#272 - Adam Epstein - Gigi

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I didn't really tell you this before, but you quickly became on my short list for 2026 because of what you're building. So I'm actually very fired up. I know I told you that very briefly, but for everyone listening, Adam Epstein is on the podcast today. Adam, welcome to show man. How are you? Thanks Shane. I'm honored to be on the short list and we got it in by the second week of January. So hey didn't take me log to get you. I must have been higher than the list. You were you were love it. Where I don't want to tease it too hard because there's a bunch of things I want to jump into today for everybody. But everyone listening will get a very clear idea of why you're on my short list of the tool the platform you're building now. I just I'm very bullish on as you already know. Sure. But for everyone listening, do you mind giving everyone just a quick background on you and then we can dive in deeper. Yeah, totally. I'm Adam, co-founder and CEO of a company called GG GG's the AI media manager for the Amazon DSP. I won't go too far back, but I've been working in Amazon as for about eight years as I have many folks on our team. I was previously co-president of a large retail media and Amazon tech company called Perpetua. Perpetua was one of those classic product market fit stories when I joined in 2018 where everything was up into the right from the moment I joined not because of me because we had an amazing team and we timed it right and the product was right at the right time. And Amazon's advertising business was a five to ten billion dollar business now it's about a 70 billion dollar business. Crazy. And so we grew the business. It was awesome. Perpetua sold to a public company called essential in 2021 for a little over a hundred million dollars. I worked for essential for two years after the earn out post acquisition. So I started to start what was the first version of GG. I knew I wanted to continue to build in the space. I had been a founder before this is now my third time being a founder. And the first version of GG funny enough was a non consensus bet that proved to be wrong. So we had a belief that connected TV streaming TV advertising would be dominated across and centralized across big tech and big media and big media would look a lot like big tech i.e Netflix Disney Paramount NBC in which they had the means and incentives to build their own out tech and become a wall garden meaning they would force people to buy on their pipes on their tech. And so we believe that there would be this fragmentation across CTV ads and we would have the ability to unify the fragmentation by building on top of their out tech building first on Amazon. And that didn't prove to be true. Okay, okay. All of those companies basically said we're going to be as open as possible. You can buy however you want to buy and one of the main beneficiaries of that was Amazon's tech and the Amazon DSP. So whereas when we began building GG the only primary like premium TV ads that you could buy or prime video ads but quickly into our gg journey you could start to buy prime video you could buy sort of by Disney Netflix, Roku, Paramount Plus and NBC inventory of the Amazon. And so when that initial thesis didn't materialize we took a step back in summer 2024 we said to ourselves hey we knew we needed to be AI native and AI first and we didn't really know what it meant at the time like obviously AI was totally transforming the way in which we worked and like simply put we had if you're a tech company if you're not going all in on AI then it's going to be tough to exist in 20 seconds and beyond. And so we made that bet we didn't know what that meant so we sort of can this the companies that were doing really really well at the application layer in AI and found that there were a lot of common characteristics that we could bring to advertising. You know some of those leading companies were able to identify a job in the workforce like software engineer for coding agents hope down sales for out down sales agents support and legal were the ones that really took off in 2025 specifically. To identify a job in the workforce and which there's a lot of people in that job in which the people in that job are performing a lot of wrote manual and repetitive tasks and I don't know Shane you haven't spent too much time in the Amazon DSP yet but there's an incredible amount of annoying buttons that you need to push to do the execute the campaigns that you need to execute on behalf of your clients. Sure and so we thought that we could replicate that for building the AI enterprise media manager and our first product was for the Amazon DSP so we literally rebuild our product from the ground up like totally scrap what we had before that TV product came to came to market with 10 customers in this past summer have quickly ballooned to grow 700% on number of advertisers manage and ad spend manage we now work with some of Amazon's largest advertisers globally and in November we won a pretty prestigious Amazon partner award, the Global Technology Innovation Partner Award. Wow. Wow. Congrats. Yeah, thank you. That was a big one for us. So, we're not killing it, but we're certainly on the right track of building an awesome company, and it's been super fun along the way. I would argue you're definitely killing it. It sounds like you killed it, but you know, we have a long way to go. You're humble. I love it. We have a long way to go. Just get started. I get it. Yeah. We're just getting started and have a long way to go. It's cool to have you on because I don't know if I told you this on the first call. We've been on a couple calls a little recently. I heard your name. I don't know. I just heard your name a couple times. I think just meeting the folks at Perpetua back in the day because I think we started doing some stuff like 22 or 23. It's crazy how long it's been. So, I just heard about you and then John obviously mentioned you. And so, you were one of those names that like I kept hearing and everyone's like, oh, you haven't met Adam yet? And I'm like, shit, I just need to meet Adam, apparently. Like, Adam's a guy. Yeah, we're here. We made it. So, it's cool to have you on. And I would love to go back was getting in to tech, getting into software. Was that something you always wanted to do or did this? Actually, I'm actually a lawyer by background. Went into law because I didn't know what to do. What I wanted to do with my life. Wow. Okay. I'm a big basketball junkie and I actually, my dream job in university and even in law school was being the GM of an MBA team. Cool. Is it still the long term dream? You're like Gary, are you going to buy the Jets? I don't need to be the owner. You're going to buy the Toronto industry. Yeah, the Raptors, they need a GM maybe. Yeah. Bobby Webster is good at his job. But the way you got that job back in the day was you were a smart guy with a lot of degree passionate about basketball. And so that's kind of why I went into law school. Every summer I would write handwritten notes to every single GM. This was before called the