Adam Torres and Nikky Kho discuss AI and being an entrepreneur.
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
Show Notes:
What does it take to successfully launch a business? In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Nikky Kho, Founder & CEO at Real AI Dynamics, explore Real AI Dynamics and launching businesses.
Watch Full Interview:
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and today I am in Las Vegas, Nevada, and we’re at the F1 event. My first time over at F1, I’ve been heading around and finding different interviews. I was fortunate that my good buddy Christopher Kai, he lined up one that I’ve been trying to get for a long time.
We have Nikky Kho on the line today. Nikky, man, big fan for a long time. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks so much. All right. So we got a lot to talk about. I definitely want to talk about your company and the work that you’re doing at Real AI Dynamics. And also maybe if you, if you’re okay with it, talking a little bit about the location that we’re at today.
Like this is amazing. I know I just went on the tour and I’m just quite impressed with all of it, but just to, I guess, get us kicked off, maybe talk a little bit more about yourself and just your history as an entrepreneur and how you got started in tech. Sure. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I got into tech when I was a teenager.
My father was a computer science professor and since I was 11 I was working in Silicon Valley. I was working at Intel and then I turned 19. I started working at NASA and I spent a lot of time just working in the In technology in you know startup as well because My first company was when I was 12 years old.
I built a website design company and I was going door to door Selling websites when people are saying hey, what’s a website? Yeah, and my dad He eventually became the chairman and founder of devry inc which is the global division of devry including campuses And I also decided to get into education and technology First I got an education over personal growth.
I built a global company and Uh, over a hundred million in revenue. Over a thousand people were working for us. We did live events over a thousand a year in 270 cities in 70 countries, and I personally taught, uh, in each of those cities. In fact, I did a tour of all of ’em in six months. I haven’t stopped kind of touring though.
I actually, last year I was in 150 countries, and this year I taught four to seven different events. every single week in front of 30, 000 people in person, 300, 000 people online for different events. But this time it’s been through entrepreneurship and AI. So I got into this because I was a professor at Brigham Young University lecturing about entrepreneurship and marketing and all sorts of others.
Other universities, I was a guest lecturer, like at Stanford and Wharton, and it was a lot of fun. And my students would come to me and they would say, Hey, I would like to create a company. And so one day I said, well, if you want to create a company, read this 1000 page book. Yeah. It was a book that’s not published.
It’s not available for sale. It was created by my mentor, Corey Rudel, and he created internetmarketing. com, but he died when he was about 30 years old, leaving behind a wife and two kids, but he also left behind 130 million business that he built over about five years. And I was so impressed by that. And the rapid iteration process of building a business is something that I’ve always been super fascinated with, but I don’t like the idea of teaching unless I’m actually doing it.
So I said, read these 1000 pages, give them 20 students, 10 people read it. And if you do that, you can move to Las Vegas for a month. and live in this house we’re in right now. It’s a 10 bedroom house. Um, I call it the uh, Trellis Venture Studio Tech Startup House Las Vegas. Because I’ve also done one in Hawaii and other cities as well.
And this was our first one. It was 100 percent free to participate. And we had 10 entrepreneurs and they would be given tasks. I wrote 150 tasks list and I said, you have a few rules. One, no dating. Two, your entire life belongs to me except you get one day off. Sunday if you want to go to church. Yeah. Uh, three, you do nothing but a new business from scratch and four, you can’t spend more than 5, 000 in the red.
And the schedule was you would start off every day with a daily huddle talking about what it is. That’s the most important task that you had as a priority to accomplish the day before. So like that’s day by day. So every single day for 30 days in a row. Man, this sounds like a formula for success in anything.
No dating, stay for it. Like all it is structured. Go ahead. If you put your attention on that one thing that you really have as a focus, then you’re more likely to accomplish that than not. And I think there was a great book called the one thing that was just on that one simple principle that in developing atomic habits, which is another great book, we provided our different entrepreneurs and residents, various books, resources, gave them 50 entrepreneurs to mentor them.
And, uh, I also did 30 minutes of one on one coaching with each entrepreneur each day. On top of that, though, Every day? Yeah, on top of that. So that’s a significant investment of your time as well, like that. Yeah, well, I wanted to prove that from 8. 30 to 5. 30, I was focused just on them, that we’d have dinner.
