldn't say

the free tools, but yeah, I put a couple of here.

David Stengle (26:01)
Well,

so free is strong. so, I mean, 20 years ago, 20, 23 years ago, started a company, Black Arrow. started, we raised $5 million from Mayfield and Polaris, really big VCs. Cisco was a strategic investor. Intel was an investor.

And that five million was like to build a tech stack, put the basic operations together that I could do in 2026 for 5K. Right? So from five million to 5K. So yeah, it's not free tools. That's fair. But it's not, it's not like you need a $5 million check from a bunch of investors to go build your first version of the app. can, you can do amazing things.

with elastic hosting and just, so that's one area that I think has changed. The other thing for me that's a big deal and I don't think it's just for startups, but in the Valley buzz, there's a whole lot of discussion about.

being an AI native company and what does that mean? so part of that spin, but part of that is it's one thing to look at your business and say, how can I automate a particular process? It's another thing to look at your business and say, if I had a blank sheet of paper, where must I put a human in the loop? And everything else I'm going to try and default to, there's not a human in the loop.

And that is a very different mindset. And I'm starting to see companies do that or aspire to do that or work towards that. And it changes how you think about talent. It changes how you think about work. yeah, yeah. So, and I still feel as someone who is trying to lean into this,

Dan Pace (27:58)
definitely agree about that, the work part. Work has really changed.

David Stengle (28:06)
I'm still far from being AI native. I've been doing things for a long, long time and gradually I'm using tools more and more to do tasks that I used to do by hand or with legacy tools. But having that mindset of in your day, in your week, in your work month,

taking a step back and saying, did I really have to do that? Could I have automated that? Could I have delegated that? How much work would it be to make the change to do that? And I think you wanna have, as any business, you wanna have time where you reflect on the actions that you're taking and say, how can I?

Stephen Covey says sharpen the saw. How can I do things in a better way? But man, the tools, I sat down with a good friend of mine who is much more AI forward than I am. Just leaned into it super hard three years ago, four years ago, three and a half years ago.

Dan Pace (29:08)
That sounds like me.

David Stengle (29:08)
And yeah, yeah,

mean, absolutely. And he took me through his desktop and his stack of tools and how they all talk to each other and what they did. And we spent about an hour and I just walked out of there blown away. Like, oh my God, I'm playing, know, yeah, yeah, I'm like.

Dan Pace (29:29)
It's not even checkers. It's like

pickup sticks or something in some ways. Yeah.

David Stengle (29:34)
I'm playing Go Fish and

there's rocket science going on. So there's a ladder, but we all should be thinking about how can we move up this ladder and how do we find people who are farther along? Because it's not like they're hiding it, right? They're like, everybody should be doing this. And then it's like, OK, well, what's really blocking you from automating?

Dan Pace (29:57)
Was he very technical, very

computer savvy, or is he really leaned in? Yeah, okay.

David Stengle (30:00)
No, he was, he's a non,

non-native English speaker marketing person who leaned into it first started writing, rewriting all his memos, using it for help with language and then started automa, but like the level of automation. So I did this, partly as an experiment, just as an example of my own much more modest learning curve.

Dan Pace (30:18)
Thank

David Stengle (30:25)
but I gave this hour talk on preparing for using AI in workforce. So I won't even say I'm an expert, but I have some points of view on it. And I said, all right, I'm gonna go use, so first I went into ChatGPT and. ⁓

went back and forth with some prompt engineering to make a like a 50 card deck, right? Just all text. Just slide one, here are the three bullets like that. Then I went and got a text to presentation package and just fed it, fed it that doc and it produced a

reasonable presentation from that in a few minutes. So it took me some time to write the 50 slides in output level, but not that much time. And it probably took me more time to set up the demo account, get the tool, all that crap that I'll only have to do once. And then I got a deck, and then I'm a real

PowerPoint wonk So I went through and like, okay, what do I like about this? What I don't, what don't I like about this? I kept one slide that cited data that was completely hallucination and kept it for the presentation to say, okay, this is why I have to check this because this is all completely on drugs. But, but, but as a productivity tool,

Dan Pace (31:40)
you

Yeah.