email was a thing. Every single GM asking for summer internships. Did you really? Yeah, I did. And so in Canada, you have to go through this process like after law school, you have to work for a year to get called to the bar called Articling. So I actually didn't have a, so all these GMs that I emailed actually got feedback back from many of them. There was a seven or eight. Yeah, I mean, they didn't give me a job, but I, they at least, that's cool back. You still got a response. Yeah. And they, this is so long ago. And so they said like, look, like we don't offer summer internships. Like our summers are actually really quiet, but we do offer full year internships. Like when you have a full year, we encourage you to apply. And the first time I had a full year was I think 2010, 2011, went after I article after I got called to the bar. And that summer, the NBA wasn't on a lockout, but they were like about to be on a lockout. I remember this. Yeah. So all of these teams were cutting staff. So like the one time I finally have this window of opportunity, it's just cease to exist. And I knew I didn't want to be a lawyer. I was playing a ton of sports at the time, like just like recreational sports. Like I was organizing baseball games, men's league basketball, stuff like that. And I built at the time a company that was a mobile sports scheduling app for recreational athletes. So rather than a reply, who's in, who's out emails? I was called Huddlers. Grab him. That was the company. Yeah, thank you. It didn't do well. Like we, we, we unfortunately shut the company down two years later. It was very difficult to monetize. And I think that was a passion project more than anything. But that's how I got into tech. I, I solved a problem for myself, a 25 year old professional recreational athlete. And now I've, I'm playing much less basketball, unfortunately, due to a couple ankle surgeries. But I'm moderately better at building technology companies. Did you, did you, like, did you build a software for this company? I was the engineer. I had a co-founder who helped build the, the, the technology behind it. Very cool. But you had to go find this guy and hunt him down and found a co-founder. Very cool. I feel like that's something I'm starting to realize is like a theme of you. You've done a great job of, you see a problem. You go out and you, you find how to, you like create, create a team, which is, again, I think that's a skill as I'm getting older and building my own business. I'm starting to realize that's a real skill set that most people don't have. Well, you know what, Shane? Life is a team sport and it's more fun when you can win together. Hell yeah. Love that. It's not, it's not just about building the team, but it's about bringing people along on the journey. And, you know, one of the things that I was particularly, I learned a great deal of at my time at Perpetua is the CEO and founder of Perpetua. Is this incredible Silicon Valley mad scientist entrepreneur named Roscoe Hill. He was an early palanter employee that he started a company called Blend, which went public. So Roscoe's done unbelievably well. And through the Perpetua journey, Roscoe was incredibly generous with equity to top performers. And when Perpetua had an outcome, there wasn't necessarily a life changing amount of money for that many people, but there was certainly a life comfort income out of money that allowed a lot of other people in the company to start companies. So it's, it's pretty amazing that there's this now diaspora of early Perpetua employees through their learnings, but also economic comfort that Roscoe provided us. Wow. And so, we're going to be able to build companies. So in addition to us at GG, there's an amazing team of folks that are building this really cool company called Cobrand, which helps musicians distribute their music through creators. Another bunch of awesome team members that are building this company called Tempo, which is basically like a vibe coding app for designers. Oh, I think I've actually heard of Tempo. I think I, I think I, I think I actually have. It's funny that you say that because I feel like I just was looking at this not that long ago. So all that's to say, it's, it's, it's like life is a team sport. Philosophically, I believe it's really important when building a company to be as generous with equity as possible to top performers. And that's how you get top performers to be in your company. And I've certainly tried to adopt that principle at GG. That's really cool, man. Yeah, that's really cool. I mean, again, this is like the first business I'm building where, you know, I would say like it's, it's gotten past the point of like barely off the ground. So building a team and finding talent is like a whole thing that, you know, I think when you start something, unless you've done it, you don't realize it's like a huge part of it being successful long term, right? So what was the bridge between kind of this like limbo period out of law school and not getting to work with an MBA team to getting to perpetuate? Did you have some hops in between there? Yeah, so I started that failed company, Hudlers. Then I started a company that was a mobile payments app in restaurants. So we were a Canadian leader in mobile payments and full service restaurants. So you would go to a full service restaurant. You would say, I'm paying with tab. We were called tab and had uber style payments and you just got up and go. Why? Okay. Yeah. We did okay. We were only in Canada, but we had two S competitors companies called Reserve and Cover. But we were ultimately bought by our UK competitor, a company called Velocity. It wasn't a big win, but ultimately Velocity was bought thereafter, like many years later for a sizeable sum by capital one. Oh, wow. So you were on to something because I'm thinking like the years you've been doing that. That was a prior time. I was like 2013 to 2015. Yeah, timing. Yeah. And then it was early. Still people we'd pay with credit cards in restaurants and we still have to wait for the bill and it is what it is. I think it was too early and again, a tough problem to solve and maybe not a profitable problem to solve. After I worked for Velocity, I joined a large Indian FinTech company called PATEM. And so PATEM is like Ali Pay in India and they had a large office in Toronto. And one of the co-founders of PATEM headed up that office and said, "Hey, we want to start expanding PATEM internationally to Canada." And I was the GM of Canada and then like future international expansion for a little bit. And the thing that's interesting about that nugget of my story is that's where I met my now co-founder and CTO of Gigi, a guy named Shalai. So we met over my two years at PATEM. I left PATEM to join Perpetua. He left PATEM to join a company called Loblaws, which is Canada's largest retail India arm. He wrote the first line of code to Loblaws' retail media business, which is now. Whoa. I don't know that details, but probably like a few hundred million dollar retail media business and I joined Perpetua. But the fun thing about PATEM was it was a very unique experience because PATEM is