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

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Daniel Robbins interviews Brandon Card, the CEO of Terzo AI, about the hidden financial chaos inside enterprise contracts and why AI is the only scalable way to fix it. Brandon explains how Terzo helps companies treat contracts like financial assets, not legal documents, extracting obligations and commitments with 99.9% accuracy through a hybrid model of AI plus trained human review. They also discuss why Terzo started by selling into Fortune 100 instead of SMB, how early customer pain shaped product-market fit, and why Brandon is equally focused on building community and mental health resilience as he is on revenue. Key Discussion Points Brandon explains the origin of the name Terzo, inspired by “third” in Italian and the idea of managing third-party relationships, plus the “Oracle effect” of a timeless name beyond one product. He recounts incorporating the company on March 13, 2020, then watching airports go empty as COVID hit, building on Zoom 18 hours a day through chaos and loss. Brandon describes the pain he lived at Microsoft: customers managing $50B supplier spend with no tools, contracts lost, and manual PowerPoint decks built from screenshots to summarize global agreements. He argues CLM systems were built by lawyers for drafting, not for procurement and finance workflows, leaving a massive gap no one understood until recently. Brandon shares the early breakthrough: realizing contracts are 300–400 pages long and signed by the thousands, making human-only review mathematically impossible. Terzo’s key differentiation is accuracy through humans-in-the-loop, because LLMs can miss financial context across related documents and even turn $1M into $3M in naive extraction. He explains why they started enterprise-first, taking on SOC, GDPR, and security onboarding to win Fortune 100 master service agreements rather than “credit card swipe SaaS.” Brandon shares his view on AI safety: he believes models behave like they have a “mind of their own,” and that even builders struggle to govern or fully control them. The conversation turns to mental health and community, with Brandon advocating in-person connection, events, and digital detox as the antidote to a cyborg-like, always-online world. Takeaways The best startup ideas come from living the problem daily, because real enterprise pain creates urgency, budget, and durable demand. If you are dealing with financial reporting, audits, or compliance, you cannot accept 94% accuracy, which is why human review plus AI QA is the path to trust. Unsexy infrastructure wins long term, because databases and contract systems become foundational layers that everything else depends on. Starting with Fortune 100 is hard, but once you pass their vendor gatekeeping, you build defensibility and a moat that smaller competitors struggle to cross. AI can support mental health through journaling and low-friction venting, but humans still need real community, nature, and offline connection to stay balanced. Closing Thoughts Brandon Card’s story is a blueprint for enterprise founders: pick a problem that is mathematically impossible to solve manually, build a system that produces trusted data, and commit to the hard path of selling into the biggest customers first. This episode also lands a deeper message: the future is not only about building powerful AI, it is about keeping humans strong enough to live with it. Terzo is building contract intelligence, but Brandon is also building a culture of community, resilience, and long-term thinking. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

With you're dealing with financial data, there's no room for error. So the only way to solve this is... So Brandon, turn. Terzo. Terzo AI. What is the importance of the name? Because I know you said there is an importance of the name. Right.

And what is, what was, who was Brandon before Terzo? So I'm not the same guy I've always been, right? They call me Brandino because my mom's Italian. And, you know, a lot of my friends that are Italian or from other countries, I call me Brandino, right? And my co-founder, L, his father happened to be from Italy around the same region of 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, Terzo 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 liked that name. And it was Italian. It was fun. And, you know, mom was happy. Family was happy. But that's really where the origin story came from.

I love Italy, by the way. Like Italian food. That's right. Incredible. It's actually why I like Croatia. I feel like Croatia is like a mixture of Italy and Greece. It's like my two favorite places. I love it there.

And it does, it does. There's something powerful about the name, Turzo. Like, there is something, I can see the Oracle effect. All right. It's fun. So you start the company. What a wild time to start a company. Like, I mean, I could tell you the story.

I got to tell you this. Okay, tell me. Because I was here at 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 to 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're in that office here, they were like, there's going to be a lockdown. No one's going to 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 L.AX. There was no one at either airport.

