"AI Isn't Under Control": The Founder Solving a $20 Trillion Problem | Ep. 397 with Brandon Card CEO of Terzo AI

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

The AI Problem Nobody Talks About—You Can’t Even Turn Them Off

Founder’s Story by IBH Media | Ep. 397 with Brandon Card (aka Brandon Turzo), CEO of Terzo AI

Date: May 13, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Founder’s Story dives deep into the overlooked challenges of enterprise AI with Brandon Turzo, CEO and co-founder of Terzo AI. The central theme: in a world obsessed with AI automation and “sexier” startup problems, nobody talks about how organizations actually manage critical financial contracts—and the enormous challenge of trusting and controlling their AI-driven processes.

Turzo shares the origin of Terzo AI, reflects on building a company during the COVID-19 lockdown, and emphasizes the hybrid approach to AI that amplifies humans instead of replacing them. The conversation also explores mental health in the tech world, community building in the age of digital transformation, and why unsexy, real-world problems can be the biggest business opportunities.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Problem No One Talks About: Contract Chaos in Enterprises

• Most Fortune 100/500 companies store million- or billion-dollar contracts in basic SharePoint folders ([00:00], [05:14]).

• Even tech giants like Microsoft and SpaceX lack robust systems for contract data management.

  “Every company is basically putting $100 million of financial commitment into a SharePoint folder. This is ridiculous.”
  — Brandon Turzo [00:00]

• Traditional solutions, such as Contract Lifecycle Management tools (CLMs), serve lawyers, not the business or finance side.

• Turzo’s lightbulb moment: If Microsoft is building these tools in-house, there’s a massive market gap.

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2. Origin Story: Building a Company in the Pandemic

• Terzo AI was incorporated in San Francisco on March 13, 2020, at the exact moment COVID-19 lockdowns began ([02:12]).

• The pandemic presented existential uncertainty and focus challenges, but ultimately fostered resilience among the team.

  “We just incorporated our company...and we literally, like, this is an apocalyptic scene...But I think ultimately it made us a lot more resilient.”
  — Brandon Turzo [03:31]

• Turzo left a stable job at Microsoft, despite family skepticism ([04:10]).

  “My mom and dad are like, are you sure you want to quit Microsoft right now?...Are you sure you want to go off and do this? And I'm like, I'm sure. But...I was crazy.”
  — Brandon Turzo [04:10]

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3. Rooted in Experience: Founding from Real-World Pain Points

• The business idea was not theoretical—Brandon lived the problem daily with some of the world’s biggest companies ([05:14], [08:15]).

  “I was brought this problem by our customers and they would complain about the Microsoft contracts to me almost every day...Oftentimes they'd ask me if I had the contract because they wouldn't even have access.”
  — Brandon Turzo [05:14]

• Highlighted a specific enterprise scenario: constructing a 95-slide PowerPoint because a client had no consolidated contract visibility, even as they were “talking about sending Teslas to Mars” ([08:15]).

  “I was managing SpaceX...talking about building Starlink and sending Teslas to Mars. And then I'm over here building a PowerPoint with 95 slides for contract data. I'm like, this just doesn't make sense.”
  — Brandon Turzo [08:15]

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4. Strategy: Selling to Fortune 100s First

• Terzo targeted Fortune 100 customers from day one—contrary to most startups’ focus on SMBs/mid-market ([09:54]).

• First enterprise customer: Home Depot, via cold outreach ([10:08]).

• Emphasis on mastering complex procurement, compliance, and onboarding processes (SOC1, SOC2, GDPR, ISO).

  “We took a very different approach. We said, we're going to go in and get master services agreements with the biggest companies in the world...I had to convince investors that, hey, we can go sell the Fortune 100.”
  — Brandon Turzo [10:08]

• Brandon’s enterprise expertise (Oracle, IBM, Microsoft) was pivotal—he “knew how they think” and deeply empathized with users’ pain ([12:04], [12:18]).

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5. Timing, Trends, and Unsexy Problems

• Turzo’s initial conviction in 2021: human labor can’t keep up with thousands of contracts, so only AI could solve the scale ([15:05]).

  “Even if you have an army of...2,000 employees, they can't go through this manually...the only way to solve this is with AI.”
  — Brandon Turzo [15:05]

• Noted their early AI bet predated the hype cycles: before ChatGPT, crypto, NFTs, or metaverse ([16:31]).

• “Unsexy”, infrastructure-level problems (contract databases, not NFTs) present massive, long-term opportunity ([17:10]).

  “It's not sexy—first one, admit it—but it's a real problem that's costing companies billions of dollars. I know this is gonna be a problem in the next decade.”
  — Brandon Turzo [16:36]

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6. The “AI + Human” Approach and AI Limitations

• Terzo employs a “hybrid” approach: AI amplifies humans, especially when accuracy matters ([18:37]).