this like meteoric and credible success story for India. And I really had never seen excellence at work in my professional career. I was a lawyer. I was a founder of a failed startup and then I was a founder of a company that did at best okay. And at PATEM, I really saw what it took to be excellent. I really saw the commitment to drive the ambition to be excellent. I saw excellence in software engineering. We had a phenomenal software engineering team. And I saw excellence in both speed and ambition that you typically don't see in Canadian technology companies. And I didn't necessarily love my time there. I have my heads with my boss for two years. But it was a incredible, incredible learning experience. Do you think, now I'm kind of like, because I have a similar story? Do you think sometimes having those roles at that point in your life where you're budding heads and you're just like not loving what you're doing? But you're at a really impressive place. Do you feel like that's kind of cemented some knowledge in you that maybe it took a while to realize what you took away from until you left? I don't think the knowledge of how I could have handled that personal relationship was what cemented things in my life. But I was made that decision to join that company very intentionally because it seemed like it was a company that was doing phenomenally well that had big bold ambitions. And I thought I wanted exposure to that. It was very cool. Like one of my first weeks was actually on an onboarding in India. And at that time, Alibaba was its main investor. And that week that I was there, the Alibaba team wrote them like a $400 million check. And I was there like the Alibaba exacts. It was super cool. you got exposure to some amazing things that like people in Toronto don't typically get exposed to. And I value that experience tremendously. Yeah, I sometimes I think I know I think back to even my career and I think about some of the roles I've had and maybe in the moment, I don't think I realized like the gravity of even the importance of the work that was happening. It maybe just felt like this wasn't that exciting or cool and now and look back like for me like being at Walmart.com back when I was there and Jack got acquired and we're like scaling up these first fulfillment centers like you look back and like damn that was like actually really important work. You know what I mean? I never met him. I met his like right hand hand team Nate Faust was a guy that yeah, I basically led up his fulfillment arm. I got to work with never got to meet Mark. He's on calls and stuff and never in person. I have a good friend that's a CEO of GrubHub in the US right now. That's working to mark globally. No way. We're reporting to Mark directly. His name's Howie McDull and I caught up with Howie in Chicago. How he's based in Chicago. No way. I caught up with him recently and just the stories of Mark are phenomenal. Like you know why he's the man. I mean you can't do what he's done in like the multiple exits the way he's exited and disruption and then obviously like Amazon Walmart. It's incredible. That guy is on the short list too with you. I mean it's like we got to get Mark on here because like then I'll be in the GM and what is he part owner and sit next to A-Route and half the wolves games. I'm like it's he's just an e-com guy diapers.com. Look, you would think you would think that Marcus had his successes. He's resting on his laurels. He's the owner of the Timberwolves but my friend Howie tells me he is just super dialed in up building this business. His current business wonder. Yeah. And he is just all like all in all the time every day. So cool. I love what here's stories like that. Yeah, totally love it. Yeah, that guy's nuts. But it's cool right? Because you think I think you get to like even if you don't get to interact like I didn't get to interact directly with them but I got to interact with like his direct reports and you just feel like the ripples of people like that like they really do kind of like they just like I don't even not explain it. They just like spread through the organization you can like feel the the energy. I know Nate probably did a lot of the same types of things that marked it like a couple classic stories of like being at a fulfillment center till 11 p.m. And then everyone need to be back there at 5 a.m. Like it was like that kind of we weren't sleeping on the floor but about as close as to like figure the shit out to make sure we could operate these warehouses kind of thing. Whatever it takes whatever it takes exactly. So that's cool man. So pay TM when you got the opportunity to go to perpetuate was that was that an offensive move. Do they reach out to you? Like how does that come about? Because I've been there as a great question too right? So around the time I was starting my first company. I met this guy named Joe Rideout who was also starting a company at some Toronto tech founders meet up. He actually started a cool company called Relay which I believe at 15 years ago it was a messenger app just for exchanging gifts like gifts were tough to come. Yeah 15 years ago and it was a very fun messenger app and Joe and I met and we kept in touch and we always looked at ways to work together. He joined Perpetua about a year before me and we had lunch in September 2018 and said like we have this product that we're starting to get customers. All of our teams are engineers and designers and product people. We don't have anyone on the on the go to market side. Do you think you're interested? And I said yeah like where do I sign up? Sounds awesome. Yeah yeah yeah. And so Rosco the founder and CEO was like dude like why are you just like all in like immediately? Like what why why are you two thumbs up? And I said look I was like many people and a shareholder in Amazon at the time and I nerd out on the stocks that I owned directly and I had seen I had seen that at Amazon's advertising business was as described it was a double digit billion dollar category growing over a hundred percent year on year at the world's largest company and I don't think in the history of the world that I've ever been the case. Yeah wow good insight you though yeah like look like I trust Joe I think he's the man you seem to be awesome and you've capitalized this business in a in a great way and I think that if we just work really hard and figure it out like there's too big of a tailwind around building around Amazon ads for us not to mess this up and sure enough it all worked out in the end for all of us. Very cool man. Yeah I mean when you when you came in knowing that you have a lot of engineers there was it I don't know say shambles was it but was it like there was a system and there was a process but like did you just kind of build everything. Well there wasn't there was a product that a few customers use okay but funny at that lunch I'm like Joe like how many customers you have he's like oh we have like a like 15 and how much revenue do you have oh we have like I know 5 10k a month in revenue and my first week I just asked everyone like who are actually our customers and how much do we make in