Yeah. And then after that, I would actually do the task list myself. Oh, okay. Right before I go to bed. So I’d, they’d have the whole day, I’d have two hours a day to do my own tasks. Because some of these tasks are kind of intimidating. For example, write a 200 page book. Mm hmm. You know, that alone sounds like it could take 30 days.
Or what about making a video commercial? Write a business plan with a feasibility study. Reach out to 50 potential clients. And establish a relationship with one of them that leads to business and sales. Reach out to influencers, at least 20 of them with at least 10, 000 followers and get on a podcast.
Yeah. Make an industry level event and speak at it and get at least one sale. Now, any one of those things could take 30 days. And all of these, all these lists that you came from, that came from that book? Or is this No, these are tasks that I inspired to create from the book. Yeah. Create these tasks myself.
Wow. Was that, was that in reflecting from like your career? These are things that I personally knew that I had to do. And, and as a result of that, Um, that task list, I’m going to say six or seven tasks, alone, Is what they do it not in 30 days, but that’s a task if they do all that in just one day, which sounds impossible with AI, though, it’s possible.
And that’s why before even doing anything, they got one bonus day where the first day they just did 11 hour AI workshop with me going over how to do each of these things with AI. And as a result of that, out of those 10 entrepreneurs that participated in the program. How long was that, by the way, the program?
30 days. 30 days. Yeah. 30 days. 30 days. It was starting on the day after christmas december 26th of 2023 Ended on On 26 of January, 2024. So that was, that was less than a year ago right now. It’s November 22nd, 2024. Right. Yeah. So, so the results, like the results, all 10 entrepreneurs got over a thousand hours in revenue and not just a thousand hours of revenue, a thousand hours net profit, half of them made over 10, one made over a hundred grand.
Um, so I think that’s, you And half the companies are tech companies, which means that in 30 days, you’re not going to finish the final event of the day. Finishing your technology in just 30 days, they’d have to do consulting plus the technology, the hybrid solution. So they’re also getting really the, like the tools to survive.
The tools to survive and more importantly the mindset. See the most common thing that people in Silicon Valley are talking about. Told is to go through this standard iteration process to seeing what’s possible, building an MVP, doing red testing, which is to try to pay a trace and testing to make the model do something that you’re not supposed to have it do the software buggy.
And then you put it in front of customers and you do a beta test, alpha test, beta test and go to market. All of which you’re talking about does not happen in 30 days. Like that’s, that’s what we do is do the exact opposite. And the first step you do is actually get in front of customers. The first step you do is you sell the customers on funding your projects by buying your product and service and you start off with a consulting plan.
You build a technology about it. So if you can’t settle it, maybe don’t make it. I don’t know. So basically the most important thing is to not build a product about what you think other people’s needs are. Instead, you need to find out what the needs are and then build a product and service around that.
So what people would do is they’d approach people, say, Hey, what are you interested in building? What’s your biggest needs? Then you provide a technology integration or solution. Maybe it’s a one to three thousand dollar solution. And it turns into a SaaS project with the backend and technology. Now, not all the companies that came here are technology companies.
We had one person who had a marriage and family company. We had another person who had a defense contracting business. There are video production services. So the same process works whether you’re doing technology or any other kind of business as an entrepreneur. And then eventually it turned into a coaching program where people ended up getting to also live in Hawaii.
And that’s, it was like a 25, 000 a month program. Yeah. 5, 000 a week and, We made it so it was a little more flexible. You could take some time off, go to the beach, go hiking. You have a life, it was more holistic, but still we always want to do like wellness. I found that the best way to lead, and this is a mistake that I made in the past was to not build.
A business that was focused on Christ like leadership. So it doesn’t mean you have to believe in Christ. It doesn’t mean you have to be a Christian. Uh, Christ like leadership just means you have kindness, compassion, empathy, and you’re building a culture of people working together with wellness and holistic growth as a focus.
So every single day people would do things like meditation, breath work, yoga, gratitude journaling, and that’s where you start every day. So to focus on a good wellness, Because if you have clarity in your mind and your heart, you’re more likely to focus. Would you say that the participants already had a like a modicum or a bit of that in them already?
