Episode 26: Cookies, Compliance, & User Control – Building A Privacy-First Digital Experience

Explore the intricate world of digital privacy with John Pestana, CEO at ObservePoint, from debunking common cookie misconceptions to advocating for user control over personal data. John highlights ObservePoint’s compliant web governance solution, while sharing compelling insights from his entrepreneurial journey, revealing how empathy and generosity have shaped his business approach. You’ll also hear his forward-looking perspective on AI’s role in digital marketing and enhancing consumer privacy protection.

Listen now for a thought-provoking episode that bridges the gap between technological innovation, business ethics, and the future of digital privacy.

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The Misunderstood Role of Cookies

Aaron Burnett: Let’s start with digital privacy. We focus on healthcare and MedTech. ObservePoint offers tremendous value for folks in those industries. Let’s start here. What do people get wrong or misunderstand about the current state of digital privacy and the role that cookies or cookie deprecation and in particular third-party cookie deprecation plays in that? What value do they think they’re getting and what’s actually happening?

John Pestana: This is a complicated question I think for a lot of people. They’re not technical enough to really understand what’s happening, just in the overall internet and how it functions and like what role do cookies play in the internet. It’s actually been a little bit of a pet peeve of mine, this concept of cookies. Because you hear everybody making cookies the villain in a lot of ways when it comes around privacy. But in its simplest form, a cookie is just how you maintain state with a person, right? So as you visit a website it’s this file that allows the server to maintain state with you and keep track of that.

It’s showing you the right things, for example they could do it server-side in some ways too, but like typically, that’s how Delta knows that you’re logged in, and that you’re actually looking at a flight or something like that. And then that you’re not logged in. And the way that those were originally designed by the architects of the internet, they actually wanted there to be first-party and third-party cookies that you very clearly could see who is interacting with you. And we’ve gotten to this state here with the privacy world where the cookie has become the villain instead of what somebody’s doing with maintaining state. And so when we’re seeing a lot of people move to what they’re calling server-side, which is actually scarier because now you have no idea who you’re actually interacting with.

Where when the cookie is more embraced, you at least see who’s third-party, who’s first-party. Now, obviously a lot, we have a lot of politicians and a lot of people around the world who are making rules about these things, and they don’t even understand the technical aspects of what I think feel sometimes they’re making rules about.

It’s always worried me as we’ve seen cookies and stuff being villainized. And people switching to server-side because I’m like, as a consumer myself, I’m like, now I don’t even know where my data’s going at all. Because it’s all now happening behind the scenes, like for example, you could have a universal tag that’s like collecting all the data and then behind the scenes start sending it off to all these different vendors and you actually have no idea that’s happening.

And at least if you go to a website, and let’s say there’s all these different technologies on the website, 30 different technologies, and if they’re setting 30 different cookies, you at least know who you’re interacting with and you potentially could have a cookie blocker or other things that could stop that, or in the privacy setting to be able to control each of the things that are happening. So it’s a complicated, I guess in some ways technical mess. And I think we’ve gone through that just because of the maturity of the internet too. When I first started, you maybe have a couple different third-party technologies that were implemented on a website, and now, at least here at ObservePoint on average, if we visit a page, we probably on average see 30-40 different technologies on that page.

Client-Side Tracking vs. Server-Side Tracking

Aaron: You’ve got client-side, third-party cookies where the control is in the hands of the user to the extent that they have a cookie block or an ad blocker, that sort of thing. Or they adjust their browser settings to block third-party cookies. You have server-side tracking where you could ostensibly indicate whether you want to be tracked or not through cookie consent. The interesting thing there, and the cautionary thing is now the onus is on the operator to comply with what you asked them to do. And then there’s a third state as well, which is, forget all that, we’re just going to use digital fingerprinting.

John: Yeah, true server-side. Because the right, a lot of the server-side that people talk about is actually still a pixel. It’s still running on the client. Where true server-side is like where nothing is ever loaded onto the person system.

Aaron: Yeah. In which case the user has absolutely no say in whether they’re tracked or not.

John: People started misusing cookies obviously early on to try and do digital marketing and try and cross domains. That was the whole purpose was to try and identify did somebody like go from this website and then over to this other website to make a purchase or do whatever. And unfortunately, I think because so many people just got sick of seeing lots of ads. They got sick of a lot of emails and they just associate that with, oh, there must be all these cookies. There must be all these websites that are like creating all this noise for me.

