← The Digital Executive
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- [00:00]
Grainger Announcer
If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
- [00:39]
Brian (Podcast Host)
Welcome to Corusant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in emerging tech? Working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corazon.com brand welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Nicholas Genest. Nicholas Genest is a technology executive, Serial founder and former multi exit CTO who has built and led companies generating over 1 billion in annual revenue. He is the founder and CEO of Codebox Technology, an AI first education and software company that trains and employs technologists from all walks of life. Well, good afternoon Nicholas. Welcome to the show.
- [01:21]
Nicholas Genest
Thanks for having me Brian.
- [01:23]
Brian (Podcast Host)
Appreciate it, really do my friend. Glad you're back on the show again for the second time. This is awesome. I'd like to talk a little bit about development, especially the stuff you're doing. As you know, I cut my teeth in technology doing that many years ago, but I appreciate that jumping in. Nicholas, if you don't mind. You've built and led technology organizations generating over a billion dollars in annual revenue and served as the Chief Technology Officer at companies like the RealReal and ModCloth. What key moments shaped your journey from technologist to serial founder and CEO of
- [01:55]
Nicholas Genest
Codebox what really happened for me during those years as a CTO building teams for startups and at Walmart was really when I came to the realization that you can achieve a lot of things using technology, no matter the stack, no matter the language, no matter the solutions that you stitch together. What truly makes the difference is the quality of the people operating and building your stack. I came to that realization realizing that you can achieve more with dedicated and mobilized people who share your values and your purpose as a company, no matter where they come from. So I've achieved more with Uber drivers and Starbucks baristas and fed up teachers and tired nurses who acquired technology skills. Afterwards, I achieved more with them, mobilized and motivated, than I did with elitist technologists coming out of Stanford and and Berkeley and Harvard and who had to be managed a certain other way. Sold. The biggest takeaway from my days as a CTO was was that that it's in spite of the fact that you deal with technology.
- [03:18]
Grainger Announcer
If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [03:49]
Nicholas Genest
You actually deal with people and that's why they make the difference.
- [03:54]
Brian (Podcast Host)
That's awesome. And I love that we talk a lot about that. At the end of the day, even with AI and robotics coming down the pike now is people make the world of difference. In fact, that is the glue that keeps society together. But I like what you heard. Obviously you learned a lot in technology, that you can achieve a lot using technology. But at the end of the day, as you talked about the people and that quality of people that are on your team and you shared some examples, you achieved a lot more with folks that had the same value, whether they were a barista or an Uber driver, versus sometimes maybe a technologist elitist that maybe comes out of Yale or Stanford or something. So I do appreciate you highlighting that. And Nicholas Codebox positions itself as an AI first education and software company, including Vibe coding that trains and employees technologists from all walks of life. What problem in traditional tech education were you determined to solve when launching the company?
- [04:51]
Nicholas Genest
Well, at first it's the speed. So we cater to a population who wants to get to their goal of knowing AI native tools or getting to technology market fast. So they don't have four years, they don't have three, they might not even have one. And they, they want to know what's the latest, what's the greatest, and how they can leverage it to achieve results quickly, either because they have an idea to materialize or either because they have an idea or already have a clear definition of the impact they want to have. And that's. So that's our crowd, that's we teach in record time. So like it's a 16 week program. And when you're already familiar with technology and you've already developed, it goes down to eight weeks and we teach the latest and greatest tools. So and it is AI native. So we don't, we explain the basics. We go through the foundational elements of software in 2026 and then we build up and we show how to go Fast leveraging tools like Codex, Claude Code Cursor. And when we have CEOs and decision makers in front of us, we teach them tools like lovable.dev, or AI Studio, powered by Gemini. And these tools allow these decision makers to remove the risk, to get lost in translation in their requirements and they can truly express the kind of offer and the kind of experience they want to propose to their customers and their stakeholders. And it doesn't get handed over to a product manager, doesn't get handed over to a project manager and it goes straight to build. And that build can then scale and be compliant and we can preserve accountability. But that's what those tools are for. They are to remove or get straight to the signal and prevent the noise from taking the objective away from the decision makers and the sponsor of the software.
- [07:13]
Brian (Podcast Host)
Thank you, really appreciate that. And I like how you truly are catering to those people that are motivated, they want to get to the goals faster, whether it's a new idea, they're switching careers, that sort of thing. I like how you teach the latest greatest tools, which includes Vibe coding and AI while also covering the foundational basics. And I think that's really important. Obviously there's going to be different levels, but I just love how you do that and you're very inclusive around that. So I appreciate those insights. And Nicholas, the debry like collaboration within the Bytecoding project aims to modernize how developers are trained and employed in real world environments. What early lessons have emerged from this experiment?