  “We want to amplify humans with AI. We do think there are some jobs...that could be fully replaced...But when you're talking about finance...there's no room for error. That human element is critical right now.”
  — Brandon Turzo [18:47]

• Concrete example: Large language models (LLMs) like Claude/OpenAI misinterpret linked financial documents, overcounting values ([18:47]).

  “If you give Claude an MSA...Claude thinks that's $3 million. That's actually $1 million...Things are not contextualized...That’s where Terzo comes in...”
  — Brandon Turzo [18:47]

• Terzo maintains 99.9% data accuracy through “human in the loop” review, QA, and anomaly detection.

• On the dangers of uncontrolled AI: Cautions that current models are increasingly autonomous and ungovernable ([22:16]).

  “I don't think any of these LLMs are actually under control...they’re literally going off on their own in their own world. You can't even turn them off.”
  — Brandon Turzo [22:16]

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7. Mental Health, Community, and the Human Side

• Turzo and the host discuss AI’s double-edged sword in mental health—AI chatbots may offer relief, but overreliance is risky ([23:44]).

  “If you're too reliant on AI...talking about how you feel. I think you have to be careful because if it gives you the wrong information, you don't want to take that to heart.”
  — Brandon Turzo [23:44]

• Journaling with AI/chatbots can provide emotional relief, but real human connection remains essential.

• Turzo advocates for proactive community-building, off-screen social events, and digital detoxes to combat tech-driven isolation ([24:51], [28:09]).

  “We have to get back to the human element. We have to get back to community...go out and have fun, fun and listen to great music and eat good food and drink good wine and dance...”
  — Brandon Turzo [24:51] “I'm gonna...mandate people take a certain amount of time off and do retreats and...get away from their phones and maybe do a detox, digital detox. I think that is going to be the key to having, you know, a actual long-term success.”
  — Brandon Turzo [28:09]

• Concern for Gen Z: Physically healthy, but mental health is suffering, partly due to digital overexposure.

• Leadership means not just revenue and growth, but community impact and building support systems for mental health ([29:59]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Founding During COVID

  “We just incorporated our company...and we literally, like, this is an apocalyptic scene. No one's at LAX the first time ever. And we're thinking to ourselves, what in the hell does the future look like now?”
  — Brandon Turzo [02:12]

• On “Unsexy” Problems

  “It's not sexy...but it's a real problem that's costing companies billions of dollars. I know this is gonna be a problem in the next decade.”
  — Brandon Turzo [16:36]

• On Human-AI Collaboration

  “If I'm reporting to the DOJ and my data is 94% accurate, I'm screwed...when it comes to financial reporting...you can't be off by 1%. That’s why we believe there’s going to be a future with humans in the loop.”
  — Brandon Turzo [20:32]

• On the Limits of AI Control

  “I don't think any of these LLMs are actually under control. They're literally going off on their own in their own world. How can you govern and control that? You can't even turn them off.”
  — Brandon Turzo [22:16]

• On Community and Longevity

  “We want to impact the community. We want to impact the world. And on a small scale, we've been able to do that. And it's about leadership, right? It's about leading these young kids...they need mentors.”
  — Brandon Turzo [29:59]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:00] — The real enterprise contract management problem revealed
• [02:12] — Incorporating Terzo AI at the start of the COVID pandemic
• [05:14] — Brandon’s firsthand exposure to the “lost contract” problem in big tech
• [08:15] — PowerPoint contract chaos, even at SpaceX
• [09:54] — Selling to Fortune 100s: why and how
• [15:05] — The undeniable need for AI in contract management
• [16:36] — Why “unsexy” business problems can drive huge success
• [18:47] — Why AI alone isn't enough; the case for human + AI models
• [22:16] — Brandon's concerns about controlling LLMs and the core AI safety issue
• [23:44] — AI’s potential for and dangers to mental health, balance, and community
• [28:09] — Mandating time off, digital detox, and the key to business longevity
• [29:59] — Series B goals, culture, leadership, and the broader mission

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Final Thoughts

This episode stands out for its raw, practical perspective on what it actually takes to build impactful AI for enterprises—and what makes a founder both successful and thoughtful. Brandon Turzo’s story is a call for startups to solve real, painful, and often “boring” problems; look after people (not just margins); and respect both the power and pitfalls of AI.

The vision: a world where contracts are financial assets (not lost PDFs), where AI supercharges but doesn’t replace humans, and where resilient teams thrive together—online and IRL.

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Transcript

[Brandon Turzo]

Every company is basically putting $100 million of financial commitment into a SharePoint folder. This is ridiculous. And I was managing SpaceX, so I go to SpaceX's office and I know that they were talking about building Starlink and sending Teslas to Mars. And then I'm over here building a PowerPoint with 95 slides or contract data. I'm like, this doesn't make sense. Some of these contracts are like 300, 400 pages long. They can't go through this manually. When you're dealing with financial data, there's no room for error. So the only way to solve this is foreign.

[Interviewer]

So, Brandon Turzo. Turzo AI. What is the importance of the name? Because I know you said there, there is an importance of the name, right? And what, what is, what was, who was Brandon before Turzo?

