In this episode of Software Spotlight, host Michael Bernzweig interviews Hunter Jensen, founder and CEO of Barefoot Solutions. They discuss Hunter's journey from freelance PHP developer to leading a custom software development company that has evolved to focus on AI and data science. The conversation highlights the introduction of Compass, a new AI solution designed for businesses handling confidential information, and explores its potential applications across various industries. Hunter shares insights on market needs, product development, and the importance of client engagement in creating effective solutions. The discussion also touches on the challenges of data governance and the exciting future trends in technology, including AI, quantum computing, and nuclear fusion.
In this episode of Software Spotlight, host Michael Bernzweig interviews Hunter Jensen, founder and CEO of Barefoot Solutions. They discuss Hunter's journey from freelance PHP developer to leading a custom software development company that has evolved to focus on AI and data science. The conversation highlights the introduction of Compass, a new AI solution designed for businesses handling confidential information, and explores its potential applications across various industries. Hunter shares insights on market needs, product development, and the importance of client engagement in creating effective solutions. The discussion also touches on the challenges of data governance and the exciting future trends in technology, including AI, quantum computing, and nuclear fusion.
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Michael Bernzweig (00:02.233)
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I'd like to welcome everyone to this week's edition of the Software Spotlight. I'm your host, Michael Bernzweig, the founder of Software Oasis. And this week we're joined live by Hunter Jensen. He's the founder and CEO of Barefoot Solutions. And with that, Hunter, welcome to the Software Spotlight.
Hunter Jensen (00:25.634)
Thanks so much for having me, Michael.
Michael Bernzweig (00:27.449)
Yeah, no, thrilled to have you here. And I see that we have quite a few questions that came in from the audience, but I really wanted to, for anyone that may not be familiar with either yourself or Barefoot, give them a little bit of your backstory and in your own words, if you could kind of share how you got to where you are and a little bit of what's going on over there at Barefoot.
Hunter Jensen (00:54.05)
Yeah, happy to, happy to. So my professional journey really started when I was in college. was picking up freelance, PHP, dev jobs on Craigslist to help pay my tuition and graduated and moved out here to San Diego and kind of officially formed Barefoot Solutions at that time. Primarily we're a custom software development shop.
which is what we've been for the duration. But we've gone through many iterations over those years. We started off building WordPress websites, right? This is back in 2004, 2005 timeframe. We got into mobile app development very, very early on. I think we were one of the first hundred apps in the App Store once it launched.
Michael Bernzweig (01:38.01)
Sure.
Hunter Jensen (01:49.87)
And that fueled our growth big time for years. Then we started really focusing in on the internet of things and connected devices and medical devices and that kind of thing. Then we focused on blockchain and crypto for a while while it was hot and everybody was talking about it. And then most recently, our focus has really been a lot about data science and AI.
Michael Bernzweig (02:11.871)
Thank you.
Hunter Jensen (02:18.776)
You know, the world, everyone's talking about generative AI right now, but you know, we've been doing machine learning for almost a decade. and so that has been, a big part of our business and it's a big area of growth, for us right now. you know, we work with, big enterprise like Microsoft and Salesforce and Samsung. We worked with, venture funded startups, which is a lot of fun, but not necessarily the most reliable.
Michael Bernzweig (02:25.2)
Sure.
Hunter Jensen (02:48.928)
And then most of the work we do is with medium-sized businesses, building out kind of custom software solutions for them. Most recently, we've identified a need in the market and are in the transition from being a services company to having a product and being a product plus services company, the likes of, yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (02:48.976)
Sure.
Michael Bernzweig (03:14.925)
neat.
Hunter Jensen (03:16.622)
We're modeling it off of maybe Palantir or SAP where it's not just a standalone SaaS product, but rather it's something that needs to be configured and customized for businesses.
Michael Bernzweig (03:32.057)
Okay, and it sounds like that that would lend itself to both ends of what you're doing because at the end of the day, it sounds like it's been a journey. But you know, if you've been doing consulting all these years, obviously, more technical solution does require a bit of consulting for clients to see see benefit from it. So it sounds like you've got something that kind of bridges the gap. What is the new solution? What's it called? And what does it do?