David Stengle (31:50)
I'm happily at a stage of life where I'm not writing 10 PowerPoints a week anymore, right? But man, it's there. And there's just, it's one little example, but it's like, how are you using these automated tools? It pulled in art, it pulled in, it did a lot of stuff that was helpful. Yeah.

Dan Pace (32:06)
Yeah, I've used that before. The design is better than I would have done to start. Then

if you go, but I often do would go take that PowerPoint, put it to Canva actually, because I have a Canva subscription. And then what Canva has is another AI. I'll take your layout and give you some examples or some options to change to a different layout. That's a little even more graphical. So it looks even nicer.

David Stengle (32:15)
Sure.

Sure, and I

was just scratching the surface of this, but it was like, okay, let's just see what the tools can do now. And it was already interesting.

Right? And I could already see how I could use it to improve my productivity. And I think there's still plenty of room. I would want to, and I'm sure there are tools to let me do this. I didn't figure it out in the quick and dirty I did with this, but to put in more guidance, like, okay, I never want to go below 30 point font. And here are some other things, right? There were definitely some wall of text. So like not a...

Dan Pace (32:36)
Definitely.

Mm-hmm.

David Stengle (33:00)
Jedi Master presentation, but also very fast for producing 50 slides. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Pace (33:05)
Yeah, for the time it took Unreal. Yeah, definitely. And

going back to what you were saying with coding and also what kind of was mentioned with the, hopefully not for free tools. And when you pay for that 20 bucks or even the $200, you get a much higher quality thing. So if you're doing stuff like coding or picking an MVP that needs to work, like you might want to pay 20 bucks. That's what I was kind of making a point of. Yeah. Right. You should probably pay for it. Yeah. Um, I think it's maybe see if you just have an idea for an MVP want to play around. Let's just wait again. Why it made that,

David Stengle (33:13)
Yeah. Yeah.

Right. I know for your job, for your job, for sure, for sure.

Dan Pace (33:31)
Advanced AI thing to try on my website. Cause there needs to be ways to try out advanced AI to see can AI do this. And if you can do it, then do it for real, make the fine tuned AI, but the right workflow and you'll really dig into it rather than just just say rely on the AI. yeah. And also on that topic of coding and new work, more, more than new work part. Yeah. I see businesses or at least the one I'm trying to make is AI first, not AI only. it's.

David Stengle (33:31)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Dan Pace (33:55)
Whatever task I'm doing, what of this task can AI gather the information for me for? What can it organize with the information? Can it rewrite some stuff or formulate, make an image? There's a plenty of lists of things that it can do that I would have to do otherwise. So I try to fill in that first with AI and then I'll take in whatever I can or whatever I need to do that's left to do or find the person that can do it better than me too, of course. And if I to unload a log, we just talked about...

David Stengle (34:01)
Yep.

Great.

Mm-hmm.

Dan Pace (34:22)
When I was looking into the advanced AI's, I wanted to point out that I got to see a lot more AI models, which I don't really have a reason to look into on a day-to-day basis. And I was kind of surprised how many new ones came out. And I'd say a third to half of them were all about coding. So a lot of development is geared towards getting code generated as quickly as possible, which kind of makes sense. If you're trying to develop AI as software, maybe you should make something that makes software first, right? And then we'll worry about text and image and video and all the other models that AI is exploring.

David Stengle (34:30)
Yeah.

Dan Pace (34:52)
But I didn't want to point that out that coding is a target for sure. AI and these frontier companies have been trying to nail down first.

David Stengle (34:52)
Mm-hmm.

For sure. I mean,

that's where the token volume went last year. I saw a really interesting article by Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures who has a personal blog that I enjoy. And one of the things Fred talked about in a recent blog is he's hard of hearing.