[Brandon Turzo]

So I'm not the same guy I've always been, right. They call me Brandino because my mom's Italian and I, you know, a lot of my friends are that are Italian or from other countries love calling me Brandino.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Brandon Turzo]

And my co founder Al, his father happened to be from Italy, around the same region that my mother's from, Roma. And when we were coming up with the name for Terzo, we were thinking about like, how do we come up with a cool name that's not about the product? Because we might do AI today, but what if we do, you know, payments in the future? What if we do infrastructure? We need a name that's generic. And we thought, you know, Tetso means third in Italian and we're helping companies manage third party relationships, third party contracts. So we said, oh, Turzo could be a cool name. We thought about it like Oracle, right? I started my career at Oracle 16 years ago and I thought, wow, Oracle, they bought up like all these different companies, they still have a powerful named Oracle. I thought Terzo is a similar name and I really like that name. And it was Italian, it was fun and you know, mom, and mom was happy, family was happy, but that's really where the original story came from.

[Interviewer]

I love Italy, by the way. Like, Italian food.

[Brandon Turzo]

That's right.

[Interviewer]

Incredible. It's actually why I like Croatia. I feel like Croatia is like a mixture of Italian Quarterly and Greece part. It's like my two favorite places. I, I love it there. And it does, it does. There's something powerful about the name Turzo. I get. There is something. I can see the, the Oracle effect. All right. It's fun. So you, you start the company. What a wild time to start a company.

[Brandon Turzo]

Like, I mean, I could tell you the story. I got to tell you this.

[Interviewer]

Okay, tell me.

[Brandon Turzo]

Because I was here in sf. I came to SF to meet with some friends, and we also had a law firm up here that was helping us do the incorporation. And we thought, you know, we'll go up the sf, meet the team in person, we'll file the paperwork up there for Turzo Technologies incorporated out of Delaware, did all that paperwork. It was March 13, 2020. When we were in that office here, they were like, there's gonna be a lockdown. No one's gonna be able to come to the office because of this COVID 19 virus. And we were like, okay. We were kind of confused. We went back to the hotel. The hotel was also in lockdown. We went to sfo, flew from SFO back to lax. There was no one at either airport. And me and my co founder, Al, were like, holy shit. I've never been at an airport in the United States or anywhere where there's been no people. And when we landed lax, it was empty. It felt like an apocalypse. And we were thinking to ourselves, I remember those days. Yeah, we were thinking ourselves, wait a second. We just incorporated our company, and we just got all excited about building this company, and we literally, like, this is an apocalyptic scene. No one's at LAX the first time ever. And we're thinking to ourselves, like, what in the hell is the future look like now? And all the people we were recruiting to come on board were scrambling with their families and worried about, obviously, their, you know, personal lives. It was a really tough time for us to get everyone focused. And everyone went on Zoom, went home and kind of, you know, spent time wherever they came from, visited family and friends. Same, same with. I went home as a visit, my mom and dad in New York, and we got on zooms 18 hours a day to build a company. And I was thinking to myself, like, wow. I didn't for. I didn't foresee this coming, but, you know, it was honestly a blessing because it was a distraction for us. But I had a challenge keeping people focused because there was so much happening and death in families, including my family. And it was really hard to keep people focused on building back then, but I think ultimately it made us a lot more resilient.

[Interviewer]

That's the wild thing about entrepreneurship. Like, it is. I tell people, like, keep a job, keep a job. Keep a job. Like, go get a job.

[Brandon Turzo]

My mom and dad are like, are you sure you want to quit Microsoft right now? After that you know, like that stable, amazing company. Are you sure you want to go off and do this? And I'm like, I'm sure. But how would it be? Crazy. I was crazy.

[Interviewer]

You didn't know? Yeah, that's, that's the thing.

[Brandon Turzo]

You knew I was crazy. So she's like, okay, like, I know you want to start your own. I started my own company when I was like 17 in her basement. Right. So I was like, wow, this is really nerve wracking. I can tell you. I had anxiety and I was a little nervous, but I was like, you know what? I already made this commitment in my head. I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to do whatever it takes. And it was a very tough time mentally for myself, my co founders, for our whole ecosystem. And it was a really interesting time in history. I think none of us will ever forget that.

[Interviewer]

I think there's something I'm finding now with AI specifically that a lot of people create a business, but they're not really solving a problem. They're solving a problem that's been solved and they're solving a problem that 350,000 other people are solving the same problem. How did you come up with the idea around that this is the problem and it's, and that really no one has really solved it?