Hunter Jensen (03:56.195)
that.
Hunter Jensen (03:59.756)
Yeah, it's Compass. And I'll give you a little bit of the backstory. So the product is focused on companies that are dealing with a lot of confidential information. They may have proprietary confidential client information or their own in-house documentation and data stores. And they want to be able to leverage large language models.
Michael Bernzweig (04:03.344)
Okay.
Hunter Jensen (04:28.082)
like ChatChip BT, but they can't because they can't go and upload confidential client information into these third party LLM platforms. It's too risky for them to risk leaking that kind of information. And so a lot of companies are getting left behind. And so we were hired by a firm to build something for them on their infrastructure.
Michael Bernzweig (04:43.536)
Thank
Hunter Jensen (04:57.516)
with an open source LLM and a rag database. So they could connect to all their unique data sources and set up proprietary processes that are unique to their workflows and do it all safely in the confines of their cloud infrastructure, or even in some cases on premise for these customers. so we were going to build them a custom solution because that's what we do at Barefoot is we build custom software, right? But then I start reading about Goldman Sachs and they
Michael Bernzweig (05:21.2)
Sure.
Hunter Jensen (05:26.434)
They just rolled out in January what they're calling GS AI, which is the same thing for Goldman Sachs. And then I learned that BAE Systems, a major defense contractor has just rolled out a very similar thing for themselves internally. And I start thinking, and I realized, man, a lot of businesses need this. They need a safe, secure way to leverage generative AI for their employees. Because if they're not,
Michael Bernzweig (05:48.399)
Right.
Hunter Jensen (05:55.362)
Their employees are doing it anyway, and it puts them at great risk, right? And so we have to give them tools to boost their efficiency and productivity.
Michael Bernzweig (05:58.243)
Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (06:04.814)
Isn't that funny what you just said there? Their employees are doing it anyway and it's so true.
Hunter Jensen (06:09.44)
Yeah, it's absolutely true. I've been asking business leaders what their AI governance policy is, and they just kind of look at me sideways like, what is that? Right? It's still kind of the wild, wild west and people are feeling left behind if they can't use these things. Because if you're in sales and marketing, you're using them all day and it's fine because you're not really dealing with a ton of confidential information.
You know, when you're a wealth advisor or, you know, an accountant or, you know, a defense contractor, can't. And so that's, you know, that's where this comes in, right. Is, building a proprietary on premise, meet normally meaning on cloud and on the client's cloud infrastructure, and heavily customized AI assistant and agent. it's a platform.
It's an AI operating system for these businesses and it will include all sorts of different use cases, right? Maybe it's for a law firm and one of the use cases is for drafting contracts or one of the others is for reviewing contracts and marking them up. it's for a defense contractor and it's using prior, you know, RFPs and proposals they've written to generate content for new ones, right? It's the, it's.
And then it connects to their various SaaS systems as well, right? For any of these firms, maybe there's an HR bot that just helps answer HR questions, right? And it knows everybody's policies and it knows all of their standard operating procedures and their HR policies and can help make HR departments more efficient. And so, a lot of people right now are thinking about AI as like,
Michael Bernzweig (07:41.658)
Yeah.
Sure.
Hunter Jensen (08:02.866)
use case specific and they're pulling in this tool for this and pulling in that tool for that. And I don't think that's the right way to do it. I think you need to think about deploying it across your organization and having a platform just like an ERP, but for AI that works across your organization and integrates with all your various tools. So when I realized this, I go back to this client and I say, how about instead of building you a custom solution,
And giving you the IP, we will do it for a license and we keep the IP so that we can go bring this to other companies. And they, they said, that's great. We, all we were going to do is use it. weren't thinking of it as product and that'll be less expensive for us. So let's do it.
Michael Bernzweig (08:43.578)
Sure. And then you're maintaining it for them and upgrading it and consistently bringing aboard new enhancements.
Hunter Jensen (08:50.35)
Exactly. Right. Rather than them having to fund new development every year as new things come out, it will just get better over time and they'll just be paying the same licensing fee. Right. And so it's a much better model for them and it created this great opportunity for us at Barefoot. So that's, that's how Compass was born. we have,
law firms, pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, wealth advisors, investment banks have all raised their hand and said, yes, this is something that we want. This is something that we'd like. And so we're at the finishing stages of V1 and product development. And then we'll be rolling it out to our first customer by the end of June.