And me and my co-founder are out, we're 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 at LAX, it was empty. It felt like an apocalypse. 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 were 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, we're scrambling with their families and worried about, obviously, their personal lives.

it was a really tough time for us to get everyone to focus and everyone went on Zoom, went home and kind of, you know, spent time wherever they came from, visited family and friends. Same with I. I went home and visited my mom and dad in New York. And we got on Zoom's 18 hours a day to build a company. And I was thinking to myself like, wow, I didn't force you 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. That's a 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. My mom and dad are like, are you sure you want to quit Microsoft right now? After that, you know, 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. You didn't know what I was crazy. Yeah.

That's the thing. You all you. I was crazy. So she's like, okay. Like, I know you want to start your own, I started my own company with like 17 and her basement. Right. So I was like, wow, this is really nerve wrecking.

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, you know, it was a really interesting time in history.

I think none of us will ever forget that. 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 like a problem. Like 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 that really no one has really solved it.

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. 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 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 I'm like, I thought there was a CLM category. Like, aren't you supposed to have a contract, light cycle 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. 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 $100 million contract with one of the biggest auto companies in the world. And I said to them, hey, question for you, a weird question. After you sign this $100 million 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 on a doci sign? 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 and no one's solving this problem. No one even understands this problem. And I said, is this a problem of 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 they 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 it in-house everyone's going to have to build it in-house we're going to 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 But, you know, this is a literally a $10 to $20 trillion 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 of solving it. You had a head start.

That's good. I think that's the smartest thing that I've heard 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? 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, it 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. And I was thinking to myself, this is the best way to do this in 2018. This is insane.

And I was managing SpaceX. So I go to SpaceX's office and I know they were talking about building Starlink and sending Tesla's to Mars. So I'm like, okay, I'm in meetings over here talking about sending Tesla's to Mars. And then I'm over here, build it a PowerPoint with 95 slides or contract data. I'm like, this doesn't make sense. You know? Perfect storm for you. Yeah.

It was the perfect storm. I was like, this is amazing. And I was sitting in LA traffic, probably like you allowed in the 405. you know I was always in LA traffic going from meetings, Orange County, Sandy A going to sit there staring at my dashboard thinking myself, I got to solve this problem. I got to solve this problem. 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 got to take this chance. I got to take this risk. You know, and I was a young guy, no wife, no kids, perfect opportunity to do it. And timing is very important in life. It seems time. Timing can almost be everything. So you create it, you start it, 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 oh, yeah, it has it. Fortune 500 is our primary customer base. Like the biggest companies in the world are Turzel customers. Is that a long? Because I've heard it's a long cycle. Very long for that.

Very long. So how is that in the process? 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 we love to share our vision and what we're building and hear 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 the 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 is. means you have a SOC 1, SOC2, GDPR, all these security requirements, ISO 27-0-1, 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. The 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 a Oracle. I know how they think. I know how they think. I worked with them my whole life.

I know how they operate. I know how complex they are. I know how side load they are. It makes from the outside looking, and 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.

I work 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 customer's problems

because they were my friends. I had dinner with these people every week. I talked them on the phone three, four times a day. These are really important partners to me. 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 spend with no data, with 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, I 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 healthcare fitness ideas, but I'm not an expert in health care. And I haven't worked in health care. You know how it gets mad at me. She's like, don't tell me another idea. Yeah. 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, right?

And I don't know what you know, right? Stick to what you know. I've also failed a lot in my life too when I was younger. I was always building stuff and I was young, high school, college, always working on stuff and just, you know, just swinging for the fences and seeing what happens. It's 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. 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 goal early on. Because I never want 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 what. 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 i can tell you it was 2021 we are working with companies like Home Depot and big banks, also a huge healthcare insurance company. And I was looking at their contract data because they were obviously working on these complex projects together. And some of these contracts are 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 1,000 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. 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 going to 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, the Series A, we'd go build more. We got to 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, you know, employees are really expensive. And this was before any of the LLMs came out. This is like before the AI boom of now. Like every, back then it was like crypto. It was crypto and metaver. I mean 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 Metavers. Everyone's going to be living in this digital world. Then we get NFTs. People are buying 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. It'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 going to be a problem for the next decade. The unsexy, I think are the best. Like, it seems like, it's like, I became a billionaire through a sexy bit. It's always like, I know a billionaire from recycling scraps. I mean, it's always the utilities, right? Larry Ellison, obviously one of the biggest beasts of all time who I have nothing but respect for. And obviously, you know, I look up to him or 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, is the foundation was the database. 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 us 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 flashing the pan stuff. And people get excited about it. And then boom, it disappears. That's my thing. We're at HumanX. And I walked on to all out 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 second. And they're all rappers and they're all like, it's going to destroy most of it. Yeah, I'm like, I'm like, where's the profit market? It's crazy. I don't know. You're all paying open AI. You're all paying Claude to do all everything that you're, you know, to do all your compute.