[Brandon Turzo]

Yeah, well, the thing is, is that I was part of the problem every day. I worked with the biggest companies in the world when I was at Microsoft for five years. They complained to me about this problem every single day. So it's not like I came up with this genius idea out of the clear blue sky. Right. I was brought this problem by our customers and they would complain about the Microsoft contracts to me almost every day. And oftentimes it asked me if I had the contract because they wouldn't even have access to the contract and they'd lose it. So I was constantly looking up the contract details, asking Microsoft Legal to get me the most version, most recent version of the contract to give it to my customers. So I knew this was a problem because I was in the trenches with these customers. I always asked them, like I thought there was a CLM category. Like, aren't you supposed to have a contract lifecycle management tool? They're like, oh yeah, well, legal will use that. We don't touch that. We're in procurement and finance or it's. So I was like, wait a second. There's this huge category called clm. But I never run into a clm. And I kid you not, Dan, I was doing A hundred million dollar contract with one of the biggest auto companies in the world. And I said to them, hey, question for you. Weird question. After you sign this hundred million dollar contract, where are you putting it? And they said, what do you mean? I said, where are you putting the PDF document that you get out of DocuSign? They said, in a SharePoint folder. And that was the moment. I was like, wait a second. Every company is basically putting $100 million of financial commitment into a SharePoint folder. This is ridiculous. This is so broken. And I thought, we got to go solve this. So after many years of hearing these problems, I thought, I know there's no solution in the market. And you know, with all due respect, the CLM category was built by lawyers for lawyers to do drafting and workflow. It's a whole different set of use cases than what we're working on. So I was very adamant and very confident in no one's solving this problem. No one even understands this problem. And I went up to Microsoft Leadership and I said, is this a problem at Microsoft? And they're like, absolutely, we're building something in house to solve it. And that's when I knew nothing was out there. Because Microsoft would go out and buy SAP or Oracle if already had it, would have already had it. So Microsoft, in my opinion, the best leadership team in the world. Nothing but love and respect for that leadership team. And I thought, wait, if Microsoft's building in house, everyone's gonna have to build it in house. We're gonna go build it for the Fortune 500. And that was, you know, the moment I went and started pitching to my founders and the early employees about this problem. And they were like, are you sure about this problem? I said, listen, I live this every single day and I can tell you no one solved it. And now people are finally catching on. People are starting to copy us, obviously, six years later. But, you know, I think it's a good thing. It just validates the size of the market. And this is a, you know, this is a literally a 10 to 20 trillion dollar problem. So, you know, we believe there's going to be a lot of players in the space, but we know we're first and we believe we're going to be the best at solving it.

[Interviewer]

You had a head start. That's good. I think, I think that's the smartest thing that I've heard from from founders, like the most successful people is they experience the problem. Clients have the problem. Because if you create something and no one else has the problem, how Are you going to get any clients?

[Brandon Turzo]

I have to tell you this because this is true. I remember being in my office at home, frustrated, because my client, this auto company that everyone knows, asked me to build a PowerPoint presentation of all their Microsoft contracts they have in every country. And I thought to myself, this is ridiculous. This is so insane. And I built it, basically would copy like a screenshot into every slide. And then like, you put the description in the slide of, hey, this is your contract in Europe, this is your contract in Mexico, this is your contract in Japan. I was thinking to myself, this is the best way to do this in 2018. This is insane. We have like. And I was managing SpaceX, so I go to SpaceX's office and I know they're talking about building Starlink and sending Teslas to Mars. So I'm like, okay, I'm in meetings over here talking about sending Teslas to Mars, and then I'm over here building a PowerPoint with 95 slides for contract data. I'm like, this just doesn't make sense, you know?

[Interviewer]

Perfect storm for you. Yeah, it was the perfect storm.

[Brandon Turzo]

I was like, this is amazing. And I was sitting in LA traffic, probably like, you allowed on the 405, you know, I was always in LA traffic, going for meetings, Orange County, San Diego, dude, sitting there staring at my dashboard, thinking myself, I gotta solve this problem. I gotta solve this problem, right? And I would constantly come in my head like, how is this right in front of me? How am I so fortunate to have this problem right in front of me and not do anything about it? I gotta take this chance, I gotta take this risk. You know, when I was a young guy, no wife, no kids, perfect opportunity to do it. And timing is very important in life.

[Interviewer]

It seems timing can almost be everything. So you, you create it, you start it. You, you're going all in. How did you get the first enterprise clients? Because I'm guessing enterprise is. Would enterprise be your client? And.

[Brandon Turzo]

Oh, yeah, Fortune 500, honestly, even Fortune 100 is our primary customer base. Like, the biggest companies in the world are Turzo customers.

[Interviewer]

Was that. Is that a long? Because I've heard it's a long cycle. Very long for that.

[Brandon Turzo]

Very long.

[Interviewer]

So how is that in the process?