Dan Pace (35:02)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

David Stengle (35:19)
the latest version of AI glasses will run text. So if you're out listening to somebody, if we were having this conversation, I had smart glasses on, which I don't, I could get the text of the conversation. So if I was having trouble picking up every word, and Fred was like, this will be a game changer for a lot of people that your hearing's a little bad, you get.

not every word, but some words and just have it. And it can not only do that, it can do that and do inline translation. So I can not only hear your conversation and get the text read out, but if you're talking to me in Swahili or Mandarin, no worries, right? I can still do it. So it's just an example of that's gonna be a game changer. And I think.

Dan Pace (36:10)
Yeah,

I think the metas are doing that and probably show some other ones have it too. Yeah, meta will like isolate someone that you're looking at and then can hear their voice. ⁓ It does something similar, not similar, but it can do a vision as well. So if you're kind of blind or have, you know, hard of seeing, it'll actually tell you what's in front of you, how far is it and it can kind of be your eye.

David Stengle (36:12)
Yeah, starting

Great.

Mm-hmm.

Right. that, that I have, that I haven't seen yet, but,

but I mean, imagine travel. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're, they're working on it and it's still, you know, the multimodal stuff is still early, but, think about traveling around the world and now you can just go and people can talk to you and you can get the English readout of what they're saying. it's a, it's a whole new, whole new era.

Dan Pace (36:31)
Google has a version as well. think Samsung for their Thrift Store.

It's awesome.

It opens

up a lot, especially in terms of business. If you want to choose to go international, you have that type of product that would go international. It's not that far of a stretch now. It's just a couple of add-ons and a couple of extensions. You add to your website and you're there. You're basically done. It's just more of their commitment than the actual doing it. It's a whole new world, a whole new way of work. A lot of developments going on. Very awesome. I'll go over some of them, especially with the innovation that's happening.

David Stengle (36:56)
Yeah.

Great, great.

So super, super exciting.

Dan Pace (37:19)
Yeah, I mean, I kind of wrapping up and anything we didn't really talk about, especially in terms of innovation or technology, because know AI is always the sexy thing on the docket, anything that's not AI or something else, did you get anyone talk to you about quantum or medicine that's going on? Have news with that.

David Stengle (37:33)
Sure, ⁓

quantum, quantum I think is still a few years out from commercial mainstream, but we're really lucky in New Jersey, there's a guy, Don Gruss, that runs a quantum computing meetup that's tremendous. think the next meeting is at the Princeton Library in a couple weeks. So a lot of interesting things happening in the state around that.

couple billion dollars in venture investment last year. So I think a little bit of exciting stuff happening there still quite early. Life sciences is just gigantic and there's so much going on there. The New Jersey, the AI Hub where I do my events is one of 12 strategic innovation centers in the state and there are multiple

centers around the state that are focused on some aspect of life science and New Jersey is the medicine chest of the United States. It's all the pharma are here. There's a lot happening. So I think we're going to see some exciting innovations there too. There's still a whole lot of heavy regulation. It's a long cycle, right? So

Dan Pace (38:34)
Mm-hmm.

you

David Stengle (38:47)
I think

it will propagate more slowly than AI for coders, where coders are like, yeah, man, I'll try something new. It's different when you're giving people drugs or whatever it is. exciting, yeah, yeah. But I think it's an exciting time for the innovation economy and... ⁓

Dan Pace (38:59)
trials, lot of research to go into it.

David Stengle (39:08)
For me, AI touches everything and just getting your fluency up in that is gonna help you in whatever you do.

Dan Pace (39:16)
Totally agree. mean, I've been trying to teach AI education for a while and I'm going to be doing a little more of that in the later 2026. Well, thanks David for the time here. Thanks for sitting down and getting started with me. I did appreciate it. Learned a lot about what's going on innovation wise in New Jersey. There's definitely more than a little. And yeah, I definitely will be seeing you at some of the startup grind events coming up and hopefully we get some other people that are watching this come by too. Cause it's...

It's quite an exciting time where you're going to hear things that you just won't hear elsewhere, kind like that whole entrepreneurial thing where you get to experience some experiences that you just don't get in the job. Those types of talks, you won't get those anywhere else.

David Stengle (39:46)
Yeah.

Alright Dan, was a real pleasure. Thank you.