- [07:55]
Nicholas Genest
That innovation that we came up with really came up like very intuitively. So we started realizing through the use of cloud code and codecs that more and more people wanted to do something for their software. They really wanted to own and control their software. There's like many, many reshoring movements within companies that are happening where they were taking this away from India, we're taking this away from Pakistan or from Latin America outsourcing that we used to do. And there's this movement to reshore your software and, and get back into control when that happens. Some people, sometimes they get stuck and the way it translates is they start wasting tokens. So like you're on your clock code, you're on your Codex interface and then, and then you're stuck. Like you don't know where to go, like try to prompt your way, then you roll back and then you try another way and then you roll back and you see it. It never ends up working the way you want specifically. And when you're stuck like that, the amount of tokens wasted can reach like a high amount and it can get shocking sometimes. So we put together this devry like service where you go on our site you book a 30 minute session with a live human being.
- [09:18]
Howie Mandel
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- [09:47]
Nicholas Genest
games and you share screen with them and you will be able to get unstuck or you'll be able to like identify what's the right tool for you or identify where to start or where to go next. And this collaboration happens with a human, so no shaming, just cheers. It happens with a lot of expertise and the results are guaranteed. So like you will get what you need out of that half hour. And if you want to continue and keep it going, you can as well. And getting online is instant. So check out, click on your voucher, get in a zoom room with a coach and you get started right away and you get to your results. So it's that on demand assistance from an empathetic human being was something we believe was missing to this all catching up phase that individuals seem to want online. So that's how we came up with that concept.
- [10:52]
Brian (Podcast Host)
That's amazing. Thank you. And you talked about that innovation that came up was very intuitive. You learned that through cloud code, codecs and other tools that it was just making it easier for companies or developers to kind of bring that work back in and do it themselves more efficiently. But what I really like is if you do get stuck, you talked about using these tools and believe me, you can burn through credits. I know I've got several subscriptions but if you get stuck, you can jump on a call with a real human and the results are guaranteed. That's phenomenal. And I just really appreciate that you're doing that. You're really giving back while helping the world and also helping your company. So I appreciate that. And then Nicholas, last question of the day. As we look ahead to the future, how do you see AI reshaping software development, education and the global tech workforce over the next decade? And what role do organizations like Codebox play in preparing people for that future.
- [11:49]
Nicholas Genest
Oh, that, that, that decade question is a, is a tough one. My horizon is closer to the five years and I don't venture making predictions beyond that because it's just moving plain too fast. Every other week you'll have this new mature version of ChatGPT from OpenAI rolling out like it happened to us this week. And then it overtakes like the 4.6 version of anthropic that was released to like a month ago. And like every other week there seems to be the announcement of a breakthrough to be tested and to be made sense of. And the pace is way bigger, like way faster than, than what humans can actually absorb. Decision makers, lawmakers, consumers, name it, it's just going too fast and they need to choose what they wrap their head around and what they leave behind. And I see like, the consequence of this frenzy is a chasm that's forming. And right now, if you look at the market and the way software is built, there's a portion of them, a portion of the population, building software like we were in 2022, like before large language models, before barcode and codecs. And these people, they, they burn the resources of the way we used to do it in 2022. And they run the risk of getting things lost in translation through project requirements and project management and all this stuff. And there's the other population who actually made it on the other side of that chasm. And they are like, the record time from ideation to transaction at code box is three days. Someone came to us saying, like, I have, I want to do this. And three days later they were online doing it. So this is how fast it's going on this other side of the chasm. And we feel like we need to be part of that movement, taking more and more people from one side to the other through individual education, through corporate training, to bridge the skill gap of the existing workforce they have, instead of laying them off, maybe they can bridge their skills gap and keep them on staff. Like they're, they have the culture, they have the dedication, they have the purpose. Like, if all there's. They're missing is like a, a few, the mastery of a few tools. Let's give them that. And, and we also can help companies as a whole through like either like taking the bottom of their backlog and getting rid of it or going faster, building software that would have cost millions of dollars to implement, getting it done in a, with a few hundred thousands now and getting compliant and operational in record time, those are the ways we feel we can help the most in that revolution. Whereas this tidal wave is disrupting so much. So we, the next five years are exciting to us because the LLM models, the large language models, are as dumb as they're ever going to get. So they're only going to get better. And we are amazed at every breakthrough they make. It's like a new discovery and it sparks like a brand new wave of ideas and inspiration that we can apply those breakthroughs to. So we see ourselves as in the middle of actors of a very meaningful revolution that happens in the sheer mass and the sheer impact is just mind blowing. So we really want to be a player that attempts to leave as little people behind as possible in the context of that revolution.
- [15:47]
Brian (Podcast Host)
Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. You know, I asked you about the next decade and you're like, well, five years is probably my limit because due to the explosion of this new, these new technology breakthroughs. And I would agree with that right now. Just like a leapfrogging effect, especially when you've got that much competition in the AI spaces. But I like that your focus is really to bridge that skills gap, to help people stay abreast to new technologies and things that are emerging and helping companies with their dev and project backlog. I think that's important. And again, Nicholas, you're making the world a better place by the work that you're providing for everybody else. So I really appreciate that. And Nicholas, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
- [16:31]
Nicholas Genest
Thank you for seeing us and thank you, Brian, for having me again.
- [16:35]
Brian (Podcast Host)
Bye for now.
- [16:45]
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- [17:11]
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