[Brandon Turzo]

In the beginning, you know, one of our first customers, believe it or not, that we got, is Home Depot. And we reached out to them cold. We had no relationships there. We reached out to a few team members there and we said, hey, we came up with this idea, we're solving this contract problem. We think we might be able to help you with your vendor contracts. I'm not sure if this is a problem for you, but love to share our vision and what we're building and here if you just want to give us some feedback. And luckily the gentleman there was a maverick innovator and he said, hey, I'd love to hear what you guys are working on. And we brought the idea to him and he said, this is very interesting. I do all this stuff manually in a spreadsheet. So we said, hey, what if we did a proof of concept together, very inexpensive and we could test this out. And Home Depot ended up being one of our first AI customers helping us test all cold. Now that was very rare. We were excited about that because we loved the hunt and chase of like getting a cold deal. But we also got into one of the largest financial transaction processors in the world through our relationships. And then from there we use a lot of our relationships in our network to get into these big enterprises. And that was really the challenge that we took on that, you know, quite frankly, with all due respect, Silicon Valley startups don't do Silicon Valley startups. Even the best tech companies in the world, they're not starting the Fortune 100. They're starting SMB Mid Market, selling to all their friends they went to stanford with, doing 5k deals, 7k deals, credit card swipes all day, right? Totally fine. We took a very different approach. We said, we're going to go in and get master services agreements with the biggest companies in the world and we're going to get approved to sell to them. Which means you have SOC1, SOC2, GDPR, all these security requirements, ISO 2701 before you go and sell your product. So I had to convince investors that, hey, we can go sell the Fortune 100 if we can get past their onboarding process. Investors looked at me like, why the hell would you start with the Fortune 100? Are you crazy? I'm like, well, that's the world I grew up in. So, you know, I started Oracle.

[Interviewer]

How they think.

[Brandon Turzo]

I know how they think. I worked with them my whole life. I know, I know how they operate. I know how complex they are, I know how siloed they are.

[Interviewer]

It makes, from the outside looking in, it might not make sense, but from you, it makes total sense. Because you're in the mind of the people, of the problem you're solving for.

[Brandon Turzo]

I worked with those people every day. And the thing is, like me, I'm a guy that when I do something, I go all in I don't do anything half assed. I go all in when I work with people and I really cared about my customers problems because they're my friends. I had dinner with these people every week. I talked to them on the phone three, four times a day. These are my, these are really important partners to me and my, and in order for me to be successful or my team to be successful, they had to be successful first. So I was really, I had a lot of empathy for the pain and I really started to understand how much pain they were going through trying to manage $50 billion a year of supplier spending with no data, I mean, no tools. I was like, how the hell are you going to do this? So I really had that empathy to go in there and I felt really passionate about solving this problem and that made all the difference in the world because don't get me wrong, I have some really brilliant ideas, but I don't have any experience in the space. I have a million like health care fitness ideas, but I'm not an expert in health care and I haven't worked in health care.

[Interviewer]

You know, it gets mad at me. She's like, don't tell me another idea.

[Brandon Turzo]

I have so many great ideas, but I'm like, I don't know if I can execute this. I have no experience, I have no idea how this world works.

[Interviewer]

Right, and stick to what you know, right? Stick to what you know.

[Brandon Turzo]

I've also failed a lot in my life too. When I was younger, I was always building stuff. When I was young, high school, college, always working on stuff and just, you know, just swinging for the fences and seeing what happens, just playing ball and striking out. And I realized, wow, if you don't work in the industry day to day. And I was lucky enough to start my career at Oracle right out of undergrad and I got a great training program at Oracle. I had great management there, great leadership there. I learned so much at a young age. And then I went to IBM, Cloud, IBM, Watson, and I was 25, I went to Microsoft at 27. So by the time I was 30, I already worked at Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. I had a great understanding of the enterprise and I thought that was my IP and I would talk to investors about it. And I'm saying, look, you know, I know problems exist that other people don't even have a clue about. So that was really the difference was being in the trenches. And that was actually the reason why I wanted to go work for those big tech companies. I wanted to get that exposure, I wanted to get that education. And I wanted to get that knowledge out of doing those complex projects. And that's really what I, you know, that was my, my goal early on because I never wanted to be like a corporate vp. I always thought to myself, like, I'm going to run my own company. It's just a matter of when.

[Interviewer]

I'm a huge proponent of work in a company, work in corporations and then start a business because the learning, or go work in a business that you want to be in a certain business, go work in a business that's in that. Because you learn so much about the things you should do, things you shouldn't do. And then also you learn the real problems firsthand versus guessing. So what, what was a moment for you where you just like you woke up and you're like, wow, like, this is, this is the thing, this is it. Like, this is going to be huge.

[Brandon Turzo]

I can tell you. It was 2021. We were working with companies like Home Depot and big banks, also a huge health care insurance company. And I was looking at their contract data because they were obviously, we're working on these complex projects together. And some of these contracts were like 300, 400 pages long. And they signed thousands of them, literally thousands of them. So I'm like, even if you have an army of a thousand employees, 2,000 employees, they can't go through this manually. It's just too much data, the scale is too big. So the only way to solve this is with AI for the world. It's the only way this can be solved. The companies can't hire enough people to do this. That was the moment where I was like, I know it's worth going all in on AI. I know I'm gonna go meet with every investor and tell them I need $30 million to go build this AI and go hire PhDs to build the AI. I know this is the right track because everyone in the enterprise needs to do this with automation and AI. It's impossible to do it all with humans. And that was really the moment where I thought, okay, I feel confident going to tell investors, give us this investment, this Series A. We, you know, go build more. We got the seed round done too, but the Series A was really where we could go put real money behind the tech. And we need to go build an enterprise scalable, secure platform. We need to hire top notch engineers who have a lot of experience and PhDs. And these, these, you know, employees are really expensive. And this was before any of the LLMs came out.

