532 Jonathan Aberman

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Meet Jonathan Aberman

Jeffrey Feldberg: There are some people who build companies, and then there are people who spend decades trying to understand what actually makes a company, a founder and a team matter when the world changes beneath their feet. Jonathan Aberman is one of those people. He's an entrepreneur, investor, educator, and innovation strategist who spent years at the intersection of startups, technology, and human potential.

Today as CEO and founder of Hupside, he's pushing a provocative idea at exactly the right moment in a world racing to automate everything the real competitive advantage may be the one thing machines can't fake: human originality.

Hupside is built around measuring and scaling what it calls original intelligence, helping organizations identify the people who can create value beyond AI sameness, Jonathan's perspective is not theoretical. He's been a venture investor. Innovation [00:01:00] advisor, professor, media commentator, post-exit entrepreneur, and a longtime voice in the startup ecosystem with recognition that includes Washingtonians Tech Titan, Washington Business Journal's Power 100 and Virginia's 50 most influential entrepreneurs.

What makes his work compelling is that it asks a bigger question than how to use AI better. It asks what kind of human being leader and company survives when intelligence becomes abundant, but originality does not. 

Sponsor Deep Wealth Mastery

Jeffrey Feldberg: And before we hop into the podcast, a quick word from our sponsor, Deep Wealth and the Deep Wealth Mastery Program. We have William, a graduate of Deep Both Mastery, and he says, I didn't have the time for Deep Both Mastery, but I made the time and I'm glad I did.

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The idea shared forever changed the trajectory of the business and best of all, the experience was fun. And we'll round things out with Stacey. 

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Deep Wealth Nation welcome to another episode of the Deep Wealth Podcast. Deep Wealth Nation, let me ask you this. Actually, let me tell you this because here at Deep Wealth we have a saying. Show us your team, and we will tell you your future. So when it comes to your team, how are you doing? Do you know their potential?

Are you unlocking the team's potential? Are you able to leverage that or are you fumbling your way around guessing and making the mistakes as you go along? What if there was a better way? What if you can use the best of technology with the best of our human capabilities all in one? And you're saying, yeah, Jeffrey sounds so good to be true.

You [00:04:00] better believe it. You heard the official introduction. We have a very special guest in the House of Deep Wealth. We have a fellow founder, a post exit entrepreneur, and an all round terrific individual who is creating a market disruption out there. So Jonathan, welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast.

An absolute pleasure to have you with us. 

Jonathan Origin Story

Jeffrey Feldberg: There's always a story behind the story. What's your story? What got you from where you were to where you are today?

Jonathan Aberman: Oh is this a 15 hour podcast, Jeffrey?

Jeffrey Feldberg: Let's make it a series. Forget the episode.

Jonathan Aberman: Yeah. Forget about all the other guests you're gonna Right. we'll get Ken Burns in here. Look, it's very interesting, I think that people who become entrepreneurial, you say they always have a story and the story has a push and a pull and that's true for all of us.

I think that, for me, the push started very young. My parents were both entrepreneurs, both owned their own businesses. My. Grandparents owned their own businesses. I grew up around the kitchen table talking about the businesses that they were in, and my parents were hell bent that I wasn't gonna be a small business owner and I was gonna be a professional and they invested a lot of time and effort in making me get great [00:05:00] education so I could become a professional.

And I was a. Pretty prominent venture capital lawyer and running some law firms. And then one day I woke up and said, my God, I want to own my own business like my parents. And I decided the business that I knew best was starting companies and that's how I became a venture investor. And I've been in the venture industry starting companies for 25 years now, and I was very happy doing that.

It's a great career. I got an opportunity to get into academia. I became a professor business school. I was a dean for a while. I've always been involved in tech. And about a year ago to go from there to here, that was the push, I wanna be an ENT entrepreneur. The pull was, one day I, happened to meet a professor, a couple of professors, local university, and they said to me, we've invented a way to objectively show how humans and when humans outperform ai.

I said to them, that's really, I'm not sure that's possible. And then they showed me that it was possible and they built it and it was objective [00:06:00] and it worked. And I realized that this was the most important thing I could find myself doing in the current environment was to find a way to help people build AI ready teams.

To help people coexist with AI instead of being replaced by it. So that was the pull and the pull got me to leave being a partner to Venture Fund and become a full-time founder again. And I started upside with my partners, which we'll talk about today. I guess it's the old dead song, you know, what a long, strange trip it's been.

But I'm very fortunate and I'm having a blast. It ain't easy, but I'm having a blast.

Jeffrey Feldberg: What a terrific story. 

Lessons From Exits

Jeffrey Feldberg: And before we get going on, what you're doing now, when you look back, you've had a number of exits, you've been right at the intersection. I'm gonna start this company, we're gonna solve this problem. And later on down the road, you cross the finish line. Not once, but multiple times.

Looking back on your liquidity events, anything that comes to mind of, yeah, Jeffrey, if I had to do it all over again, I would [00:07:00] absolutely do this one thing. Or looking back, I would absolutely not do this one thing.

Jonathan Aberman: So you know, I've seen exits from many different angles, and I've seen failures from many different angles as an advisor, investor, founder, and there are a couple of things that I've learned to be true. The first one is great businesses don't get sold. They get bought. If you grow a business to sell it, you're probably gonna fail miserably because you're not gonna focus on the thing that makes a business grow, which is customers and the here and now.

But that seems to be true. Even if you get to the point where somebody puts an offer on the table, the ability to say no will always result in better terms. So that's number one. Number two, and you mentioned it as we were starting the broadcast, and I'm sure it's a theme in your process and elsewhere team.

Team is everything because as you've pointed out in other places, most M&A events actually fail. They don't succeed. And people who are playing for the first big win or have divergent interests, nothing will cause a team to fall apart faster than a failed exit. To me, going into this [00:08:00] with a long-term view to commitment to creating something that's meaningful with people who share those values that you like.