revenue and no one knew the exact answer. Wow okay there's just yeah no one like Joe like what's going on here like told me you had revenue and customers and but it's sure enough it all worked out. That's yeah we're in a long way from there. Yes exactly. That's crazy I mean but it makes sense like so it must so Roscoe basically started it like hey I just have this concept like let's get this let's get the software built because that's that's always that's one of the things I want to talk about today is like you've now you're obviously we'll get into GG in a minute too but with perpetually you were there early enough to see is that how in your experience a lot of successful startup software companies work like you really got to just kind of like focus on you're solving a problem with software like build at least an MVP of the software before you because like obviously the hard thing I've always thought of when I look at a software company as an external like I don't know a lot about software companies is you can't go sell it until you've built it but you need revenue to build it unless you're raising capital and it seems like I chicken an egg for software. Yes and yes and no a little bit right like you can get early signals and customer feedback before you actually build a product like you can get mockups you can gauge interest you can see what people like see what people don't like and then actually build it. Okay so I don't I don't necessarily think that you need to build this massive product and get revenue before you're able to raise capital in many instances like capital is relatively available for the right founder solving the right problems right now. Okay got it. So you know with with with GG I I was a third time founder who had domain expert experience in this space I had a conviction on a bet that ultimately proved to be wrong but ultimately you know early stage investors will I'll tell you they bet on the jockey not the horse and hopefully their bet on me and our team was a bet that we would figure this out and we we certainly improved our position than the initial product that we built. So you know what you generally speaking of a bet you have a thesis you get a product a market that can provide value to customers as fast as possible you get feedback on that and you go. The funny thing is that when you don't have product market fit and you don't have customers loving your product build deciding what to build next it's actually really hard because you're kind of picking straws and hoping that something hits. Okay sure your job is actually so much easier once you have customers that are using your product and telling you what exactly they want and sure you don't need to listen to exactly what they have to say but you have to listen to the spirit of what they are saying and the problem that they want solved and then ultimately build a solution to affect that. So one of the early signs that this new version of GG was certainly working is that we knew exactly what we needed to build. Okay. The moment we got this in our customers hands they're like awesome love it need this ship that awesome love it need this and so we're just knocking those things off so initially the first six months of GG was like closing the gap on those like immediate customer needs but then there's a little bit of an opportunity to continue to close that gap I'll go on offense because that your customers are ultimately not going to be able to know the potential things that you could build and problems that you could solve for them but if you have conviction on those you can guide them along on the journey by continuing to keep them happy on the things that they touch every single day while coming up with new things that can expand the scope of responsibility that your product offers. Yeah, yeah, it makes a ton of sense. It's like an iterate move iterate move iterate move kind of game. Did you before you jumped and officially started GG like I sounds like you kind of explain the perpetual exit and sounded like there was there's an opportunity to kind of like go figure out what you wanted to do next and you had a little bit of a run away. Was this concept something where like I'm always curious and someone starts something where it's already the phases you're at. Did you make like a business plan? Did you do like all this official stuff or did you kind of were like hey I just have this like thesis and I'm gonna go find the right people and we're just gonna go figure it out. I'm a little bit of both. I'm a big memo guy. I love writing in like full sentence prose. I it's like I've worked I guess too much with Amazon over the past eight years and this is something that's like clearly rubbed off on me. Is this like email handwritten? No like written like a written document. Okay. That like you save as a PDF like I had there was like a grand vision document of what GG should be in summer 2023 that I wrote to bring people along the journey was like a five or six page memo sent it to potential investors sent it to potential team members ultimately through everything out that was in that memo by summer 2024 but in general just you know we all play to our strengths Shane. I'm not a software engineer. I don't put down pixels but I guess my legal background has tripped me in being a half decent writer and I really try and use that strength as much as possible by crafting internal memos strategy docs and kernel documents. to convey where we are going as a company, convey the status of things, convey product and strategy decisions that we've made. I think some of our investors and team members certainly appreciate that. And so that's what I did. Early days, GG, I wrote basically a memo on what's GG in summer 2023. Very cool. That's cool because you also have a brain dump of what you were thinking something could be. That's cool. Is that an Amazon thing? Did I just never know that? Is that kind of like the meeting thing? You had to write the document. You had to write a six page memo and then everyone sits down and they read the memo. It's a really like, there is no greater way to have clarity of thought than actually writing down your thoughts in prose and not using an LLM to write down the point thoughts but actually sit down, write cogent sentences that clearly articulate a unique point of view that you've thought out. And I think the ultimate readers of that, whether it be customers, investors or potential team members appreciate clarity of thought and conviction. Yeah, for sure. And there's no better way to do that than written docs. Interesting. That's really cool. And it's cool you're able to send it around to investors and potential people to loop them in. For sure. Like our seed round. So we raised two and a half million as a seed round in April 2023. I didn't have a deck. I just had the memo. Oh, nice. I hate decks. So that's a good. That's a good. Yeah. It's funny. But the funny thing is our our main investor said like, Hey, like we're about to raise another round and the not too used to future. Our lead investor who led that $2.5 million round said, Hey, like next round, the memo game is not going to