[Interviewer]

This is like before the AI boom. Of like every. Back then, it was like crypto and stuff.

[Brandon Turzo]

Like, it was crypto and metaverse. Metaverse, Metaverse. Everyone was like, hey, everyone's hot. Yeah. I was in Miami during COVID right? Everyone's like, oh, you know, Facebook changed your name to meta. Everything's about the metaverse. Everyone's gonna be living in this digital world. Then we get NFTs. People are buying NFTs. Monkey NFTs for $5 million. I was like, this is all junk. I'm sorry. But, like, I see these fads come and go all the time, and everyone jumps on the hype train all the time. And I thought, this is a problem. That's a fundamental problem. It's not sexy. First one, admit it, it's not sexy, but it's a real problem that's costing companies billions of dollars. I know this is gonna be a problem in the next decade.

[Interviewer]

Unsexy, I think are the best. Like, it seems like. It's like. It's like I became a billionaire through a sexy bit. It's always like, I know billionaires from recycling scraps.

[Brandon Turzo]

I mean, it's always the utility. It's right. Larry Ellison, obviously, one of the biggest beasts of all time, who I have nothing but respect for it, obviously. You know, I look up to him and what he's been able to do. He built everything off the database. He built everything off the database and went out and acquired more companies. Was the foundation. Was the database.

[Interviewer]

And foundation is unsecured.

[Brandon Turzo]

And we're the contract database. So I look at this as Oracle got the SQL database. We're building the contract database. And where we can go with this in the future is huge. But, yeah, everyone loves the sexy, fun stuff. And don't get me wrong, I love space. I love, you know, all this cool stuff they're talking about, you know, fun VR, AR agents, all this stuff, right? But it's all flash in the pan, stop. And people. People get excited about it and then boom, it disappears.

[Interviewer]

That's. That's my thing. We're at Human X and I walked on to a lot of the companies and I can't help but think in a year, two years, I don't think they'll exist. Like, I'm like, any LLM can just copy what they're doing in five seconds. Rapper and they're all rappers and they're all like, it's going to destroy most of that.

[Brandon Turzo]

Yeah. I'm like. I'm like, where's the profit margin?

[Interviewer]

It's crazy.

[Brandon Turzo]

I don't know, I just said you're all, you're all paying Open Air, all paying Claude to do everything that you're, you know, to do all your compute. It's just you're putting a cool UI and UX on top of code.

[Interviewer]

It doesn't matter. And they're going to be fighting as everyone else is doing the same thing. So humans, we were talking earlier about humans, right.

[Brandon Turzo]

We still use a lot of humans.

[Interviewer]

It seems like most people are like, how can I use AI and robotics to replace every human? That's the feeling I get. You have a different approach and feeling on things.

[Brandon Turzo]

Yeah, hybrid approach. We want to amplify humans with AI. We do think there are some jobs, of course, that could be fully replaced with AI and there's no need for the human element. But when you're talking about finance, you're talking about money. Really important decisions, audits, compliance, reporting, publicly traded companies. You can't 100% trust AI. That human element is critical right now. Right. I'll give you a perfect example. And I love Claude, by the way. And I love, they're all fantastic. I use them every day. But here's the thing with Claude, and we've tested this over and over. Same thing with OpenAI. If you give Claude an MSA, a master services Agreement, it's a million dollars. And then there's an invoice against that Master Service agreement for a million dollars. And there's a purchase order against that invoice for a million dollars. Claude thinks that's $3 million. That's actually $1 million. Those three documents are all the same $1 million commitment underneath the master. But things are not contextualized in the LLM makes sense. That's where Turzo comes in and plays. So when you're dealing with financial data, there's no room for error. That's why we believe that this human in the loop review process with anomaly detection, making sure that we're qaing the data for our customers so they can trust the data. And our Data is at 99.9% accuracy. That's why we're in business. And the reason why we are at 99% accuracy is because we knew that we needed to have humans that were highly trained using the AI that we built and making that the proprietary process bringing humans and AI together. And that's what we pioneered in 20, 21 and 22. I believe we're one of the best companies in the world of that they should do. And I think it's people Critical, Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Visionary.