It's just you're putting a cool UI and U.S. on top of coal. It doesn't know. And they're going to be fighting against everyone else that's doing the same thing. So humans. We were talking earlier about humans, right? We still use a lot of humans. 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. 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 Open AI. If you give Claude an MSA, a master services agreement, it's a million dollars, and then there's an invoice against that Marast and 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. That's where Terzo 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 keeping.

weighing 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 2021 and 22. I believe we're one of the best companies in the world of that.

This you do. And I think it's critical. You're a visionary. 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 are going to 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 through 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. And like, make your employees 10 times more productive and go build new stuff because we think, okay, we have 45 engineers right now. 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. Every time I 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. Yeah. Like, because they weren't checking things. And then we're not dealing with finance. so stuff, but I'm like, you guys, you've got to 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 it's not accurate. I'm not a PhD in computer science, although I worked in, you know, tech my entire life. I'm an honorary engineer, right? I understand how it tech works. My opinion, people can disagree with me all they want. But I don't think any of these LOMs are actually under control.

I just don't. The models are like building themselves. They're literally going off 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. 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 very interesting right now. 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.

No one knows how it works. And he's like, we're like, best. Exactly. So something that I'm, I'm very passionate about, which I know you are too is, is mental health. Yes. 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. It's something which I think is unique.

That's great. You have, you know, the AI chatbots that companions, which I think there's like, you know, it like can distinguish. destroy your mental health? Yeah, they want to be too reliant, right? It's something to even know. I 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?

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, TBT for their therapists, right? They're talking about their relationships. They're 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 N. AI 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 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 it in your body and holding in your organs. So I think AI can help humans a lot on the mental health side when it comes through 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, workout. 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 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? and I talk about with the Turzo employees too, is that we have to get back in person and enjoy energy with our teammates and go out and have 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. 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. But we're a huge, huge proponent of growing events, having music, having, you know, really cool lights and really cool, just like,

you know, experiences. And we've done this in Miami. We've also done this in Amsterdam. We're going to do this probably in Abiza this year. We love bringing people together, not to talk about Tursa. I'll see you there. You're welcome to come because we just want to have fun. We wish I said, let's get 300 people together.

I've never been to Ibiza. Let's have a blast. I'm going to go. Oh, you have a blast in the bees. You come to Miami one of our parties, right? We just, we have great people in the room. and it ended up bringing with your yourselves together. Exactly.

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

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. And it's really...

I heard about the many young man. You're speaking on behalf of them because I went through the same things. And it doesn't matter if you're successful. It doesn't matter if you're strong. It doesn't matter if you come from a great family. Everyone has their highs and lows. 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.

So one side healthy and unside unhealthy because they're staying we laugh about this and somebody body healthy but mentally not healthy right 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 fashion 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? The two glasses. They drink wine. They 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. It doesn't have to be your family or your wife or your husband. friends, coworkers, 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. I'm going to roll this out with our HR department once we got our series B done. I'm going to mandate people take a certain amount of time off and do retreats and go off and spend time in nature and get away from the screen and get away from their phone.

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. So I will live to 150.

We need flip phones. So I know I, I know, Brandon, you're, you just entered your series. B here at Human Next right now. So many exciting things happening. Perfect time. People want to get in touch with you. How can they do so? I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, honestly. I'm on LinkedIn every day, but people get in touch me mostly through LinkedIn or B card in Turzo Cloud. Typically, I'm pretty responsive on email. 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 a 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 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. It's about leading, you know, these people that need hope. They need people to look up to.

They need mentors. 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 better place. But thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. And I hope we get to do this again. Thanks a lot.