work. You actually. Yeah, you needed that. Did you do a deck? We haven't yet. We will build it soon. I think you stick to the memo. Like you say, no way. This is how I do it. I don't think it works. Maybe not going to have a check sizes are a little larger. You got to buy their rules. That makes a lot of sense. It's funny. I'm just laughing because I've been visioning you've been like, Yeah, Shane told me. Yeah. We're going to stick to the doc. That's like a word. That's cool, man. No, I mean, I've heard the whole Amazon six page doc thing. I've always wondered how that like I was always thinking back to my days in corporate America, how funny that would have been and how many meetings would have been canceled. Like it makes so much sense, doesn't it? How many of those meetings you probably back in your old days were just dumb and repetitive and people are in meetings all day that if there's just no well thought out reason for the meeting, it's just Waltz on the calendar and we should talk about the same shit every week kind of thing. Yes. So that's interesting. Okay. So to get back, let's jump into GG. Sure. So GG, I'm trying to think the first time I heard about GG. I can't remember the exact time. I remember I came across your website and I was super intrigued. So I think probably for people who are, you know, know some things about advertising, but even for the average consumer, like we have a lot of CPG folks on here that, you know, maybe don't do anything. They have an agency or they have someone that runs advertising for them. Could you just kind of give us like, maybe this is part of the doc you just referenced, but like very high level, like why was this a good idea? What's, why is this a problem that you guys are trying to solve and like, what's the purpose for GG? Sure. So that's a good question. The problem that we're trying to solve is the folks that are actively managing campaigns on the Amazon DSP. This is the narrow scope of the Amazon DSP at the moment, but you know, I'll back it up a little bit and just say like GG, we're building the AI media manager for the enterprise. So if you think of the particular categories that we think a lot about our retail media. So on site retail media like Amazon as well, Mardads and then enterprise DSPs like Amazon Trade Desk and as well as Google's DSP DV360. And if you think about the jobs that many of these people do every day, they're spent clicking mundane buttons over and over again in pursuit of achieving some sort of outcome for the client, whether it be launching a campaign and getting sales, growing someone's business, increasing brand awareness. And if we look at, for example, some of our top customers, which are some of the largest agencies in the world, no one signed up to be a media manager of agency X to copy and paste line items over and over again for two to three days. Sure. We spoke with a very large advertiser who says every single quarter they have to this gets in like so deep in the nuances of the Amazon DSP, but they're very large advertiser and there's someone at their agency who has to spend a week updating creative tags just so that their campaigns can run every single quarter. That's someone's job. And so like that person, when they said I want to get this job at this awesome agency, no one said that they want to that's the job I want. Created tags. Yeah. So because there's so many buttons pushed at large agencies and brands to execute these outcomes, people need to hire a lot. So if you're an agency, as you know, Shane, like you can't increase your customers and revenue exponentially without actually hiring humans to push buttons and do things. And the magic of a gentick AI is you can start to assign AI a lot of these mundane tasks that people don't want to do so that you as an agency owner could infuri exponentially increase customers and revenue while maintaining the same team or even having a smaller team. And that's powerful on a couple of different dimensions. That's powerful one because you are able to scale your agency more profitably. So I'm sure you have a fixed ratio of customer and revenue to a number of people that you have. And typically services, businesses and agencies have been tracked on a specific EBITDA multiple because services, businesses don't scale like software businesses. But with the gentick AI, the magic of a gentick AI is that a gentick AI could allow a services businesses to scale like a software business and allow you the business owner to be valued for the business that you've created in a higher multiple and a different multiple. So that's one. Yeah. The other is that one of our north stars is can be positively changed the way that people work in this industry. So again, people do not enjoy pressing these buttons over and over again. One of the things that we like to say when we onboard a new customer is what is the then diagram of buttons that you hate pressing the most and buttons that you press the most in the Amazon DSP and how can we automate tasks for GG to execute so that GG takes that on instead of you. Oh, that's cool. And so if you remove this from those people, one, those folks will genuinely enjoy their work more. The work that they're doing is being strategic working with clients, having more opportunities to have client interaction. But I think the most impactful thing is that hopefully if you the business owner Shane realize that you're more profitable because you're implementing a gentick AI invariably those team members that are awesome, you could probably pay them more. For sure. Yeah. If you're generating all of these profits by injecting AI and not having to hire team members, then your ability to pay these team members and reward them for their amazing work can actually be higher. So not only are they enjoying their jobs more, but there's an ability for them to be paid significantly more through AI. Very cool. Yeah, that latter part I hadn't really thought through that. That's a really good point. I think what's interesting too, you showed me some glimpses of GG and we've been talking about GG before the podcast. DSP, transparently, I mean, if anyone listening that knows what we do, I mean, that's just not an area that we've really explored, funny enough out of it before an hour before we got on the call together. I was actually talking with some folks at Amazon for long story short, one of our clients that they have access to some like AMC and DSP folks and I just had never met these people before. And so they were just giving me a look under the hood of some stuff I've never looked at and it came right back to you to be honest with you. I was like, wow, like just some of the capabilities of the data. I didn't even know was available. But then it quickly hit me of like, oh my god, this is like endless amounts of buttons you'd have to push in. It was just almost like overwhelming, like the amount of query information and it actually cemented so much of what you showed me within GG with how the AI can automate like campaign structure and building because maybe I maybe I'm a weirdo. But like the thing that I have fallen in love with with advertising over