Those are the two things that I think most important and where I've seen companies fall apart. And not get to an exit other than not achieving product market fit. The biggest reason they fall apart is a lack of congruence amongst the founders for what they're doing it for, and nothing makes that blow up faster than an offer on the table ever.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah, it's interesting when we get ourselves in that situation, the pressure is on motivations are there. We can have divergent views or goals. Let's circle back to something that you're saying because it's so relevant actually, as you're talking about this, I'm looking at the Deep Wealth nine step roadmap, and in step two we call it X-Factors.

These are the things that separate one company from the next. We're unique, we're world class and what we're doing and team and culture are two foundational X-Factors. Just like I said at the start of [00:09:00] when we began to talk. So you mentioned something interesting and. Whether it's selecting a business partner or not, as the case may be, and growing the team, bringing on the right members.

Jonathan, I'll be the first to say some of my biggest failures, if I can use that word. Failures are really opportunities and the ability to learn from that and become better the next time around. But it did come around. Hiring or not hiring and all of that. 

Founder Fit And Culture

Jeffrey Feldberg: So when it comes to your experience, what you've seen, how is a founder do I know?

Hey, this person that I'm speaking to right now, across the table from me, would make a great addition to the team, either as a senior team member, leadership, front of line, or business partner investor, or, Hey, you know what? I better run as fast as I can in the opposite direction because I'm seeing some red flags here.

I don't like what I'm saying. What would you say to that?

Jonathan Aberman: So number one, it's demonstrable. Lots of academic studies have shown this. It's demonstrable that the founder imprints an organization with their personality. You can see. [00:10:00] See that in how a company like Apple grew off Steve Jobs vis-a-vis how Microsoft grew off. Bill Gates one was heavy design focused and one was heavily engineering focused, and their corporate cultures reflected that it's inevitable.

So a founder, first of all, needs to be very self-aware of what his or her winning strategy is in life. Meaning how do they resolve conflict? Everybody can fake being nice when the pressure's not on, but women are under pressure. We will revert to a strategy that's gotten us our way, our entire lives. So people who, for example, are deeply analytical, become very analytical under conflict, and they want to go into a room and work it out with data people who like mixing it up and waving the ros nail and screaming.

When they're under stress, they want to work, mix it up. They wanna drop the hockey gloves and fight it out. It's not personal, it's just the way they are. So the first thing a founder needs to understand is what their winning strategy is. And then the second thing they need to understand is whether or not that winning strategy will actually work in an organization.

A great example is I think you compare Steve Jobs's [00:11:00] success. Or failure. You know, First time around with Apple, he was really antagonistic to his people and ultimately found himself out of a job. And when they brought him back after apple realized he needed him, they surrounded him with people who didn't take it personally when he was difficult.

Just said well, that's Steve and we'll just go back to work. And think so. So it starts the founder, and then I think you have an additional layer, which is once you get an idea of what drives you, you start to understand where your blind spots are. And then you honestly build your initial team based upon people who get you when you get.

Built off your blind spots. And once you've done that a few times, you then will start to develop a way that you all like to solve problems, a way that you deal with conflict, the way you deal with adversity, and that becomes your corporate culture. And at that point, I think that what has to happen is you need to start hiring people who are able to function within that culture.

But also understand that the more people are removed from you from a role level, the [00:12:00] more you're gonna have to rely upon HR practices, compensation practices, promotion practices that are consistent. It's hard enough to get five people to work as a culture. It's not so hard to get 15, but to get to a hundred or 200 or 500 is a really different challenge.

But it starts with the founder and the founding team. To answer your question. As I grow my team at Hupside and as I've grown, every team I've worked with fit with the founder and skill match or skill overlap is the most important thing for the first year or two. And then at that point you start to create leverage pyramids below the, key team, and it's up to them to implicate the culture into their teams and maintain it.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Well said. Absolutely. And the team, especially with a founder that is baked right into the culture. And the culture could be either side, it could be a toxic culture, it could be a vibrant, rich culture. Really appreciate though how you are positioning that and Depap Nation where you're listening to that because that was not gold.

That is platinum. That is from the trenches. It [00:13:00] works. It makes all the difference. And you said something earlier. In terms of as a founder, we're going out there, we're finding this problem, finding this inflection point or blind spot in terms of what's out there. And that's actually step one, big picture where we are finding a problem while it's still in the early days, most people may not have even heard of it.

And then we're figuring out how are we gonna. Not only solve it, but solve it in a world class way. And that goes back into X-Factors and everything else with that. 

Why Build Hupside

Jeffrey Feldberg: So what had you start with what you're doing right now? Because let's face it, you didn't have to do it so you didn't have to do Hupside.

What was the inflection point? What was the blind spot that you saw there that said, Hey, here's the issue. I'm gonna be the one that's gonna get this done.

Jonathan Aberman: So I can tell you the moment when it, I went from interested to committed. I sat down with my co-founder, Dan Johnson, who's an AI scientist. And he said to me, I wanna show you something. And I said, okay. And he shows me what looks like an ink blot. And I'm looking at him and I said Dan, what I'm looking [00:14:00] at?

And he says, you're looking at. A thousand people answering the same question. And this is what our technology does and it shows how people's outputs diverge. And he said, you see those few little clumps there? I said, yeah. He says, that's common knowledge. I said, oh, what was the question? He said, what do you do with a fork?

So he said, that clumps, probably people saying comb your hair. That clumps probably saying, make a mustache. That clumps saying play a kazoo, and all those little dots floating around, those are people coming up with crazy ideas. I said, oh, and you can measure that. He said, yeah. He said well, that, that's kind of cool.

And he said well, let me show you the same organization after they started working with ai. And he flips over a page and he shows me a slide. And Jeff, it's, they're three clumps and they're like five dots. So instead of there being, 500 dots, they're three and they're these three big clumps. I said, what's this Dan?

He said, this is AI at scale. This is people relying on the ai. This is AI providing the ground truth of its limited sameness answers. And I said to [00:15:00] myself, my God, this is gonna be the biggest problem we're gonna face. This is it. And I, he said, yep. People aren't talking about it yet, but we're gonna figure out that AI is a great efficiency engine, but it creates sameness everywhere and it's gonna create cognitive issues.