Or is that kind of most people? Didn’t even have experience. Yeah with that. Yeah. Um, some of them had no experience with coding. In fact, we had people who had massive pivots. One person came here, they wanted to be a book publisher, ghost writing, teach about sleep habits. Yeah. And they ended up learning so much about AI that they became Python programmers, they built integrations.
Now they’re doing AI consulting, or maybe they’re doing data clean up services. So it’s, it’s pretty fast, especially in this day where AI can do a lot of the coding for you or, and in fact, you could even take your code, put it into some kind of Python compiler, get a bunch of bugs, put it back in the chat GPT, say, hey, fix this, and then your software could be created.
You can even use things like bolt. new, where it’ll show you the code while developing entire CRMs, websites, and interfaces. We actually show people demos about how you can do these things with AI tools. In fact, AI just has so many. Practical applications, and it’s been around for the longest time. Most people just didn’t know the business use cases.
Most people don’t realize that even services like Chat GPT was generated within Google by Ilya Suskever. And he was in charge of their special projects, and when he showed Google, hey, check out these cool tools, Google said, well, this is a silly tool that just predicts what the next word’s supposed to be.
How can I use this game? Why don’t you do something else? And he left and created Chat GPT. Open AI and chat GPT with his team and the same thing happened when our instructors went to MIT. They’re like wow We had no idea. There’s all these business use cases and the the most important thing about AI isn’t understanding that AI Exists may eyes been around for the longest time my dad.
He went to MIT to university in the 60s, and AI was still a thing. Now, you have a situation where you now have the practical understanding of what AI can do with generative AI becoming popular, and it’s understanding what’s possible and understanding good business. Because in order for AI to work, there’s three simple things you need.
One is you have to have a good AI model. You have to have a good technology. The second thing is you have to have a good understanding of business processes. And it’s often not the documented process in the business that needs to be optimized. If you optimize a bad process, you’re just going to be increasing the amount of mistakes you have.
And the third is you need to have a good strategic mind and perspective. I call it the artistic gaze. You have those three things together, you have a good AI model, good tech, and something that’s going to improve your operations. If you’re missing any one of those three simple things, you’re out of the game.
Actually, I think that’s a good transition, so talk a little bit more about your company and like what you’re currently working on. So what we do is we do AI education for businesses. We’ll do events, we’ll do boot camps, we’ll come to the tech house. They live in the tech house for 30 days, they go through the program.
But that’s just the first part of the business. The second part is we have an AI app lab and an AI robotics lab. We’ll build custom software of any kind using AI and also we’ll build all sorts of things like wearables. Computer vision technology with cameras. Well, all sorts of things that require engineering.
Electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, as opposed to just software development. And we’ll do this for enterprises of all sizes. For example, for Denue Properties, we build AI videos. We did lead generation. Um, we did lead scoring, marketing generation, and creatives. Uh, they had a system where they had, uh, All sorts of outsourcing of sales to brokers.
And we didn’t want to bring it internally. So we helped them build chatbots that could talk to people on their website and also make phone calls and all sorts of things like that. And we do this for customers for any kind of solution. It could be pricing models. I know we have one client that, Just from simple price changes of just a dollar Could increase their net value their net profit their bottom line by fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a day Wow, that’s significant.
And so for your um your vision for this going forward, like what do you see next with this? I mean and getting getting back to like your background. I mean, come on you started at nasa when you were 19 So ai this is like To me, you’re a kid in a candy store. Like this is like the, everything that’s like this, that this pinnacle going forward, like what’s next for you?
Like, how do you, how do you see all this playing out? So every single time I launched a tech startup house, I launched my own venture. So I’ve launched 80 companies. And one of the companies is Ray voice. It’s a voice chat bot service. Another is real AI dynamics. Uh, another one I’m launching is called smart file, which is kind of like a combination of iCloud plus AI, because instead of paying a dollar per month for say, a hundred gigabytes, I could do the same thing for terabytes.
And that’s all through vectorization of data. And then you can also talk to your data. Hey, give me three pictures of me hanging out with the cat, something like that. And the data pulls the data for you, you know, pulls the information, shows the images. You can also talk to the data, like, Hey, I had all these reports, tell me what happened in these reports.