the last six years of running no bull is not setting up campaigns, not tweaking anything and hitting buttons. That's like the tier point. It's monotonous. There's just a ton of it you have to do. It's like figure, it's the creative side. It's like figuring out what is the thing we're missing. What are the things we should be targeting doing those and then seeing results for your client in growth. That's what's fun. So finding ways to speed up that process and again, I want to get into the weeds of what GG can do. But even what you've shown me a glimpse of, it was, for anyone listening, like just to give you kind of a framework, if you know anything about advertising, like Adam showed me, like basically like what it looks like to get into GG and and and we're like see what the interaction looks like. And for anyone listening, if you've built a campaign anywhere, whether that's Amazon, I would argue like Meta Google anywhere. It's like you, it asked me a bunch of the prompts, but then it was like Chad GPT. So it was like interacting in obviously like the LM that you guys are like building on, like it understands everything about advertising. So like just to give everyone kind of a dumb down version, it was like talking to Chad GPT, but it's, it's basically like your advertising professional that you're talking to. So it's able to just like build and structure all these things that again, I think the example you showed me, it built out a whole campaign strategy and structure and length of time that I mean that easily would have taken someone. I mean, who knows, but I could take you 30 minutes an hour maybe to like build and think through and structure all that stuff and it didn't 10 seconds. It did it in a couple minutes, not 10 seconds. I'll give you credit. A couple. Yeah. I don't want to mislead anyone. Sure. It was fast. So generally speaking, campaign building. which EG can be done in minutes. And for the most part, most of our advertisers and customers say that replace is something that would be done in 30, 40 minutes. - Totally. I couldn't believe it. Transparenly, it was remarkable how fast it was. So I mean, to maybe take one step back, the one thing that was crazy to me was obviously the version I saw you guys been working on for a little bit of time now. And you have clients and you're building this whole infrastructure. Take, I always love this zero to one process of building anything. For you, you had experience obviously with perpetual advertising. But it seems like a huge bite to go take to like, where do you start? How did you guys stop and think about like, where do you start? Because Gigi, there's already so much it's doing. But you couldn't start with all that. You had to start with like one little piece of like, does this. How did you guys think about all that? It just seems like it hurts my brain, think about. - So a couple of things. So one of the most remarkable things about working with AI is that you're able to move really, really fast. And I don't actually mean like, do your engineers use cursor or cloud code? Yes, our engineers do and it makes them more productive and in turn that makes us faster. But when you don't need to buy for you and anyone else saying like, you understand, you work with like software as a service vendors, these legacy SaaS companies for every single new feature that they need to build, you can literally, you have to literally like build the UI, you have to build every button required for every single way in which someone wants to work with that feature as an example. - Sure. - And that takes time. That actually takes a lot of time. But the really cool thing with AI is that you can just let the LLM do the work and you just need to expose the, there's a phrase and a gente guy called tool. You just need to expose the tool that the LLM can call for the LLM to make use of that to get that feature. So what's an example of that? So I'll explain the concept of tool calling really quickly for everyone. So the LLM's like openAI's LLM is incredibly intelligent but openAI's LLM and the chat and GPT, the API, it can't change inventory on an Amazon DSP campaign. It doesn't have that as a tool that it can call and the tool that it needs is the API endpoint of the Amazon DSP to edit inventory. So if you wanted to edit inventory on a legacy SaaS app, you'd actually have to build buttons and workflows and everything for someone to actually change the inventory and then I'll like the potential options. But with a gente guy and with a company like ours, you just need to expose the tool and then you say, GG, upload, change the inventory across these line items with these inventory types. And GG will go do that. - Yeah. - So I say all this because you can move so much faster when you do that. And so from our experience with the first version of GG, which was just streaming TV ads on the Amazon DSP, all of our customers said, we need you to do more. We need full funnel Amazon DSP. We can't just have this point solution just for this one thing. And so we said, hey, we need GG to be this AI media manager for the Amazon DSP but it needs to have full funnel execution, every single tactic that someone would have, it needs to have that. - Yeah, okay. So that was the baseline level of functionality that we knew that we needed. And then since we've got in this product in customer's hands, it's, they've all said, now we need GG to do this. Now we need GG to do that. And again, rather than building this prescriptive legacy software UI that would have taken a lot of time, it still takes us time, but the speed with which we can do so is super fast. And our ability to expose a new tool to GG and train her on what this tool means and the impact that it can have and how to do this successfully for our customers is just exponentially faster than legacy SaaS. And so that's why we've been able to grow so quickly. And more broadly, this isn't even about us, but if you start to see now across a bunch of different verticals, all of these AI first companies are like, whoa, like how do they do so much so quickly? It's because the LLM is doing a lot of the work rather than prescriptive software development that would normally take a lot more time. - Wild. - Yeah, that all makes a ton of sense. What's it been like, so it's interesting, I'll give you maybe the reason why my brain flew to this question next. Like for me, as we build our agency, the folks that we're pulling into our team and scaling with, I've done all the work, Kyle's done all the work. So now we're managing people, it's like, we've been doing all of this work. If they're gonna take anything off my plate, like I've been building this from scratch for a long time. When it comes to software, is it more of like, you as the leader have to be like, hey, I know I want this outcome for our client, and I know I want to look and feel like this. And then you have to give a lot more trust and ownership to like, let's say like software engineers on the team. Because like, that's always something that I've always curious about software companies in general is like, as a leader, how do you lead folks who probably are doing