And I was like, oh my God, I've got to do something about this. And that's what it went from. It was those two graphs. It was crazy. It was just those two graphs and 15 minutes. I hope we change the world. It certainly changed my life trajectory. It really did.

AI Strategy For Founders

Jeffrey Feldberg: It's so interesting how our background puts a lens on us and how we see the world, and from your side, from being a weekly columnist to having a national radio program and you're looking at different areas and politics and all those other things that go along with it. If you take what you're seeing now with AI and you were to put that into a narrative of a few sentences.

Of, okay. We now have this thing called artificial intelligence, changing life on the business and personal side as we know it. By the day, all the headlines [00:16:00] are out there. As a founder, what should I be thinking about broadly speaking, when it comes to ai,

Jonathan Aberman: I think that with respect to AI as a founder, you first of all need to decide if you want to use AI to make your business better, whether you want to create a business that will benefit the. From not being part of the AI industry, and we can talk about that. Or you need to decide whether or not you could create your own AI product that's distinctive.

First of all, let me say it's very hard to create an AI product that's truly distinctive. one of the reasons I did hubs side is it has its own models, its own LLM, effectively, that's very hard to do. So most AI businesses really are service layers built upon chat, Claude and so forth.

That's a dangerous place to be right now because every time Claude. Releases a new version, they take more capability. So I would not wanna be a service layer business however I would be, and I see many entrepreneurs successfully using the efficiency of AI with their human [00:17:00] insight to create new businesses that are very compelling.

AI is the biggest industrial trend we have seen in, in the world probably since steam power. Computerization was iterative. Railroads were iterative, but steam power changing from an agrarian industrial economy was enormous. And this is similar. It's a big trend. It will affect all of us.

The other thing I'll say just quickly is. Not every business should be an AI business, and a lot of businesses are gonna be very successful by not being AI businesses. And by this I mean because of AI as sameness, it's commoditization of experience. There's gonna be a lot of money to be made by people who provide authentic opportunity experience.

Which can be an, an amazing plumber, it can be an amazing singer, it can be an amazing author. It can be an amazing podcaster. My point is that people are going to more and more value the specialness and novelty that only humans can create more and more. So there's gonna be a lot of [00:18:00] entrepreneurial opportunities around human originality and authentic.

That I think we're just scratching the surface of, I'm a big believer that we're gonna have a real renaissance of human value as AI becomes more prominent.

Jeffrey Feldberg: As you're talking about that, and I wanna go back to your experience, not just as a founder or investor, post exit entrepreneur, back in your academia days of the business school, every business student, myself included, when I was in my MBA program. M, we do the case study marketing myopia, and this was the railroad companies that blew the opportunity of a lifetime that they could have gone on and done incredible things, but where they failed, they view themselves as railroad companies instead of something much bigger, much broader.

So for a founder today who's living through this transformation of ai, you said some really important things, maybe your best service not being. A company with an AI service or product and being authentic or perhaps you're a company that should be so avoiding the marketing myopia [00:19:00] situation where we're so blinded, this is all that we do, and nothing more.

We're not taking the bigger picture. And this now ties into Hupside. How does that help us upside in terms of. The team members that I have or that I will have to really tap into what they're doing and get the most of it that I can see what the trends are, what they're not, where things are heading, that I can position myself at the right place at the right time to help create that market disruption, that catapults growth and profits, and really makes a difference.

Jonathan Aberman: So we need to first of all, acknowledge that. You can identify a really great opportunity and a really expensive movement into a blue ocean, but at the end of the day, you have to find money to do it or find customers. And so you mentioned the railroads, or we could think about Eastman Kodak that actually invented the digital camera and didn't commercialize it because they were a quote, a film company.

This lock-in happens particularly for large companies because when you're a public company you have to go quarter to quarter, and it's hard to abandon something that's really wonderfully profitable for something. May not [00:20:00] be, the same thing is true for startups. VCs will tell an entrepreneur, find a narrow vertical, drive revenue, demonstrate revenue.

Then you can raise money, dominate a vertical, and go horizontal, 2, 3, 4 financing rounds later if you do it at, at all. So when you are an entrepreneur, you are always gonna have this tension. If you're going to try to develop a technology that if you go broad too early, you run the risk of not going anywhere.

So I just wanna make sure we make that point. But having said that, when you have an a platform company, like, help side that has broad applicability. I mean, we, kid around the world now has a cold, everybody's sick and we have Kleenex. you have to have enough courage, your convictions to go broad and, and demonstrate that.

Building Originality Teams

Jonathan Aberman: But putting that aside, you asked another question, which is, how do you know, or how do you create the culture where your people are willing to think big and execute big? And I think that, first of all, going back to hubs side, one of the things that we can show and we know is that people focus on creativity as a [00:21:00] metric traditionally.

And then they think about, somebody like Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Haen. I'm a guitarist. I think about them. Geniuses never took a lesson in their lives. Unbelievable. Alright? They're creative. Leonardo da Vinci was creative. Michelangelo was creative. When you go to a bar and you hear a bar band guitarist play Hendrick solo note for note.

That's creative too. It's just a different type of creativity. So what we've done is we defined output instead of process originality. And the person who is original by playing a solo note for note is a focal person. They're somebody who comes and gets things done using the tools around them to be completely accurate.

They, they love the accuracy. And then somebody like a Van Halen is an expander. He or she just likes coming up with great new ideas for the sake of it. So when you're composing a team. You need to have expanders, you need to have focals, and you need to have connectors and augmenters between them.

And so this is what I was getting at earlier when we talked about business formation and team. You have to have a blind spot about what you're good at. [00:22:00] For example, if you're an expander and many founders are expanders, to your point, we love thinking about new things. Expansion without application is a hobby.

You need to have a couple of focal people who will get up every day and execute. And then you need to have at least one person who's a connector between you, the expander and the focals, so that the team can work together. So if you are intentional about merging and managing your originality competency, you can have the best of both worlds.