ObservePoint’s Role in Website Governance

Aaron: So what role does ObservePoint play in this ecosystem?

John: Yeah, ObservePoint is an interesting role because in a nutshell, ObservePoint is a web scanner that analyzes a website and looks for any issues that maybe are going on and that can relate to technologies that are implemented, privacy, compliance type issues, security issues around JavaScripts and things like that to even content that’s on your website.

If you wanted to know, did my new marketing tagline get put across all my content on a website and we see ourselves as a monitoring tool to help companies keep track of that. Because if you think about a website, it is a very complicated organism, right? It’s updating, it’s changing all the time. Most big companies have tens if not even a hundred teams that are sitting there measuring, monitoring, changing, updating. Like I always laugh when somebody says, oh no, we only update our website like every other week. I’m like, no, your website is getting something pushed to it every single day by somebody, right?

And we’re there to help try and keep track of that because there is no one source of truth. Typically even a website is comprised of many different websites that just look like one website. And if you went to let’s say you were the CTO of a company and you went to your team and you said, “Hey, is Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics implemented across all the websites that we have?” That would be a monumental task for them. They’d be like, I don’t know. I need to call a hundred team leaders and I need to check all this stuff. Where ObservePoint will scan through the whole website, create this single database that has all that information in it, and we’re always updating it on where you could ask that question and we could just tell you just like that, oh, all these URLs have this version of Adobe Analytics.

These URLs have old versions that need to be updated, that aren’t maybe following certain standards that we’ve set across the organization. We kind of I always say we tell you what the heck’s going on your website. Where analytics, let’s say like an analytics package tells you what your users are doing. ObservePoint tells you what your website’s doing to your users.

The Compliance Challenge in Healthcare and MedTech

Aaron: So you mentioned compliance. Of course compliance is critical in healthcare and MedTech. How often, if at all, when you take on a new client, do you find that their website is compliant from a privacy perspective?

John: They’re never compliant. We’ve never had a website that’s been compliant.

Aaron: What are typical problems or violations that you see?

John: It’s simple things. And the problem is that there’s just too many hands in the cookie jar that are dealing with stuff. So they just don’t know what’s going on. It could be that their policy typically what it is, I’d say most common thing is that their privacy policy and their consent management systems are not doing what they say they’re going to do. So like they’ll, when they opt out of certain cookies and certain tech, it actually doesn’t do what they said. If that makes sense. It might shut off certain tech but missed some other like analytics package or something like that they didn’t know or some ad server or things like that.

A Practical Approach to Data Privacy Protection

Aaron: Given the intent behind privacy regulations and I think agreed criticality of protecting certain information. Again, particularly in healthcare, in MedTech, when you’re dealing with protected health information, I think we can all agree that shouldn’t be shared. There are reasons to have more stringent privacy regulations there, given the overall shift toward privacy first marketing and regulations, what do you think is a rational and practical approach to protecting consumer privacy and data privacy?

John: For me, it, at least, this is just my personal opinion, right? It’s around control and just making sure that you as a consumer can have control and you can see where your information’s going. Let me give you a great example because we I think laugh about like emails. You get all this spam email and we all know it’s a joke. If you unsubscribe maybe it’s going to work. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this. I’ve spent days before just unsubscribing to everything that’s in my inbox, and somehow I still keep getting all this junk email from people.

Aaron: Oh yeah. I’ve paid for services to do that for me.

John: Yeah. And we wish we had more control over those things. We wish we knew. I always laugh when I get one, especially where it’s thanks for subscribing. I’m like, I never subscribed to your thing. And I as a, when you look at like companies though. We want to be able to if we click on a newsletter, we want to have more options. We want to be able to say, I don’t want to totally unsubscribe, but I don’t want you to email me twice a day. So if you’re giving me the option of two emails a day versus no emails, I’m just going to pick the no emails.