Michael Bernzweig (09:38.031)
That's really exciting. And you know, it's amazing when, you know, you explore and find a need in a way like you did, because it in some way helps you validate that there is an opportunity. But the reality of it is the best ideas in the world and initial
you know, interest is great, but once you roll it out and you have other organizations putting their money on the dotted line, that's when you know you really have something that is going to be viable long-term. But it sounds like there is a market need. It sounds like a huge, total addressable market that the opportunity is aimed at. And at the end of the day, I think it sounds like something that you'll be able to...
you know, help a lot of organizations out in a very, you know, specific way.
Hunter Jensen (10:38.39)
Yeah, we think the total addressable market is massive. Did you know there's 450,000 law firms alone in the US? And that's just a single vertical. an important focus in that regard for us is we're going after the mid-market. This is not an enterprise solution, right? These companies that I rattled off before, they have the resources to deploy.
Michael Bernzweig (10:55.918)
Okay.
Michael Bernzweig (11:01.956)
Right.
Hunter Jensen (11:06.454)
stuff like this themselves and they're doing it already. All the big ones are either have already launched or they're working on it right now. But mid-market companies, they don't have the expertise, they don't have the resources, but they do have the need. And that's where we're laser focused on companies between 10 million and 500 million in revenue is kind of the sweet spot.
Michael Bernzweig (11:09.039)
Right.
Michael Bernzweig (11:20.09)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Bernzweig (11:28.762)
So can you give an example of a specific industry and the actual application and what it would do for them? Like how it would work?
Hunter Jensen (11:37.132)
Yeah, for sure. So take for example, a defense contractor. Now a lot of what they do is, you know, reading and writing, reading RFPs and writing proposals on sam.gov. And that's a very manual process where they're dealing with a lot of Microsoft Word documents and
Michael Bernzweig (11:43.984)
Sure.
Hunter Jensen (12:03.662)
copy pasting different sections from old proposals and hey, can you remember the one we did that had, you know, required like an air gapped room? Like what was our language for that? There's a lot of that just in proposal generation for a defense contractor. And so what they can do is, you know, upload and these are all considered, what's the term, unclassified confidential information.
So there's a regulatory standard that they have to follow to protect this information. It's not secret or top secret, but it's still considered confidential. So they absolutely could not upload something like that into ChatGPT. So it allows them to upload all their past RFPs and all their past proposals into a vector database, into a retrieval-augmented generative database, and be able to ask it things like,
Hey, is in, our past proposals, is there any language in there regarding air gap rooms? And it says, yeah, in this one, here it is. Great. That just saved like two hours in, in a matter of 15 seconds. and so while they're going through and they'll say, Hey, look at this RFP for a new proposal. want to write. What are my three most relevant past proposals? Great.
Now I don't have to do that research and ask around and figure out maybe it was before my time. You know, it just supercharges the ability to generate a new proposal where it takes, it will take a fraction of the time that it used to, to write a proposal. And that's just one use case. They have a bunch of use cases, right? They had the same HR need, right? And so one of the use cases is going to be an HR bot that can help answer questions. Another is that they have to provide monthly reports.
on all their active projects and that it's a very manual rote process that doesn't need to be that way anymore. Once it's connected to their various systems, it's going to enable them to generate those reports, put a human in the loop to review always before and then send. And so we're talking about a tremendous amount of time being saved. know, another example of this is
Michael Bernzweig (14:22.668)
And I think, you know, to share with you, think those are the two most important things. If you can save somebody time or money, you know, you've got a winning solution. And it sounds like you've checked both boxes.
Hunter Jensen (14:36.182)
Yeah, what we like to say is growth without hiring. How can we make you more efficient so you can put out more proposals every year without needing more bodies? Right. That's that's at its very core. That's what this product can do. You know,
Michael Bernzweig (14:48.559)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (14:53.104)
So you're saving time, saving money, you've found a market need, you're addressing a large market that's just tremendous. Where do I invest?