I think is what it comes down to. No, monocultures don't work in this world. It's too complex, and I think that's really what you're getting at. You have to have a culture of different types of people.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And Jonathan, as you're talking about that, you're bringing me back to what. You've coined out their original intelligence and absolutely love that and we'll have you walk deep both nation through what that is. I love the thesis though behind that because when you talk about ai, so many different narratives are out there.

The one consistent [00:23:00] thing that I've heard is AI on its own. Or not using ai, just doing the good old fashioned human way on its own. They're both missing opportunity. It's only when you combine the two that you get the best outta both of it. And I know original intelligence is getting right at the heart of that.

Defining Original Intelligence

Jeffrey Feldberg: So someone in deep, both nation, they're hearing original intelligence. What the heck is that? And why would I care about that? What would you want us to know?

Jonathan Aberman: I would want you to know is that when you cut through it all, first of all, original intelligence is a new category because. We realized as we looked at the technology, we needed a way to describe this first of its kind output measurement. It didn't exist before, and so we needed a word that would make people think, oh, okay, you're measuring how somebody performs against ai.

Why do I care about that? You care about that because that's the part that humans do. Okay, good. You've measured that. What are you measuring? I'm measuring novelty. I'm measuring the ability to create something novel.

Why does that matter?

It [00:24:00] matters because humans are wired up to create novelty.

That's what we do. We create it. We crave it. It's why when we go to a store and somebody's nice to us, we feel valued. They've made us feel special. It's why when we find a good. A piece of music that we tell a friend and we feel special. It's why we as entrepreneurs drive to do the new we, we are novelty seeking engines, so ai.

The way it's currently deploying and the way it's being built, it's a retrospective categorization of knowledge. It doesn't have the ability to do novelty and create novelty the way the human brain does. And by the way, even if it does, humans ultimately create value in what they experience. So even if AI gets really good at creating.

New things, humans ultimately determine what's valuable. So the point of original intelligence is to say very simply, in an A place, in an organization or in life, people who use AI [00:25:00] and amplify their originality will show more original intelligence. Since somebody uses AI badly. Somebody who uses AI badly will basically take the AI answer and they won't score very well at all.

They'll score the same as the AI 'cause they're not adding any value. So somebody who uses AI really well to enhance their original output will score very well with their original intelligence, but so will humans on their own. So what happens for the first time is you can be a focal person and say, I really wanna improve my ability to use AI to drive me to come up with new concepts.

And you can move from being a focal to an augmenter or a connector because you're able to use the tools to amplify originality. Or you can be an expander and use AI and drive yourself even higher. So the point of original intelligence is to reward and identify people in this level set world where we coexist with ai.

And you made the point, and it's really important when what science is starting to show is that when people use AI, not [00:26:00] as a crutch, which creates cognitive decline often, but as an accelerant, they actually outperform both ai. And human. The AI hybrid is a real thing, and the original intelligence is a metric that will allow us to measure that.

However AI develops and however we educate our students, it'll just continue to be the metric we'll use. That's why it's important.

Jeffrey Feldberg: What a refreshing narrative because right now where we sit, when AI first came out, it was utopian. It's gonna be roses everywhere. And then that quickly changed as it does so often with technology, oh, we're all gonna lose our jobs, and AI is taking over the world, and you're coming along with a different narrative that.

We're gonna have a better world because the two are working hand in hand. And Deep Nation, when you think about this, today, when we do a standard personality test, you go out there, you have different types. Jonathan, what I love, what you and the team have done is, and you've mentioned this already, you've begun to classify how people fit into the AI area and Deep Nation.

Imagine [00:27:00] this. Can you imagine running your company without computers? Today, that's a non-starter. It's not gonna happen. That same analogy is gonna be with ai. Can you imagine running your company without ai? And we're starting to get there day by day. 

OIQ Types Explained

Jeffrey Feldberg: Jonathan, for the benefit of Deep Deep Wealth Nation, you've mentioned the connector.

Focal Augmenter expander, and this is all going back into the original intelligence and what you've coined the original intelligence quotient. So what should we know about these four different types, if you will, when we're going through your system? What does that really mean for us? And what's the differentiation between them?

Jonathan Aberman: So the great thing about, um. our product is, well speaking as the product designer. A great thing about our product is it's easy, to use. The complexities is behind the scene. The AI model runs behind the scene, but what you get as a user is you get from, an assessment side, if you're the tester or you send out some challenge games and you get back really quickly.

Answers that show how somebody's original intelligence quotient, how [00:28:00] they scored, and then separating 'em into 10 different archetypes. The four main you described. And. Subtypes and also the level of individual or role autonomy that person has so you can identify organizational constraints. the player gets to play a really fun challenge game, like, goofy brain teaser kind of things.

Like, what do you do when you meet a talking cow or your brother left at the airport. How do you get your money back without having a fight? Things like that. So people enjoy playing. It takes five minutes. It's crazy how fun it is and how little time it takes. The OIQ score reflects how your originality compares to the baseline of ai.

So the more that you diverge from ai, that's a revealing characteristic of how you tend to approach problem solving. How much you drive yourself away from the norm. So people who are expanders are the folks that drive themselves the furthest away from the norm. They're the ones that are just out there pushing.

So expanders are people who are gonna be, your folks in the organization are gonna be thinking about new things all. The time [00:29:00] to the point maybe where it's like snap out of it. But that's what expanders do. Connectors sometimes can have really great new ideas, but what they really like is they like taking new things and bringing them back.

To the mainstream. Think about them as your sort of your big brothers or big sisters to your expanders. And then you have augmenters and augmenters tend to like to get things done, but they're very open to hearing from connectors. About how they could do their jobs better. There are augmenters and then the focals tend to score roughly at the the same level as the AI baseline or below.

That doesn't make them bad at all. It just means that what they tend to do is they tend to function in the world where. They use common knowledge, they use what's available to get their jobs done. That guitarist who plays note for note still being valuable, but a different way. This is not an IQ test.

It's meaning it is not a, you take this once and it's your destiny. 