But I probably would’ve said, “Hey, I’m okay with you sending me something quarterly,” and options like that. And so I think that control is what we’re all longing for. We’re wanting to be able to control how you use our information. How often you reach out to us, are you sharing that information with anybody else? It’s a pet peeve of mine when I go to a website and they’re like, oh, and I also have the right to share it with all of our preferred partners. It’s who are all these people that you’re giving my information to? We all know all of our information’s all out there. It’s probably rare for most people to not have their information out there into the internet verse. And we, I think, are longing for control mainly. So we just don’t get spammed as much, so we just aren’t feeling the weight and our inboxes and on our text messages and phone calls to us and things like that. It’s become so inexpensive for somebody just to reach out to us. At least when somebody used to have to mail us something, they had to stick a stamp on it. And it costs them a little bit of money. Now, how often do you see some person, they’re like, “Oh yeah, I just sent that email out to 24 million people.” You’re like, what?

From Website Building to Analytics: The Omniture Story

Aaron: Yeah. I know that your adult life began with a mission. And I’m curious to know to what extent a sense of mission has been a through line in your professional life.

John: Yeah. Because I grew up Mormon, and I served a mission in Brazil, there are a lot of great things that come of that – when you’re 19 years old and you go off on an adventure, right? And you’re learning how to talk to people, communicate honestly in some ways sell. I was in some ways selling religion and service and all these kind of things. And it definitely helps build discipline in me early on in my life to learn how to manage a calendar and follow up on things. I’ve definitely also always just been overall mission driven. Like you’re talking about I get my sight set on something that I want to do, and I’m very good at pushing forward with it and completing that.

It’s interesting because my first company became a company called Omniture. Originally it was called JP Interactive and then eventually became called Omniture and it is an interesting how I got there because I had this mission of just wanting to take care of my customers and we were building websites for people actually, way back in the day. I built one of ancestry dot com’s first website, a bank here in Utah called Zions Bank. I built their first website and as I was building these websites, I’d have these customers ask me, oh, how do I even know somebody’s visiting us? And this is back in like 1996, and I would be like, honestly, I’m not sure. Then I started looking into if you remember, there was a server-side log program called Analog. There were web trends that just been getting started. And it’s funny, that mission of just wanting to really take care of people is what drove us into building a big analytics package right with Omniture was because we wanted to take care of these customers and help them understand who’s visiting their websites. Which is how I even then got into ObservePoint because my biggest problem at Omniture was actually keeping the code implemented properly across the large website so they could trust all the data that they were looking at.

And it was just so difficult, if we ever had a customer who called and said, you guys are broken, things aren’t working. 99.9% of the time, it was actually their own teams somehow took code off of the websites or pushed a new release and forgot to do something and then they’d ruin all their metrics.

Aaron: You mentioned something there. You mentioned that you’re very focused and I’ve heard you allude to hyper focus and your power of hyper hyperfocus. So tell me what role hyperfocus has played in your life and what makes it a superpower and what can make it a challenge.

John: Yeah, I mean I’m definitely a tiny bit ADD, which is interesting because lots of times that’s associated with people not being able to finish tasks, which isn’t my problem.

Aaron: It goes with entrepreneurship though.

John: Yeah. No, totally. And, but I think because I’m so empathetic to people and customers, it’s like I’m just interested in making them happy and that’s what I like to hyper focus then on I could be honestly doing any business and I’d feel the same way. It wouldn’t matter if I was selling them socks, I would just build the best socks I possibly could. I think hyper-focused though can be just so powerful. At least for me because I will work more than most people because I’m really having fun and I’m enjoying it. It’s not uncommon for me to put in an 18-hour day just because I am hyper focused on whatever it’s, I’m wanting to fix for people.

And I think that speed that comes from that hyper focus, just creates great experiences for people, even though sometimes it can be taxing on me. And I will say one thing that happens for me, Aaron, is that all focus like that, and then I just need to take three days off. And I’ll just go disappear. My big, my go-to, for anybody else who’s listening, I love golfing. So like I’ll fly down to Palm Springs and just golf for three days, to, and then go right back into where I was.

Aaron: On a related note, I’ve also heard you describe your focus on being a people pleaser.

John: Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron: And I can absolutely see how that really works in ensuring that customers, clients are delighted. Yeah. That’s a great, that’s a great instinct for a CEO to have. I am aware though that also can be a real challenge in managing people leading teams. Can you talk a little bit about that?