Hunter Jensen (15:04.91)
Yeah, we had a law firm tell us that just with a prototype that it was saving an attorney six hours per week, six hours per week. Now, if you do the math at a big firm with hundreds and hundreds of attorneys billing at 500 bucks an hour, we're talking about a nine figure sum of savings there, right? Just six hours a week per attorney.
Michael Bernzweig (15:18.362)
Wow.
Michael Bernzweig (15:23.736)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (15:33.392)
That's the old 10x-ing the value of whatever they're spending for your solution. You got it right there.
Hunter Jensen (15:37.172)
Exactly. Exactly. It's driving tremendous value in efficiency and productivity.
Michael Bernzweig (15:43.472)
I don't know what you're doing talking to me. You needed to get back to work and get this thing to market. Yeah.
Hunter Jensen (15:46.67)
Well, thankfully I've got a wonderful team that's working very hard on it right now. And I've got my sprint planning meeting tomorrow morning and we're close to the finish line here on being able to ready to deploy it.
Michael Bernzweig (15:58.531)
Wow, that's exciting. So I feel like we skipped over a whole section of your journey. So I wanted to kind of go back to maybe some of the earlier days of Barefoot and have you give us a little more detail on how you founded the company, how things grew, how you got to where you are, a little bit more of that part of the story, because I think it's super relevant to where you are today.
Hunter Jensen (16:27.374)
It is very relevant, of course. You know, as I mentioned, we've, we've stayed relevant by staying at the forefront of technology. If we were still doing WordPress sites, like we were in 2004, I don't know that we'd still be around. And so, but you have to be careful about not diving into tech that's still on the bleeding edge because companies don't spend on technology that's on the bleeding edge. You want to.
Michael Bernzweig (16:43.642)
Yeah.
Hunter Jensen (16:56.276)
stay on the cutting edge, but stuff that's practical and production ready and enterprise ready and ready to deploy. And that's been the kind of tricky strategic bit. That's a big part of my job. You know, I was one of these guys that had the beta version of Google Glass like 15 years ago or however long that was because I was trying to figure out if AR was here yet and it wasn't and it's still kind of not.
Right. And so if we had bet big on AR VR back then that would not have played out well for us. So it's actually one of the most, one of my favorite parts of my job is that I get to tinker with new tech because it's part of me trying to figure out where the puck is going. Um, and so I grew the company as a sole owner organically, uh, just hiring folks, uh, to do things that I either I was bad at, or I didn't like doing or what have you. Um, and then in 2019, there was kind of a big.
a big inflection point where I sold the controlling interest of Barefoot to a very large software consultancy. They're global. They've got offices all over the world. think nine or 10 offices at this point based in Poland. And they've got 1500 engineers. so we have Barefoot is still kind of like a boutique type agency with
Michael Bernzweig (18:19.866)
Sure.
Hunter Jensen (18:21.708)
really long-term projects, kind of white glove service, but we've got incredible engineering horsepower behind us. If you need it, yeah, it's one of our main differentiators. And I think it's actually why we ended up doing so much work with venture funded startups. They get a check and it's go time. They need an engineering team today, right? But building that organically through hiring.
Michael Bernzweig (18:27.312)
It's very unique.
Hunter Jensen (18:47.564)
and building out all the infrastructure and how are we doing JIRA and how are we, know, that's an incredible, that takes a year if you're full speed ahead and well funded and we can provide all that like in a matter of a week or two. And that's really attractive, especially for folks that are building new product and need a full engineering team right out of the gate.
Michael Bernzweig (19:08.304)
So is that how they've grown is through our inquisition or have they, you know, what is their backstory?
Hunter Jensen (19:15.476)
Yeah, so their backstory is that they landed a single very large client and decided to rather than help them staff the engineering team, they suggested, why don't we build a company that provides us as a service and you'd be our first client, not unlike what I'm doing right now. And that's how they got started is with this one.
Michael Bernzweig (19:38.596)
Sure.
Hunter Jensen (19:44.131)
big customer, which is still a customer today, still their biggest customer today. And then they were able to pick up new clients, mostly in Europe. They're based in Warsaw, in Poland, but they have acquired a number of smaller shops like mine. The reason that they were interested is they needed, it was very hard for them to break into the US market from Poland, right?