OIQ as a Metric

Jonathan Aberman: This is a [00:30:00] measurement of a moment in time how you think about using your searching for novelty to solve problems. So your OIQ score. Your originality competency can actually change over time, either because you are in an environment that makes you more comfortable pushing yourself, or you get creativity training, or you learn how to use AI better.

This is a tool that's designed to keep people from getting cognitively over reliant on ai. This is, and this is a way for people who want to progress, organization, wanna progress, to be able to benchmark and give people something to strive. for. so imagine in a, maybe using the analogy of current things as like a strength finder test or a, a Myers-Briggs.

But unlike those tests, which are designed to tell you this is who you are, this is not that, this is how you perform on an objective basis today, solving problems. If you don't like where you are, you can do things about it. And if you like where you are. [00:31:00] Don't sweat it, just be you. 'cause there's roles for everybody.

That's the key.

Implementing in Teams

Jeffrey Feldberg: As you're talking about this now, let's imagine, okay, Jonathan heard you're on the deep Wealth Podcast. Love what you're doing, Hupside. I wanna put this into my company. I wanna see you, where we stand, where my current talent is. Perhaps we have some gaps. We can close those gaps with it. What's the secret sauce?

What does it look like when day one we're starting with you and the team? We're now gonna put our people through your process and systems.

Try It Free Online

Jonathan Aberman: So the good news is there are a couple of things for your listeners, and the first one is, we are umpires, we're not players. Meaning that we wanna be very pure in what we do. We see, we've seen other people try to come up with standards and they immediately go in the business to sell the standards.

They immediately go in the business to train the standards. That's not this is. We're umpires. We're just providing a metric that a lot of people can use to make their organizations better or make money. We know we want people to use it. So that's number one. And because of that, number two is you can use our product [00:32:00] without paying us by going to the website, and you can try it out in two different ways.

The first way you can try it out is you can go and do what's called the OIQ challenge, where you can play the game and see what it's like. As many times as you want that's free. The other thing is we've taken a version of our enterprise product and we put it up on the site so that groups of less than 10 can see, how they feel, how they perform, and it's there.

It's to be used. Now we obviously have an enterprise product that lets you do a hundred people at once, 200 people at once, more prompts for money. But you can use this thing and try it out for your own business. Or have fun with it. It makes a great drinking game, by the way. Just getting people, I'm serious.

It's like come up with the most goofy answers question you possibly can. So that's the product.

Benchmarking and AI Use

Jonathan Aberman: Now how do we have people generally start to use it?

Almost uniformly it starts with a benchmarking. Where you start with a smaller group of people that you feel like you know well within your organization and you try it out and you have the people that you [00:33:00] know do one or two or three prompt challenges, play the game, and then you look at their scoring and your, their archetypes, their types, and their organizational.

Situation. And what we have found, and again, this is a very new company, we started a company I did the license in January and our first product went to market in November and we're now in version two. It's growing really fast. Just about uniformly people do this initial benchmarking because they wanna see whether or not this new metric is.

Usable or accurate. So they like testing against people they feel they know. And what we find and what they're finding is how surprising it is, how it surfaces things about their team that they realized they didn't know, but how accurate it are. It is. The types are, they're surprised but that doesn't mean that they don't start to then expand it and use it with people they don't know as well.

That's the first thing. The second thing we encourage people to do is when you do this, the baseline discourage people the first time from using [00:34:00] AI and get a score and then let them use AI and see what their score is. And what's really interesting is how quickly people see that when you just let people or ask people to use the AI without being discriminating, their OIQ scores decline from their natural scores.

Which then opens up a whole possibility for then getting people to figure out how to use them better. So we call that the AI Transformation Playbook and people are using that. But I'd recommend anybody who's interested in this, go have fun. Take the A IQ challenge and then if you wanna try this out within your organization.

Try it out with 10 people and see how it works. And if you like it and you only have 10, just keep using it. And if you want to use more than 10, I'm happy to have you be a customer, but I want people to use this thing. That's why we put it up on the web.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Thank you so much for making these resources available. At the best price, which is no cost, at least in the beginning, and then we can invest a little bit later on as we go company wide and system wide. 

Hiring and Team Fit

Jeffrey Feldberg: With this, as you're talking about [00:35:00] this, my wheels are turning and I'm imagining a situation for my existing team.

I can go through upside and now, okay, Mary's over here. Jack is over there in terms of the OIQ. I've got them on the right bus, but they're not even in the right seat. Let me reposition them so I'm gonna get the best out of them. Or I'm imagining a situation where I'm now perhaps bringing on a new team member.

I have two candidates that on paper. Wow. I could probably go with either one and I'd be okay. I could see I being that. Termination. Look at this. Susie over here is just off the charts in this one area and this other candidate doesn't even rank. This is an easy choice. Let me go and give the No to Susie and move forward with that.

I'm just making this up and putting that out there. But had said, Jonathan, are there some success stories that you can share with us of companies that have begun to go through this and the difference that is made for them?

Education and Industry Wins

Jonathan Aberman: So in education, our technology is being used already to help understand the inci originality of students, [00:36:00] either as part of the admissions process or as part of the educational journey. And it's a really great additional data signal in this world, particularly because it can't be cheated. If you put an AI only answer in, you're not gonna score.

It's very high originality. So, you know, In, in the education, a big concern now is quote, students using AI to cheat. Not understanding by the way that using AI isn't, can't be cheating anymore, it's just a fact of life. But, so we're seeing educators using it, and I'm happy about that in industry, again what we're already seeing is organizations.

Are getting insights into their team and also their organizational constraints because, for example our platform measures an individual's perceived level of autonomy. And so we've seen a couple of instances already in organizations where people who are very talented and have high levels of expansive potential are in low autonomy roles, which has caused people to say, geez, I need to change my organizational structure because culturally I have [00:37:00] people feeling constrained that I could free up. Funnily enough, what I'd say, Jeffrey, is that we frame this as an AI product 'cause it is an AI product for AI transformation. But it really has the potential, I think to become best practices for change leadership and servant leaders.

I actually think that is where it may be the most important is in servant leadership.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And how so when you say it's most important for servant leadership, how does that play into that?