Kind of knowledge basis. We also love working with all sorts of fascinating clients. For example, we do all sorts of fun marketing videos and creatives. We also built something called AI selling systems, both AI education platform and AI social media marketing agency. But it’s not just that, it’s also building it for education resources.
For example, one of our clients is the Dalai Lama. And we built an AI digital avatar software program that allows you to take the Dalai Lama and he could upload 30, 000 hours of his content, all his writings and make it so you can talk to him. And so these are things that we’re also planning to build for Martin Luther King, the third and all sorts of stuff.
Hmm. Now these, these are projects that are long term projects. Of course. But, uh, Wow, that’s amazing. So just thinking about like the significance of that, that somebody could actually interact and, and with the Dalai Lama and some of the knowledge that was taught and that interaction, that connection.
Totally. And that’s amazing. And anyone, anyone could do this. This isn’t just to have to be, you know, big projects. Sure. I show people how to make these digital avatars in free programs in just one minute. Yeah. I’ve seen them and I’ve seen a couple people in, but I’m like, do I really want that person to have an avatar?
I don’t know always. No, if you go too far. But some of them are like, like this one though. And some of these other ones, when you think about this body of knowledge. Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. Sure. If you go to, uh, social media of real a dynamics more, if you go to like our website, you could actually talk to like video chatbots of me and the latency is.
Pretty much gone. And I think that the cool thing is a lot of people are concerned about deep fakes. There’s a lot of great deep fake tech and software, but more importantly, It allows you to develop content with your marketing team. Let’s say you don’t have time to create all sorts of amazing podcasts, like what you’re doing, or if you don’t have time to create social media posts.
You can have it scripted out in your digital avatar and say all this stuff for you and that allows people who are also scared of being on camera to kind of get out there and also take their voice, their image and add some life to it. Now, it’s also an art to create a digital avatar. It doesn’t sound robotic.
You have to have a lot more energy going into it, even to the point where it sounds kind of overly animated and you’re like, Hey, how’s it going? And then. At least it does not talk like a robot. Because what happens when you do that, AI will downgrade the animation and make it kind of monotone. If you look at the camera, there’s all sorts of tactics.
We train people on the art of things to captivate attention. And we’ve seen great results. We’ve seen people that have increased relief generation of 3X using some of our sequences. Other people have increased their social media conversion to get more opt ins to our newsletter by 20%. And we’ve also seen that people go to, say, some AI software, like we use something called Letterman AI and things like that.
You’ll get conversions on open rates and click through rates way higher than the average. And it’s especially useful since the April update on Google. Which has transformed. You might notice the email service provider industry is doubling their rates and that’s because of the recent slap or Google is now making it more difficult to hit the inbox.
All right, Nikky. So last question on my end, I want, I want to play this scenario cause my audience has been hearing me talk about this for a long time, by the way. So Adam AI, I have over 6, 000 interviews out there. So now what I’m thinking about is you said you, you, You put all this into this avatar. So in theory, like we’re already there.
Like I could put all these videos through, run it through, obviously not me personally, but get it done. Right. And, um, and I could create an avatar of all of the content that we’ve had and be like talking to me or doing an interview with me. Yeah. There’s 6, 000 over 6, 000 interviews. So there’s, there’s quite a bit of content and it would be, it would have some type of feeling of like realness, right?
Absolutely. Connect all the, all your interviews to a knowledge base and chat with it. We create those all the time, man. That’s fun. If somebody’s watching this or listening to this, Nikki, how do they follow up? How do they learn more? How do they follow you on social media, your website? Yeah, sure. If you are interested in learning more about what I do go to Nikki co.
com. It’s N I K K Y K H O. com. And if you go to the top, there’s some great videos and there’s also a great newsletter called why AI, and there people will get updated on the hottest tools. I have 50 tools we use in our business every day. We replace them. Whatever is the newest tool We also have a great whatsapp community and if you’re interested in joining that just subscribe to our newsletter.
We’ll send you a link Fantastic. And for everybody watching, just so you know, um, we’ll put the links to all that in the show notes so you can just click on it and head right on over. And speaking to the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day, we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Nikki, man, thank you for making time for me. Yeah. Thanks so much.