Michael Bernzweig (20:12.452)
Yeah, it's not an easy nut to crack.
Hunter Jensen (20:14.798)
It's not, you've got a million like outsource providers, right? And so with the acquisition, they got me and my team and our relationships and the fact that we can fly places and meet them in person easily and give them an American to help coordinate everything. It makes people feel a lot more comfortable than working directly with overseas teams.
Michael Bernzweig (20:18.873)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (20:43.28)
Sure, sure.
Hunter Jensen (20:44.024)
So it was a very mutually beneficial transaction. They've been a wonderful board. still kind of my day to day is not that different, honestly, still running barefoot. But like I said, I have a lot of firepower. have a lot of access to a ton of resources and just a lot of support, which is kind of fueled this next phase of our growth.
Michael Bernzweig (21:07.49)
Yeah, that's something you don't typically have in an entrepreneurial journey.
Hunter Jensen (21:12.416)
No, it's not. You're there's, there's all it like, if you're at a startup resource scarcity is always on your mind, right? How much dry powder do we have? What's our run rate? Right. There's never enough, right. And, know, getting back to this product that we're building. And part of the reason that we're able to do it is this is my parent company, right? They're investing by.
Michael Bernzweig (21:21.168)
Yeah. Never enough time or money.
.
Hunter Jensen (21:40.334)
providing the development resources at no cost so that we can get it built. And the other part that makes us uniquely positioned to build this product and provide this is the services and customization component, right? If you're a SaaS company and you have however much money in the bank, and even if you have a hundred engineers, you don't want even a single engineer working on a one-off customization for a single client.
You just don't, you want them working on core product all the time because of the resource scarcity we talked about. But with Compass, with this product, know, companies are like snowflakes. They all have some weird data source that nobody else uses or really unique workflows and processes. It needs to be really heavily customized for that business. And so with my resources, I'm perfectly happy giving every single customer
Michael Bernzweig (22:14.799)
Right.
Hunter Jensen (22:38.316)
development resources to get this customized very specifically for them. And in a way that a traditional like SaaS company just can't do because they don't want, you know, they don't have the resources to be able to accommodate every unique business in that way. so.
Michael Bernzweig (22:53.904)
Sure. And you're building out a product that's highly relevant to a lot of niches.
Hunter Jensen (23:00.212)
Exactly, exactly. so when it, and when it's highly relevant, like, you know, they'll use it forever. They'll use it for a very long time. When it's a off the shelf SaaS, it's, it's a lot more replaceable than when it's something that's built for them.
Michael Bernzweig (23:14.146)
And the other thing I like about what you're doing, it's in the B2B space. So, you know, it's a very sticky type of customer and it's, you know, you're adding a lot of value and, if you're customizing along the way to make it fit all these different use cases, I think you're going to have clients that are going to stick with what you're doing for some time.
Hunter Jensen (23:35.736)
That's the plan. That is the plan.
Michael Bernzweig (23:37.905)
I love it. That's awesome. I guess the other, you know, and just thinking back to what you said, you know, as an entrepreneur, I think something that every entrepreneur reaches in their journey, you know, the time and money type of thing, you know, so you kind of solve that. But then the flip side of it is, you know, if you take on funding, you know, then all of a sudden you start to get diluted to the point where you probably don't own a heck of a lot of whatever the final destination is.
It really does sound like you found the best of both worlds.
Hunter Jensen (24:12.588)
Yeah. So I've been down that road, you know, in addition to running barefoot, I've been on the founding team or a fractional CTO or advisor or on the board of does literally dozens of startups. I've been involved in probably eight figures worth of capital raise in these various endeavors. And I've watched both myself and other founders just get diluted into nothing. Right. And the constant stress.
Michael Bernzweig (24:32.303)
Okay.
Hunter Jensen (24:40.726)
of trying to keep your investors happy, plus the stress of making sure you have enough money in the bank and always fundraising. So I really didn't want to do that again.
Michael Bernzweig (24:43.671)
Right.
Michael Bernzweig (24:51.534)
Yeah, the stress changes along the way. It's just different.