things that, like, I mean, if I had a software engineer on our team, I would have no idea what they're doing or how they're doing it. How does that work? Well, I'm fortunate that I don't have to have too much of a hands-on role in exactly how things are built. I typically find myself just asking a lot of questions on why we're doing things and relying on our incredible team members to figure out the how and the implementation. You've met Gloria, our head of product. We have an amazing design leader, Michaela, but I think to credit all of our engineers, most if not all of our engineers are not just folks that are writing code based on product requirements that Gloria has provided them, but are additive to the conversation on the problem that we're solving to the customer to bring potential engineering solutions that non-technical folks on the team may not even consider. So when we come with our team with a customer problem, we come to it maybe from a product or design perspective of how we would propose a solution. But there's often engineering solutions and engineering trade-offs and opportunities to add an even better experience to our customers. And I think that's the thing that I love working with this team the most is that all of our team members understand the problem deeply that we're trying to solve and bring solutions to provide as much value as possible to our customers as fast as possible. That's really cool. Yeah, that's wild. And that's a good example of you have to let go and trust a team. And I think that's something I'm personally learning as I evolve into my careers. It's got let go and trust people. But in your world, that's even more important and a must. What has it been like since you started? I'm sure there's been a million. And you already said to you guys, maybe like a complete pivot to basically a different setup. But what's been the biggest surprise or biggest struggle you've dealt with in starting GGs? Are like one major thing that stood out? The question Shane, this is my third time being a founder. And since I've been a-- this is probably, I think, a little over a decade since I started my second company, the one that got acquired. And so I had always worked hard. I was a lawyer. I worked at an Indian FinTech company. I was really employee at Perpetua and certainly put in a lot of hours at Perpetua. So the hours are not too big of a surprise. Obviously I work hard and we all work hard at GG in order to build this business. It's not the hours, but the highs and lows really get you. Oh, I bet. You feel the highs and lows a lot. And the highs are super high and the lows are super low. And you feel some of these highs and lows so much in a single day. And I forgot what that felt like. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, man. That's something I don't know-- I don't know if people-- if you can understand what you just talked about until you've been through that, because I know exactly what we're talking about. Yes. You're probably at an even higher level than me, I bet. Maybe. But the-- Maybe. It's affects everyone. It affects everyone. Yeah. You try and be as even keel as possible, not to get too high, not to get too low. But you can't not do it when it's your company. When you're the largest shareholder on the cap table, it's your name, it's your baby. You can't not get too high and too low. I try and not wear my emotions off my sleeve, but certainly team members can tell when I'm having a good day or a bad day. That's a good answer, man, because it-- man, entrepreneurship is a wild thing. Or I think you hear all this flashy stuff, you hear all the famous stories. But I think time and time again, the more people I've talked to on here, it's like that right there is the macro summary of what starting a business is like. There's not a lot of just even keeled days, I would argue. There's a lot of highs and lows, and it's not even days. It's just hours. There's a really good hour and a really shitty hour, and there's a lot of those in a day, and it's exhausting. Yes. I think the guidance to a founder is you just have to be completely impervious to adversity. And if adversity just has to rub right off of you, any adversity that you face just have to move forward. Move forward. Consistency. Yeah. The next day, you just got to move forward. Being a founder is a function of being thrown problems every single day. The problems are new. The problems are different. The problems are big. The problems are small. And once you realize that solving those problems is the joy and skill of it all and not a burden of it, you start to realize that you just need to move forward and solve more problems. I love that. That's such good advice. Yeah, that really is your professional firefighter, really. You're just putting out fires and solving problems. That's really what a founder is, right? [BLANK_AUDIO] - Are you, do you feel like you guys have at least, - This is probably a horrible question. I was gonna say, have you guys, do you guys feel like you're past the, I feel like it's your past like that zero to one. Like you have a product that's finding success, you're getting some accolades from even Amazon already. So do you feel like you're kind of in this one to two where it's like, okay, then not some bolts of what we wanted to set out to do. They're coming together or they're together. Now it's like how do we take this to the masses? Is that kind of where Gigi you would say, is that in the spectrum of the life line of Gigi? - I think we're a little too premature for that shame. - Yeah, okay, okay, sure. - And I'm hesitant to say that we're at that next scale phase because, you know, again, maybe I'm working too much with Amazon, but Amazon has that philosophy of, it's always day one. - Of that. - And it's always day one at Gigi. Every day is new, every day is a new adventure. There's so many more problems to solve. There's so much more ambition for us to continue to grow. And, you know, we're a 14 person team or an awesome 14 person team. Once we're maybe a 30 person team, we're at that next stage and we're starting to scale a little bit more, but we're definitely very early, personally sell to every single new customer. - Okay, yeah, I was gonna ask you that. - Once we move off the underled sales, that's probably when we're at that next stage. And I don't believe that's gonna happen in the next six months. - Okay, fair enough. That's a really good answer. I was curious on that, 'cause that usually is the inflection point that you see as the founder don't have to do the all the selling anymore. - Well, I feel like you're the kind of person though. I feel like you'll be a little sad when that day comes. I don't know if you'll love that. - Look, I like it because it allows me to be close to the customer. I can see viscerally what people get, what gets people excited about our product and what doesn't. And I can relate that to the team. So I genuinely enjoy being as close to the customer as possible. So sales is, I'm better at sales than I am at account management. So sales is the thing that gets me closer to the customer. And I think the challenge that I'm going