Servant Leadership and AI

Jonathan Aberman: To me, a well-run organization has to make a choice. Whether it wants to be command and control, a Catholic organization in a very doctrinal or Buddhist where autonomy and authority is granted in and taken and basically the people below you give it back. The difference between autocratic leadership and servant leadership I think that when you look at the play out right now of ai.

A lot of organizations are approaching AI in an autocratic manner in almost hunger games. Here are the tools. Figure it out. If you don't, you're gonna get fired. I think servant leaders and people who want to trade, create agile cultures have to have a different model for [00:38:00] adopting AI other than use it or I'll fire you.

And what this does is it allows you to understand your people and for example, an expander. You can give 'em the tools and say, figure it out. And they will. Their biggest risk, by the way, is that the ghost I ai, that they will create their own platforms and your IP will leak out the door. If you go to a focal or augmenter and say, use this stuff for, I'll fire you.

They will seize up. They won't know what to do. Or they'll use the technology just as it's presented to make their jobs go faster. And they're the ones that are most likely to create bad output or what we call. Work swaps. If you want to treat your people with respect to maximize what you want to get outta them, which is what servant leaders must do, you need to understand on a granular level how they're gonna respond and use the tools that you give them.

And so for me, if I'm a servant leader, I would want to use H side. And I would almost think it was malpractice not to. Having been a servant leader, look, you know this 'cause you've had other entrepreneurs on, and entrepreneurs [00:39:00] do the companies to solve the problems they have.

I've been a changed leader all my life. I've been a servant leader all my life. Once I learned that I didn't want to be a dictator, I want this tool, I would use this tool myself. If I was still dean, would use this tool myself a hundred percent.

Personal OIQ Surprises

Jeffrey Feldberg: And when you've gone through the HB Checker for yourself, Jonathan, were there any surprises when they said, Hey, okay, Jonathan, here you are. Here's what I'm seeing. This is where. You are.

Jonathan Aberman: So it's interesting, so speaking for myself personally, it, depending upon the day and the question, I'm an expander or an expander connector, which doesn't surprise me at all because that's my life. I've learned over the years that I need to surround myself with some people who are heavily detail oriented to keep me from.

Running off a cliff. That's always my way. And that's one of the advantages of being a servant leader, is you can create tremendous loyalty by giving authority to people. So they will support you. And so I learned that the most fun for me in a way, there are two kinds. One [00:40:00] is, we do events where we get to show people and watch them play the OIQ challenge and then debrief them.

And what's always fun for me is when somebody says, oh my God. How did you possibly get me pegged by asking me a, a crazy question about a cow. that's a great moment. But the other one that's really interesting is when somebody gets a score and they say, I can't believe that's me. And like for example, somebody gets a focal score and say well, how did you reach the answer?

And the answer would be well, I thought of what would be the most commonplace answer. I said, why did you do that? He says, 'cause obviously that's the way you approach any problem you find. I said, you just revealed your winning strategy. You find siege to come place. He said, oh. I said, alright, play this again.

Think of the most off the wall answer you can possibly think of. Oh, okay. And they play it again and all of a sudden they're an augmented. They're like, really? It's like, [00:41:00] yeah, this is the point. You have the capacity if you want to, change, you can, or you just be happy with your problem solving.

And that to me is the glimmer of what I'm getting at earlier, which is that OIQ is not destiny. It's a tool and you can do with it what you will. I love moments like that.

LLM Progress and Concerns

Jeffrey Feldberg: It's interesting as we continue to, what you were saying earlier, the LLMs continue to move forward and change and advance. With artificial intelligence. Has anything surprised you as of late in terms of, oh, I didn't really connect the dots on that. That's interesting. Look what we can do now.

Jonathan Aberman: I think to be fair, the level of. Competence of say, Claude, but also chat notebook lm what they're able to create for you when you really drive them. And you don't just take the first answer and you're really good and how you prompt and you understand what you're reading. It's crazy. The level of information that you can get organized for your benefit it's absolutely incredible.

I'm amazed. How [00:42:00] comprehensive it can be. But by the same token, I'm also heartened because look, as you pointed out earlier, I've written hundreds of columns over the years. If you ask Chat GT or Claude to write an article in the style of Jonathan

, it will, and I've read them and just for fun, and writes like me, but it doesn't write like me.

And it heartens me because I realize there's still a part for me in the world. novelty of that particular thing that. I can't communicate, but that I do. So I like that. I think the thing that troubles me the most right now, surprising in a negative way is what's happening right now with Anthropic and the DO Department of Board, department of Defense.

I don't like the way this is unfolding. I don't like that. People have to feel like they have to make a choice about, whether or not AI should be used in warfare or how, as a way to demonstrate their patriotism or suitability to work, to develop a company. I don't like the politicization, but I guess.[00:43:00]

It's an inevitable thing that it would ultimately AI become politicized, because at the end of the day, it is a mirror on social values. it's full of cultural artifacts. So how that plays out over the next year or two I think is gonna be very important for the future of ai. I don't know the answer to that yet, but that's struck me a lot over the last couple weeks.

Anthropic DOD Backdrop

Jeffrey Feldberg: It is interesting, and you've alluded to what was going on with that. Someone in Deep Nation who doesn't follow the news, at least when it comes to AI and what's been going on. Can you share with them the backdrop of what you said, because it's important of that whole debacle of why it came about and where that setting.

Jonathan Aberman: ai, if you don't know, simply put what we have, these large language models is the most comprehensive knowledge gathering and knowledge presentation. Technology's ever existed. You can literally stand on the shoulders of everybody that's gone before you and start from a level of knowledge that frankly, it was impossible to imagine even three years ago.

That is enormous implications. It also means that the nation or the companies that have the best AI will be the most economically dominant. [00:44:00] So there is a huge. Focus in both the United States and in China in particular, on having the best AI possible to protect the nation and to also project economic power.

So that's the backdrop. And it's, like the space race was when we were all a lot younger, maybe before many of us were born. But it's the same thing. It's a technological race. Within that context, the US AI companies have been able to satisfy the national security desires of the government and also advance their technology at the same time.