Hunter Jensen (24:53.806)
And so with this, I've found a way to build a product and provide an excellent service that's really, complimentary to what we're already doing in a way that it will continue to fuel the growth of barefoot solutions. It will be a new model. as AI is an existential threat to the old model of selling development hours, right?
all of sudden a development, you what used to take a hundred hours can be done in 10 or one. And so this is also future-proofing barefoot. This is the next iteration of barefoot to make sure that we're around for another 20 years.
Michael Bernzweig (25:33.146)
So what is the name of the overall organization?
Hunter Jensen (25:36.238)
So we'd formed a new company called Barefoot Labs, which is the company that Compass is being built under. And right now, that doesn't mean all that much in that we're not fundraising and it's being run by Barefoot Solutions. So it's just a new entity. But if we choose to raise funds or want to have an exit or any of those things, having it structured as a separate business seemed like the right move.
Michael Bernzweig (25:39.363)
Okay.
Michael Bernzweig (25:45.68)
Sure.
Michael Bernzweig (26:03.108)
Makes a lot of sense.
So for the development arm of the business, is that still the majority of the business or a minority or just so?
Hunter Jensen (26:15.214)
Right now software development is the very large majority of of Barefoot Solutions. Because we're in the very early stages of deploying the product. And I imagine over time that the product will overtake the revenue that we generate providing custom software services, but that'll take some time to get there.
Michael Bernzweig (26:19.193)
Okay.
Michael Bernzweig (26:26.256)
Cool.
Michael Bernzweig (26:37.274)
So who are, you know, for Barefoot in terms of clients for your consulting solutions, who are the ideal clients where you're adding the most value and they're seeing the most benefit and what types of organizations?
Hunter Jensen (26:51.552)
Yeah, I would say like lower mid-market type companies tend to see the most value. I often step in as a form of a fractional CTO at a lot of these clients. So like when they really need like technical leadership and guidance is when we can provide the most value. Like we're happy to provide development services. But that's a bit of a commodity.
Michael Bernzweig (27:12.08)
Sure.
Hunter Jensen (27:17.238)
At this point, you know, where we really shine is being able to influence strategy with clients. they, you know, they don't, they don't have a full time, you know, very strategic experience CTO, but they have a technical business and they, and they need that kind of, that level of strategy. That's, that's a great fit for.
Michael Bernzweig (27:22.48)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Bernzweig (27:38.274)
I see you're providing more than just development, is, it's an undifferentiated space. Yeah, so this really, yeah, makes sense. And.
Hunter Jensen (27:41.364)
Exactly. And then the other area, it would be a startup that just closed around.
Yeah. And if a startup just closed around, that's it. Like I mentioned before, that's a great fit for us as well. Cause we can get you your full engineering operation up and running in, in very short order.
Michael Bernzweig (28:03.81)
And for the parent organization, is that still focused mainly on development or are they also doing some SaaS solutions on that end as well?
Hunter Jensen (28:13.144)
Well, they're big enough that they've got a lot going on. They do have a few different products that, you know, they try to sell when the opportunity is right, but none that are like heavily, heavily invested in the majority of, what they're doing is, is software.
Michael Bernzweig (28:29.815)
in
Michael Bernzweig (28:34.532)
Got it. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. And same thing. Are they working with similar size clients or something very different or
Hunter Jensen (28:42.818)
They tend to work with larger clients just because of the size of their organization. They are more in the enterprise space, I would say. And so mostly it's European enterprise is the large majority of their client base, like financial services companies, automotive, medical, that type of company, telecom.
Michael Bernzweig (28:50.991)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (29:11.728)
Sure. So, so I would think, but correct me if I'm wrong, the way you would bring aboard clients for Barefoot might be different than the way in which they're bringing aboard new clients or very similar.
Hunter Jensen (29:25.25)
That's right. Yeah. So we have a completely independent sales and marketing operation here, to bring in new clients, and their, and their barefoot clients, right. And then we contract with my parent company to provide development services for those clients. While we also provide additional services like UI UX design and project management and account management, that kind of thing with, with the barefoot, with the barefoot team.
Michael Bernzweig (29:49.21)
Sure.
Got it, that makes a lot of sense. I would think with enterprise level clients, it's probably a very different onboarding process.