John: For sure. And I always joke that like when I need to let somebody go because they’re not that great of fit, I always keep somebody six months too long. And it’s just something I’ve accepted out of myself because I want to give them chances and I want to work with them and I want to make them better. And I think in some ways that’s a noble quality too, right? But yeah, I’d say on average I keep somebody three to six months longer than I should, just because I am a pleaser and I want to be kind and I want all these other things. I think my, so my old business partner Josh James, he’s the CEO of a company called Domo now. We were, I think, a really great partnership because I’m such a pleaser and I love doing product and I love building, and he’s a very kind person too, so don’t take this as kind, but he definitely was way better at making some decisions faster about we need to change this person, or we need to do this, and we, it made us a great team. It’s actually when I do talk to people about just entrepreneurship, I think finding somebody that compliments you, it’s like you have your strengths and they have their strengths can be a very powerful combination and helping you be successful.

Aaron: The key is to hire for the thing you’re not good at. That’s right.

John: A lot of people are afraid to get people who are even better than them in things because they think somehow that’s going to make them, I don’t know, potentially get fired or things like that. But I’ve only ever seen like the people who hire are great, only keep getting promoted because they just know they’re going to put together a killer team.

The Power of Generosity in Business

Aaron: It makes everybody’s life better and it makes the outcome so much better. And it’s magic when you hire people like that. So I went to ObservePoint EDGE a few months ago, and I was struck by how different EDGE was to other partner conferences that I’ve been to. My sense was that there was a spirit of generosity at work there that it was a conference being put on by somebody who really likes to show people a nice time for the sake of showing them a nice time without the other handout twisting their arm and asking for something in return. And I’m curious to know what role generosity has played in your success throughout your career.

John: I do feel like I’m a very generous person, just in general. I think if you talk to any of my friends and peers, they would all say that’s a quality of mine. I just like to make sure that people feel like they’re getting tremendous value. So when I talk to even my own executive team here at ObservePoint, and let’s say we’re even talking about something about pricing or something like that, one of the things I’ll always tell them is say, I want their us, our customers to feel tremendous value.

So if I am giving, let’s say they feel like they’re getting a hundred percent, for me, I want to feel like I’m charging them 80% of whatever that a hundred percent was. So they always just feel like they’re getting a little more than really what they’re, what the, what they’re paying for. I just think it’s a healthy place to be and I want us to feel the same way too. I actually want us to feel like we’re getting good money for what we’re doing because you can actually get some weird things happening in your company. If the company doesn’t feel like they’re being compensated properly for all the work that we’re doing, like where you can actually have them start ignoring customers and stuff because they’re like, “Ah, they’re not even really paying us,” or comments like that.

I just kind of try and live my whole life that way where somebody just feels like they’re kind of getting that 110%, out of everything that I’m doing for them. And if you think about, if you go to a restaurant and you just like the food, but it feels a little overpriced, it’s not like you’re going to write some great review. You’ll be like, “Ah, the food was good, but it’s a little overpriced.” But when you go to a place and you feel like you got crazy, amazing food for a reasonable price, you start telling all your friends like, “Oh my gosh, I went to this restaurant. It was so good,” and not only was it so good, it was like reasonably priced, right? Because we live by word of mouth, we live by somebody telling a friend to come and work and do business with you. And I think that same approach, even honestly for even an employee, right?

So if you’re even a team member in a company, you want that company to feel like, wow, out of John I get X, Y, Z and I feel like I’m underpaying him, for what I’m getting. And I think that’s a part of being generous, like you’re just doing that little bit extra.

Aaron: It’s also a characteristic where if you’re living with integrity, if you’re generous in your personal life, then you’ll be generous in your professional life as well.

John: A funny little story about this. I was a Boy Scout. I’m an Eagle Scout and I’ve always really liked the Boy Scouts. I was walking around my neighborhood trying to collect money donations for the Boy Scouts for my local troop. And I’m like knocking on doors. And I was just really shocked at how hard it was to get somebody to give $5 to the Boy Scouts, that’s actually all I was. I said, Hey, could you give five to $20 to help your local Boy Scout troop here? And I realize everybody has their own causes. Everybody has all these little things. But it’s funny how hard that was. And the reason I think it surprised me because I actually have always taken the opposite approach.

Every time I’ve had somebody knock on my door, I’m that guy who gives them a hundred bucks or 500 bucks, even when I actually didn’t make great money, I just if it was any kind of cause that even spoke to me about my neighborhood, about my community I was in, and because I think the more we live life with a like a heart of generosity. It just makes everything in the world better. And I laugh at the people who think they’re being generous, I’ll get a tiny bit political, but when they feel like they’re being generous because they’re voting for the government to do something.