And there wasn't really any sort of collision that was accepted that the two were working in concert and a few weeks ago, anthropic, which makes Claude, which is probably the dominant provider of advanced AI products into the Department of War. Said, we're not comfortable having you use our technology.

In all respects, we think there should be limits on whether or not you can use it for, say. Surveilling on United [00:45:00] States citizens or using it to control autonomous weapons. We're not comfortable. Now, I don't know the nuances of how that was communicated. Nobody really knows, but the response of the administration was, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

You can't be part of the United States national Security establishment and pursue a direction for ai. That's anything other than we're tightly intertwined, so we're gonna punish you. By not only taking your technology out of every place that exists within the Department of War, which would be a huge economic problem for any company, but also say, we're gonna make you a supply chain risk, which is basically a death sentence.

For a company, because what it says is that not only will the government not do business with that company, but anybody who does business with the federal government can't do business with that company. It's very unclear whether the legal principles that underlie supply chain risk actually can be properly applied to philanthropic.

It's a very open lead [00:46:00] question, and it's also highly troubling. That the administration is penalized the company for exercising a commercial right of free speech. So it's a very important issue, even if you're not an AI coei, wherever you are in the political spectrum, this is something that's really important to watch because AI is in some ways litmus test for how we're gonna structure our economy.

And it is interesting to me that we have an administration and we had a change in government largely around the idea of free market business principles. And now we find ourselves with government heavily intervening in our most dominant industry. And that's why it's important to me, Jeffrey, and I'm, and I think it's important for everybody, Republican, democrat, independent, be paying attention because this is a big issue for our economic future may actually be bigger than the war that's going on right now, which by the way, is also pretty significant.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Absolutely, and my goodness, again, that's not just an episode that could be series. That said, though, Jonathan, as you're talking about this, I'm extrapolating this out in deep Both [00:47:00] Nation, maybe you're saying the government DOD doesn't really. Apply to me, and I don't fit into that. I can imagine a day though, Jonathan, where clients are saying, okay, Jeffrey, I wanna see as an organization your AI competence, because if you're not at a certain level, we're just not gonna work with you or You can no longer be a supplier for us, whatever the case is gonna be. And so again, going back to Hupside in terms of what you're doing. Deepp Nation, it's an opportunity. It's still early days. This is a competitive advantage. When you know where your people are on that scale and how they fit into ai, that's massive.

That's a massive competitive advantage. Early days, you can hone those skills and take it to the next level. 

Role Matching Examples

Jeffrey Feldberg: And just before we start going to wrap up mode, I was curious, maybe we can do an example or two, we'll see how time goes. When you look at the OIQ and you have the connector focal Augmenter expander.

Perhaps we'll pick two. You mentioned you're an expander. Why don't we do the expander and the augmenter with that kind of [00:48:00] profile, where would you not want them to be in terms of a role within a company?

Jonathan Aberman: Well, I think it's very fair. I don't think I'd want an expander overseeing a bunch of agents in a repetitive task environment. I think that would be disastrous, because if you're an expander and you're having to do the same task again and again.

You'll either break protocol because you want to break protocol or you will follow protocol and be so miserable. You'll change jobs, put in an expander in a repetitive task environment is literally leaving money on the table. They will quit or they'll act out or both. And Augmenter probably shouldn't be in an innovation cell on their own.

Because they'll give you innovations, but it'll be very incremental. They won't think of the big changing thing because it's not the way their minds work. Which again isn't bad, having a couple of augmenters in an innovation effort is terrific. If you have some expanders and you have a connector or two in between, you know what?

A mentor and an expander, I think can nip together and a connector will nip [00:49:00] them together quicker. But at the end of the day this is the point is that nobody's wrong, it is a question to find the right organizational role. And the other thing I'll say, we should point out that the autonomy measurements, role autonomy, Roe V and personal autonomy povi, are also really important.

For example, if you have an expander in a role with a low level of personal autonomy, that's a disaster too. They're gonna be miserable. But if you have somebody in a focal role with a high level of autonomy, that may also be a disaster because they may go off and do things that you don't like, or maybe they're being given a lot of autonomy to think about new things, and they never will because they just focus on the here and now.

So that's how it plays out. It's, It's matching people with, role and opportunities for growth.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Ation, as you're hearing this, your eyes are glazing over.

Jonathan Aberman: I hope

Jeffrey Feldberg: My goodness. Augment or expand or connect. Dr. Focal. I have no idea what that is. Take the challenge, take the OAQ challenge. It is three, four minutes of your time and the [00:50:00] insights that you'll get. Hey, I did it. Had a lot of fun with that.

Jonathan Aberman: Oh, that's terrific.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And Depap Nation, it's an opportunity again, to benchmark where you are based on your talent, where you wanna be and what you need to get there.

And to Jonathan's earlier point, perhaps you have an expander. Wow, what an incredible individual, but they're in completely the wrong role. Oh, now that makes sense why Mary did this when she should have been doing that. We have her in the wrong role. So talk about, okay, do I have the people on the right bus in the right seat?

Absolutely. And when we have that. Profits go up our ability to get that competitive edge, or we're looking to attract some investment or down the road, some kind of an exit, or I just wanna grow profits. I don't even wanna talk about a liquidity event or an exit. This will help you do that. 

Mission and How to Reach

Jeffrey Feldberg: And so Jonathan, before we go into wrap up mode, is there an important question that you and I haven't covered just yet that you want to get out there to do?

Both Nation?

Jonathan Aberman: Oh, you've done a wonderful job of helping me tell this story. I think the last thing I'd say is, and you gave [00:51:00] me a great shout and I appreciate it. Please, the point of this company is a mission company and yeah, we're doing this to make money, but we're doing this because all of us, my co-founders and I.

We want this technology to be widely used because we think it's an important part of what we're gonna need to really have AI achieve its true potential and have humans achieve their true potential with ai. So you mentioned the IOQ challenge. Please go and take it. It will be fun. And if you want to try it out, if you wanna try this out with the team again, it's free.