[Brandon Turzo]

Yeah. And I think that, honestly, back then, people were like, well, you won't need humans in the loop. You don't need humans. Agents can do all of this. And I said, well, not when you're dealing with financial data. If I'm writing an email to Dan, I can afford to have an error, right? If I'm writing a simple email, hey, write an email to Dan about us having a podcast at Human Acts. Okay, cool. There's no, there's no, like, repercussions for having errors. If I'm reporting to the DOJ and my data is 94% accurate, I'm screwed. So that is the space we play in. And when it comes to this financial reporting and the analysis and the payments, you can't be off by 1%. So that's why we believe that there is going to be a future with humans in the loop. And we're going to amplify the humans and we're going to make humans extremely efficient. And you know what I love about Jensen? Jensen made a comment recently that if you're getting rid of all your employees, you don't have any new ideas. He's right, though. Make your employees 10 times more productive and go build new stuff. Because we think, okay, we have 45 engineers right now. Just because AI is powerful, we're not going to go lay off 20 engineers. We're going to make those 45 engineers use Claude code and burn as many tokens as possible and go build stuff faster than everyone else. So that's how we think about it, right? Let's amplify our team. Let's use AI to make our team 10 times more productive, 100 times more productive.

[Interviewer]

Every time I ask for a new idea for AI, it just tells me what I want to hear. So you are right. Like, I've had to recently tell my team. I'm like, you guys have to check.

[Brandon Turzo]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Like, because they weren't checking things and then we're not dealing with financial stuff. But I'm like, you guys, you gotta check things. Like, we assume like the AI is 100 correct and it knows everything. And I'm like, you really have to check. Like, it's not life or death situation for us. But I'm like, still, it doesn't look good and we're just not accurate.

[Brandon Turzo]

I'm not a PhD in computer science, although I worked in, you know, tech my entire life. I'm an honor. I'm an honorary engineer. Right. I understand how a tech works. My opinion, people can disagree with me all they want. But I don't think any of these LLMs are actually under control. I just don't. How the models are. Are like building themselves. They're literally going off on their own in their own world. How can you govern and control that? And you look at all these foundational companies, all their heads of safety left.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Brandon Turzo]

Why? Because they know that the models just kind of have a brain of their own and they're going to act. How are humans going to lock these things down? You can't even turn them off. Right. So it's, it's very interesting right now.

[Interviewer]

That's the point we had an AI safety expert on before and he said the people building right now don't know how it actually works.

[Brandon Turzo]

And no one knows how it works.

[Interviewer]

And he's like, we're like, bastards. So something that I'm. I'm very passionate about, which I know you are too, is. Is mental health.

[Brandon Turzo]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

And I know Gemini just released something, I think it was today, as we're recording this about, about the ability to. If you're not feeling well in Gemini, it'll actually connect you to a hotline. Something which I think is unique. You have, you know, the, the AI chat bots that. Companions which I think there's like, you know, it like, can destroy your mental health.

[Brandon Turzo]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

They make it better.

[Brandon Turzo]

They want to be too reliant.

[Interviewer]

Right. Even though I don't know if it's the worst thing or the best thing for humanity, it's very hard to say. But what do you. What are you seeing in terms of how can AI better mental health?

[Brandon Turzo]

I think there's a lot of opportunity and just like with social media. Right. It could be a blessing and a curse at the same time if you let it consume you. And I think if you're too reliant on AI or people are using chat cbt for their therapists. Right. Or they're talking about their relationships or talking about how they feel. I think you have to be careful because if it gives you the wrong information, you don't want to take that to heart and you don't want to, you know, take it too serious because you never know what these models are, you know, interpreting and how they're going to behave. But at the same time, I do believe that people can at least vent and feel comfortable and confidential and be able to tell Nai how they're feeling and get a response back. I think it gives people some type of release to do that, and that's positive for people to share how they're feeling to type out how you're feeling. Just like journaling, right? If you journal and, and, and write out how you feel today, it actually gives you a sense of relief. I think it's a positive versus keeping it inside and holding in your body and hold it in your organs. So I think AI can help humans a lot on the mental health side when it comes to the therapy and being able to, you know, find ways to improve their overall lifestyle or, you know, improve their nutrition or sleep better or, you know, work out all those types of things. I think they have unlimited information now which could benefit people like us, right? And you can get a lot of information for free really quickly, which before you had to pay personal trainers or nutritionists a lot of money. So I think access to that free information is a beautiful thing. But at the same time we have to be careful, right? Because we're becoming too robotic. Everything we do, right? We got, we got email, we got our slack, we got an Instagram, we're on X, we're on all these channels. And we have to get back to the human element. We have to get back to community. And one thing I always talk about with the foundation we started on the side, right? I talk about with the Tour Zone employees too, is that we have to get back in person and enjoy energy with our teammates and go out and have fun, fun and listen to great music and eat good food and drink good wine and dance and have a grand old time and really get that personal touch because that is what humans thrive on and we can't forget about that. And I think that we over rotate too hard into this digital world, especially Gen Z. Yep, thank God I'm a millennial because I see how Gen Z acts and honestly, I'm scared for that generation because they're almost cyborgs at this point. But we need to balance ourselves out and we need to put the phones away. We need to go out and laugh and talk and, you know, get out in nature and go to the beach and go hiking and do all these things and balance our central nervous systems out. I think that's very important. And I preach about this all the time. And one thing we do at Turzo, I think other companies are starting to do this too, you know, but we're a huge, huge proponent of throwing events, having music, having, you know, really cool lights and really cool dislike, you know, experiences. And we've done this in Miami. We've also done this in Amsterdam. We're gonna do this probably in Ibiza. This Year. We love bringing people together. Not to talk about Turza.