Because in my mind the government only got that by taking it from somebody, not voluntarily. And you’re only actually generous when you’re doing something yourself, when you’re actually taking something that you, your productivity and done something. And giving it to others when you have agency and the cost is associated with your decision.

The Entrepreneur’s Superpower

Aaron: You’re a serial entrepreneur and you’ve been very successful. I’ve never even made cereal. No. What is your superpower? What is the thing that you’ve been able to do that is able you to be consistently successful?

John: I do think a lot of things we just talked about are some of my superpowers, like my empathy. I’m actually crazy good at putting myself in somebody’s shoes and being able to feel like I understand the processes that they’re going through. And just diving into that, somebody will tell me, Hey, go look at the website and see if you can find any bugs. I’ll find bugs like within five seconds. And I’m like, how did you guys not see these things? And it’s because so many people struggle to really put their mindsets into I’m a new user. What would the new user think and what would they feel?

That’s always come really easy for me. I’m a CEO now, but I really come out of that product mindset. I’m just idea guy. I write a lot of music too. I just love coming up with ideas. And I think that helps, especially in the software world of being that creative person who just wants to solve problems for people, right? And that’s, I think, what’s led my whole entrepreneurial journey. It’s how I’m even here at ObservePoint, because you know that problem of trying to keep a customer implemented at Omniture. Then transition to, oh, we could write a system that could help with that. I actually, believe it or not, never worked for somebody, with the exception of a few, like little high school jobs. I did work for other people for the first few years of my career. I haven’t for about the last 20.

It’s funny when I talked to entrepreneurs, like in entrepreneurship classes at colleges and stuff like that, I always tell them, everybody’s an entrepreneur. You’re just deciding if you want to have one customer or if you want to have lots of customers. So if you go work for somebody, you’ve decided you just want one customer and you better make that one customer happy, otherwise, you get terminated. What’s nice is when you’re an entrepreneur and you have hundreds of customers, like I do get fired every year a couple of our customers leave and most times there’s nothing I can do about it. But it’s not that big of a deal because I have hundreds of other customers who are still happy.

Aaron: I have daughters, and one is a teenager and another is about to turn 21. And I have similar conversations with them. And what I talk with them about is you’re deciding what sort of risk you’re comfortable with, what will you accept? Is it the risk of working for someone else directly or is it the risk of entrepreneurship where maybe you have different or greater agency? And there are definitely a lot of people who aren’t built for it, they just, they just want their nine to five and just have some super stability.

So you co-founded Omniture. Omniture was acquired by Adobe and became Adobe Analytics. When they acquired Omniture, it was for $1.8 billion, I believe?

John: Yep. That’s right.

Aaron: So you became very wealthy in that transaction. What surprised you in the aftermath? How was that experience achieving that level of wealth? Better. What difference did it make for the good that surprised you and what did it not do?

John: From the time that I really had money, I remember the first time I had just like $10 million deposited into my bank account. One thing you do quickly realize is money doesn’t bring happiness. Money doesn’t solve any family problems. If anything, I think having money sometimes makes people less empathetic to you because they for some reason have this weird thought that money does solve problems. And so you, your mom can die and they just think because you have money somehow, everything’s fine. I don’t know, it’s just, it’s this weird dynamic.

I do think money also complicates your life from the standpoint you get way more people asking you for stuff. And me being, you know me, it’s really hard to say no to a lot of people and and I have learned over, especially, because I’ve had, I, a lot of wealth now for, what, 17 years or something like that. And it’s never helped anybody. Normally when I’ve given money to people because they didn’t have the frameworks and the disciplines to like even know what to do. You just solved their problem for the minute, but then they just dig themselves right back into some hole. Like the teaching somebody to fish.

It’s like actually. When I look at my charity works that I’m doing, I’m always trying to do stuff that’s really educating people and helping them versus just lots of handouts to somebody because it doesn’t normally solve the problem. So that’s another thing that I think was interesting to me, that it’s actually harder to shape and help the world than what you would think it would be. Yeah, I definitely also learned it’s hard to do it again, here now I’ve only been CEO at ObservePoint for the last five years, but I helped co-found ObservePoint with a gentleman named Rob Seolas. And ObservePoint now has been around like 17 years or something like that.