to have with GG is that I have very high expectations of obviously everyone on the team, but I have particularly high expectations for jobs that I personally do. And once I start to give away the legos of the job that I do, whoever that first sales rep is might have a tough couple for a sponce. Hopefully they listen to this podcast and have that context before, right? (laughs) - Maybe. Where is GG going? I know that's a really hard question to follow up with, but I guess before you even answer, just because I've seen what it can do, I have told you and I'll tell you publicly, I have not worked directly with your product yet, but I've seen enough of it. And I obviously know Gloria, no you know. It's very impressive. And I can only imagine where it's going. So I'm very, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on today, it's funny if I go back through a lot of the guests I've had on here. One of the things I think I've actually done a pretty decent job at is having people on before their story as well known. Like that's kind of one of the things I really try to do is I want to get you before you're widely known. - Cool. - I absolutely think you're going to be one of the founders that we fast forward a year and a half and everyone's been like, holy shit, you get Adam on the pot? Like I'm telling you, I'm that bullish on what you're building. - Love it. - Yeah, where do you think this is going? But what's the outcome for Gigi and the company you're building? Do you have one in your mind or are you just trying to solve this problem and go as fast as you can? - Our outcome is to build a really big business. This is an awesome opportunity. Media channels that we work with are growing 20% year on year and is probably collectively a hundred billion e-commerce isn't going anywhere. And I think the problems that we want to start to tackle is right now we're focusing on the enterprise media manager with the Amazon DSP. Who are all of the people that that team member works with? And how can we begin to build agente AI workflows for the concentric circles of people that that team member would work with? - Okay. - So if it's programmatic media manager on Amazon DSP and trade desk, trade desk. If it's Amazon ads specialist doing sponsored ads and DSP that person. If it's starting to automate retail workflows on Amazon because now it's the Amazon brand manager and P&L owner, that person. And so it's the concentric circles of mid to junior level rules that touch the current role that we are enhancing. - Very cool. - Where we want to expand. We think that there are over a million people globally that do these roles. - Wow, is it that many? - At least the data that we close to excise the market opportunity represents. It represents about $70 billion in labor costs. I think that's right. - Goodness. - Maybe more. - Damn. - And we just think that that's a huge market opportunity and we want to just continue to build. We feel so fortunate to just be building in the space. Like one of the things that really excites me I was chatting with. So when we talk and you talk with a lot of brand owners, so one of our really customers at Perpetua was a company called Hero Cosmetics which George and Dwight bought for over $600 million. I was fortunate enough to build a great relationship with the founder, a woman named Jew Rue, who's one of the investors in Gigi. And I caught up with her in LA and she's like, how do you like being a founder? She actually advised me to, she said, like when we were building Perpetua, she was like, Adam, when are you gonna start your company? - Cool. - And I told her like, hey, Jew, like that actually meant a lot and gave me the confidence that I need that I could wear this hat again coming from someone like you. And I was so fortunate and grateful that she backed that up. - Yeah. - Oh hell yeah. - Right, writing a small check on our company. And she asked me like, how do you like being a founder again? I'm like, look, being a founder's fun. It's awesome. There's highs and lows. We just spoke about that. But the thing that I'm just feel so grateful and amazing about is, it's just so cool to work with LLM's every single day. Like every single member of our small 14 person team is getting a black belt in working with AI. - Oh yeah. - And this is like the best possible skill that you could possibly develop in 2026 and beyond. - For sure. - And there's just a thirst for learning that exists across our entire company. And I'm just so thankful and grateful that we get to do it every day. - So cool. I mean, that's something I didn't even thought about was just like, yeah, your team now is gonna be at the ground. It's like building first websites when the internet rolled out. I know you run out of time, you have a hard stop. So last question I always asked that I would love to understand from you since you're now you're an AI wizard that's building a sick company. What tools do you use at 'em to plan out? Annual goals, way bigger goals. All of it under like the shit you gotta get done today or you a pen and paper guide, you have some software that you're using. Like what is it that you put around yourself to stay productive? - Hey, I don't have annual goals. I don't do that. Maybe I should. We obviously have goals for Gigi and metrics and North Star's that we wanna hit. That's funny Shane. I'll end this and try and be as I do have to go. So I'll try and be as brief as possible on this. I grew up in a decent area in Toronto. My parents bought this house when I was 10 years old for I'm happy to share numbers. Like it's nothing crazy for a low under $500,000 when I was 10 years old. It wasn't an amazing house. It was a perfectly normal house that family of five lived in. There wasn't anything sick, but it was a nice house in a good area. That house they sold not too long ago for $3.8 million. - Whoa. Good for them. - Yeah, good for them. But then they had to buy another house that they live in. And like again, like it's not, but it's not sick. It just speaks to like Toronto real estate and like the comfort. - Appreciation though, hold on. That you need to earn here. And so like I've sold a company. I've been an early shareholder of a company. I still can't afford that house. And we all want to be a little bit better and a little bit more comfortable than what we were when we grew up, right? - So true. - You don't want to be worse than when you grew up for the family that you're going to build. - Yeah, true. - So my north star goal is by like floor that I need to hit. And I'm 40 right now. So maybe I'm like a little bit behind there is I just want to at least be able to afford the house that I grew up in and raised again. - Oh, that's cool. - In that house at a degree of comfort. That at a degree of comfort. So that's my goal Shane. - I love that. That's a cool. - Hopefully, hopefully Gigi can take us there and well beyond that, but at least that's my goal. - That's a killer way to end the podcast. Adam, thank you so much. We have a come on the show, man. I hope for you. It was great to have you on. - Take care. - See you man. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)