Use it if you want to tell me what you think, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Jonathan Aberman on LinkedIn. That's by far the best social media network to follow me on. I gotta admit. And I promise all my content's human generated. And and also, you can find me at Jonathan at Hupside if you wanna learn more about the company.

But I appreciate getting a chance to talk with you, Jeffrey, and your listeners. this is the kind of place where I want to tell my story, so thank you for making it available.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Absolutely love that, but not so quick. You're not off the [00:52:00] hot seat just yet, Jonathan. We have our official wrap up mode. It's our tradition here at the Deep Both podcast. It's my honor, it's my privilege. Every guest I ask the same question. Here's the question. It's a really fun one. Let me set this up for you.

Back to the Future Advice

Jeffrey Feldberg: When you think of the movie Back to the Future, you have that magical DeLorean car that will take you to any point in time. So Jonathan, imagine it's tomorrow morning. You look outside your window. This is the fun part. Not only is the DeLorean car curbside, the door is open, waiting for you to hop on in which you do, you're now gonna go to any point in your life.

Perhaps it's Jonathan as a young child, a teenager, whatever point in time it would be. What would you tell your younger self in terms of life lessons or life wisdom, or, Hey Jonathan, do this, but don't do that. What would it sound like?

Jonathan Aberman: So the constraint is, I have to go back and talk with young Jonathan. I can't just go and get a pint of milk and live the life I'm leading now.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Hey, this is your story. You can do whatever you

Jonathan Aberman: Actually, the truth of the matter is that I've lived my life very much taken the view I've always made the best decision I could make at the time with the information I've had.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Huh?

Jonathan Aberman: [00:53:00] So I think that I'm not the kind of person who would, oh, if I only knew then what I know now, I would do something different because it's counterproductive.

It just creates negativity in your mindset. I really find that they don't do that. Having said that, if I could go back in time, I think that I probably would go back in time and talk to myself, oh, probably my early twenties, and I'd say, you know what? Give yourself a break. life is longer than you think.

don't be in such a rush. Take advantage of the opportunities that are around you to enrich yourself. I didn't spend enough time when I was younger, really understanding and fostering personal relationships and life experiences. 'cause I was in such a hurry to get a great professional qualification, get a great job and so forth.

Sort of rushed my way through my twenties in a way that if I had to do it all over again, maybe I would've spent a little more time. Look, I, when I was at Cambridge, I probably should have, done the debate society or done the rowing or some of the goofy things I didn't do because I wanted to get good grades.

I can tell you.

Jeffrey Feldberg: love that, and actually tying [00:54:00] together both of your responses. Jeffrey, maybe I don't wanna do anything because I've made the best decisions that I can with the information that I had. I don't wanna put pressure on myself. It's actually the most popular and common theme here on the Zoopa podcast.

A lot of guests say. Jeffrey, I don't think I would change a thing because I love my life. I love where I've been. What was perhaps a dark moment once upon a time actually became my shining moment because it helped to forge who I am today. Just like that coal under pressure becomes a diamond. Yeah, that was me back in the day.

I didn't realize it.

Jonathan Aberman: But you know what? I do want to make sure that we level set on something. there's difference between regret and wanting to change something. There are things about my life I wish it turned out differently.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Sure.

Jonathan Aberman: But to spend a lot of time dwelling on well, if only I know you did the best you could.

that's what I'm saying. If you get through life unscathed, I'm happy for you. My experience of life is we all get nicks along the way. There's all a sadness to come with the happiness. That's why you have to enjoy the happiness when it happens.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Absolutely. In fact, I would probably take it a step further and [00:55:00] say, Hey, if you're going through life unscathed, you're probably not putting yourself out there. And that's a whole other conversation of missed opportunities and what it's really all about. So some terrific advice, and again, circling back Deep Wealth Nation.

Take the test. It's free. It is just a few moments. Why don't take the test and then reach out to Jonathan and team and Jonathan again one more time. The best place to reach you. I have a question. I wanna talk about this. I wanna put this in my company. That would be.

Jonathan Aberman: Jonathan at Upside, easy to find human upside, upside, and we named it for a reason.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And Jonathan gave his email Deep Wealth Nation, it doesn't get any better. It's a Postex exit entrepreneur, a really smart guy, success and a terrific journey. Why not speak to Jonathan? You'll come out of it a whole lot better. So Jonathan, all that said, congratulations. It's official. This is a wrap, and as we love to say here at Deep Wealth, may you continue to thrive and prosper while you remain healthy and safe.

Thank you so much.

Jonathan Aberman: Thanks for those great words.

Final Wrap and Subscribe

Jeffrey Feldberg: So there you have it, Deep Wealth Nation. 

What did you think? 

So with all that said and as [00:56:00] we wrap it up, I have another question for you.

Actually, it's more of a personal favor. 

Did you find this episode helpful? 

Have you found other episodes of the Deep Wealth Podcast empowering and a game changer for your journey? 

And if you said yes, and I really hope you did, I have a small but really meaningful way that you can actually help us out and keep these episodes coming to you.

Are you ready for it? 

The dramatic pause. I'll just wait a moment. Drumroll, please. Subscribe. Please subscribe to the Deep Wealth podcast on your favorite podcast channel. When you subscribe to the Deep Wealth Podcast, you're saving yourself time. Every episode automatically comes to you, and I want you to know that we meticulously craft Every one of our episodes to have impactful strategies, stories, expert insights that are designed to help you grow your profits, increase the value of your business, and yes, even optimize your post exit life and your life right now, whatever you want that to look like.

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The Deep Wealth Podcast, it's your reliable source for the next big idea that could literally revolutionize your business. So once again, please hit that subscribe button, stay connected, inspired, and ahead of the curve. And again, your next big breakthrough moment, it might just be one episode away. Maybe it was even this episode.

So all that said. Thank you so much for listening. And remember your wealth isn't just about the money in the bank. It's about the depth of your journey and the impact that you're creating. So let's continue this journey together. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for listening to this episode.

And as we love to say here at Deep Wealth, may you continue to thrive and prosper while you [00:58:00] remain healthy and safe. 

Thank you so much. 

God bless.