[Interviewer]

I'll see you there.

[Brandon Turzo]

You're welcome to come because we just want to have fun. We were so saying, let's get 300 people together.

[Interviewer]

I've never been to Ibiza.

[Brandon Turzo]

Let's have a blast. I'm gonna go, oh, you have a blast in the beast. You come to Miami, one of our parties. Right. We just, we have.

[Interviewer]

I like that. Great people in the room together.

[Brandon Turzo]

Exactly.

[Interviewer]

I hope that, I hope more people, I hope more founders executives learn because we, we, we are social media makes us unsocial or non. Internet has driven us further away.

[Brandon Turzo]

Crazy.

[Interviewer]

And as you know, like mental health. I've challenged things, have had, you know, been challenged myself. I know many people have committed suicide and such and such and many young men.

[Brandon Turzo]

And it's really about the many young men speaking on behalf of them because I went through the same things. And even it doesn't matter if you're successful, doesn't matter if you're strong, doesn't matter if you come from a great family. Everyone has their highs and lows. Yeah, I talk about this all the time. Right. We're all human and we all have these human experiences and we're all going to get knocked down. It's about having a great support system to help you get back up. Right. And I think that there's a ton of opportunity. And when I look at, you know, some of the data was. I'm obviously a data driven guy. I look at some of the data about, you know, let's just call it Gen Z. And the one thing is they're healthy because they're not drinking as much, which is great. And overall I think they're not as obese. They're probably eating more healthy. They're more conscious about the food they're eating. But then I look at the mental health rates and it's 4x, you know, worse than even the millennial. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

A one side healthy and unsight unhealthy because.

[Brandon Turzo]

Because they're staying. We laugh about this and sometimes they can body healthy but mentally not healthy. Right. So. So I always question my friends because we, you know, we go out and we'll have a glass of wine or we'll go out and grab whatever an old fashioned. And I think to myself, am I better off mentally staying at home on the couch by myself and not drinking or am I better off than going to have two glasses of wine with Dan and laughing and talking? Is that alcohol really going to ruin me?

[Interviewer]

The two glasses they drink wine, they

[Brandon Turzo]

live longer because they're socializing, because they're part of their community. Right. They have a purpose, they have a great sense of community. And honestly, I think that's the most underrated thing in our world is having a strong community. Doesn't have to be your family or your wife or your husband, friends, co workers, people you really love being around, people who don't drain you, people who make you feel, you know, a sense of happiness and enjoyment. That for me is critical. While we get into this AI world and everything's going to be robots, we have to also spend a lot of time and effort and I'm going to roll this out with our HR department. Once we get our Series B done, I'm gonna mandate people take a certain amount of time off and do retreats and, and go off and spend time in nature and get away from the screen and get away from their phones and maybe do a detox, digital detox. I think that is going to be the key to having, you know, a actual long term success versus being, you know, you know, overnight success and then selling the company we want to be around for the next 25 years. How are we going to do that? Consistency, stability, constant balance. And it's not easy.

[Interviewer]

So I will live to 150. We need flip phones so. I know, I know. Brandon, you're, you're, you just entered your Series B here at Human Next right now. So many exciting things happening. Perfect. People want to get in touch with you. How can they do so?

[Brandon Turzo]

I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, honestly on LinkedIn every day. But people get in touch with me mostly through LinkedIn or be carded Turzo cloud. Typically I'm pretty responsive on email. I'm, I'm on it. But we're excited about the Series B. We're very excited about changing this perception that contracts are legal documents and helping the world treat contracts like financial assets because that's what they are and we want to pioneer this space. Want to go raise healthy round of capital, go hire the best people. Selfishly, I've been trying to hire a lot of my ex Microsoft teammates. I want them to come on board and we also want to put a lot of money into community events. Right. It's not just about one thing. I'll tell Series B investors and I'll tell you too. This is who I am. We are high performers and we are worried about revenue and we are worried about customers, we are worried about profit margins and all those things. But it's not the only thing we're worried about. We're worried about building a strong community. We're worried about treating people right. We're worried about being kind. We're worried about making the world a better place. And that's important for us overall. We don't want to just be a company that's winning deals with customers and making revenue. We. We want to impact the community. We want to impact the world. And on a small scale, we've been able to do that. And it's about leadership, right? It's about leading these young kids, about leading, you know, these people that need hope, they need. They need people to look up to. They need mentors.

[Interviewer]

A lot of founders can learn from you. A lot of founders now are thinking about the profit. They're thinking about the quick exit. They're not necessarily thinking about longevity and things like that, which. This will make a world a better place. But thank you so much for joining us, by the way.

[Brandon Turzo]

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure, and I hope we get to do this again. Thanks a lot.