Which I only did Omniture for 13 years and I think we’d be a little farther along if I had been at the helm since the very beginning. But it’s really hard to put the lightning in a bottle like at Omniture. We were like the fastest growing tech company that happened at the time. I think we were the second biggest IPO of 2006. Like we were growing at a hundred percent every single year that we for, for six years and I’m talking in the hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, right? Still doubling and that’s a pretty special place to be you know where observed point, we’re a good sized company now and we’re profitable and we make money, which is a great place to be.

I don’t have to go out and raise money and do stuff like that, we’re not seeing a hundred percent growth type numbers. We’re not even seeing 50% growth numbers. We’re happy in a year when we’re growing 10, 15% right now, sure. If anything, it’s also been interesting to try and, where are you finding your motivation? Because when you don’t need money anymore, like what makes you wake up, what makes you want to do stuff and I’m still a CEO and a lot of people ask me like, why are you even doing that? I’m like I’m doing it for my community. I’m doing it for all the employees here. I want to help, continue to build Utah and our ecosystem here. And that’s what drives me.

ObservePoint’s Future in the Privacy Landscape

Aaron: What’s on the horizon for ObservePoint. I look at the privacy landscape, and again, this increasing trend toward greater privacy, which means compliance is increasingly critical. It’s not an option, it’s not a nice thing. Yep. You have to do it. Do you feel like ObservePoint is, I hope you feel ObservePoint is very well timed for what’s happening in the marketplace?

John: Absolutely. Privacy is probably our number one use case meaning right now, like where we are focused, our product can be used for lots of different use cases, but we have three main areas that we’re trying to make sure we really build out in a really strong way. And one of those is privacy. But again, it’s going to be all from the scanning perspective. We actually have great partners. We want to continue to build partnerships with the one trusts of the world so that we are just a tool that they’re even using to help because we have no intentions of getting into any of the other things. Like we’re not going to go build a CMP or these type of things. We just want to be the best website scanner that there is, period. For whatever use case you have.

Aaron: You mentioned three areas that you want to build out, one of which is privacy. Do you want to mention the other two?

John: Yeah so our three main areas are tech governance. So that’s all the tags and stuff that get implemented across your website. The second is privacy compliance, and also we throw some security of stuff in there too because security is really important to a lot of people. And then the third area is just overall user experience. So broken links, landing page validation accessibility. A lot of people don’t realize actually ObservePoint has a huge accessibility scanning component to it, where we can tell you on every page, like all your accessibility violations that are happening on it too. We also collect all the site metrics, so a Google Lighthouse type thing.

We actually do that on a site wide level, so you don’t have to even do it like per page. We can tell you site wide, all of your like content paints and all that type of stuff that’s happening.

AI and Technological Innovation

Aaron: AI is obviously in the zeitgeist, has been for the last couple of years or so, and developments in that area only accelerate. It’s dizzying. It’s hard to keep up. What is your perspective on AI? To what extent are you using it personally, using it at observe point?

John: Anything that improves productivity is good for the world because that’s what helps lift everybody out of poverty is the more and more productive a human can be, the more we raise everybody out of poverty. And it can be scary for individuals at a time because they might be losing a specific job. Like when the light bulb came out, all the candle makers have to retool or do something ultimately, like the light bulb just created a better experience for the world in general. And I truly believe that about AI too.

As long as we keep it in check from becoming Terminator, right? If we can all of a sudden increase the productivity of every human on earth by a thousand-fold, that is the only way we will all have our robot bringing us a pina colada on the beach. Otherwise we have to have basically a human, bring us the pina colada on the beach. And a lot of people actually think when they say stuff like but we people have to have jobs. I don’t know. I don’t know what that future holds. Do we live in some utopian future where you just do the things you want to do? You go hiking, you create music, you do whatever it is that you feel like doing.

I don’t know what that looks like. But I do know more productivity the better. If Aaron, if you and I were the only two people on the planet and I came to you and I said, Aaron, I just invented something that makes it so we never have to do anything again. You would just be like that is amazing. Let’s do this. Sure. But because I think of politicians and a lot of politics, we worry what the overlords are going to tell us. If all of a sudden they do go, wait, I don’t need humans anymore. Let’s commit mass genocide or something, right? If Pharaoh didn’t need the Egyptians to build the pyramids, what would he have done?