Hunter Jensen (29:59.566)
It is that, you know, I don't love working with enterprises. It's really slow and you go through procurement departments and it's heavily regulated often.
Michael Bernzweig (30:03.653)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (30:10.776)
And at the end of the day, you lose an enterprise level client, it's a major gut punch.
Hunter Jensen (30:16.306)
That's right. That's right. You end up with this like client concentration issues where losing one is a massive problem where we get to diversify with our client base.
Michael Bernzweig (30:28.72)
I love it, I love it. now, obviously getting a SaaS solution to market is not an overnight thing. How far are you into the journey and where do you see yourself at?
Hunter Jensen (30:41.676)
Yeah, we're pretty far along in terms of being able to deploy version one. We're looking at mid to late June. And so it's early May right now. So six weeks, we should be feature complete. And then it's a matter of how much polish do we need before we're ready to deploy this for the first customer. So we're at the tail end.
Michael Bernzweig (31:02.928)
It's so interesting because a lot of organizations come up with an idea in a vacuum, spend months or years getting it to market and then find out if it's gonna be a fit for the market. It's almost like you approached it differently where you found a need and then vetted it and then started your development.
Hunter Jensen (31:28.36)
Yeah, I mean, not only that, very much so. Yes, that is what we've done here and why I feel confident in this strategy. Cause I've talked to so many people that are like, just tell me when it's ready. And like, you know, this is a slam dunk for that. But our first customers are our design partners. They're telling us exactly what they need. Like we're showing them Figma designs and we're like, is this going to work for you? And they're saying, well, move that around. And I need this integration in this and that. I mean, talk about product market fit. Like we have our actual customers participating in the design.
thing, right? And saying we're going to buy it as soon as it's ready. like of all the startups I've been involved with, the number one biggest point of failure is product market fit. They just, go out and they build the wrong thing or they build too much or they don't know their customer very well. And so I never want to be in an endeavor that is guessing about product market fit. It's too
Michael Bernzweig (31:58.661)
Yeah.
Yeah, wow.
Michael Bernzweig (32:12.271)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (32:26.588)
Well, and it's so interesting because software Oasis actually started as a platform allowing businesses to download, license and deploy software in the early days, you know, before SaaS was even a thing. And today it's evolved into more of a community of top tier tech consulting organizations forming strategic partnerships to onboard new clients.
Hunter Jensen (32:27.406)
You risk.
Michael Bernzweig (32:54.072)
And I'll never forget a couple of conversations that are super relevant to what you just said. One organization that's in the community, they do basically help their clients with, you know.
finding product market fit and all of that. And at the end of the day, know, so a lot of research and a lot of that that goes into it ahead of time. And I'll never forget the owner of the company said, you know, the best clients that we have are the ones that come to us before they launch to find out what they need to be doing and, you know, if there's even a market and all of that. And the most challenging situations are when they come to us after they've launched and...
things aren't heading in the right direction and we have to figure out why and they've already spent all kinds of money to get to where they are. And then the other firm was in the UX space and same kind of thing. A lot of the time and effort really needs to go in upfront and into getting things to, you have to have a...
a stable group of early adopters and beta testers and individuals that are real users that can provide feedback along the way as you're iterating the product. And that's a big part of it. So it wasn't just dumb luck, huh?
Hunter Jensen (34:21.473)
It's the...
No, it was not an, ah-ha, I have a great idea kind of a thing. was very much knowing my customers, having worked with businesses like this for as long as I have, I know what they need and I know how they operate because I've been working with them closely strategically for so long. this just is so, the best ideas seem obvious. This one feels obvious.
Right?
Michael Bernzweig (34:56.336)
So I want to ask, because I know the community will have my head if I don't ask this question. So this is a question that came in from a lot of different people in different ways, but from where you sit, because obviously you've been in the space for quite a while and obviously going way back to the machine learning days. What are some of the most common, like if you were to bullet point it, maybe from the clients that you're working with.
common data governance challenges that companies are facing when they're looking to leverage AI in their existing operations. What are they running into?
