Transcript
A (0:00)
This clip of Making it with Jon David features John talking to Brian Hamilton, chairman of Live Switch and founder of sageworks. So you. But your background, I mean, from what I understand, it's teacher, consultant, and then you have a tech company. So what was your actual training? Were you a finance guy, an accountant by training?
B (0:21)
I was for a while. I was in the bank until they. They were going to fire me. But I was in a bank there for about a year after college and I had studied finance and all that stu. But you know, more importantly, I was a practitioner, I was an entrepreneur. So I knew what was important, or I think I knew what was important to running a company. And that, that was really kind of the magic there.
A (0:42)
And so what was your. You said your co founder, obviously was the technical person. What were you doing? Were you literally writing out the formulas that would go into the algorithm?
B (0:51)
Yeah, I have a little picture on my wall here. I can't show it to you, but. But I wrote out the formulas. And again, the magic was in not just the formulas, but how those formulas would change based upon different criteria. It's kind of boring.
A (1:07)
A whole bunch of if and then statements. Yeah, absolutely.
B (1:11)
I gotcha. Yeah, that's. Hey, good job. Yeah. And for each of those scenarios on those algorithms, you needed a separate paragraph.
A (1:18)
Right.
B (1:19)
And then the idea is the report comes together based upon the financial criteria into a one sheeter, one sheet. You're running a company. It could be a pharmaceutical company, it could be a landscaping company. You get a one page thing. How are you doing? Are you doing well? You're not doing so well. What do you improve? And it works. I mean, it really works. It was really, truly early AI and I know more about that than most people. And I don't know as much as I should, but yeah, it was early, very early.
A (1:47)
So that's 1998. What was the growth like of the company? How long until your first client? Did you raise money? What did that first, let's say, decade look like?
B (1:56)
All right, so in 1998, I had to write like 10,000 pages of single space text. It was two years. It was a lot of work. Oh, my goodness. Then, then you, you know, if they say if you build it, they'll come. And I'm like, yeah, that might be true in Hollywood, but it's probably not true. So I built the expert system. And then, you know, you're just sitting there like, wow, this is great. We got it done, but now you got to go sell it. And I didn't know where we would sell. We would sell to franchise companies, would sell accountants. Would we sell it to bankers? Could we sell directly to small businesses? And I tried all the above, and my friend, who's a friend now, Richard Sebolt, it's the craziest thing. It was based on a Yahoo search. Yahoo. Yeah. I don't even know they had search. But, like, all kidding aside, Richard Sabol odd is coming out of Citibank, the big building in, you know, New York City, was looking for an expert system like this. And he contacted me and, you know, we, we became buddies after. But. But Citibank licensed from us. And of course, we had some smaller customers before then, but it was a really. It's. It's just those moments you live for because you're like, oh, my God, you know, my work is actually worth something.