I don’t know. So I think that’s that fear. You don’t really know. We have the fear of the AI itself. We have the fear of the people in power, but ultimately, if we can do it with that gratitude that we talked about before, and with empathy for humans, we should be able to provide it for everybody. It’s the only way that we’ll be able to provide healthcare for everybody in the world because we can’t enslave everybody to become doctors. But we could, through AIs and robotics and all that, all of a sudden have doctors for, imagine if you even had your own personal doctor who was in your closet, right? And it was an Omniture bot because an Omniture bot can know everything about everything in the world. That’s an interesting kind of world to put your yourself into. So I’m excited for it.

We’re definitely using AI here at ObservePoint. We haven’t integrated it a ton into our products yet. We’ve been using it a lot of our customer support. The place we are looking at it. We have a couple places that we are, we’ve done prototypes in our product, but we haven’t actually implemented it out to any customer bases yet.

Aaron: One of the things that I wonder about AI, which is less catastrophic than the scenarios that you were describing, but still an existential risk, is that it’s already true. Certainly in digital marketing, that AI can do the work of an analyst, a junior strategist, anything that is a process driven role. AI can do. And we use it to do some of that work. Like you, we don’t yet use it for client deliverables, but we use it to accelerate things internally. So the thing that I that puzzles me that I wonder about even over the next three or four or five years is, okay, so we’ve replaced the junior level folks with AI. What really counts now is deep expertise, years of experience. Don’t cultivate years of experience if you don’t first bring on junior level people and give them lots of at bats to do the mundane and learn all the way up. And so I do wonder what the outcome will be of that. I think there’ll be an uncomfortable interstitial period.

John: Yeah. I don’t know what it’s going to be either. I look, you, I think you have people who do it two ways. You look at it with hope or you look at it with fear. And I just feel like all of it has only made things better so far. Are you familiar with the AI Suno? Yes. I love it. It’s so fun. And I’m a songwriter, so you can go on my Spotify, listen to my music. I write tons of music. I’ve found it so fun and it makes everybody now a songwriter, right? You could, today, you could go and write a song for your wife for her birthday, and it’ll be really good. Like you would’ve had to pay thousands of dollars to make this song that costs you nothing now.

To me, that’s just good for humanity. And I’ve used Midjourney for tons of images that I would’ve had to pay some digital artists to do, but now everybody’s an artist, right? It flattens the world that everybody can do these things. It’s super exciting.

Aaron: I find it really exciting, and I’m optimistic. Yeah. There are just these things that, I wonder how that’s going to turn out.

John: Honestly, Aaron, though, we might become so productive that there really is even, almost no need for money or these other things. You might enter that Star Trek experience where if it, if the cost of doing all these things is almost zero, because we have so much tech, so much robots doing these things, you might be able to drive your car for, a car costs a dollar to buy.

Aaron: I think, yeah, it’s an interesting world to consider.

John: Yeah.

Advice for New Entrepreneurs

Aaron: A related question, and I think I know the answer, but I’ll ask the question anyway. If you were at the beginning of your career, you were a fresh entrepreneur, what would you be doing?

John: That’s a hard one. It’s funny, I used to talk about tech all the time. But I do wonder with all the AIs and stuff, like how many like software companies, although I am excited about could you build a software company with AI, a really amazing one with only five to 10 people. If you think about when Omniture started, there were years that we were buying like $30 million in just servers. No startup has to do that today. They just go get AWS and they just work their way into it. So it’s a cool time, like as a entrepreneur where you can go and start a company, build software, do all these things, and have no costs upfront for you.

I definitely think there’s a lot of opportunity still in tech, like a software, especially if you’re just building systems for a lot of older school companies like, let’s say you build software for plumbing stores or something like that, just pick some niche and try and do really great at that. I do think anything in AI is interesting, even if it’s just the extension of AI where you’re not necessarily developing AI, but you’re just helping companies understand how to use AI and implement it into their businesses. I actually have my executives, so I’ve challenged them to take one day a month, full day, every month to just focus on what are the newest AI stuff that’s come out and how can it be applied to their departments.

Aaron: I think that’s wise. You have to do what you love.

John: And if your favorite thing is to actually even do hand labor, I think yeah. Start a construction company. Do whatever, just make yourself valuable and productive.

Aaron: John, I’ve really enjoyed talking with you. Thank you. Thanks for taking the time.

John: Yeah. And hopefully I’ll see you out here in Utah again.

Aaron: You definitely will.