Hunter Jensen (35:34.156)
Yeah, it's a big problem. The older the company, in most cases, the more work that needs to be done before they can really leverage AI well. know, it's all the same stuff, right? We have disparate systems that don't talk to each other. We have redundant data. have dirty data because the input is not being regulated well.
so it's in silos and it's not clean and it, you know, is difficult to get it all in one place. That's typically what we see, when we come into organizations that have been operating for a while, particularly if, know, they started 10, 15 years ago when technology was a lot different than it is today. we're seeing a ton of that and it's like, well, we have to clean this up first.
before we can really leverage this machine learning tool as an example. And so again, that's kind of where the consulting side of this all comes into play, right? It's like, we can help you with that. We can get your infrastructure up to date and get your data governance in place so that you can leverage all this new technology. Because right now, garbage in, garbage out, right? We need clean inputs if we want this stuff to be
powerful and effective.
Michael Bernzweig (37:03.824)
Makes a lot of sense and I'll just kind of finish on this but you know sitting where you're sitting in a very unique vantage point. What excites you about what's coming in the space over the next few years? What it's an exciting space just to begin with but...
Hunter Jensen (37:16.334)
it's so fun right now. It's so exciting right now. I read like two hours a day just to try and stay up to date with everything, how fast everything is moving. But like if I'm looking kind of ahead a little bit, I think that we're still not there on video, but we're pretty darn close to it being incredible.
Michael Bernzweig (37:30.725)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (37:45.274)
Yeah.
Hunter Jensen (37:45.518)
I'm excited about robots. Again, we're not there yet. Hardware is always slower than software, but it's coming. This one's a little out there, but I'm excited about quantum computing. We had major breakthroughs in the last six months in quantum computing, major. And it's getting a backseat in the media because of generative AI, but like that's a game changer.
Michael Bernzweig (37:53.2)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (38:03.684)
Yeah, for sure.
Hunter Jensen (38:13.71)
on a scale similar to AI, when we can crack that nut, that could bring about new levels of understanding of how physics works, literally, which has boggled the greatest minds of our generation in some cases. And I'm excited about nuclear fusion.
Michael Bernzweig (38:42.988)
Yeah, actually, you know, I'll be honest with you, as you mentioned nuclear fusion, actually, Bill Gates and a few others are working on an actual facility right here in Massachusetts where software Oasis is based to actually bring that to life. And it'll be interesting to see. They've at MIT done some experiments that have actually shown
Hunter Jensen (38:43.18)
some stuff outside of AI, right?
Hunter Jensen (38:58.156)
I've read about it.
Michael Bernzweig (39:12.314)
the reality of it and they're taking little shreds of possibility and turning it into reality. So we'll see where that ends up.
Hunter Jensen (39:23.146)
Yeah, I'll close with this thought. When we have, we are on a path to having four major things. Right? Super intelligent AI, limitless power with nuclear fusion, near limitless compute with quantum computing and robots. Like if we hit those four things, that is a complete
Michael Bernzweig (39:38.064)
Yeah.
Hunter Jensen (39:51.586)
different world for all of us. And we might, any of them, any of them, and we might get to see that in our lifetime. What a time to be alive. It's so, it's like so exciting for me as a lifelong lover of technology to be alive right now.
Michael Bernzweig (39:54.167)
any of those things. really is. Imagine the limitless power. Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (40:07.714)
Yeah, same here. So I think we should end on that note. with that, I really appreciate the deep dive. It's been very exciting. I think our audience will get a lot out of this episode. And once again, I want to thank everybody for joining us on this week's edition of the Software Spotlight. For anybody that's tuning in for the first time, definitely subscribe. And you'll also see we have
two other sister podcasts, the Career Spotlight, also in the B2B tech space for anybody that's looking to take that journey into tech. And then we have the Consulting Spotlight, which is focused on tech consulting and organizations providing niche consulting services. So with that, I thank you for joining us on the Software Spotlight this week. We've had...
Hunter Jensen, founder and CEO of Barefoot Solutions. And for anybody else that would like to keep up on everything going on here, just go to softwareoasis.com backslash subscribe and sign up for our weekly newsletter. So Hunter, thanks for joining us this week.
Hunter Jensen (41:17.976)
Thanks so much for having me, Michael. This was blessed.